Looking for something different to do with your rhubarb this spring? Try this Italian crostata recipe. It comes from the Tra Vigne Cookbook, Michael Chiarello’s Napa Valley restaurant. The toasted aniseed in the crisp really compliments the tart rhubarb flavor. Be sure to try to use extra ripe red bananas, which are more custardy than their yellow cousins. The polenta made for a dense, cookie-like crust. But it was still a bit crunchy, like undercooked rice. Any suggestions on how to soften the polenta? I added vanilla, ginger and cardamom to the recipes, all flavors that subtley enhance that rhubarb flavor. Remember that rhubarb acts as a thickener here to sop up the berry juices. If you omit the rhubarb, add a thickener, like tapioca pearls. Here is the recipe in full:

Strawberry, Rhubarb, and Banana Crostata

Recipe courtesy Michael Chiarello

Ethiopian cabbage and chickpeas on homemade injera bread

How privileged we are to be friends with a chef! Intaba dazzled us with an Ethiopian feast when we gathered at the home of our adopted grandmother for an Earth Day pot luck today. She made her own fermented buckwheat flour injera bread, which we topped with savory braised cabbage, chickpeas and spinach, spicy chicken wat and a lentil stew. Delish! She got most of the recipes here (from RecipeZaar). It seemed appropriate to honor the cuisine of a nation often beset with famine due to droughts and war.

I made a citrusy green spinach salad that seemed a bit bland beside the well-spiced fare. My dessert, a “Strawberry, Rhubarb and Banana Crostata,” got much better reviews. More on that tomorrow. And we toasted the evening with fruity gin and tonics, the signature drink of our host.

The Oregon State organic growers club farm

Earth Day is certainly celebrated more here in green Oregon than it was back east. Here it’s a week long celebration, like Carnival. The Oregon State organic growers club had a big kick-off event at their farm this afternoon, encouraging the guests to help them plant 10,000 onion and leek seeds. You should see the abundant variety of produce they sell on campus later in the season. Then there was their chicken tractor. It just pulled on my heartstrings. I want one. But next year. Just breaking into gardening is more than we can handle this summer.

Then the first of the spring Wednesday Farmers Market was held downtown for the first time today. It’s old location, at the Benton County Fairgrounds, was a closer bike ride from our house. But this new location is much more festive and will draw larger crowds, promoting development and revitalization downtown. Plus, it’s now held in the late afternoon and evening to encourage folks to head to the market, then picnic or dine at a surrounding restaurant. They’re having new food vendors too, including grilled gourmet pizza’s from Newport’s Pacific Sourdough. And unlike some farmers markets, at the ones in Corvallis and Albany, regulations exist to insist the produce sold comes from the six surrounding counties. The OSU organic farm inspired me to pick up some leek seeds there.

new Wednesday downtown market

Everywhere you look, there are signs of spring, and more importantly, gardening, here in Corvallis. It’s contagious. You want to go dig around in the dirt yourself. What’s the worst that could happen? Even the young ones have green thumbs here.

And speaking of Earth Day, hear are some tips for reducing your “cookprint” in the kitchen. There’s always more we could do.

Turnips/Flickr Creative Commons/By michael.newman

Maple-braised turnips with their greens

I just cannot get over how sweet these radish-sized Tokyo white turnips are, even just sliced and eaten raw. I picked up some of these beautiful orbs at Gathering Together Farm and would encourage you to do the same. Make sure they have fresh, crisp greens attached and cook them! Turnip greens are so tangy and flavorful. I adapted Ivy Manning‘s “Maple-Glazed Turnips and Carrots” recipe (see below) from The Farm to Table Cookbook, omitting the carrot and adding sliced green garlic, the greens, a sliced radish (oh so similar to a turnip) and a sliced potato or two. Given their high water content, turnips and radishes are so succulent to bite into when cooked. And remember those mountains of greens quickly wilts when cooked, losing much of their volume.

Why aren’t turnips well-loved? There was that song, “Everyone Hates Turnips, But Grown-Ups Always Eat Them…Kids Are Much Too Smart to Let a Vegetable Defeat Them,” in my 8th-grade play, How to Eat Like a Child. The problem is most turnips aren’t fresh and then are boiled to gray mush. Get yours young and use them quickly. They get that acrid flavor as they age, Ivy Manning says. With an abundance of fresh turnips here, I’m also eager to try Bryant Terry‘s recipe for “Roasted Turnips and Shallots With Turnip Greens Soup.” Stay tuned. And Terry also stresses to get your turnips young. Young! Just like you like your women or your baby micro-greens.

Maple-Glazed Turnips and Carrots

4 servings

12 ounces young turnips, 2 inches or less in diameter (and saute in the greens at the end)

1 large carrot, peeled

1/4 cup chicken stock or water

2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon grade A or B maple syrup

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Scrub and peel the turnips and cut into quarters or sixths, depending on their size. Slice the carrot at an angle into 1/2-inch-thick-pieces.

2. Put the vegetables and stock in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Cover and cook until the turnips are barely tender, about 7 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-high and add the butter and maple syrup. Stir to coat the vegetables and continue to cook uncovered until the vegetables are glazed and beginning to caramelize around the edges, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and serve.

From The Farm to Table Cookbook by Ivy Manning

Those crisp, ruby red stalks of rhubarb have arrived at our local farmers markets. I’m gaga for the pie plant, which marries best with strawberries in sweet desserts. But every year I try to attempt unusual rhubarb creations. No more. This plant really belongs in pies and crisps.

