The best broccoli of your life

I don’t like to post recipes without providing a picture, but I know the crappy picture I took late at night while everyone was eagerly waiting to pounce on the food is not going to convince you. I don’t know if my words are going to convince you. Maybe Adam over at The Amateur Gourmet, from whom I got this recipe (and the title of this post, because really, what else is there to be said?), can convince you. Perhaps a read-through of the recipe will sway you. Maybe the fact that we’ve made this recipe 15 or so times but I’ve never managed to make it last long enough for a real photo-shoot will carry some weight.

But really, the only thing for it is please, PLEASE just make this recipe. Make it once, and I won’t need to convince you. Because you’ll taste, and you’ll see, and you’ll know.

It’s broccoli, and it’s roasted. The recipe specifies the broccoli should be completely dry (we just get organic brocc and don’t wash it at all first) and that means you may be headed for your first ever not-gross roasted broccoli. It’s roasted with garlic, which is always a good idea, and the garlic is sliced instead of chopped, which means it doesn’t turn into burnt, bitter, angry little nuggets but instead becomes crisp and the essence of garlic. Then afterwards there is some lemon zest, and some lemon juice, and, as with everything, it’s even better if those lemons are Meyer lemons. And then there are toasted pine nuts, which are so enchanting, so enrapturing, that when you bite into the occasional lemon seed that has slipped into the dish and cunningly disguised itself as a nut you’ll just laugh and laugh because you’re so in love with this broccoli that there’s nothing in the world gonna bring you down.

Adam of The Amateur Gourmet got the recipe from The Barefoot Contessa, and I got him from him. I present it to you here veganized and featuring our choice of flavorings (Adam goes for parmesan and leaves out the basil and pine nuts, we leave out the cheese and herb but can’t imagine it without the pine nuts). We’ve found that kosher salt stays crystallized and gets caught in the broccoli crowns, making them too salty, so we use plain iodized salt or sea salt. I’ve also tidied the recipe a bit – Adam’s wonderful narrative recipe style is a little hard for folks with brain fog (like me!) to follow while trying to cook at the same time.

Writing this post I feel like I sound like Duck when he writes so lyrically and dreamily about The Best Song in the World. Because that’s what this is – the best song in the world, dancing across your tongue.

Roasted Broccoli with Pine Nuts and Lemon Zest

4 to 5 pounds of broccoli (maybe two large bunches)
5 Tbs olive oil
1 1/2 tsps regular salt or sea salt
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
1 lemon
3 T pine nuts

Preheat the oven to 425.

Cut broccoli into florets (but relatively big ones.) Here’s the key that she doesn’t mention in the recipe: dry them THOROUGHLY. That is, if you wash them. I didn’t wash my broccoli; I wanted it to get crispy and brown. If you’re nervous, though, just wash and dry it obsessively.

In a small bowl, combine olive oil, salt, fresh ground pepper, and stir until the salt is at least somewhat dissolved. Slice 4 cloves of garlic. Toss the broccoli pieces and the garlic slices with the oil in a large bowl, or straight on a cookie sheet if you are brave (line it with foil or parchment if you want easy clean-up).

Roast in the oven 20 to 25 minutes, until “crisp-tender and the tips of some of the florets are browned.” Keep a good eye on it – you don’t want to burn it, just brown it a bit.

While the broccoli is roasting, toast 3 Tbs pine nuts in a dry pan over medium-high heat, shaking or stirring the pan constantly so the pine nuts get slightly browned but not burned.

When it’s done, take it out of the oven–and here’s where it gets really good–zest a lemon over the broccoli, squeeze some lemon juice over it (a half to a whole lemon, depending on how juicy your lemon is and how acidic you like your food), and add the toasted pine nuts.

Sit down with the pan, someone you love, and two forks. Expect no leftovers.

Oh, pretty!

