Radish mizuna pasta

Bit of a change of plans for both the radishes and the mizuna. And a bit of an experiment too as neither ingredient is really known for its use in this sort of thing.

I started by frying up a pile of thinly-sliced radishes in copious butter and olive oil (since I knew the cooking fat would be the basis of the pasta sauce). Ideally, this should be over medium heat as the radishes go from raw to burnt rather quickly, but my stove's large burner only does high and off.

I overcooked at the time so here's a smaller batch I cooked up later at the level of doneness you're looking for: browned around the edges, some red left and just turning golden in the center. A little longer in the pan and they'll crisp up, but these are still soft. The radishes lose their bite early in the cooking process and turn sweet. The browning dims the sweetness and adds a toasty savoriness. At this stage, the flavor is not far from sweet potato chips (if you sprinkle on a bit of salt as they come out of the pan). It was hard to stop snacking on them, to tell the truth.

Sweet potato chips are also not known as a pasta topping so some additional ingredients are necessary. I added a few chopped anchovies for umami, but serano ham or even soy sauce would be good choices too if you wanted to take this in a different direction.

When the anchovies had dissolved and the pasta was done, I added the pasta to the pan, topped with the mizuna (which I had cleaned and removed the stemmier bits from. This required more attention than I expected as there were some rotty gunk mixed in that needed to be washed off. That's why I over-cooked my radishes. That's why you've got to have your mis en place all en place before you start.), removed the pan from the heat and tossed until the mizuna wilted a little.

Finish with a light drizzle of white wine vinegar (or a squeeze of lemon) to cut the fat and that's it. I never said it was a complicated recipe, just an interesting experiment. A successful one too, I'd say.

The radishes are taking the place of a more traditional toasted bread crumbs and the mizuna the place of a more traditional green (I considered the radish tops first, but their good to icky ratio was too low and would have taken too much time to deal with with the radishes already on the fire). Otherwise, a pretty standard Italian preparation and a pretty good one too.

My one reservation is that the radishes lost their crunch pretty quickly. I'd add some pinenuts next time. Or maybe capers. That would be nice too.

CSA week 14 - A mizuna pesto variation

As Caroline wrote on her blog earlier today, pesto's an easy way to use up an overload of CSA greens and it works just fine with mizuna. I've been having trouble finding a good use for the mizuna so I decided to punt with a pesto, but I didn't want to make it too easy on myself. As long as I was switching out the basil, I might as well throw in a few more switch-ups and see where I ended up.

I had a vague idea of making a Southwestern-style pesto so to the mizuna I added a handful of cilantro. And to the garlic I added a modestly hot pepper. The olive oil I kept the same. For the parmesan, I substituted an aged queso blanco and for the pine nuts I substituted corn nuts.

And, in a last minute decision, for the pasta, I substituted pulled pork.



The results left something to be desired, but, surprisingly, it wasn't my substitutions that caused the problem. It was the bitterness of the mizuna. Once I added a couple pinches of sugar and a drizzle of vinegar to balance against the bitterness, it was much improved. Now it tastes like a proper pesto with a bright fresh grassiness and slight tanginess. Without the bitterness prominent, a lot of the distinctive character beyond a generic green comes from the cheese and the corn nuts which give subtle hints of funk and toastiness respectively. And a lot of salt from both. All of this plays surprisingly well against the savoriness of the pork. This was just a lark, but I've stumbled upon something really quite tasty. I wonder why there isn't a tradition of pesto-based barbecue sauces. Maybe the smokiness of proper barbecue (as opposed to my crockpot pulled pork) throws the balance off? Or does such a thing exist; have any of you heard of it?

CSA week seven - Not quite banh pho xao he

This is a pretty straightforward vietnamese noodle dish modified from using a pound of garlic chives to using everything leafy and green within reach. The recipe I modified was from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen cookbook.

I cut the recipe down by about a quarter to adjust for the amount of noodles I had on hand. I'm going to use the original amounts to avoid weird numbers.

