The Hungry Tiger

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.

So tiny. (Okra.)

Tonight we went out for Turkish food and I had a dish that featured the tiniest okra ever. They were very small. Super small. Incredibly small! They were also delicious. And tiny.

UPDATE! I think perhaps they might have been this stuff: dried okra. After all, it's a Turkish ingredient, and that would explain how on earth you could count on getting a reliable source of teensy okra for your Cleveland restaurant. This is very exciting. Apparently dried okra are sold at Kalustyans, so I'll be adding them to my next order, and soon enough I will be able to find out for myself.

Braised baby cabbage (photos)

It turned out that we liked the braised cabbage so much we had it all over again tonight. And by then the camera battery had plenty of time to recharge.

Glamorous, isn't it?

Good, though.

I didn't take a picture of what it looked like after we polished it off. Suffice it to say that we both affirmed our qualifications for membership in the Clean Plate Club with admirable celerity.

Seasonably unseasonable: braised baby cabbage

Braised cabbage isn't most people's idea of a perfect midsummer meal. But I bought a few of these adorable little fellows at the farmer's market the weekend before last, and then we had out of town guests from early last week until this morning. So there was lots of eating elsewhere, plenty of staying up late and drinking liberally and getting up early, and very little grocery shopping, until this evening we found ourselves with curiously little fresh food and a strong desire to eat something simple and wholesome.

(That's Snark's hand gripping the innocent little cabbage. It all looks extremely dramatic, doesn't it?)

Combining my feebleness with the contents of my fridge, I cut the little cabbages into wedges and gave them a quick hot sear on each cut side until well flecked with crispy dark brown bits (I love the way cabbage tastes when subjected to this kind of browning). Then they went at the bottom of a heavy pan with a lid and were sprinkled with salt. Over top I scattered a medium onion and a large carrot, both cut into 1/4" slices, and poured about a third of a cup of white wine and three tablespoons of olive oil over all. On went the lid and the heat on medium high until the sound of boiling could be heard from within. Heat down as low as it would go and everything left alone, while I sat quietly in a corner doing not much, until the cabbage was exceedingly tender, in this case about an hour. I very gently flipped the cabbage over about halfway through. Then the lid came off and I turned the heat back up until the liquid had boiled away and the cabbage started to brown again.

We had it in bowls, topped with a fried egg apiece and plenty of freshly ground pepper, plus an extra sprinkle of salt on top. I don't have pictures of the finished dish, not because it wasn't pretty -- although it wasn't, except in the way that things that are ugly but delicious are pretty -- but because my camera's batteries ran out at the crucial moment. You can probably imagine it, though. Braising and wine both do delicious things to cabbage; I highly recommend the combination of the two. I'm sure the fact that these were gorgeous local cabbages didn't hurt, but one of the wonderful things about cabbage is that it keeps beautifully. You surely would get almost as great results with any old cabbage. (Savoy is nicer than the not-crinkly kind, though, in my opinion.) I mean, hell, we bought these a week and a half ago and they absolutely read as amazingly squeaky-fresh. Cabbage! It's a winner.

An excellent avocado sandwich

Inspired by this Ask Metafilter thread and the sandwich combining avocado with honey mustard that was described therein, tonight I made some avocado sandwiches of my own. We ate them standing up in the kitchen, making adjustments as we went: open-faced, because when you use as much avocado as we wanted to, closed-face versions just slide around; an extra sprinkle of salt; slivered red onions to gild the lily.

Like salads, most sandwiches don't really call for recipes, just descriptions. To make these, take a baguette and split it lengthwise, parallel to the table. Cut the resulting halves into pieces of whatever size suits you. Next, generously butter the cut sides of the bread with nice, soft salted butter. Now apply a good helping of avocado, mashing it slightly into the bread. Because the base of your sandwich is all crust, it will stand up to the pressure with no trouble. Sprinkle a little salt over the avocado and then add a generous (a theme with this sandwich) coating of honey mustard, which you have made by mixing equalish quanities of dijon mustard and honey.

This is very good as it is. But after we'd tried it, Snark said, "Is there any one ingredient that would make this even better?" That is how we wound up adding red onions, and also how I wound up eating quite a bit more than I had planned. In fact, if we hadn't used up all of our ripe avocado I would be eating even more right this minute.

(Almost) the same components, different meal: tostadas without tortillas

A lot of the time, I buy more of a given ingredient than gets used up in a single dinner for two. That's fine -- we like leftovers, and also I've finally noticed that it's a good idea to cook a lot of foods from the same culture, or inspired by the same cookbook, in a given week or two.

