Grilled leeks with basil vinaigrette and grilled Mint Creek Farms ham steak

Here's another meal from the farmer's market. This is a fairly simple dish, so it was a good week night meal. For the leeks, just cut off the dark green parts, cut a slit, lengthwise, down the leeks, leaving a half inch intact near the base, and rinse the leeks. Braise in water with some bay leaves and peppercorns for about 15 minutes to soften them up. Remove the leeks, finish cutting them in half, and then grill for a few minutes on each side until they are slightly charred. Top the leeks with any vinaigrette and let sit for a few minutes to soak in the flavors. I made a vinaigrette from red wine vinegar, olive oil, basil, garlic, and mustard. While the leeks are marinating in the vinaigrette, grill the ham steaks for a couple minutes on each side. Since the ham is already smoked and cured, you only need to grill it long enough to warm them up and add grill marks. As with most other pork dishes I make, I finished them off with some fennel pollen.

My "Go-To" Pasta Dish

I probably make orechiette with rapini and sausage more than any other pasta dish. This is an easy dish to make, which may be why I turn to it so frequently, but it also has a really nice balance of flavors. Another nice thing about this dish is that you can leave the meat out without losing too much flavor, making it a nice option for vegetarians.

You can make this dish with regular supermarket brocolli, and it is quite good, but I prefer the more bitter rapini, or broccoli raab. This is a classic dish that appears on numerous restaurant menus and on this blog here and here. Because I make this dish so frequently, I have had the chance to tweak the recipe several times. The main difference between this dish and the last version that I posted is the addition of oven roasted tomatoes. In my opinion, the "brightness" and acidity of the tomatoes is a welcome addition to this dish. I've made this iteration of the dish three or four times and am pretty pleased with it, so I thought I should include a step-by-step on how to make it.

First, we'll start with the necessary ingredients. This recipe makes two large servings or four to five servings if it is served as the pasta course for a multi-course meal. If you gather and prep your ingredients ahead of time, assembly is a snap.

You will need 2 cups of dried orechiette, 1/4 cup walnuts (toasted), 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, 3 cloves of roughly chopped garlic, 2-3 oven roast Roman tomatoes, 1/2-3/4 bunch of rapini, 1 Italian sausage, 1-2 anchovy fillets, olive oil, and red wine or balsamic vinegar. You may also add 1/2 to 1 tsp of red pepper flakes if you want to add a little heat.

Start by bringing a pot of water to a rapid boil. Salt the water and blanche the rapini for a little over a minute.

Remove the rapini and rinse under cold water. Set the rapini aside and let it drain in a collander. Bring the water back to a boil and add the pasta (you can add a little oil to the water to reduce foaming in the pasta water). The pasta will be done in about 10 minutes, and you can use this time to finish the other ingredients. First, remove the sausage from the casing and break apart into small chunks.

Cook the sausage with 1 Tbsp of olive oil for 2 to 4 minutes over medium high heat. When the sausage has browned, drain on a paper towel, leaving the oil in the pan. Add the garlic, anchovy, and red pepper flakes to the pan and cook over medium until the garlic just begins to change color.

Once the garlic begins to turn golden brown, add the rapini and the oven roasted tomatoes. Before adding these ingredients, cut the rapini into 1 inch length, and cut the oven roasted tomato halves (you will have 4 to 6 of these halves) into quarters. (To make oven roasted tomatoes, just cut the roma tomatoes in half, length wise, toss with olive oil and salt, and roast in a 200F oven for about 8 hours).

Toss everything together and let the mixture cook for another couple minutes.

Next, you will need to add the walnuts. Make sure to toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan, toaster oven, or oven before using them. This brings out the flavor a bit. If you don't toast the walnuts, they can have a sort of stale flavor to them, so this step is key. Roughly chop the walnuts and then toss them in with everything else.

When the pasta is al dente, add it to the pan with all of the other ingredients along with 1/4 to 1/3 cup of the cooking water.

Toss everything together, then add the parmesan cheese, 1 Tbsp vinegar, and season with a pinch of freshly cracked black pepper.

Roasted chicken, carrots, spring onions, and blue potatoes

A lot of times, you hear cooks say a key to good cooking is to buy good ingredients, and try your best not to mess them up. This was one of those dinners. The farmers markets here in Chicago are in full swing, and just about everything I used in this dish except for the olive oil, butter, and lemons, came from either the local farmers market or the community garden. What I love about the farmers market is that when you buy something like a carrot, you have a huge variety to choose from. The same goes for just about every other vegetable or fruit, including the onions and potatoes I used in this dish. While roasted chicken and root vegetables are typically thought of as a fall or winter dish, the way I look at it, anything I get at the farmer's market is, by definition, seasonal cooking, and it tasted just as good on a warm summer evening as it would on a cold winter night.

Here's the recipe. It could not be more simple.

Brine the chicken (look up your favorite brine recipe online).

Remove from brine, pat dry, and let come to room temperature.

Season with salt and pepper, put a lemon wedge, herbs, and some smashed garlic cloves in the cavity.

Truss the chicken.

Toss the vegetables with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

In a 12 inch skillet, arrange the vegetables and place the chicken on top. Add a few lemon wedges to the skillet.

Drizzle a bit of olive oil over the chicken or place a couple pieces of butter on top of the chicken.

Roast in a 450 to 475F oven for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 400F and continue to roast until the chicken breast is 160F.

Remove the chicken and let it rest on the cutting board for at least 15 minutes.

In the meantime, toss the vegetables in the pan to glaze them, and add any herbs. I used a bit of dill, chives, garlic scapes, and parsley.

