Category Archives: Vegetables

A Polish Country Dinner

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I was listening to The Splendid Table about a month ago when Lynn was interviewing Anne Applebaum who has authored a new cookbook: From a Polish Country House Kitchen:  90 Recipes for the Ultimate Comfort Food.  Visit this link to hear the podcast for yourself.    This was late January and we were up to our necks in root vegetables here in Tunis so I knew I would be able to identify with the book.

In 1988, Anne and her Polish husband, along with her inlaws, bought a broken down manor-house in Northwest Poland.  Over a decade, they renovated the house, along with the grounds and gardens, part of which was a large greenhouse.  Deer, wild boar, and geese can be hunted on the property and many types of fish are caught or farmed locally.  They preserve what they grow in the harvest season, in the traditional ways, and use what they have in the lean months in masterful ways.

I have been inspired and a little haunted by this Polish way of eating.  I was in Poland last winter and I still carry an unshakable sadness for one of the most tragic places I’ve ever been right next to a curiosity to more deeply know one of the quaintest and most beautiful places.

I was cooking this afternoon.  I needed four onions, but I only had two.  Rifling through the refrigerator, I found a bundle of leeks that had been stored for a couple of weeks.  They hadn’t yet been cleaned so they were still dirt caked and were also beginning to yellow on the outer layers.  A more finicky me would not have bothered with them and would have composted the entire bunch.  The compost can be a great rationalization sometimes when you just don’t want to bother with produce that will take a little work.  But, I needed the onions, now.  The produce shops were already closed for their afternoon siesta and I needed my dish to simmer in the meantime.  This is where the country cook comes through.  I washed and trimmed the leeks, finding plenty of good onion left to use and then slow-cooked them in a braise that was delicious.  I think that many of these old country recipes began from meats, vegetables, and fruit preserved using methods that were possible given the climate and technology of the time to provide foods of interest and variety in the bleak months, but since then, generations of cooks have refined the techniques until they have become exquisite dishes in their own rights.  They have evolved from necessity to art.

I became a little obsessed with the idea of cooking a Polish feast and I thought about it and planned it for weeks.  The atmosphere of the meal was simple with lots of candlelight, rough linens, and pottery,  and the menu was entirely Polish.  Here is what we had:

Blini with Smoked Salmon and Caviar
Barszcz or Borscht (the Russian name)
Pierogi:
     Potato and Ricotta, with Fresh Peas, and Bacon
     Sauerkraut and Wild Mushroom
Braised Pork Shoulder with Sour Cherries
Brown Sugar Pavlova with Fresh Strawberries and Creme Fraiche
Mint Tea
 

Here are a few photos.

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shutter speed: LO, F:16, ISO: 1600

shutter speed: LO, F: 16, ISO: 1600

shutter speed: LO, F: 16, ISO: 1600

shutter speed: LO, F: 16, ISO: 1600

shutter speed: LO, F: 16, ISO: 1600

Cooking a disciplined dinner like this is really a massive laboratory exercise, especially when you are cooking recipes that are all new to you.  I learned many things.

1.  Even when you have stuffed the borscht stockpot, the massive one made for industrial kitchens, with beef on the bone, many, many onions, leeks, celery, beets, carrots, porcini mushrooms, and garlic,  simmered and simmered, and then reduced the final consume, it can still be a bit thin on body.  It wasn’t all that I expected, in the end, and I will keep trying to find “my recipe” that makes the borscht I am tasting in my head.

2.  After two complete pre-party pierogi run-through batches, I still prefer the peirogi dough recipe I referenced last summer when we were making crab peirogis.  The addition of sour cream or creme fraiche to the dough not only gives it a tender bite, but also makes the dough taste like more than flour.  Following is the abbreviated version.

