CSA week six - Return to the quiche-quest

Longtime readers (Hi Mom!) might remember that back in 2008, I experimented in an attempt to create a more perfect quiche crust. Your standards crusts tend to be soggy on the bottom, dried out on top and contain a heck of a lot of butter to no notable benefit. Also, it's kind of a pain to make. I had the idea that a savory crumb crust might make a workable substitute and worked through a few variations. I was fairly happy with a cracker-crumb crust, but since I was making a quiche today to use up a bunch of scallions, I thought I'd try a new tweak on the formula.

This time around I processed a couple handfuls of homemade breadcrumbs with around an equal amount of Kalvi Crispy Thin crackers until they were fairly finely ground. To that I added a big pile of finely grated Parmesan (which I'm rather surprised I haven't tried before), a bit of salt and a couple Tablespoons of melted butter--just enough to give the mixture a little structure so it would stay up on the sides of the pan. Once I got the crumbs laid out nicely I blind baked the crust for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

It didn't quite fuse into a solid piece, but there's a bit of structure there. Enough that I didn't have to be too gentle when putting in the fillings--three scallions and a tomato cooked-down, a half cup of diced green pepper browned, a little Serano ham frizzled and three more scallions cut larger and just wilted--plus a third cup of crumbled capricho de cabra, a soft flavorful but not too tangy goat cheese. Over that went four eggs beaten with 1/2 cup milk and 3/4 cup cream. The fillings stuck to the bottom so I had to gently mix things up a bit to distribute the vegetables.

I baked for 35 minutes at 375 degrees until a knife inserted in the middle came out clean, rested it for a bit and cut out a piece.

The quiche itself is nothing remarkable, but take a look at the bottom. Now that's a proper crust; I've got no idea how the crumbs transformed into that. It's a separate layer enough density and integrity to it that it broke along its own weakpoints instead of where I tried to cut it. It's flavorful from both the crackers and the cheese and even crisp up on the sides and, as you can see, a gorgeous golden brown. Very nice indeed.

CSA week 18 - Momofuku scallion noodles with roasted cauliflower and quick-pickled zucchini

Momofuku is such a hot restaurant and cookbook right now and this recipe so easy, it's all over the cooking blogosphere. Oddly, nobody really tries to describe what it tastes like. I suppose it seems like it should be obvious--ginger and scallion--but like the Chinatown scallion sauce this is a refined version of (which I talk about a bit at the bottom of this post) there is a profound synergy here that has an electrifying effect on whatever food you use it with. You can read the chef raving about it here, but there's no reason not to just try it for yourself.

Momofuku Ginger Scallion Noodles

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups thinly sliced scallions, greens and whites
1/4 cup peeled and finely minced fresh ginger
1 fluid ounce grapeseed or other neutral oil
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
1/3 teaspoon sherry vinegar
1/3 teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste
1/2 pound ramen noodles
Momofuku roasted cauliflower
Momofuku quick-pickled zucchini

1. Mix together the scallions, ginger, oil, soy sauce, vinegar and salt. Let sit for 15-20 minutes.

2. Cook noodles. Drain and toss with sauce. Top with cauliflower, zucchini and your protein of choice (I seared a handful of bay scallops). It's important to dress the noodles well. I found that the dish improved as a dug down into the bowl and got to where the sauce had dripped down.

Momofuku roasted cauliflower
[I just did a little more reading and found that the Momofuku cookbook just uses a simple pan-roasted cauliflower without the dressing. This works too.]

Ingredients:
1 small head cauliflower
1 drizzle peanut oil
2 Tablespoons Thai-style fish sauce
1 Tablespoon rice wine vinegar
2 Tablespoons sugar
juice of 1/2 lime
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small medium-hot pepper, seeded and thinly sliced
1 Tablespoon cilantro stems, finely minced
1/4 cup cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
2 Tablespoons mint leaves, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon shichimi togarashi [so-called Japanese seven-spice powder although it's mostly not spices. It's citrus peel, ground chilis, Szechuan pepper, sesame, poppy and sometimes hemp seeds and powdered nori]
[The stand-alone cauliflower recipe calls for toasting the shichimi togarashi onto puffed rice. I figured that would get soggy mixed into the noodles so I just added it to the marinade.]

