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.

Pea, fava bean, and shrimp salad with mint, chives, parsley, and lemon.

This is more or less a reproduction of one of the dishes we had at the Purple Pig a couple weeks ago...you know a restaurant is good when it inspires you to go home and recreate everything you ordered.

INGREDIENTS:

~ 20 Shrimp, peeled and deveined

~ 2 cups of peas (fresh if possible)

~1 cup of fava beans

2 Tbsp Mint, chiffonade

1 T Parsley, finely chopped

1 T Chives, finely chopped

Zest and juice from 2 lemons

Olive oil.

Salt

Steam the shrimp for about 3 to 4 minutes. Shell the fava beans and steam for about 2 to 3 minutes. After steaming the fava beans, they will be much easier to remove from their skins and perfectly cooked for this recipe. If you are using frozen peas, just thaw them out in some water. If you are able to get your hands on fresh, English peas, boil them in salted water for a little over a minute and then cool them down in an ice bath. You still want the peas to have a bit of a bite to them. Toss together all of the ingredients and season to taste with salt. This should be a very acidic dish, so add more lemon if necessary. The lemon will cause all the nice green stuff to discolor over time, so you don't want to assemble this more than an hour or two before serving. You should serve it cold, so give it around 30 minutes in the fridge before serving.

Spring menu

Earlier this week, we went to the Purple Pig (see a friend's review here), where we had a truly fantastic, seasonal meal full of ingredients like asparagus, peas, ramps, rock shrimp, and fava beans all dowsed in a healthy dose of lemon. That put me in the mode to do a few spring dishes, so, yesterday, we had a couple people over for a big spring dinner. Here's the menu: cannellini bean salad with grilled tuna and endives, a shaved asparagus and pecorino salad, confit pork belly with fennel pollen and spicy piquillo aioli, seared scallops with meuniere sauce, langoustines a la plancha with anchovy and caper butter, minted pea ravioli with shaved parmigiano-reggiano, mint, chives, chive blossoms, and truffle oil, heirloom potatoes roasted in duck fat with garlic confit and thyme, and lake trout, roasted whole with lemon, served with classic aioli and a roasted red pepper, piquillo, and miso sauce. We served it with the following wines, which I thought were all pretty good: 2007 Cellar Can Blau Montsant, 2007 Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi, and 2007 Domaine de la Villaudiere Sancerre. Yes, it was a lot of food.

We didn't get a picture of the cannellini bean salad, but you can get the recipe from an earlier post.

We got the asparagus salad idea from our meal at the Purple Pig. It's similar to a brussels sprout salad that we make a lot.

INGREDIENTS

1 bunch asparagus

1-2 lemons

Extra virgin olive oil (preferably Tuscan or something with nice grassy notes to it)

Pecorino-romano

Salt, pepper

Break off the ends of the asparagus stalks, slice thin, on a bias. To make slicing easier, keep the asparagus bound by the rubber band that it comes with. Since this is a raw preparation, you want to cut the asparagus as thin as possible so it won't be too tough. Use a mandoline if you have one.

Add the zest and juice from one to two lemons. Add about 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil along with about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of grated cheese. Season with salt and pepper. Add more olive oil and lemon juice if necessary. The amount of lemon to add depends on your preferences. This should have a very "bright" taste to it, so the juice from 1.5 to 2 lemons is probably best.

We got bits of pork belly from a butchering demonstration at Mado, which I'll post more on latter. The recipe comes from Ad-Hoc At Home, so I won't repeat it here. I served it with a spicy aioli that was left over from a yet to be posted meal.

The scallops, along with the langoustines, were impulse buys from our trip to Isaacson and Stein. They had big tubs full of big, fresh scallops and lovely, lovely langoustines. The scallops were given a quick salt water brine, then dried off in the fridge for a couple hours. I seared them over medium high heat in clarified butter. To make the meuniere sauce, simply add lemon juice, capers, and parsley to the butter and swirl around for a minute or so to emulsify the mixture a bit.The langoustines were definitely the highlight of the meal. We first had this dish at Prune, and we've bean wanting it again ever since.

INGREDIENTS

langoustines

butter

anchovies

capers

lemon

salt

Brine the langoustines in a salt water solution (2 cups water to 5 oz. salt) for 10 to 15 minutes and pat dry with paper toils.

Get a cast iron griddle piping hot. It may take up to 5 minutes. Turn your fan on, open the doors and windows. This will create a lot of smoke. Spread clarified butter over the cooking surface and immediately add the langoustines. If the smoke gets too out of control, turn the heat down a bit. Cook the shrimp for about 6 to 7 minutes on each side. While the langoustines are cooking, melt a stick of butter in a small sauce pan. Add about 10 anchovy fillets and crush in the pan with the melted butter until they break up into really small pieces. Add capers.

