borscht

beet and cabbage soup

In my ongoing attempt to get rid of my food co-op beets, I made borscht. This is easy, and tastes pretty good. I had made a borscht last summer too, but I didn't remember which recipe I used, so I started my search afresh.

I found this great website about supporting Ukrainian orphans that looks like it is straight out of 1997 and has a whole section devoted to the world's best borscht. I explored their collection of recipes, and got a pretty good sense of what I wanted to do: Beets, cabbage, carrots, celery, onion, potato, parsley and dill. The ingredients varied from recipe to recipe, but those were the most common across the board.

I started off with the mire poix of carrots, celery and onion. I had saved the water that I boiled my syrian beets in, so I poured all that in after everything had started to brown. I would have added some chicken stock also, but I accidentally defrosted pesto sauce instead, and started to add that instead before I realized my mistake. Near disaster! Haha. Then I added half a head of cabbage, a small bunch of chopped parsley, some minced dill and a handful of small red diced potatoes. I let that all cook for a while and then I added three GIANT peeled and diced beets.

I cooked that all for long while more and then tried to mash it all up a bit since there wasn't much liquid. It was pretty chunky, but when I tasted it, it was good. It's common knowledge that soups are better after a day or two when the flavors have had a chance to meld, and borscht is no exception. Two days later, topped with dill flavored sour cream, thinly sliced radishes, scallions and fresh dill, it was a delicious meal.

I still think beets are kind of boring, but making them into a hearty borscht is not only tasty, but a cool refreshing lunch for the dog days of summer.


borscht topped with radishes, dill and scallions

fried soft shell crab with rice and creamed kale

crispy soft shell crab

One food blog that I really admire is Caviar and Codfish. I found it back in late March, whilst trying to find the recipe for The Red Cat's phenomenal bacon chard pie. While I never did find that recipe, I've been following Robin's postings at Caviar and Codfish on and off ever since. The pictures are absolutely beautiful and the food always sounds amazing. Two of her more recent entries involve soft shell crab, something I like but would never thought of cooking myself.

Fast forward to late June. My dad and I are in Harlem, enjoying some quality father-daughter bonding time. As we walk down 125th st to Dinosaur BBQ, we pass specialty grocery store Citarella, and my eye is drawn to a sign proclaiming, "we have soft shell crab!"

Two days later, with Nathan away in Italy, I decide to skip my usual Tuesday movie night and try some soft shell crab. At $5.99 a piece, they aren't particularly cheap, but since it's just me, I only need one. Cooking the crab is incredibly easy. I dredge it in a mixture of salt and pepper, flour and a little cornmeal and pan fry it in hot melted butter for three minutes on each side.

As for the accompaniments, I decide to make some rice and follow Robin's lead and serve my crab with creamed spinach. However, I've got no spinach. What I do have is kale. Kale that has been sitting in my fridge taunting me for weeks. It's getting yellower and yellower, and I know if I don't eat it soon, it will die out of spite. Maybe, instead of the spinach, I could cream kale? First google hit: Bobby Flay. This could be just crazy enough to work...

I dice a shallot and cook it in melted butter until it is nice and soft. Then I add a spoonful or two of flour, and stir that around for a few minutes. Then I pour in some cream, and let that thicken as I stir it. A few sprinkles of nutmeg, and I am really to add my steamed chopped kale. I mix it all together, season with salt and pepper, and it's ready to go. But how does it taste?

AHA! I have discovered a way to cook kale that I actually like! Of course, a load of butter and cream will make most things taste ok, but still. Maybe I'm starting to come around on kale. I think the reason I find kale so off putting is that it really doesn't look like a vegetable. It looks like vegetation. And sure enough, there are varieties of kale that are purely ornamental. Something about the thick stems seems woody, although I suppose they aren't really so bad. If I treat kale like I would spinach or chard, maybe I'll like it more. Maybe we can even be friends.

