UPDATE: I made the salad again, and this time I took a photo of it. I used 1 clove of regular garlic instead of garlic scopes this time around.
I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how to deal with the mess from peeling beets. I know, I know, I am part of some riveting conversations. Below, I explain a trick I learned.
I never cooked with fava beans before. The internet warned me that they are time-consuming, and this is true. However, the internet also let me know it would be worth the time. Also true. Wow, the internet is so smart.
Ingredients:
- 3 medium-sized beets
- 1/2 pound fava beans
- 1/4 cup crumbled feta
- 2 garlic scapes
- juice of 1/2 juicy lemon
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
- salt and pepper to taste
Directions:
1. First, you need to get the beets in the oven. Jack Bishop, author of “Year in the Vegetarian Kitchen” suggests heating an oven to 400 degrees, wrapping the beets (cut off any dangling roots and the stalks) in two layers of aluminum foil, and cooking for 1-1.25 hours. After an hour, test your beets to see if a skewer glides easily through them. If so, they are done. Then, allow the beets to cool a bit before handling. Last, take a wad of paper towels to rub off the skin. (that’s the cool trick!) The last step for the beets is to cut them into the shape you want for your salad. Then, place the beets in a medium-sized bowl.
2. Once your beets are in the oven, start to deal with the beans. Get some water boiling. While you are waiting for it to boil, peel off the stringy part to reveal the beans inside. As a bonus, you will discover that the inside of the pod is pillowy. Fascinating! The sad part will be when you realize that you don’t get a heck of a lot of beans for all that work. But you will get over it once you eat the beans (says the internet).
3. Next, put the beans in boiling water for a little under a minute. While that’s happening, prepare a bowl of ice cold water. Then, spoon out the beans and put them directly into the cold water to stop the cooking.
4. One more step before you eat the beans. Pinch off the outer shell to get to the edible part. You did it!
5. In a food processor (I used the mini prep), combine garlic scapes, lemon juice, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and a bit of salt and pepper to taste. Pour the dressing over the beets and stir to coat the beets
6. Arrange the dressed beets on a serving dish. Top with feta cheese and beans. (You can toss the ingredients all together, but the result will be a very pink salad.) Enjoy!
I was wondering what to do with all my radishes, beyond slicing and sprinkling them over greens. This recipe used up the rest of ours from our share, and the radishes and pickle relish add some great flavor to the potatoes. This is one of several recipes that I made from Food and Wine’s most recent Grilling issue (although there is no grilling involved for this recipe, I’ll be posting the grilled kale recipe soon). I like that it is a make-ahead dish, so it is absolutely no work on the day you serve it. It stays good for two days after you make it.
At this point, I have several recipes on this blog that feature the radish. You can just click on “radish” in the right column, and find other recipes that use this vegetable. Have you done anything exciting with your radishes? Let me know…I’d love to know and share more ways to use these, as I think more are arriving from the farm this week!
Ingredients:
- 3 pounds medium Yukon Gold potatoes, halved but not peeled
- Salt
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1/4 cup sweet pickle relish
- 1 tablespoon white vinegar
- 1 teaspoon dry mustard powder
- 1/2 teaspoon sweet smoked paprika (I actually used smoked hot paprika because that’s what I had on hand)
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 6 red radishes, 1/3-inch dice
- 3 celery ribs, cut into 1/3-inch dice
- 1/2 medium red onion, cut into1/3-inch dice
Directions:
- In a large pot, cover the potatoes with water, add a large pinch of salt and bring to a boil. Cook over moderately high heat until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain the potatoes and return them to the pot. Shake the pot over moderately high heat for about 10 seconds to dry the potatoes. Transfer the potatoes to a large rimmed baking sheet and let cool completely. Peel the potatoes and cut into 1-inch pieces.
- In a large bowl, blend the mayonnaise with the relish, vinegar, mustard powder, paprika, black pepper, cayenne, radishes, celery and onion. Gently fold in the potatoes and season with salt (I did not add any more salt at this point, I would wait until you serve it to decide if more salt is needed). Refrigerate the potato salad for at least 4 hours or overnight. Serve cold or lightly chilled.
Hooray for the CSA!
