Grown Up Rice

Confession. I love white rice with ketchup mixed into it. It's a dirty secret from my childhood. It's comfort in a bowl--slightly chewy, soft, hot, a bit sweet. I eat with a spoon. It's even better topped with a fried egg. Nutritional value of said dish without the egg? Yeesh. I won't even try to quantify it. 

I grew up eating grains and have always loved them as a food group. But when I try to conjure up a more grown up rice dish that I really love, nothing rises to the top of the pack. I know that brown and wild rices are great for me and can be delicious, but when I look at my jars of grains and pulses on the shelf I almost always pass over the rice in favor of quinoa, millet, amaranth, lentils.

Last week I had my nose in Yottam Ottolenghi's great cookbooks, Plenty and Ottolenghi. I spent a week making his recipes--green gazpacho, sesame and harissa marinated chicken thighs, burnt eggplant with pomegranate molasses. In Plenty, I came across a recipe for rice with herbs, which he describes as "actually, herbs with rice".

His cooking method is pretty intricate and involves things like making "chimneys" in the rice to allow for proper steaming and what seemed like constant "drizzling" with water and different oils. Steaming chimneys seemed more labor-intensive than necessary for a working night's dinner but I loved the idea of a heavily herbed rice dish. I chose red Wehani rice over Ottolenghi's call for white, ** and decided--at least this time--not to add his called-for yogurt and sour cream. To make it a one-dish meal I sauteed shallots and delicata squash, stirred it into the cooked rice, and added some sriracha hot sauce. It was hot, easy to eat with a spoon, toothsome, intensely flavorful. It would be great with an egg on top. And this time, no ketchup necessary.

** White rice is the whole grain stripped of its hull whereas brown rice (and Wehani rice) is the grain with its hull in tact. The hull contains most of the B vitamins, minerals, fiber and fat and 10% of the protein. While white rice is not completely devoid of nutrition, it doesn't provide as many nutrients as its brown or wild counterparts. Think of it as white bread versus some kind of seedy whole grain bread--it's not evil, it's just doing less good.

Grown Up Rice

serves 4 as a side dish
adapted from Yottam Ottolenghi's book Plenty

1 cup red (or brown or wild) rice

2 1/4 cups water

salt

1-2 cups finely chopped herbs (dill, parsley, cilantro, basil, mint, oregano)

1 shallot

olive oil

1 small delicata squash

sriracha or hot sauce of choice

egg (optional)

Put the rice in a sieve and rinse under cold water. Put it in a pot and cover with the water. Bring to a boil, uncovered, over medium-high heat. Once water boils, throw in a pinch or two of salt, cover the pot and reduce heat to low. Set time for 20 minutes.

While the rice is cooking, halve the delicata lengthwise and use a spoon to remove the seeds. Halve each piece again, lengthwise, and slice crosswise into slices about a 1/4 inch thick. Set aside.

Peel the shallot and chop. Set aside.

Choose the herbs you like in the amounts you like (I go heaviest on mint, basil and dill, personally) and chop finely.

When the timer on the rice goes off, remove the top, add the herbs in one big pile and replace the lid. Se the timer for another 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a small pan. When glistening, add the shallot and stir. Cook for a couple of minutes then add the delicata and a pinch of salt. Cook over medium high heat until the squash is tender and browning at the edges. About 10 minutes. 

When the rice is finished, remove the lid and fluff the rice with a fork, stirring the herbs into the grain. Add the delicata and shallot to the pot and mix well or spoon the rice onto a plate and top with the squash. Top it all with an egg (fried or poached recommended) and a generous amount of hot sauce. Salt and pepper to taste as always. 

Roasted Cauliflower with Salsa Verde

I have a lot of books about food. I have books about nutrition, books about the socio-political implications of food, collections of essays about food, books of poetry about food, musings from MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David, and slim vintage manuals that sit on my shelf to serve as art rather than instruction. I have cookbooks that are dog-eared, food-splattered and marked up the way any well loved, good cookbook should be, and I have beautiful cookbooks from which I have never made a recipe but which I find in my lap on a regular basis for inspiration.

