Tag Archive: Vegetables

The 110 on TVP

Sunday, August 12, 20120

Vegan Lahmajoon

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

You have that friend who’s a vegetarian, you know the one. Always going on about seitan and tempeh and quorn and tvp. You nod and smile as if you actually know what those are and then promptly excuse yourself, rush off to the nearest parrilla stand and order a vaciopan “extra jugoso” just to recover your inner balance and put everything right in the world. You know that, perhaps, you ought to be eating two or three fewer chorizos per weeks, but they’re just so darned good, and the idea of “meat substitute”, well, that’s a conversation best left for, well, never.

But, we’re going to have it anyway. You’re all grown up now, you can handle it. And today we’re going to tackle “tvp”, or “textured vegetable protein”. We’ll set seitan, or wheat gluten, to the side because here you either have to make it yourself or for the most part trek to Barrio Chino to buy it; tempeh, a sort of fermented version of tofu, is near non-existent; and quorn, a mushroom based fake meat has yet to hit this riverbank. But, tvp is all around us, you can find it in virtually any dietetica, where it goes by the monikers soja texturizada or carne de soja.

It sounds like something industrial, and when it comes down to it, it is. Somewhere, in an evil factory, someone is taking mounds of soybeans and extracting all the soybean oil from it, leaving behind a high protein, fat free, soy flour. Someone else is taking that flour and heating it up and pressurizing it, and then extruding it… yes, I used the word extruding early on a Sunday morning, and forming granules or strips or chunks of what sort of looks like a golden colored packing material. All sounds really appetizing and gets you revved up to run to the dietetica right now, doesn’t it?

But here’s the thing – we eat all sorts of things that go through processes like this, and the cool thing about tvp is that it’s basically just 100% high protein soy – high protein like 50% by weight. It’s a completely blank, tasteless canvas, and is flavored by rehydrating it in whatever liquid you choose – most often something like a good soup stock, but you can use your imagination, where it takes on that flavor. From there, it can be used as a meat substitute.

Now, we’re going to start with the easy one – the granules – which basically, when rehydrated in a nice, dark, roasted vegetable stock, looks like ground beef. And that’s how we’re going to use it today. We’re going to make our very lahmajoon (or any of various other similar spellings), those lovely little open faced empanadas arabes that we find all around the town.

Lahmajoon – Armenian “Pizzas”

165 gm all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
approximately 175 ml warm water

2 garlic cloves
1 medium onion
1 small green pepper
120 gm TVP in granule
240 ml of warm vegetable stock (or water)
170 gm tomato paste
4 plum tomatoes (canned are fine here)
10-12 sprigs parsley
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper
Lemon wedges, to serve

Mix dry dough ingredients together in a bowl, add olive oil and mix well with your fingers or a fork until it resembles wet sand. Add water, a little at a time as needed, to make a smooth dough – soft but not sticky. Knead a few minutes, then form into six equal size balls, then let rest for 15 minutes. Roll out into individual rounds. Heat the oven to 200°C.

Rehydrate the TVP in the stock until it has absorbed all the liquid – about 5 minutes. Finely chop the onion, garlic, parsley, green pepper and tomatoes. Add the TVP, tomato paste, cumin, cayenne, and salt and pepper and mix well – you can even pulse all this in a food processor if you prefer. The consistency should be wet and pasty, like a thick spread. And, spread a layer of the mixture onto flour rounds all the way to the edge. Bake directly on the oven rack for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the edges are browned and the filling is cooked through. If they begin to inflate in the oven like a pita bread, or pan arabe, pop them with a fork from the top. To serve, squeeze some lemon over the top and eat.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Red, White and delicious all over

Sunday, July 15, 20120

Fagottini di radicchio

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

I’ve mentioned before that I often hear people asking about not just what one unusual vegetable or fruit is, but what to do with it. At my little neighborhood verdulería the proprietor takes great pains to call other customers over and ask me to explain what to do with one or another that he’s gotten in stock. Sometimes I think he goes and looks for something different just to see if he can trip me up – thankfully so far I’ve been able to hold my own in the recipe challenges.

‘Tis the season and all that, he’s recently gotten in all sorts of lovely winter vegetables, particularly things like cabbages and endives and the like. One of my favorites of the genre is radicchio, those glowingly beautiful heads of maroon and white leaves. Now, 99% of the time when I see them used in restaurants, they’re simply used in salads, providing a little bitter note and color in contrast to the sweetness and variegated green-ness of various lettuces. While delicious there, that wouldn’t be much of a recipe.