This sweet and spicy combination is also a combination of two CSAs. (For my original post about the CSA, click here).For the past few years, I’ve been a member of Dumbo/Vinegar Hill’s CSA. I loved so many things about it: Sang Lee’s incredible organic vegetables, the serene location in Phoenix House’s courtyard, and the neighborhood friends I made while volunteering at weekly pick-ups. I also loved the convenience factor; the pick-up location was just a short and cobblestony walk along the river from my apartment.
Within the last year, I moved a few neighborhoods away, so I knew I would have to switch. I did a little research to find CSAs near my new place (ok fine, so I just read a sign posted outside Stinky). I was intrigued by Local Roots’ slightly different model for CSAs: For example, instead of joining for June-November, the season is broken up into Summer and Fall. There are other differences as well. I also liked the idea of picking up at 61 Local, the locavore-friendly (where I once spotted a dog sipping her weekly Guinness, and was assured that she prefers stouts and only has one per week) bar/restaurant just off Smith Street. Their vegetables come from Rogowski Farm, located in Orange County, NY. We also signed up for a meat share, which will come from Arcadian Pastures. Some friends in the neighborhood also got their fruit share, and I hope to get a sampling of that as well 🙂
And so, although I felt a little bit like I was cheating on Sang Lee, I went ahead to pick up my first share of the season. The vegetables have been delicious so far. The spicy greens are, in fact, very spicy. This strawberry dressing is an interesting contrast. The dressing recipe is from Sang Lee’s recipe blog, so I think of this salad/dressing as a CSA merger.
I used the spicy greens mix from the CSA share, and topped it with some goat cheese. I actually halved this dressing recipe and it was plenty for the week. Since I went a little overboard on strawberries from the farmer’s market a few weeks back, I had fun with canning and freezing a few quarts.
By the way…Do you know that to freeze strawberries you just chop off the tops, lay them on a baking sheet in a single layer with none touching overnight? Then, put in a freezer bag and they will stay good for up to 6 months)
I just let a cup of the frozen guys thaw for an hour or so before starting the recipe.
Strawberry Dressing
Ingredients:
- 1 pint strawberries, washed, hulled, and cut into quarters
- 1 tablespoon sugar or honey (I used honey)
- 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 3 tablespoons or more good vinegar — wine, sherry, rice, balsamic–preferred for this recipe (I used balsamic)
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon water
- 6 pieces of mint, finely diced
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Directions:
- Dice your strawberries and add the sugar and lemon juice to a small bowl. Muddle them together until somewhat liquid. In a blender, add all other ingredients(imersion blender/food processor work too).
- Then add the strawberry mixture and blend for a few minutes to immulsify everything and make the strawberries smooth.
Are you familiar with Whole Foods’ Step System for animal welfare ratings? If you haven’t already heard me or someone else going on and on about it, here’s the link. What’s tricky is that they don’t have all of their cuts available in all levels at all times, so one has to be flexible. I’m still too new at buying meat to know about good substitutions, but I’m slowly learning. I went to get flank steak, as this Cooking Light recipe called for, but they did not have any steps 4-5 of that kind. The butcher suggested skirt steak, which they had in a Level 4. Great! Thanks, helpful butcher! I ended up bringing home entirely too much steak because I got flustered ordering it, and froze half for fajitas another night.
Also, this recipe calls for fish sauce. So do most Thai recipes that I find. Since I don’t eat fish, I just omitted it. However, when I took a Thai cooking class, I was told you can substitute “this mushroom sauce” for the fish sauce. However, I was in Thailand at the time and could not read the label on “this mushroom sauce.” Oh well. I should look for it in an Asian market one of these days. In the meantime, I usually just taste my food and add more soy sauce if I think it needs more salty flavor.
This gave me a chance to use some of my fresh herbs: mint, basil, and cilantro.
Ingredients
- Cooking spray
- 1 pound skirt steak
- 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
- 1 tablespoon brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons soy sauce
- 2 teaspoons minced fresh garlic
- 1 teaspoon Sriracha (hot chile sauce, such as Huy Fong)
- 1 1/2 cups thinly sliced red cabbage
- 3/4 cup julienne-cut carrots
- 1/3 cup fresh mint leaves
- 1/3 cup fresh cilantro leaves
- 1/3 cup fresh basil leaves
Directions:
- Heat a large grill pan over medium-high heat. Coat pan with cooking spray. Sprinkle steak evenly with pepper and salt. Add steak to pan; cook 6 minutes each side or until desired degree of doneness. Remove steak from pan; let stand 5 minutes. Cut steak diagonally across grain into thin slices.
