Bone Appetite

Palm Beach Island Pizza

I recently was in Palm Beach for a family occasion, and we had pizza while we were there, but it was what I'd call New Jersey standard fare. Judging my the origins of most of the residents, and the complete lack of what I'd call a native trope in architecture, food, or culture, I suspect New Jersey cuisine is as close to "authentic" as one is going to get for this area. I did fall to thinking: what would constitute a native recipe here? (For all I know there may really be a Palm Beach Island Pizza recipe, but I'm taking the pledge and not googling for one before I post this recipe.) South Florida does have an agreeable mish-mosh of immigrant communities from north and south, and there may be a vestige of internal native Floridian cuisine to be had (grits are still on the menu, including at the Indian breakfast place my sister took us out to), but I couldn't put my finger on a South Floridian cuisine that has yet emerged. Not enough time to gad about, I suspect, to find it. In any event, I did notice both a slightly higher than normal incidence of mango about, and I was bemused to hear of a B&B frequented by family friends called the "Mango Inn", and when I started to make a traditional Hawaiian pizza the other day, I discovered we had no pineapple about the place but I did have a nice supply of mangoes. Hence this experiment, which turned out to be a nice enough result that I thought it worth preserving in our recipe files.

I note parenthetically that I am not usually one for the "sweet" pizza, but this turned out to be a very nice blend and my own exception to the rule of preferring savory or tangy 'za.

Palm Beach Island Pizza

Use a thin crust. I used my habitual 2/3 whole wheat 1/2 white flour recipe, divided in half, pre-baking the crust for 5 minutes.

red pizza sauce (mild, almost no spicing)
mozzarella
thin-slivered fresh basil
diced fresh mango (I'm sure frozen will do fine, mango comes out of the freezer unusually well)
pre-cooked black forest ham, diced into tiny cubes
parmiggiano

put down the sauce, top with the cheese, then the ham. Bake @425 for about 10 minutes. Add the mango, basil slivers, and a thin topping of grated parm; return to the oven until the cheeses just start to brown.

 

Pacific Rim Slaw

A pretty quick and extremely tasty salad; a house original.

1 Napa cabbage, sliced very thinly - omit the thickest parts at the bottom.
2 small carrots, grated roughly
1 large radish (or daikon, etc.), grated roughly
2 Tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped
1 Tablespoon sesame seeds (plain or toasted, to taste)

Combine and toss with the dressing (below), adding the dressing very slowly and tasting periodically. The dressing can be strong so you want to be a little delicate:

Dressing:

1 Tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup shoyu
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon wasabi paste
2 Tablespoons yogurt (heaping) (plain non-fat is best, plan whole is fine)
2 teaspoons brown sugar
(mix thoroughly with a whisk).

Fresh Napa cabbage makes this much better than stuff that's been sitting around a while, but it will work either way.

Serve at room temperature. Serving suggestion: serve warmed triangles of naan with it, or serve a larger portion on a whole piece of warmed naan with a few slices of fresh fruit or mandarin oranges as a garnish.

Recipe: Santa Maria Pinquitos, Bunkerlow Style

This one is not an adaptation, but came with some pinquitos I got for Xmas from some friends (thanks R&J!)...I'm keying it in because it's not on the Rancho Gordo heirloom bean recipe site, and I fear for the slip of paper on which I have it at present.

I'm making these tonight in part because I coincidentally also got two different kinds of Spanish smoked paprika in the old Xmas stocking, and I have a tritip that's been in the freezer for three months it's time to cook up. And, as you will note from the ingredients, this will test some of the more hallowed spices I discussed several posts ago in "The Taste of Old Spice"!

Adapted [according to the recipe slip] from Heirloom Beans by Steve Sando

1 lb Santa Maria pinquito bean
1 medium white onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 teaspoon Spanish somke paprika
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 taspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 teaspoons molasses
salt and pepper to taste

Soak beans for about 6 hours.

Drain beans and put in a stockpot with water to cover about an inch. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simer, partially covered, until the beans start to soften, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Meanwhile, in a small skillet, saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil for a few minutes, until softened. Stir the powdered spices into the onions and cook briefly, ntil fragrant.

