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.

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.

Larb salad

Larb (or laab or laap or, quite possibly, laarpb) is a salad from northeastern Thailand. There are a good many variations out there, all kind of complicated. The key, from what I've read, is balance between all of the different elements, but since we're talking Thai food here, this is the pyramid of circus elephants sort of balance, not the delicate flower arrangement of Japanese dishes. Did that metaphor work? Maybe Japanese food is a pyramid of crickets?

It's generally served rolled up in lettuce leaves, with papaya salad, with green beans, cabbage or spinach and/or with sticky rice.

Anyway,
Ingredients:
5-8 ounces of lean pork, chicken, duck, whatever, with some offal thrown in if you've got it. I just used pork.
1 Tablespoon rice
2 Tablespoons chicken stock
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 pinch sugar
1 pinch salt
1 or 2 limes
~2 Tablespoons fish sauce, the serious good quality Thai stuff. It should smell awful straight.
~1/2 teaspoon chili powder, freshly ground if you can manage it
1/4 to 3 shallots depending on how big your shallots are, sliced thin
1 large handful of mixed mint, cilantro and scallions, chopped
1 Kaffir lime leaf, slivered

1. Put the meat in the freezer for an hour or so to firm up and then chop it by hand for a few minutes until it looks like it's been ground. Apparently this makes a difference. It only took a few minutes so why not?

2. Toast the rice in a dry pan until it turn brown and aromatic. Grind it in a spice grinder or mortar.

3. Squeeze the juice of 1/3 of a lime over the pork. Mix well and marinate.

4. Add stock, garlic, sugar and salt to a small pan. Heat over high heat until boiling. Add pork and cook, stirring, for a couple minutes until cooked through and kind of fluffy in texture. The pork will stick and then unstick as it releases juices. Because it's being cooked in the liquids it shouldn't dry out too much.

5. Turn out pork and accumulated liquid into a large bowl. Add fish sauce, a couple Tablespoons of lime juice and chili powder. Taste and adjust seasonings until you're getting sweet, salty, spicy, sour and pungent all at once.

6. Add the shallots, herbs, lime leaf and most of the toasted rice powder. Toss well. The rice powder should absorb a good bit of the liquid.

Serve with whichever of the accompaniments listed above that you'd like. I defrosted some CSA green beans and made up a batch of sticky rice, myself. Garnish with the remainder of the rice powder and maybe some leftover herbage.


There are a whole lot of flavors going on here. The sour spicy funkiness of the dressing is up front, but it's on a foundation of meatiness and has a variety of herbal notes brightening it up with the aromatic mint clearly present. I'm finding the mint a lot more harmonious here with the fish sauce and lime than in the Iranian context I used it in a while back. You can taste the toasted rice in there adding its own unique not-quite-nuttiness too.

There's a good variety of textures too with the chewy meat, crisp vegetables and tender rice.

This is a dish that rewards concentration. I was paying close attention while I was writing the description, but then I sat down to dinner while reading a book and, while the larb was still tasty and unusual, I missed the subtleties of interplay between all those different elements and now that I'm finished I regret that decision. Stupid five-minutes-ago-me, doing two things at once!

CSA week 13 - Cold beef, avocado and chipotle salad

This is a variation on a Rick Bayless recipe. I've been watching his Mexico: One Plate at a Time show recently so when I had a pile of Mexican ingredients and no particular plans I checked out his website. A lot of interesting recipes there and, an aspect I liked a lot, lots of variations on them too. The nice thing about variations is, for beginners it gives a range of recipes to follow and for the more experienced cook it reveals what's central to the dish, what's ancillary and how the pieces fit together. Here's the recipe cut and pasted from his site with a few notes and pics added.

Cold Chicken and Avocado with Chipotle Chile

Pollo, Aguacate y Chile Chipotle en Frio

Yield: about 3 1/2 cups, enough for 12 tacos, serving 4 as a light main course [This is the only place he mentions tacos. You'd think "spoon into tortillas" would be part of the serving instructions, but I think guests are supposed to do that themselves at the table after the actual serving and there's a basic assumption of "what else would you do with it?" so the instruction got left out.]

The chicken for this salad can be prepared 1 or 2 days in advance and then mixed with the dressing just before serving. Great for a summer picnic.

