mushroom and pistachio stew with mint and fried onions

Marx Foods' latest cook-off challenge is Shrooms For Soup, for which they sent me one-ounce samples of dried mushrooms: matsutake, porcini, and black trumpet. I used matsutake and porcini because they're two of my favorite mushrooms - and I think the matsutake work especially well here - but this recipe would work with any dried mushrooms you enjoy.

Obviously I have fall flavors on the brain, and mushrooms work perfectly there, so my first thoughts were of parsnips, carrots, celery and celery root, and grains. I wound up avoiding all of that except the grains. This is a stew more than a soup, and is loosely based on Persian soups/stews called khoreshes. I say loosely because although I've read several Persian cookbooks, I've only had Persian dishes I either made myself or had at some pan-Middle-Eastern restaurant - I don't really trust my judgment as to what does or doesn't taste authentically Persian. The mint, for one thing, is dialed way down from what you'd find in a Persian recipe, but my American palate isn't used to large quantities of mint in savory dishes, and I didn't want to drown everything else out.

The pistachio butter is nothing but ground pistachios, from Fastachi, which I recommend highly. If you have access to some other brand of unsweetened pistachio butter or paste, it'll do fine. Blending up some roasted salted pistachios would probably work too. I know it's inconvenient calling for an obscure ingredient in a small quantity, but it's a very different dish without it. (Pistachio is a frequent ingredient in Persian food, but not in this form, so far as I know. This is my touch.)

A khoresh often has a little bit of a acidity from something like lemon juice or pomegranate. I used tomato because we've been lucky enough to avoid a frost and still have fresh ripe tomatoes available.

1/4 cup diced onion plus additional thin onion slices for frying
butter for sauteing
1 oz dried porcini mushrooms
1 oz dried matsutake mushrooms
2-3 cups water blended with 1 tablespoon pistachio butter or paste
dash cumin, dash salt
1 cup chopped parsley leaves
1/4 cup chopped mint leaves
1 medium very ripe tomato, chopped

Pour boiling water over the dried mushrooms and let sit for just a minute or two while stirring - this knocks any dirt off, and makes it easier to cut them up. Discard washing water and chop partially reconstituted mushrooms.

Cook diced onion in a little butter until translucent; reserve thin slices of onion for later. Add partially reconstituted mushrooms, water, pistachio butter, cumin, and salt to cooked onion and simmer on a low heat for about an hour. It will depend on your mushrooms - you want them fully reconstituted. Add a little more water if needed to maintain a stew-like consistency.

Cook your chosen grain separately.  I served it over a scoop of cooked wild rice, much as gumbo is served over white rice. Any other grain would do, really. Wild rice and other whole grains are especially good with mushrooms - this would be a good time for farro, wheatberries, rye berries, et cetera.

When almost ready to serve, add parsley, mint, and tomato, and continue simmering while frying onion slices in butter in a separate pan. You want the onion slightly browned - butter is important here because it develops a nutty taste as it browns, from the milk solids. (We also grilled some fresh bread in the butter left in the pan after frying the onions.)

Serve over grains, with fried onions added at the last minute.

duck and parsnips with vanilla and fennel

Can you believe it's autumn already? Seriously. I've still got tomatoes to pick at my mother's, but more than twice as many leaves are orange or red this week than last, the mornings are cool, the grape harvest has ended except for the Concords, and the good apples are here - I've got Crimson Crisp, Zabergaw Reinette, Golden Russett, Empire, and Spencer apples sitting right here with me, along with Wickson crabapples. That's some serious apple business, you know?

So for Marx Foods' "Sweet to Savory" challenge, I wanted to do something autumnal. Marx sent me, and the other participants, vanilla beans, fennel flower crystals, coconut sugar, and granulated honey, with the proviso that we have to use at least 2 of the 4 ingredients in a savory recipe.

One of the things that made this tricky at first glance is that three of the four ingredients aren't just flavors we associate with sweets, they're ingredients with sugar in them. I wanted to avoid a sweet and sour recipe. Nothing against them, and the ingredients might lend themselves that way - it's just not what I wanted to do here.

So instead, I thought about the vanilla, and which of the other ingredients I could include with it. I could use honey, but its flavor would get drowned out by a lot of savory ingredients - though I was thinking about some kind of roasted eggplant for a while. I could use coconut sugar, especially if I went towards some kind of curry.

