h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

something new for midwinter: lemony mustard greens

Not mustard greens. The title of this picture is, "The summer I effortlessly lost 5 or more pounds because my CSA's flooded-out farmer could grow nothing but lettuce and greens."

A couple of weeks ago, I found a new way to cook greens, thank goodness. Somewhere along the line I learned to wilt anything semi-sturdy and green and sauté it in olive oil with garlic and red pepper flakes. It’s a delicious method, of course, but I think it’s safe to say that I have been in a rut with it since mid-2004.

Mustard greens, in my experience, don’t take as well to my standard treatment, inspiring me to unearth some alternative recipes for them over the years. Unfortunately, given my lack of discipline in keeping a kitchen notebook (or notebook of any kind), I have no idea what they were. (Seriously, this kills me. Do you at least scribble in your cookbooks? I always resolve to do it and then get lazy, with irritating consequences. For instance, recently I saw a recipe for white beans with gorgonzola in the Dean & Deluca Cookbook. The authors make big claims for it, and I know that at some point in the last few years it was on my list. But did I ever make it? Who knows? I either made it and was not impressed or got distracted and forgot all about it, since my “to-cook” list is also a pretty casual affair.) Earlier this month when I tried something new and wonderful with mustard greens, I promised myself not to fail to write it down. This is in keeping with my usual experience of the first three months of the year: January is for relaxing and nesting, February is for getting your act together and keeping resolutions, and March is for starting to exercise again, not so much because spring’s bare arms are approaching but because by March you need those endorphins.

Anyway: mustard greens with rice, adapted from the recipe for spinach with rice in Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, the cookbook that (almost) never lets me down. I love the bright lemony flavor of this dish, especially with a spoonful of yogurt stirred in at the end: it’s quite different from my spicy-garlicky-oily greens. As the author points out, this is mostly greens; the rice is only there to thicken and bind the cooking liquid, so don’t expect a big bowl of greens and rice. This served 2 as a side dish.

If your bunch of mustard greens (about 3/4 pounds, at least at Whole Foods) is attached at the base, separate the leaves and wash well. Bring 6 cups water to a rolling boil and drop in the greens. Cook until just wilted, 2-5 minutes (check at 2 minutes). Drain and rinse with cold water; leave in a colander to drain as much as possible.

Put 2 cups water in a wide pot and bring to a boil. Add 6 scallions, cut crosswise into fine rings all the way up to the green section, 2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 3 tablespoons Arborio (or other medium-grain) rice. Cook over medium-high, stirring now and then, for 10-12 minutes, until the rice is just done and the liquid in the pot has become a thick little sauce. Add the drained greens and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Stir and cook 2-3 minutes. Stir in 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice and serve hot, adding more lemon juice as desired. I like almost anything better with a spoonful of plain yogurt stirred in, and this is no exception.

blackeyed peas and greens

(This is like one of those medieval pictures in which subjects are sized not according to the laws of perspective but instead according to their importance in the world; blackeyed peas and greens have been dominating my diet for the last few days.)

Here we are, January 5th--I tend to get a slow start on the New Year. I think a lot about resolutions but rarely make them in any formal way, and in New York they leave many of the Christmas decorations up well into the second week of December, making it easy to pretend that the holiday hasn’t yet tiptoed away. By the time you look up and realize that everything is dark and cold instead of twinkly and hectic, it’s practically February, at which point you can either start looking forward to spring or cozy up under your comforter to hibernate.

On New Year’s Day I make a pot of blackeyed peas and greens so big that it feeds me for a few days. (Andrew doesn’t share my love of beans & greens and so eats only the spoonful I forcefeed him for good luck.) Maybe this, too, slows down my return to reality after the holidays—if I eat my January 1 food over and over, I stay in that hopeful, celebratory, fresh-start state. Until, that is, I realize that the amount of good fortune in the Tupperware is barely diminishing even though I’ve been eating it for lunch and dinner every day, and maybe sometimes for breakfast, too. And so, though I love blackeyed peas and greens very much, so much that I occasionally make them on non-new-year’s occasions, my resolution for 2008 is to make a smaller batch of blackeyed peas and greens to welcome 2009. They don’t freeze well (the texture is all off), and I hate to start the new year by tossing out food. Future Robin, take heed!

(Here are blackeyed peas and kale sitting on top of my get-organized scribbling for January 2, with one of the beautiful French napkins my mother gave me for Christmas...yes, I work at home and my sofa is my office!)

