Greek zucchini pie

I had a few different ideas of what to do with the zucchini this time around. My first choice was a couscous dish, but I decided to put it off until I can get hold of some merguez sausage (which means probably no time soon). This, instead, is a cross between these zucchini galettes, originally from Bon Appétit magazine, and a more traditional Greek kolokithopita. Or maybe it's just a quiche; I dunno.

Ingredients:
crust:
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut in chunks
2-4 Tablespoons cold water

filling:
1 large zucchini and 1 small summer squash, grated
1 small onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic
3 1/2 ounces well-flavored feta, crumbled
1/3 cup Greek yogurt [I substituted the sour cream I had on hand, but yogurt would be better.]
3 eggs
1 small handful flat leaf parsley, chopped
a little bit of fresh mint leaves, chopped
a little bit of fresh dill, chopped [I was out, but it's a traditional compliment to the other flavors in this dish.]
salt
pepper
pecorino romano or kefalotiri cheese if you can get it

0. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

1. For the crust, mix the flour and salt in a food processor. Add the butter and pulse several times until the butter is incorporated and the mixture looks a little coarse. Add the water Tablespoon by Tablespoon, pulsing in between, until the dough just barely comes together. Remove the dough to a work surface, work it into a ball, split in half, flatten each piece into a disc, wrap in plastic and chill in the refrigerator for a half hour.

2. Meanwhile, grate the zucchini and squash (or whatever you've got), mix with 1/4 teaspoon salt, put in a colander and let sit for a half hour. Afterward, squeeze out most of the moisture.

3. Heat olive oil and/or butter over medium-high heat in a medium pan. Add the onion and cook for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, until softened and slightly browned. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant. Add the zucchini and cook five minutes more until the zucchini is softened and slightly browned. Remove from heat.

4. Mix feta, yogurt and eggs in a large bowl. Add the zucchini mixture and the herbs. Add salt and pepper to taste.

5. Remove one of the dough discs from the refrigerator and roll out to about 10-inches in diameter. Place it into a 9-inch pie pan and adjust it so it's lining the pan properly. Pour in the filling and grate the romano cheese over top. I folded the excess dough over the top for a bit of the galette feel. You could top the pie with the other half of the dough instead if you'd like. I ended up saving it for another recipe.

6. Bake the pie at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees and bake for 25 minutes more until the filling is set and browned and the crust is golden. Cool at least five minutes before serving.


The pie filling is fluffy and the crust light and crisp so no faulting it on texture, but I'm disappointed in the lack of a strong zucchini flavor. I would have thought the purging and pan frying would have intensified it, but no. The pie's flavor is mostly just savory eggs, feta tang and fresh herbs. Maybe the zucchini flavors blended with the herbal notes? I think it's in there somewhere. Well, I'm not being judged on my use of the ingredient so it doesn't really matter. What's important is that the results are pretty tasty any which way.

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.

CSA week three - Black sapote toffee cake

This is an adaption of a date cake recipe created by Chicago pastry chef Kate Neumann that I found on Food and Wine's website. I've got the idea that black sapote can be successfully substituted any time you find dried fruit that's been simmered and softened as Neumann calls for here.

Ingredients:
CAKE
1 cup black sapote gunk (two black sapotes peeled and seeded)
1 Tablespoon molasses
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
salt
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup plus 2 Tablespoons dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup pecans
1 handful finely shredded coconut
2 Tablespoons corn syrup

TOFFEE SAUCE
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/8 teaspoon salt
[The original recipe called for double the amount of sauce, but that's quite excessive. As you'll see, even this amount is generous.]


0. Prepare a 8 to 10-inch cake pan by buttering the sides, placing parchment paper in the bottom and buttering the paper. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. [The original recipe called for 7 ounces of dates simmered in 3/4 cup of water until it boiled down and then blended smooth with the molasses. No need to do any of that with sapote.] Just whisk the sapote gunk with the molasses until it's fairly smooth.

3. Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger and 1/4 teaspoon salt.

4. Use your mixer to beat butter with 1/2 cup brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg, then the vanilla. Mix in the dry ingredients. Mix in the sapote mixture. Beat until fluffy again. Pour into prepared cake pan and smooth out. Bake for 25-35 minutes depending on the size of your cake pan. [I had a 10-inch pan instead of the 9-inch pan the original recipe called for so I reduced the baking time from 30 to 25 minutes.]

5. Meanwhile, break up the pecans to your preferred size. Spread them and the coconut into a pie plate or baking dish. Add then to the oven for 8-10 minutes until fragrant and golden.

6. Also meanwhile, mix the corn syrup with the remaining 2 Tablespoons brown sugar and another 1/4 teaspoon salt in a small bowl. Heat briefly in the microwave to get the sugar good and dissolved.

