Recipe Rebellion: Arugula

I know, two blogs in two days.
What can I say? It's raining and I have more motivation to cook when I'm not just feeding myself.

Today's featured vegetable is arugula. Also known as rocket, this is commonly found in those expensive spring greens salads.

I'm not unfamiliar with arugula. I eat it at least once a week in the fancy inexpensive salads I make at home. In fact, one of the recipes in the cookbook was almost the exact flavor profile of one of my favorite salads (arugula, goat cheese, walnuts).

So I picked a recipe that involved cooking with arugula, as I've never done that before.
I chose Pasta with Arugula and Tomato-Olive Compote.
This recipe involved a few new things for me to work with so I was excited to try it out.

I cut the ingredients exactly to the cookbook's specifications (1/4" onion, 1/2" tomato, olives quartered lengthwise) but my cheffy-sense was tingling. I had to ignore my instinct to cut everything really small. (This is foreshadowing, kids)

Things got pretty exciting (for me) when I was pitting the olives. I pitted the first one with my knife and was thinking about how this was going to be tedious. Then I remembered a weird little gadget I got in a grab bag of thrift store kitchen things at the Salvation Army.
I bought the bag for 25 cents and had no idea what these weird contraptions were. My very smart friend Sarah told me they were cherry pitters. Oh, ok. Back in the drawer and never used.
Until....TODAY!
I was stoked to find out that cherry pitters are an excellent tool for pitting olives as well.
Um...yeah, it was really exciting. Take my word for it.

Compared to yesterday's hour-long investment for not much food, this recipe was fairly easy to throw together. Sauce in one pot, pasta in another, wilt some arugula in a pan with garlic and oil.
Done.

Time to eat. And.....bleh. It wasn't very good. It was really sweet and the compote was way too chunky for my taste.










I "fixed" it table-side; added some salt and pepper, some more chiles and some Parmesan cheese.



















Much better.
I spent the better part of my meal thinking abut how I would improve this for future consumption:

• Dice the onion, tomatoes and olives the the same size and make them nice and small.
• Use less red wine vinegar (or maybe use white instead)
• Add a little dill
• Saute some diced artichokes in the garlic oil and then add the arugula.
• Finish with some feta cheese (for salt and creaminess) and some fresh black pepper.

I'm looking forward to making my version of this recipe.

What a pain in the asparagus...

I've given up trying to blog strictly in alphabetical order. Things are not in season in alphabetical order. But I'm going to do my best.

Right now I'm on asparagus, which I love. I've only ever made the green kind so it was my intention to try my hand at the white variety.

According to VFAZ this variation is not to be dealt with clumsily. It requires precision and a delicate hand. She should have mentioned, lots of patience.

Trimming white asparagus is a bit of a pain. I had to cut a good chunk of mine off because it wasn't too fresh. Then you have to peel the entire stalk, and then peel the middle and ends more so that the stalk is the same thickness from top to bottom.

It was monotonous work. But when it was all over, I just popped them in some water with butter and lemon. I guess in an ideal world you would make enough of these guys to stand them upright in a pot that was deep enough to cover the stalks but not too wide so they stayed straight up. I don't own such a pot so they went in sideways.

The cooking time varies form 8-25 minutes. But the basic idea is, they will be cooked through and translucent. Well, after quite a while (I had time to make two types of homemade mayonnaise) I deemed them finished.

Dry on a towel, serve with lemon and mayo.


Looks pretty. Took about an hour to prep and 3 minutes to eat.

The flavor of the white asparagus is really nice. But I don't really see what all the to-do is about. Other than presentation.

It's a big step up from my childhood of pulling cold asparagus straight from the can and dunking them into a bowl of Hellman's....

Problem solved!!!

Screw flowers and candy.
















I have the Best. Boyfriend. Ever.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Why did I decide to cook from such a hard to get book?

So. Delays delays.

I have lots of excuses. But I also have a finished blog about artichokes that I haven't posted. And that's because I'm lazy I suppose.

I held onto the library's copy of VFAZ for much too long. I still haven't gone back in to see how much I owe them.

Then I went on vacation! I made a fair number of delicious things while on vacation, including a recipe from the cookbook. But I didn't take the time to xerox a few recipes so I could make something new.

I ordered my own copy of the book online when I was on vacation, thinking it would be here around the time I got back.

Well that was three weeks ago.

The website I ordered from no longer carries the book but never thought to email me and let me know that. So now I'm waiting for a refund and I will try to order it somewhere else.

Amazon has a few copies but they are all over $100!!! The book's list price is around $55.

For now, I'm going to head back to the library and pay my fines (which are probably as much as the damn book) and then start again.

Arrowhead Root

The following is a transcript of my attempt to buy arrowhead root.
Me: (to a man who clearly worked at the shop) Do you sell arrowhead root?
Man: No
Me: ok, thanks
I go to get back on my bike when I see a bucket about five feet to the right of this man filled to the brim with what looks like arrowhead root.
Me: (pointing to bucket) Isn't that arrowhead?
Man: No
Me: Are you sure?
Man: No
Me: Do you speak English?
Man: No

So again, I look to my magic phone to confirm that this bucket of weird tubers is indeed arrowhead and, upon confirmation, I take a bagful in to purchase.

I'm excited to revisit this particular Chinatown establishment when I have more time and am not too lazy to lock up my bike. The inside of the store seemed to hold many bizarre treasures that I would like to investigate further.

So I bought these things days ago. Thankfully, they keep well as long as they are submerged in water. So every time I opened the fridge, there they were, bobbing around in their big red bowl of fluid, looking like alien babies.

I finally made this dish last night after riding to the proper supermarket for the rest of the ingredients. Buying heavy items like milk is a pain when you ride a bike so I definitely procrastinated.

