Category Archives: recipe

Arugula salad with asparagus and herbed hazelnut crusted goat cheese

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Asparagus Salad

You know how they’re saying now that certain stores secretly monitor your buying habits? I have a suspicion that the grocery store is spying on my vegetable-buying patterns! Last week I just couldn’t bring myself to buy “winter” vegetables. I love you, cauliflower and winter squash, but enough is enough! So I bought summer squash, and eggplant. Well, I went back this week, and asparagus was on sale! Highly supsect, highly suspect! In all seriousness, I try to buy veggies that are somewhat in season. But I’m kidding myself if I think that the winter squash I buy at the grocery store was grown anywhere near here, this time of year. Right? So I bought the asparagus. Lovely, bright green, pencil-thin! I bought some baby arugula, too. What lovely, nutty, green flavors, so nice together! I lightly steamed the asparagus, lightly dressed the arugula with olive oil and balsamic. And then I made these little goat cheese croutons. I flattened little discs of goat cheese, coated them in ground hazelnuts, rosemary and thyme, and I toasted them for a few minutes, till they were brown and bubbly on the edges. Yum! I sprinkled some leftover hazelnut/herb mixture over for a bit more crunch. Threw in some grape tomatoes for color and sweetness, and that was it! A spring fever salad for February. Green and glowing!

Here’s The Carter Family with When Springtime Comes Again. Sweet and yodelly.

Rice-flour crusted pastry with roasted chickpeas and broccoli

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In which Claire begins a journey of discovery with gluten-free pastry crusts…

Rice flour crust

I had my first request! I’m so excited. I love a challenge! When I was little, I thought my cousin Becket was the coolest girl on the planet! I still do! Recently, she told me that her daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease, and she wondered if I’d ever made a gluten-free-crust for a savory pastry. Well, I had not. Though I’d come close! The truth is that I’m fascinated by different kinds of flour – chickpea flour, semolina flour, rice flour, tapioca flour, buckwheat flour, barley flour – on and on it goes! And I have many of these in my cupboard at the moment. But, first of all…I wasn’t entirely aware that not all non-regular-flours are not gluten free. As it happens, semolina flour and barley flour, to name two, are not gluten free. (Or so I’ve been told). And second of all…I’d never tried using these flours all by themselves, I always mix them with some amount of “regular” wheat flour. I suppose just so I know what to expect – at least a little bit!

Becket’s question prompted me to take it to the next level. I was determined to make a pastry with a gluten-free crust. So here’s my first attempt. I used rice flour, and I tried, as a sort of control, to make it as close to ordinary pastry crust as I could in every other way. I was worried that it wouldn’t be workable. I was worried that it wouldn’t be crispy. Well…it was a little hard to work with. It was like feta cheese, in texture. Just imagine trying to roll feta cheese with a rolling pin and mold it into a pastry! But I worked that out. I had to be less daring with the shape of the pastry. And one thing that I discovered was that this dough works better when it’s not so cold. I had chilled it, as one would do with ordinary pastry. Not a good idea. I had to warm it up a bit and work it in my hands before I could cook with it at all. And then I found it best to use my hands to press it flat, and do that directly on the baking sheet, rather than trying to roll it out, fill it, and then move it. But once I’d let it warm up a bit, I took a small ball, put it on the baking sheet, flattened it to be about 1/4 inch thick, and then used a spatula and my hands to gather dough from all around, pull it over the filling, and seal it on top. I’d take a pinch of extra dough to fill the gaps. Then I turned it onto the seam side. It was actually fun once I got started. Like playing with play-doh. Then I brushed the tops with egg, because it was so pale I though it would be nice to see it get browned a bit.

And, guess what? It did turn out crispy! Very crispy on the outside! Quite nice! Not the prettiest shape I’ve ever made. My son said it looked like a dumpling, and I’m ok with that. I would gladly make this again! Once I got the hang of it, it was a pleasure to make, and to eat!

You could fill this with anything you like, but I filled it with roasted chickpeas that I’d cooked in some approximation of a zatar spice. This is a middle-eastern spice mix that seems to always contain thyme and sesame seeds, but…beyond that, is pretty open to interpretation. I added oregano and caraway seeds, which I’d learned was a typically Palestinian addition. Lovely!

This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but it’s so stuck in my head right now! I love it to pieces. It’s Sir Lord Comic with Wh’appen?
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Spicy spinach cashew sauce

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spinach cashew sauce

I’d like to apologize in advance for posting so often today. I’ve got so much I want to tell you about! I don’t know if I’ll get to it all, but if I don’t then I’ll forget how I made it, and then I’ll just have to post more tomorrow… Goodness gracious, I can’t keep up with my own self.