Nigel Slater's book Tender, falls into the latter category. It is a thick, 618 page, beautiful beast of a book centered around the vegetables the author loves and grows in his backyard in London. The book is heavy on text and when pictures do appear they are simultaneously lush and cold, inviting and a bit austere, rich in hue but suggestive of a damp grey just outside the border of the page, evocative of London itself. I love Slater's narrative tone which is conversational, at times equally poetic and snarky, and always confident. He breaks the book into chapters by vegetable, gives a brief introduction, discusses the vegetable "in the kitchen" and "in the garden" and then gives general suggestions for flavors that work well together. Finally there is a picture or two and a few recipes showing how these flavor combinations might manifest.

Whenever I tire of how I am preparing a vegetable I turn to Tender for some new suggestion of a spice or preparation I haven't thought of. We have a lot of cauliflower in our garden right now. I have made "rice" with it. I have made soup with it. I've thrown it into salads and stir fries and dipped it in hummus. I ate it every couple of days for weeks and finally got sick of the stuff, wished it gone, and felt as Slater does that "Sometimes I think it wouldn't bother me if I never saw one again." Still, the dense heads of crinkly florets continue to thrive outside--some white, some an almost pale purple. I opened to Slater's chapter on the brassica about which he says, "Its chaste, slightly coy presence makes this a vegetable that would never shout its qualities." I have to agree. It can be borderline dull when mistreated and sublimely subtle given the right circumstances. Among his recipes for cheese or bechamel-smothered cauliflower, I found a simple dish of fried cauliflower with salsa verde. With plans to grill lamb chops that night it seemed the perfect first recipe to test from the book. We have a small kitchen with poor ventilation so I opted to roast the cauliflower at high heat until just tender. I collected the herbs from our backyard, chopped some garlic and 10 minutes later had a bowl of piquant, emerald colored sauce that is not only delicious on cauliflower but also on lamb, on salmon, on chicken, on roasted potatoes, mixed into quinoa......you get the idea.

Roasted Cauliflower with Salsa Verde

adapted from Tender by Nigel Slater

serves 4

1 head of cauliflower

olive oil

1 or 2 lemons

a big handful each of basil, mint & parsley

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 T dijon mustard

2 T capers, rinsed

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. 

Trim the cauliflower of its stem and outer leaves then pull apart or cut into florets. Place on a sheet tray and drizzle with olive oil. I like to go light on the oil so that the cauliflower crisps rather than sogs. Sprinkle with salt and maybe a little smoked paprika if you have it handy. Roast until just tender but not limp. About 20 minutes.

While the cauliflower is cooking prepare the salsa verde.

Chope the herbs finely but don't worry about uniformity. They should be thin but, as Slater says, "not so small they look like tea leaves." Place in a medium sized bowl and add the garlic, mustard and capers. Stir with a fork and then, while stirring, slowly add enough olive oil to bring the mixture to a dressing or sauce-like consistency. About 6 tablespoons. 

Add the juice of one lemon, a pinch of salt and a lot of black pepper. Taste and adjust seasoning and lemon juice and herb ratio as needed. It should taste salty, zesty, bright, garlicky and all around delicious.

Remove the cauliflower from the oven and serve immediately, smothered in salsa verde.

Coconut Rose Pudding

For the past three days I have been craving something that I have never made and never even tasted. Coconut pudding. Where the notion for such a thing came from I have no idea. But here I am, craving something sweet and cold, refreshing but creamy, the kind of dessert that takes two bites to get off the spoon. Comfort food.

With the ever growing popularity of coconut water it has become pretty easy to get access to the stuff. As with most trends, once it catches on there are people who become purists, which, as far as I can tell, in the case of coconut water, means getting it raw, or better yet, straight out of a green coconut. In this case, the purists are right. Many of the boxed and canned coconut waters taste too sweet, too processed, like the flavor of coconut instead of the thing itself. If you live somewhere with a good Asian market or close to a Whole Foods, you can easily get your hands on a young Thai coconut. It's worth the dicey work with a cleaver just to get at that fresh, almost effervescent, incomparable water.

Once you've refreshed yourself with the water you're left with silky coconut meat which bears little resemblance to the chalky flesh you find in the drier, brown-husked variety. This is slippery and almost gelatinous to the touch but dense when you sink your teeth in and delicate in taste.

