Straddling seasons: Pot roast and fresh asparagus

Cooking for the calendar, this weekend saw some beautifully skinny fresh asparagus, simply prepared. Cooking for the actual weather, though, called for a hearty pot roast. Recipes below.

Before we get to the food, a quick little digression about blogging.
When I started Blue Kitchen a year and change ago, I knew it would be a way to indulge my passions for food, photography and writing. I also knew it would make me think more about food and cooking, ultimately making me a better cook. What I didn’t know is what a wonderful international network of warm, sharing friends and fellow bloggers I’d be plugging into.

This kind of welcoming environment isn’t necessarily unique to food blogging, but it seems to be more prevalent here than elsewhere. Interestingly, according to a food blogger who specializes in restaurant reviews, it’s mainly found among bloggers who write about making food, not critiquing it. My friend Ronnie writes two blogs, the wonderfully eclectic Out Of My Head and the advice-filled Work Coach. She also reads a wide range of blogs and says she hasn’t found this kind of community anywhere else.

The latest example of this comes from Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry. She was just given the E for Excellent Award—by four different bloggers, no less. She then took a turn, passing the award along to five other blogs. Including this one. Thanks so much, Lydia! I learn something new every time I read your blog, so it means a lot that you thought of me.

And now my turn. The easiest thing would be to award it to everyone in my blogroll. They’re all wonderful sources of information and great reads to boot. But I’ll try to narrow it down to five. And I’m sticking with food blogs, just because [we food bloggers are a clannish lot]. Just as Lydia was in her choices, I’m every bit as swayed by entertaining writing as I am by good food. Maybe even more so. These bloggers deliver, post after post. Every one of them has made me think—and made me a better cook in the process:

Ann, at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart; Christina, at A Thinking Stomach; Jennifer, at Last Night’s Dinner; Patricia, at Technicolor Kitchen and Toni, at Daily Bread Journal.

Okay, back to the kitchen. Here in Chicago, the calendar says spring [yeah, it says that everywhere north of the Equator, I know]. The thermometer takes a different view, often dipping below freezing. In fact, the tulips you see here were an impulse purchase, something to remind us that it is indeed spring. So when we were planning one of those Sunday dinners we don’t do enough of, I decided to split the difference. For the calendar, I made fresh asparagus, suddenly plentiful and affordable again. And for the chilly weather, I made a satisfying pot roast, complete with chunky vegetables. Let’s start with that.

I’ve been on an oven braising kick lately. Soon the weather will heat up and I won’t want to do the same to the kitchen. But for now, it’s a great way to let tough cuts of meat like chuck roast get all nice and tender without drying out. You’ll find more about the technique here. My other pot roast recipe in the archives is a more exotic take on this humble, hearty meal, made with Biryani Curry Paste and pan roasted on the stovetop. I call it Terry’s Mysterious Pot Roast. You can use the stovetop technique for the more traditional recipe below, but honestly, oven braising will keep it more moist.

Rosemary Potatoes: Little spuds, big taste

A mix of fingerling and petite new potatoes adds more than just visual interest to Roasted Fingerling Potatoes with Rosemary; each variety has a distinctive flavor as well. Recipe below.

Recent oven-braising adventures aside, I’m pretty much a stovetop kind of guy. Give me a pan and a flame, and the kitchen is open for business. So I’m just as surprised as you are that roasting the potatoes above led to making an entire dinner in the oven. And I’m not talking a one-pot wonder here—I roasted three separate dishes. Also being a keep-it-simple kind of guy, I can’t for the life of me say why I don’t do this more often. Everything was brainlessly easy, and dinner was delicious—better than it had any right to be, given the simplicity.

So how did I get started with the potatoes that snowballed into a stovetop-free dinner? I blame Daylight Savings Time. This twice-a-year ritual of moving our clocks backward or forward an hour has overstayed its welcome, as far as I’m concerned. And the Wall Street Journal recently reported on a study that shows that, even though Congress extended Daylight Savings Time by three weeks in 2005 expressly to conserve energy, it actually wastes energy.

It certainly wastes mine. My life is one long sleep deprivation experiment to begin with, so losing an hour of sleep is the last thing I need. My plan for Sunday had been to get over my fear of pie crust and bake something for Alanna’s Pi Day Event over at Kitchen Parade.

When I woke up even an hour earlier than way too early Sunday morning, my first thought was that baking a pie was not going to happen. My second thought was, “Great. Now what do I do for my post?”

The age-old question of “What’s for dinner?” that home cooks stare down every day gets ramped up considerably for food bloggers. You can’t just trot out one of your old reliables you’ve made a thousand times—it has to be something new. Preferably something photogenic and preferably something you’re not only happy to eat, but you’re okay with admitting you cooked.

Staring bleakly at the computer screen Sunday morning, I was cruising food blogs and checking the latest comments on my own, gearing up for a possibly long search for a food idea that would fit those criteria. Inspiration came quickly and unexpectedly, in the form of eight simple words tucked inside a comment on my pâté post, by Kelly-Jane over at Cooking The Books: “I only use duck fat for roasting potatoes.”

Even inspiration does not handle Daylight Savings time well. My first thought was basic—feral, even: “Want potatoes.” Gradually, almost reluctantly, another thought formed: “Hey! I have duck fat!” [I'd frozen some left over from last week's pâté adventure.] You could almost hear static and the grinding of gears in my head as those two thoughts came together and synapses finally fired and I realized I’d found the basis for my post.

Once I got going, though, I started thinking where else I could take it. One thought was roasting a mix of vegetables: potatoes, carrots and big chunks of onions, perhaps. But remembering the amazing duck fat fries we’d recently had at Hot Doug’s, I came back to just potatoes. And as I started researching roasted potatoes, two elements kept coming up in recipe after recipe: rosemary and garlic. The rosemary sounded like a great idea, but as much as I love garlic, I didn’t want it overpowering whatever the duck fat was going to bring to the party.

Regarding the duck fat, by the way, if you don’t have it or are less than interested in tracking some down, you can substitute olive oil—see the Kitchen Notes. You can also substitute red or Yukon Gold potatoes for the mix of fingerling and baby potatoes. Again with the Kitchen Notes.

Now back to “What’s for dinner?” Once I’d decided on the potatoes and was on my way to the store, I settled on roasted chicken thighs for the main course and maybe a salad. Then I saw the fresh asparagus. Beautiful, slender, little spears. I could quickly steam them at the last minute. Orrrrr… I could roast them too. Perfect. I mapped out the oven real estate in my head [there was even room for Marion to roast a couple of beets for a later use] and decided on a temperature that would work with everything and went to work.

Mushrooms: In praise of the basic button

After weeks of meat and fish, it’s time for vegetables to take center stage with another in the series of A Little Something on the Side.

We all remember the rotary phone, right? Before the advent of the touchtone phone, though, the retroactively dubbed rotary phone was just “the phone.”

And not so long ago in most American supermarkets and kitchens, humble button mushrooms were just mushrooms. Unless you were one of those people who trekked out into the woods collecting wild mushrooms [and in doing so, inspiring countless articles about the deadly dangers of toadstools], button mushrooms were pretty much the only game in town.

Now, between fresh and dried varieties, we have an embarrassment of mushroom riches at our fingertips. The portobello, once exotic and hard to find, is now almost boringly available in most stores. Shiitake, crimini, oyster, porcini, chanterelle, morel and a dazzling array of other fungi are increasingly finding their way onto store shelves and into our culinary hearts. Just this past weekend, I found enoki mushrooms, those slender, almost alien-being looking Japanese beauties, shrink-wrapped and sharing shelf space with portobello caps and pre-sliced “baby bellas” [they're just crimini mushrooms, people---don't get all wound up] in my neighborhood grocery store.

With competition like this, it’s easy for dependable old button mushrooms to get kicked to the curb, to be seen as somehow less wonderful than their more exotic, more expensive brethren.

Not so fast. Turns out button mushrooms have plenty going on, especially in the health department. According to a recent article in ScienceDaily [sent to me by fellow Internet magpie Carolyn---the magpie motto: "Ooooh, here's another shiny link!"], “The humble white button mushroom [Agaricus bisporus] has as much, and in some cases, more anti-oxidant properties than more expensive varieties.” Who knew? For that matter, who knew that mushrooms even contained antioxidants, let alone that button mushrooms were particularly rich in them?

Which reminds me of a commentary I heard on American Public Media’s Marketplace last week. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, says that despite the growing cacophony of health claims from processed, packaged foods, the healthiest foods are still to be found in the produce section. “In fact,” Pollan states, “The more processed the food, the less nutritious it typically is. Yet it’s the processed food makers who have the marketing budgets to do the research to support the health claims and then shout them from the rooftops.” So we sometimes forget that “the hands-down healthiest foods in the supermarket are the unprocessed vegetables and fruits and whole grains. These foods sit silently in the produce section or the bulk-food bins. They don’t utter a word about their antioxidants or heart-healthiness, while just a few aisles over the sugary cereals scream about their heart-healthy ‘whole grain goodness.’”

So button mushrooms are healthy. What about taste? Now see, here’s the great thing about mushrooms—they are flavor sponges. In fact, you have to store them carefully so they don’t soak up flavors from your fridge [see Kitchen Notes for storage tips]. So while the more esoteric mushrooms offer delicious variations on the unmistakable earthy theme that make them absolutely worth exploring, button mushrooms, when combined with the right ingredients, can do some pretty amazing things too.

In the quick, simple recipes below, butter and salt combine first with garlic and parsley, then with port, to make the humble button heavenly.

Cabbage, wine and a not-so-bad apple

Also this week in Blue Kitchen:
Eating California. A quick look at some of the great food we ate on our recent trip down the Pacific Coast Highway.
Music to go. Sharing our favorite driving music—what do you like to listen to in the car?

A few days ago, I got to thinking about apples. Specifically about how they don’t do much for me. For whatever reason, they never have—especially in their raw, most apple-y state. I don’t think it’s a problem with apples themselves—it’s probably more of a character flaw on my part. Certainly in the store, they are alluring. So many varieties and colors stacked high in dazzling displays of autumnal plenty. And that satisfyingly distinctive, crisp crunch of biting into an apple promises so much. But that’s where it ends for me. Then I’m left with nothing more than a mouthful of, well, apple.

But then I got to thinking that perhaps incorporating them into something savory and cooked might tame their tart sweetness and turn it into a positive note in a dish for me.

Of course, once something pops up on your radar screen, you start spotting it everywhere. Most notably, Aimee over at Under The High Chair posted a russet apple and gouda grilled cheese sandwich that looked so delicious I was ready to devour it on the spot, raw apple slices and all. I also thought that some crisp, thick bacon slices would make this sandwich even more wonderful. But then bacon is my answer for everything these days, isn’t it?

Bacon plays a role in this side dish, the latest in the ongoing semi-irregular A Little Something on the Side series. I can’t remember now how my search for a savory dish with apples took the direction of red cabbage, but when I saw a Bon Appétit recipe that included a little bacon and loads of butter, I figured I’d found what I was looking for. I had. The single slice of bacon imparts a subtle rustic quality. You may be tempted to add more, but it’s not needed and can in fact overpower the dish. And if you want to go vegetarian with this dish, you can certainly leave the bacon out—the butter provides a lovely, velvety finish that would stand well on its own. Oh. And the apple? It wasn’t half bad, even to me.

Potatoes and garlic. What’s not to like?

When I opened Blue Kitchen almost a year ago, I intended to have a recurring feature called A Little Something on the Side. It was supposed to be “all about the dishes that play the supporting role to the star of the plate—and on occasion, steal the scene.” I said as much in my first something-on-the-side post, Marion’s kasha, which she makes every Thanksgiving and as many other times a year as we remember how wonderful it is when we’re planning dinner.

I’ve posted a few sides since then, but somehow, main course ideas keep taking over. They just seem more postworthy, I guess. But you need something to go with them to make a meal, don’t you? So I’m rededicating myself to posting the occasional side on a more regular basis. Sometimes fancy or at least a little exotic, sometimes humble and hardworking, like today’s.

To up their postworthiness [in my eyes, at least], I’ve enlisted my friend Matt’s help in creating a special graphic for A Little Something on the Side. Maybe that will encourage me to do more of these. Thanks, Matt!

The potato—still #1. For all the low-carb, no-carb hysteria still occasionally gripping the media, potatoes are the most popular vegetable in America. Regarding the whole carbohydrates issue, without launching into a dietary diatribe, you need carbohydrates to live. Period. According to the Dietary Reference Intakes Report issued by the Institute of Medicine in 2002, “the minimum amount of carbohydrate that children and adults need for proper brain function is 130 grams a day.” So wise up. Have some mashed potatoes.

And since you’re having them, make them Yukon Gold. Yukon Gold potatoes are a relatively recent phenomenon in North America, but yellow-fleshed potatoes are common in Europe and South America. They’re the norm, in fact. The Yukon Golds we know and love [enough to pay more for] are the result of years of work by a Canadian research team. They’re a cross between a North American white potato and a wild South American yellow-fleshed variety [we all know that potatoes originated in South America, right?].

The result is an all-purpose potato with a naturally buttery flavor. In texture, it falls between the Idaho or russet [a potato with high starch content, great for baking, frying or mashing] and waxy or red potatoes [low starch, high moisture potatoes that stay firm when boiled and stay moist when roasted]. So while Yukon Golds don’t bake as well as russets do, they do just about everything else just fine.

Including making fluffy, delicious mashed potatoes. Buttery, rich and golden. I make them a lot of different ways, but my favorite is with plenty of garlic. There are probably as many ways to make garlic mashed potatoes as there are cooks. A quick search on epicurious.com turned up 198 recipes. Some called for roasting entire heads of garlic before adding them to the potatoes; some called for sautéing garlic in oil, then adding it to the cooked potatoes. And with some, like mine, you add raw garlic to the water while the potatoes are cooking, letting it impart its oils and flavors to the potatoes—and its wonderful fragrance to the kitchen.

Garlic amounts called for varied wildly too. One recipe called for sautéing a single sliced clove of garlic in oil, then discarding the garlic and adding only the flavored oil to two pounds of cooked potatoes. That one fell firmly into the “why bother” camp for me. At the opposite end of the spectrum, our friend Joan advocates three large cloves of garlic per potato. I haven’t had the nerve to try that one yet.

So without further ado, let me throw one more garlic mashed potatoes recipe on the heap.

Salad days for peaches

Peaches and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, I’ll go entire seasons without buying a single one. First, there’s the way they often go directly from being hard as baseballs to mold-covered science experiments, with no apparent moment of just being ripe and ready to eat in between. And even when they do begrudgingly ripen, there’s often something bland or mealy or otherwise disappointing about the taste.

And then there was the tree. When Marion and I bought an old house in St. Louis, the backyard came equipped with a large, ancient peach tree. It provided a shady spot in the yard and a little extra privacy from the house directly across the alley. We looked forward to eating fruit from our very own tree.

Unfortunately, as with many old fruit trees, it had become diseased. Every summer, it faithfully produced bushel upon bushel of peaches, none of them edible. They would drop to the ground, already rotting, creating a fragrant mess on the lawn. No matter how carefully I picked them up before mowing, the mower would invariably find at least one I’d missed. Every bit as pleasant as it sounds.

And then there were the drunken wasps. Or bees or whatever. Attracted by the rotting, fermenting fruit, hundreds of them would swarm loopily around the tree and the lawn, eating the spoiled fruit and becoming completely intoxicated and lethargic. And the problem was, you never knew if they were going to be happy drunks or mean ones.

Each season, sections of the tree would die off, and we would cut away those parts. Gradually, we whittled it down to something we could entirely cut down. That was one of my happiest days as a homeowner.

This year, though, the peaches are amazing. They’ve broken my heart so many times in the past that I usually just walk right by them in the produce department. But this year I couldn’t. Their deep, beautiful color beckoned, even from a distance. Up close, their heady perfume held promise. I picked one up. Not hard as a baseball—just nice and firm and, well, ripe. So I bought some, hopeful but still ready to be disappointed. They. Were. Incredible. Delicious and sweet, with a big peach flavor and a nice, not-too-mushy texture. And the ones that were maybe a day or so away from ripeness obediently ripened without rotting.

Since that first test batch, I’ve been buying them like they’re going out of style. Which, of course, they are—summer won’t last forever. Besides eating them straight, we’ve been cutting them up on cereal, mixing them with plain yogurt, adding them to fruit salads and constantly looking for new ways to use them. Which led to this salad.

Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered

First things first. Blue Kitchen is going global this week. Brazilian blogger Patricia has graciously invited me to post a recipe on her baketastic blog Technicolor Kitchen. No, I didn’t bake [and that's not all Patricia does, but when she does, it's always amazing]. I made a flavor-packed, summery pasta dish with Italian tuna and artichoke hearts—all you cook is the pasta. So check out Patricia’s fabulous blog and this easy recipe. After you read the post below, of course.

Sometimes a restaurant just clicks with you. The food, the setting, the staff—even the moment it’s part of. Lucien, in Manhattan’s East Village, is just such a place for us. The moment it fit so neatly into the first time we ate there was the first time Marion and I managed to get to New York together. Marion had spent lots of time there, and I had made a number of three-day solo forays in search of art, jazz and booze [all plentiful there, by the way]. But we only got around to getting there together when I won a trip for two on Taco Bell’s website a few years ago. Seriously.

Last week I talked about printing out reams of recipes from epicurious.com. Well, anytime I plan a trip to New York, several trees die at the hands of my printouts. In my online research for this visit with my bride, I found Lucien. The reviews looked promising, so I called to make a reservation and ended up speaking with the owner himself, Lucien Bahaj. He was charmingly self deprecating when I told him of the glowing reviews I’d read—even a little alarmed—and wanted to make sure I understood that his restaurant was just a little neighborhood bistro. I told him that was exactly what we were looking for.

And it was. Opened in 1998, Lucien has the nicotine patina of an ancient Left Bank establishment. Tile floors, mirrors on the wall, high tin ceiling and a long, dark wood bar add to the narrow storefront’s authentic French feel. And the food is just as comfortingly familiar and authentically executed. Mussels steamed in white wine, escargots, both a foie gras and a paté, steak frites, cassoulet, duck confit… All served at modest prices in a cozy, welcoming place. We try to get there every time we visit now. If we lived in New York, we’d be regulars.

As it is, we’re already treated like regulars. We walked in with our daughter Laurel one night, having last been there a year before. Our waitress from that previous visit, the lovely, multi-tattooed Lola, came up and hugged us and said, “It took you long enough to get back here!” That trip, we ate there twice. And on one of those nights, we shared a delicious salad with Belgian endive, blue cheese and walnuts as one of our starters. Here’s my shot at recreating that salad.

With all due respect: Skillet Roasted Potatoes with Parsley

Parsley has long been the Rodney Dangerfield of herbs, getting little or no respect. For years [in America, at least], it was always curly and its only role was as a look-but-don’t-eat garnish on dinner plates at restaurants just slightly above diners on the food chain—social climbers that fancied themselves “fine dining” establishments. The irony, of course, is that places that use the term “fine dining” are as much about fine dining as people who use the term “classy” have class.

Lately, though, parsley has come into its own as a legitimate herb, especially with the increased availability of the more strongly flavored Italian or flat-leaf variety. Still, parsley doesn’t even appear on the radar screens of many cooks when they’re thinking of herbs, and that’s too bad. To me, parsley has a wonderfully fresh flavor that brings a lot to the party in a wide variety of dishes. It also has a slight peppery taste, not unlike arugula. And it’s the perfect foil for big flavors like garlic—think shrimp scampi.

For all these reasons, I thought I’d do something with parsley for Weekend Herb Blogging. Hosted this week by Sher over at What Did You Eat?, it was started a year ago [that's seven years ago in blog years] by Kalyn over at Kalyn’s Kitchen. Be sure to check out Sher’s Round-up of WHB Sunday evening or Monday [whenever she gets them all reviewed and posted].

A Little Something on the Side: Tuscan Beans

As much as possible, I try to be a “waste not, want not” kind of guy. So, having some nice rosemary left over from my last week’s Rosemary Apricots post done for Weekend Herb Blogging, I thought I’d make this simple, delicious side dish. Also being a “two birds, one stone” kind of guy, I decided to post this one on Weekend Herb Blogging too. This week, it’s hosted by the newly married Anna over at Morsels and Musings [best wishes, Anna!].

This recipe came together as much of my cooking does these days. I read a reference to Tuscan beans somewhere that made it sound like a flavorful, rustic side dish that would complement a host of main courses nicely—roasted chicken, chops, lamb shanks… But it only mentioned some of the ingredients and didn’t give a recipe. So I checked out Epicurious.com and Googled “tuscan beans.” That gave me a number of ideas for ingredients and variations, which I combined with an actual recipe for a simpler side dish I make using only white beans, rosemary, garlic and olive oil.

The simpler dish is a not bad side when you’re really pressed for time and want something interesting [see this recipe in Kitchen Notes]. This only slightly more involved dish can on occasion outshine the main course.

A little something on the side: Simple, Spicy Roasted Potatoes

First things first. I’m doing two postings today—so after you read about this easy, tasty side dish, be sure to check out the cool tool I found at Ikea.

This roasted potato dish is roughly based on one I found on epicurious.com. That recipe used only sweet potatoes. As you can see from the photo, I used both sweet potatoes and baking potatoes. I started doing this because one of my daughters, the antithesis of picky eater by just about any measure, for some reason doesn’t like sweet potatoes. Now I use both because I think the dish looks and tastes more interesting with both. You can use just sweet potatoes or just baking potatoes, if you like.

I like these roasted potatoes for a few reasons. First, when I’m jonesing for some french fries, these will kind of satisfy that craving without all the frying evils. That said, I do indulge my fries desires on occasion, but only on occasion. As Oscar Wilde said, “All things in moderation, including moderation.”

Second, the kick of a little cayenne pepper and the mixing of sweet and baking potatoes actually makes them more interesting than fries, I think. More versatile too. You can pair them with burgers, roast chicken, salmon… or pan seared, bone-in pork chops, as I did the other night.

And finally, after a few minutes of simple prep work up front, you’ve got about a half hour to pull together the rest of the meal while the potatoes roast.