Those Root Vegetable Leaves!

(photo from here)

Getting organic vegetables from a small farm is truly an educational experience. We get to see quite a few things we never see in the supermarket.

The best example is the stalks and leaves of root vegetables. In theory, of course, one knows that root vegetables grow underground, and that they have some sort of leaves overground. After all, like many other Israeli kids, I grew on the wonderful story Grandpa Eliezer and the Carrot, which involves a whole family pulling out a carrot by its leaves in an attempt to get it out. But, of course, then one goes, as a kid, with one’s parents to the supermarket, where carrots are bald and leaves fear to tread.

Actually, the whole supermarket experience, if you’ll allow me a short rant, divorces kids from the source of their food. When I lived in Jerusalem and visited Frida, my neighbor, I used to listen to her conversations with the kids she worked with. Once, a kid saw her cut potatoes for fries. Completely horrified, he said: “Why are you cutting those potatoes?” Frida replied: “For fries”. The kid’s eyes widened. “You make fries out of potatoes?” “Sure, out of what else?” asked Frida. The kid shrugged his shoulders. “Out of a bag”. Similar exchanges demonstrated that kids were amazed that lemons grew on trees. All this stuff makes me thing that Barbara’s previously mentioned rant about folks’ ignorance regarding the source of their meat extends to other types of food, as well.

In any case, folks, root vegetables do have leaves. And when we get our weekly Chubeza box, we get to meet them. Beets and turnips (lefet) have large, spinach-like leaves. Carrots have thin leaves on long stalks, a bit reminscent of algae. This, of course, raises the question, what shall we do with them?

Here are a few ideas.

Beet leaves make wonderful leafy greens and can be used in any way chard, kale, or manguld are used. My next post, hopefully, will include a fun recipe for pasta with greens which uses beet leaves; pasta works extremely well with greens, and when cooked with beet leaves, it takes a fun and entertaining pink color.

Another usage for beet leaves is in omelettes, for the egg eaters. You start by sauteeing roughly chopped leaves in a bit of olive oil with garlic and your favorite fresh or dried herbs, then you spread your egg, or egg-and-yogurt, mix on top.

Many stir-fry dishes benefit from greens. As you can read in Barbara Fisher’s Stir-Fry Technique guide, one adds the vegetables in the order that they get soft, which means the leafy greens go in last. They are ready as soon as they begin to wilt. One of our favorite dishes in California, which we ate often in Chinese restaurants in Chinatown and at Long Life Vegi House, was tofu, mushrooms and greens; these three work really well together.

Leafy greens, including beet leaves, make good fillings for crusts and play well with cheese, garlic, sauteed onions and (yum) pine nuts.

As to carrot greens, or any leafy greens you’re not using, please, take them as soon as you get them, rinse them well, stick them (with or without their roots) in a giant pot with lots of fresh, clean water, and cook them for forty minutes. You get a wonderful pot of vegetable stock, which you can later use for the rest of the week. You can cook your grains and beans in it; you can add them to your sauces instead of water; they can be fabulous bases for any kind of soup; and, of course, you can drink them in the evening, instead of tea, as a nice, warm and healthy liquid treat.

Sauerkraut Mystery Partially Solved

Our Chubeza delivery this week included more cabbage. We do like cabbage, honestly we do; my dad’s family has Polish roots, and Chad comes from a Mennonite family. And cabbage rolls are a staple of Mennonite cooking. And we like cabbage with tomato sauce, and we like slaw. But there was just too much of it for one week. So, we decided on sauerkraut. But we had no clue how to do it. We turned to two dependable sources of information: my grandparents and the internet.

Now, apparently, this is not very easy, and Faith Petric‘s song describes the process in a deceivingly easy way. In her song, while cleaning the fridge, she comes across a strange substance:

Look at this, it’s sauerkraut, now when did we have sauerkraut?
Whatever this stuff was, it sure is sauerkraut by now!

My grandparents, after a lengthy interrogation, confessed, that they don’t do any fermentation at all. They just stick the cabbage in a pot of vinegar. Now that won’t do. The internet resources, on the other hand, were less candid, and more vague and mysterious. “Large ceramic pots” in the garage were described, a process of removing some foam, daily, under a gauze, was mentioned, and the whole process was described very unappetizingly. Naaaah, we said, we won’t go there.

Then, Shari Ansky‘s book came to the rescue, and we modified the recipe there to include more stuff we liked. And after five days of just standing in our porch, it came out delicious. And here is how we did it.

The one essential tool for this enterprise is a large glass jar that closes hermetically, with rubber, like the one you see above in the picture.

You’ll need:
3 celery stalks
A nice head of green cabbage, cut into quarters or smaller pieces
4 red spicy chiles
4 bay leaves
black pepper, unground, to taste

Chop the celery stalks into pieces that fit on the bottom of the jar, and put them there. Then, pack the jar, very tightly, with cabbage pieces, chiles, bay leaves and pepper. Finally, pour into the jar salt water (1 tsp salt to 1 cup water) until the liquid covers the veg. Leave in a lit, sunny spot for five days. Voila.

