Change up your summer salads: Brussels Sprouts Salad with Blue Cheese

A fresh, flavorful take on the ubiquitous summer salad. Shaved Brussels sprouts are dressed with lemon juice and olive oil, then tossed with pistachios, thyme and blue cheese. Recipe below.

brussels-sprouts-slaw

Leave it to us to find vegetarian inspiration in a hot dog joint. Not that Chicago-based Franks ‘n’ Dawgs is your typical joint. Their housemade artisan sausages (lamb, spicy beef, jerk goat, turkey & date, bay scallop…) are topped with everything from pickled green papaya to duck confit, giardiniera, Mako shark bacon and kimchi.

Besides delicious, inventive dogs, they serve up sublime sides. Lyonnaise fries (with braised pig cheek and poached egg). Truffle mac ‘n’ cheese. Creole red beans with blackened shrimp and jalapeño cornbread. And the subtle, citrusy Brussels sprouts salad that inspired this one. Continue reading “Change up your summer salads: Brussels Sprouts Salad with Blue Cheese”

Quick and easy Sherry Dijon Vinaigrette: A reason to quit hitting the bottle

In minutes, Spanish sherry vinegar, Dijon mustard, shallots and olive oil become a lively vinaigrette that blows right past bottled salad dressings. Recipe below.

Mark Bittman loves his lists. In a recent article, “Fresh Start for a New Year? Let’s Begin in the Kitchen”, The New York Times’ Minimalist lists 15 OUTS and INS for the pantry—things to get rid of and what to replace them with.

I love Bittman’s lists too. Oh, I don’t always agree with everything on his lists, including this one [canned beans are OUT?—I don’t think so, and neither does über chef David Burke]. Invariably, though, something on each list makes me rethink how I do things in the kitchen, inspires me to try a new technique or explore a new ingredient.

And I’ll admit, one reason I love his lists is that invariably, at least one item on them makes me feel a little smug, because I’m already on the same page with him. This, for instance: “OUT Bottled salad dressing and marinades. The biggest rip-offs imaginable.” We haven’t bought bottled salad dressing in years. Making them, especially a simple vinaigrette, is just too darned easy to pay bottled dressing prices and get, well, bottled dressing flavor.

As an added bonus, you can generally pronounce all the ingredients in homemade dressing. Years ago, a potter friend of mine picked up the bottle of store-bought salad dressing I had just used to prepare a salad and started reading the ingredients. When he came to one multi-syllabic item in the list, he said he added that same ingredient to his glazes to help them stick to the unfired clay. Continue reading “Quick and easy Sherry Dijon Vinaigrette: A reason to quit hitting the bottle”

Dinner Double Feature, Part 2: Roasted beets create a truly golden salad

In which Marion capitalizes on Terry’s belated revelation that beets are delicious, especially in this Roasted Beet Salad with Oranges and Blue Cheese. Recipe below.

THE CAULIFLOWER SOUP TERRY POSTED LAST WEEK BEGAN AS A TUNA SANDWICH, and this roasted beet salad began as a trip to New York City. Our friend Laura and I were traipsing around town, a few years back, on a trip that included a lot of food and a lot of conversation about food. In the course of it all, we went into Zabar’s—me to look for various gifts, and Laura to look for pomegranate molasses for a stew she wanted to try. I had never heard of pomegranate molasses before, and I filed it in my head, alongside sumac and boldo, for future reference. That event—learning about something brand new and potentially marvelous in the company of a great friend—became an emblem of that wonderful trip. Continue reading “Dinner Double Feature, Part 2: Roasted beets create a truly golden salad”

Spicy Chicken Salad: A little hot, but very cool

Hot giardiniera gives this summery Spicy Chicken Salad a little heat and big flavor. It’s great on sandwiches or on its own. Recipe below.

When the warm weather hits and the great outdoors beckons, we tend to get lazy in the kitchen. We still want good food, but we want it to be fast and easy to make and satisfyingly filling but not too heavy. Like chicken salad. To me, some leftover chicken and a little mayo is one of the great blank canvases of summer, ready to take on all kinds of flavors and personalities. Continue reading “Spicy Chicken Salad: A little hot, but very cool”

Two delicious: Pan-grilled fish, soba noodle salad

Fresh, flavorful and quick: Pan-grilled Citrus Yellowtail and Soba Noodle Salad. Recipes below.

Last week, I posted two recipes for cooking fish that ranged from simple to simpler. I kept them simple because I didn’t want anything masking the taste of the Hawaiian yellowtail I’d been asked to try by Kona Blue Water Farms. This week, two more recipes. First, Marion shows just how well this fish plays with other flavors. Then she streamlines a complex side dish into something quick, simple and simply delicious.