Duck was craving noodles. I wanted something satisfying and filling, but also fresh and healthy. I looked in the fridge and found red chard, baby bok choy, and tofu. A quick consultation of my beloved Moosewood Cooks at Home spreadsheet offered up Gingered Greens and Tofu, page 232, and things just kind of went from there. I riffed off the Moosewood recipe to end up with something delicious and stunningly beautiful. An unexpected side-effect of red chard + rice noodles is a sea of gorgeous, sunrise-tinted noodles. They tasted of lime and, somehow, lime tasted of pink.

Sunrise Noodles with Gingered Greens and Tofu (adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home)

Rice noodles (I used half of a 14 oz packet from Thai Kitchen)

Tofu marinade:
1/2 c. soy sauce
1/2 c. dry sherry or Shaoxing cooking wine
1/4 c. rice vinegar
3 T. brown sugar

1-1.5 lbs firm tofu, blocks cut into 1/2-inch slices and then into 1-inch squares

4 T. peanut or vegetable oil
2 T. grated fresh ginger root
2-3 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
1 bunch red chard, lower stalks removed (but don’t pull the stalks out of the leaves), coarsely shredded
1-2 baby bok choy, coarsely shredded (optional)

3 T. lime juice
2 T. thinly sliced scallion + more for garnish
pinch of cayenne or splash of chili oil

To cook rice noodles: Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Turn off heat and immerse rice noodles in hot water for 3-5 minutes until noodles are soft, cooked through but still firm and al dente, not mushy. (Check firmness frequently, as you would regular pasta.) Rinse with cold water for 30 seconds. Drain well and set aside.

Make tofu marinade: In a small saucepan, bring the marinade ingredients to a boil. Simmer for one minute and remove from heat. Add the tofu squares to the pot of marinade, immersing them as much as possible. Gently stir in 2 T. of the peanut oil. Set aside for 5 minutes.

Make lime juice mixture: Combine lime juice, scallions, and cayenne or chili oil in a small dish and set aside.

Preheat broiler. Prep all the remaining ingredients and have them at hand before beginning to stir-fry.

Place the tofu in a single layer in a nonreactive heatproof pan, covered with the marinade, or remove tofu from marinade, reserving marinade for later, and place on a piece of foil (depending on how your broiler works). Broil the tofu for 7-8 minutes; then turn it over with a spatula and brown the other side. Ideally, the tofu will get nicely browned and firm on the outside, chewy on the inside.

While the tofu broils, heat the remaining 2 T. of oil in a wok or large skillet over high heat. Stir in the ginger and garlic for a few seconds and then quickly add the chard and bok choy. Stir constantly on high heat until the greens wilt. When the greens are just tender, gently stir in the rice noodles and lime juice, scallion, and chili mixture. Gently toss the noodles and greens together until the rice noodles are heated through. The noodles should turn a lovely shade of pink. Remove from heat. When the tofu is browned, gently toss it with the reserved marinade and the noodles and greens, reheating if necessary. Top with a few raw scallions slices and serve immediately.

Serves 4.

Let’s use more tomatoes

My boxes this month have contained many, many tomatoes. And I have finally used them all! It helped that the last two boxes’ worth of tomatoes didn’t start to mold the day after arrival, but I also consider it a great personal triumph that for the first time this summer I didn’t have to compost a single rotten tomato. The secret to my tomato salvation? A chance email from Cook’s Illustrated.

Cook’s Illustrated is a luscious magazine full of little hand-drawn illustrations of how to chop an onion and how to form gnocchi, and beautiful color charts of peppers and mushrooms. The magazine is made by the same people who do a show on PBS called America’s Test Kitchen (or so I’ve read in the magazine – I don’t have a TV so I’ve never seen the show), and both are based on the same principle. They take a dish, French onion soup, maybe, or vanilla sheet cake, and they make it over and over again, testing different ingredients and techniques and equipment, tweaking every variable, until they come up with what they feel is the “master recipe” – the very best way to make that particular dish. Most of their recipes involve either meat or wheat, so I can’t actually make them, but the magazine is, for me, food porn at its very best. I subscribe to their website so I can have access to their very thorough archive of kitchen equipment testing results, and consequently I get emails from them. Called “Notes from the Test Kitchen,” these recipes and tips and menus are also usually centered on meat and wheat, but occasionally I’ll read one that is just exactly right.

