The Hungry Tiger

Spinach salad, but not the kind you're thinking of.

The weather is hot and my desire for fresh light cool vegetables is, once again, running face-first into local reality. Tomatoes are approximately one million years away and even spring lettuces are still about three inches tall. And leafy green salads are all very well and good, anyway, but sometimes I just don't want one. (Here you can imagine me stamping my foot petulantly.)

This cold spinach fills roughly the same niche as a green salad but is not one. It's fresh, it's cool, it's green, it's even leafy. It makes a nice contrast to a hot entree or a hot day, or both. It's incidentally even quicker to put together than salad, at least if you follow my habit of washing and parboiling or steaming your spinach as soon as you bring it home from the store. Even if you don't cook the spinach until you're getting dinner ready, it's just not all that time consuming.

Super simple, delicious enough to eat multiple days in a row, suitable to the weather, novel yet not weird: what more could you ask?

Well, you might conceivably ask for it not to include preserved lemons, which I recognize are not the staple of everyone's cupboard that they are of ours, and no one is going to make or buy them just for the sake of putting a tablespoon's worth into a plate of spinach. I don't know that I can really advocate a substitute in this case, either--the soft briny lemon is what brings out the fruit in the olive oil, the vinegar, and even the onions, making the whole thing so well balanced and delicious. Maybe if you had Meyer lemons, you could get a similar effect with their juice in place of the vinegar, and plenty of grated zest?

If you're looking for inspiration for things to do with the preserved lemons you already have, though, or for an excuse to get some or make some, this is just the thing.

Links: Things to make

Bottled Fruit: Belgian Pears.

A truly delectable sounding recipe for special (but not complicated) poached pears, from The Cottage Smallholder.

Dutch Apple Cheese muffins.

"I make these once or twice a week. Lord help me, but when I'm pregnant I make them every other day or so." 

"Red espresso".

Rooibos tea ground to be used in an espresso machine or moka pot. Via Ask Metafilter. I have no idea if this is any good, but it's intriguing.

Miso, tahini, and nut paste.

A toasty topping for roast vegetables or a vegan filling for onigiri, from Just Bento.

Onion jam: like bacon jam, but not bacon

This past year, there was an explosion of enthusiasm over the "bacon jam" produced by Skillet, a West Coast gourmet food cart company, because the Internet loves bacon. (Also because Skillet isn't stupid, and put jars of the stuff in the hands of any number of Internet bacon lovers. Indeed, the jam has its very own Twitter account!) Bacon, you may have noticed, in addition to being a classic beloved foodstuff, is a Thing, has been a Thing, goes on being a Thing, and shows no signs of stopping being a Thing.

Onions aren't a Thing, but onion jam is very good. It's also vastly cheaper to produce eight ounces of it, or twenty-four ounces for that matter, than it is to order a $10 jar of bacon jam. And it's (at least potentially) kosher! How can you resist?

I've written about it before, but it never hurts to mention it again. A jar of onion jam, or onion confit, if you prefer, is an uncommonly useful thing to have in the refrigerator. Use in or on scrambled eggs, spread on toast, slip into a sandwich or burger, include in a savory tart, stir into your soup, mix with soft cheese, toss with pasta, add to simple fried rice, whatever your little heart desires. 

This is the recipe I've settled on over the years, cobbled together from what other people do, what I like in the final product, and what I find least fussy to put together in the kitchen.

Pozole verde

This is one of the things you can do with all that salsa verde you just made. (Didn't you?) It's unfussy, lively-tasting but substantial, texturally pleasing, and most likely not something you can get just as easily at a nearby restaurant.

Posole or pozole is, I have been given to understand, the name of both dried, slaked corn (aka hominy, the same stuff that is ground up to make hominy grits) and of soup or stew made of that corn. You can get hominy ready-cooked in a can, or buy it dried and simmer it yourself, which takes some time but hardly any work, and the results are more delightfully toothsome and less can-tasting than the canned kind.

This recipe will make six servings of pozole verde on the more soup-ish end of the spectrum. As you can see from the picture, I opted for fewer servings of something more towards the stew end of the spectrum--easily achievable by the simple method of adding less broth--with plenty of cheese on top. I also threw in some chopped leftover kale, because we had it around. This was a success.

If you already have some cooked hominy and a batch of salsa verde, you can wing it, like so: Use about a cup of salsa for every four to six ounces (in weight, that is) of cooked hominy. You'll also want a splash or two of olive oil; some quantity of additional hot pepper, minced; broth; salt and pepper; and garnishes, which is to say cheese. Then it's all very simple: heat the oil and add the salsa, plus the extra minced pepper. Cook for about ten minutes, then thin with broth. Add the hominy and simmer at least until heated through. You can add leftover greens, or shredded leftover chicken, at this point, too. Add more broth if you want it soupier, cook longer if you want it to be thicker. Add salt and pepper to taste. See, simple!