Ingredients:
1 pound banh pho flat rice noodles
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar, divided
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
3 Tablespoons water
2 Tablespoons cooking oil
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and cleaned
1/3 pound ground pork, broken up into bits
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pound assorted leafy green vegetables [I used 1 bunch each of garlic chives, mizuna, swiss chard and cilantro], chopped or torn into 3- to 4-inch-wide pieces.
1 lime

1. Put the noodles in a large bowl and cover with hot tap water. Let them soak until pliable and opaque, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain. Cut into short lengths. The original recipe called for 3 to 4 inches, but I liked them a little longer.

2. Coarsely grind the shrimp into pea-sized pieces. Break up the pork into similarly sized pieces and mix with the shrimp.

3. Mix the fish sauce, water and 1 1/4 teaspoon of the sugar in a small bowl.

4. Heat oil in a wok over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and fry until fragrant, about 15 seconds. If it took less time and/or the garlic started to brown, turn the heat down; this isn't real stir-frying. Add the shrimp and pork. Break up the meat and add the salt and remaining sugar. Cook, stirring and breaking up clumps, until shrimp and pork have turned opaque, about 2 minutes.

5. Add the greens. Stir and fold to mix in the shrimp and pork and get different bits of the greens on the bottom. When the greens have wilted down by a third, add there's room in the wok, add the noodles. Mix well and add the fish sauce mixture. Turn the heat up until the sauce starts to sizzle and continue stirring 2 to 3 minutes longer, until the noodles and greens are soft and the noodles have absorbed a bit of sauce and darkened in color.

6. Remove from heat and squeeze in the juice from the lime. Mix once again and serve.


Hmm. Not bad. The shrimp and pork are, of course, great together and enhanced by the fish sauce. [When genetically modified lab-grown meat improves (right now they can just do a meat paste suitable for hot dogs and not much else and they have to use cells from animals that actually exist), they really ought to work on shrimp-pig.]

The chard goes pretty well with the other flavors and adds a substantially different flavor and texture than the garlic chives which I think is an improvement in the dish. The mizuna and cilantro seem to have wilted away to nothing, though, which is a shame.

I used the milder Vietnamese fish sauce so it's a low key dish that could do with some nuoc cham (or at least a little more fish sauce and lime juice) and sriracha to perk it up and maybe some fried garlic or shallots for crunch. Most Vietnamese recipes, I think, assume you've got your condiments and garnishes on hand to finish the seasoning of the dish. I added ground peanuts to my first serving, but the flavor isn't quite right. Fried garlic is a much better choice.

CSA week one - My Thanksgiving dinner

I'm alone again this year and when that happens I generally feel compelled to create some approximation of a traditional holiday meal: poultry prepared whole, a starch and a vegetable or two.

This year I made a flattened pan-fried chicken, wilted mizuna, a turnip gratin and stewed roselle.

That first was from a recipe I saw on a local cooking show I saw while visiting my mother earlier this month. It's the specialty of a restaurant either in Philadelphia or Wilmington whose name I paid insufficient attention to catch. The show skipped over some details so I really only picked up a three-part technique:
1. Remove all of the chicken's bones, leaving the skin in one piece.
2. Fry it skin side down until the skin is browned and crispy.
3. Flip it to finish.

It might have struck you that step one is the tricky bit. You're not wrong about that. One further detail I did see in the show was to cut out the chicken's backbone and then squish the bird flat as if starting to butterfly it, but after that I was on my own.

I cut the backbone a bit too narrowly, so I started with the bits remaining and sliced towards the center, under the rib cages, until I hit the clavicle to get each side off in one big piece. That went pretty smoothly and didn't slash up the meat too much. I had to dig deeper to get out the thigh bones and the keelbone and basically shredded up the chest area to get the wishbone out. Some of that required more digging around with my fingers than careful slicing with my boning knife. But here it is with the main body deboned. Not too bad. I thought chilling the chicken to firm up the meat would help, but it actually got easier to work as the bird warmed up.

Deboning the legs and wings was a little tougher. I ended up slowly turning the legs inside out, pulling out the bone, scraping the meat off and snipping the tendons as I went along and then peeling the skin off the very end. Finally I poked my finger into the skin like an inverted rubber glove to turn it back right side out. The first joint of the wing worked similarly, but the second and third joints were hopeless so I just chopped them off and stuck them in the stockpile. (it's a pile of bones for making stock. Stockpile. Ha.)

