The Mushroom Hunters.

I love mushrooms – the edible kind, that is. (Never tried the other kind, sorry.) I’m not sure when I first realized they’re among my favorite foods; I do remember seeing the Good Eats episode “The Fungal Gourmet” and deciding to try the various recipes Alton Brown gave on that show, and discovering I liked them all. It was probably the first time I’d cooked mushrooms, and it inspired me to try a recipe in The Joy of Cooking for a white mushroom pizza with goat cheese, a pizza I still make often and have refined over the last 20 years. That may have been the starting point, but it just scratched the surface of what the kingdom of edible fungi has to offer.

A friend of mine from middle school asked me last month on Facebook if I’d read Langdon Cook’s The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, a non-fiction narrative work about several people who forage for the wild mushrooms that end up on restaurant plates and occasionally in markets across the country. Not only is the book an extraordinarily interesting study of a gray market industry and two of the eccentrics who live within, but Cook imparts a lot of useful information on various mushroom species – including a few fungi we call mushrooms but that belong to a different phylum, Ascomycota, than true mushrooms – that I’d eaten but never cooked, or seen but never eaten, or just flat-out had never encountered before.

Mushrooms are different from other foods that are foraged in the wild in that their removal does not diminish future supply, and when done responsibly the foraging doesn’t damage the environment. (If the foragers leave trash or are careless with surrounding plants, of course, that’s another story.) Wild mushrooms have extensive root structures below the ground, and humans typically harvest the edible shoots that appear above the surface and allow the mushroom to spread spores. Removing those tips doesn’t kill the mushroom itself, which continues to live in the ground, usually feeding off rotting wood, and will produce new shoots the following year. Different mushrooms live in different climates, with different food sources – sometimes favoring specific species of trees with which they’ve co-evolved over long periods of time – and varying ‘crops’ from year to year. Morels, among the most valuable culinary mushrooms, tend to pop up in abundance after forest fires, although they, like the famous truffles of western Europe and now the Pacific Northwest, are not technically mushrooms but are sac fungi classified in Ascomycota. (They’re also the subject of a great two-player game.)

Cook runs through the main mushrooms you’ll find in restaurants, only skipping the derided and flavorless white button mushrooms, dedicating long chapters to those morels, the meaty porcini (also called king boletes), the prized matsutakes, and the autumnal chanterelles, while giving shorter but still useful descriptions to species as diverse as candy caps, black trumpets, lobsters, yellowfoots, and more. He describes many mushrooms that chefs prize but that aren’t cultivated and would only appear if you went to the right restaurant or perhaps farmers’ market, and with just about every mushroom he describes, he gives a handful of ways he likes to prepare or consume them, or just straight-out tips on what you should or shouldn’t do. For example, just about every mushroom pairs well with cream, butter, and other dairy products, but matsutakes areone exception and are best served without those staples of French and Italian cuisines.

Cook himself is a character in the book, but the two stars are Doug, an iconoclastic forager with some interesting if not entirely consistent life philosophies; and Jeremy Faber, a mushroom buyer who runs a wholesale service to chefs on the west coast and in New York, and who also forages himself and takes Cook on several of his trips, including the morel hunt in the Yukon that fills the last long chapter in the book. Faber has extensive relationships with chefs in Seattle, including James Beard winner Matt Dillon and Faber’s former business partner Christina Choi, who was a rising star in the Seattle scene before dying far too young during surgery to address a brain aneurysm. Cook follows the mushroom supply chain to the tables of restaurants like those, and to special events like a multi-course dinner at the Oregon Truffle Festival, describing dish after dish with mushrooms used in typical and atypical fashions. If this book doesn’t make you want to cook with mushrooms, you probably just don’t like the things in the first place.

Doug is the perfect eccentric for a book like The Mushroom Hunters, with his mix of humanist views and self-serving wisdom, as well as a rather healthy disregard for property rights and the boundaries of national parks. He and Faber rail against federal and state government regulations that treat mushrooms as finite resources and restrict or simply ban foragers from gathering them, even though such activities might be good for the forest and, if done right, do no harm. Their self-interest is obvious here, and Cook acknowledges that not every forager is as responsible about cleaning up their own mess or respecting the other flora and fauna that grow in these environments. It’s also hard to feel much sympathy for Doug when he describes foraging on privately owned land without permission and finds himself threatened or unable to escape with his haul.

The Mushroom Hunters would be a great read if it offered nothing more than its education on mushrooms themselves – how they grow, where they thrive, how they’re gathered, and how to prepare and cook them – within some broader story, but Cook also wraps up the story of each species in some larger trip or escapade starring one of the two men at the heart of the book. It is a book about the foodstuffs themselves, with appearances from a handful of other wild plants the foragers often target, while also giving a window on to this shadow economy that also includes numerous immigrants from Mexico and southeast Asia, and thus serves as a bit of a microcosm of our society as a whole, with stories of racism, economic inequality, and labor exploitation sprinkled throughout the book. If you enjoy the fungus and want to know your chanterelles from your shiitakes, it’s a wonderful, educational read.

