Seared Salmon with Pea Pesto and Celery Root Puree

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Chelsea

If you are a certain type of food blogger, one who is interested in trends of the food and restaurant world, not just the backdrop and vintage props Pinterest tells us are all the rage this month, then you care about and try to integrate sustainability, and seasonality, and local foods into your cooking. You are all about ramps and rhubarb in the spring, you plan zucchini dishes for late summer and early autumn when that crop is glutted. You wouldn’t dream of presenting a heavy stew or cream-based soup unless the weather has been cold. You let the year and its turning rule your kitchen.

I try to be that kind of blogger. I try to keep my food in tune with the seasons and plan vegetable dishes according not just to what appears at my farmers’ market, but to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone is in Southern California, so not everyone has the same plethora of options I do. I even try to plan for holidays, and get appropriate dishes out there ahead of time (sometimes barely) in case you want to make them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

But here’s the thing: I’m also ruled by my stomach. Sometimes I don’t want zucchini. Sometimes I would rather roast than grill. Sometimes there’s a combination I dream up that sounds so good I don’t want to wait until the “right” time to cook it and present it to you. That’s the case this week. This is, if I were being a responsible food person, without question a spring dish. The peas could be fresh out of the pod, the dill is all about feathery fronds and new shoots. I cook the salmon so the skin is crispy, then balance the flesh side atop lemon slices in the pan to keep it moist and tender, all freshness and brightness. The celery roots, on the other hand, are the last dregs of winter, knobbly and earthy and strange, adding pale richness to complement the salmon and tame the sprightly sharpness of the pesto.

But when I thought of it – a nutty pesto of peas and walnuts, seasoned with dill instead of basil or mint and almost on the verge of being too salty, sitting atop a piece of moist, pink salmon with crisp skin, all surrounded by the creamy celery-scented puree, I couldn’t wait half a year. It had to happen now.

There’s not much to say about this dish, story-wise. No childhood memory or restaurant meal inspired it. I just thought the combination sounded good, and it was. The pesto, in particular, though admittedly not the most appealing shade of green, is a surprising and intriguing punch. Dill works very well with peas as well as lemon, and the tannic bitterness of toasted walnuts tames the sweetness of the peas enough to keep them in the savory realm.

Note: the puree does take the longest time to create, since the starchy roots can take up to half an hour to soften. If you’re very efficient, you’ll be able to prep the remainder of the components while the hunks of celery root are simmering. I am not all that efficient, so I made the pesto first just in case. You know you best, so plan accordingly.

Seared Salmon with Pea Pesto and Celery Root Puree

45-50 minutes prep and cook time

Serves 4

For celery root puree:

2 medium celery roots, any attached stalks removed, peeled and chopped into small chunks

1-2 cups milk

1 clove garlic, skin removed

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper (use white pepper if you don’t want flecks)

6 ounces mascarpone cheese, at room temperature

For pea pesto:

1 cup (4 ounces) peas, fresh or frozen

⅓ cup walnut pieces

1 clove garlic, skin removed

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2-3 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

½ teaspoon salt (or to taste)

¼ teaspoon fresh black pepper (or to taste)

¼ cup olive oil

For salmon:

4 filets of salmon, 4-6 ounces each

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon fresh black pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 lemon, cut into ¼ inch slices

To make the celery root puree, place the chunks of chopped celery root in a medium pot and pour in enough milk just to cover. Add salt and pepper and toss in the garlic clove. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then immediately turn down the heat, and cook at a bare simmer until celery root pieces are fork tender, 20-30 minutes.
Once roots are tender, remove the pot from the heat, add the mascarpone cheese, and let sit for 5-10 minutes just to cool. Use an immersion blender or a regular blender (be VERY careful with the hot liquid) to blend to a smooth puree.
While the celery root chunks are simmering, remove the salmon from the fridge and its packaging and sprinkle it with the ½ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Then set it aside. We want it to come up to room temperature so it cooks evenly.
To make the pea pesto, either blanch your fresh peas by dropping them into boiling water for 1-2 minutes before a quick drain, or defrost your peas if they are frozen.
Toast the walnut pieces in a dry pan just until they smell roasty and are slightly darker brown. Let them cool, then toss them into a food processor with the garlic and whir these together into damp crumbs. Add in the dill and whir again to break up the fronds.
Dump the cooled peas into the processor and pulse at 2-second intervals 3-4 times to create a chunky, clumpy mixture that is not quite a paste.
Finally, add the lemon juice, salt, pepper, and olive oil, and pulse again in 2-second intervals until you have a thick, barely emulsified paste. You want this to be spoonable, not pourable, so keep your eye on the texture.
When you are ready to cook the salmon, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat until the oil is rippling and shimmering in the heat. Carefully add the salmon skin-side down (oil will likely spatter a bit in excitement when you do, so stand back!), and let it cook undisturbed for 5 minutes. Really! Don’t mess with it!
After 5 minutes, top each salmon piece with 2-3 lemon slices and carefully flip over so that the lemon slices, not the flesh of the salmon, are in contact with the pan. Again, this may cause some spattering of the oil, so be careful. Let the salmon cook atop the lemon slices for another 2-3 minutes, or until just done in the center.
To serve, pour ⅓–½ cup celery root puree into the base of a small plate or a shallow bowl. Place a piece of salmon skin-side up atop in the center of the pool of puree (leave the lemon slices in the skillet, or serve one off to the side if desired). Top the salmon with 1-2 tablespoons of the pea pesto, and serve immediately.

