cooking green things again!

Farmer’s markets are back! Fresh green things are back!

So in celebration of the fact that I have non-frozen kale and have not yet gotten sick of salads, I tried something inspired by a Brazilian restaurant we like to eat at – a raw kale salad made with kale cut into ribbons, marinated in acid, salt and garlic (I used vinegar, it could use lemon instead), and then tossed with olive oil right before serving. The soaking in the acidic part of the dressing first tenderizes the kale, and the amazing this is that it’s tender enough to eat, not wilty, and keeps well in the fridge to eat the rest the next day. This will be a favorite salad this summer, I expect.

Shredded kale salad

* 1 bunch kale, sliced into thin shreds or ribbons
(you can even leave the center rib in where it’s not 1/2″ thick)
* 2-3 tbsp apple cider vinegar or lemon juice
* 1 tsp salt
* 1-2 cloves crushed garlic
* 1 tbsp olive oil

Put the kale in a bowl, add the salt, garlic, and vinegar/lemon juice, toss thoroughly, and let sit for at least 30 minutes. This step will tenderize the kale. Then add the olive oil and toss together, adjust seasoning to taste.

Our other interesting meal this week used artichokes. I don’t know that you can get these locally, and mine came in a plastic clamshell case from California or something. The rest of the meal showcased farmers’ market goodness, though! The artichokes were braised with a little garlic, lemon juice, and salted water.
Meanwhile, I gently poached some smoked local haddock that leaped into my shopping bag at the farmers’ market in milk for a few minutes (as the fish smokehouse guy recommended – I guess the smoked haddock is smoked for flavor more than preservation, and still requires cooking.) I then turned the mildly fish, smoky, milk into a sauce for dipping artichoke leaves in – too tasty to throw out! – combining it with the artichoke liquid and a bit of cornstarch.

The fish went on locally baked bread with thinly sliced onions and cream cheese, and they all went into our bellies. Except for K, who LOVES artichokes but can’t stand the smell of smoked fish and won’t eat cream cheese either. (She got her plain artichokes and bread and was happy too.)

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How to Cook a Wolf

Some years ago, I read an essay by Jeffery Steingarten titled “Staying Alive,” in his book The Man Who Ate Everything. Now, before I go on, everyone should read Mr. Steingarten, who is almost as cool as he thinks he is, which makes him very cool indeed. He’s an excellent writer and talks a lot about food in an intelligent way.

But the essay itself was one that’s come back to me, time and again. It’s about how to eat on the cheap — in particular, he examines MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf and the Thrifty Food Plan from the USDA, the government’s lame attempt to explain to people on food stamps how to eat on the cheap.

Maybe it’s because I’m living near Tufts, home of one of the best nutrition programs in the world and of Dr. Jean Mayer, but I became fascinated by the idea of eating cheaply. So, when the folks organizing the community kitchen asked what classes we’d be willing and able to teach, I included, among others, Poverty Cuisine: Eating like a Queen while Shopping Like Pauper.

(It’s not a great title, I know. But I made it up on the fly. Work with me here.)

The thing is, eating cheap isn’t drastically different from how I eat on a regular basis. Many, if not all, of the same rules apply:

1. Buy things that have one ingredient
2. Use meat as a flavoring, not as an entree
3. Never buy what you can make
4. Beans and whole grains together make an excellent meal
5. Think ahead and plan your meals at least a day ahead of time
6. Flour is always cheaper than bread

And, of course, there’s the famous rule that you can have it good, fast, or cheap. You can even have two out of the three. But you rarely get all three at the same time.

Now, I’m a mom and not in a poverty situation, so I’m willing to admit that sometimes I go for fast and good instead of cheap and good. I’m grateful that we live in Davis, where there are plenty of fast and good options … that deliver. (Redbones!)

But I can imagine a time and a place where that wouldn’t be the case. I can imagine people who have never cooked and now have suddenly stricter budgets and realize that Trader Jo’s frozen meals aren’t a good idea. I want to help them.

I’m still working on my syllabus: recipes, tips, suggestions, strategies. You all have any thoughts?

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travel salad

We go to Croatia for about 2 weeks, once or twice a year, and that’s long enough that most things in the fridge need to get used up before we leave.
Plus, outgoing flights to Europe usually leave in the evening, just late enough that dinner once you get through security is a good idea (even though they’ll eventually pass something out on the flight.)

