Tag: recipes

Green Garlic Shrimp Scampi with Linguine

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I am finally getting to the end of the massive amount of green garlic that I bought at the Greenmarket. Whew! It has been a very delicious process, but it still feels good to polish it off.

With the last three bulbs, I decided to go hog-wild with . . . not hog, shrimp!

Big, fat, sugary sweet Florida Gulf shrimp. Deepwater Horizon be damned. Yeah, there are some scary reports out there, but it’s not like I have Gulf shrimp every day. And I just had four. They were supposedly wild, which is supposed to be okay.

I live in New York City so I figure that the air I breathe is probably deadlier.

They were so tasty. And the green garlic was a great spring twist on shrimp scampi, that Italian-American classic. No green garlic? The original calls for regular garlic and is still delicious. Don’t want to chance it with Gulf shrimp? Go for any shrimp that make your motor run. Or no shrimp at all — the sauce for the linguine is incredible on its own.

On another note, has anyone been having a problem with the WordPress Reader? Generally, you should be able to see an updated feed of all the blogs you follow when you open it, right? Lately, it hasn’t been updating the some of the blogs that I follow. It’s really random, though. Sometimes it will just skip posts, or sometimes it just stops updating a single blog altogether.

I read somewhere that the solution is to edit the list and refollow everyone. I started doing that, but it was so annoying that I stopped.

Has anyone else had this problem? There must be another fix . . .

Ingredients:

1/3 pound of dried linguine

1 tablespoon of olive oil

3 green garlic bulbs, the white parts and the tender green stems finely chopped

1 tablespoon of parsley, finely chopped

2 tablespoons of butter

Red chili pepper flakes to taste

1/3 cup of dry white wine

1/2 pound of shrimp, shelled and deveined

The juice of one lemon

How to prepare:

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil and cook the linguine until it is al dente.

2. While the pasta is cooking, heat a tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat in a heavy saucepan or a Dutch oven until it begins to shimmer. Add the green garlic and sauté it until it begins to soften and turn translucent. Stir in the butter, the parsley, and red chili pepper flakes to taste. When the butter has completely melted, carefully add the white wine and the shrimp to the pan. Cook the shrimp until they are pink on the outside and their flesh has turned white or opaque all the way through, about 3-5 minutes.

3. Add the cooked linguine to the pan and toss everything together. Turn off the heat and add the lemon juice to the pasta. Toss again before dividing it up the and serving.

Fried Egg with Sautéed Ramps and Garlic-Rubbed Toast

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Ramps. Just the thought of them at the Greenmarket makes me really excited. Ramps taste like the essence of spring given that they are the first greens to come up after a long winter of tubers and root vegetables.

I’m not the only one with ramp-mania either. Unfortunately, the dramatic rise in their popularity over the past few years has been raising concerns that foragers are over-harvesting to meet demand.

Ramps are notoriously difficult to cultivate. For the most part, they are a foraged food that is found and plucked in the wild. To ensure that the plant keeps growing requires foragers to leave their bulbs intact — problematic since most ramps are sold with their bulbs and roots attached.

So what do you do if you love them like I do? Should you stop eating them all together?

You don’t have to give up ramps as long as you stay committed to being a responsible consumer. If you forage for them, take no more than you can reasonably eat. If you can, just take the leaves and leave the bulbs in the ground. If you buy them, try to buy them from a farmer you trust. Talk to your farmer and make sure that their ramps are coming to you in a sensible and sustainable way. The Greenmarket NYC closely monitors and regulates foraged food to ensure that things like ramps will continue to be around in the future.

Celebrate their scarcity because that is what makes them special!

Once you get your hands on some sensibly-foraged ramps, this is a great way to prepare them for lunch or for a light supper. I hesitate to even call this a recipe since it is such a simple way to prepare them, but simple preparations are oftentimes the best way to showcase especially great ingredients.

Ingredients:

Thickly-sliced bread, as many pieces per person as you like

1 garlic clove

4 ramps per person, cleaned and bulbs split in half if they are on the large side

1 egg per person

Olive oil

Butter

Salt and black pepper

How to prepare:

1. Generously brush both sides of your bread with olive oil. Broil the pieces until they are golden brown. Rub a garlic clove on both sides of the bread, including the edges.

2. In a large skillet, heat some olive oil over medium heat. Add the ramps to the pan when the oil begins to shimmer. When the leaves have wilted and the bulbs have begun to turn translucent, shape the ramps into a circle and crack an egg into the center. Add a knob of butter to the pan. When the butter has melted, begin spooning the hot fat over the egg yolk as it cooks. When the whites have set, use a spatula to gently remove the egg and the ramps from the pan to a plate. Season the egg and ramps with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Serve with the garlic-rubbed toast.

Ramp Risotto with Pancetta, Meyer Lemon and Parmesan

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Spring is officially here when ramps are in!

And when I think ramps, I think risotto.

Sometimes, people think that risotto is difficult. But as long as you are willing to be patient, and don’t mind giving your stirring arm a little workout, risotto is a ridiculously easy way to have an elegant dinner.

This recipe is for two, but you can easily make the recipe for more people by adhering to the following ratio: for every 1/4 cup of rice, you will need one cup of liquid.