Add the onion mixture, tomato paste, molasses, and salt and pepper to the beans. Cook until the beans are fully tender, about 20 or 30 minutes more.

Pinquito beans are supposedly a traditional accompaniment to Santa Maria tri-tip, but we like them on their own with tortillas or conrbread and braised greens.

Recipe: New Year's Black Eyed Peas

One of the several dietary traditions I inherited from my family, but virtually the only one from my father's side of the family, is the good luck New Year's black-eyed peas. I always associated this with the South, and figured that as a tasty but cheap legume flavored with pork, it had its origins in Southern agrarian poverty, whence the ancestors on my father's mother's side came. We at least have what I'd call a country menu for the day: 

• Black-eyed peas flavored with cheap pork product
• Jello with fruit salad embedded in it
• Corn bread
• Greens
• (optional) punch, with or without bourbon, almost certainly with ginger ale

I stick to this menu every New Year's, and it's to my dear spouse's credit that she has gamely gone along. This year the challenge was only in getting my eldest to try the peas, he now having decided that peas are yucky. We told him they tasted like meat and I got him to eat two. That should suffice for the good luck. To my surprise, when I looked up the origins of good-luck new year black-eyed peas on the Interwebs, the wiki claims that the black-eyed-peas-for-good luck came over to this continent with Sephardic Jews in the 1730s, mostly likely to Georgia, thence to the public at large. I have no idea what to make of this, but I guess I'll go along and believe anything I read on the internet. The pre-literacy on that side of the family into the 18th century precludes me from making any evidentiary conclusions about anything related to the family tree, particularly as I don't know whether my Grandmother picked this up from her own mother's side, father's side, or both, or just the culture at large.

In any event, here's my own version of how to cook the peas, plus or minus:

Cover two cups of rinsed black-eyed peas in water in a big pot (I use my trusty dutch oven) overnight. In the morning, drain them, rinse again, and set aside in a bowl.

Cut up one medium-sized onion into a rough dice and cook in the bottom of the medium-hot dutch oven with a tablespoon of heated cooking oil (these days I use the very inauthentic extra virgin olive oil; the flavor disappears in the vat of peas, so you can use almost anything, I think). Add salt and pepper, a quarter teaspoon of cayenne, a teaspoon of dry mustard (or a tablespoon of prepared mustard of your choice), combine with onion, and cook until the onion softens, 5-10 minutes. Add in about a half a cup of beer, combine, and bring to a simmer, about two minutes. Variation: use a quarter cup of bourbon instead of the beer.

Now add the soaked and rinsed peas and cover with water, and then about a cup more, usually 4-5 cups total of water. Add 1 tablespoon of molasses (less if you are not, for some reason, using beer). Bring the whole thing to a simmer.

Now add in your cheap pork product, sliced up according to the merits of the pork. In recent years I've been using about a half pound of shank, although I started out making this most years with salt pork, I can't find the latter now and can barely find shank. If it has fat and bone, don't bother defatting or deboning before throwing it in.

Bring back to a brisk simmer, then turn the heat to the lowest setting you have to to get the mixture to just bubble very mildly. Let cook for at least 90 minutes, preferably longer, up to 3 hours. Stir every 10-15 minutes (remember your pork cooking safety -- you want to get the pork good and done, so rotating it around your approximately 225 degree pot of peas is important.) Add a little water if it thickens before the time is up, but you do want the peas to reduce to a thickish pasty sauce with just enough liquidity to ooze a bit.

I usually then fish out the pork with tongs or a spoon, trim off the remaining fat/gristle/bone, dice up the remaining pork meat and throw it back into the pot, stirring it in.

Forgot to soak the peas? I rarely do these days, but if you really must, then you can of course boil the peas for 20-30 minutes, drain and set aside, and then re-insert them into the recipe as above.

Recipe: Quickest Chickpea and Parsley Salad, Ever

Time for more Garbanzo journalism!

This is insanely quick - 2 minutes start to finish if you have the ingredients on hand - and a really fresh and nutritious salad.