Chicken miso meatballs

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Chelsea

…and then it was a week later, not just a few days. That’s the way summer is sometimes, isn’t it? And there’s about to be another hiatus as I travel to Oregon for our annual visitation.

We are now officially half a year through this meatball exploration. I like assigning myself these year-long projects because they give me plenty of opportunities to experiment, and when I emerge, breathless, come December, I feel I’ve attained (sometimes tenuous) mastery over the subject at hand.

A year-long food project can present challenges, though. The chief difficulty, it seems to me, is the bald truth that single food types don’t often translate well through the seasons. A sweet potato project, as delicious as that might sound, would not be as welcome in July as it would in November. Meatballs, similarly, seem most suited for cooler months: draped with sauce, topped or wedged beside or squashed between bread and cheese, they are a heavy prospect.

What is needed, then, as this month grows more and more sultry, is a summer-soaked meatball: light on the stomach, feathery in texture, heavy only in flavor. Conveniently, this meatball dish delivers not just on flavorful meatballs that didn’t leave us feeling meatball-shaped, but it takes into account and makes gratuitous use of that most prolific and dreaded of summer vegetables: zucchini. If you have a garden, chances are you’re growing zucchini. And as you know, it’s getting to be the season when you’ve given loaves of zucchini bread to everyone you can think of, jammed a few in your freezer for good measure, stuffed and baked a few of the baseball bat sized specimens that escaped your notice for a few weeks, and the thing just keeps spitting out squashes. This dinner takes at least two more off your hands by offering them sliced into thin strands, barely cooked, and woven into a tangle of soba noodles.

For the meatballs themselves I went in an Asian direction, inspired mostly by pot stickers, one of my favorite indulgent snack foods, but in part by the container of miso paste hanging out in the back of my refrigerator. The aggressive saltiness of the paste means you don’t have to add a tremendous amount of additional seasoning to the meatballs, but as long as you are judicious, it doesn’t overwhelm the classic, welcome pairing of ginger and garlic. There’s lemongrass here too, for some fragrance and brightness, its persistent woody fibers tamed and made entirely edible after a run-in with a microplane.

The meatballs cook in a simple broth flavored with more ginger and lemongrass – which conveniently helps you use up those stalks after you’ve grated down the bulb end – and means you can serve this like a pasta, with just a bit of flavorful sauce to moisten the noodles, or, my preference, enough broth to make it almost like a soup, with the meatballs all but bobbing. Beautifully, the meatballs, the noodles, and the broth taste just as good at room temperature as they do just off the stove, in case you, in the midst of summer, are boiling quite enough on your own.

Chicken Miso Meatballs with Soba and Zucchini Noodles

Serves 3-4

For meatballs:

2 tablespoons red miso paste

1 egg

1 lb. ground chicken (dark meat preferred)

1 tablespoon grated lemongrass bulb (remove the outermost layer first, then use a microplane or a zester)

1 tablespoon grated fresh garlic (about 4 cloves)

1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger (easiest if frozen first)

¼ cup finely chopped fresh cilantro

3 tablespoons finely chopped green onion, dark and light green parts only

¼ teaspoon black pepper

½ tablespoon fish sauce

3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil

For sauce:

3 cups low sodium chicken broth

3 lemongrass bulbs, smashed with the back of a knife (you can certainly use the one you grated from earlier)

knuckle of fresh ginger (about 2 tablespoons)

1-2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce (if you are gluten-free, be sure to check the label – most soy sauce contains wheat)

For noodles:

2 bundles soba noodles (200 grams or about 7 ounces)