Terry and I both love to cook, but our tastes in cookbooks and food authors don’t particularly overlap. He avidly reads Anthony Bourdain; I go for obsessive re-readings of M.F.K. Fisher. His cookbook tastes run to the school of It’s Better If It’s French. My favorite cookbook is an obscure, grubby, out-of-print one about Szechwan food.

So we think it’s pretty interesting that, when Terry received that lovely shipment of Hawaiian yellowtail, we each, independently, turned to the same author. Ming Tsai—chef, restaurateur, star of two televised cooking shows and author of some very nice cookbooks—really has been our guide in understanding this amazing fish. When it was my turn in the kitchen, I found a pair of recipes in Ming’s Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai that became the foundation for a meal.

By the way, this morning a friend called and asked me what this fish tastes like. It tastes like standing on the edge of a high bluff looking straight out over the open Pacific, with the surface of the water like light beaten silver, and a faint cold morning wind washing over your face, and the wind has come four thousand uninterrupted miles straight to find you. It’s that clean and beautiful and pure.

The original and very delightful version of this recipe calls for ponzu sauce and snapper, and the fish, once cooked, goes on to become part of a salad with pea sprouts and a Dijon vinaigrette. Here is my foreshortened, non-salad take, abbreviated into a simple grilled dish. This recipe goes quickly once you begin it. Make sure your side dishes are in progress before you start on this. Continue reading “Two delicious: Pan-grilled fish, soba noodle salad”

Garlicky vinaigrette and a three-legged beagle

A very simple, very French vinaigrette elevates this mixed greens salad. Recipe below.

Last week, I talked a little about our weekend road trip to St. Louis. I’m keeping that St. Louis theme going this week.

All of us who love to cook can think of certain “Aha!” moments in our culinary lives. Moments when we’ve learned some new technique or connected a couple of dots and suddenly know something that changes how we cook or how we think about food or, as in the case of this simple vinaigrette, adds a lasting weapon to our food arsenal.

This “Aha!” moment happened at the kitchen table of an old French woman, “Aunt” Jo, one Thanksgiving in St. Louis years ago. I used the quotes around Aunt [and I’ll dispense with them from here on out] because she wasn’t really a relative, but a friend of the family of such long standing that aunthood had been conferred upon her.

Josephine—Aunt Jo—had come from France in her early 20s [she was well into her 80s by this particular Thanksgiving]. She and her husband had run the Parisian Hand Laundry at the edge of the city’s then posh West End, on Delmar Boulevard. For much of the time they had run the business, that section of St. Louis was home to Washington University professors and old money and was swell enough to support such a lovely, labor-intensive business.

They lived in a beautiful apartment above the laundry. Even back then, I realized what a sophisticated and utterly urban home it was. Big and rambling, with dark woodwork, glass French doors dividing rooms and a handsome, massive [but squared and sleek] couch that ruled the living room. Looking back now, I also realize that the apartment was very Paris.

A little aside here. As suburban sprawl continues to reshape and redefine American life, forward thinking urban planners have been looking to this urban mixed-use model to create a sense of community and life in suburban communities. This approach is called New Urbanism and was pioneered by urban planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company [thanks, Claire!]. Increasingly, suburban communities are either revitalizing existing small downtowns or “Main Streets” or building them from scratch. The approach includes putting residential space over storefronts, banishing parking to the back or in central garages and encouraging pedestrianism [as one site calls it] and the kind of life and critical mass you find in urban areas. To me, it feels a little manufactured—not unlike Epcot Center’s take on Europe—but it still beats the hell out of the relentless march of strip malls across the landscape. But I digress.

By the time the aforementioned Thanksgiving had rolled around, Aunt Jo’s husband was long dead [I had never known him] and the neighborhood had become rather sketchy. There was still enough gentility to keep the laundry going at that time—and Aunt Jo ran it with an iron fist even then—but its days were numbered.

Aunt Jo’s main companion at this point was her dog, a beagle named Jean Pierre. Jean Pierre only responded to French commands—“Asseyez-vous, Jean Pierre” and he would sit. Jean Pierre had come equipped with the standard set of four legs, but one evening as Aunt Jo was out walking him, he caught a stray bullet in a hind leg, a victim of crossfire from some gang-related shooting. After the surgery, he was left with three legs. He still got around fine, but had issues scratching his left side.

