Hakurei Turnips: A Salad, a Pickle and a Melange

Hakurei turnips are a sweet treat in the spring. Perfect white orbs, delicate in flavor, lend themselves to a raw salad of grated roots simply dressed in lemon juice and olive oil, or an Asian-inspired rice vinegar and sesame oil combination. They’ll appear again in the fall, since they are a quick-growing cool weather crop similar to radishes. (I need to grow them….) While most often eaten raw, they are quickly and deliciously pickled, and also good steamed or roasted and combined with their leaves, basically yielding two vegetables in one.

 A couple of weeks ago, I served them as a salad, grated with a little lemon zest, a splash of lemon juice and mild olive oil. Receiving two bunches from our CSA this past week, I decided to pickle a few, following Paul Virant’s suggestion in The Preservation Kitchen. I usually pickle turnip with baby beets in vinegar and herbs and cure them in the refrigerator. But Virant suggested that they could be water-bath-canned. Whoo hoo. Great for the pantry and a space-saver for the fridge. Count me in.

He made a brine of champagne vinegar, lemon juice and zest, sugar and toasted coriander seeds, brought the mixture to a boil and poured it over sliced turnips in hot canning jars. Sealed the canning lids, the jars went through the water bath canning process and sealed perfectly. Even though I was planning on using a jarful right away, I canned them all, to see what happened to the texture when subjected to the extra heat of the canning process. They became softer but not mushy as I feared. I will do a comparison with refrigerator pickling just to be sure which method I prefer.

The pickles were a tad sweet, but reasonably so given the delicacy of the roots. I will cut down on the sugar in the future. I served them as a condiment alongside panko-crusted sautéed codfish, and also tossed them into a grated raw turnip salad, dressed with the pickling liquid and a dash of olive oil. Delicious, successful, more to come.

Lemon-pickled Hakurei Turnips adapted from Paul Virant. The Preservation Kitchen

The principal adaptation here is the volume, since I wanted to make a small testing batch before committing to a pantry-full. I re-wrote the recipe.

1 bunch of Hakurei turnips (approx 1 lb or12 oz trimmed of leaves)

¾ tsp Kosher salt

1 small lemon, zested and juiced

¾ c water

1/3 c champagne vinegar

2 tbsp sugar

1 tsp coriander seeds, lightly toasted in a dry pan and crushed

If you plan on water-bath-canning the turnips, prepare the jars and assemble the lids.

Remove the greens from the turnips and reserve them for another use. Scrub the roots and slice the turnips into ¼-inch pieces.

Place all of the other ingredients into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, pack the turnip slices into hot jars. Pour in the liquid, leaving a ½-inch headspace and checking for air pockets. Wipe the rims, and seal with the lids and screw-on bands.

Process in a water bath canner for m10 minutes after the water returns to a boil. Turn off the heat, remove the lid, and let sit for 5 minutes. Remove to a counter to cool undisturbed.

Makes 2-3 four-ounce jars

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Homemade Sesame Mayonnaise: Vegetable Dip and a Chicken and Pepper Salad

This is not your average mayonnaise. Not even for homemade. Made with rice vinegar, soy sauce and toasted sesame oil, it is delicious as a dip for asparagus, snap and snow peas, radishes and other spring vegetables. I’ve made this many times, especially for large-scale spring gatherings, where I can arrange lightly blanched asparagus bouquet-style in drinking glasses and array lightly blanched snap peas and radishes around a bowlful of the light yellow emulsion. Illustrated here is the home rendition, with a handful of heirloom Indian yellow snow peas that I grow in pots every year and some thin asparagus that I picked at a local farm. 

The recipe makes a lot and I’ve never tried to shrink it, since it is voraciously consumed at parties and keeps well, for a couple of weeks at least. In addition to its service as a dip, I would use it as a sauce for chicken satay, or here as a dressing for summer-like salad of poached chicken and colorful bell peppers. It’s also great with poached salmon, an alternative to dill sauce.

The mayonnaise recipe comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook. The Silver Palate was a so-called “gourmet food shop” that flourished in Manhattan in the late 1970s to early 1980s and set trends for just about everything the owners Julee Russo and Sheila Lukins did.  An American-style bistro, it became the model for take-out shops just as it became a style guide for everything from the use of seasonal ingredients to emphasis on the homemade. It’s not in the least esoteric but introduced new dishes and approaches at the same time that it relies on traditional sources and methods. All that’s left of it today is a (licensed or sold) brand label on fancy foods found in the grocery store (think hot fudge sauce, flavored vinegar) and its best-selling cookbooks, in addition to later publications of the two authors.  I find the original cookbook, which is arranged by topic, to be quite entertaining, informative and useful, although I cringe at the graphic design every time I open the cover (it’s an early example of what I associate with Workman Publishing).