- Combine juice and next 4 ingredients (through Sriracha) in a small bowl; stir with a whisk.
- Combine cabbage and remaining ingredients in a medium bowl. Add 6 tablespoons juice mixture to cabbage mixture; toss well. Toss steak in remaining 2 tablespoons juice mixture. Add steak to cabbage mixture; toss to combine.
You can lighten this salad by omitting the goat cheese. However, this particular version was made with Bucherondin, a goat cheese log from Stinky Brooklyn. It is also tasty if you substitute sunflower seeds for the almonds.
Ingredients:
- 3 cups baby spinach
- 6-8 strawberries, sliced
- 1/4 cup crumbled goat cheese
- 4 basil leaves, julienned
- 2 tablespoons sliced almonds
- 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
- 1 teaspoon light brown sugar
- 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- salt and pepper to taste
Directions:
- To reduce the vinegar, pour it into a small saucepan along with the brown sugar. Bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Stir frequently, and be careful not to burn the vinegar. When it reduces by about half, remove from heat. When cooled to room temperature, whisk in olive oil. I added a little bit of salt and pepper, put it in a sealed container and gave it a few shakes.
- To assemble the salad, layer spinach, strawberries, goat cheese, almonds, and basil.
- Drizzle the salad with dressing just before serving. You will have extra dressing, which you can refrigerate and use at another time.
UPDATE: Last night, I made this with blanched asparagus but into pieces instead of snap peas, and it was even better!
I was excited to use fresh herbs from my new garden to add the flavor for this dressing.
Ingredients:
- 2 teaspoons minced shallot
- 2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
- 2 teaspoons lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons greek yogurt
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- salt and pepper, to taste
- 2 tablespoons minced fresh chives
- 2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
- 4 radishes, thinly sliced
- 20-25 sugar snap peas, cut in half
Directions:
- Combine all ingredients through dill for the dressing. Toss with the radishes and snap peas.
Last week, Fishkill Farms was offering pasture-raised lamb at the Carroll Gardens Farmers Market. As relatively novice meat eaters, we were unsure what to order. We went with the lamb sausage. We picked it up this morning, and made this salad this evening. I got the recipe from the Whole Foods app, and it’s spicy and delicious!
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, divided
- 1 1/3 cups pearl couscous (also known as Israeli or Middle Eastern couscous)
- 1 3/4 cups water
- Zest and juice from 1 large lemon
- 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
- Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 4 lamb merguez or other lamb sausage links
- 2 yellow bell peppers, seeded and quartered
- 2 red bell peppers, seeded and quartered
- 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Directions:
1. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add couscous and cook, stirring frequently, until toasted, about 5 minutes. Stir in water and salt and bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer until water is absorbed and couscous is just tender, 10 to 12 minutes.
2. While couscous cooks, whisk together lemon zest, juice, remaining 1/2 cup olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper to taste. Remove 2 tablespoons dressing and set aside for basting.
3. Preheat a grill to medium-high heat. Grill sausages and peppers, basting with the reserved 2 tablespoons dressing and turning frequently. When sausage is cooked through and peppers are tender, 10 to 15 minutes, remove from grill. Slice sausage into 1/2-inch-thick rounds and peppers into bite-size pieces. Put in a bowl with couscous. Toss with olive oil-lemon dressing and parsley. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve warm or at room temperature.
I recently got back from a wonderful weekend of cooking at Peter Berley’s kitchen on the North Fork of Long Island. The theme of the weekend was cooking with local foods in the winter. This salad stood out to me because of its unusual combination of flavors that seemed to go perfectly together. I had a healthy serving of it with some homemade foccacia for lunch on Sunday at the workshop. I enjoyed it so much that I made it on my own again Sunday night for dinner with friends. Every last piece of parsley was eaten up. Prior to trying this salad, I was not a fan of the fennel. However, shaving fennel with a mandoline helps to keep the flavor mild and delicious. This salad is a light and fresh complement to any meal.
