Scottish Cow

Black Bean Tacos

If we have leftovers in our house, which we often do, there are two destinations that seem the most common - stir-fried or wrapped up in a tortilla.

Today it's tacos.  The aim here wasn't to be authentic, it was to be quick and delicious.  On the authenticity scale, our tortilla-wrapped creations probably fall somewhere between sacrilegious (mmm...sacrilicious) and pretty close to something that might be recognizable as Mexican food.

Anyway, kid-wise, these can't be beat - tacos are one of those things that hit the kid trifecta -

1) They can be customized and self-assembled

2) You get to eat with your hands

3) They're really messy

These were great because they consisted entirely of things we always have, and really, everyone should - Tortillas (wheat, corn, big, small, whatever, they last forever in the fridge), a can of black beans, lettuce and tomatoes.  In the summer you should always have lettuce and tomatoes around, or else you'll be unable to make a BLT, and the thought of that makes me angry.  These were fantastic local greenhouse tomatoes, but the grape tomatoes you can get year-round are definitely good enough.

Can of beans - great for all sorts of stuff besides chili.  We eat a ton of beans.  I like cooking dried beans from scratch as much as the next bean nazi, but really, this whole thing was ready in 20 minutes.  So lay off, dried bean nazis.

Use whatever kind of tortillas you have (these were small corn ones) and add any other kinds of toppings you have (guac, sour cream, cheese, onions, salsa, etc).  I will point out that there is no meat, no cheese and no sour cream in the one pictured above, and it was (still) delicious.

This was so easy, I feel ashamed to even call it a recipe, but here goes...

Black Bean Tacos

1 can black beans, rinsed, drained
1 clove garlic, minced
(optional) any kind of fresh herb (i used marjoram, because we had it)
Corn Tortillas
Diced tomatoes
Shredded lettuce
Oil
Salt/pepper
+ any other toppings you want (i used some scallions)

Heat some oil in a pan over medium heat and add the beans, the garlic, the herb and some salt/pepper.  Cook until they get hot, stir occasionally and mash up to the desired consistency with a fork or the side of a rubber spatula.  Set aside, or keep on low heat.

For the tortillas, heat a little oil in a big pan or griddle on high and cook tortillas, flipping to get each side a little crispy.

Assemble and eat. 

Playing in the Dirt

The raised bed for the garden goes in this weekend, weather and other-stuff allowing.  Here are our tomato seedlings, pictured about a week ago after they moved from their starter cells into some 2 inch pots.  One more move until they hit the soil in the ground.  We've got some pepper plants starting indoors as well (red sweet and some jalapenos), and the rest will go right into the garden as seeds.

This is fun.  It's the first time trying something like this, and I have to say, on the scale of beholding-new-life events, it's somewhere between growing mold on a piece of bread for a 5th grade science project, and watching your kids being born. 

If these tomatoes were our kids, their names would be Sun Gold, Pink Rose, Big Beef, and Green Zebra.

Last night was the night that all the trees in our neighborhood got together and decided to throw out their leaf buds.  Everything that was brown yesterday was green this morning, and in my mind, it officially became Spring.  The ice is gone from the lake, and when we went to pick up eggs last Saturday, the farm smelled like a farm for the first time in months.  Says Molly, as we stepped out of the car, "Whoa, it stinks."

 

Iced Coffee

I've been addicted to iced coffee since my senior year of high school.  The habit began with Dunkin Donuts' iced coffee - large and black.  This continued through college and into our time in Boston - yes, I know, Boston and Dunkin Donuts, a real shock to anyone who's visited or lived there.

An iced coffee, large and black, every morning on the way to work.  Our apartment was 2 miles as the duck drifts on the Charles from my office, and there was not one, but two Dunkin Donuts on the route.

It turns out that DD isn't nearly entrenched in WNY as it is Boston, and we started making our own coffee more often (every day).  We use course ground coffee in a french press, which makes great, strong, hot coffee (and leaves some mud behind in the bottom of the cup), and in late fall, winter and the muddy month of march, I'm mostly content to drink it in coffee's standard mode - steaming.

But then Spring.  With Spring, a young man's* thoughts turn to better things...daffodils, baseball, women shedding their heavy winter outerwear, and iced coffee.

There 2 ways that we'll make iced coffee.  One is pretty good and one is fantastic.

