Cook the Books: Good Fish (Part 3)

A cooking challenge organized by Meg of Grow and Resist and Briggs of Oh Briggsy in which we explore a featured cookbook each month.  The selection for March is Becky Selengut’s Good Fish, Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the Pacific Coast.  This is my third post on the topic. The first one is here and the second one here.

With Easter approaching and spring around the corner, we’re about to start a season of get-togethers with family and friends who love nothing better than sitting around a table sharing food. Most of these events will be informal, calling for finger food, whereas others will have us sharing a big messy dish such as fondue or bagna cauda or maybe now, a bowlful of mussels. This crowd likes classics that bring back memories but also appreciates surprises, something new to savor and discuss. Since we’ve been cooking from Becky Selengut’s Good Fish all month, I dipped back in for ideas. And there were plenty.

Though they were the most recent recipes I tried, Quinoa Cakes with Smoked Trout and Chive Sour Cream (page 157) and Smoked Trout Mousse with Radish and Cucumber Quick Pickle (153) will be immediate repeats for Easter weekend. Actually, the quinoa cakes – crispy and delicious – will become a permanent fixture in my repertoire since they offer lots of room for experimentation and can easily be made gluten-free. The same goes for radish pickle (I used gorgeous watermelon radishes that I’m definitely going to grow this year). I used the radishes like crackers, smearing the trout mousse on top. Yum. My only regret was not smoking the trout myself. Time to dust off the outdoor grill. My rickety and poorly ventilated kitchen would not survive the stovetop version.

The other two experiments were equally successful. I liked the Squid with Chickpeas, Potatoes, and Piquillo Peppers (p. 214). I’ve been thinking about Spanish tapas and had a big pot of just-cooked chickpeas on hand. It made a tasty light supper served it in a terra cotta pan that pretends to be a cazuela. I can imagine serving it in tiny glazed terra cotta plates for a tasting menu. You know, the kind they sell to keep potted plants from leaking on your table.

The final one I am going to report is one of the first that I identified as a must-do: Mussels with Apple Cider and Thyme Glaze (Page 23).  We’d spent the morning in the falling snow listening to an apple farmer explain how to prune apple and pear trees, and came home half-frozen but toting a quart of fine local apple cider. Becky describes this as a “different camp” from the usual combination of mussels with either tomatoes and white wine or curry and coconut milk.  You bet. So’s the version with Guinness Cream on the facing page, which looks really promising. The reduction of the cider sauce — a combination of hard cider, regular apple cider, cider vinegar and grainy mustard – was a brilliant move, and made the dish deeper and richer in flavor than it otherwise have been. (BTW, I left out the clam juice since my mussels yielded plentiful liquid and I’m not a fan of bottled clam juice anyway.)

I already have a bunch of stickies marking recipes I want to try this season, and there will be so many more as the seasons change. Thanks again to Meg and Briggs for adding such a great resource to my library. You Seattle residents are so lucky to have Becky Selengut as a local treasure telling you about local fish, but I’m happy to know that she cut her teeth on fish right here in New Jersey (what exit was that again, Becky?).

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Cook the Books: Asian Dumplings

A cooking challenge organized by Meg of Grow and Resist and Briggs of Oh Briggsy in which we explore a featured cookbook each month.

Who’d ever think that we would celebrate Chinese Lunar New Year with homemade dumplings? We did and they were delicious and surprisingly easy to make. Of course, I started cooking from Andrea Nguyen’s Asian Dumplings at the beginning of the book after I’d read the whole thing and made a trip to our local Asian grocery. I love that store. It occupies one end of a nondescript strip mall and goes by the catchy name “Asian Food” (haha). It’s easy to find on google but hard to find in a suburban neighborhood. The market is huge, chock full of packages I can’t read and ingredients I don’t recognize. Not to mention the fresh produce, meat, poultry and fish, and its own bakery and lunch counter. I discovered it during my kimchi phase last summer when I was seeking Korean chili paste. Luckily there are Korean food websites with labeled photos of packages, just as there are photographs in Nguyen’s book, which helped me find wheat starch, Thai rice flour, tapioca starch, Japanese dried shitake mushrooms, and so on. I emerged with an armload of staples for about five bucks.

All that was the easy part. Getting the time to experiment turned out to be more problematic during a calamitous month in a household rocked by flu, again. My goal is to make something from each chapter, or at least something that uses each major type of wrapper: basic wheat flour dumplings, wheat flour and tapioca starch dumplings, spring rolls, yeasted buns, samosas, translucent wheat starch and tapioca flour dumplings, and rice sheets. And more. This will keep me busy for a while!

