Winter Vegetable Concepts / chicken-cabbage salad, wedge, steak & rock-food
Mindless Sturdies / Specific Fantasies / Seasonal Agility
Something I cherish about New York City grocery stores is that the building layouts are often so cramped that they create tunnel-like journeys through one’s shopping list. This, to me, is really helpful; it emphasizes not only the components of a meal—as any store would—but the linear structure, the narrative of putting together a dish. Some big-box grocery stores in sprawlier cities have you enter into a foyer of cashiers and self check-out kiosks, and it’s up to you to find the tender point in the aisles where you’ll begin your siege. In these layouts, the produce section—so influential—can sometimes be found in a back corner of the store. This is where our New York tunnel stores are superior, I’m sorry to say: you usually have to walk through the produce first to get to any other items. We who live with such stores should be grateful for this arrangement. Produce-first stores gift us a frictionless path toward becoming a vegetable-forward cook—not the annoying kind, who roasts an entire head of cauliflower in curried yogurt and acts like it’s a Sunday roast, but the kind who happens to eat a variety of vegetables all week, paired with meats and pastas and grains and whatever else. If you put vegetables at the top of your list and shop for them first, they will gradually become your point of departure when thinking about what to cook, and this lets you not have to think about them very hard. (Thankfully, if your store is not produce-first, you can just willfully start there anyway.)
Many factors other than corporate floor plans can influence our intake of plants. CSA boxes are one; another is relationships. On Valentine’s Day, I asked my friend Krithika—who hasn’t historically loved cooking, but who is gaining new skills all the time, largely thanks to her steam basket—what she and her girlfriend Negar were planning. She replied: “Going to Whole Foods to get ‘a new vegetable’ for Negar and then the same thing we do every night: watch 1/4 of a movie […] before I fall asleep :-)” If you’re lucky enough to have as perfect a routine as that, you may not need any more instruction, inspiration, or newsletters.
Today’s newsletter is about putting vegetables and produce at the front of our minds while shopping and cooking, filtered through what I ate this past week. I’m calling it Vegetable Concepts, I guess, and I will likely do many installments; I’m not even using hella seasonal, substantive, or sexy vegetables here, but that’s sort of the point. We happen to be in what some would call a shitty season—more on this in the third section below—so it’s the perfect time to begin! I’m organizing it by three of the many attitudes I have toward vegetables: Mindless Sturdies (when you buy stuff that can sit in your fridge for a while), Specific Fantasies (when you buy a vegetable for a very specific dish you want to make), and Seasonal Agility (when you wander into a store/farmers market and get “what looks good”). In each, I’ll talk about a dish that conceptually begins with a vegetable and ends up being about a lot else.
At the end is a new part of the newsletter (lol) called IT’S STILL GOOD, in which I describe how I transformed some leftovers. Thank you to Mina for the name.
Chicken-cabbage salad, or Mindless Sturdies
I don’t have enough organizational skills to know exactly how I’m going to use all my groceries, so I must allow myself to mindlessly buy vegetables that I know I’ll eat and that can sit in the fridge for a while. Other than squash, which is maybe the most obvious member of that category, this usually means one of the following: leafy greens sturdier than lettuce (spinach or kale or chard); broccoli; or, as was the case the other week, cabbage.
Cabbage is a heroically dependable and global brassica for its versatile, savory flavor, its adorable squeak, its affordability, and its resilience. I have consumed >month-old cabbage. I bought it this time for no reason, and I ended up using some as a pozole topper (see last post!!!) and as a topper for the pozole leftover situation (see the end of this post). I wanted to use the rest, and my late-winter tongue was craving bright, crunchy flavors and something I could easily take to work for lunch. Cabbage can of course be slaw’d, and I think the pozole made me want to poach more chicken. I saw Alexis deBoechnik make a cabbage chicken salad with southeast Asian-leaning ingredients. I decided to do something similar.
Sometimes, when I have the structure of a dish in mind and the ingredients I’ve decided to use for it, I’ll google “[A restaurant I respect that serves the relevant cuisine] + [name of the dish or ingredient],” just to see if they have any unexpected seasonings or techniques. This time I did that with The Slanted Door, a beautiful Vietnamese restaurant that used to be in San Francisco’s Ferry Building, which I went to with my aunt Barbara when I was maybe 15. (I vividly remember a moist hoisin chicken dish that I had there, which transformed my understanding of chicken’s potential.) Charles Phan, the chef, has a cabbage chicken salad that instructs pre-salting the cabbage for a while to break it down.
Phan’s recipe was a loose guide to my salad. Here’s how I made it:
First, I shredded the cabbage with a knife, lightly salted it, massaged it, and left it to sit while I did the rest. This was maybe 75% of a savoy cabbage.
Poached four bone-in, skinless chicken thighs in simmering water, into which I added salt (maybe 1.5 tablespoons), a big chunk of ginger cut into disks, and a couple scallions cut in half. I think the thighs stayed in there for 15 min or so. Then I shredded them when they were cool. Next time I’d use breasts, honestly; thighs are delicious and now thoroughly valorized by mainstream cooking culture, but they’re fattier. For a salad like this, I wished the chicken had been a little leaner and more absorbent.
Made a delicious dressing: I dissolved ~2 tsps sugar in a bit of hot water; added the juice of a whole lime; maybe 1/4th cup fish sauce; some capfuls of distilled vinegar; a sliced serrano; a chopped clove of garlic; 1/2 an inch of grated ginger; some MSG; some sesame oil. If you make this, please TASTE the dressing and adjust—I went back in with a few of these ingredients to tweak it. Things depend on the acidity of your limes, my bad memory, and other factors.