Ingredients:

1 quart (4 cups) of chicken or vegetable stock

3 ounces of pancetta, sliced into thin strips

Olive oil

1 bunch of ramps, cleaned with stems and leaves divided

1 cup of Arborio rice

1/4 cup of white wine

The zest and juice of 1 Meyer lemon

2 tablespoons of butter, cut into small cubes

1/4 cup of Parmesan, plus more for sprinkling

How to prepare:

1. Thinly slice the white ramp bulbs and roughly chop the leaves. Keep them separated.

2. In a saucepan, bring the stock up to a boil and then turn off the heat.

3. In a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed saucepan, brown the pancetta over medium heat until most of the fat has rendered and the pancetta has just begun to crisp. Spoon off all but one tablespoon of fat. Add the sliced white parts of the ramps and sauté them until they begin to turn translucent. Add the rice and toss the grains in the fat for about a minute or two.

4. When the rice grains begin to lose their opacity, add the white wine. When the wine has been absorbed, begin adding the hot stock, a ladleful at a time, while stirring constantly, until you have used all the stock or the rice has lost its chalky hardness and is perfectly al dente. This can take between 15-20 minutes.

5. When the rice is creamy and the grains are al dente, turn off the heat. Add the lemon juice and zest, the chopped green ramp tops and the butter. Incorporate everything into the rice. When the ramp tops have wilted, stir in about a 1/4 cup of Parmesan. Adjust the seasoning, adding a little hot water or more hot stock if the risotto seems to be a little thick. Serve immediately topped with more grated Parmesan.

The Daring Kitchen April Cooks’ Challenge: Whole Wheat Flatbread with Grilled Eggplant, Goat Cheese Ricotta, Sundried Tomatoes and Maple-Chili Pistachios

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This was the Daring Kitchen challenge that almost didn’t happen. After a few weeks of thinking, toying with ideas and brainstorming, the challenge got put on hold and then was quickly buried under a sea of other priorities. When I finally got around to making a grocery list and buying ingredients, my oven promptly decided that it was no longer participating in my kitchen adventures 😦

I thought about changing direction and doing something else, but my heart had been set on making a flatbread. I went as far as to contemplate doing the flatbread in a cast-iron pan on top of the stove (the stovetop was still working) and using a mini-blowtorch to char the top of it.

“Daisy,” Laura said, “I think that’s a bad idea.”

I even went out and bought pressurized butane despite having doubts that my newly acquired mini-torch — meant for itty bitty crèmes brûlées — would probably melt or malfunction if used on something as big as a 12 or 14-inch pizza . . .

“Daisy. It’s just a bad idea.”

Sigh.

Thankfully, my oven got fixed a lot sooner than anticipated — which just goes to show that you can get anything fixed in this town so long as you utter three magic words:

I smell gas . . .

I thought that was pretty smart of me 😉

Once the oven was fixed, I was back on track, though given the chance, I would have tinkered with the recipe more before posting. To make up for how rough the recipe is, I have written the recipe based what I would do it if I were to make it again — like use a lot more eggplant!

Also, I would suggest that you tinker a little bit with your cooking times and temperatures as it appears that when they fixed my oven, they also re-calibrated it so that it seems to run hotter that it did before.

This month, David and Karen from Twenty-Fingered Cooking challenged us to come up with our own recipes using the three lists of challenge ingredients. The recipe must include at least one item from each list, and if we fail, we must order a pizza.

The challenge lists were:

List 1: Parsnips, Eggplant, Cauliflower
List 2: Balsamic Vinegar, Goat Cheese, Chipotle Pepper
List 3: Maple Syrup, Instant Coffee, Bananas

When I first saw the challenge, I was thinking of a balsamic, instant coffee and maple syrup-glazed steak on top of a parsnip-goat cheese purée.

Then I thought about using the eggplant and cauliflower to make a vegetarian chili with chipotle peppers and instant coffee.

Then I thought that it would be fun to try to challenge myself to make the most inedible dish possible. Some kind of cauliflower-instant coffee banana cream pie, or a banana-chipotle baba ghanoush, but I felt like that might be a violation of the challenge’s good spirit.

To save me from myself, I threw the idea out to amazing Heather over at Ruby and Wheaky (one of my favorite blogs and one of my favorite bloggers — do check her site out when you get the chance! She is a phenomenal writer). She suggested a “maple syrup and chipotle-glazed cauliflower dish,” “an instant coffee dusted baked/fried eggplant dish with a goat cheese topping,” “an eggplant, goat cheese sandwich with a side dish of coffee-infused banana chips,” or “a crazy sort of eggplant, goat cheese pizza topped with maple- glazed pistachio nuts.”

As you can see, her ideas were way better than mine!

A giant thank you to David and Karen for the great challenge! I had a ton of fun dreaming up different recipes. Your challenge made me feel like an Iron Chef!

Blog-checking lines:
Our April 2012 Daring Cooks hosts were David & Karen from Twenty-Fingered Cooking. They presented us with a very daring and unique challenge of forming our own recipes by using a set list of ingredients!

Ingredients:

For the flatbread:

1 packet of active, dry yeast (about 2 1/4 teapoons)

1 cup of lukewarm water (between 105°-115°)

1 teaspoon of salt

2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 cups of bread or all-purpose flour

1 cup of whole wheat flour

For the toppings:

2 medium eggplants or one large eggplant, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices

Olive oil

2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

1 teaspoon of salt

1/2 cup of sundried tomatoes, cut into thin strips

6 ounces of goat milk ricotta (or another kind of soft and crumbly goat cheese)

1/3 of a cup of shelled pistachios

1 teaspoon of maple sugar (or one tablespoon of maple syrup)

1/4 teaspoon of chipotle pepper powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

How to prepare:

1. In a large bowl, mix together the yeast and the warm water. Let the yeast bloom undisturbed for about 10 minutes.

2. In a separate bowl, mix the two flours together. Once the yeast has bloomed, add the salt and two tablespoons of olive oil. Stir in the flour, a little bit at a time, with a wooden spoon until it has all been incorporated. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured countertop and knead it for about 6-8 minutes until the dough is soft and satiny. Shape the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let it rise until it has doubled, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

3. In the meanwhile, prepare the eggplant. In a small bowl, whisk together the balsamic vinegar and 1 teaspoon of salt. Let sit for a minute or two to let the salt dissolve. Whisk in about four tablespoons of olive oil. Brush both sides of each eggplant slice with the balsamic-olive oil mixture.

