Tasteh Brussels Sprouts

Many people loathe brussels sprouts because they were force-fed them as a child or because they only know them as a gross, overcooked mess in their cafeteria lunch tray. And sadly, that is probably how most people will continue to encounter them since the vast majority of U.S. production winds up in the frozen section, where larger specimens are de rigeur.

But brussels sprouts really are delicious, and it is the sprouts that are too small to meet processed food standards that are the tastiest. Although all vegetables are better fresh, this is especially true of brussels sprouts. Fresh, they're nutty, sweet and meltingly tender. Once they've been sitting around for too long, they become flatulent and flabby-tasting. I cannot warn you away from most supermarket sprouts strenuously enough. They're usually too big, which means they'll have leathery, slightly bitter outer leaves; and packed into a plastic-covered tub that's been shipped however many miles it is to you from Monterey County, Ca, where most of the U.S. supply is grown.



So if you see them at the farmer's market, snap them up. They're quick and super-easy to cook. Here's how I cooked a batch I got from Phan's Farm at the Heart of the City Farmer's Market:

Simple Brussels Sprouts:

1/2 - 3/4 lb smallish brussels sprouts
1 pat butter
1 tsp salt

Cut the bases off the sprouts, then slice them in half. Set them face-down in a shallow frying pan and put enough water in the pan to cover them just over half way. Cover the pan and put over high flame. Once the water is boiling, add salt and lower heat to medium. Cook until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and return to pan. Add 1 pat butter and swirl sprouts around in pan to coat. Done!

Eating weeds - and other unexpectedly tasty stuff

I love finding unusual vegetables and thinking of ways to cook them.

A jaunt up to the farm just before Christmas yielded a huge bounty of wild radish greens, which is both of one my favorite vegetables and also something I’ve never seen in a store or a farmers market, most likely because it’s a weed. It sprouts like crazy throughout the year, especially as it gets colder. If you have a garden, or have strolled through an area farm, you’ve probably seen it - it grows to about 3 feet and has little pinwheel flowers that are generally either yellow, white or lavender.



The plant looks very much like a taller, spindlier version of broccoli raab, which it also closely resembles in taste. It quickly grows tough and fibrous, so it has to be harvested when the tips are still young and tender, ideally before the flower opens and the inflorescence is just emerging from the stalk. I felt very lucky indeed to coincidentally be on the farm when this prolific weed was just entering the phase when it’s ideal for picking.

There are a couple of ways to cook it. It’s got a one-two punch of brazen mustardy bite plus an undertone of bitterness, which I think gives it character, but which could be off-putting to people who prefer their vegetables to be more demure. So a good way to temper it is to make tempura with it - this brings out the tender snap of the stalk, crisps the leaves and mellows the bitterness.

Another method is to stir-fry at high heat with a prodigious amount of toasted sesame oil, a dash of maple syrup or brown sugar, and about 1 tablespoon of soy sauce per pound.

A more traditional way to cook it is to use it in oshitashi - some recipes call for things like mirin, sake or sesame of some sort, but I like to just splash some soy sauce on it with a handful of katsuo flakes and call it ready. This is the plainest preparation of the green, one which doesn’t mask the bitter spiciness of the vegetable, and one that goes especially well with a nice rich fish accompaniment like the one below.



I was also delighted to come across some Scarlet Queen turnips at the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market at the Eatwell Farms stand. I think it’s a shame that turnips are generally either neglected or reviled in American food because they require so little preparation to bring out their juicy sweetness. They’re best when they’re on the smaller side (i.e., not too much larger than golf-ball sized), as fresh as possible and not too mature. Sometimes you get turnips that have been sitting around in the ground for too long, and the mellow tenderness that make them so delicious has dissipated into a searing, nose-clearing mustardy taste.