Like last week’s “All About Tomatoes” feature, containing a whole passel of recipes designed to help me take care of the pile of heirlooms, Shady Ladies, Romas, and cherry tomatoes crowding my kitchen table. I decided to try the Fresh Tomato Soup with Basil, a soup with a base of pureed roasted tomatoes that then has fresh tomatoes and basil added to it. Interestingly, when I followed the directions exactly (this was a many-times tested “master recipe,” of course) the roasting tomatoes started burning with half an hour of cooking time still to go. But I once I rescued them and scraped them off the (fortunately lined with foil) roasting pan, the rest of the recipe came together with ease, and the end result made for a truly delicious summer meal.

The combination of sweet, concentrated tomato flavor from the roasted tomatoes and bright, clean tomato flavor from the fresh tomatoes was fantastic, and many notches above your average can of Campbell’s. I used heirlooms and Shady Ladies for roasting, and a multicolored assortment of cherry tomatoes for the fresh tomatoes. It was such a relief to use up what was probably my last batch of endless tomatoes for the season (I’m putting my box on hold for a few weeks while I figure things out) that I am celebrating by contributing this post to Croatian food blogger Maninas’ blog event Eating with the Seasons. Soup recipe follows…

Summer bounty, or, my box runneth over

Week after week, my box brings the bounty of summer. Ripe tomatoes (so ripe they sometimes turn moldy within two days), fat green and yellow zucchini, paper bags full of small tender pink and yellow potatoes, and bunch after bunch of basil. All these vegetables happen to be ones that we don’t readily use so they’ve piled up as the weeks go on. We tend to go for things that can be easily steamed or sauteed, and these fellows don’t lend themselves particularly well to these techniques. (Yuck, steamed potatoes with steamed basil topping!)

But when I searched using my beloved Food Blog Search for recipes with potatoes, zucchini, and tomatoes, I couldn’t find anything combining these three. Has no one else been confronted by this particular food dilemma? I would clearly have to strike out on my own, which is never a bad thing as long as I have the energy for a little culinary adventure.

Inspired by my one of my favorite cookbooks, Vegetarian Suppers, and author Deborah Madison’s love of gratins, I decided to make a giant, summery gratin out of my collection of wayward vegetables. I found a recipe online for Classic Potato Gratin that sounded rich and filling, essential as I wanted this to be a full-meal dish. But this recipe was decidedly un-vegan, containing both butter and cream, so I searched high and low for vegan cream recipes, finally locating and adapting a recipe for a vegan creme fraiche that turned out very well.

The dish turned out delicious. The main flavoring was the garlic and basil, and the contrasting textures of the different vegetables, from chewy potato topping down into soft roasted tomato and tender zucchini and waxy interior potato, were quite wonderful. The gratin was filling but not too rich, and the colors, pink and yellow potatoes, red tomatoes, green and yellow squash, and dark green basil, were just gorgeous.

I’m pretty proud of myself for coming up with a fairly elaborate and very delicious solution to my produce conundrum, so I’m submitting the recipe to Culinarty’s Original Recipe blog event. This is also a perfect entry for this month’s Go Ahead Honey, It’s Gluten Free! event, hosted by Rachel over at The Crispy Cook. The theme for this round-up of gluten-free delights is Seasonal Vegetables and well, it doesn’t get any more seasonal than a neverending summer cascade of potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini and basil!

I’ve written out the recipe below (this blog is part of Food Blog Search, so now there will be at least one recipe featuring the potato-tomato-zucchini trifecta) but I have a few caveats and addenda, as usual, so be sure to read those first!

