Category Archives: recipes

Chickweed Chimichurri

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SOUNDS LIKE AN Arizona ghost town. In fact, Chickweed Chimichuri is a zesty sauce.

Chimichurri hails from Argentina, where it was invented by an Irishman named Jimmy McCurry fighting for Argentinean independence in the 19th century. The sauce’s name is reputedly a bastardization of his name. Anyway, the traditional way to prepare it is with parsley, vinegar, garlic, oil, and hot pepper.

Here chickweed replaces the parsley and lemon juice replaces the vinegar.

Tuna with Chickweed Chimichurri

Chimichurri

1 packed cup chickweed, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp shallot, fine dice
3 tbsp sweet red pepper, fine dice
1 tbsp hot pepper, de-seeded, fine dice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp salt

Tuna and Sushi Rice

1 lb sushi-grade tuna, cut into small (1/2 inch) cubes
2 cups sushi rice
rice vinegar to taste

Makes 4 servings.

Mix chimichurri ingredients together in a bowl and refrigerate for an hour or so. Meanwhile make seasoned (i.e. add rice vinegar) sushi rice and cut up a bunch of sushi-grade tuna. Serve a dollop of the raw tuna over a bowl of rice; garnish with the chimichurri. The acidity of the chimichurri immediately begins to act on the tuna, changing the flavor in subtle ways as you eat.

Now, about the taste. A dish like this would seem to cry out for cilantro, but please resist. We all know what that tastes like. The greens in this case are far removed from parsley, cilantro, and other standard ceviche offerings. In a word, they’re wild. The bright green flavor, somewhat tempered by the other ingredients, gives this Tuna Poke a new twist. Enjoy it on its own merits or as a change of pace, preferably outside on a sunny day with a bottle of rosé wine.

 

Fiddlehead Pasta with Lemon & Butter

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THEY LOOK GREAT on the plate and their taste, though distinctly wild, is still approachable—a cross between asparagus and artichoke, some say. Me: I say their taste is totally unique, although I get that butteriness as well as the high green note common in so many wild edible plants.

Fiddleheads are the new growth of ferns, named for their violin scroll shape. High-end restaurants charge handsomely for these greens, yet you can find them coast to coast without too much difficulty, sometimes even in urban parks.

The West Coast’s fiddlehead is the lady fern (Athyrium filix-femina). Elsewhere in North America, particularly in New England, the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) is considered tops and makes up the bulk of the commercial trade. 

Look for fiddleheads in damp woodlands, swamps, and meadow margins. You want to get them while still young and tightly coiled; the unfurled fern fronds (say that 10 times, quick) are inedible. 

Fiddlehead Pasta with Lemon Butter Sauce

1 lb pasta
3 cups fiddleheads, cleaned
4 tbsp butter
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
2-3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp lemon zest
1 cup parmesan cheese, grated
salt and pepper, to taste

1. Blanche the fiddleheads for a minute or two in pot of boiling water. Remove with slotted spoon and add pasta to same water.

2. Saute garlic in butter until not quite golden. Add lemon juice and cook another minute. Add fiddleheads and coat thoroughly. Toss with pasta, lemon zest, and cheese. Season at table. Serves 3-4.

Wilted Dandy Salad

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I’M USUALLY not a big fan of warm salads. But there’s one warm salad I’ve been making for years, thanks our friend Kathy.

Kathy’s Wilted Salad

6 cups dandelion greens (or spinach)
2 cups basil leaves
3-4 oz prosciutto, diced
1/2 cup pine nuts
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup parmesan cheese, grated
1/4 cup olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste

Mix the greens in a large salad bowl. Heat olive oil in skillet over medium heat. Add pinenuts and garlic, stirring occasionally. When pinenuts start to brown, add prosciutto and cook one more minute. Pour contents of skillet over salad greens and toss with parm. Season if necessary.

Nettle and Porcini Lasagna

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STINGING NETTLES and porcini make this lasagna a little less run-of-the-mill. 

9-12 lasagna noodles
32 oz ricotta
4 cups boiled stinging nettles
1 28 oz can diced tomatoes
1 medium onion, diced
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 pound fresh porcini (or button) mushrooms, sliced
1-2 oz dried porcini mushrooms, rehydrated in a cup of warm water
1 16 oz mozzarella
1/8 tsp nutmeg
olive oil

1. Saute onion and garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil until tender, then push to one side of pan and add sliced mushrooms. When mushrooms have started to brown slightly, add tomatoes and stir. Simmer for 30 minutes, adding water as necessary. After 30 minutes, stir in rehydrated mushrooms and their liquid. Simmer another 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile blanche nettles in boiling water for 2 minutes, remove, and wring out. Save water in pot. Chop nettles and mix with ricotta. Season with grated nutmeg.

