This Week (2nd weekend of June 2012) at the Farmer's Market

I gathered all my favorite late spring crops  from both the Friday night market at The Red Barn and the Saturday morning Hudson Farmer's Market;  strawberries, beets, shelling peas, and radishes and
turned them into food for various occasions - not to mention breakfast, lunch and dinner.
As you know from reading my last entry I've been concerned that my favorite strawberries are going to run out before I can get my fill.  To wit I froze some last week and this week I made what I call "refrigerator jam".  The jam is not processed to preserve.  I just put it in a jar and it should last for weeks, perhaps months in the refrigerator- but it won't.  Probably won't last 'til the 4th of July.  It's that tasty, and its applications are numerous.  I like it on toasted, and almond buttered quinoa bread from Loaf, with plain yogurt, and as you will see as I write on, with beets.
I add whole berries - if they're really huge, cut in half - to a non-reactive saucepan with fresh lemon juice and pure, unrefined cane sugar, like rapadura, and cook on low heat until the berries are soft and seemingly spreadable, about 30 - 40 minutes.  Remove the berries  with a slotted spoon to a glass or ceramic bowl and reserve.  Reduce the remaining syrup until it's as dense as grade B maple syrup. 
Pack the cooled strawberry jam in a glass jar and cover with some of the strawberry syrup.  Refrigerate it, and the syrup in a separate container.  The syrup itself will serve you well on ice cream or mixed with Prosecco to make a Tiepolo ,or with vodka to make a delightfully colored, and tasty warm weather cocktail.   NB - the jam, sweetened with unrefined sugar , will turn deep burgundy in color.  If you must have bright red jam use refined sugar - just not as good - to my palate.

Sweet, shelling peas have a fleeting season as well.   I like nothing better than a dish of risi e bisi - the Venetian classic pea and rice dish.  Technically this dish is not risotto.  But it tastes like it could be.  I cooked the shelled peas in salted water for about 15 minutes.   If I had been paying attention I would have discarded the few over-ripe peas before cooking because they're too mealy and are annoying - in a way.  I cooked the rice separately and used vialone nano - a short, chubby grain used for risotto - which gives the dish its risotto-like texture.   When the rice was tender I drained and added it back into the pot with a knob of best quality unsalted butter, a fistful of grated Parmigiano, and the cooked peas.   I stirred to combine all the ingredients.   If you like the flavor of peas and mint - as I did and swirl  some fresh mint sprigs through the still hot rice and then discard the sprigs. You want to add a soft scent of mint to the dish.  Mint leaves turn black when added to heat and would be most unattractive in an otherwise pristine dish.

I was invited to a party down in Red Hook and asked to bring a dish - What's needed, I asked.  Oh, something to nibble on before the main course.   Hmmmm, radishes, radishes, RADISHES.  Not just radishes, but radishes with butter. The sweet, creamy butter softens and tames the feisty radishes.  Finely chop up radishes, tightly wrap them in paper towels and let them sweat for 1/2 hour or so then add them to room-temperature-softened, highest quality, unsalted butter along with chopped chives, chopped flat leaf parsley and some flaky sea salt.  Serve with garlic toasts or as I did with black sesame crackers.  Because, wow, what a contrast.

Beets - be still my Russian heart.  I love their sweet, earthy flavor, and I love their vibrant color that turns to the most stunning shade of shocking pink when combined with sour cream or yogurt, or  anything white.   First remove the beetroots from their leaves - and reserve the leaves (later).  Rinse them and pat them dry, and salt them - I used pink Hawaiian salt for pure visual pleasure - and wrap them up in parchment paper and bake at 300 degrees F. until a tester easily, very easily passes through them 1 - 2 hours (depending on their size).   The skin comes off the cooled beets as simply as removing a glove from your hand.  Start the process at the root end with the tip of a paring knife.     You can make a tangy Russian-style salad by marinating chunks of peeled beet with whole cloves of smashed garlic, apple cider vinegar and pure honey.  Marinate for at least a few hours and up to overnight.   Drain and remove the garlic.  Add a blob of sour cream and chopped flat leaf parsley. Eat with hard cooked eggs for a simple meal or use as a side dish with any grilled meat or fish.  Would be sublime with caviar.   Keep the beets around to add, chopped into a green salad.  Or, eat, as I just did with plain yogurt and some of that aforementioned strawberry syrup.   Weird?  Maybe.  But the combination of flavor and color were hard to beat.  Pun absolutely intended.
NO NEED TO ADD SALT to anything where the beets are an ingredient.  The cooking salt has adequately salted them.

