Stocking up, part I

Making ingredients is a funny thing. You put a lot of energy into preparing something, but you can’t eat it on its own. All that energy gets expended in the service of expending less energy in the future. (Or, sometimes, in order to have a version of some particular ingredient that you can actually eat, because dietary restrictions mean it’s not possible to buy it already prepared.)

The past few weeks I’ve prepped a lot of ingredients. Not because I’ve had extra energy (I almost never have extra energy) but because I’ve had a ton of produce that was just not getting eaten in time. And this is the other function of making ingredients, also known as “preserving,” because it gets your food into forms that don’t rot, or freeze easily, or will actually get eaten.

My stockpile has included:

* Scrap Stock, batch V, my first successful batch since May (I had a failed attempt in late June). Because I canceled several box deliveries this summer, and have been away a lot, my scrap stock production has really slowed down. Additionally, tomato and zucchini trimmings don’t work for scrap stock because they rot before I can collect a large enough batch of scraps, so the scrap box I keep in the fridge hasn’t been getting full as fast as it did in the winter and spring. But at last I produced 4 cups of lovely pink stock (due to the beet trimmings from the turnip pickles, see below). And just in the nick of time! I am now cooking with my stock faster than I am making it.

* Turnip pickles, which employed beets and vinegar solution to turn my four large bunches of uneaten turnips into yummy pink, Middle Eastern pickles. Now, of course, I have 5 jars of pickles. They’re refrigerator pickles, which means they’ll get too strong if I don’t eat them soon. What am I going to do with five jars of turnip pickles? Have a pickle party? If you live in SF, let me know if you want a jar of really tasty turnip pickles. The texture of these little guys is incredible! They go amazingly well with falafel, but are also a yummy snack all on their own.

Turnip pickles with grilled eggplant and quinoa pilaf

* Mushroom gravy, following a vegan recipe from Veganomicon. I bought a big bag of mushrooms at the farmer’s market a while back, intending to make mushroom-walnut pate with them. (YUM!) But then our Cuisinart died, and I had to quickly figure out a new use for them before they turned to sludge in the fridge. Mushroom gravy is the kind of thing that always balks me. If I see a recipe, like the delicious Another Sheperd’s Pie from Moosewood Low-Fat Favorites, that has a whole separate gravy-making component on top of the actual making of the dish, I will always skip it. (In previous, more energetic times I did occasionally take on these all-day projects, which is why I know how good that recipe tastes!) But now with several cups of delicious vegan, gluten-free mushroom gravy tucked away in my freezer, I have a leg up on all those hearty but time-consuming vegetarian classics.

There’s plenty more stocking up in this pile (including our new downstairs freezer finally getting put to use with all kind of grains and seeds and GF flours, courtesy of Rainbow Grocery and their 20% off coupons from the Yellow Pages). It does give me a secure feeling to have a little backstock of ingredients, and it gives me a happy feeling to know that they came from my own hands!

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 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.

Zucchini and Baby Red Onions: Week of June 25th

AT LAST!

At last a new box!

This one really deserved to be photographed, by sheer virtue of being the first box in a month, but I was too tired and all the little veggies were lucky they even made it into the fridge.

It was a handsome box, though, and really well-balanced. A person could truly get all their needs met by such a box, and a have a bag of lettuce for the lettuce graveyard, besides!

In this week’s box:

Small red potatoes
Strawberries
Turnips, with greens
Stir-fry mix
Arugula
Zucchini (3 medium-sized ones)
Baby red onions (it says “Green onions” on my newsletter, so I am confused. These were very small, red, with long, floppy tops on them)
Lettuce
Apricots (a whole strawberry-basket of tiny ones)
Cherries (the yellow and red Ranier kind)

On another note, I made my first failed scrap stock. It smelled SO good when it was cooking, mostly due to the great smell of the sauteed yam peels. But when I strained and tasted it, it was impossibly bitter. I am not quite sure why. There was a tiny amount of radicchio trim, but too little to be the culprit, I think. There were also a few lemon peels. Partway through making the stock I remembered that you generally simmer fruit peels several times in water you discard in order to make them less bitter, and that by boiling them in my stock I was making my stock that discard-water. Perhaps I pulled them out too late?

