Green Garlic Quiche & Grilled Veggie Burgers

The Food Nanny
April 28 & 29,2009
Meal 1: Green Garlic and Roasted Red Pepper Quiche, Green Leaf and Broccoli Sprout Salad, and Crescent Rolls
· Warm the quiche in the oven at 350° for 10 -15 minutes. Warm the rolls too if you like.
· Dress the salad and serve alongside the quiche. Meal 2: Grilled Veggie Burgers on Potato Rolls, Whole Wheat Macaroni Salad, Hand-Cut Tortilla Chips
· Heat the burgers in their foil at 350°for about 10 minutes. Unwrap them carefully so as to not burn yourself. Use a spatula to transfer the burger to the roll as it is delicate. Dress the burger as you see fit. I like spicy mayo and pickles.
· Serve the salad chilled and the chips at room temp.

Local Notes:
Green Garlic is the entire, and undeveloped garlic plant. We love it so much that I collect the bulbils (aerial clone-bulbs) produced by our garlic crop and sow them densely in coldframes. The resulting thin plants can be harvested as a vegetable coloquially called garlic grass. This is what I really used in your quiche today. If allowed to grow through the season the small plants would form single bulb in the fall. If then allowed to overwinter, this bulb would grow a garlic plant that would in turn produce a head of bulbs (cloves) below the ground as well as a cluster of bulbils atop a flower stalk. There is a fair bit to know about growing garlic, but, like beekeeping, the hard part is the terminology. Try growing garlic this year. You will be rewarded.
Garlic plants grown from a full bulb are stout plants and can also be eaten as a vegetable from tip to top before they begin to flower. This is real green garlic and it is outstanding pan roasted to serve with steak, or stir fried with other vegetables and a brown sauce. Expect to see some more in coming weeks. We love garlic, pity those who don't, and rejoice in using it in its varied forms throughout the year. More to come on garlic anatomy, botany, and gustation.
Technique: The Quiche is the Most Manly of Foods!
Hahaha! It most certainly is not. I mean if you were going to show up to a fight with a food item to defend yourself would you choose a quiche ? How about a whole procuitto, or a kebab, or even Bananna's Foster. To say I can cook a quiche is to say : Yes, I can appreciate delicate, subtle things like lace, or art, or Mozart. Yet what is a man if he cannot cook a quiche?
Quiche is custard. It differs from its stunt double the frittata in this way. A frittata is a baked omelet whereas the custard is specifically a mixture of egg and cream or milk in a specific ratio. This ratio varies as widley as there are custards to make and enjoy. Despite the fact that a frittata may contain some cream etc. quiche is more closely related to ice cream than frittata.
The quich must have dairy, and I like the proportion of approximately 3:1 dairy to egg for quiche as opposed to approximately 7:1 cream to yolk for creme brulee, another custard sibling. With custards, a convenient rule of thumb is that 8 yolks will 'set' ( make firm ) one quart of cream. That is a conservative bet.
Quiche also has the interesting addition of savory cheese give body and flavor. Water and oil are the enemy of custard and they must be carefully regulated in the additional ingredients chosen to embellish your quiche. But fear not, remember that bacon and spinach are two of the best quiche ingredients, just be judicious in your rendering of them.

Grilled Pita Sandwiches with Parsnip Soup & Falafel Croquettes

Meal 1: Grilled Pita Sandwich with Hummous, Herbed Chevre, & Vegetables, Roasted Parsnip Soup
· Simmer Soup on the stove.
· Assemble your sandwich as you see fit. Build it and warm it, or toast just the pita. Try rolling the pita around the fillings like a taco, rather than cutting it.
·
Meal 2: Falafel Croquettes Wrapped in Grilled Chard, Bulghur with Kale, Moroccan Cole Slaw
· Remove the croquettes to a baking tray and reserve the bulghur to serve at room temp. Heat the croquettes at 350° for 15-20 minutes or until; hot.
· Serve the slaw chilled. Salt it if you like, as we omitted this ingredient to prevent the slaw from becoming watery during storage.