Toasted some peanuts in a dry pan and chopped them; in the same pan, I fried a mandolin’d shallot in a shallow bit of vegetable oil, then fished them out, where they dried and crisped up on a paper towel.
Chopped up some scallions and cilantro and added them to the cabbage, along with some bean sprouts. Then, I assembled the salad.
Wedge, or Specific Fantasies
Very often you’re not thinking on the fly when shopping or staring into your fridge, and you’re instead following a recipe or making a more rigid dish. I’m sure many people reasonably do this by seeing something on the NYT Cooking homepage and incorporating the ingredients into your weekly plan. But if you want to slowly unshackle yourself from that newsfeed, and if you cook small portions and need to be mindful of your time and money, I’d recommend letting your brain wander to comfort food / vague-nostalgia spaces when it comes to vegetables at this time of year: broccoli cheddar soup, specific curries, eggplant parmesan, aloo gobi, etc.? I say this because they are filling and fun, and because they star more sturdy vegetables that keep well and can be used again later if you don’t finish them off the first time.
I wanted a WEDGE SALAD this week, both because I hadn’t had one in a long time and because I wanted something fresh and crunchy without having to buy fancy lettuce. I went to my grocery store to get iceberg and the other players. Pretty straightforward, but here’s how I made it:
If you can’t find mini-wedges, which Noah Tanen smartly uses in his recipe, just quarter a full head of iceberg and then cut each quarter in half the “other way.” Smaller chunks are easier to eat and dress, since you avoid the toppings simply sliding down the sides of a giant, well, wedge. I lightly salted the half-wedges before adding other stuff.
Much like I like to do with BLTs (I think Clare de Boer turned me onto this), I marinated my tomatoes in red wine vinegar. I lightly dressed quartered and halved cherry tomatoes and a mandolin’d shallot in the vin, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and let them sit while I cooked the bacon.
The dressing I made had, in order of proportion: crumbled blue cheese, whole milk plain yogurt, mayo, lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, MSG. (I think MSG is really useful here, since the yogurt adds lightness but takes away some of the savoriness that sour cream or more mayo would bring in.)
I chopped up the bacon; Noah crumbles it entirely.
This would have been pretty with more parsley (or chives) atop, but I wanted to eat it and forgot! Chris and I crushed this for Saturday lunch.
Steak and rock-food, or Seasonal Agility
How could I write a Vegetable Concepts post and not discuss the third, aspirational, Waters / Silverton-style mindset: that of wandering into the farmers market and seeing what Just Looks Good? I occasionally do this during my lunch breaks at the Union Square growers market, which is blessedly open most days of the week. But I don’t really have the time or money for it to be my dominant method. Awe-inspiring vegetables that spark wonder are expensive, and being stunned by something unexpected sometimes requires us to buy other ingredients to prepare that rogue thing, which might not end up being useful fuel for other dishes.
What I did on Friday was this: I went to the market, did a full lap, and thought back to the fact that Chris and I had discussed wanting to eat steak and salad, an elegant and keto pairing. I decided to get what Just Looked Good within that category—something I could use in the salad, whatever it would end up being. This allows a nice balance of dominance and submission… be loose within agreed upon parameters, whether those between you and a loved one, you and another ingredient in your fridge, or you and another dish at the potluck.
Everything on Friday looked like a rock. Radishes, turnips, beets, various other roots. They rolled around grotesquely on the tables. I ended up getting two celery roots and one watermelon radish, because I knew I could use the latter in the salad, and the former acts like a potato, which we know pairs well with meat.
Now, everyone… I’m cheating here. I haven’t made this yet!!! I’ll let you in on what I’m thinking, and maybe I’ll add a photo of the result to my next post:
I’ll make a celery root puree, perhaps with one little potato to help add creaminess, and I’ll flavor it with horseradish. Horseradish is delicious with beef and seems wintery to me for its root-shape and sinus-clearing spice. I know that whatever salad I make will end up being a touch bitter and pretty acidic, since I’ll want it standing up to the heartiness of the steak, and horseradish seems nice alongside flavors like that too.
I already have a grapefruit, so maybe I’ll use that in the salad with the watermelon radish. I imagine the green will be arugula.
The steak will be straightforward, pan-seared. Whether I get a big one that Chris and I will share (and finish it in the oven) or two smaller ones (which I’ll just do in my cast iron) will depend on what the store has to offer.
Right before taking this photo, a man in a suit came up to me and told me I have a “small town girl in a big city vibe.” I found it funny and also extremely lame and awkward. Also, the Albuquerque metro area is home to nearly 1 million people; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
This is the part of the newsletter where I’ll briefly tell you what I did to transform some leftovers. It’s a perfect edition this time, because the leftovers in question were last post’s pozole verde. I had ~1.5 cups of it left, so I decided to make chilaquiles—the soup is basically just a brothy salsa anyway. This came to mind because I had corn tortillas in the fridge, and because I made this joke in a group chat when discussing the news about Microsoft’s new quantum computing technology:
I made tortilla chips in the oven (!) because I still don’t love frying things, logistically and calorically. Here’s what I did:
Lightly vegetable-oiled both sides of three corn tortillas, cut them into sixths (I think?), laid them out on a foiled baking sheet, sprinkled them with salt, and put them in a ~375 degree oven. Flipped them once with my tweezers and kept a close watch; had them in there for what ended up being about 12 minutes.
Put the pozole verde leftovers in a skillet and let it boil down a bit, since it was pretty brothy and seemed just a touch too soupy for this dish. Then threw the chips in and tossed them around. (I like my chilaquiles a bit crunchy.)
Fried an egg and put that on top.
Thinned out some yogurt with lime juice and water to make “crema.” Shredded some cabbage (which later became the above salad). Mandolin’d a shallot. Cholula, lime, cilantro.
YORM!
