Vegetables

Delicious melt-in-the-mouth roasted / braised leeks made from a video (instagram reel) shared by a friend. Easy to make but I baked them for ~75 minutes so it takes some advance planning. What they look like as they go into the oven: Jotting down a few notes to remember it, since I dislike cooking from a video: Preheat oven to 325F Trim and peel 5 leeks, sliced the white and light green sections into 1.5-2" lengths, soaked in cold water Rub baking dish with butter and salt, arranged the leeks in it (see image), sprinkle more salt on the top Insert bay leaves and tarragon between them Melt butter and anchovies, stir until they break apart Add white wine, lots of lemon zest, and a splash of cream (though that didn’t feel necessary) Pour the anchovy butter over the leeks Cover with foil or the baking dish’s lid, bake at 325 for ~45min Raise temp to 400, bake another 30min Uncover and turn the oven up to broil for 3-4 min to brown the tops I grilled some chicken thighs and made a root vegetable mash to go with them, but the leeks were the star. ...

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 softened onions and fresh garlic (low heat, 15-20 minutes), sauteed morels in butter, and wilted chard and kale (cutting out the stems first and cooking them for a bit longer). If I’m not in a hurry (i.e. not already hungry) I usually cook the components separately even though it uses 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: ...

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. ...

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). ...

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.