CSA week two - Sayur manis bayam dan jagung muda

Roughly translated from Indonesian, that's stewed spinach and sweet corn. Less roughly, bayam--usually translated as "Indonesian spinach"--is amaranth, or, around here, callaloo.

Technique-wise, this recipe is very simple and pretty similar to a standard Islands preparation, but the inclusion of a lot of typical Indonesian flavors makes it distinctive. I found it at bigoven.com, but it's on most of the big recipe websites so there's no knowing where it came from originally.

Ingredients:
a little cooking oil
1 thumb-sized knob of ginger, julienned (my ginger was too dried out to slice so I just threw it in whole and fished it out later)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
hot peppers to taste (I chopped one and left another whole)
1 small shallot, sliced (the original recipe says onion, but shallot goes nicely with the other aromatics)
1 stalk lemongrass, cored and crushed
1 thumb-sized knob of galangal, sliced (I only have dried so I put in a big chunk)
1 salam leaf
1 cup chicken stock (the original recipe calls for vegetable stock, which might be fine if you wanted to go vegan, but I'd be concerned that the particular mix of vegetables wouldn't go well with Indonesian flavors.)
7 ounces (by weight) sweet young corn (the original recipe calls for "baby corn" but those little cobs would be pretty odd to use here so I'm pretty sure that's not what they mean)
2 bunchs callaloo, thick stems removed (around 10 ounces total)
1 cup coconut milk
salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a large pot over medium high heat. Add the fresh aromatics (garlic, peppers and shallot in my case). Cook briefly until aromatic. Add the dried or otherwise inedible aromatics (ginger, lemongrass, galangal and salam for me). Cook a little longer until even more aromatic.

2. Add the stock and corn. Season with a little salt and pepper. Return to a boil. Add half the callaloo. Stir to wilt until there's room for the rest. Add the rest and stir a little more. Cover, turn heat down to a simmer and cook seven minutes. Stir in coconut milk, recover and cook five minutes more.

3. Remove inedibles, adjust seasonings and serve over rice.


Callaloo and coconut milk are, of course, a classic combination. Corn less so, but cornbread is a common accompaniment so corn isn't a big leap. So that's all pretty accessible. The overlay of the floral citrusy Indonesian flavors is something else entirely, at least if you've got some expectation of Caribbean flavors. But, if you set aside your preconceptions, I think they do counterpoint against the callaloo's distinctive flavor. I know you guys don't have the galangal or salam leaf, but try using the lemongrass when you cook up your callaloo. It's not bad at all.

Southwestern corn and squash bake

Looking at the vegetables I have on hand this week, I knew I wanted to pair the squash and corn. I had a fair amount of Southwestern flavorings left over to work with and a chunk of mild white cheddar that was close enough to monterey jack. No real plan here; I just threw it all together in some vaguely sensible manner.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 jalapeno, chopped
2 smallish yellow peppers, chopped
1/2 summer squash, thinly sliced
3 ears corn, stripped from their cobs
2 chipotles in adobo, chopped
equal amount of pickled jalapeños, chopped
6 ounces pulled brisket in faux barbecue sauce
1 handful cilantro, chopped
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup double-cream white cheddar cheese, shredded
parmesan and bread crumbs to cover
salt and pepper and chili powder and cumin and oregano and hot sauce and such to taste

I heated the butter and olive oil in a dutch oven over medium heat until the the butter melted, sizzled and settled down. Then I threw in the onion and peppers with a pinch of salt and sweated them until they softened the the onion turned translucent. Then I added the squash with some spices and let it cook down while I harvested the corn from the cobs. After a few minutes I added the corn, turned the heat up a little and cooked for five minutes until the corn was just turning tender.

Then I took the pot off the heat and added the chipotle and pickled jalapeño, brisket (with its sauce) and cilantro, mixed well and poured out into an 8"x8" baking dish. After it had cooled a bit, I mixed in the cheddar and the eggs whisked into the milk and cream, adjusted the spices, topped with the mixed breadcrumbs and parmesan, covered with foil and baked at 350 degrees for a half hour, removed the foil and baked for 15 minutes more and then gave it five more minutes under the broiler.

Here's the result:
The structural integrity isn't quite where I'd like it; Next time, I'm mixing the bread crumbs in. But even if it falls apart into a bowlful of creamed corn, it's nicely rich and full of flavor. The corn is tender but still has a bit of crunch to it. It's sweetness, surprisingly pronounced, contrasts with the several different sorts of spiciness and the savory brisket. The acid from the pickled jalapeno (and the hot sauce) cuts through the richness. Kind of trashy I admit, but really pretty tasty. Could use more squash, though. And, I just now realized that I've got a can of black beans that I should have thrown it. That would have been pretty good too.