When the langoustines are done, place them on a serving plate, season with sea salt, pour half the butter over the top, and reserve the other half in a separate bowl for dipping. Serve lemon wedges on the side. Try to contain yourself.

We didn't get a picture of the ravioli. It is similar to this dish, but I added ricotta to the stuffing and took advantage of the community garden that has a bunch of blossoming chives right now.

For the fish, I just used this recipe, but I increased the cooking time to 50 minutes since this was one huge fish. It probably could have used another 10 minutes in the oven. I served it with a classic aioli and a red pepper sauce (you can find the recipe here). I really love this sauce. It goes great with grilled and roasted vegetables and meats and will probably be a staple of my summer cooking.

Salad with steak, soft cooked egg, and garlic croutons

We had a bit of steak left over from Tony's birthday lunch, so, rather than reheating it (I think that always ruins the texture) I sliced it thinly and used it in a salad. The salad was dressed with some olive oil from Liguria, and 15 year aged balsamic vinegar. In addition to the beef, it was topped with shaved parmesan, a soft cooked egg, and croutons made from a slightly stale baguette and some garlic oil.

Tony's birthday lunch

Sunday was Tony's birthday, so Abby and I had some family over for a birthday lunch. Since I've been experimenting with sous-vide lately, I was looking for any excuse to try something new out, and this provided the perfect opportunity. The menu included sous-vide New York strip steak, and I also made a great asparagus salad recipe from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. I just got this book, and absolutely love it, so I'll probably be posting a lot of creations from this book over the next few months.

We started the meal with some home made rilletes, warm, marinated olives, and Societe roquefort (this cheese is awesome).

For the first salad course, I put together a salad of prosciutto, arugula, and shaved parmesan. This dish is so simple, yet so good. As long as you use good ingredients, you can't go wrong. Just cover a plate with very thinly sliced prosciutto, toss some arugula with some nice extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, and kosher salt and put this on top of the prosciutto. Cover with shaved parmesan, and finish with another drizzle of olive oil.

The second salad course was a grilled asparagus dish with poached eggs and prosciutto. The eggs are lightly poached, so the yolk is still runny, and when you break them, they make a nice sauce for the asparagus.
The main course was garlic mashed potatoes with sous-vide NY strip steak. I cooked the steaks in a water bath at 135F for about 3 hours. The steaks were seasoned with salt and then I include one sprig of thyme, one sprig of rosemary, and some canola oil in the vacuum pack with each steak. I seared the steaks over high heat on a cast iron griddle for about 1 minute on each side. By the time we finished the salad courses, the steaks had been sitting for quite some time, and they weren't nearly as good as they were immediately after being seared. Next time, I'll make sure to serve these immediately after searing.
For dessert, we had carrot cupcakes from Alliance Bakery.

Grilled, stuffed avocado

We had purchased a few avocados to make guacamole for the Super Bowl last week and had a few extras sitting around. You can only have so much guacamole, so we turned the last one into a salad of sorts by grilling the avocado halves and stuffing them with a salad of hearts of palm, roasted corn, diced cucumber, tuna, cilantro, and lime juice. It's lightly dressed with cilantro oil. I'm not a huge fan of avocado unless it's in guacamole, but Abby said it was pretty good.

Tomato and mozzerella "sandwiches"

I made this as a first course for dinner the other night. It's more or less an insalata caprese, but with a little twist, given the ingredients I had on hand. The main components of the dish were slices of fresh mozzerella sandwiched between slices of red and yellow heirloom tomatos. Instead of seasoning the tomatos with kosher salt, I used some alder smoked sea salt to give the tomatos a hint of smokiness. To further up the savory element of the dish, I dressed the tomatos and mozzerella with some chive oil (using chives from the back porch garden) that was spiked with some anchovies. The result was a dressing that had a slight savory tone, like ceasar salad dressing. I topped it up with some nice aged balsamic vinegar from Modena.

Locally raised steak, smoked blue cheese, and arugula and tomato salad

This is a pretty straight forward meal that relies on the ingredients more than anything else. The center of the dish was a ribeye steak from a farm in Vermont. The steak was seasoned with salt and pepper, cooked rare, and then garnished with Tuscan olive oil and smoked blue cheese. The salad was arugula dressed with the same olive oil, lemon juice, and kosher salt. The tomatoes were seasoned with salt and pepper and left to sit for about 15 minutes, then topped with olive oil, sweet balsamic vinegar, and chives. I find that letting the salt sit on tomatoes for a while really improves the flavor.

Orange glazed pork belly with assorted greens

Staying with the local theme we've been on for the last couple weeks, this meal uses some salad greens from our local organic produce delivery and pork belly from Savenor's Vermont supplier.

I used this recipe and didn't bother making any changes, so just click through for the recipe. It takes a bit of time since you have to braise it, but the actual active prep time is fairly low.