Summer soup

Ah, summer in San Francisco.

I arrived home last week after a long visit to New York. (My trip is one reason this blog has gotten hopelessly out of date!) After a couple of weeks of skirts and sandals and other wispy pieces of actual summer clothing, it was a shock to return to a Bay Area August, full of fog and the kind of grim cold that lingers in the corners of the apartment, even when I have the heater going full blast. It was such a nice surprise that my new flannel pajamas had arrived while I away. Flannel pajamas in August. Only in San Francisco.

But this interesting intersection of season and weather does have one terrific silver lining, and that’s Summer Soup. A nice warm bowl containing all the produce bounty of summer, and a nice chilly day to enjoy it on!

When I saw how full of produce the fridge and counter were when I got home, I defrosted my most delicious scrap stock as a base (the delicious batch IV stock that Duck couldn’t stop sipping straight), and put together some summer soup. I tend to have trouble making soup without a recipe, trouble that takes the form of lackluster flavor, but I wanted to make a soup that would use up all the veggies I had already, not the veggies a recipe wanted me to use.

I decided to wing it, using red onions, fresh corn, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, pink potatoes, green cabbage, carrots, and some roasted garlic, and the results were very good. I’m not going to post the recipe here because it was so basic and pretty much all the flavor came from the stock, so this would have been a pretty dull pot of soup if I’d been using canned broth, or even one of my milder scrap stocks. Duck also used some CSA basil and some basil he’s been growing on our front porch to make a puree of basil, garlic, olive oil, and pine nuts (basically, vegan pesto) which we swirled into the bowls of soup individually. As a final touch we served the soup over heaps of steamed quinoa, and had our protein for the day as well.

And though we sat in our chilly kitchen, wrapping our frostbitten fingers around our steaming bowls, at least we could taste the warmth of summer’s goodness on our spoons.

Splendid

I would not cook so joyfully, nor clean half so willingly, without a public radio program called The Splendid Table. I download podcasts of this show from iTunes (a subscription is free, and all the archived shows are free as well – you can set yourself up with a Splendid Table bonanza and work your way through them, as I did) and listen to them in my kitchen as I clean and cook. A sinkful of dishes flies by, as does the prep for a three-course meal.

Now that I’ve worked my way through the archives and the show seems to be heavily in reruns, I have been experimenting with other radio shows to keep me company in the kitchen. KCRW’s Good Food is good, but doesn’t hold my interest so completely as Lynne Rosetto Kasper and her Splendid Table gang. This American Life is always absorbing, but there’s something about listening to food programming in the kitchen that just makes me really happy.

Last night I listened my way through a series of short podcasts made to herald the show’s new book: The Splendid Table’s How To Eat Supper while I gave the kitchen a much needed cleaning following a long weekend of friends and food. By the time I was done I didn’t have an ounce of energy left to make my own supper, but luckily that is the whole point of the book and these short podcasts – how to make your weeknight supper delicious and varied yet simple and not time-consuming. So I made my very first Splendid Table recipe, “Refried Beans with Cinnamon and Clove,” and then used those in tacos with the rest of the roasted tomatillo salsa, some of my new cherry tomatoes and some parsley.

Now the beans didn’t knock my socks off, but that wasn’t the point. They were tasty and filling and more creative than I would have come up with on my own at that point, and, best of all, I made them in a kind of mindless stupor and they still turned out exactly as they were meant to. I’m posting the recipe below, but what I truly want to share is the joy of this program, this absolutely free (I have donated money to American Public Media out of gratitude), absolutely addicting hour you can spend with someone who loves food and knows how to talk about it. Recipe follows…

Zucchini

Well, I was all set to write a lovely post, waxing rhapsodical as usual about how much I love radicchio, and the fun things I did with my first zucchini of summer. But on our way home from the airport today, Duck and I got in a pretty serious car accident on the Bay Bridge. Everyone’s fine, but my beloved car is totaled (and I only have liability insurance, so I’m pretty much on my own there), and my body hurts a lot and is stiff and queasy and well, I just don’t have it in me to be lyrical about food.

