Category Archives: Recipes

Enter the Dragon Sandwich

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dragon sandwichI admit to a kind of three-ring-circus awe when I look at the colorful layered dragon rolls that some sushi restaurants serve. It might not be the most traditional or elegant form of the food, but it sure is pretty. So I’m always a teensy bit jealous that I can never order it, since it almost invariably involves salmon.

To combat this particular bout of vegetarian envy, I invented a sandwich that’s just as colorful and has a powerful wasabi dragon bite. It’s also a perfect way to use up those leftover sweet potatoes from Thanksgiving. If they’re already roasted, just warm ‘em up with some of the glaze on top.

Dragon Sandwich Continue reading →

Romancing the Rutabaga

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smashed rutabagasI read somewhere that while Americans call everyone’s favorite big turnipy-looking root vegetables “rutabagas,” pretty much everyone else in the world calls them “Swedes.” But I also read that the word rutabaga is derived from a Swedish word, so presumably the Swedes don’t call them Swedes, either. I feel like we’ve got sort of a linguistic home field advantage here, guys.

And if etymology is not enough to tempt you into cooking up some rutabagas, then you should know that they are also rich in vitamin C and zinc. So while your co-workers are nursing their dreary colds, you can munch on your rutabaga leftovers, feeling pleasantly superior.

not a good ideaThe question, as always, is how to cook them. You can, of course, cut them up and roast them with some herbs, the tried and true method for root vegetables of all kinds. But because they taste a little like cabbage and because sour cream just seems like the sort of food any respectable Swede would like, I decided to go a different route, which I’ve outlined below. At the very least, I figured it might top Jason’s culinary experiment of the week, which involved post-Halloween candy corn and breakfast cereal. I’ll leave you to be the judge.

Smashed Sour Cream and Onion Rutabagas Continue reading →

Thinking Outside the Stalk: Salt and Vinegar Broccoli

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broccoli sandwichMost people, when faced with a head of broccoli, will hack it up and throw it in a pan, sautéing it or steaming it and doing very little else to it. Nothing wrong with that; I have eaten broccoli in exactly this manner hundreds, maybe thousands of times and been perfectly happy. But there’s also nothing wrong with giving your broccoli the royal treatment every once in a while.

I find it hard to think of anything more royal than a good salt and vinegar potato chip. What’s more, dear reader, is that potato is not the only vegetable to take kindly to these flavors. Broccoli, with its cabbage-y overtones, is an ideal candidate. I actually first learned this at No. 7 in Brooklyn, when I tried their trademark double-decker broccoli tacos. They take a hard taco shell and a soft one, paste them together with black bean hummus, fill them with finely chopped broccoli treated with shallot vinegar and top the whole thing with feta cheese. Holy-brocc-oly! It was better than a salt and vinegar potato chip, and that, I recognize, is a bold statement.

You can certainly try to replicate those tacos, but once you have a mess of salt and vinegar broccoli, why stop there? Use it on a sandwich with ricotta cheese and fresh tomatoes. Scoop it on top of a baked potato with some cheddar cheese. Mix it with some hot sauce and use it as a garnish for a quesadilla or burrito. I did all of these things with great results, but I surely did not exhaust all of the possibilities. Seize the broccoli, seize the day and come up with your uses.

Salt and Vinegar Broccoli Continue reading →

I’ll See Your Pesto and Raise You an Arugula

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ASA pesto Every garden, every growing season, has its bumper crops, those wildly successful experiments that you can’t anticipate ahead of time. (Just ask my mother, who has been frantically cooking, freezing and foisting tomatoes upon anyone who comes near her. Actually, maybe you shouldn’t ask her, or even get near her, unless you’re prepared to make gazpacho.) In our household, it’s arugula that keeps growing and growing, almost faster than we can use it. So, to the rescue, comes one of our favorite new easy dinners: arugula pesto.

A delicious pesto is not the territory of basil alone. It’s true that you could substitute arugula for basil in the most familiar of pesto recipes (pine nuts, garlic, parmesan), but why stop there? In fact, pesto means paste, so you should feel free add any manner of deliciousness, blend it to a paste and call it pesto. I’ve come up with a couple of variations to get you started.

A quick word on measurements: one of the real pleasures of pesto is that you just keep dropping things into the food processor until you taste it and become convinced that you are a culinary genius. Far be it from me to rob you of that magical experience. So I’ll give you some very general guidelines for enough pesto for two big portions of pasta, but really, the best thing to do is to taste it frequently throughout until you feel like eating big gobs of it with a spoon. Then you’re done.

A.S.A Pesto (Arugula, Sun-dried Tomatoes, Asiago) Continue reading →

Grilled Mustard Eggplant Burgers

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We don’t grill a lot.  We don’t have a grill because we don’t have the space, and although there are grills in the community garden across the street, by the time evening rolls around I’m usually pretty much done with community until sunup.  But we had agrilled mustard eggplant burgers pretty purple-and-white speckled eggplant from the CSA and four ears of corn, and I’ll take grilled corn on the cob over any other variation any day.  And thus we created:

Grilled Mustard Eggplant Burgers

  • 2/3 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 1/3 cup olive oil
  • 2 tbs Dijon mustard
  • 1 ½ tbs salt
  • 1 tbs cumin
  • ½ tbs chili powder

Mix marinade ingredients in a jar (I pretty much always eyeball stuff, so the measurements are give-or-take).  Cut 1 small eggplant into roughly ¼ inch-thick slices and lay them out in Tupperware.  Pour marinade over them and leave in the fridge for a few hours.  Then grill the babies, periodically brushing remaining marinade on the slices, for something like twenty minutes.  Serve on sliced sourdough bread with arugula.

