CSA week five - grapefruit anchovy salad

Grapefruit and anchovies sound like an odd combination, I'll admit, but it's not as far a reach as you might think. I'm just substituting the grapefruit into a traditional Sicilian orange and anchovy salad. I was prepared to add some sugar to adjust, but I was lucky enough to have a couple unusually sweet grapefruit. I let them sit for an extra week after they looked ripe; Maybe that made a difference.

Ingredients:
1 medium and 1 small grapefruit, cut into supremes and then into bite-sized pieces
two stems flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
1 scallion, green part only, chopped
4 anchovy fillets, chopped
1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper to taste (careful with the salt as you've got the anchovies)

1. Cut grapefruit into a bowl and drain the excess juice.

2. Add everything else, mix, taste and adjust seasoning.


This salad comes together a lot better than you'd expect. The balance is only slightly off a salad dressed in lemon vinaigrette. The salt cuts the bitterness of the grapefruit and the juiciness of the fruit buffers the saltiness of the anchovies. With everything balanced, the most prominent flavors to emerge are herbal with citrus tartness and olive oil unctuousness backing it up. Possibly that's because I started with two quite mild grapefruit. You'll have to bump up the other elements if yours are intensely sour and/or bitter.

Now that I know grapefruit goes with the salt and umami of anchovies, I want to try it with Worcestershire sauce. I'll let you know how that goes.

CSA week three - grapefruit-passionfruit sorbet

No story here, just an idea I had.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups grapefruit, fruit extracted from various membranes
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp and seeds
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon honey
1 sizable squeeze lime
1 Tablespoon vodka
2 pinches salt
1/4 teaspoon tandori spice (coriander, ginger and cardamom mostly. Some garlic, cumin and paprika in there too)

1. Extract the grapefruit meat, removing the membranes and seeds.

2. Heat the water and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Add to the grapefruit and blend.

3. Add the passionfruit and everything else. Mix well, chill, churn and freeze.

You'll have noticed one unusual item in the ingredient list. I knew I wanted something to cut the grapefruit's bitterness beyond just more sugar and, while I was looking through the spice cabinet, the tandori spice mix presented itself.


In the final flavor mix it comes off less tandori and more spice cake and acts as a rich undertone to the sweet, sour and bitter notes of the fruit. It's distinctly separate so it doesn't temper the bitterness quite as I had hoped (the flavors blended better when the mixture was warm). The passionfruit does tone the grapefruit down a bit, though, rounding out the fruit flavors. It adds some really interesting mottling in color, texture and even flavor as the two fruits never quite fully broke up or blended together.

It's an unusual mixture of flavors that, I think, works. It isn't synergistic into some crowd-pleasing form, though; nobody's going to eat a big bowlful and come back for seconds, but I think folks will finish that first bowl. I'll add an addendum once I've found someone else to try it.

CSA week 15 round-up, week 16 start-up

Back to driving to the share pick-up point today. Weather like this always makes my bad knee (from too many crashes while bicycle commuting in Boston) act up so I wasn't sure I could make it all the way there and back on foot. And good thing too as it started pouring again while I would have been still on my way home. Maybe next week.

I've got a couple dishes left to talk about from last share. I did make dim sum-style daikon cakes again, but I a new recipe from the February 2007 issue of Bon Appétit which is posted all over the Web at this point, but I found reposted here. It's a little unusual in that it calls for squeezing all the moisture out of the finely chopped daikon and frying it for 20 minutes with the fillings instead of boiling it. It really condensed and intensified the flavors nicely. Plus the smaller batch of the recipe halved to the one daikon radish I had made the thin cakes I was looking for. A substantial improvement all around. I was hoping to use the mazuna here too, but the cup of cilantro I was going to swap it in for is actually in a dipping sauce which I don't think the recipe needs at all.

