fauren

Quinoa Salad with Spring Onions, Tomato, and Feta

Of Montreal - Know Your Onion! (Shins cover)

The term "spring onion" is often used interchangeably with "green onion" and "scallion," but actually, none of these are the same thing. Steve Albert over at Harvest to Table offers a helpful breakdown of the three, explaining that each refers to a different stage of onion growth and offers its own flavor and use. You might hear spring onions referred to as salad onions, since they have a similar bite to mature onions but are usually mild enough to eat raw, in salads or otherwise.

Spring onions surfaced at my Greenmarket last week, and since I had never cooked with them before I thought I'd give them a try. I wasn't sure what I would do with them at first, but when I decided last night that my mint needed some serious pruning -- mint is a notoriously vigorous plant -- its clippings ended up being my inspiration for a salad.

Cold grain salads are one of my favorite things to make during the summer. Grains are a heartier (and usually healthier) substitute for pastas, and are just as amenable to any number of ingredients. I had some quinoa in my pantry cupboard, so I decided to combine my mint and onions with it and a few other ingredients for a simple, summery dinner.

Celebrating Our Independence with Gran Dan's Bar-B-Que Sauce

A.A. Bondy - American Hearts (buy)
Estelle featuring Kanye West - American Boy (buy)

First, a happy belated 4th of July to you all. I hope yours was filled with friends, food, and fireworks. And freedom! Can't forget the freedom.

It rained for the third or fourth year running here in New York, but not before some friends and I got in a solid 7 or so hours of beer drinking and barbecuing at my friend Eric's house (home of the garden, not to mention two grills). Somewhere over the last two summers, it seems we all reached an implicit understanding that each barbecue would have to be better than the last, which means that the food keeps getting better and more elaborate. I couldn't tell you the last time someone dared show up with hot dogs. Or actually, I can, but it involves getting scalded by a core of molten cheese that exploded forth from the cheddar dog belonging to a woman sitting next to me, and I'd really rather not relive the details.

Anyway, this year's 4th of July feast included grilled jalapeños with cheese and grilled tortillas, mesquite smoked baby back ribs; elotes with cotija, chilli, and lime juice; a garden salad with Japanese turnips (I figured out what to do with them), fennel, red onion, and orange-almond dressing; roasted Chioggia beets and lemon thyme; grilled skewers of zucchini, golden zucchini, and summer squash; and what is definitely the best barbecued chicken I have ever eaten.

Dan's mom emailed him a copy of his Gran Dan's barbecue sauce recipe a couple weeks ago, and he had been itching to give it a try ever since. I couldn't wait, either. Growing up in New England, we didn't have much of a barbecue culture -- grilling, sure, but not barbecue -- and I'm still in the process of learning the intricacies. Vinegar, mustard, or tomato base; smoking or grilling; wood, coal, or gas. I had no idea it was so complex.

This particular barbecue sauce is straight from Dan's home base in Raleigh, NC, where vinegary barbecue reigns supreme.

Delicious and Funny-Sounding, It's Rhubarb!

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I lived the first 27 and a half years of my life without ever knowingly consuming rhubarb. What?!

Happily, that changed yesterday. I'd gone up to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket this past Saturday and rhubarb seemed to be everywhere, its red and green stalks poking out of crates at more than a couple stands. They were a hard sight to resist, so I went ahead and bought myself a bunch despite having no idea what I would do with it.

Remembering that I had some boneless pork chops in my freezer, I thought I might try out a sauce for them. I love sweet and savory combinations like pork chops and apple sauce, so maybe something similar could be done with rhubarb, which is so tart on its own it almost always needs to be sweetened.

The result of this experiment was a simple compote. Combining the rhubarb with shallots and fresh thyme yielded a dish that's indicative of this time of year for me - somewhere between winter and spring, at once hearty, fresh, and crisp. Needless to say, I was pleased. And, by the end of it, quite full.

Bittman's Spaghetti to the Rescue

Mark Bittman has already received some praise from yours truly in the abstract, but last night I gained some very concrete appreciation for the man's work. Stretching the few remaining ingredients in my kitchen until this Saturday's Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket means things are getting decidedly less exciting chez Fauren, but Bittman's adaptation of spaghetti with fried eggs came to my rescue. (He notes that this recipe is also known as "poor man's spaghetti." All too true, Mister Bittman.)

Remembering I had some fresh angel hair pasta in my freezer was really all it took, since the remaining ingredients have basically taken up permanent residence in my kitchen. The beauty of this recipe? It literally takes five minutes to make once your water is boiling.

White Chili, My New Best Friend

It's a cold, very blustery gray day in Brooklyn today - the kind that makes it hard to believe it's the first day of spring. And since I evidently have the circulation of an 85-year-old, my fingers and nose are freezing as I sit here typing. So, what better time to talk about cooking up a big pot of bubbling chili?

When we were in North Carolina for the New Year, D and I spent a night at his folks' place in Raleigh before heading out to the coast. His mom sent us on our way with a fresh batch of white chili, which I'd somehow never encountered in all my years of eating. How sad not to have experienced such deliciousness earlier in life! But Jean made it easy for me to play catch-up... when she packed up the chili, she also packed up a copy of her recipe.

White chili is so called because its primary ingredients are white beans and chicken, making it a considerably paler relative of what the word "chili" normally conjures up. Most recipes for it tend to be milder, too, but that's easily remedied.

Not long ago, I spent a couple afternoons preparing for and tinkering with my own pot of white chili.