The dish I made was Arrowhead soup.
I had to substitute two things. I subbed red onions of white because the white onion I bought for the recipe made it's way into a delicious roasted vegetable concoction the night before when I was hungry and wanted tacos. Oops. I was slightly worried this red understudy would turn my soup pink.

I also used regular black pepper instead of white pepper. White pepper is expensive at Nob Hill. When I next get up to Berkeley Bowl I'll be sure to grab some of 10% of the price.



The good thing about this dish is that everything just gets blended up in the end so it doesn't really matter if you cut things perfectly.
The annoying this about this dish is peeling arrowhead, which sucks.
I also followed the recipe's instructions to "quarter, peel and chop" the apple. In that order. This was a stupid mistake because it is waaaay easier to peel a whole apple than one that is already cut up.
But once everything was in the pot it was ok.
Until the pot boiled over. I hate my stove. Hate it.
If anyone out there has a tip for altering a stove so it cooks at a lower temp, please let me know.

(I love how I wrote that like I have more than one reader. One reader who gets a verbal summary of the blogs before I even write them. What a sweet man.)

So it cooks for like 30 minutes and then into the food processor! I love my food processor. I should use it more often.

Then into a bowl it goes, a little dill and eat. Pretty simple.

In the book the author describes arrowhead as a mix of potato, apple and water chestnut. That's exactly what this soup tastes like.
Which is probably why she wins awards for this stuff.

Amaranth 2: the delicious sequel

Ok so that soup was awesome. I had the leftovers the next day and, like most soups and stews, giving it a day to let the flavors all meld together really improved the taste. Plus it was perfect on a chilly night.

Tonight I used the rest of the amaranth to make Amaranth with Wheat, Scallions, Garlic and Spices.

Did you guess what goes in it? I thought you might.

This recipe calls for bulgur wheat, which I had never heard of until this recipe called for it. Yay for getting out of my comfort zone!

I know I'm only one vegetable and two recipes in but I'd like to say I love how easy these recipes are to make...once you track down all the obscure ingredients, that is.



This recipe was super simple, chop up the choppables, mash up the mashables, mix together in a pot. Wait a bit. Ta-da! Dinner.











The only thing I forgot to get was wax paper, which you are supposed to lay onto of the mixture in the pot to make a seal. Thankfully I had a solution to this problem.

The problem that I don't have a solution to is that my lame-o stove doesn't have a low enough heat setting for steaming things like rice or, in this case, bulgur wheat. So I had to take the lid off a few times and scrape the bottom to get off anything that was inevitably sticking to the bottom. I also had to add a little more water at the end as it had evaporated before the food was finished cooking. I feel like this recipe could probably be made in a rice cooker, so that's cool.

The book said that a good accompaniment would be baked tomatoes, so I did that. It also suggested olives, as this is a Moroccan dish, but Ive never been too savvy on that part of Moroccan cuisine.

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by this dish. The Moroccan flavor profile is definitely there, but not overpowering. It's also really hardy. I only ate a few bites and felt satisfied. (I also ate a huge quesadilla about 3 hours ago though...)


Regardless, I will definitely be making this again. I'm considering making some of the leftovers into cakes and frying them up like falafel, which this is reminiscent of...except that it's delicious. Sorry falafel, but you are my least favorite way to eat a chickpea. No offense.

After I had taken a few bites, I noticed my dinner had a certain resemblance to a cartoon mouse. So there's that.

Amaranth

It's a leaf! It's a stem! It's a grain! It's Amaranth!!

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

But seriously, amaranth is best know for it's uses as a grain substitute, it not actually being a grain itself but instead a toasted seed of the amaranth plant.

There are approximately 60 recognized species of amaranth and therefor it goes by a lot of names. The most common being...um...amaranth, aka Chinese spinach or Yin Choy.
I went with the only variety they had at the great Berkeley Bowl (seriously, if you live within 50 miles of Berkeley, CA, you need to go) which was called Taiwan spinach after a quick check on the ol' magic phone to make sure it was indeed a species of amaranth.

There are four recipes for amaranth in VFAZ (acronym for the book's title, get used to it) I made one today and if the rest of it is still good by tomorrow, I'll make another recipe.

Hopefully it is, otherwise I bought all this bulgar wheat for nothing.

The recipe I made tonight was for Amaranth-Hominy Soup with Chili and Cheddar. I'm not going to list the ingredients and the process because 1) it's boring (to me) and 2) I'm not trying to get in trouble for some copyright infringement nonsense.

I started with my mise en place. If you don't do it, do it. Mise en place is a pain in the ass but once you have everything you need together, cooking is super easy.

That being said I will still only put a mise en place together for the recipes in this blog...and when I'm at work of course.

The two things she repeats over and over again about amaranth is that you have to wash off the sand and you have to cook the stems first because they are tough. When I first started inspecting the amaranth I was thinking "What sand?" because I didn't feel any grittiness. But once I started to break it down I could see this super fine white sand at the base of all the stems. So soak and rinse a few times.
I separated the stems all the way up into the leaf just to make sure I was thorough. The book isn't picture heavy so some of the things she says are up for interpretation.

This is what it looked like once it was all broken down and ready to go.

The soup itself is really easy to put together. I ended up adding a fair amount of salt, although it wasn't listed, since I used homemade unsalted vegetable stock and I'm guessing she assumed otherwise. I also added extra chili powder and chili flakes because I likes it hot.

So here's the finished product. The cheese really mixed in nicely with the soup. I've never cheesed a soup before. That's right, cheesed. But this is somewhere in between a soup and a chili, so I suppose that's ok.

She refers to this recipe as "a bowlful of South America" I'm not sure what South America should taste like, in bowl form anyway, but either way this soup is delicious and super easy to make.