Eating Dirt

Mark Bittman's Chopped Salad

Last year, for my birthday, I received Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It is a big and impressive book, and because of its heft and lack of fancy photographs, I lumped it into the same go-to-first category as Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. My friend Shelley does go to it for everything, but I have yet to be won over by its recipes. When my Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was on hiatus, out on loan to a friend, and I had to make black eyed peas for thirty people on New Year’s Day, turning to Bittman’s book only made me nervous. 

His Black-Eyed Peas, Southern Style looked similar to Madison’s Southern Style Black-Eyed Peas. But they weren't quite right.  For one thing, her recipe is vegetarian and his is not. So I nixed Bittman’s ham hock and went on with the process. A ham hock offers salt, maybe a bit of porky flavor, but not all that much else...leaving me perplexed about what was missing. All I could come up with were a bay leaf, chipotle pepper and some allspice.  Which was close, but now that I have VCE back at home again, I see that it is not one but three bay leaves her recipe calls for, celery, thyme and, the real key, garlic. Also missing were the chipotle, allspice and green pepper, which should be left out because the flavor of cooked green pepper overwhelms everything under the sun.

But I do love Mark Bittman for his New York Times articles. His blog is great, not something I’m all that good at keeping up with, but his food section writings are the bomb. That is why I force my family to get dressed early and forgo breakfast most wednesday mornings, so we can walk over to the Irish market around the corner, pick up my paper, head to Arizmendi for pastry and a loaf of bread and then ride the muni to school. Two papers a day is just too much, so we only receive the Times on Sunday, when the kids can fight over the color funnies (luckily they are easy to separate into two pieces) while I attempt to read the important parts at high speed. As for the Chronicle, I pull out the Food and Home & Garden sections to read monday morning, when such slim pickings arrive on our doorstep that we rarely bother to bring them in. 

This year, Bittman stole the show with his first Sunday article Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One, or 6 Billion. Sensible, informative, insightful and inciting, he included three recipes that can be tweaked to prepare a year of seasonal dinners, trading in and out whichever ingredients are at their peak and choosing the recipes - stir fry, rice and beans or salad - according to your mood. So a few days after his article appeared, and a few days after we’d vowed to try to eat up every bit of produce that darkened our door this year, cabbage was on our mind. I like green cabbage - it is good stuffed with pork and baked, it makes a nice soup with potatoes and chicken stock, it sautes and takes soy sauce well and is excellent with chicken tacos. But we still never seem to eat it all. So a salad of raw cabbage to accompany lentils and rice, with a little bit of roast chicken sounded like just the thing. 

And it was - lemon juice is a magical liquid. Tossing your cabbage and other fresh salad items in a tablespoon of it, along with a little garlic and some olive oil can make most anything (especially lentils and rice) into a great meal.

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Cabbage Salad (adapted from Mark Bittman’s Chopped Salad):

1/2 small head green cabbage, cored and shredded or very thinly sliced

1 carrot, shredded

1/2 red or yellow bell pepper, diced

4 radishes, thinly sliced

1 handful parsley leaves, stems removed

2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice (or red or white vinegar)

7 Tablespoons olive oil

1 garlic clove, minced or pressed

salt and pepper to taste

Put the cabbage, carrot, pepper, radishes and parsley in a big bowl. Then put the garlic and lemon juice into a separate lidded container. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes. Add the olive oil, salt and pepper. Snap down the lid, then pick it up and shake it to mix the dressing. Pour 1/2 the dressing over the salad, then toss it gently with tongs. Taste, and add more dressing if necessary. Serve immediately

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Roast Chicken Tacos

Tonight's chicken tacos were the best dinner ever. In addition to both kids eating it, my daughter ate five radishes. Five!  I've been putting beautiful little radishes - in red, pink, purple - on the table and eating them with great relish around my family for years now, but I I've never seen her eat more than one tiny nibble, until tonight. Truth be told, I don't even like radishes that much. I used to worry about what to do with the bunches we would have stacking up in our produce drawer, and at one point resorted to making a sort of radish cream cheese spread, which actually is quite good on toasted brown bread. The funny thing about radishes is that the longer you keep them, the spicier they get. So depending on whether you like them hot or not hot, leaving them in your fridge for a while may not be such a bad thing. And now that the majority of my family will eat them, I can grow them in the garden!  

But I digress...the tacos were grand. Really delicious. Everybody loved them. They were easy, though I mistakenly waited to roast the chicken until after picking up my daughter from preschool, which seems to have led to one of her more massive bedtime meltdowns this evening. The chicken could have easily been roasted this morning, or even last night or the night before. Of course, then we would have missed out on the crispy salty roast chicken skin, which is one of the most delicious things on earth (it goes soggy after a night in the fridge), but I guess we could just eat it with breakfast or whenever the chicken comes out of the oven. 

