Turn My Head Around

 

“That is so cool! Show me again, Ben!” I hollered.

The man in the white Open Arms of Minnesota chef’s jacket smiled and took another head of cauliflower. He placed it, stem down, on the cutting board and sliced it in half. He turned one of the sections to face him, then made two cuts across the core. He picked up the cauliflower half and, in the same motion, broke the top and bottom sections apart. The leaves and core came off cleanly in one whole piece, leaving the florets.

“Well that’s sure got my attention,” I remarked admiringly. “I’ve always just cut stuff off the core by attacking the cauliflower stem side up and wedging my knife in. I never thought to turn it over.”

Every so often, even after years of cutting up vegetables, there’s something new to learn as a volunteer at Open Arms. And because we’re always cooking for a crowd—hundreds of meals a day—I had half a case of cauliflower in front of me for practice.

My newfound skill reminded me of a mixed pickle recipe I haven’t made in awhile. All the critical ingredients are crossing paths in the farmers’ markets, so now is a great time to make them.

Mixed Cauliflower Pickles
Makes 4 pt
The great thing about hot-pack pickles—that is, the kind you simmer before packing into jars—is that you don’t have to seal them if you don’t want to (or don’t know how). You can put them in any nonreactive container and pop them in the fridge.

A 2-lb head of cauliflower, cut into florets
2 big green peppers or 3-4 banana peppers, cored and cut into 1" squares
5 big carrots, peeled and cut into 1" chunks
5 stalks of celery, sliced ½" thick
1 large onion, sliced ⅛" thick
3 T canning salt
2 qt cider vinegar
2 c sugar
1 T yellow mustard seeds
1 t powdered turmeric

Toss the vegetables with the salt in a glass, ceramic, or stoneware container and let them sit out overnight.

The next day, drain the vegetables, cover them with water, and drain them again. Put them in a pot with the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil, then simmer ten minutes. Seal in pint jars with two-piece caps in a boiling-water canner; about ten minutes ought to do the trick.

Or, if you don’t want to do that, just take them off the heat, pack the solids into nonreactive containers, and ladle juice over to cover.

Easy, fun, and attention-grabbing!

Soup Series 2: Rescue Orange!

Bend your ear down to this soup: it’s so orange, you can hear a tiny siren sound.

I found some neglected carrots and abandoned squash in the crisper drawer. They had some soft spots. And a few wrinkly peels. There may have been some sprouting. All right, I admit it: parts of them were brown.

My poor vegetables weren’t going to win any beauty contests; that was for sure. But they were mostly intact and I hated to throw them out. Besides, it was I who had failed them. They deserved more from me. I owed it to them. “You will look just fine as soup,” I told them.

Cooked this way, they look (and taste) exciting and delicious again! A splash of orange juice and a sprig of tarragon rescues them from the trash can.

Carrot and Squash Soup with Orange and Tarragon
Serves 6

2 T butter or olive oil
1 c chopped onion
6 c diced carrots and/or winter squash, such as butternut and kabocha
1 qt broth
½ c orange juice
2 T chopped fresh tarragon
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the butter or oil in a stockpot. Sauté the onion until soft, about 4 or 5 minutes. Dump in the carrots/squash and sauté that for another 5 or 6 minutes, until things begin to soften up and start hinting at getting brown.

Add the broth and simmer until the vegetables are tender, maybe 15 minutes.

Purée the soup in a blender or food processor. For good measure (and if you need to impress someone), force the soup through a sieve; this will make it super-smooth.

Return the soup to the pot, add the remaining ingredients, and bring it up to piping hot. Serve to acclaim.

Bienvenue Bluie!

Welcome to the family, petite chou!

This holiday season, through a combination of comparison shopping, lurking in cooking stores, and fortuitous receipt of gift cards, I made a longtime dream come true. I bought a 4.5 quart cobalt blue French oven from Le Creuset.

There was my new baby, all round and smooth and perfectly blue! What would I do to welcome her to the family?

I knew: I’d make cassoulet from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. No, I had never made it before. But it’s one of my favorite kinds of food: making it once is like making four other different things! Twice!! And I would get to put Bluie through her paces.

First there was shopping. I did not want to use lamb, as Mastering suggests. (My better half does not want to eat anything cute and fluffy.) Goose, duck, and partridge were uncomfortably expensive—especially right after the excesses of Sparklemas. I decided to use pork.



Polish sausage and ham hock

from Tollefson. Pork rind from

Finer Meats.

