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Roman gnocchi “pizza” with chard and roasted mushrooms

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Roman gnocchi pizza

The power went out for about an hour this morning. It was the crucial coffee-making hour. I panicked, and bought two large coffees after taking Isaac to school. ($5.30? Really?) By the time I got back home, the power was on and all was right with the world. Well, that coffee must have been stronger than our usual coffee, cause I feel a little odd! I’m wired, my heart is racing, and I feel on the verge of seeing spots or possibly experiencing tunnel vision. But I’m strangely tired, too. I could take a nap, in fact. Except that I can’t take a nap, because I’ve had too much coffee!! And I feel like I’ve got too much to do to take a nap, but we all know that’s not true, because I’m a lady of leisure. A roustabout, a ne’er-do-well.

I would like to tell you about my roman gnocchi pizza, though. I’m a big fan of roman gnocchi. Basically, roman gnocchi involves applying a cream puff technique (one of my very favorite cooking techniques) to semolina flour. It’s baked rather than boiled. It doesn’t call for potatoes, but it does call for eggs. So it’s light and fluffy. Dense and soft on the inside, cripsy on the outside. Very comforting and delicious. You can add all sorts of things to the batter – herbs and cheese being the most likely (I was going to make a joke about adding nails and pennies, and legos and other small household objects, but I thought you might think the coffee had made me crazy!). I like to make a big plate of roman gnocchi in the summer, and then have lots of little dishes along with it – fresh tomatoes and basil, chard and raisins and pinenuts, basil pesto, crispy eggplant, a good salad. It’s one of my favorite meals! This time of year I thought it would be nice with chard and roasted mushrooms. And I further thought that it would be nice to combine them before I bake the roman gnocchi, and to make it in a sort of pizza shape. So that’s what I did. It was quite simple to make. Generally, when you make roman gnocchi, you make the dough and then let it sit, so that you can cut it into shapes before you bake it. The sitting step was eliminated in this version, because I just scooped it onto a baking tray and arranged it with a spoon.

Here’s Mississippi John Hurt with Coffee Blues. This song kills me, because it’s so beautiful, but it’s actually an advertisement for a particular brand of coffee!
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Kale with peanut sauce and spicy roasted black beans

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Kale in peanut sauce with roasted black beans

The weather has been remarkably strange this week. People will walk up to one another and remark, “what a strange day!” We seem to go through several seasons in one day. The mornings are cool and damp and foggy. The chill stretches into the afternoon, so that you sit, shivering in your brick house (which stays cool till sometime in August) and piling on cardigans. Then, when you venture out around three o’clock, the sun burns through the haze and suddenly it feels like mid-summer. It’s hot. You feel dazed, dizzy and burnt in the unexpected sunshine. Then small showers pass by, when they’re not predicted, and a gentle thunder storms wake you at 4:30 in the morning. What strange days!

Malcolm and I went for a walk yesterday morning in the seashore mistiness. Everything was vividly green through the haze. We pilfered a lambs ear from the abandoned train tracks for Malcolm to plant in the back yard. Someone passing asked Malcolm if he likes lambs ear because it’s soft. “No,” he said matter-of-factly, “Because it smells like goat’s cheese.” That’s my boy!!

It’s been nice cooking weather. Lots of exciting produce – fresh and tender and new. But it’s not too hot to cook it yet, and if you’re lucky the day stays warm long enough that you can eat outside. The peanut sauce in this recipe was inspired by barbecue sauce. I find barbecue sauce fascinating. The mix of flavors. The fact that it often contains tamarind, which seems like an unexpected ingredient in a very American food. I thought a peanutty barbecue sauce would be tasty. So that’s what I made. The black beans are roasted separately, with their own complementary spices. They have a nice texture, not crispy, like roasted chickpeas, but pleasantly firm. They go nicely with the kale, which brings its own assertive texture to the bowl.

Here’s Beastie Boys with Peanut Butter and Jelly. I love it! I love them!