And there you go. One boneless chicken. I generously seasoned both sides with salt and pepper, heated up a couple teaspoons of olive oil in a 12-inch cast iron pan and dropped it in, skin side down. I started with the heat at medium-high for 15 minutes and then turned up the heat to get the skin browning. I could tell by smell when it was ready to turn. After the flip, I could see into the center of the breast meat through the slices I had pulled the wishbone out of so it was easy to judge when the thickest part was finished cooking. Around another 10 minutes.

I removed it from the pan and let it rest a few minutes before slicing. Since it has no bones, I could slice it any way I wanted which was kind of interesting.

The chicken is amazingly flavorful, tender and juicy considering the lack of any brining or other special preparation and my random stabs at cooking times (not to mention my random stab version of butchery). The skin is wonderfully crisp and tasty. The only minus is maybe that it's rather greasy, but it's all the natural chicken fat so you can't complain too much. This turned out so very well and, although the deboning process was a bit complex, it was an engaging complexity so I didn't really mind. I think this just became my new favorite method of cooking chicken.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to remove the legs and wings. They kind of get in the way and keep the skin on the outer bits of the body from crisping, but they also prop up the thinner parts of the chicken away from the heat. That's probably important to keep them from overcooking while the breast is finishing cooking. It might be worth the experiment to compare the results.

An added bonus of this method of cooking the chicken is that you can wilt greens in the pan afterward and they soak up all the juices and crisp up at the edges. Mighty tasty. I didn't cook the mizuna quite long enough and it ended up a little chewy, but not too bad. The flavor of the greens only contributes a little to the final result given how flavorful the pan juices it's couriering are. I wouldn't try this with spinach; that would be entirely overshadowed. Mizuna, at least gets to be a bit player. Kale, finely shredded, might be even better.

All of that goodness is kind of a shame because it takes the spotlight off of the turnip gratin which turned out fabulously in its own right.

I've got a new mandolin that does paper-thin slices easily (at least while it's still sharp) so prepping was a breeze. Here's the bottom layer--concentric overlapping circles of turnip (which is so much easier to do with properly sliced turnips, let me tell you) topped with a couple teaspoons of chicken broth, a couple Tablespoons of heavy cream, a sprinkle each of parsley, garlic and salt and a handful of shredded fontina. With the turnip slices so thin, I managed six layers from the CSA share of turnips--a bit under a pound I think--and six layers of cheese plus some grated Parmesan on top. 40 minutes at 375 degrees with foil on top and 20 without and here's the results.

Since I went light on the liquid, the cheese isn't oozing out. Instead it mortars together the layers of just slightly toothsome turnips. The cheese and turnip flavors blend and the parsley and garlic come through adding elements of complexity and elevating the dish. You've had turnip gratin; I don't have to tell you how good it can be and this turned out to be a very fine example.

Finally, we've got the roselle. I cleaned and roughly chopped them and then stewed them in a little chicken stock. I added a little salt, but no sugar. I should have added a little sugar too. Instead of the traditional peanuts, I added some toasted pine nuts for texture.

The roselle is brightly tart and floral. Probably a bit too tart, but still quite palatable. It cuts right through the heavy fatty elements on the plate just the way it's supposed to. The pine nuts give a bit of textural contrast, but their flavor is drowned out. Not bad, but this needs a little more work.

That off note aside, this was a great meal. I regret a bit that nobody else is going to get to appreciate it. On the other hand, it's so good I really don't want to share.

Now then, what's for desert?

CSA week 1 round-up and week 2 start-up

First up I'd like to thank Marge, who whoever's writing the newsletter, for the more prominent mention this week. I wrote up a little welcome post two weeks ago, but I guess nobody noticed the blog addresses in the little print at the bottom of the last page as there wasn't a hint of new readers in my traffic stats. Also, possibly the relatively familiar vegetables and lack of time pressure meant that people weren't seeking out recipes.

