Temporarily out of stock

The first ingredient in the Cook’s recipe is chicken broth and although I’m sure it’s routinely passed off as such by unscrupulous restaurateurs chicken broth is definitely not vegan. I’ve got nothing against it at all—as long as it’s homemade. A few years ago I realized that by saving the bones from every piece of chicken we eat in a bag in the freezer I could make stock that was pretty good and very cheap. When enough bones and sundry chicken parts have accumulated, I cover the lot with water in the crock pot, and in eight short hours it’s ready for action. Naturally, that discovery morphed into the idea that it was immoral to ever buy store-bought stock again. I’m not without my food restrictions—they just don’t have to do with avoiding eating or enslaving animals. And so it was that while we were doing the week’s shopping I refused to buy broth-in-a-box, even though I knew the supply of carefully frozen cubes of stock in the freezer was dwindling. As it turns out I cut it too close, and Martha used up the last of our home-made stock making a delicious vegetable soup a couple of days prior. At some point in the week I was aware of the issue and intended to fire up the slow cooker at the right time to replenish the stock supply, but as of the morning I had forgotten and by the time I got home to make dinner it was already too late. So I turned to the poor man’s vegan-friendly chicken stock: good old H₂O.

Also called for in the recipe was fish sauce, which is usually made with ground up anchovies or other tiny fish. I don’t particularly like fish sauce, and I especially don’t like the way it tends to sit in the fridge unused for many months, taking up valuable shelf real-estate. And it isn’t free either. So I had consciously planned to skip the fish sauce all along, for my own special anti-fish sauce reasons.

The meaning of putrid

With water substituted for chicken broth and no fish sauce swimming in that water, my stir-fry sauce was vegan. But there remained the more obvious question of the pork. Even among those who eat meat, pork is the subject of special dietary restrictions, being notably forbidden to Jews and Muslims who observe their faiths’ dietary laws. This can be mystifying to those of us with no such restrictions, since pork is quite possibly the most delicious of all the meats, especially in its bacon and jamón forms. I say all this to make it clear that I am normally a pork enthusiast and would go to great lengths to incorporate this glorious meat into my cooking, and would never intentionally omit it.

Excited as I was for an opportunity to consume that forbidden beast, any excitement rapidly faded as I pulled the cellophane-wrapped package of pork—purchased at the co-op only days before—and noticed strong bands of discoloration running down the darkened meat. Here’s a pro-tip: if you notice the color of your pork is way off, just throw it out. Do it right now. Because I’m an idiot, I decided to give the pork a good smell, just to make sure. The word putrid gets thrown about pretty casually these days, but I believe it can really only be properly understood as referring to the special stench of rotting meat. Martha, for her part, declined a whiff.

As I was walking the meat down the stairs and directly out to the dumpster behind our building, since a stink like that would pretty quickly sneak out of our tiny trash can and make our tiny apartment unlivable, I thought wistfully of the farmers market season, when food can be bought that’s fresh enough to sit in the refrigerator for a few days without rotting. Only a couple of months to go!

Having disposed of the pork, the last obstacle between this recipe and full-fledged veganism was gone. I was saved by a half head of napa cabbage (the universally acknowledged pig of the vegetable kingdom) that was sitting in the crisper drawer in the wake of the aforementioned vegetable soup. It turned out well, and while I can’t say no animals were harmed in the making of this stir-fry, it is comforting to know that no animals had to be.

Vegan mushroom and cabbage stir-fry with garlic sauce

Sauce

• 1/2 c water
• 2 T sugar
• 2 T soy sauce
• 2 t balsamic vinegar
• 2 t sherry vinegar
• 1 T toasted sesame oil
• 1 T sherry
• 2 t ketchup
• 2 t cornstarch

Stir-Fry

• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 5 scallions, white parts minced, green parts sliced thin
• 2 T sriracha
• 4 T vegetable oil
• 6 oz mushrooms (I used white button mushrooms; shiitakes would be better)
• 4 celery ribs, cut on a bias into 1/4 inch slices
• 1/2 small head napa cabbage, sliced thin.

Whisk together sauce ingredients; set aside.

Combine garlic, scallions, and sriracha in a small bowl; set aside.

Heat 1 T oil in 12″ non-stick skillet until almost smoking. Add celery and mushrooms and cook until softened and starting to singe on the edges. Transfer cooked vegetables to large bowl.

Heat another 1 T oil in the skillet until almost smoking. Add cabbage and cook until wilted and browned in places. Add to bowl with vegetables.

Heat remaining 2 T of oil in the skillet over medium-low heat. Add garlic-scallion mixture and cook until fragrant — about 30 seconds — stirring frequently. Whisk sauce to recombine and add to skillet. Bring to a boil to thicken and add vegetables. Stir to combine. Serve hot with rice.

