CSA week seven - Collard potato salad with mustard dressing

This is a somewhat unusual preparation for collards; at least I think it is. When you search for collards and mustard, you get a lot of recipes offering mustard greens as a collards alternative. I scanned through a few pages and didn't see any, but maybe all the mustard dressing recipes are just buried beneath. It's the first time I've tried it anyway, so that's something.

I found this recipe on epicurious.com, but it looks like it's originally from Gourmet magazine, February 1992. I made a change that I thought would help the texture, but it didn't really work out.

Ingredients:
1 pound red potatoes, scrubbed and cut into equal-sized pieces
1/2 pound collards, stemmed, washed and sliced into 1-inch wide strips
3 slices bacon, cut into lardons
1 scallion, thinly sliced
1 Tablespoon coarse Dijon mustard
1 Tablespoon red-wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Cook the bacon in a large pan over low heat until crisp. Remove to a paper towel to drain. Keep the pan warm.

2. Fill a large pot with water and bring to a boil. Add potatoes and a generous amount of salt and simmer over medium-low heat until tender. [How long this takes will vary depending on the size of your potatoes so use your judgment and check frequently.] Remove to a large bowl filled with cold water and cool until the potatoes and handleable.

3. Turn the heat under the pan of bacon fat to medium and add potatoes, taking care to shake off the excess water before putting them in the pan. Cook for five minutes on one side then turn to brown a second side.

4. Meanwhile, add collards to the boiling pot of water. [Did I tell you to turn the heat off? I did not.] Simmer for ten minutes until tender.

5. In a small bowl, whisk together mustard, vinegar and olive oil [The original recipe called for a lot more olive oil. Way too much to my mind. I reduced it to a drizzle because I added the bacon fat. If you don't fry the potatoes, add more oil to taste.]

6. When the collards are ready, remove them to the big bowl of cold water. [Did I tell you to dump it out? I did not.] If the potatoes are also ready, remove them a large bowl. When the collards have cooled a bit, squeeze the water out a handful at a time and add to the potatoes taking care to peel the leaves apart. Add the bacon and scallion, top with the dressing and toss until everything is coated.

If you managed to keep the potatoes and bacon crisp despite the humidity from the simmering pot of water, then serve immediately. If, like me, you didn't, serve whenever you'd like.


The result isn't bad. I was hoping for a lot more texturally, but everything is tender. I think I managed to leave a little firmness to both the collards and potatoes, but I was hoping for crispness for contrast too. The flavors aren't a bad match, but it's nothing revelatory either. I might try it again adding a mustard-based hot sauce. That should perk things up. Also, I want to try it cold; I suspect the flavors will work better together that way. I'll add a comment tomorrow to let you know.

Saag aloo

Back in February I made aloo palak which is pretty much the same dish, at least in concept. That recipe and this one use the same ingredients, but combine them in interestingly different ways, particularly creating the sauce out of onion instead of spinach. Seemed worth a try.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound potatoes, cut into 1 1/2-inch diameter pieces
1 pound spinach, cleaned well
1 large onion (or one small onion plus some garlic and some shallot)
1 1/2 Tablespoons cooking oil
1/4 teaspoon whole coriander seed
1/4 teaspoon whole cumin seed
1/4 teaspoon cayanne powder
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon fenugreek
4 ounces canned tomatoes

1. Heat a medium pot of lightly salted water to boiling. Add potatoes and cook until just tender, 10 to 15 minutes

2. Heat a large pan over medium heat. Add the spinach with a little water from the cleaning. Cover and cook for 3 minutes. Remove from pan, let cool to handling temperature and squeeze out most of the moisture.

3. Slice the onion. Clean any spinach juice out of the large pan, add the oil and heat over medium heat. Add half the onion and sauté until golden brown. Add the whole coriander and cumin and cook for 1 minute more. Remove to a food processor.

4. Add the rest of the onion, shallots and garlic and blend until smooth.

5. Return to the pan and cook over low heat for 5 minutes. Add the potatoes, spinach and spices. Cook over low heat for 15 minutes. Add the tomatoes (the original recipe called for half as much tomatoes, but 2 ounces is barely any at all so I doubled it.), stir well, cover and simmer 10 minutes more.

Serve with rice or roti and a dollop of chutney.

The spinach is well overcooked, of course: on the verge of falling apart and a little mushy but the stems still have some texture. There's a bit of spinach flavor left plus mild spiciness, but the flavor is dominated by the onions and potatoes (which add welcome textural interest). It's all rather sedate so the spicy tangy bite of the chutney is a welcome addition. The amount of chutney in the picture is rather too much, but once I added another scoop of the saag aloo, it evened out nicely. It doesn't much resemble any restaurant saag aloo, I don't think, but it's been a while since I've had it. I wonder if this is a typical recipe or some weird aberation.