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cut cauliflower into florets. Toss cauliflower with the oil and spread on a baking sheet without crowding. Put in over and roast for 30 minutes, stirring once. Check doneness; the cauliflower should be tender and spotted with brown bits.

2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine fish sauce, vinegar, sugar and lime. Stir until sugar is dissolved adding a little water if necessary. Add garlic, pepper, cilantro, mint and shichimi togarashi. Add a little more water if there isn't enough liquid to moisten everything.

3. When cauliflower is done, cool briefly and dump into the large bowl. Toss to coat and let drain as there should be excess dressing.

Momofuku quick-pickled zucchini
[The recipe originally called for cucumber, but zucchini is close enough and closer to hand.]

Ingredients:
1 cup zucchini, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Toss zucchini in sugar and salt. Let stand 5-10 minutes.



Like I said up top, the scallion and ginger merge into something more than the sum of the parts. It's fresh, sharp, a little tangy, a little salty. It's just gorgeous and it actually brings out the best of the noodles flavor rather than just using it as a vehicle. The zucchini doesn't add a lot, just some textural interest, really. It's interesting on its own but it's slight bite (surprisingly tart given the lack of vinegar) can't stand up to the sauce's intensity. The cauliflower on the other hand are sweet and earthy with a nice crunch to them. A really good combination of flavors and textures, really easy and using a lot of CSA vegetables I had on hand. Winner all around.

CSA week ten - Szechuan shrimp and scallion stir-fry

This is an exceptionally simple recipe from my favorite purveyor of exceptionally simple recipes, Mark Bittman. Here's his introduction:
"It isn’t often that I stumble across a dish that’s minimalist in every aspect: quick, simple, requiring few ingredients and yet sophisticated, or at least unusual. This stir-fry, a mixture of shrimp, scallions and not much else, is one of those."

Oh, I didn't notice that weaseling before. Unusual. That's a big step down from sophisticated. Well, I've already got the shrimp defrosted, peeled and deveined so I might as well go ahead and see how it turns out.

He tried a half dozen variations that detracted from the dish; maybe I can find an improvement he passed by. I suspect it's going to involve chili oil.

Ingredients:
salt
2 store (or 1 CSA) bunches scallions, cleaned
1 garlic clove, peeled
3/4 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped

1 teaspoon black bean sauce
1 teaspoon Guilin chili sauce

1. Roughly chop 1/4 of the scallions. Chop the rest into 3- to 4-inch lengths.

2. Boil a pot of salted water and blanch the lengths of scallion for 1 minute. Remove to a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking. Put in a food processor with the garlic and a little of the blanching water. Blend until smooth.

3. Heat oil in wok or large pan over high heat. After a minute or so add the sauces. Stir and cook briefly until they become fragrant. Add the shrimp, toss and cook until almost fully cooked, 2-3 minutes. Turn the heat down to low, add the cilantro and the chopped scallion, toss, add the scallion purée. Stir, check for seasoning and serve with rice.



Oh yeah, that's some good stuff. The fresh bright bite of the scallion and the rich butteriness of the shrimp are the stars, but the sauces I added give it some subtle extra dimension and just enough of a savory backbone to tie it all together. Really tasty.

I think I missed out on sophisticated though. And it reminded me of Chinatown-standard scallion sauce so it wasn't all that unusual. Now I'm wondering what I missed by not making it straight.