I decided on the fennel flower crystals, partly because I love fennel, and partly because the textural contrast came in handy in this dish. These crystals are the ingredient you're least likely to be familiar with. They're just very small fennel blossoms that have been candied, so you get the fennel flavor along with the crunch of sugar - and not so much sugar that it'll overwhelm a dish and make it too sweet. They're very cool.

With vanilla and fennel, I had to think about what other ingredients would work to sort of connect them, and wound up with a duck dish that also uses parsnip (for earthiness, as well as creamy textural contrast so that you have three main textures in every bite - the creamy parsnip puree, the duck meat, and the crunch of the garnish), tarragon (which has an anise note like fennel), and Calvados. You could substitute brandy, apple jack, or even white wine for the Calvados, but apple cider would be too sweet.



Duck and parsnip with vanilla, fennel, and Calvados

For two:
Two duck breasts
Duck skin
Fennel flower crystals
Fennel pollen
Parsnips
A little butter
1/2 cup duck stock
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/8 cup Calvados (French apple brandy; substitute good applejack like Laird's bonded, or brandy or white wine)
Vanilla bean
Pinch of tarragon
Salt


This recipe uses duck breast, duck cracklings made from duck skin, and duck stock. To start from scratch with a whole duck, butcher the duck into pieces: two boneless breasts (skin on), wings and leg quarters, carcass, and trim the large pieces of skin from the carcass. Reserve the leg quarters and wings for some other recipe (I made duck confit, for instance).

Duck stock:

Roast duck carcass until well browned (any temperature and time that gets you there will work, so feel free to piggyback on some other usage of the oven in order to conserve energy). Cover it with water in a stockpot and simmer overnight. Add vegetable trimmings - such as fennel fronds and onion skin - for the last hour of cooking. Strain through a mesh strainer and reduce if necessary.

Duck cracklings:

Cut duck skin into pieces, cover in lightly salted water, and simmer slowly until the water has evaporated and the cracklings are frying in their own fat. At this point you may want to transfer them to the oven where they can cook evenly - 400 for half an hour usually does it.

You can precook the cracklings whenever you want up to this point, and heat them long enough to make them hot and crispy when ready to serve.

Just before plating, chop cracklings up into smaller pieces and toss with salt, fennel pollen, and fennel flower crystals.

Parsnip puree:

Peel and chop two to three parsnips, depending on size (mine were small). Simmer in salted water until very soft. Puree with a pat of butter until very smooth and creamy. Check for seasoning and add salt if necessary.

Duck breast and sauce:

Let duck breasts come up to room temperature before cooking if possible. Cook on a cast-iron or copper-bottomed surface if possible, for even heat.

Salt both sides of each duck breast, lightly score the skin, pat dry, and cook skin-side down for about six minutes, flip, and cook for another three minutes. Most of the fat should render out. These directions assume a domestic duck - wild duck is usually leaner and has smaller breasts.

Slit a vanilla bean in half and scrape the vanilla seeds out. Chop a few leaves of tarragon - just a pinch.

Let the breasts rest for at least five minutes. Meanwhile, pour the fat out of the pan and immediately add about 1/2 cup duck stock, 1/4 cup heavy cream, 1/8 cup Calvados, a pinch of salt, the vanilla seeds, and the tarragon.

Simmer the sauce until it thickens and taste for seasoning.

Slice each duck breast, plate alongside the parsnip puree, drizzle with sauce, and garnish with fennel cracklings.

This was very good, autumnal, and rich without being overwhelming or sweet, and without being too heavy - we had it for lunch after the gym. Vanilla, parsnip, and fennel all bring flavors which are subtle in a way that worked especially well together.

blowin through the jasmine in my mind

Well, I've been busy, still am busy. I had a large project to finish which started late, I had a month of illness, and Caitlin moved in, which is the good kind of busy, but still means I haven't been blogging much. Right now I am halfway through combining our kitchens, and I realize I better update or the whole summer will have gone by!

I've neglected for instance the opportunity offered by the season to talk about melons - the glut of supermarket melons from California and overseas has ended, and with it the period of time when I seem to have a little bit of Crenshaw melon or cantaloupe every day. But if your growing season is at all comparable to New England's - and I hope it isn't, but if - then your local melons are coming ripe about now and through the next month, and you should get on that. Picking out a melon can be tricky, especially if it's grown by someone who grows a lot of different things - because in my experience they may not know when to pick them themselves. If there's that one woman at your farmer's market who only ever has melons, maybe currants for a couple weeks in July and some herbs or something? She's the one to buy your melons from. She will know what she's doing. A farm stand that sells eighty kinds of produce, it's more of a gamble.