Southwestern pulled brisket sandwiches with Mesa Grill potato salad

This post combines both of my rather modest goals for the summer: cooking new things in my slow cooker (new to me, anyway) and using the produce from the Buying Club in summery ways.

My previous summers in Miami I pretty much ignored the climate and made whatever looked interesting, but I guess I'm just in a different mood this year. Running the oven in a 90 degree kitchen just doesn't sound appealing. So I'm keeping an eye out for dishes both served cold and requiring less cooking. Certainly I'll be making exceptions, but I do want to shift the majority in that direction.

I found both of these recipes on the Food Network's website. The Mesa Grill recipe is Bobby Flay's obviously. The brisket is from a 2004 episode of a show called Making It Easy that I don't think I've ever encountered. I'm no expert in either slow cooker cooking or Southwestern cuisine so I didn't make any significant changes in either recipe. I hope you don't mind a bit of cutting and pasting from the original sources as they both had quite a few ingredients and I don't see any particular reason to rewrite a scrupulously followed recipe.

Pulled brisket ingredients:
3 pounds beef brisket
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
5 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 Spanish onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon chili powder
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 (14 1/2-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, with their juices
2 whole canned chipotle chiles en adobo
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons molasses
Soft sandwich buns
Pickled jalapeños [sweet pickles are just as good. The results aren't really all that Southwestern]

1. Season the beef generously with salt and pepper, to taste. Heat a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the oil and heat just until beginning to smoke. Add the meat and cook, turning once, until browned on both sides, about 10 minutes total. Transfer the meat to the slow cooker; leave the skillet on the heat.

2. Add garlic, onion, chili powder, coriander, and cumin to drippings in the skillet and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add vinegar and boil until it's almost gone, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Stir in water and pour the mixture over the brisket. Crush the tomatoes through your fingers into the slow cooker; add the tomato juices, chipotles, bay leaves, and molasses. Cover the cooker, set it on LOW, and cook the brisket until it pulls apart easily with a fork, about 8 hours.

3. [The original recipe calls for just pulling the meat apart in the cooker and serving, but I wanted a thicker sauce which requires a few more steps.] Remove meat and bay leaves from the slow cooker. Turn off the slow cooker or remove the cooking vessel from the heater or pour out the sauce into a large bowl. Discard the bay leaves and let the brisket and sauce cool a bit.

4. When it's cool enough to handle, pour the sauce into a food processor or blender and blend smooth. Return to slow cooker if it has a High setting that's pretty high or pour into a pot on the stovetop. [I tried the former first but switched to the latter.] Cook the sauce down until it's thick enough to splatter when it bubbles.

5. Meanwhile, pull the brisket apart with forks and/or tongs. When the sauce is to your ideal thickness, mix it with the meat.

Serve on buns or in tortillas with the pickled jalapeños on top. Over egg noodles or rice wouldn't be bad either.


Ingredients for Mesa Grill potato salad:
[I halved these amounts. If I had known how poorly potato salad freezes, I would have quartered them. Instead, I've been eating potato salad way too many meals in a row. It's good but I've got my limits.]
1 1/2 cups prepared mayonnaise
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons chipotle pepper puree [or one chipotle en adobo chopped fine]
1 large ripe tomato, seeded and diced
1/4 cup chopped cilantro leaves
3 scallions, chopped, white and green parts
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
16 new potatoes, about 3 to 4 pounds

1. Heat a large pot of water. Cut potatoes into large, similarly-sized pieces. When water comes to a boil, add potatoes and a generous amount of salt. Lower heat to medium-low. Simmer until potatoes are tender. Remove to cutting board, let cool until you can handle them and slice into 1/2-inch thick slices.

2. Combine all the ingredients, except the potatoes, in a medium bowl and season with salt and pepper, to taste. Mix in potatoes. Check seasoning and serve warm.


I cooked the sauce down more after this first sandwich but this picture isn't too far off from the final version. The sauce tasted a bit muddy at first, but the flavors clarified after a night in the refrigerator with more of the spices unique character coming through instead of just a general heat. The small amount of vinegar in the sauce isn't enough to balance on its own; the pickles (of whatever sort) are important to cut through the rich meaty flavors. And I'm pleased that there is some meaty flavor left in the meat. Often it's all leached out after 8-9 hours of cooking.

As for the potato salad, I can't recall ever having better. Just the lack of chunks of raw celery is a huge plus. Beyond that, large tender slices of potato are an improvement over chunks. There's a freshness from the scallion and cilantro that balances against the creaminess, slight tartness and gentle heat. Nicely complex and a lovely pairing with the the brisket. The only possible issue is that the sauce to potato ratio is pretty high so it might be better to put the potatoes in a large bowl and add the sauce to taste.

