The Hungry Tiger

Take your salads to the next level, as your SEO consultant would have you put it.

This recipe here, from Yotam Ottolenghi's "New Vegetarian" column, has a trick in it that I have been using in all sorts of grain salads, pilafs, mixed roast vegetables, and other things of that room-temperature party dish variety. It is a fantastic secret-ingredient sort of thing that will make you feel like a wizard, it is highly generalizable, and I am drawing your attention to it because I love you.

The conditions: You have some dish of this sort, anything from the broad range of things you might call a "salad," or maybe something that would stretch the definition a bit too far. The main qualifying factors are (a) that it involves some non-homogenous stuff tossed or mixed together, (b) it is not to be served piping hot, and (c) you might conceivably want to squeeze some lemon or lime over it before serving.

The thing to do, and here I am partially quoting and partially paraphrasing from that linked recipe: Instead of just adding juice, take one or two or three lemons or limes (as you prefer). Use a small, sharp knife and trim off both ends. Then cut down the sides of the fruit, along their round curves, to remove the skin and white pith. Over a small bowl, remove the segments by slicing between the membranes. Squeeze any remaining juice over the segments. Poke your sharp knife in among the segment and cut them into small pieces -- say, thirds. Then add the segments and the juice to your whatever it is.

YES, this is more work than just squeezing a lime or two. But it is not much more work, if you have a suitable knife (it must be SHARP or you will be sad. I have a lethal little serrated fruit knife with a curved tip that works very well) and holy crow does it make things taste just like they would otherwise only magically extra amazing.

Fennel

I get infatuated with this; we go on a kick of that; suddenly four meals out of every five feature this thing or the other, where the month before it never crossed my mind at all. So we live in a succession of food eras, each characterized by a couple of distinctive flavors that run through everything, until they disappear from the market or we get distracted again. 

 

We are currently in a Fennel Period and a Grilled Lettuce Period. Grilled romaine is so two years ago, but it really is a pleasant way to fulfill simultaneously the desire for something warm and cosy and the desire for something light and salady, without faffing about with a pile of different ingredients. (You know how to make it already, but here's how I've been doing it lately: big head of romaine lettuce, cut in half lengthwise, rinsed, and shaken dry, cut side brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, on a very hot pan for two minutes or so each side, until lightly charred and wilting -- then roughly chopped and piled on a plate with a little of the aged, thick sort of balsamic vinegar drizzled (vile word) on top.)

Fennel: also perfect for that late winter pushmi-pullyu of fresh springy things on the one side and warm roasty things on the other. The bulbs you know about. I made this Ottolenghi quinoa salad for a potluck last week, with quartered brussels sprouts in the place of the fava beans, and it was very good. Sliced very thin, it makes a swell winter salad, especially with apples; or you can slice it thicker, then steam it and dress it with lemon and red pepper oil a la David Tanis.

The new trick at our house, though, is making full use of the stems. Fennel is too big and awkward to fit in the fridge as it comes. So I lop the bulbs off and put them away separately, then trim off the frondy bits for garnishes or the compost bin. The stems, then, I chop up and keep in a container to toss in with everything. They are lovely. They may look a lot like celery, but I think their texture and flavor are much nicer and more interesting. I have been tossing a half-handful in with any pan of roasting vegetables, or stirring them into a pilaf, and it makes everything taste a little springier and a little different from the way it did last month.

If you really want to enjoy chopped fennel on its own merits, though, try Fennel Rice or Fennel and Eggs:

FENNEL AND EGGS

For two.

At least half a cup chopped fennel, mostly or entirely stems, as pictured above
About a quarter cup finely chopped onion  
Butter
3 or 4 eggs
salt and pepper

Beat the eggs lightly and season with salt and pepper. Saute the fennel and onion slowly in butter until transluscent and tender. Pour the eggs into the pan. Scramble until they are set the way you like them. Serve immediately. Hot buttered toast would not go amiss. 

--

FENNEL RICE

There is no reason why fried rice, which is ultimately a very basic and versatile approach to a very basic and versatile grain, has to be, or pretend to be, Asian. This makes a pretty, green rice dish that goes well with Italian, Spanish, or California-ish flavors.

I think it would be good as a side with salmon, but what do I know?

1-2 Tbsp. light-flavored oil for frying 
3/4 cup chopped fennel, mostly or entirely stems, as pictured above 
2 tsp. minced ginger 
2 cups leftover, cold rice, preferably long-grain   
1 egg, lightly beaten with 1 tsp. ground cumin
2 Tbsp. chopped flat leaf parsley  
Salt and pepper 

Put your large stir-fry pan over high heat. When it's hot, add the oil and swirl it around.