When you're making this, be sure to get really good produce - a rancid avocado or flaccid radish would be a deal breaker. This afternoon my son and I picked up a chicken over at Alpha Market in Cole Valley, where they also had baskets of little organically grown apples that look like they came from someone's backyard, for $1.85. I know, I know, apples aren't really in season yet, but my son keeps asking for them. He is one of those kids who never wants to eat what we have a lot of. Then we swung by Fresh Organics on our way home, which is expensive as hell, but has great produce. I love shopping at Rainbow Grocery, but we cannot walk to it. When I'm heading east and staying close to home, these places are the next best thing.

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Roast Chicken Tacos (adapted from Canal House Cooking Volume 4):

1 whole roasted chicken

a dozen or so corn tortillas (taco size)

1 avocado (or more if your family likes them), peeled and cut into slices

1 fresh poblano chile pepper, roasted, peeled, seeded and sliced thinly

cotija cheese (as much as you want), crumbled

2 limes, sliced into wedges for squeezing

1 bunch fresh radishes, scrubbed clean with the leaves left on

salt

This recipe will feed four, with lots of chicken left over. If you want to feed more people just get more tortillas, another pepper, avocado and pepper. To make it into a really quick dinner you can roast the pepper and the chicken ahead of time. Both will keep for a day or two in the fridge. I suppose you could even buy a chicken already cooked at the market and bring it home, were that a more convenient option.

To roast the pepper, hold it with a pair of tongs over one of the gas flames on your stovetop. If you have an electric burner that heats up, you may be able to just lay the pepper on top, but I've never done it. Either way, be very, very careful to pay close attention to your chili, otherwise you may burn the house down. Have ready a small paper bag before you roast the pepper, and when the pepper is blackened and charred all over, drop it into the bag and close it. The pepper will steam a little bit, and in twenty minutes or so you can remove it from the bag and peel its skin off. Then slice it in half, cut out the stem, scrape out the seeds (being careful not to scrape out the flesh) and cut it into thin strips.

To roast the chicken, first make sure that it is brought up to room temperature before you put it in the oven. Otherwise, what should be an hour cooking time will become much longer. It takes at least a couple of hours out on our kitchen counter to warm up, but then we live in a place where the temperature is 55° on the first of August. At your house, the chicken may come to room temperature more quickly. You don't want to leave it unrefrigerated for too long in a warm location because bacteria will grow that can make you sick. 

After the chicken has been out of the fridge for however long seems appropriate, preheat the oven to 400°. Lay out some paper towels on a big plate, and wash your chicken in the sink, then pat it dry on the plate. Next rub the inside of the body cavity and the outside of the bird with salt. Lots of salt. If you want your chicken to look pretty, use some cooking twine (you buy it at the grocery store) to tie its legs together, as though it were crossing them. You can even throw a few fresh herbs in the body cavity beforehand if you want, thyme, parsley and rosemary give the meat a nice flavor. Place the chicken breast side up on a shallow oiled baking dish or baking sheet with high sides (at least a half inch or so) and put it into the oven. It will need to cook for about an hour, you can check it after 30 minutes, and when the skin is starting to look nice and browned, slice a knife into the thigh joint. If the juices run clear, then the chicken is done. Let it rest for a few minutes before carving.

Once the chicken is done, and the other ingredients have been prepared and put out in small bowls, call your people to the table and then toast the tortillas. Like roasting the chile pepper, lay a single tortilla over a low gas flame on your range for a few seconds, then flip it over using tongs. Once it is warm enough to fold in half, put it on a plate and pass it to the table, the lucky recipient can assemble their taco and eat it. Also like the pepper, be very careful not to let it catch on fire. Stovetop tortilla heating requires vigilance, and I'm willing to bet that your local fire department would recommend you use the microwave instead. Should one happen to light up, quickly grab it with your tongs, drop it in the sink and douse it with water. If the fire is too big for your tongs, grab the fire extinguisher that you (should) have installed close to your stove. Its easy to keep one hidden in a cabinet.

To assemble the tacos (all ingredients should be out on the table in small bowls, with the sliced chicken on a larger plate), just put a couple small pieces of chicken on the tortilla, then add avocado, roasted chile, cheese, salt and pepper, a squeeze of lime. Radishes should be eaten separately, you can sprinkle a little salt on your plate and dip it in that.

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