CSA week seven - Collard potato salad with mustard dressing

This is a somewhat unusual preparation for collards; at least I think it is. When you search for collards and mustard, you get a lot of recipes offering mustard greens as a collards alternative. I scanned through a few pages and didn't see any, but maybe all the mustard dressing recipes are just buried beneath. It's the first time I've tried it anyway, so that's something.

I found this recipe on epicurious.com, but it looks like it's originally from Gourmet magazine, February 1992. I made a change that I thought would help the texture, but it didn't really work out.

Ingredients:
1 pound red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into equal-sized pieces
1/2 pound collards, stemmed, washed and sliced into 1-inch wide strips
3 slices bacon, cut into lardons
1 scallion, thinly sliced
1 Tablespoon coarse Dijon mustard
1 Tablespoon red-wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Cook the bacon in a large pan over low heat until crisp. Remove to a paper towel to drain. Keep the pan warm.

2. Fill a large pot with water and bring to a boil. Add potatoes and a generous amount of salt and simmer over medium-low heat until tender. [How long this takes will vary depending on the size of your potatoes so use your judgment and check frequently.] Remove to a large bowl filled with cold water and cool until the potatoes and handleable.

3. Turn the heat under the pan of bacon fat to medium and add potatoes, taking care to shake off the excess water before putting them in the pan. Cook for five minutes on one side then turn to brown a second side.

4. Meanwhile, add collards to the boiling pot of water. [Did I tell you to turn the heat off? I did not.] Simmer for ten minutes until tender.

5. In a small bowl, whisk together mustard, vinegar and olive oil [The original recipe called for a lot more olive oil. Way too much to my mind. I reduced it to a drizzle because I added the bacon fat. If you don't fry the potatoes, add more oil to taste.]

6. When the collards are ready, remove them to the big bowl of cold water. [Did I tell you to dump it out? I did not.] If the potatoes are also ready, remove them a large bowl. When the collards have cooled a bit, squeeze the water out a handful at a time and add to the potatoes taking care to peel the leaves apart. Add the bacon and scallion, top with the dressing and toss until everything is coated.

If you managed to keep the potatoes and bacon crisp despite the humidity from the simmering pot of water, then serve immediately. If, like me, you didn't, serve whenever you'd like.


The result isn't bad. I was hoping for a lot more texturally, but everything is tender. I think I managed to leave a little firmness to both the collards and potatoes, but I was hoping for crispness for contrast too. The flavors aren't a bad match, but it's nothing revelatory either. I might try it again adding a mustard-based hot sauce. That should perk things up. Also, I want to try it cold; I suspect the flavors will work better together that way. I'll add a comment tomorrow to let you know.

CSA week one - Blue cheese, bacon and walnut green bean salad

Last minute Thanksgiving side-dish idea! I'm eating it by turkilessly and a day early myself, but you've probably got all the ingredients on hand and it would make a fine substitute for the usual green bean side-dish you had planned.

I modified this from a recipe I found on the Something blog. Kim Carney, who posted it, said that it came an issue of Parade Magazine. I tracked down the article and found it was by Sheila Lukins, author of the Silver Palate cookbook. Maybe I'm the only one who cares about proper attribution, particularly as I did change things around, but I care and it's my blog, so there.

Ingredients:
1 thick slice or 2 thin slices bacon
1/4 cup walnut pieces
3/4 pound green beans, stemmed and snapped into sensible lengths
2 ounces strong blue cheese, crumbled (the original recipe called for twice this. I cut it down to 3 and still found it a bit too much.)
1/2 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 Tablespoon red-wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1 Tablespoon parsley, finely minced (If you've got flat-leaf, or for some reason you like the texture of curly, chop less finely.)
1 and a bit Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

0. Bring a sizable pot of well-salted water to a boil.

1. Cook the bacon in your preferred manner until crisp. Reserve the fat. Chop the bacon.

2. Toast the walnuts.

3. When the water comes to a boil, add the green beans and cook until just tender, about 4 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, mix the mustard and vinegar in a medium bowl. Add the garlic.

5. Add the bacon fat (I had a teaspoon's worth) and enough olive oil to bring it to 1 1/2 Tablespoons total. Whisk until well-emulsified and slightly thickened.

6. Remove the green beans from the water into a colander. Run under cold water briefly and pat or spin dry.

7. Lightly mix the beans with the walnuts, cheese, parsley and bacon. Add the vinaigrette. Do not mix well or the chunky bits will all migrate to the bottom. Mix judiciously.