But when it's good, freshly grown melon that didn't spend a week on a truck or in a warehouse is awesome. It's much more flavorful, it's much more complex, and I'm told that's even more true if the melon is never refrigerated - just goes from dirt to pickup truck to farm stand to your car to your table. I'm not convinced it's true of every variety, but it's what I've been told by badass melon farmers.

Personally, I think cantaloupe and its many muskmelon cousins are the best bet, the most summery, the most interesting, the deepest in flavor, the best for juicing should you want to juice them - but that's me. Smell the stem end of the melon, see if it's fragrant, see if you like it, spend your four dollars.

I don't have any photos of melon. What have I got photos of.

Tomatoes!


These are Indigo Rose tomatoes, which I've only ever seen this year and only at Kimballs in Pepperell. It's the height of tomato season right now, and thank God for it. We've been having tomato sandwiches, ratatouille, tomatoes and okra, scalloped tomatoes, BLTs, you name it. These Indigo Rose fellas, you can see the outside in the top left corner there - dark and eggplanty. The inside varies from green (though still ripe-tasting) to pinkish.


The key to ratatouille for me is long, slow cooking, so that the wateriness of the ingredients is all cooked out. This is not a very good photo, but next to the lobster roll is a wedge of the ratatouille I'm talking about: thin slices of squash, eggplant, and tomato, seasoned with salt (or Old Bay or Tony Chachere's or what have you), often with some celery leaves or garlic thrown in, covered and cooked at 300 for a couple hours until very tender, then uncovered and cooked for several more hours until everything cooks down and the liquid reduces.

It's better the next day, when the remaining liquid is reabsorbed into the spongy tissues of the vegetables.

When tomato season was gearing up, we had a lot of burgers with tomato on them, sandwiches with tomato on them, etc. This nice little fella is one of the dark tomatoes - dark tomatoes like Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Carbon have been my favorite farmstand tomatoes this year - which is blushiest in the center.



I also need to give a shoutout to Glazed in Amherst, Mass. We took a day trip out there - I was a Hampshire student 20 years ago and wanted to show Caitlin around - and man, almost everything was closed on Mondays or closed for lunch. But most of the stuff I'd grown up with in the area was gone anyway - Pioneer Valley Coffee is long gone, the Jamaican meat patty place by the Black Sheep is gone, the little diner where I got burgers or breakfast near Henion Bakery is gone, the calzone places are mostly gone, it even looked like Pinocchio's is gone. And obviously the record stores are all gone, because this is 2013 and that was 1993.

But there was this doughnut joint, Glazed. Caitlin yanked me back when she saw there was a menu in the window, and after seeing peanut butter doughnuts on said menu, we had to go in. So good!



The peanut butter chocolate doughnut is in fact not in this photo because I ate it, but beyond the lacuna you can see the caramel-toffee doughnut. In the back, we each got a coffee cream doughnut - like a lot of New-Style doughnut joints, they slice their doughnuts in half in order to fill them. The coffee cream was good but I've been spoiled by coffee-flavored things lately - my own coffee ice cream and the Ritter espresso bar chief among them - and so the somewhat weak coffee flavor was a disappointment in comparison. However, in the other row there, you've got Caitlin's chai-glazed coconut doughnut and the French toast doughnut, which I thought was actually the best of the bunch. I don't even know how to explain what "it tastes like French toast" means, but you'd know it when you taste it.

We're going back to Amherst in October, and I'll have to try the apple fritter.

More coming soon! I finished making the homemade ramp jack cheese, so there's that to talk about.

Umeboshi are salted dried ume fruit, which you may be familiar with from sushi joints - I first had them in the form of umeboshi puree in the center of a ball of rice, which is a pretty common offering. They're very tart and very salty.

Ume are a member of the Prunus family, like plums, apricots, peaches, cherries, and almonds. They're often translated as plums or apricots, which is misleading. An ume is no more a plum than a peach is a plum. It's just that there's no word in English for ume because, hey, they aren't from English-speaking lands.

I had a bunch of leftover actual plums, though, your standard supermarket black plums, which weren't going to last the weekend, so I pitted and juiced them, added a couple pitted umeboshi, the syrup leftover from macerating strawberries and apricots (more prunus!) together, sugar, and a bit of Campari.

Boom, Campari-umeboshi sorbet. Ignore the Jeni's logo - I reuse ice cream containers!



But why Campari-umeboshi sorbet? Why those two things?