This cookbook meets many criteria that will keep it in frequent use in my kitchen. I like discussions of technique, especially when I know little about the subject. I luckily discovered Nguyen’s help desk at www.asiandumplingtips.com, which has great videos demonstrating techniques of rolling dough and shaping dumplings. Her explanations are clear and, I sense, reliable. The book contains enough variety in the recipes and their origins in different parts of Asia to make me want to return to the book again and again. Given the potential vastness of the subject, she strikes a good balance of recipes so the book seems manageable.

I chose to start with basic dumpling dough, and decided to prepare dumplings for boiling, steaming and frying.  The Pork and Napa Cabbage Water Dumplings (Page 31) were perfect for Chinese New Year, and I tried shaping them in three ways: half moons, pea pods and big hugs (gotta love those names). I served them with Tangy Soy Dipping Sauce (Page 215), which I thought could be improved, possibly with a different choice of soy sauce. Making my own chili oil next (but will have to consult with Mark Bittmann’s version which is awesome).

Next came Steamed Vegetable Dumplings (Page 35). These were my favorites because of the filling of chopped cooked spinach, ginger, shitake mushrooms, carrot and pressed tofu. Whether you ever make a homemade dumpling wrapper from this book or not, consult it for the delicious fillings. We couldn’t get enough of this one, and I will make it again with less finely chopped ingredients and serve it with cellophane noodles or rice. This recipe also introduced me to large Japanese dried shitake mushrooms, which will now become a staple in my pantry. Reconstitute a few on the weekend, jar them and you’ll be set all week to add them to all manner of dishes.

Since I was on a roll with this dumpling type, I went on to Gyoza, Japanese Pork and Shrimp Pot stickers (Page 41) with the intention of making some minis to add to Smoky Chicken Soup (Page 43) with the lovely gingery Chicken Stock from Page 222. I made the stock but not the finished soup yet. I froze some and am convinced that this will now be my go-to Asian chicken stock.

I then decided to go for dumpling wrappers with wheat starch and tapioca and filled buns, and I had the mise en place arranged just as the gluten-frees popped in for a meal. Scratch that and save it for another weekend.  I had already made the Curried Chicken Bun Filling from Page 102, so we ended up adding extra coconut milk and a few raisins and ate it for supper, proving again that the fillings are one of the main attractions of Asian Dumplings.

I’m so grateful to Meg and Briggs for including Asian Dumplings in the series since I now have another favorite book to cook my way through. And someday I’ll throw a dumpling party. I bet they did.

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Pickled Tomatillos

This was the year of the tiny tomatillo. While relatively plentiful, tomatillos were diminutive, around ¾ inch in diameter instead of the usual 1¼. I don’t think it was the variety. It was probably the weather. Nowadays, we blame a whole lot on the weather. So much so that – in December! — I was pickling the last of the tomatillos harvested from my New Jersey garden just before Thanksgiving so that they’d be ready by New Year’s. So much for our assumptions about seasonality.

 

These are considered fresh pickles, in that raw tomatillos, sweet and hot peppers, garlic and oregano are packed in a jar and covered with hot pickling liquid, composed of vinegar, water, salt, sugar and spices. Left to marinate in the refrigerator, they’re ready in a week and last for several months. The batch I made earlier in the fall definitely was mellower because of the longer curing period, but these zesty numbers are great on their own and even better in a tomatillo quesadilla. I’m sure they’ll be great chopped up and sprinkled on tacos of just about any type.

Pickled Tomatillos adapted from Linda Ziedrich, Joy of Pickling

1 lb husked tomatillos, halved if large

1 sweet mild pepper such as bell or Anaheim (I used bell), cut into 1-inch squares or strips

2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and sliced into rings

2 large cloves garlic, peeled and sliced

3 sprigs fresh oregano

1 c white wine vinegar

1 c water

2 tsp pickling salt (or 1 tbsp kosher salt)

1-2 tsp sugar

½ tsp whole cumin seeds

Pack the tomatillos, peppers, garlic and oregano in a clean quart jar.

Bring the remaining ingredients to a boil in a saucepan and pour the hot liquid over the vegetables. Insert a chopstick in the jar to release any air bubbles, and set aside to cool.

When cool, cover with a non-reactive cap and refrigerate for at least a week before eating the pickles. They will keep, refrigerated, for at least 2 months, getting mellower and softer as they age.