CSA week four - A couple of compicated salads

I don't think it struck me until just now, after the fact, that this week's CSA share (the half-share at least) is better suited to salads than cooking. I thought it was just my slow recovery from various ills that making me not feel like cooking, but with grapefruit, curly parsley, avocado, green pepper and tomato, this is just a raw foods sort of week.

As these are salads, there isn't much to say or illustrate preparation-wise. Chop everything up, mix it together, make the dressing and toss. Not much too it. The aforementioned complication comes from the sheer number of ingredients in each of these dishes. I only made minor tweaks in each so with no further ado, here are the recipes:

Italian Parsley Salad

Adapted from “Roast Chicken and Other Stories” by Simon Hopkinson (Hyperion, 2007)

Ingredients:
1/3 cup soft, fleshy black olives, pitted and coarsely chopped
1 bunch parsley, coarsely chopped
1 large shallot, chopped
1 ounce capers, rinsed of salt or brine
1 large garlic clove, finely chopped
7 large anchovy fillets, chopped

Dressing:
Freshly grated zest of 1 lemon
1/4 cup olive oil
freshly ground black pepper
juice of 1 lemon
salt, to taste [probably not a lot]

thin slivers of Parmesan cheese
crackers or biscuits or toast or bruschetta or suchlike

Mix the salad ingredients. Mix the dressing ingredients. Mix them together. Top with the Parmesan and serve with the crackers.

This has a pleasing combination of flavors that blend together in a pretty classic way and compliment the parsley while still letting it be the center of the salad. Both the texture and the somewhat less strident bitterness of flat-leaf parsley would work better; That's probably why the original recipe called for it. Still, it's still not bad with the curly parsley. The crackers are important in toning down the intensity of flavors, but it's still a bit much to eat on its own. It's better as a side dish to a straightforward piece of roasted meat, I think.



Avocado shrimp Thai salad

This is an unsigned recipe from Recipe4Living which is a community recipe website so there's no way to know where the recipe actually came from. No other versions of it online are immediately obvious so I can't track it down that way. They don't claim association with any old media source of recipes or have any chefs on staff either so far as I can see. I guess it'll have to remain a mystery unless one of their editors notices this post and wants to clear things up in the comments.

Ingredients:
1 hass or lula avocado, peeled, pitted and cubed
1 fluid ounce lime juice
1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined, poached and chopped if they're larger than 'large'
1 large meaty tomato, [whatever sort our CSA tomatoes are is perfect for this sort of thing] coarsely chopped
1 1/2 green onions, sliced lengthwise and separated into four pieces then chopped into 2-inch lengths
1/2 small green bell pepper, diced
1/2 small red bell pepper, diced
1/4 cup bean sprouts [I left these out as the grocery that usually has them didn't this week. They would have been a nice addition even in that small amount.]
1/8 cup mint leaves, coarsely chopped

Dressing:
1/4 cup lime juice [You can get this out of one lime if you rough it up a bit, microwave it for 20 seconds or so and then ream it out with a fork.]
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 cup vegetable oil [That's clearly way too much so I used only 1/3 cup which seemed to emulsify well with the amount of water-based ingredients.]
1/2 Tablespoon sesame oil
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 inch knob ginger, grated
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
zest from 1/2 lime
1 pinch crushed red pepper flakes
salt to taste

Mix the salad ingredients. Mix the dressing ingredients. Mix them together. Serve.


Now this is pretty darn good. There are so many different flavors and textures going on in here that every forkful is a different combination. Each starts with the bite of the dressing, sesame and lime foremost, blending as the crunch, creaminess or chew of the ingredients releases their individual flavors. The tartness gets to be a bit much after a full serving, though. I think that's because there is way too much dressing here. I think halving the amount would probably balance things a little better.

