Ground beef with padron peppers

I love cooking with padron peppers - they are just spicy enough to flavor the dishes nicely, and they are not so spicy to call for removing the seeds. This makes using them a very simple proposition! In this dish, the peppers elevate the flavor of simple ground beef to levels I have experienced rarely. Marjoram and lemon juice round up the dish nicely. The key to the dish is to tear the ground beef into a skillet. This results in nice bite-size pieces, and eliminates the arduous task of "crumbling" a block of ground beef while it is being cooked.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb lean ground beef. I used 85% grass fed beef.
• 1 onion, chopped finely
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 cups of so chopped padron peppers, stems removed
• 1 cup chicken stock, definitely use low-sodium variety
• 1 TBS dry marjoram
• juice of half a lemon
• salt, pepper to taste
• 2 TBS oil

Procedure:

Heat oil in a skillet. Add the onion, a pinch of salt, a few grinds of black papper, and sautee until the onions soften and are translucent. Tear the ground beef into the skillet - aim for about 1/2 inch size pieces. Season with salt an pepper. Brown the beef on a medium high heat, stirring frequently enough that the meat does not burn. Some fat will render from the meat. Turn the heat off and use a paper towel to absorb the excess fat. This will make the final dish much lighter as it removes heaviness of the beef fat.

Turn the heat back on, add padron peppers and sautee briefly to warm up the peppers. Add garlic, and within a minute add the chicken stock. Rub in the marjoram, and stir. Simmer until the stock boils away.

Turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. 

Savory corn and ricotta pancakes

Savory pancakes are a nice twist to the more traditional sweet version. Though, the sweetness of corn can turn these pancakes into a sweet version - omit parmesan cheese and salt, and add a tablespoon of sugar.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 TBS baking powder
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan
• a pinch of salt
• kernels cur from 1 ear of corn, fresh

• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup buttermilk, or a mix of milk and yogurt
• 1/2 cup ricotta
• oil or butter for pan frying

Procedure:

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. In a bigger bowl whisk the wet ingredients. Whisk in the dry ingredients. Fry pancakes on a skilled on a medium-high heat using 1/4 cup of batter per pancake. Turn the pancakes after 2-3 minutes and cook on the other side for the same amount of time.

Serve with a dollop of ricotta along with some vegetables: Sauteed zucchini and tofu work great, or garlicky chard is also a good choice. Of course you can go for bacon as well.

Miso braised fennel

We love eating fennel raw in a salad. When it is sliced finely with a mandoline, the flavor becomes milder, and the crunchiness makes it a spectacular salad ingredient. Braising fennel bulbs transforms them into sweet tenderness that is hard to pass by. Here is a simple way to try this goodness...

Ingredients:

• fennel bulbs, cut into 2 inch pieces, e.g. in quarters
• 1TBS or so miso paste
• chicken stock
• oil for high-heat cooking, e.g. avocado or corn

Procedure:

Heat oil in a pan. Brown fennel pieces. Add chicken stock half way up the fennel pieces. Add miso paste - 1 TBS is a good start. Cover, simmer slowly for about 30 minutes. Turn the fennel every 10 minutes or so. Add more chicken stock if too much liquid evaporates. The fennel is cooked when one can pierce is easily with a fork.

The cooking liquid should turn into a fairly thick sauce by the time fennel is cooked. If it is too runny, take the cooked fennel out and boil some of the liquid off.

Serve with the sauce in which the fennel was cooked.

Paprika chicken stew

My mom's goto dish. The amount of cream used is something I still dream about. No way I could eat it that way any more, and my mom also mended her ways and reduced the amount of fatty goodness. One does need to use some good full-fat sour cream though to balance the flavors.

This is best eaten with bread dumplings, nothing, I mean absolutely nothing beats the combination.
Other options are crusty bread, mashed potatoes, spaetzle, pasta, even rice.

Just the chicken!

This is a great way to prepare chicken to be used with other dishes. Even the much lighter version of the paprika sauce is pretty heavy, so you may not want to always make it. Simply let the chicken cool, and then pull the meat off the bones in nice chunks. Here is how one can use it with spinach sauce and mashed potatoes.

Chicken drumsticks that I like to use in this recipe have a wonderful property that it is really hard to dry them out. When you remove the skin, the drumsticks become fairly lean as there are no pockets of fat that I always find in thighs. Chicken breasts are simply too lean for this preparation - lately I have only been making them sous vide to avoid drying them out.