CSA week one - Bap xao

Here is a Vietnamese corn salad that uses some similar flavors as the Thai corn soup I made earlier this week, but turns out very differently. It didn't turn out great because of the tough not-very-sweet corn we got, but it wasn't out and out bad and it showed a lot of promise. I found it at Vietworldkitchen.com.

Ingredients:
3/2 Tablespoons cooking oil
1 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup chopped scallion, both white and green parts
3/2 Tablespoons dried shrimp (Chinese, SE Asian and Mexican varieties are all quite similar so feel free to substitute with whatever you've got.)
1 hot pepper of your preference, chopped
2 cups fresh corn cut from the cob (my two cobs each produced a little under a cup so I topped it off with frozen corn.)
3.4 Tablespoon Vietnamese fish sauce (milder than the Thai variety)
dash salt

1. Rinse the dried shrimp, dry them off and either finely chop them or, preferably, run them through your spice grinder to create a powder.

2. Heat the oil and butter in a wok or large pan over high heat. Add scallion, dried shrimp and pepper. Stir fry briefly until scallion is wilted and the mixture is aromatic.

3. Stir in the corn. Add the fish sauce and salt. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3-4 minutes, until the corn is cooked. (This week's tough corn took longer and never really got tender.) Remove from heat and adjust seasoning adding salt or sugar as necessary to create a savory-sweet flavor.


To make a full meal out of this, I served it over rice and topped with a skewer of shrimp. I wanted flavors on the shrimp to match the corn, but not too closely, so I used an oil based marinade flavored with garlic, ginger, scallion, sesame oil, red pepper, salt and fish sauce and then cooked them in a very hot cast iron pan still in their shells to protect them from the heat. I probably should have scraped off the scallions first. Still, they came out just fine.



As for the corn, the fishy salty savoriness is a pleasant counterpoint to the corn's buttery sweetness. It's a complex balance for such a simple dish, but I suppose that's typical of Vietnamese cooking. The corn retains a good bite (being kind of tough and all), but they squish nicely so they are cooked through. The best bit is the fond--mixed shrimp shreds and corn milk browned into a crisp powder--that I scraped off the pan and sprinkled into the salad. I like the added textural element, but I regret that that there's still a lot stuck in the pan. Next time, maybe, I'd add a deglazing step (Maybe with white wine; I could see that working with the flavors of the dish.) so all that flavor ends up on the corn. I wouldn't mind the salad just a little moister anyway.

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.

Chilled pea and avocado soup with shrimp and corn salad

No great story behind this I'm afraid. Given the giganto avocados we get here in Florida and our CSA's insistence on giving us several at a time, I'm always looking for avocado-centric dishes. I stumbled across a recipe for pea and avocado soup, found a handful more (which means that this is a known recipe. I never thought of putting peas and avocado together, much less in a cold soup, but it must be common somewhere or have gone through a fad of popularity at some point. Have any of you heard of this before?), picked through them for ideas and worked out my own, rather more elaborate, version.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup tiny shrimp or crab meat
1/2 cup sweet corn kernels
1/2 medium tomato, seeded and chopped
an equal amount of roasted red pepper as the tomato, chopped
1 small handful cilantro, stems and leaves separated. Leaves chopped.
1/2 lime, juiced
extra-virgin olive oil
salt
vinegar-based hot sauce

olive oil
1/2 of a medium onion (or a few scallions), chopped
1 jalapeño or other meaty, not too hot, pepper, chopped
2 cloves garlic
the cilantro stems from above
1/2 teaspoon cumin
2 cups chicken stock (homemade is, as always, much preferred)
2 cups small sweet peas
1 large avocado, chopped or just scooped out if it's as old as the ones I've got
1/3 cup sour cream
salt and pepper

1. Mix the shrimp, corn, tomato, red pepper and cilantro leaves in a small bowl. Salt well, dress with copious amounts of lime juice and olive oil and hot sauce to taste. Make it a little hotter than you'd like, actually. Set aside in the refrigerator.

2. Heat a Tablespoon of olive oil in a small pan over medium heat. When it's hot, add the onion, pepper and garlic with a sizable pinch of salt. Cook for four minutes, turning down the heat if they start to brown, add the cilantro stems and cook for one minute more. Take off the heat and stir in the cumin. If your peas need cooking, use a larger pan and add them after the first minute.

