CSA week one - Restaurant-style bok choy with shrimp

This is the first re-working of a dish I made a while back that I want to improve upon. We'll see how it goes.

This is a modification of the dish your vegetarian friend orders in the better sort of Chinese restaurant--the surprisingly yummy lightly-dressed big dish of wilted greens. You probably shouldn't tell her that the sauce contains oysters.

The first time I made it, I added beef and tofu which made it too heavy and detracted from both the quality of the fresh vegetables the light simplicity of the original. I still wanted to add a little protein to it to make sure I don't end up going out for a hamburger later, but I wanted to keep it light. My solution was to add a few shrimp, but chop them up so they're part of the sauce and the bok choy is still the center of the dish. I also added a little cilantro to brighten up the finish. Not really necessary given the very brief cooking the bok choy gets, but I do like the herbal note.

Ingredients:
1 bunch young bok choy - I should have weighed them. A scant pound I think. [This would work fine with a variety of semi-tender greens so don't feel limited to bok choy.]

1 Tablespoon peanut oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 dried chili pepper, whole
1 handful cilantro, chopped

1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 Tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 dashes white pepper
1 handful shrimp - around a quarter of the weight of bok choy, peeled and cleaned

0. Remove the wilted or yellow leaves from the bok choy, separate the remaining leaves. Clean them and remove the nasty bottoms if necessary. If you're using baby bok choy, just slice each head in half.

1. Heat a medium pot of water to a boil. Add the bok choy and blanch for 30 seconds. Remove, drain well, salt lightly and keep warm on a rack in the oven (or on a plate over the pot of hot water if you didn't pour it out) so they stay warm.

2. Heat peanut oil, garlic and chili pepper in a small pan over medium high heat. Keep an eye on it once it starts to sizzle and remove from heat once the garlic has just started browning. Add the cilantro while the pan is still sizzling.

2.5 Lay out the bok choy on a serving plate.

3. Mix the oyster sauce, water, sugar and white pepper in a small bowl. Chop, grind or process the shrimp not quite into a paste. Heat a teaspoon of oil in a small pot over medium heat. When hot, add the shrimp and still until it becomes opaque. Add the oyster sauce mixture and cook briefly until it thickens slightly. Pour or spoon over the bok choy.

4. Pour the garlic oil over the bok choy too.

Serve with other Chinese dishes and/or a big bowl of white rice.


The flavors of toasty garlic, umami oyster sauce and sweet shrimp would do fine blending together, and if you take a bite without any bok choy, they're great by themselves over the rice. But if you have a forkful that's mostly the bok choy, the flavors revolve around it, each complementing or enhancing the vegetable's flavor without quite cohering into a separate whole. The shrimp is also a great addition texturally, adding a meatiness to the crunchy shrimp and chewy bok choy leaves and still a bit crisp stems. The hot pepper and cilantro? Completely lost; you may as well leave them out. Maybe some fresh scallion sprinkled on top--not wilted in the oil--would work, though. Not really necessary, though; this is just dandy as is.

CSA week one - Mchicha

I mentioned a while back, I think, that mchicha is the Swahili word for callaloo. It's also the name of this Tanzanian dish, but all of the versions I found called for spinach. I'm making a, small I'll grant you, logical leap that these are Westernized recipes substituting in spinach for amaranth. Cooking times quite unsuitable for spinach are good supporting evidence that of a late insertion or a clumsy translation. But those cooking times are too long for amaranth too so I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.

Whatever the case, I used the calalloo and it turned out just fine once I cut it in quarter to use the small bunch we got this week and tweaked the cooking times a bit.

Ingredients:
1 small bunch callaloo
1 1/2 Tablespoons natural smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup thin coconut milk
1 Tablespoon butter (or ghee if you've got it)
1 small tomato (I used four cherry tomatoes), peeled (unless you're using cherry tomatoes, then don't bother)
1/4 onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon curry powder (a South Indian blend would be most traditional, but whatever you've got is worth a try)
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Trim the woody stems from the callaloo, separate the leaves, roughly chop the remaining stems and roughly tear the leaves. Wash everything somewhere along the way. I got about 1/2 pound after cleaning.

