Quick Lunch: Tuscan White Beans and Chard

A perfect summertime recipe for leftover home-cooked cannellini beans, and fits the bill when you're in the mood for a weekendy backyard picnic with a glass of wine and something Italian, but can't really muster up the patience to wait for pasta water to boil.

You can substitute canned beans if you don't mind them clumping and mushing a bit (which affects looks more than taste) -- just be sure to rinse and dry them well first, and handle them a bit more gingerly than their less-overcooked homegrown cousins. 

Ingredients
Olive oil
2 cups cooked cannellini beans, very well drained (pat dry with a paper towel if necessary)
1 clove garlic, slivered
A big bunch of chard, sliced crosswise
4 small (2" round), ripe, fragrant tomatoes, cored and cut into large bite-sized pieces
Fresh basil leaves, sliced into thin ribbons (about 2 tbsp)
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Freshly ground black pepper

Heat a wide saute pan over medium to medium-high heat. When hot enough that a drop of water evaporates immediately, add a generous glug of olive oil. Wait about 15 more seconds to let the oil heat, then add the cannellini beans. Shake the pan so that the beans spread out in a single layer. Toast for 2-3 minutes until they turn lightly golden, then shake the pan again to turn them. Continue for another couple minutes until the beans are golden on multiple sides.

Add the garlic and a bit more olive oil and stir once or twice. After about 20 seconds, add the chard and a pinch of salt (as always, go easy on the salt if your beans are already salted). Saute, stirring occasionally, until the greens wilt and the stems are just cooked through, about 2 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and stir gently to combine. Cook for only about a minute more (you basically just want to warm the tomatoes), add the basil, and turn off the heat. Sprinkle in the parmesan and a generous grinding of black pepper, stir well, and serve.

Serves 2.

 

Pasta with Pea Pesto and Bacon

There are approximately ten billion varieties of basil now growing in our garden. Or four, if you like precision, but you know what I say? I say precision is for bakers. Bakers can have four varieties of basil. I have ten billion. Ten billion basils basking in the sun, reminding me incessantly of pesto. I'm like the greedy cartoon characters with dollar signs in their eyes, only mine are full of pasta.

The thing is, though, they are small, fledgling basils. Not yet fully grown. And when you have only ten billion (four) fledgling basils, you can't really make pesto. You need, by my hyperbolic calculations, approximately six gazillion fledgling basils to make pesto. What's a slightly unhinged, grant-deadline-racing, pesto-obsessed cook to do?

Answer: Peas. (Other possible acceptable answers include: 42, and get some sleep for goodness sakes.)

Seriously, make this. It's delightful. If you have fresh peas, use them, and I'm thinking that some asparagus thinly sliced at an angle would make it even better.

Ingredients
Fresh linguine or tagliolini for two
1 1/2 cups frozen peas, blanched and drained
1/3 cup packed fresh basil leaves
(use a bit more if it's regular sweet basil, or a bit less if it's a stronger variety like fino verde)
2-3 tbsp lightly toasted pine nuts
2 large cloves garlic, one whole and one slivered
Olive oil
2 slices Niman Ranch applewood smoked bacon, sliced crosswise into thin strips*
Dry white cooking wine
Several handfuls baby arugula and/or coarsely chopped amaranth greens (1/3 lb or a bit less)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus a few shavings for garnish
Freshly ground white pepper

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil for the pasta.

Combine the peas, basil, whole clove of garlic, and pine nuts in a Cuisinart and blend until smooth.

Heat a wide saute pan over medium heat. When very hot, add just a bit of olive oil, followed by the bacon. Cook until it starts to turn golden (you can remove some of the bacon grease at this point, if you want, and add a bit more olive oil in its place), then lower the heat and toss in the slivered garlic. Cook for another minute or so until the garlic is tender.

Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes or until al dente.

Meanwhile, add the pesto to the bacon and stir to combine. Allow it to warm through, then add a slosh of wine to help thin. Turn off the heat, and add the greens.

Reserve a ladleful or two of pasta water, then drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the sauce. Toss to combine, adding pasta water as needed to thin the sauce (add just a little bit more than you think you need if the pasta is homemade, since it will soak up a bit more liquid on the way to the table). Stir in the grated parmesan.

Serve hot, with a little freshly ground white pepper and some shaved Parmesan over the top.

Serves 2.

*If you double the recipe, you only need three strips of bacon (rather than four).

Sauteed Green Beans with Almonds

The trouble with green beans, I've decided, is all about texture. They insist on being too mealy, or too dry, or too rubbery and squeaky when steamed, or too shriveled when forgotten in a pan of roasted vegetables under the asparagus (although I admit the fault for the last one might technically lie with me). We found lovely, fresh, organic beans in our CSA box last week, and they sat in our fridge for days while I studiously avoided acknowledging their existence. But today, we ran out of leafy green things, and the beans were all that was left.

