She Spills The Beans

Radish, Cucumber, Onion & Chickpea Salad with a Lemon-Parsley Dressing

Frankly, given how often I make this, it's hard to belive it hasn't made it to the blog before now.

This is one of my favorite dinner salads. We make it in spring, when the first radishes appear, along with green onions and green garlic. At that time of year, it tastes like a spring tonic after a winter of cooked green vegetables. The salad gets a rest during the height of the summer when the heat is too much for radishes here, and then it returns with the fall crop. This time of year, we use mature onions and garlic, and it's a reminder that the days are starting to gather in.

Part of my love for this salad is that it's super-easy - if the chickpeas are already cooked, it's just a little chopping and getting the dressing ingredients into the food processor. Sometimes I'll toss a little cooked grain into this salad - bulghur is my favorite, but quinoa or millet or even some cold brown rice would be nice. I do that - as I've mentioned before - because the grain picks up the dressing nicely and also gives the salad a bit more heft and a pleasant chewiness.

We had this with Yukon Gold potatoes from our CSA box that I roasted with olive oil and tossed with lemon juice, parsley and garlic after they came out of the oven. They were the sweetest-tasting white potatoes either of us had ever had.

Baba Ganoush & The Eggplant Incident

My lack of love for eggplant has been previously mentioned herein.  Each summer, though, the tide of eggplant rises along with the other nightshades - tomatoes, peppers - and eventually, a globe or two shows up in our CSA box from T&D Willey and I must dispense with it.  This was the week.

That "previously mentioned" link above - to a recipe for Royal Eggplant with Garlic, which is a really delicious smoky roasted eggplant puree with tomatoes, onions, spices and butter - is one of my two ways of coping with eggplant.  My other coping mechanism is baba ganoush.  Load eggplant up with olive oil, tahini & lemon juice, and really, there's no reason not to eat it. 

It's sad that I have two eggplant recipes and a bajillion ways of using just about every other kind of produce, but they are two really good eggplant recipes.

So, not having posted my baba ganoush recipe previously, that's where I headed on Saturday.  The heat had broken (it was going to be 104 instead of 112; that's what we mean in Fresno when we say it's going to be "cooler") and so I took some time before the day got really hot to roast the eggplant in the oven.

This occasion is one of those times that I think I should buy a grill to avoid heating up the house with the oven, and then Chimp reminds me that you have to cook on a grill outside.  Well, scratch that when it's 110.

I think I could skip buying the grill entirely; just oil the eggplant up and lay it on a well-scrubbed section of patio, then go out and kick it every 30 minutes or so.  Come to think of it, why don't I have a solar oven?  And along with that, why isn't every roof in this town covered with solar panels?  You'd think we could make a mint.  I must be missing something.

But I'm getting off track here.

I came home from the market, washed the eggplant, and popped it in the oven to broil while I washed some shallots (for something else) to roast along with the eggplant.  I was tossing the shallots in a dish with some grapeseed oil and salt when

POOOFFfffffsssssss.

"Aha," I thought to myself, "That must be the eggplant exploding."

I opened the door.  My oven had birthed a Japanese tentacle monster.

Exploding the eggplant was not originally part of my baba ganoush recipe, but if you, like me, are tired or forgetful and omit the step of pricking the eggplant before you place it in the oven, I want you to know that this recipe has been tested with both exploded and intact eggplant on separate occasions, and both kinds work just fine.

Fasoulakia Salata

(Photo snapped in the doorway of my office's kitchen.)

Back when we lived near D.C., we used to throw this great party called the Gyroscope. Chimp threw it annually for a motley bunch of graduate students before we were together, and when I came on the scene, the guest list expanded to include a bunch of food professionals and there was more and better food to go with the copious booze.

It’s not necessarily easy to mix academics and foodies – you have to find sneaky ways to get them to connect, or else you’ll end up with a party where the two groups will eye each other warily across the room all night, like a middle-school dance.

So two things that we did were this:

First, we made everyone put on name tags when they arrived - it didn’t have to be the wearer’s actual name; if they preferred to go incognito, they were free to party under an assumed name. In addition to the name, they were asked to put on the tag an interesting fact about themselves (or their adopted persona).

Second, we put an electric skillet on the coffee table and put someone in charge of getting the halloumi started, because we knew the Cardinal Rule of Fried Cheese: most people are perfectly willing to talk to total strangers if it will result in getting fried cheese.

The food at the Gyroscope was loosely Greek, though as in that region, influences from neighboring countries tended to sneak in, so it was a bit of a liberal interpretation. I made homemade spanikopitakia, a whole mess of falafel, hummus, and these green beans, which have long been a summertime favorite, among other things, the last year we threw the party.