And how was the crab, you ask? Pretty much awesome. It was crispy and yummy and wow soft shell crab is good. There was ONE thing I thought was weird though. You're supposed to clean soft shell crab by cutting off the eyes and the top of the head and emptying out the organs, or whatever. The fish dudes at Citarella said they would do this for me, and they certainly were off in the back doing something with it before they wrapped it up for me to take home. However, when I cut into my crab, a huge amount of light green liquid oozed out of the head, seeping into my kale and rice. I was worried that they didn't clean it properly, or that I didn't cook it long enough, but the flesh was all very white and firm, so I just ate it, goo and all. It was delicious, if unsightly. I asked Robin if this was normal, and she wrote back said it was just tomalley and internal fat, akin to the green goo you find in lobsters. I was glad to know there was nothing amiss with my dish, and learned a bit about crabs to boot!


creamed kale over rice with a soft shell crab

ravioli with swiss chard, sugar snap peas and garlic chips/radish salad sandwich

ravioli with chard, sugar snap peas and fried garlic chips

So last Monday night when Nathan left for vacation in Italy, I decided to cook up some Borgatti ravioli. I had had a box in the freezer since I was last up on Arthur Ave the last weekend of April, but I was waiting for a special occasion to break it out. I guess I was feeling like if I couldn't go back to Italy, I could at least eat the best ravioli this side of Atlantic. The time was right. (Appropriately, Nathan actually gets back TODAY, and I am so excited!!!)

As I was leaving work, I stumbled across this recipe for spaghetti with swiss chard, olives and garlic chips. I had seen it before, but it hadn't particularly struck me at the time. However, with a bag full of chard slowly wilting back at home, it suddenly seemed much more appealing. So, when I got home, I dug into a fridge full of vegetables and used that recipe as a jumping off point for my dinner.

Obviously, I switched the pasta from spaghetti to ravioli, but other than that I followed the recipe fairly closely, with one notable exception. I've never really liked olives. Lately, I've been coming around on them somewhat, but I still usually avoid them. I definitely don't keep them in the house, and I didn't go out shopping, so they got axed from the recipe.

I sliced the garlic into thin chips and fried it in hot olive oil until golden brown. I removed the garlic from the pan, and added a diced shallot, which I cooked until soft. Then I added a pint of shelled sugar snap peas, (after almost five days in the fridge, the pods were truly sad looking), and then the chopped leaves of a bunch of chard. (I reserved the stems for use in a dish Nathan likes to call chard surprise, but I'll be saving that for another post.) Meanwhile, I boiled my ravioli in a pot of salted water until it floated. Once the chard was wilted and the pasta drained, I tossed it all together and added back in the garlic chips. Yummy!


ravioli with veggies and open faced salad sandwich

I also had some old Italian bread in the fridge, the end of a head of food co-op lettuce, not to mention that never ending bag of radishes. I toasted the bread with some butter so it would taste less stale, and then just topped it with thinly sliced radish, the red leaf lettuce, kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper and a drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar. It wasn't as extraordinary as my last radish sandwich, but it was quick and easy and helped me use up some of the food I have in the fridge. (If you too have a surfeit of radishes, you can simplify this even further and just eat them sliced with butter, salt and pepper. That's how I finally finished mine off.)


radish and red leaf lettuce salad on Italian bread

So that was that. Dinner without my boy. Inclusion of peas aside, I think he would have liked it. That being said, for those of you keeping track this type of dinner is getting to be bit of a standard in my kitchen. Olive oil, garlic, onion, cooked greens, an extra veggie and some pasta... It's getting a bit formulaic, and I'm wary of falling into a rut. That being said, when there are so many greens to use up, there's only so much you can do with them. If anyone has any especially interesting suggestions, please pass them along!

What I did particularly like about this recipe that made it stand out from the pack was the crispy fried garlic slices. If you too are intrigued by the idea of garlic chips, I also happened upon this post which a couple of other interesting ideas for crunchy fried garnishes. I use a lot of browned garlic in my cooking, but it's generally more finely chopped and serves more as additional flavoring than as stand alone element of a dish. I'm intrigued by exploring this idea of crispy little garnishes and what not. In my first post of the year, I mentioned a dinner that Nathan and I made that included blue steak, creamed spinach and a poached egg with crispy onions. This we did accidentally, but I ended up really liking it. This other blogger's post has got me thinking that there could really be something to this flavorful crispy thing!

syrian beet salad

So while there are many wonderful things about having a food co-op share, it can be a bit rough at times. The amount of vegetables can be simply overwhelming, and all too often something beautiful and fresh wilts and rots before you can use it. Very sad. This is even more likely to happen if the veggie in question is not something you are particularly familiar with or even like. For instance, neither Laura nor Nathan nor I can ever seem to muster up any enthusiasm for beets. I don't hate them, but they're just not something I generally cook with. I have no idea what to do with them.

