Eating Out An Asphyxiated Solar Mass

Ok, that one was a bit of a stretch? What can I say? I've kept the pun running for almost a full year now! That's right, in 2 days it will be the 1 year anniversary of Eating Out Fresno! Hard to believe that it’s been a year since I took the dare to get off my creative butt and start babbling food guff to the interwebs. That’s over 64 Eating Out innuendos! My Mom is sooo proud!

So, the subject of this week’s rambling intercourse is on sunchokes, or the jerusalem artichoke. I go with sunchoke mainly because they’re actually a starchy root bulb of a type of sunflower. And man, oh man, do I love when these lovelies are in season! They impart a light, crisp sunflower seed flavor to just about anything and are about as versatile as waxy potatoes like reds.

So far, I’ve only got one tried and true recipe for them. Mainly because I love the recipe so much, none survive long enough to be made into anything else! And since we dragged a wagonload home from the farmers market, it was time for a special rustic style home cooked feast, featuring egg salad sandwiches, a homestyle tomato vegetable soup and the fabulousness that is sunchoke gratin.


Egg Salad Sammitches (this is a gimme just in case you’ve never made your own)

6 boiled eggs
½ cup mayonnaise
3 tablespoons dijon mustard
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon dill
2 tablespoons pickle relish
Dash of red wine vinegar (just a tiny wee dash!)
Salt and pepper to taste

Slice the eggs in half and place the yolks in a bowl, reserving the whites. In the bowl with the yolks, add the remaining ingredients and mash together with a fork until you have a moist dressing, then chop the egg whites and toss into the yolk mixture. Stir thoroughly and serve on toasted bread.

Rustic Tomato Vegetable Soup

2 cans chopped tomatoes
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
1 large purple (or regular carrot) diced
1 stalk celery diced
1 shallot diced
2 cloves garlic
2 peter peppers (or other hot pepper) diced
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 pinch red chili flake
2 tablespoons olive oil

First sauté your shallots in olive oil until glassy. About 5-7 minutes. Then add in your celery, carrots, garlic and seasonings. Toss and sauté for an additional minute then add both cans of tomatoes and the chicken broth, cover and bring to a simmer. Cook for about 20 minutes or until the carrots and celery are soft. Blend in batches or hit it in the pot with your stick blender until you have a smooth tomato soup. Add additional chicken broth if necessary to achieve desired consistency. Serve…in a bowl.

Sunchoke Gratin

1 lb sunchokes, peeled and sliced 1/8th inch thick
2 cups, + ¼ cup heavy cream
4 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
2 cloves garlic, minced
¾ cup panko breadcrumbs
¼ cup walnuts
1 pinch nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cornstarch
½ teaspoon black pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and grease a med size casserole dish with butter. In a pan, combine sunchokes, garlic, ginger, nutmeg, salt and 2 cups of cream. Bring to a simmer and cook for 3 minutes. Mix cornstarch with the remaining ¼ cup of cream and add mixture to the pan. Simmer an additional 5 minutes to thicken. Allow to cool for a moment then pour into your casserole dish. Top with panko crumbs completely, then sprinkle walnuts over the top. Into the oven for 30 minutes, or until the top is golden and toasted. Allow to rest for at least 10 minutes. Serve by scoop/slicing pieces out with a serving spoon as you would a casserole.

Who says you can’t eat fresh and hearty in the winter? The soup has a wonderful spicy sweetness to it from the peppers and the carrots mixed with that great fruit/vegetable flavor of the tomatoes. The egg salad sandwich is perfect for toning down the burn from the soup and has a nice dill tang. And I just can go on enough about how wonderful the sunchoke gratin is. The layers of sunchoke give a nice soft bite with a little bit of resistance left of their original crunch. The walnuts and the sunflower seed flavors weave in and out of the cream, ginger and garlic with just small hints of the nutmeg popping up to unify everything together. If you try one of the 3 recipes, that’s the one you can’t live without.

So, happy cookering dear Fresno peoples! I’m still not sure how to celebrate the anniversary. But we’ll figure something out. Maybe we’ll offer some peter pepper seeds and seedlings as a prize for some odd contest. Maybe a Fresno wide culinary scavenger hunt. Give some vague hints about ingredients at certain locations and see what you all wind up cooking. This bears some thought!


-Pook

Eating Out Peppermania!