4. Brush a grill pan lightly with olive oil and heat it over medium-high heat. When the oil just begins to smoke, lay a few slices of eggplant on the grill. Grill the slices for a minute or two on each side. If you want, you can give the slices a quarter turn on the grill so that they have some nice grill marks. Remove the slices to a plate as you finish them.

5. Preheat the oven to 350°. In a small bowl, toss the shelled pistachios with the maple sugar or maple syrup, the chipotle pepper powder and a drizzle of olive oil until they are evenly coated. Toast the nuts for no more than 5 minutes, checking them frequently to make sure that they don’t burn. Remove the nuts from the oven and let them cool before roughly chopping them.

6. Turn the oven up to 425°. Punch the risen dough down and stretch it out to cover the bottom of a half-sheet pan. Lightly brush the surface with olive oil and evenly arrange the grilled eggplant slices over the top. Scatter the sun-dried tomatoes and the goat cheese evenly over the eggplant. Bake the flatbread in the oven for about 10-15 minutes. The dough should be crisp and the edges should be browned. Remove it from the oven and scatter the chopped pistachios over the top. Drizzle the flatbread with olive oil and cut into squares to serve.

Young, Green Garlic Knots with Parmesan and Marinara Sauce

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Well, I did it. I broke my oven.

After a week of intense pizza-making, my oven decided that it was having no more of this high-heat nonsense and promptly decided that it was going to go on strike.

The stovetop still works, but the oven just makes a clicking noise and stays as cold as my hopes and dreams for weekend baking 😦

If my landlord doesn’t fix it in the next day or so, this will certainly throw a wrench into my plan for this month’s Daring Kitchen challenge. It is strongly looking like I am going to have to get creative fast.

Thankfully, before my oven decided that it had lived through enough, I was able to crank out these awesome garlic knots using Patricia Wells‘ basic pizza dough recipe.

Since I used the rest of the green garlic I got at the Greenmarket, the garlic butter turned out to be more like a garlic spread. No matter, the results were still sloppily delicious. I inhaled about four in a row while standing in my kitchen. They were just so soft, pillowy and slathered with green garlicky goodness that I couldn’t eat just one or two . . . or, erm, three!

On another note, I passed that darned Spanish exam! Tequila para todos!!!

Ingredients:

For Patricia Wells’ Basic Pizza Dough:

1 teaspoon of active dry yeast

1 teaspoon of sugar

1 1/3 cups of lukewarm water (between 105°-115°)

2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 teaspoons of salt

3 3/4 cups of bread flour (thank you RubyandWheaky!) or all-purpose flour

For the Marinara Sauce:

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes (if you don’t live in the Tri-State area, you can order Jersey Fresh tomatoes here, or use the best San Marzano tomatoes that you can find)

Salt

For the Young, Green Garlic Spread:

2 bulbs of young, green garlic, white and green parts trimmed and thinly sliced

2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 tablespoons of butter

1 teaspoon of salt

Freshly grated Parmesan cheese for sprinkling

How to prepare:

1. In a large bowl, mix together the yeast, the warm water and the sugar. Let it stand for about 5 minutes before stirring in the olive oil and the salt.

2. Using a wooden spoon, stir in the flour, a little bit at a time, until most of the flour has been absorbed and the dough begins to pull together. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured countertop and knead it until it is smooth and elastic, about 5 to 6 minutes. Shape the dough into a ball and transfer it to a large lightly oiled bowl. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let the dough rise between 8-12 hours in the refrigerator, or until it has doubled or tripled in size.

3. When the dough has risen, remove it from the refrigerator and punch it down. Let the dough rise again until it has doubled in size.

4. While the dough is rising, heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the tomatoes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer the tomatoes, stirring frequently, until all the oil has been incorporated and the sauce has thickened. Adjust the seasoning.

5. Preheat the oven to 400°.

6. Divide the dough into 15 2-ounce portions. Use your hands to roll and stretch each portion into a 6-8 inch-long strip. Make a knot, and tuck the ends under the bottom of the knot. Arrange the knots on a parchment paper-lined sheet pan so that they are evenly spaced apart. Bake the knots for about 20-25 minutes, or until they are browned and golden.

7. While the knots are baking, soften the green garlic in the olive oil and butter over medium heat. When the garlic is soft, season it with about a teaspoon of salt. Transfer everything to a food processor and process it until you have a smooth purée.

8. When the knots are done, remove them from the oven and let them sit until they are just cool enough to handle. Spread the green garlic purée over the top of each knot. Let the knots cool and absorb the the melted butter and olive oil in the purée. Sprinkle each knot with Parmesan cheese and serve with marinara sauce on the side.

Young, Green Garlic Pizza

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Have you seen Jim Lahey‘s new book? The one all about pizza? I have been a big fan of Lahey ever since I lived up the street from the Sullivan Street Bakery in Soho. Back then, I used to go over there almost daily for shots of Illy coffee and square slices of pizza, available in four varieties: Bianca, Potato and Rosemary, Tomato Sauce, and Mushroom and Thyme.