CSA week 20 - Beet, dandelion and potato gratin

I think this is officially the last of the CSA dishes for this year. Well, I've got some turnips left, but two weeks after the last delivery is probably a good place to stop counting. I think I'll do a full wrap-up post for the year some time this weekend after I've thought it over for a bit.

I was hoping to do something with the dandelion greens separately--a Sephardic soup--but I wasn't able to find the Spanish-style corned beef or kosher chorizo to do it up right.

I think the dandelion greens will have a good home here. I found a few beet gratin recipes that used mustard greens and dandelion is a fair approximation.

I'm using potatoes as well in emulation of a recipe by Chef Lance Barto from the restaurant Strings in Denver. When I found his recipe I liked how he layered the two separately for a two-tone effect. And since I've got a few extra potatoes in the pantry to get rid of, why not give it a try?

As isn't unusual with semi-improvised recipes, this didn't work out perfectly and there are lots of possibilities for improvements. I'm just going to tell you what I did instead of writing up some imaginary version; you can adjust as you see fit.

Ingredients:
1 bunch dandelion greens
2 teaspoons olive oil
4 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 handful parsley, cleaned and chopped
3 medium beets, peeled and thinly sliced
3 medium potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
6 ounces goat cheese
3 ounces Parmesan cheese
salt, pepper and fines herbes to taste (or tarragon and chervil if you don't have a fines herbes blend)
good quality mild red wine vinegar

Step zero, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

I blanched the dandelion greens in boiling water for 3 minutes. Let them cool, then chopped roughly. Then I heated the oil in a medium pan over medium high heat, added the garlic and greens and cooked until aromatic and tender. Moved them to a bowl, let cool and mixed with the parsley.

Nex I heated up the cream and milk in the same medium pot I blanched the greens in. While it was heating I added the goat cheese, forcing it through a slotted spoon to break it up. And I used my microplane to finely grate in 2 ounces of Parmesan cheese. I also added the salt, pepper and herbs at this point. Vigorous stirring and a couple minutes of simmering dissolved most of the cheese but it was still a bit lumpy.

Then I layered the beets on the bottom of the baking dish. My slices were very thin so I got five layers or so out of it.

The dandelion mixture went on next. And the potatoes over that.

I poured the cheese mixture over top, shook and tapped to get out air bubbles and lifted up the edges a bit to get it to seep down through the strata.

45 minutes at 350 degrees with foil over top then I removed the foil, forgot to check the potato for doneness, grated on more Parmesan and topped with a layer of panko bread crumbs. Then back into the oven for another 8 minutes to get it browned and crispy on top. That didn't do the trick but 2-3 more minutes under the broil did.

After 10 minutes of resting, it was time to slice out a piece. The potatoes and beets were a little underdone so back into the oven for 15 minutes. No real change so back for another 20. I'd recommend baking at 400 degrees to try to speed things up if you make this.

OK, after all that baking, I'm really hungry and it's finally ready.
The sauce didn't thicken up much, though. Not enough cheese dissolved in it and nothing absorbant in the solids. I should have added a few eggs in there. The liquid sauce carries the red tint around too so that screws up the cool presentation I was hoping for. Well, it's sort of there. A smaller, deeper pan would have emphasized it more.

Visual aesthetics aside, it tastes great. The potato is pretty much filler, but the combination of the softly sweet beets and salty creamy cheese sauce accented by the garlicy greens and toasty crisp topping is pretty fabulous. A few drops of vinegar adds a tang that brings out the beets flavor and cuts through the fattiness. I can see why so many beet and goat cheese recipes use it. It's a very nice added touch.

The flavors were best a bit before the potato got to the texture I wanted so, if you're going to try making it, best to leave it a little al dente. Also beware the dreaded pink drips of irrevocable staining.

This needs a little more work, but it's definitely in the right neighborhood and good enough to be worth perfecting. I wonder how replacing the potatoes with turnips or radishes would work.

CSA week 20 - Suwa bhaji

Dill with garam masala. Garam masala with dill. I've got to say I'm a little skeptical about how this is going to turn out. But it isn't some avant garde experiment; this is a traditional north Indian dish. Search for dill bhaji or dill curry and you'll get lots of variations. And I'm not one to doubt the collective wisdom of a cuisine so I'm going to give it a try. OK, here goes nothing (but a perfectly good bunch of dill).

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon oil
1 teaspoon cumin seed
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium onion, diced
1 hot chili, diced
1 large potato, peeled and diced
1 CSA-sized bunch of dill (the original recipe I based this on called for 4 bunches and I don't know how large a bunch of dill is in north India. But the CSA gave us quite a lot of dill so I figure I'm probably in the ballpark.), cleaned and roughly chopped
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon garam masala (there's a good bit of variation in the three garam masala spice blends on sale at Whole Foods. I picked the one with the most pepper since "garam" means hot. If yours is less spicy or is just faded since you don't use it too often, you might want to add more than the 1/2 teaspoon of pepper called for to compensate.)
salt to taste (probably more than you think you need since the potato just soaks salt up)
1/3 to 1/2 cup water

1. Heat the oil in a large pan or dutch oven over medium high heat. When it's shimmery add the cumin and garlic. After a few seconds, when they've become fragrant, add the onion and chili. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion becomes translucent and lightly browned.