3. Boil lasagna noodles in same pot (making use of those nettle nutrients) until al dente.

4. To make the lasagna: Smear a little sauce in a 9 X 13-inch oven-proof dish. Lay down 3-4 noodles and cover with half the nettle-ricotta mixture. Top with sauce and a third of the mozzarella. Repeat: noodles, nettle-ricotta, sauce, mozzarella. Cover with one more layer of noodles and the rest of the sauce and mozzarella.

5. Cover with foil and bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. Discard foil and bake another 10-15 minutes. Remove from oven and let stand 15 minutes before serving.

Braised Dandelion Greens

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Halibut with Braised GreensIN LIKE A LION and out like a lamb? Not likely. 

The upside is a long season for early spring greens. Dandelions poking through the pavers of my back terrace are just right for the plucking: big rosettes of leaves without buds (yet).

I braised a handful of the dandelion greens in white wine (1/4 cup) and chicken stock (1/2 cup) with some chopped garlic for 15 minutes or so.

Braising is an excellent and approachable way to start trying common edible weeds. If you like braised kale, you’ll feel the same way about dandelions. Use as a side dish or as part of a composed meal, such as this fillet of halibut over braised dandelions and cannelllini beans.

 

 

Stinging Nettle Pesto

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I FORAGE ENOUGH nettles every spring to enjoy them year-round. My favorite way to preserve them is nettle pesto.

Because stinging nettles must be boiled briefly to neutralize the sting—unlike basil—my advice is to use a food processor. Once boiled and drained, they’re a soggy mess; a food processor remedies this sorry state without messing with that splendid day-glo green color.

2 cups stinging nettles, blanched and chopped (figure 6 cups raw)
1/2 cup Parmesan
1/2 cup pine nuts, roasted
4-5 large garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 cup olive oil, plus more to taste
1 tbsp lemon juice, plus  more to taste
salt and pepper, to taste

1. Blanche nettles for a minute in boiling water. Remove to a salad spinner and shake off excess water, then ball up your nettles and give one good squeeze to wring out more water. It’s tough to watch all that dark green, nutrient-laden liquid vanish down the drain, but you’ll want olive oil lubricating your pesto, not water.

2. Add nettles to food processor, along with roasted pine nuts (or walnuts, if you prefer), grated parmesan, garlic cloves, lemon juice, and seasoning. Pour half of the olive oil in and…Whirrrr. Pour the rest of the oil in. Whir again, until your preferred consistency. That’s it.

This recipe makes a fairly pasty pesto; if you want something a little more spreadable for bread, sammiches, etc., try using more olive oil.

Next, think about putting up. You may want to fill a few small (e.g. 4 oz) tubs for the freezer for dinner party pasta, as well as an ice tray for smaller servings. To fill the tray, use a plastic Ziploc with a corner cut out and squeeze out a blob of pesto in each cavity, just like icing. Remove the pesto cubes from the tray once frozen and seal in a freezer bag; now you’ve got instant sauce to brighten a fillet of fish or piece of meat—or simply to spread on good homemade rosemary bread baked by your friend and neighbor, as we did.

Oyster Stew

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LATELY I’VE BEEN considering the oyster. We’re lucky in Washington: this is the only state between Mexico and Canada on the West Coast where you can harvest wild oysters on public land. 

Like M.F.K. Fisher, my favorite way to eat oysters is raw, which is to say alive, with a light mignonette. But you can’t always find suitable quarry when picking a public beach. Sometimes you settle for the gaggers and make stew.

1 cup celery, minced (about 3 ribs)
1 shallot, minced (3 tbsp)
1 large potato, chopped
4 tbsp butter
3 cups milk
1 cup heavy cream
1 limit large oysters (or 2 12 oz jars)
salt and white pepper
fresh parsley, chopped for garnish
hot sauce

In a heavy pot saute shallot in butter over medium heat. Add potatoes and celery, season, and saute for 15 minutes. Add 3 cups milk and cook just below simmer until potatoes are soft, about 20 minutes. Use an immersion blender or food processor to blend milk and vegetables. Add heavy cream, then oysters and their liquor. (I chopped up my big oysters into bite-size pieces.) Oysters are done when edges curl. Serve immediately with hot sauce and cold beer.