Remove the beet leaves from their stems and saute in olive olive and garlic as you would do with spinach or chard.  A wonderful cooked green with an ever-so-slight beet flavor.

And sweet cherries - just into the market for the first time this week.   I like to eat them until my stomach hurts.  They are divine.

SUSANSIMONSAYS:    SATURDAY, JUNE 16th - YARD SALE  at 112 Union Street in Hudson, NY - 9am - 3pm - NO earlybirds, please.  Collectibles and lots of interesting household items.  Buy them here first before they wind up in a shop on Warren Street

The Last Gasp of Aspara-gasp (Sigh)

With the last few local asparagus  in  market bins I was reminded to make a favorite recipe from
Faith Willinger's glorious book, RED, WHITE & GREENS .  It's kind of perfect to make this dish, Penne with Asparagus-Lemon Sauce, as the coda to the other asparagus dishes that I've enjoyed for the past few weeks as it uses the stalk in a few ways to complete the dish.

PENNE WITH ASPARAGUS-LEMON SAUCE
4 - 6 servings

Faith says that she was inspired to make this dish by a lemon peel-olive oil pasta that she enjoyed from one of her favorite Tuscan home cooks .She has lived in Tuscany for decades

1 pound fresh asparagus
5 - 6 quarts water
2 - 3 tablespoons sea salt
1 teaspoon minced lemon zest
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
freshly ground pepper
14-16 ounces penne or short pasta
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1.   Snap the tough butt ends off the asparagus or peel to  the tender core.  Cut the stems into 1-inch pieces.  reserve the asparagus tips.
2.   Bring 5 - 6 quarts of water to a rolling boil, add 2 - 3 tablespoons salt, and cook asparagus stems for 6 - 8 minutes until soft and totally tender.  Remove stems with a slotted spoon, refresh in cold water, and drain.
3.  Cook the tips in the boiling water for 3 - 5 minutes until tender, remove with a slotted spoon, refresh in cold water, and drain.  Reserve asparagus cooking water.
4.   Puree the stems in a food processor with lemon zest, extra virgin olive oil, 1/2 cup asparagus cooking, and salt and pepper to taste: transfer the sauce to a 3-quart pot.
5.   Return the remaining asparagus cooking water to a rolling boil, add the pasta, and cook until it still offers considerable resistance to the tooth, around  three quarters the recommended cooking time.  Drain, reserving 2 cups of pasta water.  Add pasta, asparagus tips, and 1/2 cup starchy water to asparagus stem puree and cook in a 3-quart pot over highest heat, stirring for 3 - 5 minutes until pasta is almost cooked and sauces coats pasta.  Add more pasta water, 1/4 cup at a time, if sauce becomes too dry.  Sauce should surround pasta but be slightly liquid since cheese will thicken it.
6.   Add the grated Parmesan, heat for an additional minute to melt the cheese, and serve immediately.

When you make a dish as important as this one it needs to be shared.  And so I did - with a couple of friends from the "left bank" (Kingston) in town for a shopping expedition.  I added a few other dishes and there we had it, an ode-to-late-Spring lunch.

