Scapes, all a-tangle
With my children finishing school this week, and my daughter participating in her first ballet recital, it’s been a less-than-optimal week for cooking. Maybe that’s why I decided I had to cook this Friday, and had to cook as entirely local a meal as I could muster. I had short ribs in the freezer from the quarter steer I bought last fall, turnips and collards from the CSA, arugula pesto frozen and waiting to top a pizza-like flatbread…nearly everything I needed for a simple and delicious meal for a cool and rainy night.
I made a double batch of my favorite pizza dough, which is in the (yellow) Gourmet cookbook. I stretched it thin, drizzled with my olive oil of the moment, spread with 4 T of that arugula pesto, and topped with a sifting of freshly grated parm. Note to local cooks: I used some organic AP flour I bought earlier in the day at Hawthorne Valley Farm Store, and its texture was wholly different than the King Arther AP I usually use. As a result, the dough was so tender I had to bake it on a pan instead of assembling it on a peel and sliding it off onto the pizza stone, as I usually do. The result was more super-crisp flatbread than pizza, but it was still a perfect cruncy, savory bite with drinks before dinner.
For the short ribs, I used a recipe adapted from Daniel Boulud that is in the new Gourmet Today cookbook. The recipe is available online here; I adapted it slightly, using canned plum tomatoes. I also baked it in the oven instead of cooking it on top of the stove, and added some beef stock because the pan got too dry. I made it ahead of time, removing meat and vegetables from the sauce to cool, and chilling the sauce to defat it more thoroughly. I then reheated everything together at serving time.
Alongside, I served a mix of turnip, collard and beet greens (these were bulls blood beet greens from my own garden.) I trimmed the stems out of the collards, blanched each green separately in boiling water for a minute or two, then chilled them all down and chopped them coarsely. At dinner time, I heated a couple of tablespoons of fragrant olive oil in a sauté pan, added 4 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped, and after the garlic became fragrant, dumped in the (well-drained) greens. I tossed them around in the pan over medium high heat for about ten minutes, until they were tender and fully flavored. They needed salting, and I should have added a pinch or two of peperoncini for flavor–that would have made a good dish better.
Finally, the turnips, which were my favorite. For these, I adapted a recipe from one of my other go-to cookbooks, Sunday Suppers at Lucques by Suzanne Goin. (This is my turn-to-every-time dinner party cookbook.) I warmed 2 T olive oil in a pan, and then added the turnips, which I had trimmed, leaving about 1/4 inch of stem atop, then halved or quartered, depending upon their size, so that I had more or less uniform pieces. I tossed them over high heat in the olive oil until they started to turn a nice, pale caramel color, then added 2 T of unsalted butter. I kept tossing and stirring over the high heat until they were fragrant and uniformly caramlized. The whole cooking process took less than ten minutes. To serve, I tossed them with a gremolata made from the zest of one (organic) lemon, 1 large clove of garlic, and 1/3 cup of flat leaf parsley (also from my garden) all finely chopped together. As with the greens, I found these needed a bit of salt (but then, I’m a salt freak.)
Today, come hell or high water (a distinct possibility, with the driving rain we’ve had the last two days) I’m making that scape pesto. At dinner at a friend’s last night, I was gifted with yet another bunch of scapes (these seem like one of the Alienating Vegetables that plague CSA members) that my friend couldn’t figure out how to use happily. I’ve promised to drop off pesto if it’s successful. (A similar plan involving chicken livers turned into paté was very well received by a chicken-farming friend last summer.)
Keep cooking.
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