Luckily, beets can stay for months in the refrigerator and reemerge little worse for the wear. Last season, I honestly did my best with the beets. I pickled them, I made borchst, I roasted them with sage for Thanksgiving dinner... but by the time winter rolled around, I was burnt out on beets. While I don't dislike them, persay, they really do very little for me, and I was flat out of ideas and inspiration. Judging by the fact that we've had two big bags of them in the crisper since at least February, I think it's safe to say that Laura feels the same way. My apologies to Dwight Schrute, but I think I've had enough of nature's candy.

However, with the summer CSA season now in full swing, I started to feel pretty bad about the winter veggies taking up room in the fridge, and resolved to remedy the situation. Enter A Bushel of What?, a fabulous blog detailing one woman's attempts to use up all the strange produce she gets from her food co-op. It's interesting reading, it's got good recipes, and she's got plenty ideas for using stuff like beets and kale, vegetables that generally stump me. Basically, it's a god send.

One of the recipes Nicole posted was for a Syrian beet salad. I liked the idea of jazzing up with beets with cilantro and scallion, and I had gotten both of those in my summer share, so I was excited to try it.


syrian beet salad

I halved my beets, (they were tiny), and boiled them for ten minutes. Then I peeled them simply by pushing at the now-softened skin with my fingertips. I smashed up a small clove of garlic, sliced up half a scallion, and chopped up my cilantro. I tossed all this with salt, pepper, olive oil and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. As instructed, I let this sit for a half an hour so that the flavors would meld.

It was good, but it still didn't blow me away. I was happy to taste the bolder flavors of the lemon, garlic, scallions and cilantro, but the beets were still a little bland. I suppose it could be that they were so old, but I think it's also just a matter of personal taste. Beets, in my opinion, are just alright. I doubt I'll ever be a true beet enthusiast. That being said, if you are, then you should give this recipe a shot. It's definitely an unusual and tasty take on the vegetable.

gnocchi with pan fried radishes and turnip tops

gnocchi with radishes

So remember when Nathan and I made Jody Adam's disastrous gnocchi in cream sauce? Well, even if you don't, I've had nightmares enough for the both of us. They were soggy, leaden, doughy lumps that sat in our stomachs like cannon balls. An undisputed utter failure.

Well, believe it or not, we had uncooked gnocchi leftover which I actually froze and saved, and I was recently brave enough to defrost them and try again. Nathan told me to just throw them away and not suffer through the awfulness yet again, but I hate to waste food, and I suspected they might be slightly better if I were to pan fry them to a crisp golden brown. (This smitten kitchen posts assures us that after pan frying we will never boil again.)

The verdict? Browning made all the difference! They still weren't super amazing or great, but they were actually quite palatable, and much lighter than the cream laden ones we had cooked the first time around. I'm sure I could improve with practice, but I think the first batch went so badly wrong because we used too much cream and didn't reduce it enough, not because of any fatal flaws in the gnocchi itself. Somewhat of a comfort.

Of course, I had to go and overload the cast iron skillet by about 5 or 6 gnocchi, making it nearly impossible to flip the little dudes without smushing them together. Typical move on my part. Luckily, I still got them all to brown, and if a couple of them joined together to form conjoined twin super gnocchi, it had very little impact on the final flavor.

As for the gnocchi accompaniments, I was inspired by my surplus of radishes and starting-to-yellow turnip tops. I happened across a New York Times article and recipe that sang the praises of cooked radishes, and I was immediately all about it. You can only slice so many of those things and throw them in salads.