Caprese

Here's a simple little snack I made with some nice local ingredients from Savenors. It's just organic cherry tomatoes, sliced thin, super fresh mozzerella from Fiore Di Nonno, a really good cheese maker based just up the street in Somerville, some nice thick, aged balsamic vinegar, Campo Corto olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little parsley. 

Fattoush

Fattoush is basically Lebanese panzanella. Rather than using an old baguette, fattoush is built around fried pieces of pita. I think the traditional ingredients include cucumber and tomato, but you can really add just about any vegetable you want. Abby and I had an amazing version of this salad at Oleana that included roasted eggplant, romanesco, pomegranate, and a bunch of other good stuff. For this version, I used a bunch of ingredients from this week's Boston Organics delivery. I also use pita chips instead of frying the pita myself.

INGREDIENTS
Dressing

• olive oil
• lemon juice (1/2 lemon)
• lemon zest
  
• mustard (1-2 tsp)
  
• salt, pepper

Base

• tahini
• Greek yogurt
• lemon juice (1/2 lemon)
  
• salt, pepper

Salad

• pea shoots
• 1/4-1/2 cup diced, roasted beets
• 1 green bell pepper,
• 1 apple
• 1-2 tomatoes, seeded and diced
• 1/4-1/3 cup carrots, diced
• 1/4 cup onion, diced
• 1/4 cup radish, diced
• 1 blood orange, cut into supremes
• parsley
• mint
• 1/8-1/4 cup olives, chopped
  
• feta
• salt, pepper
• sumac
• pita chips

Dice all of the vegetables into small, even pieces. Toss the veggies together, but leave the beets and the blood oranges separate. Tossing these together with everything else will just turn the whole thing pink. You also want to leave the pea shoots separate.

Mix up the lemon juice, zest, and mustard for the vinaigrette and add oil, stirring, until you get the taste you want. Season with salt and pepper.

Mix together the tahini and greek yogurt in a 1 to 4 ratio. For 1 T tahini and 4 T yogurt, add the juice of 1/4 to 1/2 lemon. Stir together, season with salt and pepper, and set aside.

Chop of parsley and mint and add to the vegetables. Toss the herbs and vegetables together with the vinnaigrette (reserve 1 T), and add some of the smaller pita chips. Season with salt, pepper, and sumac.

To plate, spread some of the yogurt mix around the bottom of the plate. You can sort of see this in the picture below.
Arrange a bed of larger pita chips on top of this base, and spoon some of the salad mix on top of this. As you are plating the salad, add the beets and blood oranges. Dress the pea shoots with the remaining vinaigrette and top the salad with the pea sheets and crumbled feta.

More home cookin' in the state of Washington

Abby, the Moys, and I were in town for a few days, so the reception dinner wasn't the only think I made. When it was just the Moys and Kinas, and not 100 guests, I was able to make a meal where I could focus on more than one dish. In addition to a simple grilled chicken, which I've made a few times this summer
I made a grilled corn salad with red onion, red bell peppers, mint, and lime
toasted orzo with artichoke hearts and almond slivers
and an appetizer of grilled toasts topped with a white bean and tuna bruscheta (I normally make this with anchovies).
For dessert, we had my mom's blackberry pie. We picked the blackberries for this from our front yard earlier that day.

Family Dinner in Boston

Last week, my sister had an art opening at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, and my mom and dad used that as an excuse to finally get out to the east coast after all of these years. With Laura, Mitch, Midori, Ariel, and my mom and dad in town along with Melissa, Dino and Aiden, it was, at times, a full house. We went out to restaurants a couple of times, but the last two nights that the Chicago branch of the family was in town, Dino and I split up cooking duties.

I decided to finally make something out of the Oleana cookbook that I have purchased several months ago. I went with the "Spoon Lamb," a braised lamb shoulder chop with a sauce of reduced braising liquid and pomegranate molasses, and smokey eggplant, a puree of eggplant seasoned with urfa chiles, smoked salt, and lemon, combined with greek yogurt and toasted pine nuts.
We had a shredded carrot salad with apricots and another salad with arugula, shaved fennel, blood oranges, and olives as side dishes.

Panzanella

Panzanella, or bread salad, is a great way to make a slightly stale baguette into something edible and tasty. I had the requisite main ingredient sitting around - a rock hard baguette that had been sitting on the kitchen table for almost a week - so I decided to give it a try. To make it, cut the bread into cubes and, if it is still soft, dry it out by sticking in the oven for a few minutes. Throw in whatever vegetables and herbs you have lying around and toss it all together. I uses a couple tomatoes, a yellow bell pepper, a roasted red pepper, half a cucumber, onions, some olives, capers, basil, parsley, and tuna packed in olive oil. I think that last ingredient is a bit untraditional, but it tasted good.You will also want to add olive oil and vinegar. I made a dressing of olive oil, mustard, orange muscat vinegar, oregano and garlic. For the amount I was making, I needed about 1/3 cup of dressing. You can also top the salad with freshly grated cheese. Let everything sit for at least an hour so the flavors mix and the bread soaks up a lot of the moisture. If the bread is hard enough to begin with, it will have this nice texture where it is soft on the outside from all the dressing and liquids from the vegetables, but still a bit crunchy in the middle.

