playing with fire and water

summer pasta

 In these, the last days of summer, autumn encroaches clever and lithe.  

I try to ignore the signs, but it's worse than that. 

I see the chlorophyll drain from the leaves and tell myself it's just the sun. I notice the flowers looking dry and wan and say it's because I didn't give them enough water. And... isn't the goldenrod blooming extra early this year? 

I'm in denial.

It's not because I dislike autumn. I don't. But because I will miss summer.

It's not even that it's been a good summer. It hasn't! Losing my father cements it as one that I will poignantly remember forever.

Still... I hate to see it go.

I think what I'll miss most is the bounty at my fingertips.
The joyful sight of fruits on the vine. 
The perfume of herbs baking in the sun. 
The many colors of ripe. 
Nature, in all of her white-hot intensity.

But it's not over yet. 

As the sun arcs lower in the sky and night grows longer and cooler, summer vegetables rush to put out their last flush. It's a well known fact that leafy greens, crucifers, and root vegetables taste sweeter when nipped by cold, but I would swear that late-season tomatoes and corn are the best of all. They are only sweeter in memory.

Colors and flavors, the icons of summer, are arranged atop a swath of emulsified tomato milk like notes on a scale. A seasonal keyboard.

Tucked in between are tubes of parmesan pasta. I'll tell you about those next time.

These are covered by a strip of reduced corn juice, thickened by its inherent starch and bursting with flavor. Its form is controlled by freezing, then tempered to a fluid sauce.

Just for this dish, I ignore my tendency towards minimalism, my carefully managed urge to over garnish. I lay it all out. Let nature play all of her notes at once. A crescendo of flowers and herbs.

This is my tribute. An homage. A celebration.
The swan song of summer.

 
  

tomato milk and cornflakes

More bottom-of-the-bowl goodness: tomato milk.
Tomato milk is the lovely elixir that occurs when tomatoes mingle with bufala mozzarella and basil. 
It is liquid essence.

 

Late-summer native corn has no peer. 
When we're not eating it straight off the cob, I'm juicing it for sauces and soups.
As is often the case when juicing vegetables, the remaining pulp is dry, flavorless fiber that is discarded. A wonderful by-product of juicing just-picked corn is that the pulp is juicy, tender, and full of flavor.

 

corn flakes

Note:It is important to use the pulp from corn that has been juiced on the same day that it is picked, before the sugars convert to starch and the pellicle toughens.

After juicing corn kernels, remove the pulp from the juicer basket and saute it over medium heat with 1 Tablespoon of butter for each cup of pulp until it just begins to brown. Season with salt and scrape pulp onto a baking sheet that has been lined with silpat. Compress corn pulp into a 1/4" thick even layer, using fingers or a spatula. Dehydrate at 65C/150F for 2-3 hours or until uniformly dry. Break off a segment of dried pulp and gently crumble into flakes with hands, letting flakes fall back onto silpat. Repeat with remaining dried pulp. Spread flakes evenly on silpat and bake in 82C/180F oven for 30 minutes-1 hour, until crisp and lightly toasted.

 

 
 

bread and tomato water

While it's true that fruits and vegetables are often at their best at a certain time and place, I'm not a slave to eating seasonally or locally or [insert buzzword]-ly. There are so many opinions and discussions on the topic, but as far as I'm concerned, quality gets the final word. 
Right now, on my patch of earth, there's a whole lotta quality to be found.

In late August, the local tomatoes clearly demonstrate the tenet of simple preparations. They are of optimum quality and so abundant that they make their way into nearly every meal. A quick and satisfying lunch involves nothing more than thick slices, sprinkled with salt and drizzled with good olive oil. The best part comes at the end— the umami-laden tomato water that collects at the bottom of the bowl. When meals are that casual, etiquette is tossed aside, and the savory juices are noisily slurped directly from the bowl.
 
If there is good bread at hand, a hunk is used to mop up the juices. The yeasty, malty flavor and chewy texture changes the taste entirely— transforms it into something else. If I had been brought up in an Italian house I would compare it to Panzanella, but my bread and tomato association leads to Açorda.