I probably opted for the most time-consuming method possible (read on), but in the end it was worth it.

Chickeny Goodness

I think chicken gets a bad rap sometimes. It's become this sort of default protein that just gets fried, drowned in sauce, or reconstituted into fun shapes to distract from how supposedly boring it is on its own. Not so! Give the chicken its bones and skin back and then give it a chance, I say.

Last winter, I was turned on to the whole roasted chicken. Not those sticky rotisserie jobs at the supermarket, but rather the raw thing, rinsed, seasoned, and then tucked into my oven for a couple hours. It's incredibly easy, plus it makes the kitchen (and then some) smell delightful.

The only trouble with roasting a chicken for one or two people is that, once I've enjoyed my serving fresh from the oven, the remaining chicken goes into the fridge, after which it's impossible to duplicate that fresh-from-the-oven taste ever again. So what does a person do with all that cold chicken?

Well, it may be February, but I'll tell you what: roasted chicken makes the best chicken salad I've ever had. Lots of recipes call for boiled chicken, particularly of the boneless and skinless variety, which almost always makes for a dry and generally disappointing chicken experience. But roasted chicken holds on to the fat and juices that keep the meat from drying out, and using a whole bird also means being able to use the dark meat, which I've always found to be more moist and flavorful, anyway.

(Chicken salad pictured here with Bread Alone's whole grain health bread, my new sandwich love.)

And hey, once you've carved all that meat off for the salad, plunk that chicken carcass into 4 quarts of water with some onions, celery, carrots, garlic, fresh parsley, salt, peppercorns, and cloves; simmer for a few hours; and you've got yourself the base for some nice hot soup. (In my case, it was kale and turkey meatball.)

Vive le poulet!

Best of All, There's Only One Pot to Wash

A trip to the Tompkins Square Farmers Market this fall yielded some ground turkey from DiPaola Turkey Farm (Hamilton Square, NJ), which I immediately froze.  I realized today that I should probably come up with a use for it and decided to whip up a batch of chili.

I love chili for so many reasons -- it's really cheap and easy to make, it freezes well, and it's yummy.  A pot of decent chili can cost less than $15 plus labor time to make, and for someone like me who's generally only cooking for one or two, one recipe can make six or eight meals' worth of soup.

Winter in New York has been mild thus far, but I'm prepared for the cold snap if and when it arrives.

Dinner For Us Lazy People

At the Tompkins Square Park farmer's market this past Sunday, I realized that New York City is in a state of produce limbo.  Lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes, and other delicious goodies are losing their luster, while apples, pumpkins, and other fall fruits and veggies haven't quite come into their own yet.  I secured some surprisingly good peaches, but otherwise it was not a produce-heavy trip this time.

Instead, I took advantage of Stannard Farm's extensive choice of meats.  On my last trip to this market, I bought some of their nitrate-free uncured bacon.  It's thickly cut and incredibly rich, but not too salty.  I cooked the last of it at breakfast before heading to the market, so of course the void needed to be filled. 

I also got a pound of their grass-fed ground beef, which I used in my dinner this evening.  The beef was a beautiful deep red, and even after cooking it with vegetables and seasonings it maintained a very rich, beef-y aroma and flavor. 

After a long day I often find it hard to muster up the energy to cook any kind of extensive meal, so tonight I compromised and cooked something that wouldn't take too much effort or time, but still tasted yummy and was not peanut butter crackers or a bowl of cereal (both are specialties of mine, I'll have you know).  So, it was taco night.

Silver Spoon Strawberry Risotto

I decided on Saturday to finally purchase The Silver Spoon, the storied Italian cookbook that was translated into English for the first time last year.  If nothing else, it's very pretty.

When I got home from the bookstore, I opened it up to browse some of the recipes.  The very first recipe I laid eyes on was for strawberry risotto, something that struck me as both strange and serendipitous; strange simply because I'd never encountered a savory dish featuring strawberries before, and serendipitous because I'd just purchased some beautiful Tristar strawberries from Fantasy Fruit Farm at the farmer's market in Tompkins Square Park (corner of Avenue A and East 7th Street, New York), which takes place every Sunday.  It was a clear sign that the risotto should be my first attempted Silver Spoon recipe, so this afternoon I headed over to my neighborhood supermarket to purchase the remaining ingredients for the dish. 

First, a couple of liberties I took: 

• I substituted short-grain brown rice for a standard white risotto rice.  I may have sacrificed some of the creaminess as a result, but brown rice is a bit more nutritious (it has more fiber and nutrients than white rice, and it has a lower glycemic index). 

• I used 3/4 of a cup fewer strawberries than the recipe called for because the flavor of the Tristars was so robust.  I also did not completely hull them; they were so ripe that removing the caps was all that was necessary.

• Rather than using the full 7 tablespoons of butter the recipe called for, I used only two and substituted extra virgin olive oil for the rest.

I also debated about the cup of light cream that finishes off the recipe.  It seemed a bit like cheating for the right texture, but admittedly I couldn't resist the idea of an entrée that managed to have both strawberries and cream in it.

The risotto took just over an hour to make from prep to dinner time.  Aside from the constant stirring required of any risotto, it was very little work for a meal with a surprisingly complex flavor.

I was more than happy with my first bite.

The flavor of the strawberries had mellowed considerably, making room for the savory ingredients, and the cream added a delightful richness that I'm sure I would have missed if I'd decided against using it.  As a result, each bite had a nice trajectory from tart to buttery to nutty.

The garnish is more of my Anise Hyssop.  It worked very well here, too.