Serve with turkey.


This is quite a nice combination of flavors and textures. Texturally, the green beans had a bit of firmness left to them, the cheese was meltingly creamy (which is important. This is a warm salad and wouldn't work nearly as well if you let the beans cool all the way down before adding the cheese.), the bacon and walnuts crisp. The parsley is pretty much lost. You should probably use a couple Tablespoons so it can assert itself a little more.

ON the flavor end, the blue cheese dominates at first in each bite, but any combination of the other elements can rise to the front depending on the particular forkful you got. The vinaigrette lends just a little tang and doesn't overwhelm the other flavors. I liked the walnut and green bean pairing particularly, probably because I toasted the walnuts right to the edge of burning. That flavor pairs with the beans much better than raw walnuts did. Bacon and walnut is a very pleasant paring, too.

Hmm...I think I've just had an ice cream idea.

Green tomato hoja santa galette

I vacillated for a long time over whether to follow through with my plan to use hoja santa in this. The other elements--green tomatoes, onions, bacon and goat cheese--are easy to see together (if you've been reading a bunch of savory green tomato pie recipes anyway) and there was a fair chance of ruining the whole thing with a wild card like hoja santa. If I only had to answer to myself and didn't need material for the blog, I probably would have backed down and just thrown in a little oregano instead. But that wouldn't be worth writing about would it? So, in that spirit, here goes...

Ingredients:
2 thick slices bacon, chopped
2 green tomatoes, thinly sliced
1/2 medium onion, thinly sliced
3 ounces fresh goat cheese, crumbled
2 leaves hoja santa, deveined and chopped
salt and pepper

Crust ingredients:
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into chunks
2-4 Tablespoons cold water

1. Blend flour and salt in a food processor. Add butter and process until incorporated and the mixture has a crumbly texture. Blend in water until the dough just comes together.

2. Dump dough out onto a work surface. Form it into a ball, split into two, flatten and put into refrigerator to chill for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

3. Meanwhile, put bacon in a medium cast iron pan and cook over medium heat until well rendered, browned and crispy (stirring as necessary). Remove bacon to a paper towel.

4. Add green tomato and onion to bacon fat in pan. Salt lightly to draw out juices and cook until tomato starts to soften and onion becomes translucent. Add hoja santa and cook briefly to wilt and blend flavors. There's plenty of cooking later so don't overdo it now. Remove to a bowl and chill in the refrigerator until the dough is finished chilling.

5. Mix cheese and bacon into tomato mixture.

6. Take one of the dough rounds out of the refrigerator and, on a well-floured surface, roll out into 9-10 inches diameter circle. Drape the dough into a pie plate, optionally, to make it easier to fill. Fill with tomato mixture and fold excess dough over top. Spray exposed dough with olive oil and bake for 40 minutes until tomatoes have dissolved, the cheese has melted and the crust is golden brown. Cool for 10 minutes and serve.


The flavors here have pulled together nicely. Bacon and onions are a natural pairing. Goat cheese makes perfect sense with them. The green tomatoes add an almost citrusy tartness and the hoja santa an odd herbal aromaticity. It strikes an odd note just through its unfamiliarity. I'm still trying to decide if I like it. It's not bad, but is it an improvement over, say, oregano? ... Upon consideration, I think that when there's just a hint, it blends nicely with the green tomato flavor and counterpoints the smokiness. When there's a lot, it's weird and distracting. It's good, but I should have used less. One leaf would have done it. Two did seem like a lot, but with ten in the pack, I thought maybe I could use it more as a vegetable component than an herb. It's really too strongly flavored for that, though, at least in this sort of application. Maybe in a salad, though.

Roasted cabbage with bacon

I had hoped to present a new black sapote recipe for you today (and have a fancy desert for myself), but my sapotes aren't cooperating. One's softened, but the skin isn't browning and flaking the way it's supposed to. Who knows what's going on inside there. The other may as well be a bocce ball for all the ripening its done. I guess the cold snap affected the fruit in my pantry just a badly as it did the ones still on the trees.

Instead, here's how I used up the rest of my cabbage. This is a recipe I saw on TheKitchn.com this morning, and like most of their recipes, it's pretty simple.

