CSA week three - Morshan

This recipe is all over the web, cut and pasted on recipe sites and blogs (usually minus attribution and copyright information. This seems to be the origin.), but I can't find any indication that anyone's actually made it.

That's not right; somebody needs to step up, cook it and find out if it's any good and it may as well be me. I want to make this post easy to find for anyone who finds all the other copies so I'm not going to modify or rewrite it at all, just cut and paste like everyone else.

Chickpeas and Swiss Chard in the Style Tunisian Sahel (Morshan)


Recipe from: Mediterranean Cooking, Revised Edition, Copyright ©1994 by Paula Wolfert

Makes 4 servings

3/4 pound Swiss chard leaves, stemmed, rinsed and torn into large pieces [My CSA bunch yielded a half pound of leaves so I added in the thinner stems.]
2 large cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 small dried red chile
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup minced onion
2 teaspoons tomato paste
1 cup cooked chickpeas with 3/4 cup cooking liquid [There's about 3/4 cup liquid in a can of chickpeas so that worked out fine.]
1 lemon, cut in wedges, optional

1. In pot steam, parboil or microwave chard leaves until tender, about 5 minutes. [Our chard started out pretty tender so I cut this down to 2 minutes]

2. Set leaves in colander to drain.

3. Squeeze out excess moisture and shred coarsely.

4. Crush garlic in mortar with salt, coriander and chile until thick, crumbly paste forms.

5. Heat olive oil in 10-inch skillet and saute onion until pale-golden.

6. Add garlic paste and tomato paste and stir into oil until sizzling.

7. Add chard, cooked chickpeas and cooking liquid and cook, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes.

8. Remove from heat and let stand until ready to serve. (Contents of skillet should be very moist but not soupy. For looser texture, stir in more chick pea cooking liquid.)

9. Serve warm, at room temperature or cold with lemon wedges.


It's not bad, but not really inspired either. Maybe its because I haven't had a bowl of greens that wasn't callaloo in a while, but the chard seems really blah. The subtle spice and lemon are nice, but there's nothing much else going on here. I expect bigger flavors from Tunisian cooking. Judging from the other recipes on Ms. Wolfert's site, I think this has been wimped out for the Western palate and probably chard has been substituted in for another, more flavorful, green. It's a shame I couldn't find any other recipes for the dish for comparison.

CSA week nine - Chicken tagine with olives and preserved lemons

and also large bunches of parsley and cilantro.

This is a recipe from North African Cooking by Hilaire Walden. It's not the one I mentioned on Saturday, but this one uses more parsley and cilantro than that one plus some other interesting flavors so I thought I'd give it a try. I've modified it a bit and probably screwed it up since I couldn't get the right sorts of olives or preserved lemons. Well, that's the way of things; I'll just have to hope for the best.

Ingredients:
2-3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves
3/4 teaspoons ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 large pinch saffron threads, crushed
salt and pepper

1 chicken weighing about 3 1/2 pounds (Mine was a bit bigger so I was generous on all the spices and used a large onion.)
3 cups chicken broth or water

1/2 cup greeny-brown Moroccan olives, rinsed or kalamata olives, roughly chopped
1 large bunch of cilantro, finely chopped (I used about half my share. There's large and then there's large.)
1 large bunch of parsley, finely chopped
1 preserved lemon in salt (The lemons I found were pickled, but so are the olives so I figure I'm probably OK. They were also kind of small so I used two.), chopped

0. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a dutch oven just big enough to fit the chicken. Add onions and fry until golden brown.

2. Meanwhile, crush garlic in a mortar with a pinch of salt. Work in the ginger, cinnamon, saffron and a bit of pepper. Add to onions and cook until fragrant. Remove to a bowl.

3. Let the spice mix cool a bit and then mash it up into a smoother paste.
Or just run it through the food processor. Spread it all over the chicken including in the body cavity.

4. Put chicken in the dutch oven (which you're glad you used because you didn't lose all the flavor from the spice mix you couldn't entirely scrape out) and add broth. Bring to a simmer and cover.

The original recipe goes on to simmer on the stovetop for 1 1/4 hours, but instead I put it into the oven for omni-directional heat. 350 works for stews but wanted to keep the sauce simmering here so I want a little higher temperature. Technically that means this is a braise not a tagine, I think. The recipe called for flipping the chicken a few times which still seemed like a good idea so I went ahead and did that.

I'm not sure about the timing since I started at 350, changed my mind, tried 375 and then 400. I just cooked until my probe thermometer got a reading of 165 degrees. I've been having trouble getting reliable readings so the chicken ended up a bit overcooked, but the sauce kept it from drying out so it wasn't a disaster.