Since those years, Lahey has expanded the Sullivan Street Bakery and opened a pizza joint called Co. Co. is just about one of my favorite places for a pizza pie in the city. The dough is imperfectly perfect: lumpy, irregular, charred, crispy and toothsome, with just the right amount of salt and olive oil. When I saw that Lahey had published a book all about pizza, I got really, really excited.

Because I thought it would be really, really easy.

See, Lahey’s other book contained the über-recipe for no-knead bread. As long as you were willing to let the dough do its thing and rise overnight, you could have amazing bread with just about zero effort. You didn’t need a fancy oven, or a special starter, or a wooden paddle. You just needed a bowl and an oven-safe pot with a lid.

So of course, I assumed that his pizza would be just as simple.

In many ways, it is. You mix the ingredients, you let it rise overnight, you stretch it, you top it . . . and then you pull out your pizza stone, pizza paddle or pizza peel.

Insert screeching wheel sound here.

Lahey wants you to heat your pizza stone by positioning it about 8 inches from the broiler element before using your pizza paddle to slide your pie onto its hot surface. I have three problems with this:

A) I live in a tiny studio apartment and I don’t have any space left for any more pieces of specialized cooking equipment, no matter how “inexpensive” Lahey says they are.
B) My broiler has exactly three inches worth of clearance because the broiler unit is positioned underneath the actual oven. If I put a pizza stone in there, there will be no room for a pizza. If I do manage to wedge a pizza in there, chances are that I will set my apartment on fire.
C) I live in a rental.

I have no problem with letting dough proof overnight. Delayed gratification doesn’t bother me, but if there is one thing I abhor in terms of cooking it is being told that I can’t make X if I don’t have Y.

Especially when Y is a piece of equipment.

Pizza is pizza. It’s not molecular gastronomy, it’s peasant food — albeit very wonderful peasant food that has a cult following and official Italian government recognition.

Nevertheless, I refuse to be precious about pizza.

If you have a pizza stone, by all means use it. If you have a pizza peel, good for you. You are likely a more serious pizza aficionado than myself. If you have neither, you can still make a perfectly serviceable— and even an amazing pizza — without them.

I’ll worry about authenticity when I have the money, time and space to build a outdoor wood-burning oven just like they have in old Napoli.

Pizza dough is really easy to make at home. Generally, it consists of five ingredients: flour, yeast, olive oil, salt and water. Every time that I make pizza dough, I end up using a different recipe than I did before because I forgot to scribble down the proportions that I used. However, there is one dough that I keep coming back to consistently: Amy Scherber‘s “Push Button” Pizza Crust, published in The Chefs of the Times. Scherber’s dough is super easy to pull together; you just whizz all the ingredients together in a food processor for about 60 seconds total, and then let the dough rest for 60 minutes. You don’t have to toss it to stretch it, just use your fingertips to “press, prod, push and poke” the dough into place on a plain old cookie sheet. The crust gets wonderfully crispy in the oven, but it still has a little bit of give to it. It also has great flavor even though it has the same ingredients that every pizza dough has.

If you don’t have a food processor, you can just stir the ingredients together with a spoon, and then knead it until the dough feels elastic.

For the sauce, I make the simplest marinara ever using Jersey Fresh Crushed Tomatoes — which are amazing straight out of the can. All I do is heat about two tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add the 28 ounces of crushed tomatoes, and simmer everything over low heat until the oil has been incorporated and the sauce has thickened. I love it. If the canned tomatoes are really good, it’s just the purest taste of tomato that you can imagine.

The #1 most important trick to perfect pizza at home is to go easy on the sauce and the toppings.

I know it’s hard to resist the urge to slather your dough with tons of sauce and cheese, but the more you pile on, the spongier your dough will be because all those toppings carry moisture. The more toppings you add, the less chance you will have of achieving a crispy crust.

And pizza really is all about the crust. So remember, less is more!

This is also the first post this year to feature spring vegetables. Green garlic is in! Whoo-hoo!!!

Ingredients:

For Amy Scherber’s “Push Button” Crust:

Olive oil

3/4 cup + 1 tablespoon of warm water (between 105-115°)

1 1/2 teaspoons of active dry yeast

2 cups of all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons of coarse cornmeal

2 1/2 teaspoons of salt

For the pizza sauce:

2 tablespoons of olive oil

1 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes (if you don’t live in the Tri-State area, you can order Jersey Fresh tomatoes here, or use the best San Marzano tomatoes that you can find)

Salt

For the toppings:

1 ball of buffalo mozzarella

1 bulb of young, green garlic, thinly sliced on the bias along with some of the tender green stem

Special equipment:

1 half-sheet pan or a plain old cookie sheet

How to prepare:

For the dough:

1. Whizz together the water, the yeast and 2 teaspoons of olive oil in the food processor. Add the flour, the cornmeal and 2 1/2 teaspoons of salt. Process everything together until the dough comes together, about 10 seconds. Process the dough for about 5 seconds more before turning it out onto a lightly floured countertop. Knead the dough briefly for about 30 seconds. Shape the dough into a ball and place it in an oiled bowl. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rest for about an hour.

If you don’t have a food processor, you can mix the water, the yeast and the olive oil together with your fingers, and then incorporate the dry ingredients a little bit at a time with a wooden spoon. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured countertop, and knead the dough until it becomes elastic. Shape the dough into a ball and place it in an oiled bowl. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rest for about an hour.