Take however much cabbage you've got, slice it into thick wedges, lay them out on a baking rack over a pan, spray with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, strew with bacon lardons (4 thick slices for a full head), and bake at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. I added some sliced onion, but otherwise left it as is.

Here it is just before I flipped the wedges half way through roasting:


And here's the final result served over a plate of potato pierogies with a dollop of sour cream:


For as simple a dish as this is, it's pretty darn good, actually. The cabbage takes on a range of flavors and textures depending on how browned it got, from sweet and juicy to toasty crisp. Not a hint of the off flavors cabbage can have. And it's pretty unusual to have cabbage that isn't wet or greasy. It lets you appreciate it for itself instead of as part of a salad or transformed by pickling.


The bacon, of course, pairs fabulously with the cabbage. The onion is less prominent, but it does add a little extra to the dish. Worth including.

I think I'd slice the cabbage a little thinner next time; the thicker slices are just barely cooked through and the centers didn't see much salt. I'd want the bulk of the cabbage softened a little more if I were going to serve it over pasta, as one might if one were out of pierogies.

But really, I find myself considering ways to elaborate on the dish. Top it with buttered bread crumbs maybe? Anchovies instead of bacon? There are some interesting options here.

Bacon cheddar chive scones

Are savory scones unusual? I don't recall ever encountering such a thing before but now that I've done a search, I see lots of different recipes for cheese scones. There are even a handful of distinct recipes for bacon cheddar scones, most with either scallions or chives. The particular one I made originally called for scallions, but the chives in my herb garden have been growing well so I wanted to use them. This recipe is from the Atlantic's new food section of their website. They've had some pretty interesting recipes there recently and I find Grant Achatz's column about introducing experimental new dishes at his restaurant quite fascinating. It's worth taking a look.

But getting back to the recipe, this is the first time I've ever made scones. From all the awful scones I've had, I had always assumed they were very difficult to make, but these came out beautifully first try.

Bacon Cheddar Scones
Makes 12 small scones

8 ounces sliced high quality peppery smoked bacon [If your bacon isn't peppered, add some pepper]
2½ cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon fine sea salt [I have no fine salt in the house so I ground up coarse sea salt in a mortar)
¾ cup high quality [European-style or organic] unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces, cold
2 large eggs, beaten, cold
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons heavy cream, cold
4 ounces cheddar, aged at least one year, crumbled and cold
3 scallions, chopped

1. Fry the bacon over medium heat until crisp. Drain, chop, and place in refrigerator to cool.

2. Preheat oven to 375°F.

3. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter with a knife or pastry cutter until the mixture forms ½-inch pieces. [I just used my fingers and the texture I got at the end was more sandy than anything I'd call "pieces". Could someone who understands baking better than I do please explain the significance of the difference?]

4. Add the eggs, ½ cup of the cream, and cheddar. Mix by hand [well, by whisk held in your hand] until just combined. Fold in the scallions [or chives] and cooled bacon. [This I did with my hands.]

5. Transfer the dough to a well-floured board. Form two 7-inch rounds. Cut each into 6 wedges.

6. Transfer the wedges to a baking sheet lined with parchment. Brush with the remaining cream and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, [I went all the way to 30 minutes, but baking in my oven often goes long.] until the scones are golden brown on the top and bottom (you'll have to lift them off the baking sheet a bit to check underneath).

7. Allow to cool and firm up for about 10 minutes before removing from sheet. Serve the same day [or, I'm hoping, freezing is OK. I haven't defrosted any to check how they're holding up yet.]


The author, Ari Weinzweig, suggests serving these with butter or bacon fat or mayonaise with tomato and arugula. I liked Chef Allan's Mango Tears chutney as an accompaniment.


These are crisp on the outside, soft and not-quite-crumbly not-quite-flaky on the inside. They're smokey, savory and sharp with a subtle herbal note keeping the richness from overwhelming. The best bits were where a piece of cheese was exposed and melted and browned over the surface. If you make these, sprinkle a little finely shredded cheese over top. Really quite lovely and a fine thing to have around as a snack. I think I'll try a sweet scone next as those would be pretty nice to have around as well.

