Culinary Concoctions Week Six: The Ingredient

So...math equation for you all:

(Work Stress + Life Stress) (Lack of sleep + Middle-of-the-week Tummy Woes)  = Me cooking, but not writing about it.

I can't believe how I've fallen behind with blogging this week! Dang it!

So...with that, a brief on this week's ingredient, chicory.

Jason and I went to (surprise, surprise) the Hillsdale Farmer's Market on Sunday and raided Ayer Creek Farm's stand, meddling our way in between women stockpiled with parsnips, salad greens and slices of winter squash boasting the boldest orange hue I've ever seen, to pick up a few bunches of chicory.

"I have no idea what to do with these," I confessed to Jason, whose eye was wandering to the one pound bag of ground cornmeal (that yes, he subsequently purchased).

So, come Sunday night, I did my research:

Chicory, a/k/a blue sailors, coffee weed and succory, is a bushy perennial herbaceous plants that's cultivate for salad leaves. However, it's roots are also used, baked then ground and used as a coffee substitute.

In the US, real chicory is often confused as curly endive. They're not one in the same. However, chicory leaves also include raddichio (a/k/a choke lettuce), sugarleaf and Belgian endives.

Ahhhh it all makes sense now.

To really geek out with ingredient research...I found that the chicory plant is one of the earliest plants cited in recorded literature. Horace mentions it in his own diet: "As for me, olives, endives and mallows provide substance." While I loathe olives, at least that gives me a starting point for creating a recipe.

Moreover, Lord Monboddo described the plant in 1779 as the 'chicoree,' which the French cultivated as a pot herb (No, fellow Portlanders, not a pot pot herb). Rather, chicory is, and has been since the Napoleanic Era, used in coffee or as a coffee substitute. And of course, even the Egyptians used it for the same purpose.

Recipe starting point number two...complete.

More about the recipe tomorrow!

Week Five: The Ingredient

I'm steering away from vegetables. Sure, the USDA just came out with new dietary suggestions (again?) that say, surprise surprise, we need to eat more vegetables and less processed food but it's not like I'm saying adios to vegetables all together, just as my current theme of ingredients-yet-to-be-cooked-with.

That prologue aside, I'm happy to pay homage this week to Oregon's state nut (Yes, we have one and yes, we're the only state to claim an official state nut -- not even Hawaii, with its obsession with the Macadamia nut, touts an official state nut): The hazelnut.

Though its also called a cobnut and a hazelnut, the two aliases boast different shapes -- the cobnut rounder; the filbert longer. In our great state of Oregon, we're more used to the filberts. Of French origin, the term filbert refers to both the tree and the nut (Though great debates in the nut world ensue that maybe...just maybe...that's not true). Like many of the great things in Oregon, the French brought the filbert here. In 1981 however (Hundreds of years after the filbert's introduction, of course), the Oregon Filbert Commission (Bet you didn't think that'd exist, eh?) conformed to the rest of the national marketing scheme and renamed the filbert to the hazelnut we now hold near and dear to our hearts.

And why wouldn't we love the hazelnut? Not only is it tasty -- delicious in both desserts and coffee (Though if we're talking Torani hazelnut-flavored syrup, I'll pass, acknowledging my nose stuck snobbily up in the air) -- but it is also ridiculously good for you. Rich in protein and unsaturated fat, the hazelnut is also high in vitamins B1 and B6. With such health benefits, it's no wonder (GAH! "No wonder" = a total AV scripting phrase. Oh well) the Chinese, in 2838 BC, believed the filbert took its place among the five sacred nourishments that God bestowed upon human beings (God, of course, being a term of relativity). What's more, the Greek physician Dioscorodes said of the hazelnut:

"It cures chronic coughing if pounded filbert is eaten with honey. Cooked filbert with black pepper cures the cold. And ointment of mashed burnt filbert shells and suet smeared on a head reverts baldness."

I'm neither bald nor experiencing a cough right now but still, I say, bring on the filbert.

February!

Okay so February isn't here until tomorrow. Nevertheless, it's arrival means I've successfully added four new dishes and six ingredients to my list of culinary goodies:

• Maitake mushrooms
• Kohlrabi
• Radishes
• Celeriac
• Swiss Chard
• Rutabaga

All to create dishes such as:

• Grilled Halibut with Spinach and Thai Chiles over Maitake Quinoa
• Bacon-butter Braised Chicken with Celeriac and Roasted Vegetables
• Candied Radishes with Vanilla Ice Cream and Bacon Caramel
• Salad of Arugula, Avocado, Grapefruit and Baked Salt and Pepper Radish Chips
• Stuffed Swiss Chard Purses 

And what have I learned so far, one month into this resolution?