Mesa menu

I often buy cookbooks, look at them, and, at most, cook one or two recipes from them. That's not to say that they are useless. They do, after all, provide a lot of great ideas, but still, it would be nice to use them a bit more. So, when I got my latest cookbook, the Mesa Grill cookbook, I figured a dinner party would be a nice way to knock out a lot of recipes at once. I was able to make an appetizer (corn pancakes with mango serrano crema), a soup (pumpkin soup with chipotle), an entree (spice rubbed pork tenderloin with bourbon ancho sauce and a smoky red pepper sauce), and a dessert (molten chocolate cake with dulce de leche). I also added a couple things of my own: an apple and manchego salad, cheddar and jalapeno polenta, and spicy garlic kale. Here are some pictures of the food.






A dinner party would not be complete without great company, and Eliana, Sebastian, Jon, Katrina (first picture below), Suzanna, William, Melissa, and Dino (second picture below), ably filled that role (they also all did a great job of bring some great wine to the table).

Wedding planning

In early September, Abby and I went to Chicago to go to a friends wedding and get some of our own wedding planning underway. We spent a day running around the city to meet with the photographer, check out a church, a bakery, the venue, and, finally, at the end of the day we went to the caterer's main kitchen for a tasting.

We tried out three salads. Here are two of them. I forgot to take a picture of the third one. We also tried a number of hors d'oeuvres, some good, some not so great. We think we'll go with the last salad pictured. Everyone liked the fresh berries in it, and the flower petals were a nice touch.
The salads were followed by three sample main courses. Fish, chicken, and beef. Surprisingly, the chicken was the best of the three. The fact that they used truffle butter in the chicken probably didn't hurt. I also liked the beef dish, the brussels sprouts in particular, but everyone else seemed to think that a lot of guests would not be as excited about them.




We finished off with a desert plate, which probably won't make an appearance at the wedding.

I don't think any of the dishes will show up on the wedding day menu in their current form, but that gives us a good excuse to go back for another tasting.

Heirlooms

Every week, a farmer's market comes to Harvard Square, and last week, one of the stands had a bunch of great looking heirloom tomatoes on sale. Here are two salads I made. The first is a caprese with basil, parsley, and chives from the herb garden on our back porch.


For the second salad, I combined a variety of different colored tomatoes with shallots, garlic, basil, parsley, salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Its a pretty simple salad that is only as good as the ingredients that you put into it.
This salad was part of a larger meal that I made when Gustavo was visiting our place for a couple of days. Below is penne with peppers and sausage. For this dish, start by making a simple tomato sauce with San Marzano tomatoes if they are available. While the tomato sauce is cooking, begin prepping the peppers. The finished product will look a lot better if you use a variety of different colored peppers. The key to making this dish good is to peel the outer membrane off of the peppers. Its a bit of a pain, but it really makes a big difference in the texture of the dish. I usually cut the peppers into quarters and then take the skin off with a vegetable peeler. Once the peppers are peeled, cut them into squares (about 2cm) and throw them in with the tomato sauce. Next, slice up a couple sweet Italian sausages and cook them separately with a bit of olive oil. It is easier to get nice thin slices if you partially freeze the sausages. If you put them in the freezer when you begin to make the tomato sauce them enough time to firm up. Add the sausages to the sauce when they are cooked and season the sauce with a pinch of red pepper flakes, salt, and balsamic vinegar. Add the vinegar a little bit at a time and stop once you can just begin to taste the vinegar in the sauce. Peppers, sausage, and vinegar is a classic combination, and the goal is to try to get a nice balance between all of those elements in this sauce. Be judicious with the vinegar, though, since too much will over power all of the other flavors. Let the sauce simmer for a little while to let the flavors mix, and then to finish the dish, spoon some of the sauce into a pan with some almost cooked penne (any shaped paste will work well) and cook the sauce and pasta for a minute or so. This last step helps the flavors of the sauce penetrate the pasta and is something that you should do with any pasta dish.

As a first course, I made a bunch of mussels. These are good, easy, and cheap. You can prepare mussels a million different ways. For this dish, I cooked up a lot of garlic with shallots, pancetta, and a generous portion of butter. After a few minutes, add a cup or so of white wine, bring that to a boil, throw in the mussels and cover. After a couple of minutes, the mussels are done. Season with some salt and pepper and garnish with parsley. Serve with bread to soak up all of the broth. That's all there is to it. It takes about 15 minutes to make and all the ingredients cost about $8.