5. When the thermometer reaches 160 degrees add the chopped olives, lemon, cilantro and parsley, turn the oven down to 350 degrees and cook for 15 minutes more.

6. When the chicken is done, remove it to a cutting board to cool and put the sauce on the stove to cook down if it looks like it needs it. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning now. When the chicken is cool enough to work with, portion it out and serve with the sauce. If you can figure how to skim the chicken fat from the sauce, you probably should.


I also had a side dish: Fried peppers with capers and garlic

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons olive oil
3/4 pound red peppers, cut into strips
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1/2 Tablespoon salt-packed capers (don't substitute the pickled capers; the flavors are quite different)
1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar (go ahead and substitute plain white vinegar)
salt and pepper

1. Heat the oil on high heat in a cast iron pan until nearly smoking. Add the peppers. Fry, stirring frequently but not constantly, until they've charred around the edges.

2. Add the capers and garlic. Cook until they sizzle and the garlic starts to brown.

3. Stir in the vinegar which will evaporate too fast to do any real damage to the seasoning on your cast iron pan. Still, you'll want to clean the pan promptly after dinner.

4. Serve hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.


And I made couscous too.

I'm fairly happy with how the tagine turned out. There's a lot of good flavor in the sauce, but you can tell the right olives and lemon would match with the herbs and spices a bit better. As usual when I neglect to brine the chicken is flavorful on the outside but the actual meat is kind of bland. Even this free-range, organic blah-blah-blah chicken doesn't have a whole lot of flavor. Not compared to olives and preserved lemons, anyway. I suppose the overcooking was no help here either. But still, not bad and the sauce is quite nice with the couscous.

The peppers are sweet, salty and tangy. Very different from the chicken and a nice accompaniment. The recipe doesn't actually specify sweet bell peppers so I wonder how it would be using a pepper with a little heat.

Now I could really go for some baclava for dessert.

CSA - Chermoula baked tilapia

This was another CSA Summer ad hoc week. I went out to Theine early so I could get my pick of the bananas; a variety of varietals were offered and I wanted to get some of each. I was early enough to meet Margie before she finished the drop-off. We got sidetracked into talking about this blog and another person making a pick-up asked, but I wanted to thank her for all her effort in making the CSA work (and since she said she reads the blog I've got this second chance). It's easy to limit the support in CSA to the money we pay, but we should remember that the C stands for community not consumer. The least I can do is thank her.

Beyond the bananas, some really big tilapia were on offer this week. I've talked about scaling and gutting before I think so I'll skip that this time around. I do think I'm approaching competence at it.

Tilapia is a pretty mild fish--particularly when it's farmed--so I knew I had to really boost the flavor. I decided to go with a North African spice blend that is often used with white fish: chermoula. The formula for chermoula is one of those that's different in every village. I looked a few different ones to get a sense of the range and, as usual, went the over-complicated route. Here's my recipe:

1 small handful parsley, finely chopped
1 small handful cilantro, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
1 small hot pepper, finely chopped (I believe I used a birdseye)
1 teaspoon hot paprika
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 Tablespoon white vinegar
3 Tablespoons fruity olive oil
juice of 1 lemon

I mixed all that up, put the fish in a baking dish, cut three slits in each side and then poured the chermoula over top and stuffed some into the body cavity too. Then I let the fish marinate for a couple hours, turning every half hour or so.

Then I preheated the over to 350 degrees, scraped up all the solid bits of the chermoula and fully stuffed the fish, put the squeezed lemon into the pan (plenty of flavor left in it I figure), covered it with foil and baked for 40 minutes flipping the fish at 20.

And the result is this:

No pictures of a serving; sorry. The fish is falling-apart tender and spectacularly moist, but also full of tiny bones so it collapsed as I picked through it and the result is a heap of soggy fish bits on a bowl of couscous. Quite unsightly. Textural issues aside, the tilapia is infused with the aromatic flavors of the lemon, herbs and spices but not entirely overwhelmed by them. I'd say the flavor of the fish was an equal partner with the flavor of the chermoula. That aspect, at least, was a great success. I wonder if the texture of tilapia would respond better to broiling than a braise. Or maybe cutting five minutes off the cooking time would do the trick.

There was surprisingly little meat for a fish this size, but I did save a little bit for a salad tomorrow and all those bones should make a decent stock so I should get a few meals out of it anyway.