Blueberry banana ice cream

This is just something I threw together without any real plan to use the pint of blueberries getting a little past their prime. I didn't realize until afterward that I was essentially just making a frozen smoothie. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

2 cups blueberries
1 large banana, frozen and defrosted
1 cup cream
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup light honey
1/4 cup agave nectar [a half cup of one or the other would be fine, I'm sure.]
up to 1/4 cup sugar depending on how sweet your fruit is
dash nutmeg
dash cinnamon
dash vanilla
dash salt

Plus a little more cream to thin it out. No more than 1/4 cup.

and, because they often show up in blueberry banana bread so should taste good here, 1 large handful pecans, toasted and salted.

and, inspired by the chocolate-covered bacon in vanilla gelato Kat made last week, 2 slices good, but not great, bacon fried crisp and crumbled. My goal here was to find a combination of flavors where the bacon was an integrated part of a complex whole, not just framed by the other flavors. That's why I didn't use top quality bacon, large pieces or all that much of it compared to the pecans. I think Kat manages the same trick with the honey ice cream with bacon and dried figs she made this week.



The ice cream's texture could be better. It's a little too firm when fully frozen and melts goopily. You've had a blueberry smoothie so you have a pretty good idea what the ice cream proper, without the mix-ins, is like. The spices aren't readily identifiable, but I think I can taste them doing their job in there supporting the main flavors. But that's in isolation and I deliberately overloaded it with pecans so every bite pairs the sweet, slightly tart fruit and the chew of savory toasty nuts and the (mostly still) crisp bits of smoky bacon. You get a nice cross fade as the ice cream melts away exposing more of the mix-ins to the taste buds. Or you can start chewing right away and blend the flavors. And I think that blend works really well. Go to IHOP and order the blueberry pancakes with bacon and use the pecan syrup and see if you don't agree.

This seems to have gone over a little better than my last bacon ice cream, although that wasn't unpopular. The more subtle use and the better texture I got out of the bacon helped a lot, I think. The next time I do a bacon ice cream, I think I want to move away from breakfast flavor combinations. I wonder if a bacon and blue cheese ice cream could work without going entirely savory. Or bacon and miso. Ah, I see that last has been done. And used in bourbon root beer floats. Can't top that. I'll have to think of something else.

Chinese bacon and cherry stir fry

I bought a big chunk of Chinese bacon a while back in a misguided attempt to improve my already fine scallion rolls. I only used a little of it for that and I've been looking around for a proper use of the rest of it. This recipe is adapted from the Bacon Cookbook by James Villas. He gives his version this half-hearted recommendation: "I doubt it's a dish you'll make a regular habit of serving at brunch, it is a delectable and unusual introduction to authentic Chinese regional cooking—and it's fun to make once in a while." Let's see if I can make something I can be more enthusiastic about.

INGREDIENTS

1/2 pound lean Chinese slab bacon
3 or 4 small red and yellow sweet peppers, seeded and cut into thin rings
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tablespoon black bean paste
2 Tablespoons hot chili oil [I'm substituting for the genuine Szechuan chili paste I haven't got, but Chiu Chow chili oil is very nice too.]
1 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons dry rice wine
a few dashes of soy sauce
1/2 pound cup green beans, blanched
1/4 pound tofu, cubed
2 scallions, white and green, cut into 1- to 2-inch lengths
oil to fry

1. Steam or boil bacon until tender. [How long depends on the sort of bacon you've got and how thick it is. The original recipe says to boil it for an hour. The package instructions say steam for 15 minutes. I went with the latter and it worked out fine.] Let bacon cool. Remove bacon rind if it's there. Slice bacon against the grain 1/8 inch thick.

2. Toss garlic, peppers and green beans together with a generous pinch of salt. In another bowl combine bean paste, chili oil, sugar, wine and soy sauce.

3. Heat wok or large heavy skillet over high heat until really really hot. Add oil and bacon. Stir fry until lightly browned. [7 or 8 minutes says the recipe. 2 minutes says I.] Remove from pan.

4. Add garlic, peppers and green beans to pan. Stir fry 1 minute and remove.

5. Add sauce mixture and tofu to pan. Stir fry 1 minute. Return vegetables and bacon. Heat through. Stir in scallions just before removing from heat.



The recipe says to serve hot with fresh fruit and fried wonton skins. Sure, why not? I've got some cherries here and some dumpling skins in the freezer that I can fry up.



The sauce is a typical Szechuan hot sauce, but I like that so I've got no problem there. Spicy, but not overwhelmingly so, with lots of good pepper flavor along with the heat. You can just barely taste the individual flavors of the vegetables through the sauce, but the bacon, with its sweet soy glaze and inherent bacon-ness, is just as flavorful as it should be. It's chewy and a little tough, but it gives the dish a little more texture than some other cut of pork would have. Quite possibly I wasn't supposed to use cured bacon but I like it the way it is.