The Silver Palate’s Sesame Mayonnaise

1 whole egg

2 egg yolks

2½ tbsp rice vinegar

2½ tbsp soy sauce

3 tbsp prepared Dijon mustard

¼ toasted sesame oil

2 ½ c vegetable oil (canola or corn)

Optional: Szechuan-style hot chili oil

Optional: grated orange zest

In a food processor, whir the egg, egg yolk, rice vinegar, soy sauce and mustard for 1 minute.

With the motor running, dribble in the sesame oil and then the corn oil in a slow, steady stream.

Turn into a bowl and season with hot chili oil if using. Add the grated orange zest just before serving.

Makes about 3 cups.

Chicken and Pepper Salad with Sesame Mayonnaise

This recipe assumes that you don’t have leftover cooked chicken from another recipe.

2 halves of boneless chicken breast

2-3 tsp soy sauce

Water

½ orange pepper

½ green pepper

2 scallions

2-3 tbsp sesame mayonnaise

Salt or soy sauce to taste

Hot chili sauce (e.g., Sriracha) to taste

Cilantro leaves (or use Thai basil)

Thai basil flowers

Oven-poach the chicken breasts. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the chicken breasts in a single layer in an ovenproof glass or ceramic baking dish. Sprinkle on a few teaspoons of soy sauce and add water to a depth of about ¼ inch. Cover tightly with foil and bake for about 25 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the foil and let the chicken cool in the juices.

Shred the cooled chicken along the grain into bite-sized pieces into a mixing bowl. Slice the peppers into lengths of approximately the same size as the chicken and add to the bowl, along with thinly sliced scallions (cross-wise or lengthwise). Add mayonnaise and adjust the seasonings to taste with salt or soy sauce and red pepper or chili sauce. Garnish with snipped leaves of cilantro or Thai basil and Thai basil flowers.

Serve at room temperature or slightly chilled. Serves 4.

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Chive Blossom Vinegar

A long row of magenta blossoms gently swaying in the breeze welcomes us back to the CSA in springtime. Like so many puffy prom dresses or an infinite supply of pom-poms, the blossoms have a kind of festive air, dominating the thin reedy stalks of the chive plant. 

Pick a bunch for a bud vase, or better yet, use them to flavor vinegar that will be used all summer for salads of potatoes, cucumbers, greens.  This has become an annual ritual for me.

First, detach the blossom heads from the green stems and lightly clean them. I shake them in a sieve to remove light dust and then spray them with water, continuing to shake the sieve. Let them dry so that the water doesn’t dilute the vinegar.

Choose a very clean jar with a screw-on lid. Mine’s a pint jar since that’s about how much of this vinegar I would use in a season. Fill the jar about halfway with the chive blossoms and pour in light white wine vinegar, such as champagne vinegar, which pairs well with the oniony taste of the chive blossoms.

Let the vinegar sit for about a week before decanting into a clean bottle. I store mine in the refrigerator and use within a few months.  Its color doesn’t become as saturated as the violet vinegar I made earlier this spring, but the flavor is much more intense. 

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Fruit Shandy in a Jar: Rhubarb-Beer Jam with Lemon

Christine Ferber is a genius and Paul Virant is one smart cookie for using her for inspiration. Every season, I mark preserving techniques, ingredients and whole recipes that I’d like to try. One that’s been on my list is Ferber’s “Rhubarb and Apples with Beer.” I’ve made jams with wine before but never with beer and I was wondering what the beer would do to the rhubarb. 

Then along came Paul Virant’s The Preservation Kitchen, and a recipe for “Rhubarb Beer Jam,” which is similar to Ferber’s but uses lemon juice and zest instead of apple. Both lemons and apples are good pectin producers, and I do interchange them.  However, from preserving rhubarb in the past (remember that rhu-barb-ecue sauce that originated as rhubarb ketchup?), I find it reduces to a thick puree anyway.  In this case, using Virant’s recipe and spiking the amount of lemon zest, the marinated rhubarb was like a fruit shandy, a drink that combines beer and lemon. Fully cooked, it has a certain “je ne sais quoi.” Virant uses it as an ingredient in a bar drink that he serves at his restaurant in Chicago.  I can envision it as a condiment to accompany any number of meats or savory dishes.