Local Notes:
OK, OK...the parsnips were imported from Madison, Wi. I was there this past weekend, so I shopped for you all whilst there. The Madison market is a spectacle and I love it for what it is (lots of cheese, and meat, some of the best maple syrup I'v ever had - sorry VTers- and great vegetable growers of many styles) but for a practical market, Urbana is one of my favorites. For one thing, they are two weeks behind us up there and I was hoping to get some real asparagus to you all. Perhaps this coming week.
Alas what I did find were some of the fattest, firmest, prettiest parsnips I have ever seen. They were grown by Driftless Organics of Wisconsin. I think they specialize in root crops because their potatoes are also among the best I've seen. So, when life gives you parsnips - make soup!
I did roast these parsnips before incorporating them into the soup and, well, they are sublime aren't they ? They are sweet, but also silky and creamy, plus nutty and deeply satisfying. I think this is by far the best parsnip soup I have ever made. But the credit is entirely to the parsnip itself. It is a joy to cook such food and I am so grateful that such beautiful vegetables are readily available to us - may we never take them, their source, or the artisans who produce them for granted.
Parsnips are outstanding roasted and you should toss them in some olive oil and S&P along with the regular players of potato and carrot to accompany a chicken, cut of beef, or other roast. Try them in chicken soup with carrot, onion, and celery. Also, chunk and boil them with potatoes to convert into secret special mashers. Note: when roasting or cooking in soup, parsnips cook faster than carrots, but slower than potatoes, so cut their size accordingly - larger than the carrots and smaller than the potatoes. In this manner, if cooking all things at the same time, they should finish together despite different densties. Kapisch ?
Other local notes, the chevre is Prairie Fruits, plus herbs from our garden. Does anything beat chive? What an elegant herb. As indespensable as any allium. The roasted red pepper is, as usual, from our Food Nanny freezer. As mentioned before, we put up about 80lbs of Jon's good red peppers this August. Sure tastes good on a grey April day doesn't it ? The carrots too, and the spinach and so on...
The cabbage is commercial organic, but not bad huh? I think we'll do some more of that soon too.
Technique:
White Mirepoix
What is meer-pwah in the first place ? Mirepoix is the combination of onion, carrot, and celery that is the fundametal bilding block of Continental cuisine. It is the flavor base upon which all other flavor is built.
This being the case, what do you do if you have some lovely fat parsnips, and you want to turn them into a creamy, white soup. Do you omit flavor ? Never. Just build a white mirepoix. The onilns and celery stay of course, but the X factor is the use of leeks. Despite their oniony nature leeks impart a sweet and earthy, yet ethereal component to you flavor base. Sometimes you can include some potato too, to build body.
When cooking with leeks, first remove the fibrous green leaves by twisting the whole plant to tear them off. They will break where they should. Do some cleanup with your fingers. Next clean the leek by slicing it into rings or biasd and soak the rings in enough water that their sediment will fall and separate from the leek pieces floating at the top.

Tomato Chevre Soup and Grilled Dolmas

The Food Nanny
April 14 & 15 2009
Meal 1: Tomato Chevre Soup with Kale Roasted Red Onion Frittata and Spinach Salad
· Simmer Soup on the stove.
· Warm Frittata gently in oven at 350 for 10-15 minutes
· Dress and serve salad.
Meal 2: Grilled Dolmas with Roasted Herb and Lemon Potatoes and Sundried Tomato Quinoa Salad
· Heat Dolmas and Potatoes in 350 oven until hot through, 15-20 minutes.
· Serve Quinoa at room temperature.

Local Notes:
I wrote quite a bit last week about Passover, and the season, and the food; and, then it all got lost due to a glitch in my connection to the blog. Given our new family pattern and my limited penchant for typing, lost was gone forever. My apologies.
We are pretty squeezed this week too, so I'm going to skip to the good stuff.
Technique: Body Building
Last week I wrote about roasting vegetables for use in a soup in order to create complex layers of flavor comparted to simply boiling vegetables. Believe me, I did.
Anyway, this week I want to write about building body in dishes. Body is what gives a dish a substantial flavor experience coupled with an arousing mouth feel to produces satiety. Wow. How racy is that!
Body can be achieved a number of ways. The primary, francophilic way is to use reduced animal stocks to concentrate the gelatines rendered from roasted joint bones. When rendered from veal it is famously know as demiglace and it is divine, but stocks of other types can be used and theior result is tremendous for producing both excellent flavor and mouth feel. These require some planning, familiarity with their preparation, and a penchant for animal byproducts.
Dairy is a more familiar tool for building body in food. It is effective, rich, and lovely, but does have some drawbacks. It's effect can be too heavy and bourgeois, some people have allergies, and it is expensive.
When making a puree, as with this weeks Chevre and Tomato Soup, you can also add starche foods to the soup to produce a creamy body without cream. Leftover rice is great for this, or add a few potatoes to the soup while it is cooking.
We employed both the use of potato for this Kosher for Passover soup as well as a little goat cheese at the end to give our soup its svelte form.

Enjoy

Potato Cake Florentine & Matzoh Ball Soup

The Food Nanny
April7,8 2009
Meal 1: Potato Cake Florentine, Carrot Soup, & Roasted Turnips and Rutabega
· Heat the potato cake and root vegetables in the oven at 350° until hot and lightly sizzling, about 15 -20 minutes.
· Thin the soup with a little water, adjust the seasoning, heat and serve.
Meal 2: Matzoh Ball Soup, Spinach Salad with Hard Boiled Eggs and Roasted Red Onion, & chocolate Covered Matzoh
· Heat the soup to a gentle simmer and serve.
· Chop the egg and serve atop the spinach and onions with your favorite dressing.
· Enjoy the dessert!