So I’ve gotten in the habit of making a composed salad out of whatever I can find in the fridge that needs using up.

This time, it was:
boiled beets
boiled potato
cooked peas
olives (didn’t need to be used up but were in the fridge)
and a little salt, pepper, and mayonnaise

and in separate containers
hard boiled egg (the eggs could have made it till we got back, but hardboiled eggs are very satisfying travel food)
sliced pork cutlet

I can’t remember now, writing this post just when we’ve gotten back from the trip rather than when we were rushing madly off to the airport, whether both of the potatoes and peas were leftover from some meal too, or whether I decided to use them to round out the salad. Potato always makes a composed vegetable salad work better for me, and the peas were good too, so I think my meal planning for a travel week should include purposely having some leftover potatoes and peas around. Or maybe I was just pretty smart this time too!

Smooth travel food and frugal use of leftovers. Except for the part where my backpack got some extra scrutiny because apparently dressed vegetables look too “wet” on the baggage scanner. (It’s ok to bring them, and we did get to eat them, but I should have put the containers of food through separately.)

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Slow food … in stages

I made lamb stew with white beans the other day for dinner. Deconstructed.

Normally, I make stew in one pot — a nice long simmer in the dutch oven to fill the house with good smells and keep the kitchen toasty warm. But I had a screwy schedule earlier this week and wound up doing it in bits and pieces.

On my way out the door to preschool, I took five minutes to sear the lamb shank and then threw it into the slow cooker with blocks of chicken stock still frozen into yogurt-container cylinders. I add a bay leaf, set the whole thing on HIGH and dashed out the door.

As we were walking up the back stairs after preschool, May said, “Mommy! It smells good in here!” And indeed it did. I think that’s one of the main benefits of a slow cooker. You get to smell the food as you come home on a frosty day.

The lamb was fall-apart tender… but swimming in a vat of chicken stock. The stock was enriched with lamb fat, but it was still just stock.

I threw some beans into a pot with lots of salt and brought them to a boil, then lidded the whole thing and set my timer for 1 hour while I contemplated some body for the stew.

I diced a mire poix (2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrot — though I usually double the carrots) and sauted it in some of the lamb fat I skimmed off the broth. When the vegetables got aromatic and translucent, I added a tablespoon of tomato paste, a palmful of flour, and some garlic and cooked that until it smelled right — not very long at all, maybe a minute.

Gently lifting the meat out of the slow cooker — it was literally shredding under any touch — I poured off the enriched stock and gradually whisked it into the pan with my vegetables. The roux from the fat and flour made it luscious and thick. I added some thyme, pepper, and chopped parsley, and turned the heat off.

By this time, the timer had gone off and I dumped my beans out, rinsed the hell out of them, and put them back in the pot with fresh cold water, a bay leaf, and some parsley stems. (One of my best tricks, learned on some cooking show back when I was in college: always freeze your parsley stems. They add so much to stocks and stews.)

At that point, Life intruded and I wandered out of the kitchen.

Lunch on the hoof. By law_keven, from Flickr

Two hours later, my beans were done and my husband was walking in the door. I shredded the now-cool meat into tiny filaments with my fingers while the sauce reheated and had Christopher set the table. Then I dished out beans from one pot, a spoonful of sauce/gravy from another, and sprinkled some lamb (from another pot) over the top. The heat from the beans and the sauce reheated the lamb nicely.

There’s no real moral to this story. Part of me feels like I should have been a good Kitchen Witch and remembered to soak the beans over night and get up early enough to dice and saute the aromatics. Then I could ahve thrown the whole lot into the slow cooker and been done with it. That certainly would have dirtied fewer dishes.

But part of me says that being able to improvise around a real schedule is a much more useful skill.

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pasta leftoveravera

Sometimes, when things in the fridge line up just right with inspiration, needing to “grab a quick lunch” with no meal-sized leftovers in the fridge doesn’t mean ordering delivery. We often have a lot of very small servings of meat or vegetables in the fridge which we save (rather than just eating a few more bites when that meal is served); thinking we can serve them to Kata, but then we wind up with more than we need, and usually those don’t look like a meal when I’m thinking of what we can have for lunch or dinner.