2. Mix the peanut butter and coconut milk. Set aside.

3. Heat the butter over medium heat in a medium frying pan or dutch oven. When it stops foaming add the onion, tomato, curry powder and salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion softens and the tomato breaks down, about 5 minutes.

4. Add the callaloo stems. Cook 5 minutes more.

5. Add the callaloo leaves. Cook 3 minutes more to wilt and begin cooking the leaves.

6. Add the peanut butter and coconut milk. Stir well and scrape the bottom of the pan. Cook 5 minutes more to blend the flavors adding water to keep the sauce saucy as necessary.

Serve with an approximation of ugali, a Tanzanian starch dish that is essentially an extra-thick polenta made with more finely ground corn meal.


It looks a mess, but I really like how this turned out. The flavors have blended together in a synergistic way I haven't seen in other African recipes using similar ingredients. There's an earthiness, but I'd be hard pressed to identify peanut butter; a spiciness but I couldn't say it was curry powder; there's a creaminess but no clear coconut. The amaranth, though, is unmistakable. It stands up to the strongly flavored sauce in a way spinach couldn't. I even like the pairing with the ugali, and polenta really isn't something I could have predicted to work with these flavors.

This may be the first fully successful sub-Saharan African dish I've made (although I don't think I've done any Ethiopian cooking. How could I have missed that? That's going right on my to-do list.) If you've still got your amaranth, give it try.

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 one - Thai corn, coconut and crab soup

This isn't a real Thai recipe. There's a real Thai corn and crab soup, Kaeng Poo Kab Kao Phod, but the recipes I found for it call for a can of creamed corn. I went a different way.

First up, I needed a base for the soup and this seemed a good time to make a batch of shrimp stock. Every time I cook shrimp, I keep the shells and I had accumulated a quart bag full in the freezer. I knew it was going to make more than what I needed today so I kept the seasonings simple:
1 quart shrimp shells
2 corn cobs
1 half onion, cut in two
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns

All that went into a large pot with water to cover--around six cups--and simmered for twenty minutes. Then I strained it, set two cups aside to freeze, and started into the dish proper.

To start building the Thai flavors, I added:
2 lemongrass stalks, trimmed and crushed
1 hot pepper, split
2 cloves garlic
1 piece dried galangal (Galangal is a relative of ginger with a less sharp, more floral flavor)
4 ears of corn kernels

and simmered for a half hour.

Afterwards, I fished out the lemongrass, galangal and a cup of the corn, added:
1 cup coconut milk
1 Tablespoon fish sauce

and blended in batches until the soup was fairly smooth.

Then I returned the reserved corn and added:
6 ounces of picked crab (Lump crab would have been better. Crab claws would have been better still. Dropping in a whole fresh crab might have been interesting.)
and, if I had thought of it, this would have been a good time to add some thinly sliced kaffir lime leaves. But I didn't remember until much later so I only added them to the leftovers.

and simmered for 5 minutes to blend the flavors.

Finally, I garnished with copious cilantro and scallion, a squirt of sriracha and a squeeze of lime. And, after tasting, a bit more fish sauce and, to compensate for few-day-old corn, a bit of sugar.


I think you can see that the texture ended up kind of sludgy. The fresh corn was kind of tough and didn't blend so well instead of the creamy result you'd get from blending canned or frozen corn. You're going to get sludge from the picked crab anyway so that's OK.

The corn flavor, once I had tweaked it with a little sugar, was strong through and harmonized nicely with the crab. The lemongrass and galangal flavors, which were prominent before blending were kind of lost and the coconut was pretty mild so it was up to the herbs and the funkiness of the fish sauce and kaffir lime leaves to add complexity to the soup and make it definitely Thai. A slight shift and this could have easily ended up Chinese or Southwestern or a bisque and been just as good. Lots of room for variation to preferences here.

