Szechuan String Beans

Everybody should have problems like this: I have too much garlic. There’s a bag of fresh string beans in the refrigerator, too. At this time of year, there are string beans everywhere: at farmers markets. In CSA boxes. Spilling out of gardens like a green and yellow tide. But don’t be upset. There’s a solution, and it is Szechuan string beans.

In her Still Life with Menu Cookbook, Mollie Katzen describes her frustration at trying to cook this recipe in a house full of taste-testers. “It’s difficult to accumulate a dinner-sized amount of something when it disappears faster than you can make it,” she writes.

It’s true that if you cook this dish as part of a meal, it will likely have been nibbled away by the time you set the table. The trick, in my opinion, is to make it on a day when you are home alone. Or if you have just fallen in love in the last few minutes, and the object of your affection comes to your house while you are fixing this, then perhaps you will be swept away on a wave of romance and share your string beans with your visitor. The following week, though, things will be back to regular. You’ll be snacking on more than your share by the time your sweetheart rings the doorbell.

I have altered this recipe a tiny bit to include fresh chiles instead of Katzen’s crushed red pepper. The key points are for the wok to be hot and the beans to be dry. It seems like a lot of garlic here, but don’t be scared. High heat knocks the fight out of garlic and leaves it tasting sweet rather than pungent.

Szechuan String Beans

2-3 T sesame oil
2 lb string beans, cleaned
8 cloves of garlic, minced
1 Thai chile, minced
Oh, use more garlic and chile if you like. It’s fun.
½ teaspoon salt

Heat a wok over medium-high heat. Add the oil. Wait for the oil just to begin smoking, and then throw in the beans. Turn the heat to high and stir-fry—that means constant tossing! Keep this up for five minutes or more, until the beans are seared and blistered.

Add the garlic, salt, and chile. Toss, toss, toss some more! Stay at it for another 2 or 3 minutes until the garlic is cooked. Be sure to toss madly so that the garlic doesn’t burn.

Put the beans in your serving dish. You could serve them hot with rice as a main course. You could serve them warm or at room temperature, too, if any are left by the time they cool down.

Enjoy!

Butter: Why Bother?

(with a note about cherries)

Y’all, this post is about butter, but the picture is not as big a bait and switch as you think. There’s a note at the bottom about cherry jam. Stay with me.

So it’s hardly an original idea to write about making butter. I read in the New York Times about a year ago that hotsy totsy Manhattan chefs were doing it. The Minneapolis Star Tribune plastered it all over the Taste section just weeks ago. If you Google “how to make butter,” you will come up with more than 39 million hits.

Why, Amy Boland, why would you bother to blog about butter?

Because it’s just so fun! It is so easy and so fun and you can’t screw it up. You don’t have to buy anything. Or you can use it as an excuse to buy everything. You could do it with your kids on a rainy day and then make cookies with it. Or you could do it by yourself on a barbecue day and show it off to your friends, who will not know it is easy and fun and will be all impressed.

If you want to do it with few purchases, then you only need heavy whipping cream and a lidded jar that you fish out of the recycling. (Get cream with no other ingredients, i.e. carrageenan.) If you want to use buttermaking as an excuse to buy a KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook, well then you just go on.
I went halvsies. I spent $7 on a bench knife that I secretly wanted to buy anyway. And I used Organic Valley cream and a bowl and my hand mixer.

Just beat or shake cream until it passes through the whipped stage, through the “Rrr! I overwhipped it” stage, and all the way until “What the hell? There’s milk in here!” Pour off the liquid (It’s buttermilk! Drink it! It’s not nasty like the kind in the store!). Rinse the solid in cold water until it runs clear. Shake it dry, or better yet knead it with a spoon against the side of a bowl, or with your new bench knife on the countertop, or on the brand new marble countertops that you had to have installed so that you could make butter. (See what I mean about excuses?) Use a clean kitchen towel to pat off the water as you go.

Mix in salt, or don’t. Mix in flavors, or don’t. Because it’s… easy and fun! You can’t screw it up!

On a total non sequitur, cherry jam! Oh boy! My family recipe for strawberry jam also works on raspberries and, as I just discovered, cherries too.

I used the sour cherries pictured above. I got them from Maple Leaf Orchard. If you get to the downtown St. Paul farmers market early enough on Saturday, August 8, you might be able to score a quart or two. Afton Apple sometimes has an extra flat you could pick up. Or maybe you, or a neighbor, have a North Star cherry tree growing in your yard. Or you could use sweet cherries, too, I guess.

I pitted a generous quart, chopped them very roughly (each cherry into 2-3 pieces), and omitted the lemon juice. I measured 3 cups of very juicy cherries. I boiled them hard for several minutes until they had reduced a bit, then carried on as usual—I had to cook the jam for six minutes before it would gel. The recipe yielded just over a pint. Holy intense cherry flavor!

