Peanut Noodles with Spring Greens. And an Egg.

For what it's worth, I wasn't complaining about the cold in February. Complaining about the dark, maybe. I save my temperature complaining for when it's hot out. It pairs well with my cantankerous stubbornness about air conditioning. Today peaked at 95°. Certainly not as hot as it can get around here, but just as certainly beyond comfortable.

Regardless of how warm it was today, here or where you were, we all have those days where the mere thought of turning on the stove makes you want to get another icy drink out. I've been realizing how much peanut sauce is a hot-weather staple for me recently: Fresh summer rolls dipped in it, drizzled over lettuce-wrapped rice (with or without anything else), or even just a bowl of veggies and a jar of peanut sauce.

This has been the recipe I've come back to more than others recently. Here, the peanut sauce dresses up cold buckwheat noodles tossed with long, thin cut cucumber or summer squash (inspired by zucchini noodles) and the piquant blend of greens I've been gradually thinning out of my garden. And ,just for good measure, an egg on top. Since discovering steam-cooked hard boiled eggs (a method which I can't recommend heartily enough), I've been putting them in all kinds of things. I'll let The Food Lab go into detail about the method, but by way of my recommendation, it is faster than other boil methods (since you only have to wait for ½" of water to come to a boil), and I have had an almost perfect peel record with it. The closest thing to an imperfect peel I've had since starting to use it is actually in the photos of this dish, and I'm pretty sure that one was my fault.

It's pretty good without the egg, too, though, and is totally vegan without it. If you're not eating eggs for whatever reason, the peanut sauce does provide a little protein, but I've also made and enjoyed this with crispy-fried bits of tempeh.

Peanut Noodles with Spring Greens

2 servings

• 100 g soba noodles (one bunch)
• 1 cucumber or small summer squash/zucchini
• ¼ c. peanut sauce (see below)
• 2-3 c. mixed baby greens (1-2 good handfuls per serving)
• 2 eggs, boiled (or steamed!) to your preference (I like about 8 minutes here)
• optional but nice:
  • scallion, sliced thin
  • a few sprigs of cilantro

Start by putting on water to boil the noodles and cook the eggs (if you've got time, you can use the same pot and do the eggs after the noodles). While the water is heating up, peel your cucumber or squash. They're both very tasty here, and bulk out the noodles with cool fresh flavor. If you've got a spiral slicer or julienne peeler, good for you. You know what to do, so go to town. Otherwise, use your vegetable peeler to peel thin slices off of the cucumber or squash until you get down to the seeds. If you prefer, you can slice these strips thinner to blend in with the noodles more.

Once the noodles are cooked, make sure to run cool water through them until chilled. Toss the noodles and cucumber/squash in the sauce until well coated. Divide up into bowls and toss with a handful of greens, then top with an egg.

Peanut Sauce

vegan, gluten-free depending on your soy sauce
makes about 1 cup of sauce

• ¼ c. peanut butter (Mine is creamy, natural & salted. Yours will work too, but you might have to add more or less stuff)
• 1-2 Tblsp. sugar
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 tsp. minced fresh ginger
• ½-1 tsp. thick chili-garlic sauce like Sriracha or sambal oelek
(or more, to taste)
• 2 Tblsp. soy sauce
• ¼- c. water

Add all ingredients except water. Add water a tablespoon or so at a time, stirring until thoroughly combined before adding more water. If you add too much water at once, the suspension will break and you'll get weird thready peanut-butter bits in seasoned water. If this happens, add a little more peanut butter and stir until smooth. You'll have to add more water later. Adjust seasoning as necessary.

The Co-op's Korean Spinach

I'm pretty sure that the reason I would happily down this entire bowl of spinach has more to do with it being tasty than about it tasting like good memories, but it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.

This is a great spinach dish for people who think they don't like spinach: it has a mild, savory flavor that enchants all kinds of palates. It's also, starting with frozen spinach and adding very little, highly nutritious and cheap as chaff.

