The Confabulist

Yellow Mustard, Orange Carrots and Red Communism

Before getting in to this latest carrot exploration, I need to explain that my personal history with mustard is short.  I was a mayonnaise girl in my youth. And I did think you had to be one or the other. For some reason, my childhood was filled with these imagined food dichotomies: you either liked mayonnaise or mustard, but not both. Chocolate or vanilla is another good example. The sensible among us spread mayonnaise on our sandwiches and ended a meal with vanilla ice cream. In the cold war era, I felt like these choices were akin to being a loyal patriot for democracy versus becoming a communist. Imagine my concern when I noticed my father spreading mayonnaise and mustard on his sandwich and that my mother added vanilla extract to chocolate cookie dough. What are they, anarchists? My aversion to mustard continued well past the point I'd overcome the majority of my other pickiness, which was of course also long after the cold war ended. These days, I don't go so far as to special order my Croque Madam without mustard, but I also don't actively spread mustard on sandwiches of my own making.

I had several carrot dishes picked out to try.  I don't even know why I had a mustard-bearing one among them, but you won't be surprised that it was at the bottom of the list.

However, it was 7 pm on a weeknight and it wasn't until my key hit the lock of the apartment that I remembered I was planning to try out another carrot recipe. I had the lion's share of a great big bag of carrots, but nothing else to round out a recipe. (I'd say this should be called the rabbit's share, but rumor has it rabbits actually prefer to eat grasses, weeds and their own poop. I think I'll stick with the lion.) I couldn't convince myself to head back out to the grocery store; I needed something I could make with ingredients we already had around the house. A quick look around the kitchen confirmed what my sinking heart already knew:  the only recipe I could make was the mustard-based one.

Dijon Vinaigrette Carrot Salad
or
I Heart My Cuisinart

After the folly of the sweet carrot salad I made a couple days before, I knew I wanted something savory. The aptly (but not very descriptively) named Savory Carrot Salad by The Nourishing Gourmet caught my attention for being unabashedly savory while also making use of some common ingredients we already had around. I changed the recipe only a little from the original, mostly through the addition of orange zest, use of fresh basil instead of dried, and suggested amounts of salt and pepper as I found the "dash or two" too little. Though admittedly, I'm not sure I have a great handle on how much a dash is supposed to be. Oh, two pinches - that clears everything up. I also couldn't help renaming it to be a little more descriptive. Here's what I did:

4 carrots, shredded
2 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons of Dijon mustard
2 garlic cloves, small diced
3 to 5 basil leaves, chiffonade or diced
2 teaspoons orange zest (about 1/2 to 1 orange worth of zest)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoons pepper

Shred the carrots in the food processor. If you are still wasting time chopping and shredding by hand, you should seriously consider ordering a 12 or 14 cup Cuisinart or equivalent as soon as possible. You'll get so much more use out of it than that Kitchen-Aid Mixer you've been eyeing and the Cuisinart comes in red now too!

Small dice the garlic, cut up the basil, and zest the orange peel then mix these together with the remaining ingredients (other than the carrots) to make a thick dressing. Pour this over the carrots and don't panic when it doesn't look like nearly enough to cover all the carrots you have. The flavor is strong and the dressing should be viscous enough that you won't need the carrots to be drowning in extra dressing. Just mix it all up until everything is lightly coated and serve.

The spiciness of the raw garlic and mustard contrasted nicely with the natural sweetness of the carrot. The orange peel amplified the juicy freshness of carrots. Both Orion and I found this a compelling side dish. The leftovers were used a couple days later during an impromptu dinner party with friends. They became one ingredient in an otherwise simple salad and added a surprising zing to the bowl of greens. If you end up with leftovers, note that they do lose some of their crunch over time, but still taste great as part of a salad.

This salad is a quick weeknight side dish with serious adult appeal.  Not bad at all considering it's simply shredded carrots with some goop on them. It's a big step for me to make a dish using mustard. I'm proud to have overcome another childhood aversion, and I'll thank you not to call me a mustard-eating commie pinko.

A Big Bag of Carrots and a Dream

Unfortunately, I decided to learn to cook vegetables in the late fall. With the winter vegetable season trudging along, I've begun to feel like a one-trick pony with quite seriously only three recipes in my repertoire that can make use of the meager offerings in the produce section these days. Though I suppose that makes me more accurately a three-trick pony, I still strive toward that elusive carrot on a stick that is the ability to eat veggies every night of the week without repeating and without feeling the need to compare myself to a diminutive ungulate.