I also made the fruit and oat bars again filling them this time with a cup of chopped dried apricots stewed with 1/3 cup sugar and a thick slice of ginger in the juice of my last grapefruit. I accidentally halved the butter in the oat mixture so the texture is rather sandy but the filling is bursting with bright and rich flavor. You can't identify the grapefruit, but the apricot is airbrushed, enhanced and framed and I'm giving the grapefruit credit for that.


Beyond that, I've still got plenty of mazuna, lettuce and chard although they're getting past their prime. And a whole lot new in this week's share too.



Along with what came in my half share I was pleasantly surprised to find a leek in the extras box and I took some red radishes from the event-leftovers pile. Even if I can't find a use for them immediately, they'll keep for a while.

I'd be much happier seeing the callaloo and kale if I hadn't had more than enough of them already. And I've still got half of the previous batch of callaloo still sitting around. I haven't made a proper pepper pot soup yet. Maybe I'll do that. As for the kale, a braise with Portuguese sausage, maybe. I don't really want to do the full caldo verde thing because of how potatoes freeze poorly, but I can use the same flavor profile for something with better leftovers.

The zucchini and squash are enough for a few recipes. I have a zucchini garlic soup I'd like to try and I've got this image of a recipe where you layer long strips of thinly sliced squash in a baking dish. I'm not sure that's real, though. Maybe a risotto instead.

Plenty of radishes, too. The tops I'll likely sauté. At least some of the rest I'd like to roast. I don't think I've tried that before and I'm curious how it'll work out.

The pepper goes into the pepper pot soup if I make that. The cucumber in a salad of some sort, maybe with salmon since I've got some.

I'm not going to plan anything in particular around the herbs or the leek. I'm sure they'll find a place. The Chinese celery saves my chicken soup (that I really ought to get started making if I want it done in time for dinner) from the rubbery browning celery that's been sitting in my produce drawer for a while. That's a good place for the leek too now that I think of it.

CSA week 15 - Grapefruit-coconut milk ice cream

And here we go. A pretty simple recipe this time around as all the citrus ice cream recipes I found were very straightforward and I decided to go with the suggestion. You wouldn't want to muddy the bright clean flavor of grapefruit with custard or cream cheese anyway.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup brown sugar
zest of 1 grapefruit
3 dashes cinnamon
2 dashes allspice
1 dash ginger
1 pinch salt
Process in food processor until fine-grained and uniform.
Then add
1/2 cup grapefruit supremes and juice
a few drops vanilla.
Blend until the sugar is well dissolved, add a little more grapefruit pulp for texture and chill.
I probably should have gotten a picture of this. Sorry.

Just before churning, mix with:
1 cup thick coconut milk
1 cup heavy cream
No reason to risk curdling by leaving the citrus with the dairy any longer than necessary.

I was afraid that without the custard or cornstarch this would freeze up solid, but it churned up nice and light without any problem.


The texture's quite good considering. It's smooth and creamy, but a little light as something more than half fruit products ought to be. The flavor, well, imagine taking a scoop of lightly flavored, slightly spicy coconut ice cream, and eating it with some grapefruit. The two components don't mesh; they're both just there. A bit of a disappointment there, but it's nothing you'd turn your nose up at unless you really hated grapefruit. Both elements are understated so it's easy eating but nothing really pops. That's not entirely a bad thing considering what you get when grapefruit pops.

But you know what would have really worked? If I had used lime instead, boosted the coconut flavor a bit and maybe included a little kaffir lime leaf as an exotic touch. Or if you want a crowd-pleaser, use key limes, replace the coconut milk with sweetened condensed milk and add crumbled pie crust.

CSA week 15 - Grapefruit and curried shrimp sauté

I mentioned in this week's opening post that I wasn't sure about the flavor combination of grapefruit and coconut milk. I took a look on-line and I found very few recipes using the two. Not a good sign. Best to try one to be sure, though. Yeah, I could open a can of coconut milk and dunk in a piece grapefruit, but then I'd be stuck with an open can of coconut milk and I'd end up wasting it.