Anyway, I wrote up what I did with most of the vegetables, but there are still some unaccounted for. Unusually, I did mainly what I said I might do in the weekly start-up post. All of the cucumbers and half of the dill went to refrigerator pickles. I used this recipe for a change of pace from my usual except she forgot to actually include dill in the ingredient list so I just judged a reasonable amount to add to the jar. It takes a few weeks for the best flavor to develop so it'll be sitting in the back of the refrigerator for a while before I know how it turned out.

Half of the avocado went to a rather nice guacamole I put together without using a real recipe. I used culantro from my garden instead of the usual cilantro, but I didn't notice any real difference. And I think this is the first time I've added cumin which I think played off the other flavors nicely.




The mizuna I stuffed in rolled chicken breasts and tuna niçoise wraps (good quality tuna, white beans or chick peas with a bit of the canning liquid to moisten, some sweet herbs, tomato and greens. Yummy.) and this alternate presentation of the suon nuong xa I made (which also used some avocado slices). A rice paper wrapper would have been an improvement, but even with just a tortilla, it's a great sandwich. I'm surprised it isn't a staple at those international wrap sandwich shops.

And on to week two. A lighter share this week which is good as I had some trouble getting through everything last time. To start, there's the callaloo. From last year I know that it goes bad fast so I better use it soon. I still haven't had a chance to make callaloo, the dish, as all my callaloo, the vegetable, rotted before I got around to using it last year, so that's my plan for it this time.

The Pei Tsai I'm going to stir fry. In one of my cookbooks, there's a lettuce stir fry recipe on the page opposite a cabbage recipe I've used many times and I've been meaning to try it for a while now. And since I've got the right sort of lettuce at last now's the time.

The butternut squash is nice roasted or in soup or roasted and then in soup. These little ones would make a lovely presentation if they were stuffed, but I'm not likely to have anyone over for dinner so that would just make me sad. Soup it is, then.

The avocado I'd like to find a Caribbean recipe for, but a quick search isn't turning much up. Soup maybe if I roast the squash.

The tomato is a meaty variety that can handle being cooked. Maybe I'll stuff it or it could go into the Thai fried rice I have planned to use up the last of last share's bok choy and lemongrass.

The black sapotes worked well in a sherbet last year. I've got fewer this time around so they won't be the main ingredient if I try that again. I think I may substitute them into my piña colada sherbet recipe and see how that works. I've got a while before they ripen so no rush in deciding.

Finally, the mint. I've never really had much use for fresh mint, particularly this large amount of it. Mojito sorbet?

CSA week one: Suon Nuong Xa

a.k.a. Grilled Lemongrass Pork Tenderloin Skewers

When I posted about the CSA box this week I wrote that lemongrass meant Thai cooking but when I actually looked around for recipes I found Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian recipes using it too. Since it's going to take four recipes to use up all the lemongrass I'm going to make a point of cooking recipes from four different cuisines.

First up is Vietnamese. This recipe is from Corinne Trang's cookbook Authentic Vietnamese Cooking via Sara Moulton's show Sara's Secrets. It's for a dish you'll recognize--those skewers of pork served over a big bowl of rice noodles in every Vietnamese restaurant on the planet (excepting banh mi stands, of course. Can you get banh mi anywhere in Miami? I think I'd actually drive some distance through Miami traffic to get some).

I didn't make any big changes to the recipe so here it is straight from the Food Network website:

Prep Time: 30 min
Inactive Prep Time: 1 min
Cook Time: 20 min

Level: Intermediate

Serves: 4 servings

1/4 cup fish sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 stalks lemongrass, outer leaves and tops removed, root ends trimmed, and stalks finely grated
1 large shallot, finely chopped
2 large cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 pound pork tenderloin, thinly sliced
16 bamboo skewers, soaked for 20 minutes and drained
1 recipe Rice Vermicelli: Bun Thit
1/2 cup chopped unsalted roasted peanuts
Nuoc cham, as needed, recipe follows

Stir together the fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, and oil until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the lemongrass, shallot, garlic and pork and mix to coat the meat evenly. Allow to marinate at room temperature for 20 minutes or refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to overnight.