I made a salad with blanched sugar snap peas - which are as advertised, snappy as in crunchy and sugar sweet - with thinly sliced, peppery radishes, crumbled salty feta cheese, lots of chopped fresh chives (one of my few personally grown "crops"), extra virgin olive oil, fresh lemon juice and brown rice vinegar.  
The day before the lunch I had been in Albany at Honest Weight, the great food co-op, where I picked up a container of goat's milk yogurt from R&G Cheesmakers, Cohoes, NY (no website). 
R & G makes exquisite goat's milk cheeses and their yogurt is exceptional.  Michael Harris of Cheese! (Hudson Farmer's Market) warned me not to expect a loose yogurt - or even a Greek-style yogurt - that this was was more like a fresh chevre cheese.  I planned accordingly and decided to treat it as if it were  labane, the Middle Eastern-style yogurt cheese.  Labane is usually served spread on a plate covered with fruity olive oil and possibly, a sprinkle of za'atar - a spice and sesame seed mix - as an appetizer or meze together with assorted salads and plenty of warm pita bread to scoop up all the offerings.  I served it with a warm Loaf baguette.

Dessert had to be something with strawberries.  While there are varieties of strawberries that will last for almost the whole summer, the kind I've been buying for the past few weeks are just about finished.
I sliced the berries and macerated them with fresh lemon juice, rapadura sugar - unrefined and unbleached organic sugar from Brazil, and vincotto - the cooked must of Malvasia grapes- which gives anything it's added to deep flavor.   Honest Weight sells vincotto and so does Buon Italia (they do mail order).  I had every intention of making cornmeal-pecan shortcakes but never seemed to get there.  I called my friends who were out shopping somewhere on Warren Street and asked them to please go directly to the farmer's market and get a loaf of Loaf's other-worldly cinnamon  bread.
As long as Rachel continues to make the buttery loaf with a generous whirlpool of cinnamon and a crackling maple-glazed top, I may never make shortcakes again.   Here's what I did; cut 3/4-inch slices of the bread, toasted them and placed each piece on a plate.  The strawberries and a bowl of whipped cream were served separately.  Everyone assembled their own dessert.  It was fragrant, tart, sweet, spicy, crispy and creamy.  Need anything else for dessert?

I bought a few extra quarts of strawberries for the freezer to be pulled and defrosted in a time of emergency.   Hull the berries then lay out, single file, on a parchment paper-covered baking sheet.  Freeze, then store the frozen berries in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag.   To defrost do the whole thing in reverse - lay the frozen berries on a baking sheet, thaw and you will have perfect berries to use as you like.  Use semi-thawed berries in a smoothie.

SUSANSIMONSAYS:

If you find yourself in downtown NYC (not all the way down) and are desperate for sweet refreshment
go here on the east side:

Zucker is a small east village bakery with all the charm of a coffee house in central Vienna.  Their cold brewed Stumptown coffee consumed with  alfajores ( Argentine sandwich cookies filled with dulce de leche then rolled in coconut) is the pause that refreshes.  No doubt.

L'Arte del Gelato on the west side, in the Chelsea Market serves the real thing.  Real Italian gelato - ice cream with about 1/4 of the butterfat as found in American ice cream.   My benchmark gelato is straciatella - literally "a little rag" - it is plain (not vanilla) white, gelato with chocolate "rags" swirled through.  L'Arte del Gelato's straciatella  passes the test, it tastes like Italy.  All the other flavors do too. 

Friday Night Bites

Just when a scintilla of doubt about leaving the NYC for Hudson passed through my being
The Red Barn, out on 9H in Ghent reopened it's doors - so to speak - as a proper food establishment and I was once again smitten with the Hudson Valley.   Owners, Chris and Bert call  what they serve at their new version of The Red Barn, roadside food.  And so it is.  There's Bert, dentist/chef behind the big grill using one hand to cook brats, dogs and burgers to order and he's frying State Fair-style potatoes with the other hand.   (how's all of that accomplished?).
Chris is always in motion, moving from the grill, to the red harlequin-patterned gazebo/bar - with a string of red & yellow banners - where a thirsty visitor can order a gin & tonic,  pink lemonade and vodka, a chilly glass of wine, or a frosty Stella just like that (the owners, fortuitously, kept up their NYS liquor license), to check on the vendors' and their tables.

