Hummus

Why is hummus so expensive at the store? When you can make a quart of hummus for $2, even in these inflated times, in five minutes, flavored the way that you want it, why would you buy pre-prepared hummus from the store?

Hummus with Sweet Peppers, Sugar Snaps, and
Roasted Broccoli and Sprouting Cauliflower

At the farmers market in McMinnville last week during our two-day quick trip to the Willamette Valley to see old friends and to do some shopping for wine, fish, and veggies that are unavailable in Central Oregon, we went to the Even Pull Farm stand. This is a farm that I have been doing business with for a long time and I love their products. We really miss being able to shop with them on a weekly basis.

Long story short, I spied several bunches of sprouting cauliflower on the back shelf and asked for two of them to go home with us. The loose heads with tiny florets used to be the secondary shoots that would grow around where the main head was removed, but any longer, seed companies are producing plants whose main crop are these cauliflowers that look more like broccolini in form than cauliflower.

I decided to roast this cauliflower with some broccoli from the fridge, but what to serve them with? As we move fully into spring in early June, the days are getting warmer, some up into the 70s, and with that warmer weather, we are starting to crave more summer-like foods. Spurred by a conversation that we had at dinner the night before with Dyce and Rob, I decided to make a small batch of hummus and serve it with the roasted veggies and also raw veggies that we need to consume before departing this week for Alabama to see my father, who is quite unwell.

Quick Hummus

I really feel awkward writing down a recipe for hummus when it is really something like soup. Everyone makes it to his or her own taste and it is all good. Still, I do understand that people do like to have a recipe to work from and so I offer this one, using a slug of roasted sesame oil rather than tahini. I just don't have the room in my fridge to keep tahini on hand, so I substitute a bit of sesame oil and it works well for me. The following recipe yields about a quart and is flavored as I like it, with olives and lots of spicy sambal oelek.

3 15.5 ounce cans chickpeas, drained
1 tablespoon roasted sesame oil
1 cup pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives, drained
1/4 cup sambal oelek (I like it spicy)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
juice of two lemons
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Add all the ingredients to a food processor and blend until smooth. For a smoother product, you can rub the chickpeas between your hands to remove the outer husks, but this then starts to become work and is no longer a quick recipe. Sambal oelek is an Indonesian spicy chile sauce that is readily available at most grocery stores. Huy Fong, the maker of our most famous Sriracha sauce, is the brand you want.

Taste for seasoning and adjust as you see fit. You may require more sesame oil, olive oil, lemon juice, sambal, or salt to make it taste like you want.

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

 

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

I've got this thing for roasted carrots with dobanjang and honey going on lately. I love the texture and flavors.

Last trip to the store, I bought some chickpeas and some carrots, knowing that Ann wanted to dip carrots into a batch of hummus for a light dinner. But the weather is still cold here in Central Oregon and I wasn't really feeling such summery fare. I thought instead to roast the carrots and serve them still warm out of the oven on a bed of hummus.

Right now, it is just too much effort to come up with a recipe for the two major ingredients here, hummus and the dobanjang honey sauce in which the carrots are tossed. Both of these I make at the drop of hat in the quantities that I want, spiced like I want. It robs my cooking of all spontaneity to measure and to assign a precise ingredient list to such whimsy. In short, codifying a dish robs all my joy. Sorry. Not sorry.

The hummus is chickpeas, lemon juice, pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives with some brine, garlic, pimentón, salt, a splash each of sriracha and sesame oil, with enough water to smooth it out to a rough paste. I'm not the biggest fan of super smooth hummus. It's great and all that, but I really do prefer more texture.

The sweet and spicy sauce could be made from anything spicy and anything sweet, but this version is about equal parts dobanjang and honey with a touch each of soy sauce and rice vinegar, to add salt and to tame the sweet a bit.

Maybe someday I will get around to codifying these two recipes, especially if I ever decide to write about creative vegan fare.

Grilled Zucchini with White Bean-Artichoke Pesto, Harissa, and Hummus Dressing

I love vegetables, especially roasted and grilled vegetables. When we left Virginia in 2017, we sold our grill. Since then, because finances have been thin, we had no grill until just weeks ago. One of the things I have missed the most is grilled zucchini. Now that I have a grill, I'm working towards satisfying that itch, with the delicious vegetarian summer dinner that you see below.