I made a wheatberry salad with rhubarb-mint dressing (see below) for the seasonal Ten Rivers Food Web recipe contest. The goal is to use as many locally-sourced ingredients as possible in your recipe. I didn’t win one of the prices for the top three dishes, but I did at least get a shout out for even using locally grown recipes. I had also entered this contest last winter with my chickpea-leek soup. I’ll enter again with the fall contest. Maybe third time is the charm?

But really I’ve concluded that rhubarb’s place is in desserts. I do recommend keeping it crisp through a sweet macerating marinade rather than fully cooking it, as I have done before with this New York Times recipe: “Crisp Rhubarb in a Sweet Broth” (page 2). Later this week, I’ll be cooking and posting about a “Strawberry, Rhubarb and Red Banana Crostata” I’m making from the Tra Vigne Cookbook. It’s a crisp/cobbler made with polenta and toasted anise seeds. Stay tuned!

Read the rest of this entry »

Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy, of Beast bistro, featured in Meatpaper's Spring 2009 "Pig" issue (Photo by Alicia J. Rose /Flickr Creative Commons)

 (Click here to hear the archived show.)

I love the power of the unadorned human voice. And so I increasingly find myself gravitating towards radio, perhaps our most enduring, flexible and irrepressible forms of media that continues to thrive in this digital age. I spent two nights blindly fumbling through Pro Tools to sloppily edit my first produced radio piece on the new Emergency Food Pantry on-campus here at Oregon State. It will debut tomorrow during my second time co-hosting the monthly KBOO Food Show! Join me:

This Year at the White House/Obama's Seder (Official White House photo by Pete Souza), which just happened to be organized by Carolyn's Harvard classmate.

President Obama hosted his history-making Passover seder at the White House, and we were invited to two here in Oregon, that most secular of states where there are more Buddhists than Jews (but lots of Jew-Bus).

Homemade rye matzo

The first invite came at a matzo-making party I attended with my chef friend Intaba. She’s teaching me to make all the Jewish breads. It’s really a wonder more folks don’t make their own matzo instead of subsisting on the Manischewitz boxed-stuff. You just mix two cups of flour to one cup of water, don’t let it sit more than 18 minutes and then bake at 400 degrees. But I realize, who has time to make matzo when preparing the other dishes for the seder feast?

For our first seder, I prepared an unusually savory carrot and sweet potato tzimmes, accented with fresh thyme and chopped green onions. I’d make this side dish year round. That the veggies are roasted with lots of butter doesn’t hurt. I also made a Sephardic version of charoset, blending dried figs, dates, apricots and raisins together with the traditional apples and walnuts. It got rave reviews and the fruity paste spread nicely on matzo.

Carrot and Sweet Potato Tzimmes

Fruity charoset

We’re constantly impressed by the kindness of practical strangers, and neighbors, here. We had only met the host of the Wednesday night seder once, and there we were comfortably reclining around her table until 11 p.m.

But our Friday night hosts, Slow Food Corvallis president Ann Shriver and her husband Larry Lev, both of OSU’s agricultural econ department, we met back during our first weekend in Corvallis. I made the matzo ball soup for that meal. Let’s just say the balls were a tad rubbery and marked with my fingerprints, rather than in perfect spheres. Still tasted good though. Ann prepared a feast: Moroccan chicken tagine (see recipe below), purple cauliflower and potato puree, grilled asparagus and Greek salad. Larry’s simple Ashkenazi-style charoset was sweet and delicate: peeled and grated apples, chopped walnuts and pecans, a bit of grated lemon peel and dashes of wine, cinnamon and sugar. Ann indulged us with a cheese course (featuring a prize-winning hard Tumalo goat cheese from Bend) and a delicate ginger-dark chocolate mousse served, with a fresh whipped cream cap, in demitasse cups. It was an informal, secular, social justice-minded seder. We didn’t even go back to the haggagah after the meal. Very reminiscient of the McCandlish-Friedberg seders growing up. I was right at home! Next year in Corvallis, right?

Moroccan chicken

Chocolate mousse

Chicken Tagine with Preserved Lemon & Olives (from Ann Shriver)

Fallen plums from our neighbor's tree last October

The end of today’s “This American Life” was a tribute to William Carlos Williams’ sparse, perhaps unfeeling “This is Just to Say” poem. It’s one of my favorites. It’s a non-apologizing apology, which contributors from Sarah Vowell to Shalom Auslander riff on in their own versions of the verse. But I mostly love it for its simple evocation of the powerful temptation represented by those crisp, cold plums. As President Obama once said, “The flesh is weak.”

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of
New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of
this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent
of the publisher.

Turkey Picadillo

When Sunday night dinner stumps you, it’s a treat to discover bags of still flavorful shredded Thanksgiving turkey in the freezer. We sure got a lot of life out of that bird. I had wanted to try Turkey Picadillo, this sweet-and-sour saucy Latin American stew, ever since spotting it among The Oregonian’s suggestions of what to do with Thanksgiving leftovers. But it’s a tangy and soothing dish to make anytime of year. Of course, this Spanish mincemeat is more traditionally made with shredded beef or pork. Try chicken, too. For a kick, this recipe recommends adding chipotle en adobo and capers. But I hands-down recommend The Oregonian one I tried:

Published November 25, 2008

Makes 4 servings