Thit Heo Nuong Xa

That would be lemongrass-marinated pork in English.

From the picture it looks pretty complicated, but it's really very simple and easy to make.

It's just a couple thick pork chops or a hunk of pork loin (not too lean!) marinated overnight in a paste of:
2 Tablespoons light brown sugar
1 Tablespoon garlic, chopped
1 Tablespoon shallot, chopped
3 Tablespoons lemongrass, white bits finely grated
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoon black soy sauce
1 1/2 Tablespoon fish sauce
1 Tablespoon neutral oil. Grill or fry them up and slice it it thin against the grain.

Add grilled green vegetables. I had pak choy on hand. Also sliced tomato and cucumber and a poached egg are nice additions.

Put those over a big bowl of coconut rice:
6 oz rice
1 1/3 cups coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 bay leaf
cooked on a standard rice cooker cycle.

Plain white rice is OK, but the coconut rice does add a nice little something.

and top with drizzles of:
Nuoc Cham
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons sugar
125 milliliters water
heated until just about to boil and then mixed with
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 hot pepper, thinly sliced
2 tbsp lime juice
1 small carrot, shredded
and cooled

and
Scallion and garlic chive oil
250 milliliters neutral oil
4 scallions, finely sliced
1 handful garlic chives, finely sliced
1 pinch salt
1 pinch sugar,
simmered briefly and cooled,

and sambal hot sauce
from a bottle and better suited here than over-hyped Sriracha to my mind.

OK, maybe it is a little complicated, but you don't have to do it all at once. You can make a big batch of the pork and keep it in the freezer, make the sauces a day or two before and cook whatever vegetables you've got to hand.

It's as tasty as it looks. More tasty if you don't think it looks so good.

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

I hope nobody was too disappointed not to find this post up yesterday; I wanted to give my sorbet post another day on the top of the blog before it got buried and never looked at again.

That sorbet and the pasta thing I made used up the bulk of last week's share. I did pickle the cucumbers with the dill as I said I might. The cukes turned out to be rather firmer than I expected and well suited to pickling. It's early days yet, but I think they'll turn out well in a few weeks.


On to week four...


Starting on the left, we've got turnips with some very nice greens attached. I'm going to save the turnips since we've got a couple weeks off and they'll keep for a while. I wasn't happy with the texture of the mashed turnip I made with the last turnips we got, so I'll probably slice these up for a gratin or the like. The tops I've already cooked in a Thai-inflected stir fry that also used up the last of the eggplant and some poorly conceived Thai-spiced sausage.

I snacked on the radishes all day yesterday, but there's so many that I've still got a half pound or so left. I'm thinking of making chips out of them as they're quite nice when browned. The tops aren't in nearly as good shape as the turnip tops so I'll probably end up tossing them, but they may end up in the gratin or in a pasta sauce.

The oranges here add to the two I haven't used yet from last week. There's enough now that I could get a reasonable amount of juice out of them or I might just eat them out of hand. The clementines I'd like to use for a stir fry. When I did that last year it turned out really bitter, but I think I know what I did wrong so I'd like to give it another shot.

I'm not sure what to do with the mizuna. I haven't had much luck with it in it's previous appearances. It wilts down to nothing very quickly when cooked and, while it's good in salads it's better complementing other greens than by itself. The mizuna pesto I made last year turned out OK, but I'm not a huge pesto fan and this sizable bunch will make quite a bit of it. This requires more thought.

The sprouts, I've been enjoying in sandwiches as they have a watercress-y flavor to them. It's not using them up very rapidly, though, so I may have to go buy some lettuce to add them and the mizuna to for a salad.

And that leaves the mushrooms. I usually cook them with beef and/or eggs, but they're good raw too. Maybe they'll go into the hypothetical salad I've been constructing.

You know, hypothetical salad would be a pretty good name for a band.

Kederok and Tahu Kering

I mail ordered a bunch of Indonesian ingredients a couple months ago and then promptly stopped cooking anything Indonesian. But Indonesian cuisine has evolved for the sort of oppressively tropical weather we've been having so now's definitely the time to break it out.

I don't know how useful it is to you guys for me to post about dishes that require ingredients you don't have, but I suppose my conception of a food blog as a practical rather than a voyeuristic endeavor is something of a minority view. For whatever it's worth then, here's a west Javanese salad and an east Javanese tofu dish both from The Indonesian Kitchen.

Kederok

1 fresh semihot chile, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 teaspoon salt
2 small slices dried kencur, soaked in water for 30 minutes [a.k.a. lesser galangal. I was going to use some regular galangal as I haven't been able to get kencur, but it didn't soften enough smush in the mortar. I used a little ginger instead which is a fair approximation.]
3 Tablespoons crunchy peanut butter [I've got smooth so I added some coarsely ground peanuts I keep around for garnishing.]
1 teaspoon tamarind, dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup thin-sliced cucumbers
1 cup bean sprouts
1 cup lettuce, broken into bite-size pieces [I have no lettuce either so I used a cup and a half of cukes and an equal amount of sprouts.]

1. Crush chile, garlic, salt, kencur and peanut butter in a mortar.

2. Strain seeds out of tamarind. Add tamarind and sugar to peanut butter mix.

3. Toss sauce with vegetables until well mixed. Served chilled or room temperature.


Tahu Kering

12 ounces tofu
1/2 cup high smoke point oil for frying
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1/4 cup onion, sliced
2 semihot red chiles, sliced thin diagonally
1 salam leaf
1 piece laos [a.k.a. galangal. I used the two small pieces that didn't work in the salad.]
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons tamarind, dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
1 Tablespoon sweet soy sauce

1. Cut tofu into 1/4-inch thick slices in whatever size in the other two dimensions as you'd like. [The original recipe says 3/4-inch square, but I left mine in slabs a couple inches across and I liked the result.] Heat the oil until not quite smoking, add tofu and fry in batches for five to seven minutes until they are golden brown on the outside. Do not let them cook through or they'll become leathery. If you do it right, they'll crisp up once they're out of the oil.

2. In small bowl mix sugar, salt, strained tamarind liquid and sweet soy sauce.

Remove all but 1 Tablespoon oil. Turn heat to medium. Fry garlic, onion, chiles, salam and laos until the onions and garlic brown. Add tofu and sauce mixture. Turn the tofu pieces to ensure they're all coated with the sauce and fry for five to eight minutes more until all the liquid has evaporated (except the oil which will still be liquid. Don't be fooled!). Serve with rice or on toothpicks with cocktails before dinner.


The salad is not as good as I hoped. I used a natural peanut butter that was pretty dense and had to water down the sauce to get it thin enough to dress the vegetables. That was fine, but then the salt in the dressing made the vegetables express their own liquid and soon we're talking about peanut soup. Actually, recontextualized like that, (and with the seasoning punched back up) it's not bad. It's a little sweet, a little spicy, a little tart, and the peanut does go well with the cucumber and sprouts. On the other hand, I don't like how limp the vegetables got while waiting for me to finish cooking the tofu. Leave the dressing thick and serve immediately and it's worth doing.

The tofu is deeply savory from the browned vegetables and reduced soy sauce plus a little sweet and a little sour. The salam and laos are subtle but distinctively aromatic. It's got a surprisingly meaty chew and a little crispness around the edges. I don't think I can explain it better than that; it's rather odd and since its primary flavor is umami, there's not a lot of appropriate English vocabulary. Pretty tasty though.

Szechuan pork and cucumber stir fry

One of my coworkers, I don't know who, brought in some garden vegetables and left them in the break-room on Monday. There were some grape tomatoes, some very nice banana peppers and a few rather large cucumbers. It was my duty, I thought, to make sure they were used well. The cucumbers were not only large, they were dense and meaty, nicely suitable for cooking.

A pork and cucumber stir fry's been on my to do list since I passed it over in favor of stuffed cucumbers back in April. I took a new look around for recipes and found I had the choice of a generic brown sauce, oyster sauce or a super-spicy Szechuan version. That last was definitely the one for me. I did pull in shiitakes from another recipe and red onions from a third to add some more textures and boost the vegetable to meat ratio.

Ingredients

8 ounces pork tenderloin, sliced into thin strips
2 teaspoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
1 teaspoon rice wine
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon cornstarch

1 handful dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked and sliced

1 1/2 Tablespoons peanut oil
2 teaspoons bean paste
1 teaspoon chiu chow chili oil
2 teaspoons garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns, crushed
1/2 teaspoon chili flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 pound cucumber, peeled, halved, seeded and sliced thin
1/2 large red onion, sliced thin

2 teaspoons light soy sauce
2 teaspoons rice wine
2 teaspoons white rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar

Instructions:

1. Combine soy sauces, rice wine, sesame oil and cornstarch in medium bowl. Add pork, toss to coat and set aside.

2. Heat a wok over high heat. Add oil, wait to see the oil shimmer and nearly but not quite start to smoke. Add bean paste, chili oil, garlic, peppercorns, chili flakes and salt. Stir fry 10 seconds.

3. Add pork (with marinade) and mushrooms. Stir fry 1 minute.

4. Add cucumber and onion. Stir fry 1 minute.

5. Add soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar and sugar. Stir fry 2 minutes more. With luck the liquid should have all evaporated, but I found I had a bit left at that point and I didn't want to overcook the pork. I wanted some sauce for the rice anyway.

Serve immediately with rice.



I'm a little disappointed with how this turned out, but just a little. The textures are all good. All of the ingredients are cooked well--the pork is tender, the cucumbers soft with just a little crunch, the mushrooms soft. But something odd happened with the flavors. Almost all of the heat is concentrated in the mushrooms. It's not just that they absorbed the sauce; they pulled that element out of the sauce and the remaining liquid doesn't have a lot of spice to it. Weird. The recipe I cribbed that ingredient from used fresh shiitakes, not dried. That probably would have avoided this issue.

That leaves the pork and cucumbers out there speaking for themselves and I'm still impressed with that unexpected (for the American cook, anyway) pairing. The cucumber is a light freshness adding high notes to the rich meatiness of the pork, tied together by the salty soy sauce and the tanginess of the bean sauce. Think of how sweet relish complements a hot dog. It's kind of like that, but not really. It's definitely worth a try--if not this recipe (minus the shiitake), one of the other versions.

CSA week 20 - deep fried stuffed cucumbers

Did you know that pork and cucumbers are a traditional Chinese combination? I didn't, but I did a search for "fried cucumbers" just to see if recipes for such a thing existed and there they were. At first I was going to do a stir fry, but I gotta do something a little more interesting for the blog, so stuffed and deep fried it is. This is another recipe from Thousand Recipes Chinese Cookbook.

Ingredients:
3 dried black mushrooms (I used cloud ears)
1/2 pound lean pork
2 slices fresh ginger
1 scallion
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon sherry or rice wine
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon oil

3 large cucumbers
3 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup water
oil for deep frying
1/2 cup water
1 Tablespoon tomato or soy sauce

0. Soak the mushrooms and chill the pork in the freezer until firm.

1. Process the pork, mushrooms, ginger and scallion in a food processor until nearly smooth. A dozen pulses or so.

2. Blend in soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, salt and oil. Set aside in refrigerator.

3. Peel cucumbers in stripes and cut crosswise in 2-inch sections.

4. Start heating oil for deep frying.

5. Scoop out seeds. [An old fashioned peeler is a good tool for this. I haven't got one, but the tubular protective case for my candy thermometer did the job nicely. Any thoughts on what to do with the leftover cucumber cores?] Stuff cucumbers with filling mixture.

6. Mix cornstarch with 1/4 cup water. Brush mixture over cucumber sections. Resist the temptation to dunk the cucumbers since you'll be using the cornstarch in the sauce and don't want raw pork in it.

7. When oil is just about smoking add cucumber sections a few at a time without crowding the pan. Deep fry a few minutes until pale golden. Drain.

8. Heat 1/2 cup water to a low simmer in a large pan or dutch oven. Carefully add cucumber sections, cover, turn down heat to low and simmer 10 minutes.

9. Remove cucumbers to serving platter. Mix soy or tomato sauce [I didn't want to open a can of tomato sauce for one Tablespoon so I used a teaspoon of tomato paste and a Tablespoon of soy sauce.] with a little of the corn starch mixture [The recipe says to use all of it, but it was far too much for the amount of liquid I had to thicken and I ended up adding another half cup of water to thin it out.] and add to liquid in pan and stir to thicken. Pour over the cucumbers and serve.


Hmm, not the most attractive presentation I've seen. It reminds me of the painting of the Elder Ones in Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials. Just me? The striping is more prominent on the page. Maybe it was the unsettling texture of the over-thickened sauce that put me in a Lovecraftian state of mind.

Appearances aside, it's not bad. The cucumber has the texture and, to some extent the flavor, of cooked green pepper. Soft in places but still with a little firmness to the bite. It's not easy to recognize as cucumber as the flavor isn't strong, but if someone told you, you wouldn't scoff. The pairing with the pork is pretty good but the sauce gets in the way. I shouldn't have used the tomato paste. The sauce is thinly flavored due to the extra water I had to add, but the tomato flavor does come through and I don't think it works well with the cucumber. The combined pork and cucumber juices that gathered on the plate as the pieces rested is pretty tasty and a fair bit better than the prepared sauce to my mind.

I'm curious about the pork and cucumber stir fry recipe I passed up for this. If the two were both sliced thin and tossed together instead of sitting is separate chunks, would I get that blending of flavors throughout? Maybe so. Rather lighter on the oil too. This is good, but next time I've got cucumbers to hand I'm making that instead.

CSA week 16 - Zucchini, cucumber and salmon salad

This was actually just a zucchini and cucumber salad to accompany a salmon fillet, but it needed the fish in there to work so I'm considering it a unified whole.

My original plan was to make zucchini noodles but my mandolin just shredded it instead of making tidy strips. So it was on to plan B. I ran the cucumber through the mandolin to shred it as well. Both ended up with a pile of shreds and a plank of outer shell that I couldn't run through without risking my fingers. Those I sliced as thinly as I could.

I squeezed the liquid out of the shredded cucumber and salted the zucchini and let it drain for a half hour before wringing it out too. That may have been a mistake since I ended up with a nasty overcooked vermicelli texture. I decided to chop up those extra slices and add them to the mix to help the texture out. And then I added parsley and Chinese celery leaves--roughly chopped so that they're vegetable components of the salad, not just herbage--some dill and capers.

If I had any in the house I would have mixed all that with sour cream and topped it with caviar. Yougurt would have done too. But I had to settle for mayonnaise thinned with white vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste and the flavors didn't quite work, but it was edible.

The salmon I rubbed with salt, pepper and dill and fried in olive oil, skin side down, for three minutes. After the flip I turned down the heat, poured some white wine into the pan and covered to let it steam for a couple minutes. When the fish was done I removed it to on top the salad, cooked down the liquid left in the pan to nearly nothing, mounted it with a little butter and poured it over top.


It turned out a bit better than I expected, really. The meatiness and oiliness of the salmon and the rich buttery sauce balanced out the light crunch and slightly funky flavor of the vegetables and the tanginess of the vinegar and capers. So it worked out and, in the end, I can recommend making along these lines.

One last thing while I'm here: tomorrow I'm going to the Coral Gables Food and Wine Festival . I'll be there early before the crowds so I get in fewer people's ways while I'm taking pictures and making notes. Last year I made the worst possible choices of what to try so if you see me there do please say hi and point me to what you think I ought to be eating.

CSA week three - Sunomono

Sunomono is a generic term for any vinegary Japanese side-dish salad. I had this with my leftover sukiyaki and I thought the contrast of the astringent salad dressing and the sweet sukiyaki sauce improved both dishes.

I cobbled my version together from several recipes I found on-line, but there's not a huge amount of variety out there.

Ingredients:
1 medium cucumber
1 small daikon
1/2 Tablespoon salt
dressing:
1 fluid oz soy sauce
1/2 fluid oz rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon chili oil
1 pinch sugar

3 oz picked crab meat

0. Don't peel the cucumber or the daikon. OK, you can peel the daikon if you really want to.

1. Thinly slice the cucumber and daikon in similar ways. I used my mandoline to make somewhat larger julienne than I really wanted. I probably should have used my food processor and made shreds instead. Coins would be fine too. I also probably should have scooped out the cucumber seeds but they did no great harm.

2. Toss vegetables with salt and put into a colander. Let them desiccate and drain for 45 minutes. Rinse off the salt and drain/spin/pat dry the vegetables.

3. Mix the dressing ingredients. Put the vegetables and the crab into a bowl, add the dressing, toss, let sit in the refrigerator for 15 minutes before serving.

Those 15 minutes are actually important I found. Not only does that give the vegetables time to soak up some of the dressing, but the flavors are best at just below room temperature.

I know you don't have crab. I wouldn't either if I hadn't bought it for the callaloo last week. The dish is OK without it, but it's really much better and much more Japanese (which was important to me as I was pairing it with the also distinctively Japanese combination of soy, sweet and fishy in the sukiyaki). The slight bite of the daikon and the cool freshness of the cucumber both pair nicely with the crab. Right now, I'm thinking the three, with a little mayo, would work just as well in little crustless sandwiches for afternoon tea. But with soy and vinegar, yeah, very Japanese. Serve with teriyaki, yakitori, anything yaki, really.

CSA week 1 round-up and week 2 start-up

First up I'd like to thank Marge, who whoever's writing the newsletter, for the more prominent mention this week. I wrote up a little welcome post two weeks ago, but I guess nobody noticed the blog addresses in the little print at the bottom of the last page as there wasn't a hint of new readers in my traffic stats. Also, possibly the relatively familiar vegetables and lack of time pressure meant that people weren't seeking out recipes.

Anyway, I wrote up what I did with most of the vegetables, but there are still some unaccounted for. Unusually, I did mainly what I said I might do in the weekly start-up post. All of the cucumbers and half of the dill went to refrigerator pickles. I used this recipe for a change of pace from my usual except she forgot to actually include dill in the ingredient list so I just judged a reasonable amount to add to the jar. It takes a few weeks for the best flavor to develop so it'll be sitting in the back of the refrigerator for a while before I know how it turned out.

Half of the avocado went to a rather nice guacamole I put together without using a real recipe. I used culantro from my garden instead of the usual cilantro, but I didn't notice any real difference. And I think this is the first time I've added cumin which I think played off the other flavors nicely.




The mizuna I stuffed in rolled chicken breasts and tuna niçoise wraps (good quality tuna, white beans or chick peas with a bit of the canning liquid to moisten, some sweet herbs, tomato and greens. Yummy.) and this alternate presentation of the suon nuong xa I made (which also used some avocado slices). A rice paper wrapper would have been an improvement, but even with just a tortilla, it's a great sandwich. I'm surprised it isn't a staple at those international wrap sandwich shops.

And on to week two. A lighter share this week which is good as I had some trouble getting through everything last time. To start, there's the callaloo. From last year I know that it goes bad fast so I better use it soon. I still haven't had a chance to make callaloo, the dish, as all my callaloo, the vegetable, rotted before I got around to using it last year, so that's my plan for it this time.

The Pei Tsai I'm going to stir fry. In one of my cookbooks, there's a lettuce stir fry recipe on the page opposite a cabbage recipe I've used many times and I've been meaning to try it for a while now. And since I've got the right sort of lettuce at last now's the time.

The butternut squash is nice roasted or in soup or roasted and then in soup. These little ones would make a lovely presentation if they were stuffed, but I'm not likely to have anyone over for dinner so that would just make me sad. Soup it is, then.

The avocado I'd like to find a Caribbean recipe for, but a quick search isn't turning much up. Soup maybe if I roast the squash.

The tomato is a meaty variety that can handle being cooked. Maybe I'll stuff it or it could go into the Thai fried rice I have planned to use up the last of last share's bok choy and lemongrass.

The black sapotes worked well in a sherbet last year. I've got fewer this time around so they won't be the main ingredient if I try that again. I think I may substitute them into my piña colada sherbet recipe and see how that works. I've got a while before they ripen so no rush in deciding.

Finally, the mint. I've never really had much use for fresh mint, particularly this large amount of it. Mojito sorbet?

Community Supported Agriculture - bonus week

So this is the last week of regular CSA shipments for me. I thought that would be true for most of the other subscribers too, but if my drop off point is typical most of you didn't miss any weeks and finished up last time. I guess I shouldn't have saved my wrap up post for today.

Overall I enjoyed the CSA experience. The surprise selection of vegetables each week forced me cook more, cook better and cook more interestingly than I would have otherwise. I could have done with a lot less lettuce and I never need to see another sapote, but otherwise I was pretty happy with the selection we got. The quality and flavor were always tip top which works well with my natural tendency to keep recipes simple.

It also gave me plenty to fill up the blog with and, if I understand my stats right, around two dozen regular readers (most of whom are no longer judging by last week's numbers). I was disappointed that the other blogging subscribers dropped off posting about their cooking very quickly. I was hoping for a community with discussion to develop instead of just me monologuing on. Next year it would be great to have a discussion board on the Bee Heaven website for people to ask questions, give advice and post recipes. I'd happily abandon the blog and put my support behind that. On the other hand, having an audience was crucial to getting me to try new recipes instead of just getting rid of everything in the same old recipes again and again.

And speaking thereof, I managed to use up one of last weeks cucumbers and half a squash along with substantial amounts of dill and garlic chives in a tuna tartar yesterday. It didn't seem worth a blog post of its own since I've discussed tartars a couple times before. But it is worth mentioning briefly as I could easily have used tuna from a pouch (much better than the canned. You really should switch over if you haven't.), cut the cuke and squash a little smaller and had a quite presentable salad. Or I could have sliced the vegetables thin, mixed pouch tuna and the herbs with mayo and layered them in sandwiches. Thinking back to the very tasty cucumber sandwiches I made last month, now I'm really regretting not going that last route. I've still got another squash and cucumber left so I still might.

And by the way, last week I described the share as winter vegetables. While I was researching recipes I learned that they were really an typical end of summer vegetable collection. Just shows how dissociated from the natural harvest cycles I am from a lifetime of shopping in supermarkets. I know you guys knew better; why didn't you correct me?

Anyway, on to this week's share.

First up are scallions and yukina savoy. The scallions are so crisp and fresh that I really want to feature them in something right away. I never made the spiced beef with lime marinated scallions recipe that I found a while back. Maybe I'll do something with that.

The yukina savoy adds to the pile up of cabbage in the house. I still have all of last week's baby bok choy and a bit of the head of Western cabbage from before. If I want to go through a lot at once I think I'll have to do a stir fry or maybe a slaw.

Next I've got more tomatoes, which I will eat fresh this time since I squandered last week's box, a couple peppers once of which looks stuffable, a couple of possibly radishes/possibly turnips I found in the extras box that will roast up nicely either way and a nice big bag of shiitake mushrooms. If I'm going to do a stir fry with the cabbage, the mushrooms will likely end up in there.

And finally, a daikon, some Japanese eggplant, strawberries and cilantro. I did a bit of poking around for a recipe that would use both the daikon and the eggplant (and preferably some of the cabbage too), but nothing presented itself. I could do a tempura, but I've been defaulting to deep frying too much lately and I'd like to go another way.

The cilantro looks a bit faded so I wouldn't be surprised if it goes off before I get to use it, but otherwise I'll find a use for it.

And that leaves the strawberries. Last week I made some whipped cream to accompany them, but I don't think the whipping added anything. It'll be just plain cream this week.

Blogger (or possibly my internet connection) is being temperamental. I'll add the pictures later when I can. Or, alternatively, I'll accidentally delete them. Ah, you know what all those vegetables look like by now.

CSA weeks ten, eleven and eight? - salmon tartar

I've talked about salmon tartar before (way back in week two) so I won't go into too much detail here. If you've been reading along for a while you may have noticed a decreasing level of precision in my cooking. With all of the practice I've been getting I think I'm developing more of a feel for working with vegetables and I'm becoming more comfortable with improvising. I only made the tartar tonight because I started thinking about dinner a bit too late to start brining the chicken; I didn't have a game plan in mind or all the ingredients on hand that I wanted. The original thought was a dill and cucumber sauce for poached salmon but my sour cream had gone all pink. Instead I just started throwing things together. Cucumber from this week's share and dill leftover from a few weeks ago were naturals with salmon of course, and a bit of spring onion wasn't too risky. The interesting ingredient, if there is one, is the shiitake mushrooms from last week. In retrospect they give the same earthy base to the flavor that usually comes from the toast points. I also tossed in some capers (preserved in salt, not vinegar. The vinegared ones would be a bit too strong I thought.), a few shots of hot sauce, lemon juice, salt, pepper and a pinch of dried dill to supplement the faded fresh herb.

Looking back at the recipe from week two what I did, this week wasn't too different, but I was winging it then too (although after having done my usual research). I'm still quite pleased with the combination of flavors and textures and proud of my decision to use the mushrooms; You can't take that away from me.

CSA week five - crock pickles

As I wrote I might in my initial post a week ago, I decided to try making crock pickles with this week's cucumbers. Crock pickles, unlike refrigerator pickles, use no vinegar. Instead they rely on the environmental bacteria to ferment the cucumbers, creating acid and the sour flavor.

The process is simple: make a salt water brine with dill, garlic, black and red pepper for flavor. Put the cucumbers in, cover loosely with a weight to hold the cucumbers under the surface and wait a week or so.

Here's the result. It didn't work out so great. From my reading, two things went wrong. First, these are the wrong sort of cucumbers. The traditional pickling varieties are more solid and they're picked young before the seed region gets watery. That watery part tends to dissolve completely in the brine; I made this a bit worse by cutting the bigger cucumbers to fit and giving the bacteria direct access.

Second, too high a salt level lets yeasts grow that produce carbon dioxide. This creates "bloaters" swelled hollowed out pickles with a somewhat off flavor. (Not nearly as bad, I read, as the cheesy flavor of pickles in an under-salted brine, though.) I suppose it's some comfort that the problem I had is common enough that there's a word for it. Must mean I got it nearly right.

Despite all that, the smaller and more solid cucumbers turned out OK. It's been so long since I've had a proper deli cucumber that I'm not sure how close these come in flavor. I presume I'd have a Proustian burst of memory when I took a bite if I hit it dead on so I'm pretty sure I didn't. But, like I said, they're OK. More tangy than than sour with plenty of salt and hints of dill and garlic.

On the whole, I think I'll stick with refrigerator pickles at least until I get my hands on some proper Kirbys and a real crock.

CSA week two - salmon tartare

I got some distance into preparing pickles (dumping ancient pickled beets and scrubbing out the coffee crock I use as a pickling jar) when I decided that the CSA cucumbers are too watery to be properly pickled and some other application is called for. As you probably guessed from the subject line, first out of the gate is salmon tartare.

A lot of the recipes out there call for sushi grade salmon, but I don't think that's really necessary for this dish for a couple reasons. First, when the fish is chopped so finely (1/4" cubes) and mixed with so many other ingredients, you're not going to be left chewing on a piece of tough meat. Second, the dressing includes lemon juice so the salmon chemically cooks on your plate while you eat.

Additionally, I use frozen fish from my local Publix supermarket on the basis that fish frozen onboard the fishing boat is fresher than fish that's been sitting in the display case for who knows how long. Most likely that fish was frozen too and then defrosted at the fish market so defrosting it yourself is a better idea. My actual point here is that freezing causes ice crystals to form inside the fish's cells which grow to rupture some of them which acts as a tenderizer. (Or if the process is handled badly, turns the fish into mush.)

So here's what I did as near as I can reconstruct the process:

Salmon Tartare
serves one and a half

1 fillet of skinless, boneless salmon, approximately 1/3 pound
1/2 cucumber
1 T onion (or shallots if you've got them)
2 T dill (more CSA produce used up there)
1 T chives (this could easily be doubled)
2 t capers
1 T lemon juice
2 T mayonnaise (sour cream, yogurt, or the like would work just as well. Or use olive oil for a lighter dish.)
1 medium tomato, peeled and seeded (I normally wouldn't bother with peeling, but the peel really wanted off of this particular tomato. weird, really.)
salt and pepper to taste (I'd recommend going light on the salt during prep and use a finishing salt. That worked really well for me.)

1. Cut salmon into 1/4" dice or just whack at it with a couple knives like you're on Iron Chef until it's nearly a paste. (For some reason many tartare recipes specify putting the salmon back into the refrigerator at this point as if it's going to take you all afternoon to chop your vegetables. I say leave it out for the 15 minutes it takes to finish the dish and let it warm up a little to let the flavors out.)

2. Finely chop the onion, dill, chives and tomato. And the capers if you feel like it.

3. Slice the cucumber paper thin and lay the rounds out to cover a plate.

4. Mix the salmon, chopped vegetables, lemon juice and mayo. Mound on the cucumbers or if you want to get fancy, press into a ring on the center of the plate.

5. Sprinkle with finishing salt. (not pictured as I thought of it only after I had taken a few bites and ruined the presentation) Serve with toast points for extra fanciness.

Very tasty and those who go 'ew' at raw fish probably won't even notice that's what they're eating what with everything else going on.