1 can chickpeas, rinsed out in a colander
1 cup of fresh parsley, finely chopped
juice of 1 lemon
about a tablespoon of EVO
1 teaspoon soy sauce
salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste (don't be shy with the salt here, though; a 1/4 teaspoon seems about right)

Toss and serve. May also be chilled to good effect. Serves about four as a side.

I've tried adding in "bonus" ingredients here -- a little roasted red pepper, split cherry tomatoes, etc. -- which are fine, but less somehow seems to be more here.

Recipe: Rosemary Scallops with Spinach and Brown Rice

We saw a recipe for a simple scallops and spinach, but after deciding it was a bit bland we riffed gently on this combination a bit to come up with the following. It has the advantage of being incredibly quick if you're using frozen spinach and scallops, and has a rich flavor without much at all in the way of spicing.

1 pound frozen scallops (or fresh equivalent)
1 pound frozen chopped spinach (or fresh equivalent
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped and roughly minced
2 tablespoons EVO (or butter)
juice of one lemon
 3 cloves garlic, pressed

Start your brown rice well ahead of time. Start your scallops defrosting if they're not already thawed. The cooktime for the main dish is less than 10 minutes.

The spinach can be cooked in advance and set aside. I simply stir-fried mine in a dry, hot wok over medium heat, then removed to a glass bowl.

Add EVO or butter to the pan and heat gently. My taste-tester preferred EVO; I think a little butter (maybe 50/50?) helps a bit here but if you want to go all healthful on us, by all means just use EVO.

Sauté the scallops and rosemary on medium high heat for about a minute, stirring constantly. Add the lemon juice, and toss and stir constantly until the scallops are almost but not quite done (as ever, don't overcook), 2-4 minutes probably. Add the cooked spinach and pressed garlic, stir to combine thoroughly and heat, 1-2 minutes.

Serve immediately over steaming brown rice. Makes about four medium servings for a "one dish meal".

Apropos of the garlic: it would be wrong to carmelize it by cooking it in the oil before adding to the scallops. By adding it into the end you get the zestiness of the garlic without permeating the whole dish, especially the scallops.

The scallops: either bay or ocean scallops will do here; smaller may be better to get a consistent dish, however.

Variation: try lime juice instead of lemon (I sort of prefer this, but my taste tester insists lemon is better).

Recipe: Dora Flood's Bear Flag Restaurant Seafood Pasta, aka Monterey Seafood Puttanesca

Okey dokey, this started out as an innocent pasta puttanesca but I have determined that this had sufficient correspondence with some things we get very nicely locally -- calamari, artichoke hearts, garlic -- that it would qualify as faux Monterey cuisine. (It's even vaguely cioppino-like).

So this recipe is probably prententiously knowable as Monterey Seafood Puttanesca, but in honor of the alleged origins of Puttanescas everywhere and our fabled local color, I decided to name this after the restaurant/restaranteuse in Steinbeck's Cannery Row, who was not actually the proprietor of a restaurant but a, well, purveyor of puttanesca. (I need to be subtle, I don't want this blog blocked by some overzealous piece of filtering safe-internet software.)

Ingredients with instructions are...

6 tablespoons EVO, heated on medium heat (I used a dutch oven to absorb slop spills, a skillet with a cover will do fine)

crush in 4 cloves of garlic, woosh around for a minute

add 1 tablespoon hot pepper flakes, woosh around for a minute

crush in a can of anchovies (6 ounces in this case), woosh around for a minute

add a can of San Marzano tomatoes or 8-10 fresh ones peeled and cored if you have them (OK, OK, I would never actually have the patience to peel them myself, but I think puttanesca's better without the tomato skin) chopped roughly - combine with anchovy-garlic mix and bring it to a strong simmer.

Add one bay leaf.

I added a 1/2 tsp of salt, but given the anchovies were salty this probably wasn't necessary.

After about 15 minutes, fold in:
2 tablespoons of capers,
10 diced black olives, and
a tablespoon of dried basil (or equivalent fresh basil leaves if you can get them, finely minced).

Reduce to a low simmer for five minutes or so. Fish out the bay leaf.

Now add one can of (drained) artichoke hearts (not marinated) and turn the heat up. You can slice up the artichoke hearts a little but if you mash them with a wooden spoon in the pot they should come apart on their own as well.