1. I'm terrible at going to the Farmer's Market and focusing on buying just what I need.

2. I can indeed make a meal without using bacon or bacon grease (But why?)

3. A little bit of (soy) cream goes a long way with mushrooms.

4. Braising meat will always yield a super moist end result (I braised boneless pork chops last week. Succulent...and, believe it or not...moist!).

What's February going to bring? I have ideas...perhaps extending the new ingredients beyond the realm of fruits and vegetables?

More to follow...

Culinary Concoctions Week Four: Swiss Chard Purses with Vegetable Stuffing

I'll admit right off the bat with this meal that the swiss chard purses were not from my own brain but instead from the professional brain trust that was Gourmet (May that magazine rest in peace).

The stuffing is my own though.

Since I'm a bit lazy today and know the recipe, with directions, is online, I'll just do this thing...and force you to Epicurious for the recipe.

I will however, detail my vegetarian stuffing recipe:

Winter Vegetable Stuffing


Ingredients
4 cups dried bread pieces
3 TBSP butter
1/2 cup soy cream
1 apple, diced
1/4 cup pine nuts, roughly chopped
1 cup leeks (white part only), chopped
1/4 cup craisins, roughly chopped
Chard stems, diced
2 kohlrabi, peeled and diced
1 small white onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 TBSP fresh sage, chopped
4 radishes, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and diced
2 eggs

Directions
Preheat oven to 375.
Soak bread in cream for 15 minutes, until softened. Drain excess cream.
Heat large skillet on medium-high and melt butter.
Add all vegetables, salt and pepper. Saute for 10 minutes.
Remove from heat. Add bread crumbs. Mix together.
Add eggs. Mix with hands until the whole stuffing mix is nice and coated.
Spoon stuffing into glass baking pan.
Bake for 45 minutes.

Story to follow!

Culinary Concoctions Week Four: The Ingredient

Hello Swiss chard. Silverbeet. Perpetual spinach. Spinach beet. Crab beet. Seakale beet.

Mangold.

I like that last one the best I think.

However you call it, chard is one of the vegetables synonymous with wintry comfort foods, even if its peak season is between July and August. That's just one of the great things about Portland -- it's freaky deaky  growing climate allows for thick, luscious vegetation to grow year round. And I love it.

Of course, chard isn't native to Portland. Nor is it native to Switzerland, despite the name, which simply comes from the fact that it needed to be differentiated from French chard. Why someone decided with Swiss is unbeknown to me still (Let's face it; sometimes I'm lazy with my research). It is, in fact, native to the Mediterranean region, first traced back to Sicily (Like all good things -- heck, it's called God's Kitchen for crying out loud!) and it's been around for freaking ever. Aristotle actually wrote about it during the fourth century BC.

Yeah; it's that bad ass of a vegetable. But here's how I came upon it for this week's ingredient:

Sunday's farmer's market gander left me with a slew of goodies. While the carrots, carrot honey (Yes! Carrot honey!!), farm fresh eggs, sunchoke (More on that baby next week) and slew of baked goods (Darn you Baker and Spice; my waist line is not enjoying the pies, lemon tarts and slices of garden bread and crumb cake) were awesome grabs, I was mostly excited about the gorgeous rainbow chard I picked up: A thick fan of NBA-basketball-palm-sized leaves of dark green held together with stalks of bright reds and oranges.

The richness of the colors just blow my mind. And it's no wonder; they're so vivid and bright because chard is freaking chock full of vitamins and nutrients; just one serving has over 700% of your recommended daily value (RDV) of Vitamin K, over 200% of your RDV of Vitamin A and just a hair over 50% of your RDV of Vitamin C.  It's no wonder it ranks second only to spinach as one of the healthiest and most nutrient-rich vegetables.

Oddly enough, water starts breaking chard down almost immediately. That's why, when storing it, you want it to be nice and dry and in a cool place. You also don't want to wash it until cooking as, like I said before, exposure to water encourages spoiling. And I think anyone who has been forced to muck out the vegetable drawer in desperate need of cleaning knows that there are few things as disgusting as rotten leafy greens (I think a rotten tomato just barely trumps the foul odor and brown vomit-inducing sliminess of rotten greens).

That said, when it does come time to cooking chard, it's typically best to remove the stems and center ribs of the leaves as they can be super hard to eat and thus super hard to digest. Braising is the best. Sauteeing chopped chard is another option. Eating it raw? Goooooood luck. You'll be chewing for days.