The interesting thing is, that like many other hearty vegetables of similar sort, that bitterness is tamed and changed by cooking – roasting and grilling are particularly good and bringing out the hidden sweet notes and tamping down the bitterness. Radicchio also pairs beautifully with nuts – walnuts and hazelnuts are personal favorites, and also with fruits in the family of pears, apples and quinces.

Let’s take a quick moment to just note what radicchio is – it’s a member of the chicory family – the same family of vegetables whose roots are dried and ground and added to coffee in many parts of the world to soften the bitterness of the brew. Ironic, no? The family includes radicchios (of which there are several types), chicory itself, endives – and not just the “Belgian” endive or witloof that we think of in its torpedo shape of pale green and white, but also frisée and escarole, which are both endives as well. Radicchio’s two most common varieties are the Chioggia – the globe shaped, cabbage like version that most of us are familiar with and which is the only one found here in BA, and the Treviso, which is shaped like a Belgian endive, but decked out in maroon and white colors.

So, on to the cooking, and my version of a favorite dish from the Veneto to tempt you into trying out a head of this little used vegetable….

Fagottini di Radicchio – Radicchio Pies

8 hojaldre (puff pastry) style empanada rounds
1 small head of radicchio (roughly 150 gm)
1 shallot, finely chopped
200 gm cuartirolo cheese
1 pear, diced small (½ cm)
12-15 hazelnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

Rinse and chop the radicchio, removing the hard core, and saute in a pan with oil, shallots, salt and pepper until the radicchio is just wilted. Remove from heat and let cool.

Empanada rounds are typically about 12 cm. You’ll need four of approximately that diameter. Take another four and cut out rounds using a cookie cutter of about 8 cm. Butter 4 ramekins that are 8 cm in diameter (you can adjust here – if you’ve got slightly smaller or larger ramekins, just adjust the dough diameters to fit) and line with the larger dough rounds, covering the bottom and up the sides. Divide the radicchio between the ramekins and then top with the pear dice and chopped hazelnuts. Divide the cheese in four equal parts and mold into a round and press down over the filling. Classically you’d also add a slice or two of white truffle just under the cheese, if you have a good quality white truffle oil, you could add just a drop or two at the most to the pear and hazelnut mix.

Beat the egg with the milk. Cover the filling with the smaller rounds of dough and press down to pack tightly. Fold in the outer edge of the bottom round and pinch together to seal well. Brush the surface with the egg wash and bake in a 200̊C oven for 15 minutes, until the dough is golden brown and puffed.

Remove from oven and tip each fagottino (“bundle”) out carefully (two oven mitts are a good idea here), brush the sides with more of the egg wash and return to the oven on the same baking sheet to brown the sides well. Serve hot or warm as an amazing little dinner party appetizer.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Pasted

Sunday, July 1, 20120

Caprese salad

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

I’m not going to enter the fray and dispute over pasta here in Buenos Aires. For many of us from overseas, pasta here tends to be cooked to a point of limpness that we find too far gone. And, for many from here, what we call al dente they call tan crudo! It’s not an argument worth having and it’s simply a cultural preference and custom.

I will, however, delve into, as I have in a recent column, the world of pasta sauces – it continues on the theme I’ve embarked on recently of pastas, gnocchis, etc. And the sauce of the moment – pesto. Let’s start with what it is, at it’s heart. It’s a pounded paste. In fact, that’s what the word means – paste. Traditionally it’s made in a mortar and pestle, and made with the freshest ingredients possible, and generally at pretty much the ultimate moment to preserve that freshness.

What it isn’t, is a specific set of flavors. There’s certainly the classic pesto Genovese that comes to mind when the word is spoken – basil, garlic, pinenuts, parmesan – but it’s not just a set of flavors. In the last few years I’ve been subjected to versions of this sauce that have ranged from dried out spaghetti with a sprinkling of dried basil flakes, browned bits of over-cooked garlic, and a dusting of pre-processed grated cheese, to an entire soup bowl filled with olive oil and slices of burnt garlic and chopped spinach with some noodles floating in it. They’ve missed the point.