Ingredients

1 chicken leg-and-thigh quarter or 1 large breast half

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 small (about 6 ounces total) boiling potatoes like the red-skinned ones, halved

2 medium (about 6 ounces total) carrots, peeled and cut into 1 1/2-inch lengths

1/4 cup cider vinegar

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 to 4 canned chiles chipotles, seeded and thinly sliced

1/4 small onion, finely diced

4 large romaine lettuce leaves, sliced in 3/8-inch strips, plus several whole leaves for garnish

1 ripe avocado, peeled, pitted and diced

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1 slice of onion, broken into rings, for garnish

Directions

1. The chicken mixture. Bring 2 cups water to a boil in a medium-size saucepan, add the chicken and salt, skim off the foam that rises as the water returns to a boil, partially cover and simmer over medium heat—23 minutes for the dark meat, 13 minutes for the breast. If there is time, cool the chicken in the broth. Boil the potatoes and carrots in salted water to cover until they are just tender, 12 to 15 minutes. Rinse for a moment under cold water, strip off the potato skins, if you wish, then cut the potatoes and carrots into 3/8-inch dice. Place in a large mixing bowl. Skin and bone the chicken, then tear the meat into large shreds and add to the potatoes. Skim off all the fat on top of the broth, then measure 3 tablespoons of broth into a small bowl. Stir in the vinegar, oregano and salt. Pour the dressing over the chicken mixture and add the sliced chiles chipotles and chopped onion. Stir, cover and let stand for 45 minutes, refrigerated or at room temperature.
2. Finishing the dish. Shortly before serving, mix the sliced lettuce and diced avocado into the chicken mixture. Drizzle with oil and toss lightly. Taste for salt. Line a serving platter with the remaining romaine leaves and pile on the chicken mixture. Decorate with the onion rings and serve.

COOK’S NOTES

Ingredients

Chiles Chipotles: In Mexico City, dishes like this often utilize pickled (not adobo-packed) chipotles. Without any chipotles at all, this dish loses many of its special qualities, though a nice salad can be made using pickled jalapeños and chopped fresh coriander (cilantro), if desired.

Timing and Advance Preparation
The active preparation time is less than 45 minutes, though you’ll need to start a couple of hours before serving. The chicken mixture can marinate overnight, covered and refrigerated; complete the final dressing within 15 minutes of serving. [I didn't find I needed much more than an hour prep time total. I think he's giving really long cooling times.]

TRADITIONAL VARIATIONS
Variations on the Salpicón Theme: The proportions and selection of the main ingredients should be kept loose. Meats such as ham and leftover pork or beef roast can easily be substituted for the cooked chicken.
[I had beef but it wasn't leftover. I didn't think it would respond well to boiling like chicken would so I braised it instead. I'd rather have given it a longer time but I was hungry. I kept it to twenty minutes cooking and then physically tenderized it during shredding by removing excess connective tissue.]

CONTEMPORARY IDEAS
Smoked Chicken Salad with Avocado and Chipotle: Replace the cooked chicken with 4 or 5 ounces (about 2/3 cup) diced smoked chicken. Serve on plates lined with lightly dressed curly lettuce leaves.

It turned out pretty good. The chewiness of the beef and, to a lesser extent, the tortilla contrasts with the soft cooked vegetables, crisp raw vegetables and creamy avocado to give a lot of textural interest. There's a nice combination of flavors here with subtle heat and tartness against the savory beef, smoky chipotles and the bright freshness of the vegetables. The tortilla both holds the salad together physically and tempers the sharpness of the dressing to keep everything in balance. I considered making the pickled jalapeño variation, but I'm glad I didn't. The vinegar would have been overwhelming; the chipotles give this dish a lot of character.

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.

Bresaola salad

I've been making a habit recently of picking up something I haven't tried or have no particular recipe in mind for during my grocery shopping. Bar hurricane alerts, that's about as exciting as my life gets. On my last visit to Fresh Market I got some bresaola, a salted air-dried aged meat that's essentially the beef equivalent of proscuitto. I was rather hoping that it would match proscuitto's double life: equally good raw in antipasti or fried up as a component in a main dish. But from everything I can find, it's just used in simple salads. This one I made is on the complicated side. A bed of baby greens, a layer of bresaola, capers, peppers, some shreds of Parmesano and a dressing of lemon juice and olive oil. Or you could just wrap it around a piece of cheese and stick it on a crostini. The flavor is a slightly funky version of lunchmeat roast beef which isn't bad I suppose if you're a big fan of lunchmeat roast beef. Now, I understand that the twenty-some dollars per pound I spent is rather a bargain so this is unlikely to be the good stuff (And since my visit to Salumi in Seattle I have entirely new perspective on just what "good stuff" means when it comes to cured meats.) and I would not be at all surprised if the good stuff is sublime. But this isn't. And even if it was, sublime stuff you can't make a complicated recipe with does not a blog post make unless you're touring the factory.