Dough: 3 eggs, 8 ounces sour cream or creme fraiche, 3 cups all-purpose flour, 3/4 tsp. salt, 1 tablespoon baking powder

Blend all ingredients and 1 cup flour in mixer with a dough hook.  Gradually add remaining flour, 1/4 cup at a time, until dough pulls away from the bowl and is not too sticky to work with.  Beat dough a few minutes more, then let rest for 5 minutes before beginning to roll.

3.  If you find, like some Polish country cooks do, that moths have hatched an entire colony in your precious stash of dried sour cherries, cranberries work just as well.

4.  Not many people could tell you what Polish food is, but when they taste it, they love it.

Getting off Auto

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I want to take photos.  I am so weary and mortified by the silly representations of things and life I have posted on the internet.  I have gotten by with some close up trickery, but I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.  I took the plunge last summer and bought a true DSLR with a couple of lenses.  Having not had lenses before, I read research and then bought what I thought would be great for me:  an 85mm macro lens and a wide-angle zoom, something I have wanted for years for taking shots of my carpets and room interiors.  It turns out that I have lenses for two extremes now:  super close and super wide.  My son says it’s like I am trying to dig a hole and I have a teaspoon and a backhoe.  Surely, my next camera purchase will be a mid-range telephoto lens.

But lenses aren’t my biggest challenge.  Using the settings on my camera is.  I had an introduction to settings last fall through a technology class I was taking and now, some colleagues at school have formed a little club.  We meet once a month, bringing a photo to share along a certain theme or technique.  The first meeting in January, I brought a photo I had taken in Vienna in November.  It was nice and showed a good use of the “proportion of thirds”.  But at the end of the meeting, a fellow photographer tossed down the gauntlet, “Let’s always post our camera setting when we show our photos.”  I was outed.  I was still just shooting my new fancy camera on Auto.

Second meeting, the theme was “love”.  I figured out how to adjust my shutter speed and aperture and I did spend a couple of hours one Sunday afternoon photographing a still life of Tunisian food products I had gleaned from the countryside and the markets that weekend:  things I love.  I tried every aperture setting and a few different shutter speeds and in the end, I just had a picture of some food sitting on my kitchen counter.  I complained to my son, “I did all of this adjusting and I still didn’t get an amazing photo.”

He challenged, “Well, what were you trying to use the settings to do?”

I didn’t exactly know, and there was the problem.  It was getting late and I needed to email my photo to the organizer so she could make a slide show for the next day.  I said, “I just won’t go to the meeting.  I’ll wait until I know what I’m doing and can take a better photo.”

Again, my son, who has been a vocal performance major for the past three years said, “Yep, that’s what singers think, too.  They think they will just continue working on their own in a practice room and only come out when they are good enough.  It’s intimidating to go in front of your peers when you know you’re not very good, but you grow a lot by showing what you can do and also by studying their work.”

So I went to the meeting and I cringed when my photo came up, but I made a new vow to work at this.  It’s not just going to come easily to me, but I want the skill.  I am mortified, at the moment, because I can clearly see the difference between what I want and what I take, but hopefully, that vision will help take me toward a better photo.

This made me think about teaching children.  Sometimes I get frustrated with kids who won’t put aside trying to cover up their reading and writing deficiencies.  It looks obvious to me that a learner must just jump in and start practicing the skills at whatever level he or she is at.  That is the way to make progress.  But kids don’t automatically know that or believe you when you tell them that.  And as I relived this week, it is embarrassing to put your deficiencies out in front of peers.  It is good to have re-experienced this.  I hope I can keep that empathy with my struggling learners.

I am going to post photos here, frequently.  And I am going to post my settings as an act of accountability, until I find it so pretentious that I can’t do it anymore.  (All of these pictures were at a shutter speed of about 200 and aperture of 2.5-2.8).

I have been brining this week and when I think of brining, I picture a 20 lb. turkey in a 5-gallon bucket set out in a cold garage a few days before Thanksgiving.  It was a small revelation to me that I could brine a smaller cut of meat, such as a lamb shoulder, in a pot that can nicely fit in my refrigerator.  It took nothing to mix some salt and sugar with water, plop in my piece of meat, and leave it for a couple of days.

