I have not been as dutiful with our vegetables as Erin has, but I hope I will be forgiven since I am juggling working full time, raising my nine-month old daughter, and nursing our new puppy through kennel cough. Oh wait, that's Erin, who does all the former while making pork tenderloin with sage rub. Thanks Erin, if you need me I'll be on the couch licking my Cheetos-stained fingers and watching "Law and Order" reruns.
Anyway, the first week all we did with our vegetables was make salads. And by make salads, I mean cut stuff up and then put things in our new salad spinner. An inauspicious debut, to be sure, but we liked them and enjoyed using the new salad spinner.
But last night, we made potato-beet hash and choy in a buttery ginger sauce. The hash was made with shredded beets, potatoes, and onions. It was pretty tasty but it probably could have used more onion (the recipe called for two but I just used one). The choy was delicious and couldn't have been easier. I blanched* the choy and then melted some butter in a sauce pan, added two tablespoons of soy sauce, some freshly grated ginger, and the choy and stirred it around for two minutes. Here is a helpful tip for this dish: melt the butter on medium heat like the recipe tells you and not hight heat, under the mistaken assumption that the butter will melt faster. Otherwise when you add the soy sauce it will visciously splatter all over the stovetop and the wall behind your stove and will cause lengthy clean-up. Then I mixed it up with some basil from this week's delivery. The original recipe tells you to use cilantro, but I didn't have any. The basil was very tasty in there, however.
Pictures to come!
*Blanching is a term that professional cooks like to throw around and which you probably have never heard before unless you yourself are a professional cook. It involves mercilessly plunging the vegetables in a pot of boiling water for 2-3 minutes. I had never done it before last night and it was exhilarating
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I had never heard the term "blanching" before unless it was in regards to DuBois. However, I wonder if blanching does anything to the nutritional value of greens. Can either of the chefs speak to this?
Thanks for asking, Martin. Here is what I found out from UIUC's "Food and Nutrition" web page: "Blanching brightens the color, helps retain vitamins and reduces the action of the enzymes that would otherwise destroy fresh flavor, even after freezing. There is another very practical reason for blanching: it shrinks the product, making it easier to pack."
I forgot to add that you are supposed to run the vegetables under very cold water in a colander after you take them out of the boiling water.
Post a Comment