Blackeyed Peas and Kale

Usually I make this dish with lots of bacon, but this year I served it with delicious pulled pork tacos and macaroni and cheese and figured I should ease up on the pig fat. This recipe is adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's Cypriot Blackeyed Peas with Swiss Chard in World Vegetarian, an indispensable cookbook. Try it out, but for goodness sake, CUT THE RECIPE IN HALF unless you are feeding 12 enthusiastic vegetarians. It's good and a little soupy by itself but also especially satisfying with brown rice.

Put 1 bag rinsed-and-picked-over blackeyed peas (just over 2 cups) in a saucepan with water to cover. Bring to a boil, boil hard 2 minutes, remove from heat, and cover. Two hours later, drain the blackeyed peas, cover with seven cups water, and bring to a simmer. Cover partially, turn the heat to low, and cook very gently for 40 minutes, or until the peas are tender (my peas were tender after about 20 minutes, so check as you cook).

Meantime, wash 2 bunches kale. Remove the tough center stems and roughly chop the leaves however you like. When the blackeyed peas are tender, add the greens to the pot with 2 teaspoons salt. Stir the greens in completely and bring back to a boil; then turn heat to low, cover, and cook 30 minutes more (again, check after 20 minutes or so to see if the greens are tender enough to eat; you don't want the blackeyed peas to fall completely apart).

When it's time to serve the blackeyed peas and greens, make a tiganissi (fried garnish): Heat 3 tbs olive oil in a small skillet over medium high. When it is hot, add a dried chile and stir for 5 seconds. When it turns dark (much longer than 5 seconds for me--maybe 30) add 1 small onion, finely chopped, and 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped; cook, stirring, until the onion and garlic are beginning to turn brown at the edges. Immediately pour the contents of the skillet over the blackeyed peas and greens; add a big squeeze of lemon juice, stir, and serve.

potatoes roasted in duck fat

My lack of a working camera is devastating at the moment, for last night I made the most gorgeous roast potatoes I have ever seen (and that includes potatoes roasted by professionals). But wait, you say, handsome is as handsome does—how did they taste? Well, they did taste quite handsome, too. Last night I roasted potatoes in duck fat.

The story begins this summer, when I bought a Greenmarket duck on a whim. Duck is one of my favorite meats, but I had never made it at home. After consulting several cookbooks, I decided to follow the French Farmhouse Cookbook’s method, which calls for the duck to be roasted simply in a pan with a couple of inches of water in it. Other books offered many more complicated options involving pre-poaching, air-drying, constant basting, and worse, but this simple way worked beautifully—crispy skin, tender meat, no fuss.

Before the duck went into the oven, however, I had to trim away its globs of excess fat, which wouldn’t do the roast any good. Several books advised me to render the fat for later use. Even though all you have to do is heat the fat in a skillet until it melts (20-30 minutes over medium heat, stir intermittently) and then strain it to remove crisped-up skin and other solids, and even though it would keep in the refrigerator for months, I was skeptical. I worried that rendering fat would mean that I had taken this home cooking thing too far. Did I really want to have a little jar of animal fat in the refrigerator, its solid milky opacity making it impossible for me to ignore what it would eventually do to my arteries?

Yes, I did want. I rendered the fat, strained it into an old mustard jar, labeled it “DUCK FAT” with a Sharpie and, I'm sorry to say, some smug self-satisfaction, and gave it a prominent spot on the refrigerator door.

Last night I finally got around to using it for the first time, to roast potatoes according to Nigel Slater’s instructions in Real Food. Cubed potatoes tossed in olive oil (and maybe some spices) and roasted in a hot oven are a dinnertime staple for us, but this is a different matter entirely. Cut larger, given a quick boil, and then tossed in a dry pan to rough up the edges a bit before roasting, these potatoes turned a lovely caramel color in places, stayed prettily blond in others, and were quite creamy on the inside and delectable throughout. I braised some cabbage, too, beginning with duck fat instead of olive oil, but it didn't make much difference. The potatoes—the potatoes were the thing.