Cioppino

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WHAT’S IN A NAME?  In our anxiety-prone food culture we tend to get uptight about the smallest lexical tics and demarkations. For instance, is it a Bouillabaisse or a Cioppino? How about Fish Soup—that seems to work pretty well. Italians mostly call dishes like this Zuppa di Pesce—Fish Soup. Occasionally Ciuppin. And sometimes Brodetto… Okay, you get the idea.

A Brodetto is a regional Italian variation found along the Adriatic that calls for special inclusion of the scorpionfish, or scorfano. Bouillabaisse is the Provencal word for essentially the same thing. All involve a mixture of both finned fish and shellfish, cooked in a tomato and wine-based stew, with peasant bread for sopping up the rich broth.

Cioppino, legend has it, is a New World invention—the word, that is. Italian immigrants shipping out of San Francisco to fish the Pacific ate Cioppino at sea—the catch of the day plus whatever other ingredients they had on board. The word derives from ciuppin, which translates as “chop”—in other words, chop it all together and make soup.

That’s what I love about Cioppinos and their ilk. When you can get past the regional claims, prejudices, and pronouncements, a Cioppino is merely an efficient way to make use of the odds and ends hanging around in the fridge. But to do it right you still need a variety of fish. Make it with either red wine or white; with spicy peppers or saffron; with fennel or celery. Just make it. You won’t be disappointed.

Here are my ingredients this time around. Remember that you can use just about anything that swims in the sea, or that filters salt water, as the case may be. Squid add lots of flavor. Just about any firm white-fleshed fish is a good choice; avoid more fragile-fleshed species such as flounder, sole, and thin cuts of cod as well as the dark-fleshed fish (e.g. salmon, mackerel, tuna) that will overpower the stew.

I used 2 cups of homemade shrimp stock. You can use a cup of clam juice plus a cup of chicken broth, or conventional fish stock. Fish heads are ideal if you can get them; my market was sold out.

2 dozen littleneck clams
2 dozen (or more) mussels
1 lb shrimp, shelled
1 lb bay scallops
1/2 cooked Dungeness crab, broken into leg segments
1 lb rockfish fillets, cut into 3-inch pieces
1-2 cups white wine (or red)
1 28 oz can whole plum tomatoes with liquid
2 cups fish stock (or clam juice, shrimp stock, etc.)
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tbsp tomato paste
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium onions (or 1 large), chopped
2 ribs celery, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 bay leaf
1-2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
fresh basil for garnish
good bread

In a heavy pot or Dutch oven saute the onions in olive oil over medium heat for a minute or two, then add the garlic, chopped vegetables, red pepper flakes, and bay leaf. Cook several minutes until veggies are soft, then stir in tomato paste. Cook another minute and pour in wine and let bubble for a couple minutes. Add tomatoes and stock, roughly chopping the whole tomatoes in the pot. Simmer for a least 30 minutes; longer is better. Add the crab legs and simmer another 15 minutes. When you’re ready to serve the stew, add the fin fish first and simmer for a few minutes, then add the shellfish. When the clams and mussels have all opened, stir in the parsley. It’s ready to eat. Serve piping hot with good crusty bread and some chopped basil for garnish.

As written above, this Cioppino will easily serve six, but for larger groups you can add another can of tomatoes, more wine and stock, extra seasoning, and leave the seafood amounts as is. Or, if serving a smaller group you might consider cutting the shrimp and scallops by half. All this seafood can be expensive when paying market prices, so tinker according to your budget and taste. It’s a very forgiving dish.

Stinging Nettle Ravioli with Sage Butter

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WHAT BETTER WAY to kick off a new year of foraging than an early spring Stinging Nettle Ravioli. You’ll want your pasta maker for this one, which might require an additional spring cleaning.

Filling

Make the filling while your pasta dough is “resting” in the fridge. 

10 oz stinging nettles (equivalent to 1 package frozen spinach)
1 15 oz ricotta
1/2 cup grated parm
1/4 cup whipped cream cheese
1 egg
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp grated nutmeg

1. Blanche nettles for 1 minute in boiling water and drain. This is enough to neutralize the sting and cook the nettles. Squeeze out excess water. Chop nettles. Later in the season, when the nettles are more robust, you’ll want to remove the lower stem.