Even on a regular day, this dish calls for four different kinds of pork: roast, side or salt pork, sausage, and pork rind. I thought a nice, flavorful ham hock would be the perfect economical stand-in for rich duck or goose confit. I went to the Minneapolis Farmers Market to see Dan Tollefson, my favorite pork farmer in the world. He set me up with everything but rind. After calling all over the city, I found it at Finer Meat Company just a few blocks from my house. Who knew that this store was there? And why didn’t they tell me?! Finer Meat has a beautiful array of fresh, smoked, and salted meats. They have a shelf of meat-related groceries. (They have butcher hats on, for crying out loud!) They sold me a half-pound of lovely pork rind for a buck.

I’m not going to recite the recipe, since it is tiresome in its length and also it’s not mine. My Google fu turned up this, which will get you there. Instead of goose, I used a pork roast per Mastering’s original instruction. Instead of lamb, I used a ham hock per my imagination.

First, make a roast. Brown a pork loin and then some onions and carrots. Throw in a bouquet garni, then cover and pop in a 325 degree oven for an hour and a half.

(Just so you know, I used some bean cooking water to wash this tasty brown stuff back into the pot.)

Pork rind: weirdly elegant?

While all that jazz is going down in the oven, time to start the beans. Child specifies the quick-soak method. While the beans soak in their hot bath, freshen the pork rind in two changes of boiling water. Then cut it into quarter-inch dice and simmer it for a half hour. You’re essentially making gelatin here: the softened pork rind will melt to nothing but collagen. It will add velvety body to the finished dish.

All the stuff in the picture to the right, here, has got to get crammed into the same pot to simmer for an hour and a half. Julia wasn’t kidding about an 8-quart pot. I didn’t listen. I’m using the gray pot because Bluie was in the oven during this part.

C'est magnifique! Also I don't

speak French.

While the beans are cooking, or maybe the next day, you can make another meat dish. Mastering has many suggestions, including lamb braised with browned bones that add flavor. I had some meaty pork bones left over from Sparklemas dinner. I browned those in Bluie, then browned two chopped onions and two diced carrots. The bones went back in the pot along with a ham hock, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, a can of tomato paste, two bay leaves, four cloves of mashed garlic, and a half teaspoon of thyme. I braised that in the oven for an hour and a half.



Finally, everything is cooked and it smells like a French chophouse in here. Time to assemble...

...and top with crumbs and butter.









After baking it looks... um, it looks rather brown.

But it tastes like the heavenly congress of pork and beans. Which it is!




And though I scrubbed her with an enamel-safe pad and plenty of soap, Bluie has a few brown battle scars on the bottom of her. Ah, c’est la vie, little one. You work hard in this family of pots and pans. You get a mark here, a ding there. But you are no less beloved for it; no less beautiful to me.

So Not in the Mood

OMG you guys, it’s allergy season and spring. Two of the stupidest times of the year in terms of cooking: not only do my symptoms and/or pills render me functionally useless, but there’s nothing to cook! There’s nothing fresh, nothing in season, nothing local or abundant. Yeah, yeah, local food blah blah blah, traditional foodways blah. Back in the day, you know what people did this time of year? They starved!

Well, I guess I DO have some canned kraut around here. Quit bitchin’ and get in the kitchen.

A Thing I Just Made Up This Minute
Hardly groundbreaking, but hush up. I’m crabby and this is comfort food. It tastes good to this Slavic American, so make one for yourself too.

Olive oil
1 or 2 pork chops
1 onion
1 qt sauerkraut – mine has caraway in it
3 Yukon Gold potatoes, quartered
2 carrots, cut in chunks
1 apple, quartered, cored and peeled
¾ c water – white wine would’ve been good too
1 bay leaf, broken up

Heat the olive oil in a skillet with a tight-fitting lid. Throw the pork on one side and the onions on the other. Stir those onions around while the pork browns well, then flip pork over to brown the other side.

Throw everything else in the pan, stir it up a little, and heat to boiling. Turn down the heat to simmer. Clamp that lid on. Go do something else for an hour.

Come back and see if you can cut the pork with a wooden spoon. You can? Yay, it’s done. Oh, it smells good in here. Maybe I can carry on another day.

Dear Thailand: Thanks for Curry

Dear Entire Nation of Thailand,

I am only one person and you are all Thai people considered in context of your history, culture, language, geography, and cuisine. So the weight of my awe and gratitude will be as nothing to you, less than the weight of a fly upon the back of an elephant.

Even so, I would like to express my deep happiness to have been put on the same planet as you, Entire Nation of Thailand. On a winter evening, in the gathering darkness and the unrelenting cold, a person comes to crave something lush and tropical. The muted colors and sounds of the icebound landscape leave little to see and hear, and other senses can make known their demands. Smell, touch, and taste clamor for something sensual and wildly delicious—something that will make the body feel life and warmth again.