Ingredients

• Chicken pieces - I like using drumsticks with skin removed. Quantity - you need to be able to have them in one layer in your pan.
• 1/2 onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 TBS butter or oil. Coconut oil works very well.
• 1/3 cup paprika, or adjust as you wish
• 1 TBS ancho chili, optional
• 2 TBS tomato paste (approx)
• 1 TBS or more dry marjoram, optional
• low sodium chicken broth, enough to cover the chicken half way
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup full fat sour cream. Sorry, no-fat cream will yield a miserable result.
• 1-2 TBS of flour

Preparation

Select a wide preferably shallow pan for which you have a lid. In the pan, on a medium heat, saute onions until they become translucent. Then add garlic, and saute until you it starts to release fragrances. Add paprika, stir and cook for a minute of two. Make sure the heat is not too high so that the paprika does not burn. The flavor of paprika changes substantially to the better when you fry it for a bit.

Arrange chicken in one layer in the pan and season each piece with salt. Add enough chicken broth to cover the chicken half way up, or a bit more. Also add rubbed marjoram and tomato paste. Cover and simmer until the chicken is cooked, turning the chicken every 10 minutes or so. After about 30 minutes the chicken should be cooked.

Take the chicken pieces out and collect them in a bowl. Pour the braising liquid into a gravy separator and wait until the fat collects at the top. 

Carefully pour the liquid from the gravy separator in a fresh pan, leaving the fat behind. Add flour, about 1TBS per cup of liquid, or less if you want a runnier sauce. Add sour cream. Mix everything with an immersion blender - this is a sure way to avoid flour clumps, and also a sure way to get rid of any onion piece that was not caught by the gravy separator.

Alternatively, mix flour, sour cream, and some cold water to make a slurry.

Bring the liquid to a boil on a medium-high heat while whisking slowly and continuously, preferably with a flat whisk. Cook for a couple of minutes so that the gravy thickens. Return the chicken to the pan, heat it up and serve a piece of chicken on top of some gravy. 

Quick rhubarb sauce

Rhubarb!!!! Kind of hard to get in the Bay area, and also kind of pricey for funny looking stalks few people know how to use. No idea why. Milk Pail has it when it is in season, which is the case now. I was going to make some rhubarb crisp, and I ended up using some rhubarb to make a quick sauce to go with the trusty ricotta sourdough almond pancakes.

The good thing about rhubarb is that it is so tart, and one can use that to balance out the flavor of the dish. For example, plain apple compote tastes, well, somewhat plain. Add some rhubarb, balance out the sweetness, and the whole dish goes from plain to ballistic.

That was lots of rhubarb sauce, a bit less may be more reasonable

Ingredients:

• 1 TBS butter or coconut oil
• 1/2 cup sugar; use a bit less or more, to taste
• 2 cups of thinly sliced rhubarb, about two stalks
• a dash of freshly ground nutmeg
• rind of one lemon or orange, or a few drops of orange flavoring

Preparation:

In a pan dissolve sugar in the butter over medium heat. Add rhubarb slices.  Initially some caramel may form, but it will dissolve as the cooking goes on. Stir occasionally until the rhubarb is almost cooked. Add the nutmeg and citrus rind, stir well and cook for another minute or so until rhubarb is cooked.

Eat with pancakes, as a jam on bread an butter, use as crepe filling, ...

Clafoutis

A couple of months ago I found a collection of recipes for, so they said, simple but extraordinary French food. I forgot where I found that collection, I forgot about all the dishes but one - clafoutis. A custardy goodness that really is trivial to make, yet the result is nothing short of extraordinary. I cannot believe I was not familiar with that.

Basically, all there is to clafoutis is a simple custardy batter that one bakes slowly with some fresh fruit. The classic seems to be a cherry clafoutis, which I tried immediately using frozen cherries. My mom happened to be visiting and she was seemingly in heaven.

I got a box of very nicely ripened ataulfos mangoes, speculating that mango clafoutis may be the thing to do. Mango has a nice mix of sweetness and acidity that I expected to go very well with the custardy batter. A short poke around Google search, and I quickly learned that I was not the first person to have this idea. I decided to make a simple basic variety of clafoutis, and next time I might play with adding some grated ginger and other goodies, and possibly baking it in individual ramekins.

