Hands-Free Cooking

Garlic scape pesto - vampires beware!

June 25, 2009 in farmer's market, seasonal | No comments

A lot of my CSA-member friends have been wondering (aloud, in my vicinity) recently: what are these green, twisty things in my CSA share? And then: can I eat them? How?

Pesto, made with garlic scapes and spinach

They are garlic scapes, and they taste, well, like garlic. People also call them garlic curls or pigtails. They’re the green part of garlic that pushes up from the ground while the bulb is still growing. You can pretty much only find them in late spring or early summer, and pretty much only at farmer’s markets or CSAs. In the early part of the season, you can cut them, chop them up, and saute them like garlic. Or, you can make pesto.

I made up this recipe last weekend, and then made it again last night because it was so good. (It came out better the first time, honestly - I think the second batch of scapes was a little tough and didn’t puree nicely.) This is also a perfect sort of hands-free cooking recipe, because the ingredients really do just go together in whatever portions you prefer. It’s all about adding things, tasting, and adding more things until you get it right.

I will warn you, though: people say scapes are milder than actual garlic, but this was still really strong. Really strong. It rivaled the dinner I had at The Stinking Rose, a San Francisco restaurant that specializes in garlic. If you love garlic, you’re in for a treat - and even then, use with care.

Garlic scape pesto is great over pasta

I served this dish two different ways: once straight over spaghetti, and the second time with ricotta and whole wheat pasta spirals. Both were excellent, and both left garlic coming out of our pores. Another cool thing: because there’s little or no basil in it, this pesto doesn’t turn brown as soon as you make it!

Got another great use for garlic scapes? Please share! I might like to try something a little less intense, next time…

Garlic Scape Pesto

Combine the following in a food processor, starting with the lower-end amounts:

1 bunch (4-6) garlic scapes, cut into pieces to make them easier to puree
1/4 to 1/2 lb baby spinach (or even more)
some basil leaves (optional)
1/4 to 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
olive oil (add a little at the beginning, then more to get the desired consistency for the sauce)
salt to taste

Put your starting set of ingredients (or as much as will fit) in a food processor. Start on low, and work up to a high speed, stirring by hand as needed. If your food processor is like mine, you’ll need to mash the pesto down and away from the edges of the bowl every few minutes. Once you start to get a smooth consistency, with as few chunks as possible, start tasting and adding more spinach, cheese, and olive oil until you’re satisfied with the garlic-to-everything-else balance. Be patient, and keep processing until you’ve got a nice puree.

Serve fresh over your favorite pasta.

A beginner tries strawberry pie

June 16, 2009 in dessert | 2 comments

Last year, I saw the movie Waitress twice, and was utterly inspired to make pie. To become an expert at pie, like the main character - a pie master. Until now, I never really tried, for perfectly valid reasons:

Pie is intimidating.

It’s very intimidating to me, and I’m pretty bold about trying things I might ruin, at least as far as cooking goes. It should be in my blood, since my grandmother made the most perfect pies you can imagine - but it’s not, or at least it doesn’t come naturally.

I had to make pie this week, though, because I bought entirely too many strawberries at the farmer’s market. I did it on purpose, because I heard whispering that strawberry season was almost over, and I knew that I just had to do it. I had to make strawberry rhubarb pie. So I got more than I could comfortably use for anything less than a pie, invited some friends over specifically to help eat pie, and I was committed.

If you’re feeling terribly concerned, I’ll give away the ending: Buttercup lives. The pie is delicious. But it’s not without its share of mishaps, and even with some rescuing it’s still not a pie like Grandma would make.

For the first step, I made the dough the night before. This, I believe, is a recommended practice. I dutifully followed the notes in my Joy of Cooking, being careful to add just enough water that the dough could be squeezed into a ball. It made a rough, crumbly sort of ball, but it held together, so it fit how I read the recipe. Like so many things in cooking, no amount of description will tell you how it should really look and feel - the only way to know is to see and feel the real thing. I wasn’t sure if I had it quite right, but I was wary of making it too wet. Best not to end up with a too-wet crust!

So this evening, after I made the filling (the easy part!), I let the dough warm up and tried to roll it. It crumbled into big, dry pieces. I let it warm a little more and tried again. No improvement. By that time, my friends had arrived, and two of us together started working some water into the dough to get it smooth enough that we could roll it.