Traditional pudding involves cream and milk and actual cooking. Maybe it's the hot weather, maybe it's the past weeks of a sprint-paced life, maybe it's as simple as missing someone I love who now is gone. Whatever the reason, I really needed this pudding to be simple, no-frills, easy to make and comforting to eat. I recently read that the Sanskrit word for coconut palm means "tree that gives all that is necessary for living." Eating this, barefoot in my dusty backyard, a thin slice of moon rising in the twilight, and not a sound but the crickets and my spoon against the bowl, I just might have to agree.

Coconut Rose Pudding

serves 4

2 young Thai green coconuts

1/2 cup coconut water reserved from the coconuts

1 t raw honey or other sweetener

2 t rose water

Lie one of the coconuts on its side. Carefully and with confidence, use a cleaver or other very sharp butcher knife to cut off the top of the shell. Do your best not to lose too much of the coconut water inside. 

Once you've cracked the nut, pour the water into a cup or jar and repeat with the second coconut. Drink some of the water. It's delicious.

Wielding the cleaver again, split the coconut in half from top to bottom so you may more easily access the meat. Using a spoon, scoop the meat from the shell and place it in a high speed blender. 

Add the honey, rose water, and about 1/2 a cup of the reserved coconut water and blend until smooth. Chill in the fridge for at least a couple hours so the pudding thickens.*

Top with a sprinkle of cinnamon, cocoa powder, some chopped pistachios or just enjoy as is. 

*I put one small bowl in the freezer just for fun and ended up with a sorbet-like consistency which was very nice.

Note: This can be made vegan by replacing the honey with stevia or coconut nectar. Stevia will also make this a cleanse-friendly sweet.

Zucchini: A trilogy

PART I: RAW
Admit it. You're sick of them already. For the first week you're ecstatic: the daily harvesting of the small and delicious squash, the blossoms stuffed and fried, the very picture of summer abundance, living proof that even you can grow a vegetable, and a flourishing one at that. And then you forget to look at your beloved plant for a couple of days and lo and behold, you have 4 zucchinis the size of baseball bats. We have three plants in our backyard, and we've stayed pretty on top of harvesting. Still, I find myself opening the fridge and sighing deeply with resignation. Another meal, another zucchini. It's hard to stay excited and inspired by the same ingredient no matter how versatile it is. But I will try in these next three posts to get myself and you re-excited about good old, dependable, prolific, adaptable zucchini. There will be one recipe for each stage of the fruit: one for the baby size, one for the mid-sized and one for the sleeping giant zucchini, so that none of your harvest goes to waste.

My favorite way to eat zucchini is raw, harvested young, when they are tiny, no longer than a couple of inches and about the width of two of your fingers. Sliced very thinly they are crunchy, slightly nutty, and the perfect vehicle for lemon, good olive oil, and a mild cheese. The other day I prepared them in a carpaccio-like salad, alternating the paper thin slices with equally thin rounds of lemon cucumbers and armenian cucumbers.  Add a little cheese and whatever fresh herbs you have on hand--basil, dill, mint, parsley, tarragon, or all of them--and you have yourself a delicious (and maybe home grown and harvested) lunch or side dish. Eat up, there is more on the way!!!

Raw Zucchini & Cucumber Salad

2 small zucchini 

1 or 2 cucumbers 

juice and zest of one lemon

zest of one orange

a handfull of basil, chopped

a few mint leaves, chopped

a few sprigs of Italian parsley, chopped

a handful of multi-colored nasturtiums, chopped

1/4 cup really good olive oil

1 shallot peeled and minced

a splash of rice wine or champagne vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

optional: a mild chevre or, for a vegan option, chopped toasted almonds to garnish

Very carefully, using a mandolin, slice the zucchini into paper thin rounds. If it is very hot and dry out, cover the slices with a damp paper towel while you tend to the rest of the ingredients.

Slice the cucumbers into paper thin rounds and set aside, covering with a damp towel if needed.

In a small bowl whisk together the shallots, lemon zest, lemon juice, a pinch of salt and a splash of vinegar. Let sit for ten minutes.

Alternating between zucchini and cucumber, lay the slices out on each individual plate or on a large serving plate. Each round should slightly overlap the one beneath it. 

Whisk the olive oil into the dressing and taste. Adjust as needed. Drizzle the salad(s) with the dressing, coating lightly but well. Sprinkle the chopped herbs and nasturtiums all over the salad. If you are using goat cheese add generous hunks here and there on top of the slices. Sprinkle the whole salad(s) with orange zest.

Finish with good sea salt and cracked black pepper.