And that, Entire Nation of Thailand, is why I am so indebted to you. From your collective imagination springs curry: a dish that bursts with flavor and color. As I eat a bowlful, the fragrant steam curls around my frozen heart. The melting ice loosens, slips, and falls in a shattering splash.

Simmered Curry
This makes a big old pot of curry, 6-8 servings. If I were up to usual caliber for this blog, I would make my own curry paste. But I am too tired, sad, and sick of winter today. Look, just make this and eat it, and I don’t think you can stay mad at me.

2 cans regular or light coconut milk
A 4oz jar of curry paste. I like Thai Kitchen.
½ c or more of chicken stock
2-4 T fish sauce
A kaffir lime leaf (you can find these at an Asian grocery or at Lunds - ask the produce manager to order you some)
1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1 white potato, peeled and cubed
3-4 carrots, peeled and cubed
1 zucchini, sliced
1 red bell pepper, cubed
A handful of frozen green peas
A package of seitan
Jasmine rice (or white rice if you can’t find it)

Stir the coconut milk and curry paste together until they bubble, then simmer for a few minutes. Put in the stock, fish sauce, lime leaf, potatoes, and carrots. Simmer for 20 minutes. It’s OK if the potato starts to get crumbly.

Add the zucchini and pepper. Simmer a few minutes until the vegetables are tender. Drop in the peas and seitan; heat through. Serve over cooked rice.

Roast me a chicken

When the weather turns cool, some people crave soup. But I always want a roast chicken. There's something about it that says fall, home, family, comfort, Sunday afternoon, and someone loves you enough to feed you.

Roast chicken is not hard, either. It's the dish that makes itself. You can spend fifteen minutes getting it ready, throw it in the oven, and spend the next hour lounging around reading. Perfect for a Sunday.

Since it's not quite hopelessly winter, there's still the possibility of using some fresh herbs from the garden (yours or Dehn's). I love the savory perfume that tarragon lends to a chicken. It's also fun to strew a few vegetables in the pan around the bird. Carrots, potatoes, and onions are de rigeur. Fennel ratchets it up from "bases covered" to "dreamy." Seriously, I'm going to swoon.

The really nice thing, though, is that with one more ounce of effort, you can have your soup after all. Pop the bones and trimmings into a stockpot for six hours, strain, and throw in any old vegetables in the house.

Roast Chicken Chez Amy
First off, two words: Kadejan Farms. Because happy chickens are tasty chickens.

1 chicken, about 4 lb
1 bunch tarragon
1 T butter
Salt
2 carrots
2 potatoes
2 onions
1 fennel bulb
2 T olive oil
Fresh ground black pepper
1/2 cup stock

1. Prepare the chicken: Stuff a sprig of tarragon under the skin of each thigh and each side of the chicken breast. Stuff the rest of the tarragon in the cavity. Rub the chicken all over with the butter and salt. Put the chicken breast side down in a wide roasting pan.

Oh, fine. If you will be all sad that you don't get crispy browned breast skin, then put the chicken breast side up. But if you are interested in juicy, perfectly cooked white meat, then try it my way just this once.

2. Peel the carrots and potatoes, or don't. Cut them into 4-8 pieces each. Quarter the onion. Halve/quarter and core the fennel, then separate it into pieces. Toss the vegetable pieces with the olive oil and black pepper. Arrange the vegetables around the chicken in one layer.

3. Roast the chicken at 400°for an hour. Stir the vegetables two or three times during the cooking. You'll know the chicken is done because the juices run clear when you stick a knife in the thickest part of the thigh. The chicken's thigh. Not yours, for G-d's sake!

just-a like-a this

4. Remove the chicken to a carving board and the vegetables to a serving dish, which you can keep warm in the turned-off and left-open oven during the next part. Let the chicken rest about 10 minutes, then carve it into serving pieces. If juice runs off, try to catch it and return it to the pan.

5. Remove as much of the fat from the pan as you can, leaving any pan juices that may remain. Set the pan over the burners of your stove on medium to high heat. Pour in about a half cup of stock. Scrape up all the browned bits of chicken and vegetable yumminess and stir that stock around as it boils. When it has reduced by about half, pour this sauce over the chicken pieces and serve to acclaim.

Bonus! Chicken soup!

1. When you are done with dinner, if there are leftovers, pull the meat off the bones. Don't scrape off every scrap, though. Leave some on there for flavor. Throw all those bones, hard-to-retrieve meat scraps, and skin into a stockpot. Add garlic, an onion, a carrot if you want. Put in the stems of tarragon left over from the roasting. Add some peppercorns. Or don't. You can't do this wrong.