End result: it was too wet anyway, and over-handled to boot. Handling the dough melts the butter and helps develop gluten, just like kneading bread. So the crust ended up more on the chewy side than the crumbly side. Plus the venting holes I cut sealed themselves up, and none of the juice steamed out.

But… it was delicious. I haven’t had a strawberry pie in way too long, and we devoured it. It helped that they were really good strawberries, too! It was good enough, it turns out, that I’m inspired to try again. I’ve learned at least one lesson - the dough should be moister than I made it, before you chill it. But I also learned that, while it’s a bit complex and takes some time, pie isn’t really that hard. It’s hard to get it perfect, but not hard to make something really good. After all, if you get it wrong, at worst you’re back where you started. And if you get it right, you get pie. Sounds like a good deal to me!

The veggie burger challenge is back

May 24, 2009 in veggie burger challenge | No comments

You may remember that last summer, around this time, I issued myself (and anyone who would join me) a challenge to create the perfect veggie burger. We got off to a promising start… and then, unknown to you, the grill at my apartment building disappeared. Not a little personal grill, either; this was one of those big iron contraptions on a post like you find at campgrounds. Now, it is just a post in the ground. It was far from the ideal grill, but without it I got kind of disheartened.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had an idea, and this week the weather was so nice that I felt like burgers, even if I had no grill.

The idea was gluten: if you’ve ever made seitan from scratch, you know how gluten flour sticks to itself and stretches when you mix it with water. It’s hard to shape into burgers, and wouldn’t make a very satisfying one on its own, but I thought it could be just the binder that I was looking for in my black bean quinoa burgers.

And it worked, sort of; I followed the method from the originals, and at the end, slowly worked in gluten flour until the batter got a little solidity to it. It held together on a frying pan (the grill would be the next test), got a nice charred coating on the outside, and tasted good. But, it was still mushy. The next attempt might need a lot more gluten, using it as a major ingredient rather than just a binder. But these burgers, according to Nathan, “push the little button in my head that says burger.”

And they were great with blue cheese.

So this isn’t yet the ultimate veggie burger - but I think it’s the next incarnation beyond my previous attempts.

(Apologies for the lack of pictures - I actually took some, but my camera cable got packed away somewhere, so they are stuck in my camera. I will share next time!)

Michael Pollan on Colbert

May 14, 2009 in food politics | No comments

If this blog has been quiet recently, it’s because I’ve been too active - first vacation, then life getting in the way. I’ve got a post coming about all the great food I ate on vacation. But for now, enjoy a thoroughly entertaining interview with Michael Pollan on the Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Michael Pollan

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Maybe brussels sprouts aren’t so bad

April 26, 2009 in easy meals | No comments

Brussels sprouts with quinoa - better than I would have expected

I’ve never met a brussels sprout I liked. I have always found them to be bitter, without redeeming flavor, and too tough to chew. But, I think it’s healthy to try things from time to time even if I think I won’t like them, and ideally trying a really good example of that thing so I can be sure it’s the food and not the preparation that I object to. In this case, it paid off.

I saw brussels sprouts at the farmer’s market last weekend, and thought I’d give them a whirl, because they’d been on my mind. I’d heard from a couple different sources recently, just offhand, that these veggies get an undeservedly bad rep, and that in fact most of the ones we see in supermarkets matured too long to cook well. It was enough to pique my curiosity, and the sprouts I found looked small and young - tender young brussels sprouts are less tough and more tasty.

While I won’t call them my favorite vegetables, these brussels sprouts weren’t bad! Most importantly, they softened up nicely upon cooking, making them easy to eat. They also had a better flavor - a little bitter, but also crunchy and vegetal - than others I’ve had. I would even go so far as to call them pleasant!

My preparation was simple, concocted after reading a few books’ theories on the best ways to eat them. The one piece of advise I found everywhere: do not overcook. I’m not sure if I followed this to the letter - even when I’m careful, I’m prone to walk away for the 30 seconds it takes a veggie to go from crunchy to soggy. But, they came out fine nevertheless. It was an easy and free-form dish, and the hardest part was rinsing and slicing all those brussels sprouts. Here’s what I made:

These brussels sprouts were especially good alongside yogurt

Cook up some quinoa.
Rinse the brussels sprouts, remove any bad-looking outer leaves and tough stems. Cut in half and boil them for 6 minutes or so. Do not overcook! They’re done when they’re just tender when you poke them with a fork.
Drain them, and toss with the quinoa, along with olive oil, dill, and lemon juice.
Garnish with salt, pepper, and maybe some mint, and serve with yogurt.