In my fridge I found:

half of the last sausage from the sausage-making project, which was supposed to get saved for Kata but got forgotten
a few bites of brisket that didn’t get eaten off Kata’s plate
a little bit of collard greens, same
A little bit of steamed broccoli that came back home in the lunchbox
A half a small baked butternut squash
some chunks of boiled carrot from the vegetable soup making
a bit of leftover chicken stock I defrosted for another use earlier this week

In the pantry, I grabbed a third of a box of pasta, and a few shallots, and from the fridge, some parmesan cheese.

I set the pasta boiling, and sauteed the shallots in oil. Tossed in the meat bites to make sure they got well heated since the sausage was getting old. Then tossed in the rest of the vegetables, salt and pepper. I added a little flour to thicken it and then some stock to make it into a sauce. Voila – pasta with vegetables and a bit of tasty protein!

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frozen vegetable stock

I like to make vegetable stock when I have more vegetables than I know what to do with, or something that’s getting a little long in the tooth.
I usually make 3-5 quarts at a time – once in a while a little more or even a little less.

This is my first batch where I planned for some of the vegetable scraps came from the freezer – leek greens, parsley stems, and celery tops, primarily. I’ll definitely be continuing to save these things in the freezer so I don’t need to have the full mix of vegetables on hand! Add some parsnips that I had a few too many of (I didn’t realize that was even *possible*, last year!), and some carrots, brown in the bottom of the stockpot in some oil, and then add plenty of water to make the stock. I also added a leftover cooked butternut squash half we weren’t going to eat. Transfer to the freezer and make matzoh ball soup later, or add to stews and sauces.

Simple Vegetable Broth

• 5 carrots
• 3-4 parsnips
• celery greens
• leek tops
• parsley stems
• any other vegetable that’s getting tired or even already cooked
• 5 quarts of water
• salt
• 2 Tb oil

Brown the vegetables in the oil, letting them develop some good brown spots. Then add about 5 quarts of water and let simmer for 2 hours or so until it tastes good. Spoon broth into containers through a sieve, refrigerate, and freeze. You can reserve the parsnips and carrots to eat – they’ve given a lot of their flavor to the broth, but still have a bit and I presume a bit of nutritional value, so why throw them out?

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After-party soup

Farmwives are thrifty.

At some point, during the holiday season, you will find yourself in the presence of the leftovers of a party. Don’t throw them away. Look at them with the farmwife’s eye and think about what you can make.

Here’s a recipe I concocted looking at some recent leftovers.

Take the carrots and the celery off the crudite platter and dice them with some onion. Saute in butter until transluscent, add some minced garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Then pour in a bottle of that leftover beer and some chicken stock. Stir until it’s boiling and turn towards those chunks of cheese left over from the cheese-and-cracker platter. Grate the cheese in your food processor first, with a tablespoon of cornstarch. Stir the grated cheese in one handful at a time, stirring until it melts.

Viola! Cheese soup! Good with toast (those leftover pieces of little party bread, maybe?).

If you have some broccoli left on the crudite platter, blanch that in boiling water for 2 minutes, then shock in ice water, then chop into fine pieces and add to the soup. Viola! Cheese and broccoli soup.

My delightful FIL says I should be a scavange cook at a soup kitchen. High praise, from him.

Ladies, what’s your favorite scavenger recipe?

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my old friend ginger

Thanks to the encouragement of my friends here at Always Be Cooking, the 2nd half of the fresh ginger went into two projects, and for each one I got a little more out of it than the recipe said, just by thinking “am I really supposed to get rid of that now?”

Ginger beer starts off with a syrup of sugar, water, and finely grated ginger, steeped for an hour and then poured through a sieve into the bottle with yeast and water. So I sampled whether all that steeping had sucked all the flavor out of the shredded, somewhat sweet ginger – it hadn’t. I scraped that onto a piece of wax paper, sprinkled more sugar on it, rolled it flat between two layers of wax paper, and let it dry on the wax paper, and wound up with a tasty ginger candy sort of thing, lacking some texture and integrity compared to the real product.

Because I wasn’t fully invested in the ginger beer project, and wanted something that was pleasantly gingery but not knock-your-socks off, I used less ginger than the recipe called for for my first 2L test batch.

This left me with just a little bit more ginger – perhaps 2″ of thick root. Just enough for a microbatch of the other project I was hoping to try – homemade pickled ginger. Once again, the first thing to do gave me a bonus – the slivers of ginger had to be blanched for a minute or two in water. So while I proceeded with the recipe (you just dump the blanched ginger in a jar with the same volume of vinegar plus a little sweetener of your choice), I poured off the water into a mug and drank it with a little sugar and lemon.