Simple Brine

1/4 cup sugar, 3/4 cup kosher or course sea salt to 10 cups water

 

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This is the second of the fantastical broccoli found at the market this week.  Now and then, we get this purple-tinged variety and I try to find a use worthy of its beauty.

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Here is how I used both the brined lamb shoulder and the broccoli.  Bon Appetit did an article, in the February issue,  on the Saltimporten Canteen in Malmo, Sweden.  The intent of this sliding-metal-door-fronted restaurant is to bring up the simple qualities of excellent ingredients, without much culinary trickery.  That is something I need reminding of in both food and photographs.  I would love to enjoy this Lamb and Broccoli Stew on a cold Saturday, sitting outdoors at long wooden tables with fun people.

Beetroot Pesto

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We just finished three weeks of high entertaining.  There has been a succession of new staff for next year coming to visit us in Tunis, along with some side friends we wanted to spend time with.  We knew it was coming, saw it all booked out on the calendar, and then we geared up for day, after day, after day of eating events.  And it was wonderful.  It about killed us; I won’t deny it, but as a whole, I am happy for all of the faces that have been around our table and happy for the cooking experiences that were involved.

And I didn’t blog about any of it.  I didn’t even take pictures.  You just have to take my word that any of these events happened because there is almost no evidence.  This even surprised me.  There were a number of interesting dishes I prepared.  Several were new to me and would have been perfect to write about, but  I was just simply too busy cooking and entertaining to write about cooking and entertaining and I didn’t feel the need to.  It was what we call in education a performance-based assessment.

That made me think about the place of this blog in my life.  What purpose does it serve?  Why do I want to return to it so often and continue trying to express an experience I’ve had with food?  A friend of mine mentioned my blog last week and said, “Cooking grounds you, doesn’t it?”  That sounds like a really simple comment, but it resonated with me all week.  If cooking grounds me, then that explains why I sometimes can’t get on with other pressing responsibilities, like posting an assignment for my online course, until I’ve written a blog post about something I’ve cooked.  That comment actually made me feel less obsessed about blogging, which I didn’t feel was the source of my motivation anyway, and gave me permission to have a need to take time to place some creative thinking  in a certain place and then go on with other life activities.  That seems more normal to me.

All of this actual entertaining took the place of  writing about it so I was satisfied and didn’t miss the blog documentation.  But I miss it, now.  Passing through a particular season always opens the opportunity to enter a new one.  I am still so thrilled to squeeze the life out of this season’s produce.  This is a classic expat sort of recipe as I had to gather up the ingredients from more than one country.  We have beetroot and are starting to get some nice basil harvests, but I didn’t have fresh mozzarella until I went to Italy three weeks ago.  I also don’t know where I can buy macadamia nuts in Tunis, but my teaching partner went on a safari to Kenya over Spring Break and brought me back a package of them so I had the exact amount needed for this recipe.  I thought that this was an almost cosmic alignment of ingredients and so this recipe was meant to be.

It feels good to be back in this space with some fresh motivation to tell and show my cooking experiences.  Thanks for being my guest.

Beetroot Pesto

Adapted from Bennetts Café in Mangawhai, NZ

  • ½ lb. beetroot
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped
  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • ¼ cup walnuts or macadamia nuts, toasted
  • ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice
  • ¼ cup chopped basil, mint or both

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Place the beetroot in a roasting dish then cook for 1 hour until tender.  Set aside to cool completely.  Using your fingertips, rub off the skins.  Cut the beetroot into chunks.

Place the beetroot, garlic, oil, nuts, Parmesan, lemon juice, and herbs in a food processor.  Process until smooth.

Serve the pesto with blanched green beans and pasta.  Serve alongside smoked fish, or serve on bruschetta with mozzarella, arugula, basil, and tomatoes.