Chinese-spiced chicken stew

This recipe is an interesting example of a dish mutating as various cooks adapt it to different purposes. It started as the classic French braised version of chicken with forty garlic cloves. Mark Bittman switched out the seasoning for Chinese flavors and, for some reason, called it a stew even though it's still just chicken in sauce. I toned down the garlic to let the other seasonings come through and made it into a proper stew.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon high smoke-point oil
2 chicken thighs, bones in and skins on
1 Tablespoon minced Chinese ham, bacon or sausage (I used something labeled bacon, but it's so lean I think it's actually ham)
5 cloves garlic, peeled (halved from amount of garlic in the original recipe, so if you want to scale it back up to a whole chicken use 20 cloves)
2 Tablespoons dry rice wine or sherry
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 star anise
1/2 stick cinnamon
2 1/4-inch slices ginger (or a roughly equivalent chunk if your ginger is all dried out from too long in the refrigerator like mine was)
1/4 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns, lightly crushed
1 1/2 Tablespoons soy sauce
vegetables you've got on hand including, preferably, greens and scallions. (I keep to minimalistic vegetables off-season so I only used scallions and peppers today.)
2 handfuls fresh egg noodles

1. Heat the oil on medium high heat in a deep well-seasoned cast iron or nonstick pan or pot just large enough to accommodate the chicken. (I didn't use nonstick and, as you can, see, the chicken skin stuck.) Add the chicken, skin-side down. Cook for several minutes to brown, adjusting heat to avoid burning. Turn and cook for another minute or two (depending on where your heat level turned out) to brown lightly. Remove chicken to a plate and pour off any more fat than you started out with. (And save it. I save both chicken and pork fat for adding a little extra flavor when I'm frying up random vegetables.)

2. Return pan to fire and adjust heat to medium. Add your cured pork product and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic is browned. Add rice wine, scrape bottom of pan with a wooden spoon to deglaze, then add sugar and spices. Once the sugar is dissolved, add soy sauce and a quarter cup of water (maybe a little more if the rice wine mostly boiled off when you added it).

3. Return chicken to pan, skin-side down, turn heat down to low, cover and gently simmer for 15 minutes. Turn chicken and add any tough vegetables you're using (e.g. bamboo shoots, carrots, rehydrated mushrooms, daikon, kale or other tough greens), squish the garlic to release a bit more flavor, re-cover and simmer another 10 minutes.

4. When chicken is done, remove to a plate and keep warm. Add noodles and lighter vegetables (e.g. scallions, peppers, eggplant, mizuna or other mid-weight greens) to pan. Look at the amount of liquid in the pan and taste it for flavor. Decide if you want to keep the cover off to reduce it, keep the cover on to keep it, or add some water or stock to thin it out. Simmer for three to five minutes until vegetables are tender and noodles are cooked.

5. Remove the cinnamon stick, star anise and ginger from the pot and check the thickness of the sauce. If your noodles were coated with flour like mine were or if you left the cover off the pan earlier, then it will be thickened slightly. If not, you might want to remove everything else from the pot and mix in a little cornstarch. Up to you. Also up to you is if you want to keep your chicken pieces whole or carve them up into bite-sized pieces. I went with the latter.

Serve by filling the bottom of a bowl with the noodles, layering in the vegetables, topping with the chicken, pouring the sauce over and garnishing with scallion and/or cilantro. Or mix everything together.


This is really quite lovely with flavors that are complex and understated. The sauce is sweet, but not cloying. Aromatic, but not spicy. Bright, but not salty. I'm normally not a huge fan of anise, but I like how the star anise pairs with the Szechuan pepper to compliment the chicken. I also like how the flavors in the sauce reconfigure into a notably different, earthier arrangement when they're absorbed into the noodles. The variety of textures, with the chewy noodles, tender chicken and still slightly crisp scallion, is nice too. But this is really just a test run for a more vegetable-intensive version of this dish I'll make after the CSA shares start arriving. Given the similarity to a standard red-simmering master sauce (like the one I never used again last year), it should make a good throw-in-whatever-you've-got dish. I'll report back then with how it goes.