A metaphorical carrot on a stick leads me to consider the very real five pound bag of carrots taking up valuable real-estate in our fridge and threatening to turn rubbery and unusable if neglected much longer. These aren't the cute baby carrots either, that promise crisp sweetness with their low-effort clean and rounded nubs. No, I'm talking about gnarled 9 to 12-inch lengths of orange tubers still sporting smears of the dirt in which they gestated and starting to split lengthwise as they dry out. These are to be my inspiration for at least a few healthy side dishes? Yes! And there's some very good reasons:

1. they're laughably cheap,
2. they outlast even my ability to procrastinate when kept in the fridge, and
3. they are at least as tasty raw as they are cooked.

Just take a moment to think about the implications of this last point. You can make entire dishes without actually having to cook anything. Talk about a time-saver! This is my kind of "cooking"!

Carrot-Apple Salad
or
I'm Just Not That Sweet

I bravely pulled the first 4 carrots out of the huge bag but then lost a good portion of my nerve. I had trouble likening these trollish tubers to the sweet and buttery carrot dishes of my youth, but I couldn't remember eating a carrot-focused dish any other way. Rather than listen to my gut instincts, I fell back upon the familiar. I found this simple and sweet Carrot Salad recipe posted by Colleen on All Recipes and decided to give it a go.

The ingredients aren't anything crazy, just carrots, apple and slivered almonds mixed with honey and finished with a squeeze of lemon and a few dashes of salt and pepper. I'll let you follow the link to the actual recipe if you're interested in specifics, as I followed it exactly. If you can shred and mix things together, you've got all the skills you need to tackle this recipe. I may have been undershooting even my limited kitchen skills.

The results? While tasty and sweet, I wouldn't call this sophisticated. It struck me as something you make because the kids will eat it too.The almonds added a good crunch but not much else as their flavor was drowned out by the sweetness of the carrots, apples and honey. It needs something to give it more adult appeal, but I haven't thought of what that is exactly. Definitely cut down on the honey and replace the almonds with a more aggressively flavored nut or seed and consider adding spices other than just salt and pepper. Really though, I don't think it's worth trying to refine. No need to become mired in this first disappointment. I'll just move on to the next recipe! I do have about 16 carrots left in the bag...

IMBB #14: Orange You Hungry?

Orange is the theme of this month's IMBB, and what a theme it is!  An inspired bit of  lateral thinking by Foodgoat has left us with a  color, not an ingredient, to work with this month.  I am, as always, very curious to see how other people approached the theme.  Until then, here's my attempt:

Vertical food:

Some say it's trendy, some say it's already passe,  but I  think it's here to stay.  There's something special, something uniquely gratifying about vertical food.  Is it a protest against the entropy of the universe and the disorder and decay that seem to dominate our lives?  Is it the phallic nature of these towering constructions that is the source of their appeal?  Or is it a destructive impulse?  Is it that we take pleasure in toppling, dismantling, and then consuming the creations that our hapless hosts have  painstakingly built for us?  Perhaps.  All I know is, some food tastes better when it's taller than it is wide.

The recipe below should make four salads.  You may wish to increase the amount of the dressing you make, though, to suit people's preferences.

Tower of Orange:

• 1/2 small papaya
• 4 small (orange) tomatoes
• 1/3 head savoy cabbage
• 1 lb fresh salmon fillet
• 5 slices thick cut bacon
• 3 (orange) bell peppers
• 1 c chopped pea shoots
• fresh basil
• fresh tarragon

Render and reserve the fat from the bacon.  Chop the bacon into bits.  Sprinkle salt and pepper on the salmon fillet and pan-fry in 2 tbsp. of the bacon fat.  Remove the skin from the fillet and shred the salmon with two forks.

Chiffonade the basil and mix with the papaya.  Chop the tarragon and mix with the shredded salmon. 