Açorda is a rustic bread soup from Portugal. At its most basic, it's made by pouring a water, garlic, cilantro, and olive oil broth over day-old bread. Typically, the bread used is Broa— a dense, round loaf made with wheat flour, enriched with cornmeal. 

There are gussied-up versions of Açorda; my favorite involves prawns cooked in the broth with tomatoes. For today, I've ignored the prawns and the cooking, but kept the impression of the dish with a hunk of my mother's excellent Broa soaked with seasoned red and yellow tomato water, olive oil, garlic bulbils, green coriander seeds and sprigs.

 

Outside of summer, it would never occur to me to attempt a dish whose sheer simplicity relies entirely on an ingredient used at its pinnacle of flavor. Like it's inspiration, it's a humble dish— the food of peasants. But it's also profoundly good and begs a revision to an old adage:

[wo]man can live [happily] on bread and [tomato]water alone!

 

 

potatoes halibut garlic

earthy potatoes the color of an Aegean sky
silken paint spread on a porcelain canvas

piquant bulbils strewn across a Skordalia triptych
like stray pearls from a necklace that has come undone

Poseidon offers fish from the depths of a torrid ocean of oil
they emerge blistered and weightless as ghosts

caught up in the fantasy I imagine
[only for a moment] that I've made something new
something original

foolish me it's only fish and chips

 

skordalia

200g red bliss potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2" dice
200g purple potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2" dice
100g extra virgin olive oil
7g garlic, thickly sliced
salt
50g french bread, trimmed of crust and soaked in milk
25g white wine vinegar
25g red wine vinegar
garlic bulbils

Place the red bliss potatoes in a bowl and drizzle with 10g of olive oil. Add half of the garlic and a sprinkle of salt. Toss well, then pack into a bag and vacuum seal. Repeat with purple potatoes. Sous-vide at 85C/185F for 45-60 minutes or until very tender when pressed.
Empty the contents of the red bliss potatoes into food processor and add half of the remaining olive oil. Process until smooth. Squeeze excess milk from bread and add to processor along with white vinegar. Process until smooth and fluid, adding some of the milk if too thick. Season with salt. Repeat with purple potatoes, using the remaining ingredients and the red vinegar. 
To serve, screen the skordalia through a stencil onto plates or serve in separate bowls. Sprinkle garlic bulbils over top.

halibut crisps

115g halibut, cut against the grain into 1/4" thick slices
rice flour
salt
peanut oil for deep frying

Season halibut with salt on both sides. Lay out a sheet of plastic wrap on a flat surface. Cover with a thick dusting of rice flour. Place a slice of halibut over top of rice flour and generously dust top with additional flour. Cover with another sheet of plastic wrap and pound until paper-thin, adding more rice flour if necessary. Repeat with remaining fish slices. Cut pounded slices into 2" discs with round cutter.
Heat a pot of oil for deep frying to 190C/375F. Fry discs for 1-2 minutes, or until crisp but still pale.
Serve with skordalia. If desired, sprinkle with dehydrated, pulverized kalamata olives and cinnamon basil stems. 

 

garlic bulbils

When garlic scapes are left to mature on the plant, they form bulbils that are like miniature garlic cloves. These are not true seeds, but they can be planted as such. Although they take two to three seasons to develop heads, I find they're a more reliable way to propagate garlic than starting with individual cloves. For one, [because they're airborne] they don't harbor soil-borne diseases. And two, they produce a truer strain of the parent plant— and isn't perpetuating a species an important reason to save seeds?

Some of these bulbils will go back into the garden once they have hardened off, but many will find their way into the kitchen. I can't resist playing with these tiny, tender bursts of mild garlic flavor.
 

•  Freshly harvested, they add fantastic flavor and texture when simply sprinkled on a dish.
•  Pickled in a vinegary brine with a pinch of sugar, they become succulent.
•  They soften and mellow in an olive oil confit with seeds and spice. Today I added green fennel seeds,  grains of paradise, crushed sumac berries, and fleur de sel.
•  Or, they can be flattened with a rolling pin between sheets of silpat and dehydrated. The flakes will  keep their flavor and crisp texture if sealed in a jar, though I doubt they'll be around for too long.