Fortunately, it turns out you can solve the whole dry and mealy thing with a simple one-two punch: slice, and then saute. So next time you're confronted with slightly overgrown, endearingly misshapen, texture-challenged green beans, try this.

Ingredients
Several handfuls green beans, sliced diagonally
(this is much easier with wider, flatter green beans, rather than round ones)
1-2 tbsp sliced almonds
Olive oil
1 small clove fresh summer garlic, thinly sliced
Salt and freshly ground white pepper

Set a nonstick pan over medium heat. Add the almonds and toast, stirring or shaking the pan frequently, until they just start to turn golden brown. Add a bit of olive oil and stir to coat. Turn the heat to low, then add the garlic and saute for about 30 seconds, stirring once or twice.

Add the beans, turn the heat back up to medium, and saute, stirring occasionally, for 3-5 minutes or until the beans are just tender (you want them at that perfect in-between al dente between raw and completed soft and cooked).

Turn off the heat, sprinkle with a pinch of salt and a bit of freshly ground white pepper, and stir. Leave in the pan until you're ready to serve so they stay hot.

Serves 2.

White Bean and Chickpea Spread with Cumin and Cilantro

You know how chickpeas are slightly too thick to make a good spread, and white beans are slightly too watery?

I think I may have had a culinary epiphany. Or possibly the 100 degree weather has addled my brain. Regardless, this was both easy to make and delicious. I have witnesses.

Ingredients
1-2 cups cooked chickpeas
1-2 cups cooked cannelini beans
1 small clove fresh summer garlic
(if you don't like the bite of raw garlic, try using a clove or two of roasted or boiled garlic -- just add one clove at a time to avoid overpowering the flavor of the other ingredients)
Fresh cilantro (again, use sparingly -- try a five-fingered pinch of leaves to start)
1 tbsp(ish) olive oil
Generous sprinkling of cumin
Dash or two paprika
Pinch or two salt (unless your beans are already highly salted)
A little freshly ground white pepper
2-3 radishes, julienned

Toss all the ingredients except the radishes in a Cuisinart and blend until smooth. Adjust the beans to chickpea ratio until you've got your desired consistency, and adjust all the herbs and spices to taste (too little spice? Add more cumin. Too much cilantro? Add a few more white beans to dilute it down again).

Serve with or over toasts or crackers (I think thinly sliced, toasted french bread would be perfect, but all we had was crackers, and that worked well too). Garnish with julienned radishes and a few leaves of cilantro if desired.


Serves 2-4 alongside other small plates for tapas.


Pairs amazingly well with a $5 bottle of Honey Moon Viognier (available at Trader Joe's. I know, we're classy).

Eggs on Toast with Aztec Spinach and Green Coriander

I'm in love with June produce. (True, some people might think of today as July, but I prefer June 33rd. Anything to maintain the illusion that my grant is due next month.)

First, there's the garlic. Soft-skinned, totally fresh, balanced between the wimpy spring variety and the dried out autumn and winter staple, perfect for adding in slices or slivers to every green vegetable you can think of. Not to mention the ones you couldn't think of because you'd never seen them until they showed up in your CSA box.

Case in point: Aztec spinach. Similar to regular spinach, but milder, and a bit drier so it holds its structure better when sauteed. Perfect for pairing with an egg atop toast on a lazy summer Sunday.

And finally, a new discovery in our produce box: green coriander. I always thought you could either eat the cilantro fresh or dry the seeds for a few months until they turned into brown coriander, but it never occurred to me to taste them in between. And, go figure, they taste more corianderish than cilantro, but fresher and more cilantro-y than coriander -- another perfect halfway point.


 



The point being, you should cook this and eat it. But then, that's always the point.
 
Ingredients
2 pastured chicken eggs, medium-boiled (about 7 minutes) or poached
Olive oil
1 small clove garlic, slivered
Several handfuls Aztec spinach, coarsely chopped (or sub chard, amaranth greens, or spinach)
A sprinkling of green coriander
2 slices fresh whole-grain bread, toasted
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 nasturtium flowers* (optional)

Heat a wide pan over medium heat. Add a glug of olive oil and the garlic, turn the heat down a bit, and saute for about 30-60 seconds or until the garlic is tender. Add the greens, turn the heat back up to medium, and toss with the garlic and olive oil (I often use a spatula and a cooking spoon together to corral the greens until they cook down a bit). Saute for 2-4 minutes, until greens are wilted (saute regular spinach for just a minute or two, and other greens for longer). Add a light sprinkling of green coriander about a minute before it's done (you can substitute a couple pinches of chopped cilantro or parsley if you don't have green coriander).