Virant brings the ingredients to a simmer the night (or days) before he’s ready to make the jam and let’s them cure together in the refrigerator. Ferber macerates the rhubarb and sugar overnight. I did both. Both separate the fruit from the liquid and boil the liquid down before adding in the fruit. (I know rhubarb is a vegetable technically, but it jams up like fruit.) Since I halved Virant’s recipe (except for the lemon), I did not get enough volume of liquid to get the temperature up to 215 degrees as he did (it would have boiled off), but I find the freezer gel test more reliable anyway.

Rhubarb-Beer Jam adapted from Paul Virant, The Preservation Kitchen

1½ lb trimmed rhubarb (about 4½ c cut in 1/3-inch dice)

¾ c sugar

1 ½ c wheat beer

2 tbsp lemon juice

4-5 tbsp grated lemon zest

Macerate the rhubarb and sugar for a few hours in a large saucepan. Add the beer, lemon juice and zest and bring to a simmer. Cool and refrigerate overnight.

Prepare canning jars and have the lids available.  Place a saucer in the freezer for testing the gel.

Drain the rhubarb liquid into a wide saucepan, reserving the diced stems. Bring the liquid to a boil over medium-high heat and cook until it nearly reaches the gel point, about 215 degrees on a candy thermometer, or when not very runny when tested on a frozen plate, about 12 minutes. Add the reserved diced rhubarb and bring back to a boil, cooking for approximately 10 minutes more until gelled or reaching 215 degrees.

Put a small pot of water on the stove to boil, turn off heat and place the canning lids in the water. Remove the jars from the hot water and fill them with hot jam, leaving ½ inch headspace. Wipe the rims clean, place the canning lids on top (dry them first) and screw on the rings.

Process in a water bath canner for 10 minutes after the water returns to a boil. Turn the heat off, remove the canner lid and let the jars sit for 5 minutes before moving them to a counter to cool undisturbed.

Makes 5-6 four-ounce jars.

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Chicken with Spinach Indian-style

Indian cuisine has a way with spinach. Unlike other cuisines, how those dishes are prepared – and even the ingredients — are not self-evident, so I’ve been doing a little research, of course including one of my favorite sources, At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. She chops onions, garlic, ginger and red pepper in a food processor until nearly pureed and sautés it in oil before adding the spinach. She then simmers browned chicken on top. Brilliant technique and wonderful mix of flavors and aromas.  I halved Jaffrey’s recipe except for the spinach, cut back on the oil and removed most of the chicken skin, in response to her parting comment, “Extra fat may be removed before serving.”

Chicken with Spinach from At Home with Madhur Jaffrey

4 chicken thighs

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 medium onion, roughly chopped

1-inch pieces of fresh ginger peeled and coarsely chopped

3 medium cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped

1½ tsp paprika

¼ tsp ground cayenne pepper

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 2-inch piece cinnamon stick

4 whole cardamom pods

¾ lb fresh spinach, cleaned, de-stemmed and chopped (or use 10 oz frozen)

Trim excess skin from the chicken, sprinkle with salt and pepper and set aside.

Chop the onion, ginger, garlic, paprika and cayenne in a food processor until very finely chopped, but not pureed.

In a wide sauté pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat and add the cinnamon stick and cardamom until they start to sizzle. Brown the chicken on both sides in one layer in the pan (work in batches if necessary) and remove to a plate.

Add the onion to the oil, turning the heat down to medium and stir-fry for a few minutes until most of the liquid has dried up. Add the spinach in batches, and cook it for a few more minutes until wilted.

Place the chicken on top, add a little salt and ½ c water and bring to a boil. Cover the pan, turn the heat to low and simmer gently until the chicken is done, about 20-25 minutes, turning the pieces a few times. Serve with rice.

Serves 2-3.

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Dorie Greenspan’s Cocktail Cookies

Dorie Greenspan is a baking genius. Her tome Baking from my Home to Yours is the go-to reference for just about any kind of baked good you can imagine. In fact, thousands of bloggers baked their way through it Tuesday after Tuesday. However, I was intrigued by an article she wrote in Food & Wine Magazine about savory cookies, which she and her son Josh made for their CookieBar pop-up shop n New York. Perfect for cocktails, she claims.

I’ve been trying various savory cookies in anticipation of a big party I was cooking for this past weekend. The rosemary pine nut cookies and the Parmesan wafers with poppy seeds I made last month were both delicious but didn’t hang together as an ensemble. So I tried three of the five that Dorie featured in the article: chocolate-cayenne, rosemary-almond, and sesame seed. Cut in 1¼-inch rounds and stacked on a three-tier stand, these addictive little slightly sweet but mostly savory cookies were a big hit.  I promised people at the party that I would provide the recipes, so I’ve linked to Food & Wine.