Sick of all the pepper posts yet? Lordy, I hope not! Because it’s coming time soon to start germinating all of those seeds we mentioned back during X-mas! And life is showing no signs of slowing down my manic pepper seeking behavior. Beyond growing tons of and reading everything I can get my hands on about them, it seems that good ole Fresno is going to be putting on a Fresno Chile Festival. Notice the lack of an “I” at the end? That’s right, it’s a celebration of the species, not the dish. Up until now I assumed the name of the pepper had some relation to ash trees, like our town. But a bit of snooping uncovered that the pepper itself is named for Fresno, CA USA! Of course, the internet doesn’t yield any reasons as to why it was named for the ‘No… But hey, I’ll take it as a compliment anyway. That means I’m gonna have to give a little extra attention to my Fresno plant that I’m overwintering to have some fresh pods to show off this summer. Haven’t heard a date yet, but we’ll post it as soon as we know.

Why the sudden pepper nerdism? There’s a lot of good reasons. They’re fairly nutritious, they bring strong flavors to a dish, they’re very easy to grow and in a garden, some varieties add very striking color to your garden and are just a pleasure to look at. Ok…all that’s true, but there’s also a bit of a goofy macho edge to it too. It’s not like I want to eat pure capsaicin or anything. But I do get a bit of a chuckle when folks react very strongly to what I consider extremely mild heat. For example, I like to toss a couple habaneros into my scrambled eggs. That comes out hot. Usually right at my comfortable limit before I’d dive for the milk. And there is a nice, subtle mood altering effect of a pleasant burn. I liken it to the satisfaction one feels after a brief massage or work out. Sorta like a nice little glow radiating from the mouth and tummy out through the rest of one’s essence. Like heroin, but totally nothing like heroin. Here’s the recipe

Jalapeno Atomic Buffalo Turds

6 med to large jalapeno peppers
½ lb softened cream cheese
4 oz habanero jack cheese
2 tablespoons chopped Spanish chorizo (the hard kind! not raw Mexi chorizo, or cook it first)
6 slices Serrano ham
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon oregano
½ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and cover a baking pan with tin foil (your dishwasher will thank me!). Grab some latex or nitrile gloves for pepper chopping. They’re just jallys, but they’ll still give you a good sting if you scratch something before washing thoroughly. Take your peppers and lop off the stem end, about an 1/8th inch from where the stem connects to the pepper. Then slice the pepper down the middle. Take a teaspoon and scrape out the seeds and placental tissue (the white stuff) and set aside. Then chop your habanero cheese roughly and place in a bowl, add your softened cream cheese and the spices. Take a fork and mash everything together thoroughly. Alternately you could put this into your food processor and spin it up. Spoon or pipe your cheese mixture into your jalapeno boats until they’re about 2/3rds full. With 6 of your peppers, dot them with pieces of your chopped Spanish chorizo and the other 6, wrap them around the pepper, trying to make sure to tie up the open end of the pepper. Place on the baking pan and toss into the oven for about 15 minutes, or until the ham begins to crisp on top.

Voila! The pepper will still be a bit crunchy and bring a nice green flavor that’s blanketed by the spicy herbed cheese. Depending on if you used the cayenne or not, you’ll find the cheese is actually more spicy than the jalapeno. The regular recipe is actually very mild. Mild enough to introduce non-chile fanatics to a fun little appetizer. And good enough for Rockabilly impresarios Motel Drive to slake their hunger on the road. Make sure to check them out this weekend at the Babylon!

-Pook

Eating Out In The Yard

The back yard!  And it's breakfast time!  How often in the winter time can one say that more than half the ingredients that you're using came from your overwintered garden.  But fortunately we've still got some peppers on the overwintering plants that are slowly ripening in the Okie greenhouse.  And there are a good number of herbs that can withstand winter's chill, as long as you keep them from freezing.  So what did we make?

Red Hot Egg O'Muffins!

2 eggs
2 english muffins
2 pats of butter + 1 tablespoon
2 habanero peppers
2 tablespoons chives chopped
1 pinch each salt and pepper
4 thin slices cheddar cheese

It's a pretty simple scramble.  Slice the peppers thin and toss into a bowl, add your 2 eggs, the chives, salt and pepper.  Beat with a fork or whisk briefly.  Add your +1 tablespoon of butter to a preheated pan and after it foams, add your eggs and cook.  Toss your muffins into the toaster and just before they're fully toasted, top them with the cheddar cheese to melt.  Then put your scrambled eggs onto your muffins and get ready to sweat!  Garnish with fresh radishes and an orange from the garden and you're ready to face the horrors of a new day!

-Pook