 

  

 

 

lamb coconut yogurt garlic

Garlic scapes are the flowering seed heads and stems of hard neck garlic varieties. It used to be that farmers removed them to direct the plant's energy into developing the bulb rather than the seeds, and would discard them. At some point, an enterprising farmer thought the mildly-flavored scapes were a marketable novelty, and now they are popular seasonal treats at farmers markets. Incidental crops like these are often a win-win situation.

 

When harvested just as they begin to curl, the stems are tender and mild. By the time that the seeds begin to form, they harden and become tough. At that stage, I like to use them as skewers for grilled meats and vegetables, allowing heat to release their aroma and infuse the food from within.

This dish is loosely based on souvlaki, with deliberate Greek flavors. Instead of the ubiquitous oregano, I used winter savory (Satureja montana), an under-utilized perennial herb that tastes like a blend of thyme, pine, and lemon, to season the lamb and tzatziki.

 

The tzatziki was made with yogurt curds, which readily form when yogurt is gently heated to 170F/76C. The process is identical to making ricotta, but as the yogurt is already acidic, it doesn't require the addition of buttermilk. The curds are folded into coconut milk, along with savory, garlic and cucumber.

The ground lamb is blended with minced aromatics (savory, onion, garlic scapes) and coconut powder, then wrapped in a blanched fig leaf and grilled.

  

   

I know that gif's are sometimes annoying, and even though these shots are overexposed, I thought that it effectively demonstrated the leaf-folding technique.
 Actually, I'm kind of mesmerized by it. I'm alternately disturbed and amused by the furling and unfurling. As it folds up, I think "Silencing of the Lamb", then it pops open, exposing itself like a Cypriot burlesque queen. 

 

 
 

infusions: a revolutionary technique

 

On the days when I work at home, my morning starts with reading emails over a cup of coffee. Today, though, I took some extra time to catch up on blog reading. 

One of my favorites, Cooking Issues, put up a post this morning about infusion that, quite frankly, changed my life. No joke. When your life and your livelihood revolve around food, and your obsessions include plants and aroma, then this post was truly life-altering.

Extracting flavor and aroma from plants has long been a source of frustration for me. Without a rotovap or chamber vacuum, I've had to resort to conventional methods of infusion that can take days, sometimes weeks. That's all changed now, thanks to Dave Arnold and an isi whipper.

Dave's revolutionary infusion method involves packing aromatics and liquid into an isi whipper, charging it with N2O, waiting 60 seconds before opening the canister and straining. The depressurized gas disrupts the cells, releasing aroma into the liquid. The beauty of this technique is that it is simple, quick, and inexpensive. 

After I calmed down, I tried to work. Really, I did. But I was too distracted. I had to take inventory of my chargers and figure out how soon I could get more. And I kept thinking of all the herbs, flowers, and seeds in my garden, pantry and refrigerator. 

Despite a crushing deadline, I took a few hours off to play. My reward is a refrigerator stocked with a dozen or so jars of brilliant infusions. 

It's nearly midnight as I write this, and I have hours of work to make up. It's gonna be a long night, but I had to take a few minutes to share this with you. Maybe it will change your life, too. 

popsicles

I'm always looking for uses for plant materials that are often overlooked or discarded because they're too fibrous to eat. 
Wild carrot stems may appear thin and fragile, but are rigid and strong enough to support these popsicles.

 

Layering is one way to control progression of flavors.
Usually, in the context of a meal, flavors progress from savory to sweet.
Here, they move from sweet to savory, starting with wild carrot syrup, then on to naturally sweet casaba melon, and ending with fig leaf tea.

   

The popsicles were molded in silicone plastique molds made from test tubes.
Don't try freezing liquids in thin glass molds. Trust me.
 

 

the simple charm of wild carrots

A new attitude is really just a change in perception. It's what makes one man's rags another man's riches. It's how a weed becomes a charming flower.

And, yes, the wild carrot has many charms. 

Take, for instance, one of its common names: Queen Anne's lace. 

OK, maybe you have to be a girl (or an Anglophile) to appreciate that one.

