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?

Indian Feast 2008

Back when I was a freshman in college, I took a class on the history of India. Partway through the term, our professor hosted a dinner party at her house, featuring traditional Indian foods. I volunteered to be part of the cooking team, and learned how to make chai, pop mustard seeds and fry potatoes. The rest of the class arrived later, ate a vast quantity of everything, drank chai and all fell asleep on the professor’s living room floor. I think some of us had to be carried back to our dorms.

Inspired by that experience, for a number of years now we’ve hosted an event at our house, formally dubbed the Quasi-Annual Skagit County Indian Feast & Hike (QASCIFH?) As you might expect from the name, it involves a hike followed by a lot of home cooked Indian food. We’ve found that a brisk walk in chilly weather helps work up a good appetite and keeps us awake longer. We don’t usually go far - maybe 2 to 4 miles - but it’s a fun outing, with the prospect of good food at the end.

We usually hold this event early in the year, when weather is uncertain, but usually it works out pretty well - we’d never had to cancel on account of weather. Enter spring 2008. The day of the party it snowed. And hailed. And rained. And snowed some more. We all stood inside staring out at the ice pellets as they poured down and skittered across the sidewalk, and decided that drinking wine and eating pappadums was the better part of valor. So no hike this year, save for a small excursion around the block during a sunbreak.

asparagus tart

One of my various jobs at work is managing the library’s collection of periodicals. This keeps me splendidly up to date on all kinds of important stuff, like Britney’s latest debacle or who’s crushing on who this week. It also lets me peek at all the food magazines I don’t bother to subscribe to, like Gourmet and Bon Appetit (full disclosure: I do get Gastronomica, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated, Simple Cooking and Food & Wine (hey, F&W was cheap)). When the latest issue of B.A. crossed my desk I picked it up and flipped through it to get rid of the subscription cards, and was immediately caught by an article on things to do with all the vegetables in your CSA box, by Molly Stevens of All About Braising fame. Not that we get a CSA box (nearly all the farms around here only produce May through October). Sigh. But anyway - the very first recipe was a tart made with asparagus, whole-milk ricotta and comte cheese, and I instantly knew I had to try it.

After some careful searching at the co-op, we were able to come up with whole-milk ricotta, a small chunk of comte cheese, nitrate-free soppressata salami and a bunch of fresh, fat asparagus from California. I had a leftover sheet of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry in the freezer, so that was taken care of. We also picked up a small pack of pork chops to give us some protein with our puff pastry.

asparagus with ajwain and ginger

Local asparagus still isn’t here, but when I stopped by the co-op yesterday to pick up something for dinner they had the most beautiful bundles of organic Mexican asparagus - I couldn’t resist. We were feeling a little hankering for Indian food, so I roasted a pork tenderloin that I had rubbed with salt, pepper, cumin and paprika, and cooked the asparagus with ajwain, fresh ginger and amchoor (green mango) powder, like the green bean recipe from Madhur Jaffrey.

In case you were wondering, this is what ajwain looks like, piled up next to some (larger) cumin seed. We bought our current supply at a small Indian grocery in the Pike Place Market.

glazed gingery ribs

I have no idea where this recipe came from. I think it was a library book, maybe something general like “Asian Cooking” by somebody-or-other. I don’t think the original recipe called for star anise or chile pepper - I think J thought that up himself. But, you know, we just have no record of it. The recipe is written in our little home recipe binder and has been there for years, and every time we make it we’re impressed anew with how easy and delicious it is.

It’s a great dish to make for company because it’s so hands-off: you combine the ingredients with water and let it simmer, then boil off the liquid. Stir occasionally and cook some rice and veg to go with it. That’s it! The only downside is being able to start it early enough, since it takes a long time to boil down - not really a weeknight meal unless someone in your house gets off work well before 5.

cassoulet for New Year’s Day

I was only recently introduced to the idea of eating beans on New Year’s Day for good luck and prosperity. I’ve always figured I’ve gotten my good luck from our noodles the night before - but on the other hand, you can’t have too much good luck. So this year I decided to try my hand at a cassoulet.