2. Combine cheeses, seasoning, and egg into a bowl. Stir in chopped nettles.

Pasta

I follow Marcella Hazan’s recipe, which calls for 2 large eggs per cup of flour and a half-teaspoon of milk for filled pasta. I doubled the amounts. (Be prepared to add more flour as necessary; as with baking, anything can influence the making of fresh pasta: heat, humidity, the stock market…)

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
1 tsp milk

Unlike Marcella, however, I combine my pasta ingredients in a food processor (horrors!), removing the dough when it starts to ball up and adding more flour by hand until I can reach a finger into the dough and pull it out without any dough sticking.

Next I commence to kneading. The technique here is to use the heel of your palm and push down on the dough, flattening it in the middle, then turning the dough clockwise a half turn, folding it over and pressing the heel of your hand into the dough again. Repeat. Repeat some more. Repeat until it’s smooth as the proverbial baby’s bottom, no less than eight minutes according to Marcella. Now refrigerate in plastic wrap while you make the filling.

After retrieving the pasta dough from the fridge, roll it into a log and cut it into a dozen equal parts (Marcella calls for six parts per 2 eggs). Each part then gets fed into the pasta maker, starting at 1 and finishing at 6.

Make two leaves at a time (top and bottom layers), trim them, and use a melon ball scoop to add the filling at intervals. Next sandwich the two leaves and use a fluted pasta wheel to get those nice scalloped edges, making sure to firmly press the two leaves together around each dumpling.

Sage Butter Sauce

Figure a minimum of a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of chopped fresh sage per serving (with more butter for those of us not hung up about fat content). Melt butter in small saute pan over medium heat. While the butter is starting to melt, gently drop ravioli into a pot of salted water on low boil. Add sage to butter. The ravioli should start floating to the surface after a couple minutes. Remove to a warm plate with slotted spoon. Meanwhile, stir the butter and sage as the butter foams, and just as it starts to brown a tiny bit kill the heat and pour sauce over ravioli. Add a few grindings of salt. The specks of brown, caramelized butter sweeten the sauce ever so slightly, and combined with the sage, this simple sauce packs a wallop that belies its meager list of ingredients.

Serves 6-8.

Dried Morel Cream Sauce

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EVERY YEAR AROUND this time I start to get restless in anticipation of spring. One of my favorite rites of the season is the morel hunt, but for now all I can do is stare at the dried mushrooms from previous seasons in their glass mason jars—and then grab a handful to rehydrate for Steak and Morel Sauce…

Steak with Morel Sauce

After making this sauce a couple times you’ll realize all it takes is a little improvisation in the kitchen to whip together an elegant and very tasty sauce every time, no matter what ingredients you have lying around.

For this one I used dried morels reconstituted in water, a splash of red wine not exceeding half a cup, beef stock, and just a touch of cream, but you could use white wine instead, or sherry, chicken or veggie stock, and other herbs (fresh tarragon pairs well with morels). Soy sauce is a nice touch. Always make sure to keep the liquid used to rehydrate morels as it’s a flavorful stock in its own right.

Most recipes will have you sauté the onion or garlic before adding the mushrooms, but this often leads to scorching the aromatics to an unpleasant bitterness. Mushrooms—and morels especially—take time to properly brown, so I add the shallots (or onions , garlic, etc.) after the morels have had some time in the pan.

2 steaks
2 oz dried morels (about 2 dozen)
1 shallot, finely diced
2-3 tbsp butter
1/2 cup red wine
1 cup beef stock
1 tsp fresh thyme, chopped
2 oz heavy cream
salt and pepper

1. Rehydrate morels in warm water, just enough to cover, and set aside for 20 minutes. Salt and pepper steaks and allow to come to room temperature.

2. Pre-heat oven to 250 degrees. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in skillet over medium-high eat and cook steaks, a few minutes per side according to preference. Remove to a plate and keep warm in oven. Strain rehydrated morels, reserving liquid. Pat mushrooms dry on paper towel.

3. In same skillet over medium heat, add morels and another tablespoon of butter if necessary. Sauté a few minutes until morels begin to brown lightly on edges, then add diced shallots and cook together for another minute or two. De-glaze with red wine. 

4. When wine is mostly evaporated, add some of both the beef stock and the mushroom stock, the fresh herbs, and a little heavy cream. Sauce should remain dark. Reduce and add more of both stocks and cream if necessary. When sauce reaches desired consistency, remove plate with steaks from oven and pour off accumulated juices into sauce, stirring. Spoon sauce and morels over steaks.