Did I mention that on Friday night The Red Barn also hosts a mini-farmer's market?    So, if you think you won't be able to make it to the larger version on Saturday morning in Hudson - stop by on Friday between the hours of 4 - 7pm and pick up vegetables from two different vendors; cheese, yogurt and some Loaf bread from Cheese!; flowers from Cedar Farm, meat from Pigasso; and the Red Barn's own seasonal pies, cakes and those wicked good Wicked chips.  

I picked up two bunches of perfect little radishes so I could make one of my all-time favorite salads, Greek Radish Salad.
The recipe comes from Perla Meyers classic cookbook The Peasant Kitchen, A Return to Simple Good Food, published in 1975 way before it was stylish to talk about "simple good food".

GREEK RADISH SALAD
Serves 6 to 8

1 tablespoon lemon juice
6 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
4 to 5 cups thinly sliced radishes
8 to 10 black Greek olives, thinly sliced
3/4 to 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
2 tablespoons finely minced fresh parsley
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
freshly ground pepper
salt

1.   In a small jar combine the lemon juice, olive oil, and mustard.  Shake the jar to blend the dressing, then set aside.
2.   In a large serving bowl combine the radishes, olives, feta, parsley, and onion.   Add the dressing and a heavy grinding of black pepper.  Toss the salad and taste it for seasoning.   (Feta can be slightly salty, so the salad may only need a small pinch of salt.)   Chill for 2 to 4 hours before serving, then serve with French bread and a bowl of sweet butter.

Perla has some good advice about feta cheese included with the recipe:  
If you want to reduce the saltiness of feta cheese, place it in a bowl and cover with cold water.  Place the bowl in the refrigerator and use the cheese a day or two later.  The cheese will keep for two weeks in the refrigerator.
As an additional garnish you can serve a plate of sardines dressed in a little lemon juice and olive oil

Oh joy.   A late spring or summer afternoon spent out at The Red Barn in the glow of the setting sun might be a reason to live.   And, from the the reactions of the shoppers and diners who arrived in jeeps and antique cars from all points in Columbia County there was universal agreement that this was - as one well known man-about-Hudson offered, "It's heaven, isn't it?"

SUSANSIMONSAYS:

Last - but certainly not least - among the The Red Barn's delectable offerings - an absolutely scrumptious lobster roll worthy of the finest roadside stand in Kennebunkport, Maine.  Guess which dog waited, in good faith, for a chunk of succulent lobster to fall?

Last Weekend

The gorgeous Allegra & I are off the Nantucket this upcoming weekend.    But, first, a quick word about last weekend - Memorial Day weekend - which we spent in the relative quiet of New York City.  

I started the weekend on Friday by inviting a friend over for lunch.   

We ate outside, sitting in the shade of Norway maple tree that overhangs my terrace.  I made salad with grilled chicken, very slim green beans dressed with peanut sauce ( see blog posting from  January 8th 2011 for recipe) all sitting on a bed of green leaf lettuce.

Serves 3 - 6

GRILLED CHICKEN, MAY 27th 2011
Marinate 1-inch wide strips of 6 chicken breasts in:
2 tablespoons sesame oil
zest & juice of  1 lime
2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger root
1 clove garlic mashed through a press
2 tablespoons soy sauce
a few drops of sriracha sauce
Let marinate for at least 2 hours and up to 8 hours.
Grill over a charcoal or gas grill for about 3 minutes on one side and 2 to 3 minutes on the other

Blanch the green beans, toss with enough peanut sauce to evenly coat.  For this particular dish I fried 'til crisp the white part of ramps (because their season is just ending) and tossed them into the beans.

Pile pieces of green leaf lettuce on a serving platter.  Top with the beans, then the chicken.  Serve immediately.   While the grill was going  I toasted some pieces of olive-oiled baguette to accompany the salad.

We had a bowl of frozen vanilla yogurt topped with the rhubarb-strawberry compote from my last blog.  I often serve amaretti cookies with a dessert like this one and show my companions how to smash them, either between your hands or on the table then sprinkle the crumbs over the dessert.  Yum!