Keep the heat high and the food moving in the pan. Put the fennel in and cook for about two minutes, then add the ginger and cook for just a moment before adding the rice. Fry, stirring/tossing constantly, until the rice is heated through. Add the egg and cumin mixture. Keep things moving, so the egg just coats the rice and more or less disappears.

Remove from heat and add parsley plus salt & pepper to taste. My own taste says that you want to err on the side of more pepper, but maybe you disagree! If you have some of your fennel fronds around, you may as well chop them up and toss them in there, too: it's pretty. 

Look, ma!

I put together a little page archiving our not-quite-daily dinner reports. I don't pretend that they are fascinating, but it can be interesting to see what we have our little fads for. I also find it useful for reminding me of things I have liked to cook in the past, on days when I'm feeling uninspired.

A good idea: quick fresh vegetable broth

I've just returned from a short trip to visit my mother. She's an excellent cook and, as always, fed us very well. She also passed along a clever new trick she'd learned for making an especially easy, clean tasting vegetable broth.

This broth is so simple and flexible that it doesn't rise to the level of a recipe. But it does have a method, and the method is this:

Take about two pounds of vegetables, mainly ones with a high water content, like lettuce, tomatoes, celery, cucumber, or bell peppers. Carrots are nice. Toss in odds and ends of whatever you have on hand, except for brassicas like broccoli or brussels sprouts, which are a bit too pungent. Skip the potatoes, too. But corn, spinach, summer squash, even a bit of onion -- go for it.

Then wash and chop the vegetables (the handiwork on display in the photo here is fussier than necessary) and put them in the blender with two cups of water. Blitz the hell out of them and strain the results through a fine sieve. The end.

Now you have a nice, fresh, uncomplicated broth with a bit of body to it that you can use for soup, a pilaf, a plate of lentils, breakfast strata, whatever you like.

Okra lunch

Brown rice on one side, delicious okra on the other. You know, don't you, that there is a pretty simple trick for preventing okra from getting slimy? The key is that no water (or anything with a high water content) should touch any cut surface of the okra until it has been seared, generally in hot oil and spices. This means that you must dry your okra VERY VERY thoroughly after you wash it. Very! Dry them as well as you can and then let them lie on a fresh dry towel or cooling rack to airdry some more.

Don't use a wet knife, either; even if your knife is just damp from cutting up another, wetter, ingredient, strings of mucilage will begin to multiply. Similarly, if you are pickling okra, do not prick it with a fork! It is also best to ensure that the wet ingredients in your recipe, which you add later, are acidic: use plenty of tomatoes, vinegar, lemon juice.

This new bento/lunch box, made by my favorite purveyors of plastic food storage containers, Lock&Lock, is just right for me. The Lock&Lock lids are easy to open and close and have an excellent seal, thanks to their gasket. I usually don't have it in me to make lunches that combine more than two or three elements, but often like to bring exactly two, so the divider configuration suits me very well, and the amount of food that fits inside is also just about right. I'd also be delighted to have some of these for three-item days, but they're hard to find. In the meantime, of course, I can always bring a second little container when I need one, or nestle two things on one side. In other news, ugh! The most recent photos I've taken have all been horrendously lit and therefore generally horrendous. Hélas.

Composed salad

As the weather gets warmer, I am naturally drawn more and more to suppers that are not so much cooked as assembled. Composed salads are nice for this, as they allow plenty of range for imaginative combinations of ingredients, and have a little bit more gravitas as a main dish than a simple tossed salad does. I made this one with some leftover "vegan popcorn chicken" from Whole Foods -- sort of a shameful thing to buy, and place to buy it, but it sure is good, and the salad I made from it was really, really good. If you eat real meat, leftover roast chicken would of course work perfectly in the same kind of composition.

This dinner also reminded me to tell you that I always buy my avocados in a state of rock-hard unripeness. They will ripen just fine on your counter, and no one but you will have a chance to prod and poke and bother and bruise them as they get riper and more vulnerable. (Once they're ripe, you can move them to the fridge if they are ready too soon for you.) I think Mark Bittman wrote a "Bitten" entry about his same realization, so this is no doubt old news to you, but this habit has made my avocado eating adventures infinitely more pleasant and consistent, so I want to proselytize.