Potatoes Roasted in Duck Fat
adapted from Nigel Slater’s Real Food

-Preheat the oven to 400F. I roast my potatoes in a jelly roll pan and put it in the oven to heat up while I get everything else ready.
-Melt 1/4 - 1/2 cup duck fat. I think I used about 1/3 cup.
-Peel 5 potatoes about the size of your fist. Mine were Yukon gold and weighed about 2 pounds total. Chop them up into pieces too big to eat in a single bite. Maybe you want a few 1-biters to get extra crispy, but the larger ones get a lovely crust, too, and are full of creamy flesh. Put them in a saucepan of cold water with 1 tsp or so salt, bring to a boil, and boil gently for 5 minutes. Drain in a colander, toss the potatoes back in the pan, and jerk it around a bit to rough up the edges; this is important for the texture of the finished potatoes. (The boil-before-roasting may sound like a pain in the neck, but it’s not that bad, and I do think it made a difference.)
-Remove the pan from the oven, pour the melted fat in, and tilt to coat the pan evenly. Add the potatoes to the pan, toss them in the fat, and roast for about 45 minutes, stirring only once.  (I added 3 cloves garlic—skin on, crushed—to the pan and don’t think it made much difference.)
-These needed a lot of salt since they were not salted before roasting: I used 1 tsp sea salt, crushed in a mortar and pestle. A few grindings of black pepper are lovely here, too—the hot, simple potatoes enhance its fragrance mightily.

* This was really only enough for 2. Two pounds of potatoes may sound like a lot for 2 people, but trust me, we would have eaten more if there had been more. Of course, potatoes and cabbage were our whole dinner…as a side dish this might feed four, but you’d better prepare something divine for the main event or everyone will just be longing for more potatoes. To eat these potatoes with a green salad for dinner would be, I say, very heaven.

Chipotle Black Beans and Rice and Sweet Potatoes

I felt a little off today...I'm trying to start running again, but I still feel really weak and lacking in willpower. (Did I mention that instead of the freshman 15 Andrew and I have both gained the newlywed 5? Is it the end-of-workday beer? The fact that we're both 30 now? The passion for baking? Curse you, no-knead bread!) Thank goodness I had already defrosted four cups of beans to use for dinner. I love cooking beans myself instead of using cans. It makes me feel ultra-frugal, it leaves me with lots of easy dinners, and it doesn't actually take much time at all.

This meal was colorful and felt healthy-but-not-punishing. The beans are adapted from a Deborah Madison recipe. Of course, the logical complement of Negra Modelo renders it somewhat less healthy...as does my breakfast of tarte tatin! But with the way the ALCS is going, it's a good thing I have the beer for Andrew.

Today I learned that gypsies cook pheasant by packing it in soft clay and then roasting the whole thing, so that a sealed clay pot bakes all around the bird. That is all.

-Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Start a pot of brown rice (1 cup rice, 1.75 cups water, dash of olive oil, dash of salt). Wash and peel 4 sweet potatoes. Chop into roughly 1 inch dice. Toss with 1 or 2 tbs olive oil, salt, and pepper and bake for 30 minutes.
-Prepare chopped cilantro and crumbled or grated feta (I used ricotta salata) for garnish. Finely chop a small onion and a fat clove of garlic. Chop half a 28 oz can of tomatoes (or less...I used what I had left over, which was half a can). Chop a chipotle chile packed in adobo.
-15 minutes before the sweet potatoes are finished, saute the chopped onion in 1 tbs neutral oil in a pot large enough to hold the beans and tomatoes. Saute until soft, about 5 minutes; add the chopped garlic clove and stir for 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes, chipotle chile, 4 sprigs of cilantro, and 4 cups of black beans with some of their cooking liquid (or 2 cans of black beans, rinsed). Season with 1.25 tsp salt, bring to a simmer, and simmer 15 or 20 minutes.
-Everything should finish at about the same time. Serve the black beans on top of brown rice, garnished with cheese and cilantro. Serve the sweet potatoes on the side. This made enough for our dinner plus 1 large or 2 small lunches tomorrow...if I had doubled the rice it would be enough for two lunches.

turnip and rutabaga stew

These are the seven medium-sized turnips for which I paid EIGHT DOLLARS Saturday at the Greenmarket. I was so shocked when the guy said "eight dollars" that I just handed him a twenty with the same sense of impending shame I feel when splurging on a dress at Bergdorf Goodman. As god is my witness--isn't your number one association with turnips the starving Scarlett O'Hara, defiantly gnawing a raw turnip as she plots her revenge on the world? Or peasants, or pig slop? My determination to appreciate these precious turnips is strong. Half of them went into this week's buffalo stew. The other half may meet the same fate as their cousins who served to make last week's stew.

I have been playing pastry chef too often lately--brown sugar pound cake, peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies, cinnamon ice cream--and so looked to Deborah Madison for a vegetable stew that would make me feel a little more virtuous. Braised turnips with thyme turned out to be just what I was looking for, and it even won male approval. I also got to know a new vegetable--rutabaga, which I had never even seen before, as far as I can remember. It looks like...a big turnip.

