Hedonia

Black Spanish radish

The problem with being a food blogger is that people assume you know what to do with all kinds of crazy ingredients. The upside is that you occasionally end up with crazy ingredients to figure out what to do with.

Such was the case this past weekend when we inherited a black Spanish radish from her CSA box, along with some kale and bok choy. "If anyone knows what to do with it," she said, "you two would." Why, of course we do.

OK, no we don't, or didn't. Admittedly, at first I was intimidated by this new creature, this charcoal-black, apostrophic, striated monster the size of both fists. But it's just a radish, right?

As a matter of fact, yes, it sort of is. A big, black radish. That it's also evidently Spanish is beside the point. But a quick Googling uncovered a trove of recipes for said radish, from Mariquita Farms, no doubt where this beast came from in the first place.

Where to buy produce

I know, I know. The obvious conclusion to that title is the farmer's market. But the reality is that the farmer's markets in town are profoundly inconvenient for me. When I do get to go to them, it's as a field trip, and excursion, a lark. It's not sustainable for me, pardon the pun.

Luckily, in a place like San Francisco, good fruit and veg is readily available at good markets all over town. No one store satisfies every need, but there are four spots that I frequent most often. Not coincidentally, they form a nearly straight line along a north-south corridor that limns my transportation options.

1. Golden Produce, 172 Church St @ Market
Why anyone would bother to buy one single vegetable at Church Street Safeway when Golden Produce is literally across the street is beyond me. Golden has pretty much everything you need, plus a little more, and a healthy dose of exotic/ethnic produce in there for good measure.

2. Bi-Rite, 3639 18th St btwn Dolores/Guerrero
Sure, you pay dearly for the privelege of shopping there, but Bi-Rite's produce, in particular anything that comes from the owners' family's Balaikan Farms is unbeatable. Local, fresh, ripe and close to the source.

3. Valencia Farmer's Market, 1229 Valencia St @ 24th
Not a farmer's market at all, but a good little hippie dippie market with good produce and a goodly amount of tofu and other health food staples. Excellent fruit here, and often at better prices than other places even within the Mission.

4. Nameless produce market, 1798 Church St @ 30th
I honestly have no idea what the name of this market is, but it never ceases to amaze me. They sport a constantly changing array of fresh produce, sometimes rather boutiquey. A couple of weeks ago I passed by and they had a box full of gorgeous tiny purple artichokes. Last week we found plump Romano beans, and for our anniversary dinner on Friday we got adorable baby zucchini smaller than your pinky. Considering how woeful the market situation is in Noe Valley generally, this place is a pure godsend. Plus, it's close to Drewe's, which makes for one two-stop shopping.

Edit: Just found a receipt. It's called Church Produce. Original.

Dear Safeway

Get bent.

Today was meant to be the one-kajillionth time we've ordered groceries from you. We lovingly selected the items we needed, carefully checking the right options so we didn't get any surprise substitutions that make no sense to the sane and rational home economist. We even chose the one available time slot we could possibly accept, two days nigh: 5-7 pm Wednesday, September 6, which would still necessitate a certain amount of hightailing from the office early.

So why, exactly, did you think it appropriate to call us 30 minutes into the delivery window -- and not, say, anytime during the previous 48 hours -- to alert us that you were unable to find a driver and therefore were simply not going to fulfill your commitment to us, your misguidedly loyal customers?

Your slogan is "Ingredients for life." As you did not deliver the ingredients I so desperately need, do you want me to die? Is this what you want from me, Safeway?

Well that's just too darn bad. I will survive, Safeway, and I will survive without you. Your loss is Whole Foods' gain, and BiRite's, and dozens of other markets. Even Bell. *shudder*

So thanks, Safeway. Thanks for making me realize how little we need you, since you so obviously don't need us.

Stalking the wily tamarind paste

So yesterday I had it in my head -- and once I have something in my head, I will move the heavens and earth to make it so -- to make the always-satisfying Salad of Pain. I've made it a few times before, and it has established itself as a mainstay in our mid-week menus. I've found it to be quick, easy and tasty -- all qualifiers of good weeknight fare.

Now, in the past, I've foregone the tamarind paste because I was too damned lazy to go out and get it. I've just subbed in some lime juice for tartness and astringency. This time, however, I decided to try to stick to the actual recipe, so I was hell bent for leather to find the stuff. A quick consultation with my friend Anita, who cooks a fair amount of Thai food, prompted me to make an excursion to the fabled 99 Ranch.

I've never been to 99 Ranch before. I expected a kaleidoscopic array of magnificently foreign and indecipherable product labels; unidentifiable smells both appetizing and otherwise; and the occasional glance askance at the lone guailo staring with unusual intensity at shelves full of obviously mundane product. I was not disappointed.

