The Middle Way

January 27, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | 2 comments

Kale salad and baked sweet potato fries

One of my favorite meals to order in a restaurant is French fries and a salad (but only if the fries are really good and come with a delicious dipping sauce, like the duck-fat fries with brown butter béarnaise sauce at Orson, or the fries with harissa aioli at Nopa). But that is not really a meal in the spirit of the season of resolve. As we learn from the Buddha, the middle way is best.

And so I present, French fries and a salad, Buddha-style:

Take some sweet potatoes; cut them into wedges; toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper; and maybe some cayenne or chili powder. Spread them out on a baking sheet in a single layer. Bake at 425 for 30 minutes or so, turning occasionally.

The kale salad is another recipe from my friend K., via her father-in-law who had this salad at a restaurant in Aspen. From Aspen to Portland to San Francisco to you. Nothing could be easier. Take some kale (curly or dino, whichevs); separate it from its ribs; and chop it up very, very fine until you basically have a pile of kale confetti. Finely mince a shallot. Put it all in a salad bowl. Add a generous handful of parmigiano cut into a fine dice. Toss in a handful of currants and pine nuts. Squeeze a lemon over the whole thing and drizzle on some olive oil. Add some Maldon sea salt if you’re feeling fancy, or just plain kosher salt. Toss to coat.

Kale salad also goes well with a baguette and pate, but that might be a meal for another season, too.

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The All-in-One

January 27, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | No comments

Arugula and roasted pumpkin salad with pomegranate seeds

Does arugula count as a dark leafy green? It is green and it is a leaf, so let’s say yes. This is a perfect main-dish salad invented by my friend K. It makes an ideal supper for a lady dining alone but it also likes company. Pomegranate seeds are like the high heels of salads. Throw them into the mix and you feel all dressed up.

You need about 2 cups of roasted pumpkin (or whatever winter squash you have on hand. I’ve used red kuri, buttercup, kabocha, pumpkin, and plain old butternut). 6 cups of arugula. Seeds from one pomegranate. Shavings of parmigiano. A handful of toasted pumpkin seeds (extra credit for toasting the seeds from the pumpkin you roasted).

Make a vinaigrette with 1 minced shallot; 1/4 cup olive oil; 3 tablespoons of the vinegar of your choice; 1 tablespoon each pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard; and salt and pepper to taste.

Toss it all together. Serve it to your guests or sit down with a glass of wine, kick off your high heels, and have a nice solitary supper.

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The Gypsy

January 25, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | No comments

Gypsy Soup

Put on your finest scarves and bring your crystal ball—it’s gypsy soup for dinner. The original recipe comes from Mollie Katzen and her classic Moosewood Cookbook (the first cookbook, alongside Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso’s New Basics, that I ever owned). I don’t really cook from Moosewood anymore. A few years ago I was telling my friend M. about the sweet potato and kale soup I’d made, and she said “Oh, like gypsy soup.” Gypsy what? I didn’t remember the recipe at all. But when I went home and pulled out my copy, there it was, on a page with stains splattered across it, calling to mind the gypsy that I was at age 22.

In Katzen’s headnotes for the recipe, she urges you to experiment. All you need, she says, is a combination of orange and green vegetables. Except her recipe doesn’t involve actual greens. I had to read it three times before I decided that her green must be the bell pepper listed in the ingredients. To me, “bell pepper” always means red. Or any color but green. Moosewood was written in a different era, a gentler time when green bell peppers were not held in widespread contempt.

In fact, the more I read the Gypsy Soup recipe, the more I realized that my version has deviated widely from the original. Mine isn’t even vegetarian. But gypsies are free spirits. They can’t be pinned down. They have to roam where their hearts lead them. Just ask Stevie Nicks. So let’s say that the core elements of gypsy soup are sweet potatoes, chickpeas, and some kind of green vegetable, and leave it at that.

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The Innovator

January 25, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | No comments

Pasta with kale pesto and roasted winter squash

This is my new favorite orange-and-green combo, thanks to Melissa Clark of The New York Times. Yes, it’s a lot of carbohydrates. She originally wrote this recipe to fuel a marathoner, so if you don’t think you’re going to need a few hundred extra calories to get through your day, you could skip the pasta part. That’s what I thought I would do, but it’s so good with the pasta—even gluten-free spaghetti made from corn and quinoa—that I usually keep it in. This dish also works well with polenta.

