What To Do With All That Lettuce, #2

In the search for innovative things to do with lettuce, I have found one other great cooked lettuce recipe -- a real star.  It's not freezable or preservable, which would be ideal when facing an overabundance of any particular food, but it is different, interesting, very quick, and very good.  I think this may become a mainstay in the house.

This one is from The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces by Diane Seed, another one of my favorite cookbooks, and the kind of book that is particularly useful when faced with such a task as Lisa and I are facing, trying to come up with different ways to use the same foods.

Tagliolini con Gamberi e Radicchio
(Tagliolini with shrimp and radicchio)

1 lb tagliolini (as usual, I just used linguine)
5 Tbs butter
1.25 lbs cooked shrimp (I used the frozen ones that I always keep in the freezer because they're so handy to have available, but big ol' prawns would be lovely here)
10 oz radicchio
10 oz lettuce
1 small glass brandy
2/3 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper

Heat the butter and add the shrimp and the radicchio and lettuce leaves cut into fine strips.  Cook gently for 5 minutes.  Add the brandy and when it has evaporatedadd the cream, salt and pepper.  Cook the pasta.  Drain and stir into the pan containing the shrimp.  Stir well and serve at once.

What To Do With All That Lettuce?

My husband loves salads and always complains that we don't eat enough of them.  I have long been a cooked vegetables girl, and I'm only interested in a salad if it's totally interesting and unique (bonus points if it has a hefty dose of protein).  He on the other hand considers a plain plate of lettuce an acceptable -- and enjoyable -- side salad.

But even he isn't sure about what to do with all the lettuce we've been getting.

I've been working to improve my salad-making and -eating enjoyment, and will continue to share my salad adventures with you.  But what I really need are cooked lettuce recipes!  Better yet, cooked and freezable lettuce recipes.  I have found only one freezable recipe so far -- something I've dubbed "Salad Soup" which is a surprisingly yummy, spring time soup.  Don't knock it until you've tried it. . . It's from one of my favorite soup cookbooks: Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread: A Country Inn Cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon. 

Cream of Leek, Herb, and Garden Lettuce Soup

6 c chicken stock
1/4 c white rice
Cooking spray
2 Tbs butter
3 leeks, white part and 3 inches green, split open lengthwise, well washed, and chopped
1 rib celery with leaves
1 medium carrot, peeled, halved lanthwise and thinly sliced
2-3 c assorted lettuces sliced into ribbons
1/2 c Italian parsley, chopped
1/4 c fresh basil leaves, chopped
1/2 c fresh herbs such as sorrel, tarragon, thyme, oregano, rosemary, and sage (anything but dill) chopped
1 c heavy cream or evaporated skim milk
1 Tb flour
1 tsp honey or sugar
freshly grated nutmeg
salt and pepper

In a heavy soup pot, bring hte stock to a boil.  Add the rice, turn down the heat to medium-low, and let simmer, covered, until quite soft, about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, spray a 10-inch skillet with cooking spray.  Add the butter and melt over medium heat.  Add the leeks and saute until softened, about 3.5 minutes.  Add the celery and carrot and saute 3 minutes more.  Add the lettuce and herbs, cover teh skillet, and let sweat until wilted, 1 to 2 minutes.  Lift the cover and remove from the heat.

Strain the stock, reserving both the rice and the stock.  Transfer the rice to a food processor and return the stock to the pot.  Add half the veggies and herbs, the cream, flour, and honey to the processor.  Puree until smooth.  Stir the puree and the whole vegetables back into the stock.  Simmer, stirring frequently, until slightly thickened and free of any raw flour tasts, about 10 mintues.  Season with nutmeg, salt and pepper.  Serve hot.

Butternut -squash ravioli

We received butternut squash a few weeks ago, and I tried out a great recipe from Giada's Kitchen: New Italian Favorites by Giada De Laurentiis which was a butternut squash sauce with shrimp and basil, which I served over linguini.  I thought it was fantastic, but my husband said it was a little too sweet for his tastes.  So I decided to try the sauce again as a ravioli filling.  Now this isn't nearly so intensively Martha Steward obsessive as it sounds -- I certainly didn't make my own pasta.  I just used wonton wrappers. . .  which now that I think of it, may have been where I went wrong.  I have always sworn off making bread products of any kind, and the few times I have tried to make pasta by hand have been a disaster.  But the wonton wrappers, pretty much ended up tasting like wonton wrappers, and half of the fillings leaked out when boiled. 

