Cavolo Nero

We've been serving a lot of cavolo nero recently, mainly because it's the season and because, finally, a local grower is supplying it to us. Cavolo nero is Italian for black cabbage, but in English, it's often known as Tuscan black kale, lacinato kale, or less frequently dinosaur kale.

Although this green is hard to find, it is easy to recognize with its long narrow dark black-green leaves with the distinctive leathery appearance. It's only leathery in appearance: the leaves of cavolo nero are as tender as any kale and the stems are significantly more tender than standard curly kale. But the big payoff for this kale is the flavor: customers universally love it. It has a big, meaty flavor that makes it easily my favorite winter green.

To prepare cavolo nero, we slice it into thin ribbons from top of the leave to the bottom. We may discard a couple inches of the bottom if the stem gets a little tough. Our favorite way of cooking it is the simplest: we warm some extra virgin olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper in a sauté pan. Then we blanch the kale ribbons in simmering water for 45 to 60 seconds, drain them, and add them to the oil and garlic. Onto the plate they go after a quick toss. For our recent wine dinner, we used half duck fat and half butter instead of olive oil for a wholly decadent treat.

I also like the way this kale stands up in soups. For me, it is the must-have green in ribollita or any white bean soup. And it's an excellent, but different, stand-in for tronchuda in caldo verde.

I can't tell you where to find cavolo nero, but if you ever spot some, take it home. I predict it will quickly become one of your favorite greens.

Purslane

Sorry for the dearth of posts recently. Staffing and personal issues have taken a huge toll on my free time.

I've always been a fan of foraging for food: it's hard to beat the price of free food! Now that it is mid-summer, local purslane is in full swing and there happens to be a bunch growing in the crack where the asphalt of the parking lot meets the stucco of the restaurant. And how ironic that this wild Portulaca (P. oleracea) with its tiny yellow blooms is growing under the window boxes full of its showy cousins with the big pink and fuchsia blossoms.


But be careful when foraging anything whose identity you're not certain of. Growing in the same crack right next to the purslane is a Spotted Spurge (Euphorbia maculata) which I have seen people confuse with purslane and which is mildly toxic. Spotted spurge, as you can see, has very thin stems which exude a milky sap when broken and has tiny leaves that are opposite each other on the stems. This is an entirely different growth habit from the purslane with its large succulent stems and whorls of leaves, largely at the end of its stems.



Here in the United States, purslane is considered a weed; however, it finds favor as a salad and cooking herb around the world. In Mexico, purslane is called verdolaga and while it is often used in green chile and pork stews, I like it best when used raw on tacos. Nothing like carnitas on a fresh corn tortilla with a nice tart green tomatillo salsa and a sprig of purslane. And in the Mediterranean and Middle East, you'll see purslane leaves in all manner of chopped salads and often in tzatziki-style yogurt sauces and salads.

We use purslane in salads (just the leaves) where the crunchy and slightly tart leaves make a pleasant addition. We also toss some in sautés with spinach, garlic, and olive oil. The whole plant is edible, stems, leaves, and blooms, but I find the stems a bit much, so I just strip off the leaves. Also, because purslane is a succulent, it has a mucilaginous quality similar to okra. I like purslane best when raw or just slightly cooked: it becomes a bit slimy for me when cooked longer.

It's pretty neat and no doubt you have some growing in one of your gardens or flower beds. Give it a try.

Creative Greens

I like making salads from a large variety of greens: lettuces, chicories, herbs, all kinds of things. So I'm always happy to find new greens at the market for my salads.

In this photo, you see at the top red-stemmed dandelions and below that, radicchetta, the one that is similar to oak leaf lettuce. Dandelions are fairly bitter so I only use the small leaves raw in salads. The larger leaves I blanch and then sauté with olive oil and garlic, or I add them to braises of mixed greens. Radicchetta is a new green to me. Being a chicory, it has a little bitter note, but it is also nutty enough to be eaten out of hand. I can see it doing really well on a tomato and goat cheese sandwich. Both of these are from Mark Bishop at Master's Touch, Berkeley Springs, WV.