And then there's the flowers, all lacy and white, but they can be any color you like. If you put the cut stems in water stained with food color, the blossoms will change color right before your eyes. They're chameleons that way. 

What it doesn't have, at this stage, is a lot of edible parts. But because it's so aromatic, it has plenty of extractable flavor.

 

Simple infusions are one way to capture the flavor. In these very busy days of summer, simple is good.

And it doesn't get more simple than this. The only hard part is the waiting. 

 

I picked my first cucumber and serrano pepper from the garden on the day that the vinegar was ready. It made sense to toss them together in a light salad. Cool cucumbers and hot peppers are a nice contrast.

 

I let the syrup infuse for just over a week, until the wild carrot flavor was good and concentrated. I have lots of fun, simple plans for this syrup. One of them is to drizzle it over grilled carrots: wild carrot-candied carrots.

But since the cucumbers are coming in fast and furious, my attention went back to them. This time, I pickled slices of the cucumber in the vinegar, spiked with serrano, then topped them with a dollop of syrup, whipped with 5% versawhip. The whipped syrup looks like a rich whipped cream, but with pure, clean flavor and a lightness that cream cannot imagine. 

I served the sweet-tart-spicy-cool-creamy bite in a nest of fuzzy wild carrot seeds so that when my fingers rubbed against it to pick it up, they carried the scent of wild carrots to my nose.

 

Quite simply, wild carrots have me charmed.

 
 
 

wild carrot

My attitude towards weeds has changed so much in recent years that I hardly recognize myself. 

I used to be a weed warrior, indiscriminately pulling anything that I didn't plant. I realize now that it was a futile attempt at controlling my environment. Me vs. Nature. My new attitude laughs.

The shift came from an understanding of weeds and the roles that they play. I had to step back, ask questions, and look at the big picture. I had to be reminded that Nature is a consummate designer.  

Left on her own, Nature creates self-sustaining communities of plants where nothing is random or arbitrary. Because Nature hates a void, exposed soil quickly covers with plants— the intention, ultimately, is to turn it back into woods and forests. Shallow-rooted annuals move in to prevent erosion and run-off of precious water. The long taproots of perennial plants burrow deep into the soil to collect minerals. Above ground, natural selection plays out as a timeless, tireless game of offense and defense.

To gardeners and farmers, weeds are just a plant in the wrong place. To Nature, it is absolutely the perfect place. Understanding why has allowed me to become much more lax about weeds and we're both the better for it.

 

Wild carrot (Daucus carota), also known as Queen Anne's lace, is the progenitor of the common carrot that we eat. All parts of the wild carrot exhibit pungent carrot aroma, made up of over 100 volatile compounds. The white roots are only tender when very young, turning woody by the time that they flower. The leaves are also tender when young, but must be cooked when mature. 

Wild carrot is native to Europe and Asia, but has become naturalized in the US, where it's categorized in some areas as a beneficial weed (because their umbels attract parasitic wasps), and in others as a noxious weed (because of it's prolific, long-lasting seeds). It also bears a close resemblance to the deadly poison hemlock (Conium), though the carrot aroma is only present in Daucus.  

In the Northeast, wild carrots are ubiquitous plants that favor patches of sandy soil where land meets pavement. When in bloom, from June through August, they form foamy white swathes along the roadside that look like flower surfs. When the tiny white petals drop, the umbels form chartreuse fuzz-covered seeds that have a unique way of propagating themselves. Instead of dropping their seeds like most members of Umbelliferae, the pedicels curl up like a bird's nest, detach from the stem and fall to the ground, where they roll around like tumbleweeds in search of a spot to take root. Quite genius, and [I think] explains their proclivity for roadsides.

For as long as I've lived here, I've routinely battled a tenacious patch of wild carrot that grows along my driveway. Every spring, I would pull them out by the roots from under the lilacs to plant more desirable flowers. Without fail, everything dies in that spot. Everything. Except for wild carrot.

When it comes to gardening, I realize that I can be as stubborn as the weeds that I've fought so hard to eradicate. It's that control thing. But this year, I let Nature have her way. And, you know something... I'm glad that I did... that spot has never looked better.