The crispy chips are fine. A bowl of rice to soak up this sauce wouldn't have been a bad idea, though. The fresh fruit, on the other hand, is quite a nice accompaniment, giving a bright freshness that the dish lacks. They're particularly nice in close contrast to a bite of bacon. A squeeze of lemon juice might have done the trick as well, but instead I'd suggest halving the cherries and stirring them in with the scallions so the warm cherry juice mixes in and sweetens the sauce. That not only improves the balance of flavors, it makes this into a rather interesting new non-traditional dish. I'm going to pretend that's what I intended from the start and go back and change the name of this post to reflect that, OK? Isn't that a more intriguing title than "Twice cooked Chinese bacon"?

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.

Bacon and egg risotto

This is a recipe from the Ojai Valley Inn courtesy of the Los Angeles Times' Culinary SOS column. Risotto is pretty flexible so just moving the flavors from Italian to American isn't all that interesting, but instead of dumping a bunch of cheese in at the end, the recipe called for a raw egg yolk to be mixed into each serving at the table and that seemed worth a try.

I wanted to add some vegetation to the dish so I left out the minor amount of chives and substituted in a good bit of finely chopped broccolini. No doubt that ruined the balance of flavors Jaime West, the original chef, was looking for, but I think it still turned out fine.

Ingredients:
3 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2 tablespoon butter
3/4 cups arborio rice
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
3 strips bacon, preferably apple-wood-smoked, cut into 1/4-inch dice
1/8 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1/8 cup chopped chives [or a full cup of broccolini]
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 egg yolks

1. In a medium saucepan, bring the broth to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low to keep the broth warm.

2. Meanwhile, in a 4-quart heavy pot over medium heat, cook the onion in the butter until softened, stirring often, about 5 minutes. Stir in the rice, garlic and bacon and cook, stirring frequently, until the bacon begins to brown, about 3 minutes.

3. Stir in one-half cup warm broth and continue to cook the rice at a simmer until the broth is absorbed, stirring frequently. Continue to add the broth, one-half cup at a time, stirring constantly until each addition is absorbed before adding the next, until the rice is creamy-looking but still slightly chewy, 18 to 20 minutes (you should have leftover broth). [I added the broccolini at around 10 minutes and ended up using the full three cups of broth and 25 minutes of cooking time.

4. Stir in the cheese and chives, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

5. Immediately divide the risotto between 2 warmed plates, and make an indentation in each mound of risotto for a yolk. Place a yolk in the center of each mound and serve immediately.



The egg flavor comes through clearly in the sauce so there's no mistaking this for a traditional risotto. It's rich and smokey with a little bit of bitterness from the broccolini. I think the flavors would be rather straightforward and boring without it though. I was more attentive to my stirring than usual and I think it paid off in rice that was firm but not chalky and a thick creamy sauce. I cut my bacon larger than the recipe called for so I had a little problem with chewing limp rubbery bacon pieces, but crisp really isn't an option in a risotto. Kind of misses the point of bacon, though; There are plenty of other ways of adding smoky flavor. I wonder if there's some way to make it work with a smoked ham hock instead.

Anyway, I did like it; Not as much as a traditional risotto with prosciutto and cheese instead of bacon and eggs, but I did like it well enough.

CSA week six - Cobb salad soup

I may have exaggerated a bit when I called this idea "clever" on Saturday. Really, once you've come up with the basic idea of creating soup versions of famous salads by mixing the dressings into lettuce soup and garnishing with the other salad components different varieties don't require a lot of imagination.

I'm not sure the original idea is all that clever either as a quick search on-line finds a few other people who independently came up with it. Either way, I made cobb salad soup today and here it is.

Traditionally, cobb salad should be made with iceberg lettuce, watercress, chickory and romaine which makes for a fairly bitter mix. I used the lettuce I've got: pei tsai and, um, assorted.

I kept the soup really simple since it would be getting a big flavor boost from the dressing. I just wilted a pound of lettuce in butter and olive oil, added two cups chicken stock and a cup of water and simmered for ten minutes. Once it had cooled I transferred it to my food processor, discovered that the liquid level was too high when it started pouring out over my work-table, transferred it to my blender, cleaned up the mess, and blended it to a not-too-smooth texture.

