BostonZest

Fennel and Pickled Onion Salad: Quick, Easy, and Delicious!

When we have hot weather, you can be pretty sure we'll be eating cool food. Something like this fennel and pickled onion salad is perfect. It's easy to make, refreshing, and healthy.

On the last day of a recent heatwave, Penny found a bulb of fennel in our crisper drawer. She had a jar of red onion pickled in apple cider vinegar, salt, and sugar. (This was the remainder of a red onion she used to make our favorite version of gazpacho on the first hot day.) 

She cut the fennel into thin slices, added a bit of scallion for color, and drizzled the pickled onion and some of the pickling liquid onto the fennel. Then it just took a few dollops of olive oil and a few grinds of black pepper to have this salad on our table.

This batch of pickled onion developed a pretty pink hue that really looked great on the plate. We've had batches that have had a much deeper tone like the one above. 

We're already thinking up items to add to this dish for some variety. Penny wished she had a tart apple like a Granny Smith today, so the next time we have it, thin slices of apple may make an appearance. 

Here are a couple more of our pickled onion posts:

It's Great to Have Pickled Red Onion on Hand. My Two-Ingredient Method and Tips for Enjoying Your Treasure

A Follow-Up on Our Pickled Red Onion Post

 

What's on your Food Lover's Shopping List?

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2017 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

Fig, Arugula & Goat Cheese Salad

Occasionally, Penny will follow a recipe from a new cookbook to the letter, to be sure her results are the same as the author. It's a good way to test the reliability of the instructions. But, sometimes, there is no way for us to enjoy the recipe as written because of an allergy to an ingredient or because we would have to shop for a few items before we could try it. 

This fig and arugula salad is a good example. Penny spotted figs in the grocery store and remembered a recipe she had marked in Naturally Nourished: Healthy, Delicious Meals Made with Everyday Ingredients by Sarah Britton.

Sarah's recipe was dressed with a toasted walnut sauce which would not work with one of our allergies. But the combo of arugula and figs was certainly worth exploring.

We had an open package of goat cheese that was waiting to be used, so some of that was sprinkled around the figs and greens. For a dressing Penny made a raspberry vinaigrette. (That was made with a local organic gem, Silferleaf Farm Raspberry Infusion Sweet Vinegar.)

This salad was not just delicious, it was spectacular! What's more, it will become a model for salads that can keep us eating healthy all summer long. We'll combine one tangy seasonal green with one ripe and luscious fruit and some dabs of creamy cheese and top with a dressing that will bring out the best in that combination.

 

What's on your Food Lover's Shopping List?

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2017 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

Related articles

Bun Thit Nuong: A Fresh, Cool Summer Dish from Vietnam

Healthy Alternatives for July 4th Cookouts, Pot Lucks, or Picnics

Cool Asian Salad for Spring and Summer

This cool Asian style salad is perfect for the warmer days of spring and summer. It started out with Penny searching the refrigerator to figure out what to serve with some chicken breasts that had been sous vided with garlic, ginger, scallion, and a touch of toasted sesame oil. 

She found napa cabbage, carrot, cucumber, scallions, radishes and pickled ginger. The herb vase on the kitchen counter had Thai basil, mint, parsley, and flowering chives. Since we both love Bun Thit Nuong, that was her inspiration.

She decided to julienne the vegetables to take the place of the noodles and make a dressing with the same flavor profile as the chicken. That had seasoned rice vinegar, avocado oil, finely sliced pickled ginger, and a touch of toasted sesame oil. The chive flowers were sprinkled on top for color and fun.

        

Since this was just a salad for two, Penny used her Kuhn Rikon Julienne Peeler to shred a carrot and cucumber. If she were making it for a crowd, she might have taken out a mandoline or used our food processor. The cabbage, radishes, and scallions were sliced thin with a new Wusthof Nakiri knife that we bought on vacation this year.

 

We both love it and are slowly learning the chopping technique that works best with this style of knife.

This made a great lunch! 

Related Post:

Bun Thit Nuong: A Fresh, Cool Summer Dish from Vietnam

What's on your Food Lover's shopping list?

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2017 Penny Cherubino 

Related articles

Healthy Alternatives for July 4th Cookouts, Pot Lucks, or Picnics

Simple Spring Supper: Asparagus & Eggs

Minestrone: a Soup for All Seasons

When was your last bowl of hearty, delicious, nutritious minestrone? This classic but adaptable vegetable soup seems to have slipped off menus and off the radar of home cooks like me. Yet, it deserves to be rediscovered, explored, and adapted for today’s food lovers.

Jacqueline Church’s pot of minestrone is not only delicious, nutritious, filling, and economical, it’s also vegan. A soup for all eaters! (photo credit: Jacqueline Church)

Great Minds …

Food writer Rachel Roddy featured minestrone in one of her recent columns for the Guardian. She wrote that minestrone, “... sums up the Italian knack for taking the most basic and economic ingredients and bringing them together in a delicious way.” She referred to her trusted Italian food experts, like Marcella Hazan, when writing about all the regional and seasonal variations on this pot of goodness.

 

Roddy's book My Kitchen in Rome: Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking is one of my favorite cookbooks from the past year.

From my own bookshelf, I reached for Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s “The Italian Country Table” and found a summer minestrone that she says should be served at room temperature. This was followed by her more traditional recipe for the soup with serving variations and a brilliant two-page spread of tips for perfecting your own pot of vegetables and broth.  

"Eating Down the Fridge’ Meal ..."

A few days later, Jacqueline Church, culinary instructor at Brookline Adult & Community Education and private cooking coach, posted a photo of a steaming pot of vegan minestrone on her Facebook feed. Since I always seem to learn something new from this food educator, I asked her what she loves about this soup.

Her answer was, “It's perfect for an ‘eating down the fridge’ meal, key ingredients can be kept on hand in the pantry: box or can of beans, dried porcini, handful of pasta, can or box of tomatoes. In the fridge, we almost always have carrots, celery, onion. Add a bit of cabbage languishing in the bin, some seasonal squash (zucchini in the summer, butternut in the winter) a few potatoes. With kidney beans and porcini you've got umami (strain the soaking liquid and add that) so the whole thing can be customized to what you have on hand. Hearty and satisfying, it may be the ultimate comfort food!”

   

Finally, one of the chilly days we spent in Provincetown recently was warmed by a "Spring Minestrone" with chard, peas, carrots, and chicken from the wonderful food team at The Canteen.

Learning Experience

This is also an excellent soup for cooks to learn basic skills. Roddy writes, “Minestrone is made with a staggered march into the pan. By adding the ingredients gradually you lay down foundations of flavour, one thing sizzling gently while you chop the next. Once everything is in the pan – including the marvellous, umami parmesan rind if you have one – let everything simmer, slowly, until the flavours have come together.”

The Italians call this process, “insaporire” which sort of translates to “making tasty.” Marcella Hazan describes it as drawing out the flavor of an ingredient or set of ingredients before adding the next one. It’s like sweating onions, celery, and carrots in oil before adding broth or meat.

Big Soup!

Perhaps restaurants found that if customers ordered a bowl of minestrone, they filled up on it and didn’t order much food to follow. In Italian the word for soup is minestra. The suffix “-one” adds the concept of “big.” Therefore minestrone means big soup.

But that doesn't mean it has to be a heavy, wintertime soup. Perhaps this is the time of year for a green minestrone. I found Joanne Weir’s recipe for that in Food and Wine. She uses many of the first green vegetables we find at the farmers markets. It has leeks, fennel, peas, asparagus, Swiss chard, and mint with just a shaving of Parmesan on top.

Buon Appetito!

 

What's on your Food Lover's shopping list?

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2017 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

(Adapted for BostonZest from one of our Fresh & Local newspaper columns.)

 

 

Another Way to Explore History, Follow a Historic Recipe for Bread Pudding

For our Friday Link today, we're sending you over to the Massachusetts Historical Society's blog as they follow a recipe for bread pudding that was found in their collection.

Now you know we love bread pudding, so this caught our attention. 

Bread Pudding: an experiment with Mary Channing Eustis’ recipe book

If you've ever read an early cookbook, you'll see that measurements, as we know them today, were scarce. At least this one called for weights of some ingredients. 

While you're there visiting this page, take a look at this blog. You may find that you'll want to add this organization's social media updates to your own collection. 

Here's a link to the blog's main page. We get updates on our RSS feed.

Here's their facebook page.

And, their twitter feed.

 

Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Screenshots: Courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society.

Sous Vide Chicken Gremolata

We finally broke down and added a Joule Sous Vide immersion circulator to our kitchen equipment. Penny did the reading and checked in with some of her more modernist cooking connections to be sure this one was the right one for a beginner at the method. 

You can see the juice seeping from this boneless chicken breast that was vacuum sealed and cooked for 55 minutes in a 149-degree water bath. 

Gremolata Flavor Component

Penny made a batch of gremolata by chopping together lemon zest, garlic, and parsley until finely minced. (If you would like a real recipe, try this one from Epicurious.)  

The chicken breasts were patted dry, rubbed with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, then sprinkled with the gremolata and vacuum sealed. After their bags had spent the prescribed time in the sous vide bath, the breasts were patted dry again and quickly seared in a blazing hot cast iron skillet to add some color and caramelized flavor. 

Since the garlic was still in an almost raw state after the low-temperature cooking, it didn't burn during the very quick searing process. 

Simple chicken breasts were the first thing we tried after our new Joule arrived. They just had olive oil, salt and pepper. We seared one to have for supper and used the unseared, white meat for a great, moist chicken salad the next day.

With simple cooking methods, you want to showcase the product, so for the first batch Penny bought Bell & Evens chicken. We both agreed it was one of the best "poached style" chicken breasts we had ever made. The batch shown above was made with Halal chicken. 

What's on your Food Lover's Shopping List?

  

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2016 Penny & Ed Cherubino 

Related articles

Healthy Alternatives for July 4th Cookouts, Pot Lucks, or Picnics

Simple Spring Supper: Asparagus & Eggs

Mastering Hamersley's Roast Chicken Recipe

What to do When the Recipe Calls for a Tablespoon of Tomato Paste

As a test run for my new Instant Pot, I decided to make this recipe from The Kitchn for Chicken Tikka Masala. Like many recipes that use tomato paste to add depth of flavor, it calls for 2 tablespoons out of the can.

When this happens in our kitchen, we freeze the rest and have one tablespoon dollops ready for the next recipe where it is needed. Here's how Penny does it.

She preps a quarter sheet pan by covering it in a double layer of parchment paper and readies a freezer bag to hold the final product.

She measures one tablespoon portions of the tomato paste using a small rubber spatula as her tool of choice and places them on the parchment.

We pop the sheet pan into the freezer until the tomato paste is frozen.

Finally, she snuggles the dollops closer together, wraps them with the parchment, and tucks the package into their freezer bag. 

The next time we feel like a bit of Tikka, we'll pop out 2 tablespoons as we gather our mise en place.

Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2016 Penny & Ed Cherubino