Open Letter to a Star Prairie Trout

Dear Splashy:

Do you mind if I call you Splashy? It’s a little familiar, I know. But I would like to think of you as someone, and I never knew your name—assuming trout have names.

You don’t know anything about me. Well, you don’t know anything at all—not in the state you’re in. But I know a few things about you. I know that a mere five days ago you were swimming in fresh, cold spring water with thousands of other trout. I know that you were sleek and lovely, well-fed and healthy, and almost certainly happy.

Such is life for a fish. I understand; I have kept your kind as pets for more than ten years. Give you the proper water chemistry and temperature, the proper food, the proper companions, and the proper underwater landscape, and you thrive. That’s what Star Prairie Trout Farm did for you in the time it took you to grow to marketable size.

I can’t say I didn’t feel a little ambivalent bringing you home all filleted and labeled “Smoked 7/30.” Oh, Splashy, I would just as gladly have watched you swim around. To have admired your torpedo body, your untouchable quickness, your translucent and shimmering color—ah! A fish is one of the most beautiful and efficient creatures on earth. In other circumstances, our relationship could have been much different. A little sad, that.

The real tragedy, though, Splashy, is that you will never know how delicious you are. You will never understand how fantastic you taste baked into a tart with a flaky crust and served with some braised greens, roasted potatoes, a salad, and a nice glass of fume blanc. Your firm, smoky richness is why I can just get over it and eat you. You’re absolutely scrumptious, and you’re one of the many reasons I will never become a vegetarian. It’s good to be on top of the food chain.

So, my small friend, perhaps we will meet again in another life. But I hope not. If we do, I hope your memory is short and you don’t hold a grudge.

Smoked Trout Tart

Pastry:

1 ¼ cups flour
½ cup butter or shortening
½ t salt
3-5 T ice water

Mix flour and salt, cut in fat, and sprinkle with water. Stir a few times until it clumps together. Form into a ball and chill for as long as you can—at least an hour but better overnight.

Roll out the pastry and line a tart pan with a removable rim. If you don’t have that, you can use a pie pan. Make sure to patch up any holes in the crust! Chill again for ½ hour.

Now, the tart:

2 smoked fillets of trout, i.e. one fish – Star Prairie is perfect.
4 eggs
1 cup milk or cream
¼ t freshly ground black pepper
A dash of freshly ground nutmeg
Salt to taste

Take the skin off the trout and tear or chop the meat into ½-inch chunks. Scatter across the bottom of the pastry-lined tart pan. Whisk together the eggs, milk, and seasonings. Pour them over the trout. Bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the center of the tart is just firm. The tart should still be a little quivery. Remove from the oven and let stand 5-10 minutes. Serve to acclaim.

Rolling in Green

This week my friend Judy invited me to pick vegetables. Her partner, Stu, was out of town, and his garden needed to be harvested. "I have to get in, get as much picked as I can, and get out before dark," she said. "Do you want to come with me?"

Well of course I did. We stuffed her dog and a bunch of plastic shopping bags in the back of her car and drove through the dissipating rush-hour traffic to Stu's outer-ring suburban home.

Stu's garden is in the corner of his enormous yard. (I garden on a smaller-than-standard south Minneapolis lot. You could spit a watermelon seed across my yard.) His soil is rich and black. (Mine was sand before I spaded in mountains of compost.) He grows peas, beets, brassicas, 10 kinds of pepper, tomatoes, berries, radishes, and a small ocean of Swiss chard. (No, I'm not at all envious. Whyever would you ask?)

We commenced filling up bags of produce, including a sack of chard as big as a gradeschool child. It hardly seemed to make a dent in the patch.

Judy dropped me off at home well after dark. "Thank you," she said. "If you hadn't come, I'd still be out there. And I'd have to find someone to take some of this food."

"Oh, thank YOU," I replied, hefting the bag of veggies that was my share of the haul. Each of us felt she'd gotten the better end of the deal.

Even though it was late, I decided to cook up a bit of the chard and eat it right on the spot. Chard is fast and easy to fix, after all. And how often does a city dweller get the chance to eat something that was picked less than two hours ago?

Not often enough, I thought, as I munched on my little dish. The vivid green leaves and white stems tasted sweet and fresh. Chard's mild undertone of minerals and barely perceptible bitterness add depth to the flavor of this favorite green. Perfect, and well worth the late bedtime.

Swiss Chard Midnight Snack

A few leaves of chard
Gomasio* (sesame salt)


Wash the chard and cut it up roughly. Throw it in a pan with perhaps a quarter inch of water and cover. Cook on medium until tender--maybe five or seven minutes.

Drain and sprinkle with gomasio. That's it!