Toast the bread, drizzle very lightly with olive oil, cover with wilted greens, and top with an egg. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, garnish with a nasturtium, and serve.

Serves 2 for breakfast.

*Nasturtiums, it turns out, are not just another decorative edible flower...they actually have their own, slightly floral, slightly radishy, totally delicious taste. We kind of want to wander around our garden grazing on them like some new breed of flower-obsessed sheep.

Roasted Napa Cabbage

I may have mentioned, on between one and sixty-three previous occasions, that roasting one's vegetables is almost always a brilliant idea. You might wonder whether the same thing holds for Napa cabbage, since it seems like it might be a little too limp and lettucey to roast properly. Let me be very clear about this: NOT roasting your Napa cabbage, while technically possible, would be an act of culinary irresponsibility. You owe it to yourself and the world of food to put it in a 400 degree oven. Seriously.

Of course, it's summer, so you may be delicately wondering whether I've gone completely insane to suggest roasting something, and if it were yesterday or tomorrow I would agree with you. But it is today, and today was a balmy and bewildering 68 degrees in Sacramento, and it was raining. (Sacramento is the place where you can go a whole summer without seeing a single cloud. This is not normal.)

So, in celebration of global warming or Armageddon or whatever's going on out there, we roasted us some cabbage. It was delicious.

Ingredients
Napa cabbage, sliced crosswise about 3 times into wide strips, washed, and dried
Olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground white pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Toss the cabbage with a bit of olive oil and arrange on a baking sheet about two layers thick. Roast in the oven for 8-10 minutes, turning halfway through, until some of the leaves start to turn golden brown in spots.

Sprinkle with a pinch of salt and a dusting of white pepper, and serve. Pairs particularly well with quinoa.

Wordless Wednesday: Nopalitos Salad with Avocado

Wilted Greens Salad with Tuna

The problem with brunch -- and I must admit I feel slightly sacrilegious uttering those words, so allow me to rephrase -- one tiny, insignificant, easily airbrushed imperfection on the face of the deeply beloved meal of brunch (ah, much better) is that it's one meal instead of two.

I bemoan this fact not because of my intrinsically greedy, supersized-endless-refill-loving American ways, but because as someone who eats like a hummingbird (that's the polite term my husband has developed to mean "constantly"), having one big meal all at once can't quite take the place of smaller portions spread out over the day. Now if it's a late brunch, this is easily remedied by a surreptitious cup of coffee and handful of fruit while, for example, your house guests slumber away unknowingly upstairs. But if it's an earlyish brunch, you're left with this awkwardly-sized stretch between french toast and dinnertime that's too small for lunch but too big for nothing.

Enter the Goldilocks Brinner. Large enough to feel like a meal, and light enough not to interfere with dinnertime appetites: just right for any fellow foodie hummingbirds out there.

Ingredients
1 can albacore tuna, drained
Medium, good quality curry powder
Handful flat leaf parsley, chopped
Salt & black pepper
Small handful sliced almonds
Olive oil
Yellow and/or black mustard seeds
Several large handfuls of spicy greens (e.g., half baby arugula and half mustard frisee -- something with a bit of a kick), very coarsely chopped/sliced

Combine the tuna with a bit of olive oil in a small bowl, then stir in half a spoonful or so of curry powder, the parsley, a pinch of salt, and ground black pepper to taste. Mix well, then add the almonds and stir gently a couple times to combine.

Meanwhile, heat a bit of olive oil in a wide saute pan over medium heat. When hot, add the mustard seeds and stir once or twice. After about 20 seconds, add the greens and toss to combine with the mustard seeds. Saute for a minute or two until they just begin to wilt, then cover the pan, turn off the heat, and let steam for a minute more until just wilted.

Arrange a bed of the greens on plates (don't preheat the plates -- you want the greens to go ahead and cool to room temperature), sprinkle with just a little olive oil, and top with tuna.

Serves 2 for a very light, halfway-between-brunch-and-an-early-dinner sort of meal.

Grilled Veggies and Chicken over Quinoa

Hey guess what? It's summer. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it's clearly high time we put things on skewers and grilled them.

Also, just in case you've been pining for new ways to express your support for the blog, voila: Visit this website, and click "Like" near the top of the page. And as always, you can Follow the blog by clicking the button to the right, either to actually follow via Google or as just a virtual wave to say hi and that you enjoy it here.