2 medium zucchini

2 teaspoons sesame oil

Toasted sesame seeds and sprigs of cilantro, optional

In a large bowl, whisk together the egg and miso paste. The goal here is to break up the miso a bit for easier integration with the chicken.
Add the ground chicken, lemongrass, garlic, ginger, cilantro, green onion, black pepper, and fish sauce to the egg and miso. Using your fingertips, lightly mix and work the seasonings into the ground chicken until evenly distributed.
Heat a teaspoon of the olive or vegetable oil in a large, deep skillet over medium high heat. Scoop up about a teaspoon of the meatball mixture, press it into a small patty, and fry it about a minute on each side until cooked through, then taste for seasoning and adjust for the rest of the mixture if needed.
Heat the remaining olive or vegetable oil in the skillet over medium high heat. While it warms, use a tablespoon and moist hands to make small meatballs. They will be very soft – don’t worry about making them perfectly round. As you make each tablespoon-sized meatball, set it aside on a clean plate. You should have enough mixture for 18-20 meatballs.
Carefully place meatballs in the skillet, taking care they do not touch. You will likely need to fry them in batches. Brown them on all sides (about 2 minutes per side), then remove to a clean plate. Repeat with a new batch of meatballs until all are browned.
Your skillet should now have a layer of deeply browned bits and drippings stuck to the bottom. This is called fond and it is lush with flavor. Add the 3 cups of chicken broth directly to this residue in the pan and use a whisk to scrape up and incorporate the fond into the liquid. Toss in the smashed lemongrass bulbs and the knob of fresh ginger, then bring to a simmer.
When the liquid reaches a simmer, taste for seasoning. If it needs salt, add the 1-2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Keep in mind the flavors will concentrate a bit as cooking continues. Add all of the meatballs back into the broth mixture. Try to keep them in a single layer, but it’s okay if they bump up against each other now. Clap on the lid, reduce the heat to medium, and simmer for 15-20 minutes, basting and turning the meatballs occasionally.
While the meatballs simmer, make the noodles. Draw a y-shaped peeler along the zucchini lengthwise repeatedly to cut it into long, thin strips. Stack up 5 or 6 of these strips at a time and, very carefully, cut them into thin “noodles” with a sharp knife (see photos above for reference). Set aside.
Cook the soba noodles in boiling salted water according to package directions. About 30 seconds before you are ready to drain them, toss in the zucchini noodles and stir gently. Drain and rinse as instructed.
In the same pot you used for the noodles, heat the 2 teaspoons of sesame oil over medium-low heat. Add the drained noodles back in and toss gently to evenly coat them with the oil and to be sure the zucchini is well distributed, not just clumped up by itself. Keep warm until the meatballs are ready.
To plate, coil up a tangle of soba and zucchini noodles in a shallow bowl. Top with meatballs – 5 per person is about right – and ladle on about ½ cup of broth for a soupy presentation (my preference), or 3-4 tablespoons of broth for a more pasta-like assembly. Add a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds or sprig of cilantro if desired, and serve hot or warm.

Spicy Carrot and Radish Herb Salad

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Chelsea

It’s dangerously easy to throw some greens into a bowl and crunch through them, but I think this is the kind of preparation that makes people think about salads as boring to make and to eat. With summer in gear and a series of weddings and reunions to attend within the next month or two, I find myself brainstorming salads creative and intriguing enough to hold my interest, so I can more easily convince myself to make choices that keep me ~~responsible~~ ~~healthy~~ fitting into my summer wardrobe. The easiest way of making a salad more exciting, it seems to me (besides just loading it up with cheese and some crisped pork product), is to take ingredients not usually used in a salad and jamming them in there anyway, lettuce be damned. For me, this generally takes the form of whatever dish I’ve been craving, transformed into something you can add an acidic vinaigrette and maybe a few crumbles of cheese to, toasting up a hunk of bread, and calling it dinner.

This particular salad has two geneses. Lately I’ve been craving banh mi, with all its freshness and brightness, but I haven’t wanted to go through the whole production of making all the ingredients myself (which I’d insist upon, because I’m such a responsible foodie stubborn). Rather, I convinced myself, I wanted a salad inspired by a banh mi sandwich. What this meant was a collection of fresh and pickled vegetables, with some brightness from soft green herbs and some heat from jalapeño slices. I dithered over the pickled part, reluctant to devote multiple days to preparing for a simple salad, until I remembered a grain salad my friend S. exalted about a few years ago featuring lightly pickled carrot slices, along with some jalapeño and mint. Wheels turned.

