sea bean stir fry

In one of those instances of weird synchronicity, we ate sea beans for the first time last Friday, and on Saturday we saw them for sale at our local farmer’s market. Of course we bought some. Then we went home and attempted to find a recipe for them in our vast array of cookbooks - not as easy as I thought. Turns out this stuff, a marsh plant, goes by a lot of different names: glasswort, sea asparagus, samphire, salicornia, pousse-pied…and most of my books don’t talk about it at all. Many people pickle it, but the Zuni Cafe cookbook has a nice recipe for fish with a topping of sea beans sauteed in butter and sprinkled with vinegar - I might try that if we get more.

What we did with it was make a stirfry. It seemed logical - the sea beans are small, crisp and salty, and cook up quickly, and I thought the flavor would work well contrasted with meat and vegetables. We combined them with pork marinated in black bean sauce, some sliced mushrooms, ginger and shallot, and ate it with plenty of brown rice. It was excellent - a touch salty, but the rice balanced it out. Green tea would have been a nice match, too.

I have no idea how long the season is for these, but I would definitely buy them again. Anyone know any good recipes for sea beans besides pickles?

solstice olives

We had friends over to help celebrate the solstice, and after much deliberation we settled on North African-style food. I made a roasted chicken rubbed with pureed onion and sumac powder (from Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern Food), chickpeas with pomegranate molasses, Lebanese couscous with apricots, and marinated olives. J made a green salad with strips of piquillo pepper and nuggets of fried garlic (from Casa Moro), and for dessert we just put out a big colander full of ripe strawberries and a bag of chocolate nib cookies from the Breadfarm. Oh, yum.

It was all fantastic, but I’d like to make special note of the olives.

lemongrass rice and grilled beef

There was fresh lemongrass at the farmer’s market again! This time I used it to flavor a batch of rice cooked with coconut milk and daun salam (recipe from Cradle of Flavor, very easy). I just tied the lemongrass into knots, combined it with washed basmati rice, a handful of dried daun salam (Indian bay) leaves, coconut milk, salt and water, brought it all to a boil and steamed it for 15 minutes, then let it sit while we did other things. Just before we ate I fished out all the aromatics and fluffed up the rice - it was dry, sweet and a little chewy. J thought it smelled a bit like Froot Loops, which I can’t say is a real recommendation, but there you go. It was tasty.

To go with the rice, J made some grilled beef skewers

grill me an oyster

Finally, a beautiful day! We celebrated by going on food safari, as Jen from Last Night’s Dinner puts it (I’m adopting that phrase, it’s perfect). We had visited the farmer’s market the day before and gotten a bunch of goodies, but on Sunday we drove out Chuckanut for further supplies. We got mussels and Kumamoto oysters at Taylor Shellfish, a loaf of farmer bread from the Breadfarm (plus what may have been the world’s best macaroon), and a completely gratuitous chorizo sausage from Slough Food (hey, as long as we were in there…) We took our haul home, fired up the grill, opened up some wine and settled in to eat shellfish.

strawberries

At last, we have local strawberries! J went out to Sakuma Brothers last week and bought our first Skagit Valley strawberries of the season. They were huge, juicy and sweet - a totally different animal from the California berries for sale in the grocery store. I know that there are great strawberries in California - we used to buy them at the Santa Barbara farmer’s market every week - but they never make it up here.

What did we do with our fresh berries? Apart from eating one every time I walked by the box, that is? Strawberry shortcake, naturally.

in the garden: Junuary

This month has been so depressing here in the Northwest, people have started called it Junuary. The sun has appeared a few times, but it’s mostly been in the low 50s and raining. Ugh. The only way to know that it’s really June is that the foxgloves are blooming, in spite of it all.

chicken with lemongrass and lime leaf

It may not look like it from the picture, but this was really good (taking appetizing pictures of stewed chicken can be mighty tricky).

The library recently acquired a copy of the book 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer. I checked it out, we made two recipes out of it and promptly bought our own copy. It’s a great book, written in a humorous, comfortable tone and full of a huge selection of curries from all over India. I knew I had to have it when I had counted something like 15 different recipes for okra.

Last weekend at the farmer’s market we were thrilled to find fresh lemongrass at the Hedlin farmstand. This was exciting enough that we searched our cookbooks looking for something that would really show off the flavor, and we landed on this lemongrass-lime leaf chicken curry from the new book. J made it while I was at work, and let me tell you - the house smelled really good when I got home. He also took all these pictures, since I wasn’t around - so yeah, I’m really just the reporter on this one.

First he marinated whole boneless chicken thighs in ginger, garlic and salt.

tofu is delicious food

We don’t have tofu at home real often - I usually get my fix ordering it deep-fried in Thai restaurants - but when we do, one of my favorite ways to eat it is with broccoli and peanut sauce. I remember we made a sort-of version of this back in college, when I lived in a vegan interest house on the edge of campus. One day we discovered we had left our shipment of tofu out on the porch…in Minnesota. In January. In case you haven’t done this yourself, let me tell you that frozen tofu takes on a really interesting texture, kind of like a hardened sponge. It’s not entirely unpleasant, and actually it was such a nice change from the usual that we all got very enthusiastic about it for a while. Anyway, we would cut it into cubes and toss it up with broccoli and peanut butter and rice, and it was good and more filling than a lot of the things we cooked in that house (I often had to eat a peanut butter sandwich after dinner just to get through the night).

My current version is, I hope, a little more carefully put together. We only recently discovered how good buckwheat soba is in this dish, but I like it a lot - the creamy sauce and tofu against the earthy bite of the noodles is great. Brown rice works well, too.

a cheering supper

Coming home a bit late one evening, I was tired and slightly grumpy at having spent much of a lovely afternoon indoors. We were hungry and wanting to make the most of the remaining evening, but there was no food at home. We thought quickly and did a fast swing through the grocery store before heading home and bought ground lamb, whole wheat pita breads (from a local company!) and a fresh cucumber - I had recently been reading through my copy of My Bombay Kitchen and had some idea of making parsiburgers with lots of fresh mint. J, however, wanted to try a recipe from his Street Food book, packing spiced lamb onto skewers and grilling it.

The kebabs were a mixed success - they were very very delicious, but the soft lamb mixture didn’t want to cling to our narrow metal skewers and threatened to fall off every time they were moved.

chickpeas with pomegranate molasses

Nothing really groundbreaking here, just a really nice thing to do with chickpeas for a little side dish, bringing in a bit of North African flavor to an otherwise ordinary dinner. I was wanting to make something else out of Casa Moro, but wasn’t feeling very ambitious, so this is what I landed on. It’s really easy, assuming you have a can of chickpeas hanging around in your pantry and you happen to have some leftover pomegranate molasses lurking in the fridge, like we did.

Chickpeas with Pomegranate Molasses

adapted from Casa Moro by Sam & Sam Clark

• 1 can chickpeas
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
• 2 Tbsp pomegranate molasses
• about 1/3 cup water
• 30 threads of saffron, steeped in 2 Tbsp boiling water for a few minutes
• 2 Tbsp chopped cilantro
• salt and pepper

Fry the garlic in the olive oil until it just turns golden. Dump in the pomegranate molasses, water, saffron infusion and chickpeas, stir it up well and let it simmer for ten minutes. Add the cilantro, then salt and pepper to taste. You can add pomegranate seeds, too, which looks pretty, but I’m not fond of the texture.

The book suggests serving the beans with fish, but I thought it went splendidly with roast chicken. Follow your own taste, as always.