Fast forward to the Monday, the 30th, Memorial Day and another little meal outside, under the maple.  By Monday it was steaming hot - which translate ito drinks poured over mountains of ice and freezer-chilled beer.

To go with those gelid beverages we - my guests & I were fed fried asparagus by another guest, His Royness, Roy Finamore, legendary cookbook editor, and winner of a James Beard award for his book, "Tasty, Get Great Food on the Table Every Day" ( Houghton Mifflin Co. 2006).  Roy used his string beans fritto  recipe from "Tasty..." for the Pecorino cheese battered, rolled in bread crumbs, olive oil fried asparagus - and, Man, oh Man were they deeeeeeeeeeee-vine.    Salty, crunchy, and grassy with a tiny spritz of fresh lemon juice for a tiny bit of tang - the asparagus got us started in fine style.

Our main course were grilled cheeseburgers ( made with local, grass fed beef) and  two salads:

STEAMED POTATO SALAD WITH MUSTARD VINAIGRETTE AND CAPERS

Serves 4 or 5

1 pound smallish red skin potatoes cut in half, steamed until a fork passes through them with ease

While the potatoes are steaming add a heaping tablespoon of finely chopped shallots, 2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves, 1 tablespoon prepared Dijon mustard, 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar, 1/4 extra virgin olive, 2 tablespoons coarsely chopped capers (preserved in salt)  and 1 teaspoon sea salt to a large bowl and whisk together until emulsified.   Cut the hot potatoes into 1/2-inch chunks and add to the vinaigrette - toss together.   The hot potatoes will absorb the vinaigrette  as they cool.   Taste for seasoning and add as needed.

RADISH & BLACK OLIVE SALAD

Serves 4-ish

1 large bunch radishes, leaves and root end removed.  Rinse thoroughly - they are covered in secret pockets of dirt!
Use a mandolin to thinly slice.  Wrap the sliced radishes in a layer of paper towels or a cotton tea towel so they can sweat out some of their liquid.   Let them rest for an hour or so.
Toss together with some coarsely chopped black olives, chopped chives, chopped fresh mint, extra virgin olive oil, fresh lemon juice and sea salt to serve.

We started our meal with a "Tasty..." recipe and ended with one too.  Roy's Strawberry SHORTCAKE.
Shortcake capitalized because that's recipe included in the book.  Once you've got it - use it with any fruit in season.  When the strawberries have gone it's onto to peaches, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cranberries - you get the idea.
Here's what Roy says, "I've been baking this tender cake - almost cake, almost biscuit - for thirty years now.  When I lived in Vermont , I'd make it for breakfast, putting slabs of the cake into bowls with fresh-picked raspberries from the yard and ladling in top milk, which we got from the dairy farmer down the road."

 Makes one 8-inch cake
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch sat
1/3 cup butter softened
1/3 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/3 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Butter and flour an 8-inch round cake pan.
Whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl.
Beat the butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer until it starts to lighten.  Gradually pour in the sugar, beating while you pour, and continuing beating until very light.  Beat in the eggs.
Now switch to a wooden spoon and stir in the dry ingredients and milk in batches: half the dry, all the milk, and the rest of the dry.   Beat for a moment or two with the spoon until the batter is smooth.  It will be stiff.
Add the the batter to the pan and pat it out into the pan with floured fingers.  Give the pan a rap on the counter top to release any air bubbles, then slip into the oven.  Bake for about 25 minutes, until risen and browned in spots.
Let the cake cool on a rack for about 5 minutes, then turn out of the pan and let cool completely on the rack.
Roy sliced about a pint of strawberries and let them macerate with 1 packed tablespoon brown sugar, 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar and a few grinds black pepper.

Assemble the cake:   Spoon some of the strawberry juice over the cake and then spoon on the fruit.   Whip a cup of heavy cream and spread over the berries.
Serve right away, or refrigerate for later.



SUSANSIMONSAYS:   I'm all talked out.   Next week, Nantucket!