Bottom layer: a ring of delicate tender pale green lettuce, surrounding chiffonaded radicchio
On top of that: "chicken"
Then: sliced avocado
And: red onion that had been chopped and left to sit for about half an hour with vinegar and a pinch of salt
Topped with: Cilantro and serrano pepper minced together
Drizzled with: Olive oil and vinegar (the vinegar from the onion isn't enough -- you want plenty of acidic sparkle)
Plus: A sprinkling of salt and some coarsely ground black pepper.

Radicchio adds a nice bitter bite that complements the richness of the avocado and the acid of the vinegar, though I'm sure the salad would still be good without it. Chopped endive would be a good (if less colorful) substitute. If you reheat your chicken or "chicken", heap it in the center of the plate so it rests on the radicchio, wilting it slightly.

How to boil an egg (and devil it)

Tomorrow is Snark's birthday, so I was making some deviled eggs, and at long last, I've found the timing that did the trick for hard-boiled eggs. For some reason, the times most people suggest for the supposedly foolproof cold-start method seem to give me overcooked eggs. Very sad! Today's, though, were just right--no grey ring around the yolk, yolks cooked through absolutely but no more. It didn't hurt that they were farmer's market eggs. The yolks were a brilliant yellow as well as being cooked the perfect amount.

Here's what worked for me: Eggs, size large, right out of the fridge into the bottom of the pan, nestled in so that I couldn't have fit another in a single layer in the pan in question, but not really packed tight, and covered with cold water about 3/4" above the tops of the eggs. Pan partly covered, over a high flame. When I noticed the water had come to a boil (because I heard a little clunk of the eggs bumping), I turned the flame off immediately and covered the pan entirely. Then I set the timer for twelve minutes. When it went off, I used a slotted spoon to transfer the eggs to a bowl of ice water, with plenty of ice.

If you want to be really particular, you can make an effort to center your yolks before you boil the eggs. I've read a few different suggestions for this: store the eggs tip-down, or tip the carton on its side, or give the eggs a spin before you cook them. Anyone have personal testimony about the effectiveness of any of these techniques? If you'd like my exceedingly simple deviled egg recipe, read on. (I expect everyone already has a perfectly good idea of how to make deviled eggs, but hey, why not?)

An exciting new method for cooking celery root

As you may recall, I am fond of celery root, aka celeriac. Its potato-like texture and gentle, nutty flavor are lovely in gratins, soups, and all the other usual suspects for root vegetables. I also like it cold or at room temperature: cut into batons, planks, or cubes, cooked, and dressed with a simple vinaigrette, it is tasty and substantial, but refreshing. As long as your olive oil is good, this and perhaps some scallions or red onions are really all you need to make a very satisfying salad. And as you can see, it's also delicately pretty and pale. It is thus especially nice for this time of year, when the markets are largely still full of winter vegetables but your heart is crying SPRING!

The trouble with celery root is that you lose so much of it to peeling. The same gnarled, hairy form that makes it look so much less appetizing than it truly is also makes prep a bit of a hassle and disappointment. Dirt and tough skin are trapped in deep, narrow crevasses that you must cut out ruthlessly, which means you can lose up to a third of the original mass to your preparatory ministrations. However, my recent reading of Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Family Table has taught me that there is another way.

You can boil or roast the root whole, let it cool a bit, and then the skin will come right off, just as with a potato. You'll still have to do a little bit of excavation in the deeper cracks, but you'll lose much less of the tasty edible part, and it will be much quicker and easier. This works great for gratins -- rather than peel, cut and parboil, you use this method, then slice up the cooked globe and continue on your merry way. It's a snap. And for salads, it's just perfect. Brilliant.

Terrible lies: On make-ahead dinners, pizza and soup

I have two particular favorite make-ahead dinners that I haven't written about here before. Both of them work by dividing the prep into two parts. In step one, you make the basis for four (!) meals for two or three people at once and pop them into the freezer. Later, you can make each meal-serving into one of several different variations on a theme. There's some real cooking time on the final end in both cases, so you can't just walk in the door and have dinner on the table in fifteen minutes, but surprisingly little fuss or muss. This is especially true because I have my prep down to a science.

So -- here's my plan. I'm going to make at least two posts about each one in the coming week or weeks. Post one will show you how to do the make-ahead bit. Post two will show you what to do with the base once you have it, and I'll try to be as explicit as I can about the approach I use that leaves me with clean counters and few dirty dishes.

The first of these (though not necessarily the first I'll post about! we'll see) is my favorite thin-crust pizza. This pizza comes almost directly from the Figs Restaurant recipe, which you can find online here, though I'll talk in more detail about my process and how it works with my own methods for cooking ahead. I was first alerted to this pizza by this inspiring post at the Grub Report. If you don't want to wait around for my take on it, follow those links and you can get started all on your own!

The second set of dinners is a suite of soups made using Lidia Bastianich's clever method of creating a rich vegetarian base ahead of time, then combining it with any number of delicious and varied star ingredients to create several quite distinctive final dishes. In particular, I like the Savory Potato Broth from Lidia's Family Table. This basic recipe is also available online (as part of this recipe for vegetable soup with rice) if you want to get started without me. But do check back here for the full unabridged story of exactly how we do it in these parts!

Vacation slides, plus a tip for ordering Manhattans

We were in New York this weekend, where we attended a lovely wedding and ate a great deal of excellent food. One of the highlights of the trip was lunch at the superdeluxe Google cafeteria, as the guests of our kindly and delightful hosts, who (you will have already figured out) work there.

The Google sushi chef was on paternity leave, a state of affairs I found so deliciously... something, it made up for being deprived of the deliciousness that we missed due to his absence. Anyway, the other options were plentiful and very tasty, and the quality and variety are really quite amazing. There was a roasted pepper and potato soup that S. and I both liked most especially.

Another highlight was getting to try some of Audrey Saunders' gorgeous cocktails at the Pegu Club. They really were superb, though of course also not cheap. I had the Little Italy, which is a Manhattan variant made with Cynar, as well as rye, vermouth, and bitters. (Oh! Did I tell you? I realized why the Manhattans I was getting in bars and restaurants were all so feeble -- apparently most places these days don't put bitters in. What is the world coming to?

Anyway, I picked up a handy way to circumvent this without risking stepping on anyone's toes: ask for a Manhattan "with an extra dash of bitters."

At the Pegu Club this is far from necessary, as not only are they going to put bitters in already, each table has an assortment of little bottles full of things, including Angostura, to let you doctor your drink as necessary, though none of us thought there was any need for adjustments.) Cynar, as you may not know, is an artichoke aperitif, which I realize sounds fairly revolting, but here it was great.

The wedding lunch was also fantastic and bursting with vegetarian options (the groom was a vegan for many years) -- loads of delicious vegetable appetizers, including extra good tiny bruschetta, teeny samosas, and beautifully crisp tempura.

The main course for vegetarians was a layered vegetable thing of the sort that might have been bland and gloomy but was instead entirely delicious, and accompanied by some sort of small risotto timbale kind of thing with a lovely crunchy crust. The meat-eaters got steak or cornish game hen, which looked as if they were equally enticing.

After a full afternoon of walking across Prospect Park and up and down the streets of Brooklyn, appetite just barely began to return, but we squelched that quickly with an assortment of surprisingly affordable treats from Nana. And then yesterday morning we had an excellent brunch as well! Oh, and I almost forgot our stop in to... hm, I can't remember the name, but I think we grabbed a matchbook, so I'll ferret it out for you later today -- anyway to somewhere very pleasant with a "snack" menu for the time after they stopped serving lunch and before they started serving dinner, which I thought was highly civilized and an excellent idea.

Also I drank a ridiculous amount of coconut water, which I'd tried a couple of times in the last month or so, but really guzzled it in New York, since it's so very refreshing when you've been out walking in the sun, and there it's available on (it seems) every street corner, whereas here you have to haul your ass to Whole Foods. Now I am tragically addicted. In conclusion, we had a great time, saw many wonderful people, and stuffed ourselves silly, just as one ought to. Perhaps for the rest of the week? month? we will live on nothing but soda water and biscuits, like Byron.

Oaty: Soup mix-in

Just a little tip, from me to you: a handful of thick rolled oats (not instant!) is an excellent addition to soups involving lentils. Lately I have been making many pots of soup that combine many lentils -- brown lentils, little tiny dark green lentils, masoor dal (aka red lentils), toor dal, and urad dal -- with oatmeal. (Also with the usual other things: onions, garlic, carrots, cumin, tomato, and a splash of vinegar.) The oatmeal adds body, of course, and retains just enough integrity to provide the tiniest bit of chew. Very nice.

By the way, you should really poke around the site that my "urad dal" links to, because it is full of such fabulous gems of prose as:

For us at Laxmi Toor dal, Picking up each grain is akin to picking up a diamond from a mine. Only the best Toor produce is acquired through our in-house international trading house. It is subsequently checked at our laboratory before the processing stage. It is the sheer expertise to identify and consistently procure the best grains from around the world, which leads us to offer an unmatched assurance of superior taste and nourishment in each grain that we produce.

