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Here’s my haul from a recent trip:

Featuring: New potatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, carrots, beets, zucchini blossoms and the summer’s first tomatoes.

I bought the zucchini blossoms and tomatoes pretty much without thinking–zucchini blossoms are a rare treat around here and I would hate to miss even a day of ripe tomatoes, given how fleeting they are. Anything else I bought with an idea in mind, for its own good looks, or simply because I just happen to like it. It is important to allow for impulse to enjoy the farmers’ market.

After getting home, self-satisfied and hence in a photographic mood, I set to figuring out what to do with all this stuff. All sources seemed to agree that the zucchini blossoms would not last the night so they had to be dealt with first. Taking my cues from a travel-nostalgic girlfriend and Patricia Wells I battered and fried them. What better dip to accompany flowers than a saffron mayonnaise? For the rest of the meal I stuck with an Italian, or at least Mediterranean theme. Following Wells again I used some local (but not from this market trip) arugula to make a cream sauce for tagliatelle. Since I was excited about my tomatoes and cucumbers I made a Greek country salad, which ended up being a nice relief from fried and dairy.

The eggplants I bought because I wanted to try stuffing them as they do in the Middle East. I actually spent a good part of my morning walking and calling around to try to locate a tool for hollowing-out the eggplants before just deciding to dig at them with a paring knife. This actually worked well since the skins of the eggplants were tough enough to keep the knife in, though I doubt I would have won much admiration for my safe knife handling practices. My newly-hollowed eggplants got filled with a mix of rice, tomato, onion, ground pork and allspice inspired by Claudia Roden and then boiled until everything was soft and edible. Keeping with the Middle Eastern theme I cut up some cucumber and tomato for a simple salad on the side and made hummus and pita (neither of which had anything to do with the farmers’ market).

The new potatoes did not have any specific destination when I bought them. In fact, I mostly got them in order to get a better deal on the cucumbers. My favorite way to eat tiny potatoes like this is steamed, salted, and dipped in aïoli. Unfortunately, I had recently done this and I hate repetition, so something else was called for. I knew I wanted to keep the potatoes more or less whole since their whole enchantment is their creamy texture. Potato salad was the obvious option. Since I have never been fond of mayonnaise-based potato salads I decided to make one with pesto. I added arugula and cucumbers mostly because I had them (and the arugula was on its way out) but they ended up adding nice contrast to the potatoes, which were undoubtedly the stars of the show. I never saw such a nice salad to pair with Italian sausages.

If you’ve been keeping track (of course you have) you must be dying to know what I did with the beets and carrots. The beets I roasted and tossed with greens, bleu cheese, fried shallots and a honey vinaigrette. First course. The carrots too were roasted, next to an obliging chicken from Kadejan. I butterflied the chicken and roasted it at 500º to make the skin extra crispy. Unfortunately the carrots were also a little crispy but still nicely sweet and just oozing with Minnesota. The bread pictured was made with local flour, local yeast and local water.

And that’s how my trip to the farmers’ market ended up as four meals. I made no attempt to limit myself to food from the market in making these meals nor did I try very hard to purchase everything from local sources. I tried to limit supplemental trips to The Wedge or (gasp) Rainbow, but only to save money or another trip to the store. It does feel good to support the local farmers and get a sense of the taste of this place, but as far as I can tell nobody can grow lemons in Minnesota and I like lemons. In any case I think dogmatism with respect to eating locally will turn more people off to the idea than on. Moderation in all things.

Despite naan’s ubiquity in Indian restaurants, it can not found in any of the cookbooks I use for Indian cooking. Naan is a catchall term for bread used throughout Central and South Asia. Indian cookbooks emphasize the diversity of Indian breads, from puris to chappathis to rotis to pappadums. Naan is conspicuously absent from this roster.

Searching the Internet reveals plenty of naan recipes, but none are particularly accurate. In all cases a basic dough is enriched with dairy (milk or yogurt) and then typically baked at a high temperature preferably on a stone. This process is presumably intended to recreate the effect of a tandoor oven at home, but since home ovens can’t top 500º F compared to the 900º a Tandoor can achieve they make a poor substitute. Naans prepared in a home oven, even on a preheated baking stone, end up dried out and under-browned with none of the crispy crust or soft, chewy interior of restaurant naans.

