Monday, July 23, 2012

GRILLED LAMB BURGERS

Lamb burger with tzatziki, green salad, and barley salad
GRILLED LAMB BURGERS
After a weekend of lazing by a campfire in the great outdoors, everything tastes better. The need to eat is urgent, pressing, now! Hunks of watermelon are like Technicolor to the senses, and a meal consisting wholly of grilled corn is no hardship. And grilled meats—oh, the burgers! Let’s linger here, and consider the humble burger. A basic ground beef burger with a slice of melted cheese is nothing to sneer at. But a burger can be made from almost anything, not just meat: lightly mashed beans, shredded zucchini, or one of my personal favorite iterations, a combination of ground meat and cooked grains. First thing you must know: grains like bulgur, barley, quinoa, or millet keep the burger light and juicy. The grains hold in cooking juices and create an airy structure. Additionally, it stretches a pricey meat further. It helps as you're mentally transitioning to buying organic, hormone-free meats (“happy” meats, as we like to call them) to feed 5 to 6 generously with just a pound of meat. (A great cookbook on the subject is Almost Meatless, available wherever books are sold.)
This weekend a package of ground lamb ensnared my husband with its siren song. A fairly hefty purchase comes with no small responsibility: we had to do it right. We settled on a grain-heavy burger, which yielded about 7-8 patties. (Note that we were still affected by Camping Appetite, so on a normal day wouldn’t have eaten, ahem, almost two servings each.) After a few minutes over a charcoal fire, those burgers became one of the best meals we’ve eaten this summer. In our minds we were somewhere in the mountains: a little dusty from a long hike, comfortably weary, and sated with fresh air and good food.
Lamb and Barley Patties
Adapted from How to Cook Everything iPhone App, by Mark Bittman
1 medium onion, quartered
2 cloves garlic
1 pound ground lamb
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pinch cayenne
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 egg
1½ cups barley, cooked until just tender, drained
½ cup chopped fresh parsley leaves
Prepare a charcoal fire, with coals in the middle under the cooking grate. (Ordinarily I’d be perfectly amenable to a pan-frying alternative, but the flames make such a difference that I order you to fire up a grill.)
Take the onion and garlic for a spin in the food processor to evenly chop. Add the lamb, salt and pepper to taste, cayenne, cumin, and egg, and pulse until combined. Turn it out into a large bowl and stir in the barley and parsley. Form loose patties with your hands. Lightly salt and pepper the patties for good measure.
Grill over the hottest part of the fire until lightly charred on the outsides and cooked throughout, turning carefully with tongs. Serve with grilled corn, tzatziki, and a green salad.

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Monday, July 9, 2012

SPEEDY ICE CREAM

SPEEDY ICE CREAM
From mid-May to early October, I’m a frozen food addict. Ice cream, sorbet, popsicles, frozen watermelon—during heat waves like we had this weekend, I could subsist (and have in past lives) entirely on coconut popsicles without a second thought. (When, for instance, one’s salary as a young wee thing makes air conditioning a luxury out of reach, replacing solid food with popsicles is an adequate solution. Consult your physician before attempting this non-medically supported diet plan.)

Now I’m fortunate to have an ice cream maker, which gets a lot of use during the warmer months. It’s not in the holy trinity of useful appliances (mixer, food processor, immersion blender), but it’s close. My beef with homemade ice cream, other than its somewhat questionable nutritional value, is the cooling time for a thickened base. If you make a traditional custard with eggs, the time it takes to cool from 170° to between 40 and 45°, the optimal churning temp, can seem interminable when the outdoor temperatures are almost as high as the custard’s. Even a sorbet made with simple syrup needs a goodly amount of chill-time.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve experimented with a quick-and-dirty no-heat ice cream base. You can use granulated sugar, maple syrup, or (best) an infused simple syrup that you’ve made in advance. Freezing your fruit helps, too. Purée everything in a blender, strain it through a sieve if you’re feeling fussy, and then churn immediately. Now, you should know that this kind of ice cream is best on the day it’s made. Leftover, it can be too icy: it doesn’t have adequate binding properties to hold up for long in the freezer. But the potential flavors are almost endless: it’s easily made dairy-free, and with so little time spent in prep, you can make a new flavor every day. So far I’ve made two kinds of blueberry—which is a great fruit to try, since it has a lot of natural pectin. The pectin keeps the ice cream smooth and thick without any additional thickeners. I’ve also used cucumbers instead of fruit for a cucumber-mint spin: highly recommended as the final note of a steamy day.

