Risotto Primavera with "Worms"

When I was young, the biggest influence on my developing interest in cooking--after my mother and great-aunts--was my college roommate, Debby Mefferd. Debby grew up in a family that deeply celebrated food and cooking and good wine, and I'll never forget my first visit to her family house in St. Louis. We spent the entire day shopping to cook and then cooking (racking up the most impossible pile of pots and pans and bowls) and then eating. And at dinner her father and a friend of his did a blind tasting of a French red burgundy in which they correctly identified not only the particular vineyard but also which slope (north- or south-facing) the grapes had clearly been grown on. Most humbling.

Anyway, to this day Debby and I love to talk about food, including a recent missive from Deb about a risotto she cooked. The recipe is adapted from The New York Times.

Risotto Primavera with "Worms"

Last year during the Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the USA we were not surprised to hear that he wanted light, seasonal food prepared for him at the residence of the papal nuncio in New York. After all, he's almost Italian.

The New York Times ran a story about a risotto primavera, full of fresh seasonal vegetables, which became a favorite of ours last spring. Spring is here again, and this year we found fiddlehead ferns at our local market, so could have even more fun playing around with the recipe. However, what with the law of unintended consequences, the fiddlehead ferns, after all that stirring, cooked up to look like fiddlehead worms.

The key to the risotto is a fresh pesto that is stirred in at the end, making it extremely green. If you can't find all the green vegetables, just use what is available, but don't omit the pesto.

PESTO
1/2 cup ramps (or substitute leeks or chives)
1-1/2 cups raw spinach
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil

RISOTTO
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup sliced scallions
2 shallots, diced
2-1/2 cups Arborio rice
1/2 cup dry white wine
6-1/2 cups hot chicken broth
1/2 cup shelled fresh peas
1/2 cup asparagus, blanched
1 cup fresh fava beans (taken from their pods, blanched and peeled)
1 cup fiddlehead ferns, blanched
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

1. For the pesto: Place the ramps, spinach and salt in a food processor. Have the olive oil at hand. Have everything staged and standing by, but don't actually process the pesto until just before you need it (step 4).
2. For the risotto: In a large broad pan or Dutch oven, heat the oil. Add the scallions and shallots and cook to soften them.
3. Add the rice and stir until the centers of the grains are white and the edges translucent. Add the wine and stir while it evaporates. Add the chicken broth by ladlefuls, and stir constantly. Cook over high heat and don't add another ladle of broth until the previous one is completely absorbed. When the rice is a little more than half cooked, in 25 minutes or so, add the vegetables, and continue stirring and ladling until all the broth has been used. Turn off the heat.
4. Quickly process the pesto--or get your sous chef to do it while you stir in the last ladle of broth [grin]--by pouring the olive oil into the food processor while it is running and chopping the ramps and spinach. Stir the pesto into the risotto.
5. Stir in the butter. Stir in half the cheese. Ladle into deep serving dishes and top with the remaining cheese.

Cheap Eats: Chickpea & Cabbage Stew

I was watching a 93-year-old cook named Clara Cannucciari on her YouTube channel called The Great Depression Cooking Show. Clara was born in Chicago in 1915 of Sicilian immigrant parents, so much of what she ate as a kid in the Depression was Italian. Lots of pasta. Here's Clara cooking Pasta with Peas. (BTW Clara dates from an era when cooks, like my grandmother and great-aunts, didn't use cutting boards. She cuts everything in her hands, and it makes me crazy nervous to watch.)



And here's my contribution to eating on a budget (I refuse to use the word depression). It's a stew of chickpeas and cabbage and it costs under $1 a serving. The bonus is that it's chockablock with fiber (especially heart-healthy soluble fiber in the chickpeas) and folate.

Chickpea & Cabbage Stew
I was looking for a meal that would be satisfying (carbs & protein) but that wouldn't break the bank. I came up with this: A stew that costs 86 cents to $1.15 per serving, depending on if you're serving 6 or 8. You could make this a little heartier by adding shredded leftover meat or poultry. Or you could serve the stew with cheese toasts.

1 lemon
2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
1 pound dried chickpeas, soaked overnight* and drained
6 large cloves garlic, minced
1 star anise or 2 teaspoons ground fennel (optional)
2 teaspoons salt
5 teaspoons olive oil
3 medium onions, diced
5 carrots, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced crosswise
1 medium head cabbage (2 pounds), shredded
1 can (28 ounces) crushed tomatoes

1. Grate the zest and squeeze the juice from the lemon. Place the juice in a small bowl, add the red pepper flakes and set aside.
2. In a large saucepan or soup pot, combine the lemon zest, soaked chickpeas, half the garlic, the star anise (if using) and 1 teaspoon of the salt. Add cold water to cover by 1 inch. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to a high simmer, partially cover and cook until tender, 45 minutes to 1 hour. (Keep the chickpeas covered by at least 1/2 inch of water as they cook.)
3. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat the oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the remaining garlic and the onions, and cook until the onions are softened and beginning to brown, about 7 minutes. Add the carrots, stir to combine, cover and cook for 3 minutes.
4. When the chickpeas are tender, use an immersible blender to puree about half of them to give the broth some weight (or transfer about half the chickpeas to a blender or food processor and then return to the pot). Be sure to steer clear of the star anise if you used it.
5. Add the sauteed vegetables, cabbage, canned tomatoes, 2 cups of water and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt to the pot of chickpeas and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to a high simmer, cover and cook until the cabbage is tender, about 30 minutes; about 10 minutes into the cooking, stir the cabbage down into the pot.
6. Strain the lemon juice/pepper flake mixture and discard the pepper flakes. Add 1 tablespoon of the spiced lemon juice to the stew. If you want it hotter, add the rest.