If you have gluten intolerance, clafoutis is still within reach. Instead of using all-purpose flour, use gluten-free flour. If you are fortunate to have a grain mill, I recommend a making millet four and combining it with almond flour. It does change the texture - I think to the better.

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour. For gluten-free version use gluten free flour. I used 1/2 cup almond flour and about two TBS millet flour. 
• 1/3 cup sugar, or honey. 1/4 cup is likely enough.
• 1 cup milk. Buttermilk adds to the experience.
• 1 tsp vanilla
• Recommended: rind of one lemon and juice of the same lemon
• Optional: 1/2 cup fresh coconut or 1/3 cup shredded coconut. Blend at high speed with milk for a completely smooth texture.
• 1-1.5 cup fresh or frozen pitted cherries for classic clafoutis, or 2 -3 mangoes, peeled, cut into about 3/4 inch chunks, or pineapple chunks
• Recommended: A splash of grand mariner
• 1-2 TBS butter or coconut oil

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350F. Set a 10 inch cast-iron skillet on a medium heat on a stove. In a bowl, whisk the eggs, the flour, and the sugar. Gradually whisk in the milk, this way it will be easier to keep the batter smooth. Also add vanilla and lemon rind.

Add the oil or butter to the skillet, when it melts, add the cherries. Stir gently and cook just enough for the fruit to warm up some, maybe for a minute or two. Pour in the batter.
Note: If you are using pinepple, you may choose to brown it a bit, or even sprinkle lightly with sugar and then brown

Bake for 40 minutes until the custard is set and the clafoutis is nicely browned on the top.

Serving:

I prefer clafoutis at a room temperature, dusted with powder sugar You might like it either hot or cold, you never know until you try.

Cream of kohlrabi

I agree that kohlrabi has an odd name. According to Wikipedia the name kind of means cabbage turnip, and is popular in German speaking countries and Vietnam. Now we know.

Typically we ate it cubed in vegetable soups, though raw and roasted are both tasty way to consume this vegetable. When I was growing up, we would only eat the root. Eating green leaves was never even considered. It took many years and a move across the ocean to start to appreciate the goodness of leafy greens!

This is a full-meal cream of kohlrabi with no cream. I added some carrots, steel-cut oats and cooked kidney beans to add some carbs and boost the fiber, even though kohlrabi itself already has lots of fiber. Extra smooth tofu is there for proteins, onion and garlic help with the depth of flavor, and lemon balanced everything out nicely.

With any cream of X soup, I have learned that having the best blender one can afford makes an enormous difference. We have been using our VitaMix for almost 10 years now and every time we make a soup, we still marvel in its smoothness. The VitaMix run has not been totally issue free, we are on the second blending jar and I replaced the potentiometer, but the motor is still going as strong as when it was new.

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of kohlrabi, I used 4 roots and also the leaves
• a handful of carrots, brushed or peeled, and chopped roughly
• a handful of quick-cooking steel-cut oats; use rolled oats if that is what you have in the pantry
• a handful of cooked kidney beans
• 3-4 cups of low-sodium vegetable stock, chicken stock works fine too
• 1 medium size onion, chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 package (11oz, 300g) of extra-soft tofu (Soondubu), liquid discarded
• juice of one medium-sized lemon
• vegetable oil or coconut oil, a couple of TBS

For mise en place chop kohlrabi roots, no need to peel them, just wash them well. Wash and chop roughly kohlrabi leaves. Also clean and chop the onion, carrots, and garlic.

In a 3 to 4 quart pan heat the oil, add onions, season with a pinch of salt, and sautee until the onions soften a bit.

Add chopped carrots and chopped kohlrabi root, sautee some more until the vegetables start to soften.

Add the garlic and sautee for another minute.

Add the vegetable stock and steel-cut oats, cover, bring to boil and simmer for 5 minutes.

Add the chopped kohlrabi leaves, cover the pot and simmer for another 5 minutes.

Transfer the soup to your blender.

Add tofu and cooked beans.

Add lemon juice.

Blend until smooth. Taste, add salt if necessary.

Serve in a bowl with some nice garnish. I used pine nuts and a touch of pumpkin seed oil - the green-on-green combination worked well.