This one will be quick, though. Just like the sauce. It’s very flavorful, very easy, and probably very good for you because spinach and nuts have protein and iron and… other things, that are good. You’re the boss, with this sauce. You can make it quite thin and creamy, and have it with pasta or rice. Or you can make it quite thick, and use it however you would use pesto. I made it spicy, because I still have a cold, but that’s adjustable as well. It’s a nice dipping sauce for croquettes or kofta, and it’s very good with roasted vegetables, such as winter squash or sweet potatoes. It would make a nice meal with boiled diced potatoes stirred in. It’s creamy, yet vegan. And that’s all I’m going to say about that!

Here’s Duke Ellington with Spongecake and Spinach.
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Cadbury egg cookies

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cadbury egg cookies

What?!?! Chocolate chip cookies with cadbury mini-eggs baked right in?!?! THAT’S RIGHT!! This was another inspiration of my husband, culinary genius. These are chocolate chip cookies – the kind that are just the right amount of crispy on the outside and just the right amount of chewy on the inside, with the better part of a bag of cadbury mini-eggs mixed into the batter. The mini-eggs are milk chocolate, the chocolate chips are bittersweet chocolate, and the cookies are ridiculously tasty. I love the way that the candy shell on the blue eggs changes color as it bakes, and comes out a real robin’s-egg blue. So pretty! But they won’t last very long for you to admire them!

Here’s the Beastie Boys with Egg Man.
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Cousous, sweet potato, goat cheese croquettes

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couscous croquettes

For these tasty croquettes I repurposed some lovely vintage articles that had been artisanally handcrafted a couple of days ago. That’s right, I used leftovers. Red beans left over from the stew, sweet potatoes left over from the fries, and couscous left over from a meal I didn’t even tell you about! The advantage to this, of course, is that everything’s already made, so you can throw these together when you have very little time after work, which is exactly what I did. Plus, everything already has its own seasoning from the previous meal, and they all happen to taste wonderful together. I think this would work well as reverse leftovers, if you know what I mean. You could make a batch of fries, a batch of couscous, and open a can of beans, make these lovely little croquettes, and then use the remaining ingredients for different meals in the weeks to come. You can always throw couscous and beans into a salad the next day, if you’re looking for an easy way out. Any way that you do it, these are worth making! They’re subtly sweet, because of the sweet potatoes, but this is balanced by the goat cheese, which has its own way of tang-ing up a dish, doesn’t it? We had these with warm tortillas, grated sharp cheddar, chopped romaine, the leftover stew, and with a nice spinach cashew sauce I’ll tell you about later. But I think they’d be nice with a simple tomato sauce, or romesco sauce, or chermoula sauce, or even BBQ sauce! I’m going to tell you how to make these as if I’d started from scratch, and the couscous and sweet potatoes will make a little extra for another time.

Here’s Tom Waits’ Yesterday is Here. Yesterday’s dinner is, anyway!
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Toasted barley flatbread with sesame seeds

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barley flatbread

You know who likes these? My son Isaac. He doesn’t like a lot of different flavors, but he gobbled these up and asked for more. As you might recall, I bought some Machica a few weeks ago, in my super bodega travels. Machica is a toasted barley flour, and mine is from Ecuador. I did a bit of research into recipes that call for toasted barley flour. I read about some rolls served in an ecuadorian restaurant, which sounded intriguing. But most of the recipes I came across were actually Tibetan, for a sesame-crusted flatbread that sounded delicious! This is my vague interpretation of that idea. Baked toasted barley has a lovely flavor – slightly sweet, distinctive but subtle. I have to be honest, and tell you that my flatbread became crisp bread, because I left it in the oven to keep warm after it was fully cooked, and it cooked further till it was more cracker-y than bread-y. Tasty, though! I could almost pretend that I’d done it on purpose. The other thing I might say, is that my sesame seeds (I used black, because I had them and they looked nice, but you could use white as well) fell off and, somehow, I got them all over my kitchen. If I were to make this again (which I will!) I’d knead them right into the dough. Yes I would.

Here’s Freddie Hubbard with Open Sesame.
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Collards with tiny spicy crispy potatoes

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collards

We’ll begin today, friends, with a reading from the liner notes of my new (brilliant) Jimmy Smith album, Home Cooking.

On the front of this album, there is a brilliant color photograph of Jimmy Smith by Blue Note’s talented lensman, Frank Wolff. Jimmy is standing in front of what is, to many musicians, the “soul station” in the neighborhood of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.

Kate’s Home Cooking is located on 126th Street, not far from the Apollo’s backstage entrance. Performers such as Ruth Brown, Cozy Cole, Count Basie, Fats Domino, James Moody, Art Blakey and Horace Silver make it their prandial headquarters during the course of a week when they are playing the big A. Jimmy Smith is an ardent admirer of “Home-soul” cooking, especially the brand dispensed by Kate O. Bishop. Home Cookin‘ is a dedication to Kate. This “all blues” date musically approximates the feeling her cuisine imparts. The distance from grits, greens and gravy to swing, sounds and soul is a short one for Jimmy Smith.
…
This salute, Home Cookin‘, in recognition of a certain brand of culinary art that has not perished (thanks to Kate Bishop), finds Jimmy Smith and his colleagues demonstrating that the blues, if utilized when just ripe and seasoned correctly, will never lose any of their flavor either.