A great naan is basically like a great steak; a crusty seared outside and a tender, just-cooked-enough inside. The best steaks come out of a burning hot cast-iron skillet, so why not apply the same principle to naan? Naan is thin enough that while the surface is being crisped up by intense conduction heat the interior dough will cook enough–but not too much.

With this theory in mind I tried cooking naan on my cast iron skillet on the stovetop. The result was perfect; it looked just right and tasted and felt like naan at an Indian restaurant. Further experimentation revealed that the dough recipe is not especially important; it all comes down to the cooking technique. It was as simple as taking about 3.5 oz balls of dough, rolling them out so they were less than a half-inch thick and would fit in my (12”) skillet, then transferring them as gracefully as possible to the quite hot skillet. After the bread had cooked for about three minutes on the first side and was bubbling up all over I could flip it with a pair of tongs and leave it to cook on the second side until an unacceptable amount of smoke started to rise out of the pan.

I moved the hot bread to a towel to keep it hot while I cooked the rest of the dough. Just before serving I brushed each one with melted ghee. As with many breads, cooking great naan comes down to finding the right technique.

Naan:
15 oz white flour
1 tsp instant yeast
1.5 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
8 oz water
3.5 oz yogurt or milk
(the sugar and the milk both help make the dough soft and chewy, but even if you omitted them and made a totally lean dough [you would have to add more water] but cooked it in cast iron, it would work well)

Mix together the flour, salt, yeast, and sugar. Mix in the yogurt and water until the ingredients start to ball together, then knead everything until it is smooth and tacky. Let the dough rest an hour or two, until it doubles in size. Divide the dough in to three and a half ounce portions and roll those portions into balls. You should have around seven balls. Let the balls rest at least 15 minutes to allow the gluten to relax and make rolling them easier. Roll out each ball immediately before cooking it with enough flour to avoid sticking.

Heat a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Brush the surface of the skillet with oil or spray it with cooking spray. Lay a rolled-out dough round in the pan and allow it to cook until bubbles appear all over the uncooked surface. Use tongs to flip the naan and let it cook on the other side until smoke appears and desired level of brownness (well, blackness) is reached.

Transfer cooked breads to towel and keep wrapped up until all the breads are cooked. Brush finished breads with melted ghee right before serving.

Have it with all your favorite Indian food!

The fork gave me an idea: a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs!

Mmm, delicious.

All done. Strega Nona would be proud. But there would be more spaghetti.

The holy grail of pizza making is the wood-fired oven. Apparently in Italy (this is according to fornobravo) pizza ovens are as common as the iconic barbecue grill of American backyard fame. I know that if I had a house the first thing I would be doing when the snow started disappearing from the backyard is laying the foundations for a wood-fired oven of my own.

My uncle, who is a homeowner, has not built a pizza oven in his backyard. He did pizza and hearth bread lovers one better by building his house around a great big Tulikivi. Imagine, wood-fired pizzas in the convenience of your home! My uncle is the one responsible for getting me into pizza making and bread baking and I have had a number of great experiences cooking pizzas on his wood-fired oven. The temperature of the stone gets up to around 600 degrees F, and I imagine the cooking surface is hotter, but since I lack one of those cool infrared thermometers I can’t say for sure. In any case, this thing will cook a pizza in three minutes with excellent results.

These pizzas are everything I like about pizza: a thin, crispy crust that is nicely charred on the bottoms and has plenty of puffy air bubbles around the rim. I did not really think to take enough pictures to really show these pizzas in all their glory because I was too busy eating them and making more. Such are the pizzas that can be made at my uncle’s house.

I, on the other hand, do not have a house and will not have a house for the foreseeable future. I am forced to make do with whatever oven my apartment has installed. Up to my most recent rental I have considered myself lucky to always be able to find full-sized home ovens. But when I rented my current apartment, which I loved for too many other reasons to nix for the poor oven, I was greeted in the kitchen by this little guy:

I consoled myself that at least it was new (I have since dirtied it significantly) but didn’t think much of my prospects for pizza. Having finally got my hands on a pizza stone and baked with it, I realize how wrong I was. Baking pizza in a small oven allowed me to produce the best pizza of my life.

