In Vacanza

The witching hour is practically upon me...I've been working like an insane person, compiling a packing list, studying my Italian verbs, writing way too many instructions for the cat/housesitters, and all that's standing between me and my vacation is two more (very full) days at work and, you know, the actual packing part. 

David and I have been spending most of our evenings at home this week, both to get more time in with Ingrid and to get ready to go.  Have you ever been so behind on blogging that you stop taking photos of food because you don't need more things to blog?  In the past week I have not photographed a terrific seafood risotto, a marvelous chicken piccata and a zippy fennel salad.  My future blog entries runneth over, though the chicken piccata was both easy and tasty enough that I expect to make it again this summer and will blog it then.

The exception was the cabbage rolls that I made earlier this week out of the head of cabbage that was rolling around in the vegetable drawer begging to be used.  A word of caution on making these:  my sweet little organic head of cabbage made this recipe more difficult--ideally, a cabbage with larger leaves would be better.

I found myself with a lot of leftover filling on my hands, which I made into meatballs and served with pasta last night. 

Finally, a thanks to those who commented on my mention that I had a no good, very bad day last Saturday.  Some of you may recall that I there was a situation with a friend with whom I was very close, who was having lots of issues during a play we were working on last fall and subsequently left the production.  He's said lots of awful things about me, and I've just been trying to be dignified and keep my head up because confronting him would have been pointless.  He has some significant problems and somehow I've become the scapegoat for them.

At a wedding we were both at last weekend, he yelled at David.  At the wedding.  Horrible and humiliating and painful, so of course I burst into tears and David and I left the reception.  This has been going on for six months and it's not getting any easier.

I hate being such an emotional person.  It's hard to write about this, even in kind of a detached manner.  So again, thanks to all who offered their support.

Whew.  And now on to the cabbage rolls.

Involtini di Verza in Umido (Stewed Stuffed Cabbage Rolls)

Adapted from the CIA's Italian Cooking at Home

12 large green cabbage leaves

1 lb. lean ground beef

1 lb. loose sausage, preferably a spicy Italian chicken or pork sausage

3/4 cup leftover cooked rice or small pasta (I used leftover couscous)

1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped

1 1/2 cups canned Italian whole tomatoes, crushed by hand

1 cup low-sodium chicken broth

2 bay leaves

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, torn by hand or julienned

Kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper

Start a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil.  When it is ready, add the cabbage leaves and blanch them until they are soft, about two to three minutes.  While you are doing this, start the oven to preheating to 350 degrees.  When the cabbage leaves are done, remove them from the water and place in a colander to drain.

In a large bowl, combine the ground beef, sausage, onion, rice or other pasta, and a little salt and pepper.  Use your hands to make sure everything is blended together.

Spray a large baking dish with nonstick spray or rub it with a little olive oil.

Using your hands again, shape the meat mixture into small rolls and place one in the center of each cabbage leaf.  Tuck the edges of the leaf around the bottom of each roll and place in the baking dish.

Once all the rolls are ready, pour the broth and then the crushed tomatoes over them and sprinkle with the parsley and basil.  Tuck the bay leaves into the pan.

Bake until the rolls are cooked through and very soft, about 45 minutes.

Makes twelve rolls, for about four main-dish servings.  Serve with a green salad and bread.

The Brigadoon of the Vegetable World

I am obsessed with sunchokes. 

Sunchokes, Jerusalem artichokes, whatever they are--and I'm still not totally sure, since the definition in my beloved Larousse Gastronomique that my brother-in-law Philip gave me for Hannukah a couple of years ago is maddeningly vague--I love them.  I want to write haikus to them, or perhaps a symphony in praise of them.

All right, I'm getting carried away.  The fact is that sunchokes are fairly ugly little brown tubers and pretty much unavailable in Alaska.  When I saw them in the list of possibilities for the CSA box that arrived this week, I was at least smart enough to order double of them. 

I can only remember eating these little critters a couple of times, and the last was about four or five years ago.  They're the Brigadoon of vegetables, at least in Alaska (as an aside, extra love to anyone who gets that reference).

They are hellish to peel, which the Larousse does say, and to which the small gash on my left middle finger can attest.  However, they were heavenly to eat.  The flavor is deep and rich and earthy, slightly starchy and reminiscent of really good mushrooms. 

I'm particularly proud of this recipe because I made it up on the fly on a night I didn't expect to be home.  Essentially, it's puréed sunchokes stirred into a basic risotto.  But the flavor?  Anything but basic.  I might have swooned.