2. Add water just to cover. Bring to a just-barely-simmer and cook, covered, for six hours or more. When the bones have all disconnected and fallen to the bottom of the kettle; when you taste a piece of the meat and it has no flavor; then you are done.

3. Strain out the solids and discard them. Chill the stock until the fat is a hard layer on top. Remove this fat with a spoon.

4. Put the stock back in a pot and simmer it until it is reduced to about five or six cups. Add whatever you want: the leftover chicken meat cut up; noodles; rice; any vegetables. You can add these things alread cooked or simmer them in the stock until they are done.

My new favorite combination is to add two sliced zucchini; two sliced carrots; a cut-up bell pepper; some cut-up hot cherry peppers; the leftover chicken meat; and six torn-up corn tortillas. Simmer this until the vegetables are cooked. The tortillas will disintegrate and add wonderful thick body to your soup. I hesitate to call this a posole, but maybe that's the closest word for it. Let's call it posole-inspired. It is even better the next day.

Enjoy!

Fennel, once more from the top—with feeling

Even after polishing off a fennel bulb pasta dish, I was still practically cackling with glee over the fennel tops I had left. As the great-grandchild of northern Italian immigrants, I am mindful of the happy marriage among pork, fennel, garlic, and black pepper into porchetta (pronounce it porKETta but don’t let me catch you spelling it that way). I was itching to make this beloved special-occasion dish from my childhood.

I have a recipe (well, it’s more like driving directions) scrawled onto a paper a few years ago while talking to Grandma on the phone. It calls for me to butterfly a Boston butt roast, stuff it with herbs, tie it up with string, and roast it for a few hours. Did I mention it’s July? I’m not roasting. Instead, I’d make the porchetta with a tenderloin, close it up with a kebab skewer, and let it rest overnight. Brilliant! I planned a honey-orange glazed carrot side dish and a small green salad. Then I called my fellow pork-loving Italian-American friend Judy and cajoled her into coming for dinner.

Porchetta tenderloin tasted much like the roasts I remembered: tender, savory pork perfumed with the unmistakable sweet spice of fennel. In absence of long roasting, the garlic was sharp rather than mellow. When it got too intense for me, I scraped the herbs off and let the meat’s flavor sweep me back in time to family gatherings when I was so young my gaze was at tabletop level. I remembered standing eye to eye with plates of cold sliced porchetta to be served in split buttered hard rolls. “This is really good the next day,” I mentioned to Judy around a mouthful. “Next day?!” she said as she speared another slice.

Of course we didn’t get to find out about cold porchetta. I’m afraid we stayed up too late on a work night, drank too much red wine, and ate that whole tenderloin. And I’m not ashamed to suggest that we do it again the very next chance we get.

Buon appetito!


Porchetta Tenderloin

If you’re within driving distance of the Minneapolis Farmers Market, buy from Tollefson’s Family Pork. Best. Pork. EVER.

1 lb pork tenderloin
Fronds from 2 small bulbs of fennel, chopped fine. I guess I had 2/3 cup or more.
3 big cloves of garlic, minced
¼ cup fresh ground black pepper, divided
1 t salt

First, you’re going to butterfly the tenderloin. Well, more like you’re going to caterpillar it. Pretend like you’re going to cut it into medallions about ¾ inch thick. Don’t cut all the way through, though—only about ¾ of the way.

In a small bowl, mix the fennel, garlic, salt, and half the pepper. Stuff some of the mix into each cut. Use it all. Thread a kebab skewer through the tenderloin from end to end, near the top, to hold the butterfly cuts closed. Rub the tenderloin with the remaining black pepper, covering it well. Bundle it up tight in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Unwrap the tenderloin, put in a shallow pan, and cook 20 to 25 minutes. Remove and let stand 5 minutes, pull out the skewer, and cut the slices the rest of the way through. Serve to acclaim.

Should have served 4, but we were being gluttons about it.


Honey-Orange Glazed Carrots

One of my food heroes, Lynne Rosetto Kasper, puts orange zest in her porchetta. I’m not about to mess with my own family’s recipe, but I understood immediately that she’s right. Here's a compromise side dish.

1 lb carrots, peeled and sliced ½ inch thick
2 T butter
2 T honey
½ cup orange juice

Plunk them all in a pan, people. Simmer, covered, for 10 minutes. Then uncover and simmer about 10 more, stirring often. The sauce will reduce to a glaze. Stir to make sure all the carrots are covered.

If you start this and the pork at the same time, they will be done together, too.