25th Anniversary 9-Course Vegetarian Tasting

Earlier this week, we did a nine-course vegetarian tasting menu for a couple's 25th wedding anniversary. In some respects, the timing was good, this being the last week for local asparagus and sugar snaps, and being the first week for English peas. In other respects, doing vegetarian menus before the onset of the summer vegetables such as squashes, peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants poses its challenges.

This menu is truly a menu of the season and was inspired in large part by what we found at the farmers market and what our growers brought to us: green garlic, garlic scapes, sugar snaps, English peas, fava beans, fennel, asparagus, dandelions, mulberries, morels, and shiitake mushrooms.


Sopa de Ajo. Creamy Soup of Local Green Garlic; Roasted Garlic Scape; Garlic Scape Pesto. This was inspired by the abundance of green garlic and garlic scapes that we have from thinning our garlic and keeping them from blooming so that they will focus on making garlic bulbs. Wine Pairing: Feffiñanes Albariño Rias Baixas 2008.


Fennel. Salad of Fennel Confit, Fennel Latke, and Fennel Slaw; Pernod Cream. We have so much fennel on hand now that we are looking for creative ways to use it. Fennel confit was marinated in herbs, garlic and olive oil then grilled and then poached in olive oil for 10 hours. The greens you see are red-stemmed dandelions. Wine Pairing: White Hall Vineyards Viognier Virginia 2008.


Spring. Sauté of Morels, Peas, Sugar Snaps, Favas, and Garlic Scapes; Achiote Pasta. This was conceived as an open-faced raviolo showing off all the spring vegetables on hand. The morels and veg were cooked in the Tuscan style called trifolati, in the style of truffles, with butter, garlic, and lots of fresh parsley. There's no better spring sauté in the world! Wine Pairing: La Slina Gavi di Gavi 2008.


Napoleon of Local Shiitake Mushrooms. Roasted Shiitakes; Crispy Goat Cheese; Crispy Shiitake Bits; Balsamic Gel. I love shiitakes and goat cheese together (anybody remember my shiitake polenta with herbed goat cheese mousse?) so the napoleon flowed naturally from the disk shape of the mushrooms and the cheese. We wanted some bacon for this dish; the crispy shiitake bits do a great job standing in for the bacon. Balsamic vinegar works really well with shiitakes too. I wanted to use the balsamic as a plate garnish but didn't want to reduce it and get that muddy caramelized balsamic flavor, so I gelled it. Wine Pairing: Swedenburg Pinot Noir Virginia 2008.


Vegetarian Yiouvetsi. Baked Orzo with Tomatoes, Artichokes, Preserved Lemons & Local Goat’s Milk Feta. My Greek friends know that I'm a fairly deft hand with a traditional yiouvetsi, baked orzo with lamb and tomatoes, redolent with olive oil, lemon, and fresh oregano, topped with feta cheese. I had heard of Michael Psilakis doing a vegetarian one, but I never knew what he put in it. That idea has been in the back of my brain for a long time and I am happy to have had the chance to bring it to a menu. This one contains tomatoes, onions, artichokes, house-cured preserved lemons, and garlic scapes. It may not look like much in the photo, but the flavors are intensely amazing. Thanks to Alan at Spriggs Delight Farm for the feta. Wine Pairing: Dupeuble Beaujolais 2008.


Panisse. Fried Chickpea Cake; Smoky Chickpea Salad; Roasted Red Pepper Hummus. For red wine vegetarian courses when tomatoes are not in season, I look to paprika and last year's roasted red peppers. And I love chickpeas. I eat them every day; they are my primary source of protein. This then is a loving homage to the many forms of chickpeas. Note to anyone listening: we tried to make the smoky chickpea salad with fried chickpeas, thinking we could get them crunchy. Instead, they just got leathery and no bueno. Wine Pairing: Borgia Campo de Borja 2008.