2. While the dough is rising, heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the tomatoes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer the tomatoes, stirring frequently, until all the oil has been incorporated and the sauce has thickened. Adjust the seasoning.

3. Preheat the oven to 450-475°.

4. When the dough has risen, divide it in half if you want to make two round personal pizzas, or leave it as one ball of dough if you want to make one big rectangular pizza. Line your sheet pan with a parchment paper. Lift the dough out the bowl and stretch it out slightly. Place it in the center of the sheet pan. Using lightly oiled fingertips, press the dough out from its middle to its edges. Continue to pat it out until it is thin and evenly covers the pan.

5. Spoon just enough sauce over the dough so that there is a thin, even layer. Hand tear the mozzarella over the top, half a ball per round if you are making two round pizzas instead of one large rectangular pizza. Scatter the thinly sliced green garlic evenly over the top. Bake the pizza until the crust is golden and the top is bubbly, about 10-15 minutes.

Split Pea Soup with Bacon Ends

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A while ago, I was gifted a giant tub of bacon ends from a member of a different CSA. They languished in the back of my freezer until a deep spring clean last week.

Bacon ends are a terrific thing to have in the house — even if you’re like me and fall into the “out of sight, out of mind” camp. Just make sure that you have them somewhere you can see them at all times, a visual reminder that every dish is better with bacon.

Not only are bacon ends a good thing to always have on hand, but they are also much more economical than buying bacon strips. Chopped up and slowly browned, they make wonderful bacon bits. The rendered fat can be used in the place of oil or butter, or in anything that could be enhanced by some smoky porcine flavor.

And let’s be honest, what wouldn’t benefit from added porkiness?

People can sometimes be a little skeeved out by cooking with animal fat. However, so long as the pigs are pasture-raised by a farmer who follows organic practices, there should be no fear of needing Lipitor. Bacon fat from pasture-raised pork even has the added benefit of being a good source of vitamin D, making bacon fat certainly as good as butter!

I’m not saying that you should sit around the house and chow down on scoops of it, but a little bacon fat is much healthier for you than all those omnipresent, heavily-processed vegetable oils. My rule of thumb is that the more steps in processing it takes to get the food to your mouth, the less healthy it is for you. I would even go as far as to argue that it’s not even food at that point. This is why I always shake my head at people who buy low-fat foods because in order to make up for the taste and flavor deficit, those items are generally bulked up with tons of sugar — which might be worse for you than the fat.

Plus low-fat foods taste bad.

Anyway, no more ranting. Back to the soup!

Dried split peas scream for bacon! But if animals are not your thing, you can leave the bacon out and make the soup with smoked paprika instead.

Ingredients:

About 3 or 4 ounces of bacon or bacon ends, cut into small dice

1 small onion, chopped

1 large carrot, peeled and diced

2 stalks of celery, diced

1 pound (16 ounces) of dried split peas, picked over for small stones

2 bay leaves

4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock + 1 cup of water

Salt and pepper

Smoked paprika

Special equipment:

A hand-held immersion blender (optional)

How to prepare:

1. In a large Dutch oven, cook the bacon or bacon ends over medium heat with a little bit of olive oil until most of the fat has rendered. Reserve a few bits of bacon for garnish. Spoon off all but one tablespoon of bacon fat. Keep the bacon fat in a clean container in your freezer, and use it for other things like roasting potatoes, eggs, roasting chickens, anything really.

2. Add the vegetables to the pot. Let them cook until the vegetables have softened and the onion is translucent, about 5-7 minutes. Add the split peas and toss them with the vegetables until they are evenly coated with bacon fat. Add the bay leaves, the stock and the water. Bring everything up to boil, and then reduce the heat. Let the peas simmer until they are tender, about 45 minutes to an hour. Periodically skim the top of the soup of scum and grease. If the soup seems too thick, thin it out by adding more stock or water.

3. When the peas are tender, you can leave the soup alone if you like a chunky soup. I like to partially purée the soup so that it is creamier, but still has some interesting bits of vegetables and peas in it. This is super easy to do with an immersion blender. Just insert the stick blender into the soup and blend as much as you like. You can also transfer half of the soup to a regular blender or a food processor, then add the blended soup back to the unblended half. If you use a blender, keep your hand smacked tight onto the blender lid lest it go flying off, leaving your kitchen covered in pea soup spray. Adjust the seasoning for a final time, and thin the soup with stock or water again if it seems too thick.

Serve topped with a few of the reserved bacon bits, a dusting of smoked paprika and with some good, hearty bread.

Orecchiette with Broccoli Rabe and Italian Sausage (Orecchiette con cime di rapa e salsiccia)

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Have you ever had one of those weeks where you were amazed at how busy your schedule was, yet surprised at how little you seemed to get done?

That was last week for me and the blitz of activity left me little time to cook, let alone eat something good for me. Lunch was reduced to a handful of jalapeño-flavored potato chips and half a curried tofu sandwich. Dinner was an even more embarrassing affair consisting of leftover boiled potatoes drizzled with olive oil and followed by gelato straight out of its paper container.

I was starting to feel like a human garbage disposal, and was yearning for a real meal, meaning something satisfying that was also quick and easy to put together.

Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe fit the bill perfectly as simple, rustic Italian seems to be my go-to cuisine when my belly is rumbling and my eyes are blinkered from low blood sugar.

One of the emblematic pastas of Puglia, orecchiette are thus named because they are supposed to resemble little ears. I don’t know about that, since they only look like ears to me if we’re talking (nerd alert!!!!) Ferengi ears. I do know that they are delicious and are perfectly shaped to cup little bits and pieces of chopped vegetables. The bitterness of broccoli rabe always goes well with savory sausage, garlic and red chili pepper flakes. To make this dish vegetarian, simply omit the sausage. It is very tasty that way as well.