At any rate, I have tried to be fearless with my stock experiments and always open to a negative outcome. It still comes as a shock and a disappointment, however, to have to throw all that beautiful (but inedible) stock away.

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…

Scrap Stock IV – Mega-edition

Another consequence of being too tired to cook or blog or generally do anything was that my veggie scraps really started piling up. By early this week most of my fridge’s top shelf seemed to be devoted to scraps, waiting like pining lovers for the transformative kiss of the stock pot. So when I finally started to have a bit more energy, it was time to brew up some stock and get that shelf cleared.

I ended up having enough material to make two pots of stock, ending up with 13 cups of rich, savory broth, tinged a beautiful pink from the beet scraps. My freezer is truly well stocked now, which saves me from treating the stock like it is a scarce commodity.

In this mega-edition of scrap stock:

Spinach crowns
Garlic peels and trim
Carrot trim and tops
Chard stem
Kale stem
Asparagus trim
Red cabbage trim
Fennel stalks
Apple cores
Radish trim
Leek trim
Green garlic trim
Arugula trim
Sugar snap pea trim
Thyme stalks
Red onion peels and trim
Shallot peels and trim
Mustard green trim
Beet trim
Bay leaves

Scrap stock, III

Getting bored of my surely less-than-engrossing detailed account of what I put in my stock each week? Well, I’d like to keep track of it for my own purposes and something tells me there’s a short life-expectancy for the soggy little scraps of scratch paper I use to record all the components as I toss them in the pot.

This week was not as successful, I think because of technical difficulties. I left the pot alone for its simmering time (I’m usually in the kitchen with it doing kitchen things, but I was in another room this time) and I think the fire may have actually gone out. So this round of stock is very mild. However it will serve to add a bit of flavor and nutrition to something that wants a mild broth, like risotto, so perhaps it is actually a blessing to have one batch with a decidedly non-aggressive character. I was a bit let down, though, since I felt like I was being wild and throwing caution to the winds, what with all the ginger peels and lemon balm stalks.

I googled “scrap stock” and found an interesting recipe from the civil war. Inspired by this, I added an apple core to my pot (although I forgot to save most of them this week – I need to get in the habit of putting them in the stock box and not the compost). I quite flagrantly ignored the admonition to never use cabbage scraps, however. Take what you like and leave the rest, right?

Into this week’s pot:

Leek tops
Green garlic tops
Onion skin
Garlic skin
Asparagus trim
Red cabbage trim
Apple core
Lemon balm stalks
Ginger peel
Potato peel
Portobella stems
Chard stalks
Beet green stalks
Kale stalks
Sugar snap pea trim
Carrot trim
Bok choy trim
Fennel trim
Thyme stalks

Lemon balm makes friends

Okay, there’s one thing that I feel needs to be understood right off the bat about lemon balm. In case my previous post’s “it’s like you’re eating in an aisle at Bath & Body Works” description wasn’t evocative enough, or if you have never set foot inside this beauty outlet where the air is heavy with the competing aromas of a hundred “scent collections,” I will say it more plainly. Lemon balm has a definite aftertaste (which I think is actually composed of scent rather than taste) of perfume or bath product, or “dish soap” as my friend labeled it tonight. I really enjoy this strange note, in part because it really lets me know I’m eating something novel, but your mileage, as they are fond of saying here on the interweb, may vary.

So keeping this all in mind, here are some results of my lemon balm experimentation. I tried the vinaigrette I wrote about in my last post, a simple affair composed of olive oil and rice wine vinegar and lemon balm. It was yucky – too vinegary, too peppery, no lemon balm flavor at all. Dressings are like my kryptonite right now – I get all insecure and clueless around them, where usually I am quite an improvisational, roll-with-the-punches cook. So I called in Duck as a guest dressing doctor, and we added some lemon olive oil, some sesame oil, a dash of maple syrup, a dash of balsamic, and a shallot. And then it was quite decent, but not worthy of topping my lovely tender asparagus as I had hoped. Good enough for salad, though.

Instead, I threw a handful of lemon balm leaves in with my asparagus as I steamed it. I really liked the flavor it imparted. But it got mixed reviews from my dining companions, again because of the B&BW factor, which can go either way for people, I guess.