Stuffed Piquillo. Sweet Red Piquillo Pepper Stuffed with Israeli Couscous in the Style of Paella. You may have seen me make this couscous on WVPT. It is a customer and staff favorite because the flavors are so amazing. The couscous is flavored with sweet yellow and red peppers, artichoke hearts, yellow onions, green onions, tomatoes, saffron, garlic, and pimentón. And piquillos are the best tasting red pepper in the world. All in all, a terrific dish. Wine Pairing: Finca Sobreño Toro 2005.


Cheese Plate. Artisanal Cheeses; Mulberries; Caerphilly-Pecorino Crackers. I don't eat sweets after a meal; they just don't appeal to me. But I love to finish dinner with cheese and a glass of wine so when the customer told me he'd like to finish dinner with cheese, he was talking my language. I foraged some mulberries and made some crackers to accompany the three artisanal cheeses, one each from New York, Wisconsin, and Virginia. Wine Pairing: Linden Claret Virginia 2006.


Gorgonzola Cheesecake. Candied Walnuts; Port Reduction. Another riff on the cheese theme to end dinner is my subtle gorgonzola cheesecake made with Gorgonzola Dolce. This is my kind of way to finish a meal: all the classic port accompaniments reworked into a dessert. Wine Pairing: Warre’s Otima 10-year old Tawny Port.

Risotto of Israeli Couscous in the Style of Paella

Wow! That title is a mouthful! In this recipe that I demonstrated on a recently taped segment of WVPT Cooks, I cook couscous somewhat in the manner of risotto and flavor it in the manner of paella. It really is a wonderful vegetarian dish that I would willingly eat several times a week. It would also be very good with a little chorizo and studded with shellfish such as mussels, clams, and shrimp, if you like.

First, a word on couscous. In this photo, on the left you see the traditional couscous that you probably already know. I'm finding that very few people are familiar with the larger Israeli couscous on the right. Traditional couscous is made from semolina, hence its yellow color. Israeli couscous is made from very fine durum flour and is whiter. You "cook" modern couscous merely by refreshing it in very hot water or by steaming it, whereas Israeli couscous is generally boiled in water like any other pasta.

In making my "risotto," the texture is best when I start with Israeli couscous that has been precooked for about five minutes.

Risotto of Israeli Couscous in the Style of Paella

extra virgin olive oil
1/2 poblano chile (or green pepper), diced
1/2 red pepper, diced
1/2 yellow pepper, diced
1/2 orange pepper, diced
1 clove garlic, finely minced
salt & pepper
1 pinch saffron
2 teaspoons pimentón (smoked paprika)
1-2 cups vegetable broth or water
2 cups Israeli couscous, par-cooked for five minutes
3 green onions, thinly sliced crosswise
4 artichoke hearts, quartered
10 grape tomatoes
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup pecorino cheese, grated

In a large sauté pan, heat the olive oil over high heat and sauté the peppers for two to three minutes. Add the garlic, a pinch of salt and pepper, the saffron, and pimentón and let cook for another minute, stirring well to distribute the spices.

Add a cup of broth or water and the couscous. Stir together well and continue to cook until the couscous is hot and cooked through, another minute or two. Add more water or broth as necessary to adjust the consistency to your liking.

Add the green onions, artichoke hearts, and tomatoes and stir while they warm through.

Stir in the butter and cheese and serve immediately.

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

I was freezing my rear end off at the farmers market yesterday—it was the 15-knot winds, not the actual temperature—while piling my purchases on the table. Somebody said, "That looks like a picture!" So courtesy of my trusty iPhone, here's part of my haul.


Who said there's nothing to buy at the winter market? From the red cabbage in the upper left moving clockwise, there's curly kale, blushing golden and york apples, butternut squash, savoy cabbage, leeks, and several celery roots, which are mostly obscuring some very pretty turnips.