Just as importantly, Genovese is not the only pesto out there. Truly, if you make a paste to toss with your pasta or spoon on your meat or vegetables, you’ve made a pesto. And getting creative is half the fun – just do it with some respect for the basic ingredients. Can you use a food processor or blender instead of a mortar and pestle? Of course, but it won’t be the same texture nor experience. Here is a trio of my favorites:

Pesto Genovese

1 large bunch of fresh basil
50 gm parmesan, just grated
3-4 cloves of garlic
25 gm pinenuts
50 ml good olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Mash together the first four ingredients to form a coarse paste. Add a teaspoon of water if you need to help it mash. Transfer to a bowl and whisk in the olive oil, a little at time, like making a mayonnaise, in fact, that’s more or less the consistency you’re going for. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Toss with linguini or fettucine, or serve over fresh tomatoes and mozzarella for a refreshing take on a Caprese salad.

Walnut Pesto

250 gm walnuts, ground
50 gm toasted pine nuts
2 cloves garlic
2-3 tablespoons of chopped parsley and/or oregano
100 gm ricotta or mascarpone
100 ml olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

In a mortar or small processor, puree the walnuts, pine nuts, garlic and herb(s). Season the mixture with salt and pound or grind to a smooth paste. Transfer to a bowl, add the cheese and 1 tablespoon of water. Whisk until smooth and then whisk in the olive oil to create a creamy sauce. Excellent served warm (but not cooked) over spinach filled pansoti or ravioli.

Green Olive-Almond Pesto

250 gm fileted almonds
125 gm green olive paste
1 tablespoon hot red pepper flakes
60 ml fresh orange or tangerine juice
60 ml good olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Since the olives are already in a paste, this recipe actually works better in a blender or processor. Simply place all the ingredients in and blend until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper. This is delicious over lighter grilled meats – chicken, goat, fish.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

Wheat, not pink, berry

Sunday, June 10, 20120

Wheatberry stew

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

The Turkish have their Bugday Çorbasi, the Saudis their Shorobat Il-Jereesh and the Jordanians their Shourbat Freekeh, and the Yemenis, Shorba Burr. From Cyprus, Tarhana; Algeria, Jary; Zanzibar, Shorba; India, Alisa, Poland, Zur, Armenia, Madzoon Abour, and Iran, or Persia, Aash-e Gandom. I could probably keep going, but by the time I was done, I’d have forgotten what I was writing about, and probably put all the celiacs into anaphylactic shock. Because what do these all have in common? They’re wheat based soups. What brought all this on? Monday.

Why Monday? It’s a day in the northwest of Peru, originally from the mountain region, though in modern day centered around the coastal city of Trujillo, when, week in and week out, local cooks prepare a dish called Shambar. It’s a pork and wheat soup, very thick, very hearty, and the reasons behind the Monday only tradition are pretty much lost to time. It’s generally assumed that, being the first day of the work week, it was a way of providing plenty of nutrition to start the week. But that assumes that back in antiquity, in the indigenous cultures, Sunday was somehow a day of rest, if there even was one, as it became after the arrival of the conquistadors. That’s unlikely, unless the day of rest just happened to coincide, and this tradition is reputed to go back well before the Spaniards arrived.

Here in Argentina (though shambar is available at virtually every Peruvian restaurant at Monday lunch), we have the Guiso de Trigo Candeal – no fancy names for us, just tell it like it is, “Durum Wheat Stew”. It’s not one of the more commonly seen one-pot meals, at least not here in Buenos Aires, but it’s a traditional and hearty winter dish from the mountain regions of the country, where it is, I’ve been assured, recommended to be consumed with “a group of brave friends”. I assume that since the only person telling me that is a porteño, that it’s because the stew contains a couple of hot chilies, which require sallying forth valiantly, spoon in hand.

Not surprisingly, as with, it seems most of the stews here, beef and bacon make an appearance. Far be it for me to eschew bacon, the “gateway meat”, and I generally leave it in the dish, it’s a small amount, but if you prefer, leave it out of the following recipe and just add a teaspoonful of liquid smoke, or use smoked salt in place of regular salt, to give that hint of wood smoke. For those of you who don’t cope well with spicy dishes, substitute a red or yellow bell pepper for the chilies.