Golden beets with beet greens, farro, guanciale, garden herbs and lemon

Here's a recipe for a salad I made using some ingredients I picked up from the farmers market and the community garden this weekend. The main ingredients for this salad are farro and golden beets. I like to use golden beets for a dish like this because they are a little less sweet, so they don't overpower the other ingredients, and they won't stain every other element of the dish red, so the presentation will be nicer. Farro has a nice, nutty flavor that goes well with the beets.

RECIPE

1 cup farro

2-3 medium golden beets with greens

1/4 cup diced guanciale

2 cloves garlic

1/2 cup+1 Tbsp olive oil

1/4 cup lemon juice

2 tsp mustard

1 Tbsp chives, minced

1 tsp mint, chopped

1 tsp oregano, chopped

1 tsp tarragon, chopped

1 tsp dill, chopped

salt, pepper

Srubs the beets clean. Make a foil envelope for the beets, and roast with 1 Tbsp olive oil and salt and pepper. I roasted them for 1 hour at 400F, and I thought they could have used at least another 15 minutes in the oven. While the beets are roasting, remove the thick stems from the beet greens and thoroughly rinse them. Bring about 2 cups of water or chicken or vegetable stock to a boil and add the farro. Let the farro simmer over medium heat for 25 minutes (longer if not semi-pearled). Blanch the beet greens in heavily salted water for about 1 minute. Remove, and immediately rinse with cold water or place in an ice bath. Next, saute the cubed guanciale (about 1 cm cubes) over medium heat to crisp up and render some of the fat. Once the fat has begun to render, and one smashed garlic clove to the pan. Remove the crisped guanciale, and add the beat greens. Saute the greens in the rendered fat until they are tender. Season with salt and pepper.

To make the vinaigrette, whisk together the remaining olive oil, lemon juice, herbs, mustard, and a smashed garlic clove. Season with salt and pepper and remove the garlic cloves.

When the farro is done cooking, drain in a collander. When the beats are done (a knife should slide to the center with little resistance), peel and cut into 1/2 in dice. Combine all the ingredients while they are still warm so the farro and beets absorb more of the flavor from the vinaigretter. Chill or serve at room temperature. This can be made a few hours before serving.

If I make this again, I might try adding toasted almonds or feta to give the dish another dimension. A little bitterness from parsley would have been nice as well, but I was limited to the herbs that were growing in the garden around the corner and, sadly, no one planted parsley this year. I also might dial back the dill a little. Dill has a pretty assertive flavor that can dominate the other herbs in the dish.

Monkfish with grilled asparagus and romesco

Here is yet another dish from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. The recipe calls for baby leeks, but since those are hard to find, I went with asparagus instead. I used the leftover romesco sauce from the previous blog post, and then I pan roasted the monkfish with rosemary, thyme, and garlic. I bought the monkfish at Isaacson and Stein, where they just sell whole monkfish tails, and they leave it to the customer to actually fabricate the fish. Monkfish are really ugly, prehistoric looking creatures, and a giant fish doesn't really yield that much edible meat. Monkfish are almost all head and jaws connected to a tail that propels said head and jaws towards its pray. With most fish, you can fillet them fairly easily with a couple quick swipes of the knife down each side of the spine. Monkfish are not so simple. I have seen monkfish fabrication as a challenge on Top Chef before, but I had never actually taken apart a monk fish myself.

To prepare the monkfish, remove it from the fridge about 30 minutes before cooking to let it get to room temperature. Season with salt and pepper, and then sear over high heat in a pan with canola oil for a few minutes (after about 3 minutes check to see if a crust has formed). Add 2 tablespoons of butter turn the heat to medium (you don't want to burn the butter) and, once melted, tilt the pan and baste the monkfish as it is frying. Once one side is nicely browned, turn the monk fish, add a couple sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and garlic along with another tablespoon of butter. Continue to fry/baste for another 3 to 5 minutes until the fish is cooked through and a golden crust has formed on the other side of the fish.

Romesco sauce

Last week, we had a great dinner with friends at Mercat a la Planxa (definitely get the tasting menu if you go there), and, being a Spanish restaurant, romesco sauce made more than one appearance in our tasting menu. While I've made several variations of roasted red pepper sauces before, I had never actually made this classic sauce. It's pretty easy to make, and, as this dinner shows, it goes well with quite a few dishes. Here, I served it two ways: with asparagus topped with a fried egg, and with lamb shoulder chops.The lamb shoulder chops had been marinated in a vacuum sealed bag with some oil that had been infused with garlic, pepper, bay lead, rosemary and thyme. Both the lamb and the asparagus were cooked "a la plancha" on my big cast iron griddle.

You can look up several variations of romesco sauce online. Here's what I ended up making, based on the ingredients I had on hand.
RECIPE

2 red bell peppers

4 plum tomatoes

1/4 onion

2 piquillo peppers

1 ancho chile

4 garlic cloves

1T red wine vinegar

1T sherry vinegar

1/4 c olive oil

2-3 inches of a bagguette, crust removed, cubed, and toasted.

1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted

1 tsp paprika

salt, pepper to taste

Half and core the tomatoes and bell peppers. Cover the tomatoes, bell peppers, onion, and garlic with some a couple tablespoons of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast at 400F for an hour. Let cool and remove the skin from the tomatoes and peppers. Meanwhile, soak the ancho chile in warm water to rehydrate. Combine all the ingredients in a blender and season to taste with salt and pepper. Make sure to toast the almonds, otherwise the nutty flavor of the almonds (which is the thing that makes romesco sauce special) won't come through.