I got the first indications of this discovery while making pizzas at my friend’s house (the very same friend from whom I was picking up the pizza stone). I couldn’t really wait to bake pizza again so I drove those four hours to Madison with a cooler full of all the pizza supplies I would need. My friend’s oven is the same size as mine but electric rather than gas. As I got up to preheat the oven for the hour I like to before baking he warned me that his oven runs a little hot, by about 25 degrees. The hotter it was the closer we would get to wood fire. I greedily cranked it up as high as it would go.

This was the result, after 8 minutes:

This was pretty close to where I wanted it to be. The crust was crispy but a little too dark. I compensated by cooking the next pizza for slightly less time but was unhappy with a slightly too soggy crust. Still, this pizza was far better than what I got from standard ovens in the past.

I figured the good result was due to my friend’s extra hot oven. I was excited to see how my oven would perform. I put the stone on the oven floor and, after broiling some chicken, I heated the oven to 500 degrees for an hour. After 8 minutes of cooking, here is the pizza I got:

This is one of the best pizzas I have ever made. The amount of browning and scorching I was able to get both on the bottom of the crust and on the edges was unlike anything I have ever achieved in larger ovens. This makes sense; there is less air to heat so the air gets hotter faster and stays hot. I think it might also have something to do with the fact that my oven is heated from below, which is also where the stone sits. The heat from the gas is going directly to the stone, allowing it to get hot fast.  This is not as good as what you can get from an 800 degree oven, whether you achieve that with a wood fire or a modified home oven, but it is pretty good.

I have a few problems with these ready-made guacamole solutions (not to be confused with pre-made guacamole, which I believe is mostly mayonnaise), among them the idea of buying fresh tomatoes in March in Minnesota and one’s ability to select ripe avocados when they are inside plastic (I suppose you have to put your faith in Trader Jose). But my real problem with all this is the idea that tomatoes, onions or jalapeños (and even the occasional cilantro) go in guacamole! Save those vegetables for the pico de gallo; when I want guacamole I want avocado, garlic, salt and maybe a little lime to keep things greener longer.

Inevitably someone will try to argue that truly authentic guacamole does in fact contain tomatoes et. al., and that may be. I certainly would be interested in a history of guacamole that explores its development and regional variations. Etymologically speaking the only essential ingredient would seem to be mashed avocados. But right now I am not after a history lesson I am after delicious chip dip. So, authenticity aside, I make guacamole the way my aunt taught me with only garlic, salt and avocado (the lime came later). I have reason to believe this is in fact an ‘authentic’ recipe, but on the basis of its superior flavor alone you owe it to yourself to try making guacamole without all that extra filler.

Start with some garlic. I usually allow at least one big garlic clover per avocado because I love extremely garlicky food, but if you are averse you can certainly adjust the amount. You are the boss of your guacamole (just please, no tomatoes)! With your garlic cloves in the bottom of a bowl with a decently large flat area at its base sprinkle on a healthy (or actually, unhealthy) amount of salt. Use a fork to mash this all together until you have a paste.

Now for the avocados. You selected avocadoes which were firm but slightly yielding in their flesh, with no extremely soft spots. Maybe you were really smart and bought hard avocadoes a few days beforehand and allowed them to ripen at home. But probably not. Take each avocado and slice it in half vertically, moving your knife around the pit. Extract the pit in the way you feel most comfortable: I have been known to chop with a large knife at the pit as the avocado half is held in my outstretched hand, but if you don’t have the stomach for this you can always dig at it with a spoon or your fingers. Once the pit is removed, there is simply the matter of extracting all the flesh with a large spoon into the waiting bowl of garlic paste (to make future mashing easier you can score the flesh of the avocado into more manageable chunks). Repeat as necessary with all remaining avocado halves.

Now take your fork (the one from the garlic paste) and mash the avocado flesh, making sure to stir up from the bottom in order to mix in the garlic-salt paste. And you’re done! You can leave the fork in there for serving purposes. You’ll want it when a tortilla chip just can’t get those last bits out of the bowl without breaking.

Delicious guacamole, and all green! If you want to preserve that beautiful green for a while you will need to add a squirt of lime juice and mix it up well. I will add superfluously that this goes great with tortilla chips as a dip, on any kind of mexican food, and, as the ‘southwestern burger’ at any number of restaurants can testify, on a hamburger.