Simple pleasures and salsa verde

At last, it's (what I think of as) summer at the farmer's market! Hallelujah. As a result, I made buckets of salsa verde yesterday, and tonight we gorged ourselves on a mere fraction of the ripe tomatoes in our kitchen.

In fact, tonight's dinner was an especially fine example of simple food elevated by virtue of having all the components be extra good examples of their type: tomato salad made with good, ripe, long-awaited tomatoes; beautiful fancy beans topped with a extra-crisp young onions in vinegar and cilantro from the pot on our own back porch; and tortillas I made with my very own two little hands. It was lovely.

Maybe you would like a recipe for something now, since it's been a while. How about the salsa? It didn't feature in tonight's dinner, but it will appear later in the week. There are many variations on salsa verde, but this is the way I make it, and I think it's very good. This type, with cooked tomatillos, will keep a week or two, tightly sealed, in the fridge, but it also freezes beautifully, so feel free to make enormous batches while tomatillos are in season. It's good with chips or on top of a quesadilla, but also serves as an ingredient in dishes like chilaquiles, pozole verde, and enchiladas.

INGREDIENTS

• Tomatillos
• Serrano or jalapeno peppers: for a base, I like to start with about one for about every pound of tomatillos. This makes a mild but not utterly kickless sauce; I add (or don't) more minced chile to suit the final dish, depending on what it is and who I'm serving it to.
• White onion: about half a smallish one for about every pound of tomatillos, roughly chopped
• Garlic: a clove for about every pound of tomatillos
• Several sprigs of cilantro
• Salt to taste

TO DO

1. Husk your tomatillos. They have a tendency to be sticky underneath their husks, so I find it easiest to do this under running water. Twist off any stems.
2. Lightly oil a large baking dish, or several, depending on how many tomatillos you have. Put the tomatillos in a single layer in these dishes, and tuck the chiles in between them.
3. Broil the tomatillos under a high flame for about 4-7 minutes, until they start to turn brown on top. Flip them over and cook a few minutes more. Let cool. Cut the stem ends off the chiles and discard.
4. Now, puree all the ingredients together, in a food processor or blender or molcajete. If you are the kind of person who makes your salsa in a proper molcejete, I wonder why you are getting your recipe from the likes of me, but I bet it will taste great. You may have to do this in batches, which is also a nice way to give yourself a chance to adjust proportions to your taste. Puree ten tomatillos with the proportions of other ingredients I suggest and then give it a taste. Too much or too little spice, or garlic, or whatever? Compensate accordingly next time and mix together to get the balance just right.

Eggs with braised pale green vegetables, mustard cream sauce

Okay, eggs, butter, and milk are certainly not roughage, but this frittata, which verges on being a crustless quiche, is mostly a tangle of flavorful, if pale, vegetables, with just enough egg to hold them together. If you accompany it with a big green salad, no one should have anything to complain about. The mustard cream, which can be made with creme fraiche, full-fat yogurt, less-fat yogurt, or sour cream, is an idea from Deborah Madison that I find pulls the dish together magnificently. (It's fantastic with asparagus, too, by the way.)

You can prepare the cabbage and leeks ahead and refrigerate for a few days, in which case assembling the final dish is really a snap. It's not too much work for a weeknight, even so. Also, if you dislike cabbage, just substitute another leek or two.

We like onion jam, yes we do

Today I made a batch of this onion jam, and it is delectable.

After I had skimmed off the butter (into a little tub which I popped into the fridge, figuring it would be a fine addition to, say, some roast asparagus) and decanted the rest into two half-pint jars, S. and I stood in the kitchen and shamelessly put our fingers in the pan and licked them clean, again and again. I had originally had the notion of giving one of the jars away, but now I feel some reluctance about that.

What to do with onion jam, or confit, or marmalade, or whatever you might call it? Well, it will obviously be excellent in a sandwich or with bread and cheese -- it would make a superb ingredient in a slightly glammed-up take on a plowman's lunch. Ximena of Lobstersquad (a truly delightful food blog, by the way) reports that it is also very good indeed with scrambled eggs, and I can easily imagine that I would agree. I'm sure it would be lovely with a quiche or frittata or savory souffle, as well. I bet it would be good with pork or roast chicken, too: meateaters should try it and report back!

I doubt I will have any trouble at all consuming this batch, but if you have any other thoughts about what this sweet but savory condiment would complement, by all means pipe up about them. I should note for the record that I used a bit less sugar even than called for in the linked recipe -- only 100 grams -- and as I had neither cassis nor brandy on hand, I used sherry. It was not a problem.