Makes 6 to 8 servings

*You can cook the chickpeas without soaking them first. The cooking time will be longer and you'll have to start with water to cover by 2 inches.

BLT candles

From The Grateful Palate--a website that celebrates bacon (their tagline is "It's a bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon world)--comes BLT Candles. The clearly impassioned inventor explains why he/she (unclear authorship) felt the need to create votive candles that smell like a sandwich:

I love the smell of bacon cooking. I fantasize about having bacon grilling on the stove day and night. In my philosophic musings I asked myself what is better than a BLT? As much as I try, I can't eat a BLT at every meal and I can't grill bacon 24 hours a day.

As the candles clearly indicate, one smells like bacon, one smells like tomato and the third smells like lettuce (????).

If you're not willing to spend $34 on the BLT candles, you should check out their Bacon of the Month Club (I'd mentioned this before when I was discussing a book called Seduced by Bacon).

Dulce de leche in 10 minutes

Dulce de leche (which translates as milk candy) is a dessert sauce and/or flavoring from Latin American cooking. If you heat milk until the water in it evaporates, the natural milk sugars will concentrate. Then if you continue to cook the milk, the sugars will caramelize.

There is a classic home recipe for dulce de leche involving a can of sweetened condensed milk, a saucepan of water and 3 or 4 hours of slow cooking. The milk gets cooked right in its can (though you have to put some holes in the top of the can for the steam to escape or you'll have an explosion).

My favorite engineer/cook at Cooking for Engineers experimented with making dulce de leche in the microwave. He got the condensed milk to a dulce de leche sauce in about 10 minutes. With 5 more minutes of cooking he got it to the candy stage. His instructions and step-by-steps are great.

Hearts of Palm Salad

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans eat 177 eggs a year (not counting the 70ish eggs from processed foods). Chances are a good number of that total get eaten right after Easter, so the Census Bureau has dubbed this upcoming week Egg Salad Week.

In honor of that, but not going for a straight-up egg salad, I offer this lighter salad of hearts of palm, peas and radishes. The dressing is a sort of lime mayonnaise made with the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, lime juice, olive oil and a touch of sesame oil.

Hearts of Palm Salad
Heart of palm is the inner core of very young palm trees, including coconut palms and açaí palms. Though palm hearts were once harvested in the wild, making them quite a luxury since the process killed the trees, domesticated palm trees are now grown specifically for the purpose of giving up their hearts. (Awwww.)

2 cans (14 ounces each) hearts of palm, thinly sliced (3 cups)
1-1/2 cups frozen green peas, thawed
1/2 cup julienned radishes (5 to 6)
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro or flat-leaf parsley
2 large eggs, hard-boiled
2 tablespoons lime juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

1. In a large bowl, combine the hearts of palm, peas, radishes and cilantro.
2. Peel the eggs and place the yolks in a small bowl. Chop the whites and add to the bowl with the vegetables.
3. Add the lime juice, salt and pepper to the yolks and mash together with a fork. Whisk in the olive oil and sesame oil until well emulsified.
4. Add the dressing to the salad and toss gently.

Makes 8 servings

Spiced Edamame

The first time I traveled across the country I was in my 20s and was driving a commercial van that had been retrofitted to be a camper. I had great dreams of cooking my healthy hippie food out in the wild on my little propane stove.

The very first night I decided--with what I now know to be absurd naivete--to make a big pot of soybeans. This was going to last for the whole journey.

Let's just say that round about 1 in the morning I gave up waiting for the soybeans to get soft enough to eat...ever. I put the pot of beans outside, under the van, and in the middle of the night some snuffling beast came along and overturned the pot.

Interestingly, the beast didn't want to eat the soybeans either. In spite of many hours of cooking, they were still like little pellets of plastic.

This is why I resisted for years trying edamame, which are young soybeans. I was imagining that they would be just as intractable as their older, dried counterparts. I'm glad I finally caved in, because I am now quite an edamame fan. The trick is in the flavoring you use when you cook them. Salt is a must, because even though edamame are tender, they are still on the bland side. And in the recipe below, I upped the ante a bit.

Spiced Edamame
The addition of fresh garlic, lemon juice, lemon zest and red pepper flakes takes edamame out of the ordinary.

3 quarts water
4 large cloves garlic, smashed and peeled
2 large strips of lemon zest, cut into thin slivers
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt, preferably Hawaiian
2 bags (10 ounces each) frozen edamame
1 tablespoon lemon juice

1. In a large pot, combine the water, garlic, lemon zest, red pepper flakes and 1 tablespoon of the sea salt. Bring to a boil and cook, partially covered for 3 minutes. Add the frozen edamame, let the water come back to a boil and cook for 3 minutes.
2. Drain well and transfer to a serving bowl. Add the remaining 1 teaspoon sea salt and the lemon juice and toss well.

Makes 8 servings