Tag: garlic

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

45. Hummus with toasted pine nuts, cumin seeds, and parsely oil p.14


The recipe

I made this for one of The Boys going away parties. He’d just finished his Ph.D. and was heading off to a very fancy post doc in the states. I was throwing a party in his honor, and I wanted to make things he would like. I think I did alright in pleasing him, but I totally forgot that his girlfriend is allergic to garlic, and couldn’t eat even one of the dishes I’d prepared. I apologized at the time, but I’ll say it again. I’m sorry.

I love hummus as party food. It has all the virtues of a good crowd pleaser; it’s intensely flavored, can be dipped with anything your heart desires, it neatly avoids almost all dietary restrictions, it’s substantial, and it costs pennies to prepare. The only downside to hummus it that it’s oatmeal like appearance doesn’t make for the greatest visual impression. Here a very basic hummus recipe is given a face lift with a rather attractive topping of pine nuts, cumin seeds, and drizzled parsley oil. The nuts also add a nice texture and bursts of flavour, giving you a little something to look forward to in every bite. The vibrant green of the oil really set the dish off. That colour happens to have been attained with parsely. Maybe it’s not so useless after all? That might be going too far.

I think this dish is being added to my repertoire of party standards. It’s a way to take the ubiquitous bowl of hummus at college parties along with you into the adult world.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

42. Pan-Browned Brussels Sprouts p.526

the recipe

A while back I mentioned that I’d think about opening a restaurant that specializes in helping adults overcome their childhood food traumas. Brussels sprouts will feature prominently on the menu. This preparation is the perfect reintroduction to this maligned vegetable. Boiled or steamed they can be fairly one-note bitter, and overcooked they have that sulfurous stink that’s so common in foods kids hate. Here they’re prepared simply with garlic and pine nuts in a bit of butter and olive oil. The garlic, and the nutty flavours of the browned butter, and pine nuts compliment the sprouts beautifully. The presentation is dramatic and very attractive, and the sprouts end up crisp, lively, and just cooked through. My dining companion and I made twice as much as we thought we’d eat, but polished the whole plate off.

I liked these so much I made them for the boys on one of our weekend getaways. That experience emphasized how important a heavy bottomed pan, and careful heat management are to getting this recipe right. Using a flimsy non sitck, on an unfamiliar stove I managed to leave half of them mostly raw on the inside, the other half overdone and all of them unappealingly blackened on the bottom.

That said this is still far and away my favorite Brussels sprouts preparation. As long as you can maintain low even heat the sprouts get caramelized on the bottoms, and perfectly cooked though. This recipe is ideally balanced; it manages to show off everything that is great about Brussels sprouts, and deftly avoids their weaknesses.

Pan-browned Brussels sprouts, you’ve earned your 5 mushroom rating.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

39. Penne with Broccoli Rabe p.206

I can’t find an Epicurious recipe for this one. If I had this might have been a 4.5 mushroom dish, but I can’t bear not to share this simple flavourful Tuesday night supper with the world. Here it is.

2 pounds broccoli rabe
1 pound penne
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 garlic cloves, sliced
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste
Salt

Accompaniment: finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Trim and discard any yellow or coarse leaves and tough stem ends from broccoli rabe. Cut off florets and reserve. Cut stems and leaves crosswise into 1-inch-wide pieces. Wash stems, leaves, and florets and drain in a colander. Cook Broccoli rabe in a 6-quart pot of boiling salted water (1 tablespoon salt per every 4 quarts water) until stems are tender, about 5 minutes; drain.

Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente.

Meanwhile, heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately low heat. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and cook, stirring until garlic is golden, about 1 minute. Add broccoli rabe and salt to taste, increase heat to moderately high, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 to 5 minutes.

Drain pasta and toss with broccoli rabe until well combined. Transfer to a bowl and serve with cheese.

Broccoli rabe is usually sold as rapini here. I don’t think I’d ever tried it before I met my dining companion. She adores all bitter greens, but rapini is her special favourite. It looks quite a bit like leafy broccoli, and has a similar taste, but with a serious bite. Apparently it’s a member of the turnip family, and some of that sharp flavour comes through. Rapini was definitely the vegetable find of 2006 for me. We eat it quite regularly, and I hope that I’m getting the touch. It’s a bit tricky because it has tough fibrous stalks, and relatively more delicate leaves. The idea is to get the stalks tender, without overdoing the leaves. More than once I’ve stopped early (inedible stalks), or gone too far (nasty yellowish leaves, and a bit of a sulfurous funk). I think I’ve got the hang of it now, and the 5 minute mark set in this recipe is right on the money. The photo is proof that it came out a vibrant green, and I assure you that it was toothsome and not a bit mushy.