CSA week 15 - leblebi-esque escarole and chikpea soup

I was looking at the escarole and cannellini bean recipe in this week's newsletter and thinking that the chickpeas I had handy would substitute well for the beans I didn't. A quick search turned up this recipe for an escarole and chickpea stew that seemed promising. The author said it was based on leblebi, a traditional Moroccan breakfast soup. Well, it turns out there are a few different dishes that go by that name but when I came across this recipe I was hooked.

It hasn't really come out in the dishes I've talked about on the blog but I'm a huge fan of garnishes. My favorite presentation is a simple dish surrounded by a dozen bowls so everyone can personalize their serving. So this list of leblebi garnishes:
Lemon wedges
Coarse sea salt
Harissa
Chopped fresh tomatoes
Chopped green and red bell peppers
2 hardboiled eggs, chopped
Rinsed capers
Sliced pickled turnips
Flaked canned tuna fish (oil- or water-packed)
Freshly ground cumin
Finely chopped fresh parsley
Finely chopped cilantro
Sliced preserved lemons
Croutons or sliced stale bread
Thinly sliced scallions, both white and green parts
Olive oil

called out to me.

There's nothing to the soup itself: four cups of chicken soup (I used half my stock and half from a can), one can of chickpeas, one head of escarole. Simmer until tender (around five minutes I found). It's everything else that makes the dish.

The most important garnishes are the stale bread underneath and the loosely poached egg and harissa on top. Harissa, if you didn't read my previous post on it, is a North African chili oil. The particular bottle I've got has the other ubiquitous North African condiment, preserved lemons, mixed in. I also added tomatoes, green pepper, capers, scallion, cilantro and parsley, black olives (which weren't on this particular list but they're also typical for North Africa), sea salt and olive oil. I probably wasn't suppose to use all of that at once, but I liked having a different combination of flavors and textures in every spoonful. Five minutes cooking didn't give time for the soup's flavors to blend. The escarole and chickpeas retain their character in the crowd. This is simple (sort of) hearty comfort food. You can tell that even if the flavors are unfamiliar. My only advice is to go easy on the harissa and preserved lemons or they'll walk all over the other flavors.

One final thing just so Googlers with different terminology can still find this recipe: garbanzo, garbanzo, garbanzo, garbanzo. There, that should do it.

CSA week eight - Moroccan-flavor stuffed pepper

Note please that that's not Moroccan-style; I don't think there's a north African tradition of stuffing peppers. This is one of those let's-try-to-do-something-interesting-with-what-I've-got-in-the-refrigerator type of recipes. What I happened to have is leftover charcoal grilled chicken and onions from a Colombian barbecue restaurant and a bottle of harissa, the Moroccan hot pepper and preserved lemon spice mix. You could grill real shish kabob I suppose but if you're going to do that just cut up the pepper, add it to the skewer and forget this silly recipe. If you're in need of appropriate leftovers I recommend Al Carbon at Coral Way and 23rd. There's a middle eastern market a few blocks east too where you might find some harissa. The particular bottle I've got actually came from a TJ Maxx in Wilmington, Delaware (Thanks Mom!). You can find some real oddities hidden in their food section.

For the most part, the recipe is as straightforward as any stuffed-anything recipe. Get all of the ingredients that need to be cooked cooked, chop everything up small, mix them in with a starch (in this case couscous) and pack it into the vegetable to be stuffed. Of the chopped items in this particular case, I kind of regret the olives. Black olives are a traditional match in Moroccan cuisine with hot peppers and preserved lemon, but I don't think I had the right sort.

The one interesting thing here is a trick I came across while looking up what to do with the harissa. In some recipes, instead of just dumping it into the dish, it's mixed into a beaten egg which is cooked into an omelet which keeps the sauce nicely sequestered. Modern molecular gastronomy does something similar using various chemicals to trap sauces in sheets or caviar-esque balls. Today I had the heat a little too high, screwed up the omelet, and ended up making goopy mess I was hoping to avoid after mixing it into the couscous but I've done it successfully in the past and it was pretty neat. If eggs didn't go with the dish you're making (as they do here), you could use just an egg white and control the sauce without adding any extraneous flavor. It's an idea to keep in reserve anyway.

So, I mixed everything into the couscous, packed it into the pepper, sprayed it with olive oil, sprinkled on some salt, and baked it at 350 for 25 minutes. If I had a gas grill I might have charred the pepper for some extra flavor, but this is Miami so I'm more likely to have a charcoal barbecue handy.

The end result looks about the same as it did when it went into the oven but the pepper is nicely tender but not collapsing (one benefit of not dousing it in sauce and then over-cooking as many Italian stuffed pepper recipes call for). Other than the olives, I think everything worked well together. Still and all, I'll probably just chop the pepper up and char it in a pan next time.