Spanikopita & Black Eyed Pea Stew

The Food Nanny
March 31&32 2009
Meal 1: Spinach and Chevre Spanikopita, Lemon Cous Cous Salad & a Macaroon
· Heat the spanikopita in a 450° oven until golden brown, about 10 -15 minutes, but watch it, they go fast at the end.
· Serve the salad at room temp, and enjoy the dessert
Meal 2: Black Eyed Pea Stew with Collard Greens, Multigrain Rolls, & Spinach Salad
· Stir a decent amount of water into the stew and heat it in a sauce pan or a microwave until it simmers and the collards turn bright green. Adjust the seasoning and serve immediately with the warmed roll and dressed salad.

Spinach Soup and Tamales

The Food Nanny
March 24&25 2009

Meal 1: Spinach Soup and Roasted Garlic Potato Rolls, Baby Lima Bean Salad
· Heat the soup in a saucepan or microwave until just hot. Try to not boil it.
· Warm the Roll and serve the bean salad at room temp.
Meal 2: Squash and Pepita Tamales with Refried Beans and Yellow Rice Salad
· Heat the tamales by either steaming them in a vegetable steamer basket or in the microwave. If you have neither simply place a small glass bowl in the bottom of a sauce pan. Next, place a ½ “ of water in the bottom of the pan. Now place a plate atop the glass dish and position the tamales on the plate. Cover the pot. Bring the water inside to a boil and steam the tamales for about 5 minutes.
· Stir a little water into the beans to thin them a bit. Warm the dish in the oven for about 10 minutes or use a microwave.
· Serve the rice salad at room temp or pan fry it with some oil to get it hot.

Miracle Max's Spinach Soup
Local Notes:
Kate thinks this soup is the epitome of March,, and with its Shamrock Shake appearance, I don't disagree. This soup features Jon's super spinach which has been coming in to us all winter too. But the real backbone to it is the tail end of the potatoes I put up from him. March cuisine is a tail-ends cuisine. The asparagus is not yet here, nor the seasons mushrooms etc. But the alliums and herbs are coming back along with the leafy greens. So we use them to embellish and brighten the last of the hearty roots that have so thankfully kept us nurtured this last cold winter. How lucky we are to have such quantity and quality of comestibles within our reach during the non-growing season: sweet turnips, vigorous onions and garlic bracing all subsequent flavors, rich potatoes - a new variety for each purpose, unparalleled carrots just ringing with the vital mineras of Earth. I imagine what hardship, war, and oppression bring to living, and I think of those whom I know this very day are enduring such, likely for no good reason, and I shiver at the tenuousness and shame of our precious good fortunes. When I think of justice I think of full bellies and lively homes, and the opportunity for us to make them so.

Technique:

What makes this soup so uniques is that it stays very green. Most green vegetables turn that military shade of green that is anything but appealing - except to some philistines who will sadly never know really how to eat. I do not know what makes is so...that Max just has a gift. Max Hanson, of Max & Me Catering was one of my mentors and I remember the day he told me how to make ths soup.

You just make a white mire poix, and add thinly sliced potatoes, and then stock. Let it simmer until the potatoes are cooked and brittle. Then puree in batches with handfulls of raw spinach. Voila! Brilliant green soup positively brimming with the sweet flavor of that beautiful fresh, local, sweet spinach and loaded with everything you need to brace you for the season ahead. Enjoy with the very aromatic roast garlic rolls and look out tastebuds.

The master wrapper at work.

Spinach and Pesto Galettes & Thai Noodle Salad

The Food Nanny
March 17 & 18 2009
Meal 1: Spinach and Pesto Galettes, Red Cabbage Salad With Balsamic Reduction, & Wild Mushroom Risotto
· Heat the galettes at 350° until warm, 10-15 minutes.
· Serve the cabbage salad at room temp, but be sure to season it with salt as we omitted this ingredient to prevent excess wilting of the cabbage.
· Heat the risotto in a sauce pan with enough water, stock, milk, or cream to loosen it and bring it to a simmer. Stir in some butter, parmesan cheese, or additional cream if you desire and adjust the seasoning and serve. The risotto should have enough body to not run, but it should not be a stiff porridge. Enjoy!

Meal 2: Thai Noodle Salad with Egg and Tofu & Curried Sweet Potatoes
· Heat the curry in a pan or microwave.
· Serve the salad at room temp.