Follow up: A quick search using Google (why don’t I search before I post?) suggests that the tomato/no-tomato debate is alive and well on the Internet with pro-tomato people having a numerical edge.  This might explain why my supermarket and Trader Joe’s want you to put tomatoes in your guacamole; they’ve got to market to the masses.  I suggest this solution: make this guacamole and also make pico de gallo.  If anybody feels the guacamole is ruined for its lack of tomatoes, onions, cilantro and jalapeños, they can mix them together themselves.  Guaranteed to please all of the people all of the time.

One of the supposed virtues of baby artichokes is that you don’t have to cook them for a long time as you do with more mature artichokes. I decided to keep things as simple as possible by roasting them at 400 degrees for about half an hour, until they were nicely brown and tender. Since I am a slave to Cook’s Illustrated, I whisked together some aïoli to go on top.

Preparation is also easier since their is no choke to remove (so-called because of the effect eating it might induce?) In a matter of minutes I had all of my artichokes cut up and soaking in acidulated (a word used almost exclusively in artichoke recipes?) water.

After draining them and tossing them with a bit of oil and salt and pepper they went into the aforementioned 400 degree oven and came out looking and smelling quite edible:

I almost forgot the aïoli, but remembered before dinner started. The artichokes were good, although I found their flavor to be much milder than the bigger versions. And there is something fun about working your way around a fat artichoke, pulling the leaves off of and scraping the flesh off against your teeth that is lost here. I also don’t think I removed quite enough of the outer leaves before roasting because parts of the choke were a bit too woody.

A side question on aïoli for the better educated than myself: what is the desired consistency for aïoli? When I make it by hand it is usually pretty runny like a sauce, but when I make it in the food processor it is quite thick like bottled mayonnaise. The difference seems to be the speed of stirring since my arm gets quite tired turning that whisk but the food processor’s motor never flags. I would think the ratio of oil to egg yolk would also affect the consistency. Something to play with or read about in the future.

I think if I get these artichokes again I may try battering and frying them, or maybe preserving them in oil. At the moment the refrigerator is too full to contemplate another large jar.

Lentil Salad is an old standby on French Bistro menus and in the cuisine of the Middle East. In the United States we are so accustomed to seeing lentils in soup that cooks often fail to think of other possibilities for the little lentil. The key to making lentils worthy of a (pre)spring salad is proper cooking: they should be cooked so that they fight back a little against your teeth, like a tender young chute, well before the point of mush. You may find it helpful to use French green lentils to achieve this texture, but with careful attention any variety can be used.

In all likelihood your lentils have been sitting in your cupboard or in a warehouse for quite a while now so their flavor might be a little dull on its own. This is easily remedied with the bright and sharp-tasting lemon juice. A little feta cheese gives the salad a pockets of richness and tangy flavor. For more assertive flavor the natural choice is the onion family, of which I find the garlic and scallion members to be best with lentils. If you are worried about all the gas they burned to bring you those scallions from California you can always substitute that last shriveled little yellow onion from the bottom of your root cellar. Just make sure you chop it fine.

Herbs can be grown indoors year round so there should be no objection to adding a little parsley and mint, both of which show this salad’s Middle Eastern roots. Greens make the salad more substantial, but they are not strictly-speaking in season so you can use them at your preference. If you want to go further in this direction and you have it, add some sumac or za’tar. Finish the dressing with your good olive oil. Add a dollop of hummus on top and serve it with pita bread.

This simple salad makes a refreshingly light meal after a whole season of heavy ones. It won’t bring the spring any faster, but it might make the wait for it a little more tolerable.

Lentil Salad

1 cup lentils

2 Cloves Garlic

Juice from 1 Lemon

1/3 cup Olive Oil

Salt and Pepper

1 Bunch Scallions, thinly sliced

1/2 cup feta cheese, crumbled
Sumac or Za’tar (optional)

1/2 loosely packed cup parsley leaves, coarsely chopped

1 loosely packed cup mint leaves, coarsely chopped

Lettuce or Other Greens

Your favorite hummus (optional)

Cover the lentils with cold water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until tender but not falling apart, about 15 minutes. Keep in mind that this time will vary depending on the age and condition of your lentils, so you should check after ten minutes. Drain the lentils and set aside to cool.

