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.

Something Old, Something New

From earlier in the spring, a couple of dishes celebrating the first asparagus of the year and the final butternut squash from winter storage, "Something Old, Something New."

The first dish took full advantage of a rare sunny spring day to grill both the asparagus and the butternut squash, giving them a nice char that works against the sweetness of the scallops. Garnishes are a quick sweet chile sauce and Korean chile threads known as sil-gochu.

Scallops with Grilled Asparagus, Grilled Butternut, Sweet Chile Sauce, and Chile Threads

Grilling the Veg

Black Steel Gives a Perfect Sear Every Time

Sweet Chile Sauce (Agave, Sambal, Salt)

The second dish came on the following night when the weather turned back to its usual rainy springtime norm, making us want something warm and comforting, the genesis of the butternut lentils, a batch of brown lentils cooked with cubes of the bell of the butternut, the leftover bits that I couldn't slice for the grill the evening before. The salad is shaved raw asparagus dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt.

King Salmon, Butternut Lentils, and Shaved Asparagus Salad

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.

Thai Chicken Salad

On Monday, Ann and I were both running different directions and we missed the opportunity to discuss what was for dinner, so I ended up making an executive decision. Given that it was a warm day, I wanted something cool, light, and highly flavorful.

Thai Chicken Salad

And so I decided to grab a pre-roasted chicken, some herbs, some lettuce, some vegetables, and throw together a salad. I'm calling this Thai Chicken Salad, but I doubt seriously that it has a counterpart in Thailand, though Thai cooks would recognize the spirit of the dish.

Salad Fixings

The first thing I did was to throw together a quick dressing, which you see in the bowl at the top of the photo, of freshly squeezed lime juice, fish sauce, sambal oelek, and agave nectar. Agave isn't used in Thailand but it has the benefit of dissolving readily in a cold dressing. It works better than sugar and I am all about works better.

Then I diced some of the chicken breast and gave it a quick marinade in the dressing while I tossed cilantro and Thai basil leaves with some lettuce leaves. I put the undressed leaves on a platter and then put tomatoes, sweet orange peppers, cucumber, and red onion rings over that. Then I spooned on a good bit of dressing and tossed the chicken on top.

I love crunchy bits in a salad, so on top of everything, I scattered some roasted peanuts and crispy fried shallots.

This was a delightful salad that we gorged ourselves on while sitting in a chair and eating right out of the platter with two forks!

A Salad Riff on Shrimp Bánh Mì

Last night for dinner, I had shrimp bánh mì on the brain, but I just wanted everything in the sandwich without the bread, without any mayo, so I came up with a quick salad.

Salad with Fish Sauce-Garlic Shrimp and Lop Cheung

The salad itself is torn butter lettuce, cilantro, and Thai basil from our garden all tossed with a dressing of caramelized sugar, rice vinegar, lime juice, sambal oelek, and fish sauce. This is topped with raw vegetables: julienne of carrot, julienne of sweet peppers, thinly sliced red onion, Mexican Midget and Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and green onions. And then this is topped with a quick sauté of fish sauce-garlic shrimp and lop cheung and the whole is sprinkled with deep-fried shallots. Lime wedges finish the salad.

Mise-en-Place

Ten minutes of prep work after we got home let us have a glass of wine and relax for ninety minutes before three minutes of assembly.

Shrimp in the Marinade

For the two of us, I put six ounces of shrimp in a bowl with lots of chopped garlic, a splash of sambal oelek, and a healthy dose of fish sauce. These guys hung out in the refrigerator until they were ready to go in the pan. I lifted the shrimp and garlic out of the marinade and then put them into a hot pan. Once the shrimp were cooked on one side and flipped, I added the three ounces of sliced lop cheung, and poured the marinade over. Total cooking time, three minutes, if that.

The best part of the whole dinner was cuddling in a chair with Ann and both of us eating the salad right out of the salad bowl while watching a movie! Great dinner!

Note to self: Ann said she wants peanuts in the salad for crunch next time. Can do.