Wheatberry Stew

250 grams of wheat berries (trigo pelado)
1 large potato, diced (250-300 grams)
100 grams smoked bacon (optional)
1 liter vegetable or chicken stock
2 hot chilies, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 green onions, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
60 ml whiskey
250-300 grams chicken breast, diced
10-12 sprigs of parsley, chopped, stems and all
4-5 sprigs of oregano, leaves stripped off the stems
240 grams canned, peeled plum tomatoes (1 can)
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Wash the wheat grains well to remove any chaff, and then leave to soak in cold water for 20 minutes. Drain. In a good sized pot, saute the bacon (optional, as noted), onions, garlic, chilies, and paprika in the olive oil until the onions are soft. Add the chicken and cook until lightly browned on the surface. Add the whiskey and deglaze the pan to get up any stuck bits, let the liquid absorb. At this point add the remaining ingredients (wheat, potatoes, herbs, tomatoes, and stock), bring to a boil, reduce the heat to minimum and simmer, covered, until the wheat and potatoes are cooked through, approximately 30 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Note: You can also make this dish with whole, unpeeled wheat grains, just soak them overnight and plan on the cooking time being more like 45 minutes; or, with bulgur wheat, which is a cracked type of wheat and takes less cooking time, 15-20 minutes.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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A bowl of chic

Sunday, June 3, 20120

Hummus soup

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

For years I’ve maintained that Argentine cooking is the only cuisine on the planet to eschew soups. Oh, there are stews, big heaping one pot meals – we’ve tackled locro and lentejas in this column – but an actual soup? Most of my Argentine friends and guests assert that they only ate soup as small children, or these days when they’re ill, in which case they resort to chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in hot water.

There is, of course, the Spanish derived puchero, a big boil-up of beef and vegetables, and traditionally served in two courses – first the solids, then the broth. But those same friends and guests tell me that these days, they generally just toss the broth, eat the meat and perhaps a bit of the veg. After all, they’re not poor anymore, they can afford to eat meat, meat and more meat, the rest of it is unnecessary. Shades of my home country post-WWII.

But are there actually soups in the Argentine culinary canon? The answer is, traditionally, yes. In modern life perhaps not so much, but the recipes are still out there. Among my favorite Argentine cookbooks is one that lists not only a dozen different ways to make puchero, but another dozen plus actual soups, most of them surprisingly vegetable based (though all, of course, managing to throw in some meat in some fashion or another – bacon, chorizo, beef, chicken). Another lists a solid five dozen different soups, albeit a few are clearly just foreign imports included for convenience.

At my table, a recent addition to our repertoire has proven to be a consistent hit, and it came about while playing around with several Greek and Middle Eastern dish ideas. It’s based on our old friend cicero, the chickpea. The sopa de garbanzos, or chickpea soup, uses a beef broth base and simmers them away with a mix of vegetables – potato, tomato, carrots and escarole – plus, not surprisingly, a good amount of bacon.

So when it comes down to it, this recipe, other than including chickpeas and potato, has really nothing to do with the Argentine one, but it’s become such a favorite that I can’t not share it with you all. The spicing on it is reminiscent of hummus, which was the intent from the beginning. (Take out the potato and the water and puree the rest with olive oil and you’ve got a killer hummus.)

Hummus Soup

250 grams dried chickpeas, soaked overnight in water
1 large potato
2 large garlic cloves, chopped
100 ml tahini (sesame paste)
peel of 1 lemon
2 teaspoon smoked pepper (ideally something middle eastern like aleppo or urfa biber, but smoked paprika will work)
1 teaspoon cumin, toasted
salt to taste (1-2 teaspoons)
1½ liters water

About as easy as it can get – put all the ingredients into a soup pot (use 1 teaspoon of salt at the start, you can add more later, you can’t take it out once added), bring to a simmer and cook until the potatoes and chickpeas are soft. Puree in a blender or food processor. Add salt if needed. Serves 4-6 as a first course.

Now, I like to add a little something to the soup for texture, and over time we’ve come up with several different options. You can emphasize the chickpeas by adding fried chickpeas to the pureed soup. A personal favorite is to lightly char cauliflower florets in a pan or under the broiler, lightly coated with olive oil and ground sumac. Diced roasted beets. Toasted almonds slivers. Unsweetened plain yogurt, perhaps flavored with some lemon or orange juice. Chives and/or green onions. Spiced olive oil. If you could add it to hummus, you could add it to this soup!

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Through the culinary lens

Sunday, May 6, 20120

Lentejas

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

Brown, green, yellow, red, Turkish, French, Puy, small, large… the world of the Lens culinaris, the lentil, is wide and varied. Delicious and nutritious, lentils pack in the third largest amount of protein of any pea, bean or nut (following soy and hemp). And, following in a long Italian tradition, particularly from the Umbrian area, Argentina has sallied forth with one of its quartet of famed stews, lentejas (which really just means lentils, come on, couldn’t you have been more creative?), joining in with mondongo (tripe), locro and carbonada. I’ve already covered a locro redux in a past column, and with cold weather coming on, we may just see the other two coming down the pike.