The Butterfly Effect, part 1

I've been tagged by Ilva, she of the fabulous Lucullian Delights, on this intriguing meme. Ilva never fails to amaze me with her gorgeous photography and delicious recipes. Of course, I'm a staunch Italophile, and as she's based in Pistoia, Tuscany, she's got my undivided attention.

The meme, The Butterfly Effect, originated at Dan Perlman's Salt Shaker, with the following proposition:

My thought in this meme is food items or events that changed your foodie life. Not some “oh, it’s the first time I didn’t put jelly on a peanut butter sandwich and used bananas instead” sort of change, unless you truly feel that affected you profoundly. That’s the key - it affected you profoundly, in some manner. A moment you can look back at and say “that was a defining moment”. The questions are simple, the answers might be harder - an item, person, event, or place that had that effect on you, and why. They don’t have to be big splashy things - sometimes it’s something very small and simple that changes the way we view the world - the famed “butterfly effect” (and I’m not talking about the Aston Kutcher movie). So, to those who want to participate, copy this and pass it on (and, if you’re so inclined, do a trackback to the originating post). Here are your categories:

1. An ingredient
2. A dish, a recipe
3. A meal (in a restaurant, a home, or elsewhere)
4. A cookbook or other written work
5. A food “personality” (chef, writer, etc.)
6. Another person in your life

Like Ilva, and Tana before her, I will take on this challenge in six separate posts. And to spread the love, I am tagging the following food bloggers to cogitate over the same things: Garrett at Vanilla Garlic, Martha at 2 Tasty Ladies (though she's just left on vacation...), Sam at Becks & Posh (as fodder for her upcoming Blogathon), Adam at Bloghungry and Anni at Life Is a Banquet. I very much look forward to everyone's postings! My first after the jump.

When life gives you lemons...

Conserve them!

My friend Greg, his girlfriend and his brother recently purchased a home one scant block from my place. In their backyard is a glorious, well-established Meyer lemon tree, positively exploding with lemons. For weeks, I procrastinated dropping by to raid it, but finally had the occasion last week. I brought home a healthy bag full of petite and extremely fragrant yellow fruit.

A few went straightaway into an infusion. Knowing from past experience that the pith makes for a very unpalatable infusion, I just barely zested a couple of the lemons into a container, then set about supreming the fruit. As these are seriously tiny things, and the segments are quite thin indeed, it took nearly surgical precision to extract a few fleshy slices of pulp. But the deed is done, and there will hopefully be a small burst of lemony liquor in my near future. (No pic of the infusion -- it's not exacly photogenic right now.)

But the other thing I've been wanting to do with lemons is conserve them. I do like to make Moroccan/North African dishes from time to time, and it is the one ingredient I am always without. You can substitute fresh, but it just doesn't have the same zing. Besides, I think it will make a fabulous addition to nearly any recipe, regardless its provenance.

Pretty much all the research I've done on making conserved lemons says the same thing, but I did find one handy resource that came with photos here. And, so, that is pretty much the recipe I'm going to stick to. This is not instant-gratification food, though; I've got a month ahead of me, and several steps along the way, before I'll get to enjoy these babies. Luckily, I am a patient man.

Chilled melon soup with prosciutto and mint

We had a dinner party last Thursday, and it's taken me some time to pull together my notes and images to get the recipes up from it. But it was a fairly successful meal all around, and I wanted to document at least a couple of notable items.

For this event, I broke the cardinal rule of dinner parties: Every single dish I made I was making for the very first time. That said, I didn't make anything all that complicated and so felt pretty confident that each dish would turn out at least well enough to serve to friends, if maybe not droolingly delicious. I am pretty sure I met at least that goal. Of course, it helps that I cheated on dessert and bought a bunch of pots de crème from Miette.

For the first course, I stole an idea from our recent exceptional meal at Acquerello: Chilled melon soup with prosciutto and mint. At Acquerello, they used galia melon, which was a brilliant green and extremely fragrant. I was unable to find galias, purtroppo, as they are my favorites, and had to resort to cantaloupe. But I think this would work well with any melon as long as it is very fresh, very ripe and very sweet and fragrant.

This is obviously a permutation on the classic Italian appetizer prosciutto e melone. But making it into a chilled soup lends a certain elegance, and the addition of mint adds a pleasant dimension of freshness and added complexity.

The recipe is simplicity itself, though it is slightly more than just pureeing melon. You have to bolster the melon with some supporting flavors lest it taste one-dimensional. A dash of sugar, a pinch of salt and some lime juice and Grand Marnier helped to build a more complex flavor and bouquet while still not getting in the way of the beautiful, ripe melon.

As per usual, the recipe follows after the jump, with the one caveat that measurements are extremely approximate. I did everything to taste, and so should you.

Vodka infusions: Watermelon, part 2

Because my watermelon infusion experiment was predicated on the assumption that the melon's flavor is extremely delicate and easily overpowered by underlying flavors, I began tasting at the three-day mark, fully two days earlier than I normally do with fresh infusions. On that day, all I tasted was vodka and sugar. Days four and five were little changed, and by day six I figured it had gotten to wherever it was going, so I strained.

On the bright side, it tastes nothing at all like cantaloupe (as was my concern). On the other hand, it tastes little like watermelon, either. DPaul insists he can taste watermelon, and I suppose I can, too, but it's certainly ... subtle.

It is a lovely blush color, though, and some of the pulp of the fruit even managed to work its way through the coffee filter, which is unusual. Speaking of the pulp, I of course tasted it post-strain, and the verdict is: Blargh! Rather than firming up the texture, as was the case with the other infusions, the spent watermelon was flabby, like too-old raw beef, and utterly devoid of flavor.

So. We'll see how it fares when chilled. I'm sure it will be lovely in some lemonade or a cosmo or something. This much I know -- I went through the trouble to infuse it, strain it and make a fastidious little label for it, so it's sure as hell going to get drunk. So I guess I know what I'm bringing to July 4 festivities!

Vodka infusions: Watermelon, part 1

Typical of me and DPaul, we managed to skip all the big stuff this past Pride weekend. No parade, no parties ... we even missed Pink Saturday, which we rarely if ever do. It's not that we didn't do our fair share of fun things over the weekend, it's just that most of them didn't involve being surrounded by thousands of drunk gays and lesbians. It did, however, mainly involve being surrounded by just a handful of drunk people at any given time. Oddly enough, come to think of it, we were mainly surrounded by drunk straight people. Hm, whatev.

Anyway, the point is that on the night of Pride proper, we had a few friends over, and I was too damned drunk lazy to make dessert. While at the market, I saw watermelons and thought, perfect!

I'm guessing this year's wacky weather was not so impactful on melons, because the box of watermelons outside Bell was full of gargantuan beasts bigger than basketballs. It wasn't until I got home and checked the receipt that I realized I had just hefted home 15 lbs of fruit. On my shoulder, like a second head. For three blocks. Oy.

It's a good thing I didn't actually *make* dessert, because Jim & Matthew showed up with a box of goodies from Tartine. Well, that beats watermelon any day! Unfortunately, I was left with a fridge full of juicy red fruit. (Which I had to quarter just to get it into the fridge!)

I didn't really get watermelon until about two years ago. I loved all other melons, and it's not that I didn't like watermelon, I just thought of it as the pedestrian filler fruit of the melon world. But then, one summer, I had a few remarkable watermelon preparations and the lightbulb went off. Most memorable was the watermelon sorbet in cucumber soup with pink peppercorns at Aziza, which I promptly recreated for DPaul's birthday that year. Yum.

Now, we have done infusions of several melons in the past, watermelon included. Disappointingly, they all turned out tasting just like cantaloupe. Not that there's anything especially wrong with that. I love cantaloupe. But when you put watermelon in and get cantaloupe back, well, you're disappointed.

This time will be different, I thought. As I have such a monstrous surplus of watermelon, I can be selective, only using the juiciest, reddest, watermeloniest part for infusion. The rest of it, well, more on that later.

So, gentle readers, my hope is that, by using only the choicest bits, I can extract enough pure watermelon essence to overcome the evidently overpowering cantaloupiness that lies within. Stay tuned!

Roasting peppers

Of the many tasks and techniques in the kitchen, roasting peppers is perhaps my favorite.
If I'm going to use peppers of any kind in a recipe, be they bell peppers or chiles, I will almost always roast them first. In the case of bell peppers, especially red peppers, I like the sweetness that develops. With chiles, roasting helps mellow out some of the burn and accentuates the underlying fruity flavors in the pepper. It is, after all, a fruit. It's not that I don't like the bright, forward heat of raw chiles. On the contrary! Very often I will use a combination of raw and roasted to get greater depth of flavor.

Best of all, in both cases, roasting breaks down some of the tough cell walls of the flesh of the pepper, making it more digestible. I find raw peppers to be a little distressing on the system sometimes. (*Urp*)

With chiles, as they tend to be small and roll around a lot, I'll put them on a pan and under the broiler. Bell peppers, being bigger, I usually just do over an open flame on the stovetop. In either case, be sure to roast them well all the way around, until the skin is completely charred, papery and pulling away from the flesh.

Put your roasted peppers in a plastic bag and seal it up, leaving some air in the bag to create a steam oven. Let the peppers rest until cool.

Once cool, peel away the skin (you may want to do this under running water if it's being stubborn). Slice open the peppers, scrape out the seeds and cut away the ribs. The flesh of the pepper should be soft and supple. I usually chop my roasted chiles very finely, almost to a paste.

The chopped chile paste will keep, refrigerated, for several days, and is easy to add to pretty much anything. It lends a gentle burn and vegetal flavor. How easy was that?