Grilled Zucchini Platter

Last week, I grilled zucchini and put the squash on a platter with piquillo peppers and olives, then drizzled the platter with harissa and a dressing made of hummus, lemon juice, and olive oil. In the center of the platter, for some protein, I put a bowl of white bean-artichoke pesto. I would have loved some pita with this, but we are trying to shed a few of the many pounds we have gained during this quarantine. The pesto, at Ann's urging and because we love spicy food, has a healthy tablespoon of harissa swirled in.

White Bean-Artichoke Pesto

It seems kind of weird to call this a pesto, but that's what it goes by. This is a very quick spread or dip made from items in my pantry. If you leave out the cheese, you'll need a touch more salt, but the result will be vegan.

1 can cannellini beans (15.5 oz net)

1 can artichoke hearts (8.5 oz net)

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese (optional)

juice of half a lemon (more to taste)

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

In a food processor, puree the white beans, artichoke hearts, and garlic to a semi-smooth paste. I like to leave some texture in the final product. Add the salt, lemon juice, and cheese and mix. With the motor running, drizzle in the olive oil until the pesto is as loose as you want. Adjust lemon juice and salt to taste.

Quick Harissa

Harissa is a spicy condiment from North Africa, most frequently attributed to Tunisia. Lover of spicy food that I am, I have had a lot of harissa in my life and none that I like better than the quick harissa that I developed at the restaurant. I call it quick harissa because rather than process dried chiles, I make it with Huy Fong Foods' sambal oelek as a base.

I cannot get enough of this delicious sauce. Every batch is different depending on my mood and ingredients at hand, but this is a base recipe. My inspiration originally came from Copeland Marks (a phenomenal culinary writer) and his book The Great Book of Couscous: Classic Cuisines of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

1 tablespoon caraway seeds

1 tablespoon fennel seeds

1 tablespoon cumin seeds

2 cups sambal oelek

8 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon salt

juice of one lemon

1/2 cup olive oil

Mix the caraway, fennel, and cumin seeds. Reserve one third as whole seeds and grind the remainder in a spice mill. I like the whole seeds in my harissa for texture. Mix all the ingredients and let stand for a few hours: it gets better with age. Adjust the seasoning to your liking. I store mine in the refrigerator after topping it with olive oil. 

Hummus Salad Dressing

I make batches of hummus weekly as hummus is one of my absolute favorite foods. I probably have a recipe for hummus somewhere on this blog, so I'm not going to give a recipe for that here. Do you really need a recipe for chickpeas, garlic, salt, olive oil, tahini, and lemon juice, all whirled up in a food processor?

I use hummus for all kinds of things, including tomato-hummus bisque and a really quick and easy salad dressing, that I mainly use for dressing vegetables.

1/2 cup hummus

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

juice of one lemon

salt

Mix well and adjust the salt and lemon juice as necessary.

A Vegetarian Fourth

Almost two years post restaurant, I rarely get the urge to cook full meals any longer. But on July 4th, I felt like I wanted to cook a really simple meal that we could enjoy on the front porch with our vegetarian neighbors, taking full advantage of Oregon's delightful summer weather.

I always associate the Fourth with watermelon and Ann had been asking me to make lentil burgers for a week or two, so I decided to build a meal around that: lentil burgers, pita, hummus, arugula, tzatziki, and a watermelon salad. I started around 7:30 in the morning with some really easy tasks, mixing up some pita dough, making tzatziki, and knocking out a quick watermelon salad.

About 30 minutes before neighbors Pat and Mary Jo came over, I baked the pita, keeping them warm under a towel, while simultaneously frying the lentil burgers which then went into the oven after I turned it off, to keep warm for dinner.

Pat and Mary Jo

"What can we bring?"

We started the evening with a stack of warm pita, a bowl of hummus, and cocktails of pomegranate liqueur and Prosecco. I think that if that was all we had to eat, we would have been happy chatting away on the front porch, hearing all the neighbors doing the same on their nearby porches.

