Kitchen Sojourn » vegetarian

Weekend pause (mid-day)

Greg Turner — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:04 +0000

Weekends are tough. Not for dinner. There’s time for dinner. And certainly time for breakfast. Weekend mornings are great for breakfast. A slow prep in a well-lighted kitchen, the house waking into itself. We enjoy the scent of freshly brewed coffee and have time enough to pause and enjoy it. Eggs or oatmeal, French toast or fruit. Lunches, however, are another matter.

In my house we sit down together for dinner nearly every evening, even weekends. In fact, Sunday dinners are one of my favorites; I have time enough in the kitchen to really cook. But lunch is often a solitary affair, each of us cobbling together nourishment from a hodge-podge of ingredients and scarfing it down between morning laundry and afternoon errands.

I think it might be time to stop the rush, to pause a moment and enjoy the mid-day meal. To make something worth eating. Worth enjoying. It doesn’t have to be complicated or fancy, and it doesn’t have to take forever. Indeed, it can’t. It just has to be good. Sunday’s lunch fit the bill nicely, based on a Rocco recipe (I know, right?).

Grilled cheese and roasted red pepper sandwich with fennel salad

Ingredients (serves 4):
8 slices of delicious bread
2 red peppers, roasted and peeled
Provolone cheese, sliced thin

2 medium fennel bulbs, shaved
Fennel greens, plucked and sorted
2.5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
kosher salt
ground black pepper

Techniques
shave
slice

Method
grill

Begin by placing a pan over medium heat. While the pan heats, cut the fennel. Halve the bulbs, remove the stalks. From the stalks, pick the tender greens. They look like dill. Use a mandolin to shave the fennel bulbs, then mix in the greens.

Make sandwiches using a half a pepper and two slices of provolone for each one. Swirl a pat of butter in the heated pan and lay in the sandwich, cheese side down. Let it grill for about three minutes, flip, then three minutes more.

During the final three minutes, toss the fennel and greens with the olive oil and vinegar. Add a couple pinches of salt and a dash of the black pepper.

The mid-day break was fantastic. Home from grocery shopping I sat in the living room with my son perched in his bouncy chair on the coffee table. He watched me eat and drink and I watched him laugh and play with a plastic bee. Would that all weekends could contain such pause.

For simplicity’s sake

Greg Turner — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:32:54 +0000

Fresh citrus fennel salad

Ingredients (serves 4)
2 medium fennel bulbs, greens attached
4 teaspoons lemon juice
8 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 + 1 teaspoons orange zest

Technique
shave
mix

Shave the fennel using a mandolin or other slicer. Trim the fennel greens and give them a fine chop. Stir together in a large bowl.

In a small bowl, mix together the lemon juice, olive oil and salt.

Using a micro-planer, zest several oranges, until you have the 2 teaspoons of orange zest. Set half aside.

Pour the dressing over the fennel mixture and add a teaspoon of the orange zest. Mix everything together. Your hands are the best tools for the job. Don’t worry. You can always wash them.

To serve, separate into four bowls and top each with a bit of the remaining orange zest.

Hearty broccoli and potato soup

Greg Turner — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:54:33 +0000

My daughter’s a picky eater, one of those people who is particular about both taste and texture. Things easily range into some combination of bitter/slimy, so we have to be careful what we serve her. Strange thing, though, she seems to like all beans, from lentils to lima (spare me, okay?). She’s eleven.

Beyond beans, she’s always liked broccoli and potatoes, and when we deign to visit places like Panera or Crispers, she goes for the broccoli-cheddar soup. Seems simple, but all that cheese? Not the healthiest. By working with Yukon gold potatoes, I came up with a fantastic, rich soup that’s so flavorful, you’ll swear it must be bad for you:

Ingredients (serves six)
six medium Yukon gold potatoes, cubed to equal sizes (about 1/2 to 1 inch)
1 bunch broccoli
kosher salt
2 cups cheddar cheese, separated
black pepper (to taste)

Technique
Chop
Puree

Methods
Boil
Roast

Put the potatoes in a large stock pot, approximately 6 quarts. Add cold water until the potatoes are covered by about an inch of water. Add two tablespoons of kosher salt. Place the pot over high heat and cover with a tight-fitting lid.

Turn on the oven, set for 400 degrees F. Chop the broccoli to remove the florets (the top pieces that look like oak trees at a distance). Keep the florets intact and spread on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with salt and drizzle with olive oil.

When the oven is at temperature and the potatoes are boiling, set a timer for seven minutes. Place the broccoli in the oven and let each cook until the timer beeps.

Remove the broccoli from the oven and take the potatoes off the heat. Add half the broccoli to the potatoes and puree using an immersion blender. Chop the remaining broccoli and stir it into the soup, then slowly fold in about half a cup of the cheddar cheese. Serve with hearty bread and garnish with a teaspoon of the remaining shredded cheddar in each bowl. Bring the soup to table with the remaining cheese and allow people to stir it into their soups as they see fit.

This soup couldn’t be easier and tastes wonderful. The starch from the Yukon potatoes gives the broccoli cheddar soup a wonderful, rich mouth feel without adding fat, and since it doesn’t use chicken stock like many other soup recipes, your vegetarian conscience remains clear. Just avoid the smugness. No one likes a smug vegetarian (right, Bittman?).

How to cook vegetarian

Greg Turner — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:15:58 +0000

On the way back from my in-laws Christmas day, my daughter announced she was officially a vegetarian. My wife and I weren’t surprised. We knew it was coming the day she disavowed bacon, and I’ve been encouraging her since reading Michael Pollan’s “Farmer In Chief,” which includes striking information on environmental impact of the US food industry. Still, it throws a wrench in my overall plan of learning again how to cook.