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Champagne mango tart (with cardamom pastry cream and ginger-shortbread)

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Champagne mango tart

The Guardian recently had an article about alphonso mangoes. They sound magically delicious! They also sound like champagne mangoes, and I thought they might be the same thing. When I did a little research I learned that they’re closely related, but not the same. Alphonso mangoes come from India. Champagne mangoes come from Mexico, and they’re also called Adolpho mangoes. I love that! I love that they have people names, and that they’re close relatives. Can’t you just imagine a family reunion of mangoes from all over the world? If mangoes were people they’d be bright and sweet and pleasant, with just enough of a piquant edge to keep them interesting.

Champagne mangoes are ripe and cheap around here at the moment. They’re also irresistible. They have a mild, sweet taste (you can see why they’re also called “honey mangoes.”) They have small pits and pretty, velvety flesh, not at all stringy. I wanted to make a fresh little tart that would show them off nicely without overwhelming them. So I made a ginger-shortbread shell (which would taste good on its own as a cookie, as it happens!) And I made a pastry cream flavored with vanilla and cardamom. Pastry cream is my kind of custard. It has a little bit of flour in it, which means that you don’t have to worry too much about letting it curdle. And if it does curdle, you can process it till it’s smooth again. And – you know when it’s thick. There’s no doubtful “Is that coating the back of the spoon? What does that even look like? Should I be using a metal spoon or a wooden spoon? Will it get thicker, or will it just get RUINED?!?!” (I’m a nervous custard maker.) When pastry cream is thick, it’s thick.

Everybody liked the tart, even the littlest food critic, Isaac. And, you know, it’s just fruit and milk! Right?

Here’s Mango Meat by Mandrill. I love this one!!
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Chick(pea) patties and guacamole

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Chick patties

This time I’m going to listen to my own advice, and just post the damn recipe. Except that it’s two recipes. Sigh, nothing’s simple. We ate them together, and they go very nicely together, but they’re good on their own, too!

The first is “chick patties.” Part of an ongoing series, here at The Ordinary, in which I attempt to make homemade meat substitutes. Fake meat from the store – fakin bacon, veggie burgers, soy sausage – although frequently very tasty, is also very expensive and full of questionable ingredients. (Questionable to me, anyway, because I don’t know what they are, and my old eyes are getting so bad I can’t read the small print!) So, here in the test kitchens of The Ordinary, we have a whole division devoted to coming up with simple, economical versions you can make at home. Our motto is, “It’s all in the seasonings!” So we’ve made flakin bacon, veggie burgers, “meatballs,” and sausages. Well, we thought it was time to tackle every child’s favorite – the chicken nugget. I love the texture and flavor of roasted chickpeas, so we started there. I’ve been obsessing lately over the combination of lemon, sage and rosemary, so we continued in that direction. And I have fond memories of making lemon pepper chicken when I was very very young, so we added a big dose of black pepper. (Might be the first meal I remember being proud to share with people!) We fried them lightly in olive oil, and then ate them with oven roasted french fries and guacamole. The youngsters dipped them in barbeque sauce.

Guacamole

I’m very proud of my guacamole! It’s simple, yet flavorful. I add cilantro, lime, cumin, cayenne, tomatoes and a bit of honey. A lovely balance of sweet, hot, tart and creamy. Just in time for cinco de mayo!!

Here’s Organized Konfusion with Who Stole My Last Piece of Chicken. I love this song so much. And the video, too. Food and memory. Beautiful!!

