CSA week ten - Hilda Minter’s spicy escarole

I don't normally do the cut and paste for recipes, but this one was written up quite professionally--more professionally than the version I worked off of--and I don't see how I could do better. Plus it's got a story that adds a lot of character. This is from One Big Table by Molly O’Neill. As always, my comments are in square brackets.

Hilda Minter’s Spicy Escarole

Birmingham, Alabama

In 1988, Hilda Minter’s husband, Joe Minter, a retired construction worker, received a message from God directing him to create a sculpture park depicting the African American spiritual experience in their backyard in the Woodland Park neighborhood of Birmingham. Their property abuts a historic African American cemetery, and the notion of painting the verse from John 3:16 on the tailgate of a pickup truck or His Word Is Real on a defunct movie theater marquee gave her pause. When her husband paid homage to the American workingman by welding giant rusty wrenches to a cross, Mrs. Minter made her favorite spicy escarole. When Mr. Minter was heralded as a visionary genius, she made bigger pots of the escarole for the busloads who began to make pilgrimages to his sculpture park. “We were put here to make things and give them away,” said Mrs. Minter, a retired nurse’s aid. “People don’t expect escarole to be so sweet and spicy. That’s why I like it; it make me think and I like to watch what it does to people too.”

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons bacon grease or olive oil
1⁄4 pound thickly sliced spicy pressed sausage such as pepperoni, chorizo or soppressata, cut into 1⁄4-inch dice [I used some sausage-of-the-week from Whole Foods that I forgot to label. I thought it was Indian and was prepared to adjust the spices to suit, but I couldn't identify it when I tried a piece so I left things as is. It was fresh, not dried as called for here; the version of this recipe I used just said the very vague "chorizo" so I didn't know what was called for.]
2 garlic cloves, minced
1⁄2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
4 heads of escarole (2 1⁄2 pounds), dark outer leaves removed, inner leaves coarsely chopped
2 cups diced stewed tomatoes, fresh or high quality canned [I used fire-roasted crushed tomatoes]
1 tablespoon minced fresh oregano
1 to 2 teaspoons salt
Black pepper to taste
Cider vinegar or lemon juice to taste

1. Heat 2 tablespoons of the bacon grease or olive oil in a large soup pot over high heat. Add the spicy sausage and garlic and cook over high heat, stirring constantly, until the garlic is golden, about 2 minutes. Add the red pepper and stir.

2. Add the escarole in batches and cook. Add the tomatoes and oregano; season with salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Cook over low heat until the escarole is tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from heat, cover, and allow to sit for 10 minutes.

3. Season with additional salt, pepper, vinegar or lemon juice to taste and serve with cornbread or beans or both. [Or neither.]

Serves 4 to 6

The ten minutes of sitting turns the escarole from tender to a bit limp, but that helps it carry the sauce so that's fine. I do think the recipe might be a bit better using collards, though.

The cider vinegar transforms the sauce from a spicy tomato sauce (which I liked fine) into a sweet, spicy and sour combination that works surprisingly well with the flavor of the escarole. Without the vinegar the flavors work on their own; with it, it's tasty but unbalanced. It needs some ribs or pulled pork to give it some weight. The beans, the recipe calls for, would work just fine too, actually. Still, all in all, not a bad dish and a rare good use for escarole.

CSA week ten wrap-up, week 11 start-up

I made a couple dishes last week not worth a full blog post but worth a mention here: spinach pasta dough and Italian wedding soup.

The spinach pasta dough was a real pain to work with. I kept adding more flour to compensate for the moisture in the spinach, but it stayed sticky and delicate and refused to roll out well in my pasta machine. I ended up using half the dough to make some really tough gnocchi and some noodles that stuck together into a lump and putting the rest in the freezer. It'll probably roll out better half-defrosted, I figure. If it had good spinach flavor, maybe it'd be worth all this trouble, but I could barely taste any. Big waste of some quality spinach.

The Italian wedding soup, on the other hand, was quite good, but it's just adding meatballs and coarsely chopped escarole (or curly endive) to chicken soup and finishing off with egg-drop-soup-style egg threads made out of alfredo sauce. I did make my own meatballs, but not much there to write about.

What's left then? Half a head of escarole, half a head of celery, half a container of grape tomatoes, most of the parsley, the honey and a still-not-ripe canistel. Huh, I thought I had made more of a dent in the share than that. I'll make a frittata or a stew or suchlike to use that up.