Starters: Pita, Hummus, Pomegranate and Prosecco

I love hummus. Just ask anyone who ever worked for me at the restaurant. I probably ate it every day for lunch. I eat it less frequently now, cooking less, but I still love it. Although you can't see it, this hummus has a lot of green olives ground up with the chickpeas. I also use a drizzle of sesame oil rather than tahini. Same flavor, but easier.

For this batch destined for company, I went to the trouble of peeling all the chickpeas, six pounds of them. For regular batches, I don't peel them. The texture is really much better if you peel them, but I'm not working that hard on a daily basis. I am no longer a restaurant chef judged by the slightest nuances in food. I'm now a guy who values time with people more than time in the kitchen.

Hummus with Olives and a Drizzle of Olive Oil

Lentil burgers, black bean burgers, squash cakes: I have a love affair with fried vegetable patties of all sorts. For these, I cooked the lentils with garlic and herbs, drained them, added eggs, sautéed mirepoix of carrot, celery, and shiitake mushrooms, fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, thyme), and panko. I pattied them out and put them in the fridge to firm up before frying.

Lentil Burgers; Local Sauvignon Blanc

Who doesn't love arugula tossed with some lemon juice, olive oil, and salt? It's one of the greatest and simplest salads.

I couldn't celebrate the Fourth without watermelon, so I made a really quick watermelon salad with feta cheese, red onions, mint from the back yard, olives, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Thank goodness for the smart plant breeders who came up with the infertile (seedless) triploid hybrid watermelons that are so delicious and easy to work with!

Call it tzatziki, cacik, or tarator, it's pretty much the same yogurt and cucumber condiment all over the Mediterranean. I've made a few thousand pounds of it in my life, always preferring the flavor of red wine vinegar in mine, rather than lemon juice. Herbs vary with my mood, but almost always include oregano, this fresh from my back yard.

Arugula, Watermelon Salad, Tzatziki

Behind the Scenes: Frying Lentil Burgers

Not sure why people think pita is hard to make. It's among the easiest flatbreads. I don't have a recipe per se, keying off the amount of water to give me final yield. One cup of water will incorporate enough flour to make 8 pita. Salt, yeast, and olive oil round out the dough, which I let rise twice before shaping into balls. After the balls rested for 20 minutes, I patted and rolled them out and into the very hot oven onto a hot sheet tray they went, three at a time, about two minutes on one side and another minute on the other.

These pita are very similar to the flatbreads and naan that I used to make at the restaurant, but I would typically put some yogurt in the dough for those. I did not for these pita, but it wouldn't have hurt.

Pita, Still Puffed from the Oven

When all was said and done, I was really tired. I no longer stand in the kitchen and cook all day and it shows. But I really am OK with that. I like the word retired in front of the word chef. It suits.

Dinner al Fresco

Now that the restaurant kitchen is starting to operate more smoothly post transition to a new kitchen crew, I felt like I could take off last evening to spend some time with Ann. In fact, I decided early enough in the day that Ann and I discussed options for dinner and decided that we needed to eat some of the asparagus and eggplant from the refrigerator.

I got home around 4:30 and began prepping and Ann arrived home at 5:30 just as I was finishing cleaning up the kitchen. In an hour, I sliced and blanched all the vegetables for dinner, made a pot of chicken paprikash for Ann to eat later in the week, blitzed a pint of tomato goat cheese (fresh tomatoes, salt, and goat cheese) in the food processor, and made three cups of white bean hummus.

After Ann took a shower, we went out on the patio with this bottle of Ramey Syrah and enjoyed what proved to be an exquisitely beautiful evening. I couldn't have randomly picked any better evening to be off. Or a better random bottle of wine. This Syrah is more French than Californian with an earthy nose riding on top of plum fruit with hints of black pepper. Understated and delicious and decidedly contrarian for California.

Ramey Syrah: More France Than California

At some point later in the evening (gotta love these long days!), I fired up the grill and grilled the eggplant along with the asparagus and broccoli that I had blanched earlier. I went by the farmers market in the morning and found a few things we could use for dinner: two small cucumbers, the first of the year; a small basket of greenhouse cherry tomatoes, also the first of the year; a couple handfuls of broccoli side shoots, again first of the year; and a lone bunch of radishes, about the last of the spring. These are the first new vegetables at the market in weeks!

