CSA week eight wrap-up, week nine start-up plus an important note about the betel leaves

I should follow-up yesterday's post right off the start. I added the mustard-based hot sauce and tried the collard/potato salad cold and it's still mediocre. I still think there's a good idea in there somewhere, though. I'll have to work on it.

Still a lot of greens unaccounted for. I was in a noodly mood this week so I went that way for two out of three. I mixed the peashoots into cold sesame-vinegar noodles after giving them a quick blanch so they had something of a noodle texture too. That was pretty good.

The yukina savoy I cooked way down and mixed into mac and cheese. That worked pretty well, too.

And for the chard, I tried the taco recipe from the newsletter, but I don't think it was nearly as good as the Rick Bayless recipe I made a couple years ago. I had some trouble with it, anyway.

I also made an extra-dilly gravlax so, unless I'm forgetting something, that just leaves the canistel which just got ripe enough to use today. I'll have to see how much flesh I get out of it before figuring out what to do with it.

This week brings plenty more greens even after leaving the lettuce behind. Some other interesting stuff, too, though.

In the upper left corner is curly endive. That's the traditional green used in Italian wedding soup which doesn't sound bad. I thought I might try that.

Below that is kale. Drlindak (Dr. Lindak? D.R. Lindak? Dr. Linda K.?) and have been discussing pairing kale with beans in the comments of last week's start-up post and I'm intrigued enough to give it a try. This isn't actually the proper sort of kale, though, so maybe not this time around.

I'm thinking a green bean/tomato salad for those two, and pairing the mushrooms with the piper betel too.

As for the betel recipe in the newsletter, I came across this quite interesting webpage that strongly warns that betel is the wrong leaf to use. Comparing the photos on that page with what I've seen elsewhere, I'm pretty sure that every time I've had a Thai dish wrapped in a leaf, it's been bai cha plu, not the bai plu we've got. This other page also compares, contrasts and makes the distinction clear, too. Both authors say that bai plu doesn't have any culinary applications; it's used for chewing betel nut and that's about it.

Having tasted it, that sounds about right to me. I'm going to not use mine, and recommend that you don't use yours either. I'm not saying that they're poisonous or anything, just that they taste lousy and you shouldn't ruin a dish by including them. I've made a couple fairly successful dishes using them in previous years, but I'm tired of struggling to make them palatable, particularly starting from the disadvantage of them not actually being food.

Margie, if you're reading this, could you talk to Robert about this? If he's growing and you guys are selling the wrong stuff, that's a problem.

Back from that tangent, there's still the turnips and dandelion greens. Eh, I'll blanch to remove the bitterness and then cook them both up with some fresh pasta and plenty of garlic. Done.

Thai beef and betel salad

Well past time to use my betel. It's two weeks old at this point and a little faded. A little late on the blog post too; sorry about that. Mussels were on sale at Whole Foods and you've got to bump them to the front of the queue.

This recipe is a take off of a betel leaf salad recipe I found on ImportFood.com with some elements from the ubiquitous ground-beef-wrapped-in-betel-leaves recipe added in, plus some adjustments to compensate for the tiny amount of betel I've got and some adjustments that just seemed like a good idea at the time. Pretty standard origin for me, really.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup betel leaves, shredded
1/2 cup carrot, shredded
1 small handful cilantro, well stemmed and roughly chopped
1-2 sprigs mint, chiffinaded (is chiffinade a verb?)
1 medium-hot chili, seeded and thinly sliced

1/4 pound tender beef, sliced into strips and cut into sensible lengths
marinated in fish sauce and lime juice with a little sugar and a little cilantro

2 Tablespoons roasted unsalted peanuts
1 Tablespoon dried shrimp
ground together or crushed in a mortar and pestle

2 teaspoons tamarind pulp dissolved in 5 teaspoons water
juice of 1/2 lime
1 Tablespoon palm sugar or any sugar with some molasses left in
1 Tablespoon light soy sauce

salt, sriracha

1. If your betel leaves, like mine, are a bit soggy from moisture expressed during storage, lightly toast them to dry them out. Only a few minutes or they'll start to crisp up. Hmm...betel chips; I've got to make a note of that.

2. Mix the betel leaves, carrot, cilantro, mint and chili in a large bowl.

3. Heat a cast iron pan over high heat, add a little oil and heat some more. Drain the marinade from the beef. Add the beef to the pan and cook, stirring but not stir frying, until cooked though and maybe a little browned. Remove to a bowl. Feel free to add them to the vegetables, actually.