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Two spring salads

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Asparagus castelvetrano salad

A big part of my brain is telling me to “just post the damn recipe, Claire!” But when have I ever listened to my brain? Rarely! So here we go…Yesterday I rambled on about nutella and sweets and American’s eating habits. Well, of course I have more to say on the subject. Let’s begin ten years ago. I worked in a bookstore. I was amazed at the number of diet books. And the number of weird diet books. Eat your colors, eat your horoscope, only eat carbohydrates, don’t eat carbohydrates, don’t eat green beans on Tuesday, eat only cheese and grapefruit, eat only chocolate chip cookies and cider vinegar. I joked, at the time, that I was going to write a book called “The DUH Diet.” There are some ideas about eating that just make sense (to me!), and they’re not new ideas or revolutionary ideas. They’re not eating habits that are difficult to live with. I love Satchel Paige’s Rules for Long Life, so I’m going to present a few of these commonplace, commonsense ideas in this form. (I should note that this applies mostly to Americans, because that’s mostly what I know.) Ready? Begin…

1. Enjoy every bite you eat. Don’t stuff something down your throat that you don’t really like the taste of–that you don’t really have a hankering for–just because it’s mealtime or you’re hungry or it’s sitting in front of you. It’s okay to feel hungry once in a while, as you wait for the food you really want. Most of us go through life snacking whenever our stomachs get a little grumbly. Let yourself feel hungry before a meal. It’ll wake you up! You’ll enjoy it more.

2. Drink lots of water. Good for every part of you.

3. Eat cookies and potato chips if you feel like it, but enjoy them. Eat a handful, not a bagful.

4. Satchel said avoid fried meats. I’d say avoid all meat, or try to go easy on it. Bad for the animal, bad for the planet, bad for your body, bad for your soul.

5. Never ever go to McDonalds or any other fast food restaurant, unless you need to use their toilet. Bad for the planet, bad for every part of you.

6. Enjoy rich foods, like buttery, cheesy savory pastries, but have that be a small part of your meal, and eat a big salad with it, or a big bowl of soup. Fill up on fruits and vegetables.

7. Satchel said “jangle gently as you walk,” which I love. Do it every day! Go for a walk, or a run, or jump around your living room. Get your heart beating, and your blood flowing.

I guess that’s it, for now. Sorry to get all preachy on you. But it’s all stuff everybody knows anyway, right? Duh.

Anyway, in the interest of loading up on vegetables, which is part of tenet number 6, let me tell you about these two salads. I make a salad almost every night, but I rarely talk about them because they’re gone before I can make a record of their existence.

These two seemed notable, though. The first had royal trumpet mushrooms. These had become a questing food for me ever since my friend Neil told me about them. Neil’s in Germany, and he called them “king trumpet.” I think the version we have in America is called “royal trumpet.” Either way, I found them, by accident, in a local market. The same market that had fiddleheads. It’s a magical market! I decided to keep it simple, this first time, so I sauteed them with rosemary and a bit of garlic, olive oil and balsamic. Then I put them on a salad with

Royal trumpet mushroom salad

spinach and arugula, and added a handful of chopped hazelnuts. And that was it! They were delicious. They became lovely and crispy. I’ll definitely be having these again. The second had bright green asparagus, bright green castelvetrano olives, capers, almonds and a little goat cheese. Simple and green and crunchy.

Here’s Louis Armstrong Tight Like That to go with the trumpet mushrooms. I think it’s such a perfect song!
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Non-sausage rolls with roasted mushrooms and white beans

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Non-sausage rolls with roasted mushrooms

Here’s another installment in the non-sausage roll series. I made these for our shadfestivities. They’re the easiest of all the small savory pastries to make, in my opinion, because you slice them apart, rather than painstakingly forming each one. The mushrooms are roasted with sage and rosemary and thyme, and then a little Spanish paprika is added because I can’t resist it! And to give it a slightly smoky flavor, of course!.

Rather than go on and on about them, I’ll share this cartoon I recently saw.

Alex Gregory's New Yorker cartoon

I’m thinking of going back to the pointless barking!!

If you’ll cast your memory back, you’ll recall that for my last shadfest savory pastry post, I added Desmond Dekker’s Intensified Festival track. Well, this is Toots Hibbert’s recollection of the same event. Desmond Dekker came first!