When I made the caesar salad soup I mixed in the dressing during the blending but the extra time it took to make sure I had everything well incorporated meant I blended the lettuce smoother than I really wanted. This time I mixed the dressing in by hand afterward.

Wikipedia, and some other references I checked agree that the original cobb salad dressing is:
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon dry English mustard
1 small clove garlic, finely minced
1/4 cup full-flavored olive oil
3/4 cup salad oil
plus up to a 1/4 cup water if the dressing seems too oily. I cut the recipe in half and left out the water since it's going into soup. Half was probably a little too much, but not by a lot.

And then there's the other components:
boiled chicken breast (I don't keep chicken breasts around so I steamed a thigh)
diced tomatoes
bits of bacon
diced avocado
chopped hard-cooked eggs (I prefer the slightly softer mollet)
crumbled Roquefort cheese
chopped chives
and some recipes include baby corn but I decided against it.

It's usually presented with each of the components in its own distinct sector of the plate on top of the lettuce. I tried that with the soup but half of them sank.

But, presentation aside, it's pretty darn good. The soup itself is light, fresh and tangy. And every spoonful has a different mixture of the garnishes with a unique combination of textures and flavors. The mildly tart creaminess of the Roquefort matches very well with the soup. I expected the bacon to be another stand-out, but the cool bite of a cube of tomato and the fattiness of the avocado and egg yolk are surprisingly good and overshadowed it.

Overall, a nice little dish but kind of a pain with all of those ingredients to prepare. I'd recommend it to any of you who have a sous chef to help out.

CSA week four - Seared scallops with bacon, tomato, and avocado puree

I should have just wrapped a scallop with bacon, seared it, dropped it on a slice of tomato and topped it with a dollop of mashed avocado. Instead I followed this overcomplicated-to-no-great-advantage recipe from Martha Stewart.

Ingredients

Serves 2 to 4

* 2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lime juice
* 1/2 teaspoon agave nectar or corn syrup (I've been looking for something to do with the bottle of agave nectar I bought on a whim a while ago.)
* 1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
* Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
* 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

* 1 medium Hass avocado, pitted (I used a Monroe)
* 1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 2 tablespoons Brown Butter, cooled

* 2 slices bacon, cut into 1/4-inch-long pieces
* 6 to 8 sea scallops
* 1 tablespoon butter

* Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
* 1/2 cup red or yellow cherry tomatoes, halved (I chopped up one of the CSA tomatoes instead. Not nearly as nice in either flavor or texture, really.)
* 2 lovage leaves or celery leaves, torn (I used arugula)
* Fleur de sel

Directions

1. In a small bowl, whisk together lime juice, agave nectar, vanilla, and a pinch each of salt and pepper. Slowly drizzle in extra-virgin olive oil, while continuing to whisk, until an emulsion has formed. Set vinaigrette aside.





2. Remove flesh from avocado and place in the jar of a blender along with 1 teaspoon salt, lemon juice, 2 tablespoons water, olive oil, and brown butter; blend until smooth.

3. Place bacon in a medium skillet over medium heat. Cook bacon, turning, until fat has been rendered, 5 to 7 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove bacon from skillet; transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate.

4. Pour off bacon fat from skillet and discard. Return skillet to stove and place over high heat. Season scallops with salt and pepper; add to skillet. Sear scallops 1 minute, add butter and turn scallops; sear 1 minute more. Remove pan from heat.

5. Spread a spoonful of avocado puree on each serving plate. Divide scallops evenly between plates; drizzle with vinaigrette. In a medium bowl, add bacon, tomatoes, lovage, and remaining vinaigrette; toss to combine. Divide evenly between plates, season with fleur de sel, and serve immediately.

First published: May 2008

Some presentation, huh?


The seared scallops are good just on their own. No complaints there. Actually, I'm kind of surprised at how well I cooked them considering how little experience I have working with sea scallops.

With bacon: better. But you knew that.

With avocado goop: about the same. It tastes of avocado, brown butter and olive oil and it's OK but it adds a lot of fat the dish doesn't need for an unremarkable result. And there was a whole heck of a lot of it. Maybe a medium Hass avocado is smaller than I thought. I used a bit more than half of a medium Monroe avocado. Even with the waterier Monroe it really didn't want to blend. The blades would clear out a space and whir away under a dome of half-mushed avocado pieces. There was a lot of stopping and starting a stirring and poking before I got something reasonable out of it. It would only be worse with a more solid Hass so I don't how it was supposed to work or how the flavors were supposed to balance out.