Things of Beauty

Just looking at these gorgeous organic Hakurei turnips, how could you not be moved to want to try them? I feel blessed to be able to work with such gorgeous foods each day. Hakurei turnips are Japanese hybrids known for their sweetness, uniformity, and delicious hairless leaves. They're really tasty and I'm looking forward to serving these tonight as part of a vegetarian special.

Market Shopping

I don't think it will surprise too many of my customers, especially the local ones who see me at the market, that I get the inspiration for a lot of dishes from seeing and feeling ingredients. Just last week, I was at the market when I spied some gorgeous tomatoes and very unique luffa squashes. I took them back to the restaurant with the vague idea that roasting tomatoes and luffa would be an interesting dish.

Only one slight problem, I'd never worked with luffa (Luffa acutangula) before. Grown them to maturity and made sponges from them, yes; eaten the immature ones, never. But, it's another squash, albeit a firm one, and so I didn't think I could go too far wrong by treating as any other firm squash. These luffa were sold to me by their Mandarin name, si gua. This photo is from another batch and these luffa are a little worse for wear, still I wanted you to see the product that I am blessed to work with.

Then later that afternoon, my fish delivery came in with some very pristine Atlantic Spanish mackerel, which happen to be migrating off the coast of Virginia right now. Mackerel is known as a dark, gamy, oily fish and undeservedly so. If you've ever eaten saba (pickled mackerel) at the sushi bar, you know that it is white-fleshed and although it has a strong fish flavor, it is delicious when extremely fresh. Mackerel do have a high oil content which makes them a delight to cook, for it is hard to dry them out. But the high oil content means that they go rancid quickly. Only buy from a trusted source. This little guy (2.5 pounds, 1.1 kg) was fat and pristine and yielded four nice filets. I don't skin mackerel; it has no scales and it is impossible to remove the skin anyway.

While I was breaking down the mackerel, the whole dish came to me. Why not roast the tomatoes and luffa and season them assertively arrabbiata-style, then roast the mackerel to order on top of the arrabbiata sauce? If mackerel can stand up well to pickling, certainly it will stand up to an assertive tomato sauce.

Roasted Spanish Mackerel with Luffa Arrabbiata

This feeds four people quite well with a green salad and a glass of red wine. You can substitute other squash for the luffa. If you use a soft squash such as zucchini, reduce the cook time to about 15 minutes. You can substitute any of the mackerels or bluefish in this recipe.

2 small luffa
4 large tomatoes
4 cloves garlic
1 anchovy
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes or to taste
1/2 teaspoon salt
black pepper
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 mackerel filets

Preheat the oven to very hot, 450F. Slice the luffa into coins about 1/4" (1cm) thick. Peel, seed, and roughly chop the tomatoes. Mince the garlic. Remove the backbone from the anchovy and chop it finely. In a roasting pan, mix the squash, tomatoes, garlic, anchovy, red and black pepper, salt, and olive oil. Roast the vegetables until the squash is tender, stirring every now and again. It took me about 40 minutes. Rub the mackerel with extra virgin olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place skin side down on top of the vegetables and return to the oven until the mackerel is just barely cooked, about 6 minutes.

For presentation, we put the sauce down in the well of a soup plate with the fish over. Then we spooned a tomato vinaigrette around the plate and a little on the fish and topped the fish with a small mound of local baby arugula dressed with lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil.

You Know It's August When....

You know that it's August when you have more tomatoes than you know what to do with. I want to show off some of my outstanding tomatoes, tomatoes that you could eat tonight at the restaurant were you so inclined. First, here's the artsy magazine cover shot of some of our organic cherry tomatoes in all shapes and sizes.