So, the recipe I found at the Halal Kitchen blog is kind of odd even beyond this unusual pairing of ingredients. I've never seen a recipe that thickens coconut milk with a roux before. But the author said it came out well so I'm going to make it as written, just cut down to a quarter to make a reasonable amount.

Grapefruit and Curried Shrimp Sauté

Ingredients:
1 TB. butter
1 cloves garlic, smashed
tiny pinch of saffron
1/4 small yellow onion, finely chopped (about 1/8 cup)
1 1/4 TB flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 TB. curry powder (1/4 TB. if you like really spicy!)
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/8 cup freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice
1/2 pounds fresh shrimp, peeled, deveined and cleaned
1/4 cup grapefruit meat (skin removed), quartered and cut in half
1 Tb.(or more, to taste) fresh cilantro, roughly chopped

Method of Preparation:
*Note: Prepare all ingredients ahead of time and organize them well. Once you begin this recipe, the steps go fast and you will not have time to leave the stove lest you burn the butter, dry out the roux or curdle the sauce.

1. In a medium saucepan, melt the butter on low with the garlic and saffron, approx. 5 min. Do not burn. There is no need to stir.

2. Once the butter mixture is done, add onions. Over medium-high heat, sauté the onions but do not brown them, approx. 5-7 minutes.

3. With a wooden spoon, blend in the flour to make a rough paste, or roux. Add the salt and curry powder and blend. Keep blending to avoid burning the roux, until all ingredients are well mixed. [I found that this made a particularly thick roux so I added a little more butter to loosen it up a little.]

4. Turn heat to medium-low. Add coconut milk and blend until the roux is completely free of any lumps. Add grapefruit juice and keep stirring to smooth out the mixture and avoid curdling of the coconut milk. Cook until thick, approx. 3-5 minutes. [The roux thickened the liquid into more of a paste than a sauce so I had to add around a half cup of water to fix the texture. Rouxs must not change linearly when adjusting recipes.]

5. Add shrimp and stir, until you see that some have begun to turn pink. Next, add the grapefruit sections and continue stirring the mixture to avoid anything from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Turn heat to low, if necessary. Be sure that shrimp is cooking well by
turning pink and becoming a bit smaller than when raw. This may be a bit difficult to see through the pinkish color of the sauce, but keep turning the shrimp in the pan to look for this color. Cook in this manner for approximately 10 minutes. [I turned the heat to low immediately, got the sauce below boiling to poach the shrimp. My extra large shrimp took the full 10 minutes that way.]

6. Serve on a bed of white, sticky or jasmine rice and top with roughly-chopped cilantro. [I used brown rice since I had the extra time to cook it. I discovered halfway through prepping the recipe that the can opener that broke on Saturday hadn't miraculously fixed itself since so I had to go out and but a replacement.] I added some kaffir lime leaves to the cilantro, since my little tree has foliage to spare these days, and some sriracha too.


The grapefruit pieces broke down so this is really just shrimp in a creamy sauce, and that sauce is, surprisingly, very tasty indeed and a remarkably good pairing with the shrimp. Or maybe it's not so surprising: coconut milk with a bit of spice, a bit of salt, a bit of citrus. That should taste good and match with the shrimp's meaty sweetness. If there's an unusual aspect that stands out, it's really the roux that gives it an interesting gravy-like texture and yummy unctuous undertones. There's a slight bitterness that hints at the presence of grapefruit instead of the more traditional lime, but it's very subtle. This was a fine dish that I could easily see making again, but it wasn't a very good test of the flavor combination. I'm going to have to just try the two together after all. ... Not bad, but not a nice harmonious chord of flavors either. And I think it works only because this grapefruit is particularly sweet. Eh, good enough. Grapefruit coconut sorbet it is. Now I just need to clear some space in the freezer to fit the churn's bucket.

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.]