from Florence, with love: warm farro salad

Every year I get to go to Florence for work, which rocks. Florence is an excellent place to spend a week working and eating... I rarely eat out here, for a simple reason: I stay next to the central market, and like to spend time cooking with the spectacular fresh ingredients available in spring. This year I did the usual pasta (picci, which is rarely found outside Tuscany, and which I love, but I also love that it's something that is still a local food) and fresh porcini, but that's not really something you need a recipe for. However, spelt is big here. I especially like whole spelt berries, or farro. You can use them like rice, or wheat berries, or small pasta. You can make rissotto with them, which I highly recommend. They're super yummy chewy. Also, spelt seems to be the only concession to "whole grain" made here. Everything else (the bread, the pasta, the rice) is white. This year, I also happened across some fresh canellini beans (which practically melt in your mouth), and there were little zucchini flowers everywhere. Oh my. I made this, and it was perfect. It's very simple, and relies on having good, very fresh ingredients. In other words, no, you can't substitute canned tomatoes, cheap-ass olives, or dry parsley. (You can, however, use dried beans). Make this when you can get excellent tomatoes that were picked ripe, and get damn good olives. If you can't find zucchini flowers, use barely-steamed mangetout or fresh green peas.

-1 c farro, cooked (gives about 1.5 cups)
-1 c fresh cannelini beans

-8 zucchini flowers
-2 ugly but perfectly ripe summer tomatoes, chopped
-2 cloves garlic, chopped
-1 c parsley chopped
-a few spicy olives in olive oil, or if your olives are in brine, some good olive oil to drizzle plus a dash (only a dash) of hot pepper. This isn't a hot dish per se. The pepper just adds a very subtle edge. Very. Subtle. Exercise restraint, gentle reader, and you will be rewarded with a lovely lovely layering of flavours. Too much chili, and you'll overwhelm everything, which would be a shame.
-salt and pepper to taste

Cook the spelt berries/farro in plenty of boiling salted water for about 10 mins. At the 10 minute mark, add the beans. Somewhere between the 15-20 minute mark both should be done. When the farro and beans are done, add the zucchini flowers for about 30 seconds, and then pick them out with a fork and put them aside (you want to just barely cook them). Drain farro and beans. Return them to the hot pot, but don't bother turning the heat back on. Stir in all the other ingredients, and serve, topped with the zucchini flowers. Oh, and when I say "some olive oil", I didn't add any. I was just using olives preserved in oil. So if you're adding, I'd say 1 tsp or so for the whole recipe. Or you could just leave it out.

singing: a love song to ugly tomatoes that i made up on the spot.

garlicky spring risotto

A friend gave me a splendid bag of fancy-pants arborio rice. This is what happened when I got home. This is tastes like the filling of stuffed vine leaves, only in the form of risotto! So exciting! The leftovers are great wrapped in vine leaves (how shocking). Failing that, they're also great wrapped in any leafy green. Or eaten straight out of the container cold. I might have done that today at lunch.

Confession: I love fresh fava beans. LOVE. However, they take for frikkin' ever to shell, so I'm secretly glad that fresh fava bean season is mercifully short, because otherwise I'd have a pretty serious time problem on my hands.

1 c arborio rice
1c white wine
hot veg stock or water

2 stalks celery
5 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 tbs cumin
1 zucchini, thinly sliced
1/2-1 c fresh fava beans (broad beans)
1/2 c fresh mint, chopped
a few sprigs fresh dill, chopped
juice of 1 large lemon
salt and pepper to taste


Usually I use brown rice, but for this, brown is a bit heavy, though it could work if you wanted to use this as a stuffing for peppers or something. Meh. Serve this with olives and a simple tomato salad.