Next up: My friend Joe Posnanski’s upcoming book The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.

Arizona eats, 2019 edition.

The larder & the delta was in the now-closed Desoto Central Market food hall, but has since reopened in its own space and I think it’s going to be a standby for me when I’m in Phoenix and looking for something more vegetable-forward than most of the restaurants out there. The menu draws inspiration from southern cuisine, but vegetables are more front and center than meat. My friend and I got four dishes, all from the small plates sections of the menu, including the can’t-miss vegetable beignets, which are stuffed with mixed vegetables and are huge, airy, and just faintly sweet, served with green goddess foam, a black garlic-mustard topping, and some ‘vegetable ash’ that is just for show. The hamachi crudo with citrus, herb oil, and some not very spicy Fresno peppers was also superb, almost entirely because the fish itself was so fresh – citrus is a great complement to hamachi but this fish was good enough to eat with just a pinch of salt. The hoe cakes – a type of savory, unleavened pancake that traces its roots to slaves in the American South (and likely beyond) – come with a house-fermented chow chow (a type of spicy pickle, like a chutney) and a celery leaf salsa verde, which brings the same kind of contradictory sensation as the beignet: you associate the starch with sweet flavors, and here you get acidity and heat and a slightly heavy base from the density of the cakes. My least favorite dish, although it wasn’t any worse than average, was the baby beets salad, with more citrus, escarole, fennel, and almonds, which I think suffered because it has such a muted profile compared to the other dishes. The new space is small, but with quite a bit of seating on the patio and a long bar where we ended up sitting, and they do happy hour specials from 3-6 on weeknights that looks like pretty good value.

Fellow Osteria has a menu designed at least in part by Claudio Urciuoli, now running things at Pa’la and formerly of Noble Bread/Noble Eatery, with an emphasis on fresh pastas, some made in-house and some imported, as well as pizzas and a few very traditional southern Italian plates. Their charcuterie plate includes sopressata, speck (smoked prosciutto), three cheeses, basil pesto, peperonata, and flat breads, all good but I could have taken that entire bowl of peperonata and drank it like a shooter. The orecchiette di grano arso, one of the pastas they import from Italy, is a traditional Apulian pasta made from ‘burnt’ wheat that is toasted, providing a nutty, caramelized flavor, cut with some untoasted wheat so the finished product will still have enough gluten to hold together. Fellow serves theirs with a slightly spicy sausage from Schreiner’s, a local purveyor, and broccolini; even with the big flavors of the sausage, this dish is about the pasta itself, which was perfectly al dente and also had a very satisfying, deep semolina flavor that tasted more complex than regular white pasta.

Restaurant Atoyac Estilo Oaxaca has been a bit of a white whale for me since I lived there; like its previous incarnation, Tacos Atoyac, it’s a bit out of the way of my travels for work, not very close to any ballpark except maybe Maryvale, without nothing else nearby that would bring me to the area. They do very simple, no-frills, authentic Oaxacan cuisine, with superb homemade tacos. There’s a lot of red meat here, which is a minor limitation for me, but I did fine, getting three tacos, one with chicken, one with shrimp, and one with fried fish, as well as sides of rice and refried beans, which proved more than enough for me – I could have skipped the beans, but when in Rome, etc. I’d get all three again, but the shrimp was probably the least flavorful of the three (I concede that shrimp is hardly a Phoenix staple), and I was pleasantly surprised at how much flavor the chicken had, given how much that meat is an afterthought at restaurants that focus on beef. That said, if you eat cow, they have beef cooked many ways, including asada, al pastor, lengua, and more, and also offer burros and other plates beyond tacos. Atoyac’s location is a little hard to find – I drove right past it – without a ton of parking, and it’s a barebones spot, but clean, which is all I really ask of a restaurant.

The Normal is actually two separate restaurants in the Graduate Hotel in Tempe, on Apache, close to ASU’s campus, and their new menus incorporate some dishes from the couple behind Tacos Chiwas and the just-closed Roland’s (more on that below). The morning I went to their diner for breakfast, they were out of the fresh flour tortillas required for some of their dishes, and their take on chilaquiles, with a salsa rojo, had a solid flavor profile, with a little heat and a strong earthy flavor from whatever pepper (maybe a red New Mexico?) it included, but the dish needed far more of the sauce to keep it from drying out.

