(How to) Eat Your Veggies

[A recap of all the good food Sudip made this week using delicious, freshly-farmed veggies. Enjoy!)

Good friends of ours who have bought CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares just happen to be away for a month this summer. That means that we're getting their vegetables, shipped in from a nearby organic farm every Tuesday. Given that I'm at the local farmers' market every Sunday anyway, my kitchen is just filled with amazing produce, all of it organic, much of it heirloom: beautiful little fingerling potatoes, knobby white baby carrots, jewel-like golden beets, purple kohlrabi, fennel, green garlic, sorrel leaves, purslane (my new favorite salad green), Romanesque broccoli (as gorgeous to look at as it is to eat), and of course the ubiquitous zucchini and yellow squash.

Anyway, the best thing you can do with produce like this is not to mess around with it too much. That means, for me, no fancy sauces, no complicated cooking process. A little coarse sea salt, a few lashings of black pepper, a touch of lemon or sherry vinegar, the best olive oil you can afford, and heat--what else do you need?


The dishes I made this week aren't recipes so much as they are wonderful combinations of ingredients that I wanted to share: fingerling potato and purslane salad with knobs of ripened goat's cheese; baby golden beets, fingerling potatoes, and baby white and orange carrots roasted together with olive oil, pepper, and sea salt; spaghetti with sorrel pesto; a soup of Spanish lentils, sorrel, baby carrots, and green garlic; roasted beet, fennel, and goat's cheese salad; and finally, Romanesque broccoli soup with purple onions and green garlic, topped with a quenelle of goat's ricotta. So delicious.

Ramps, Part Deux

[Now, what to do with aforementioned ramps. Chefdip is on a roll!]



Earlier, I wrote about the glories of pickling ramps. Tonight, I decided to use the ramps I pickled over the weekend. Luckily, I still had some wonderful ingredients from Saturday's farmers market: asparagus, new potatoes, and scallions. So I made a warm salad. I quartered the new potatoes, tossed them with olive oil, coarse sea salt, and pepper and put them into a hot oven to roast. When they were nearly done and getting caramelized, I add the asparagus and scallions, which I cut up in small pieces. I have some thyme growing in my kitchen, so I tore off some sprigs and added them as well.

When the vegetables were caramelized and tender, I took them out and squeezed a lemon into them, then added the zest of that lemon--and a handful of pickled ramps. Some more coarse and salt, and I had a wonderful warm spring salad.

For our main course, I took baby swiss chard (which I'd also bought at the market) and wilted it in olive oil, then set the greens aside. I made a sauce by mixing creme fraiche with the strained pickling liquid from my ramps, plus salt and pepper (you whisk it and gets wonderfully foamy). Then I seared off six sea scallops, which I'd seasoned first, adding some butter after turning them initially, then basting the scallops with that delicious brown butter.

I put a bed of swiss chard on the plate, topped with a couple of sea scallops, put some pickled ramps on the plate, and spooned on the sauce. The dish was absolutely incredible and tasted like the essence of springtime.
















I'm out of produce. Tomorrow I'm ordering a pizza.

Ramps? Pickled? What?

[This comes to us from our dear friend Chefdip. I've never had a ramp, and I've certainly never had one pickled, but he takes it there, and makes the rest of us look bad in the process. Shad roe? Shaved asparagus? Sorry, I'm busy with my Betty Crocker yellow cake over here.]



















Springtime seems to bring the most delicious things to the farmers markets:
fava beans (which are worth the great trouble involved in preparing them), earthy morel mushrooms (best eaten when cooked gently in butter), the most delicious asparagus (which I both roast and eat raw, shaved in a salad), and tender, young salad greens. And of course, the shad are running, and that means shad roe, which I look forward to each year with an anticipation bordering on lunacy.

Ramps are also in season. Americans have been eating these wild, garlicky little leeks for ages, but only recently have they become a flash item in restaurants. They're only available for a short time in the spring, they grow wild in parts of Appalachia, and they're highly perishable. But they're intense and delicious. I like to eat them with shad roe and capers, in a soup with new potatoes and thyme, pan-roasted with chicken, oven-roasted with scallions--just about any way I can.

But because they go bad so quickly, I like to pickle them, to extend my ramp season. I can then add these pickled ramps to a braise, to salads, to a sauce for soft-shell crabs, to frittatas.

Last weekend, I pickled my ramps in two ways. Both involved a base of 1 cup of white wine vinegar and 1 cup of sugar. To the first batch, I toasted some mustard seeds, coriander seeds, black peppercorns, and bay leaves and added this mix to the liquid. I blanched the ramps for just a minute or two, then put them in a sterilized jar and poured over the pickling liquid. In the second batch, I toasted off about 4 tsps of the Bengali spice mix called panch phoran (five spices): nigella seeds, fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, and cumin seeds--the aromas in the kitchen were unreal--and added this to the brine. After about three days, you have a truly wondrous thing.