But zucchini season is here, and I really do want to share with you my very most favorite, super simple and super awesome way to prepare it. So forgive me if I sound flatter than usual, but please enjoy this recipe which is going to taste a million times better than I’ll be able to make it sound.

I ate my yummy, garlicky zucchini with a radicchio and potato gratin from Deborah Madison’s great simple-foods cookbook Vegetarian Suppers. The gratin had radicchio and little red and yellow potatoes and baby red onions and Laura Chenel aged goat cheese and olive oil and salt and pepper. It was a bit bland the first night, but after sitting for a day it was delicious.

Taverna Zucchini (from the San Francisco Chronicle, a million years ago)

Zucchini
Fresh lemon juice
Olive oil
Crushed garlic
Salt
Pepper
Herbes de Provence

Slice each zucchini (I always feel weird not calling it a zucchino – I wonder why we changed that?) in half lengthwise. Using a knife, gently score the cut face of the zucchini in a large cross-hatch pattern. That is, make a few shallow, diagonal cuts across the zucchini, and then make a few more in the opposite direction.

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Boil the zucchini until it is your desired texture (I hate undercooked zucchini, but I hate mushy, overcooked zucchini, too!).

While the zucchini is boiling, combine the lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and herbs. When the zucchini is cooked, drain it and spread some of the mixture over the face of each half. Eat warm, or enjoy as a cold appetizer.

Sweet potato and kale

When I think of sweet potato and kale soup, I think of winter, no question. It sounds like a healthy but still sturdy and comforting dish to make when the temperatures drop and just going outside seems to take more energy than usual. But one of the nice things about my box is that it keeps me truly seasonal. And this doesn’t just mean swearing off tomatoes for eight months of the year. It also means discovering that sweet potatoes and kale can be spring/summer seasonal vegetables. How do I know this? Well, there’s no hothouse at Eatwell, and it’s currently June, and there are the tenderest, most adorable sweet potatoes and a beautiful bunch of kale in my box.

Considering that I’m in San Francisco, summer is sadly often the time when you need a hearty, warming meal. Haven’t you heard the quote, widely attributed to Mark Twain? “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

In addition to the sweet potatoes and kale, my box this week also included a newsletter featuring a recipe for sweet potato and kale soup. Duck and I decided this wasn’t the best use of our gorgeous bunch of purple-tinged kale (we love it so much plain – no, we crave it plain – that the box can’t even keep up with our appetite for plain kale, much less have anything leftover to be sticking in soups) but then Duck went out of town before we could eat the kale and I just couldn’t stop thinking about this soup.

I decided to make a batch of it, and I am really, really glad I did. The recipe brings out perfectly the sweetness of both the kale and the sweet potatoes, and the fennel seed manages to be interesting without being overpowering. I slightly tweaked the original recipe, which seems to be a home-invented one from another Eatweller. I changed the proportions and only blended part of the soup, so the texture I ended up with may be rather different from the original intent, but I thought it was perfect. I also worked a little FASS magic and added a touch of lemon juice – the dish is already perfect on the sweet and salty, and the cheese or yogurt or cream at the end takes care of fat, but it needed just a hint of acid for my tastes.

The recipe follows…

Spinach for breakfast, the sequel

I’m totally enjoying the feature on wordpress that lets me see what google search phrases have led people here, to my box. I get a lot of visitors on “aphid” related searches, and surprisingly few on “community supported agriculture” related ones. (Although I get a lot of CSA-specific visitors clicking over from the Eatwell list of member blogs and from the post on Chowhound about choosing a CSA.)