Thanks to Peter Berley for this recipe and many others throughout the weekend. Your creativity in the kitchen is very inspiring!
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup shaved or very thinly sliced red onion
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 very large or 2 medium fennel bulbs, shaved or very thinly sliced
- 1 cup loosely packed cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
- 1/4 cup coarsely chopped celery leaves
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- freshly ground black pepper
- 24 pitted green, brine-cured olives, such as Picholine, sliced
- shaved parmesan to sprinkle on top (optional)
Directions:
- Toss the onion with 1/4 cup lemon juice and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Cover and refrigerate for about 30 minutes.
- In a large bowl, toss the fennel, parsley, olives, and celery leaves with the olive oil and the onion and its liquid. Season with 1/4 teaspoon salt and pepper to taste.Taste and adjust seasoning, adding more olive oil or lemon if needed.
- Sprinkle with parmesan (optional) and serve.
This is a salad adapted from a delicious Mexican Pie Dip traditionally served at my family’s Thanksgiving and famous for spoiling my appetite for dinner several years in a row.
Individual servings of the salad can be made in one bowl (as shown in the picture), or you can make a giant salad in a large pie pan.
NOTE: If you want to make the dip, it is is made without the lettuce. Instead of crumbling the chips on top, just serve chips alongside the dip. It also is made with double the sour cream/mayo/taco seasoning mix and less tomatoes. Really, you can adapt quantity of the different ingredients to your choosing.
Ingredients:
- one container of black bean dip of your choice
- homemade gruacamole (3 avocados mashed up, 1 tablespoon finely diced red onion, 1/2 teaspoon cumin, juice of half a lime, salt and pepper)
- 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
- 2 tablespoons sour cream
- 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
- 1/4 packet taco seasoning mix
- 3 cups bibb lettuce (or your favorite lettuce)
- 1 tomato, chopped
- 1 scallion, chopped
- 1/2 small container sliced black olives
- 10-15 tortilla chips, crumbled
Directions:
- Make guacamole by combining ingredients listed above (or buy store-bought guac)
- Mix taco seasoning mix with the sour cream and mayo.
- Layer ingredients in a large pan in the following order: bean dip, guacamole, cheddar cheese, taco seasoning mixture, lettuce, tomato, scallion, olives, chips.
- Dig in.
“Fresh from Spain” might be a more appropriate title for this post, which highlights my favorite winter fruit…the clementine. I know that eating clementines in such large quantities does not win me locavore points with Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. However, I find that a clementine a day (at minimum) shields me from the germ factory* in which I work.
We used Murray’s chicken breasts for this recipe, which I sliced in half so they would cook more easily. Murray’s chicken comes from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. What I like about this chicken is that each package comes with a Farm Verification number. You can type this in, and find out exactly which farm. My number 2631 gave me 2 potential farms. Feel free to check it out at Murray’s Chicken website.
This healthy recipe comes from Lifetime Moms, and I only adapted the quantities. This amount made 4 salads, and was perfect for lunch the next day (just make sure not to dress it until right before you eat it)
*elementary school
Ingredients:
- 3-4 cups mesclun mix (We used Satur Farms)
- 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
- 4 fresh clementines,peeled and sectioned
- 1/2 cup plus 4 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange or clementine juice, divided
- 4 tablespoons slivered almonds
- 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons soy sauce
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 2 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons fresh ginger, minced, divided
- 2 teaspoons honey
- 2 tablespoon rice wine vinegar (can substitute white wine vinegar)
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Directions:
- Mix together 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/2 cup orange juice or clementine juice, garlic cloves and ginger and pour over chicken breasts in a shallow dish. Refrigerate and let marinate at least 30 minutes. Heat griddle over medium heat and grill chicken for 6 minutes each side until juices run clear.
- While the chicken is grilling, mix together remaining soy sauce, orange juice, honey, ginger and rice wine vinegar for the dressing. Slowly add the olive oil while whisking until oil is incorporated.
- Slice the chicken into thin strips. Layer greens, clementine sections, almonds and chicken, topping with desired amount of dressing.
fresh from brooklyn 