I love that! The whole idea. Food, music, soul. Yeah. Well, after reading this, I went out and bought some collard greens. I love greens of any variety, I really do! I know I’m not remotely from the South, so this isn’t exactly my home cooking, but I love it all the same. The idea of it and the taste of it. I’ve given some thought to what my home cooking might be. Savory pies, I guess, with greens and beans in them?

These collard greens are sort of a fusion of two different quintessential collard recipes. One is Ye’abesha gomen, an Ethiopian dish with garlic and ginger, and the other is one more typical of the American south, with chiles and bacon. Obviously, I don’t eat bacon, but I roasted some potatoes that had been chopped into small cubes, and then I tossed them with my spice mix, which has the smokey, savory flavor I associate with bacon or sausage.

I usually like my greens bright and cooked just as much as necessary, but for some reason, I wanted these collards to be meltingly soft, so I cooked them for quite a long time. The crispy potatoes on top formed a nice contrast of texture. I added a dash of vinegar at the end, to bring out the hot savory flavors, and that’s about all I have to say about that!

Here’s Jimmy Smith with Messin’ Around from Home Cookin’
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Banana bread with chocolate covered cranberries

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Banana bread

You could put dark chocolate on just about anything and I’d probably bake with it! As long as it’s vegetarian, of course! I’ve used chocolate covered cherries and chocolate covered ginger. My lastest foray into the chocolate covered world is dried cranberries. Very nice! Tart & sweet, just like you’d want them to be. I decided to bake them into banana bread, because we had some very ripe bananas, and, let’s face it, bananas and cranberries are a perfect combination, aren’t they?

Here’s Calypso Rose with Banana
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Coconut cake with blackberry mousse

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Coconut cake with blackberry mousse

I work in a restaurant that has a candy dispenser. If I have two quarters left over at the end of the day, I’ll sometimes bring home small cups of candy to my boys. Twenty-five cents worth a piece. I always bring M&Ms to my little one, and skittles to my older son. It seems funny that their love for fruity or chocolate-y candy has become a defining characteristic for them. One small way to be their own boy. And an easy way to divide the spoils come Halloween or Easter! I made a cake for my brother and father the other day (they both have February birthdays). I know they like chocolate (who doesn’t?) but I always think of them as falling towards the fruity end of the sweet spectrum. So…flush from my success with the chocolate drambuie mousse, I decided to make them a coconut cake with blackberry mousse in between the layers. This being February, when raspberries and blackberries seem to cost about $10 a piece, I used blackberry jam instead of fresh fruit. (Honestly, if you have fresh raspberries, don’t you just eat them? Exactly as they are?) The mousse is actually a white chocolate blackberry mousse, because I didn’t want to use gelatin, and I thought the chocolate would help to make the mousse more substantial, once it un-melted. It isn’t a difficult cake to make, but the assembly process does have a few messy-fun steps.

Here’s Doc Watson’s Blackberry Rag.
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Guacamole soup

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guacamole soup

Coriander is an interesting herb, isn’t it? It shows up in so many different cuisines throughout the world. You can use every part of the plant, and the leaves and fruits taste quite different from each other. I’ve never encountered the root, but I’ll keep an eye out for it, because it sounds intriguing. Apparently, coriander was cultivated by ancient Egyptians and Greeks. They’ve found traces it at various archeological sites. It’s hard to get my mind around that, in so many ways! Coriander is also fascinating, I think, because the leaves taste so different to different people. To some they have a lovely herby, slightly citrus-y flavor. To others they taste like soap or stink bugs. (I love stink bugs, I really do, I think they’re adorable, but I wouldn’t want to eat them. I’m a vegetarian for heaven’s sake!) It’s such distinct proof that humans experience the world differently.

This soup came about because I bought a job lot (as Thompson and Thomson would say) of avocados. Avocadoes? Avocadi? They were at that moment of perfect ripeness. The first night we had one on a salad, but I continue to be bitterly disappointed by lettuce and tomatoes this time of year. So the next day, whilst whiling away the hours at work, I had the idea to use them in a soup (the avocados, not the whiled-away hours. I wonder how whiled-away-hour soup would taste?). When I considered the various flavor combinations I could use, I kept returning to the seasonings I use for quacamole (I make a mean guacamole). Viz: Cilantro, cumin, chile, lime and honey. So that’s how we did it. I added cauliflower, because I seem to be incapable of making soup without cauliflower lately, and because I thought the puréed cauliflower would save the soup from a certain slimy texture that puréed avocados sometimes attain. (I’m sorry, avocado, but it’s true) Well, the soup came out very nice. A little of the warmth of summery flavors combined with the warmth of a wintery soup.

Here’s MF DOOM’s Coriander.
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