3. Scrape pan into a blender, add stock and peas. Blend smooth. Add avocado and sour cream and blend again. Salt and pepper (and cumin) to taste. Also adjust the texture with a bit more stock or avocado if you've got them to hand, water and sour cream if you don't. Some recipes call for straining it, but if it's chunky, blend it some more instead.


Serve soup topped with a sizable spoonful of the salad and a good drizzle of the dressing. Maybe with a chunk of hearty brown bread.



The soup tastes of peas and avocados naturally, sweet and creamy rounded out with touches of savor and spice from the additional ingredients and a slow burn in the background from the pepper. Each component of the salad, which separate out so you get one or two per spoonful, is a bright burst of flavor--salty, acid and spicy on top of its clearly delineated individual character. It's just gorgeous stuff. My expectations were far exceeded, here.

CSA week nine - corn shrimp and sausage chowder

I looked at a few corn and shrimp soup recipes trying to decide just what I wanted to make, but I ended up mainly just winging it.

The first step was to get the corn off the cobs since I need the cobs to make the stock in step two. I used the Bobby Flay method I picked up watching Iron Chef: hold the cob vertically in a medium bowl and slice the kernels off downward without slicing too close to the cob to avoid getting too many nasty bits into the corn. Once the cob is bare, scrape it down with the back of the knife to get the corn-bits that stuck and the corn milk. I found I had to scrape both directions to get everything.

Next up, that shrimp stock. The two cobs, broken in half, go into a pot with half an onion, a couple of smashed garlic cloves, a couple celery ribs, a couple pieces of carrot and the 12 ounces of shrimp shells I've been accumulating in the freezer. That seems like enough for four cups of water, but it took five cups to cover so I'm hoping for the best here. That all comes up to a boil for thirty minutes of covered simmering before straining. I didn't add any salt so I can more easily control the salt in the dishes I use it in. That, I read recently, is how you're supposed to do it. OK.

Meanwhile, I brined my shrimp with both salt and sugar. I only have a quarter pound so I also defrosted a couple links of southern-style sausage and sliced them into quarter-inch coins. Oh, hey, I bought some potatoes earlier today. (I don't usually keep them around. I understand they're not actually very good for you. Unlike southern-style sausage.) I finely diced one of those too. When I got tired of waiting I pulled the shrimp from the brine, shelled them and cut them into quarters.

I only got a cup and a third of corn out of my two ears so I'm setting that aside to be the chunky part of the soup. Another cup of corn from the freezer I blended with a cup of my shrimp broth to thicken the soup.





Next up are my aromatics: a quarter cup each of red bell pepper (I guess I'm not stuffing it after-all), green bell pepper (from last week), celery and onion. Also, I chopped a handful of cilantro and the rest of the onion.



Now, I think I'm ready to start cooking.

I started by browning the sausage in a Tablespoon of butter, a minute or two on each side over medium-high heat.

Then I removed them and browned the potatoes.

I removed the potatoes, turned down the heat to medium low and added my aromatics including the extra onion I decided to chop, but not the cilantro. The potato absorbed a bit more fat than I had hoped for so I added a bit more butter.

After five minutes I returned the sausage and potato and added the blended corn mixture along with another cup and a half of stock, the fresh corn, most of the cilantro and some salt and pepper. I brought that back up to a boil and then simmered for ten minutes on medium-low heat until the corn and potatoes were tender. (The potatoes more than the corn. I may hold off returning the potatoes until later next time.)

Then I added the shrimp and a half cup of cream and simmered for five minutes more. And it's done.

The broth has lots of flavor, not just from the corn, but from all those additions, too none of which have had time to complete dissolve so there's lots of texture here. The shrimp and sausage aren't washed out so they retain their individual flavor and texture in the mix and their flavors haven't had time to leach out into the soup so each spoonful is a bit different. The fresh corn is a touch undercooked but has a lot of sweet fresh flavor even after being boiled for fifteen minutes. I think that shows a very real difference between CSA corn and supermarket corn. The soup needs a shot of hot sauce at the end, but that's traditional so I deliberately avoided adding any heat earlier on. So, overall, not too bad for a first try.

And now I'm tired. I'll post about the stone crab picnic tomorrow.

CSA week five - Things not to do with grapefruit

I tried a couple interesting things with the grapefruit this week neither of which I thought were entirely successful, but you may like them better than I did so I thought I'd post them up for comments or at least as a warning.