I didn’t get to Bri this trip, unfortunately, but that was ‘next’ on my list of places I wanted to try. I visited a few old favorites, including FnB, which is still my favorite high-end restaurant out that way; Soi 4; Noble Eatery; the Hillside Spot; and crepe bar, which now has a sweet crepe with sunflower butter, grilled figs, bananas, and coconut flakes that is delicious and so filling (that’s a lot of fiber) that the first day I ate it I didn’t need lunch. Roland’s Market closed shortly before I got to Arizona, although the location has already been converted into a new, larger outpost of Chris Bianco’s Pane Bianco, while also serving coffee and breakfast, open from 8 am till 3 pm. I also got word that Giant Coffee, one of my favorite spaces in Arizona, has switched to using beans roasted by ROC, a local roaster whose coffees are way too dark for my tastes, which is a huge disappointment, so I stuck to Cartel and crepe bar (now using Tucson’s Presto) for coffee on this trip.

 

You can find some of my previous Arizona food posts here: from March 2018,  one writeup from May 2016, from March 2016, and my 2016 Cactus League dining guide, a bit out of date but still mostly relevant.

Los Angeles eats, 2017 edition.

This isn’t ideal, writing up food from a trip I finished two weeks ago, but given everything that happened between the end of that trip and today, it’s the best I can offer. Fortunately I ate some memorable stuff.

The best meal I ate was at P.Y.T., a new ‘vegetable-forward’ restaurant right in downtown Los Angeles, not entirely vegetarian but mostly so, with only two real meat-centric dishes and plenty of options that were vegetarian or even vegan. I am not a vegetarian, as regular readers know, but I have curtailed a lot of my consumption of red meat for health reasons (because I don’t metabolize the amino acid leucine properly and because my cholesterol is the highest it’s ever been) and I actively seek out vegetables when eating on the road. I ate a completely vegetarian meal at P.Y.T. and was totally satisfied and still full afterwards, because the dishes managed to be decadent without being heavy.

I had three plates at P.Y.T., which does mostly smaller plates but without going to tiny portions. The baby beets salad with mandarin segments, arugula, pumpkin seeds, and coconut labneh (like Greek yogurt, but Lebanese) was light and offered an unusual combination of flavors that worked well even if I didn’t get everything into each bite; the citrus + beets combo is pretty classic, but the arugula leaves were too mature and kind of tough. I’ll definitely try to replicate that coconut labneh at home at some point. The hand-torn pasta with green garlic cream, shishito peppers, cilantro, and mint was the most unique pasta dish I’ve ever tried, very green (obviously) but bringing together flavors I’ve never had with pasta; it was intermittently spicy, and I suspect there may have been a little jalapeno in there, and it was properly sauced (not drowning in it, not dry). If there was heavy cream in the dish, it was scant, which is a positive – too much and suddenly you’re at Olive Garden (and not even family). The dessert was a peanut butter mousse by another name, with chocolate wafers crumbled on top of alternating layers of whipped cream and the mousse. If that had had just one little layer of dark chocolate it would have been an 80.

I went to Son of a Gun for lunch, and tweeted the picture of their enormous fried chicken sandwich, which I split with a friend. It’s right up there with the Crack Shack (San Diego/Encinitas) and nocawich (Tempe) for fried chicken sandwiches, and it might have had the crispiest shell around the meat of any I’ve ever had. We also got the lobster rolls, which are basically two bites big, and the garlic fries, of which I ate way too much, and I seem to remember a salad of apples and cheese that I thought was just fair. The chicken sandwich, though … I still think it’s a two people per sandwich choice, but it’s double-plus.

The Son of a Gun team – owners of Animal and Jon & Vinny’s – co-own Petit Trois, an offshoot of their fine-dining place Trois Mec, but this one is run by chef Ludo Lefebvre, who was actually in the restaurant in his chef’s whites the night I ate there. It’s lighter fare, still Parisian French but more like French bar food than classic French gastronomy. The best item I had was their English pea tartine, which had English peas over honeyed chevre spread on a thick, grilled slice of crusty bread. The peas just made the dish, of course, since they were at peak sweetness. I also had butter-poached shrimp served in avocado, which was fine but probably fussier than it needed to be; and the “beignet,” which I would just call a donut but what do I know.

Both Petit Trois and Sqirl showed up on Eater’s list of the best 38 restaurants in America for 2017 – I’ve been to ten, plus Publican’s offshoot PQM – and while I totally get Petit Trois’ place, Sqirl … I think it’s more about a novel concept than anything else. It’s a breakfast and lunch spot with mostly non-traditional fare, including their specialty rice bowls, with sorrel pesto, sliced radishes, feta cheese, and a poached egg, with the option to add other meats. It’s filling, certainly, although I find rice for breakfast, a staple for maybe half the world’s population, a jolt to my palate. I thought the food was good, but nothing spectacular; the rice/pesto mix is made in huge batches anyway, and there was nothing I ate that I couldn’t easily replicate at home. They used good inputs, but what came after was just fair. The place is Full Hipster, if that sort of thing matters to you.