Cellophane Noodle Salad with Grilled Red Drum

After a really unpleasantly hot and humid weekend full of nasty thunderstorms, Monday started out to be a carbon copy, but turned out to be a pretty decent day and cool enough to sit outside. Finally! And I was able to move a late afternoon meeting up by an hour so that I could get home to enjoy the nice weather that developed during the day.

Note to self: I am under strict orders from my wife to give her credit for the following dinner.

During the morning and early afternoon, it was pretty humid and it looked like the day was going to be a rehash of the weekend: soupy air and threat of thunderstorms. And the morning is when we discuss what we want for dinner. Given the weather, we were looking for something light and Ann had Asian on the brain and specifically mentioned cellophane noodles (the credit, folks, is all hers). I wanted grilled fish, so I put the two together.

After we picked the kids up from school at 5:00, I started prepping dinner, making a quick cellophane noodle salad (yum woon sen), the dressing for the salad, and prepping a side of red drum.



Standard Thai Salad Dressing

Dressings in Thailand are very simple and although I make mine from slightly different ingredients than they would in Thailand, the end result is almost identical. The dressing above is a mix of lime juice, sambal oelek, fish sauce, minced garlic, and agave nectar. I use sambal so that I don't have to crush the chiles in a mortar and I use agave nectar so that it goes directly into solution without a lot of stirring. A basic recipe idea is:

    juice of 3 limes
    3 tablespoons agave nectar (to taste)*
    3 tablespoons fish sauce
    2 tablespoons sambal oelek*
    2 cloves garlic, minced

Mix well. Adjust seasonings to your taste. Makes enough for a large salad.

*or your favorite sweetener/your favorite heat

Cellophane Noodle Salad without Fish and Dressing

Cellophane noodles, aka glass noodles, bean thread, woon sen, among other names, is a noodle made from various kinds of starch, most typically mung bean. They have a slippery-crunchy quality that makes them perfect for cold salads (although they are often stir-fried, see pad woon sen). They come in small bundles, each of which is typically enough for a single serving. Cover the bundles with boiling water and let stand for 5-10 minutes, then drain the noodles, and spread them out to cool off. When cool, chop into manageable lengths with a knife (or some people use scissors).

Mix with your favorite crunchy raw vegetables and herbs and toss with dressing. Add a protein if you like. My salad above has noodles, orange peppers, red peppers, carrots, cilantro leaves, and Thai basil leaves, green onions, lots of each. I love sliced red onion in this salad too, but didn't have any. No worries, it's just a salad!

After prepping all this, we went outside and enjoyed a glass of wine while the noodles were chilling and the grill was heating. I congratulated my wife on her brilliant choice of dinner.

Asprinio d'Aversa, our new Favorite Summertime Sipper

The wine that we opened is our new favorite summer sipper, a sparkling Asprinio from the town of Aversa, near Naples in Campania. We just love this lightly creamy wine: it feels more like beer in the mouth than sparking wine and it is a touch cloudy. The nose to me is of yeast, beer, apple cider, pear cider (perry), and apple sauce. The flavor on the palate reminds me of similar things but with really nice and refreshing acidity. It kind of reminds me of Mauzac a bit and some of the Blanquettes de Limoux that I have tasted, only a lot better than any Mauzac that I have ever had. This particular bottling from Grotta del Sole is also famous for being made from grapes from vines that are trained to grow up poplar trees. It's a pretty cool sight to see.

Dinner! All Ann's Idea!

When we were good and relaxed and the grill nice and hot, I put two big slabs of drum skin side down on the grill and closed it up, checking every few minutes until each piece had just turned opaque. I scraped the fish off the skin into the salad and tossed it all with dressing, all the while complimenting my beautiful wife on her wonderful dinner idea.

Dead Soldiers at Dusk

I am so glad that Ann had this idea for dinner tonight. She deserves all the credit.

Seís de Mayo: Appetizers

This is the second post of four on our Seís de Mayo party. We decided to start off our little party with chips, guacamole, and salsa. At the last minute, Ann ran out to the store and came back with a bundle of asparagus and asked me to fry them. Thanks honey!

