Monthly Archives: April 2012

Beet your greens

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The title of this blog doesn’t really make sense, but I was really trying to stay away from writing, “can’t be beet.”  Damn, I did it anyway.

I’m convinced that one day an eager grad student will earn his PhD by telling everyone that beets are one of the healthiest things we can eat.  I think that’s true of most things that grow that are shockingly different than other plants – things with great colour, strong flavour, or weird consistency…  I have similar mostly unjustified suspicions about eggplant and avocado.    

What I had never considered was that beets could give a one-two punch of nutrition.  The roots are one thing, but the greens that usually end up in my compost might offer some goodness too (click here for details).  And lately, I’m all about making my family eat stuff that I would normally have thrown out.  Happy Earth Day!  With all of this in mind, I undangerously boiled up some beetroot as a side the other day, and put away the greens for safekeeping.

Because I was trying to kiss up to my husband who was just about to send me to Washington DC with a friend for a girls’ weekend (fantastic – stay tuned for some culinary inspirations from the trip like turtle soup) I decided to prepare the greens in two different ways, even though doing so was a bit extravagant for a weeknight where he would be the only one eating them and would also probably complain that they were too healthy. 

I started with an appetizer that was really fantastic, based on the one here, although I made a few alterations (my ingredients listed below).  I may have changed one or two things about their recipe, but damn, can those kids ever kick my ass around the block with their food photography.  It’s worth checking out.

 Beet green and goat cheese crostini

  • 1 whole wheat baguette, thinly sliced on diagonal, toasted on baking sheet in oven at 400 for 5mins
  • 3 medium-sized beets
  • 1 mini log of soft goat cheese
  • 1 lemon, very thinly sliced, including rind
  • Salt & pepper

 Directions:  1.  Wash and peel beet roots with a peeler.  I had leftovers from the previous night that I had boiled, but the chefs who inspired this one roasted theirs in the oven, which probably added even more sweetness.  Slice.

2.  Blanche the beet greens (bring water to a boil and drop the greens in for a short time), rinse to cool, and then chop

3.  Spread the toasts with goat cheese, add lemon, beetroot, and greens.  Salt and pepper to taste

 Results and rating:  This recipe was very delicious.  Don’t leave out the lemon even though it may scare you to eat the rind (my husband obviously asked me whether or not it would kill him to eat it because my cooking keeps him on his toes).  The bitter/sour/sweet combination in this dish was excellent.  A great spring appy.  4 yums

 

And on to the main course…

Mushroom and Beet Green Penne

(Based on recipe found here)

  • 4 handfuls of penne or other pasta.  Choose whole grain, your colon will thank you for it
  • 2 pints of mushrooms, chopped.  Choose some sort of brown ones – good cancer fighters
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1tbsp fresh thyme (our stupid grocery store didn’t have fresh, so I used 1tsp dried)
  • Good bunch of blanched beet greens, chopped
  • Healthy handful of grated parmesan cheese
  • Good glug of olive oil

 Directions:  1.  Boil a pot of water and prepare pasta as per package instructions, or to your taste.

2.  Heat olive oil in pan over medium-high heat.  Add mushrooms, onions and garlic and sautee until liquid has been released from mushrooms.  Add beet greens to pan when pasta is nearly ready, just to warm them.

3.  Drain pasta and toss with mushrooms and their pan friends, adding thyme, parmesan, and a few good glugs of raw olive oil.  Enjoy!

 Results and rating:  A very healthy and simple vegetarian main course to prepare.  Didn’t knock my socks off, but could be a good reliable weekday entrée.  3 yums

 Interesting fact:  “Beeturia” is a harmless condition present in 10-15% of the population where eating beets makes your pee pink or red.  Please remember what you had for dinner before calling 911. 

 

Mellow Pomelo

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Here are some pictures of the biggest hamburger in the world:

 Here’s a picture of one of the largest lobsters in the world:

 

And here’s a picture of the largest citrus fruit in the world, the pomelo:

(My pomelo was about 1/3 of the size of this one, but I thought the picture I found here was too cool to pass up)

If you’re into big food, I’d recommend going for the last one – it’s pretty easy to get your hands on one, and if you eat the whole thing, it probably won’t make you throw up afterward.

 You’ve probably seen a pomelo if you’ve ever strolled through a well-developed produce section.  I’ve always been attracted to them because they’re so large and mysterious, but also because they’re covered in a pretty kind of netting.  Fishnets can also be intimidating, though, so maybe that’s why I’ve always passed them by.  This time I overcame my nervousness and picked one up.