2. Add the potato and cook, stirring frequently, until the potatoes get a little browned. Turn up the heat if necessary.

3. Add the dill stems, cook briefly and then add the leaves. Cook briefly to wilt. Add the salt, cayenne, garam masala and the water. Mix thoroughly, scraping up any bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Turn down the heat to medium and cook until potatoes are tender and the sauce has cooked down and thickened.

Serve with rice or if you're rather less tired than I am, phulkas. Some chutney or yogurt or something would probably not be bad either. I actually bought both and then forgot to use them. Whoops.

And that looks...kind of odd. And it tastes...not bad. Takes a little getting used to, tasting the dill against the cumin, but the sweet heat of the spice against the particular taste of the dill works. It helps that cooking the dill tones down the grassy aromatic edge and lets it play better with the other flavors as a vegetable. I'm halfway through the serving and now I'm starting to actually like it. Then I hit a little raw dill (I reused the bowl) and I'm not liking it so much any more. OK, so, not a revelation, but interesting. I'll try adding those forgotten condiments when I have the leftovers and put some notes in the comments to tell you how it went.

Potato Pandemonium at Possum Trot

Last night was an underground-ish dinner down at Possum Trot Tropical Fruit Nursery. Robert Barnum, the proprietor of the place (geez, now they've got me doing the alliteration) was our host and chef. Margie of Bee Heaven Farm helped organize it. Marian Wertalka of Redland Rambles did some previews on her blog and took a bunch of photos too so I think you can expect her write up on the event too. They both mentioned being part of the taste testing in preparation for the evening and I believe Margie supplied the potatoes. Robert of Robert is Here is also thanked on the flyer but his contribution isn't explained and I didn't meet him there to ask. That is a different Robert than Robert Barnum, right?

Robert served eight dishes for, I'd say five or six courses depending on your definition. He was aided in the kitchen by three interns or hired help or some such. I didn't get everyone on film or catch all their names so I'll have to refer you to Redland Rambles again because I'm pretty sure Marian was rather more conscientious about that than I was.

All the dishes featured potatoes; Several just were potatoes. Refined fancy cuisine this was not. Then again, professional chef Robert is not and the point of the evening was more to highlight the quality of the produce than to wow us with technique.

That causes a bit of a problem for me since that makes my usual write-up of bitchily picking apart and critiquing the dishes seem a bit mean-spirited. For the Cobaya dinners I know the dishes are experimental so maybe my feedback is helpful. For the other dining events I just expect professional results from professionals and the public ought to know if the chefs deliver. Robert told me straight out he's not going to be reading this so the first justification doesn't hold and he's not running a restaurant so the second doesn't really apply either. ... OK, I've given it a bit more consideration and I think I've changed my mind. Robert is intending to do more of these dinners if there's demand, it's easy enough for feedback to get back to him though Margie or Marian and he does have "Cantankerous Chef" on his business card. So bitchy critiques it is.

As usual, I let other folks take pictures of the people while I concentrated more on the food. I refer you again to the Redland Rambles blog if you want pics of who was there. I did take a few shots during Robert's brief tour of the farm immediately surrounding the house. Here he is proffering a, I think, cas guava or possibly an araçá.

I had some forewarning of local coffee but I had no idea you could grow cinnamon around here, miracle fruit or bay leaves. Funny you don't get more bay in tropical cuisines if it's a tropical plant. We also saw the smoker out back which will come into play later.

There were around ten of us in attendance. Two people expected didn't show. I barely made it myself given the weather, traffic and the Google Maps directions that sent me to the unmarked back entrance. Luckily, I stumbled across the front door where they had stationed a fellow with a red truck visible in the gloom to wave people in.

Before dinner, we had a bit of homemade wine. Ignore the labels, these bottle have been refilled. I had a brief tour of the winery after dinner. It's not a big operation, just 45 gallons this year. Robert had several varieties on offer (and several more not on offer including lychee and antidesma wines); I had the dry bignay wine which I found easy drinking--smooth, light and floral. Not complex, but nice. Miles better than Schnebly's tropical fruit wines to my mind.

The first course we sat down was the vichyssoise with potato chips. It needed a bit of salt, probably intended to be supplied by the potato chips, but I wasn't going to waste extra-tasty fresh potato chips by dunking them in cream soup. Luckily there was a small pot of salt supplied although I didn't see anyone else taking advantage of it. It's not an insult to the chef to add salt, you know. Experience of flavors is subjective and varies between individuals. If you, like I, have a low sensitivity to salt, you need to add more to bring the flavors out. That's just the way it is. Anyway, once properly seasoned, the soup had some good potato flavor with little potato shreds adding texture.