To mark the occasion of my daughter’s vegetarian transformation, I wanted to do something special. An appetizer. In the past, we’ve enjoyed the frozen spinach artichoke dip produced by T.G.I. McGuilicutty’s (and yes, I’ve hated myself for it). Why not do something similar? Luckily, I’d seen a close recipe in Rocco’s 5 Minute Flavor. Did I mention how I already hated myself a bit? Don’t judge. It was heavily discounted, and there must be some merit, some universal truth in spending $7.95 on a book that lists at $26.95 by a former chef (he’s just a cook now) who enjoyed one of the most well-publicized and precipitous falls from favor in the public cooking world.

And I tell you this: if there is no other recipe in the whole book, the artichoke dip alone is worth the price of admission.

Ingredients (serves 4)
1 14 oz. can of artichoke hearts, finely chopped (I’m a fan of Virgo. They’re organicish and inexpensive, which is much more than I can say for Progresso)
3/4 cup mayonnaise (the original recipe suggested low-fat or reduced fat, but that doesn’t quite have the same wonderful unctuous mouth feel as the real stuff)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup parmesan cheese, grated fine
2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped fine (yes, fresh counts here. I wouldn’t dare use the dry stuff for this recipe)
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs (this is my addition, for color and some texture)
1 fine French baguette

Technique
Mince
Chop, fine

Method
Bake

To make the dip, simply combine the artichoke hearts, mayonnaise, garlic, parmesan cheese, and basil in a 8” * 8” baking dish. Stir them all together then sprinkle the top with the bread crumbs. Cut the baguette on a bias and arrange the slices on a baking sheet. Put the sliced bread and the artichoke dip in a 425(degree F) oven for about 5 minutes. The bread will crisp up and the dip will get nice and bubbly. Right at the end, zap the dip under the broiler for about 30 seconds to brown the bread crumbs and give them some additional crunch.

For the main course, I went with an old standby, spaghetti and tomato sauce with garlic bread.

Ingredients (serves 4, without being piggish)
For the sauce
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, mostly drained
1 8oz can tomato sauce
four garlic cloves, crushed and copped fine
kosher salt
1 teaspoon dried oregano (or more, to taste)
1/4 cup grated parmesan + 1/4 cup grated parmesan held in reserve

For the pasta
1 16 oz package of dried spaghetti (duh)
2 level tablespoons kosher salt

For the garlic bread
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 loaf of crusty Italian or cu ban bread, cut in half lengthwise

Technique
Chop, fine
Mince

Method
Boil
Simmer
Broil

Fill a 6 qt stock pot with four quarts of water. Add two level tablespoons of kosher salt and set the water over high heat

While the water is coming to a boil, set a large sauce pan over medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of olive oil. The pan is at temperature when it feels warm to a hand that’s several inches above it. Add the garlic and let it soften and turn translucent at the edges. Make sure to keep it moving so it doesn’t burn.

note: burned garlic is very bitter and gives a hard, sometimes unpleasant edge to sauces and soups.

When the garlic has softened some, add the diced tomatoes and the tomato sauce and stir it all together. Let the mix come to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low (low-medium), and allow the sauce to simmer. Give it a taste and add a little salt, if necessary.

Without any extra ingredients, the sauce will taste very bright and acidic, like a slightly under-ripe tomato. Add the oregano, stir it in, and taste. The sauce should taste more mellow now. Gone is the tannic edge and in its place is a rounder, deeper flavor. If the sauce still tastes tart, try adding a bit more oregano or a couple grinds of black pepper. As a last resort, you could add a trace of sugar, but then you might as well have saved yourself the trouble and just bought the jarred stuff at the store, savored its cloying sweetness.

When the sauce tastes good (tasting along the way is the secret to an excellent tomato sauce), slowly stir in 1/4 cup of the Parmesan cheese and then leave it alone. From here on out, the sauce will take care of itself.

Your water should be boiling now, so go ahead and carefully place your pasta in the pot, give it a stir, and let it go. Set the timer as directed on the box (I usually go for the lowest suggested time so I don’t inadvertently cook my pasta to mush), and give it a good stir about two minutes into the cooking time. That’s when the pasta will release most of its starch into the water and thus will be most likely to stick together into a giant spaghetti rope. Looks cool, but is pretty inedible.
After you’ve given the pasta the second stir, It’s time to toast the garlic bread. Set a small sauce pan on one of your remaining burners (sorry, Bittman) and bring it to medium-high. Add the olive oil and butter. When the butter has melted, add the minced garlic. Don’t let it sit in the pan. Stir, keep the pan moving and heat the garlic until it begins to go translucent, then use a slotted spoon to remove it from the pan. Get a brush (or you could just pour it over the bread) and brush the bread with the butter mixture.

Note: If you want an extra garlicy touch, reserve the minced garlic to spread on the bread once it’s out of the oven.

Stick the bread in the oven under the broiler for about a minute (check it at 45 seconds, just to be safe). When the bread begins to brown on the edges, take it out.
When the beeper beeps, drain the pasta.

Plate the pasta, cover with a couple spoonfuls of the sauce, and serve with the garlic bread, sliced. Put the remaining Parmesan cheese on the table so guests can adjust the sauce’s cheesiness to their liking.

A good spaghetti sauce is easy to make. Cook it slow, taste along the way, and add nothing in huge quantities. Use the best ingredients you can (don’t you dare use off-season tomatoes; go for canned), and keep it simple. It’s a formula that’s served me well for a long time, evidenced by this exchange:

Daughter: What are we having for dinner?
Me: Spaghetti and tomato sauce.
Daughter: The stuff you make, or the stuff from a jar?
Me: The stuff I make.
Daughter: Good.

That vote of confidence from a picky eater? It’s a wonder I don’t make the stuff every night.