My final experimental result was much more successful – in part, perhaps, because I’m the only one who ate it. I made the Cream of Leek Soup with Lemon Balm that I mentioned in my last post. It’s kind of a strange recipe, not very detailed (says the queen of excruciatingly detailed and annotated recipes!), so of course I’ve given my annotated and tweaked version below. But in general, I thought it was a very tasty combination of flavors and a terrific easy lunch.

(Incidentally, I’m so excited to have finally written a post that I feel is worthy of submission to Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week at Coffee and Vanilla. Weekend Herb Blogging is a weekly event where food bloggers write about herbs and share their stories and recipes and factoids. Cool!)

Read on for my heavily annotated soup recipe…

Scrap stock, round two

I was so nervous making this week’s scrap stock! I think I was worried that last week’s good results were sheer random luck and that it was statistically unlikely I would succeed again if I just did a repeat of last week’s method of simply cooking up all my veggie scraps from the past week, without regard to composition. But I gave it another shot. This week’s stock came out quite rich and quite assertive, which is unsurprising given that there were many asparagus stalks, fennel tops, and even two heads of roasted garlic that had been emptied of their yummy gooey cloves. I think it would make a delicious soup base, but I wouldn’t use it for something like risotto, because it would just take over the dish.

In this week’s scrap stock:
Leek tops
Green onion tops
Carrot tops
Roast garlic bulbs (no cloves)
Red cabbage trim
Red kale trim
Fennel stalks and leaves
Asparagus bottoms
Carrot trim
Shallot peels and trim
Spinach crowns
Thyme stalks
Sugar snap pea trim
Garlic peels and trim
Mushroom stems

Scrap Stock

Some kind of revolution took place before I was born, or at least before the chef side of me was born into consciousness. By the time I made my first forays into vegetarian cooking, there was a kind of stock backlash happening in the pages of all the cookbooks I read. According to all these veg-empowerment cookbooks, people used to make their stock from scraps and trimmings, but now, especially for a vegetarian cook without simmering bones and flavorful marrow to add to the pot, this was highly discouraged. We are worth it!, these books proclaimed. Worth a delicious, savory stock made from whole vegetables and bundles of aromatic herbs. I made vegetable stock from one of these recipes once. I almost cried to see pounds and pounds of beautiful vegetables reduced to a heap of mush and a pot of broth.

And so the scrap stock experiment was born. For a bit more than a week I saved all the trimmings from every vegetable I ate. Brown or yellow bits went straight into the compost, but everything else was washed and put into a tightly sealed plastic tub in the fridge. At the end of the week, I made an experimental stock. I had no idea how it might turn out. Really bitter, I suspected, because the majority of the heap consisted of the green, almost leathery tops of leeks, green garlic, and spring onions. But I figured, what do I have to lose? All I’m really wasting is the water I’m adding – everything else was compost-bound. At the last minute I almost chickened out and added a whole onion, a whole carrot, just a few things to boost the flavor, but I decided to really go for it this first time and just see what happened.

Here’s what ended up going into my scrap stock pot:

Leek greens and ends
Green garlic greens and ends
Spring onion greens and ends
Swiss chard stalks
Onion ends and peels from red and white onions
Red cabbage leaves from the outside of the cabbage
Spinach crowns
Garlic ends and peels
Thyme stalks
Carrot leaves and trimmings
Cauliflower leaves
Kale stalks
Radish trimmings
Sugar snap pea tops and strings

I cut everything into pieces and then first sauteed the allium trimmings (leeks, garlic, onions) for a bit in 2 teaspoons olive oil, then threw everything into the pot and stirred it over pretty high heat for about ten minutes. Then I added 3 quarts of water, 2 1/2 teaspoons of salt, 3 bay leaves and a few peppercorns, brought it to a boil, turned it down to a simmer, and simmered it, uncovered, for about half an hour. I let it settle for a few minutes and then strained it right way (I’ve heard stock can get bitter if you let the bits sit in the broth too long after cooking). And I have to say, it is quite, quite tasty. Certainly head and shoulders above the bitter brews that pass for vegetable broth in those vacuum-boxes. I can’t wait to freeze it and have it on hand the next time I need veggie broth for something. Best of all I am so tickled to have created something really valuable from something I’ve been throwing away. There may have been a broth revolution, but I guess I’m just an old-fashioned girl.