A note about the recipes, which I had to adjust. Since I made the chocolate first and it turned out perfect — rich chocolate shortbread with a kick from cayenne pepper and flaky salt on top — I assumed that the other two recipes would be perfect. Not so, but I made an adjustment that worked just fine. The chocolate version was a typical recipe with butter eggs, sugar, flour chocolate, seasoning. The rosemary-almond was delicious and crumbly, which I attribute to the fact that my egg yolks – from local free-range chickens – were on the small side. However, the sesame cookies, which are shortbreads – meaning no eggs – were made with a combination of almond meal and all-purpose flour, which can vary in absorption rate. While I had forced the rosemary-almond cookies to coalesce by kneading it — most of the cookies held together – I simply couldn’t get the dough for the sesame cookies to hold together, so I added a beaten egg to the dough in addition to brushing the cookies with a beaten egg to “glue” on the seeds. The results were great.

A technique that made these work was to roll the dough between two pieces of parchment paper (Dorie called for waxed paper, which I didn’t have) and to freeze the dough for an hour to firm it up before cutting out and baking the cookies. This also allows the dough to be frozen for another time, in which case it would need to be thawed slightly before baking.

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Seasonal Tart: Spinach, Dill and Ricotta

I love an excess of a single ingredient that allows me to experiment. Watch what you wish for! Opening day of our CSA season brought 4 pounds of spinach and 8 large heads of lettuce into the kitchen, not to mention a pound of baby bok choy and ½ pound of arugula. All those greens were too voluminous for my fridge. So we started with the easy task: eating spinach right away and wilting the rest to reduce the volume.

I had made delicious homemade ricotta for a big party last weekend, and combined it with lemon zest and herbs. I used the leftovers for this dilly spinach tart, which we ate alongside a lettuce and arugula salad with plenty of snipped herbs and a sprinkling of feta cheese. The combination of young herbs and the season’s first lettuces is magical. A suitably spring-like supper.

Spinach and Dill Ricotta Tart

1 sheet frozen puff pastry

3 eggs

1 c ricotta cheese

¼ – 1/3 c milk or cream if needed

1 c cooked spinach, squeezed dry and chopped

1 tsp lemon zest

2-3 tbsp chopped dill

Optional: ½ tsp salt

Optional: 1 tbsp mixed chopped herbs (lovage, tarragon, chives)

Thaw the puff pastry for about ½ hour. Roll it out slightly and place it in a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom, Run the rolling pin over the top of the rim to cut the dough neatly and save the scraps for another use.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Lightly beat the eggs in a medium bowl. Add the ricotta, combining well. Add milk or cream to thin the mixture if it seems too thick. The amount will depend on the consistency of your ricotta.

Add the remaining ingredients, stirring to combine well, and pour the mixture into the prepared tart shell, smoothing the top.

Bake for 45 minutes, or until the tart is puffed and golden. (It will fall as it cools.) Let the tart cool for 10 minutes before unmolding and serving.

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Impromptu: Curried Sweet Potato, Chickpeas and Spinach

It was just one of those days. I came home late and my husband came home early. While the refrigerator was burgeoning with produce from the weekend’s opening of our CSA season, not to mention leftovers from last season (hard to believe, but true) and previous meals, I had no idea what to cook. I had had a time-consuming meal in mind but now I had to act fast. What tasty supper could I get on the table in 30 minutes or less? What would satisfy us on a rainy day in mid-spring?

How about a vegetable curry? Normally I would not post something that I just dashed off, but this turned out to be an amazing supper, a lucky accident of what was in my refrigerator and on my counter and in my pantry. I just connected the dots and cooked for a hungry audience. In addition to being fast, this turned out to be the ultimate crossover-season dish: fresh and home-canned produce from last fall combined with just picked produce from this spring. A little of this and that, Indian style, with contrast of colors, textures, and taste. The proportions are flexible of course.  While I used chickpeas that I’d previously cooked from dried beans, you could use canned. You could also use canned diced tomatoes instead of homemade tomato puree. You could probably even use frozen spinach.

Curried Sweet Potato, Chickpeas and Spinach

2 medium sweet potatoes

1 spring onion or ½ small yellow onion, diced

1 tbsp vegetable oil

2-3 tsp curry powder

1 tsp ground cumin

½ small dried chili pepper

¾ c tomato puree (or fresh or canned tomatoes and juice)

Approximately ¼ c water (omit if using canned tomatoes)

½ c cooked chickpeas

About ¾ lb uncooked spinach leaves or 1 c cooked spinach

2 tbsp cilantro leaves

Peel the sweet potato and cut it into ¾-inch chunks, yielding about 2 cups. Steam for about 10 minutes or until tender nut not mushy. Set aside.