P.I.G. - Pork is Good

[Edit: Most of you are coming here looking for chicharones. I have some tips a few paragraphs down by the picture of Chef Jeremiah's creations, but my recipe for making them at home is here. Also, chicharrones is spelled with two r's. You only found this page because both of us mis-spelled it with one. Search for it with two and you'll find a lot more info.]

That there is the advertisement for last afternoon's PIG event. The event was a not-quite-underground dinner organized by Frodnesor of the Food for Thought blog (a first time CSA subscriber this year and good luck to him) as part of his Cobaya gourmet guinea pig project.

The Chef Jeremiah mentioned is Jeremiah Bullfrog, late of Bullfrog Eatz in Wynwood and soon to be of a retro-fitted kitchen in a 1962 Airstream trailer, and currently caterer at large. (You can read a recent interview with him here if you want to know more.) The menu is all pork with a bit of experimentation with new recipes.

Harvey's on the Bay is not just inside Legion Park, it's a back porch attached to the Legion Hall. Kind of musty and creepy until you get through the hall and come out to this view:


I sprung for a VIP pass so I got in early and got my serving of all of the dishes. Chef Jeremiah kindly explain each dish, answered question and put up with nearly half of the twenty-some-strong crowd that rushed him with cameras each time he brought out something new. With all that documentation, I'd better not be the only person writing this up.

He started us off with chicharones and a fizzy cocktail of black cherry syrup and store-bought moonshine. Who knew you could buy such a thing? The cocktail went down dangerously smoothly and the chicharones were mighty tasty and a substantial improvement over my recipe. Three reasons for that: 1. a rather thinner layer of fat for a more skin-centric experience, 2. an overnight brine before simmering and 3. dehydrating at 150 degrees instead of roasting at 250. Those first two steps, at least, are easy improvements to make so I'll definitely be making better pork rinds next time around.

After the appetizer, it was time to get the pig roasting. It was a 50 pound baby pig from West Hialeah the chef picked up earlier in the week. He entirely deboned it, made a stock from the bones and head-cheese from the head and wrapped it up into a giant roulade. Here it is brining in sour orange, lime, oregano, garlic, a little sugar and lots of salt: traditional Cuban flavors.

And here it is going into the caja china box. There's surprisingly little charcoal under there putting out enormous amounts of heat. And it took very little fussing with, I was told.


Then back inside for the first dish, the chef's take on char chui bao--steamed pork buns. Instead of the standard Chinese roast pork filling, he used a barbecued pork butt coated with a traditional Southern-style spice blend, smoked then roasted at 350 degrees. The soft, milky and slightly sweet dough compliments the tender flavorful pork, but the pairing is a little dry. To compensate, we got little syringes filled with soy sauce to inject into the buns which tied the flavors together nicely. Also, a couple hot sauces to put on top. I chose the Malaysian crispy prawn chili sauce that added some texture and just a little funkiness that I though rounded out the flavors nicely.

The non-VIP crowd started filtering in at this point. Good to get the bloggers down under 25%.

Next up were banh mi tacos--all the rage in Los Angeles; unheard of in Miami. Hard enough to get a decent standard taco or banh mi here. I'm not sure if the meat in there is the head cheese or trotters. Either way, its flavored with fish sauce and cilantro and topped with pickled carrot and daikon and a drizzle of sriracha. A pretty presentation, but difficult to eat so I stuffed the salad inside. That muted the bright sweet flavors though, letting the corn tortilla dominate. There was just a hint of fish sauce in the lovely flavor of the pork, but the meltingly soft fat had the texture of refried beans and reinforced the Mexican aspect of the dish for me. Very successful as a cabeza (or possibly pie) de puerco taco; less so as a banh mi.

Around this time the guitar guy started playing. Poor guitar guy sitting all alone and strumming his heart out with everyone ignoring him and wishing he'd stop. So sad.

But back to the food. Next were simplified Cuban sandwiches, anyway. He left out the ham and cheese--which I can't say I really missed--so it was just mustard, homemade pickles and thick slices of pork belly. The flavors were good--maybe a bit heavy on the mustard--but I had a little problem with the texture. The pork belly was chewy which is undercooked to the Western palate, but about right for most Asian applications. And that's fine on its own, but I don't think the pairing with the texture of the Cuban bread was great. But then I think Cuban bread is lousy with just about anything so I'm not the best judge.