I know that there’s a lot of argument over what makes the “true” cassoulet. I read the recipes in The Art of French Cooking and The Cooking of Southwest France, and I read David Lebovitz’s post on Camp Cassoulet in Gascony.  Doing it the “official” way, with confit and pork fat and God knows what, certainly sounds exciting. But you know, the only people I was trying to impress were J and myself, and I just wanted it to taste good. So I did it all in one day, skipped the confit, and came up with something I was really pleased with. My one concession to working ahead was to have a pork roast for dinner a few days previous, so we could use the leftover meat.

Christmas vignettes

We’re back from our Christmas trip! We spent it mostly holed up at my parents’ house, with a short expedition to Leavenworth when it stopped snowing for a few minutes. We cooked a lot. Here’s an abbreviated photo essay of the holiday:

First, for my mother’s birthday, there was chicken biryani (with a tofu option) and chocolate cake.

Indonesian pork & greens

I do lots of the cooking in our house, and I like it that way, but still - I love it when J cooks. Not only does it mean I can sit around with a drink and watch someone else work - always enjoyable - but he often tackles recipes that are a lot more complex than I usually feel like dealing with. He loves measuring spices for Indian curries, is a great baker, and doesn’t mind following long detailed directions. I tend to look at this sort of recipe, think “what’s all this nitpicking detail for?” and ignore half of it. He doesn’t, with the obvious result that a lot of his cooking tastes more complex and authentic than mine. Not that he complains much about my cooking

So on Sunday when I was at work, he undertook to make a couple recipes out of James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor. I loved this book when I bought it so much that I actually sat on the couch and read it cover to cover, it was so evocative of the sights, smells and tastes of Indonesia. We made a special trip to Uwajimaya (a 100-mile round trip) to stock up on every single weird-sounding ingredient: pandan leaf, sweet soybean paste, fermented shrimp paste, galangal, water spinach, fresh turmeric, et al. It was great. But lately we haven’t been cooking out of it, and when we were in Uwajimaya again on Saturday the water spinach looked good, so …

Stir-Fried Nyonya-style Water Spinach

from Cradle of Flavor by James Oseland

lemony pork chops & sweet potatoes

You ever have something in your fridge or pantry that’s really old, not very appealing any more, but not nasty enough to just throw away? I have this problem with preserved lemons - not the lemons themselves, I usually use them right up - but the syrup that they come in. Even after the lemons are gone, that juice is still good! But then you forget to use it, and it gets shoved to the back of the fridge, and you feel guilty about it but never quite want to toss the jar and buy a new one…at least that’s what happens to me.

So anyway, I wanted to do roasted sweet potatoes this week, so we went to the store looking for something to go with them. Pork chops sounded nice, and we were suddenly struck by the notion that we could use some of our leftover lemon goo on them! We used to roast pork blade steaks with preserved lemon and garlic, but hadn’t thought of it in a while.

Pork braised in milk

Our plan for Sunday - which actually worked out, astonishingly enough - was to go get our Christmas tree at a local farm, set it up, and braise something for dinner so it could be cooking away and scenting the house while we decorated our tree. Often, of course, these plans don’t work out, because getting the tree into the house takes approximately five times longer than you think it will, and by the time it’s upright, the floor is vacuumed and the furniture has all been rearranged twice, you don’t have time for an involved dinner. But we actually allowed enough time for once, so we had our braise and our tree, too.

I was very pleased with the braised short ribs I made out of Molly Stevens’ book All About Braising, and wanted to try another recipe or two from her. We have an Italian friend who used to make pork cooked with milk and sage, but I had never tried it myself (I think I still wasn’t convinced it really worked) so when I saw a recipe for Pork Loin Braised in Milk, I thought I’d try it just as written and see what happened.