Warm the oil in a large sauté pan and add the onion, cooking until translucent. Add the curry powder, cumin and dried pepper, stirring to combine. Add the tomato puree and water and cook for a few minutes. Add the chickpeas and cook for a few more minutes. Add the sweet potatoes and the spinach. If using fresh spinach, add in batches to allow the leaves to wilt.  Remove the chili pepper and add the cilantro, reserving a few leaves for garnish.

Serve over rice. Makes about 4 servings.

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Baby Bok Choy in Garlicky Oyster Sauce

Simple, immediate, delicious. This is my favorite way of preparing bok choy, especially when they’re young and tender, 5 inches high or so. I received a pound of the little darlings in our first-of-the-year CSA distribution. So…oo glad to have the “farm” back in our lives.

This couldn’t be simpler. Clean the bok choy well to loosen any sand and grit, trimming the root end but leaving the heads intact. Steam them lightly and set aside to drain.  Saute plenty of chopped garlic and a little ginger in vegetable oil, add the bok choy and a couple of tablespoons of oyster sauce. Heat thoroughly and serve over rice, which will absorb the delicious juice. (If serving as a side dish, you can drain the bok choy and lightly dry it so it won’t exude so much liquid.) 

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Waste Not Want Not: Pickled Chard Stems and a Bunch of Ways to Use Them

The weather turned reliably warm and my chard bolted. I don’t mean, found the door and vamoosed. I mean, developed thick, faceted stems and prepared to go to seed. Chard in my experience is slow to bolt, but this patch was over-wintered — first time ever for me – and it’s time. Everything else that over-wintered – kale, Asian celery and parsley – is also bolting. Oh man, I have to clean out the garden just as the CSA is starting up, yielding a ridiculous amount of greens. What to do?

Think pantry thoughts. There’s little you can’t pickle or preserve in one way or another, prolonging its life just a little or a lot. As you know from my earlier post on “aigre-doux,” I’ve been combing through Paul Virant’s The Preservation Kitchen, a recently published book by a Chicago restaurateur who’s a fan of stocking a pantry full of ingredients that either complement or become essential ingredients in dishes he makes for his customers. He’s also a great fan of combining pickled and non-pickled versions of the same vegetable, asparagus for example, or chard. 

The chard stems are a quick pickle, meaning that they’re intended to be consumed within a few days and are not processed. The chard stems are lightly poached in a combination of Champagne vinegar, honey and water. The lightness of the vinegar and the use of honey impart and intriguing delicateness to the sweet-tart pickle.  My chard was white but this would be great with yellow- or orange-stemmed chard, which I’m growing this season, or pink.

The pickles are fine on their own as a condiment. Virant suggests adding them to cooked chard leaves, which was very good. I also added cooked chickpeas to make a more substantial meal.

And finally, the full build-out tossed the chard and chickpea combination into fettuccine to which I added cubes of crisped prosciutto. This made a full-bodied and flavorful meal. However, the richness of the pasta and chickpeas were offset well by the chard greens and the piquant pickled stems. 

Just as with aigre-doux, I have an issue with the sequencing of his recipe. He makes the vinegar mixture first, and then prepares the vegetables. Vinegar loses its oomph when heated and evaporates. Maybe he meant to weaken the vinegar mixture, but I doubt it.

Pickled Chard Stems adapted from Paul Virant

2-3 cups chard stems, sliced ¼-inch thick (see below)

½ c champagne vinegar

½ c water

2 tbsp honey

½ tsp kosher salt

To prepare the chard stems, slice the leaves from the thick stalks and cut the stems crosswise into ¼-inch slices. Alternatively, depending on the shape of the stems, slice them into ¼-inch wide matchsticks.

Bring the vinegar, water, honey and salt to a simmer in a large saucepan, stirring to dissolve the salt. Add the chard stems and bring back to a simmer. (The liquid may not fully cover the stems.) Cook gently, stirring occasionally to make that all of the stem pieces absorb some brine, for about 4-5 minutes or until tender but not mushy. Remove from the heat and let the stems cool in the liquid.

If you are not serving them right away, refrigerate the chard stems in the liquid for up to 2 weeks.

Sauteed Chard Leaves with Pickled Stems adapted from Paul Virant

1 lb chard leaves, stripped of their stems

2 tbsp olive oil

Picked chard stems (see recipe above)

Salt and pepper to taste

Wash the chard, shake off excess water and cut the leaves crosswise into 1-inch strips

Heat the olive oil in a wide pan and add the chard, stirring it until wilted. Serve tossed with picked chard stems. Season with salt and pepper.

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