For a recipe I’m giving a 5 mushroom rating to, it’s horribly written. It wasn’t at all clear to me what I was supposed to do with the florrets that I’d reserved. Were they meant to go in to boil with the stalks? possibly. Perhaps then they are the broccoli rabe that goes into the pan with the garlic and oil? Would have been nice to specify it. Does that mean that the boiled stalks go into the pan as well as florets? Perhaps reserve the florets, meant reserve for another purpose. Who knows. Anyway, I boiled the stalks, cooked the garlic and red pepper flakes, then added the stalks to the garlic, cooked for a bit and tossed with the pasta. I forgot my little bowl of florets on the counter and they never made it into the dish at all.

I guess the recipe is pretty tolerant, and it is delicious. Do what you will with the florets, but do make this dish.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

37. Swiss Chard and Chickpeas p.542


the recipe

This quick stew was fine, nothing special, but fine. It’s centred around swiss chard and chickpeas, with a bit of tomato, onion, garlic, and lemon juice. It was a bit bland, and the flavours never really came together. The fibrous swiss chard and grainy chickpeas didn’t make for the most appealing texture either. On the other hand it was a heathly and simple side dish.

I think this was a case of great things being inappropriately combined. Sauteed swiss chard with a bit of onion garlic and lemon is an excellent summery vegetable dish. Simiarly a simple chick pea salad with those ingredients is a satisfying dish any time. Put them together and add tomato, and you get something less than the sum of it’s parts. I don’t think tomato would be particularly good with the chard or the chickpeas alone, and it didn’t really add much to the stew.

On the plus side the ingredients were easily available, there was almost no effort involved in making it, it’s cheap, and it feels healthy. Unfortunately “tastes really healthy” is the food equivalent of “has a great personality”.

Categories
Soups The Book

28. Rustic Garlic Soup p.94

Sorry, no recipe this time.

This is an Italian soup called aquacotta or “cooked water”, because it comes together from nothing special. It starts with a garlic broth (water, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, and salt) which is forced through a sieve, and slowly added to a mixture of egg yolks, parmigiano-reggiano, and olive oil. Add pepper, and spoon it over some chunks of country style bread. I wanted to make it more of a meal so I browned some cheddar on the bread under the broiler and added it to the soup.

This recipe really appealed to me because I’d invited a friend over for supper, but when I got home from work I just couldn’t face going to the grocery store. I loved that it didn’t require anything I didn’t have on hand, and that it hardly took any effort. The garlic broth worked out really well, giving the soup a pungent flavour, without the same old same old of chicken stock.

The egg yolks gave the soup a bunch of body. The recipe says only to stir the hot broth into the egg mixture slowly, but it would probably be a good idea to take the time to temper the mixture before you start adding in a stream. Coagulating your yolks wouldn’t be good news for anyone.

Most of the saltiness came from the cheese, which was nice. Not too many soups call for cheese in such a nice proportion. I appreciated that the cheese was a nice flavouring agent, without being the star. My cheddar topped toasts didn’t work too well as a replacement for the bread chunks. They floated to the top, and ended up looking a bit sickly. Also one of the best things about cheese on toast is the contrast between the gooey cheese, and the crisp toast. That’s obviously a non-starter when your toast is floating in soup. I wish I’d just stuck to the recipe as it was, or served them on the side.

Overall I liked this one, it was simple, flavourful, economical, and not much fuss.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

26. Guacamole p.9

No linked recipe this time, but this one is so simple I don’t mind retyping it.

4 ripe California avocados, halved, pitted, and peeled
1/2 cup finely chopped white onion
3-4 serrano chiles, minced including seeds
2 1/2 tablespoons fresh lime juice, or to taste
1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt, or to taste

Combine ingredients in a bowl, mash with a fork until avocado is mashed but still somewhat chunky. Stir until blended.

This guacamole was absolutely minimalist, and not in a good way. No garlic, no cilantro, no tomatoes, no nothing. The avocado relish meant to accompany Tortilla Soup With Crisp Tortillas and Avocado Relish on page 96 is by far the superior guacamole (I’ll get to writing that up in a few months, I’m way way behind).

To be fair, the book does offer this version of the guacamole up as a base for several interesting variations: Guacamole with tomato, radish and cilantro guacamole, fall-winter fruit guacamole, and summer fruit guacamole. The radish and cilantro sounds particularly interesting. I’m adding radishes to the list of under appreciated vegetables, relegated to being picked around on crudité plates and otherwise ignored.

The central flaw with this recipe in all it’s variations is the omission of garlic. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guacamole without garlic, and I don’t think I care to ever again. I’m not sure if this this no garlic business is the traditional method and my readers in Oaxaca are exchanging sly glances about the stupid Canadian, but this is my stance and I’m sticking to it. Maybe if this was the first time I’d ever had guacamole I wouldn’t have missed the garlic, but theres no going back once you know the wonders of the avocado-lime-garlic trifecta.

Overall this was fine, but could have been so much more. The other variations may have worked out better than the base recipe, but as it was it was just dull.

N.B. I’ll do my best to push that nasty picture of the fajitas off the main page as quickly as possible. Sorry.

Categories
Salads The Book

24. Green Bean Salad With Pumpkin Seed Dressing p.143


the recipe

I love cold green bean salads, they’re so quintessentially French countryside. When I’m eating them I can’t help but feel I’m sitting in the back garden of the old farmhouse, outside Lyons, I stayed at one summer as a teenager.