Steamed scallion and sausage buns dee-luxe version

The steamed scallion rolls I made a while back were good, but they were simple and straightforward. I was making another batch because they're such convenient snack food and I thought I'd complicate them up a little to a) see if I could improve the recipe and b) get a blog post out of it.

The dough stayed nearly the same:
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
2 1/2 cups bread flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
3 Tablespoons sugar [I reduced this last time]
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk

Mixed, rested, kneaded, risen and rolled out.

For the filling I used:
4 Tablespoons chopped scallions
4 Tablespoons chopped garlic chives
1 link lop chong, microwaved one minute to partially cook and then sliced thin and chopped
1 chunk Chinese bacon about the same size as the lop chong, chopped and pan fried until cooked through
2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 Tablespoons sesame oil

If you compare, you can see that this coats the dough rather more densely and a lot more oilily. Part of that is the extra fillings, but I've also got a new somewhat smaller cutting board and couldn't roll the dough out as thin.

I rolled it up, sliced it into 2-inch segments, stood them up, let them rise and then steamed them for 13 minutes to cook through.

You can see the earlier version for more details if you're interested. I want to talk about how things went wrong here, because these aren't nearly as good as the first batch.

First off, take a look at these two rolls. See how the one on the left is deflated? That's what happens when you have too much water in your steamer leading to lots of dripping off of the cover. That roll was boiled, not steamed. I had nearly boiled dry over the three batches I steamed last time so I was being careful to have lots of water this time. Better to have just added some water after the second batch.

Second, there are some problems with the flavor. I described the dough last time as mild, but it was a nice sweet contrast to the savory fillings. Here it's been coated in sesame oil and its flavor can't come through. And that contrast between the mildly sweet dough and bright savory of the isolated bits of filling really worked. Here the contrast is between the light flavor of the lop chong and the heavy soy flavor of the bacon. One problem is that Chinese bacon shouldn't be fried as I burn the soy coating a little. You can find the pairing in recipes for sticky rice and turnip cake so they can work well together, but they need other strong flavors and textures in there too and this bun has nothing that can stand up to them. A baked bun, I think, might have had a chance.

And I'm disappointed that I can't taste the garlic chives at all. Darn. Both Chinese bacon and garlic chives go well with eggs so what I really wanted to do was to make another sort of Chinese bun I've had that uses all three, but I couldn't find a recipe. Just now doing some more research on Chinese bacon I find that the reason I couldn't find a recipe is that the creamy filling that works so well with the bacon and chives isn't a custard, it's a mayonaise. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway, the lesson here is that scallion and sausage rolls work best just like that. Make my original version (and you should. It was really good and hard very hard.) with maybe some extra scallion, but that's the only change you should make.

CSA week 20 - steamed scallion and sausage buns

This is not quite an authentic recipe, I think. At least the sausage buns I've seen have also had egg custard or were a bun wrapped around a whole sausage. Also, I doubled the scallions. There's never enough in the traditional ones.

I worked off of the recipe from here. I made some minor adjustments for adding the sausage and skipped the fancy styling, though.

Ingredients:

For the dough:
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
3 cups bread flour
2 oz sugar [down from three in the original recipe]
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk

For the filling:
6 Tablespoons chopped scallions, green part only
1 link lop chong, steamed for five minutes or microwaved for one to partially cook and then sliced thin and chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil [double if you're not using the sausage]

0. Turn on oven to lowest setting.

1. Mix flour, sugar and yeast (or activate yeast in milk if you're using that sort). Mix in vegetable oil and milk until a slightly stiff dough forms. Let rest 20 minutes. Knead for five minutes until gluten forms. Put in clean bowl, cover with moist cloth and put in oven for 1 hour.

2. Mix filling ingredients and allow to macerate.

3. After an hour, remove dough from oven and scrape out onto a floured work surface. Roll dough out to form a 14" by 20" rectangle. A little thinner would probably be fine but that's how big my cutting board is so that's as far as I got. Spread filling over dough. [I used 4 Tablespoons of scallion to start but decided it was a bit sparse so I chopped up a bit more. Another half a sausage wouldn't be a bad either.