I also went back to Square One for breakfast a different day; it’s one of my absolute favorite breakfast spots in the country, and there’s bonus value in watching the zombies walk around the Scientology complex across the street. I always get the same thing – the house-cured salmon benedict, which is served over a hash brown pancake of sorts rather than bread. I don’t even look at the menu any more. And it’s a lot more chill than Sqirl.

In San Diego I just went with my standbys, The Crack Shack (where a reader of mine works, and we discovered later that he’d made the matzoh ball posole I ate for lunch) and Juniper & Ivy (menu always changing, and everything so good). I don’t mess with perfection.

The Third Plate.

Chef Dan Barber first came to my attention with his 2010 TED talk “How I Fell in Love With a Fish,” where he describes his visits to the Spanish fish farm Veta la Palma in Spain, which defies almost everything we think we know about aquaculture. Veta la Palma is an open, integrated operation that connects its waterways to the Mediterranean and thrives because the fish – primarily bass but also grey mullet, which plays a large role in Barber’s new book – are part of the larger ecosystem of the farm, attracting fish from the outside environment with clean waters rich in food for each of those species. It’s a new paradigm in raising fish for human consumption, one that doesn’t keep the fish in unnatural conditions that would require dosing them with antibiotics or feeding them with artificial products that might keep yields high but are unsustainable (if not damaging) and don’t produce flavorful fish.

Barber’s 2014 book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, expands on the concept he explored in that TED Talk, reconsidering how to feed the world in a way that’s environmentally sustainable, sufficiently nutritious, and – let’s not forget – produces tasty food. While some of what Barber prescribes, such as reducing the prominence of meat in the American diet, is obvious, much of it is not unless you’ve spent a lot of time on a working farm. (I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Barber himself.)

The basic premise of Barber’s book isn’t new – our food system is broken, disconnecting diner from food source – but his approach to the question is novel. He points out the role that chefs play in determining food trends and consumer awareness, and that merely going “farm to table” is a superficial and ultimately insufficient way to try to fix the broken chain between the grower and the diner. He rightly decries the monoculture approach of modern agriculture – grow a lot of one specific plant or strain over and over, using synthetic nitrogen sources, antibiotics, herbicides and fungicides, and so on to maximize yields and reduce costs. But he points out that simply going organic doesn’t always address the real problems with Big Ag, as organic farms can be monocultures too and may use organic chemicals that aren’t actually any safer or more sustainable than their synthetic analogues.

Indeed, if there’s one common thread through all of Barber’s anecdotes – and he meanders extensively, both on the map and within the book – it’s soil. Traditional agricultural practices centered on soil health: crop rotation, composting, cover crops, plowing under, encouraging anything, even “weeds,” that might benefit the soil. Modern practices, whether “conventional” or organic, ignore soil quality or health, instead using chemistry to provide an artificial supplement to soil that’s been depleted through malpractice. Healthy soil is teeming with microbes that make the soil more fertile and ultimately help produce healthier plants that contain more nutrients for us and can be more flavorful as well, but soil itself is part of a cycle that even what Barber calls “big organic” agriculture tries to circumvent. Whether your nitrogen source is synthetic or organic doesn’t really matter to soil health (although synthetic N is typically derived from petroleum and thus contributes to climate change and ocean acidification), because if you’re not feeding the soil, you’re just going to have to dump more N into it next year and every year after that.

Barber doesn’t limit himself to plants, although that’s understandably the main focus of the book. Barber talks extensively about the practices at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a nonprofit research center that works with chefs and farmers to develop sustainable agricultural practices, including a working farm that supplies Barber’s Blue Hill restaurants, including one on site and one in New York City. Much of what he and his colleagues there discover around the world, such as the rare strain of ancient wheat they found in Aragon, Spain, or the long-forgotten eight-row corn strain that arrived at the farms one day, unsolicited, in a FedEx envelope, become experiments on the farm’s eight-plus acres. They’re raising some livestock now as well, using all parts of the animal on Blue Hill’s menus and using animal waste to supplement the biomass they till into the soil. Everything revolves around soil health and its connection to long-term sustainable agriculture. The farm isn’t just “organic,” because that’s as much a marketing term as anything else (and indeed isn’t clearly better for the environment than conventional ag); it’s searching for the best possible agricultural practices that will satisfy three goals simultaneously: feed the world now, feed it tomorrow, and make the food flavorful and nutritious too.