As this is a very simple dish, I have given you proportions for two, even though I ate the two for one.

Yep, that’s how I roll in Hungry Town 😉

Ingredients:

1/3 of a pound of orrechiette

1/2 pound of pork Italian sausage, casings removed

Olive oil

1/3 of a bunch of broccoli rabe, roughly chopped

3-4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

Red chili pepper flakes

Salt and pepper

How to prepare:

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Cook the pasta until it is al dente.

2. While the pasta is cooking, heat a little bit of olive oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil begins to shimmer, pinch off one-inch pieces of sausage and brown them in a single layer in the pan. When the sausage pieces are browned on all sides and cooked through, remove them to a paper towel-lined plate or bowl.

3. Drain the pasta, reserving about a 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of the pasta water. Wipe out the skillet and add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil to the pan. Set the pan over medium heat and sauté the garlic slices until they are fragrant, about a minute or two. Add as many chili pepper flakes as you like and continue to sauté for about 30 more seconds. Be careful that the chili pepper flakes don’t burn. Add the chopped broccoli rabe and a little bit of the pasta water (you can always add more water later if the dish starts to look a little dry) to the pan. Cook the rabe until it begins to wilt. Add the sausage and the pasta, along with another splash or two of pasta water if needed. Toss and let everything cook together for another minute or two. The pasta should begin to absorb some of the sauce. Adjust the seasoning if needed.

Serve in large warmed bowls with an additional drizzle of olive oil.

Cooking The Hunger Games: District 11’s Crescent Moon Rolls with Sesame Seeds and Katniss’s Favorite Lamb Stew with Dried Plums

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“The Hunger Games? Nope, don’t want to read it. Isn’t that for 14-year old girls?”

“You read Harry Potter!”

It’s true. I read every single Harry Potter book, but this wasn’t Harry Potter. That was about wizards, and good and evil, and growing up, and friendship, and butter beer! This was probably some kind of Twilight spin-off full of conflicted teenagers whining about how they shouldn’t be in love with vampires and werewolves.

“No, really” Joseph insisted, “You should read it.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it about?”

“Well, it’s about this girl . . . And she hunts . . .”

It wasn’t the most persuasive thing he could have said, but Joseph must have been sure that once the seed was planted in my mind, curiosity would get the better of me.

The next time I saw him, I told Joseph that it was completely his fault that I went to bed at 4:45 AM and was raccoon-eyed and foggy-minded for the rest of the day.

“Ha ha!” he said, “You read The Hunger Games, didn’t you!”

I did. I read it cover to cover. In one night. Straight through.

And I loved it. I was completely hooked.

Yes, The Hunger Games series is clearly Young Adult Fiction. As befits the genre, sometimes the books can be a little repetitive (okay! I thought by Chapter 3 of the first book, I get it! She hunts!). They are also fast-paced and packed full of action. The narratives are straightforward, and the books are emotional and plot-driven. It’s the world from the perspective of kids.

But just because the target audience of The Hunger Games is young, doesn’t mean that any of the books in the series are simplistic. In fact, what makes the books so good is how they use food to illustrate complex ideas and to represent the complicated relationships between different characters, different people, and different social classes. I’ve even read some other things about how the story can be read as an allegory for our current food system and its potential unsustainability, how Katniss herself can be seen as a model of locavorism as a girl who is forced outside of her manufactured food system in order to survive, and how hunting, foraging and sometimes going without — as Katniss does — is a healthier model of eating than what is offered by the super-sized Capitol (thanks, Charlene!).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For those of you who haven’t read the books, maybe a brief overview is necessary:

The Hunger Games takes place in a postapocalyptic future in roughly what is used to be North America. Now known as the dystopian Panem, the state is divided into 13 districts — one of which was annihilated after fomenting rebellion, leaving 12 under the rule of the Capitol. As a means to control the remaining districts, the Hunger Games were created as annual televised event reminding everyone of the power that the Capitol holds over them. Participation is mandatory and each year, each district must send one boy and one girl between the ages of 12-18 to participate in a gladiatorial-like game set in an artificially constructed arena that may or may not kill them if their fellow gladiators — called tributes — don’t get to them first. There can only be one survivor, and the child who manages to be survive earns precious food and oil for their starving district.

The book’s main protagonist is a 16-year old girl from Panem’s poorest district, District 12. Her name is Katniss Everdeen and, as explained so well by Joseph, she is a hunter. More than a hunter though, she is a survivor: tough, capable, resourceful, skilled, and lethal . . . to animals (but as another character points out, are kids really that different?). The story is told from her point of view, and hardly a page goes by without the mention of food.

Food is everywhere in The Hunger Games. It is what everyone in every district outside of the Capitol is obsessed with because just about everyone outside of the Capitol is starving. The decadent Capitol produces nothing. It is reliant on the outlying districts to provide everything from its food to its fuel to its manufactured goods. However, the Capitol’s citizens want for nothing, and what the districts produce is never meant for their own consumption.

Not only is this power dynamic illustrated through the difference between the kinds of food eaten in the Capitol (rich, elegant, sophisticated, refined, and luxurious) and what is eaten in the districts (rough, unrefined foods like ration grains, or things that people eat out of desperation like the pine wood and wild dog), but in sheer quantity as well. People in the Capitol have so much to eat (and eat so much it) that they enjoy making themselves sick just so they can empty their stomachs and continue eating more. This would be inconceivable to people in districts who have never had enough to eat.