Back to the Thanksgiving in question [I do love to ramble, don’t I?]. I had tired of scratching Jean Pierre’s left side [even though he had not tired of me doing so] and of the living room conversation, so I wandered into the kitchen. The turkey was in the oven, and various pots on the stove held fragrant sides-in-progress. Aunt Jo bashed a fat garlic clove with the side of a large chef’s knife and squeezed it from its skin into a small bowl. She added a couple of healthy pinches of salt and ground the garlic and the salt together with the tines of an old fork. When she poured some olive oil over the mixture and attacked it again with the fork—Aunt Jo was a tall, formidable woman, not unlike Julia Child [only without the sunny disposition]—I suddenly realized she was making her garlicky vinaigrette. The women of the family all professed their sorrow at being unable to make this sublime, simple dressing themselves, but none of them ever seemed to find the way back to Aunt Jo’s kitchen when she cooked.

Aunt Jo didn’t exactly teach me to make it—it was more that I kind of just picked it up as I sat at the table and watched her. She set the bowl aside and tended to other things in the kitchen. I didn’t know [and never will now] if this was part of the process for her or the other things just needed tending to then. Later, she added some red wine vinegar and a couple of grinds of pepper and whisked it all together. That was it. It then sat on the table, letting the garlic do its work, while the rest of the meal came together.

The next time there was a family meal [sans Aunt Jo], I offered to make a dressing for the salad. Eyebrows were raised—the foodie in me had not yet awakened [well, maybe a little], and bottled dressing was still considered just fine for most occasions. But I nailed it. Around the table, the response was a mix of admiration and irritation [mainly from the women who never made their way back to Aunt Jo’s kitchen]. I enjoyed both equally.

Continue reading “Garlicky vinaigrette and a three-legged beagle”

Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes

Paprika-rich Spanish chorizo teams up with globe-trotting beans in this Warm Butter Bean Salad with Chorizo and Tomatoes. Recipe below.

Anything that prompts me to call my Aunt Veta down in southern Mississippi is a good thing. She is my favorite and most colorful of all my aunts—and I have been blessed in that department. She and my Uncle James raised a family and then proceeded to raise two grandkids until Uncle James passed away several years ago. Then Aunt Veta finished the job on her own. She is stubbornly positive and optimistic, even when the going gets rough—and if she can’t find something good to say about you, you are a sorry individual indeed.

What prompted my call the other day was this dish. Specifically, the butter bean part of it. Based on a dish served as a starter at London Moorish/Spanish restaurant Moro [covered in the May issue of Food & Wine], it also features Spanish chorizo—but more about that later.

Butter beans? Lima beans? The one thing everyone agrees on concerning these beans is that they originated in South America. Explorers and slavers of the early 1500’s carried them to the farthest parts of the earth—Europe, Africa, the East Indies, India, the Philippines. Depending on who’s telling the story, they’ve been cultivated since either 4,000 B.C. or 6,000 B.C. There are two distinct varieties: The baby lima—an actual variety, not just a lima bean harvested early—and the larger, plumper Fordhook. According to most sources, the names lima and butter are interchangeable, with butter beans simply being the popular name for them in the southern United States. But other sources say that southerners insist that the lima bean and the butter bean are two different beans altogether.

It was time to call Aunt Veta. “They’re as different as black-eyed peas and English peas,” she proclaimed. “James and me, we never much cared for lima beans. So James would always plant speckled butter beans.” [When mottled with purple they’re called calico or speckled butter beans—great, more names.] But Uncle James would harvest the beans early, when the pods were light green, so the beans would be white. Still, when Aunt Veta cooked them, they would turn the cooking liquid to what she called a “blue liquor.”

Whatever the name/size/color, these full-flavored, slightly kidney-shaped beans contain high quality protein, phosphorus, potassium and iron. They’re also rich in the best sort of fiber, soluble fiber, which helps to eliminate cholesterol from the body.

Spanish Chorizo. Last week I wrote about Spain’s love of all things pork and mentioned this dense, paprika-powered sausage. Chorizo is made from coarsely chopped fatty pork and seasoned with mild Spanish paprika, salt and garlic. That’s pretty much it. Spicier versions will also include small dried hot chiles. In Portugal, they make a similar sausage called chouriço. Both are completely different from the ground pork Mexican chorizo.

As an indication of how much paprika is used in making chorizo, when you sauté the fully cooked sausage, the rendered fat is deep red-orange and will color anything else you cook with it. I like cooking up some chorizo and maybe an onion and some red bell pepper, then scrambling some eggs with it—they take on a nice, orangish tinge. They are also quite delicious.

So is this dish. I adapted the recipe to use as a side instead of a starter. Either way you use it, it’s as impressive as it is easy to make. Continue reading “Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes”