Vegetables

Cooking from Plenty. Excellent. And the Straus plain Greek yogurt is now my favorite brand.

That thing where you bake oiled delicata squash slices in the oven for 40 minutes at 400F, and crack a raw egg into them 15 minutes before the end? Still really good, and easy. +Oven-roasted kale and pancetta.

I’ve finally started reading On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (1984). It’s not really recipes but more a book about the science, history, and nature of individual ingredients. It’s inspired me to occasionally pick a single ingredient and prepare it several different ways to compare side by side. Taken to a ridiculous extreme for a solo dinner on a busy weeknight, I cooked brussels sprouts and kale four ways each (roasted dry or coated with oil, boiled, raw, raw soaked in lime juice): ...

A nice breakfast at home after a long week: Poached eggs, spinach, nettles (good!), bacon, first peas of the season, and a dressing of olive oil, black pepper, poppy seeds, fresh horseradish, and orange juice.

A quick, satisfying dinner during minimal-starch month (and after a weekend of salt-depleting exercise). I’d shopped with Niçoise salad on the brain, but ended up making: salmon rubbed with salt, white pepper, and sesame seeds, broiled for 8 minutes skin-side-up, on a bed of butter-sauteed lettuce, celery, and black olives, topped with chopped up crispy salmon skin and a poached egg.

A quick salad-as-mostly-healthy-meal for visiting family: kale (salted raw, let sit, then rinsed), celeriac, smoked salmon, broccoli, lemon-garlic-olive oil dressing (using a smokier heirloom garlic with less bite raw), and grilled haloumi cheese. It worked. (Campari-soda with meyer lemon as apertif, and the still-amazing Dandelion Madagascar chocolate for dessert)

For dinner: bread, cheese (Humboldt Fog and a Neals Yard cheese that wasn’t their cheddar), mixed greens with roasted peaches and radishes, and a bowl of figs. Followed by lentil soup based on the version I liked so much earlier this year, involving sweating the lentils, shallots sauteed in bacon fat, nora pepper, and this time a dried ancho pepper for a little extra kick. I did the “add a big bunch of spinach a few minutes before serving” thing again too: ...

Hey, this was a more successful than usual “leftovers hash”, and only 20 minutes. (cue typical low-light cell phone photo:) Some good pancetta fried at low heat. A little water added to deglaze the pan and get the crusty bits off the bottom. A minced shallot sauteed in the fat. Then a few brussels sprouts I had (sliced thin), a coarsely chopped head of broccolini, and a few big pinches of white pepper, for variety. With the pan covered, fried/steamed on medium-low heat (stirring occasionally) for about 10 minutes. ...

Another (busy-at-work, forgot-to-invite-anyone-over) Tuesday CSA, another attempt to cheat time with the pressure cooker. I’d give this one a B+. Similar to the last lentil soup: I sauteed some home-cured-by-a-friend and deliciously fatty/salty lambcetta, shallots, celery, carrots, and onions. Then I sweated a pound of lentils with it over medium heat for 5 minutes. Plus a few dried Nora peppers, chipotles, cayenne, a pinch of smoked paprika, 8 cups of water, and the lid came on, for 10 minutes at pressure. I opened it, added salt and black pepper to taste, and simmered it another 5 minutes. A whole Meyer lemon squeezed into the bowl for the last-minute acid. Pretty good. Could have used more meat or a meaty stock. ...

Okay, too much eating out, back to cooking (mostly from the Tuesday CSA). I meant to invite a few friends over but didn’t plan ahead. Red Kuri Squash, brushed with peanut oil, black pepper, and salt, baked about 30 minutes at 425F, until soft. No butter or sugar, and it was earthy and good with a dark belgian beer (St Bernardus Abt): Spigarello greens, which taste uncannily like broccoli, but not bitter (shredded and sauteed with about 8 cloves of crushed garlic until just starting to wilt). ...

I have mixed luck with soup, but this weekend I made the best lentil soup I’ve had. And no, that’s not intended to be damning-with-faint-lentil-praise – it was delicious. I used The New Best Recipe for initial inspiration (their key insight being sweating the lentils first), but also made some changes: I cut two strips of bacon into pieces and cooked them until done but not crispy. I sauteed two minced shallots in the bacon fat (with the bacon still in) a few minutes until translucent, added 3 cloves of crushed garlic, 2 bay leaves, a crushed dried nora pepper from Tierra Farms, and about 1tsp of whole cardamom seed, turmeric, and cayenne powder, a little black pepper, and sauteed/toasted that for a few minutes. ...

Using the new pressure cooker to try to make beans quickly: A mix of classy-looking anasazi beans and white navy beans from Tierra Farms, soaked for about 12 hours, drained, then combined with 3 cups water per cup beans, half an onion, two bay leaves, two dried guajillo chiles, a few garlic cloves. Pressure cooked for 15 minutes (from the time the steam started escaping), which it turns out was longer than needed– they were very soft by the end of this. ...

Nothing fancy: Chick peas with onions, lots of garlic, cardamom, turmeric, a little tahini, lime. Roasted broccoli and spinach salad. And a Russian River Redemption (belgian-style blonde).

Helping a friend work through his CSA on a cold and somewhat gloomy evening: Soup of sauteed onions/garlic/carrots, kidney beans (white and black, half mashed), chicken broth, sage, parsley, and roasted garlic precooked sausage, simmered together for 10-15 minutes. Then a full head of shredded escarole was added for another 5 minutes (covered). And hey, the rest of the soup actually managed to keep the escarole in check and mask the bitterness. ...