In the last couple days, I’ve experienced one of those funny swirls of coincidence that crop up sometimes: we received fava beans in our mystery produce box; before I could cook them, we happened to eat some grilled at a local restaurant; the next day, my email update from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks blog offered a recipe for grilled fava beans.
The universe was telling me to grill fava beans.
However the grill, which turned out to be out of propane, was telling me to do something else with them.
Tony reminded me that roasting is a fine substitute for grilling, so that is what I did. You lose that nice smoky flavor that the grill imbues, but the beans are still incredibly tasty. Almost as important, this method of cooking the beans takes the effort of shucking and peeling the beans out of the kitchen (or wherever you prep your food) and onto the dining room table (or wherever you gather to eat). Prepping raw fava beans can be pretty labor intensive (shucking, blanching, peeling), and while it’s certainly something you can do with your kids, or delegate to them entirely, when my kids do it, they wind up eating all the beans raw and not leaving me any to cook. So this gets the cooking done fast, and then whatever’s left over of the roasted beans can be pureed into a delicious spread or thrown into a salad, a pasta or a risotto.
Preheat the oven to 425. Rinse the fava beans and spread them out on a roasting pan with a generous splash of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and maybe some hot pepper flakes, to taste.
Roast, stirring once, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until they are blistered and tender. Toss them into a bowl and eat. We found them so tender (and the roasted skins so salty and delicious) that we ate them pods and all, but you can also pop the beans out, of course, and just eat those.
Ever since we found a bunch of agretti in our mystery box, I have been wanting, naturally, to make agretti spaghetti. But somehow the stars aligned toward an Asian treatment first: steamed rice, caramelized golden tofu, and blanched agretti tossed with sesame oil and sesame seeds. The saltiness of the agretti complemented the sweet tofu really nicely, and Ben (who is not the kind of picky eater who disdains greens) ate several servings.
Agretti with sesame seeds
Tonight, then, I had my chance to make the happily rhyming agretti spaghetti. I blanched it for a few minutes (if I’d thought of it, I just would have thrown it in the pot with the pasta for the last 3-4 minutes), then tossed it in the pasta with some cannellini beans, olive oil, and grated cheese:
Agretti Spaghetti
For more information about this crisp, salty green, follow this link; if you happen to find agretti at your market, there are some more good-looking recipes over at Kitchen Gadget Girl.
Learning to eat isn’t just for the kids in our house. Recently we’ve taken to picking up a bi-weekly “mystery box” from a local farmer. She comes to the city to make restaurant deliveries, and makes her extra produce available to those who are willing to pick up an unpredictable assortment. The benefit to us is that for $25, we generally wind up with over $50 worth of fabulous fresh vegetables, some of which we have never seen before. So then it’s a little homework for me as I figure out what to do with the bounty. Our recent mystery box included cardoons and agretti; I knew that from the list tucked into our pile, but had to do a quick Google image search to match each vegetable with its name, and then do a little more research to figure out what to do with them.
Cardoons look somewhat like celery:
The various sources I found advised peeling off the tough outer strings and then blanching them; prepping them only took a couple minutes, after which they looked like this:
They taste rather like artichoke — a mild, sweet flavor — so I tossed together a quick pasta with marcona almonds, lemon zest, and olives (green olives would have been prettier, but I didn’t happen to have any):
My picky boys are these days more interested in brand new things than the old familiar foods, so they tried this eagerly, and although they probably wound up eating more of the almonds and olives than the cardoons, I’m calling this a success.
Fruit leather is a bit of a thing in our house. On the one hand, I just don’t see the point. To me, it’s perfectly good fruit to which sugar has been added and plastic has been wrapped around. Why not just eat an apple or a cup of berries? But on the other hand, of course, I truly do see the kid appeal: it’s packable; it doesn’t drip; it’s never unripe and never has funny spots; plus, it’s fun to rip and smoosh and play with.
Years ago, when Ben was a brand-new preschooler, he eyed the snacks the other kids brought in their bags and asked his teacher to write me a note. She wrote:
Mommy and Daddy, I want fruit leather in my lunch. Love, Ben.
But Ben read the note to us a bit differently; he said:
Dear Mommy and Daddy, I hate my lunch! Give me fruit leather in my lunch! Love, Ben.
I learned my lesson.
Now Eli is in fruit leather corner, as he would say (channeling his beloved Pooh), and he asks for one in his lunch box every day, and I provide it, cringing slightly at the plastic but knowing, too, that it’s certainly not the least-green or least unhealthy thing in our lives.
When I had the chance recently to get a deal on a flat of strawberries, and started thinking of all the fabulous strawberry things I could make — tart! shortcake! jam! smoothies! — fruit leather rose to the top of the list, and I found a recipe over on Epicurious. It takes a while, but for the most part it can do its thing while you’re off doing something else.
1 1/2 lb strawberries, halved (4 1/2 cups)
3/4 cup sugar (depending on your berries, you can cut the sugar a bit; remember that the sweetness will concentrate as the fruit is cooked)
Purée strawberries with sugar in a blender until smooth:
Then strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a large heavy saucepan:
This is the most tedious part of the process, so I highly recommend enlisting your kids to do the job; just let them run the wooden spoon around inside the strainer to push the puree through and into the pot.
Bring purée to a boil, then simmer over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally (more frequently toward end), until thick enough to mound slightly and reduced to 1 to 11/4 cups, 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 200°F with rack in middle. Line a large baking sheet with nonstick liner.
Pour hot purée onto liner and spread thinly (as evenly as possible) into a 15- by 10-inch rectangle using an off-set spatula.
Dry purée in oven until it feels drier (it shouldn’t stick to your fingers) but is still slightly tacky, 2 to 3 hours.
Cool on liner on a rack until completely dry, at least 3 hours and up to 24.
Place a sheet of parchment paper over leather, then peel leather off liner and roll up in parchment.
It will keep in a sealed bag at room temperature for a month, but it’s not likely to last that long.
On the one hand, you might think, “Well, of course everybody likes pizza, what’s not to like?” But that means you do not know about the boys who do not care for tomatoes in any form and the one boy who typically only eats one kind of cheese, a particular brand of Monterey jack cheese, in slices, please, not melted. Once you know about those two limitations on our pizza dinner, you might understand why the meal is a triumph.
Plus, because my kids always eat better when they’ve had a hand in the meal production, we generally make the crust and sauces from scratch (I am seriously considering buying the materials to make homemade mozzarella. I’ll let you know when I do.) So pizza dinner here is not exactly a quick meal; it’s more like an art project, so we save it for weekends, start early, and take our time.
First, you make the crust. I’ve tried recipes from a number of sources, including The King Arthur Flour cookbook, Gourmet magazine, the Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza and Calzone cookbook (a recipe that calls, weirdly enough, for milk) and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. This past Sunday’s New York Times magazine has a nice piece on homemade pizza (with a crust recipe I’ll try soon) but my favorite comes from Catherine Newman in Wondertime, whose method I have quoted here:
1 envelope (2 1/4 t) active dry yeast
1 3/4 c warm water
pinch of sugar
3 c all purpose white flour
1 c whole wheat flour
1 T wheat germ
1 T ground flax seed
1 T kosher salt
2 T olive oil
Cornmeal to dust your peel or baking pan
It’s nice (but not necessary) to have a pizza stone to bake in the oven, or a barbecue grill, and a wooden peel or cookie sheet to slide the pizzas onto the stone or grill.
Sprinkle yeast over water in measuring cup, add sugar, and let dissolve for about 5 minutes. If any dry yeast remains on the surface after that, stir briefly to mix in. Proceed with one of the following three methods.
Food processor: Pulse flour with wheat germ and flaxseed, if using, and salt. Add oil to yeast mixture and, with processor running, pour liquid slowly into the feed tube. The dough should cohere and form a ball that sits on top of the blade. If it doesn’t, it’s either too wet or too dry, and you should add water or flour accordingly, a tablespoon at a time, pulsing until the ball forms. Scrape dough (it will be sticky) onto a lightly floured counter, sprinkle with flour, and knead 2 or 3 times to form a ball.
Stand mixer: Pour yeast mixture and oil into bowl of mixer. Using paddle attachment, mix in dry ingredients on low speed (adjust dough with flour or water as directed above if it seems too wet or too dry) then switch to dough hook and knead about 5 minutes, until the dough is smooth and springy.
By hand: Pour yeast mixture into a large bowl with oil, and stir in dry ingredients until the mixture coheres into a mass of dough, about 1 minute. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, then knead, adding as little flour as possible, until dough feels smooth and springy — 8 minutes or so.
Next, whichever method you’ve used, place dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise for about an hour, or until it doubles in size.
Halfway through the rising time, start preheating your oven or grill to 500.
Once the dough has risen, flour your fist and punch down dough, then turn it out onto a lightly floured counter, knead once or twice, and use a sharp knife to cut it into desired number of pieces — 4 for 12-inch pizzas, 8 for 6-inch pizzas, or some combination. Shape each piece into a smooth ball, cover balls loosely with plastic wrap, and let rest for 5 minutes. At this point you can freeze the dough if you like; it also keeps fine in the refrigerator for a few days — just bring to room temperature before using.
Now back to Caroline: Shaping the dough is where it gets fun for the kids, and I have to let mine play with the dough for a few minutes before we get serious about crust. You can let them experiment with braids and snail shapes, and there’s nothing wrong with baking a few of these oddly-shaped breadsticks on the side. Once everyone’s ready to move on, use the heels of your hands or a rolling pin to flatten dough, then hold it down in the middle with one hand while moving the other hand around the edge, pulling it gently outward. If the dough resists or starts to spring back when you let go, let it rest for a few minutes. You can also try holding the dough up and letting gravity pull it down. Pull and stretch until the dough is 1/4 inch (or less) thick. Pinch closed any holes as they develop. Don’t worry if the dough isn’t perfectly even or perfectly round; it’s going to taste terrific no matter what it looks like.
Once the dough is shaped, transfer it onto a wooden pizza peel or cookie sheet that has been dusted with cornmeal (if you’re using a pizza stone or grill) or onto a pan that has been brushed with olive oil, then sprinkled with 2 tablespoons cornmeal. If you’re grilling the pizza, you need to bake the pizza crust before topping it:
Just slide the dough onto the grill (it won’t seep through the grates, nor will it stick if the grill is good and hot), and bake (with the lid of the grill open) until browned on the bottom. Slide off the grill, flip, and top the baked side. If you’re baking the pizza in the oven, you don’t need to take this extra step; just slide the topped pizza into the oven and bake 15 minutes or so until browned and bubbly.
We top our pizzas with pesto, tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, sauteed mushrooms and caramelized onions. In the summer, we top dessert pizzas with cinnamon and brown sugar and sliced peaches; sliced bananas would work nicely, too. There’s no bad pizza topping in my book, really, go ahead and experiment. If you’re barbecuing the pizzas, close the grill when you bake the topped pizzas:
The finished product:
And then add a salad and you’ve got a beautiful family supper.
In the last couple days, I’ve experienced one of those funny swirls of coincidence that crop up sometimes: we received fava beans in our mystery produce box; before I could cook them, we happened to eat some grilled at a local restaurant; the next day, my email update from Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks blog offered a recipe for grilled fava beans.