Two reasons. First, a little alcohol helps prevent iciness in your sorbet or ice cream - and sorbet is especially prone to iciness.

Second, umeboshi is salty and Campari is bitter. These two things don't exactly cancel each other out, but they rub the raw edges off. Coffee with a pinch of salty is still bitter, but the bitter becomes more palatable. Bitterness isn't something I have a problem with, but still, it made for a nice complementary pair.

As for the recent past. Once again my mother took me to Wegmans for my birthday (followed by a lunch of fried clams and a frappe). Pretty pretty great - I got a handful of things previously unfamiliar to me, some excellent fish and produce, and was able to make soft-shell crab for my birthday for the second year in a row.

My birthday weekend, we had Eton mess (strawberries, meringues, matcha meringues, chunks of dragonfruit, whipped cream) in dragonfruit shells. So good!



I used fresh wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon from Wegmans to make homemade gravlax, which is pretty easy: mix two parts salt to one part sugar, add seasonings (in this case: spruce tips, fennel, dill), cover salmon on both sides, wrap in Saran wrap, and refrigerate (in a container) for a day or two. You may need to drain the fish after a few hours.

We had the gravlax on these awesome bagels - "black Russian" bagels, pumpernickel with caraway and sesame seeds. Perfect. Accompanying: pierogi, knish, and cheeses, all from Wegmans.

The cheeses, from left to right, are Moses Sleeper, a very good camembert-like cheese; La Tur, a strong and deliciously flavored mixed-milk cheese with a sort of fluffy texture; and five-year Gouda.

The Last Word is one of my two or three favorite cocktails and the one that best goes with strawberries, thanks to the Chartreuse - and most years, as this year, my birthday intersects with strawberry season:



Caitlin has previously gotten me burgers from Pat La Frieda for my birthday or other holidays, but this year got me burgers AND Pat La Frieda hot dogs - a natural casing all-beef hot dog. It's also a coarsely-ground hot dog, which you hardly ever seen anymore, at least around here, and I'm just old enough to remember when they were more common. The result is a great-tasting hot dog with serious texture. We had more on the Fourth of July, but this is a shot of Caitlin's plate from my birthday weekend, with toasted breadcheese on the side:



Surprisingly, I was also able to get more fresh fava beans, and the night before leaving for the lake for the Fourth, we had fava beans quickly boiled (like five minutes) and served with ground lamb cooked with onions, garlic, cumin, chile, and soy sauce.

strawberry season 2013

I don't think I have the patience to make Campari-stuffed strawberries this year, but it's finally local strawberry season and I had to have Eton mess:



Matcha meringues (egg whites, superfine sugar, cream of tartar, and matcha powder whipped until stiff, baked at 200 for 2 hours, left in the closed oven overnight) broken into pieces;
whipped local cream;
halved strawberries macerated with a little sugar and Chartreuse;
a few extra drops of Chartreuse on top.

I say it every year, but if you haven't had strawberries and Chartreuse together in some way, you're missing out.

fish market sushi bar

No photos in this entry, but I've been meaning to mention Fish Market Sushi Bar in Boston. This place served us not only the best sushi I've had (in the broad sense of "food from a sushi restaurant"), but sushi of a quality I associate with prices two, three, four times as high.

First of all, the sushi itself was terrific and comes in a nice variety. Sometimes, the more unusual pieces of sushi, either I find places are constantly sold out of them, or because they aren't ordered very often, you may get something that's been sitting around a while. But I had confidence in Fish Market's sell-through, so I went with giant clam, salt water eel (anago - the more common eel is unagi, fresh water eel), and foie gras with truffle. There's nothing especially unusual about the foie except for the novelty of having it on the sushi rice - but you know what, there is something terrific about being able to get foie for five bucks. That's all you need, really, or all I need - an occasional bite of foie gras. I don't need a twenty-four dollar app, and I appreciate having a bite small enough that you don't need the acidity of some sweet accompaniment in order to balance the richness.

The giant clam and the salt water eel were very fresh and very very good - the salt water eel was one of the single best pieces of sushi I've had anywhere.

I can't remember which roll Caitlin got, but I got the softshell crab, which was wrapped in a thin sheet of daikon radish - very nice and a nice contrast to the nicely crispy deep-fried crab. A lot of times I avoid rolls with flying fish roe, because it's my least favorite roe, but there wasn't too much here so it wasn't overwhelming.