So, I'm going to keep working on that recipe, and I'll let you know how it goes.  In the meantime -- here's the original from Giada:

Rigatoni with Squash and Prawns 

Serves 4 to 6

6 Tbs Olive Oil 

1 lb butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1-in cubes

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 tsp salt

3/4 tsp pepper

1 cup vegetable broth (I used chicken)

1 pound rigatoni pasta (I used linguine)

1 lb prawns or large shrimp

3/4 c whole milk

1/2 c chopped fresh basil

1/4 c grated Parmesan

Warm 3 Tbs of the oil in a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the butternut squash, garlic, 1 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of pepper.  Saute the squahs until golden and tender, 5- 7 minutes.  Add the broth, bring to a simmer, cover, and cook until the squash is very soft, another 5-7 minutes.   Transfer to a blender or food processor and puree. 

Cook the pasta and drain. 

Meanwhile, warm the remaining 3 Tbs of olive oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium high heat.  Sprinkle the shrimp with the remaining salt and pepper and add them to the pan to cook, turning once until just cooked -- about 3 minutes. 

In a large pot over low heat combine the cooked pasta, the squash and 3/4 cup milk.  Stir to combine.  Add the remaining milk if needed.  Add the shrimp, the basil and the cheese.  Stir until warm, and serve!

Cucumber Vodka!

So, suddenly there's all this good food in the house and it just kills me if any of it goes bad. . . which means I'm doing a lot of preserving these days. The easiest of these are the simple "turn it into a liqueur" version of preserving. Thus the cucumber vodka above. The bonus of making flavored alcohol is that the alcohol itself kills all the germs, so there's no need to do a water bath or worry about botulism or any of the other canning fears that people generally have. I will be mixing this cucumber vodka with sake in the early summer for a refreshing summer drink. I got the recipe from Infused: 100+ Recipes for Infused Liqueurs and Cocktails by Susan Elia MacNeal and Leigh Beisch, but basically you simply slice up a peeled cucumber put it into a big jar with 1 quart of vodka and leave it for a month, shaking it a few times a week. Then you strain out the cucumbers, which is what I was doing in this photo, and then put the vodka back into some pretty bottle. You have to wait another month before you can drink it. . .

Whoops!

So, I sliced up those wonderful fingerling potatoes and sauteed them in butter and served them at a dinner party.  Someone asked me what they were and I said fingerling potatoes. . . and then tasted them.  They really didn't taste like potatoes.  I tasted another one.  It tasted like artichokes.  Which is when I realized that we didn't GET potatoes this week, we'd gotten Jerusalem artichokes. 

I think I just came up with an entirely new way to serve Jerusalem artichokes!

I love BEETS?

Yes, I love beets.

It's a revelation that I've come to quite late in life. Aside from pickled red beet eggs--a midwest peculiarity if you've never had them--I've always associated beets with deprivation. When I was in middle school, my mother decided to try yet another diet. It's not that she has ever been particularly overweight, but as a buxom, curvy, and short woman in the era of Twiggy, she tried a number of different diets: grapefruit, cabbage soup, and the beet diet.

The beet diet required you to eat a cup of diced canned beets with every meal. And, no it isn't particularly effective. However, the memory of all of those tinnish, soggy beets has been so seared into my psyche that the mere mention of beets would trigger a pavlovian nausea in the very pit of my stomach--similar to drinking an entire pot of coffee without any food.

So, of course, my very first grab bag featured almost two pounds of golden beets. The horror. The whole reason I joined South Mountain was to prepare more foods in season and locally grown. Beets were definitely in season.

Exploring recipes on Epicurious and Cooks Illustrated baffled me because I couldn't believe people were waxing poetic over beet recipes that had 5 ingredients. They featured beets, they couldn't be good. Skeptical, I wrapped the beets in foil and roasted them in a 400^o oven for about an hour. I cooled, peeled, diced and added them to a salad containing feta and a red wine vinaigrette. They were simply delicious--I couldn't stop eating them. My five-year-old gobbled them up as a well. As good as that first foray into beetdom was, true nirvana was attained with the following Beet Carpaccio recipe that I slightly modified from Bon Appétit April 2003:

Beet Carpaccio

1 pound Golden Beets, roasted and sliced thinly

2 ounces Goat Cheese, crumbled

1 Shallot, minced

⅓ cup Seasoned Rice Vinegar

⅓ cup First Press Unfiltered Olive Oil

A pinch of Sugar

⅓ cup Mint, chopped

Salt and Pepper

Whisk together vinegar, olive oil, and shallot and let sit for 15 minutes. Whisk in mint and a pinch of sugar. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Arrange beets slightly overlapping in a shallow dish. Pour dressing over beets and crumble goat cheese on top.

You really must make this. It's a revelation, truly. And, it couldn't be more simple.

--Lisa