This dish wasn’t particularly French, or entirely what I expected it to be, but that’s all right. I think the word “salad” threw me off a bit here. I was expecting the dressing to turn out like a vinaigrette, but it’s actually more of a pesto; very thick and densely coating the green beans. The ingredients in the dressing are straight out of the classic vinaigrette textbook: oil, lemon juice, salt, garlic, olive oil. But there’s a detour via Mexico with pumpkin seeds, cumin, and cilantro. I found that the flavour was quite good, if a bit heavy on the cumin, but the texture was off. The dressing came out kind of lumpy and goopy. I didn’t think that it worked too well with the beans. There was also far too much dressing for the amount of beans they called for. If I were to make this again I’d toast the pumpkin seeds and scatter them over the beans without putting them through the blender. I’m sure the dressing would come together nicely without them.

The beans were nicely crisp-tender, and the flavour deserves high marks. I also appreciate the Franco-Mexican fusion concept going on here. It’s really the texture that prevents me from giving this the rating it might otherwise have earned.

Categories
Sandwiches & Pizzas The Book

17. Grilled Eggplant Sandwiches With Lemon Aioli, Feta, and Mint p.182

the recipe

I sextupled this recipes and brought two sheet pans full to a picnic in the parc. They were devoured within seconds. I’m not sure if this was because they were scrumptious, or if my audience of hungry students wasn’t too discerning. I though these were OK, without being anything special. I think my expectations may have been a bit high. I was hoping for a very Mediterranean result, with feta, olive oil, garlic, lemon, eggplant, and mint. Somehow the mayonnaise in the aioli overwhelmed the other flavours, and the result was a bit bland. The mint did come through nicely.

I didn’t have access to a grill for these so I broiled the eggplant slices. Grilling might have added a nice smokiness, but the problem here didn’t lie in the eggplant. Toasting the buns I put them on would have been nice too. The recipe calls for a baguette, but for feeding a crowd rolls made more sense.

If I made these again I’d up the garlic and lemon juice, and use the best quality feta I could get my hands on. There really isn’t a lot of mayonnaise in here, but I think I’d try to cut it even further (would it still be an aioli? that’s a question for the ages). While this was better in theory than in practice, it wasn’t at all bad. In fact I’d make it again.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

13. Toasted Walnut, Roasted Red Pepper, and Cumin Spread p.12

the recipe

This was an absolute winner. Easy, cheap, packed with flavour, unusual, brightly coloured, exploding with garlic, what’s not to love? I’ve made this twice and I’m sure a third time is not too far away. There are flavours pulling in all sorts of directions here, sweet roasted red peppers and molasses, earthy cumin and walnuts, sharp garlic and red pepper flakes, an acidic bite of lemon juice, but everything plays very well together. It also changes a bit as you eat it. At first the sweet and spicy flavours are prominent, but after a few bites the nuts start to take centre stage.

I was complaining that the lamb tagine’s flavours were too scattered and working against each other. The flavours here are similar in some ways, but they’re pulling in concert. The result is my new favourite spread. The book suggests adding this sauce to meat, and while I haven’t tried it on a roast, I did put it on a turkey sandwich. I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch.

The only downside here is that I think I might be slightly allergic to walnuts. It’s nothing much, just a slight numbing of my mouth and lips and a tickle at the back of my throat; particularly if they’re raw. I’d probably do well to limit my exposure to avoid kindling or sensitization though. Too bad.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

3. Garlic Bread p.606

the recipe

Ahh Garlic bread, the ubiquitous starchy accompaniment to a big plate of my mom’s pasta. Weren’t the fat phobic carb happy 80’s a good time? So this is fairly idiot proof: apply garlic butter to bread, bake in tinfoil till warmed through, open tinfoil package to crisp up bread. Who could screw this up? apparently I can.

Things were going well through the cutting of the ciabatta loaf, and smearing butter stages. All clear for operation put in tinfoil and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Things were going so swimmingly I decided to focus on the rest of dinner. 15 minutes became 20, and the first hint of burning came to my nose. I never opened the package to crisp, and while the bottom of the loaf got nicely done, the rest of the loaf was the soggy mess of a thousand backyard BBQs.

Soggy garlic bread does have some fairly good memories associated with it, and
I enjoyed it thoroughly. However, I was really looking forward to the crispy crunch. Thankfully this is as simple a recipe as there is, so a redo won’t call for any untoward effort.

One thing I really appreciated about this was the suggestion to replace the parsley with basil (a suggestion not made in the linked recipe). To me parsley is a bit of waste of an herb, the Italian stuff has some nice flavor, the frizzy has none. All in all I’ll give parsley a pass whenever possible. Unfortunately The Book (and the whole world) seems to have a bit of thing for it. I won’t balk at spending eight bucks on a tiny piece of goat cheese, but that 79 cent parsley tax so many recipes charge really irks me.

This is a childhood classic not re-imagined in any way, as it should be.