Just this, and a knife

I've been eating chicken and dumplings all week, and as much as I would like to share that recipe with you in all its warm comforting goodness on a day when temperatures are rapidly approaching single digits, I don't think it's a good idea. After all, it was a four hour endeavor that involved much prep work chopping celery, carrots, onions, and garlic, boiling a whole chicken, straining the stock, shredding the chicken, browning the flour and then thickening the stock into a gravy, mixing dumpling dough and cooking the dumplings on the simmering surface of the stewing chicken. Or maybe I'm just slow.

Rest assured, it was good and maybe I'll make it again some day when the memory of it's production fades, much like I imagine the memory of giving birth must fade because indeed the population of the world continues to grow.

Instead, I'll tell you about something much easier to make, and the main thing you need for it is a mandoline slicer. No need for stockpots or whisks or strainers. Just this, and a knife.


Take your knife and hack the base and the fronds off a fennel bulb, so that all you're left with is the bulb. Then, remembering my rule for all good produce, take a whiff of the bulb. If you're totally repulsed by the anise-like smell, you may not enjoy this dish so much, but don't be deterred. Shaved thin, fennel is just another crunchy base for a salad, not an assertive root vegetable. So shave that fennel with your mandoline slicer, until you get a pile of feathery, light flakes. Do the same thing with several crimini mushrooms. Now place half of the fennel on a plate, add a layer of a mushroom, and shave some good parmigiano-reggiano on top of that. Repeat the layers of fennel, mushroom, and parm, then drizzle on a healthy, fruity olive oil, squeeze some lemon juice on, and get your pepper mill going to grind some fresh cracked pepper over it all.

Believe it or not, I ate nearly this entire plate, and by the time I was finished I had forgotten all about my long labor pains with the chicken and dumplings. Which means that by next week, I'll be embarking on another four hour dish.


Fennel and Mushroom Salad
I've read about this salad on Orangette, but it's originally from the Joy of Cooking so I'll give their recipe here with the suggested dressing. But I highly recommend the simple combination of good olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice and pepper. I also happened to have some lemon grapeseed oil (oh the things you'll find in my cabinets) so I sprinkled that on too. It says 6 to 8 servings in the Joy but I used half the mushrooms and got two to three servings from one fennel bulb.

Dressing:
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1/2 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon
salt and pepper to taste

Salad:
8 ounces cremini (baby portabella) mushrooms, wiped clean and thinly sliced
1 fennel bulb, thinly sliced
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
salt to taste
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese shavings (recommend you get a good parmigiano-reggiano)

Whisk together the dressing. Toss together the salad ingredients through the salt. Pour the dressing over the salad and top with cheese shavings. Or layer it the way I did, and get good chunks of cheese throughout the whole salad.

Not Once But Twice

I'm so excited because the market near me sells lemongrass.



Yes, it does look like a funny, long stalk of grass. It's kind of thin and dirty and if I didn't know better, I would have walked right by it. I would be wondering if it was meant to be part of some sort of flower arrangement decor, maybe set in a round bubble vase in a base of marbles.

It would be lovely like that, but such a waste. You'll understand when you cut and crush your first stalk of lemongrass. Trim the base and bulb, and slice the stalk in half. Then hold one of those halves up to your nose and inhale. (I insist on this with corn cobs too - it makes it worth the trouble.) You'll get a clean scent of lemon from what looks like a weed. It's like cracking open a piece of coal to discover a diamond, or finding out that the quiet guy has a clever wit.

Lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves are the two components of authentic Thai food that are difficult to find. The lime leaves have still eluded me, though like vanilla beans, they are easily available on the internet. But with lemongrass in hand, I made a Thai hot and sour soup not once but twice this week. Usually I hate eating the same thing every night but the soup was spiced up with habanero chili, tangy with lemongrass and lime zest and juice, and chock full of mushrooms and shrimp and tomatoes. It tasted as good as any hole-in-the-wall restaurant's hold up the bowl to your mouth and suck it down soup. It's a light soup, only 135 calories per serving, but you can always put more coconut milk in it if you miss the creaminess. The flavor is there either way. Cooking Light recommends it with some sauteed snow peas, but for a heartier accompaniment, I found that a Thai beef salad was perfect.





Thai Hot and Sour Soup (Cooking Light)
(4 2-cup servings)

• 6 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
• 4 kaffir lime leaves or three strips of lime zest
  
• 1 (4-inch) lemongrass stalk, halved and crushed
• 1/2 habanero chile pepper, minced
• 1 cup thinly sliced shiitake mushrooms (about 2 ounces)
• 1/2 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined
• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 2 teaspoons fish sauce
• 1 medium tomato, cut into wedges
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced (about 1/2 cup)
• 1 cup light coconut milk
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

Combine chicken broth, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, and habanero in a large saucepan; bring to a boil. Cook 5 minutes. Add mushrooms and shrimp to pan; cook 3 minutes or until shrimp are done. Add juice, fish sauce, tomato, and onions to pan; cook 2 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in coconut milk and cilantro. Discard lemongrass stalk and lime leaves or zest strips.

Adopted

Today I sat down with my veggies and we had a little talk. I had to explain to them, my sweet baby portabella and baby bok choy, that they were adopted. The news came as a bit of a shock. They knew I was apt to take recipes from anywhere and adopt them as my own. I'd make minor changes in those recipes and prepare them for guests and send those guests away talking about my chocolate espresso cookies (Gourmet) or my chicken tagine (Cooking Light) or my bean dip (Mas). But baby portabella and baby bok choy had no idea that they had been adopted too, even though their seasonings were of an East Asian descent.

I get recipes from so many different sources, I can hardly claim any of them as my own. But when you buy the chicken, trim the fat, season and brown the meat, and add a myriad of ingredients and set it bubbling on the stove for a good long time, when you turn out a dish with flavors that surprise and please your guests, it's like you've adopted that little recipe and raised it to its greatest potential. And sometimes when you can't develop your own recipes easily, or aren't very good at it, adoption is the perfect alternative.

Ultimately my babies accepted the news and went on to provide a great side dish for a steak. For this dish, I've taken the sauce from a Cooking Light recipe for tofu and green onions and poured it on my baby bok choy and sliced baby portabella mushrooms after sauteeing them. The sauce is tangy, with an Asian flair, and pretty easy to whisk up. I imagine it's versatile too, and can be used for dipping potstickers or drizzled over rice. Just be sure to have that talk with whoever you adopt into your family, and your guests will never know.


Baby Portabellas and Baby Bok Choy with Korean Inspired Sauce
(4 side dish servings)

2 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 tablespoons rice wine
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tsp dark sesame oil
1/8 tsp of kosher salt
1/8 tsp of red pepper
8 heads of baby bok choy, with the bottoms chopped off.
12 baby portabella mushrooms, washed and sliced thinly

canola oil
additional salt and pepper to taste

Whisk together rice vinegar, rice wine, soy sauce, sesame oil, kosher salt, and red pepper in a bowl.
Prepare the bok choy and mushrooms. Cut the bottoms off the baby bok choy. The baby bok choy will be more tender than regular bok choy, so you can retain the majority of the vegetable. If using regular bok choy, use only the green portion. Slice the mushrooms thinly with a knife or mandoline. Add oil to a pan heated on medium-high. Add mushrooms to the pan, saute until starting to brown. Add baby bok choy and saute just until wilted. Remove from heat and pour sauce over vegetables. Stir and season with additional salt and pepper as desired.

Vanilla Beans

I need to talk to you about vanilla beans. I've been meaning to sit down and have a conversation with you about vanilla beans for quite some time. Because far too many recipes call for vanilla beans, and they're just not that easy to come by.

In the supermarket, or in specialty grocery stores, you can find a single vanilla bean in a glass jar for a price ranging from $10 to the value of your first born child. So you give up hope of ever making that vanilla bean ice cream, panna cotta, rice pudding, or cookie. Or you substitute vanilla extract, and it tastes fake and no longer homemade. What's the point?

I'm here to tell you that you can buy vanilla beans online, and it's not a scam. I found a pack of ten beans for $15 including shipping on beanilla.com. They have beans from all over - India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico. Whatever the difference might be, they are a deal. Here's the package I received, after I eagerly pulled out a bean to confirm that it was in fact the real thing:


Maybe you've never used a real vanilla bean. It's oily, long, flat, with a texture like thin leather. When you run a knife down its side, little beans explode from within and stain your fingers black. You scrape those little black specks into your ice cream base or custard or cookie dough and they are sticky and smell a little funky. Then you drop that whole oily bean into the cream and simmer it for half an hour, until the cream is infused with vanilla flavor and beautifully speckled. It's a bit of a process to use them, but you'll never get a flavor like that from extract.



Vanilla Bean Ice Cream
yield: 1 pint

1 vanilla bean
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup milk
3/8 cup sugar
1 egg yolk

Using the pointed tip of a sharp knife, split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape the tiny black seeds into a heavy medium saucepan. Add the vanilla bean pod, cream, and milk and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove from heat, cover, and let stand 30 minutes at room temperature to blend flavors.

Add the sugar and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is hot, 6 to 8 minutes.

Whisk the egg yolk in a medium bowl. Gradually whisk in about 1/2 cup of the warm vanilla cream. Return the egg mixture to the saucepan, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook, stirring, until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon (at least 160 degrees F on a candy thermometer), 5 to 10 minutes. Do not boil or egg yolk will curdle.

Strain the custard into a bowl, pressing through as many of the vanilla seeds as you can. Remove the vanilla bean pod from the strainer and add to the custard for flavor. Partially cover and let cool 1 hour at room temperature. Refrigerate, covered, until very cold, at least 6 hours or as long as 3 days.

Discard the vanilla bean pod. Pour the custard into the canister of an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's directions. Transfer to a covered container and freeze at least 3 hours.