Good cold: open faced sandwiches and two vegetable mezze

We are entering the time of year when I frequently think it would be extremely unpleasant to stand near a hot stove at the end of a working day, but not yet the time of year when we can eat tomatoes every night. So the plan is to have a number of items that can be mixed and matched chilled or at room temperature, maybe alongside something very very quick to cook at the time, like scrambled eggs. Ideally they would also serve as nice components of smørrebrød, the existence of which I have only recently discovered.

Smørrebrød is an open-faced Danish sandwich constructed on that dense European bread that comes in remarkable dark brown bricks, sliced thin -- "health" bread, or that specially bricklike pumpernickel, or whateverelsebrot in that vein. I picked some up from World Market this morning. It is always covered completely by its toppings and always, or almost always, has a sauce of some sort on top (which makes sense when you experience how very dense indeed the bread can be). I found thinned Greek yogurt, a bit of salt, and lemon juice was easy and nice for the purpose.

You always eat these with knife and fork and always butter the bread thickly or spread it with goose schmaltz, to seal it against the toppings. (You will note that the smørrebrød concept is very closely related to the simple, down-home habit of Piling Tasty Things on Top of Toast.) I like this concept and think I will pursue it often, while I also intend to pursue often my more tried-and-true habit of the eclectic mezze. Today's cooking was therefore directed towards suitability for both, with some hardboiled eggs, sauteed mushrooms from the farmer's market, asparagus roasted in the toaster oven, etc. Two other dishes were new for me, and the recipes appear below.

Versatile ricotta and greens

I am sure you all already know the handy fact that wonton wrappers, being pasta, can be used to make ravioli. But what you may not know is that leftover ravioli filling makes an outstanding sandwich when tucked inside a toasty pita. I am feeling like Einstein for figuring this out. So good!

The stuff I am eating right this very minute was made like so: I took 1/2 onion and 2 cloves of garlic minced extremely fine (in the food processor) and sauteed them in olive oil. I then added a pinch of dried thyme, a pinch of nutmeg, a tiny pinch of cayenne, salt and pepper. After a minute, I tossed in some chopped parboiled greens and cooked it all together until it was good and thoroughly heated through. I finally dumped the contents of this skillet in a bowl with 1 cup ricotta cheese and mixed it all up together.

This was enough to fill four large ravioli for each of us with enough left over for a generously filled pita and still more left for tomorrow.

Guacamole tacos

I proclaim the following to be the perfect guacamole delivery system:

1. Make guacamole following your favorite recipe, using perfectly ripe Haas avacados.

2. Take some cheap-ass undistinguished crispy taco shells and heat them in your oven.

3. Fill taco shells with guacamole.

4. Consume.

This dish is complemented exceedingly well by S.'s newest discovery, the blessed union of Limonata soda and Boodles gin.

Olives marinated with lemon and spices

Just a few days ago, it was seventy degrees. This weekend it snowed. All weekend. Fortunately, we had some of these very summery olives to remind us of warm weather. They are based on a recipe from Quick Pickles by Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, and Dan George. This is a very appealing book with enticing recipes and, what's almost as important to me, good notes on each and every one of them.

I like to know what a cookbook author thinks about a recipe -- where it came from, why it is the way it is, what's negotiable, what's not. This book is excellent in this regard, and though I have only tried this one recipe so far, it gives me a lot of confidence in the others, too. S. was immediately attracted to these olives, so I made up a batch, more or less, incorporating a few ideas from the Paula Wolfert books I've been reading obsessively of late. She suggests that green olives should be boiled, drained, and rinsed (up to three times) before marinating, to remove excessive bitterness. I find that this is true, and what's more, a slightly warm olive seems more receptive to its marinade. Here's what I did:

Ajvar, a relish

"Ajvar" is the name of an eggplant-and-pepper relish made in the Balkans. The kind I've seen at the grocery store, and the kind that most recipes on the Internet seem to be for, is a mild-mannered one made with red peppers and tomatoes. It is a very fine accompaniment for cheesy toasts, as my friend and I discovered one happy spring break.

I have Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Cooking out from the library, and at first I found it intimidating. Her directions are very thorough, and sometimes the ingredient lists make me feel hopelessly aware of how far I am from the Mediterranean. But I keep trying things from it, sometimes with substitutions (especially for specific greens), and more and more I am discovering that I don't have to make as many substitutions as I think, and that the instructions are definitely to be trusted. The results are seriously delicious.

There is a recipe in Mediterranean Cooking for ajvar, but it is not red. It's pale green with sweet and hot green peppers and eggplant, and it is chopped, not pureed. This recipe gives the proportions, but the original has the instructions that insure that it comes out right: you can start the eggplant in the oven but should finish it over coals or a gas flame, and when you have removed the charred skin, squeeze out all the bitter juices before you chop it up; you should add the olive oil a tablespoon at a time, stirring until it's absorbed before you add the next dollop, so that it all is absorbed evenly and fully as it should be.

We had some tonight with frittata, and it was fantastic. It would also plainly be excellent with cheese toast, as a bruschetta topping, on crackers, with white beans, or on your bratwurst. I may have to make a lot more of this.

Chickpeas with yogurt

Today could have been a pretty irritating day. We were foiled in our plans of going out to our CSA farm by the discovery that S.'s car had been molested by incompetent would-be thieves who had left it with a broken window and a batterd and gnawed ignition that no longer functioned. Grunt. Yet it was not so bad, after all, and there was plenty of lazy afternoon cooking. At dinner, S. took one bite and widened his eyes in happy surprise. "You'd better write down what you did, because you need to do it again. Soon."

Fortunately, it was all very easy. First, I started some barley in the rice cooker along with broth, a splash of white wine, a blob of butter, and some minced garlic scapes. That made for a nice little juice-catching bottom layer on the plate, but you could do without it. What you couldn't do without was:

GARLIC YOGURT
The most important part of this dinner. Take about a cup of nice thick yogurt, preferably the strained Greek kind. Mix it with a few garlic cloves that you have turned into a puree. If you chop them roughly and then add a pinch of salt, you can achieve this by rubbing out the pieces with the side of the tip of your knife. Stir in the juice of one lemon. Cover and put into the fridge for at least two hours. This will eventually appear in a large delicious blob on top of:

CHICKPEAS AND GREENS

1 large yellow onion, sliced into thin half-rounds
3 cloves garlic, minced with a pinch of salt
2 T olive oil
2 t ground coriander
a bunch or two of mild but not too, too mild greens: mature spinach would do well; I used escarole
1 small can (14 oz. or so) nice chickpeas, rinsed and drained
salt
pepper
a fat pinch of red pepper flakes


Saute the onion very slowly in the olive oil, in a heavy pot with a lid, until it is collapsing and deep gold. This can take up to half an hour, if you're doing it slowly and patiently. Near the end of the process, tip in the garlic. Turn the heat up to medium, add the coriander, and then add the greens with the water clinging to them (you know the drill). Cook these by turning down the heat and covering the pot. If there are too many greens to fit, do it in batches, just adding more and stirring things up a bit every time the previous batch has cooked down and out of the way. Add the chickpeas, pepper, and red pepper flakes. Depending on whether there is only a little liquid or too much, at this point, cook covered (the former) or uncovered (the latter) until the chickpeas are heated through.

Trailing avocados of glory

Guacamole tacos ahoy! Though the supermarket avocados were small and not terribly flavorful, this still proved itself to be an excellent and decadent idea. I can't wait to try it out with better ingredients.

Along with the tacos of sin, we had a salad featuring greens from our first CSA delivery. There were pea shoots, which were especially delicious, and in fact the whole thing, though in appearance not so different from what we can get at the local co-op or Whole Paycheck, was wonderfully fresh-tasting. I also had a nice email exchange with the farmer about some delivery location confusion and the tastiness of the pea shoots. It is a wonderful world in which one can email one's farmer to say how much you enjoyed your salad. I foresee that this CSA thing is going to be well worth our while. And I still just find CSAs to be a wonderful idea for how family farming can be made to be worthwhile for the farmers. I hope it works as well for them as I like to imagine it does.

Tofu salad is good for me and other living things.

Today I dragged my sorry carcass over to the local supermercado and bought some produce -- we seem to be in that tragic lull before anything is full grown enough to eat and after all the storage foods are gone. I did obtain some mushrooms, and thus was able to make a batch of this egg salad, in the version where a block of firm tofu pinch hits for the eggs.

By the way, the secrets to this egg salad are as follows:

(1) LOTS of dill.
(2) Plenty of salt and especially pepper -- be sure to taste and adjust.

Nice mayonnaise is nice, but plain old Hellmann's is just fine. As mentioned above, it can also be made with tofu if you feel like being a bit healthier, or if boiling the eggs seems like an irritating extra step; in that case I like to add a quarter-teaspoon or so of turmeric. I imagine it could be made with soy mayonnaise, too, if one happened to be vegan, though I've never had soy mayo, so I can't actually vouch for how well that would work. And if you happen to have some fresh chives around, chop them in, too.

We'll be enjoying it very much with some toasted pita bread in the morning, and for other mornings and/or lunches thereafter. I really can't get over how tasty it is, especially because I am otherwise so uninterested in egg salad and its allies. But this stuff -- yes please, and second helpings.

For tonight's dinner, I have no idea; it's awful hot in here, and I am awful lazy. We'll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe dinner will somehow arise as an emergent property of the dynamic network with inputs me and torpor.