The Veg Count Too: Rant and Recipe

Have you noticed how, for some meat eaters, the meal doesn’t count unless it contains meat?

Fear not, gentle reader. I’m not about to launch into another one of those vegetarian-carnivore debates. I have no beef (ha!) with meat eaters; becoming vegetarian is a highly personal choice, and I’ve heard, countless times, all the arguments and counterarguments. What I do want to rant about, is the way some carnivores make meat into the focus of their culinary experience, completely ignoring the rest of the food.

Now, with homemade food, for many folks here, the idea is that there’s an “entree” – namely, some sort of a dead animal – and then there are the “additions”, the things that meat is “served with”, which, in classy restaurants, are not even mentioned in the outset. You read that you’ll be served a steak or a leg of lamb, and then, in small print, it’ll say “with potatoes and asparagus”. Sometimes they don’t bother at all. This practice bothers me to no end, because it completely ignores the quality of ingredients, creativity and nutritional planning that goes into making a truly wonderful vegetarian dish. This tendency to ignore anything on your plate that isn’t meat, by the way, is a common accompaniment to the unwillingness to understand that one’s meat has come from animals – an absurdity on which my dear friend Barbara Fisher has written an award-winning post.

Why, you ask, have I launched into this rant? Well, Wednesday was Independence Day in Israel. While Americans tend to celebrate all their national dates of importance by, well, shopping, Israelis do so by eating. A lot. Of Meat.

All national parks, forests, patches of green, and often traffic circles, I kid you not, are invaded, since morning, by folks carrying dozens of kilograms of meat and a barbecue, or as it’s called here, a mangal. Gender roles are very specific, and very reminscent of Jean Auel books: only the men are allowed to directly deal with the fire, while the women hunt-gather for pita bread and condiments, and the children mainly eat and make noise. This in itself is quite fine, though the lust for such huge amounts of meat certainly does not agree with everyone’s arteries. In fact, Chad and I attended an event like this.

So, whaddwe do when we go to a barbecue? Do we sit and stare longingly at the meat, or stuff our face with meatless bread? Hell no. We bring Vegetable Skewers. We put them in a delicious, aromatic marinade. We include all sorts of exotic veg. And we eat with great pleasure. So this time, we brought in skewers with celery roots, beets, fennel, and other amazing organic veg. Oh, and we stuck on them the occasional cube of tofu. While our veg were top quality, the tofu, this time, was a tad mediocre, so we didn’t put much of it on.

And when we took them out, folks looked at them and said “heh, tofu skewers”.

Now that was really ridiculous. All these fabulous vegetables were there, but the folks around us zoomed in on the sole tofu cube, not even registering the rest of the skewer as “food”. But of course, we’re vegetarians, so given the fact that anything beyond meet is not considered “food”, then we must eat tofu all day.

Wrong, folks. We love our veg. And we never go hungry. And while protein is very important, so are vitamins, and minerals, and carbs, and other nutrients. Vegetables are food.

And then, one person asked to try one. And another. And another. And eventually they all ate, and were happy, and said it was very good.

So here’s the recipe, for your barbecuing pleasure:

Vegetable Skewers

Vegetables:
3 carrots
3 beets
1 large fennel bulb
1 celery root, cleaned
4 tomatoes
10 forest mushrooms of any kind
1 large onion

Marinade:
4 cups vegetable stock
2-3 cups soy sauce
1 one-inch diameter ginger chunk, chopped or grated
6-7 garlic cloves
3 handfuls of fresh herbs: we like parsley and cilantro
1/2 tablespoon of cornstarch (optional but helps consistency).

This can be done with any vegetables. Really. It’s just that the aboce combo worked so well. The trick is to skewer a variety of ingredients that work well together and take about the same time to cook. Alas, this is tricky; because the tomato cooks almost instantly, while, say, the carrots take a long time.

Which is why you steam the “hard” vegetables first.

“Peel” the celery root, that is, cut of its external rougher surface. Then, dice all the vegetables, so the pieces are about 1/2 inch wide and no more than 1 inch in other directions. It’s best if they are about the same size. Now, take the carrot cubes, the beets, the celeries, and the fennels, and steam them for about 30 minutes or until they are firm but easily pierced with a skewer. We use a bamboo steamer (easily purchased for very, very cheap in your local Asian houseware store), but a collander over a large pot of water would work just as fine. Just let the water work its magic.

Then, mix all ingredients for the marinade in a very large bowl, and put all vegetable cubes, including tomatoes and mushrooms and onions, into the marinade, and let them sit there for at least three hours.

