caldo verde

My friend Tony suggested I make a caldo verde soup with all my food co-op kale. My only regret was that it took so long to follow his advice.




My family came over for dinner after work one night back in July, right before I left for a glorious two and a half weeks of vacation in the California sun. I thought that this soup would be super easy and ready in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the potatoes decided to be difficult and take two hour to cook, which was bizarre, but other than that this dinner came together quite nicely.

Caldo verde is a Portuguese soup or stew, and I used this recipe from Mario Batali. I spent the night before simmering a big pot of chicken stock and getting all my potatoes and kale chopped up and ready to go, so the next night all I had to do was chop and sautee the onion and garlic, and then add the broth and potatoes and let that pot go to work.

dry fried garlic scapes with chorizo and polenta

One of the funny things you get from your CSA at the beginning of the season is garlic scapes, the little shoots that grow our from the bulbs. They are milder that the cloves, and they are only available for a short window of time in the late spring.

I like scapes, but aside from dicing them up for coleslaw or salads, I'm often at a loss of what to do with them. That's why I took note when I saw this recipe for dry fried garlic scapes.

roasted sweet potatoes, chorizo, greens and garlic

sweet potato roasted with kale, chorizo and garlic, served with manchego cheese

This dish was a very serendipitous creation that Laura and I came up with. I think we were both very surprised just how much we liked it.

We had, (and still have, for that matter), tons of sweet potatoes from the food co-op, as well as garlic and your garden variety leafy greens. I think it was kale, but I could be wrong and in any event I'm sure that spinach, chard or even collard greens would work just as well. As I was peeling my sweet potatoes, Laura came home bearing a package of chorizo. I looked the in The Flavor Bible, and it told me that chorizo and sweet potatoes were secret lovers. Laura and I quickly decided to join culinary forces.

Laura sliced up the chorizo and fried it. I boiled the sweet potatoes and sliced up some garlic. Once the potatoes were cooked through, I cut them into centimeter thick disks and spread them out in a pyrex baking dish. I sprinkled the potatoes with garlic and drizzled on some olive oil. This method is from Mark Bittman, whose sweet potatoes have been a family Thanksgiving favorite for eleven years now thanks to my Aunt Cathy.

From there I decided to improvise by tossing in a bunch of leafy greens. Of course, when I put this all in the oven to roast, the greens were on top, exposed to the worst of the oven's heat, and soon started to get singed. I had to do a lot of stirring to make sure they didn't completely burn. If were to make this again, (which I totally would, because it was awesome), I would definitely sautee the greens with the chorizo before adding them to the baking dish.

When it became clear that all the stirring in the world wasn't going to save my kale from burning, Laura suggested that we mix in the chorizo. This was a brilliant idea. The grease from the pan moistened the kale so that it cooked down nicely, and infused the whole pan with meaty Spanish flavor. Somehow, the meat and slightly bitter greens perfectly complimented the sweetness of the sweet potatoes. In short, this just came together perfectly.

This is a complete meal unto itself, which I love. All we had with it was a little of the giant wheel of manchego cheese that our Spanish friend Katia had brought Laura from Spain. Anyway. Next time I make this, this is the recipe I plan on following:

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Chorizo, Greens and Garlic

1 lb chorizo, chopped
2 lbs sweet potatoes, peeled
1 large bunch leafy greens, stems removed and leaves coarsely chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
3 tbs olive oil

Pre-heat the oven to 400˚. Boil sweet potatoes for ten minutes. Run under cold water to cool, and slice into rounds. While potatoes are boiling, cook chorizo in frying pan on medium heat. Once the chorizo is cooked, set it aside, leaving the drippings in the pan. Saute your greens in the chorizo grease until they begin to wilt. Remove from heat.

Toss the sweet potatoes with olive oil, salt and pepper. Spread the sweet potato rounds in a large baking dish and sprinkle with chopped garlic. Bake for ten minutes, then add the chorizo and leafy greens and bake for five more minutes, or until sweet potatoes are cooked all the way through and the greens are soft.

Fried Chickpeas with Chorizo and Spinach

This is another recipe from Mark Bittman, the dean of people who mean well but don't want to spend a million years in the kitchen getting all messy and irritable as they slave over some complex hogwarsh. I made it one night after seeing it on the Times' website.

Ingredients:
- 2 cups canned chickpeas (no need to get fancy, I just got one of those big Goya cans)
- 4 oz. diced chorizo (Goya to the rescue again. Just get a whole one and cut it up.)
- half pound spinach
- bread crumbs

The original recipe also called for sherry, but I'm not the sort of moneybags who keeps a well-stocked bar filled with all sorts of exotic liqueurs. I have a minibar area in my bedroom but it currently consists of a bottle of red, a bottle of rum, a chocolate bunny, and some cookies. In the freezer there be gin and vodka, but no sherry. Sorry haters. Anyway, I just used red wine vinegar instead and so should you.

First, put like 3 tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a pan, and heat it up. Put all of the chickpeas in there (after draining their fluid from the can) and salt/pepper them. Bring the heat down to medium-low and let the chickpeas cook for ten minutes or so until they start to turn brown. Then add the chorizo, and let it cook for another 5 minutes, maybe a bit more, until the chickpeas start to crisp up on the outsides and they start to get some nice chorizo flavor on them.

Remove all of that stuff from the pan and then cook the spinach in the oils that remain. At this point you can add a quarter cup of sherry, or if you're awesome like me, red wine vinegar. Add some salt and pepper too, naturally. When the spinach is nice and soft, pretty much cooked, put the chickpeas and chorizo back in and toss everything together for a bit.

To finish it off, put breadcrumbs on top of the whole thing and put it all in the broiler for a little bit, just to brown the breadcrumbs and give the dish a nice crust. Then eat.


chickpeas, chorizo and spinach with a nice crispy top

I really enjoyed this dish - it was great and it easily cost less than ten bucks. The chickpeas had a great texture, nice and soft but just crispy enough on the outside. The chorizo was luscious. The spinach provided a nice clean backdrop, keeping the dish from getting bogged down in starch and meat. Best of all, it only took like 20 minutes to make.