Spring raises its head

April 19, 2009 in seasonal | No comments

After teasing us for several weeks, it looks like spring is here and it might stick around a while, this time. (We’ve had a few nice days in DC so far this year, but they’ve all been followed shortly by cold and rain.) It’s finally warm enough to comfortably go outside in a t-shirt, and yesterday was the obligatory day of going outside and remembering, for the first time in months, what that big bright thing in the sky is and why you might want to limit your exposure to it. I always seem to end the first really nice spring day with a sunburn - but it feels worth it after enjoying such a nice day outdoors.

It’s also the time when farmers’ markets re-open and welcome back the vegetable farmers. After a winter where the only local veggies are potatoes, suddenly green things reappear. Today, I found a big bag of baby green kale, which I think will be fabulous - baby greens are much sweeter and more tender than their grown-up versions, which can sometimes get bitter and need a lot of attention. In a week or two, there should be asparagus coming in, which will launch a period of eating as much tender local asparagus as possible during its short season.

Thus, our cooking changes: we move from the winter where well-cooked and elaborate preparations of hearty foods keep us comfortable, to the growing season, where ingredients - especially vegetables - are king. It requires a different philosophy of cooking. When you have good, fresh ingredients, it’s easy to make them the stars with minimal preparation. It also means you can plan menus around what’s fresh and good, not buy food based on menus you plan. It’s an altogether pleasant way of cooking.

For many people, growing season also means gardening season. Even with so much talk in the news about how the recession is inspiring more people to grow their own food, I’m a little amazed at the sheer number of people I know who are growing gardens. The market today was chock-full of seedlings for every type of vegetable. I got more than a little jealous of all the people around me who, I’m sure, have houses with nice big yards with rich soil where they’re already planting a bounty of food. My apartment, with not even a balcony, is no place for growing food, but I’ve been itching to do some gardening. With luck, I’ll move someplace more garden-friendly before it’s too late to grow anything this year. If not, I’ll be living vicariously through my friends.

Hearty dinner pancakes

April 5, 2009 in comfort food, easy meals | No comments

Savory pancakes, packed full of good things, make a great dinner

The other day, I was in the mood for something very hearty and healthy for dinner, but because it was a rainy day, I was also in the mood for comfort food. Really, I was in the mood for pancakes. I thought of my own savory pancakes of the past, and remembered some tips from Mark Bittman on some very tasty-looking spinach pancakes. Then I combined the ideas, went a few steps further, and got something a little more extreme.

As it turns out, you can cram just about anything into pancakes, and end up with a tasty dinner. If you know how to make pancakes from scratch, it’s easy to improvise and throw in additional fillings or seasonings - just make sure the batter still holds together. (If you’ve never made pancakes from scratch, grab a book and learn. It’s an invaluable skill and the results are far better than any boxed mix. It’s easy and takes hardly any time. Really!) These weren’t the very best pancakes I’ve ever had, but then they’re in their own league - they were undoubtedly the healthiest, and more than held their own in the taste department. I don’t know the exact proportions, because I was improvising, but what went into these pancakes was approximately:

1 1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach
1 carrot, grated
1/4 cup swiss cheese, grated
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1 cup whole wheat flour
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1 Tb olive oil
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
dash of pepper, dill, and nutmeg
1 tsp lemon juice

Then you just mix up the wet ingredients, mix up the dry ingredients, mix them all together, and cook them up. I pre-cooked the veggies, but I’m not sure it was necessary. This made 6 small (but dense) pancakes, which was slightly more than the two of us could manage. We ate them with plenty of yogurt. This is definitely going to be the direction I go next time I want pancakes for dinner - which, to be honest, is pretty often.

Do you like pancakes for dinner? What’s your favorite way to jazz them up?

Organic can still be bad for you

March 23, 2009 in easy meals, food in culture | No comments

There’s some confusion in the world about exactly what “organic” means - in fact, it means less than you think. Organic food - essentially food certified that it was made without pesticides - can still be junk food, and can still be unhealthy. Mark Bittman has a great article this week about how the “organic” buzz word tricks people into thinking organic food must be healthy.