Next up was a potato salad with carambola relish and smoked eggs. The dressing looks heavy, but it was really quite light and the potato flavor came right through. There were several sorts of potatoes in there and I tried to taste the difference but if there was any it was lost on me. The carambola was the particularly sour sort which was an odd pairing, but not bad. A little more fo the pimiento, celery, curry powder and/or smoked egg would have added some dimension, but it was pretty much just potato.

The dishes started piled up at this point. Here you can see, in the back, scalloped potatoes with betel leaf and a beef stew with potatoes and carrots. In front are smoked potatoes on the left and parsleyed potatoes on the right.

There's not much more to the front two dishes than those names: smoked potatoes with a little olive oil and rosemary and boiled potatoes slightly mashed with parsley and a little butter. Neither really needed any more. Both had moist texture and a good balance of flavors and would have been fine side dishes in a more sensible meal.

Robert skimped on the betel in the scalloped potatoes. Partly as a deliberate decision and partly due to how badly the betel bushes fared in the cold. It really could have used more and the cheese he used didn't have a lot of flavor and the dish could have used something to punch it up. I saw a lot of this dish leftover at the end of the evening.

On the other hand, the beef stew was quite popular. I'm not entirely sure why, though. If the grass fed beef (from 4 Arrows Ranch in Citra, FL) was anything special, that specialness had been boiled out of it. The gravy was rich, but greasy and the vegetables on the edge of mushiness. What I really liked, though, was the raw white carrot that garnished the stew. That was sweet, bright and crisp--pretty yummy.

After a few minutes wait so it could come out of the oven perfectly done, came a light and fluffy potato soufflé. I'm told that the trial-run soufflés fell and tasted like potato pancakes. These stayed up and tasted mostly of egg with a subtle note of hashbrown. I might have added a little maple syrup and/or hot sauce to round out the flavors myself, but since Robert didn't expect it to turn out so breakfasty, I can understand why he didn't.

And finally desert--potato pancakes with cas guava/passion fruit drizzle, chunks of mango and slices of another unidentified fruit underneath. Along with that we had small glasses of araçá wine. The wine had a liqueur-like intensity with caramel notes balanced against green apple. It was fairly tart, but much less tart than straight araçá (or so I'm told never having tried araçá before). This dish was the most professional of the night, with a lovely balance of sweet, savory, tangy and tart plus a variety of textures.

And that was the meal. Overall, a lovely evening and slow food in every sense but the capitalized one, but to be honest, that's way too much potato. I get the idea of featuring one item in multiple ways, but when your secret ingredient is something as meat-and-potatoes as potatoes, you've got to be extra clever to make it continually interesting over the course of an evening Robert is no iron chef. There were definitely some good dishes in there, but they'd be stronger in contrast, not surrounded by similar-tasting dishes. I'd certainly consider coming to another Possom Trot dinner, but I'd have to consider the concept and the menu first.

CSA week 11 - Aloo palak

So my third thought for using the spinach and potato together was an Indian curry. There are lots of recipes for aloo palak out there, but almost all are basically the same: shred some spinach and cube some potatoes, put them in a pot with a little water and cook until done. Yeah, 15 minutes of cooking will turn spinach into a sauce of sorts, but that's an awful thing to do to an innocent vegetable. Better to take another approach that I've seen in Indian recipes--cook the elements separately and then combine them just before serving.

Ingredients:
1/2 onion, chopped
1 mild green chili, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed (garlic is rare in the recipes I saw, but I included it anyway)
1-inch knob ginger, crushed
1 large bunch spinach, roughly chopped

4 medium new potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
turmeric

1 Tablespoon ghee (or failing that, butter)
whole cumin
ground coriander
salt

cilantro, chopped
tomato, chopped
lemon
cream

1. Add onion, chili, garlic and ginger to a medium pot along with a quarter cup of water. Simmer over medium heat a few minutes until onion and pepper soften. Add the spinach in batch, adding more as previous batches wilt to make room in the pot. When all of the spinach is cooked, pour everything into a food processor or blender and process until smooth.

2. Return the pot to the heat, add the potatoes, water to cover, generous salt and a bit more turmeric than you think you need (since most of both the salt and turmeric will stay in the water). Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are tender, around 10 minutes maybe. Drain potatoes in a colander.

3. Return pot to heat, turn heat back up to medium and add ghee. When it finishes sizzling add a few dashes of cumin seed. Cook briefly until it becomes fragrant and add spinach. Add coriander and salt to taste and a little cream if needed to loosen the sauce. Then add the potato. Stir to combine and heat through.