Russian Eggplant "Caviar"

I recently lost my main Russian grocery hookup when the last of my stepmother's family pulled up roots from their largely Russian Northeast Philly neighborhood. Our shared background in Russian Studies has been a major bonding point for us. I first met her shortly before I started studying Russian towards the end of high school and she was a big part of my reassuring my parents that it was perfectly fine to send me off to Central Asian parts of the former USSR back in 2002, based on her own experiences in the USSR in the late 70s/early 80s (my parents have never leaned towards being overprotectively alarmist, but anywhere ending in -stan raised a high eyebrow that close to 9/11 and the beginning of US involvement in Afghanistan). A couple times a year, she'd call to say, "Hey, I'm going to visit my mom for a few days. You want anything from Bell's?" (referring Bell's Market, the go-to Russian store in Philly). We'd go on for a few minutes about all the different kinds of frozen dumplings, smoked fish, cold salads and baked goods available there, which inevitably turned into reminiscences of particular meals and dishes from our travels. Every culture has its notable culinary adventures, but Russian culture in particular seems to keep the kitchen table at its heart. I'm reminded of a toast in honor of the kitchen table from Dennis Danvers's novel, The Watch:

"The Kitchen Table...is the site of all that's best in Man—his sociability, his intellect, his good humor, and his generosity—not a monument to death but a celebration of living, not the theft of life but its sharing, not the jingoistic cant that generally passes for history but here and now, together in solidarity, this very moment! I give you: The Kitchen Table!"

This toast is delivered by none less than Peter Kropotkin, or at least a fictional, time-traveling version of him, though I could imagine a similar proclamation coming from the man himself.

In any event, one of the Russian specialties that we always lingered over was баклажанная икра (bak⋅la⋅zhan'na⋅ya i⋅kra'), which literally translates as, "eggplant caviar." For all that it's called "caviar," baklazhannaya ikra is a totally vegan "salad" (Russian salads rarely involve leaves) made of eggplant, tomato, pepper, onion and carrot slow-cooked together to savory perfection and seasoned with the only two herbs that really matter in Russian cuisine, dill and parsley

Quick Hits: Lentil, Herb & Feta Stuffed Tomatoes

The months of drooling, rhapsodic fantasies about perfectly-ripened field tomatoes have finally given way to a flood of them. It's not an overabundance; that would imply too much. The simple joy of slicing a tomato, sprinkling it with salt and maybe drizzling a little olive oil over it hasn't gotten old yet, but there's so much more to do with tomatoes before you even get to cooking them. I tossed together this fresh-stuffed tomato using some left over odds and ends recently and was so excited about it that I had to recreate it and write it down to share.

The dish is built around a protein-rich lentil and grain stuffing, simply flavored with a healthy handful of fresh herbs, a little feta, and the guts of the scooped-out tomato. It may look like a salad, but it eats like a meal.

Swordfish with Peach-Corn Salsa

My CSA keeps me sane in the summer: it helps keep my miserly urges from denying me fresh vegetables and jump starts my culinary creativity in a couple different ways. Not only does the seasonality lead me into the diverse options for familiar vegetables, but it also forces me to try out vegetables I'm less familiar with (see the last post, a study of kohlrabi). This has worked really well for the last few yeas, and both my miserly urges and desire for a varied palate are satisfied.

This year, the farm down the road where I have a share became a pickup location for Cape Cod Fish Share. The fish share does the same things that the vegetable share does for me as regards creativity and circumventing the miserly urges, but also answers many of the sourcing and sustainability questions that keep me from buying fish regularly.