Extravagance with Artichokes

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I want to do wildly extravagant things with artichokes.  They are so cheap and plentiful that this is my time, if ever, to try all of those artichoke recipes I’ve always dismissed as being for people who live in California.  One little hurdle in my mind can be getting past the separation of leaves and stem.  First, it is physically challenging to peel and de-choke an artichoke.  It’s not impossible, but I wish I had a better technique.  Second, if I don’t use the whole artichoke, I feel like I’m wasting the meat on those leaves.  I am currently steaming them off separately and Allan and I will either just sit and have a big artichoke leaf fest or I will try scraping the meat off of each individual leaf to add a layer of artichoke paste to a lasagna.  That’s my current plan.

Concurrently, I have been saving nutrient rich greens from the cutting room floor all week.  The vegetable sellers here are very quick to cut the greens from the bulbs of carrots and fennel, and on to beets and turnips, which we know are delicious.  I bought a bunch of beets a few days ago and had my back turned when the owner chopped off the greens and tossed them in a bundle on the shop floor.  When I asked for the greens, he put the decapitated heads of two other customers’ bunches in my bag, too, so now I have plenty of beet greens.  Plenty.

I bought a beautiful cookbook last summer, Turquoise, by Greg and Lucy Malouf that I am long overdue to start learning from.  The subtitle is A chef’s travels in Turkey.  Greg is an experienced Australian chef, Lucy is an evocative writer and they also had a fantastic photographer along because every page makes you want to crawl right inside.  They try everything they can, but then Greg puts a little Australian spin on the dish so it’s just a tiny bit fusionized for Western cooks.  This is my first recipe to actually cook from the book and it’s perfect for what’s available to me at the moment.  Rather than chicory and chard, I used beet and turnip greens.

Bitter greens, artichokes, and shallots with poppy seeds

Adapted from Turquoise, by Greg and Lucy Malouf

Ingredients

  • ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 6 fresh artichoke hearts, cut into quarter and kept in acidulated water
  • 12 small shallots, peeled and halved
  • 1 leek, white part only, cut lengthwise into thin strips and washed
  • 1 teaspoon poppy seeds, lightly crushed
  • ¼ teaspoon hot paprika
  • ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • Ground sumac
  • 1 1/3 pounds chicory, roots trimmed
  • 5 ounces Swiss chard, shredded lengthwise
  • 5 ounces chicken stock
  • Squeeze of lemon juice
  • 2 ounces unsalted butter

Directions

 Heat the oil in a heavy-based saucepan and add the drained artichokes, shallots and leek.  Saute over a low heat for a few minutes, then add the poppy seeds, paprika, pepper and 1 teaspoon sumac and cook for a further couple of minutes.  Add the chicory, Swiss chard and stock.  Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 8-10 minutes until the artichokes and onions are tender.

Remove the pan from the heat, then stir in the lemon juice and butter well and put into a warmed serving bowl.  Sprinkle with a little more sumac and serve.

Serves 6

I prepared this using two separate pans to keep the beets from turning everything pink.  If you use chicory, kale, or endive, you can just use one pan.  I had never sauteed raw artichokes before and I love this method.  I will do this more often this winter.

Back on the Juice

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My husband has been gone to the US for a week.  He got back last night, on Valentine’s Day.  It was alright having some time all to myself.  I’m working on some big projects and it was fun to have some endless days, especially on the weekend, to work and think and only stop to put a few bites of leftovers in my mouth.  But I very much missed Allan’s juicing routine.  I think I made it clear in Two Ways with Turnips that produce, all produce, is really inexpensive and organic in Tunisia.

We had a handy citrus juicing attachment for our food processor last winter and started the habit of making citrus juice everyday.  This year, we made the investment in an extraction juicer so we could take advantage of the beets, carrots, ginger, pears, and apples we have available all winter, in addition to citrus.