4. Serve with rice and/or Indian bread, garnished with cilantro, tomato a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of cream.



Pretty good. It's just spinach and potatoes so it's not spectacular, but both flavors are brought out well so: pretty good. The garlic, ginger and spices add a bit of interest but don't overwhelm the basic flavors. It could use a little acid, but I left my last lemon at work to fix up my ice cream. Maybe a little white vinegar...yeah, that's not bad. The sauce is creamy (cream will do that) and the potatoes soft. Not a whole lot of textural interest; I should have pulled the potatoes out a minute or two earlier.

The dish isn't entirely satisfying. Some paneer wouldn't have hurt. Or maybe a second dish with some contrasting flavors. A fine side component of a meal, let's say.

CSA week five - Bacalhau a Mineira

Coming off of two relatively dull posts and some extra time away from the blog, I knew I had to come back from my trip with an extra interesting post. That's a particular challenge given the cabbage and plum tomatoes I had to work with. Not the most congenial ingredients for something impressive.

But, I think what I've got here just might fit the bill. Bacalhau a Mineira is a salt cod dish from the Minas Gerais state of Brazil. It's one of those dishes where every village has its own variation and the only proper one is the way your mother made it. I found a recipe in English on recipehound.com that was taken from the Book of Latin American Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, but when I looked for other versions, I had to Babel-fish translate them from Portuguese. I may not be getting everything quite right, but at least I know they're authentic.

Almost every version I found, with the exception of Ms. Ortiz's oddly, was a casserole layered with pre-cooked vegetables, heavy on the potatoes. So, I started with a pot of salted water where I boiled two thickly sliced medium red potatoes until just tender. I removed those and then blanched three plum tomatoes to make them easier to peel. Removed them, lowered the heat and coddled two eggs.

Meanwhile, in a medium cast iron pan, I sautéed sliced onion, garlic and red and green peppers until softened. Then I added about three quarters of a pound of sliced cabbage which I sautéed over rather high heat until nicely wilted. To that I added the tomatoes, peeled and chopped, and a half cup of white wine. I reduced the heat, cooked until the tomatoes started to fall apart and then removed all of that to a bowl, leaving the accumulated juices in the pan.

Into those juices went three quarters of a pound of salt cod that I had soaked overnight in a few changes of water to desalinify (so why I didn't just use fresh cod, I dunno). I cooked the cod until it started getting fragrant and flaky and then removed it to another bowl.

Now it was time to start building the casserole. Since the pan was oven safe I just used it instead of a baking dish. First a layer of the cabbage mixture, then some potato slices, then some cod, sprinkled with parsley, green and black olives and, god help us all, raisins. I repeated that two more times, each layer well-lubricated with olive oil.

On top I nestled in my halved beautifully mollet-cooked and then topped with shredded queijo Minas. At least that's what the recipe called for. I asked for a substitute at Whole Foods, but the cheese expert (from Brazil fortunately enough) got called away and a couple yahoos attempted to help. I ended up with a queso blanco that was a) a bit too salty and b) didn't melt the way queijo Minas is supposed to. Ah well.

But I only learned that latter part after 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

And here's the result:


That pile really ought to be at least partially held together with melted cheese. One recipe I saw shredded the potatoes and mixed it and shredded cheese in with the other ingredients. Maybe I should have done that.


Hmm...this is an interesting combination of flavors. I wouldn't have thought raisins and cod would work, but they do. It's not really melding though. It's a lot of individual elements that aren't actively clashing, but not building to anything either. Maybe the cheese is supposed to hold it together more than just physically. Now that it's cooled a bit, the cabbage, potato and cod flavors are working well together, the earthy melange punctuated by the bright saltiness of the olives emphasizing the cod and raisins bringing out the cabbage's sweetness. The tomatoes don't do much, but these aren't the world's most flavorful tomatoes. Still, I think I'm starting to get how it's supposed to work and I think I can say I actually like this now. Good thing since I've got about five meal's worth left over.

Another roast chicken variation

A nice thing about roasting a chicken is that, although it does heat up the kitchen, you don't actually have to be in there with it most of the time. I think I've mentioned before that my kitchen door has a rubber gasket around the edges that can seal the heat in without it contaminating my air conditioning. I get a headache if I go back and forth too often, but for roasting, that's generally not necessary.

Last roast chicken I made, I used the Zuni Café recipe. I did it by the book that time; This time I wanted to tweak the recipe in a few different ways to see how it would hold up.

My first change was to replace the basic salt and pepper dry marinade with a fancier spice mix. I used more to compensate for the low salt percentage in the hot Cajun spice mix I picked, but not enough. I had to salt the chicken again at serving. Surprisingly, that seemed to be just as good. Usually, post-cooking salting of meat doesn't work as well; Maybe this method primes the meat to take up flavorings? I have an idea of how that might work, but I don't actually know what I'm talking about so I'll spare you the details.