An experienced forager would probably have been able to find a feast amongst the fallen leaves and icy paths, but since I have trouble distinguishing an elm from an oak, I couldn’t take my dinner inspiration directly from the land. Instead, I took it to a more conceptual level, asking, what really is a wetland? A soupy morass, a muddy stew of plants and animals, dotted here and there with islands of reeds that floating on top.

If there’s one thing my culinary education has prepared me for up to this point, it’s the cooking of soupy morasses. I had in mind a chicken stew — duck would have been too cute, let alone turtle — full of onions, carrots, mushrooms and peas and bound together by sauce velouté — chicken stock thickened with a roux. And those fluffy islands floating on top? Biscuits.

From browning the chicken to plopping the biscuit batter on top of the stew and baking it all together, this can all be done in one pot. I used:

Stew

• Olive oil
• 3 chicken leg quarters
• 2 onions, diced
• 4 carrots, peeled and diced
• 1/2# button mushrooms, quartered
• 6 T flour
• 6 T butter
• 4 c chicken stock
• 8 oz frozen peas
• Juice of 1 lemon

Biscuits

• 2 cups white flour
• 1 T baking powder
• 1 1/2 t sugar
• 1 t salt
• 1/2  t baking soda
• 4 T cold butter, cut into cubes
• 1 1/2 c cold buttermilk

Make the Stew: Heat oven to 350ºF. Sprinkle the chicken legs with salt and pepper. In a dutch oven, or a large cast-iron pan if you’re dextrous, heat a little oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the chicken, skin side down, and cook until well-browned. Turn the chicken over and immediately place the vessel in the oven. Roast until chicken registers 170ºF — about 25 minutes. Remove chicken from pan and set on a plate. Drain any accumulated chicken fat and juices to a small bowl.

Place the dutch oven back over medium heat. Pour a few teaspoons of the conserved chicken fat in and add carrots and onions. Cook the vegetables until softened and slightly browned, 10–15 minutes. Remove to a large bowl. Return dutch oven to medium heat and add a few more teaspoons of the chicken fat (if that runs out, olive oil or butter is fine). Add the mushrooms and cook until browned. Add to bowl with the onions and carrots.

When the chicken has cooled, remove the skin and discard (or, if nobody’s looking, eat). Remove the chicken from the bones and shred by hand. Add chicken to bowl with onions, carrots and mushrooms.

Heat butter over medium heat in dutch oven. When foaming subsides, whisk in flour. Cook a minute or two, stirring constantly. Gradually whisk in chicken stock—keep stirring! Bring to a boil then add reserved vegetables and chicken. Turn off the heat, stir in peas and lemon juice, and adjust seasoning to taste with salt and pepper.

Make the Biscuits: Heat the oven to 450ºF. Combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and baking soda in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Drop in butter cubes and pulse until distributed into flour, about eight 1-second pulses. Transfer mixture to a bowl. Fold in buttermilk with a rubber spatula until just mixed.

Using well-floured hands, plop small handfuls of biscuit dough directly on top of stew, starting in the center and working out to the edges.

Bake stew, uncovered, until biscuits are browned, about 25 minutes.

Not that the attention ratatouille garners is undeserved; packed with vegetables at the height of summer ripeness, it is one of the best testaments available to the joy of eating seasonally. In fact there may be no better way to enjoy zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes all at the same time. But the real lesson of ratatouille lies not in the adherence to those core ingredients but in the happy combination of peak season produce, with nothing that’s not in season. Just about any combination will do, as long as the vegetables are fresh and ripe.

Luckily, this is the time of summer when the overabundance in farmers markets helps keep my kitchen stocked with nothing but fresh, ripe vegetables. The motivation for this summer stew was two large eggplants, but as I stooped down to remove these from the crisper drawer I kept seeing additional prospects for a seasonal stew: half a head of cabbage, a green pepper, five small leeks, tomatoes (the latter not, of course, stored in the refrigerator).

The great thing about a stew is you can be pretty lax about procedure since it’s all getting cooked together anyway. I cubed and salted my eggplant, since conventional wisdom suggests doing so will remove some kind of bitterness. I then sauteed sliced leeks and green bell pepper in a large amount of olive oil until the leeks were starting to brown deeply. I added the eggplant cubes and let them brown a bit too. Next went in the half head of cabbage, thinly sliced, a large sprig of thyme, and about ten roma tomatoes that I had pureed (and salted and sugared to make up for really lackluster flavor — you don’t win ‘em all at the farmers market). I added water to just about cover everything and let the pot stew away for a half an hour while I cooked some white rice. Right before serving the dish, I sprinkled it with fragrant basil shreds.