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Preserving Tomatillo Salsa

Momma’s got a brand new sauce. Canning tomatillos is certainly possible since they’re naturally acidic like tomatoes, but to make salsa that includes onions, pepper and garlic, conventional wisdom is to add a goodly amount of lemon juice. At least that’s the way I’ve made it for years following Eugenia Bone’s recipe in Well-Preserved. This year instead, I consulted Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling, which is a veritable bible of all things pickled, whether canned, fermented or just brined.  

I like Ziedrich’s method very much. She reduced halved tomatillos over medium low heat until soft, pureed them, and added lime juice, salt, abundant onions and garlic and roasted Anaheim peppers to cook thoroughly. Since we’ve had such a great growing year for hot peppers at our CSA, I’ve been roasting much of each week’s harvest (mostly pan roasting in a cast iron skillet, but oven roasting at high heat or a quick flip on a hot grill work well too). What we don’t use that week is frozen in single-serving-sized plastic bags. Tomatillos haven’t been that plentiful though they’re a late season crop. This year’s harvest yielded smaller and stronger fruit – even in the few rogue bushes that mysteriously cropped up in my home garden. The result is a denser and more pungent salsa. I like the kick. Add cilantro when serving.

Tomatillo Salsa adapted from Linda Ziedrich, Joy of Pickling

2½ lbs (2 quarts) tomatillos, husked, washed and halved

½ lb roasted, peeled and seeded Anaheim chile peppers, chopped

2 c neatly chopped onions (¼-inch dice)

4 garlic cloves, neatly chopped

¾ c lime juice

2½ tsp pickling salt (or 1 tbsp fine Kosher salt)

Prepare canning kettle and jars for water bath canning. (This recipe makes about 6 four-ounce jars.)

Cook the tomatillos over medium-low heat in a large nonreactive pot until they are tender, 10-15 minutes. Stir them frequently at the beginning and occasionally thereafter to avoid sticking to the bottom of the pot. Using an immersion blender, roughly chop them to a chunky consistency. (Alternatively, use a food processor but cool the tomatillos slightly first.)

In the pot, combine the tomatillo puree with the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. All of the vegetables should be completely cooked and the tomatillos should envelop them.

Ladle the salsa into warm prepared jars, leaving ½-inch headspace. Close the jars with two-piece canning lids and process for 15 minutes after the water comes to a boil. Turn off the heat, remove the canning lid and let the jars sit for 5 minutes before removing them to a counter to sit undisturbed until cool.

Store in a cool dark place.

Makes approximately 6 four-ounce (half-pint) jars.

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Marinated Mushrooms with Cinnamon and Thyme

My interest in mushrooms returns with cold weather. Although we have abundant local, sustainably farmed mushrooms all year round, I can barely look at them in the summer. But their earthy countenance is perfect for the crispness of autumn and they’ll be welcome in warm vegetable stews when the snow flies.

I made these as part of an antipasto platter last weekend, but they’re equally good as a stand-alone appetizer or a side dish. The vegetable overtones provided by the garlic, parsley and thyme are fairly predictable but the addition of cinnamon warms the flavors to an alluring sweetness that lingers deliciously. The dish comes together quickly and can be made days ahead, so it’s perfect for parties. 

Mushrooms with Cinnamon and Thyme adapted from Viana La Place, Verdura

1 lb small mushrooms of roughly equal size (I used baby bellas)

¼ c extra-virgin olive oil

3 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped

3 sprigs thyme, leaves removed and chopped if large

3 tbsp chopped Italian flat-leaved parsley

1 small stick cinnamon, broken in half

Juice of 1 lemon

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Clean the mushrooms with a damp towel but do not rinse. Trim the stem even with the cap, reserving the trimmings for another use. Cut large caps in half.

Combine the olive oil, garlic, thyme, parsley and cinnamon in a large sauté pan and warm over low heat for 2-3 minutes.

Add the mushrooms, raise the heat to medium and sauté for about 4-5 minutes (less for smaller mushrooms since you want them to remain firm at this point), stirring frequently. Lower the heat, add the lemon juice and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover the pan and cook for about 2 minutes, until the mushrooms are tender but still firm.

Transfer the mushrooms to a dish to cool. Cover them and let them marinate for an hour before serving or store for up to several days in the refrigerator. They improve as they age. Bring them to room temperature before serving as an appetizer.

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Giardiniera

Garden in a jar. A light and delicious appetizer salad is as picturesque as it is piquant.