 The pomelo is native to Southeast Asia and Malaysia.    Based on the origins of the websites I’m finding, it seems to be a favourite in China, although these sites also explain that it is enjoyed in Tahiti, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Fiji, India, and Tahiti.  The Chinese name for pomelo is similar to “blessing,” and so it’s considered good luck.

 It peeled much like a grapefruit would, except that the skin came off more easily.  I would have taken more pictures, but if you’ve seen a grapefruit, you’ve seen a dwarf pomelo, inside and out.

I tasted one of the inner sections, and the consistency was like a big orange that’s dry and un-juicy.  You know when you get a bad batch of oranges that aren’t even good for juicing and you start cursing and your kids say, “what does that word mean, mommy?”  Yeah.  Been there.  But the pomelo quickly recovered from disappointing me with its dryness.  It’s much sweeter than a juiceless orange, and it has a fragrance that’s a beautifully floral combination of the best the citrus fruits have to offer – it’s the obese love child of a lemon, grapefruit, and orange.

 I thought it might serve as a sexy stand-in for grapefruit in a recipe, and I was right.  I served pomelo salsa over tilapia, varying this recipe slightly based on what was on hand.  My ingredients are listed below.  Sorry there isn’t a picture, but my husband ate and cleaned up before I got one.  He felt appropriately guilty.

 Tilapia with pomelo avocado salsa

  • ¼ Honey pomelo, peeled and separated from segment casings
  • 1 small avocado, diced
  • 1/4C red onion
  • 1Tbsp lime juice
  • 2Tbsp cilantro, chopped
  • Salt & Pepper
  • 4 whitefish filets
  • 5Tbsp olive oil

Directions: 

  1.  Make salsa by chopping and mixing together first 6 ingredients above.  Add 3Tbsp oil.
  2. Preheat oven to 400.  Put fish filets on baking sheet, brushing all sides with oil and sprinkling with salt and pepper.  Bake 20 minutes or until fish is white and flaky
  3. Serve salsa over fish

 Rating:  2 yums.  The salsa was a fresh, healthy way to jazz up fish, and I believe the pomelo would be an improvement over using grapefruit.

Oh, and apologies for getting the “mellow yellow,” song in your head.  It’s driving me crazy right now too.

My humps – How to cook camel

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If you look back through my previous posts, you’ll see that my meats are slowly becoming more and more exotic as time goes on.  That’s primarily thanks to procrastination. 

 You see, when I first visited Black Angus Fine Meats and filled my basket with exciting bits of frozen creatures, I was enthusiastic, but that excitement soon gave way to fear.  Did I really want to taste all of these strange animals, or had the shock value of them gotten the better of me?  I was determined to cook everything, but because I was slightly fearful I started with the more tame animals (in terms of taste, anyway), like wild boar, and ostrich, and have eventually, reluctantly, made my way through the freezer to the more adventurous ones. 

 And so, reluctantly, camel.

 

I had purchased ground camel, which brought my brain to the mental file folders containing ground beef recipe ideas.  Camel meatloaf?  Camel burgers?  I’m gagging, you? 

I did what I always do, and googled. I found that most descriptions said camel tasted like sweet beef.  Combine sweet beef with a get-together with my cousins, and the logical mathematical result is…meatballs.  Plus, a party with my cousins would definitely involve a number of healthy glugs of alcohol for each and every card-carrying member, unless they were on drinking hiatus due to pregnancy (congrats, Hannah), so if the camel made them puke, they would never be able to blame it completely.

 I googled, “the best meatballs ever,” and one of the first recipes that wasn’t an allrecipes one (why do I have an aversion to those, but yes, I definitely do) was this one.  It was simple, and I was smart to trust it, because even with camel, it worked perfectly.  But I skipped the sauce.  Any family meatballs I have ever had have been sweet crockpot rather than tomato ones, so I decided to go with the devil they knew.  Here are the two recipes I used:

Best Camel Balls Ever

  • 1 onion peeled and finely chopped
  • small bunch fresh parsley, finely chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
  • 500g ground camel
  • 2 egg yolks
  • 50g breadcrumbs

(click for full recipe)

Janet Nowak’s Slowcooker Meatballs or Ribs

  • Meatballs or ribs
  • 1 cup barbeque sauce
  • 2 tbsp corn syrup
  • 2 tbsp flour
  • 1 tbsp soy sauce

 Directions:  Brown meatballs in a pan.  Mix ingredients above and put in crockpot.  If your meatballs aren’t nicely covered, multiply the recipe as need be.  Cook on low for approx 6 hours, stirring occasionally. 

And the gorgeous result…

 A special thank-you to Mrs. Nowak, who gave me the sauce recipe as part of a recipe album for my wedding shower, along with the advice that I should never go in the water wearing a yellow bikini.