The stars, oh man - two cold appetizers, listed under the "new cold appetizer" section of the online menu. This is where a lot of the more inventive stuff falls, stuff that makes sense for a sushi bar to sell but doesn't fall into the rather strict categories of sushi/sashimi/maki.

I got scallop and sea urchin, because how could I not? When it's fresh, sea urchin is one of my four or five favorite flavors. At Fish Market it was fresh. The portion is small - a blob of uni on a slice of scallop, two such slices per order, with a little basil-yuzu dressing - but like with the foie, what I like here is just getting a hit of that strong, rich flavor. Goddamn it was good. It's also a good way to try sea urchin for the first time, rather than having a bite full of it in the form of sushi.

Caitlin got the truffling tuna - slices of raw tuna "swimming in truffle butter," and they really aren't exaggerating about that. You could mop it up with bread if you had any. Again, terrific stuff - truffle goes better with tuna than with most meats.

Now I'm thinking about that scallop and sea urchin. Geez.

sloppy joes

A quick update just because I've been so remiss.

Two things made me think of sloppy joes yesterday: Eataku's post about a sloppy joe mac and cheese sandwich, and buying a Crenshaw melon.

It's earlier than I'm used to seeing Crenshaw melons, but the one I got, though a little underripe, is delicious, especially for four bucks. And it made me realize, I don't give Indiana enough credit when I talk about the arc of my learning to cook.

I started cooking as a little kid, throwing random ingredients into boxed cake mixes, and cooked actual meals as a teenager, before spending some of my college years taking care of and cooking for three young children, and then moving to New Orleans where I learned to really cook - because everyone pretty much does, and people generally know more about food, and I lived in places conducive to figuring out what I was doing. (I was adjacent to Little Vietnam for a couple years, which meant access to a lot of new ingredients and foods, and then lived in an odd corner of Gentilly, in a predominantly black formerly German neighborhood with Hispanic markets.)

But before moving back to New England I lived in Indiana.

And it's in Indiana that I first had ramps, for instance, and sour cherries, and Mitchum peppermint, and duck eggs, and fresh currants and elderberries, and fresh fava beans, all at the Bloomington Farmers Market. In Indiana I first cooked pork belly, goat, venison, tongue, and cuts of buffalo other than ground or steaks. This is even aside from the pig head I bought at Jungle Jim's in Cincinnati, or the rattlesnake I didn't buy because it was $25 a pound (I've seen it for three times as much since then). I had Middle Eastern markets where I could buy labneh and pomegranate molasses, a Filipino market where I bought balut and calamansi and pig's blood, a butcher that sold me three quarters of a goat because they knew I'd be into that, a Chinese restaurant where I ordered fried intestine, a Korean joint where I had raw crab still in the shell.

Indiana grew the best apples I'd had before moving back to New England (where either orchards have made more interesting apples available or I've become a better apple customer), unbelievably great cherries, pawpaws and American persimmons. And Indiana grew melons.

Man, the melons at the farmer's market were so good. The appeal at first was the watermelons, big bright watermelons with seeds, which might be a pain in the ass but mean much better flavor than the seedless melons. But I tried everything. Santa Claus melons, Crenshaw melons, all the various muskmelon varieties. Crenshaw is one of the best - like a cantaloupe with more character.

Anyway, that's Indiana. And one of the things I made a lot in Indiana was sloppy joes, partly because of that goat - I had a lot of ground goat to use up - and partly because I was into Cuban food, which may be the origin of sloppy joes (I'm skeptical of most food origin stories, so I have no idea if that's really where sloppy joes come from or not).

These sloppy joes capitalized on my having just bought some Tony Chachere's seasoning, and are stuffed into red bell pepper halves.

Sloppy joes:
1 pound ground beef, browned, most of the fat drained
a couple spoonfuls diced onion
5 diced ramp bulbs
1 14 oz can tomatoes, pureed
a few dashes Worcestershire sauce
Tony Chachere's to taste

Cook onion and ramps in a spoonful or two of fat from the ground beef. Combine remaining ingredients and cook until thickened; refrigerate overnight.

Pimento cheese:
combine pimiento peppers, Duke's mayonnaise, sharp cheddar, a dash of mustard, a pat of butter, and a dash of hot sauce in Cuisinart.

Schmaltz:
Cook a little diced onion, diced ramp, and diced radish in chicken fat leftover from Sunday's roast chicken. Add Tony Chachere's until noticeably salty. Chill.

Fill pepper halves with sloppy joes, top with pimento cheese, and bake at 350 for an hour. Serve with schmaltz on bread.