Tonight for dinner I made two of the recipes from Heidi Swanson’s new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day. One of them I liked in principle; the other I plain old liked.
The one I liked in principle was the Spinach Chop. This is blanched and chopped greens cooked briefly with olive oil and garlic, and then harissa (North African chile paste), chopped hard boiled eggs, and toasted almonds. What’s not to like? I used a combination of escarole, and already blanched spinach from my last CSA box. I couldn’t find harissa to buy at Whole Foods, and didn’t want to bother with making my own (it’s not hard, but it’s really one of those things you need to make in advance and just have sitting in a jar in the back of the fridge), so I bought a jar of Asian chile-garlic paste, and used that – and left out the fresh garlic. I had a bag of toasted sliced almonds leftover from the trapeze artists’ wedding – at which they were a salad topping – so I used those instead of slivered. The resulting dish was pretty good. Not as perky looking as Heidi’s, and I think the Asian chile-garlic paste has fish sauce lurking in it, so in combination with the spinach, not as fresh tasting as freshly sauteed garlic & harissa would be. And slivered almonds would be crunchier. Still, good in principle, and possibly applicable in principle to the CSA box cooking class I’m teaching on the 30th. I mean, all we’re getting in the boxes is greens – here’s what was in the last two boxes:
| Asparagus, 1.2 lb Spinach, 1.9 lb White salad turnips Escarole Red Romaine Scallions |
Asparagus, 1.5 lb Bok choy Spinach Red leaf lettuce Radishes Green garlic Rhubarb, 1.5 lb |
The recipe I really liked was the yogurt biscuits. Heidi recommends a combination of white whole wheat & spelt flour; I used unbleached white, and 1/4 cup each whole wheat and rye. When I opened the lid of the carton of plain yogurt I wanted to use up in the biscuits, it was getting moldy – so I scraped off, and used what I could, and used sour cream to get to the 1 1/2 cups needed. Heidi has a patting out and cutting in half and stacking method to make flakey layers in the biscuits, and you get one-dozen square biscuits, no wasted edges. I used salted butter and forgot to leave out the salt – but they were still really good biscuits, even salty.
Pretty good dinner, especially with the addition of several handfuls of chocolate cheerios for dessert, although the waist of my skirt is feeling kinda tight now.
Spinach chop & a biscuit