4 gingery food items, one half a root of fresh ginger in need of using up.

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Anatomy of a Cod

I may not have the whole farmhouse from-scratch operation running smoothly, and I may never keep chickens in the backyard, but making good use of what I have and not throwing away perfectly good food are goals I am getting better at. Here’s a snapshot of my almost-efficient fish machine at work, after 18 deliveries of whole fish since June.

This week’s whole fish was 2 small cod, and I pounced right on it for a second shot at preserving and drying my own salt cod. I’ve done a trial run once before, and now I’m looking forward to the 2nd batch being usable for Christmas Eve. So here’s what became of the fish over the next several days:

Day 1: I clean and fillet the fish, winding up with

• fish skins (sadly, must toss, or find a friend who wants to feed their cats raw fish. My usual suspect wasn’t up to this this time, so I tossed the.)
• fish fillets – to cook, or in this case, preserve with salt (they get coated in salt for a day and change, then rinsed and left to dry in the fridge for a week.)
• fish spine(s) with head, tail, and plenty of meat on it, because I am not an expert at filleting
• I reserved the scrappier bits of the fillets to make a little bit of plain fish for K, who requested that it not all be turned into bakalar (as we call salt cod in our house).

Day 2:
Make fish broth with the spines and heads. This is a quick-cooked broth – I put the fish in cold water with bay leaves, salt, pepper, and a splash of vinegar, then bring slowly to a boil, let it boil 10 minutes afterwards, and turn off the heat.

After pouring off the broth, pull cooked meat off the fish carcasses into a storage container, removing small bones as I go. This week’s cooked meat mostly went into cod-salad sandwiches with melted cheese. I mix shredded cooked cod with mayonnaise, celery, seasonings; basically pretending it came out of a can of tuna and go from there. I sometimes put it into fish cakes, or freeze to use later for these purposes or add back into soup.

Also, the scrappy bits of fillets that I saved went into a small person’s serving or two of fried fish (and more than a serving of french fries to go with, for all of us!)
I’ll probably make miso soup with some of the broth. The rest is in the freezer. If there’s an Armageddon soon, we’re all covered for miso soup.

My 6+ lbs of whole cod (2 small fish worth) gave me 2.2lbs of fillets, plus a bit under a pound of cooked shredded fish meat, and about 4 quarts of fish broth. I would probably have gotten more fillets off of one large fish, but somewhat less broth.

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Waste not, want not

I’ve been defrosting a chicken from Chestnut Farm – all of our meat from there comes frozen, and we defrost it when we need it. (Well, a few days ahead of when we think we’re going to need it… but sometimes this doesn’t work out as planned!) Unfortunately, this means that when it’s possible to get the bag of giblets out of the chicken, they have already been defrosted. So we need to use them or lose them – and so far I had mostly opted for lose them. One chicken liver is not really enough to make a decent amount of pate.

This time, emboldened by a recent success with a larger rabbit liver that I turned into pate, I decided it couldn’t hurt to see what I’d get out of one chicken liver if I threw in the other unidentified bits too. I sauteed them up with plenty of salt and a little oil, then sauteed half an onion, and added a bit of water to deglaze the pan. I used a little mace, a little dried orange peel, and a little garlic for seasoning while I sauteed. With the stick blender, I blended up the giblets, onion, and liquid, along with a slice of turkey sandwich meat we had in the fridge to round out the flavor. I learned the extra meat trick from my mother-in-law, who always adds cooked chicken to her chicken liver pate. I hadn’t actually cooked the chicken yet – I guess that is why today’s planning lesson is to cook the chicken first and the pate later.

The resulting pate was not as amazing as one that is largely chopped chicken livers, and I think I could actually taste the deli meat flavor coming through a bit, too, so I’d definitely wait till I’d cooked the chicken next time. Our deli meat is not so locavore as much of our food… it comes in a vacuum pack at Trader Joes and purports to be responsibly, industrially raised. There was just enough pate to spread on two sandwiches for lunch, it was simple but flavorful – a lot more flavorful than just a slice of turkey would have been! A perfectly satisfactory use of something that I hoped not to throw away, and the protein source of one more meal for two adults to boot.

I wonder if I can get the farm to provide the giblets not stuffed inside the frozen bird, though. I’d still love to make a serious chopped chicken liver pate, with more than one liver at a time, someday!

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