With the salad: eh, why not?

With the vinaigrette: blagh. Oh, I just realized I switched the quarter teaspoon for the agave nectar with the half teaspoon for the vanilla. That would explain the bitterness and intense lingering unpleasantness of the vanilla clashing with everything else on the plate. It doesn't help that the new brand of olive oil I tried turned out to be pretty bitter too.

Ah well. Even if I hadn't screwed it up, I can't imagine the world's best vinaigrette elevating this dish into something worth the trouble. Worth a try, though.

Grand Slam Ice Cream

so-called because it contains a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, a waffle with maple syrup and banana, two eggs and three slices of bacon--all the components (more or less) of a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast.

You knew as well as I that I was going to make a bacon ice cream sooner or later. Straight bacon ice cream is pretty passe these days; it was over a year ago that Michael Symon got dinged for making it during the Next Iron Chef competition. If you look around on-line you see variations like maple-bacon, coffee-bacon, peanut butter-bacon and the like so that next step beyond is well trodden. I needed not just a more complex flavor but some grander idea to make it worth while and so a complete breakfast ice cream was born.

The first thing was to infuse the coffee. I coarsely ground three Tablespoons of coffee beans and added them to 1 cup heavy cream and 1 1/2 cup milk. I slowly heated that to the edge of simmering and then turned off the heat, put on the lid and let it sit for 15 minutes. Not quite boiling means that I don't release the more bitter flavor components in the coffee and get a smoother flavor.

After it was done steeping I strained out the coffee grounds, pressing them to get out all the liquid, and split the dairy into two batches. I wanted to thicken it both with (two) egg yolks and (one) banana but I don't know what it is in the banana that mimics a custard I don't know if it would survive heating and I'm sure that the protein chains that egg yolks thicken with won't survive a spin in the blender. That means two separate operations to be mixed later.

First one's easy, 1 cup dairy plus one frozen-and-defrosted banana blended together.

For the second one I whisked the two egg yolks with 5 fluid ounces of grade A dark amber maple syrup. That amount was determined by what I had on hand but it worked out so I'll leave it as is. Grade A dark is actually an average as I have a bunch of sample bottles of different grades and I mixed some grade B, some grade A dark and the dregs of my big bottle of grade A medium. Once that was smooth I mixed it with 1 1/2 cups of dairy and slowly heated it to 170 degrees whisking frequently to create a custard. I immediately removed it from the pan and cooled for a half hour and mixed it with the banana blend. I noticed that it tasted really good warm which meant it wasn't sweet enough for freezing. So I added a quarter cup of white sugar before chilling it overnight to 40 degrees.

Meanwhile, it was time to cook the bacon. That's three strips for the ice cream and one for me. I preferred method is baking in my toaster oven. Ten minutes at 350 degrees, give the strips a flip, another ten minutes and maybe a bit longer depending on how they're doing. This particularly bacon is thick cut--the extra-nice, extra-fancy, extra-expensive sort from Whole Foods. It's great and I'm never going back to the supermarket stuff--so it took an extra five minutes and maybe could have cooked a bit longer to get really crisp, but I didn't figure it would stay crisp in the ice cream so I didn't want to take the risk of burning it. If it wasn't going into something sweet I would have sprinkled it with brown sugar which candies the bacon up nicely and very tastily.

I also chopped up a frozen waffle. Even if I had a waffle maker I probably would have gone with store bought as I expect they're well-designed for freezing. I used Van's whole-grain Belgian waffles which have a good bit of flavor and a firm texture that Eggo doesn't deliver.

In the morning the mix wasn't noticeably thick, but it did heavily coat a dipped spatula which is what you're looking for in an ice cream mix.

It churned up nicely with a good gradual freezing and a slowly thickening texture. That allows plenty of time for churned in air which helps keep the results from freezing too solidly. I mixed in the bacon and waffle as I spooned out the churned ice cream. No point in pouring the solid bits into the churn where they can get ground up and jam the works. And then into the freezer for ripening.


And here's the final product. Bacon entirely aside, the coffee/maple/banana combination is fabulous. Even my co-workers who picked out the bacon raved about the ice cream. There was a nice synergy of the three flavors straight out of the churn, but after ripening coffee has come to the forefront with the others rounding it out. If you make it, I'd suggest using only two scoops of coffee beans or just mashing up the beans in a mortar instead of grinding them.