What we have here, then, is a salad that announces its summery freshness through bright, grassy herbs and crunchy cucumber, but still clings to the mild crispness of spring with ribbons of carrots and impossibly thin discs of radish. I find herb salads can get almost medicinal on the tongue, so a handful or two of baby greens tempers the sharpness of the herbs and the pucker of the vegetables after a 2 hour lemon juice bath, and brings this closer to what we usually think of as a salad. You could use any combination of greenery, but lately I’ve been obsessing over the “power to the greens” package from Trader Joe’s – baby chard, kale, and spinach, all tender enough that no stem removal is necessary. Add jalapeños, which I’ve put through the pickling process but you can certainly leave fresh, and you have a salad that pairs happily with almost anything.

Serving suggestions: I can see this making a perfect base for grilled steak or salmon, with or without the addition of some tangy crumbles of goat cheese. I risked all to have it as a side for last week’s crab and shrimp balls, and though there’s a certain digestive peril to the fried + spicy pairing, hey, that’s what alka-seltzer is for. You could even force this back to its banh mi inspiration roots and stuff it inside a baguette or maybe a pita, with or without a protein accompaniment. In all cases, I’d recommend something sparkling to drink alongside – maybe a crisp prosecco or a hefeweizen with a thick wedge of citrus, or, if you prefer to go alcohol-free, a frosted glass of ginger beer with lime, for an intriguing contrasting spice.

Spicy Carrot and Radish Herb Salad

Serves 2-3 as a side salad

1 cup carrot ribbons (from 3-4 small carrots)

1 cup thinly sliced radish discs (from 5-6 radishes)

8-10 thin slices of jalapeño cut on the bias

3-6 tablespoons lemon juice (see options below)

2-4 tablespoons olive oil (see options below)

salt and pepper to taste

1 tablespoon capers

⅓ – ½ cup thin slices of seedless cucumber, cut on the bias

¼ cup cilantro leaves plucked from their stems

¼ cup mint leaves, torn if large, plucked from their stems

¼ cup parsley leaves plucked from their stems

2 tablespoons tender, pale green celery leaves, plucked from their stems, optional

1 cup mixed baby greens

Prepare carrots, radishes, and jalapeño. To make the carrot ribbons, peel carrots, then continue shaving off long pieces with your peeler from one side only. When the carrot gets concave and it’s difficult to make complete ribbons, flip it over and begin the shaving process again. Slice the radishes and jalapeños as thinly as you can or, if you are fancy, use a mandolin slicer (watch your fingers!).
For a quite spicy salad: In a large bowl, whisk together 3 tablespoons of lemon juice with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the carrots, radishes, and jalapeños, toss gently to distribute, and allow them to marinate for about 2 hours. They will soften, pickle slightly, and the vegetables and dressing will take on the spice of the jalapeños.
After 2 hours and just before serving, add the capers, cucumbers, herb leaves, celery leaves (if using), and mixed baby greens to the bowl and toss lightly to combine. Lift out with clean fingers or tongs, let excess dressing drip off a bit, and position on serving plates.
For a moderately spicy salad: In a large bowl, whisk together 3 tablespoons of lemon juice with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the carrots, radishes, and jalapeños and allow them to marinate for about 2 hours. They will soften, pickle slightly, and the vegetables and dressing will take on the spice of the jalapeños.
After 2 hours and just before serving, lift the lightly pickled carrots, radishes, and jalapeños out of the bowl and set them aside for a moment on a paper towel. Discard the remaining liquid in the bowl and wipe clean.
In the clean bowl, whisk together the remaining 3 tablespoons lemon juice and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the vegetables back in, then gently toss with the capers, cucumbers, herb leaves, celery leaves (if using), and mixed baby greens. Lift out with clean fingers or tongs, let excess dressing drip off a bit, and position on serving plates.
For a mildly spicy salad: In a large bowl, whisk together 3 tablespoons of lemon juice with 2 tablespoon of olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the carrots and radishes and toss gently to distribute. In another, smaller bowl, combine the jalapeño slices with 1 tablespoon lemon juice and a bit of salt and pepper. Allow all vegetables to marinate for about 2 hours. They will soften and pickle slightly, but the spice will not infiltrate the carrots and radishes as in the above preparations.
After 2 hours and just before serving, add the capers, cucumbers, herb leaves, celery leaves (if using), and mixed baby greens to the bowl with the carrots and radishes and toss lightly to combine. Drain the lightly pickled jalapeños from their lemon juice bath and add them to the salad as well, tossing gently again to combine. Lift out with clean fingers or tongs, let excess dressing drip off a bit, and position on serving plates.
Serve immediately – salad left in its dressing wilts quickly and loses its crisp appeal.