4. Roll the dough up along the short axis and slice into two inch pieces. Use a sharp knife and and sawing motion with little downward pressure to keep from squishing the dough. Stand the slices up on baking sheets with plenty of room around each and return them to the oven that I never told you to turn off. Let rise 40 minutes.

5. Start a steamer steaming. When buns are well risen, move to steamer and steam 13 minutes. They'll expand again so don't crowd the steamer. I did batches of four but that only worked because my end pieces rather small. If you did step 3 better than I did, you'll have to do batches of three.

And that's it! Serve immediately with a completely optional soy/chili oil dip or cool and freeze. Reheat 60 seconds in the microwave covered with a damp paper towel.


These turned out very well. I'll put them up against the best I've had in various Chinatowns. The dough is just as it should be: fluffy and light, but squishy and chewy to the bite. Mild, but not flavorless. A lot of recipes didn't use milk, but I quite like the character it added. The scallions and sausage are aromatic and brightly savory, cutting through the sweetness of the buns. Darn good stuff, but I've got to stop eating them so I can freeze some for later. So now I've made gyoza, sticky rice and buns. I think roast pork is up next in my Chinese snack agenda.

CSA week 19 - garlic soba noodles with kale and scallops

So I was searching on-line for a New York Times recipe for kale that substituted soba noodles for a traditional Italian buckwheat pasta and discovered a) the non-healthified version of that dish uses cabbage and potatoes (other CSA veges I've still got) and looks really good and b) there are Japanese recipes that legitimately pair soba noodles with kale. I set the Italian recipe aside and went with Japanese tonight.

There doesn't seem to be a particular name for this dish, but a couple pages of Google results roughly agreed on the recipe. Cook the soba noodles and set them aside. Shred the kale, blanch it for a few minutes and then sauté just like the Brazilian recipe I posted about a while back. Maybe this is a recent Sushi Samba sort of thing. Garlic, shiitakes and scallions are standard additions. Scallops my own since I wanted a bit of protein.

I sautéed the kale over very high heat and it took a couple minutes before it started wilting properly. I added the shiitakes early on, the garlic just as the wilting started and the scallops and scallions right before taking it off the heat and mixing with the noodles.

For the sauce I went the lazy route and used the little packets that came with the soba. I saw a recipe that simmered the shiitakes with some kombu instead of soaking and boil that down and mix with a bit of soy instead which sounds interesting.

Deglaze the pan with a little rice wine, mix in that and the sauce, top with a little sesame and/or chili oil and, if you've got it, shredded nori and you're done.


The texture on the kale's pretty good--just a little firm to the bite, but I wish it had retained a little more flavor. The chunky bits stand up to the sauce but the little bits of kale and scallion have trouble. Their not entirely lost, but it would be nice if they stood out a bit more. I think I'd use big chunks of scallion next time, but there's not much to be done about the kale. Maybe some salt in the blanching water to brighten it up.

Also, in retrospect this would be best chilled instead of slightly above room temperature. And that means this would work as a potluck dish and you could trick unsuspecting innocents into eating kale. Interesting.

In search of a better quiche crust - part four

In previous installments of this series (I didn't think of giving it a title until now so just click on 'quiche' in the tag list if you want to know more) I first disparaged the idea of a crust on a quiche as it's always soggy on the bottom and dried out on the edges and while my crustless quiche was tasty, something was missing; then I took up Sara Moulton's idea of a savory cracker-crumb crust but didn't care for the aggressive flavor of the crackers or the enormous amounts of butter required; next I lined the bottom of the pan with bread crumbs. They melded into the bottom of the quiche instead of forming a proper crust, but they showed potential.

