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.

Paella meets risotto with beet salad

This dinner was a bit of a pantry raid. I didn't feel like going to the store, but we had some beets, radishes, and guanciale in the fridge and some shrimp and peas in the freezer. I started out thinking I would do a risotto with shrimp and peas, which is something I've made several times before, but then I realized that I had some guanciale in the fridge and a bunch of saffron in the pantry, so I decided to go a different route and make a "paella inspired" risotto. The result actually turned out pretty good.

RECIPE:

-3 to 4 oz. guanciale, diced into 0.5 cm squares (you can substitute pancetta or chorizo)

-1/2 white onion, fine dice

-3 cloves garlic, minced

-1/2 to 1 tsp saffron

-3 sprigs thyme

-1 cup arborio rice

-1/4 cup grate parmesan

-2 Tbsp creme freche

-1 cup peas

-6 jumbo shrimp, shells off and cut into 4 pieces (or an equivalent amount of smaller shrimp)

-salt, pepper

-1/8 to 1/4 cup white wine

Heat up 4 to 6 cups of chicken stock. Put the thyme sprigs in with the stock so that the cooking liquid becomes infused with the thyme flavor,

In a separate, medium sized pot, heat up a little bit of olive oil over medium high to high heat. Add the guanciale and cook until the fat has rendered and you are left with crispy little bits of guanciale. If the oil begins smoking, turn the heat down. Remove the guanciale and drain on paper towels.

Turn the heat down to medium and pour out any excess fat. You only want about 1 T in the pan. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are translucent. If the onions begin to brown, turn the heat down. After about 5 to 6 minutes, add the saffron and continue to cook for another minute or two. Add the rice and cook for another minute, stirring frequently to coat the rice.

Add the white wine, stirring constantly until the wine is absorbed, then begin adding chicken stock, 1.2 to 1 ladel full at a time. Keep stirring the risotto. After about 15 to 20 minutes, begin checking the rice. Keep adding the liquid and stirring until the risotto is done. You want to get the rice to a point where it still has some bite, but the interior is no longer chalky.

While you are cooking the rice, cook the shrimp. Since shrimp are usually previously frozen, they tend to be waterlogged, so to cook them properly, you will need to cook them in small batches in a screaming hot pan. The shrimp will give off a lot of water, cooling the pan down, and it will be difficult to get them to cook right if the pan is too crowded. You may end up stewing or steaming the shrimp instead of searing them, and they won't taste nearly as good. When the shrimp are nearly cooked, add a small pat of butter. You don't want to add the butter beforehand or it will scorch. Drain the shrimp on paper towels and sprinkle a pinch of salt over them.

Once the risotto is done, stir in the grated parmesan and creme freche. This gives the risotto a nice, creamy finish. Season to taste with salt and pepper and stir in the peas, guanciale, and shrimp. If the risotto is too thick, stir in a bit more stock. The risotto should be runny, and not have enough body to stand up on its own.

The recipe for the beat salad is a bit simpler: roast beats, peel and cube, toss with orange zest, some orange juice, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Add sliced radishes and pieces of orange. Chill for at least one hour. Serve at room temperature.

Chilled beet soup

This is a really simple, tasty recipe that would make a good starter for a summer meal.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 lb roasted beets
  
• 2 c unsweetened cranberrry juice
  
• 1 orange
  
• 1-2c greek yogurt
  
• salt, pepper
  

Roast the beats, peel and dice. Combine the beets with the cranberry juice, yogurt, and juice and zest from one orange. Blend together. You can add more beets or yogurt until you find the taste that you want. Season with salt and pepper, then strain through a fine mesh strainer to improve the texture. Chill in the fridge and garnish with mint and/or sour cream or mascarpone.

Beet soup

Wrap beets in foil and roast at 350F for 1 hour. Let cool, then peel and cut into chunks.
While the beets are cooling, cook roughly chopped red onion and ginger with butter and salt in a medium pan. I used 1 half of an onion and 1/2" of ginger for 8 small beets (about the size of a new potato). When the onions have softened (5 minutes), add the beets and enough chicken or vegetable stock to cover everything by almost an inch. Add part of an orange peel to the mixture and let simmer for about 30 minutes. Remove the orange peel and puree the mixture. Season to taste with coriander, orange juice and lemon juice. For the garnish, mix together soft goat cheese with a bit of sour cream in a food processor. For a more refined version of this soup, pass the pureed soup through a strainer a couple times. This will make the finished product thinner and smoother.

Blog post #100!

This weekend my blog passed a somewhat momentous milestone: 100 posts. It just so happened that Stefan wanted to have a dinner party over the weekend, and I volunteered to have it at my place. Only after the fact did I realize that I was almost at entry number 100. So, this dinner party provided the perfect way to recognize the moment.

The dinner party also gave Abby and I a chance to try out some of the new kitchen gadgets we got for our wedding. The entree for evening was smoked chicken breast with sweet potato gnocchi and roasted beets and brussels sprouts. We used a stovetop smoker that Anand and Sara gave us to make the chicken.
The smoker has a nice lid to it, but I had to replace it with foil in order to create room for all of the food inside. I smoked the chicken over relatively low heat for a little over an hour. You could tell the chicken had been smoked, but just barely. I've used this twice now and I am still trying to figure out how many woodchips to use, what heat to use, and how long to smoke something to really get some good smoke flavor.