General instructions for risotto are here. For this one, prep the rice (ie, rice, wine, stock) in a nice heavy bottom pan. While the rice is cooking, shell the fava beans. When that's done, get going on the celery and garlice: In a separate pan from the rice, saute the celery and garlic on medium heat in a splash of wine. Once they're translucent, add cumin and zucchini, drop the heat and cover. Add fava beans at end (a minute or two before the rice is done. Mix the rice into the veg. Stir in the mint, dill and lemon juice. Salt and pepper to taste.

springtime music: dance me to the end of love, by leonard cohen, for my plum.

highbrow/lowbrow

After brunch this weekend, the kitchendancing cave had some leftover champagne.  By the way, if you want to keep champagne fizzy, store it in the fridge with a fork in it thusly. Maybe it works without the fork, but I like champagne too much to risk finding out. Since  I looooves me some boozy cooking, I decided to make something decadent yet decidedly lowbrow with it: Barley "risotto". People often try to do too much to risotto, and also tend to get dogmatic and snobby about it. If you have good mushrooms and good wine and decent technique, it's best not to add too much in the way of other flavours, and if you do that, it's hard to go wrong. Others may differ, but I find that the trick to a really good mushroom rissotto (other than quality ingredients) is to do the mushrooms and the rice (or in this case barley) separately, and to make sure you don't over-spice. I also like to add the barley or rice to the mushroom pan instead of vice versa, so as not to lose all the good stuff kinda stuck to the bottom of the mushroom pan.  Also, rissotto is just a wet pilaf, or savory rice pudding, depending how you look at it. Have fun. Making perfect rissotto takes a bit of practice, but it's not hard, and if you're a beginner, barley is much more forgiving than rice for this dish, though you could do this entire recipe with rice as well. Personally, I love the way barley goes with mushrooms. It's all very earthy and musky and kinda sexy. 

Barley-mushroom-champagne risotto

Soak in enough water to cover:

15g or 1/2c dried porcini (or other) mushrooms

4 dried shiitake mushrooms, chopped and stemmed

Basically, you want a good cup of dried mushrooms here. Use what you have. That's what I had. Nyah.

meanwhile, 

Fill your kettle with water and turn it on. While the kettle's going, dry-roast 1.5 cups of barley in a big pan on low heat. When it gets light brown, douse with all the champagne you want, reserving a few tbs of the champagne for the next step (though you can use white wine, vermouth, or even vodka here). When the champagne is absorbed, add hot water to cover, stirring occasionally and adding more water as needed. You'll eventually be adding the mushroom soaking water, so take it easy at this point with the water-adding, okay? This should be cooking on low heat, just barely simmering. I used about 1.5 cups of champagne. Yes. I'm that decadent. If you're just using a splash of wine, sub hot veg or mushroom broth for the hot water, but use one without strong flavours (like celery) that might overwhelm your lovely little mushrooms. You don't have to stir constantly. That's some kind of myth perpetuated by people who want to intimidate you into thinking that making rissotto is difficult. *Feh*, I say to these people. The secret is out: this is easy. 

While the barley is cooking, chop a leek and (in a separate large pan from the barley) saute it in some more of that champagne. Use green onions if you don't have leeks. When the leek is translucent, add two cloves of chopped garlic. Then throw in the soaked mushrooms, and dump the soaking water into the barley. Turn the heat dow waaaaaaay low and cover the mushroom leek goodness. It should be wet enough to not stick to the pan, but not simmering in liquid as such. This should cook for at least 15 mins. You want to give the leek time to start getting kinda sweet. 

Your kitchen should now smell like I imagine heaven does. 

When everything is done, mix the barley into the mushrooms and adjust the liquid. If it's too soupy, let it simmer a bit (unlike a rice rissotto, it's near-impossible to overcook this one by letting it go a few extra minutes) and if it's too dry, add water or broth. Then add salt, pepper and  if you want, stir in a tablespoon or so of white miso at the end. Add a whack of fresh chopped parsley. Drizzle with some truffle oil if you have it. 

Ducky's culinary school: foodgasms.

I was in Florence and spent some time in the central market on the top floor where all the vegetables are, stumbling around in a state of quasi-estatic sensory overload. Mostly because of a fresh porcini stand. I bought fresh porcini, which are butter-melty and frankly, have a taste and smell that falls into the sex category. It would have been criminal to do too much to such a lovely and complex taste, so I just heated them through in some olive oil and salt, and put them on some fresh bread and ate. I also cooked up this little flowered zucchini on the side (just oil, salt, pepper and a bit of garlic). And maybe slumped into my chair making little noises of happiness. Of course, the next day, I went back to the market and bought some dried porcini to take home.