I quartered my (surprisingly large) radishes and set them face down in a hot oil pan and just let them brown for about three minutes. After they started to color, I added some finely chopped garlic and stirred it all around for a bit. Then I added the chopped green tops of two bunches of turnips, mixing them around until they all began to wilt. After the tops were cooked through, I added the golden brown gnocchi back into the pan and sprinkled with shredded parmesan. It was all actually pretty good. Cooked radishes are damn tasty, and when it comes to gnocchi, pan frying is definitely an appealing option.


homemade gnocchi: better pan fried

coffee marinated pork chops

coffee marinated pork chop with food co-op pesto and salad

So I found this recipe for pork chops marinated in Manhattan Special Coffee Soda in the Yelp talk threads. I once went out to lunch at Tino's on Arthur Ave with my friend Kevin and decided to try the Manhattan Special Coffee Soda. I thought it was pretty disgusting, but then again I don't like coffee or soda, so I am probably not the best judge of the product. I do like many coffee flavored things, and I actually tried some coffee flavored steak at this Greek place in Astoria earlier this year that was absolutely delicious. Therefore, a coffee marinated pork chop sounded pretty good to me, so I decided to take up the recipe's suggestion of plain old coffee as a replacement for the espresso soda.

Of course, to marinate anything in coffee, you first have to brew it. To most people this is probably second nature, but aside from occasionally running the coffee machine at the deli I worked at when I was seventeen, I've never brewed a cup of coffee. Somehow, I've made it through life without caffeine— no soda, no coffee, no tea. Normally, I feel pretty good about that, but when I needed to make the coffee for my pork chops, I all of sudden felt as though I was lacking an essential life skill.

Laura used to have a French press thingie (I think), but it got old and clogged, and then she decided she wasn't going to drink coffee anymore, threw it out and has not replaced it since. That means we had no coffee machine, no filters, no anything. So, I MacGyvered myself a cup of coffee using a paper towel and a funnel. It was totally ghetto and I'm sure it was a weak ass cup of coffee. However, since it wasn't for drinking, I thought it would be okay.

I put my coffee in a tupperware and added chopped ginger, garlic and parsley, apple cider vinegar, dijon mustard, dried thyme, salt and pepper. I stirred up the marinated, added two pork chops, and set it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

I pan-fried the pork chops and tried to reduce the sauce into a glaze in a separate pot. The chops were a bit too wet and didn't brown up the way I would have liked them to, and the sauce didn't ever get any thicker, which was a disappointment. The taste was good, but I think a longer marinading period would have produced a stronger, more pronounced coffee flavor. Also, I realized afterward that the original recipe probably meant dried ground ginger, which probably would have made a bit more sense. Otherwise, the ingredients made for a tasty marinade.

We served our pork chops alongside a fresh food co-op salad. We also had a particularly good batch of pesto for dinner. Nathan would like to take the credit, but I suspect that it may have something to do with the basil itself, which came from the food co-op and looked to be a slightly different variety than that I am used to.

All in all in was a good, tasty, satisfying dinner. Nothing fancy, but it did hit the spot on a Sunday evening.

pasta with peas and broccoli rabe

pasta with peas and broccoli rabe

So, my first batch of peas, I pickled, and I liked them more than I expected. So, when week two of sugar snaps rolled around, I was feeling more generously towards the little legumes. (I just googled "are sugar snap peas legumes?" to be sure, and the results suggest they are. I apologize if I am mistaken; botany is not my strong suit.)

That Friday night I decided to make myself up a quick dinner before heading downtown to a party at my friend Becky's house, and I decided to make a dish that would honor the previously maligned pea, and my father's usual preparation of it. As I mentioned in my pickled pea post, my dad will often make a simple pasta dish with peas, onion and olive oil, and I usually try to get as few peas as possible. He also makes a similar dish with garlic and broccoli rabe. Since my second food co-op share included both of those veggies, I decided to combine the two ideas into one meal.

When I told Nathan of my plan, he got angry because "peas are the worst!" I tried to assure him that farm fresh peas were completely different from the frozen supermarket blandnesses he was used to, but he was adamant and kept saying "I can't believe you'd rather stay home and cook worsts instead of letting your boy take you out to dinner." I held my ground though, and was ultimately pretty happy with my decision. You'd be surprised how satisfying it is to get through even a small part of a weekly food co-op share.