There's enough bacon and waffle to get one or the other in most bites. If you get the bacon there are hints of salt and smoke poking through the intense but mellow flavor of the ice cream--which actually works quite well. The ice cream melts away rapidly without much lingering aftertaste so you're left just chewing a piece of really good bacon and/or a not-bad-at-all chunk of whole-grain waffle. The few seconds of overlap as the flavors build and fade in intensity are the best part.

The texture is about as good as I've ever managed: soft, smooth and creamy. I think that's from the fructose in the maple syrup. I could see the mix getting gooey as it froze in the churn instead of just hardening up. The texture of the waffles isn't great--a bit stiff and crumbly--but it's a good contrast and the flavor blooms as you chew it so not too bad. I was afraid it would get soggy, but I think the hearty multigraininess helped avoid that Eggo-esque possibility. Surprisingly, the bacon retains a bit of crunch around the edges with a nice chewy center. There was some concern expressed that an unnamed "some people" might not like the chewiness. Maybe I could have cooked the bacon crisper, but with thick-cut bacon there's a fine line between crisp and burnt and you start to lose flavor as you approach it. Now that I know that bacon retains its texture when mixed in ice cream, I'll probably go with thinner, crisper bacon next time it's an appropriate addition.

Overall, a great success but not a terribly surprising one. Of course all these flavors go together; I'm just presenting them unusually. I think that's a bit less impressive than novel flavor combinations that work out. That's what I'll have to work on next.

Semi-crustless quiche

A while back I tried out a recipe for a savory crumb crust to use with quiche. It worked out well enough that I was planning to try it again using different crackers, but I took a look at the four Tablespoons of butter it adds to an already pretty fatty dish (and an increasingly fatty me) and decided against it.

Instead, I just laid a layer of breadcrumbs on the bottom of the pie pan to see how it would turn out. It required a bit of delicacy in placing the fillings (bacon, caramelized onions and spinach) and in pouring the egg mixture (three eggs, a quarter cup heavy cream, three quarters cup milk, three quarters cup semi-soft cheese, a quarter cup hard cheese, salt, pepper and a sprinkling of nutmeg), but you shouldn't be throwing that stuff around, anyway. I used Bittman's crustless quiche recipe from his Minimalist column in the New York Times. It called for mixing the cheese into the egg mixture instead of into the fillings which was an interesting difference from other recipes I've used.



Here's the result (after 20 minutes at 325 degrees).



And here's the bottom. Not much to see there, but it does give a bit of firmness to a rather loose and creamy quiche. Since the center was firm I thought I had left it in the oven too long, but really it could have used another five minutes. There was no browning, though, which was a bit of a disappointment. So it's not quite a success but I think there's promise.

For the last crumb crust I had laid down a layer of cheese just on top which I think melted through, insulating it from the main filling and holding it together. I'll try that with the bread crumbs next time.

CSA week 18 - paprika cream of turnip and potato soup

My original plan was to do some clever play on the cream version of lettuce soup but I got it into my head to use the dandelion greens as a garnish which would have been a bit much green on green. So the soup turned to turnip.

Of the many turnip soups out there, I thought this one had a more interesting spicing than most. I made it pretty much straight other than only having 3/4 lb of turnips left and having to make up the difference in potatoes. I did salt at each step along the way instead of just at the end. I suppose since everything is blended smooth at the end it wasn't really necessary but I'm just more comfortable seasoning as I go along.

The recipe doesn't specify so I had to decide what sort of paprika to use: sweet, hot or smoked. I went with sweet so as not to overwhelm the flavors of the turnip and potato. They're good quality vegetables and I didn't want to hide them.

The suggested garnish, crisp shallots, sounds nice enough, but I don't have any shallots on hand. I figured a garnish of bacon and turnip greens would more than suffice. I would have added some croutons too if I had any bread at the appropriate level of staleness.

The end result is nothing spectacular but nice enough. I would roast the vegetables next time instead of sauteing them in an overcrowded pan which really limited the browning I could do. That should boost the flavors. And I might mix the paprikas to give hints of heat and smokiness. If I did that it wouldn't hurt to replace the bacon with a garlic sausage. I'd definitely have to add croutons then to keep some crunchiness. I wish I thought of all of that a couple hours ago. Next time, then.