-Put a big pot of water on to boil. Peel one pound of turnips and cut them into sixths. Peel 2 rutabagas and dice into 1/2 inch cubes. Add salt to boiling water and parboil the turnips for 1 minute, rutabagas for 3 minutes.
-Melt 2 tbs butter in your stew pot over medium heat. Add 1 finely diced onion, 3 cloves of garlic cut in half, the rutabaga, 1 diced carrot, and 4 sprigs of thyme. Cook for 4 minutes.
-Add the turnips to your pot. Sprinkle with 3/4 tsp salt and 2 tsp flour [I do not know whether you're supposed to stir the flour in or leave it on top. I left it on top and am not quite sure what it added here.] Cover, turn heat to low, and cook for 4 minutes.
-Stir in 1/5 cups water and 2 tbs chopped parsley. Simmer, covered, until turnips are tender, about 15 minutes.
-Taste for salt and pepper. Stir in 1 tsp Dijon mustard and 1/4 cup cream. Cook for 2 more minutes and serve.

chicken en papillote with tomato, olives, and thyme

Two weeks ago tomorrow I moved into the apartment I had been trying to get renovated for more than a year. For a while I thought I should start a blog documenting that process, but I'm glad I didn't--it would have been gloomier than a fourteen-year-old's journal. One of the hardest things about waiting all that time was that most of my STUFF was in storage, and I love my stuff. It's good, I suppose, that I learned to live without the reassuring presence of my books, but boy, am I glad to have them back now.

I'm especially glad to have my cookbooks back (though I kept some essentials with me, and couldn't resist acquiring a few more). For the first dinner, I wanted to try out both the cooktop and the oven, so I chose recipes from two books I had particularly missed: a potato leek gratin from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and a provencale chicken breast from Simple to Spectacular.

As so often happens, everything had to be tweaked--this time because the cooktop was not yet functional  (is still not functional, I might add). Curiously, Jean-Georges does his foil packets of chicken in a skillet on the cooktop; so I had to adjust and try it in the oven, which resulted in someone's suffering sweetly through a piece of half-raw chicken. I tried the recipe again this week, though (at a home where the cooktop works), and it was fan-tastic. I would have found Simple to Spectacular too intimidating (Jean-Georges? Spectacular? Caviar on the jacket?) to pick up, but happily a friend recommended it as a learn-to-cook text. The simple recipes (the ones I've tried, at least) really are fast, easy, and yummy, and the only reason I haven't tried the others is that they often call for ingredients that make me nervous.

chicken in a foil packet

Put two 18" square pieces of foil on top of each other. Smear about a tablespoon of olive oil in the middle. Layer on top of olive oil:
    2 thick slices of tomato
    2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, about 6 oz. each
    salt and pepper
    1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
    1 tsp. fresh thyme leaves
    10 pitted black olives (I sliced them up)
    2 branches of thyme
Seal the packet up good and tight by folding, but leave some room around the chicken. (There weren't really clear instructions for this, and I'm pretty sure I didn't do it right, since the packets didn't puff up. But the chicken was cooked and good). Put a skillet on high heat; after a minute, add a mere film of olive oil. Put packet in skillet, seam side up. After two minutes, it should puff up; then you cook it for 5 more minutes. Let sit for one minute off heat, and be sure to spoon juices out of packet when you plate.

As I said, my packet did not puff up, so I cooked it longer, and I could have cooked it longer still. Next time I will try folding the packet differently (and next time, I hope I get to do it in my own kitchen!).

tuna with tapenade

THIS IS the tuna with tapenade that was Sunday night dinner about a month ago (!). A funny thing about this camera...the colors aren't true at all, but at least in this case, that seems to have improved matters rather than made them worse.

I can't remember whether this was from Fast Food My Way or Encore With Claudine, but it is the best Jacques Pepin recipe I have tried yet. You simply mince olives (Nicoise and oil-cured) and press them onto one side of the fish before cooking it on top of the stove. (We should have added anchovies to the tapenade, too, but I did not want to buy them). You finish the fish in the oven, but this left it rather dry--if I use such a thin piece again (just under an inch), I might skip the oven. I would not skip the bed of arugula, though. I'm usually not sold on that kind of thing, but in this case, the cool, peppery bed made the meaty tuna and olives all the tastier.