I was happy with the way this turned out, but I hope I don’t have you headed to the store in search of two eggplants, a half head of cabbage, a green pepper, five leeks and ten roma tomatoes because the point of all this was that if the ingredients for your summertime stew are fresh and in season, you won’t go wrong — it’s the spirit, not the letter, 0f a ratatouille recipe.

I am confident to cook most of my farmers market haul without consulting references, but zucchini blossoms send me into panic mode and I dive deep into whatever my miscellaneous Italian cookbooks and the Internet have to tell me. In past years this has yielded up some interesting, if ultimately flawed, techniques. Patricia Wells’s Trattoria recommends making a meringue of a batter with three egg whites (along with flour, water and beer) which makes a nice fluffy coating. Nice and fluffy, that is, until the meringue produced after furious whisking starts to droop, and the battered blossoms with it. Even the first few flowers when the meringue was working were coated in a great puff of a shell that drew most of the attention to itself. I don’t remember on what website I found the recipe for the disaster of the year before that (I think club soda was involved) but if it had been any good, I would have saved it.

With two consecutive years of failure under my belt, I was determined as ever not to buy zucchini blossoms this year. I put up a pretty good fight, having delayed the purchase until late July before Martha finally got her way and we went home with a bundle of bright orange blossoms in our basket. Unsuccessful in my attempt to avoid them altogether, I was at least determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous years, and by my calculation principal among them was reliance on dubious and finicky recipes. So I scrapped the recipes and went with what I knew in my heart to be true: when it comes to frying vegetables or anything else, you can’t go wrong with beer batter. Mine was made with half a bottle of my home-brewed Irish red ale and enough flour to achieve a thin consistency that was still substantial enough to fully coat the flowers.

It just goes to show you, to paraphrase a wiser man than myself, beer really is the solution to all of life’s problems. These fried blossoms were just what I was after: the batter was crisp but still delicate enough that you could tell you were eating a flower. Light salting after they came out of the oil was all the needed seasoning.

If you have the option, buy zucchini blossoms with long stems. These impart two advantages: the stem serves as a handle allowing you to swirl the flower fully in batter without getting your hand dirty, and this handle also affords you a method for lowering the blossoms into 350°F vegetable oil without burning off your fingerprints. It’s a real win-win.

While I’ve faced substantial doubt in the past about what to fry zucchini blossoms in, there’s never been any question what to dip them in once they are fried. I make aioli (whisk together a mashed clove of garlic, an egg yolk, citrus juice, salt, pepper and a little mustard then slowly whisk in about 3/4 of a cup of oil) thinned by using a higher proportion of lime or lemon juice — the thinness of the sauce is important as the delicate flowers won’t stand up to being dragged through a thick mayo.

What I did have, though, were cucumbers. And what are pickles but cucumbers plus vinegar plus salt—and maybe sugar—plus time? I could kill two birds with one stone here: I could start my salad dressing while at the same time transforming fresh cucumbers into quick pickled ones, another key ingredient to the salad.

I began by whisking two tablespoons of brown sugar and two teaspoons of salt into about a cup of white vinegar until the sugar and salt were dissolved. To this I added one peeled, seeded, quartered and thinly sliced cucumber and stirred well. I also added a few chopped small onions to the cucumber, thinking the vinegar might tame some of the onions’ wicked heat. I let the cucumber and onions sit and pickle while I boiled thick slices of potato for the salad.

When the potatoes were just cooked, but not at all falling apart, I drained them and added them to the bowl with the cucumber, onions and vinegar. Adding the potatoes to the vinegar while they’re hot helps to season them. After the potatoes had cooled, I added a healthy scoop of mayonnaise (Hellman’s, or you could use homemade), a quarter cup of minced cilantro, and salt and pepper to taste.

To taste, by the way, is an instruction that shows up in recipes again and again, especially in reference to salt and pepper, but that’s rarely explained. It’s a great cop-out for recipe writers, actually: if the recipe ends up sucking, you probably didn’t salt it properly (or you have bad taste). I’m sure each cook has a different definition. In the case of this potato salad, though, and actually most instances where I use the phrase, what I mean by “salt to taste” is keep adding salt until you take a taste of the dish and you immediately go back for another, and another, and you almost can’t stop. That’s what happened when I got the salt right in this potato salad — I actually yelled out an expletive, and that’s not something I usually do in the kitchen unless I’m bleeding or on fire.

My pickle shortage ended up being a blessing in disguise. Freshly pickled cucumbers — soft yet still crisp, sweet and sour — were better than anything found in a jar.