Food with legs

Beets have got to be one of the strangest, most wonderful vegetables in existence.  It’s almost scary to ingest something with such freakishly wild color.  But while its color is potent, the beet’s flavor is sweet, mild, gentle, and earthy.   They are a mainstay crop of East End farms, spring, summer and fall. 

Occasionally I cook the beets and their tops together (risotto is a good dish for that) but most of the time I cook them separately, which is what I did with the lovely bunch of beets I bought at Briermere.

I cut the greens off about one inch from the top of the root.  Then I steam-roasted the beet roots.  I have a super high-tech Gaggenau steam and convection “combi” oven.  It allows you to use steam and convection heat in adjustable proportions.  If you use full steam, it works as a steamer.  Or, you can choose no steam and it works like a regular convection oven.  And you can select an almost infinite range of combinations of steam and heat.  For the beets, I set the heat to 360 degrees and the steam level to 60%.  This way the beets get the concentrated flavor from roasting but they don’t dry out.  (An equally good way to do this in a regular oven is by putting them in a roasting pan with a splash of water at the bottom, covering the pan with foil, and roasting them for about an hour at 400 degrees.)

This is what they looked like after being steam-roasted for about 45 minutes.   And there’s a better picture of my salad from Sunday night!

After they cool, I peel them, which is easy because the skins slip right off.  Only I do this on a paper plate because otherwise they would stain my cutting board.  My fingertips do get stained a little red, but unlike Lady Macbeth, I don’t have a problem with that.  I actually like it because it reminds me later of what I cooked.  I feel the same about the smell of garlic and onions on my hands.  People go to great lengths to remove those smells from their hands, engaging in all kinds of folkloric rituals like rubbing their fingers on the back of a spoon.  Not me.  I keep my hands clean, of course (I wash them constantly), but if there are some lingering signs or smells of cooking on them, I’m happy. 

After I peel the beets, I chop them into smaller pieces and sprinkle them with red wine vinegar and fleur de sel.  This pickles them lightly.  They last in the fridge for about two weeks. 

These marinated beets are terriffic in a salad, particularly as a vinegary balance to something rich like salmon or goat cheese.  Or I serve them individually, topping each piece with a dollop of goat cheese and a sprinkling of fleur de sel and pepper.  With a toothpick in each piece, passed on a plate, they make a lovely hors d’oeuvre. 

I washed the greens on Sunday evening and put them in the fridge for a couple of days in a plastic bag.  Then on Tuesday morning, I made some farmhopper weekday food.  I can’t give it any other name, because it’s just a mish-mosh of whatever leftovers I have in the fridge thrown together to make something light and tasty that I can serve as a quick family dinner or take to work for lunch.  It’s simple, healthy food that I wouldn’t serve at a dinner party but I’m happy to eat during the week.

On weekdays, I like to cook in the morning before I go to work.  When I come home at 6 p.m., I’m tired, and if something is not already planned and prepped, I reach for the take-out menu.  My wonderful babysitter, who is a great cook in her own right, arrives at 7:30 a.m. and we spend an hour together cooking, planning meals, making grocery lists, and getting my son ready for school. 

I once heard Ruth Reichl interviewed by Terry Gross, who asked her how she managed to cook dinner on weeknights.  Reichl said that if you’re sitting at your desk at 4 p.m. and you don’t know yet what’s for dinner, then you’ve lost the battle.  It is so true. 

This was my mise en place: diced ginger and scallion bulbs, a couple of pork chops leftover from Sunday night, chopped, the beet greens, chopped, and the leftover grilled asparagus, also chopped.

I sauteed the ginger and scallions first in a little vegetable oil mixed with a drop of dark sesame oil.

Then I added the pork.

Then the beet greens.

After I added the beet greens, I deglazed the pan with some rice wine and chicken broth, to make it a little saucy.  Then I added the chopped asparagus and some leftover brown rice that I had in the fridge.

I sprinkled the whole thing with soy sauce and a few squirts of sriracha, packed one serving into a container for work, and the rest I popped in the fridge for later. 

That’s food with legs.  The leftover pork and asparagus were reincarnated with the fresh beet greens and some leftover brown rice to create something new, delicious, easy and healthy.  And the marinated beets also have legs:  I’ll find a way to use them as an element in some other dish over the next week or so.

It’s cooking in layers.  Many times when I cook, I’m making something for the moment and something for the future — although I often don’t know what that future will be.  As I create dishes and meals, I try not to to be rigid in my thinking:  I usually improvise the best dishes from whatever’s left over in the fridge plus something fresh from the CSA, fish market or a recent trip to a farm.  The food is cooked, eaten, returned to the fridge, modified, joined with something new, eaten, and returned to the fridge in an ongoing cycle.  I do this not to be clever, but because I’m cheap and lazy! 

I watch almost no TV these days but the closest I’ve come to finding anyone else with this philosophy was the Frugal Gourmet — that charming TV cooking pioneer from the 1980s (minus the claims of sexual misconduct!)  If I can adapt something already made into something new, it saves time and money, and I throw less food away.  It just takes a relaxed attitude of imagination and experimentation.

The meaning of life. Or, salad.

Until I was about 20, I never ate a salad.  I hated salad.