The Third Plate is a book of anecdotes, not one of research. Barber travels the world – he’s in Spain a lot in this book, poor guy – in search of these best practices. He goes to Veta la Palma, eats fish served with a phytoplankton sauce, visits the site of the annual almadraba bluefin catch, and hangs out in a Spanish dehesa that produces the world’s best cured ham, jamón iberico, as well as a form of natural foie gras that requires no force-feeding. He visits the Bread Lab at Washington State and plays around with cross-breeding wheat strains. He goes to the Carolinas to the farms that supply Anson Mills, the country’s main purveyor of artisanal strains of corn, rice, and other grains, including the story of how its founder managed to obtain some of his seeds from a family of moonshiners on the South Carolina coast. He talks at length about the grain farmers in upstate New York who supply much of the flour used at Blue Hill. But there isn’t a lot of data here. It’s easy to follow Barber’s logic and understand why these practices might be better for the soil, and thus for the planet and the future of our food supply, but the research isn’t cited here, and what I’ve found over the years, while tilted in favor of these practices, is scattershot. Soil health matters, but if there’s a comprehensive study that proves this, or even provides substantial evidence for it, it’s not here and I haven’t found it either.

However, The Third Plate is a compelling enough argument on its own that it should simultaneously change the way we eat and the policies we support. Going to a farmers’ market is great, but far from enough. Chefs who cook “farm to table” menus are helping, but it’s not enough. We need to think about eating the whole animal and, as Barber puts it, the whole farm too, emphasizing less-consumed cuts of meat, less-common fish in the food chain, less-common plants that might be part of a successful crop rotation scheme. Our diet has become highly specific, and only a fraction of what farmers might grow ends up food for people. Barber says that is going to have to change, something he lays out in an epilogue with a potential menu of the future. But it might be a change we embrace if it means we recapture lost strains of foods we consider ordinary now: a variety of wheat that carries notes of chocolate, a carrot with twice the sweetness of even good local carrots, a pork shank from an heirloom pig grilled over carbonized pig bones. Barber manages to make an environmental alarm reminiscent of Silent Spring that promises a food future that’s still appealing to our palates.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Richard Price’s 1992 novel Clockers.

The Broad Fork.

My updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors is up for Insiders.

Hugh Acheson’s newest cookbook, The Broad Fork: Recipes for the Wide World of Vegetables and Fruits, is the book that’s been missing from my shelf for years: a book devoted to all manner of fruits and vegetables, ranging from simple recipes to involved ones, that’s largely but not exclusively vegetarian. I’ve tried seven recipes so far, and they all worked on the first try and produced results that made me want to make them all again. (Disclaimer: I’ve met Hugh and he sent me a copy of the book with a signed card that said he hoped this would be “the knuckleball” of cookbooks – weird, but it works. I’d say that’s accurate.)

Acheson writes that his inspiration for the book was a friend who received some kohlrabi (a member of the Brassica family, like broccoli and cabbage, but with a larger stem and sweeter flesh) in his CSA allotment and asked Hugh what the hell he could do with such an odd and uncommon vegetable. Acheson has organized The Broad Fork by season, to align with those of you in CSAs or folks like me who prowl local farmstands for whatever’s in season, although some of these recipes will work just fine with out-of-season items because of the preparations or seasoning involved. He also includes numerous preservation recipes, including pickling and fermenting, so that you can taste the bounty of one season well into the next one.

The two biggest hits so far have been recipes that star one fruit or vegetable but build it up with a sauce or other accompaniment that works in many other dishes as well. Acheson’s take on the classic Italian dish prosciutto e melone (cured Parma ham, which is very salty, along with half-moons of cantaloupe) adds a blended charred-onion vinaigrette that bridged the gap between the salty-fatty meat and the sweet fruit … and also turned out to be an ideal accompaniment for a grilled New York strip steak the following night. The griddled asparagus with pipérade and creamy grits and poached eggs would make a complete meal at brunch, and I used the remaining pipérade – a spanish preparation of onion, garlic, tomato, red pepper, and sherry vinegar – on my fried eggs the next day at lunch. (The grits in the main recipe came out too thin, but I found stirring a little flour and baking powder into the watery leftovers made an excellent savory pancake batter to have with those eggs.)

His pickled hot pepper recipe is simple and extensible to pickling other vegetables (although he has numerous pickling recipes throughout the book), and it leads into the next recipe, a salad with sliced pickled peppers, chickpeas, olives, oranges, mint, and feta cheese, which had a fantastic panoply of flavors but was too difficult to eat with a fork. (A tablespoon did the job just fine, though.) His carrots Vichy are simple and quick and complement the fresh spring carrots we’re getting around here right now without overwhelming them with butter or cream, including just a small amount of each in a recipe that cooks a pound of the roots. Even the honeydew agua fresca, which balances the sweetness of the melon with a cup of lime juice, was an immediate hit around here, one I’ll save for when east coast melons start to show up at our markets later this summer. He does call for the occasional hard-to-find ingredient – bonito flakes, Espelette pepper – although their availability is increasing thanks to Whole Foods and amazon.