The recipe is pretty perfect as written by Ms. Clark in the Times.

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The Holiday Edition

January 25, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | No comments

Baked kale with gruyere and sweet potato-poblano gratin

I first came up with the idea for an orange-and-green series back in November, when winter squash were everywhere and the season stretched long before us. But now it’s almost the end of January and the supply of local squash is dwindling down to butternut, acorn, and spaghetti. So, forthwith, the rest of the recipes!

Let’s go back in time to Thanksgiving. The baked kale and sweet potato gratin were my contribution to the table this year. The traditional Thanksgiving palette runs the narrow stretch of neutrals between beige and white, so it’s nice to see some pops of color on the plate. The challenge with The Holiday Edition is dealing with the quantity of kale it takes to fill a 9 x 13 pan after being sautéed with shallots and onion. Kale is not a ruly vegetable. It has not a single ounce of rule in it, and just the draft caused by turning around will make it fly all over the place. You’ll probably also run out of bowls for washing it in. Definitely use two pans to sauté it all. Even with two pans, it doesn’t all fit right away, so I add it in batches as it wilts down.

And beware, the gratin calls for the use of the most bloodthirsty tool in the kitchen: the mandoline. Keep your band-aids close by and be prepared to give up some fingernails/fingertips. The sacrifice is worth it. While I’m not entirely sure what this says about the gratin, it was pronounced the best side dish on the Thanksgiving table by a man who doesn’t really eat vegetables.

If you have any gratin and gruyere left over, put the gratin in a dish, top it with the cheese, and pop it in the oven at 400 degrees. After 15 minutes, crack two eggs on top, bump the heat up, and cook for another 5 minutes or so, until the whites are set but the yolks are runny.

The kale comes from a recipe found in Food and Wine a few years back and I adapted the gratin from this recipe in last year’s Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet. All I did was substitute sweet potatoes for the potatoes.

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The Classic

January 19, 2010 in Orange and Green, Recipes | 1 comment

Braised kale and roasted sweet potatoes

The first, the original, the Classic. This was my first combination of the orange and green, invented shortly after I discovered dino kale, the gateway green. Take a few tokes off this bumpy, dark green leaf and it is a short spiral into more hardcore greens like curly kale, mustard greens, collard greens, broccoli rabe, red Russian kale, and the like. Like marijuana, dino kale goes by many names: lacinato kale, dino kale, cavolo nero. It’s all the same thing.

The Classic was my go-to meal for much of the late 1990s, leading some to call it “The Lynne Special.” It was probably the first dish I ever made that wasn’t from a recipe. I still eat it fairly often. It’s not particularly fast, but it’s easy and uses mostly things you have on hand (or should have on hand). Most recently I ate this for dinner after a yoga workshop dedicated to detoxifying the body (in the spirit of the season). I felt full but not toxic. A few more meals like this one and I’ll feel well enough to start on a retox diet.

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The Orange and the Green

January 19, 2010 in Food Habits, Orange and Green | No comments

There are some instances where the combination of orange and green doesn’t work so well—like Northern Ireland—but when it comes to food, it’s hard to go wrong when you put the two together. Take a dark leafy green and introduce it to an orange-fleshed vegetable and you have a vegetable powerhouse. Nutritional benefits aside (and there are many—dark leafy greens and orange-fleshed vegetables are the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of superfoods), they just taste really good together. And they look pretty on the plate next to each other, making them the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of superfoods.

And they just so happen to be in season during winter, the season of resolution. If you’re searching around for dietary alternatives to holiday excesses like salami-and-cheese cracker sandwiches washed down with a bottle of wine, look to the orange and the green. Even if you cook them in cream and butter, it’s hard not to feel virtuous and healthy when these two are on your plate, in the same way a Prius might ease your guilt about driving the two blocks to the store.

There are endless ways to combine these two, but in the following posts I present some of my favorites. First up: The Classic.

The Celery Stalks at Midnight

November 22, 2009 in Dinner out, Food Habits | 4 comments

Those who know me know that I don’t like olives or cilantro. But there are also a few (a lot, my friend LKA would insist) other things I don’t like. First among these is celery. Let’s just say that regular celery is as unpleasant a prospect to me as the thought of vampire-enslaved zombie celery is to the highstrung cat Chester in the Bunnicula books.