Sunchoke Risotto

1/2 pound sunchokes, peeled to the best of your ability and cut in 1/2" cubes

1/4 cup 2% milk

3 tbsp. olive oil

2 1/4 cups arborio rice

1 cup dry white wine, divided

4 cups chicken stock

1 leek, white and pale green parts only, chopped

1 shallot, chopped

2 peperoncini peppers, crushed

3/4 cup finely shredded Parmesan

Truffle or kosher salt to taste

Freshly-ground black pepper to taste

Heat a medium-sized pot of water to boil, then add the sunchokes.  Boil for approximately 20 minutes or until fork-tender.  When the sunchokes are cooked, drain them and transfer to the bowl of a food processor.  Pulse the sunchokes briefly, then drizzle in the milk and one tablespoon of olive oil.  Pulse again and taste, adding pepper and a little salt.  Then process until the sunchokes are silky in texture, like mashed potatoes without the lumps.

Pour the stock and 1/4 cup of the wine in a small saucepan and warm over low heat;  this will need to stay warm for the entire process.

Heat a large skillet or saucepan over medium heat.  Add two tablespoons of the olive oil and heat until shimmering.  Add the leek and shallot and cook until they are lightly browned, then add the rice.

Stir the rice well for several minutes, until it is coated with oil and gets slightly toasty.  Then add the remaining 3/4 cup of the wine and cook until it is almost incorporated.  Add the peperoncini.

Add the broth/wine mixture in half-cup increments, stirring constantly so the rice doesn't stick.  After two additions of broth, add half the sunchoke mixture and stir well to combine.  Add another two additions of broth, add the remaining sunchokes.  Incorporate another cup of broth and taste;  you want the rice to be al dente and may not need the additional broth.

When the rice is the desired texture, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cheese, plus salt and pepper to taste.  Truffle salt really complements the sunchoke flavor, if you have it around.

Makes about four main course servings;  would serve six for a side.

Winter White

The care and feeding (of us, that is) of the CSA box continues, on a slightly more ambitious level.

White salads seem to have become all the rage at restaurants in Anchorage.  The problem is that most of them have heavy, gloppy dressings that obliterate the delicate flavors of the root vegetables in them.  It's a perfect salad for winter, but the balance of ingredients is generally off.

I happen to love root veg, although I almost never eat them raw except for fennel.  This salad has the chic white salad look with a light vinaigrette.  If you have a mandoline, I highly recommend using that for the shaved vegetables.  I used a great little Kuhn Rikon peeler, which worked  except that I kept nicking my fingers.  Perhaps I was suffering for my food.

The dressing on this is a bit sweet;  at the end, I recommend a variation for a tangier vinaigrette.  I served this with a spicy lemon shrimp, which made a great light meal.

Shaved White Salad

Adapted from Bon Appetit Magazine, November 2011

4 tbsp. hazelnuts, chopped

1/4 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice (about one orange)

1 tbsp. fresh-squeezed lemon juice

2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

1 fennel bulb, shaved

3 radishes, thinly shaved

1 turnip, thinly shaved

Kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper

2 tbsp. blue cheese crumbles

Roughly chop two tablespoons of the hazelnuts;  combine with the juices, salt, pepper and olive oil and set aside.

Toss the fennel with the vinaigrette using your hands, then add the radishes and toss again.  Add the shaved turnip, cheese and remaining two tablespoons whole hazelnuts and toss one last time. 

Variation:  This dressing is a bit sweet.  With the leftover root vegetable salad, I tossed it with a bit of baby red leaf lettuce leaves and some of the lemon-shallot vinaigrette from this post.  It lacks the elegant uniform white color, but it is zestier and in my opinion tastier.

The CSA Box: It's What's for Dinner

Does anyone remember those old "Beef:  It's What's for Dinner" commercials set to music from Aaron Copeland's ballet "Rodeo"?  That music has been going through my head over the last couple of days as I've been thinking about this blog entry.

This past Wednesday brought the latest CSA box, chock-full of apples and pears, along with buttercup (not sure how it differs from butternut) squash, purple-top turnips and a few other veggies.  When the box first arrives, I really do my best to cook to those ingredients and minimize the number of things coming from the store.  Some boxes lend themselves to this more than others.

Wednesday was a long day at work, with an ugly case settling practically at the door of the hearing room.  That was cause for celebration, but more importantly it meant that I didn't have a lot of energy for dinner.