Vegetable Platter with Two Dips

While we were waiting for the grill to heat, I heard a big crash from inside and knew instinctively what had happened. I arrived in the kitchen about two seconds later to find a shattered platter in the floor; tomato-goat cheese spread plastered all over the dishwasher, cabinets, and walls; and the brown dog happily licking up the mess from the floor. Carter and I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen while Ann hauled Grace outside for a hose bath. Dogs!

Vegetarian Sunday

Let's just start with the disclaimer that we are not vegetarians. Anything but, actually. We love our charcuterie, for example: we are those people that keep a drawer full of salame and cheese in our refrigerator. Though Ann is by nature quite a bigger carnivore than am I. I'm always having to fend off her requests for a big hunk of meat on the grill, which interests me not at all. But now it is summertime and the weather is hot and we naturally gravitate towards eating lighter food. Plus we have all these glorious vegetables at our disposal now. So it shouldn't be terribly surprising that we eat a fair amount of vegetarian meals in the summer. And yesterday was one of those days. We didn't plan it that way purposefully. It just evolved that way from what we really wanted to eat.

Lunch al Fresco

This last week at the restaurant kept me really busy, especially executing a wonderful 50th anniversary menu on Saturday. It meant extra long hours for me and 100% of my focus, leaving no time for Ann or thinking about the weekend. She hates these weeks when she really feels the true chef widow. So Sunday morning dawned without any plan. After I spent a couple hours in the back yard working, Ann finally joined me and we got to thinking about what to eat. Lunch was easy: she wanted a reprise of last weekend's Mediterranean mezes plate that I did when Karen dropped by.

A few chickpeas in the food processor, slicing a few roasted red peppers, and a little baguette in the oven and instant lunch.

Roasted Red Pepper Salad

Some days ago, Ann had brought up the idea of a grilled vegetable sandwich but we never got around to it for some reason or other. I brought it back up Sunday and it stuck. So when I made the roasted red pepper salad for lunch, I made extra for our dinner panini. Slice roasted red peppers, chiffonade fresh basil, mince garlic, add salt, pepper, Sherry vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil. Toss. Done.

Grilled Vegetable Panino

This is one of the very best sandwiches that I have ever had. I split a loaf of focaccia, brushed the cut faces with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and grilled to a crispy golden brown. Then, while the zucchini, yellow squash, and red onions were grilling, I spread the grilled faces of the bread with pesto. From there, it was a simple matter to layer the sandwich: zucchini, red onion, yellow squash, roasted red pepper salad, and provolone cheese. I left the top off and put it under the broiler to melt the cheese and then put the top back on and cut it into small panini.

Ever the expert on all matters, teenager Carter argued with us (but still ate the sandwich) that these are not panini because they have not been pressed. We had to school him a bit in the Italian language. At almost 15 years of age, he still knows that parents are dumber than dirt!

A Beautiful Mediterranean Sunday

Sunday was a fantastic day to be outside and Ann and I headed out around 11:30 to wait for Karen to arrive, talking, sipping Pinot Gris, and sitting on the patio in the shade of the pergola. Karen arrived a little while later and we spent a most enjoyable afternoon on the patio catching up, until after we ate lunch late afternoon and headed in to cool off in the air conditioning.


My Two Lovely....

....Dining Companions

Thank You Karen!

Karen brought a couple bottles of Willamette Pinot of which this Boedecker was the superior. She knows exactly what I love to drink.

Mezes: Olives, Hummus, Grape Leaves, Red Pepper Salad

Earlier in the day, I put together this platter of dolma/dolmades, red pepper salad, olives, and hummus. I make the hummus fairly loose with lots of lemon juice, olive oil, and for a special flavor, sesame oil rather than tahini. Try it some time. I took my meal cues from the beautiful breezy warm Mediterranean weather and created a meal that would be recognizable almost anywhere in the Eastern Med.

Turkish Chopped Salad

Early in the day, I chopped red peppers, cucumbers, red onions, and tomatoes. Just before dinner I dressed the salad with lots of chopped parsley, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper.