If this all sounds very Roman to you, it is pretty obvious that author Suzanne Collins intends it to be. From the idea of a gladiatorial fight to the finish, or to the use of food as a way to symbolize the contrast between the decadence of the Haves in the Capitol and the Have-Nots in the districts, Rome overshadows everything in the series. Characters have Roman names (Seneca, Cato, Cinna, Plutarch). Even the name Panem derives itself, not from Pan-American, but from the Latin phrase panem et circenses which means bread and circuses — the Roman means of appeasing and controlling populations through food and entertainment.

Speaking of bread, every single district has its own, from the rough drop biscuits of District 12, to the ultra-refined rolls of the Capitol. Bread — like all food in The Hunger Games — is used to communicate all kinds of relationships. For example, when Katniss and her fellow tribute from District 12, Peeta Mellark, are transported to the Capitol for training before the games, every table is set to include a basket of bread with representative loaves from each of the 12 districts and from the Capitol. The inclusion of the Capitol’s bread is a symbolic reminder of its power and superiority among those rougher, unsophisticated loaves.

As you can see, there is a lot in the book to think about.

You probably also guessed that I had been very anxiously awaiting the The Hunger Games movie that just came out last week. I was so excited about it that I cooked a Hunger Games feast using recipes from, or adapted from The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook by Emily Ansara Baines before dragging my friends to the midnight IMAX showing of the film.

What did we eat? A “Caesar” salad consisting of chopped Romaine lettuce simply dressed in a lemon juice vinaigrette with lots of grated Parmesan and freshly ground black pepper. It was meant to be a nod to The Hunger Games‘s Roman roots even though Caesar salad has nothing to do with Rome (it was invented in Mexico by a guy named Caesar).

District 11’s Crescent Moon Rolls with Sesame Seeds, because how could a Hunger Games-themed dinner not include bread? Especially this bread, as those of you who have read the books know.

Katniss’s Favorite Lamb Stew with Dried Plums, the name says it all. But read further along to hear more about that story!

And Rum-macerated Strawberries with Prim’s Goat’s Milk Ice Cream, which was simply quartered strawberries tossed in sugar, a sprinkle of salt, and a few splashes of rum, served over goat’s milk ice cream.

It was so much fun. I can’t wait to do this for the second movie!

District 11’s Crescent Moon Rolls with Sesame Seeds

Ingredients:

2 .25-ounce packages of dry active yeast

3/4 cup of warm water (about 110°)

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons of white sugar

Salt

2 eggs

3/4 cup of unsalted butter at room temperature (divided into 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup)

2 cups of all-purpose flour

2 cups of whole wheat flour

For the egg wash:

1 egg

1 tablespoon of milk

2 tablespoons of sesame seeds

How to prepare:

1. Sift together the two flours into a large bowl.

2. In another large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Using an electric mixer, add the sugar, the salt, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup of butter, and half of the flour mixture to the dissolved yeast. Beat everything together until it is smooth, about 5 minutes. Add the remaining flour mixture and beat everything together until it is smooth again.

3. Scrape the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Using your hands, knead the dough for about ten minutes. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover it, and let it rise in a warm place until the dough has almost doubled in size. This can take anywhere between 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

4. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Punch down the dough and divide it roughly in half. Shape each half into a ball and roll each ball out into a 12-inch circle. Use a butter knife to spread half of the remaining 1/4 cup of butter evenly across the circle. Sprinkle with salt. Using a pizza cutter, cut each circle into 8 wedges. Starting at the wide end, roll each wedge up towards its point. Arrange the rolls, point-side down, about an inch apart from each other on the baking sheet. At this point, you can curve the ends inward to make more of a crescent shape. You may need to use more than one baking sheet. Cover the rolls again and let them rise until they are almost doubled, between 90 minutes to 2 hours.

5. Preheat the oven to 375°.

6. When the rolls have doubled again in size, brush them with an egg wash made from one beaten egg and a tablespoon of milk. Sprinkle each roll with sesame seeds. Bake the rolls in the over for about 12-15 minutes, or until they are golden brown.

Katniss’s Favorite Lamb Stew with Dried Plums:

Out of all the dishes from the Capitol that Katniss eats during her training for the games, it is this stew that leaves the greatest impression on her. However, the stew kind of sounds better in concept than execution for the following reason:

If you ask for dried plums at the market, you will likely be pointed in the direction of the prunes. Because dried plums are a fancy way of saying prunes without the stigma associated to the word “prunes.”

Kind of how all bourbon is whisky, but not all whisky is bourbon, all prunes are plums, but not all plums are prunes. Prune plums are generally the plum variety that is almost always dried before eating.

And this recipe called for 5 cups of them. 5 cups of prunes.

Let us consider this for a moment:

For those of you who haven’t read the book, or are currently in the process of reading it, I apologize in advance if I give away a little bit of the story to you.

You know that when Katniss and Peeta are in the cave? When they’re starving the in the cave and they get sent a large tureen of this stew from their sponsors? I don’t know about you, but if I were Haymitch, I wouldn’t send my tributes a big pot of steaming lamb and prunes. Not a good idea.

I would send them something else, like that creamy chicken dish with oranges or some cookies. Because if the whole goal is to not get killed in the arena, I would try my best to not put my tributes in the position to literally be caught with their pants down.

Seriously. Not to be crude or anything, but I strongly think that this recipe should be renamed Katniss’s Favorite Natural Laxative with Stewed Lamb.

