Hand Cut Manacotti & Miso Hot Pot

The Food Nanny
May 12 &13,2009

Meal 1: Hand Rolled Manicotti With Grilled Asparagus and Herbed Chevre, Chick Pea Salad, Mixed Greens
· Heat the manacotti in the oven at 350° for 15 -20 minutes, or until the sauce begins to bubble.
· Serve the chick peas at room temp, and dress the salad.
Meal 2: Miso Hot Pot with Bok Choi, Udon, and Marinated Tofu

· Allow the vegetables etc. to come to room remp in their container or another vessel if you prefer.
· Heat the Miso soup to just under a boil – do not let it boil- and pour it over the vegetables etc. Allow the dish to steep a minute or two and then dig in with spoon and chop sticks!

Local Notes:

Boc Choi is perhaps the most elegant of the cabbages, or brassicas to be more accurate. Yes, its true that broccoli, cabbage, turnips, canola, and the chois are all the same species Brassica rapa.

As for the choi, just look at those lines, the graceful curve of its vase-like profile, the seamless integration of leaf and petiole, and its helix pattern of growth. Study brassicas enough, especially cauliflower, and you will get some serious insight about the nature of our cosmos.

These are Jon's chois and they are just scrumptious. I could not help but ordering more after last week and planning a menu just to fit them. I love to peel the petioles from the stem and cook them whole so as to eat that whole thing with its transition in texture from the undulous leaf to the fat crunchy suculence of the petiole base. However, you may also opt to cut them for politeness or even safety. In which case, cut them at the dividing point of the leaf and the petiole ( if you can find it), and cook them separately as the thin leaf parts will cook faster than the thick petiole parts.

Technique:

Sick of Sidedishes

We ordinarily eat vegetarian when dining out, or even out of home. In a nutshell, we only eat meat when we know and approve of its provenance. Previous to this we ate a vegetarian diet for a few years. When out or say, at a wedding, this typically meat eating those side dishes that did not contain meat. This is not a satisfying gustatory experience and I get tired of it pretty quickly.That being said it is important to understand that vegetarian cuisine is not just cooking the remainders from other cuisine.

Now that there is a vegan among our members, I have to remeber that vegan cuisine is not just vegetarian food with certain things omitted. It has its own ways of achieving all the concept I have been writing about lately: body, complexity, satiety, richness, fattiness, umami, etc. It is a challenge to me to approach this, as in all honesty vegan cuisine is one in which I claim no expertise. But, the concepts for how to approach it are there in the head and hand. This is why I stress technique over recipe.

This weeks pasta is made of egg, and the filling contained cheese. So, how solve it ? Well, for the pasta I used store bought dried ("...Know when to fold 'em...") but for the filling I rehydrated some of our shiitake mushrooms, and made a nut paste to bind it with the grilled asparagus pieces. This paste consisted of toasted almond, olive oil, and spices ground in a mortar and pestle. The mushrooms are laded with satisfling umami falvors (glutimates). The nuts gave the mixture a savory, rich, and unified composition, while the olive and nut oils, plus the nut protien, gave the filling a satisfying, fatty aspect that the tongue and body appreciates.

I even like it myself.