Pork Kofta with Feta, Dill, and Mint

I had a hankering for kofta on the grill, but I didn't have any lamb I felt like grinding so I used pork (frown if you must) and seasoned it the same way with feta, dill, mint, garlic, oregano, and various spices (such as allspice, coriander, etc.).

Dinner is Served: Kofta, Salad, and Tzatziki/Cacık

And here you see our dinner, ready to eat, with the kofta, the salad, and a bowl of thick tzatziki that I made the day before. Turkish cacık is rather thinner than this in my experience: I like it thicker.

Vegan Feast

Some weeks ago, shortly after announcing that she had gone vegan, Yael invited us to dinner. Although I cook my share of creative vegan meals at the restaurant, I don't really get the whole vegan thing. I enjoy hard cheeses and pork way too much for that, though otherwise I could be very comfortably a vegetarian. Still, I have no problem eating vegan especially when the food is made by such a gifted cook as Yael! After you look these pictures, you will see the vast effort that she underwent to put on this dinner (and the resulting food for an army)!

Very soon after we arrived at their place out in the county just northwest of Winchester, we were ushered into the dining room with the table set thus:

Add caption

I did have to give Yael a little grief about the beautifully set table. If the meal is vegan, why is the table set with steak knives? ;)

Oregano, Zinnias, Thyme, and Sage Decorated the Table

Hummus and Salad with Sesame-Sunflower Seed Pita

Spaghetti with Carrot and Zucchini Ribbons

Asparagus Tips Wrapped in Grated Parsnips Rolled in Beet Slices

Dolmades!

Eggplant

Spinach in Pastry

Mushroom Cigarettes

I loved everything! My favorite dish of the day would have been the eggplant, though with its filling of ground cashew nuts, it was too rich for me to eat much of it. And the beet dish has my chef brain working overtime.

Honeymoon: BridgePort Brewing and Portland Food Carts

Saturday May 4, NW and SW Portland OR

BridgePort Brewing

After touring the incredible farmer's market at Portland State University, we decided to grab a beer and check out the food cart scene, not necessarily in that order. Because we were already in SW, we drove over to the food truck pod at 10th and Alder SW, the one that we had driven by on our way into town and scouted the offerings. Because it was still before noon, a lot of the carts weren't open, but Ann and I each picked a cart to sample later in the afternoon.

Bridgeport: Still Great Beer

We decided to make a beer detour for a while until the food carts got fully ramped up, so we drove a few short blocks up to NW to BridgePort Brewing for drinks and appetizers. I spent a lot of time drinking IPAs and Blue Herons at Bridgeport when I was making regular visits to Portland back in the 1980s. The beer was very good back then and I am happy to report that the beer remains good to this day.

Since then, I have moved up in style from pale ales to imperial pale ales and I really enjoyed the first pint of Hop Czar, a big hop monster of a beer. Me like. After this pint, our server tasted me on a couple of other beers (including the Kingpin Double Red Ale) that he thought I would like as well, but I ended up having another Hop Czar. After you start with a hop monster, it is hard to go backwards.


Ann's "Margarita"

While Ann was off in the restroom, I ordered her a Summer Squeeze Bright Ale, but she wasn't much of a fan: her taste runs mainly to straightforward lightly hopped lagers, Mexican or Asian. So she ordered a pinkish Margarita that looked pretty good. I didn't taste it but it seems like she enjoyed it. I'm totally drawing a blank on what was in it.

At this point, it was about 1 pm and we decided to get a little bit to eat while we were there. And it turns out that they have pretty decent food; in any case, it way exceeded my expectations (which are admittedly pretty low when it comes to brewpubs). We ordered a Mediterranean Plate and an order of warm soft pretzels.


Mediterranean Plate: Decent Brewpub Food

The Mediterranean Plate was pretty tasty even if the pita was a bit odd. I don't believe I have ever seen a whole white pita docked so that it wouldn't rise. It wasn't bad, just odd. On the plate was hummus, a quinoa "tabouleh" that was kind of fun, olives with feta, and a so-called "Moroccan carrot-walnut pate." This appears to me to be a riff on halwa and I liked it because it wasn't sweet.


