Bone Appetite

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: 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.