Here’s a basic formula for 1 1/2 quarts:
1 cup chopped fruit, frozen if possible
3 cups milk (I use So Delicious unsweetened coconut milk for some vegan guests, but 2% cow’s milk is great too)
1/2 cup to 1 cup sugar or simple syrup, to taste (for the cucumber-mint variety, see recipe below)
1/2 cup Greek-style plain yogurt (optional)
Blend together with a blender or immersion blender until smooth. Strain through a sieve, and pour immediately into an ice cream maker. Churn until frozen according to manufacturer’s directions.

Cucumber-Mint Simple Syrup
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup warm water
Skin peelings from 1 unwaxed cucumber
Handful of mint leaves, roughly chopped
Heat the sugar and water in a saucepan over high heat. When the sugar dissolves and the syrup begins to burble, reduce the heat and let it thicken for 2 to 3 minutes. When the syrup is thicker and somewhat slow-moving in the pan, add the cucumber peelings and mint. Stir, and let infuse off the heat for 10 to 15 minutes. Strain and cool completely. This is an excellent addition to iced tea or cocktails.
Stay cool out there,
image via here

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Monday, July 2, 2012

Salads of Summer


SALADS OF SUMMER
When the temperatures rise, I want nothing but giant salads and coconut popsicles. Hey—you there: did you just nod off when I said “salad”? Here is my treatise on tossed greens: in my opinion, dinner doesn’t get much better.
Step away from the bottled dressing. This is not my Food Snobbery talking, swears. (That comes later.) Making your own dressing is dramatically less expensive, loads healthier, and a great way to explore your own taste buds. Start with a super-basic French Dijon dressing: a dollop of Dijon mustard, a few tablespoons of white wine vinegar, a squeeze of lemon, and extra-virgin olive oil. Whisk together and taste: add salt, pepper, or more mustard/vinegar/oil until it works for you. Personally, I like almost equal parts oil and vinegar for a sharp dressing. Too sharp? Add a smidge of honey.
Other dressing ideas? Plain yogurt, cumin, lime juice. Sherry vinegar used sparingly. Marmalade, EVOO, and citrus juice. Chili powder, EVOO, and lime juice. The possibilities are endless.
Something creamy, something crunchy. Chopped hard boiled eggs, crumbled cheese, avocado, and hummus add a touch of smooth luxury to all that crunching. Also? Don’t depend solely on your greens for the crispy factor. Try pea shoots (readily available at Trader Joe’s!) or other sprouted grains, endive, toasted nuts, or homemade croutons.
Perfect the toss. Is there anything sadder than anemic iceberg unevenly dressed with fatty-sweet Ranch dressing? Taking care to coat your greens with flava will go a long way to making a salad convert of you. Use a big, big bowl and drizzle lightly at first. Taste as you go. When every bite is seasoned to your taste, plate the greens and add toppings. Waiting to dress the leaves until you get to the table is a messy proposition.
Branch out. A good mix of baby greens makes a solid, enjoyable salad. But there’s so much more in the world of raw veggies. A slaw is effectively a salad: try thinly shaved fennel, carrots, and a citrusy drizzle. Or ribbons of zucchini with roasted tomatoes or garlicky chickpeas. Baby kale and chard are tender enough to chomp with no cooking at all, and they’re filling (lots of fiber!).
Grill, baby, grill. Wedges of Romaine, radicchio, or endive handle high heat like pros. Grill the cut edges just to barely char, then serve at room temperature.
Here are a few meal-caliber salads from my kitchen table.  Stay cool this week.
left: cobb-ish; middle: corn, lime, pea shoots, avocado; right: veg burger, corn, pea shoots, cumin-yog dressing