This one-pan baked polenta with greens and eggs from the NY Times Coronavirus Cooking series was easy and satisfying and took about an hour. I started with half an ear of corn and a whole large shallot (minced) sautéed in butter, and baked them with polenta, water, and about three cups of chard greens from the garden. Near the end I made divots and added in eggs to bake in place, and I finished it with various green herbs and a little grated parmesan. ...
I’ve made pakora-inspired fried vegetable fritters a number of times in different contexts. After some experimentation, here’s the approach I like best: Coarsely shred a range of root vegetables, alliums, and brassicas. My favorite mix: carrots, onions, broccoli, cauliflower An alternate winter mix: Brussels sprouts, onions, carrots, cabbage For a large batch of pakoras as appetizers for a 12-person dinner party, I combined: 6 cups coarsely shredded vegetables (squeeze in a colander to get as much liquid out of them as possible) 6 small green chiles, chopped 1 tsp crushed garlic (or more) 1 tsp grated ginger (or more) 1 T garam masala I let them sit for another 30 minutes in the colander to drain, then squeezed the liquid out of them one more time. Then added: ...
(from July when fresh beans were in season) Once you have jars of colorful flint corn on the counter, you look for things to do with them… what about fresh red-and-blue polenta, with slow-cooked dragon tongue beans and boiled fresh shelling beans (both also from the garden), a fried egg, and a fresh corn and tomato salad? Even if my favorite use of dry corn has been cornmeal pancakes, soft polenta is a nice part of a low-effort but several-hour dinner, and something I make a few times a year. ...
Frittatas are my current go-to for an easy, satisfying dinner incorporating a lot of greens and whatever else is in the garden (it also makes great next-day leftovers, cold): This particular evening I caramelized onions and fresh garlic (low heat, 15+ minutes?), sauteed morels in butter, and wilted chard and kale (cutting out the stems first and cooking them for a bit longer so they would soften). If I’m not in a hurry (e.g. already very hungry) I usually cook the components separately even though it dirties another pan or takes some extra time– everything takes a different amount of time to cook well. ...
Last spring I started some Colorado Star purple artichokes from seed and transplanted them into a strip of soil along a driveway. They started slow and didn’t produce any fruit last year, but here I am a year later: While I’ve simply-boiled some later harvests (three rounds so far this spring) I cooked a first harvest of baby-size artichokes with an “oil and water” hybrid blanching method inspired by This Is Camino-- simmering them in batches in a single-layer half-covered in water (with garlic, bay leaves, herbs, and olive oil) until mostly done, then finishing them on the grill while straining the liquid and reducing it to a sauce that reinforced the artichoke flavor: ...
I thinned some carrot seedlings out of the backyard garden to give other carrots room to grow… and remembered I’d heard of carrot top pesto. Indeed, the leaves plus green garlic tops from the garden, olive oil, pistachios, salt, and a little bit of parmesan cheese made a nice nutty pesto. We ate it tossed with pasta, some 2-minute-blanched peas (some from the garden, some from the store), and spigarello sauteed with the baby carrots and garlic from last summer’s harvest. ...
A simple stir-fry– cooking a series of ingredients individually in a hot pan with peanut oil (some very briefly– just a minute or two), in this case: onions + sliced garlic + minced ginger rattail radish pods from the garden (incredibly prolific plants crank out the long slender pods– no much flavor but a nice juicy/crunchy component when harvested before the individual seeds start to bulge in the pods) snow peas also from the yard (planted in the late fall, harvesting in February) a bell pepper pre-made mapo tofu (includes miso and chili flake) I just mix them at the end with a little soy sauce and serve over rice (I sometimes add black vinegar, miso, and/or chili flake, but not this time as the tofu was already seasoned). ...
Last winter, spring, and again this winter I’ve grown a variety of radishes (almost all from Kitazawa Seed’s excellent selection) in a raised bed in the back yard– a very easy crop (and one that can grow off-season in the Bay Area). Just jotting down a few notes here from across the garden journal: Japanese Scarlet Radish: Crisp, attractive, mild heat, grew fast, the healthiest of the plants, would grow again as a good salad radish or to eat fresh with butter and salt. White Icicle Radish: Watery taste, fairly bland Korean Good Luck Radish: Large– 2" diameter and 5" long. Stayed crisp, with some lingering heat (seemed to be from the skin). Had a lot issues with germination and seedling survival, though. Chinese Mantanghong (Watermelon) Radish: Beautiful concentric circles of white and pink, quite spicy– but they all ended up a bit pithy and with a tough skin I had to peel off (I assume this means I left them in the ground too long or should have grown them earlier in the winter when it was even cooler, but it’s unclear). Minowase Daikon: A lot of my seedlings died originally, but the ones that survived produced an excellent radish– long and firm– and in particular, with especially tasty greens (not raw, as they were a little prickly/spiny, but just a few minutes sauteed with garlic or added to a soup for its last few minutes on the stove and they were delicious). This year I’m growing more daikon to leave in the ground for a while, primarily for the greens– every few days we harvest another set of outer greens as a side dish for some meal. Japanese Purple Radish (can’t remember where I got these seeds or what the exact variety is): Another nice firm, crisp, mild heat radish, made great quick pickles (I expect the Scarlet Radish also would have). Rattail Radish: Growing them this winter, they’re prolific and fast growing but haven’t put up the seed pods (which is what you eat rather than the root), so no “tasting notes” yet. Every variety grew fast– looking back at my notes, last spring I started seeds indoors on 2/16, they’d sprouted by 2/20, I transplanted some to 3" pots on 3/5 (likely an unnecessary interim step for a radish), planted them outdoors on 3/12 (after a few days of ‘hardening off’– setting them outdoors but under an awning so they didn’t get direct sun), and was eating my first large radishes on 4/15. ...
The caramelized garlic tart in Ottolenghi’s Plenty is very good. I recently made a greener tart inspired by it that combined: A basic butter pie crust, pre-baked until golden Three heads of heirloom garlic cloves, caramelized with a little red wine vinegar (following the general process in the recipe above) Gruyere and goat chevre A whole bowlful of kale from the winter garden, chiffonaded and wilted / cooked down for a few minutes in a skillet 4 eggs and a little milk and yogurt to fill the tart It worked well for breakfast the next morning, too… ...
I traveled with friends to Japan over the holidays and had a range of interesting meals, from many-small-dishes breakfasts to a few kaiseki-style set menus working through a formal progression of dishes, to excellent ramen in a museum, to dinners we cooked in a rental house in the mountains from the wide variety of product available in one of the markets. We came home inspired to learn and try to periodically cook in this style, and with some special rice from the rural Noto peninsula where we’d taken a side trip. ...
From the back yard garden, kale and radicchio that’s finally forming heads (planted last fall). With fermented Jimmy Nardello pepper paste…
This batch of sauerkraut turned out especially good: I cut two heads each of savoy and red cabbage into long narrow strips, then sprinkled them generously with sea salt, let them rest, then kneaded them until juice was coming out and they were turning translucent. I added a decent amount of caraway seed and a handful of dried juniper berries, covered it with a few spare cabbage leaves, and weight them down with some ceramic weights– pushing the cabbage down into its own liquids. Then I just let it lacto-ferment in a crock on the counter for 3 or 4 weeks, tasting periodically. ...
From earlier this summer, a bowl mostly picked from our little urban raised-bed garden: Armenian cucumber, tomatoes, blistered Padron peppers, sliced jalapeno (along with a soft-boiled egg and some sardines). I wish I ate like this all the time.
Starting to cook weeknight dishes from Ottolenghi’s Plenty. The salad was simple but surprisingly good.