If this week's share looks sparse, that's because I left the lettuce behind, as usual, as well as the mizuna. I've got nothing against mizuna, but I'm getting tired of greens at this point, plus I need to limit how many new ingredients I bring in this week. my freezer is completely full and I need to clear out some space so I can make ice cream.

So, the only real non-seasoning ingredient I need to deal with here is the kale. There's a German beer-braised kale recipe that caught my I, but kale has been trendy recently so there are interesting recipes floating around out there. Or maybe I'll just make chips; That's always an option.

For the curry leaves, the trick is using a reasonable amount of them at once. Jamie Oliver has a few recipes that ask for a handful; his fish soup looks pretty good.

I might go Indian again with the dill (as mentioned in the newsletter). I wasn't too impressed with the curry I made with them last April, not while it was fresh, but it improved over time in the freezer and was very tasty when defrosted.

The carrot I've already snacked upon and, as carrots go, it was a good one.

I'll save the pulp from the black sapote when it's ripe and wait for more. It's easier to use in bulk, I've found. I'll probably do the same with the canistel, now that I think about it.

Finally, the green onions are no problem. I use plenty of onions and scallions in my cooking so these should substitute in nicely.

That's still three or four dishes all of which will probably have leftovers. Even if I can pull most of the non-share ingredients out of the freezer, I don't know if I'll be making much progress towards emptying it out. Maybe I'll save the dill and curry leaves. They both freeze well.

CSA week nine - Utica greens

The greens in question here are escarole a.k.a. curly endive a.k.a. the stuff from the CSA share this week.

The Utica in question is a town in upstate New York. I'm always pleasantly surprised to find a regional cuisine that I wasn't familiar with. Yes, this is basically Italian-American, but it evolved its own way upstate to create a few dishes you won't find outside the region. There's this, salt potatoes, riggies, snappys (which I knew as Harry's white hots when I visited family in Rochester) and a few others. There's an interesting list here.

This is one of those recipes where every kitchen has its own variation. Only a few of those are up on the Web. I based mine on one by Janet Chanatry of Chanatry's SuperMarket in Utica.

Ingredients:
1 1-pound head of escarole, cleaned and chopped into large pieces
2 Tablespoons olive oil
at least 1 ounce prosciutto, sliced thin and chopped
copious garlic, finely chopped
2 long Italian hot peppers, seeded and sliced thin [I couldn't find the peppers I wanted so I used Anaheims]
1/3 cup hot pickled Italian peppers, sliced thin [I couldn't find what I wanted here either so I picked peppers out of the various mixes at the Fresh Market olive bar.]
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup or more breadcrumbs
1/3 cup pecorino romano, finely grated
1 cup chicken broth
salt and pepper

0. Preheat oven on broil.

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add escarole and less salt than if you were making pasta but still a good bit. Simmer 4-6 minutes until the escarole is tender and wilted. Remove to a bowl, add cold water until the greens are cool enough to handle. Squeeze out the water and unwad the resulting wads from your squeezing.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add garlic and proscuitto and cook for 2-3 minutes until prosciutto is frizzled and garlic aromatic. Add both sorts of peppers and cook another 2-3 minutes until the raw peppers soften a little but still have some bite to them.

3. Turn off the heat and add escarole and stock to pan. Mix in breadcrumbs and cheese gradually. The goal is to soak up all the stock so be generous with the crumbs. [Chanatry's original recipe called for only 1/2 cup breadcrumbs but I used lots more. She must have meant store-bought dust-dry crumbs. My homemade crumbs absorb a lot less liquid per cup.]

4. When the mixture is no longer soupy, check to see if you used a pan that can survive going under the broiler. If not, move everything to a baking dish. If you used a cast iron pan then you can leave it where it is. Season the mixture to taste, sprinkle some more breadcrumbs on top and drizzle or spray with a little more olive oil. Broil for a few minutes until well browned.

Serve hot. The Delmonico's menu pairs it with steak. I saw another appealing suggestion of using it to top a chicken cutlet sandwich. Basically, it's both vegetable and starch so pair it with a chunk of meat.

With the prosciutto, garlic and peppers, of course this tastes pretty darn good. The question is: how much do the greens contribute to the goodness? Escarole isn't the world's most hearty or flavorful vegetable so it has a hard time standing up to the other flavors in the dish, but it's in there. It's a kinda-spinachy-letucey baseline (not a bass-line, though. No real low notes in this dish. That's why it's a side dish for meat.) the other flavors work off of. It's also the physical bulk of the dish which is important. It contributes to the dish, but it doesn't really contribute to the goodness. I want to try it again after it's fully clotted and the flavors have had time to blend a little. I think it might come together a bit better on reheating.

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.