Allan has taken this practice on almost like a form of meditation.  We have a great produce shop just a block from our house and every few days we stop by, often after school.  When we get home, Allan heads to the kitchen and while I work on dinner and we listen to news, he washes produce and then starts juicing.  He used to make it every morning, but it involved quite a bit of clean up so he has taken to filling two or three Nalgene bottles and putting them in the fridge and then we have enough for two or three days.  This juice is so electric and vitamin packed I almost worry sometimes what it can do to a body to consume the equivalence of an entire bunch of beets in one glass, but I’m taking my chances and so far, we are both super healthy.

I think Allan is almost as proud of the bucket for the compost as he is of the juice.

My blood orange aperatif.  Notice the frothy crema on the top.

Spring Onion Pesto

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Are these scallions? scapes? ramps?  I didn’t clearly recognize the bulby bundle in the market, but I remember buying them last year and chopping them into salads, raw, and they were delicious.  Some internet search later and I now know that these are true spring onions.  I think I have interchanged the terms scallion, green onion, and spring onion in the past, but there is a distinction.  Scallions have a white head that is no wider than the green stem.  Green onions have a narrow, straight head and spring onions are developing into bulb shapes, though are still not very mature.  They will have the most pungent flavor of the three and will be the most suitable to take the place of garlic in a pesto.

I never wavered in my decision that the nut must be walnuts.  I could taste that flavor combination in my mind’s taste buds and it was good.  After grinding 1 cup of nuts and about two cups of washed and trimmed onions in the food processor, I added enough of our local cold-pressed olive oil to make a desirable paste and finished it with fleur de sel so it would have flaky bits of salt mixed throughout.  Just to bring up the brightness and color a little, I added about 1/2 cup of basil pesto I had prepared in the freezer.  I tossed the pesto with hot penne pasta and topped it with a tomato salad, dressed in lemon juice, olive oil, fleur de sel, and pepper.

The flavor is not so biting as pesto made with garlic.  It is warmer and more buttery, but still very potent.  Puree this pesto with white beans for a fantastic dip or a spread for bruschetta.

PS:  I’m going to have to tell you that my friend, Claire Bear, did not like this pesto.  She found it unpleasantly pungent and I value her outspokediness.  Out of loyalty to my readership, which might just be Claire, I need to disclose this.  I recommend the following:  If you aren’t going to puree this pesto with white beans or even if you are, blend in some grated Parmesan cheese until you find the right mellowing balance.  Under no circumstances add lemon juice to make it less pungent.

Two Ways with Turnips

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So here it is, my debut post at my new site.  I’ve considered this carefully and I know just what I want to lead with:  turnips.  You know, I’ve talked a turnip game before, but about all I’ve really done is boil a few to whip with some mashed potatoes.  I see them in the market.  They’re so pretty.  You get all the greens and the bulbs and they’re cheap as dirt itself, but I often walk by and get something safe and green that I know how to easily cook.

I bought this bundle of turnips last weekend and I took a picture of the price tag.  Here is a good opportunity to show you that our currency goes to the thousandths place.  When we go shopping here, we feel like we’re carrying around ‘pieces of eight’.  Even men have to have a change purse to hold all of the coinage.   The currency converter wouldn’t let me convert less than one Tunisian Dinar, but one dinar is worth about 66 cents.  This is one fifth less than that so it’s a little more than 50 cents.  Sorry to be so about the money, but look at the food you get for 50 cents!

I had to break this bundle into two dishes because I could.  Following, we have two distinct ways to go with a bunch of turnips:  all leaves and all bulbs and I really recommend them both.  Now, I’ve got three strategies in my game.

SAUTEED FRESH TURNIP GREENS

Adapted from COOKS.COM

1 lb. fresh turnip greens
1 tsp. salt
1 hard cooked egg
1/3 c. minced green pepper
2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
1/3 c. chopped onion
1/2 tsp. sugar
2 strips bacon
1/4 tsp. black pepper

Wash turnip greens thoroughly. Trim off coarse stems. Fry bacon until crisp and remove it from the fat. Save bacon for later use and discard fat. Heat 5 Tbsp. olive oil in a saute pan.  Add onion and green pepper and saute until limp. Coarsely chop turnip greens and add to onions and green pepper. Stir to mix well. Cover tightly and cook 10 – 15 minutes, or until tender. Add salt, black pepper, sugar and lemon juice. Toss lightly. Turn into serving dish and garnish with crisp, crumbled bacon and slices of hard cooked egg. Yield: 4 servings.