Next, here is a top view of some of the haul from the market this morning. You see the lemon-shaped tomato at the top that is called imaginatively enough Lemon Tomato? To its left are two Pruden's Purples and to the right is a Caspian Pink. Just below it are two unindentified round red tomatoes. To the right of the Caspian Pink are two tomatillos, not even tomatoes but pretty nonetheless in both green and purple forms. The large red and yellow tomato below the tomatillos is known by many names including Old German, Pennsylvania German, Mr. Stripey, and Big Rainbow. To the right are a few black cherry tomatoes. Just below that is a very interesting fuzzy lemon yellow tomato called a Peach Tomato. Continuing clockwise you see a yellow plum tomato and then a Red Zebra, the small red and orange striped tomato which looks amazingly like the Green Zebra, none of which I have this year. Above the Zebra you see the pink Brandywine and flanking it, two green cherry tomatoes and an unidentified round red and yellow tomato.

Feast on!

Nepalese Bell Pepper

You know why I love going to the farmer's market? Because sometimes I run into something that I've never seen before. Check out these small peppers that Seed Savers lists as Nepalese Bell Peppers. They are about as interesting looking a pepper as I have seen in years, almost hat-shaped. Here they are on a three-year old plant (yes, some peppers are perennials in their native habitats) that overwinters in the greenhouse. These peppers are starting to ripen into their orange phase and ultimately they will go red-orange.

Here are two green ones that fell off in transport. They are very thin-fleshed peppers and the bottom of the hat is very mild. Up around the stem and seeds, however, they have a good spike of heat that lasts several minutes. We're thinking that if we had enough of these little guys, we'd stuff them.

2009, Summer of the Beet

I'm starting to get something of a reputation for cooking one of the world's most humble and underappreciated foods: the beet. And I'm fine with that. I'm especially fine when I visit tables and I hear the common refrain, "I hate beets, but..."

I grew up eating beets directly from our garden, so I never understood why people dislike them so until I was a teenager when my family ate at a Holiday Inn, probably because my grandfather who had terrible taste in food wanted to eat there. The beets on my plate were disgusting and the rest of the food wasn't much better. My parents explained to me that they were canned beets, something I had never eaten before. Gross. I understand where you beet haters are coming from. Now I ask you to put aside your hatred and read on.

Back to the present and our annual Harvest Dinner this past week when we celebrate the hard work of our friends Gene and Beth Nowak at Mayfair Farm by putting on a multicourse vegetarian menu using only the produce from their farm. It's our way of thanking them for supplying us in good weather and bad, year in and year out.

I was determined to put on an entirely new menu this year, largely because we have the same devout customers attending from year to year and I wanted to show them some new dishes. Because this summer of 2009 has been abnormally cool, we have been blessed with fresh baby beets all summer, and this is unprecedented in my lifetime. To have baby beets coincide with the height of summer produce (corn, peaches, tomatoes, peppers) season just doesn't happen and I wanted to take advantage of that.

As I mentioned at the start of this meandering post, I'm getting a reputation for beets. It's not intentional: I assure you that I am not proselytizing for beets in any way. It's just that I cook what I like and I like beets. I like beets a lot. And so do our customers.

My Baby Beet, Goat Cheese, and Walnut Salad is the simplest thing to make and it is so delicious that customers actually decide to come to dine with us based on whether this salad is on the menu. I quote a customer's email to me: "If I wasn't already married and there had been a preacher in the house, I would've married the beet, walnut and goat cheese salad." This seems a bit extreme, but there is no denying that this salad is one of our top five most popular appetizers ever. Beet haters: understand that this is a beet dish so popular they'd be after me with a noose if I suddenly stopped making it.

Each year before the Harvest Dinner, the speculation starts about the menu. I always keep this menu a secret because I want to surprise everyone. On market day before the dinner, I see everyone peeking in the back of my truck to see what I am taking back to the restaurant. And people will have been bugging Beth for weeks about the menu. There was no hiding that I was serving beets—a very significant quantity of beets. And so I knew that in no way could I put the beet, goat cheese, and walnut salad on the menu because that would be what everyone expected.

