Recipes by Ingredient + Prep – Page 49 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Tomatillo Sauce

I’ve made salsa verde before using different kinds of greens: parsley, mint, basil and capers. This version fits its Spanish name more because it uses tomatillos, those green tomatoes you see in your grocery store covered in an onion-skin husk.

Ingredients:
8 tomatillos, thoroughly washed, halved
1 medium red onion, chopped
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
2 Jalapeño peppers, stemmed, seeded, chopped
1/4 tsp sugar
juice from half a lemon
salt

1. Place tomatillos cut side down on a baking sheet. Place in broiler for about 8 minutes to lightly blacken the skin.
2. When done, pulse together all ingredients in a food processor. Season to taste with lemon juice and salt. Transfer to a large container with a seal. Let cool to room temperature before storing in refrigerator.

Pickled Ramps

In a week’s time, New York City has gone from spring to summer. Temperature was up 76 last week and I wore shorts to work. Good thing the produce at the farmers’ market was still in spring mode because I couldn’t have celebrated the warm weather without having my first ramps of the season. I got my early batch from Whole Foods for $19.99 a pound. F that! A bigger bunch in Union Square was $2.50 each when I stopped by the next morning. Because I was able to afford a few bunches, I decided to pickle them.

Make sure you wash and clean the ramps thoroughly. From the farmers’ market, the roots were intact. I cut them off and washed them with the water running; the onion skin from the stalks easily came off. I cut off and only left about an inch of the greens. I set the leaves aside for another recipe. Shichimi togarashi is a Japanese spice mix used to flavor soups and noodle dishes. You can buy a small bottle from Sunrise Mart if you’re in Manhattan, or else make your own.

Ingredients:
4 bunches of ramps
2 cups rice-wine vinegar
1 cup white sugar
salt

For the shichimi togarashi:
1 tsp red chili flakes
1 tsp sesame seeds
3 curls of orange peel
a very small knob of ginger, peeled, crushed
1 sheet of nori

1. Bring all the ingredients, except the ramps, to a full boil in 3 cups of water until sugar dissolves.
2. In a pickling jar, place cleaned ramps and pour in the pickling juice. Using a small tea cup as weight, make sure that the ramps are completely submerged. Let cool to room temperature.
3. Seal jar and store in the refrigerator for about 5 days.

Stir-Fried Black-Eyed Peas

The ginger-garlic paste I made three weeks ago is proving to be very useful. I first made it for dilled vegetables when I started cooking for some of my co-workers. I have since used the batch I stored in the freezer for two kinds of kimchi and now for this dish. It’s so much easier than peeling and chopping garlic and ginger all the time. And because they’ve been puréed together, the paste is much more fragrant. I love snapping a frozen sheet of it and just waiting for a few minutes before throwing it in a pot of vegetables.

This is the first time I’ve cooked with black-eyed peas. I’m only familiar with it from Cameron’s traditional New Year’s dish. She made it for our group when we welcomed 2007 in Florida and again in Austin last January. This take is more northern than southern; in fact it’s a northern Indian specialty in Punjab, Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi according to Monisha Bharadwaj’s India’s Vegetarian Cooking.

Ingredients:
3 cups of black-eyed peas, soaked in water overnight then drained
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
a handful of cilantro, finely chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp sugar
oil, salt

1. Heat some oil in a large Dutch oven. Toast the cumin seeds until fragrant. Stir in ginger-garlic paste and cook for 1 minute.
2. Add the black-eyed peas and sprinkle in the chili powder, turmeric and garam masala. Cook for another minute. Add the tomatoes and sugar and season with salt. Mix and add 3/4 cup of water, cover and bring to a boil.
3. Reduce the heat and simmer until the peas are tender. Mash some of them to add thickness to the sauce. Turn off the heat and mix in cilantro before serving.

Dirty Rice with Brussels Sprouts and Tofu

Southern cuisine’s “dirty rice” gets its name from the offal pieces they add in their rice. Comfort food often contains more than its fair share of fried stuff as well as heavy starches and some people say “dirty” is also taken from that. I honestly fucked this dish up so I had to literally scramble and rename it “dirty”. I stir-fried the Brussels sprouts and carrots with the salted black beans and then browned the tofu. When it was time to turn the tofu over, they just fell apart. Fuck it, I thought, and I just mixed everything together.

Mark Bittman recently featured canned black beans and I immediately recognized them as the 89-cent cans I see in Chinatown. Filipinos call them tao-si because the black beans come from long string beans we call sitaw. Reverse that and you get taw-si. The spelling changed to make it sound more Chinese. Oh, those Filipinos! I knew they were salty–the beans, not the Filipinos–but not that salty, so I added rice to the dish to fix it up. Sometimes, the most wonderful dishes come out of mistakes made in the kitchen.

Ingredients:
2 small buckets of Brussels sprouts, hard tips sliced off, quartered
a handful of baby carrots, julienned
1 package of extra firm tofu, sliced into strips
1 can of salted black beans, drained
2 cups of steamed white rice
juice from 1 lemon
1 onion, finely chopped
oil

1. In a large skillet, heat some oil. Sauté onions until translucent. Add black beans and cook for 1 minute. Add Brussels sprouts and carrots and stir-fry until carrots are tender. Set vegetables to the side and make room to fry the tofu.
2. Add some more oil if necessary. Brown the tofu on one side. When turning tofu over to cook the other side, they may stick. That’s okay. You can mix them up with the vegetables and make a scramble. Add rice and continue to mix until fully combined. Add lemon juice to control the saltiness of the black beans.

Pork Chops with Apples and Potatoes

Twenty-four hours before, we were in Philadelphia, the so-called sixth borough of New York City. It was like summer and everyone was out walking and enjoying the weather. From the Reading Terminal Market, we picked up some purple potatoes and apples, a bunch of arugula and escarole. We planned to cook a nice fish dinner back in New York City with the fresh produce we stuffed in my canvas bag. Alas, there were no more whole fish at Eli’s grocery store when we stopped by in the upper east side so we moved to Plan B. We bought two pork chops from the back and I thought of baking them with the Fujis. The Dr. was exhausted and just wanted to leave the cooking to me. I’ve done a similar dish before using red and white wines, but we were starving and this had to be fairly easy and quick. We snacked on the beef jerky we bought from Philly and drank the Hungarian red brought by co-workers from Budapest while we caught up with New York City news.

Ingredients:
2 pork chops
1 Fuji apple, peeled, sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
5 small purple potatoes, halved
1 cup veal stock
2 tbsp mustard
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 cloves
salt, pepper, oil

1. Preheat oven to 375º. Sprinkle pork chops with salt and pepper.
2. In a large skillet, heat some oil and brown the pork chops on both sides. Remove to a plate. Using the same skillet, sauté onions while scraping the bottom of the pan to include the pork bits. Remove to another plate.
3. In a small bowl, combine stock with mustard, sugar and cloves. Whisk and season with some salt and pepper.
4. Transfer pork chops to a baking dish. Add potatoes around them. Top with caramelized onions and pour in flavored stock. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes, turning chops over during the last 15 minutes of cooking. Remove the chops to a chopping board and let rest while the potatoes roast for another 15 minutes.