4. Strain the tamarind mixture into a small bowl. You'll have to force it through the mesh and scrape it off the bottom of the sieve most likely. Add the lime juice, sugar and soy sauce. Don't measure, just mix them to your taste.

6. Mix together the beef, peanuts and shrimp with the vegetables. Add the dressing bit by bit just until the vegetables are coated. I used about half, myself. Add salt if necessary and maybe a little more lime or sugar until the flavors are balanced.


OK, let's give it a try. This is my first time using raw betel, and I've seen a fair number of complaints about its strong medicinal flavor, so I'm not sure how this is going to turn out.

Oh, this is very nice indeed.
The betel is the foreground flavor, but it's not overbearing. The sweetness of the carrots, emphasized by the tamarind, and the tangy tartness of the dressing blend with it for an pleasantly interesting whole. And there's just a bit of aroma from the herbs floating above the bolder flavors.

It could use a little more heat--I shouldn't have seeded the jalapeño I used--so I added just a little sriracha. That helps and adds just a touch of burn in the aftertaste which I like. Brought up the acid a little too which isn't a bad thing.

Each bite has a slightly different character; I particularly like it when the beef-betel-peanut combinatination of flavors comes out.

Texturally, it's mostly the crunch of the carrot and the chew of the beef. The herbs have wilted a little but there's still a little leafiness in there.

I think it helped that my betel's flavor was faded. If I were working with perfectly fresh leaves, I think I'd boost the carrot and add some shredded daikon to thin it out. That would help making this more than two small or one large serving, too. The original recipe I based this on actually has double the betel to carrot ratio. I can't see that working, at least for my palate. I'm curious to try a properly authentically prepared Thai dish using betel leaves. I think Robert from Possum Trot is the only one growing piper betel locally. I know he's unlikely to be reading this; anyone else know if he's supplying any local restaurants?

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

For the record, I'm feeling much better now. Once my course of antibiotics was done with I could go back on my probiotics and my tummy trouble faded rapidly. I appreciate the concern of all those who were concerned.

I believe the only item unaccounted for from week four is the turnips. The tops I had over pasta (with olive oil, tomatoes and sausage) that very first day. The roots I used in a beef stew that didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. I had read that, if you're going to make stew, you ought to deeply brown the ingredients to develop as much flavor as possible. You may dry everything out, but they'll be soaking in liquid for a few hours and all the tasty bits stuck to the pot will get dissolved back into the mix. A good idea, but I think I took it a bit too far. The flavor balance was all screwed up and the dried out meat didn't rehydrate; it just fell apart into chewy strands. It wasn't until after a night in the refrigerator and the dissolution of the dumplings that the flavors managed to stabilize into something palatable. Which is why I didn't write it up.

One other note before I move on. Remember a while back when I said the betel leaves tasted like root beer? This week I watched an old episode of Iron Chef America where Rick Bayless used an herb called hoja santa or acuyo which is also known as the root beer plant because of its flavor. The leaves looked a lot like betel too so I wondered if there was a connection. Turns out they're closely related: hoja santa is piper auitum and betel is piper betle. I think the takeaways here are:
a) my left-field description of betel was actually pretty apt. That means that I comprehended what I was tasting and was able to accurately describe it. It's an unexpected confirmation that I'm a half decent food writer.
and b) if we get betel again, and you aren't happy with the standard recipe options, there's a whole world of Mexican recipes you can substitute it into.


On to this week. I'm a little disappointed with the selection this time around; I find myself with a surfeit of eggs and slightly stale bread so I was hoping for something that would make a suitable filling in a bread pudding. The closest here is the mushrooms. I hadn't really considered a mushroom bread pudding before, but a little searching reveals a good number of recipes so I guess that's a plan.

I've also got a bit of salmon in the freezer so that's a natural partner for the dill. I haven't decided if that's going to involve a cure or a sauce yet, though.

Plum tomatoes are particularly good for sauce and I'm out currently so I guess I'll be making some more. I've never made a bolognese; maybe I'll try that.

The beets I want to roast. I'll probably roast a chicken to go with them as long as I've got the oven going.

The lettuce looks to be a sort that's good for wrapping stuff in, so I'm going to look around for recipes along those lines.

For the black sapote. I've got the idea to use it in a custard or mousse. I'll see if I've got sufficient eggs left to do that after I've made the mushroom bread pudding.

And that leaves the cabbage. I'm not sure what I'll do. It'll last a while so I may just pick at it over time instead of making one big cabbage-centric meal.

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.