My good friend Syn-D’s son Ben, who was about two at the time (and now a Weblos…yikes), ate a bunch of these off of a plate his mom gave him, then stood next to the table where the bowl was, and delicately took one after another after another out throughout the course of the party. Nobody minded. It’s pretty hard to mind a two-year-old voluntarily gorging himself on green beans.

So when presented with the sheet for our office 4th of July potluck, I thought to myself, Okay, whatever it is, it needs to be easy, cooling, and vegetable, and this immediately came to mind. It was a hit – at least one person took some home that night – and the potluck as a whole was roundly recognized as our best in recent memory. (A good deal of that might have had something to do with the sugar buzz caused by my co-worker bringing in Whoopie Pies, made from a recipe in the latest issue of Cook’s Country – phenomenal – but I’ll take a little of the credit too.)

Vegan Zucchini, Tomato & Onion Gratin

“Do you like zucchini?” my co-worker asked, peeking into my office.

“Of course!” I said.

She put the two globe zucchini she was carrying down on my desk.

“Are these from your mom’s garden?”

“Yes…”

“Oh, they’re still warm!”

“She just picked them.”

“Thank you!”

I had to keep working, of course, but looking at the two of them sitting there, I couldn’t help but think about what to do with them. Later in the afternoon I popped out to her desk.

“How about a zucchini and tomato gratin? How does that sound? It’s pretty standard, but I think it’d still be good.”

“That sounds great. Do you need more?”

“Oh, no. I’ll just make a small one to start. I have a red onion – maybe with some onion too?”

She nodded in agreement. I nodded back.

Since today was Wednesday, I stopped by the farmer’s market to get tomatoes. I grabbed four of an heirloom type called Black Russian and headed home to do the assembly.

Well, the two zucchini and the four tomatoes was enough to make a 9x13 pan worth, and I think I could have spread the vegetables out on a jelly roll pan and done just as well. This may not be a true gratin – no breadcrumbs, no cheese – but the idea is there. If I did this again, I might add a couple cloves of finely minced garlic to the cornmeal mixture.

Poblano Peppers with a Black Chickpea Filling

Looking at the picture, you might think that looks like a lot of work.

You would be correct. Stuffed peppers are a lot of work to do well.

They can be done poorly very easily: slap cooked rice and some other stuff, mostly tomato sauce, into a raw bell pepper with the top cut off; bake until listless and flabby. Remove from oven. Eat; regret eating.

A good stuffed pepper, on the other hand, needs to start out with a thin-skinned variety, needs roasting or frying to make its flesh savory and flavorful, careful work to open the peppers up, and a filling with some character to give the whole thing a reason to live.

Black chickpeas have that character. They’re truly nutty and have slightly tough skins that keep them from cooking to wan split starchiness, as regular chickpeas will if unattended. For that reason, they grind up well in bits once cooked, rather than easily becoming hummus. Their toothsome nature occurred to me as a good texture for this spot where ground meat is usually found.

When it gets hot in Fresno, and boy, is it getting hot in Fresno this week, I tend to turn to Mediterranean foods. I flipped through a few of my Greek cookbooks to get ideas for this recipe, and not having looked at them for a while, I remembered why they seem like such a good idea in the summer – all those cool flavors and vegetable salads.

So the filling is Mediterranean-influenced. Onions, both raw and cooked, make an appearance, as well as copious garlic, salty feta and olives, bright lemon juice and green notes from parsley and mint.

Fennel-Red Onion Salad

No long story here; just a good idea that worked well. This was one of the answers of What to Do With Fennel, which we had ended up with a lot of in the house. In this salad, sweet-crisp slivers of fennel and torn mint leaves cool while the slight bite of the onion and garlic and the briny feta add dimension.

This is a perfect example of what, precisely, one wants to eat in Fresno during the summer. Also on that list: fruit straight out of the refrigerator and big glasses of very cold water.

This simple little dish can be presented with far less effort than I’ve expended above. If you’d like to make this as a light main-dish salad, make a double batch of the dressing and toss it with a bowlful of any salad green.

No-Kebab Kebabs: Vegetables with Lemon-Herb Tofu

I’ve been trying to put together a lemon-herb tofu for a while, and I think I’ve finally got it.

The original inspiration for this was kebabs. However, you will notice that no sticks were harmed in the making of these vegetables.

They did not go on sticks for a couple reasons. Mixed skewers are beautiful-looking, with all the vegetables arrayed in a colorful progression, but no matter how evenly everything is cut, one foodstuff inevitably cooks before another, resulting in burned something and nearly-raw something else. Additionally, I don’t own a grill (it seems somewhat pointless when my favorite food is beans) and I find that placing the vegetables flat on a baking sheet under the broiler works very well.