Oven-Baked Tortilla Chips

Fried chips are awesome! But cranking up a big pot of oil at home, stinking up the house, and having to dispose of a lot of oil is not awesome. So these chips are a compromise. Ann tossed them with olive oil, salt, pepper, and pimentón before placing them in a hot oven on an icing grate so that they cooked on both sides evenly without having to turn them.

Guacamole

Avocados, lime juice, cilantro, green onions, minced green chile, diced tomatoes. Done.

Mango-Tomatillo Salsa

Salsa is a simple condiment theme on which you can make endless variations once you learn the mantra: fruit, onions, acid. Fruit, onions, acid. Easy. Tomatoes are the fruit that we most often associate with salsa, but tomatoes are not in season now. I found some ripe mangos and some tomatillos to counterbalance them. From the vanilla extract in the upper left corner, you see sambal oelek (crushed chile paste), mangos, a poblano, green onions, cilantro, salt, brown sugar, tomatillos, limes, and garlic.

Years ago, I hit on the trick of adding brown sugar and vanilla to my mango salsa quite by accident and I love the result. So does everyone  else. This salsa has it all going on: sweet, tart, spicy, salty, crunchy, smooth, fresh.

Fried Asparagus with Cilantro-Pimentón Aïoli

I really was trying to avoid frying things, but Ann brought these asparagus home for me to fry as an appetizer. It is so difficult to keep fried food hot and palatable for guests.

The double breading station is something that is best left to the professional kitchen. This whole dish is, really. Doing it without a deep fryer is a pain. The flour is seasoned with salt, pepper, and pimentón.

From left to right, cilantro-pimentón aïoli, olives, and melted jalapeño jelly. I crushed garlic and cilantro stems with salt to flavor the aïoli. The aïoli and the jalapeño jelly are for dipping the asparagus.

Stay tuned for two more posts about this feast.

Noodles with Pork, Green Onions, and Snow Peas

I wasn't feeling well yesterday and the weather was turning chilly again: I needed comfort food. In the morning, when Ann and I were discussing dinner—isn't that a primary topic of conversation for all couples?—she said, "It's getting cooler; let's have something wintery one more time before it gets hot." Both of us on the same page is always a good place to start. "Or let's go out!" Oops, maybe both of us not on the same page.

I just didn't feel up to going out and so I brought home a few things to make a bowl of noodles. Noodles and soup noodles are my go-tos when I am not feeling well. Here you see my mise for dinner: wheat noodles, green onions, doenjang, preserved vegetable, sambal oelek (the jar just barely in the photo), snowpeas, garlic, ginger, and ground pork. I didn't bring the snow peas home; they were a lucky find in the refrigerator. Doenjang is a Korean soybean paste. I like it better than most Chinese bean paste because it still has some whole or partial beans in it for texture. Preserved vegetable is a mustard green that has been cured in salt and chile. Sambal oelek is ground fresh red jalapeño chiles.

Vietnamese Caramel Red Drum on Cellophane Noodle Salad

I think with all the heavy comfort food we've been eating recently, we both wanted to go lighter for dinner. Ann had suggested a cellophane noodle salad on the weekend but we never got around to making it. Cross that with some fresh red drum that just came in and you've got a tasty light meal.

Somewhere along the line, I got it in my mind to braise the drum in caramel just like the catfish in a clay pot that you see in every Vietnamese restaurant of substance.

The salad is cellophane noodles with julienne of carrot, daikon, and cucumber, sliced green onions, and shredded Thai basil and cilantro leaves, dressed with lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, and a touch of sambal oelek (crushed chile paste).

To braise the red drum, I first made a caramel of white sugar to which I added fish sauce, a lot of black pepper, and water. Then I added sliced shallots, sliced garlic, and the bulb ends of the green onion along with a little chiffonade of Thai basil. This I let cook down for about 10 minutes and then I added the red drum and slowly braised it, turning it once, for about 10 minutes. I removed the fish to the top of the salad, reduced the braising liquid to a syrupy sauce and poured it over.

Easy and tasty.