Now, usually, dried mushrooms don't smell like much when you open the bag. This smelled like much. Suddenly I understood why one might need a warning on a plastic bag telling you not to stick your head in it. One night, I rehydrated a few of the mushrooms, and put them on spaghetti with truffles and just a bit of parsley (Yes, I bought truffles packed in oil on this trip. Because life is too short not to) and parsley. Oh. My. Goodness. And then last night Spanky and I went down to Leith for an night of risotto. Hilarity ensued, but that was mostly due to the conversation.

Mushroom risotto: If you are lucky enough to get your hands on mushrooms this good, for the love of sweet Jeebus, don't do too much to them. Brown rice in olive oil, heated until is smells nutty and then doused with a good cup of dry white wine. Simmered and stirred in the mushroom water. Meanwhile, the rehydrated mushrooms were heated up in a little oil, a tiny clove of garlic, some wine, and a green onion. When the rice is done, mix, and add salt and a smidge of black pepper. Perhaps a little more olive oil. If you have more delicate mushrooms, use white rice.

Strawberry risotto: Take thinly sliced red onion and a clove of garlic and add it to olive oil in a pan before heating the oil. Turn the heat on low and cook until the onion is translucent. Add white rice and a tiny bit of cumin and some salt. When the rice is also translucent, add a healthy two or three shots of saffron gin (or gin and saffron. vermouth would also work), then hot water. Do the usual risotto thing. Meanwhile, reduce some balsamic vinegar (somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup for 1.5 cups of rice going into the risotto). When the rice is done, stir in the reduced vinegar, about 3 cups of sliced strawberries, at least half a cup of fresh basil, and black pepper.

Take both of these, and serve them with green salad to good friends. Eat slowly. Laugh a lot.

perfect music: snippets of Bach, sung by a choir boy and an angel, interrupted by helpless laughter and drinks.

ducky's culinary school: post 2

The culinary school has been busy, but we've failed to post. We are bad, bad homosexuals. No biscuit. There was even a double layer carrot cake, which was so exciting I forgot to take pictures.

Spanky likes beets. I likes beets. The veg box this week has beets. You can see how this dinner was inevitable. We give you.... (drum roll please) beet risotto. One of the best kept secrets in the culinary world is that risotto is actually really really easy to make. Ducky is withholding his conclusions until he's tried this unsupervised. So, you take your short-grain rice. We used brown, because I'm a freak. I like brown rice. And frankly, white rice is too wimpy for the sheer number of beets in this dinner. You take the rice (1 cup) and saute it in a little bit of good olive oil along with a bit of dried basil until it becomes translucent and smells nutty. Then you add 1 cup of red wine. We used Peter Lehmann Wildcard Shiraz, which was perfect for this. Simmer until the wine is gone, then add broth plus a little marmite and keep doing that (adding warm broth) until the rice is done. Stir as much as you like. I am a lazy ass, and stir my risotto so infrequently that Italian grandmothers would probably claim it's not even really risotto. However, I have fed this to actual Italians, from Florence even, who made little sex noises upon tasting it. So there.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, pour yourself a glass of the wine. Then chop beets. 3 beets. Maybe chop then drink. Not drink them chop. Spanky was drinking coffee because he's an addict. Also, chop an onion. Fry the onion up, then add the beets, then cover them, drop the heat, and let everything caramelize. If it starts to weld itself to the pan (as it did tonight) throw in a splash of wine and/or apple cider vinegar. While everything cooks, drink and talk about gay cheetahs. Drinking optional.

When the rice is done and the beets are done, mix them together in the beet pan. We then added all the roasted garlic we could lay hands on, which was just under a head, and some nutritional yeast. And toasted walnuts. Yum. We also had salad, mostly for colour contrast. Beet rissoto is yummy, and PURPLE. So much fun.

There was no music. We had the cheetahs and some fairly surreal conversation. Spanky, however, went out on the town dressed as Seymour last night. I think that takes care of the musical component of the weekend.