I began by shelling the peas and setting the pasta water to boil. Then I sliced up an onion and cooked it in olive oil until it was very soft. After that, I added sliced garlic and the broccoli rabe, discarding the thickest stems. I cooked that over medium heat, stirring to keep the broccoli from burning. Then I added the peas and my secret ingredient: the olive oil and hot pepper flakes from an empty jar of anchovies. This fish infused oil gave it a little extra saltiness and richness, but the dish would obviously still work with regular oil and red pepper flakes. Once the pasta was al dente, I drained it and added it to the pan. I used campanelle, which is Italian for bell and is also a pretty cool pasta shape. I cooked it all together for a few minutes longer, and then ate it with plenty of grated parmesan. Delicious.

I realize now that I kind of screwed up with the peas. They were still delicious and fresh, and I should have cooked them up in the pods, rather than shelling them. They still tasted amazingly sweet and were crunchily delicious, but tossing the pods was definitely a waste. I've since made a similar dish with peas that stayed in the fridge for a few days longer, and by that point the pods had gotten nasty and wilty. While they were in their prime, however, they should be used. I won't make that mistake again.

asian style tat soi and zucchini stir fry

food co-op stir fry

This dish was really simple, so it was sad that I screwed it up. I started off by trying to recreate a baked zucchini dish my dad and I invented last summer. I had sliced zucchini and summer squash sitting in the fridge, so I simply rubbed them with brown sugar and sesame oil laid them flat on a tray and baked them in the toaster oven. Looking back, I think my dad and I also used butter and salt and pepper. These want a significant amount brown sugar, and I think I skimped on it.

While these were the toaster, I chopped up some tat soi, leaves and stalks both, and sauteed them in hot vegetable oil with minced garlic and ginger. Since I had already used the sesame oil and ginger, I started to feel like my veggies were asian inspired, and decided to add some soy sauce. Usually, I only use soy to make fried rice, which can absorb a lot of soy flavor. The tat soi was overwhelmed by what I thought was a small glug of soy, and the dish became overpoweringly salty. To try and spread the soy around, I threw the zucchini and squash into the pan. Not only did this not particularly help, it also meant that I completely lost the brown sugar and sesame flavors. It was sad. Not terrible tasting, but disappointing nevertheless.


zucchini and tat soi with soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger

You might expect that I paired these veggies with some sticky rice, and if I had planned ahead, that's probably what I would have done. However, this wasn't so much a planned ahead dish as much as a "oh shit, these zucchini and summer squash slices have been sitting around since Sunday! and I need to use that tat soi!," so I ate it with leftover mac and cheese. The two made relatively strange bedfellows, but I was eating by myself and I wasn't too bothered by it.

It was my first time eating tat soi, and I liked it. I just wish I hadn't killed it with so much soy sauce. If the food co-op gives us more I may try this simple blanched and sauteed version. I also plan on trying my sesame brown sugar zucchini again, since it didn't work out so well this time. I think I just lost sight of the goal. Oops.

skillet mac and cheese with bacon/fried goat cheese salad

Nathan got really mad at me for this one. He's always suggesting we make mac and cheese, and I'm never in the mood and then he gets cranky and accuses me of cruelly withholding his favorite thing that I cook. And then a couple of weeks ago, I made mac and cheese without him. Oops. When he gets back to the states I'm going to have to welcome him with a big cheesy American style pasta dish to make up for it. Maybe I'll go uber traditional and use elbows. Or maybe I'll make it Italian style and add pepperoni and sundried tomatoes. We shall see.

This mac had five cheeses plus bacon and onions. I didn't deviate much from my previously described method. (If you are looking for more mac ideas, Mark Bittman unsurprisingly has some great ones, or you could make Gordon Ramsay's.) I made a cheesy bechamel sauce with butter, flour, a spash of hot sauce, a dash of worcestershire sauce, some salt and pepper, shredded parmesan and grated romano. I fried a couple of slices of bacon and some sliced onions. I cooked up a pound of orecchiette until tender and then mixed that into the sauce with the bacon and onions. I think I also added some little slices of garlic scape. I layered the pasta mixture with grated cheddar, monteray jack and gouda cheeses, and topped with breadcrumbs and extra of all five cheeses. Then I baked it in Laura's cast iron skillet. When we inevitably part ways as roommates, I will miss that the most. Like, aside from her, obviously.