Add one pound of frozen seafood or fresh equivalent (see note below), preferably calamari or a mixture of calamari, bay scallops, and small shrimp. Bring to high heat and cook until the seafood is done, about five minutes or less (test constantly, the shrimp will pink, calamari will be tender but solid.)

Serve over al dente penne. Makes four healthy-sized portions or eight side pasta portions. Top with parm if you must, but I don't think it's necessary given how rich the broth turns out on this one.

Sorry, no photo once again -- I was concentratin' tonight.

OK, so, the frozen seafood. Most of the "fresh" seafood we get isn't really fresh, it's just unfrozen. If you ask an honest fish monger about a particular fish, they should normally tell you it was 'flash frozen'. It is possible to get fresh fish, of course, that you haven't caught yourself -- meaning fish that has only been on ice, not encased in it -- and boy is that great. But such is not the case with shrimp and scallops around here.

Calamari, on the other hand, you can get here nice and fresh and usually cheap when it's in season. Squidders are practically the only commercial fishing we see out here these days. So if you can get fresh calamari, use it here, and don't overcook it! (On the Cape, I might be tempted to use fresh scallops, but there are so many great ways to use fresh scallops I would think the strong background of puttanesca would not be one of my first choices.)

But, since shopping for said fresh shellfish or what have you requires some premeditation and correct timing, such is not the usual case for most cooks, I would warrant. Not for me, at least. So I resort to one of my stashed bags of frozen seafood.

I try to keep seafood in the freezer as a sort of staple, particularly the shellfish. (Shrimp scampi is incredibly easy to whip up.) It's not that I wouldn't love, say, to have some fresh steamers or mussels, but I'm realistic about the price and their availability. Frozen is underrated in this particular area.

One bag o' seafood available is what Trader Joe's sells as "Seafood Blend", which is what I used tonight. You can use a little or the whole bag at once, and it cooks straight from frozen to the pan. it's great for quick stir frying or sautes - you do have to try carefully not to overcook it -- but I find it almost indistinguishable from similar quality "fresh' fish. Of course, it's often farm-raised or lower quality stuff that goes into such mixes, hence this perception frozen isn't as good, but on the other hand it's affordable and most really good seafood these days is scarce enough as to be expensive.

And, fresh food snob that I am notwithstanding, I have to say one of the things about this dish is you can make the entire thing with food you can stock in the pantry. It's really nice to be able to whip up something semi-fancy on short notice if you have to. (I actually deliberately ignored the very nice fresh cilantro in my hydrator tonight. Shocking, I know.)

Recipe: Cold Green Bean and Leek Salad

I had a bunch of leeks to use up, and I realized that on Sunday -- cooking for five adults and two children -- I had a somewhat thin menu for company, but I also wanted to cook ahead. (The rest of the menu was grilled tritip - which I sadly, hideously overcooked, but that's a story for another day -- sweet potato fries and a simple green salad with vinaigrette.) I looked around on the net, found some green bean and leek and potato salads, and a couple of hot bean and leek dishes, but nothing quite like what I had in mind, so I riffed.

This is what I came up with (sorry, no photo, I forgot!):

1 pound green beans, trimmed and cut into thirds
5 leeks, white parts only, sliced into thin rounds
3 cloves of garlic, pressed
2 tablespoons EVO
2 tablespoons sun dried tomato paste (I would have used sun dried tomatoes, but was out)
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1/2 cup curly parsley, finely chopped

Steam the green beans lightly and then dunk them in cold water. Drain.

In a small skillet, in heated EVO, over medium heat, saute the garlic with the leeks until the leeks are cooked and floppy but not to the point of limpness (3-5 minutes, I'd say). Then mix in the sun dried tomato paste and remove from the heat to a bowl.

In a small skillet, brown the pine nuts over high heat, moving constantly. (You can do this first if you want to use the same skillet for the leeks, but do this is in a DRY skillet, no oil or anything.) Don't burn the poor things.

Combine the beans, leeks, pine nuts, and parsley, and toss until everything is mixed and thoroughly coated. Chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

I got about five medium-sized portions out of this recipe; to make it into a main dish for four, I'd double the ingredients.