Acheson includes a lot of kohlrabis – vegetables you might barely recognize, much less know how to prepare – in the book, including sunchokes, salsify, fiddlehead ferns, yacon (the tuberous root of a type of daisy; I’d never heard of it), endives, okra, and more. He doesn’t limit himself to fruits and vegetables either, with sections on pecans and various mushrooms (by season!), and the book includes numerous asides on subjects like poaching eggs, curing yolks, making vin cotto and citrus ponzu sauce, preparing a roux, preserving lemons, and making dashi and chicken stock (two ways – pressure cooker and slow cooker). He gives us a photo of his cookbook collection and a note on how he uses old books to develop new ideas, and lots of the dry wit that has made him popular as a judge on Top Chef. I’m always looking for new ideas for cooking vegetables, and the fact that Acheson has covered so many plants with easy to understand and easy to modify recipes (because the underlying ratios or concepts are so clear) make this cookbook a new essential.

Potato-parsnip rösti.

Parsnips are awesome, and wildly underconsumed in the United States (both facts according to me). A cousin of both carrots and parsley, parsnips share the carrot’s high quantity of sugars just waiting to be brought out with heat, but also have a slightly spicy aroma that always reminds me of ginger ale.

On their own, parsnips can be overwhelming, which is why they’re often paired with other root vegetables or tempered with other strong flavors like bacon or maple syrup. (Or both.) Here I use parsnips to kick up the Swiss potato pancake known as a rösti, adding flavor, texture, and extra nutrition* to what is at heart just a good large hash brown.

*Parsnips are high in vitamins C and K as well as folic acid, and have more than twice the fiber per 100 g as a regular potato does.

Potato-Parsnip Rösti

1 russet potato (going for about 12 ounces/350 grams)
1-2 parnsips (about 4 ounces/100 grams)
1-2 tsp vegetable oil
large pinch of salt
2 Tbsp duck fat, butter, or bacon fat

You want to cook these in a saturated fat, as the potatoes will brown better and of course you’ll get more flavor. If you want a vegetarian option, I’d try coconut oil.

1. Peel and grate the potato on the coarse side of a box grater. Wrap the result in a tea towel* and squeeze as much liquid as you can out of it, wringing it tightly and squeezing again after a quick rest. This is key to getting a crispy brown exterior; if you don’t get enough moisture out, your rösti will steam when you want it to fry.

2. Peel and grate the parsnip and toss with the wrung-out grated potato.

3. Add the oil and salt and toss to thoroughly mix. You could add other spices here, but I wouldn’t go much beyond salt and black pepper.

4. In a 10- or 12-inch nonstick skillet, heat 1 Tbsp of the cooking fat over medium-high heat until melted and very hot – at least 300 degrees if you have an infrared thermometer, which you should because then you can tell your daughter you’re actually a spy chef. Add the potato/parsnip mixture and press lightly to create a flat pancake that fills the skillet.

5. Cook about 8-10 minutes until the bottom is brown and crispy. This is a little tricky the first time, as it depends on your stove; you may need to moderate the heat a little to make sure the potatoes cook through without burning the bottom.

6. Flip the rösti on to a large plate, flat pan lid, or a cookie sheet. Add the second tablespoon of cooking fat to the pan, heat until melted and sizzly, then slide the rösti back into the skillet and allow it to cook for 5-6 minutes until brown and crispy on the second side.

* A tea towel … I don’t really know what the hell those are either. I have a couple of thin dishtowels that do the trick, but I also have a few white cotton handkerchiefs that I bought very cheaply a few years ago and that work great for applications just like this one.

If you love parsnips as much as I do, check out Alton Brown’s parnsip muffin recipe – I add a tablespoon of oat bran (removing the same weight of flour) and a teaspoon of vanilla, and I substitute brown sugar for half of the white – as well as the various roast and mashed parsnip recipes in Nigel Slater’s wonderful cookbook Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch.

Plenty.

I’m not a vegetarian – I like bacon way too much to be so crazy, and duck confit too for that matter, and sushi, so really this isn’t going to work out – but I do believe in eating less meat as part of our overall diets. It’s better for the planet, and it’s better for the wallet, even if you choose, as I do, to spend some of the savings on buying better-quality meat, like grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, or organic chicken. It’s probably better for your health as well, although I think that’s still up in the air. The problem is that a diet based around meat is pretty easy to plan and prepare – most meats can be marinated and grilled, or brined and roasted, or even pan-seared with a quick sauce, without a ton of active work. If you want to eat more vegetables, either with or in place of meat, you need more time and more creativity to make them taste better and fill the void left on the plate by the reduction in animal proteins. Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi, a book of vegetarian recipes written by a chef who eats and cooks with meat, has filled a critical hole in my bookshelf.