It’s a no-brainer if you really think about it: how can organic cookies, made with real sugar and butter by a company that can afford an expensive government certification, be healthier than a tomato grown without pesticides by a small farmer who can’t afford a certification, or even a conventional (non-organic) tomato grown with pesticides? But the word “organic” has come to signify health in our minds, even as it’s being diluted by companies that practice the letter of the organic certification without the spirit, which would involve a more holistic view of creating healthy food.

I agree with Bittman on the best way to improve your health and the environment: cook more. Use fresh, unprocessed ingredients. Get more fruits and vegetables into your diet. If cooking seems too hard or time-consuming, check out the posts below for some quick and easy, relatively healthy meals.

Check it out: local food in Austin

March 21, 2009 in farmer's market, local | 2 comments

Sign for the Austin Farmers' Market

Hands-Free Cooking has been quiet over the past week, but my life has not! I’ve been off at South by Southwest (SXSW), hanging out with some very cool geeks and spending so much time talking and thinking about blogging (along with the rest of that social media stuff) that I haven’t had any time to blog! But, as I was surprised to discover, there are tons of sustainable foodies at SXSW and in Austin, and I got to meet a lot of them.

Austin seems to have a strong and growing local food contingent. I met someone from the recently formed Resolution Gardens, a local Austin organization which previously planted vegetable gardens in unused space in local families’ yards, and has since expanded into offering gardening classes and helping home gardeners sell their produce to local supermarkets. This is a great system - it helps families get more delicious, healthy food, makes productive use of land that would otherwise just grow grass, and supports the local food economy. They have plans to grow and become a really serious resource for home gardeners in Austin. I wish we had something like them in the DC area.

There’s also a lot of local food pride. I was out for a walk and accidentally discovered where a farmer’s market is held (though I wasn’t there at the right day or time - and I don’t even know what seasons it runs). I liked this sign: “just-picked Texas goodness.” It makes sense: local food should be a matter of local pride, and I don’t know any place with more local pride than Texas. Maybe that’s a message we should be using more, with a little friendly competition. If someone claimed that a tomato that travelled a thousand miles from California was better than a tomato grown in your home state, would you be inspired to prove them wrong?

It wasn’t all local to Austin, either. There are a lot of groups out there using technology to support the sustainable food movement. One of my favorite examples was Farms Reach, a beta site that’s connecting chefs with local farmers to order and pick up produce online, thus mitigating one of the big challenges of navigating the local food scene if you’re preparing food on a large scale. Serving local food in restaurants is becoming very “cool”, at least in my area, but the restaurants that do it tend to be high-end and pricey. Maybe a service like Farms Reach will bridge the gap and make it possible for more restaurants to feature local produce. They’re just working in California now, but planning to spread to other areas soon.

One challenge I heard discussed was the problem of compiling a full, public list of farmers’ markets and other local food resources. There are some pretty decent ones, but none are complete or make the data available to coders. It’s tricky: there are thousands of small farmers’ markets around the country, and they’re constantly changing. Still, it would be very cool if we could pull this data together and make it open for use on the web.

I also spent a lot of time learning and thinking about blogging - in general, as well as specific to this blog. I’ve got a lot more thinking to do, and I won’t write here about the technical things that I learned, but you’ll probably see some changes here over the next few weeks.

A Garden for the Obamas

March 19, 2009 in food politics, local | 1 comment

It’s a happy day for local foodies: Michelle Obama is going to start a vegetable garden at the White House. The sustainable food community has been pushing for this since before Barack’s inauguration: symbolically, the garden stands for healthy eating, local food, and freshly prepared meals. It sounds like those meals will be pretty tasty, too: they’re planting over 55 varieties including cilantro, tomatillos, berries, and many types of greens. (Yes, including arugula, as NYT points out.) They’re even starting a beehive! And most of the first family, including the President, will be helping out with the garden’s care. One of the coolest things, I think, is the total cost of starting up: $200. That’s it, for a pretty substantial vegetable garden. Cost is clearly not an obstacle to healthy eating. (Labor/time and space are harder to come by for some of us, and the Obamas have those in abundance.)

Michelle says:

“A real delicious heirloom tomato is one of the sweetest things that you’ll ever eat,” she said. “And my children know the difference, and that’s how I’ve been able to get them to try different things.

“I wanted to be able to bring what I learned to a broader base of people. And what better way to do it than to plant a vegetable garden in the South Lawn of the White House.”

Very cool. Can’t wait to see pictures!

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