After I made the salad pictured below, we still had more ripe avocados, more radicchio, and more cilantro and onions and serrano peppers. So last night I made a sort of black bean tostada arrangement, but where crispy tortilla would go, we had grilled (broiled, actually) radicchio. It was great, and while it was in the same taste family as the salad, it was different enough to keep things lively.

Any meal with this much radicchio really is only for those who like the taste of bitter things. But the black beans are mild and creamy, as of course is the avocado, so there is considerable balance for that bitterness.

The arrangement was a bed of freshly cooked radicchio; then black beans heated through with some salt, olive oil, and cumin; then lots of sliced avocado; then the same vinegared onion as last time; then a minced mixture of cilantro, serrano pepper, and a small clove of garlic; then feta cheese and a drizzle of oil. For the radicchio, I turned the broiler on and oiled a baking dish. Then I cut the radicchio into substantial chunks -- eighths, maybe? -- and put them in the dish, letting the pieces fall apart where they liked. I gave them a sprinkle of salt and a quick brush of olive oil, and popped them under the broiler for what turned out to be 7 minutes, until the outer leaves were getting brown and crispy, while the inner parts of each piece were still warmed through and juicy.

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.

Roasted miniature artichokes

While I wait for our farmer's market to catch up with the external evidence that it is spring, I find myself unable to resist some of the not-so-very local or organic offerings at our local Whole Foods. The shrink-wrapped little flat of twelve Ocean Mist brand baby artichokes was perhaps not as glorious as the bin of perfect, squeaky-fresh, bright green baby chokes doubtless frolicking in the fresh air at my old Berkeley farmer's market as we speak, BUT it was pretty exciting to me, and so I bought it.

The neat thing about miniature artichokes is that the chokes themselves are not developed, so you have more options for eating them gloriously whole. I've had wonderful teeny ones that were minimally trimmed of even their spiky outer leaves, fried in olive oil, in Italy, and if you have the chance to do the same, let me be the first to tell you not to hesitate. However, this is more the sort of thing I like to let other people do for me than to do in my own home on a weeknight, and I had a feeling, too, that our agribusiness arties were a little less tender in their outer leaves than some, so I opted for a different method.

Trimming and roasting are both easy-peasy, and S. said: "hey! that tastes like fancy restaurant food!" I'm not precisely sure what he had in mind there, but he did definitely mean it as a compliment. Serve with something that has a mild and simple flavor -- simply dressed pasta is a good choice -- so that you can fully appreciate the effect of the cynarin, which makes other foods taste curiously sweet.

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.

Eggs and asparagus

Spring has sprung! It's wet and cold here, but green things are poking up from the ground, which is springy enough by comparison to what came before. In honor of April, tonight for dinner we had a pound of asparagus, roasted in olive oil and then dressed with lemon and salt, accompanied by scrambled eggs with onion jam.

Delicious. Also delicious: the several quality minutes Snark and I spend in the kitchen afterwards, dipping our fingers in the oil and lemon at the bottom of the roasting pan.

ROAST ASPARAGUS

This hardly even counts as a recipe. Just heat your oven to 425° F and prep as much asparagus as you like -- the usual way, by washing it, then snapping off the woody ends where they naturally break when you bend each stalk. Pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a roasting pan and add the asparagus.

Roll the stalks around until they're well coated and sprinkle with salt. Roast until at least the tips (and possibly more) get toasty. How long depends on the thickness of your stalks and how cooked you want them to be. We had fairly thick, not that recently harvested stalks, so I opted to cook them to super-roasty and super tender-y, which took twenty minutes. For more bite and/or thinner stalks, adjust accordingly. (Don't forget: thinness isn't a sign of particular quality in asparagus. Early in the season, stalks tend to be fatter; later, they're thinner, but generally the main thing is that they should be nice and green and fresh.) Then gorge! That's what asparagus is for.

Happy New Year! Lentils and greens.

To be traditional for New Year's Day, we had lentils and greens for dinner, and while it doesn't sound all that exciting, it was actually outrageously delicious. The lentils were tiny Umbrian ones, with slow-cooked onions and red peppers and plenty of olive oil, ground pepper, and a splash of good sherry vinegar.

The greens were mixed spinach and kale, with garlic and again not shy with the olive oil. The results were surprisingly pretty -- the red pepper made the lentils an attractive golden brown that looked very nice against the dark green of the greens -- and very good to eat. I should have taken a photo, but it just smelled too good to wait. We ate every scrap.

It's hardly a recipe, but the description above should give you the general idea, should you (or I) want to reproduce it. Just between us, I also included a tiny pinch of MSG in the lentils. I'd do it again, too! I notice that this is yet another entry in the growing list of roughage-laden, post-feasting meals I've been posting about a lot lately. We've just been out of town for well over a week, and the last four days of that featured nothing but hotel and restaurant food. It was generally very good, but I have a hard time resisting the siren call of fried-by-someone-else options, even though I know full well that I will be left feeling something like a lump of suet. Almost as soon as we were unpacked, I went to the grocery store and piled my cart with all the dark green and orange vegetables I could get my hands on. It makes me feel secure to know the house is well supplied. I think I'll start a spa! Roughisch Baden, we could call it.