7. Remove the cake from the oven, cool slightly and then dump it out onto a cooling rank. Peel off the parchment and return it to the cake pan. Sprinkle the pecans and coconut onto the parchment then drizzle with the corn syrup mixture. Return the cake to the pan, preferably the same side up. [This is much easier said than done. If you've got a method that works for this sort of thing, do please share.] Retrieve the broken pieces of cake from the counter and pack them back into the cake pan as best you can.

Return to oven and cook another 12-17 minutes depending on the size of of your cake pan. When the cake is springy and dry, remove from oven, cool slightly and then invert onto a cooling rack. Peel off the parchment trying to retain as much of the nuts and coconut as you can. Return to cake pan or place on serving platter.

8. For the toffee sauce, place the butter and brown sugar into a small pot. Melt the butter over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add cream. Stir until blended and then return to heat.

Return to a boil and simmer 5 minutes. Stir in salt, let cool slightly and then pour over the cake. Let sit overnight to soak in.

Well that was a bit of a project, but the results are pretty impressive:

This was a big hit in the office. It's pretty rich, but not nearly as over-the-top as you'd think from looking at it. Despite everything else, you can taste the black sapote in there with its not-quite-chocolately flavor undergirding the bright toffee and nuts. Combined with the brown sugar, it's hard to identify, but it's an important component giving the cake depth and keeping it from becoming cloying.

The texture is deeply moist, but still caky, not like those brownies people try to pass off as extra-rich because they're only half-baked. The toffee did successfully epoxy the broken cake back together which is a bonus.

While I'm not going to say the toppings are a bad thing, the cake is pretty good on its own. You can probably save some of that trouble and just dust it with powdered sugar and you'd still be pretty happy with the results.

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

I'm afraid I haven't got much to say today. I was ill most of last week and, while I'm on the mend, the antibiotics are giving me tummy trouble and cold viruses have moved in as the bacteria have retreated. I haven't much appetite and little inclination to cook or think about what I might do with this week's share.

I did make some ice cream with last week's avocado that didn't turn out so great. I think I have everything written up for that. I'll post it if I've got it all.

Also, I've got a recipe lined up for the black sapote, which are finally ripe, but I'm waiting until I actually feel like eating the cake that will result from it.



As for this week, I'll post something once I'm feeling better. Right now, I don't even want to think about it. Sorry.

CSA week three - Beef with betel leaf and lemongrass stir fry

My turn to tell how I dealt with this week's CSA mystery ingredient. I found a pretty simple Vietnamese-style stir fry that used the betel leaves as a substantial part of the dish--as a vegetable, not just a flavoring. Unfortunately, that meant that after I scaled everything else down to fit the five leaves I had, I only had enough for one modest serving. Here's my modified version:

Beef tossed with wild betel leaf and lemongrass
Original version created by Luke Nguyen

Ingredients:
100 g lean beef sirloin, thinly sliced
5 betel leaves, roughly sliced
1/2 lemon grass stalk (white part only), finely diced (peel off dry outer shell)
1 small clove garlic, finely diced
most of 1 hot chili, finely diced
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon soy sauce
2/3 teaspoon sugar
a little cilantro, chopped for garnish
the rest of the chili, finely sliced for garnish

0. Mix fish sauce, soy sauce and sugar in a small bowl.

1. Heat a medium pan to over high heat to smoking hot, add oil and lemon grass, cook briefly until fragrant. Add garlic and chili. Stir fry until they become fragrant too, then add beef.

Stir fry two minutes, until beef is cooked through and starting to brown. Add seasoning mixture and betel leaf. Stir fry 1 minute more, until betel leaf is wilted.

2. Remove to a plate, garnish and serve with rice.


I know some others had difficulty with the flavor of the betel leaves, but I liked them. Maybe it's the difference between having them raw or cooked. The cooked betel leaf flavor is quite distinctive and hard to describe. It's a bit spicy, a bit smoky, a bit medical. It's one of those odd distinctive flavors like curry leaves and kaffir lime leaves that have no easy paralell for comparison in Western cuisine. I can see it being a bit rough on it's own, but I wouldn't want to eat straight curry leaves or kaffir lime leaves either. They're meant to be mixed with other flavors. Here, moderated by the sugar and complimented by the lemongrass, the closest comparison I can find is root beer--the real stuff, not the artifically flavored version you can commonly get. I quite liked how it paired with the beef; it would probably work well with pork, too, I think.

The dish as a whole needs a little tweaking, though. Two minutes on high heat is too much for thinly sliced sirloin and the soy sauce ended up a caramelizing when I dumped it into the hot pan. If I had been making a full-sized recipe in a wok, that would have worked better. But, overall, it was pretty tasty and it did show the betel leaves to good advantage.

CSA week two - Chocolate and roasted avocado ice cream

The combination of chocolate and avocado is unusual, but not entirely unheard of. I understand that chocolate-avocado milkshakes are common in Viet Nam and Indonesia. I can see how the creaminess of the avocado could work; as for the flavor, well, I've got a Monroe so it hasn't got much. Using it as is would have been the easy way out, but I decided to try to intensify the flavor and then see what I could do with it.