While I will grudgingly dice a rib or two to make a mirepoix, I otherwise steer well clear of celery. And since discovering that Suzanne Goin, as revealed in her cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques, sometimes substitutes fennel for celery in a mirepoix, I have happily abandoned celery and its ribs all together.

Recently at a restaurant in Portland, the kind that only has two seatings a night and serves a six-course fixed menu, I was faced with an escarole salad that had celery in it. Maybe, I thought, escarole has some magical property that makes celery taste good.

It doesn’t.

So I ate the rest of the salad and left a neat pile of celery on the side of my plate. A perfectly logical course of action, except in the eyes of my fellow diners.

“You’re not eating your celery,” said G.

“I don’t like celery,” I said.

“How could you not like celery?” asked C.

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An Egg by Any Other Name

November 19, 2009 in Eggs, Recipes, Uncategorized | 5 comments

IMG_0269

I’ve had this conversation many times. It goes something like this:

“It’s a piece of bread with a hole cut in it. You put it in the pan and then crack the egg into the hole—”

“Oh, you mean birds in a nest?”

Almost every time I have it, I find out a new name for this dish. To date I have heard it called egg in the hole, eggs in a basket, birds in a nest, joeys, bullseyes, popeye eggs, hole in one, knothole egg, and eggs in jail. Some people call it toad in the hole, which is also the name of an English dish involving sausage baked in Yorkshire pudding batter. How this confusion came about I don’t know.

Those are just the names I’ve come upon in my own personal experience. A Google search also turns up names like one-eyed jack, one-eyed monster, moon egg, gashouse egg, paddy egg, castle’d egg, egg on a raft, man on a raft, egg in the middle, egg in a frame, picture frame egg, bird’s nest, egg in a blanket, egg in a hat, breakfast bread, one-eyed Egyptians, ace in the hole, frog in the pond, scout eggs, egg in a window, and—my personal favorite—gibbly’s willies. Who is gibbly? What are his willies? The answer that springs to mind is probably much less savory than you want in a breakfast dish, but if your appetite isn’t ruined by the thought of what gibbly’s willies might be, try them for yourself.

Gibbly’s Willies

2 pieces bread
2 eggs
butter
salt and pepper

1. Cut a hole in the middle of each slice of bread. Use a cookie cutter, the mouth of a glass, or just wing it. Butter the bread on both sides.

2. Place the bread slices in a cast-iron skillet on medium heat and cook until the bottom side is lightly browned.

3. Flip the bread and crack an egg into each hole. Cook for a few minutes until the yolk is how you like it, then carefully flip each slice and cook for a few more seconds. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve quick.

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Olives in Cilantro Sauce

November 16, 2009 in Food Habits | 3 comments

When I was growing up, we had a rule at the dinner table: You had to at least try everything on your plate. If you didn’t like it, you didn’t have to eat it, but you had to taste it first. This led to the theatrical display of taking a bite while holding your drink to your mouth, so you wouldn’t have to actually taste whatever it was you didn’t want to eat (in my case, English peas; in my sister’s case, green beans). I wasn’t even that picky of an eater, although I can’t say that at the time my mother’s cooking was that adventurous. We ate the standard American fare (with a Southern twist) of the 1970s and 1980s: pot roast, fried chicken, spaghetti, spanish rice, baked chicken, taco night, broccoli with cheese, and double-stuffed potatoes.

In high school I became a vegetarian—the ultimate expression of picky eating—and by the time I grew out of it in my mid-twenties (thank you, France), I was ready to eat just about anything. Lamb brains, sweetbreads, Brussels sprouts, fresh peas, sweet potatoes, venison, braised goat shoulder, kale, kale, and more kale. Anything except a short list of foods that I cannot, will not eat on a train, in the rain, here or there or anywhere. Of course, in the spirit of the old dinner table rule I still (nobly, bravely) take a taste if served one of these offending flavors because it is true that your taste buds are changing all the time and you never know, you might like it.

That philosophy is the reason I often find myself in a nice restaurant, politely spitting out an olive into my napkin. I don’t like olives and I’m not ashamed to admit it. For some reason, my dislike of olives is a regular source of amazement and disbelief among my friends. “How could you not like olives? You, of all people?” they gasp. Or, from those who have known me for a while, “Oh yeah, I forgot you don’t like olives. It’s so weird.”

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