In considering my next attempt, I gave the standard quiche recipe some thought. Most recipes layer the bottom of the crust with shredded cheese before adding the rest of the fillings. I suppose the idea is to form a fatty layer insulating the pastry crust from soaking up the liquid in the quiche, but I've never seen it actually work. For my crumb crust, what would happen if I mixed the cheese in and then blind baked it?

Only one way to find out. I used generous amounts of bread crumbs--a mixture of panko and homemade-- added just one tablespoon of melted butter and mixed in the 3/4 cup of Emmentaler Swiss cheese I was going to use in the quiche anyway.

After 10 minutes at 350 degrees, the crust looked like this:

Pretty promising, although I should have broken up the long strands of cheese to get more even distribution. But the proof is whether it will retain its integrity after the quiche is cooked.

My recipe this time was four eggs mixed with 1/2 cup cream and 3/4 cup milk along with another quarter cup of liquid from my fillings.

Those fillings are a couple handfuls of large shrimp, quickly blanched to just barely cook through (since they'll be spending another half hour in the oven); a bunch of chives from my garden, a giganto clove of garlic, one large scallion and maybe two cups of baby spinach. All the vegetables got a sauté in olive oil and butter and a bit of a wilt with a splash of sauvignon blanc (he says as if he has more than one bottle of white wine in the house at any particular time).




The fillings go on top of the cooled crust and are topped with a grating of Parmigiano Reggiano,








then the egg mixture, and in to the over for 30 minutes at 375 degrees.






Resulting in this:








After letting it cool off for ten minutes, I cut a piece. Here's the bottom:


Looks pretty good. As for the texture...let's take a bite...well, I wasn't expecting that. Somehow I've managed to turn the breadcrumbs back into bread. It's like the quiche is sitting on a light fluffy slice of white bread. Weird. There are some chewy bits where there was an unusual concentration of cheese, too. I can't say that it's bad, but it's not what I was aiming at.

As for the quiche itself, I went a bit light on the salt, but it has a nice light texture, a tasty blend of herbal flavors and a good balance of flavors with the shrimp. Not too shabby.

I'll have to give the crust some more thought, though.

If you'd like another interesting crust option take a look at Kat's polenta crust here.

CSA bonus week - Spice crusted burgers with scallion-lime slaw

The original recipe I mentioned in my last post called for a 3 inch thick tenderloin, but I'm not a huge fan of steak and the rare occasion I make it, I generally ruin it. On the other hand, I've been craving a hamburger recently so I decided to go that direction.

That same original recipe called for marinating lengths of scallion and then occasionally nibbling on one as you eat your steak. I decided to upgrade that into a full-fledged slaw to incorporate into the burger.

As usual, all measurements are approximate and you should be judging for yourself anyway.

2 scallions, cut into 3-4" lengths and jullianed
1/3 cup green cabbage, sliced thin
1 habenero pepper, seeded and sliced thin
1/4 cup lime juice
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon peanut or canola oil
1/2 teaspoon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Mix all and let sit in refrigerator for at least two hours, tossing occasionally.

I was suprised how much this improved over time. As the vegetables wilt and absorb the flavors the slaw goes from lousy to really tasty.

The spice rub I changed a little, mainly by using ground spices instead of crushed. Unfortunately, that meant that when I added the sesame oil everything clumped up. I'd leave it out next time or go with crushed spices if I have everything on hand.

1 teaspoon crushed coriander seeds
1 teaspoon crushed black peppercorns
1 teaspoon crushed white peppercorns
1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 pinch kosher salt
1 pinch crushed red pepper

I chopped around half a pound of beef in my food processor along with a bit of salt and black and white pepper, then I let it rest in the refrigerator for a couple hours before trying to form it into patties. It seemed to help. Once I had two patties made I pressed in the spice/herb mix and fried them up in a cast iron pan.