For a cocktail party fundraiser in New York last weekend, I was planning to take a large antipasto platter centered on ravioletti (mini raviolis) with sundried tomatoes, tiny balls of mozzarella, and salami, and needed a vegetable counterpoint. While I was fishing the ravioletti from the bottom of the freezer at our posh local Italian deli, I spied giant jars of giardiniera, pickled peppers and mushrooms on top of the freezer cases. Aha. That would be it. 

Giardiniera is a combination of lightly pickled vegetables, usually containing cauliflower, peppers, celery and carrots, and spiked with mustard seeds and hot pepper. It goes together in a snap, cures within a day and keeps for weeks in the fridge. I couldn’t find my notes from the last time I made it but I recalled that the recipe came from Gourmet magazine, and luckily Deb at the Smitten Kitchen blog reproduced a similar recipe, which I used as my guide. Like Deb, I omitted the olives. I was considering omitting the jarred pepperoncini, but added them at the end since their hotness re-balanced the sweetness of the pickling liquid.  My organic veggies were from our CSA and very fresh, so my cooking time was considerably less than the original recipe. Pay attention at the stove!

Giardiniera adapted from Smitten Kitchen and Gourmet

Pickling liquid (see below)

1 large head cauliflower (at least 2 lbs before trimming, about 2 after)

4 medium carrots

4 stalks celery

1 red bell pepper

1 yellow bell pepper

About 8 oz jarred pepperoncini (3/4 of a 12 oz jar, selecting the smallest ones)

Pickling liquid:

2½ c white vinegar

3 c water

¾ c white sugar

5 tbsp Kosher or other coarse salt

1 tsp yellow mustard seeds

½ tsp red pepper flakes (or crushed whole red peppers)

Clean a large (2 quart) jar.

Make and cool the pickling liquid. Bring the ingredients to a boil over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt. Set aside to cool for about 30 minutes.

Prepare the fresh vegetables. Cut the cauliflower into florets of about ¾-1 inch,  saving the large stems and core for another use. Peel the carrots and slice on the diagonal into ½-inch pieces. Trim the celery, pulling off any long strings and slice it on the diagonal to a similar size as the carrots. Remove the stems, seeds and ribs and cut the peppers into 1-inch squares.

Cook the vegetables. Bring a large pot of water (not salted) to a boil. Place a bowl of ice water in the sink.  Cook each vegetable separately until it is crisp tender (err on the side of crisp). Cauliflower and carrots take 3-4 minutes, celery and peppers about 2 minutes. Remove the vegetables quickly to a colander and dunk it in ice water for a few seconds to stop the cooking. Drain well and spread the vegetables on towels to remove as much water as possible.

Assemble the giardiniera. When the vegetables are dry and thoroughly cool, place them in layers in a large (2 quart) jar, adding in the pepperoncini as you go.  Pour the cooled pickling liquid over the vegetables to cover. Cap the jar and refrigerate.  The pickled vegetables will be ready in 24 hours and will keep for a week or two in the refrigerator.

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Moroccan Tomato Jam

This jam is intense. It embodies the complexity of Moroccan food: sweet yet savory, bordering on sour, spicy but not from a specific source. Except for the standout tart lemon peel, and maybe an occasional bite of ginger, the ingredients dissolve into a magical compote that is anything but subtle. If I didn’t know that the base was tomato, I might not have called it out as the main ingredient. Wow.

 The jam is the brainchild of Mourad Lahlou, owner and chef of a restaurant in San Francisco called Aziza, and the author of a recent cookbook entitled Mourad, New Moroccan, The Cookbook. I am naturally skeptical of an eponymous publication with over 30 contemporary photographs of the author. However, his turns out to be not only an interesting story, which he insists you read first, but also a very instructive course in the underpinnings of Moroccan food. Growing up in a household with an influential and discerning grandfather whom he accompanied to market, and a tableau of women whose cooking and serving of family meals was central to their cultural and social existence, he later uses his memories to reconstruct and, in the process, re-imagine Moroccan food. The trope works and the food comes alive because of the stories, aided by the book’s logical construction, excellent writing and beautiful photography. This book is a winner.

While flipping through the book in our public library (which some brilliant person endowed to purchase the latest cookbooks), tomato jam caught my eye.  Every year, as I am canning tomatoes and tomato sauces for the pantry – in abundance – I experiment with tomato jam to serve as a condiment alongside a vegetable, poultry or fish dish, or to serve with soft cheese and croutons as an appetizer. Last year, my tomato ginger ketchup was outstanding and while I’ll make it again, Mourad’s tomato jam was in my sights. I was already under a Moroccan influence after my recent experiments with chermoula, and having just put up a jar of preserved lemons for the pantry.