Ottolenghi was born in Israel, trained as a chef in London and operates one restaurant, Nopi, and four shops in that city. His food is heavily Mediterranean, although it has strong Turkish, Italian, and Arab roots as well as the obvious Israeli influences, and at the same time grabs from other cuisines around the world, often crossing boundaries – such as his insistence that cilantro has a place in dishes that are fundamentally Italian. Plenty brings that sensibility together with the idea that a vegetable can be the star of the show, filling its pages with potential main courses and luxurious side dishes across the spectrum of vegetables, even stretching into pulses and grains before the book concludes.

I’ve tried a half-dozen recipes from Plenty so far, with broad success overall. The hits included zucchini and hazelnut salad with parmiggiano-reggiano; stuffed zucchini with rice; mushroom ragout with croutons and poached eggs; roasted sweet potato wedges; and caramelized endive with Gruyère, although that latter one suffered slightly from the way the cheese melted right off the endive halves in the oven. In general, Ottolenghi uses every non-meat tool available to boost the flavor of vegetables and make them more suitable for the central role on a vegetarian plate, including spices, herbs, acids, sharp cheeses, yogurt, crème fraiche, and the occasional runny egg. The resulting dishes burst with strong yet balanced flavors and are bright and appealing on the plate, with most recipes within reach of a moderately skilled home chef. The one disappointment, lentil galettes with a lemon-yogurt dressing, wasn’t bad, but even with all of the spices and herbs included in the mix, you’re still left with a plate of lentils, just nicely seasoned ones. Every recipe I tried was clear enough to make substituting ingredients (e.g., swapping out pine nuts because my daughter is allergic to them) simple.

The drawback to Plenty is that the instructions for several recipes don’t seem to have been tested on home stoves. When the text says “simmer gently,” what they actually seem to mean is “boil.” Oven cooking times all seemed too short, even with a thoroughly preheated oven. The book also includes volumetric measurements when weights would be more accurate. It’s a better cookbook for someone with a little more home cooking experience than a beginner would have, but if you’re like me and want to find new ways to get vegetables into your diet, whether as side dishes or as main courses, it’s perfect.

So here’s my take on Plenty‘s stuffed zucchini recipe, tweaking some of the ingredients to suit our tastes and allergies. Removing them from the pan after 40 minutes of cooking was a little tricky because I used very long zucchini, so look for short, wide fruit that will allow you to stuff them without requiring an engineering degree to extract them once they’re done.

Stuffed zucchini
Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty

1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
2/3 cup short-grain rice
2 tbsp chopped pecans
2 tbsp minced parsley
½ tsp dried thyme
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp ground allspice
3 Tbsp lemon juice
2 wide zucchini, sliced lengthwise
¾ cup boiling water
1½ tsp sugar
1 tsp toasted sesame seeds
about 1 oz Pecorino Romano
salt and black pepper

1. Saute the onion in the oil until translucent but not brown. Add the next seven ingredients, a pinch of salt, plus 2 Tbsp of the lemon juice and cook on low to medium-low heat for five minutes, stirring to avoid sticking, until highly fragrant.

2. Use a spoon to scoop out the centers of the zucchini for stuffing. Place them in a shallow but wide saute pan that is large enough to fit all the zucchini. (You can use more zucchini if they’re small enough to fit in the pan.) Fill them with the rice-onion mixture. Pour the boiling water, sugar, a pinch of salt, and the last tablespoon of lemon juice around the zucchini (but not on top yet).

3. Cover and cook at an active simmer for 30-40 minutes, basting with the cooking liquid several times to allow the rice to cook. They’re ready when the rice is al dente.

4. Plenty suggests serving these cold with yogurt as a sauce, but I liked these hot, topped with sesame seeds, freshly ground black pepper, and shaved Pecorino Romano.

Note: Thicker grains of rice may require more cooking time, so you might parcook them about ten minutes to get them soft before adding to the remainder of the stuffing ingredients. I’d also recommend the same if you wish to use brown rice, although that might require even more pre-cooking.

Cauliflower steaks … and I Want My Hat Back.

Before I get to the recipe, I have to talk about my favorite gift from Christmas this year – one I gave, not one I received. I’m not even sure how I first heard about Jon Klassen’s book I Want My Hat Back, which has apparently spawned its own online meme, but it is one of the most clever, sneakily macabre childen’s books I have ever seen, one that my daughter and I both loved on first read. It’s about a bear who has lost his hat, asks various forest animals if they’ve seen it, and eventually realizes where his hat is, a few pages after the reader has figured it out. It’s dry and a little twisted, but also perfectly captures how kids lie even when they’re caught red-handed. I’d put the vocabulary level at age 3 or 4, but the subject matter might make 5 a better minimum age. My five-year-old daughter wasn’t disturbed, and she asked to read it again last night, which is good, because I wanted to read it to her again anyway.