 Results:  The cousins ate all but two meatballs, and I made a lot of them.  A few cousins said that they could taste a different aftertaste with the camel, but generally, they didn’t taste a difference from regular beef meatballs.  Maybe if you cover anything with enough barbeque sauce it tastes great.

 Rating:  2 yums.  When I made wild boar I said that you should cook it while entertaining snobs, because it tasted similar to pork, but sounded more impressive.  With camel, you might want to cook it for someone you don’t like and want to scare the pants off of.  It pretty much tastes like beef, but the actual source is just plain strange.

Skeletons make great lamb soup

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I am still on the fence about the title of this post.  I considered calling it, “Boners,” because I’ve been reading about how to publicize what I’m doing and I thought maybe that word would be very search engine friendly.  My mom and father-in-law have been reading my posts, though, so in the end I decided to give it a PG rating, although I told you the story about boners because I’m not giving up on the idea that perverts who also like to cook will find it as long as I throw the word in there somewhere.  And now I’ve used the word twice!

 Anyway.  Last week I had a friend over for dinner – she’s the one who ate the alligator bites as the appetizer.  I wanted to make something special for her for the main, so I was browsing and found a Jamie Oliver recipe for barbequed leg of lamb with thai green spices.  I cooked it exactly according to his recipe, and it was delicious and cooked just to a nice pink level of juiciness. 

 Now you can’t just grab a lamb leg at my grocery store, but I thought it would be a good excuse to venture out of my neighborhood to find a real butcher.  I was successful, and will be returning to Vince Gasparro’s Meat Market (like a real butcher I don’t think they have a website), where they were very friendly and knowledgeable.  While I was there at the counter of the real butcher he asked whether or not I wanted the extra lengths of bones he had just sawed off so that the leg would fit in my pan.  Huge apologies to vegetarians reading, because writing that almost disgusts me too.  Without pausing, I answered, “yes please,” even though I have never cooked anything with bones in my life.   This blog has made me cook really differently than I used to, though, because now cooking challenges me to find tasty uses for things I normally would have ignored.  Kind of a good way to be.  I swear the next time I go out for chicken wings I’m going to ask them to take the bones home in a doggy bag.  Dare me?

 So making lamb stock and soup from actual bones is not really dangerous cooking, but I’m including it because in the past, I always thought, “why wouldn’t you just always use purchased chicken or veg stock?  It’s cheap and easy.”  Well you know what?  Making stock from bones is cheaper and easier!  Although it takes more time (but no effort).  And apparently, bone broth is high in easily digestible protein that also assists with calcium and digestive health.  Also, when you have complete control over your stock you can remove the fat layer and make soup without added salt.  Here are the recipes and methods I used, although I made a different soup from the ones listed on the stock site.

 Lamb Stock

  • Put lamb bones in a slow cooker and cover with about 1” of water
  • Add 1tbsp vinegar (I used flavoured rice vinegar)
  • Turn slow cooker on low and let it go for 12-24 hours.  Mine went for about 20
  • Strain stock into bowl through a cheesecloth.  Add back any pieces of meat you can find if you like
  • Put stock into fridge until you need it, or freeze it in containers.  Pick off solidified fat layer when cold

 

 

When I picked mine up cold from the fridge I thought I had wrecked it, because it looked like jello…

…but when I googled, “my stock looks like jello,” I found this website that told me that congratulations, that was a good thing, and that now I had just proven why vegetarians don’t eat jello, because gelatin all jello comes from animals.  It turned to soup when I heated it again and made up this tasty lamb soup recipe based on a number of recipes I browsed.  Mine was heavy on sausage, but amounts are flexible.  Please find the freedom in modifying the combination of ingredients to your own taste.

Protein Power Lamb Soup

 

  • Homemade lamb stock, above (enough to fill a large pot)
  • 2tbsp olive oil
  • Lamb sausage
  • 1 onion, peeled and chopped
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1 peeled, diced sweet potato
  • A few big handfuls of chopped kale
  • About 300mL white kidney beans (half a large can)
  • 1 healthy tsp thyme
  • Salt and pepper to taste.  I found the homemade stock quite bland at first, but I think I’m just used to the great volumes of salt in commercial brands

 Heat oil in a pan over med-high heat, while re-heating your stock in a large pot over high heat at the same time.  Add onions and garlic to pan, heating until onions are translucent, 2-3mins.  Add sausage until all pink is gone and liquids have been released, about 5-7mins.  When stock is bubbling, drain fat from pan contents and add it to the pot, and then add remaining ingredients.  Bring to a boil before lowering heat to a gentle bubble, putting the lid on, allowing a low simmer for 1-2 hours.  Enjoy!

 Rating:  3 yums, as long as you like lamb