I usually make something like this at midsummer, when there are plenty of appropriate vegetables. I especially like broiled small tomatoes, their skins puckering and their flesh slumped into a juicy mass that collapses over the other ingredients when tossed together. In May, though, there are no such ideal tomatoes on offer, so we limited ourselves to what was locally available: the yellow squash and red onions from our CSA box, plus zucchini and fennel from the farmers’ market.

Despite the lack of tomatoes, these came out very well. The summer squashes developed a buttery, almost nutty toasted flavor, the onions softened and caramelized beautifully, and the fennel yielded its crunch just enough to provide an interesting counterpoint to the softer vegetables and the springy-textured seasoned tofu.

I’ve been wrestling all week with how to describe the red onions used in this recipe – I would call them green onions, because they have their soft stalks on - except they’re red on the bottom. Green red onions sounds confusing. Perhaps they’re immature red onions, because they haven’t been dried for storage?

Red Pepper Sauce

I really like using vegetable-and-nut sauces. Things like this and the Sorites Paradox Pesto add tons of color and nutrition to a plate, and variety to a vegetarian diet. Plus, because there’s little chopping and prep work, they’re usually manageable for me to assemble and contribute to dinner unless my energy is really, really poor.

This can be used to top fresh vegetables (it's especially nice on green ones, as it's a bit like a shortcut romesco sauce, except with red peppers instead of tomatoes), liven up a salad dressing or toss with pasta.

Sorites Paradox Pesto

I had to ask my husband the professional philosopher tonight, “What’s the name of the idea about how much of something you have to take away before it ceases to be that thing?”

“The Sorites Paradox.”

“May I call this Sorites Paradox Pesto?”

“It’ll be clear that you’re married to a philosopher. It’s also called the Paradox of the Heap.”

“That’s okay. ‘Sorites Paradox Pesto’ sounds better than ‘Paradox of the Heap Pesto’ anway. ‘Heap’ isn’t really a good word for a recipe title.”

Classic pesto: Basil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, salt. This shares only the last two ingredients and the method, and is by dint of that vegan and still interpretable as pesto. The method is what’s really important.

We put big dollops of this on top of an otherwise very plain-Jane white bean soup, a place I sometimes put gremolata. It would be good applied to just about anything that would hold still long enough – broiled on bread, tossed with pasta, incorporated into an oil-and-vinegar dressing, heated and mixed with wilted greens.

Cucumber-Chickpea Salad

This is an easy one for when it’s very hot.

With the presence of the chickpeas, it’s substantial enough to be an entrée salad.  If you buy canned chickpeas, there’s no cooking required. However, if you buy dry ones and fully soak them, you can cook them in the pressure cooker by bringing it to pressure, cooking them under pressure for seven minutes, and then allowing the pressure to drop on its own off the heat. When the cooker is ready to open, they’ll be fully cooked. The nice thing about this method is that it tends to not blow the skins off or split the beans.

Chickpeas:

1 1/2 c. dry chickpeas, soaked for 8 hours or overnight (or two cans, rinsed and drained)

water to cover plus one inch

1 T. olive oil

Salad:

2 cucumbers, peeled, seeded, and cut into chickpea-sized pieces

1-15 oz. jar roasted red peppers, drained and chopped

5 oz. fresh spinach (one bag)

Drizzle of olive oil

2/3 c. fresh parsley, minced

Dressing:

1/4 c. extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 c. canola oil

2 T. red wine vinegar (or more to taste)

2 cloves minced garlic

salt and pepper to taste

Place chickpeas in pressure cooker and add water. Close cooker and bring to pressure. Cook seven minutes, then remove cooker from heat and set on a heatproof trivet. Allow pressure to drop of its own accord.

Place the spinach in a large bowl and season lightly with salt and pepper and a short drizzle of olive oil, then toss. Microwave for one minute, then stir and set aside to finish wilting. When the cooker can be opened, drain the beans and add to the large bowl. Add the cucmber, red pepper, spinach, and parsley as well, and toss.

In a glass measuring vessel, thoroughly mix together all the dressing ingredients, then pour over the contents of the bowl. Toss gently. Serve at room temperature. Makes 6 servings. Leftovers will keep a few days, but the spinach will not look very attractive past the second day.

If you are the type who likes crumbly, salty cheeses, feta or ricotta salata would be excellent atop this salad.

(Note on the slightly inaccurate photo: I thought I'd have the chickpeas separately, but it ended up better when I mixed everything together later that night.  I wrote the recipe as if I had done that straight away.)