Incidentally, I'm completely delighted by the wave of new readers (hello!) as well as by those of you who have been regulars for awhile now and keep coming back. I kept thinking, when I started this, that either nobody was ever going to read it, or that to get readers, I'd have to do one of those advertising thingies (so that someone somewhere would put up a link to my blog in exchange for me advertising Rice-A-Roni or whatever at the top of the page...which struck me as slightly ridiculous for a blog that's purportedly about whole foods). So, let me just take a moment and thank you all so much for reading and cooking along with me. Without you, I would've gone back to easy microwave dinners sometime last October and thought back nostalgically from time to time to the few months I actually did what I wanted to do with food and cooking.

But that wasn't the point. The point was skewers. This combination is delicious, and I like that the meat ends up being a complement to the meal rather than the main focus.

 
Ingredients
Chicken
2 pastured chicken breasts, cut into 1 1/2" cubes
Zest and juice of 1/2 Eureka lemon
1 tbsp chopped green garlic (or sub 1-2 cloves garlic, pressed)
1-2 sprigs rosemary, chopped
Ñora pepper (if you have it)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 red onion, sliced in half again lengthwise and then quartered into wedges (you want squares that are about as big as the chicken pieces)
1 bell pepper, cut into squares (same as above)
Olive oil



Veggies
Olive oil
1 tbsp chopped green garlic (or sub 1-2 cloves garlic, pressed)
2-3 sprigs fresh thyme, chopped
Ñora pepper
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2-3 portobello mushrooms, brushed clean and stems cut off
Summer squash (.25 lbs or a bit less), thickly sliced (about 1/2" thick -- cut pattypans crosswise into circles; zucchinis lengthwise into long strips)



Quinoa
1/2 cup red quinoa
1/2 cup white quinoa
1 cup veggie or chicken broth
A little less than 1/2 cup water
4-6 sorrel leaves, thinly sliced crosswise into ribbons (optional)



Whisk together a glug or two of olive oil with the lemon juice, and then stir in the zest, garlic, rosemary, ñora, salt, and black pepper. Pour over the chicken, toss to coat evenly, and let marinate for an hour or two in the fridge.

About half an hour before you want to take the chicken out, rinse the quinoa and then soak in room temperature water for about ten minutes. Next, whisk together the ingredients for the veggie marinade, and brush over the vegetables (including the onion and pepper). Make sure to let a little marinade soak down into the gills of the portobellos.

Take a couple pieces of the onion and pepper and chop them (I use any pieces that ended up too small or weirdly shaped for the skewers). Rinse and drain the quinoa. Heat a smallish pot over medium heat, and add a glug of olive oil, followed by the onion and pepper. Saute until soft. Stir in the quinoa, saute for another minute, and then add the broth and water. Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce the heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the grill on high. Push the chicken onto skewers, separating each piece with a pepper on one side and an onion on the other. Grill the skewers, mushrooms, and squash slices, turning to let all sides cook evenly.

Just before serving, stir the sorrel into the quinoa. Use as a bed for the chicken and veggies.

Serves 3.

Black Beans and Rice with Greens and Oregano

The combination of rice and beans and whatever greens we have on hand tends to be my go-to meal when I haven't thought ahead about dinner and just want something straightforward and easy that doesn't require going to the store. But because it's the Backup Plan and doesn't really sound that glamorous, I'm always surprised when it turns out to be not just passable but really good...and it almost always does. So here's another version that works well if you have black beans and beet greens or chard nearby (if you have fresh cilantro instead, see this post or this one, and for white beans and kale, go here).

Ingredients
1 cup Forbidden rice (or sub brown basmati rice), cooked
Olive oil
1/3 cup chopped onion
1 tbsp(ish) chopped green garlic
1 jalapeno, minced
1 red pepper, chopped
2-3 cups beet greens (or sub chard), sliced into ribbons
1 can black beans, partly drained
Finely chopped fresh oregano, to taste
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
A little extra sharp white cheddar, grated

Heat a glug of olive oil in a saute pan over medium heat. When hot, add the onion, green garlic, and jalapeno, and saute for 2-3 minutes until soft. Add the red pepper and cook for a minute or two more, then stir in the beet greens and saute until they begin to wilt. Add a pinch or two of salt.

Stir in the black beans, cover, and turn the heat down to low. Simmer for 5 minutes or so to let the flavors blend, then add a couple pinches of oregano and cook a minute more. Turn off the heat, add some pepper, and adjust the salt and oregano to taste.

Serve over rice with a little grated cheddar sprinkled over the top. This is one of those dishes that will taste more complex when it's not piping hot, so leaving a minute or two between serving and starting dinner will help bring out the flavors (you want it to be warm, just not molten).

Serves 2 for a light dinner (if you're hungry, you might want a little salad too or a fruit course afterward).