Now, salad is my favorite food.  But I feel it is widely misunderstood.  Salad is not a bowl of lettuce or supermarket mesclun with wedges of cold off-season tomato and bottled dressing poured on top.  (And by the way, how many ways can restaurants misspell the word mesclun?  I know, restaurant menu typos are a classic white-person problem, but seriously, I have even seen it spelled “mescaline.”)

Salad, to me, is a carefully chosen, balanced selection of greens and a few other items tossed with oil and lemon juice or vinegar, salt and pepper.  Period.

The place that changed my mind about salad was Russia.  I visited a family at their dacha outside St. Petersburg, where they spent their summer weekends.  It was very basic, with no indoor plumbing except for a cold-water kitchen sink.  Their grandmother lived at this dacha full-time in the summer and was an avid gardener.  Almost all their food came from her garden, and they made a salad from vegetables they harvested twice every day — at lunch and again at dinner.  Their salad contained freshly cut lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, and, most memorably, loads of fresh parsley and dill.  Everything was chopped small.  They added a chopped soft-boiled egg or two (from their hens), and dressed it with plain vegetable oil, distilled white vinegar, salt and pepper.  It was amazing.

Another misunderstanding about salad is that it is easy to prepare.  Usually, it’s not.  It is the most time-consuming dish I make, and I generally try to avoid time-consuming dishes.  But salad is a labor of love. 

A good salad can make a meal.  I prefer to have it with the main meal, as a counterpoint to whatever protein I am serving.  In the summertime, I like to serve grilled meat or fish, salad, and bread for dinner.  That is really all you need.

Today was a perfect spring day.  Since my Sang Lee CSA has not started yet, I went to Briermere Farm in Riverhead to see what they had.  Briermere is a good place to go in the spring, because Riverhead averages 5-10 degrees warmer than the south fork, so their products are usually harvested  earlier.  There is a reason that Riverhead has been an agricultural center for generations: it’s a great place to grow fruits and vegetables.  Briermere has fantastic fruit.  They use this fruit in their delicious pies and baked goods for which they are justly famous, but I rarely buy those because they are way too caloric.  I just buy the fruit, and sometimes also vegetables. 

The great “fruit writer” David Karp had an article in the New York Times a few years ago about rhubarb, in which he noted that Briermere has five acres planted with rhubarb — probably the largest in the state.  Five acres is a lot of rhubarb!

They had rhubarb today, of course (it’s always one of the first crops of the season), but I didn’t buy any.  I just bought veggies.  This was my haul.

It’ll take several days for me to use all of this stuff.  Tonight’s menu was grilled pork chops, grilled asparagus, salad, and bread. 

The pork chops I marinated in an ad-hoc asian marinade, with soy, rice wine, sesame oil, sriracha, sugar, ginger and worcestershire sauce.

The asparagus I tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and grilled them after I took the pork chops off the grill.  This is a great way to prepare asparagus. 

The salad contained baby arugula, scallion greens, multicolor greenhouse cherry tomatoes, grown on the North Fork and sold at Briermere, and a few crumbles of Maytag Blue cheese.  I like salads that have a little bit of something rich —like an egg, avocado, bacon, or cheese — and in this case, the Maytag Blue did the trick.  

I always use the same method of dressing salad.  First, I drizzle it lightly with olive oil and sprinkle it with fleur du sel and pepper, then I toss it with my hands.  Then I drizzle on red wine vinegar and toss it again.  Fini!

The salad was simple but good, mostly because Briermere’s baby arugula was extremely delicate, but still had a strong peppery bite that is missing from lots of plastic-box baby arugula.  I’ve bought full-grown arugula from Briermere later in the summer season in past years, and it’s always super-spicy.  These babies were obviously thinned from that future crop.   

My picture doesn’t do it justice.  If I am going to have a real blog, I am going to have to learn proper food photography!

Sang Lee CSA coming

I have a CSA coming.  You know what that is, right?  COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE, baby!  It is a deal where you sign up to take a shipment of fruits and vegetables from a specific farm for a whole season, paying in advance.  It’s relatively cheap by the week, but it’s a long-term commitment.  That’s tough for me, because I am a farmhopper.  I like to go to different farms and see which one has the best what. 

My CSA is with Sang Lee Farm, in Peconic, a tiny hamlet on the North Fork of Long Island, and it’s a  pretty special farm.  It operates almost year-round, which is critical for me, living here through the freezing, windy, damp, deserted wasteland that constitutes the Hamptons in the winter.  True to its Chinese name,  Sang Lee specializes in Asian greens — in addition to the normal farmstand offerings of cabbages, squash, tomatoes, etc.  Its heirloom tomatoes are outstanding.  And it’s organic.  In this day and age, that’s better than a health-insurance policy.

My check cleared in March, and I’m scheduled to pick up my first shipment on May 26.

Eating locally is nothing new for me.  It’s one of the reasons I live on the East End.  In fact, I was eating topnecks from Shinnecock Bay and making minestrone from Long Island-grown cabbages, carrots and squash back in in the eighties, when the rest of the country was ordering blackened catfish and learning to pronounce the word “balsamic.”  I realized a long time ago that the local stuff we have out here is pretty much the best around, if you buy it fresh and cook it well. 

So, as I write this, the little U-choy sprouts are popping their heads up through the organically-amended soil, waiting to be snipped by an old Chinese lady in a cone-shaped, wide-brimmed hat (I swear I’ve seen her out in those fields), popped into a box with the magic words “Fresh-Lee-Cut” printed on it, and picked up by yours truly.  Stay tuned!