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Millionaire shorbread with sea salt, rum, and meyer lemons

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Millionaire shortbread with sea salt

Apparently there’s a woman who successfully sued nutella because they made her believe their product was healthy. She fed it to her daughter daily, with dangerous results. Well! I feed nutella to my son on a regular basis, but I don’t kid myself that it’s healthy! I know it’s got lots of sugar and fat. But I spread it on a sandwich made with unsweetened peanut butter and whole wheat bread. And I know those are good for him. I believe it’s important to find a balance. A little bit of sugar is okay if it’s part of a relatively healthy combination. Sugar whipped together with chemicals in candy is a very rare treat. Chocolate in a cookie, on the other hand, is a good reward for a meal well-eaten. Especially if it’s a cookie that we make together! I’m suspicious of processed foods. Even “healthy” processed foods. I’m not a fan or margarine, low-fat cheese, or sugar-free anything. These products remind me of the saying, “Americans will try anything to lose weight, except eating less food.” And the food companies will try to sell any kind of diet that involves products they can market to people trying to lose weight. Which, let’s face it, is probably a majority of Americans. I’d rather have a small amount of real butter or real sugar than a large amount of a substitute that tastes like chemicals. Everything in moderation. As long as you have lots of vegetables and fruits and foods with protein and vitamins, it’s fine to have something special and sweet once in a while.

Which brings us to millionaire shortbread with sea salt, rum, and meyer lemons. Let’s see. There are ground almonds in the crust! That’s good for you, right? A little? Well, you wouldn’t want to make these every day, but they’re ridiculously delicious, and I think we need to eat sweets like this every now and again (health permitting)! I cut them small, and I almost think of them more as candy than cookies. Let me tell you about them…they have an almond shortbread crust with some rum in it. They have a layer of caramel with meyer lemon zest & juice and a bit of rum and sea salt. And they have coarse sea salt sprinkled on top. I had fun making the caramel, but it was a slightly anxious time. I’ve made caramel in the past to spread over a cake. I wanted this to be a little harder, but not hard enough to crack anybody’s teeth. I thought I might have made it too hard, so I added an extra tablespoon of butter and milk. And it turned out perfect! I’ll have to try it again and see if I can repeat the feat.

Here’s Mississippi John Hurt with Shortnin Bread. He’s the best!

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Pear, spinach, rosemary, bleu cheese galettes

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Bleu cheese, rosemary, pear and spinach galettes

Maybe spring is to blame, but I feel as though I’m bursting with recipes I want to share, and recipes I want to make. I have about five things I’ve recently made that I want to tell you about. I’d save them up and tell you about one each day, but I also have about five things buzzing around in my head that I can’t wait to cook! It’s gotten really bad, I tell you! So I apologize in advance for posting more than once a day. As ever, feel free to ignore it all!!

I live in a sleepy little city on the Delaware. I’m no town historian, but our house is from 1850, and it feels as though most of the rest of the town was built up at that time. Lots of brick row houses. Narrow streets and small yards. More antique stores and art galleries than we know what to do with. (Delightfully so!)

One weekend of the year our quiet little town becomes crazy crowded – we have a street festival! Roads are blocked off, booths are erected. Hundreds of people walk by each day. We can watch it all from our store – just on the edge of the action. Our store is small and has a huge window in front, so we feel like we’re in a fishbowl, watching the crowds go by. It’s oddly quiet, despite the sudden population increase. Maybe from the lack of cars. Maybe with the hush that crowds sometimes have, when everybody seems to adjust the volume of their voices to form, all together, a low, incoherent rumble. It’s mesmerizing to watch everybody passing by, at a stately, regular pace. FIrst one way, then crossing back, in tempo, returning the other.

I always find crowds of people strangely moving. I don’t always love humanity in the abstract, but masses of people make me feel oddly affectionate towards us as a species. Small moments of human drama in the sea of people feel so poignant. A child who is over-stimulated and over-tired, with a crumpled, crying face that just happens to be painted like a happy tiger. Eccentric looking couples that seem so happy together, and make you happy that they met each other, even though you don’t know them at all. Straggling groups of teenagers wearing giant 70s sunglasses, who can’t suppress how excited they feel to be wandering without parents at the festival.