Mourad suggests that the recipe may be canned “in the usual way,” which I would have figured given the amount of acid – from sliced lemons, vinegar, lime juice and tomatoes.  He made it with cherry tomatoes, a boon for those of us with way too many of those during the season. I didn’t like the red cherry tomatoes that I had on hand, as they were not as flavorful as the jam deserved. So I substituted small field tomatoes with relatively thin skins since the skins are not removed. This meant that I had more liquid than he did and thus cooked my jam longer to get it to the consistency that I wanted. Also, since I intended to can the jam, I eliminated the butter he used during the process of cooking cherry tomatoes with sugar until bursting. I figured butter had more to do with that process than the mouth-feel or the flavor. All the above made my jam less chewy and more tomato-like than his but it was as stunningly delicious a concoction as I have made in some time.

In the first of the book’s opening seven chapters on technique (seven being an important number in Moroccan culture and even in its cuisine), he makes a few excellent points about spices. One is the obvious: toast and grind your own. The corollary, which he touches on, is to buy them where they’re sold in bulk so you don’t overstock and let them go stale. I’m lucky to be able to do that, so for this recipe I bought 1 tablespoon of dried rosebuds (really) and just 20 juniper berries.

The other point is more important and literally more global. The commonly used spices in Moroccan cuisine are not unique to Morocco (we knew that from the example of, say, cumin that spans from India to North Africa to Mexico).  Since the Egyptians started trading spices 4000 years ago, major spices have found their way around the world, and many of them passed through the strategic trading hub of the Moroccan coast. That’s the origin of the conception of Moroccan food as spice-centric, and Mourad tells us so many ways of using and combining them – in a uniquely Moroccan fashion — that this cookbook will provide culinary adventures for a long time.  As he says, it’s not which spices you use, it’s how you use them.

Moroccan Tomato Jam adapted from Mourad, New Moroccan, The Cookbook

2 organic lemons, preferably unwaxed

1 three-inch piece ginger (weighing 52 grams), peeled and cut into slivers

1 tbsp whole cumin seeds, toasted

1 tbsp dried rosebuds (if you can find them)

20 juniper berries

10 whole cloves

½ tsp black pepper, preferably Tellicherry

4 pods green cardamom, cracked

5 allspice berries

2-3 cinnamon sticks (weighing around 10 grams)

2 lb cherry tomatoes or other small tomatoes (the latter coarsely chopped)

2 c granulated sugar

Optional (if using cherry tomatoes and not canning the jam): 2 tbsp unsalted butter

1 c champagne vinegar

3 tbsp fresh lime juice

1 tbsp molasses

1 tsp kosher salt or to taste

If canning, prepare the canning kettle and jars (plan for 8 four-ounce jars or four 8-ounce jars).

Prepare the lemons.  If they’re waxed, dunk them briefly in hot (just boiled) water for 20 seconds or so and dry them in a towel, rubbing the skin brusquely. Quarter the lemons lengthwise, removing the seeds and the center spine. Slice them thinly crosswise into little fan shapes.

Prepare the ginger. Peel it and slice it crosswise into 1/16-inch rounds. Slice the rounds into thin strips, 1/16 inch wide.

Prepare the spices. Place the spices into a muslin sack or fold and tie cheesecloth to make a sachet. The cinnamon stick can be set aside to add to the jam separately.

Place the tomatoes, sugar and butter, if using, into a large, wide, heavy-bottomed pan and warm the mixture over medium-high heat, stirring, until the tomatoes render their liquid.

Once the sugar has melted, add the vinegar, lime juice, molasses and ginger and stir well to combine. Add the spices.

Bring the mixture to a boil and cook at a gentle simmer until the jam is reduced by about half. This could take 30-60 minutes depending on the juiciness of the tomatoes. Taste and stir in salt. Leave chunky or use an immersion blender to smooth the jam a little (as I did) or blend to a smooth puree.

If canning, spoon into hot jars, making sure to release air bubbles. Cap and process for 10 minutes after the water comes to a boil. Remove canner lid, turn off heat, and let sit for 5 minutes before removing the jars to a counter to cool undisturbed.

Makes about 4 cups, filling 8 four-ounce jars or four 8-ounce jars.

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Summer Bean Salads

A pot of beans is a summer savior.  Cooked dried beans are so versatile that you can use them in a salad, as a side dish, in soup, pureed as an appetizing spread. I like to cook up a whole pot of them over the weekend, which is hardly a burdensome task, and have them available for impromptu uses throughout the week. These are white cannellini beans, or white kidney beans.