Caprese Meatballs

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Chelsea

You may have noticed there was no recipe post on Monday. I could, were I a bit less honest, have sold you on the idea that this was related to the holiday weekend, or me traveling, or some such minor fabrication. But I don’t have a great poker face, so I’ll admit it was in fact because I’ve been feeling a bit of whatever the cook’s version of writer’s block might be called. I had cloudy ideas of things I could cook, I just didn’t really feel like figuring them out.

Then I went to a wedding in Sacramento on Sunday, and saw a friend I realized I’ve known for over a decade, despite last seeing him something like seven or eight years ago. As we caught up, he told me he’d had to stop reading this blog because it always made him hungry, and licking his computer screen seemed like a bad idea. Despite the concerning image this conjured, it tripped something in my brain. Making you hungry is just what I’m after! That means – at least in his case – this blog is doing its job.

Thereafter, the block was broken. On the drive back to Los Angeles (only while I was a passenger, of course), I kept having to text myself food ideas. One was these meatballs, which I’m posting off-schedule because I have to get them in while it’s still May! I know you aren’t reading this, J., but I hope you would want to eat them anyway, since it’s your fault thanks to you that they came to be.

Previous to my little block, my sister and I had a rapid-fire email exchange of meatball ideas. One of her suggestions – a bruschetta meatball – eventually morphed into what I came up with here: a nod to a caprese salad in a moment when the juicy, swollen garden-ripe tomatoes of your dreams are far from ready. A beef meatball shot through with sundried tomato chunks, ribbons of basil, and roasted garlic. Seared and then simmered in a balsamic vinegar and red wine sauce. And then, the pay-off: the glorious goo of melted mozzarella cheese oozing out from the inside. We snuggled them down in a pillow of soft polenta and gobbled them up before the cheese inside had time to cool.

Though I prefer these meatballs piping hot with a molten center of oozing cheese, they are also tasty as part of a sandwich or an antipasti platter. In fact, they basically are the platter – tomato, herbs, cheese, and meat already included. They just need a drizzle of olive oil, maybe a few torn leaves of fresh basil or parsley, and a glass of wine to complete the picture.

A word: as you’ll see from the procedure, these are delicate little beasts. I made mine without the egg I’ve added to the ingredient list here, and half of my meatballs were oozing cheese before they completed their simmer. They were still good, but didn’t have the melty surprise factor I was hoping for. The addition of egg should make the meat and crumbs bind more securely. Still, though, be gentle as you work with these, and be doubly triply sure the cheese is completely enclosed inside the meat mixture before you introduce them to the heat.

Caprese Meatballs

Makes 10-12 large meatballs

For meatballs:

4 cloves garlic + a splash of olive oil

½ cup fresh bread crumbs

½ cup milk or cream

½ cup oil-packed sundried tomatoes, well drained

1 cup loosely packed basil leaves

1 tablespoon finely chopped chives – I like to use my kitchen scissors

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

12 ounces (3/4 lb.) ground beef, at least 15% fat

1 egg, beaten

10-12 room temperature miniature mozzarella balls, or 10-12 small cubes of fresh mozzarella cheese

3 tablespoons olive oil

For sauce:

Meatball drippings

1 tablespoon flour

1 ½ cups beef broth or chicken broth

1 cup dry red wine

¼ cup balsamic vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

1-2 teaspoons brown sugar or honey, optional

To serve:

Soft polenta, cooked according to package directions with water, milk, or broth

A few sprigs of basil for presentation, if desired

Place garlic and splash of olive oil in a small oven-safe dish. Cover with aluminum foil and roast at 300F for 20-25 minutes, until garlic cloves are soft and fragrant inside their skins. When cool enough to handle, remove and discard the skins.
Once you’ve ground your fresh bread crumbs in the food processor, combine them with the milk or cream in a small bowl and let sit for 10 minutes or so to soak.
In the belly of the food processor, combine the sundried tomatoes, basil, cooled and peeled garlic cloves, and chives. Pulse at 3 seconds intervals until all ingredients are very finely chopped. They won’t quite form a paste because there’s no liquid in the mix, but they should all be in very small pieces for easy meatball integration.
Dump the tomato and herb mixture into a mixing bowl. Drain the bread crumbs by squeezing them out with your hands, then add the crumbs to the tomato and herb mixture. Add the salt, pepper, ground beef, and egg, and use your fingertips to lightly combine into a fairly homogenous mixture.
(If you want to check for seasoning at this point, heat a very small puddle of olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat and drop in a teaspoon or two of the meat mixture. Let it cook, then taste. Adjust salt and pepper as needed.)
When you are ready to form the meatballs, flatten about 2 tablespoons of the meat mixture in your hand, then enclose it around one of the room temperature mozzarella balls. It’s important for the cheese to be room temperature because otherwise it might not melt completely inside the meatball during the simmer. Be sure the cheese is completely sealed inside the meat layer; structural integrity is important! Repeat until meat mixture is used up, setting each meatball on a plate once formed.
Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Gently add the meatballs in a single layer and allow them to sear undisturbed for about 2 minutes per side. When nicely browned on all (or at least most) sides, remove to a clean plate while you make the sauce.
Reduce the heat on the skillet to medium and sprinkle 1 tablespoon of flour over the remaining oil and meatball drippings already in the pan. Whisk the flour into the drippings and let cook for a minute or two into a soft golden smear.
Slowly add the broth, whisking continuously to ensure no lumps form, then add the red wine and the balsamic. Cook, whisking occasionally, until the liquid reaches a simmer. Simmer for 5-10 minutes, turning the heat down if needed. The sauce will take on a velvety appearance and thicken slightly. Now give it a taste, and season with salt and pepper as needed. If it is too acidic for you, add 1-2 teaspoons brown sugar or honey, but remember it will be less intense once ladled over meatballs and polenta.
When the sauce is velvety and slightly thickened, add the meatballs back in. Be gentle! We don’t want them to crack open.
Simmer the meatballs in the sauce, basting often (but not flipping – again, structural integrity!), for 15 minutes. Serve immediately over soft polenta with a spoonful or two of sauce.

Green bean and roasted red potato salad with blue cheese

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Chelsea

As buried in pages as I am, it’s difficult to believe that I’m only one week away from “summer.” Well, four days of class and about 120 mixed papers and exams. This is difficult to bear – something about this semester has been more burdensome than usual. It’s hard to know how to feel when there is so little time but so much work between me and those glorious two and a half months of no work but also no paycheck.

As if matching my own cloudy-with-a-chance-of-vacation feeling, our weather lately has taken turns back and forth between what looks like summer and what, for here, passes as wintry. Typically June mornings in Southern California are overcast such that they even have their own nickname: June gloom. We’ve hit this a trifle early, it would seem, with the last week sporting what my officemate helpfully titled “May gray,” and temperatures barely grazing 70F. This is, it would seem, an uncertain entree to summer.

Speaking of entrees, let’s talk food. Specifically, let’s talk potato salad. It’s not summer just yet, so it’s a little soon to dive into a platter of mayonnaise-robed spuds shot through with crisp cubes of onion and pickle. But because I surely am not the only one longing for everything a good potato salad represents, this adaptation from The Bon Appétit Cookbook is a perfect compromise. Here, roasted potatoes provide warmth and comfort, all caramelized edges and creamy softness, but a sharp, tangy mustard vinaigrette and crisp-tender green beans push the dish salad-ward.

To fill my yen for green vegetables, I’ve doubled the amount of green beans and reduced the quantity of oil from the original. I’ve also eliminated walnuts and changed up the herbs to suit my fancy, and gone with whole grain rather than dijon mustard, because I like the tart pop of the little seeds. This can be eaten at room temperature as well as slightly warm, but because a generous scattering of blue cheese adds a creaminess and funk to the party, you don’t want things too heated, lest melting commence.

This is the kind of dish that contents me as an entree. I suspect it would happily welcome a handful of crisp crumbled prosciutto or diced hard salami, if you want a little meaty component. If you’re treating it as a side dish, I highly recommend sausages of any variety to round out the plate, or a nicely roasted or grilled pork tenderloin.

As most things are, this was just as good on day two heated up just enough to take the chill off, and topped with a fried egg still runny enough in the yolk to offer a velvet golden cascade that turned the salad into something more like a hash, my own ideal of comfort food. It’s the very thing you need, when you know summer is coming but you can’t quite see the light yet.