* I always have gomasio, or sesame salt, lying around for the very purpose of sprinkling onto freshly cooked vegetables. I can't think of a single veggie that would not be rendered more delicious.

2 T sesame seeds
1 T sea salt (or less. Or none, if you're watching your salt. I guess technically it will not be gomasio anymore. Oh well.)

Toast the seeds in a dry skillet over medium heat, shaking often, until they color and pop. The darker you toast them, the more flavorful they get. Have patience, hang in there, and shake them a lot so you toast them evenly--don't let them burn!

Grind them with the salt. I have a mortar and pestle. If you don't, you could use a food processor or even a blender.

Simple! Isn't it disproportionately good, though? That's what we call "high ROI" in the marketing world, folks.

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.

Fennel in Fifteen Minutes Flat

How great is fennel? A fountain of fragrant, feathery green leaves sprouts from the heart of a pale bulb that tastes like no other vegetable in the garden. Having two fennel bulbs AND their fronds feels to me like being rich; I fight the urge to save them all for a special occasion. The fact is, you can’t hoard vegetables. You have to spend them, and the sooner the better.

I’ll cut off the fronds and put them aside for now. Today I'll cook the bulb. It’s delicious roasted, but I can't see my way to roast things on this sunny day in the middle of summer. Besides, that would take soooooooo long, and I'm hungry NOW. I’m going to cook it in butter and serve it on top of pasta.

As it sautés, the fennel fills my kitchen with a spicy-sweet fragrance that makes me think of nothing so much as cookies—particularly, the anise biscotti that my 94-year-old grandmother still makes. The finished dish perfectly balances the sweetness of orange juice and lightly caramelized fennel against the savor of garlic and the warmth of the ginger. The soft richness of the vegetables practically melts onto perfectly al dente pasta. Best of all, it only took fifteen minutes to prepare.

Mangiamo!

Gingered Fennel with Garlic over Pasta

This recipe is modified so heavily from Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites (Clarkson Potter, New York, 1996) that the Moosewood Collective would probably disavow it. I would maybe serve this on linguine next time, but whole wheat fusilli is what I had in the cupboard.

You can heat the water while you do the prep work, then boil the pasta while you’re cooking the fennel. Everything will be done together. Hooray!

2 fennel bulbs (mine weighed ¾ pound total)
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root
1/3 cup orange juice
½ to 1 teaspoon sugar
Salt and pepper to taste
½ pound dry pasta, cooked al dente

Trim the fronds off the fennel, halve and core the bulbs, and slice thin. I sliced up the stalks, too, because I was feeling greedy and wishing I had even more fennel.

Heat the butter in a heavy pan or skillet. Sauté the fennel for about 5 minutes. It will start to color. Add the garlic and sauté 1 to 2 minutes more.

Turn down the heat, add the ginger root and the orange juice, and simmer until the fennel is tender—about 5 minutes. Take the pan off the heat, sprinkle the sugar over the fennel, and season with salt and pepper.

By now your pasta should be done. Drain it and toss or top it with the fennel. This will make between two and four main course servings.

What the Hell Is Amaranth?

What on earth is this stuff, I wonder. Asking around at my local co-op yields little help. The customer service person checks the Internet and blithely reports, "It's like spinach."

No it ain't, I grumble to myself, as I eye the shock of lurid magenta leaves in my refrigerator.

But I'm not daunted for long. I never met a vegetable I didn't like, and this punk rock spinach impostor is not going to get the best of me. I taste a raw leaf and find it earthy and bitter. Aha. A perfect companion for goat cheese. "I am going to make you into a pizza, little one," I tell the bunch of amaranth.

I'm happy with the result. The taste of amaranth is only vaguely reminiscent of spinach. It's got a bitter undertone, a minerally aftertaste, a flavor that approaches sweetness but shies away at the last minute. I'm hardly doing it justice. It's like if Swiss chard decided to take a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. Like if spinach and beets finally stopped caring what their parents thought and ran away together to Morocco. Like if kale quit its $300K/yr job and joined an ashram instead.

Do try it.

Amaranth and Chevre Pizza

If you have a pizza stone, put it in the oven while you preheat. If you don't have a pizza stone, then do the first part of the baking on a cookie sheet or pizza pan. Slip the crust off the pan, dress it, and put it right on the rack when you return it to the oven.

The crust:

1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 package yeast
1/2 t salt

Mix these together. Add all at once:

2 T olive oil
1 cup tepid water (110 degrees F)

Stir together until it is dough. Cover the bowl with a cloth and let rise 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, assemble these things:

A sprinkling of cornmeal or semolina
1 bunch amaranth leaves
1 clove garlic*
1 scallion
1 small chevre (4 ounces is fine)
1-2 T olive oil
Salt and fresh-ground pepper

*I used mild, sweet uncured garlic because it was in the CSA box from Harmony Valley. If you use cured garlic, make it a small clove.