I served them on sliced Italian bread with a thin slices of onion and yellow tomato and topped with piles of the slaw (with the marinade drained). I think I used a bit too much of the spice rub for the amount of meat I had, but not a lot too lot so the flavors weren't too unbalanced. The coriander matched well with the lime and the scallions matched with the beef. It was a nice melange all around with some strong flavors balancing against each other. I was pretty happy with it and if I were to make any changes next time (beyond switching to crushed instead of powdered spices), I'd experiment with adding a little mayo. Even with the marinade left on the slaw, the final result was a little dry.

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 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 13 - collard-wrapped pork, shrimp and daikon dumplings

These are not dissimilar to the last collard-wrapped dumplings I made. I started with Chinese flavors because I wanted to use the daikon and as I had a little bit of leftover shiitake mushrooms and scallions left in the fridge it seemed like the way to go. Since joining the CSA, this is the first time I can remember that I've had proper leftovers and haven't had to deliberately buy ingredients for this sort of recipe.

For the meat, I used a typical Chinese dumpling mixture of pork and shrimp. I ground both up in the food processor, and mixed them with the shredded daikon. The shrimp made a good binder so I didn't need to add an egg. I hand chopped the mushrooms, scallions, and some peppers, garlic and ginger to leave a bit of texture. I mixed those in along with some dark soy sauce, a dash of rice wine and a bit of sesame oil. Then I let it all sit for a little while for the flavors to meld and the mushrooms, which were a little dried out, to soak up some of the excess moisture.

I had a little trouble working with the kale this time as it was a bit smaller and a bit crisper than last time and didn't really want to roll up nicely. The presentation ending up a bit sloppy but everything stayed inside. Ten minutes steaming and there you go. Despite all the seasoning the dumpling itself is still rather mild so the kale is able to add a significant greens flavor to the mix. Hints of the daikon show up in the aftertaste, but it mainly they just give the dumplings some texture.

On the whole, it's not something I'll be serving to guests, but not bad for a half-hour's work.

CSA week eleven - curried peanut-squash soup

The thought just jumped into my head yesterday: "Doesn't African peanut soup use squash?" and suddenly peanut soup was all I wanted. Even if you can't use squash in it, I was going to make some. As it happens, there are plenty of recipes for peanut soup that call for squash, butternut squash primarily. But a summer squash I've got so a summer squash I'll use.

My next concern was the peanuts. I knew that the peanuts were substituting for something called "groundnuts" and I wondered if there was a better simulation than just stirring in a couple tablespoons of Skippy. A bit of research turned up the fact that peanuts are in fact replacing an ingredient called Bambara groundnuts, but they're doing it in African agriculture. People just like peanuts better as a crop and as an ingredient. Peanuts have even taking over the name; when you're in a West African village market and you ask for groundnuts, you'll get peanuts. I was still confident that a jar of peanut butter wasn't the best substitute and I was fully prepared to mail order some boiled peanuts from South Carolina and make my own non-roasted paste. But, yes, the peanuts are supposed to be roasted. I did learn that the all-natural unsweetened unsalted ground-on-demand peanut butter from the health food store is the closest approximation so I did learn something useful out of all that research.

Most peanut soup recipes use tomatoes or tomato juice or at least salsa, but I've made that sort before and I really don't like the combination. Non-tomato varieties are rare, but I found one I liked the look of here. I'm not sure the curry spices are entirely traditional but what the heck.

I made the recipe as written, but realized too late that the 20 minutes simmering was too much for a summer squash. So I added a cup of bay scallops with the peas to give a similar firm bite to a not-overcooked-squash. The end result is pretty nice with a lot of different interesting flavors playing well together.

You could easily use vegetable broth instead of the chicken to make this a vegan dish. Or add chicken to make it more substantial. Using a citrusy Singapore curry blend instead of a straight Madras mix would be an interesting variation. I might add some chunks of white fish filet to that, too. Now I'm thinking that the Singapore variation would be really good; I'll have to remember that one for next time.