First, the one that's merely good.  If you find yourself with hot coffee that you want to ice (happens often in our house), this is the quickest way I've found to do it.  You need a stainless steel cocktail shaker and something wider and shorter than it - I use the flowerpot/popcorn thing in this set up:

Add the hot coffee to the shaker, fill the outer tub with cold water and keep the tap running into it (the outer tub, not your coffee).  As the water is running, get a spoon and stir the coffee vigorously.  If you allow me to geek-out for a moment - you're getting convection (cooler air moving through your coffee) and conduction (cold water meeting the hot coffee via the metal cup - which is great at transferring heat) both working at cooling your coffee at the same time.  It takes about 30 seconds to get the coffee to room temp.

At that point, you can pour it over ice without any fear of melting and dilution of your precious brew.

Now, if you want to get serious and brew some dedicated iced coffee, the following method is the way to go.  Grind your coffee, add cold water, and let it sit overnight.  What?  You want your coffee now?  Too bad.  You weren't planning ahead - you should have put it in last night and it would be ready to bring to work in a big, ugly green thermos full of ice.  My recipe is adapted from one that appeared in the NY Times Dining and Wine section a summer ago - I changed it reflect our brewing strength, and not to make concentrate, but immediately drinkable coffee.

You need to plan ahead a little bit, but you'll be rewarded with something that tastes totally different than both hot coffee and hot coffee that's been cooled and iced.  It's richer, more coffee-y and less bitter.  The astringency that's normal in hot coffee really gets accentuated when you ice it.  This coffee has none of that, and all the other flavors come flying through.  If you're someone who's really into your coffee, I bet you'll find that the difference is fairly incredible.  It's just really, really good.

Iced Coffee, for Iced Coffee Fanatics, and Those Who'd Like to Become One

1/2 C coffee, coarsely ground
3 3/4 C Cold water

Mix together in a large french press (or just a big jar), and let sit overnight.  Mine usually ends up going for about 9 hours.  Extract the coffee from the grounds, and pour over lots of ice to serve.  I fill the aforementioned ugly green thermos with the coffee and lots of ice. 

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* Disclaimer - no longer a young man.

A Tale of Two Sandwiches

We love sandwiches. Thankfully, there are no gluten allergies or carbophobics in our family. We usually have a few different types of bread around, and lately at least one of them is usually homemade. If you've got the bread part covered, a good sandwich can't be far away.

I have no qualms about publicly admitting my love for peanut butter and jelly (except I'd rather have jam or preserves). I like chunky, we usually have smooth, but that isn't enough to keep me away. I will even lay claim to having invented (at least in my sphere of influence) the renown Peanut Butter and Jelly on Waffles. Yes, substitute toasted waffles for bread for a transcendental experience.

Yeah, maybe transcendental is taking it a tad past reality, and for health reasons, let's just agree not to eat those too often.

Here are two of our favorites. The first, pictured above, is made from one of our most common leftovers, and the second from two "pantry" ingredients we almost always have on hand.

My Dad's chicken salad. It's the best. Everyone agrees and you will too. It has two special ingredients that take it well beyond your typical minced-up-chicken-with-too-much-mayo mess: toasted pecans and lavender. Our family is blessed with pecans falling from trees in my grandmother's backyard in sunny Texas. Each year, after the collecting, shelling, picking through and bagging, we end up with a few bags in our freezer and they never last as long as we'd like. The lavender was an accident. My dad thought he was adding tarragon from the garden, which has similarly shaped leaves, and to be fair, there wasn't a big lavender colored flower on the top of it yet. What a mistake it was. It plays so well with the rest of the ingredients, and it seems like you can't add enough. If it's fresh, great, if not, we have enough dried to last the rest of the year, and it tastes just as good.

The second recipe is from the first meal I had in Amsterdam. Goat cheese and honey. Overwhelmed with jet lag and the awe of a first trip to Europe, we travelled via tiny boat from my cousin's apartment to a cafe somewhere in the city for lunch. It was this sandwich and a cold beer. The goat cheese was served warm in a crock, and you got to assemble your own sandwich on a crusty roll. This is pictured on a ciabatta roll (not homemade), toasted well, and assembled quickly so the cheese can melt and the honey can run. The acidity of the goat cheese and the sweetness of the honey are a match made in oh-man-i'm-dribbling-honey-all-over-my-sweater heaven.