The flavor of the leeks comes through nicely without overwhelming the beans, and there's a rich taste joining the flavors together from the garlic and nuts and sun dried tomatoes; the parsley adds a fresh accent to the combination. A fairly successful experiment.

Recipe: Spinach Barley Casserole

I like the cookbook One-Dish Vegetarian by Maria Robbins, but I have a running objection to the relative blandness of many of the recipes. It's not vegan, that's for sure (cheese everywhere) and the author confesses she's not actually a vegetarian, but I'll leave the consideration of these points to my V-friends to ponder. That said, I've had decent luck using recipes in this book as a departure point.

In the particular section I was reading last week, I was taken with her praise of barley. And it's true, barley is underrated - it holds its own in such mixes a lot better than rice, it cooks up more easily than brown rice or a lot of beans, and it holds a coat. It's possible to overcook it and get a glutinous mass, but it's relatively hard in my experience. So I thought: let's do something with barley this week.

I started this recipe based on her "Barley with Spinach and Peas" on p. 114, a recipe I've made before and said, yeah, OK, but something's missing. This time I made it into a casserole: I monkeyed with the ingredient quantities, added mushrooms, omitted the salt, doubled the parmiggiano, and added an egg and some milk as a holding agent. Verdict: excellent. Here's the modified version of the recipe:

EVO to coat the bottom of a dutch oven
1 largish onion, diced finely
2 very large carrots or moral equivalent, diced (note I used yellow carrots tonight, see photo above)
6 small celery ribs (or, maybe, 2 huge ones), diced finely
4 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups pearl barley
16 ounces of frozen chopped spinach, thawed, or equivalent fresh blanched (maybe a pound and a half?); Mika thinks chard would be an acceptable substitute here, but I'm not so sure
1 cup frozen peas (fresh if you can get them would be excellent here, they'd have to be steamed and immersed in cold water before adding in the step below)
1 pound crimini mushrooms, stemmed, and sliced in half and then in rounds
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 cup grated parmiggiano

Get out the Dutch oven, heat it a bit, add the EVO, let it heat, and then add over medium heat the onion, carrots, and celery. Woosh around for about five minutes, until everything is just a bit soft.

Add the vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Add the barley, reduce heat to a hard simmer for 5 minutes, then reduce to a light simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Stir once or twice while simmering.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Stir in the peas and spinach, cover, and cook on low for another 10 minutes, until the liquid is almost all gone -- just a bit on the bottom. During this stage, saute the mushrooms separately in a tablespoon of butter until they're cooked but still firm. Set aside. Then beat the egg with the milk in a separate bowl.

Mix in the mushrooms, then the egg-milk mixture, the second tablespoon of butter, and then the cheese. Put the dutch oven, covered, into the oven and cook for 15 minutes. Remove the cover and cook 5-10 more minutes. The casserole will be bubbly, not crusty, but the bubbling should be quite thick.

This was great as-is, and also was served nicely with a little Louisiana-style red hot sauce.

The Apple Crumble of My Eye

I wish I'd been able to take a picture of Duncan and Mika making this recipe today:

Apple Crumble

1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
4 cups apples (about 7 medium apples)
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350.
Cut apples into small pieces.
Toss the apples with lemon juice and place in a lightly buttered baking dish
In a bowl, mix the flour, oats, and brown sugar.
Melt the butter in a saucepan or the microwave, and incorporate into the oats mixture.
Spread the mixture over the apples.
Place in an oven and bake at 350 degrees for approximately 30 minutes.

This was on the pbskids.org/caillou web site, and I'd link there only I can't figure out how to navigate to find this recipe. Duncan gets a little computer time on weekends, and my dear boy seems to enjoy doing the cooking simulator on Caillou's page. Somehow he got to this recipe and printed it out, but me, I can't figure out how to find it.

But the Apple Crumble came out great. We had some for tea. 

We don't do a lot of baking (the bread comes from our bread maker) but when we do it's usually Mika doing it with Duncan's help these days. And Dunc did a terrific job of measuring everything out and helping with almost all the steps.