Green Bean and Roasted Red Potato Salad with Blue Cheese

Adapted from The Bon Appétit Cookbook

Serves 6 as a side dish

For dressing:

¼ cup whole grain mustard

3 tablespoons white wine vinegar

½ cup olive oil

3 tablespoons finely minced chives

2 teaspoons finely minced sage

For salad:

2 pounds red skinned potatoes, cut into 1-inch chunks

16 ounces green beans, trimmed of stem ends and halved on an angle

⅔ cup crumbled blue cheese

For the dressing, combine the mustard and vinegar in a 2-cup measuring cup or a small bowl. Gradually whisk in the oil until well emulsified. Add the herbs and season to taste with salt and pepper, keeping in mind the flavor will be much sharper alone than when it’s coating the salad.
Preheat oven to 450F. Toss the potato chunks with ¼ cup of the dressing in a 9×13 inch baking dish. Roast for 20 minutes at 450F.
After 20 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 375F. Shuffle the potatoes around for even browning, then roast 30-45 minutes more, until tender. Stir and shake once or twice during the cooking process to minimize sticking and ensure even cooking. When potatoes are tender, remove from oven and set aside to cool slightly.
While potatoes cook, bring a large skillet of salted water to a boil and drop in the green beans. Cook until crisp-tender, 2 to 3 minutes, then drain and cool.
When the beans and potatoes are still warm but not piping hot, combine in a large bowl (or just keep them in the original baking dish, as I did), add cheese and ¼ cup of the dressing (you may need to re-whisk the dressing first, as it will separate as it sits), and toss gently. Taste for dressing and seasoning, and adjust to your preferences (I added about 2 tablespoons additional dressing and a bit of black pepper).
Serve warm or at room temperature.

Vegetable pickles, three kinds

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Chelsea

Not long ago, I finished Cooked, Michael Pollan’s latest, in which he seeks to elucidate the magic of our kitchens. He looks at the transformative power of each of the four elements when applied to ingredients, and works to understand the connections we draw from and through what we eat as it ceases to be raw materials and becomes food. I couldn’t put it down. I tore through it like a fluffy bedtime novel, as my friend S. probably knew I would when she sent me a copy.

In a number of ways, Pollan’s investigation reminded me of my own scholarly work a few years ago when I was a graduate student. Though I was focused on medieval literature, I was intensely interested in what we could learn about human – and not-so-human – beings by examining the literary depictions of how and what they ate. Dietary habits, I thought, along with sexual practices, might be what determines humanness within this field of literature. Too much, too little, or too weird, and your food habits moved you outside what we think of as human, and into something else.

Unsurprisingly, as anyone who has researched food and its cultural impacts deeply knows, this led me to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and The Raw and the Cooked, the first volume of his elaborate, complex exploration of human myth and culture. Without getting too academic, I’ll just say that Levi-Strauss thinks a great deal of the development of culture happens as – and as a result of – foodstuffs transforming from raw to cooked. His analogy equates the wild to the raw, and the civilized to the cooked.

Pollan pulls on and plays with this idea, considering that if indeed cooked food represents culture or civilization, then there must be something about the cooking process itself that is civilizing and bridging. The four elements he examines are aligned with four types of cooking methods: fire explores the tradition of barbecue; water looks at stews and braising; air relates his adventures in the magic/science of bread baking; and earth digs into fermentation, the weird, marginally repulsive transformation of fresh food into pickles, or beer, or cheese – food that is prized and yet impacted by earth and death and rot.

This, too, reminded me of my own work (and don’t worry, we’re getting to the recipe part here soon), particularly an article I ran across as I was working on the Chaucer chapter of my dissertation. Subtitled “The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten,” the article took on Levi-Strauss’s nature/culture formulation and added a step to accommodate one of the characters in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. If raw food is wild and cooked food is civilized, what happens when that cooked food goes bad? This seemed to equate to my idea of people who had exceeded the limits of humanness through their eating habits, turning food into waste.

But I was looking at food habits from a perspective of too little as well as too much. What about superhuman beings who survived without eating, or whose bodies remained impenetrable, and un-penetrated, by the eventual corruption of food? I hypothesized making this triangle a square: adding preservation as a fourth corner. Suspended in limbo by sealing oneself against the external corruption consumption and digestion can bring, you remain preserved. This is not humanly possible, but it is not considered with disgust in medieval literature. Rather, such individuals hang closer to the divine than to the monstrous or subhuman.

Though this is not quite the four-some Pollan presents, I think fermentation and preservation have some similarities. In being preserved by their “cooking” process, fermented foods and preserved foods are mysterious blends of human and natural magic. Jams and jellies, preserved by being cooked with sugar, are the sweet side of this equation. Pollan opts to explore sauerkraut and cheese and beer. Today, I’m taking on pickles: simple raw, sliced vegetables transformed, “cooked,” and held in briny limbo by vinegar, sometimes sugar, and salt.