The recipes:

Dad's Chicken Salad Sandwich

Mix in a big bowl:

Leftover chicken (grilled, roasted, poached or cooked by divine intervention)
Finely chopped onions/scallions
Diced sweet red pepper
Diced jalapeno/poblano or pinch of dried chili flakes/powder (optional, if you want some heat)
Several pinches of chopped fresh, or dried lavender
Nice handful of toasted (toaster oven is great for this), chopped pecans
Small pinches of salt/pepper

Mix everything together and start adding mayonnaise slowly, mixing it in well. You really only need enough to bind everything together.

 

Goat Cheese and Honey Sandwich, as if you needed a recipe

Put a bunch of both on crusty, warm bread:

Honey (we like acacia honey, which seems both mild and richly flavored at once)
Soft goat cheese

Eat quickly, without sharing.

Random Bits

• First, nothing to do with food, but I'm really excited (and proud) for Tina and her friend Caren - they have turned their new found sewing addictions into something both productive and fun and will be exhibiting at the first Buffalo Indie Market this weekend. The piles of bonnets, dresses, tutus and bags will be leaving home, and hopefully fewer will be coming back! Tina's new site is http://www.polkadotbug.com and Caren's (although, I'm not sure if she has anything on it yet) is here.

• Back to the grub...the Times is relentless - not that I'm complaining - but in the last two weeks, there have been one, two, three (well, three that I've seen) pieces related to the intertwining of high food prices, commodity crops, industrial vs. small farming, environmental impacts and local eating. Should be of interest to anyone interested in food and/or farming.

• What else we've been eating...
  • Tina made a great quiche - homemade pastry crust, typical custard, red peppers, onions and capers (next time it's replicated, we'll capture a recipe.)
  • The Short Ribs Braised in Wine, Coffee and Chilis from the Times - I was a little scared, but it was tested and recommended by my Dad and I'll confirm - it was excellent. But I'm not messing around with short ribs anymore - they taste delicious, but for me, it's too much work, too little meat, and I feel like I've taken a bath in Crisco when I'm done handling them.
  • Braised Cabbage from "The Art of Braising" by Molly Stevens. Great, great book. And a really good recipe, this coming from someone who previously thought coleslaw was as good as cabbage could do.
  • Flaxseed Pain au Levain - I ended up turning a mistake into something good, and have been able to duplicate it once. Recipe coming up...
  • Goulash - usually at least once a week, we'll do a recipe that makes a prodigious amount of leftovers - at least 2 dinners and 4 lunches - this week it was goulash, American Chop Suey, whatever - ground beef, pasta, tomatoes, lots of onion, garlic, cumin and other spices.

• My co-worker Jon and I made a trip to Ni Hoowa at lunch yesterday - a Asian supermarket about 20 minutes from work. He was in the market for some pocky, and I was seeking out soy sauce, Shaoxing wine and spicy broadbean sauce recommended by my cousin Mandy. I think I did pretty well. I made a quick stirfry tonight, with noodles, grilled tofu, a ton of scallions, with soy sauce and Shaoxing, which seems to have a TON more flavor than the dry sherry I'd been using as a substitute. Also purchased - hot garlic shrimp chips. The votes were split on whether or not they were addictive or terrible. For me, both. I woke up at 2:00 AM last night, feeling like I had been assaulted by a giant, evil shrimp and couldn't get the taste away.

• Finally some advice - not that it really needs mention, but be careful what you say around a 4 year old. The other night at dinner, I was trying to explain to Tina how I thought her random dinner creations usually turned out better than mine. I said, "Two really great things you made recently, the tofu/spinach lasagna and the vegetable bean soup, you completely pulled out of your ass." So, Molly heard my now-obvious poor choice of words, her eyes lit up, she jumped up, stood on her chair, reached behind herself, and well, made a motion of pulling something out. Tina and I both started choking. Forgot about trying not to laugh when kids do something funny and inappropriate. Not possible in this case. When we finally settled down, I asked Molly what she was doing. "I was pulling something out of my doopa," she said, subtly pointing out that not only did she understand what I said, but she also knew enough to translate to an acceptable word. Kids.

Our Roast Chicken

The title says it all...do we need another roast chicken recipe? No, probably not. But it's an undisputed classic, indisputably one of our favorites and there are a zillion variations and twists. People like that. People like that it's a blank slate food - a fairly mild canvas for delivering other flavors. And then the leftovers (I think that's what we like) - soup, stew, sandwiches, quesadillas? Oh yeah.