Slide 2 to 4 slices of pork onto each skewer so the meat is flat with the skewer going through the slices several times. Grill over a barbecue (make sure that the flames have subsided and the coals are red with white ashes). Alternatively, heat a well-oiled grill pan or non-stick skillet over high heat and, working in batches, cook the skewers until the edges crisp, about 1 minute per side. Remove the skewers from the grilled pork.

Divide the grilled pork among the bowls of rice vermicelli. Sprinkle peanuts and drizzle nuoc cham over each serving. Serve immediately.

Fish Dipping Sauce: Nuoc Cham

5 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons water
1/3 cup fish sauce
1/2 cup lime or lemon juice
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 or more bird's eye or Thai chiles, seeded and minced
1 shallot, peeled, thinly sliced, and rinsed (optional)

Whisk together the sugar, water, fish sauce, and lime juice in a bowl until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the garlic, chile, and shallot, and let stand for 30 minutes before serving.

Yield: 2 cups Preparation Time: 5 minutes Cooking Time: 5 minutes Non-Active Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Recipe courtesy Corinne Trang, Authentic Vietnamese Cooking, Simon & Schuster, 1999


Personally, I don't particularly like rice vermicelli (There's not a whole lot there to dislike there either, but I don't think it adds anything much to a meal.) so I served the skewers over a bowl of mizuna and a big scoop of white rice instead. The picture's harder to parse than I expected. Those are wedges of tomato on the left hand side and the fiddly bits on the pork over on the right are sprinklings of ground peanuts.

I also added dollops of hoisin sauce and sambal chili garlic sauce to complete the trio of sauces you need for a proper Vietnamese meal. Actually, I thought the hoisin and sambal were better accompaniments than the nuoc cham. I'm as big a nuoc cham fan as much as the next guy, but it was the weakest complement to the dish.

The marinade used most of the same ingredients so the nuoc cham just watered down the intense flavors of the pork which actually was best--hot, tender and juicy, bursting with complex pungent and herbal flavors--right out of the pan. The couple minutes it took for me to fix up the bowl all pretty were much to its detriment. On the other hand, the sambal and hoisin worked with it nicely and lots of other things will benefit from being dipped in the leftover nuoc cham.


Oh, and I should say something about grating the lemongrass. I only had to remove one outer leaf and a little wedge of woody stem out of the bottom before running it through my microplane grater. It was surprisingly easy and released lots of flavor that you could taste even through the fish sauce and pork fat in the final dish. Beats crushing it with a cleaver and fishing it out later by a long shot. That's the benefit of having fresh local ingredients.

CSA week 15 - yakisoba, sort of

I was due another clear out the refrigerator dish and I was craving noodles so I decided to go with yakisoba or some facsimile. There were a range of noodle dishes up and down the east Asian coast I could have done and since I wasn't paying close attention to the mix of vegetables the major differences were in the type of noodle and the sauce.

An interesting thing about yakisoba, I learned as I was researching the dish, is that apparently it is very difficult to do well outside of Japan. All but the least ambitious recipes I saw were preceded by a lament over the fact. Maybe it's just people complaining that they can't reproduce what their favorite childhood corner dive made, but I'm willing to take them at their word that I've never actually had a decent example. Given what I've had at Japanese restaurants I actually wouldn't be at all surprised.

The first problem is finding the flat egg noodle required. As I wasn't planning a trip out to the Asian grocery I didn't even try. I used the instant yakisoba noodles I had in the freezer. Upon inspection they replaced the egg with yellow die #5; that was a bit of a disappointment.

The second problem was the sauce. It's amazing how many recipes there are on the web that do a basic Chinese noodle sauce and think that's good enough. The better recipes called for Japanese ingredients that I at best don't have handy and often didn't even recognize. The key seemed to be trying to approximate the meaty and fruity flavor of the traditional ingredients. I grokked the variety of recipes and came up with this:
1/2 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon mirin
1 Tablespoon rice wine
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon chili oil

A lot of the sauces were sweeter, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me. Keep in mind that this is not meant to be a balanced sauce. It plays as an earthy base for the slivers of pickled ginger and nori that I belatedly discovered I was out of.

