Showing posts with label clementines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clementines. Show all posts

Saturday, January 8, 2011

CSA week four wrap-up, week five start-up

It's been a little while, but I promised when this season started up that I was going to cook less ambitiously and post more judiciously. Put those together and you get fewer posts. Let's see if there's anything worth mentioning that wasn't worth a full post...
Frizzled breakfast radishes are good as a topping for steak.
...
I used the clementine to revisit the unsuccessful Szechuan orange chicken I made last year. This time I was scrupulous about de-pithing the skins, but that didn't change the results much. The skins still turned palate-blastingly bitter when cooked. Luckily, the bitterness doesn't spread and I left them in larger pieces this time, so I was able to pick them out (as the original recipe says to do so I don't know why I thought I could do otherwise in the first place). The resulting dish was pretty good, but there were so many other bold flavors that it was hard to tell if the clementine skins had any real effect. There seemed to be a slight citrus edge, but it's nothing a squeeze of orange juice wouldn't more easily accomplish.
...
I found a very interesting turnip recipe, but it's a main dish so I decided to save it until I had more than a half pound of turnips to use. I didn't do the gratin I was planning either; I made the mistake of shopping at Whole Foods and I don't think they carry cheese that isn't too good (or at least too expensive) to waste melting over turnips. I ended up cooking the turnips pot-sticker style which is a great preparation if you're making them as a side-dish.

I think that's it. On to this week...


Not too much here this time, partially due to the cold weather and partially because I left the lettuce behind and got shorted mustard greens. I should have read the read the newsletter more carefully and checked another box; I do quite like mustard greens.

As for what I do have, there isn't really enough of anything to base a recipe around, except maybe the scallions. I was thinking a quiche for them since I've got some excess eggs at the moment.

I could see pickling the broccoli, but it's really good with pasta too so I might do that.

I ought to find a recipe that uses a whole lot of cilantro too since I've got a supermarket bunch in addition to this one. I've made a parsley salad or two; a cilantro salad should work just as well. The microgreens I found in the extras bin might work well in that.

The green pepper is big enough to stuff and I found instructions that promise better stuffed peppers than the results I've had before so I might give that a try.

The black sapote isn't going to be ripe for a while and I'd like to accumulate a couple more before cooking anything with it.

That leaves the grapefruit. As Margie mentions in the newsletter, they do go well with shrimp. Maybe I'll do something with that.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

CSA week six - Szechuan clementine chicken

Nothing novel or exotic here, just a more authentic alternative to the recipe in the newsletter for the same dish. There are a few variations on this particular recipe on-line and I think I've worked my way back to the original at fiery-foods.com. At least that appears to be where it first appeared on the web, but I think it likely had a former life on paper somewhere. I made an alteration in the directions to bring it even closer to the traditional method so this is a new variation on the theme.

Ingredients:
Marinade:
1/2 tablespoon cornstarch
1 Tablespoon dry rice wine
1/2 pound boneless chicken thighs, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

Sauce:
1/2 Tablespoon minced ginger
1/2 Tablespoon minced garlic
1 green onion, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground Sichuan peppercorns
1 Tablespoon dry rice wine
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon hot bean sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Stir-Fry:
1 Tablespoons peanut oil
5 small dried hot red chiles
2 Tablespoons clementine peel, torn into 1 inch pieces

1. Cut up your chicken and toss with the wine and cornstarch. Let marinate 30 minutes.

2. Combine the sauce ingredients.

3. Heat a wok to smoking, add the oil and then the chiles and peel. Stir fry briefly until they darken and become aromatic. Add chicken and marinade. Stir fry 1 minute until chicken is cooked through. Add sauce. Stir fry 30 seconds until sauce is thickened and bubbling.

Remove the chiles and peel before serving with a big bowl of white rice.


This is almost right, but the flavor has nasty bitter notes from burt orange oil. I should have added the peel with the sauce instead of blackening it with the peppers. Oddly that's one thing the newsletter recipe kept traditional so it's going to suffer from the same problem. ... There may actually be a problem with these clementines too. I've just tried the fruit and they've got the same bitter edge to them. Ech.

I added a little more sugar to the dish to compensate for the bitterness; It doesn't fix the problem, so I don't think I'm going to be keeping the leftovers, but I can just about look past the bitterness. The other flavors are, I think, just about right. I really want to try this recipe again with peel from extra-sweet oranges added late in the recipe (and maybe with a few more chilies). I think it'll be dead on traditional Szechuan and really tasty.