For the gnocchi, we got to break in a nice stand mixer that some of Abby's relatives gave us. The base of the sweet potato gnocchi is a mix of roasted sweet potato passed through a ricer and ricotta cheese.

By the time we had the gnocchi dough mixed up, guests had started arriving, so we got to enlist some help in the kitchen. Here's Stefan with a batch of freshly cut gnocchi (and a smashing apron)...
...and here's Venice getting ready to boil the gnocchi.
Jon and Katrina put together a nice spread of cheese, fruit, and salami to hold us over while we finished cooking.
Here are a couple more pictures from the evening.

Corduroy

Corduroy is one of those restaurants that I heard about fairly often back when I was living in DC. I guess it used to be located in some out of the way, hard to find spot, so, being a bit off the map, it was never one of the first places I would think of when I wanted to go out for a nice dinner. Since I've left DC, Corduroy has moved into a new location. Although, being located next to the convention center, it still isn't in a place that you would normally go for an evening out in DC. That said, this place is a good destination in itself. The menu is a bit pricey, and the dining room is fairly formal (if you don't have a jacket, please, at least wear a tie), but the food is top notch. I thought it was just as good, if not better, than any of the big name restaurants Abby and I ate at earlier in the summer in New York. More importantly, though, Abby's friend, Natsu, recently married the chef and owner of the restaurant, so we just had to check the place out.

I'm never quite sure how to describe restaurants that, while high end, don't really fall into a well defined category (i.e. French, Italian, seafood, etc.) I guess I would say that this is classically prepared food that uses local, seasonal ingredients. There's nothing cutting edge here. Just great ingredients that are treated really well. The flavors were really clean and I liked the presentation.

For the starter, I had a salad of goat cheese, roasted beets and carrots.
Abby started with lobster tail.
I ordered crispy fluke with warm potato salad for the main course while Abby had Muscovy duck with fig sauce.

Christmas dinner

This year's Christmas gathering was a little smaller than usual with Laura, Mitch, and Midori all back in Chicago. Normally, Laura and I do most of the kitchen work on holidays, but this year I put my mom to work as sous chef. On Christmas day, my parents had their friends, the Mike and Liza Morell over for dinner. I don't remember my parents being big wine connoisseurs when I was back home, but I suspect those to may have something to do with the increasing quality of the wine that they consumer. One of their sons is a vintner and the other a chef, so its a real foodie family.

The Christmas menu included flank steak stuffed with olives, pine nuts, and currants, braised escarole with fried garbanzos and garlic chips, mustard crusted, roasted fingerling potatoes, and a beet salad with arugula and goat cheese. The first two dishes come from a Tom Douglas cookbook that I got for Christmas a couple years ago. An online recipe can be found here. A couple notes about the recipe: unless you like things very rare, cook for a couple of extra minutes. As you can see from the picture above, it's pretty much black and blue in the middle. I like it this way, but I suspect most people don't. Also, frying the garbanzo beans is a bit of a pain in the ass if you don't have deep fryer. One approach might be to toss the garbanzos in olive oil and salt and than place on a cookie sheet under a broiler, shaking frequently, until they crisp up. I'll try this if I ever make the dish again. The potato recipe was pretty good, but the crust burns easily and it is a bit heavy on the mustard, so you probably need a bit less mustard and you need to toss the potatoes around more than the recipe recommends. The beet salad was the one orginal thing that I made for this meal. Or, at least, I wasn't going off of someone else's recipe. Its really simple, and quite tasty. Here's the recipe if you want to try it at home.

red beets (I think I used two large beets above)
orange (juice and zest...remember to zest before you juice)
taragon (optional)
good quality olive oil
red wine vinegar
kosher salt
coarsely ground pepper
arugula
goat cheese

Cut the tops off of the beets, clean them off, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper and wrap them in foil. Cook in the oven at 375F until soft. This should take an hour or so. After an hour, you can unwrap the foil a bit and poke the beets with a pairing knife. When its done, the knife will slide in with minimal resistance. It could take as long as two hours....I really can't remember.

When the beets are done, let them cool a bit, then rub off the skin and dice to the desired size. To rub off the skin, just use a big wad of paper towels. This will allow you to get going while the beets are still hot and will keep you from staining your hands red.

In a bowl, toss together the beets with about two tablespoons of roughly chopped tarragon, the juice from half of an orange, a teaspoon of orange zest, and a dash or red wine vinegar and olive oil. In a separate bowl, whisk together about one tablespoon of the juice from the other half of the orange, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar and a bit of olive oil (start with one or two tablespoons and adjust to taste), and salt and pepper. Toss this vinaigrette with the arugula (only use a little bit, you don't want to drench the salad) and arrange it on a serving plate with the beets and goat cheese.

You can make the beets well ahead of time, and at the last minute, dress the greens and combine the ingredients.