CRISPY TURNIP FRIES

Adapted from COOKS.COM

8 med. turnips
1/4 c. grated Parmesan cheese
1 tsp.garlic powder
1 tsp. ground paprika

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Pare and cut turnips into 2 1/2 x 1/2 inch sticks.

Put 1/8 cup olive oil in a gallon-size sealable plastic bag.  Toss cut turnips in oil.   Combine cheese, garlic powder and paprika. Add combination to turnips and toss to coat.  Place turnips on baking sheet. Bake 15-20 minutes or until turnips are tender and golden. Makes 8 servings.

Red Snapper Chowder

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            The soup worked.  I was kind of stressed about it.  After I made such a dramatic point about the fish stock with my glassy-eyed John Dory photo, I knew some people wanted to know how the actual soup came off.  And to tell you the truth, I had to really think about it.  It has been a couple of years now since I’ve had the pleasure of a serving of the snapper chowder at Stock Market in Granville Island Market.  I actually scrolled through the reviews of the restaurant looking for descriptors and found a few helpful ones.  In the end though, I had to go deeply into my taste memory and what I clearly remembered is as follows:  It was a little chunky.  It had a base flavor of oysters and bay leaves.  There was a ton of celery with some actual stringy bits that didn’t puree out.  And it was completely nondairy.  Here is how I built the soup to go with the stock.
Ingredients
1 ½ – 2 yellow onions, chopped
A bundle of celery about 3” in diameter, including leaves, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
1 medium zucchini, chopped
1-2 leeks, chopped
3-5 bay leaves
1 potato, peeled and cubed
2 liters fish stock
¼ cup Arborio rice
2-3 fish fillets, diced into ½ inch cubes
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
            Sauté all of the vegetables, except the potato, in olive oil until soft, but not browned.  Cook the potato in a small saucepan, with a little water, until tender.  Puree vegetables in a food processor or with an emersion blender.  Leave it a little chunky.  Add solids to fish stock and heat.
            Stir in Arborio rice and simmer until rice is soft.
            Add the fish to the heated stock and simmer, without boiling, until fish is cooked, but tender.
            Season with salt and pepper.
Serves 8-10
The Rosemary, Scallion Focaccia Bread is a David Tanis reprint.  I have already written about it at Dinner at Diane’s.  It’s always great, but remember, you have to start it one day ahead of when you want to eat it.

Fish Stock

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 If I could do anything I want to this weekend… anything at all, I would go to Vancouver for the day and wander around Granville Island Market.  This False Creekside maze is the creative, culinary hub of the city that is still my standard as the greatest city in the world.  Sydney? Barcelona? Munich?  They’re all great, but you cannot beat that fresh, west, native feeling of Vancouver, which at the same time is Manhattan hip and San Francisco grounded.    With all of the big bounty of the Frazier Valley and the Pacific Ocean at hand, Granville Market serves as a food terminal moving it all along to kitchens and tables.  There’s the produce, strawberries stacked in almost 12-inch high pyramids, and the seafood, the cheeses and pastas and almost every beautiful food item you could desire.  So I dawdle through the sectors of the market, totally wide-eyed, my mind spinning with the options of the meals I could cook.  And suddenly, I’m starving.  Hunger comes upon me instantaneously and I have to eat that second.  I always go to the same place; it’s called The Stock Market.    This is a kiosk that sells vacuum-packed liters of their made-fresh-daily soups, fresh soup stocks, pasta sauces, dressings, and pestos.  You know, this is where you really need to start your shopping and then work backward, picking up meat, or pasta, or vegetables to complete the dish.  But how does this help my hunger issue?  They sell containers of their daily soup topped with a big hunk of Rosemary focaccia bread and they always seem to have my favorite:  red snapper chowder.  I never considered that anyone else in the world had noticed the red snapper chowder at The Stock Market on Granville Island, but me, yet when I researched it, there seems to be an entire cult following for this soup.