Take a 16 oz plastic cup -- you know, a "beer cup" -- and cut out the bottom.  Grease the inside with nonstick spray or olive oil.  Turn the cup upside down on a flat-bottomed plate or bowl.  Drop a few tablespoons of each mixture into the cup and pack it down gently with the spoon.  We alternated the orange layers with the non-orange layers like so:

• Orange bell pepper
• Pea shoots
• Bacon bits
• Orange tomatoes
• White bean ragout
• Papaya/basil mixture
• Savoy Cabbage
• Salmon/tarragon mixture

But of course most any order will do.  Spoon the dressing around the sides of the cup and gently remove the cup.  The resulting tower is surprisingly stable and very impressive.

The 16 oz. cup results in a relatively large salad.  If you're serving this as part of a three or four (or more) course meal, you may wish to use a smaller cup.

White Bean Ragout:

• 1 can Cannelloni beans (or other white beans)
• 3 tbsp "bacon bits" (see above)
• 2 sprigs of thyme
• 4 cloves of garlic, finely diced
• 1/2 cup stock

Saute the garlic for 4 minutes in 1 tbsp of olive oil.  Add the beans, the stock, the thyme, and the bacon and cook over a medium heat for about 5-8 minutes or until the bean mixture begins to thicken.

Curried (Orange) Tomato Dressing:

• 6 cloves of garlic, rough chopped
• 1/2 of a sweet onion, diced
• 8 (orange) tomatoes, rough chopped
• 20 or 30 coriander pods
• 3 cardamom pods
• 20 or 30 cumin seeds
• 3 or 4 peppercorns
• 2 sprigs of thyme
• 1 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 cup vegetable stock
• apple cider vinegar

Toast the spices in a dry pan until you can smell them.  Grind them using a mortar and pestle or a spice grinder.

Saute the onions and the garlic in 2 tbsp of olive oil until the onions are translucent.  Add the ground spices and saute  for two more minutes.  Add the tomatoes and saute for two minutes.  Add the wine, the stock, and the thyme, cover, and let simmer for 20 minutes.  Let cool and puree.  Add vinegar to taste.

The result should be somewhat aggressively spiced and tart.  It may look like a soup, but it's really a salad dressing, so don't be afraid to add just a little more vinegar.

Conclusions:

I had fun making and eating this salad.  The various textural elements worked well together, I thought, and the flavors meshed satisfactorily.  The curried tomato dressing was quite good.  I do feel as though one or two of the flavors could be a bit more intense.  I may trade mangoes for the papayas the next time, for instance.

I count this as a definite success, if only because it has increased my confidence regarding vertical plating of salads.  The assembly was easy and fun and trouble-free.  And it was fun to eat, too!  This will definitely enter my dinner party repertoire.

sometimes a meal just comes together

Put together a great meal tonight in well under an hour. New York steaks, pan-seared (for the sauce), then grilled, served with my standard madiera/cream sauce, mashed potatoes, and one of my two favorite cabbage dishes, both of which come from Mark Bittman (who wrote, among other things, the very useful _How to Cook Everything_). It's trivial to make, costs next to nothing, isn't the worst thing in the world for you (although I'm not claiming it's incredibly healthy), and still manages to be delicious. I need more recipes like this. Here it is, to the best of my recollection:

Cabbage Braised in Wine with Nutmeg

Ingredients:

1 head of Savoy cabbage
1 1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup white wine
1 tsp brown sugar
1/4 tsp nutmeg 
salt/pepper

Preparation:

Don't even think about trying regular cabbage with this 
recipe.  Once you eat Savoy cabbage, you won't ever want
regular cabbage in any case.  Other types of cabbage,
such as Napa cabbage, may be acceptable substitutes in
this recipe, but I haven't tried them.

Chop the cabbage.  Melt the butter in a wide, lidded pan
on medium heat.  Saute the cabbage for four or five minutes.  
Salt and pepper to taste.  Add the wine and stir briefly.  
Add the nutmeg and brown sugar and stir it in.  Cover the 
pan and let the cabbage cook for 15 minutes.

Serves 2-3.  (Bittman claims that it serves 4.  Maybe
Savoy cabbages grow bigger where he's from.  Or maybe they
don't like this dish as much as I do.  All I know is that
I served 3 with it and I was eyeing other people's plates.) 

I felt like having something special, so I topped this all off with a bottle of 1998 Lewis Syrah (think about the steak, not the cabbage), an ebullient wine that has a lot of sentimental value for me.