Post-refrigerator-rest, the original recipe calls for heating a skillet on the stovetop, dropping the chicken into it and then putting it into a preheated oven. Instead, I heated a cast iron skillet in the pre-heating oven. When the oven was up to 475 degrees, I took out the pan, added potatoes that I had cut into pieces about an inch across and a handful of garlic cloves, still in the peel, both of which I had rolled in salt, sprigs of fresh thyme and olive oil. The chicken went on top of that. The goal here was not just to roast some potatoes, but to elevate the chicken out of its juices. Last time I ended up with one side with crisp skin and one side that was tasty but soggy. Maybe this will help.

Oh, and I stuffed half a lemon and a few stems of parsley into the chicken's cavity. That's pretty standard and I was surprised the original recipe didn't do it. On the other hand, I couldn't detect either flavor in the final chicken so I dunno.

Then I roasted as per the original recipe: 30 minutes breast side up, flipped for 10-20 more and then flipped back for 5-10 for crisping. This was a 3 3/4 pound chicken so my times were on the upper end of those ranges.

Once the chicken was done, I removed it to a cutting board, pulled out the potatoes and, instead of just cooking down the drippings into a sauce the chicken didn't really need, I added a couple handfuls of spinach to the pan to wilt. It's always nice when you can get all the elements of a dinner out of one pan.




On the whole, pretty good, but no particular improvement over the Zuni original. Actually, I think the potato roasting rack idea backfired and ended up steaming the skin on the bottom of the chicken to flabbiness instead of letting it crisp. The potatoes themselves are nicely chewy on the outside, soft inside and nicely flavored by the drippings, but that flavor was taken away from the pan so the spinach didn't gain from it. Next time, I'll roast the potatoes in a separate pan alongside the chicken. Ah well, worth a try.

One more thing before I go. Since the chicken wasn't heavily spiced, but was nicely succulent, I was able to use the leftovers in a classic Chinatown chicken on rice. If you've had this dish, you know that it's a whole lot of white rice, sliced plain boiled chicken served at room temperature, maybe a little leafy green vegetable and an amazing sauce that elevates it to equal the roast pork and roast duck its served alongside. I did a bit of research and discovered that the sauce is amazingly simple, just chopped scallions, grated ginger and salt poached in a neutral oil to infuse the flavor plus a drizzle of good soy sauce and a drizzle of sesame oil. I didn't get a good picture so you'll just have to imagine it, but it was better than the original dinner and really easy if you've got the chicken and some extra spinach or somesuch about.

Kuku paka

I've been meaning to try some more recipes from the Congo Cookbook
for a while now. I don't know much about the cuisines of sub-Saharan Africa and there's no better way to learn than actually cooking the dishes. But when I actually started looking around the site, the techniques and flavor combinations were familiar from the African diaspora. I've seen a lot of it before in Southern and Caribbean cooking. So, when choosing what to make first I ended up with Kuku Paka, an Ismaili dish from eastern Africa that mixes in influences from India. It's interesting that some of the same influences that went west into Africa also went east so this recipe actually has a fair bit in common with the Indian-influenced Thai Masaman curry. Well, I think it's interesting.

I didn't want to use the whole chicken the recipe calls for so I cut it (the recipe, not the chicken) in half and used a pound and a half of chicken thighs (which I tried to cut in half too, but my hatchet wasn't sharp enough to get cleanly through the bone. I ended up slicing down the side of the thigh bone to make smaller pieces instead.)

Kuku Paka

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoons cooking oil or butter
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 sweet green peppers, chopped [I used a pile of small red and yellow sweet peppers instead]
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
2 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 pounds chicken thighs, cut into small serving-sized pieces
1/2 cup water
2 to 3 potatoes, cleaned and coarsely chopped
2 small tomatoes, cut into chunks
1 cup coconut milk
2 teaspoons lemon juice
fresh cilantro or parsley [or both], chopped

1. Heat oil in large saucepan over high heat. Add onions and peppers and fry, stirring, for a few minutes until softened and starting to brown. Add garlic and continue to stir for one minute more. Mix in spices and salt and cook briefly until fragrant.

2. Scrape mixture to the side and add chicken to the pot. Brown the chicken on all sides. Remove chicken and set aside.

3. Add water to pot, scrape up browned bits from the bottom, lower heat to medium low and bring to a low simmer. Add potatoes, cover pot, and cook until tender. [This step takes approximately for-flippin'-ever so you may not want to follow my example here. The original recipe offers the alternative of frying the potatoes in a separate pan while the chicken is cooking in the next step. You should probably do that.]

4. Add chicken and cook until done.

5. Stir in tomatoes and cook for several more minutes until they collapse and start to form a sauce. Add coconut milk, reduce heat and gently stir and simmer until sauce thickens to however thick you want it. If you want it particularly cooked down, remove the chicken to keep it from overcooking. If you're using proper boiling potatoes, they can take it and will absorb some flavor so leave them in.