Beyond the sauce, some recipes called for steaming the vegetables, but I just did a stir fry as it was easier. I started with the mei qing choy stems, broccoli and the leftover roasted chicken. After a couple minutes I added the mei qing choy leaves, mizuna tops, garlic chives, scallions and ham. After those were nicely wilted I added the noodles, omelet slices and the sauce. Let that cook until the sauce was reduced a little and served.

I'm pretty happy with how the vegetables were cooked; the broccoli stems were still al dente while the mei quing choy were more tender. The rest wilted away but still had a bit of chew to them and some individual character. And please note the quite good noodle/vegetable ratio. That's not something I usually get right. The sauce wasn't bad although it clearly was missing sharper flavors to play against. Some bean sprouts would have helped making the dish yakisobier too. I'll make a note for next time.

CSA week five - braised greens with lop chong

This, I've got to admit, didn't work out so well. Not that adding a bit of sausage to greens is a bad idea. If you've been reading a while, you know that I don't think adding a bit of sausage to just about anything is a bad idea. The sauce--soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and a bit of sugar--worked fine as well. You've another version of that flavor profile in the sugar and vinegar-based hot sauces added to American greens recipes. No, the problems here were a) the Sichuan peppercorns weren't well crushed so they remained unpleasant crunchy woody bits in the thin sauce, and b) another mess of greens that wilted down into a bowl full of stems.

That latter problem seems to be characteristic of the sort of mid-weight greens we've been getting a bunch of most every week. For light greens, like spinach or arugula, the stems wilt and soften along with the leaves. For tough greens, the stems are incorrigible and removed as a matter of course. But with these greens in-between--mizuna, tatsoi, hon tsai tai, and baby versions of the tough greens--the amount of cooking that tenderizes the stems does the leaves in.

The solution may be to remove the stems, chop them up and cook them for a couple minutes before adding the leaves. Hardly seems worth all the trouble though. If anyone has a suggestion for an alternative method that works for you, I'd like to hear it.

CSA subscription - week three

I've got one more recipe for the vegetables from week two that I'll post about tomorrow, but for now it's time to look to the future and the cornucopia that is week three. (Here's what Trina at miami dish did with Week Two if you haven't seen it.)

A whole lot of different things this week and I've got to admit that I'm a bit overwhelmed. Luckily the oranges and salad mix don't need any imagination to deal with. The parsley I'll use if it comes up, but if the extras box was still there when I got to the pick up spot I would have donated it; I'm not a big fan. In the back of the first photo you can barely make out a rather large avocado. It'll probably end up a guacamole. There are only so many avocados you can look at before giving up and taking the easy route out. Anyway, I'm currently stuck in a delicious cycle so I've got an immediate use for guac.

Next up is the mizuna. I'm intrigued by how Trina used her greens last time in a sticky rice so I think I'll try that with my leftover tatsoi and the mizuna. I've never had luck cooking sticky rice in the traditional way, wrapped in a banana leaf, so I'll probably just make the rice in my rice cooker, stir fry the other ingredients, mix them in and compress the results into the proper loaf shape. In fact, I think I'll go do that right now. Hang on a moment...

OK, I'm back and here's the result. The only short grain rice I had in my pantry was risotto rice, but I think it worked fine. I added dark soy sauce and some white pepper to the rice maker. In the rice are plenty of tatsoi and mizuna, some onion and water chestnuts for a bit of crunch and the traditional sticky rice meats: Chinese sausage and shrimp. After taking my first couple bites I realize I'm missing shitake mushrooms. Well, no reason I can't fry some up and mix them in to the leftovers later. I also used garlic, hot pepper and sesame oil. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and it was very quick and easy, too.

Let's see, what else have we got...the callaloo and turnip tops are going to make a mess of greens since I've already got the unused ham shanks defrosted from last week. The turnips and the cherry tomatoes will probably end up in salads. The green beans I'll probably just steam. Nothing fancy required.

Of course, my plans last week had little to do with what I actually ended up doing so stay tuned.