Super Easy Pan-Cooked Spinach Fritatta with Humboldt Fog cheese, green garlic, spring onion, and thyme (medium-pan sized, cut in half) with a salad of lettuce, red cabbage, cauliflower, carrot, and sugar snap peas

One surprising search phrase that shows up almost every day, sometimes in multiple versions, is some variation of “spinach for breakfast.” Which is, of course, the title of a post I made back in February extolling the pleasures of spinach as a breakfast food. My first thought of course is, “Wow, there sure are a lot of people who want to know about eating spinach for breakfast. Huh.” My next thought every time I see that someone’s search for breakfast-spinach information led them here is a bit of guilt. Because my first Spinach for Breakfast post is more about my personal, heartwarming journey to spinach acceptance than it is a helpful guide on how to use spinach in one’s morning meal. Which I assume is what all these googlers are googling for.

So I decided to revisit the topic of spinach for breakfast. It gives me an excuse to share a recipe I’ve been wanting to share. The other morning I was cooking breakfast (it involved spinach, of course) and thinking about how much this one recipe, which isn’t even a recipe but more of a technique, completely changed my breakfast life. I used to think I was “not a breakfast person” and “not an egg cooker” because fried eggs bored me, scrambled eggs eluded me, and frittatas were special occasion food involving all kinds of fancy cooking and flipping using plates or pans with heat-proof handles so you could finish them in the oven.

Super Easy Pan-Cooked Frittata with Carmody cheese and thyme (small-pan sized, whole), tempeh bacon, and fruit salad with pomelo, kiwi, apple, and mint

This technique is usually how spinach ends up in my breakfast, but it’s also a great, simple way to incorporate most any kind of leftover into a hot, pleasing morning meal. It’s so obvious that I feel a little silly even writing it down, but I so distinctly remember the change in breakfast, from before I practiced this to after, that it seems worth taking the time to share it.

Recipe below…

Bok Choy and Turnip Greens

Well, tonight I had my first-ever disappointing experience with a 5 Spices, 50 Dishes recipe. My first response, as I doctored up the tasteless, watery black-eyed pea curry, was anger and a sense of betrayal. But as I realized the specific missing flavors that I was trying to add into the dish – fat and sweet – my eyes strayed over to the empty can of coconut milk – lite coconut milk (it was all I had in the house!) – and I knew I had no one to blame but myself.

Well, the curry ended up quite edible after generous infusions of ginger, Earth Balance, salt, and vermouth. (How does vermouth make absolutely everything better?) And I accompanied it with a fabulous side – spicy bok choy and turnip greens stir fried with garlic and ginger. Unfortunately at this late stage in the game I had to compost at least half the turnip greens, which is a shame. I don’t know if I’ve ever cooked them before. I was put off by their prickly texture when they were raw, but once they were cooked I could not get enough of them. Super-yum!

I’m about to run out of garlic (although luckily Libby left me some she had in her bag from hostelling), and the curry used my second to last onion. I may have to go shopping soon for these must-have staples if the magic box fails to provide…

With no further ado, however, here is the recipe I used for the bok choy (it’s modified from the internet and I want to make sure I have a copy for the future – it was that good).

Spicy Bok Choy and Turnip Greens with Garlic and Ginger

• 1 1/2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
• 5 garlic cloves, sliced
• 1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon Thai red curry paste
• 1 head mature bok choy, sliced crosswise 1/2 inch thick
• 1 bunch turnip greens
• Salt
• 3 tablespoons broth
• 2 tablespoons vermouth (recipe called for Shaoxing rice wine, which would be great, but I’m out)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons soy sauce

Heat a large wok or skillet until very hot. Add the canola oil and heat until just smoking. Add the garlic, ginger and chili paste and stir-fry until lightly browned, about 30 seconds. Add the bok choy and turnip greens and a pinch of salt and stir-fry until crisp-tender, 5 minutes. Add the broth, cooking wine and soy sauce and cook, tossing, for 2 minutes longer. Finish with a drizzle of sesame oil.