My father used to have a batch of turnip pickles going whenever they were in season, and it’s nice to have the opportunity to replicate that out here. These turnips were especially nice because their festive reddish-pink blush added a bit of cheer to what’s otherwise a relatively drab-looking vegetable. I cut them into thin, half-moon slivers and layered them in a glass dish with a bit of yuzu peel, salt and kombu. Then I put some plastic wrap over them, weighted them down with a jug of water and waited an hour. I also pickled the greens in a similar fashion, but replaced the salt with light miso and added a tsp each of sake and mirin. Add some rice, miso soup and a protein of some sort and you've got a meal!


Clockwise, from top: hijiki brown rice, wild radish green oshitashi, pickled turnips w/ sesame oil, miso-pickled turnip greens, miso soup, sauteed wild radish greens, fried sand dabs

More winter squash!

Delicatas are probably my favorite kind of winter squash. They have the perfect texture, aren't too moist or too dry and have a deliriously sweet taste that goes well with all things winter. The standard way of cooking them is to simply cut them in half, brush them with olive oil and then bake them until soft - at which point you can gobble the whole thing down, skin and all.



But that would be so easy. It wouldn't require hours of baking, boiling, pureeing, fussing and mess-making in the kitchen. So I decided to try making delicata gnocchi. Now, I love gnocchi, but I absolutely hate it when they're too heavy and you feel like you have a leaden torpedo of dough in your stomach from eating them. Here's what went into the dough:

The meat from 4 roasted, seeded delicata squash and 3 baked russet potatoes
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3 eggs

Instead of adding flour to the dough until it became manageable enough to roll out and cut into pieces, I just left it as it was and used a spoon and a pastry spatula to spoon the dough up, divide it and drop it straight into boiling water. This I served with fennel sauce:

3 fennel bulbs, browned in a covered pan with 2 tbsp olive oil
blended with
1 cup milk
1 cup grated parmesan cheese

I reserved some fronds off the fennel to mince and toss on top for an extra anise-y kick. As you can see, it wasn't the most elegant meal, but it was damn tasty.

Lemon bars!

Couldn't resist buying these citruses from DeSantis Bella Frutta at the market. They're a couple of Meyer lemons (the "it" lemon of the moment) plus a baseball-sized fruit they were calling sweet lime. Meyers come in a bewildering array of different colors (the ones at Whole Foods, for example, are light orange) and cover a pretty wide flavor spectrum ranging from almost tangerine-like to puckeringly sour. These had green mottling that I've never seen before and were very mild. The sweet limes had a very strong citronella scent to them that I actually found kind of off-putting, but the juice was delicate and very slightly sweet.

I suppose I could have made a batch of lemonade, or some lemon-ginger tea, but instead, I decided to give lemon bars a shot even though I was horrified to find out that lemon bars (which I love) are basically a big pile of sugar, eggs and butter. To give the bars a veneer of healthfulness, I made a whole wheat crust with crushed almonds (also from DeSantis!). Doesn't this look wholesome??



OK, so maybe it doesn't, really. Here's what's in it:

1/2 cup ground almonds
1/2 cup wheat germ
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tbsp honey
1/2 cup almond butter (so far so good...)
and
1 stick of frozen butter, cut into small pieces

Yeah, yeah, butter is full of cholesterol and will cause your arteries to harden, but without it, the crust would have been the consistency of dirt. And no one wants to ruin tasty lemon curd with dirt.

Behold...

The most delicious yogurt in the world.

OK, so perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it really is sensational. I picked it up on a whim from Avedano's, and it was well worth the price ($3!!!). Light years beyond even better yogurts like Nancy's. AND for people who have trouble digesting bovine dairy (not me, thank god!), made from sheep's milk. It has a velvety mouthfeel with a hint of pleasant graininess from the vanilla and isn't at all mutton-y.

Not sure if it's better than St. Benoit, another local Bay Area producer, but it is just as creamy without the slightly heavy, fatty taste of St. Benoit. Not that there's anything wrong with that - yogurt is meant to be delicious, not a diet food.

Adventures with winter squash

It's winter squash season!!!! There are SO MANY delicious kinds of winter squash and so many ways to cook them that it's almost overwhelming. Almost enough, even, to not rue the fact that if you live anywhere other than California, that's pretty much all you're going to get at the farmer's market until next May.