Despite being able to cover chicken will all kinds of sauces and toppings, a good chicken doesn't need much more than some salt. For a good roast chicken, especially if it's a mass-market bird to start, it seems like either a brine or a dry salting ahead of time makes a <strong>huge</strong> difference. Our chickens spend there lives just up the road, but they still get the salt if there's time. I like the salting as opposed to the brine, because it's easier, more flexible and the results are just fantastic. I think I read about it first in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook - you just get a nice dry chicken, sprinkle it well with salt/pepper and whatever other seasoning you want and let it sit in the fridge from overnight up to a couple days. Both the brining and the salting permeate the whole bird with flavor, make it moist and keep it tender. If you've never tried it, you'll never go back.

I like to butterfly the chicken (also known as "spatchcocking", but I can't say/type that without laughing, thanks to a sense of humor retained from my 12 year-old self). You just take a pair of kitchen shears and cut straight up the back on both sides of the backbone, and then flatten out the bird. I haven't figured out the whole removing the breastbone thing yet.

It cooks quicker, looks cooler and is easier to carve up afterwords.

This one just got some finely chopped rosemary along with the salt, which is great with chicken and convenient for us, as we haven't managed to kill our rosemary bush yet. Lemon zest is super too.

When we ate this last Saturday, we had it with a little bit of aioli for dipping it in (an unnecessary, but delicious indulgence), some food-processored white beans, a salad and some bread. Simple, tasty, great meal.

Roasted Chicken, The Way We Had It Last Weekend

Rinse and dry:
3-5 LB Chicken

If your kitchen obeys the same natural laws as ours, bigger chicken will take longer to cook.

Sprinkle chicken liberally with:
Kosher Salt
Pepper (not as much as the salt)
Fresh Rosemary, minced fine - (other herbs, lemon zest... all good)

Cover and put in the fridge for at least overnight.

Preheat oven to 450. Oil a cast iron pan (or other heavy pan big enough for chicken) lightly, and put it in the oven to get hot. Take it out when the oven is ready, and put the chicken in breast side down. Put it in for 20-30 minutes, more importantly, until the skin is starting to get some color and crisp up. Take it out, flip the bird, turn the heat down to 400, and leave it in until it's done.

There are a lot of recipes that start it breast up, flip once, and then flip again. Too much flipping I say, but you should try it. We should roast as many chickens as possible.

Fresh from the Farm, Still Speckled with Dirt

A small apology to the out of towners - sprinkled about in the next few posts, we're going to be talking about where we get good produce, poultry and meat from locally. Only a small apology, because even if the actual names and places don't mean anything to you, the ideas behind them should.

Last year was our first with a local CSA - if you're unaware, CSA = Community Supported Agriculture. It's very simple, you sign up to get a share of a local farm's output once a week throughout the growing season. You pay for your share up front. You are at the mercy of the farm and the weather for what will be in your bag each week. The farm and the family (these are small family farms for the most part) get their income up front, which as a farm, helps them plan ahead, and as a family, helps them live. You end up with incredible, fresh produce that's usually been picked within a day of you receiving it.

There a few choices in the Buffalo area - we went with Native Offerings. We signed up with two coworkers to split a full veggie share and a fruit share (all our own), and once a week went to one of the four drop off points after work. You get to pick your out of overflowing bins and boxes, weigh your potatoes and apples and pack your bags (one guy would show up with a laundry basket).

The only problem is that it's quite hazardous driving home while rapidly trying to devour the three pounds of warm strawberries sitting on the seat next to you.

In addition to fruit and veggies, they have pork and beef shares as well, but we stuck with the produce. It was a great experience - yes, there were moments when we didn't want to deal with another hearty, leafy, bitter green, but that's how it works. It felt like being on Iron Chef on some weeks as the fridge would be overflowing with vegetables, some of which we hadn't encountered before. Here's a pile of the greens (note the 18 inch asparagus - incredible broiled/grilled) from a spring pickup.

We're going with Native Offerings again this year, but there are others with different options and pickup locations. Porter Farms is another I've heard good things about, and we've had their produce before (sold at the Lexington Co-op) and it's all been good. Buffalo Rising has a rundown of a number of the local options here.

You could also just buy veggies at a farm stand or farmer's market each week, which we do to supplement the share from the farm, but it feels good to be part of something, and it definitely gives the farm some certainty.

So we're excited for Round 2. And mizuna and mustard greens? I'm waiting. I'm ready.

Victory will be mine.