When N. and I got serious, we started using pickles as a metaphor for our relationship. In most refrigerators, there is a jar of pickles shoved way in the back, often on the top shelf, getting in the way of the orange juice and the milk and the mayonnaise. When you finally pull that jar out and peer inside, it’s almost never full. There are one or two pickles in there, floating around in the dill-and-peppercorn-laced brine, warty and sour and beautiful. The ubiquity of that pickle jar became our metaphor. As long as there were pickles in our fridge, we would be okay.

As with most Americans, I would wager, the pickles I was accustomed to when I was younger were always cucumber based, and usually dill (though I am a fiend for bread and butter pickles). I had no real sense that other sorts of vegetables could be pickled (aside from beets, thanks to my Nana) until I started frequenting the McMenamins pubs, an Oregon and Southern Washington chain of sorts featuring decent beer, good burgers, and remarkably slow service. Our little graduate crew went often – there were three different locations in the city of Eugene alone. Their hummus platter, ever present on the appetizer menu, came with a variety of vegetables along with triangles of pita, and often the spears of green bean and carrot, and the occasional nub of cauliflower, were pickled. Of course I had little thought of doing this myself until, chasing after an elusive potato salad that included pickled green beans, I started noticing how expensive these various vegetable pickles were in the grocery store. Recreating that potato salad required pickled green beans, dammit, and as a poor graduate student I was both unable and morally opposed to spending $7.99 on a slender little jar.

Fortunately, vegetable pickles are easy and fall within even a humanities graduate student’s budget. Vinegar, sugar, and a healthy shower of salt, heated to a simmer to dissolve the crystals. Jam as many vegetables as you can into a jar, shove in some flavoring agents: bay leaf, mustard seeds, dill, fennel, and pour on the vinegar. Cap, relocate to the fridge, and remember them a few days later when they’ve had a chance to sour up.

Vegetable pickles seem entirely suitable for the season. Fresh, young vegetables are great for pickling, especially while they are still small in size, so the vinegar can penetrate faster. Slender carrots, or plump radishes, or the tiny lanterns of young peppers, are a sign of spring that is often gone too fast. Pickles, though, hold that spring forever, jarred and capped and safe on the top shelf lurking behind the orange juice. Though they are not unaltered – the raw crispness is indeed transformed – in that way too they are like a spring gone by, or perhaps the memories of that spring that remain. It’s not that perfect, warm day anymore, but you remember its brightness – you need only uncap the jar and fish out a crisp briny souvenir.

I’ve done three types of pickle here: onion, carrot, and radish. Each is seasoned with a different combination of spices, and because I like to be fancy, I’ve used a different variety of vinegar. The radishes, I must admit, are my favorite. To play on their peppery flavor, I’ve added mustard seeds and a dried chili, but teased them as well with a heaping helping of sugar for the sweet-hot kick.

While these are lovely in salads, as part of a cheese or hummus plate, or just bright and sour on a fork, they are dynamite on a sandwich. And as the above photo suggests, it is on a sandwich that they found their sprightly home for us. Specifically, on a banh mi sandwich, that fresh, crisp Vietnamese invention. Even more specifically, on the idea that spawned my whole 2015 project: a banh mi-tball. There are essentially three components to this sandwich. These pickles are the first. Next week we’ll look at the bread (the true banh mi), and in the third and final installment, pork meatballs awash in aromatics, simmered in a miso-spiked broth I wanted to drink all on its own.

But for the moment, let’s just revel in the transformative magic of pickles. You’ll need the week for them to get good and sour before you can properly enjoy the sandwich anyway.

Refrigerator Vegetable Pickles
My jars held 6 ounces (¾ cup), so these measurements are keyed to that.

Carrots:

carrot ribbons from 1 carrot to fill jar (use a vegetable peeler to create long strips)

⅔ cup white wine vinegar

2 teaspoons celery seed

2 teaspoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns

Sweet/hot Radishes:

thinly sliced radishes to fill jar

1 small dried chili pepper

scant ⅔ cup rice wine vinegar (unseasoned)

2 teaspoons salt

4 tablespoons sugar (¼ cup)

2 teaspoons black mustard seeds

Onions:

thinly sliced red onion to fill jar

1 bay leaf

⅔ cup cider vinegar

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon fennel seed

For each: fill a heat-safe, lidded jar with vegetable slices (add chili or bay leaf, in the radish or onion case, respectively).
In a small pot, combine vinegar, salt, sugar, and other spices. Heat over medium-high, stirring occasionally, until liquid reaches a rolling boil and salt and sugar have completely dissolved.
Carefully, pour vinegar mixture over vegetables in jar until full. Gently push vegetables into liquid if needed – they will want to float.
Close jars tightly and refrigerate until vegetables are pickled to your liking – at least 2-3 days.