6. Squeeze in lemon and garnish with herbs. Serve with chapati or rice.

The lemon is optional in the original recipe, being a modification from another coconut chicken stew from southeast Africa, but I think the dish definitely needs the acid.



It's...well, it's not bad, as such, but I've had a lot better coconut chicken dishes. Putting the tomatoes and coconut milk in at the end doesn't bring out their best. Even with the lemon and herbs, the flavors are muddy--probably from the onions, peppers and spices that were over high heat for rather a long time. A few dashes of Maggi sauce help and add some African character but I still find that I want to dose it with hot sauce to wake it up and hide its imperfections. I've found another couple recipes for the dish online and both use hot peppers so that's probably OK. They also cook the chicken in the tomatoes and coconut milk so maybe I should be looking over there instead. Too late for this dish, though. I'll have to count on some time in the refrigerator to improve the flavors.

Butter poached shrimp, new potatoes and pearl onions

It should tell you how far awry my cooking went today that none of those four ingredients were in the recipe I was making. Also, that recipe was for ice cream.

The original idea here was to a) use the last of the CSA celery and b) make a new ice cream flavor since I hadn't in a while. Put those two together and you get, first, celery ice cream--which might work as a component in a savory dish--second, celery and peanut butter ice cream--a natural sweet pairing that is interesting but presents textural issues--and third, celery-infused peanut butter ice cream with raisins--an ice cream version of ants on a log (ants in a bog maybe?).

Peanut butter ice cream recipes aren't hard to find, but how to infuse the celery flavor? I don't want to cook it as I want the raw flavor so I can't use the usual infusion method. But I figure celery is mostly water; if I run it through the food processor it should break down into mush easily enough. And with supermarket celery I think it would have worked. CSA celery is different though, much more dense. I processed it with a little milk and just got a bowlful of celery shards.

Plan B: add all the milk and cream and process the celery until everything turns green and it's fairly smooth. Strain out the big chunks and there you go. I give it a few pulses and things are indeed turning green, but there's not a lot of celery flavor getting into the liquid. I figure a couple minutes processing should get everything good and combined and add in the celery leaves for good measure. But when I check the progress I find the tiny bits of celery encased in a mass of creamy gunk--I've churned the cream into butter. I thought making butter was supposed to be a lot harder than that. The cream was ultrapasturized; Isn't that supposed to stop it from separating quite so easily?

So, the ice cream is ruined. I fish the solids out of what I suppose is now celery-colored skim milk and ponder what to do with them. Nobody wants celery-flavored butter so I'm going to have to get them apart. I can do something like distilation. Just like water and alcohol boil at different temperatures allowing their separation, butter and celery melt at different temperatures and that should let me separate them.

I want to use gentle heat so I put it in a double boiler. It works, sort of, but a lot of the milk solids are stuck to the celery and aren't going anywhere. In that case, I may as well skip the gentle heat, simmer it for a while and try to clarify it. When you simmer plain butter, the milk solids turn brown and sink to the bottom leaving clarified butter on top; maybe these milk solids will be able to drag the celery down with them. I simmer for ten minutes and I can start to see some clarification around the edges, but no browning. Close enough, I scoop it into a cheesecloth-lined strainer and squeeze out the liquids.

Here's the result.

Still not quite clear, but at least it isn't green. It does taste of celery so, hey, at least I finally managed to infuse some flavor. While it hardened in the refrigerator I considered what to do with it and came up with butter poaching. Looking at what I've got around the house to poach, I first thought of salmon, which isn't bad with celery, but I only found one proper butter-poached salmon recipe on the web and lots of butter-poached shellfish, so I'm going to go with the wisdom of crowds on this one.

I melted the butter back down, added a blorp of white wine, the juice of half a lemon, salt, pepper and a good pinch of a Parisian herb blend, mixed well to emulsify and brought it to a bare simmer and backed off the heat a little to keep the cooking to a poach. In went the smallest of my CSA red potatoes, the larger ones quartered to match the smallest in size. They simmered (as the heat crept up on me) for 10 minutes before I added the still-mostly-frozen onions. Twenty more minutes of semi-simmering got them done and then I dropped the heat down a little more before adding, still in their shells, the three shrimp I had left in the house. They only needed three minutes poaching. Everyone out of the pool and kept warm while I turned up the heat and cooked down the liquid into a sauce for four more minutes. I finished off the sauce with some capers and poured it over top.


Not bad at all. A hint of celery comes through in the sauce and works with its tart and rich flavors. The potatoes are creamy, the onions squish like they should and the shrimp are done just right and, with the lemon and butter sauce, are plenty tasty. All in all, a pretty good salvage job for a failed ice cream.