macaroni and cheese

It was pretty good. Orecchiette is one of my favorite pastas, but I think it might be a little too thick and chewy for macaroni and cheese. I'm afraid that the pasta on top got a bit dried out and tough. Otherwise, it was delicious. Obviously a little smokey bacon and sweet onion take things up a notch,and the bacon and gouda really complimented one another well.


skillet baked mac and cheese

I also tried to pair it with a fried goat cheese salad. This didn't end up working out so well, so the horribly out of focus photo is somewhat appropriate. That isn't to say it wasn't tasty, just that I didn't wind up with the beautiful and neat little crisp golden goat cheese cakes that the recipe's author promised...


fried goat cheese in a lemon mayo dressing

As you can see, the breading burned and kept sticking to the pan, and I had to kind of stick it back onto the cheese... And it looked so good, too! In retrospect, it's probably my fault though. I didn't feel like breaking out the eggs, so I just rolled my freezer-firmed goat cheese rounds in bread crumbs and tried to fry them up in a hot pan of melted butter. I bet the egg would have helped everything stick together better. Obviously goat cheese + butter + bread crumbs still = TASTY, but it was a good deal messier and far less attractive looking than I would have hoped.

What was just a perfect as I imagined it would be was the dressing: olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, homemade mayonnaise, white vinegar and dijon mustard. Salt and pepper to taste. If I had had poppy seeds, I certainly would have added them, but this dressing was delicious even without them. Very bright and fresh, it tasted delicious over food co-op greens and some of my never ending $1 radishes.

pickled sugar snap peas

peter piper picked a peck of pickled PEAS

I don't like peas. My dad makes a pasta dish with onions and oil and frozen peas and the peas are always the worst part. Whenever he serves it, I always wonder why anyone bothers to eat the tasteless little buggers.

So, as you can probably imagine, I was less than thrilled when the season's first food co-op share included a little cardboard carton of sugar snap peas. The co-op is a big commitment in terms of the quantities of food you're getting, and I really want to waste as little of it as possible. However, that didn't mean I was looking forward to eating peas. At all.

While I was searching for a good sugar snap pea recipe, I came upon this one, which calls for pickling them. I'm not a particularly big fan of pickles, (in fact, there are a great number of pickles I don't like at all), but the idea appealed to me because it meant that I could prepare the peas and then pack them away for later. With so much produce and so few people eating it, there's only so much you can eat on any given day. I pickled these peas the day after my first pick-up, after eating a salad for breakfast, after preparing coleslaw, and before making spinach meatball risotto and a great big salad for dinner. I wanted to use those peas, but I wasn't about to eat them that Friday. Enter pickling them, which was supposed to take two weeks.


cold and refreshing pickled peas

This recipe was also great because making it was super fast. Once I had sliced a couple of cloves of garlic and cleaned the peas by snapping off the end and peeling off the string, the bulk of the work was done. I dissolved equal parts sugar and salt into white vinegar on the stove top, and then added as much cold water as I had vinegar.(I think I may have actually added too much vinegar and not enough water, but these were still good.) I put the peas and the garlic and some red pepper flakes in a jar, and then poured the cooled vinegar mixture over them. Into the fridge they went, and I didn't try them until a week later.

Crunchy and acidic, tempered by a bit of the peas natural sweetness, these make quite a good snack. Just don't bite them in half, lest you want ice cold vinegar running down your chest. Actually, in the summer heat, that might not be such a bad thing. Who knew peas could be so refreshing?!


gimme da peas

Since unenthusiastically pickling my first batch of peas, I've been cooking them with pasta and quite enjoying them. I regret being so biased against such a delightfully sweet and crunchy vegetable after encountering them only after a long sojourn in the supermarket's freezer department. It was unfair of me. I've got a couple more pea dishes that I'll be blogging about presently, but if we get more this week I think I'll try this. Pancetta and sage and garlic and ricotta? Sign me up! We'll see if I get it together with all those non-pantry-essential ingredients before snap pea season ends, but it does sound delicious.