            I found a beautiful St. Pierre, which is a Mediterranean species of John Dory, at a local market this week.  I’ll admit that he’s not the most handsome fish, but I knew when I saw it that the post-fillet carcass of this fish was bound for fish soup stock, which is what is absolutely required if you’re going to make any kind of fish soup.  This formula will fill a 1-gallon stock pot. The ingredient amounts are suggestions to give you an idea of the proportions so you can, of course, adjust them.
Fish Stock
Ingredients: All well-washed and chopped in large pieces
Onions, 2 large
Celery, 3 stalks, including lots of leaves
Leeks, 1 large or 2-3 small
Carrots, 2-3 large
Fresh garlic, 1 clove, peeled and smashed
Fresh parsley, about 1 cup
Thyme, 6 healthy sprigs
Bay leaves, 3-5
Cloves, 2
Black peppercorns, 20 whole
Sea salt , a little for now.  You can adjust the salt in your finished dish.
Non-oily white fish bones (halibut, cod, red snapper or sole), rinsed and kept in large pieces
Cover with filtered water and low-simmer for 45 minutes to an hour.
When cool, strain the stock and compost the solids.  Freeze or use the stock in soups, sauces, and braises.I plan to follow through with the snapper chowder and Rosemary focaccia bread this weekend and if all goes well, I’ll post it here.   Otherwise, I’ve got a gold mine of stock in my freezer for my next endeavor.

Grilled Caesar Salad

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            You know that January night when you come home from work and say, “Wait a minute, isn’t the sun usually down by now?”  There is some lingering daylight hanging over the backyard and the long-shrouded barbecue is giving you a nod.  We’re a month past solstice and at a minute per day, it amounts to something.
            I wanted so much to make this grilled Caesar salad last summer, but in Tunisia, Romaine lettuce is a winter crop, not summer.  It is perfect and abundant now so tonight, we have a great opportunity to bring some summer into our winter work week.
            I use non-stick aluminum foil on the grill.  With some planning, I can cycle through the entire meal with one set of foil.  I started with leeks wrapped in pancetta and drizzled with excellent olive oil.   Wrapping vegetables in pancetta and grilling them is one of my go-to food preparations.  I do an entire bundle of vegetables at once and then put them in scrambled eggs for breakfast during the rest of the week.
            Next, I toasted bread, tossed in the leeky, salty olive oil.  This is basically Texas Toast.  Funny thing, my dad is from Texas and everything great in our house, when I was growing up, was from Texas.  I actually thought that Texas Toast was my dad’s invention until about 3 months ago when I heard my Canadian friend, Paul, mention Texas Toast to his sons in the context of not having a toaster yet because their shipment hadn’t yet arrived.
            Finally, you put the Romaine lettuce on the grill and leave it only until it develops grill marks.  Grilling it in whole heads is extra beautiful, but mine came apart on its own.
Dressing:
2 flat anchovy fillets, drained and chopped
2 small garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 large egg
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, or to taste
Artisinal salt (I used Himalayan pink salt)
Freshly ground pepper
Blend all ingredients until emulsified.  Adjust amounts to taste.
           We bought these eggs, individually, yesterday in the Tunisian countryside.  I carried them home in a plastic bag.  I felt like I was playing a party game on the way home, trying not to break the eggs.  I won!
           Toss the greens with the dressing, to taste.  Coursely chop the leeks and pancetta and place on top.   Dust with freshly grated Parmesan and pepper.

It doesn’t just taste like a summer salad.  It’s a little bit roasted, a little bit wilted.  It suits winter.