Avocado, I love you.

Because we are decadent, we like to have guacamole for dinner whenever we can. I want to share with you our happiest discovery in this vein, namely: Costco's avocados rock the house. As far as I know there is nothing sustainable, ecologically sound, or labor-friendly about them, and certainly nothing local (Costco's own labor policies are very good, however!), but they are damn tasty. I imagine this is mainly the outcome of two factors: (a) they're Hass, and (b) you can get them when they are completely and totally unripe, meaning that they spend their entire stressful time of ripening in the comfort of your home. The result is entirely unblemished, flavorful avocados. Every single freaking time, people! And I've lived in California, so it's not that I have no acquaintance with good avocados, nor with sad, tasteless ones, either.

Cooking ahead and long cooked green beans

I used to associate cooking ahead with eating spaghetti with the same frozen ragu for weeks on end or the sort of depressing magazine article that tells you how to get six different meals out of a single pot roast, where by the end you are finding slivers of brisket in your lasagna.

But in fact the cultures of Earth have conspired to create any number of foods that are excellent or even at their best when cooked ahead. Indian food is well suited for this concept (this is why everyone loves their reheated leftovers from the Indian restaurant even better than the original meal itself). So too are the kind of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern recipes where you serve bits and pieces of several dishes together at a single meal in infinite permutations.

"Small dishes" are very chic right now, and to a harried weeknight cook they seem like the world's most exhausting proposition. Why would you want to substitute six little things for one simple big thing with something else on the side? And it is certainly true that one of the most disheartening things for a cook to hear from a non-cook is "It's late and you're tired -- why don't we just have something cold?" because it is a fact of life that most foods that are nice to eat cold for dinner must first be made hot, and usually require a number of other steps as well.

Maligned vegetables

I got really absurd quantities of greens at the farmer's market today: spinach, curly kale, and turnip greens, my recent most favorite. One of the farmers has a particularly tender variety. Anyway, as faithful readers know, I like to prepare them for storage all in one go, bringing a big pot of salted water to a boil and then parboiling each type of green separately, then draining, cooling, and squeezing out extra water. Some nutrients are lost this way, of course, but they

a) take up a lot less space in the refrigerator,
b) keep better, because there's no risk of tearing and bruising that accelerates rot, and
c) are much more amenable to sautéeing and related cooking methods, because they don't express liquid that then makes them stew rather than sautée.

And Marcella Hazan backs me up on this!

The spinach got used tonight in a turnip curry. It turns out that turnips are a beautiful substitute in Indian recipes where potatoes are commonly called for. Those of you who do not spend time worrying about blood sugar and things, of course, don't need any substitute for potatoes. But they're awfully good anyway, especially if you like just a little touch of the sharp-and-bitter in your flavor mix, which harmonizes well with both Indian flavors and with gratin-ish things. Turnips seem to me to be the love child of a radish and a potato. And as I like both radishes and potatoes, I feel I should be giving turnips a bit more time in my diet.

Madhur Jaffrey has a tip where she suggests soaking your peeled and chopped turnips in salty water to help make the texture a bit denser. It works very well and coincidentally insures that the turnips are seasoned all through. These were particularly attractive and firm young turnips -- I should have bought more of them while I had the chance. Hopefully there will be a few more chances to get the young 'uns before the weather turns too cold.

My mother sent me a nice-sounding cabbage recipe today. I'll have to buy a cabbage and try it out, and then I'll report back. I do think cabbage is an unfairly maligned vegetable. I'm very fond of it.

Grooming the produce

Treats from the CSA are beginning to pick up steam. It's still early in the season here (hard to believe when I'm wilting from the heat) but about to be midseason, hooray! Soon, soon there will be local tomatoes and all sorts of wonderful things. In the meantime, I'm finding that it's actually pretty nice to be able to ramp up to full capacity. Farm-fresh produce is incomparably delicious, but it takes a lot of grooming. I'm discovering that I need to schedule an hour or so for food-grooming on Thursday evenings.

I hadn't expected that, but in fact it's a nice, relaxing activity, as long as the kitchen is clean when I start. And then everything is in nice clean working order when I go to cook, which is a definite good. Grocery store produce may look a lot more groomed than this stuff, but it still needs attention before you can cook with it -- there's just a lot less motivation to do it as soon as it comes in the door, because it looks fit for storage. It's also a lot more efficient to take care of it all at once, as you'll see: