Pappardelle with caramelized onions, skirt steak and fresh tomatoes

Despite my talk about avoiding the kitchen as soon as I restocked my supplies I found myself leaping straight from "I'm hungry" to throwing together something worth writing about. (There are no prep pictures this time as I didn't know it would be post-worthy until after I tasted it.)

Specifically this came about because had purchased more skirt steak than I needed for a fajita recipe you'll see later this week. I don't eat a lot of beef so I haven't tried a lot of different cuts. This is the first time I've tried skirt steak and I'm pretty impressed with it. It's nicely flavorful, has an unusual loose texture that grabs on to rubs and marinades, and it gives tender results when cooked up quickly. It's not a traditional steak but it seems like a good choice for dishes that call for small pieces of beef which are far more common in my repertoire. So, anyway, I was cutting a large skirt steak up into serving-sized pieces for freezing and decided to give it a try. Here's what I came up with:

Pappardelle with caramelized onions, skirt steak and fresh tomatoes

3 nests pappardelle or two generous servings of another pasta
1/4 lb skirt steak, sliced into thin strips against the grain
1 medium onion, sliced thin
3 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
4 large cherry tomatoes, roughly chopped (or 1 medium full-sized tomato)
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
2 teaspoons butter
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons steak spice rub (I used Spice House's Milwaukee Avenue polish-style steak seasoning, but anything smokey and peppery will do)
2 Tablespoons parsley, roughly chopped

1. Heat cast iron pan over high heat. Add oil and butter. When butter stops foaming add onion and garlic, stirring so they're well coated in oil, and immediately turn heat down to medium-low. The vegetables will get a head start on browning from the residual heat. This works best with cast iron on an electric stove. Stir onions frequently. Lower the heat if they look like they're starting to get crisp.

2. Put water for pasta on heat.

3. Coat steak in spice rub. Set aside.

4.When water is at a rolling boil add pasta (with generous amounts of salt). Cook to al dente, for pappardelle six minutes.

5. When pasta is almost ready, remove onions to serving bowl draining the oil back into the pan. Add tomatoes and vinegar to bowl along with salt and pepper to taste. Stir briefly. Turn pan up to high heat.

6. When pasta is ready, drain but don't rinse and add to serving bowl. Toss with onions and tomatoes. (You'll be tossing again later, but don't neglect this one or your pasta will stick to itself instead of to the sauce.)

7.Add steak to pan, making sure the slices are well scattered over the surface. Let sit for 20 to 30 seconds to get a good browning on one side and then stir fry until finished. This should only take around another 20 seconds. Remove to serving bowl, add parsley and toss again.


If you used a non-stick pan, you might want to deglaze it, but that generally doesn't work so well on cast iron unless it's enamelled or very well seasoned.

8. Serve immediately.

mafé - groundnut tomato stew

If you watched Top Chef this week you'll have seen one of the judges, Chef Tom Colicchio, repeatedly disparaging one dishes' combination of tomatoes and peanut butter as if he had no idea that it's a traditional West African combination (as traditional as an African combination of two new world plants can be, anyway). The chef who made it was clearly going for a standard chicken in peanut sauce--she served it over couscous so she knew the African origins and didn't just stumble on recipe independently--but if she explained that the fault lay in the preparation of the dish and not the conception, it didn't make it to air.

That's a problem I've had myself. I mean preparing a peanut-tomato dish, not malicious reality show editors making me look like a jerk. I've tried it a few different times and I've never come up with something worth eating. Colicchio's ignorance and/or lousy attitude was sufficient impetus for me to give it another shot.

I found a lot of different variations on the basic idea on-line, but I settled on this recipe for the Senegalese version, mafé, mainly because it hasn't been adjusted for American kitchens and sensibilities so I could do that myself.

I really wanted to use mutton or maybe goat but I've settled on buying my vegetables at Whole Foods in the CSA off season for lack of a better choice and their in-house butcher is more focused on semi-prepared meals for harried professionals than on offering a decent selection of meats or cuts. They didn't have any pork belly either so that dish is going to have to wait until I make a trip to Publix or maybe order something through the mail if I don't like the looks of what they've got. On the other hand Whole Foods does carry marrow bones so that should be a nice meal (and a post) some time soon. Anyway, I settled on beef given the choices offered. For vegetables, I've got a sweet potato and a carrot that should suit and my CSA yukina savoy survived all my refrigerator troubles fairly unscathed.

For the cooking method, I've discussed the better way to make stew in a Western kitchen (browning the meat and then a low slow braise in a 300 degree oven) before. You didn't get the full story then because that was a simple stew without any vegetables. Adding vegetables complicates things because they don't all take the same time to cook. For this recipe, I browned the beef, removed it from the pot, browned an onion and a couple jalapenos, returned the beef and stirred in two Tablespoons of tomato paste (I like the sort that comes in a tube) and a couple handfuls of roughly chopped cherry tomatoes. That would be two standard sized tomatoes if I could find any that taste anything like an actual tomato. And that goes into the 300 degree oven.