One more dish before the main event--homemade hot dogs. The dogs were simply seasoned, cured and not lightly smoked, as hot dogs should be. A nice snap when bit, also good. But they were outshined by the very tasty pickled onions.

Finally, the roast pig! Quite good indeed. Well done, but not dry due to the brining which also subtly enhanced the porky flavor. The real star, though, is the skin--fatty, crispy and oh so tasty. The sweet potato flan isn't half bad either. Light, smooth and creamy and a flavor that was just right with the pork.

I had to run off to get to work at this point. The room was getting crowded and the band had just finished setting up so I presume I missed the real party. Thank god. Anyone who stayed please continue the story in the comments. Actually, even if you didn't stay, if you could talk about how the event went as an event with actual humans socializing, I'd be obliged. Although I did make a little conversation, overall I wasn't really paying much attention to that part. I'll just leave it with thanks to Chef Jeremiah and to Frodnesor for making this event happen and to go so smoothly. Folks seemed to be having a good time so far as I could tell. I certaintly did. And I'm looking forward to the next event.

CSA week one - starting up after all

I contacted Margie about the missing shares and it turns out they weren't actually missing; they were camouflaged. They accidentally switched the numbers of half and full shares and then some folks who picked up full shares didn't sign off on the sheet which hid the excess boxes. So I went down a picked up a full share. I left a couple ears of corn since I had picked up two earlier, but since this is for two weeks I think I should be able to use it all up, barring maybe the beans. The trick is using more than one ingredient in each dish.

I figure I can use the corn, bok choy and lemongrass in a soup. I'm going pickle the green beans with the dill. Avocado and tomato will go into a guacamole. Mizuna and lettuce in a salad. The turnips I'd like to use in a gratin. The calalloo in mchicha. Or maybe it would work better than the bok choy in the soup? That just leaves the hibiscus. I made an unsuccessful sorbet last time and I think I'd like to try them in a savory side-dish this time around. As I mentioned then, I've read that somewhere in Africa they stew them and serve them with ground peanuts. I might try that. If you look up hibiscus recipes, keep in mind that we've got calyces, not flowers and most recipes that call for flowers really mean dried flowers so adjust amounts accordingly.

The real problem for me here is going to finding uses for the leftovers after making dishes that use up half of a particular vegetable. I'll have to make new plans when I see what I've still got around after a week.

CSA week one start-up - stalled at the starting line

I was really looking forward to the start of the CSA today. I've cleared space in the freezer, sorted through my stockpiled recipes and I've avoided serious cooking for the last couple of weeks to build up anticipation so I could start this week with some alacrity. But when I got to my pick-up spot all of the half-shares were gone. I looked over the check-in sheet and it looks like we were at least three boxes short. Darn.

I did pick up a couple ears of corn from the extras bin so I'm not entirely bereft. There's a salad recipe I've set aside for the first CSA corn that I can make. Beyond that, I guess it's back to the off-season model for a couple more weeks.

Still, I may as well talk a bit about my plan for this year. I'm deliberately going to be trying fewer new recipes this time around. There are lots of recipes over the last couple years I subscribed to the CSA that I just made once. Many of them showed promise that that first try didn't fully capture and I'd like to go back and improve on that result. I'm not sure how much of that will be worth blogging about. A few tweaks isn't a fully worthy new post, but it's not like anyone's been going through the backfiles. Maybe I'll post with a note that it's a repeat. Any bloggers reading this have thoughts on a proper methodology?

If you want a more proper CSA start-up post, I think there are a few other bloggers who are going to covering it. The Tropical Locavore over at Eating Local in the Tropics has promised a CSA post. I know La Diva of La Diva Cucina and Trina of Miami Dish have talked a bit about their subscriptions in previous years. This is also the first year Bee Heaven's had a blog so we can hear how the first week looks from the other side. Go check them out and see what they have to say.