Now, if I were to make this stew the traditional Umbrian way, it’d be packed with the flavors of smoked and salted pancetta, the classic bacon of the region, fresh sweet and spicy Italian sausages, with a touch of fennel seed, and maybe even some other pork bits of one sort or another floating about. Here in Argentina it’s more likely that I’ll find much of that translated to beef – oh, the bacon part may still be present, but there will be ground or diced beef stewed along. There will also be lots of carrots. I appreciate the carrot in many ways, but for me, it sits there alongside cream cheese in sushi, it’s just in the wrong place. Put your carrots in your split pea soup and be done with it.

The hard part about lightening up a hearty stew like the lentejas is that so much of its flavor comes from those bits of meat and curing spices and all that sort of good stuff. And far be it for me to tell you can’t add a bit of one or another to this dish, but give it a try for your “meatless Monday” and you may just find that it’s not necessary. Oh, and this recipe is way too easy – and, of course, if you’re preference is vegan, leave the eggs out of the dish – some sauteed portobello caps would be great on top of the stew.

500 gr lentils soaked in water for 1-2 hours
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1-2 chili peppers, finely chopped
500 grams tomato purée (canned is just fine here)
1 liter vegetable stock
1 teaspoon liquid smoke
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 bunch of arugula, cleaned and stemmed
8 eggs
4 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Saute onion, celery, garlic and chili in olive oil with a little salt and pepper over medium heat until softened and just starting to color. Add the lentils, the tomato purée, liquid smoke, stock and balsamic vinegar. Cover and cook over low heat for approximately 1 hour until the lentils are tender. Adjust the seasoning to your tastes with salt and pepper. Off the heat add the arugula and mix in well, cover and let sit.

In the remaining olive oil in a good sized frying pan fry up the eggs (you can also poach them if you prefer). You may need to do it in batches depending on the size of pan you have. In a large bowl serve a couple of scoops of the lentil mixture and top with two eggs per person. Put a little grind of pepper and perhaps some good sea salt on top of each egg. Serves 4.

Just a note – why soak the lentils for 1-2 hours beforehand? After all, they cook up fairly quickly anyway – instead of an hour in the pot they might need only about two hours. While that’s true, what will happen is that the texture and flavor of the other vegetables in the dish will get lost – they’ll turn to mush by the time the lentils cook through. And while you’re saving an hour overall, it’s an hour during which you don’t need to be attending to the lentils, and isn’t it worth it to enhance the flavor and texture of the dish? I think so.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Vice forgiven

Sunday, April 15, 20120

Semolina gnocchi with mushroom sugo

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

I’ve heard it said that the difference between French and Italian cooking is that for the former, it’s all about sauces, and the latter, it’s all about the main ingredient. While there’s ostensibly some truth to that, when it comes down to it, both cuisines have sauces – albeit that France’s are codified into vast tomes that detail “correct” methods and Italy’s are passed around by word of mouth or carried to the grave without ever having been spoken aloud or written down. And both cuisines rely on the best of ingredients – as does any culinary tradition out there – otherwise we may as well toss a TV dinner into the toaster oven and call it quits.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, noted American author and satirist, is quite possibly best remembered in the latter category for his tongue-in-cheek The Devil’s Dictionary, which basically makes fun of everything sacred to politicians, self-important people, and, well, pretty much the rest of humanity. I like to keep his definition of sauces handy, just to remind myself how important they can be to a cuisine:

“SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.”

Within the Italian canon, beyond the ubiquitous marinera, the tomato sauce often referred to by descendants of Italian expats as either red sauce or gravy, neither of which truly captures it – there are a vast number of others, particularly for pasta. One of my all time favorites is the classic roast pork sugo, an amazingly delicious combination of roast pork, white beans, aromatic vegetables, herbs and wine that, rustic or not, tends to bring tears of joy to the eyes of those dipping into it.

Recently I was asked to come up with a version of the same for a vegetarian dinner, and while I could have played around with something as off-putting, but commonly used, as seitan, or cooked wheat gluten, or perhaps tofu, I decided against it. Instead, I went for a combination of mushrooms that could be cooked in different ways to emphasize their depth of flavor. My favorite pairing for this being Roman semolina gnocchi – completely different from potato gnocchi. It’s also delicious over ricotta filled manicotti, canelloni, or ravioli.