Pretzels, Quintessential Beer Drinking Food

The pretzels came with a Kingpin Ale-Honey Mustard and a Porter-Cheddar spread. I liked the honey mustard but I didn't get much cheese flavor out of the cheddar spread.

[Note: The iconic BridgePort Brewery founded by Willamette Valley icon Dick Ponzi and Oregon's second craft brewery finally closed in 2019 after years of mismanagement by new ownership. I really miss the great nights there back in the day.]

Portland Food Carts

On our way back to our B&B in SE, we stopped back by 10th and Alder SW to grab a couple of things from the food trucks there. I will say in advance that I think we struck out here. The food we got was not great and not what we expected of the vibrant cart scene. Clearly, we chose poorly. It happens; not often, but it happens.


Click to Read the Fine Print on the Downtown Sign

Ann Chose a Fancy Burger from Sideshow

The Sideshow cart has pretty good reviews for their fries and poutine, but it was the window sign that got Ann's attention. She loves a good burger and was seduced by the Fancy Burger at the Sideshow food cart. Reading that description, what foodie wouldn't want to try the burger? The burger was really meh. Really meh. Super, super average. Meh.

I fared about equally well with a porchetta sandwich at The People's Pig. I am a big porchetta fan and if I do say so myself, I make kick-ass porchetta. I always like to taste other people's versions though, just to widen my frame of reference. Sadly, the People's Pig porchetta might as well have been a smoked pork shoulder sandwich. It had a good smoky flavor, which most porchetta does not, but who can fault a guy for throwing some smoke to a pig? My porchetta is cured for several days in a great fennel, rosemary, and garlic rub. This, this had no flavor other than smoked pork. Which would have been fine chopped with a good bit of East Carolina sauce. But to call it porchetta is something of a crime.


Porchetta? Who Can Resist?

How about So-So Pork Sandwiches?

Love Me Some Pig. Pig Didn't Love Me Back

Zee Restaurant, Woodstock, VA

We had a free day on Sunday, one of those rare Sundays that we reserve for ourselves, and we took advantage of that to make the 45-minute drive to Woodstock, county seat of Shenandoah County, our neighbor to the south. A customer had told me of a couple that had just started a small restaurant there in the summer and that the chef is Croatian and that there were some interesting dishes on the menu.

In the week before our lunch at Zee, I started up a conversation with chef/owner Zlatko "Zee" Saravanja via Facebook, so he and his wife Lorianne were expecting us. I had hoped to explore a little bit more about Croatian food and how it differs from that of its neighbors.

Chilean Cab

We were seated and then proceeded to find a bottle of wine for lunch; I noticed that of the four other tables in the restaurant, we were the only ones having wine with our lunch. I guess that is to be expected. And hence the very limited wine list. Of the five or six reds, there was a sweet wine, an Agiorgitiko, an Argentine Malbec, a Spanish Monastrell, and a Chilean Cab. I wasn't going to tackle the Agiorgitiko; my experience with the St. George grape is that very few wineries make a decent one. I like Monastrell/Mourvèdre for a Sunday afternoon sipping wine, but that one was sold out. So we ended up with the Chilean Cab, which far exceeded my expectations.

Flatbread and Dips

We started with a trio of dips: hummus, tzatziki, and a roasted red pepper spread ("capsicum dip"), the last something similar to the Greek htipiti, I suppose. The bread is a focaccia-like flatbread sprinkled with sesame and caraway.

Lamb "Steak"

We had asked Zee to cook us whatever he wanted and although we were looking for something Croatian, he cooked us lamb steaks, nicely sized steaks from a leg of lamb. I guess this is his Aussie side showing through: although he was born in Croatia, Zee moved to Australia when very young and grew up there, just having moved to the US. The steaks were delicious and very well cooked, crusty on the outside and perfectly done on the inside. I really don't eat steak, especially at lunch, but I did enjoy mine very much. Ann and I never order the same thing so that we can share, so it was a bit of a bummer to both get steaks. The iceberg salad did nothing for me.

So we went away with mixed feelings. The wine and the steak were both very good. But we never did satisfy our itch for Croatian food. Next time, we order off the menu. And bless this really nice couple for trying to do something different in Woodstock, VA!