First up, broiled grapefruit. I had never heard of this before I stumbled across a recipe a few days ago but the same simple recipe shows up for page after page if you Google for it so maybe it's just me. It's simple enough: just pre-slice a grapefruit half, cutting out the pithy bit in the middle and separating the flesh from the rind, top with a bit of butter and a bit of sugar (Brown sugar is popular. I tried vanilla sugar.) and maybe a bit of spice, and broil for five minutes until browned around the edges. Serve optionally topped with sliced fruit or, in one recipe I just found, a chicken liver.

It looks pretty good but I found that the broiling cooked all of the bitterness and most of the sourness out of the fruit and what's left just isn't terribly interesting. Why cook a grapefruit in a way that destroys all its grapefruitiness? If you don't like grapefruit, eat an orange. Have any of you had this and can explain the appeal to me?


And second, scallop and shrimp ceviche with grapefruit and avocado. In contrast with the first preparation, scallop, grapefruit and avocado is a pretty rare combination. I only had half a grapefruit left by now so I marinated the shrimp and scallops in lemon and lime juice before adding finely chopped cilantro, shallot and jalapeño, grated ginger and olive oil for another hour's marination. And then, just before serving, in goes the diced avocado and the grapefruit supremes. I added an ear's worth of CSA corn too which added some nice color. In this case the bitterness of the grapefruit overwhelmed and ruined a perfectly good ceviche. Maybe the author (Tina Jones, it says here) assumed I'd be using one of those new-fangled grapefruit with most of the bitter bred out or at least something less uncompromising than what we got. I'll try it again tomorrow; maybe a night in the refrigerator will mellow it out.

[Added tomorrow: No, it really didn't. I ended up tossing most of it.]

Southwestern black bean hominy stew

My original plan was to make a traditional pozole--a stew of just hominy, peppers and pork--but things got a bit out of hand.

Well, backing up a bit, the origin of this dish is the tiny ethnic food isle in the local Whole Foods. They've got a rack of various southwestern peppers and herbs packaged by a company called Los Chileros out of New Mexico. They also sell dried hominy. I had no idea there was such a thing. Hominy is made by soaking dried corn in lye- or lime-water and I figured once it was soaked it was soaked and I had only ever seen it in cans. So I was intrigued and determined to try it out.

I also had on hand some dried black beans and some fresh corn on the cob that seemed like good additions. And, since I wanted something fire roasted in there and don't have ready access to fire, a can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes seemed like a good addition.

All that plus the pork--I think I accidentally made chili. It's nothing like a real bowl of red, mind you, but chili is such a degraded term these days I think this is somewhere under that broad umbrella.

Anyway, it went like this (keeping in mind that I didn't actually measure anything at the time):

ingredients:
1 cup dried black beans
1 cup dried hominy
1 Tablespoon olive oil
2 cups finely chopped onion (I used red and white as I had those available)
1 cup finely chopped green bell pepper (only because I had no fresh hot peppers handy)
1 Tablespoon Mexican oregano
1 Tablespoon epazote (epazote supposedly reduces gas, but best to use the beano anyway)
1 Tablespoon ancho chili powder
1 Tablespoon ground cumin (whole cumin would have been nice but I seem to be out)
2 dried casabel chiles
2 dried chipotle chiles
1 lb pork roast (not stew pork as that does best when the stew never reaches a boil, but you've got to boil to cook the beans and hominy), chopped in 1 inch cubes
kernels cut from 1 small ear of corn, including the milk if you've got any. Mine didn't.
14 ounces crushed fire roasted tomatoes
1 cup chicken broth
vinegar hot pepper sauce

garnishes:
lime
white onion, finely sliced
green cabbage, finely sliced
tortillas

1. Soak beans and hominy separately overnight

2. Heat oil in dutch oven on medium heat. Add any whole spices you're using, cook until aromatic, add onions and peppers, sweat onion and pepper until soft but not browned. Stir in oregano, epazote, chili powder and cumin and cook until aromatic.

3. Add hominy, black beans and enough hominy soaking water to cover by 1 inch. Crumble, crush or chop peppers and add to pot. Simmer on low heat until hominy and beans are just getting tender, around 1 1/2 hours.

4. Add corn, tomatoes, enough chicken broth to thin out the stew to your preference and salt to taste. Simmer for another 1/2 hour.

5. At some point during that half hour add the pork. Exactly when depends on your cut of meat and how large the pieces are. Use your judgment. I added mine with the corn and tomatoes and it ended up a bit overdone. Ten minutes would have been sufficient.