I chopped up the avocado, sprinkled it with brown sugar for caramelization--I considered adding a bit of butter as I would if I were caramelizing bananas, but it's got plenty of fat of its own--and baked it at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring a couple times. If you compare the before and after pictures, you can see that it's shrunk considerably. The flavor isn't, I think, a lot more intense, but it has transformed. There are a lot of warm, toasty notes now.

Still, the cup of caramelized avocado wasn't really enough to flavor a full batch of ice cream so I looked around for some additions that would pair well without overwhelming it. And also I wanted to use up some scraps left in the refrigerator. Here's what I came up with:

Ingredients:

1 cup caramelized avocado mush
1/4 cup pineapple
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 1/4 cup milk
1 cup cream
3 Tablespoons dutch process cocoa
1/3 cup light brown sugar

I blended all that together and put it in the back of the refrigerator to chill. The texture seems about right at this point so that's good, but I'm still concerned the flavor isn't bold enough to survive freezing. I may add some spices after I taste the fully chilled mixture.
...
Actually, the flavor intensified, but it did turn somewhat bitter. I added another quarter cup of sugar to compensate.

So, to churning. It froze very quickly. Look how it glommed onto the dasher. I've never seen quite the like before and I don't think that bodes well for the texture of the final result. I was hoping the fat in the avocado would help keep things creamy, but I don't see that happening. The fat's not there in the mouthfeel either. It feels like sherbet despite all the cream that went into it. Here's hoping that ripening will help.
...


And here's the final product. The fact that I didn't bother to deal with the freezer burn is probably a biasing factor, but I think despite that, you can see that that it's not terribly attractive. The texture could be creamier--it's definitely more sherbet than ice cream rich--but it melts smooth if you let it warm up out of the freezer for a while before serving. I'm going to blame the roasting here as there are plenty of avocado ice cream recipes that don't appear to turn out like this.

The flavor starts with cocoa, clearly not intense or creamy enough to really feel like chocolate, with a little tropical fruitiness rounding it out and fades into bitter roasted notes not dissimilar to those you get with very dark chocolate. There's definitely a note of avocado there at the end, too, but difficult to identify if you don't know what you're looking for. It might just be an off note if you're expecting straight chocolate (upon which this is definitely no improvement). It just seems like cheap nasty chocolate ice cream. I'm going to take this back home before it ruins my reputation around the office.

CSA week three - Morshan

This recipe is all over the web, cut and pasted on recipe sites and blogs (usually minus attribution and copyright information. This seems to be the origin.), but I can't find any indication that anyone's actually made it.

That's not right; somebody needs to step up, cook it and find out if it's any good and it may as well be me. I want to make this post easy to find for anyone who finds all the other copies so I'm not going to modify or rewrite it at all, just cut and paste like everyone else.

Chickpeas and Swiss Chard in the Style Tunisian Sahel (Morshan)


Recipe from: Mediterranean Cooking, Revised Edition, Copyright ©1994 by Paula Wolfert

Makes 4 servings

3/4 pound Swiss chard leaves, stemmed, rinsed and torn into large pieces [My CSA bunch yielded a half pound of leaves so I added in the thinner stems.]
2 large cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 small dried red chile
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup minced onion
2 teaspoons tomato paste
1 cup cooked chickpeas with 3/4 cup cooking liquid [There's about 3/4 cup liquid in a can of chickpeas so that worked out fine.]
1 lemon, cut in wedges, optional

1. In pot steam, parboil or microwave chard leaves until tender, about 5 minutes. [Our chard started out pretty tender so I cut this down to 2 minutes]

2. Set leaves in colander to drain.

3. Squeeze out excess moisture and shred coarsely.

4. Crush garlic in mortar with salt, coriander and chile until thick, crumbly paste forms.

5. Heat olive oil in 10-inch skillet and saute onion until pale-golden.

6. Add garlic paste and tomato paste and stir into oil until sizzling.

7. Add chard, cooked chickpeas and cooking liquid and cook, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes.

8. Remove from heat and let stand until ready to serve. (Contents of skillet should be very moist but not soupy. For looser texture, stir in more chick pea cooking liquid.)

9. Serve warm, at room temperature or cold with lemon wedges.


It's not bad, but not really inspired either. Maybe its because I haven't had a bowl of greens that wasn't callaloo in a while, but the chard seems really blah. The subtle spice and lemon are nice, but there's nothing much else going on here. I expect bigger flavors from Tunisian cooking. Judging from the other recipes on Ms. Wolfert's site, I think this has been wimped out for the Western palate and probably chard has been substituted in for another, more flavorful, green. It's a shame I couldn't find any other recipes for the dish for comparison.