Grill Monster

You’re a Star, Green Bean: Loubieh B’Zeit

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loubieh2Eggplant has eggplant parmesan. Spinach has spanakopita. Even the humble cabbage has cabbage rolls. But green beans too often get cast in only a supporting  role, shuffled off into perpetual side dish territory. And that’s too bad, since beautiful green beans are pouring in these days, from both our CSA and our own garden.

Luckily, there’s a delicious Lebanese dish that gives green beans their moment in the spotlight. It’s called loubieh b’zeit, and you can find many, many versions of it (and almost as many different spellings) on the ol’ Internet.  I used some combination of them to come up with my own. Most recipes call for Lebanese Seven Spice, but if that seems way too exotic for your neighborhood grocery, you can make a pretty good simulacrum from spices that are probably already in your cupboard: equal parts black pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, allspice and coriander, all ground up together. (I think the real thing has fenugreek, but this will get you pretty close.)

Another great thing about this dish is that it’s often served cold or room temperature as a mezze, which means it’s practically begging to be a leftover. Stuff some the next day in a pita with some tzatziki sauce and you’ve got yourself a mean sandwich. And you know how I feel about sandwiches.

Loubieh B’Zeit Continue reading →

Lemon Kale & Chili Chickpea Salad ~and~ Caramelized Peach & Mint Arugula Salad

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Summer salads!  We currently have a mere two rows of rocket arugula, each maybe three-feel long, planted in one of our gardens, and even though I’ve instructed all the neighbors to help themselves, we’re overrun with arugula.  If you don’t harvest it, it will bolt (produce flowers and seeds) according to Evolution’s imperative, and then you’re out of luck stuck with flowering plants sporting dinky, anemic leaves.  The solutioLemon Kale & Chili Chickpea and Caramelized Peach & Arugula Saladsn, obviously, is endless salads.

We also happen to be in peach season and kale season, and thus we give you:   Lemon Kale & Chili Chickpea Salad and Caramelized Peach & Mint Arugula Salad.  These are awesome salads because they are hearty but not heavy, and they keep well in the fridge.

Lemon Kale &… Continue reading →

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kohlrabi?

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kohlrabi

It kind of resembles a Muppet, which is another reason to like it.

I hope that when you read that title, you sang it in full-lunged Sound of Music style. But if you Google “kohlrabi” and see the articles that pop up, you may be convinced that this vegetable is even more trouble than a certain spirited chanteuse/nun. No one quite seems to know what to do with the rather starchy, fibrous outcast cousin of the cabbage family.  Should you cut it up and dress it like a salad? Grate it and fry it into fritters? Steam it and puree it into some kind of vichyssoise-like soup?

I am typically too lazy to blend or fry much of anything, so when a couple kohlrabi landed in our CSA haul, I went looking for a different solution. Amidst the online kohlrabi hand-wringing, I found a few sites that mentioned that it’s often used in Indian cooking and pairs well with Indian spices. This struck me as odd, since I have never seen kohlrabi on the menu of any Indian restaurant, nor did I confront it during my very brief visit to India. But maybe the Indian restaurateurs are hiding this delicacy from Western customers, certain that their palates can never fully appreciate the full magic of the kohlrabi. Anyway, it was worth a shot.

curried kohlrabiSo I made up the following kohlrabi recipe, and I have to say that kohlrabi does pair well with Indian spices. I used half pav bhaji masala and half chaat masala, but use whatever mix you can get your hands on, and it will probably turn out just fine. And don’t worry, all you kohlrabi purists out there: the spiciness does not cover up the essential cabbagey complexity. Problem solved.

Curried Kohlrabi and Lentils Continue reading →

Quick Lemon Pea & Avocado Salad

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It should be too late for peas right now, but Spring and Summer have been cool enough thus far to keep pea plants producing.  I picked up one of those small, plastic trays of some at the Grand Army Plaza farmers market to compliment my own modest, backyard-garden haul and improvised my way through the following.  I sIMG_2128imply had the avocado on-hand and needed to use it, but the crispness of the peas contrasted very nicely with its silkiness.  This recipe makes two salads to accompany entrees.

Lemon Pea and Avocado Salad

  • 12 ounces of fresh peas
  • juice of one lemon
  • 2 tbs dried thyme
  • 1 dash of chili powder
  • 5 or 6 cloves of garlic crushed and minced
  • 1 avocado
  • salad greens
  • olive oil and salt & pepper, each to taste Continue reading →

Rainy Day Cauliflower and Potatoes

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cauliflower and potatoesIt’s been a gray and cool spring around these parts, but there’s no reason that a little chill in the air needs to rain on your culinary parade. After all, the days are surely numbered until it’s so hot that you’d rather, I don’t know, be chained down and forced to watch that terrible new Cameron Crowe movie instead of turning on your oven. So embrace the cool; make a casserole.

Here’s one I came up with this weekend. Full disclosure: I wanted to make something that necessitated that I slice at least one ingredient because my friend Mignon gave me a sweeeet new mandolin for my birthday. This handy tool makes me feel at least fifty-three percent fancier as I am cooking, and my potato slices really were shockingly even. But even if you don’t have a mandolin (or a Mignon) in your life, fear not: you can totally rock it old-school and slice them by hand.

Rainy Day Cauliflower and Potatoes Continue reading →