6. Taste and adjust seasoning. I found mine a bit muddy so I added a vinegar based hot sauce, specifically Urban Chefs hotlicious pepper sauce which is a micro-brand out of Columbus, Ohio. Tabasco or Cholula would do fine, but Urban Chefs has a fruitier character that I like a lot.

7. Serve garnished with onion, cabbage, strips of tortilla and a squeeze of lime.


The end result is pretty good. Looking at it you expect chili pretty much, but the strong corn element in the broth (and the fact that it's actually soupy) is pretty distinctive and interestingly tasty. I like the variety of textures in the chewy hominy, creamy beans, firmly tender corn, not too overdone pork and crisp garnishes. Tasting the dish today, I found the tomato a little forward and the chiles a bit mild and dissociated from the other flavors. These sorts of stews always taste better and usually spicier the second day after the flavors had time to meld. It's actually tasting better every time I try it as it cools. I'll add a note tomorrow when I have a final result.

OK, it's tomorrow. I'm a little disappointed. The flavors did meld nicely but the broth turned into a chili-style sauce and the flavors all mellowed a bit so the end result is kind of undistinguished. I was hoping for something with more pizazz. Still, a couple shots of hot sauce and it's perfectly palatable.

I might try a different mix of peppers next time; I picked what I used fairly randomly. It's easy to find out how hot each pepper is, but its the other flavors they have that are important and that's much harder to learn so you just have to try them and see. Wow, I just found myself respecting Bobby Flay for a moment there. What an odd sensation.

Frogmore stew a.ka. low country boil

Frogmore stew is a Carolinas specialty and it's something that's been on my to-cook list for a while now. It finally made it onto the menu when I was shopping at Whole Foods earlier this week and saw that they were having a sale on local produce. I thought I'd simulate a CSA box and pick up whatever they had and figure out what to do with it later. This recipe stems from the corn on the cob from Pioneer Growers Coop in Belle Glade, Florida. I was suspicious when I saw corn at a farmers market a while back, but I was wrong. Live and learn.

Along with the corn, frogmore stew also contains redskin potatoes, sausage and shrimp. And that's it. No frogs, sadly. There are an enormous number of recipes for it on the web and, for once, they're not the same three copied and pasted all over the place. And even more oddly, despite them all being keyed in individually they were all exactly the same: potatoes, sausage, corn and shrimp, optionally crab and and optionally a lemon.

There seem to be two key points to getting this dish to turn out right. The first is the timing; Boil the potatoes for 20 minutes, then add the sausage for ten, then the corn for five, then the shrimp for three. The second is in the spices; not many recipes specified exactly what sort to shrimp/crab boil to use, but then not many had anything sensible to say about the timing either. The recipes that were written with care said to use both sweet and spicy boils. That's Zatarains and Old Bay if you're going mass market. My southern style boil is from Spice House. I'm still boiling as I type, but even a suburban boy from Delaware like me gets visions of picnic tables and surf from the smell coming off the pot. I used a couple Tablespoons of each for a gallon of water (for six medium red potatoes, half a pound of sausage, three ears of corn, and a pound of shrimp). That's probably on the high end, but I always bump up the spice a bit.

Most recipes aren't very specific about the sausage--just something smoked and garlicky. I had some andouille on hand as I had intended to make gumbo this week. I hit a few snags with that. First, I had a hard time finding the andouille. Oysters in bulk were tough to come by too. Maybe they're out of season? None of the supermarkets carried them and I didn't get a chance to check the fishmongers before I realize a bigger problem. And that's that there's just no way gumbo is a weeknight recipe, at least not with a chicken involved. With a chicken you have the choice of long or complicated. The long way is to start with a pot of water and boil the chicken for a few hours to make soup which you then add a bunch of other ingredients to to make gumbo. The complicated, and much better way, is to start by frying the chicken, shredding it and adding it at the end after making the gumbo with a pot of pre-made chicken soup. See, that way you get double the chicken flavor. So, I set that aside and I'll find some other use for that chicken.

OK, now that I've had my dinner, those times were spot on, everything was cooked quite nicely. The flavor infused by the boil spices were subtle. I may use even more next time. I served the dish with butter, sour cream and cocktail sauce and, to simulate the picnic style, got a bit sloppy about what went on what. Cocktail sauce on corn is surprisingly good. Sour cream on sausage, less so. All in all, not bad, but I think I must be missing some element that makes it a classic. Maybe it's because I didn't cook it over a bonfire on the beach with friends and family. I'll have to try that some time.