Heat, Bill Buford's book about his Italian cooking journey from Babbo in New York to the Tuscan countryside, filled my head with delusions of hand-rolled pasta and thoughts of a plate of pumpkin ravioli with radicchio sauce I had in Florence over 10 years ago. Which is an insane and thoroughly unrealistic standard to set. I mean, I'm Asian. I'm not some fleshsome Italian grandma who's been pressing pasta w/ her orecchiete thumb since birth.



But I'd shlepped 4 orange kabochas down from the farm and I figured I'd give ravioli a shot. Now, in Heat, there is a brief mention of some recipe for ravioli di zucca in which the squash is grated and then stewed in milk. This is intriguing because it seems gratuitously fiddly. Winter squash is great because all you have to do is cut it in half, brush it with oil and throw it in the oven. And you can even skip the oil part if you're feeling really lazy. So why on earth would you make the process so painstaking?

Needless to say, I just couldn't bring myself to muscle down in front of the grater for hours and shred my own fingers into the ravioli filling. Instead, I halved each squash, removed the seeds and then baked them semi-submerged in milk at 350 - just because I had some sitting around in the fridge and thought, what the hell. Once the squash was baked through (about 45 mins), I scooped the innards out, added 1 1/2 cups of grated parmesan, a dash of salt and nutmeg and mixed it all together.



I rolled my pasta out, cut it into 2x2 squares and put about half a tablespoon of filling in. Then, while the ravioli were cooking, I minced some leeks, shredded up some chard and sauteed the lot in butter.

Tada! Ravioli. Not pretty, not perfect and definitely not the way the Tuscan mountain people make it, but not too shabby. Even if I did cheat and add what is probably a sacrilegious amount of olive oil into the dough so it would behave.



Can't wait to use the leftover filling in a sauce...

More marathon cooking - or rather, canning

Photo from St0rmz's flickr stream

Last year, when I was working on the farm, the late summer was marked by a frenzy of jam-making. We'd come home from the farmers' market loaded down with plums, peaches, pluots and strawberries which then got turned into jars and jars and jars of delicious jam - none of which was made by me. I'm actually from New York City, so the idea of canning your own food kind of freaked me out. I'd never done it before, and frankly, I'm kind of a putz so I figured that if I canned it, it would have to turn into botulism.


12 lbs. of tomatoes yielded 3 1/2 quarts of sauce and 8 oz of dried tomatoes - not quite enough to get you through the winter, but not bad for a first attempt

But I've been gorging on tomatoes from the farmers' market all summer and about a week ago, it dawned on me that this bounty of tomatoes would not last forever. One day, the tomatoes will be gone, replaced by stand after stand of winter squash (not that I have anything against winter squash!). My favorite dry-farmed tomatoes from Yerena Farm aren't going to last forever. And they really are great tomatoes. Heirloom and specialty tomatoes are everywhere these days, but heirloom doesn't automatically mean delicious. If you're going to shell out upwards of $3.50/lb for tomatoes, you want delicious. Yerena's Early Girls and Romas are rife with an intense, sweet flavor that will bring tears to your eyes. I am not kidding, people! They are amazing!


This is just under 12 lbs. of tomatoes, blanched and peeled. Romas are great for this b/c the skin splits almost exactly down the middle and you can just tweeze the skins between your fingertips and shake them to peel.

This is why I decided to try my hand at some home preserving. I was always content to buy Italian canned tomatoes in the off season, but mainlining those delicious tomatoes from the market has made me think it would be worthwhile to give it a shot. I picked up about 12 pounds of tomatoes and decided to make oven-dried tomatoes and can the rest.

Oven-drying is extremely easy. I took 10 romas, cut them lengthwise into quarters, brushed them with a little olive oil and a sprinkling of salt and put them on a baking sheet.





After three hours in the oven at 300 degrees (had to turn them a couple of times), I had about 8 oz of dried tomatoes. It's pretty amazing how concentrated the flavor gets with this treatment. Here they are:



Canning is a bit more complicated, so rather than recount my bufoonery in the kitchen, I'll leave it to the USDA to explain. Alternately, eGullet has a great post on this, but you might have to be a member to view it.