As for this peculiar side dish, I got the idea from the most recent issue of Bon Appetit, a magazine with which I’ve had pretty mixed results over the years. (The original recipe does include a useful photo if you can’t picture a cauliflower steak.) I’m just finishing a free subscription I received because my wife bought me one of their cookbooks as a gift, and the book included a coupon for a free year of the magazine, but I won’t be renewing because their recipes don’t work well and the magazine seems so much more focused on eating out (and expensively) than on actual cooking. Anyway, the idea of a cauliflower cut vertically into large steaks appealed to me, but I changed up the sauce to something that I thought better suited the mellow, slightly sweet flavor of well-browned cauliflower.

To cut the ‘steaks,’ start with a whole head of cauliflower and trim away all green leaves while leaving the stem intact. Standing the head on its base, make a small mark with your chef’s knife in the center of the top of the cauliflower, and then make similar marks at least ½” in either direction, enough to cut four slabs from the head. Anything less than a half inch won’t hold together when cooked; too much more than about 5/8” and you’ll only get two steaks that won’t cook through before the outside burns. You can cut the remaining florets and brown them with the steaks, or save them for another use (like soup).

This sauce is tangy, but contains no heat; you could also roast a hot pepper, like a red jalapeño, and add it to the puree, or finish the sauce with a few drops of red chile oil.

Cauliflower ‘Steaks’ with Roasted Red Pepper sauce

1 cauliflower head, cut as described into four steaks
2 red bell peppers
2 garlic cloves, peeled
1 Tbsp sherry vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbsp olive oil

1. Roast the peppers on all sides under a broiler, about 40 minutes total (turning as needed), until well charred. Throw the garlic cloves on the same sheet pan for about ten minutes to soften and brown slightly. Set the garlic aside.
2. Place the peppers in a bowl and cover with foil for ten minutes to allow the steam to escape the peppers and separate the flesh from the skin. Remove the charred skin, the stems, and any seeds, saving the liquid from inside the peppers.
3. Place the peppers, garlic, pepper liquid, and sherry vinegar in a bowl or cup and puree with an immersion blender, or puree in a food processor. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper and set aside.
4. When the peppers are done, set the oven to bake at 400 degrees. Heat a large saute pan or skillet over medium-high heat.
5. Add 1 Tbsp olive oil to the skillet and heat until shimmering. Add two of the four cauliflower steaks and cook one and a half to two minutes until nicely browned. Flip the steaks carefully with a spatula (place your hand on the cool side to flip without splashing the hot oil on yourself) and brown the alternate sides. Remove the steaks and any stray bits of cauliflower to a rimmed sheet pan, add another tablespoon of oil to the pan, and brown the other two steaks.
6. Roast in the oven for ten minutes until you can easily pierce them through with a paring knife. Remove, season with salt and pepper, and serve on a bed of the roasted red pepper sauce. Finish with a drizzle of an assertive, peppery olive oil if desired.

“Grilled” Baby Bok Choy.

Again, just the recipe here.

2 heads baby bok choy, rinsed and roughly chopped (leaves and upper stems)
1 clove garlic, slivered
1 small dried chili pepper
1-2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp honey
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
Toasted sesame seeds

1. Toss the bok choy in a bowl with all remaining ingredients except the sesame seeds.
2. Place the bok choy mixture in the center of a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Fold up the edges of the foil to enclose the bok choy in a packet, crimping all edges to seal it and then poking two or three small holes in the top of the packet to allow steam to escape.
3. Place the packet on the grill just barely off of the heat (somewhere between direct and indirect heat). Grill for 8-10 minutes until the bok choy stems are tender, although you’re going to have to guess at when that is.
4. Open one small end of the packet and drain off any excess liquid. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

Browned and Braised Asian Carrots.

This is a pretty simple side dish, although it doesn’t scale well because of the sautéing required. You can use other liquids in place of the ginger beer, including chicken broth; you can also add about 1/3-1/2 tsp of butter at the end to turn the glaze into more of a sauce.

½ pound young, slender carrots, peeled and sliced into 3″ sticks
1 Tbsp butter
¼ tsp Chinese five spice powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp brown sugar
¼ cup ginger beer
chopped fresh parsley (optional)

1. Heat the butter in a sauté pan (with a lid) until the bubbling stops.
2. Add the carrots and let them brown on one side, approximately 3 minutes. Do not stir.
3. If you’re using a gas stove, turn down the flame. With the lid in one hand, add the salt, spice powder, brown sugar, and ginger beer, and clamp the lid down. Wait a few seconds for the initial violence to stop, then remove the lid, stir once, and put the lid down again. Raise the heat to medium-low and braise the carrots until barely tender, two to five minutes.
4. Remove the lid and allow any remaining liquid to cook away, taking care not to let the carrots burn in a dry pan. Serve with chopped fresh parsley if desired.