Anyway. We had some food in our store, for anybody that was brave enough to come in off the street. I made three kinds of savory pastries. And I’m going to tell you about all of them!! One at a time!! They all turned out really good!! Or so I think!! The nice thing about savory pastries (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again) is that although they’re probably best hot out of the oven, they’re also very tasty at room temperature. So they’re nice for parties, or picnics, or art openings, or to offer at street festivals. They’re easy to pick up and carry around, and they combine lots of good flavors in a manageable package.

The first I’ll tell you about is this little galette. It’s got a toasted oatmeal black pepper crust. It’s got fresh baby spinach, ripe pears, bleu cheese and rosemary. It’s very tasty!

I’ve got the Tom Waits song 9th and Hennepin stuck in my head, so I’ll post that here. Not because it describes my town, thank heavens, but because he’s watching people through windows, just like we were, and he’s rambling on to anyone who will listen. Just like I do!

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen…
And I’ve seen it all, I’ve seen it all
Through the yellow windows of the evening train…

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Fiddleheads!

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Hellooooooooo!! Greetings from Shadfesterville. As I speak there’s a sea of people walking back and forth in front of my house. It’s shadfest! It used to be all about the fish, man. And then it was all about the art, man. And now it’s mostly about homemade soap and dog bandanas. It’s all good, though. An exciting weekend in our sleepy little town. I baked a ton of food to offer in our store, so if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by! And if you’re not, I’ll tell you all about it with recipes on Monday!!

So, not much time to write, at the moment, but I’m very very excited to have found fiddleheads. They’re so lovely. We ate them boiled till bright and tender-crisp, and tossed with a bit of butter and meyer lemon juice (yes, I will be putting meyer lemons on or in everything I eat until the bag is gone.) Then we chopped up some equally serpent-green castelvetrano olives and mixed those in. Bit of sea salt and pepper. Perfect!!

Here’s Desmond Dekker with the contagious Intensified Festival ’68.
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Puffy roasted sweet potato and rosemary flatbread

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Roasted sweet potato flatbread

The night we had these for dinner, Malcolm asked if he could have another. (I think he’d already had two!) I said, without thinking, “No, I’ve got to save them for a photograph.” Then I realized how crazy I’d gotten. Instead of being glad that my 9-year-old son liked sweet potato flatbreads enough to ask for another. Instead of being thankful that he was eating a healthy food, with vitamins and whatnot (sweet potatoes have vitamins, right?), I was going to save them to take a picture. Ridiculous. Well, I quickly saw the error in my ways, and let him eat one more. (Yes, I did save one!)
Here’s how it all came about…we had some leftover stew, and for some reason I was semi-obsessed with the idea of making flatbreads to go with it. But I wanted to do something different. I wanted to use some unusual ingredient. I thought about all the different kinds of flour in the cupboard. But I’ve already made toasted barley flatbreads, and semolina flatbread. Then I thought about the sweet potato I’d bought on a whim. Why not put that in? And I’d just bought a huge bunch of fresh rosemary, so we’ll have some of that, too. And we’ll roast them together, rather than just boil and purée the potatoes, for more intense roasty flavor. So that’s what I did! The dough was a pleasure to work with – soft and firm at the same time, just as dough should be. I wanted them to be sort of light and puffy, so I made them the way I’d made pita bread one time, on a preheated baking sheet. They puffed beautifully! I was so happy! I love a bread that you can tear apart and use as a spoon, and stuff with delicious foods. I finally let Malcolm eat the remaining flatbread the next day, and it was good reheated as well.

In the early days of this blog, I foolishly used up all my sweet potato songs at once in a small playlist. It’s been a while, and they’re all good songs, so I’m just going to repost it here. Something to listen to while you wait for your dough to rise!
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