Do not fear beef. It is your friend.

The stove is well-loved, *not* just dirty, all right?

OK, so admittedly, that is not a picture of beef. Instead, it's a picture of the first step in the long process of beef stew and ultimately, beef stroganoff. I picked up a gorgeous chuck roast from Marin Sun Farms over the weekend and wanted to try slow-cooking it instead of just browning it, shoving it in the oven and eating it rare, which is what I usually do.

So the first step was making a decent vegetable stock to stew it in. I love making vegetable stock because it's an opportunity to take all the stuff you'd normally discard (or compost, for that matter) and turn it into something tasty. I've found that as long as you have the basics in there - carrots, celery and onions or leeks - it doesn't matter what else you add as long as there is a great heaping pile of vegetable matter and you cook the living hell out of it. This one had the aforementioned basics, plus leek tops, cranberry and fava bean shells, kohlrabi peels and tops, beet stems and peels, chard stalks and onion skins. Basically, you throw it all in your stockpot and then add water to about an inch or so above the pile and let it simmer for a couple of hours. For some reason, it seems as though something magical happens at about the 2 1/2 hour mark - the liquid goes from having an inchoate watery-green taste and develops a deep, rich vegetable flavor. Here's what you end up with after about 4 hours of cooking:



I strained all the spent vegetable matter through a sieve and discarded it, having yielded about 5 quarts of stock from a pile of stuff most people would normally toss.

Next, I put my chuck roast, two medium-sized onions and 6 cloves of garlic into a stew pot and filled it with vegetable stock and about 2 cups of red wine. When I opened the package of beef up, it looked and smelled like a rosy, delicious meat-gasm. Here it is, uncooked, in the pot:


BEEF, up close and personal

After about 3 hours of simmering, the meat was fall-apart tender and the cooking liquid was just redolent of beefy goodness. I let it cool over night, stuck it in the fridge and when I took it out the next evening to prepare, a thin layer of fat had solidified at the top. This I cracked off and mixed with some flour to make a sauce thickener. When it was reheated, I added quartered potatoes and a small red cabbage, also quartered, to cook in the stew juices. I know it must seem insane to spend 7 hours cooking one meal, but the thing to remember is that most of that time is spent sitting around, doing other stuff and popping over to the stove occasionally to stir.



Of course, there were leftovers. I turned those into beef stroganoff, which is a really easy way to use up beef leftovers. It basically involved shredding the beef, reheating it in the stewing liquid and then adding some sour cream and dijon mustard to taste, and then serving it over egg noodles. It made me feel triumphant in a 1950's home-ec kind of way to transform my two-day old chuck roast like this.

I'd also like to add that this whole rigamarole is probably the most economical way to enjoy grass-fed beef, since chuck roast is one of the cheaper cuts you can get other than hamburger, which sells out more quickly. I totally understand the sticker shock that comes with sustainably raised/natural/organic/grass-fed etc. meats, but do not freak out and go buy feedlot beef from Safeway instead ("Rancher's Reserve", my ass)!!! Just get a brisket or a chuck roast and you'll be good for a while. This one yielded 6 meals.

Almonds from De'Santis Bella Frutta

Bella indeed. Every time I go to De'Santis' stand at the farmer's market (they're at Civic Center on Wednesday and San Rafael on Sunday), they have something new. This week it was fresh roasted almonds for only $3 a pound!!! Almonds will usually set you back at least $8 a pound, and these have an distinctly sweet taste that your standard bulk almond doesn't. Try them out!

Fava Beans require a lot of prep

Hiding inside those huge, plump shells are little morsels of beany goodness. You have to peel the shell open, make a little notch on the pale green casing and pull that off, too, to unearth the deliciousness within. Definitely a huge pain in the ass. But so worth it. Don't even think about eating them without that second step - you'll have a mouthful of pasty mush that will take you right back to your elementary school cafeteria.