David arrived home even later than I did, saw the carton of  eggs sitting on the counter and groaned.  We eat a lot of omelets in our household, and he was unexcited about eating another one.  Fortunately, I had secret ingredients.  Exhibit One:

Or, as I like to call it, the leek that ate Anchorage.  This sucker was enormous.  Exhibit Two:

Shallots (pictured here with the chopped leek).  Why doesn't everyone use them?  They have a flavor that combines onion and garlic with, as Garrison Keillor says, "special mellowing agents."  Delicious.

Exhibit Three:

When it doubt, a good bottle of wine never hurts.  This  is from Maysara, a small producer in Oregon's Willamette Valley.  It's gorgeously colored and fruity, but perfectly dry.  It tastes like summer in a bottle. 

Eggs love rosé.  I could get all wine-geeky and explain why I think that is, but I'm going to spare you.

Exhibit Four:

I forgot to take a photo, but truffle sea salt, also from the Willamette Valley, gives killer flavor and aroma to any savory dish.  It can be ordered here:

https://www.oregonmushrooms.com/p-157-truffle-sea-salt.aspx

Taken together, these things take an average omelet (including one that fell apart a bit when turned over) from blah to a great weeknight dinner.  It's not original--for that I've got the next CSA box entry--but it is satisfying.

CSA Box Omelet

1 medium shallot, chopped

1 regular leek (or a portion of the above leek), white and pale green parts only, chopped

5 eggs

Generous pinches of truffle or good-quality sea salt and fresh-ground black pepper

1 tbsp. 2% milk

2 tbsp. olive oil

2 tbsp. blue cheese crumbles

Whisk together the eggs, milk, salt and pepper.

Preheat a medium-sized skillet over medium heat.  Add a tablespoon of olive oil and then sauté the leek and shallot until light brown.  Remove the pan from the heat and scrape the leek-shallot mixture into a small bowl.

Reheat the pan over medium heat and add the other tablespoon of olive oil.  When it is warmed, swirl the oil to thoroughly coat the pan.  Add the eggs and cook, running a spatula and lifting it along the side of the skillet to loosen the omelet and swirling so that the runny egg is incorporated.  When it begins to look cooked, loosen the omelet again and flip it over with a spatula.

Spread the leek-shallot mixture over one half of the omelet, and the blue cheese crumbles on the other half.  Cook briefly and then fold the omelet over. 

Remove from heat and cut into slices.  Serves two with a side of veggies and a bottle of wine.



The omelet-flipping didn't go so well that night, though I did manage to patch it back together and tried to hide its ugliness by slicing it into wedges.



Letdown

Ah, A16, it was bound to happen.  You have let me down.

Wednesday brought our biweekly CSA box, chock-full of fresh fruits and vegetables, mostly from the Pacific Northwest.  When possible, David and I plan our evening meal around the contents of the box.  Neither of us is a vegetarian, but when there is an array of fresh veg that needs to be eaten--some of it right now--it's a good way to go.

Among the contents of our box was zucchini, one of my favorite summer vegetables, and white sweet corn.  I tried two A16 recipes, grilled corn and a raw zucchini salad.  The corn cobs, cut in half, drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper and grilled over a pile of hot coals for about five minutes, was brilliant:  charred black in some spots, salty and soft and sweet.  It tasted exactly like summer should.


We also grilled some bread, which we served with a schmear of fromage blanc.

The zucchini salad is more or less zucchini shaved into ribbons--time consuming but not difficult with a good peeler--drained of some of their water content by salting them and leaving them to drain in a colander.  Dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, the ribbons are then tossed with chopped mint, parsley and green olives and topped with shards of Romano cheese.

And here is where the letdown happened, and I can't totally explain it:  the salad was simultaneously bland and overdone.  The parsley added nothing other than a little color, and the mint overwhelmed the delicate taste of the zucchini.  In a word, meh.

There is a similar salad on epicurious.com, which collects many of the recipes from Bon Appetit and the late, lamented Gourmet.  It has fewer ingredients and is vastly superior to the salad above:

Shaved Zucchini Salad
Adapted from epicurious.com

Juice of one small lemon
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves minced garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper

2 lbs. medium zucchini
Parmesan cheese for shaving
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted

Wash the zucchini and cut off the ends.  Shave into ribbons either using a paring knife or (preferably) a really good vegetable peeler.  Set aside and toast the pine nuts lightly.  Combine the first set of ingredients, adding salt and pepper to taste.  Letting the vinaigrette sit for about half an hour intensifies the flavors, but don't dress the salad until you are ready to eat.  When ready, toss the zucchini ribbons with the vinaigrette.  Shave Parmesan cheese on top and sprinkle with the pine nuts.

Now that's a zucchini salad.