Wash the amaranth and steam it. I shook the water off and put it in a covered bowl in the microwave for 4 minutes, then let it sit another 4 minutes. Press out the excess liquid and chop roughly.

Slice the garlic as thinly as you can. Do the same for the scallion.

Mess up the cheese a little--just make it into chunks that will look pretty on the pizza crust.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

By now your dough should be ready. With floured hands, turn it out onto a floured surface and give it 6 or 10 quick kneads. Press or roll it about a quarter inch thick.

Sprinkle the cornmeal or semolina on your pizza stone, pan, or cookie sheet. Slip the crust onto the sprinkled sheet and bake 10 minutes. Remove from oven, brush the crust with half the olive oil, and dress it: cheese first, then amaranth, then garlic and scallions, then brush these with the rest of the oil. Sprinkle with salt and a grind or five of fresh black pepper. Return to the oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

Let the pizza rest for a couple of minutes before cutting. Mangiamo!

Strawberry Jam!

Harmony Valley’s homegrown strawberries are ringing a bell for me. They are small, deep red, and dense. They’re reminding me of the wild strawberries my family used to pick when I was growing up on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range.

Every evening in midsummer, my mother would take a battered 1-quart Tupperware measuring cup out to the field a quarter mile down the road from our house. She would come back an hour or two later with varying amounts of wild strawberries—sometimes just a cup or two, sometimes the berries heaped up to make well over a quart. Someone who only knows supermarket strawberries would call them dry, seedy, and tiny; but each pea-sized berry packs an intense flavor.

We’d pick the caps off the berries, wash them, measure them, add sugar, and cook them into jam. We’d put it up in any old jar—peanut butter jars, mustard jars, sometimes proper canning jars—and top them off with melted paraffin to seal them. Eating that jam on a frigid winter morning was like seeing the past and the future at the same time. “It was summertime once,” I’d remember, “and someday it will be summer again.”

***

2-3 cups prepared berries (wash, hull, quarter)

1 1/4 to 2 cups sugar

A tablespoon of lemon juice

Measure the berries into a heavy pot. Add ¾ to 1 cup sugar per cup of berries. Add the lemon juice. Cook, stirring constantly, over high heat until the mix comes to a full rolling boil. Cook 4 minutes.

Test: drop some liquid on a cold plate. If you can swipe your finger through the jam and leave a clean streak on the plate, your jam is thick enough. Keep testing every minute; the jelling happens quickly. I wouldn’t cook more than seven minutes, regardless of what’s going on with the plate.

Take off the heat and stir down the foam. Pour the jam into sterilized jars, put on two-piece caps, and process in a boiling water bath. If you are not a canner, you can put the jam in any glass or ceramic container you like. Store it in the refrigerator.

Beet Greens, Garlic, and Romaine

Yesterday I got a box of CSA goodies with all kinds of wonderful stuff in it! What to cook first?

My sig.o, Beth, wanted fish on the grill; we settled on a simple piece of lake trout. Any fish dinner is begging to be served with plenty of good greens. We decided to start with the beet tops, which are highly perishable, and the romaine. I had a lemon lying around, and it became a key component to the meal.

And what a lovely meal! The beet greens provided an earthy, garlicky complement to the trout. Sweet, crunchy romaine played counterpoint to the tang of feta; and the squeeze of lemon brightened all the flavors. We rounded out the meal with a crusty whole-wheat baguette and a choice between iced tea and pinot grigio.

***

Beet Greens with Fresh Garlic and Mirin

1 bunch beet greens, roughly chopped

1/4 cup fresh garlic (I sliced up the still-soft stem)

1 T olive oil 1/4 c. mirin Salt & pepper

Lemon wedges

Saute the beet greens in the olive oil for 2-3 minutes. Toss in the garlic and cook an additional minute. Add the mirin. Cover and turn down the heat a bit. Cook until tender, maybe 5 minutes. Salt & pepper to taste. Finish with a squeeze of lemon.

Romaine, Feta, and Walnut Salad with Lemon Vinaigrette

1 head romaine lettuce, torn up

1/2 cup crumbled Feta cheese

1/2 cup walnut pieces

Toss with this dressing:

3-5 black peppercorns

1 sprig of fresh thyme

1/3 cup lemon juice

1/4 to 1/2 t grated lemon zest

1 scallion bulb

1 cup olive oil

salt to taste

Put everything except the oil in a blender and pulverize. Drizzle the oil in a thin stream into the running blender.

Try A CSA!

So I got hooked up with a CSA box this week. A Twitter connection led me to @matt_wilson , who was headed out of town and would not be eating his farm share from Harmony Valley Farm.



He decided to give the box away on the condition that the lucky recipient document the experience of eating the contents.



That lucky recipient is me! I could not be more excited. Thank you, Matt!