By the way, you will perhaps be amused to know that part of my original intent here was to show my grocery bill for each dish. This would help me comparison shop, and I think it's interesting. So far I have a big pile of receipts but have not broken anything out. I can tell you off the top of my head that fish is almost always so expensive as to be a very special dinner. Last week wild ("wild"?) salmon cost only $10/lb at Whole Foods, and I had to buy it; though on second thought, that's pretty expensive for Tuesday night dinner. In the new house maybe I'll start managing my receipts. Onward!

soba with goat cheese, arugula, and haricots verts

                         

Even though I will eat food way out of season--yes, even tomatoes! and yes, I persist in finding something that tastes good about them--I love reading Alice Waters's descriptions of the perfect, perfect thing at the perfect, perfect moment. But she's a little bit scary with her absolutism, no? I have always been too intimidated by the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook to cook from it. A shocking number of recipes begin with instructions like "remove the pigeons' feet and heads," and this is a little more hard-core and authentic than I'm ready to be. Sunday morning, though, I noticed a pasta recipe that looked easy enough: buckwheat pasta with rocket and goat cheese.

You'll forgive me for using soba instead of making my own buckwheat pasta as suggested. There were two things I loved about this simple preparation: it came together in about 30 minutes of easy work by one person, and it bridges the gap between stick-to-your-ribs satisfying (cream, goat cheese, chewy noodles) and springtime lightness (haricots verts, arugula).

Gosh, I always feel pretentious writing or saying haricots verts.

I also got to buy one of those Coach Farm cheese buttons that are always so tempting. Those are the Coach Farm goats up there! The leftover cheese and arugula made a yummy salad the next day.

to serve 2 (with other courses, could serve 3 or 4):

6 oz. soba noodles
1/4 lb. haricots verts
1 cup half-and-half (N.B. book calls for cream, but half-and-half was fine)
1.5 oz. soft, plain goat cheese
2 handfuls of arugula
salt and pepper

1. Put water on to boil for soba and haricots verts. I used two pots, but you could use one, doing the beans first, lifting them out, then throwing the pasta in the still-boiling bean water.
2. While water comes to a boil, heat half-and-half (or cream) over medium-low flame, until it has reduced slightly (5 minutes? I'm not at all sure I followed this step correctly). Off-heat, whisk in goat cheese to make a smooth sauce.
3. Blanch haricots, 2 or 3 minutes, then chop into whatever size pleases you.
4. Cook soba according to package directions.
5. Toss soba, cheese sauce, and beans with 2 handfuls of (still uncooked) arugula. Salt and pepper to taste and serve in big bowls.

vegetable tian

To recover from a busy month of birthday food and eating on the   run, I made the vegetable tian from Barefoot in Paris. Um, yes, it was a month ago...I am playing catch-up now but hope to have my ducks in a row soon. 

I was surprised to realize that this is only the second recipe I've tried from Barefoot in Paris, the other being boeuf bourguinon <...happy memories of chuck stewed in wine...>. It was, of course, supereasy, delicious (even better the next day), and (I thought) very pretty. I had never heard of a "tian," so I looked it up in the Larousse. A tian is one of those foods, like a tagine or a gratin, that is named after the dish it is traditionally prepared in. Larousse did not clarify how it differs from a gratin--to me it looks to be exactly the same thing. In any event, slices of vegetables (in this case, zucchini, tomatoes, and potatoes) are layered on top of sauteed onions, sprinkled with thyme and olive oil, and popped in the oven. The veg came out succulent and sunny-tasting, as in a good ratatouille.

Yesterday afternoon I took a nap instead of braving the crowds at Fairway. Not having procured the cream, goat cheese, haricots verts, and arugula needed to mess with an Alice Waters pasta recipe that had been selected when the day was young and ambition was in the air, we were left with cauliflower, potatoes, broccoli, and bulgar wheat for dinner. The cauliflower and potatoes got mustard seed and cumin, the broccoli got plenty of butter, and the bulgar wheat, in its debut performance on my plate, got rave reviews. The all-veggie dinner was as satisfying and almost as yummy as last week's tuna with tapenade.

crab with mango

Sunday afternoon these whole, cooked Dungeness crab were lying in wait at Whole Foods in Chelsea. I was reprimanded for taking this picture as the fish man cracked and cleaned my crab. Chastened, I ran back to the produce section for  two brilliantly-named champagne mangoes, some cilantro, and a red onion.

The object was to make a mango salsa, but when it came time to eat  Monday night, I was too tired to do more than dice the mango with some onion and cilantro and a tiny bit of white vinegar. Thank goodness the help was there to extract the crab meat from its beautiful shell.

Thanks to the meltingly delicious mango, it was a very nice light dinner.