In the end, I had three really neat ideas and couldn't make up my mind what to put on the menu, so I did a trio of all three ideas, which you see here. On the left is a beet chutney, more properly called as my Indian friends would remind me, a beetroot pickle. In the center is one of my goat cheese truffles, in this case with roasted figs and roasted beets, rolled in crushed walnuts. On the right you see BBQ beets, about as inspired an idea as I have had in a very long time. Its genesis lies in a conversation that one of the cooks and I were having during a brainstorming session on the deck. He was talking about a dry rub of brown sugar and pimentón for something and somehow I got the idea of making it into a sauce for beets. The result: primo!

Several people asked for the recipe for the beet chutney and here is my recreation as best as I can recall, scaled to human size, rather than the 100-person batch I made this week.

Beet Chutney

2 pounds beets (two nice bunches)
1 tablespoon mustard oil
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 yellow onion, finely diced
1 poblano chile, finely diced
1 green Thai chile, finely minced
3 curry leaves
2 tablespoons ginger, finely minced
2 tablespoons garlic, finely minced
6 green cardamom pods
6 black cardamom pods
2 teaspoons fenugreek seeds
1 tablespoon ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup rice vinegar
3/4 cup brown sugar
salt and black pepper to taste

Well, isn't this a prodigious list of ingredients? If you cook a lot of Indian food as I do, you'll have all these ingredients already. If not, there's no time like the present to start!

Cut the tops off the beets, leaving about an inch of stem attached and place the beets in a single layer in a foil packet on a sheet pan, and then roast the beets in a medium oven until tender when pierced with a knife. For golf ball or smaller beets such as those shown above, this will take a half an hour or so. Let the beets cool in the foil packet until they are cool enough to handle, but still warm. Wearing gloves, slice the stems off the top of the beet and squeezing the beet gently, slip the skin right off. Trim the root and dice the beets.

Next, heat the mustard and vegetable oils in a heavy bottom pan big enough to hold the beets, until the oil is almost smoking. Add the mustard and cumin seeds and cook until they really start popping, like popcorn. Quickly add the onions and cook until the edges are starting to brown, then add the rest of the wet ingredients: the poblano, Thai chile, curry leaves, ginger, and garlic. Cook a few minutes longer until the onions are nicely caramelized.

At this point, add all the remaining dry spices, the brown sugar, and the vinegar. Mix well. Add the diced beets and turn the flame down. Let the mixture simmer for 20 minutes or so to come together and until the mixture is almost dry. Adjust the sweet and sour balance with more vinegar or sugar as necessary. Adjust the spice level to your taste. Correct the salt and pepper seasoning.

Although you can serve this immediately, it is much better if it cures in the refrigerator at least for a day and preferably for several days.

Variations. I often use tamarind instead of vinegar and frequently I add a dried fruit for sweetness, such as golden raisins. For texture, sometimes I will add lotus seeds.

So Many Beans, So Little Time....

In speaking with customers and shoppers at the local farmers market, I can sense a little confusion about some of the lookalike shell beans that are for sale now. Here are three that I picked up this morning. From left to right, bird egg beans (which are very similar to Italian borlotti and inspired a Virginia Living article on the restaurant), dragon tongue beans (which are a wax bean used both as a fresh bean, shown here, and a shell bean later in the fall), and cranberry beans.

From a culinary point of view, these beans are all interchangeable. You can use any of them with excellent results in any fresh or dried bean recipe. What you don't want to do is mix them in the same recipe, unless you cook each type separately, because they all have different cooking times. As you can see, the rounder bird eggs are significantly larger and will take much longer to cook than the smaller and longer cranberry beans. For my trivially simple and utterly favorite recipe for fresh shell beans, refer to the bird egg post from last summer.

And now I'm off to the deck to shell some beans before lunch starts. It will be great to sit and be productive while letting my mind wander, and the results are going to be incredible tonight as a base for the lamb shanks from Virginia Lamb that I braised last evening.

Pickles on the Hoof

I'm always making some kind of pickles (see Dill Pickles and Zanahorias en Escabeche) to accompany the charcuterie that I make in house and when I ran across this cornucopia this morning at the market, I knew I had to start a new batch of dill pickles today.