Mushroom Sugo

1 can of white beans (roughly 210gm drained weight), rinsed
2 ribs of celery, leaves included, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of dried oregano (or 2 tablespoons of fresh leaves)
1½ tablespoons tomato paste
220 ml of dry white wine
500 gm of white button mushrooms, sliced in half
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
440 ml of mushroom or vegetable stock
200 gm small portobello mushrooms, sliced
100 ml olive oil
salt and pepper

In a saucepan cook the onion, celery and garlic in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat until the onion is soft and translucent. In a separate frying pan, over high heat, bring the other 2 tablespoons of olive oil to just the point where it’s starting to smoke, add the mushroom halves, a little salt and pepper, and cook, stirring regularly, until they’re nicely browned on the outside.

Add the tomato paste, wine, vinegar, and oregano to the vegetable mixture and cook until about half the liquid is absorbed. Add the beans and the browned mushrooms to the pot along with the stock. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to very low and let simmer for 45 minutes, occasionally stirring it.

Back in the frying pan, heat up the 100ml of olive oil, again to just the point where it’s starting to smoke, and add the portobello slices to it. Here you’re going to cook them until they’re golden brown and a just getting crisp – more or less deep-frying them. When they’re all brown, scoop them out with a slotted spoon and let them drain on some paper towel. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper.

Ladle the sauce over pasta or gnocchi and then top with a scattering of the crispy portobello “chips”. Dig in!

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

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Behind the Eight-Ball

Sunday, March 25, 20120



Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

One of the questions I get from visitors when I take them to local markets comes down to a sort of “how do you make sense of this bewildering array of vegetables and fruits?” I stand there, looking at peaches and plums, carrots and cauliflower, and wonder just exactly what bewildering array they’re seeing that I’m not. Is it the sheer quantity of different things piled up in artful arrangements? (Did you know there’s actually a whole profession here in Buenos Aires of people who are hired to come in to the verdulerías at night and create artistic arrangements?) Or are there actually items stacked about that my guests are simply not familiar with?

I think it’s a bit of both, because I find myself remembering that I had much the similar reaction thirty years ago when I first moved to New York City from the Midwest. I grew up in a small city surrounded by farms and we went to the farmer’s market on a weekly basis during nice weather. But generally it was just a tables and baskets piled with whatever happened to be fresh that week – sometimes there might have been no more than half a dozen different items available, and there was certainly no artful arranging going on. And, there in New York, and here in Buenos Aires, there are indeed a few fruits and vegetables that were new to me when I moved here as well.

This week, I thought I’d tackle one of the most common ones I get asked about, those small spheres of dark green that locals call zapallitos or redondos or the two combined. They’re a summer squash, within the zucchini (marrow, courgette) branch of things, and in the English speaking world they’re variously referred to as round, globe, eight-ball or cannonball zucchini. And they’re completely usable in just the same way when it comes to cooking, they just look cooler. Admittedly, my first culinary experience with zucchini was at summer camp where we grew them to massive sizes and then ate them sliced, on white bread, with mayonnaise, but that’s a story for another time.

While my personal favorite thing to do with these beauties is simply slice them, dip them in seasoned flour, then beaten egg, and then panko crumbs (a Japanese bread crumb that gives a very crunchy and delicate crust) and fry them, that wouldn’t be much of an interesting recipe to present, though I still recommend doing it. Locally one of the culinary faves is the zapallito relleno a la criolla, or country style stuffed eight-ball (if I may use that term in polite company), which unsurprisingly tends to be stuffed with crumbled sausage and bacon, egg, and a lot of cheese… you know the drill. Let’s lighten that up a bit.

Stuffed Globe Zucchini

4 globe zucchini
1 chicken breast, diced small
1-2 stale (leftover) dinner rolls or bread slices
100 ml milk
100 gm grated cheese
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2-3 stalks each fresh parsley and oregano, chopped
1 green onion, chopped
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
breadcrumbs
olive oil

Trim the top and bottom of the zucchini by just cutting off a thin slice, and then cut them in half across, so that you can stand both the top and bottom up on their trimmed ends. With a spoon, scoop out a cavity, leaving about a ½ cm wall of zucchini flesh all the way around. Chop up the zucchini innards you scooped out.

Soak the bread rolls or slices in the milk until soft, then drain off extra milk. Then in a bowl mix together the chopped zucchini and chicken, and smush it all together with the softened bread, cheese, eggs, herbs, salt and nutmeg. You should end up with a mixture that’s easy to scoop into the zucchini shells, mounding them up a bit to they’re nice and pretty. Sprinkle the tops generously with breadcrumbs, drizzle a little oil over the top, and bake in a moderate oven (160-180°C) for 45 minutes until browned.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles