Bountiful Stock

 

Yesterday's market was a feast in the making of full-spring bounty: the first fava beans of the season, baby carrots and turnips, green garlic, and on and on, to the point that we risked taking too much home.  

It will take several posts to talk about what we did with all of this, but at the moment we'll talk about making stock as the foundation of a myriad other dishes.  From Cache Creek Poultry, our local chicken farmer, we took home a stewing hen, something we'd read about it but neither seen nor cooked before.  A stewing hen is an older female chicken, an egg-layer, who has passed her prime, so that her meat would be too tough for a regular roast, but which is perfect for the stew pot.  The whole hen will simmer in water for twelve hours or more with a bunch of aromatic vegetables (onions, celery and carrots, plus parsley and a handful of other garden herbs), to make what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "The liquour made by boiling meat (without or without vegetables, etc.) and used as a foundation for soup." 

We're not vegetarians; but we have been trying, like so many others, to no longer think of meat as the center of every meal, the way it was when I was growing up.  Rather than always thinking of a meal as a piece of cooked meat seasoned and adorned with vegetables, spices and herbs, we sometimes try to  reverse the process:  that is, think of the savory flavors and aromas of meat as a seasoning for vegetables — the way it often is in traditional Italian cooking, where a small amount of chopped ham or bacon often lends its salty savor to a range of other dishes where the vegetables are otherwise invited to dominate.

Still, a stewing hen is perhaps not for those who prefer to deny that they are eating something that used to be an animate creature, that could see and walk and make noise.  It comes as a whole bird, with the head and feet still attached.  In supermarket chickens, of course, these are carefully removed and hence made invisible to the fastidious consumer.  (Actually, Cache Creek can also sell you one with these removed but we wanted to try it in the traditional way, where the head and feet are said to be a source of flavor in the stock.  Hey, if you're going to consume something, you might as well consume it all.)

The word “stock” itself is a fascinating one.  Here’s how we would summarize, very quickly, a few bits of a very long etymology by which the word comes to have, among all of its other varied senses, the meaning it has in cuisine.  A 'stock” originally meant a large piece of wood in either of two rather different senses: on the one hand, a “trunk,” and on the other hand, a “log.”  In English, going back to very early usages, a “stock” was often used to mean something like “lifeless thing” or “block.”  For example, the expression “stocks and stones” was used in early Christian discourse to refer to idols, to underline their inanimate lifelessness as opposed to the proper invisible deity.  But the other meaning, by which a stock was a trunk, a source or foundation for further development and growth, would have a much longer history.  It seems to be in English that the word “stock,” for somewhat obscure reasons, came to have the meanings fund, store or source, and therefore became the historical antecedent of our word “capital” in the financial and economic sense.  In different contexts, “stock” has meant and often still can mean such things as the amount of product available for sale at a certain business, or a sum of money intended for investment (today we would say “capital”), or the name for a “share” in a business venture.  Strangely enough, it is this sense that seems to condition the culinary meaning.  The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, cites Charles Carter’s The Complete Practical Cook from 1730: where it is affirmed that “A good Stock of strong Broth Well made, and good Gravies well drawn off, are very principal Ingredients in the Composing of all Made-Dishes of boil'd Meats.”  A stock is thus a base and foundation for other dishes, the source from which they will slowly develop and emerge.  

We bring the hen to a simmer in a large pot covered with cold water, skim the white foam that rises to the top, and then add a bunch of vegetables: 2-3 onions, 2-3 carrots, 2-3 sticks of celery, a few garlic cloves, and a handful of herbs (parsley, thyme, bay leaves) tied together to form a bouquet garni — leek greens are also a good addition, though don't overdo them.  (By the way, you can do the same thing with a regular cut-up chicken or with chicken parts; but the stew hen seems to us to produce a much more complex and rich flavor.  We also always freeze the carcasses of roast chickens, which can be also be used to make a serviceable chicken stock)  

We leave this on at first at a very slow simmer, partially covered, all night long.  When it's done, drain in a fine sieve, and let it cool.  There will be an inch or so of thick yellow fat on the top which can be removed and discarded. 

It's now already a flavorful broth which can be eaten by itself or with the addition of some vegetables and noodles.  But we usually then bring the stock back to a boil and reduce it about half way or more, to make it easier to freeze in small containers.  When defrosting, you can always add more fresh water if you want a soup base, or add it in its reduced form to the liquid of a stew or braise.  If you continue reducing it even further, you'll eventually get a thick brown paste which is close to  what the French call demi-glace (except that the latter almost always also has beef or veal bones browned and added to the stock mix.)

In other posts we'll try to give some suggestions of what can be done with this wonderful liquid, which is a veritable cooking elixir, a foundation for all kinds of wonderful other things to eat.  We'll also later write about vegetable stocks, which can also be a great foundation for flavor.

 

Big questions in the neighborhood of an asparagus lasagna

Today we find ourselves with a few trepidations or qualms of conscience about these apparently-simple themes of shopping and cooking.  To try to write about such things, it seems to us, raises all manner of insistent and inescapable questions.  When too many people, even in our own local community much less in the wide world, still go hungry, isn’t it unseemly to dwell on food as though nothing could ever interrupt such plenty?  Is dwelling on the details of cuisine no more than hedonism or, even worse, an exercise in class distinction?  And what about this whole idea of “the local” that interests so many people nowadays?   Living, as we all do, in a global economy, isn’t it sentimental to imagine that there is something oppositional about local farms and local food?  In fact, by writing about shopping, cooking and eating, aren’t we still just encouraging, relishing and mystifying what amounts to good old-fashioned consumption — and therefore, finally, still contributing, however indirectly, to that global market that still today, as Marx writes, "hovers over the earth like the Fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand deals fortune and misfortune to human beings"?   

And even if one lays aside these very big questions, mightn't there still be something ridiculous or laughable about the intense interest given to locally-grown food? — for example, in the manner represented on the comedy Portlandia, where a couple insists on visiting the farm where the chicken they would eat was raised, to make sure it had lived a happy and fulfilling life, before allowing it to be roasted and served to them.

From such uncomfortable or laughable questions, there can be no escape. We began the blog because we found ourselves being asked much simpler questions, such as: what is that?  How do you cook it?  What are you going to do with all that asparagus?  Those are the only questions we can really aspire to answer here.  As we do so, however, we allow ourselves only to suspend, not to forget, the larger questions that will always linger in the same neighborhood.

 

 

Asparagus’ moment has almost come and gone.  This is an amazingly simple and light lasagna that pairs asparagus with early spring herbs.   It's based on a recipe by Martha Rose Shulman in the New York Times, June 28, 2010.  We use a regular egg-based homemade pasta.  You could do it with store-bought lasagna noodles, but it's really better with thin sheets of delicate, homemade pasta.

We won’t go over the basics of pasta-making since there are so many other places online that go over it step-by-step, not to mention many fine cookbooks.  Two of our favorites as far as making pasta are Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand, and Aliza Green’s Making Artisan Pasta.  Pasta-making is one of those things one learns on one’s hands.  There are innumerable little variations in different recipes, but they’re all basically the same thing, so try it three or four times following any recipe and you’ll soon know how you like to do it.  For this recipe, we use a durum flour mixed with at least one third semolina flour because we think the latter improves the texture.  Later, we'll be posting about some of our experiments with pasta using other kinds of flour and grain.

For this lasagna, you make a light white sauce (a béchamel or besciamella) using olive oil instead of butter, and two-percent milk.  (The original recipe called for using one-percent.)  Once your white sauce is thick and off the fire, you mix a generous handful of finely-chopped tender spring herbs — basil, parsley, oregano, rosemary, chives, thyme, tarragon, whatever you got.  We think this is really the time to use the tender new sprigs of stronger herbs like rosemary and oregano, which in high summer get too intense.

 

Then take two pounds of asparagus and trim them.  Cook the trimmed parts and two peeled cloves of garlic in simmering water for fifteen minutes.  Then blanch the asparagus stalks in the same water briefly (3-4 minutes), stop the cooking in ice water, cut into one-inch pieces, and then finally stir them gently into the herbed white sauce.  Now also cook your sheets of pasta in the same water; then mix a little bit of this pasta water (now imbued with starch and flavor) into your vegetable and white-sauce mixture so it’s a spreadable consistency.  In a greased baking dish, layer the cooked sheets of pasta with this mixture and plenty of grated parmesan cheese.  Drizzle the top with olive oil.

Bake covered for 30 minutes, then uncover to brown the top slightly for about 10 more minutes; and finally let it rest out of the oven for another 10 or 15 minutes before serving.  The whole lasagna can be made a day in advance and heated when you want it serve it.  The result is light and subtle and with an herbal undertone that no one you serve it to will be able to identify.  

Picnic Day Market: Festive Crab

Our farmers market on Picnic Day is both crowded and empty.  While many of those in town for Picnic Day visit, vendors know that they are most likely to buy snacks and prepared foods rather than, say, kale.  Like the picnic in the park markets on Wednesdays, it is more about instant gratification than deferred.  As a consequence, some vendors were missing today and others had reduced wares.  But the determined cook still found much to buy.

 A lone Sherdo shopped today--and had to carry the haul.  I wandered around contemplating what I could get to make a welcome home feast for Sherdo #2.  I have the reverence for seafood of someone who grew up in the Midwest.  The seafood that reached us in my childhood was well-traveled, expensive, and, I now realize, a bit past its prime.  But it was often the centerpiece of celebratory meals.  My mother kept cans of lump crab and cocktail shrimp in her (always well-stocked) pantry, along with sardines and tuna.  One time when I was a teenager, I had to cobble together a late night meal for the two of us after we'd spent a day in a hospital waiting room.  My father had weathered a serious health crisis and Mom and I felt exhausted and starving.  I made a seafood salad from the cans in the pantry and few things have ever tasted so good.  In later years, I'd make seafood salads for Mom on special occasions, traveling long distances in Chicago to get crab, shrimp, and lobster that had traveled even farther to repose on ice at Burhop's fishmonger.  Which is all a long way of saying that the gorgeous, fresh fish and seafood available weekly at our farmers market continue to astonish me.  A weekly miracle.  At the market today, I realized that I could buy everything for a classic Crab Louis.  I usually go for the whole crab and clean and pick them myself.  Those are no longer available (this season) so I settled for E-Z (or lazy) crab and cooked shrimp.  I bought fresh eggs, the earliest of tomatoes (pale shadows of what they will be a few months from now but a promise of that later glory), baby lettuces, avocado and cucumber.

My version of Louis dressing is, like most of them, in the Russian dressing/Thousand Island family.  I combine about 3/4 cup mayonnaise with 1/4 cup ketchup or chili sauce or, since I have it, homemade tomato jam.  I add a squeeze of lemon juice, a canned chipotle chili, and a shot of Worcestershire sauce.  Since I have a horseradish root in the fridge, I grated a little in.  You can add pickles but I get that sweet/tartness from the tomato jam.

It's typical to add hard boiled eggs to a Louis salad.  I gild the lily, as I so frequently do, by deviling the eggs.  This makes the plate seem even more as if my mother might have served it to her lady friends in the 1960's.  To devil the eggs, I just pop out the yolks and mix them with a little dijon mustard, some mayo, and salt and pepper.  I top them with smoked paprika.  Deviled eggs may not seem sophisticated or trendy but most people will polish them off with unseemly haste if you produce a platter of them.  Please make a note of it, as directory assistance used to say.

In restaurants, you will often get just lettuce and seafood on a Louis plate.  But since I'm an inveterate lily gilder (see above), and a greedy market shopper, I add tomatoes (when I can), avocado, radishes (if I've got them, which I don't this time), and cucumbers.  Since I still have some of those pea shoots from last week, I threw them in with this week's baby lettuces.

At today's market, I also got all the ingredients for a roast chicken dinner later in the week, a stewing hen for making stock (on which more in another post), and a vegetarian dinner focusing on asparagus and mushrooms.    Not bad for a market geared more to tourists than cooks.

Winter turns to spring salad: fennel, orange, and . . .

This week at the market strawberries were less plentiful because of all the rain, but there were still plenty of winter roots, asparagus, leeks and greens.  There are also the wonderful tiny baby potatoes that, roasted in a hot oven with nothing but a little butter or olive oil and salt and pepper, are one of the best things in the world.  We also bought some pea shoots, an ingredient still relatively unfamiliar to us, but a sure and obvious sign of spring.

This week we made another salad for which all the ingredients are available at the market except salt and pepper.  We had seen recipes for fennel and orange salads in cookbooks, especially Italian ones, but the combination didn't really capture our imaginations, or get us chopping, until we saw fennel bulbs and oranges cohabiting at the Davis Farmers Market in the winter months.  Following our guiding  principle of composing market salads--assembling ingredients with different colors and textures to achieve a balance of sweet and bitter, crunchy and tender--we've gotten in to the habit of adding a bitter green (such as the beautiful burgundy treviso radicchio at last week's market), a hint of sweetness (from chopped dates), and the crunch of pistachios.  Here are the ingredients, a salad maker's inspiring still life.

The result is both beautiful and delicious, and can be a main dish or a side.  But first there is a little work to be done.  Cut out the cores of the fennel bulbs and slice the bulbs as thinly as possible.  If you have a mandoline, this would be a good time to use it.  We tend to rely upon our chef's knives. Be sure to throw in some of the fennel fronds chopped.  This turns up the green and the fennel flavors.

For this salad, we like glistening, juicy orange segments.  These are easy to achieve by cutting off the peel of the orange and then inserting a paring knife between the segments to free each one, leaving the membranes behind.When you are done, squeeze the remaining husk of the orange.  The juice will provide the acid that dresses the salad.  No vinegar necessary.

It's true that one loses a little bit of orange flesh with this method.  That's a reminder of what a luxury it is to have so much luscious fruit available.  In all those Victorian books about receiving one precious orange at the bottom of one's Christmas stocking--a burst of sunshine in the dead of winter and a triumph of shipping--such an extravagant salad would be unimaginable.  But we're not living in the little house on the prairie so get that knife out. 

We roll the treviso radicchio leaves to julienne them.  Then we chop the dates.  They are so sweet that you want just little bursts of their flavor here and there.  Too many and the salad will be cloying.  Before moving to Davis, the dates we'd used in baking were diced and came in a box.  They were hard as rocks and flavorless, resembling most closely the hard lumps in old brown sugar rather than a fruit.  These soft, chewy, carmelized dates seem worlds away from their debased relations.  They are a treat in themselves but they are also, as in this salad, a revelatory addition to dishes savory or sweet.  Finally, sprinkle the salad with toasted pistachios, and toss it with olive oil, salt, and pepper.  It will look like this.

 

The fennel and oranges can be prepped in advance.  The orange juice will keep the fennel from browning.  But the oranges will also shed juice, which can make the salad wet.  So you might want to drain it before proceeding.  Add the radicchio, nuts, and dates, and dress the salad, at the last minute.  You want to maximize the contrasting textures.

Winter salad: apple, endive, walnut

After we moved to Davis, we began to understand that the salads of our childhoods--tomatoes and lettuce--were strange hybrids, requiring ingredients that cannot usually be found in the same time and place.  Most lettuces like cool, damp weather, while tomatoes are sun lovers.  Occasionally, one can find both late lettuces and early tomatoes at the Farmers Market.  For those who crave that combination, now is the time.  But if you want to make good market salads, the best strategy is to look, smell, and taste what is on offer at the market and to experiment with how to combine different textures, colors, shapes, and flavors.  It is often true that ingredients that are in season at the same time go well together.  Letting go of the notion that green is the only salad color will also free you to think differently about what counts as a salad.

 We will offer more reflections on salads as spring ingredients start to turn up at the market.  But for now, we want to start with a winter salad we eat often.  We purchase all of the ingredients for this apple, endive, and walnut salad at the market--except for the salt and pepper.  The walnut oil we show here is from walnuts grown and pressed in Woodland and is available at the Coop.  But walnut oil is also sometimes available at the Farmers Market.  It adds a smoky, nutty heft to vegetable and grain salads.

To make this salad, we cut off the ends of the endives, cut them in half and then cube them.  We core and cube the apples but don't bother to peel them.  The peels add not only nutrients but color this winter salad needs.  Try to get the endives and apples roughly the same size.  We then toss the apples and endives with a little Meyer lemon juice, walnut oil, salt, and pepper.  We used to worry that the endives and apples would brown quickly, but this salad can be made a little in advance.  If that's your plan, toss the vegetables with the lemon juice just after cutting them and then add the walnut oil just before serving. For color, we throw in some parsley, which is so abundant and fragrant right now.  In a salad this simple, don't stint on the salt.  Salads get their name from the Latin word for salt (sal) and salt heightens the flavors.  But remember not to salt until the last minute!  This is especially true for salads made of soft fruits and vegetables, which will melt to mush with shocking speed.  This salad, however, holds up well and is even good leftover.  It will also welcome the addition of cooked grains, such as farro, bulgur, or barley.