Forget Spring Rolls: Summer Rolls

I've been suffering urges to eat live green things by the fistful recently. There's something about the onset of hot weather and the boisterous upspringing of plants that makes me want to rip off their tender little leaves and eat them like a hungry, hungry beast. It's like I'm trying to cram in all of the fresh air and sunlight they've absorbed. I am eating plants the way some ancient warriors consumed the heart of their enemy: to gain their strength and wisdom. There's a Philip K. Dick short story, "Piper in the Woods", in which people, suddenly craving a simpler life, start claiming that they have become plants. There's a certain appeal to it: what if sitting still, smiling at the sun all day fulfilled all of your needs? In the absence of that, or, rather, the presence of all the other things that must be done, or that I do anyway, I try to steal the essence of leafy plants. By serenely dismembering and eating them.

Vietnamese gỏi cuốn, literally, "salad rolls" but also known as summer rolls or Vietnamese spring rolls, combine fragrant, leafy herbs, crisp veggies like bean sprouts and thin-cut carrot and cucumber, and a little bit of protein, usually from shrimp or shredded chicken and roll it all up in bánh tráng, rice paper. Not only do they satisfy my unholy cravings for crisp, green crunch, but they also require very little prep and even less time with the stove going, which is always at a premium when it gets hot out. Even more so, they're fun to put together and make dinner into a great group activity.

Quick Hits: Panzanella

We have kind of a unique problem - we have too much artisan bread hanging around on a regular basis. Maybe it sounds a little less whiny if I tell it like it really is: we have too much half-stale artisan bread hanging around. Maria works most of the week as a farmstand muffin and cookie-slinger, but one night a week, she puts on her cape and cowl and takes on her real passion: bread. Every Monday, after working a full shift at the regular baking job, she heads out at 11 o'clock at night to go shape bread at El Jardín, one of a few local bakeries that focus on wood-fired, sourdough bread. She returns, half-delirious, at about 9 o'clock in the morning, often towing several loaves of day-old sourdough, and proceeds to sleep for most of her Tuesday off (and then wakes up in the afternoon and commences cooking again for her weekly pot luck).

Bread, especially sourdough, is kind of a family legacy. We grew up with perpetual sourdough. Mom began baking when pregnant with me, and, for several years, plied her bread at the Brattleboro Farmer's Market out of the back of the 1970s Volvo with her spokesbabies. When I was about 5, she got a job baking in the kitchen at The Putney School, where she was encouraged to further develop her sourdough wiles. We also grew up in the back of that kitchen, warming ourselves against the huge, ceramic-lined ovens and sampling whatever came down the pipeline. As such, we grew up with the idea the sourdough wasn't a big deal. Folks' ability to normalize their childhood is remarkable sometimes. All that said, we only eat so much bread before it becomes almost unslice-ably stale. I guess it's better than it going moldy, with which you can do very little, but we store it at room temperature and not in plastic, which will get you stale over moldy most days. For better or worse, once bread has gone totally stale and lost all its moisture, it really won't go moldy.

So, we end up swimming in stale sourdough, and having to find creative ways to use it up outside of making breadcrumbs in quantities of epic proportion. Leading up to the end of summer, here's a quick favorite: Panzanella, a quick, Italian bread-tomato-basil salad full of simple, fresh, summery flavors that we always have trouble not picking to death before it makes it to its destination (the same can be said of another favorite stale bread usage, a savory bread pudding, but that's a story for another, cooler day).

Panzanella

vegan, about 20 min. start to finish
serves 4-6

• 1 loaf half-stale bread, large dice
• 2 med-large tomatoes, large dice
• 3-4 cloves garlic, slivered
• ¼-½ c. olive oil
• 1-2 tsp. salt (this is a good opportunity to break out the good salt)
• 3-4 stems (15-20 leaves) fresh basil, chiffonaded
• fresh ground black pepper to taste

Optional:
• 1 chile, seeded and minced

After prep, toss all ingredients save the garlic. Toss garlic in a skillet with some of the olive oil over med-high heat until it starts to smell toasty, then sprinkle on top. Let sit for as long as you can stand it, or at least 15 minutes. Crank black pepper to taste over the top.