More eggplant adventures: eggplant dal

Eggplant and split red lentils (masoor dal) make a delicious combination. We had this for dinner tonight, using some eggplant that I had conveniently roasted earlier in the week and set aside for just such a use. We were too hungry and greedy to take pictures of the final dish before we ate it, and it wasn't the most photogenic dinner of all time, in any case, but believe me when I tell you that it was beautiful to us.

EGGPLANT DAL

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut eggplant into cubes of about 1" or a little smaller. Toss in olive oil, sprinkle with salt and roast, turning occasionally, until golden brown and collapsing, as in the picture. This may take something like 45 minutes, though I confess I didn't keep track. Remove from oven and set aside, or even refrigerate for a few days.

2. Heat a splash of oil in a pan with a teaspoon each of mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and whole coriander seeds until the seeds begin to crackle. Add one small onion, minced, and cook over medium-high heat for a few minutes, until the onion has softened.

3. Add half a teaspoon of ground cumin and a quarter teaspoon apiece of tumeric and cayenne (adjust to your tastes). Cook just a moment, then add 3/4 cup of red lentils, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and 3 cups of water. Let the water come to a boil, then turn down to a simmer.

4. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the lentils begin to disintegrate. Keep an eye on the water level. If things begin to get too dry, add a splash of water. You want your end result to be a sort of porridge consistency, but at this stage you should err on the side of wetness.

5. When the dal is soft, add one small chopped tomato or equivalent amount of chopped canned tomatoes. If the dal is too loose at this point, you can turn the heat up a bit and cook it down to your desired consistency. Taste and adjust for salt if needed. Now, put some eggplant in the bottom of a bowl, and spoon dal over top until you can't see the eggplant any more. Put a few more pieces of eggplant on top of the dal, and if you happen to have some crispy fried onions in the house, as I always do -- I really like the Laxmi brand jug o' onions, available from Kalustyan's -- sprinkle some on top. Of course you can also fry your own, but I find that I simply cannot replicate the gorgeous light crispiness of the prepared kind. CRUNCH CRUNCH.

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.

Black bean and winter squash stew

Thanksgiving week is upon us, oh my! We aren't traveling this year; instead we'll be eating at the house of our friends M. and F., a mere 10 minutes' walk away. I've been asked to bring a pasta-based vegetarian main dish, as well as pumpkin pie. (The pumpkin pie is going to be wonderfully homespun -- there were plenty of proper pie pumpkins at the market, and so I spent a little time yesterday making pumpkin puree from scratch, a nice opportunity to press my food mill into service.)

I might make a side dish of some sort while I'm at it, if the hosts approve. For whatever reason, I find the idea of pasta at Thanksgiving a little dissonant, but after a lot of thought, I've come up with a baked pasta variation that pleases me for the purpose. The fact that it is called upon to present itself as an entrée, rather than just another meatless dish added a little extra challenge, I thought, as well as the fact that we're trying to avoid too much overlap in flavors from dish to dish.

I'll tell you the whole story of the pasta when it's all made and I have pictures to go with the recipe -- for now I'll just say that it involves both caramelized onions and pistachios. Today's recipe is for one of the meals I made to carry us through to Thursday. I think that cooking for this week is a little bit extra fraught: I don't want to make anything that will wind up being redundant, or near-redundant, with the Big Meal, and yet here we are buying the very sorts of vegetables that lend themselves to that exact kind of treatment.

One answer is to go for a cultural contrast; we'll be having something East Asian tonight, and at least one Indian dinner before the week is out. But there are a few odds and ends of our shopping that didn't inspire me in either of those directions, and this recipe is for them. The cultural provenance of this dish is a little bit this, a little bit that, but mostly, I think, Berkeley Hippie. It's also not particularly schmancy, what with the canned black beans and chili powder. It's still good, though! And leftovers, cooked down a bit further, make an excellent filling for (hippie) burritos or empanadas.

Eggplant and chickpeas

Sorry I've been so delinquent about posting lately. Also sorry not to be able to provide a tantalizing photo. Both my computer and my camera are acting up at the moment. But lest you give up on me altogether, here is a nice thing to do with an eggplant and some chickpeas. It's pretty simple, though the two-step cooking process does take a bit of time and dirties an extra dish. It's worth it, though, to ensure that everything is very thoroughly cooked without being a complete grease bomb. Undercooked eggplant is vile. (Surely you agree!)