After an hour the tomatoes and beef juices have formed a rather nice sauce. The low heat keeps temperatures below boiling so it doesn't thicken and dry up. I stirred in the sweet potato and carrot and returned the pot to the oven.



After another half hour I added the yukina savoy.

After twenty more minutes I added a cup of fresh(ish)-ground unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter and enough water to thin the sauce out a bit. The original recipe says it's done now, but I put it back in the oven for ten minutes to let the flavors blend a little. Oh, and I should mention that the original recipe calls for Maggi sauce. From what I can dig up, that's an all-purpose sauce made from vegetable protein that tastes something like soy sauce. Whole Foods didn't carry it, but they did have a bottle of another brand of vegetable protein sauce at the salad bar. It seemed somewhere between soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to me. I used just a little soy sauce in the mafé and, as I neglected to replace the Worcestershire after the big refrigerator melt-down, some Pickapeppa sauce which tastes surprisingly similar considering its complete lack of fermented fish.

So how did it taste? Like peanut butter. The one cup I added walked all over the other flavors. The tomato had cooked down, mellowed and blended with the other flavors over the two hours of cooking so it had no chance against the peanut butter. Stews generally taste better the second day so I'm hopeful the situation will improve, but for now it's one more failure in my peanut-tomato recipe history.


OK, it's tomorrow. The overnight flavor-melding doesn't seem to have helped much, but on the bright side I was able to get my hands on some Maggi sauce. I think the comparison to soy sauce must be more by way of use than flavor. There is a slight resemblance but Maggi sauce has smoky, vinegary and meaty notes you don't find anywhere in soy. I can see why it's a staple in West Africa as it goes beautifully with peanuts. Mixing in a generous amount gives a result something like satay peanut sauce. I think it salvaged the dish and the lack of it at Whole Foods was probably why the chef who made peanut chicken on Top Chef ended up in the losers' circle.

CSA week 18 - beef & bulgar stuffed peppers

The last couple times we got peppers in our shares the ones in my box were rather too gnarled for easy stuffing. That's not a real complaint; beautifully shaped, extra large vegetables are the hallmark of factory agriculture and they usually taste of nothing much at all. So it was just luck that my peppers this week had nice big hollows suitable for stuffing. Or maybe they had longer on the vine now that we're at the end of the season? I dunno.

Anyway, I've discussed stuffing before and it comes down to a starch, a binder, finely chopped aromatics and optionally some meat. I happen to have some bulgar wheat that I picked up on a whim and have been wanting to use, so that's my starch set. Before I did my research, my assumption was that I'd find northern European bulgar-and-beef-stuffed cabbage recipes that I could modify to suit, but what I actually found were vegetarian Turkish bulgar-stuffed pepper recipes. I decided on this rather odd recipe from Good Housekeeping that pairs the bulgar wheat with ground beef, spinach, canned tomatoes, feta and dill. I don't know if that's supposed to be any particular cuisine or just a bunch of flavors they liked together.

I was intrigued by the technique of microwaving the peppers for a good long time before stuffing. They didn't say why so I wondered if it was to drive out moisture and it certainly did a little of that, but, in retrospect, I think the main point was to just get the peppers cooked. Everything else is cooked by the time it goes into the oven and the half hour at 350 degrees is just to warm everything through. If I had to do it again, I'd roast the peppers or at least microwave a little less and then char them on the stove.

I used the recipe as a vague guideline and didn't really pay much attention to the amounts. When dividing a recipe by four the ratios don't work out anyway. The biggest difference, I think, was using a couple handfuls of grape tomatoes instead of canned crushed tomatoes. I ended up opening a can of tomato sauce to compensate. That may have been a mistake as the canned sauce flavor ended up contributing to making the whole thing taste kind of generic and pre-prepared. I had hoped the odd combination of flavors would make something distinctively different, but other than some better textures, it could have been your standard Italian stuffed pepper. It wasn't a bad example of an Italian stuffed pepper, mind you, but I was hoping for something a little offbeat. That's what I get for following a recipe. I think now I know enough to improvise and I can do something really interesting the next time I stuff something.

CSA week 15 - roasted broccoli, spring onion and grape tomato

This is a slight take off from the Cook's Illustrated (a.k.a. America's Test Kitchen) recipe for roast broccoli. The main differences being me not bothering with most of their refinements. That's not unusual for me as they often overcomplicate recipes, but usually each step or ingredient I leave out is a small but noticeable deviation from an ideal result.

This time, though, the difference was in the broccoli. They don't mention it explicitly, but it's safe to assume that their recipe starts with supermarket broccoli. The CSA broccoli we have is more delicate; I think it's a hybrid with the trippy fractal Romanesco variety. You can see a little bit of the spirals and the distinctive light green coloration in the heads. The delicacy meant that I didn't need to peel the stems (such as we were given) and I couldn't cut the florets into tidy halves to lie flat the way the recipe prescribes.

The key bits of the Cook's Illustrated recipe I kept were tossing the vegetables in olive oil with a dash of salt and sugar (to encourage browning) and cooking them at 500 degrees F for ten minutes or so. I was quite worried the onions would scorch far before that but they held up well. On the other hand, I was hoping the grape tomatoes would burst and start creating a sauce, but they just shriveled up.