It was tasty, but I feel like it is my duty to warn you if you attempt this at home — especially if there are leftovers.

Despite halving the amounts of almost all the recipe’s ingredients (the original called for a insane 5 pounds of lamb), there was still so much stew that it completely filled up a 5-quart Dutch oven to the rim. I had to transfer the stew to an 8-quart stew pot, but even then, the pot was uncomfortably full. What would have happened if I made the recipe exactly as specified? Would I have had to have used a swimming pool?

Even after feeding myself and my friends, I was still left with unholy amounts of stew — enough to soften the stool of a small Roman army.

So if I were you, I would go ahead and halve the recipe again one step further.

Ingredients:

2 to 2 1/2 pounds of lamb stew meat

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons of olive oil

3 cloves of garlic, finely minced

1 large onion, chopped

1/2 of water

4 cups of beef stock

2 teaspoons of white sugar

3 teaspoons of brown sugar

3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into large dice

2 small zucchini, cut into large dice

3 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cubed

5 cups of pitted prunes

2 teaspoons of fresh thyme, finely chopped

3 teaspoons of fresh rosemary, finely chopped

2 teaspoons of fresh basil, finely chopped

2 teaspoons of fresh parsley, finely chopped

1 cup of dry ginger ale

How to prepare:

1. In a large mixing bowl, generously season the lamb with salt and pepper. Toss the meat to coat it evenly with the seasoning.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Sear the lamb cubes on all sides, working in batches if you need to. Remove the lamb to a large stew pot or a lidded casserole.

3. Spoon off all the fat except for about a tablespoon. Add the onion to the pan. Sauté it until it just begins to turn translucent. Add the garlic and continue to sauté everything together until the onion begins to turn golden. Carefully add about 1/2 cup of water to the pan. Cook to reduce the liquid by half. As the liquid reduces, gently scrape the bottom of the pan to release and dissolve the fond. Add the garlic-onion mixture to the lamb.

4. Dissolve the two sugars in the beef stock and add it to the lamb. The liquid should cover it completely. Bring everything to a boil, then cover the pot and simmer the lamb for about an hour.

5. Add the vegetables, the prunes, the herbs, and the ginger ale to the pot. Cover the stew again and simmer it for about 30-45 minutes more. You may need to add more water or stock if the stew looks too thick. The meat should be falling apart, and the vegetables should be tender when the stew is done. Adjust the seasoning and serve.

Breakfast Sausage, Spinach and Roasted Red Pepper Muffins

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Lately, I have been trying to get myself to eat breakfast more often. I actually love breakfast, but I regretfully have rarely made time to have it.

Breakfast muffins are a great thing to make. They are so easy to pull together. They look beautiful, and a nice big basket of them is always a hit for brunch. You can also make a batch the night before and toss one or two (three for me) in the oven to warm the following morning while you make coffee.

These muffins are a great way to use the pork breakfast sausage that I get from my CSA, but in all honesty, the recipe is fairly versatile. You can make them meatless, with broccoli, or any other vegetable that you like. You can use Parmesan or Asiago instead of Cheddar.

The tricks are to not over mix your batter, and to make sure that your vegetables have as little moisture as possible so that your muffins don’t turn out to be soggy.

I have been playing around with different combinations of ingredients and like the mix of roasted red peppers and spinach. I think it’s because I like the idea of starting the day with lots of color!

Ingredients:

1 pound of bulk breakfast sausage

1 large red bell pepper

6 ounces of baby spinach

1 cup of cheddar cheese, shredded

1 cup of whole milk

2 eggs

2 cups of all-purpose flour

4 teaspoons of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt

Special equipment:

A 12-cup muffin pan, preferably non-stick

How to prepare:

1. Preheat the oven to 400°.

2. If you have a gas range, set the red bell pepper directly on the gas burner with the heat on high. Turn the pepper periodically to make sure that the skin chars evenly.

If you have an electric range, rub the bell pepper with olive oil and place it on a cookie sheet set underneath the broiler. You can also rub the pepper with olive oil and pop it into a 450° oven. Remove it when the skin is blistered and blackened.

When your pepper is nice and charred, put it in a clean plastic grocery bag or a small paper bag and wait for it to cool. When it is cool enough to handle, you should be able to gently rub off all the charred skin from the pepper. Seed the pepper, and discard the seeds and the stem. Dice the pepper and spread the pieces out onto paper towels to absorb any excess moisture.

3. In a large skillet, brown the breakfast sausage over medium to medium-high heat, breaking up any large pieces with the side of your wooden spoon or spatula. Remove the browned sausage to a large mixing bowl with a slotted spoon, leaving as much of the drippings behind as possible.

4. Wipe out the skillet and wilt the spinach in it over medium heat with a little bit of olive oil and about a tablespoon of water. When the spinach has wilted, remove it to a colander to drain. When the spinach is cool enough to handle, gently press as much liquid out of the leaves as you can without squeezing them.

5. Roughly chop the spinach leaves and add them to the browned sausage meat along with 2/3 of the roasted red pepper (reserve 1/3 of the peppers to top the muffins), the cheese, the milk and the eggs. Gently stir all the ingredients together until everything is well-mixed.

6. Sift together the flour, the baking powder and the salt. Gently fold the flour mixture, a little bit at a time, into the other ingredients until the batter just comes together. Do not over mix.

7. Divide the mixture evenly among all the muffin cups. Top each with a few pieces of roasted red pepper. Bake the muffins for about 20-25 minutes. The tops should be browned and golden. Let them cool in the tin for a couple of minutes before removing them to a cooling rack.