At the top of the photo, the small round yellow cucumbers are called Lemon Cucumbers and just below that are the standard European/Burpless/English cucumbers we call Eurocukes. Below and to the right, the pale green ones are Armenian cucumbers, which I have read do not make good pickles: we shall see. At the bottom left are typical small pickling cucumbers that the vendor called Tiny Toms. These are about half the size of a typical Kirby pickling cucumber.

We'll know how this batch of pickles turns out in a couple of weeks.

Dragon Tongue Beans

Here's a photo of the beautiful Dragon Tongue beans that we are getting at the farmers market now. I have read about these beans for years and seen them many times in seed catalogs, but this is my first experience with them. And I'm in love. Territorial Seed says, "Dragon Tongue is probably the best multipurpose bean available." Amen. This bean tastes better than any I have had in the last 25 years.

Dragon Tongue is an old French variety called Dragon Langerie that was apparently re-established in the Netherlands. It's a moderately long flat yellow (wax) bean with purple streaks and mottling that disappears when cooked. This very tender stringless bean is excellent raw and as a fresh bean and couldn't be simpler to prepare. I am waiting for the fall to try it out as a shell bean, for which it has an excellent reputation.

We are currently bias cutting the bean into small pieces and sautéeing it in clarified butter with shallots to order. Done this way, the bean is incredibly delicious.

They are available now at the Freight Station Farmers Market from Mark Bishop of Master's Touch Plants & Produce from Berkeley Springs, WV. Mark tells me that they are a very prolific bush bean and that we can continue to look forward to them for a while longer.

Tronchuda

Here's my latest new vegetable toy of the summer. It's a cabbage called Brassica oleracea var. costata or var. tronchuda with common names including tronchuda, couve tronchuda, or Portuguese kale.

In the field, this leaf cabbage looks similar to Brussels sprouts or collards, with large rounded leaves radiating off a central stalk, and no sign of a head like cabbage. As you can see, the leaves look very much like collards, but collards are bluer and collards don't tolerate the heat of summer. Also, these leaves are thicker than collards.

The flavor tastes very much like cabbage and not at all like collards. As such, so far, it has only gone into our farmers market slaw where it performs admirably. It is the traditional green in a wide array of Portuguese soups.

Dill Pickles!

I just love this time of year when I can feast directly from the produce coming into the restaurant without having to cook anything! And among my favorite feasting items are cucumbers. A cucumber right off the vine is a wholly different beast than you're used to eating, if you get your cukes from a traditional grocery store.

I love the little Kirby pickling cucumbers for pickles, but right now I'm blessed with a bumper crop of what we call Eurocukes in the trade, the long, slender largely seedless, so-called burpless cucumbers with the tender skins. Not only do I love eating these cukes out of hand, I also love to make pickles with them (or any cucumbers for that matter).

I know that the legion of putting-by cookbooks treat pickling as an exact science, but what I've learned after making hundreds of batches of cucumber pickles is that for fresh, refrigerated pickles, any old attempt at winging it will result in a tasty product.

Here then is my winging it for today. While my gallon of brine was coming to a boil, I sliced a bunch of cucumbers (about 10) and layered them in my bin with roughly mashed cloves of garlic (about 24), heads of dill (about 16), and a few sprinkles of crushed red pepper (about a teaspoon). Note how much head room I am leaving in my bin. That's important later on.

Pickle Brine

3 quarts water
1 quart vinegar
1 cup Kosher salt

Once the brine comes to a boil, pour it over the cucumbers until they are covered, still leaving plenty of head room. You should have a quart or a quart and a half of brine leftover. Let the remaining brine cool down so that you can handle it without burning yourself for the next step.

Fill a large plastic bag with the cooled brine, press all the air out of the bag, and seal the bag. Lay the bag over the wannabe pickles to seal the bin. Refrigerate. These pickles are good to eat at any time, but I like to let them sit at least a week. Naturally, they will keep for months.