The key to flavorful bean salads, in my view, is the dressing.  For one of my recent salads, I used the Fennel à la Grecque that I made earlier in the month. I chopped the fennel pieces, and combined them with beans that were moistened by the poaching liquid, an unctuous combination of olive oil, white wine and lemon. This was a perfect foil to sautéed shrimp, making this a one-dish meal.

The other  salad uses a garlicky dressing that I’ve been making for a while, based on an internet source I no longer can locate. I heated a crushed clove of peeled garlic in olive oil and let it sit for 5 minutes.  I then placed the mixture into my mini-chopper with a few anchovies (you could omit them and use salt but the depth of flavor is very good and it doesn’t make the dressing taste fishy), a splash of vinegar, and some snipped woody herb, like sage or rosemary. Here I used rosemary since I like it with beans and tomatoes, the vegetable I chose to add to the salad.  I brought the refrigerated beans and their liquid to a simmer, drained and reserved the liquid and tossed the beans with the warm dressing to help the flavors become acquainted. When the beans were cool and ready to be served, I checked the seasonings, added a few chopped tomatoes (good use for the millions of cherry tomatoes that crop up at this time of year), and finished it with rosemary leaves.

I served the bean salad on a bed of small kale leaves that had been tossed in the same vinegar. My garden has been producing great kale from the same plants for nearly a year! That’s crazy but true. I’m about to rip them all out and start over but it’s tempting not to after all the hard work to keep them from bolting. 

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Fennel à la Grecque and a Platter of Hors d’Oeuvres

The second of a two-part series on ideas for using the whole fennel plant – bulb, stalks and fronds – in several complementary dishes… 

We were pretending to be in Provence, on vacation.  Cold fennel à la Grecque. And a platter of fennel-flecked crostini served in the raking light of late afternoon. There were crostini topped with a garlicky mash of beans that had been cooked in fennel frond broth. There were crostini with goat cheese infused with the lemony broth from the poached fennel bulbs and topped with the residual confit of lemon and onion. That was the brilliance of making fennel à la Grecque: not only were there slices of fennel bulb and tender stalks, but also the delicious aromatics and the broth.

The French phrase “à la Grecque” means “Greek-style” and refers to a way of preparing vegetables usually for an appetizer course, although I find them useful as side dishes or salads. The vegetables are lightly poached in olive oil, vinegar, lemon and white wine, and seasoned with a spice like coriander seed. Here I used fennel seed, no surprise for a full-fennel mode, and black peppercorns. I also added sliced onion and garlic. While the fennel was excellent, the lemon and onions stole the show, melting into a confit that was delicious on its own. That was partly because the lemon – peel and all – was sliced super thin and the onions were cut into little half moons. They were simmered in the warmed liquid for 15 minutes before the fennel was lightly poached. The recipe was adapted from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Vegetables but I changed the proportions of oil to liquid, cutting the oil in half and increasing the white wine. As it was, it was a little oily for my taste, but the broth made a good base for salad dressing, especially for potatoes and beans.

Fennel a la Grecque adapted from Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Vegetables

1 medium or 4 very small bulbs of fennel

½ c olive oil

¾ c white wine vinegar

½ c white wine

½ lemon, washed and thinly sliced crosswise

½ large onion, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise

3 small garlic cloves, sliced

2 tsp fennel seeds

2 tsp black peppercorns

1 large bay leaf

Trim the fennel bulb(s) and reserve any tender stalks. If tiny (2½ x 3 inches or so), slice them in half lengthwise. If larger, cut them longwise into wedges.

Heat the olive oil, vinegar and wine in a saucepan. When just simmering, add the rest of the ingredients, except for the fennel, and simmer gently for about 15 minutes.

Add the fennel and continue to simmer until it is tender but still slightly firm.

Remove the fennel from the liquid and let it cool. When both the fennel and the poaching liquid are cool, recombine them into a jar with a tightly fitting lid and let cure, refrigerated, for 24 hours before serving.  Both the fennel and the lemon-onion confit should be used. The poaching liquid makes a great dressing for beans.

Crostini

Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Slice a baguette into ¼-inch pieces and array them on a baking sheet. Melt a little butter with olive oil and add minced herbs and a little salt. Brush the bread on one side and bake slowly for about 10 minutes until crisp. Cool and store in an airtight container. They’ll keep for a few days.

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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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