My initial plan was to roast the broccoli, onion, tomato and maybe some pepper and mushrooms to go into a macaroni and cheese. (Not the instant sort. I have a very nice recipe for from scratch. Well, maybe the instant sort. Kraft dinner isn't anything like real macaroni and cheese but it has charms of its own.) But I decided that for the first time I made this, if it turned out, I wanted to really taste it and not drown it in a heavy cheese sauce.

Instead I figured I could add a bit of butter and use it as a pasta sauce on its own. My choices were plain or egg pasta (in various shapes), or one of the three varieties of ravioli I currently have in the freezer: black olive artichoke, garlic Gorgonzola, and three mushroom. Which would you pick? After some deliberation I went with the garlic Gorgonzola ravioli. Gorgonzola goes with broccoli; It's true. But I've got to say I liked the roasted vegetables best all on their own without any pasta or cheese getting in the way. In retrospect, they'd work better as a topping for steak than for pasta. The same goes for Gorgonzola now that I think about it. Now if only I actually liked steak.

CSA week 15 - leblebi-esque escarole and chikpea soup

I was looking at the escarole and cannellini bean recipe in this week's newsletter and thinking that the chickpeas I had handy would substitute well for the beans I didn't. A quick search turned up this recipe for an escarole and chickpea stew that seemed promising. The author said it was based on leblebi, a traditional Moroccan breakfast soup. Well, it turns out there are a few different dishes that go by that name but when I came across this recipe I was hooked.

It hasn't really come out in the dishes I've talked about on the blog but I'm a huge fan of garnishes. My favorite presentation is a simple dish surrounded by a dozen bowls so everyone can personalize their serving. So this list of leblebi garnishes:
Lemon wedges
Coarse sea salt
Harissa
Chopped fresh tomatoes
Chopped green and red bell peppers
2 hardboiled eggs, chopped
Rinsed capers
Sliced pickled turnips
Flaked canned tuna fish (oil- or water-packed)
Freshly ground cumin
Finely chopped fresh parsley
Finely chopped cilantro
Sliced preserved lemons
Croutons or sliced stale bread
Thinly sliced scallions, both white and green parts
Olive oil

called out to me.

There's nothing to the soup itself: four cups of chicken soup (I used half my stock and half from a can), one can of chickpeas, one head of escarole. Simmer until tender (around five minutes I found). It's everything else that makes the dish.

The most important garnishes are the stale bread underneath and the loosely poached egg and harissa on top. Harissa, if you didn't read my previous post on it, is a North African chili oil. The particular bottle I've got has the other ubiquitous North African condiment, preserved lemons, mixed in. I also added tomatoes, green pepper, capers, scallion, cilantro and parsley, black olives (which weren't on this particular list but they're also typical for North Africa), sea salt and olive oil. I probably wasn't suppose to use all of that at once, but I liked having a different combination of flavors and textures in every spoonful. Five minutes cooking didn't give time for the soup's flavors to blend. The escarole and chickpeas retain their character in the crowd. This is simple (sort of) hearty comfort food. You can tell that even if the flavors are unfamiliar. My only advice is to go easy on the harissa and preserved lemons or they'll walk all over the other flavors.

One final thing just so Googlers with different terminology can still find this recipe: garbanzo, garbanzo, garbanzo, garbanzo. There, that should do it.

CSA week 14 - warm green bean tomato and feta salad

I had other plans for the green beans but I noticed a program listing with this recipe while scrolling through the cable guide yesterday so you can thank this morning's episode of Sarah's Secrets for this dish. I was surprised to discover Sarah Moulton airing at all on the Food Channel, even as a Wednesday morning rerun. I thought she had been banished along with Mario to give Rachel Ray and Paula Dean more airtime.

Here's her version with all the right ratios of ingredients. I didn't catch everything as they flashed up on the screen so mine turned out a bit differently. Mainly I misread 1 1/4 pounds of green beans as 1 3/4 pounds so my scaled down version is significantly beanier than the original. Also, I threw in a couple handfuls of shredded leftover roast chicken. Beyond that, I used the cherry tomatoes halved instead of chopped larger tomatoes, used red wine vinegar instead of white and garnished with fresh oregano.

But that's not enough tweaking that I feel entirely comfortable plagiarizing the recipe here. Just follow the link if you like the looks of the pictures.

EDIT: Well that was a pretty anemic post. I should have waited until this morning instead of trying to get it up just before heading to bed. I neglected to mention how the dish actually tasted. Pretty good, actually. The tomatoes cooked down into the base of a sauce enriched by the slightly melted feta. I've had orzo salads before where the cheese completely melted to create a gloppy mess with an unpleasant mouth feel. The nearly intact feta worked better as the beans, cheese, tomatoes and chicken each retained their individual character without being drowned by an overwhelming sauce.

One final thought: if you're going to try this dish (and why wouldn't you?), undercook the green beans a little at the start as they'll cook a little more waiting in the pan for the orzo to finish and you want them to retain some crispness. Also, I think adding beef or lamb would work better than chicken if you're going to add meat.