Cucamelon

You're right. They're so damned cute that it's ridiculous. Grape-sized watermelons. Not exactly. These little Curcurbits taste like cucumber with a bit of watermelon rind and a squeeze of lemon juice. The crunchy little critters are tasty, no doubt.

I first read about them perhaps four years ago and got to play with them for the first time last summer. And I have more in hand right now. This native of Mexico and Central America, Melothria scabra, besides being known as a cucamelon also goes by several other monikers such as pepquiño, mouse melon, Mexican sour gherkin, and sandía de ratón in Spanish. It's still too early to know what name will catch on here in the US.

Although the cucamelon tastes like a cucumber-melon cross, it is botanically neither and won't cross with either. The vines with deep green ivy-shaped leaves are beautiful and lend themselves to trellising. If I had more room in my garden, I'd grow these prolific little fruits. At 75 days to maturity, they are well suited to our growing season here in Virginia, seeded out May 15 and fruiting the first of August, or even faster if transplanted from the greenhouse.

I don't have a whole lot to play with right now, but my experience over the last two summers is that they store very well under refrigeration. Right now, I'm just eating them out of hand—the whole fruit is edible just like a grape—and putting them in salads along with heirloom cherry tomatoes. I'm looking forward to pickling some when I have more quantity.

Sorrel-Wrapped Mahi Demonstration

Here's a brief photo essay from a recent lunch special that one of my cooks was prepping. It's a good lesson in how to wrap any kind of protein with a leafy green. In this case, we're wrapping relatively mild Mahi Mahi in bright, lemony sorrel.

Sorrel (Rumex acetosa) is not well known in the US and not commonly grown. In fact, we take all we can get from two different growers and it's still not enough for us. The bright lemony flavor is a favorite in our kitchen. If you've ever tasted the shamrock-leaved Oxalis that we commonly call sour grass and gets its sour flavor from oxalic acid, you know the flavor of sorrel, which gets its flavor from a big dose of ascorbic acid.

Sorrel pairs extremely well with mild seafood such as this Mahi and with poultry; roasted chicken with sorrel sauce is a classic.

Here are the lanceolate or arrowhead-shaped leaves of raw common sorrel.

 

 

 

 

When you blanch sorrel even for just a second, it goes olive drab; it's unavoidable. After blanching, blot the leaves well to remove any water.

 

 

Chop the leaves finely and flatten between two sheets of film. Peel the top layer of film off.

 

 

 

Place the raw fish bottom side up on the sorrel and using the bottom layer of film, wrap the sorrel around the fish.

 

 

 

Here's the bottom side of the fish after having been wrapped.

 

 

And the top side.

And the finished lunch special with rice wine vinegar-poached dried pears, microgreens, and a plum-sesame sauce. We seared the fish bottom side down in a hot skillet and then finished cooking it in a hot oven.

Perfect Bok Choy

And this is why I go to the farmers market personally: to find something as beautiful and exquisite as these perfect little bok choy. These are the miniature variety (bred to be small) of Brassica chinensis known as Shanghai bok choy.

Growers who are focused on maximum revenue don't want to pick anything this young; after all, think of all the money they could make when these gain four times their current weight.

Spigarello, Spigariello

Today I've got my hands on a new (to me) leaf broccoli called variously Spigarello or Spigariello. Actually, it's not new: it's an heirloom from Italy, where it is called variously Cima di Rape Spigarello or Cavolo Broccolo Spigariello. To add to the confusion, I've seen two different types in seed catalogs, one with flat leaves like this variety and one with really curly leaf margins. Some look more like standard rapini/cima di rape/broccoli raab; this kind looks more like small broccoli leaves.

The flavor is very much broccoli with a touch of spice reminiscent of rapini on the finish. I'm happy to have it in my arsenal this weekend.

If you don't already know the answer to the question how am I going to prepare it, you should. With olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes, of course.