Meanwhile, crush the garlic cloves with the flat of cook’s knife and remove the papery skins. Sprinkle a little salt over the cloves. Mince the garlic and salt, crushing periodically with flat of the knife in order to obtain a paste. Transfer paste to a large bowl. Add lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir together with a fork or whisk then add the scallions. Add a generous pinch of sumac if using. Stir in the feta.

When the lentils are cool, add them to the scallion-lemon juice mixture along with the chopped herbs and the cheese (as well as the sumac, if using). Toss until the dressing coats the lentils and everything is well distributed. Serve the salad on individual plates with a dollop of hummus (if using), or serve it in a large bowl, passing hummus separately.

Committed to the idea of eating more plant and less animal, I was at a loss as to how to do it. Vegetarian cooking is not part of my heritage. Nor is it part of my usual culinary repertoire, and among the books and magazines I usually look to for recipes and ideas, meat figures in a large majority of the savory preparations. When I sit down to try to come up with ideas for dinner I usually organize my thinking around some kind of meat. I have also noticed that when I browse cookbooks, even vegetarian ones, vegetable-only dishes seem more at home on the side of the plate than at its center. I constantly find myself saying, “that would be delicious with some (meat or meat product).” If I am going to eat semi-vegetarian, my most basic ideas about cooking need to be changed.

It was with this attitude adjustment in mind that I first picked up Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I wanted vegetarian ideas that would stand up on their own and not seem out of place. This was more or less what Madison promised. For my first meal I chose mushroom stew over polenta because I thought it sounded sufficiently meaty to satisfy the more carnivorous among my co-diners and I was pretty confident that the ingredients could be found at Kroger in Michigan in January.

These are good things to consider when choosing what to make for dinner, but it is even more important to consider if you are actually going to like the meal you make. This is especially important when making your first attempt at a new cookbook and vegetarian cuisine. Having not considered these things I found after a hectic hour of cooking that I didn’t like this meal very much. This should have been obvious from the beginning. I don’t really like polenta, particularly ‘soft’ polenta. Its taste is bland, its texture gluey (I think this has something to do with starch gelatinization). It is tolerable when it is cooked, shaped, and then fried golden on the outside with a creamy center, but I did not decide to do this. Further, I am not much enamored of mushrooms. Some people are crazy for mushrooms. My brother regularly exposes himself to dangerous levels of poison oak in search of the things. I can’t imagine spending two weeks itching for the chance to eat some mushrooms. Being that this particular Mushroom Stew included in its ingredients three kinds of mushrooms, I should not have been surprised that I found the result more than a little too mushroomy.

A little mushroomy, and a little gummy, but not inedible. As I took the first bite and got over my texture and mushroom related objections I found that the flavor of the stew was pretty good. The sauce was sufficiently rich thanks to a mushroom stock with a good amount of red wine that lent a depth to the flavor that I don’t usually associate with vegetables. There was also the pleasant piney tastes of rosemary and sharp heat from red pepper flakes. This was not going to be so bad! I took a second bite and it was as good as the first. In fact it was exactly the same as the first. And so on with the rest of the bites. Despite its layers and seasonings, this dish soon settled into a dull monotony of flavor that characterizes many vegetarian dishes and leads the diner to dread the final bites. Granted, this was a stew and in a stew one must expect a certain homogeneity of flavor, but for whatever reason when meat is included in a stew the stew’s flavors seem a lot more interesting.

While I’ve noticed the problem of monotonous vegetarian dishes before, it has usually happened to me when eating dishes that while not necessarily meat substitutes were clearly written as an analogue to a meat dish. In cuisines that developed vegetarian cooking in its own right, such as Indian food, the flavors manage to seem more natural and varied. It might be more fruitful to focus on vegetarian cuisines rather than western cuisine made vegetarian in my quest to eat more vegetables and less meat. But given that this was my first attempt at vegetarian cooking and it really wasn’t that bad, I think I’ll try some other things before I succumb to eating curry five nights a week (though I think there are probably worse fates). At the very least I ought to withhold judgment till spring, when things can grow in the north other than icicles.