Then, grap a bunch of skewers and get creative. One of the best ways to do this, is to place a large bowl in your sink, hang a collander over it, and pour the contents of your marinade bowl into the collander. Thus, you get all the veg ready for skewering, and you save the marinade for future use. Yay! Another recommendation is to split the different kinds of veg between several bowls, so you see how many of each you’ve got, and you don’t end up with a bunch of skewers that only have, say, carrots on them. In this, I beg to differ from Alton Brown: I understand the rationale behind skewering the same vegetables on the same skewer (uniform cooking time), but since folks will usually have no more than two of these, why not give them something that offers more fun and variety?

You can do whatever you want in terms of the order of skewering, but I really recommend having one of the firmer, tougher vegetables on each end. Also, a good idea is to stick bits of the onion and fennel between vegetable cubes, as they infuse their “neighbors” on the skewer with their magnificent aroma.

The best way we’ve found to carry the skewers to the barbecue is taking a very big plastic bag and putting a bowl inside it, with the skewers “standing” in the bowl. Also, be sure to carry a little container with marinade with you, so you can sprinkle it on the vegetables should they become dry.

Then, at the event itself, once you’ve fought off the meat eaters for some space on the barbecue, you simply place them out there,on the barbecue, and give them a little turn every couple of minutes. They’ll be done in five or seven minutes, depending on the size of veg you’ve picked. They’re very good with fresh tchina, or in a hummus sandwich. Enjoy!

Tiny Amaranth Popcorn



People around me LOOOOOVE to talk about food; which works out just fine, because so do I. And one of the topics people feel very passionate about is breakfast. I’ve often wondered why so many people are willing to try a variety of foods, but insist on having a familiar breakfast. I guess when you get up in the morning you want to face something you know and care for, before the surprises of the day start hitting you…

Here in Tel Aviv, one of the most beloved breakfast traditions is the Israeli breakfast, consisting of fried eggs, a vegetable salad, cheese, bread, orange juice and coffee. In California, going out for brunch meant you’d face fried potatoes and some meat, and sometimes fruit instead of vegetables. When I visited Oxford for a talk, my hotel served cooked tomatoes and mushrooms. Each of these, of course, seems the only viable breakfast option to those used to it…

These days, I usually have fruit, or veg juice, or some light cereal of some sort; the newest invention I’ve come across is actually quite fun, and it makes breakfast into snacktime. Eating popped grains for breakfast feels a bit like pretending to be sick and skipping school; it’s a breakfast that breaks the rules. I don’t mean Rice Krispies or anything of the sort, but something that can be made, within minutes, in your kitchen, and tastes lovely on its own, or with your favorite soy, goat or cow morning liquid.

Amaranth Popcorn.

Yeah, Amaranth Popcorn. The concept is quite fun, actually. When in California, I bought Amaranth and didn’t know what to do with it; my beloved nutritionist, Anasuya, recommended it as one of the healthiest whole grains. Apparently, amaranth seeds are very high in protein and contain significant amounts of amino acids; it’s high in fiber and mineral content, in fact, much higher in fiber than wheat and much higher in calcium than milk. Truly a supergrain. And, as an added bonus, its chemical structure makes its many nutrients available to us even when processed. Which means, folks, amaranth is good for us.

There are many ways to combine amaranth in your diet, and I’ve tried some of them, and I find that I don’t really enjoy cooked amaranth. In her wonderful breakfast book, Sunlight Cafe, Mollie Katzen recommends making wafers out of it, or cooking it into a porridge. You might enjoy this; me, I’ll stick to the popcorn option any day.

So, how do you do this?

Popping seeds is quite easy once you know how to do it – “follow these easy assembly instructions”, as Tom Waits says, and you’ll be left with beautiful amaranth popcorn, with no charred grain or sticky skillets. The only tool you need is a smallish skillet, preferrably with a glass lid. I wouldn’t do this in a wok, as the bottom needs to be wide and flat.

Put the skillet – dry, without even a drop of oil, on the stove. When the skillet is very hot, pour in, carefully, about a tablespoon of amaranth seeds. Avoid covering the entire bottom of the skillet. Quickly cover with the lid. You’ll then witness a fun theatre of miniscule popping action (now this is why a glass lid is best; otherwise, you’ll just have to trust your ears and listen carefully to the quiet, cute popping sounds). When all the grains have finished jumping merrily in the skillet, pour its contents into a bowl, return to the stove, and repeat with the next batch. Each batch takes, oh, about five seconds, and the entire amount you need will be made easily and quickly. The top picture in this post shows the exciting popping action as it happens.

Now, whaddya do with this thing? You could, of course, snack on it as it is. Or, you could add spices. Amaranth is a bit on the sweet side, but the popcorn will also take nicely to savory options. You could go with any of the following combinations:

Cinnamon, nutmeg, ground clove
Cumin, fennel seeds
Cardamon and cinnamon
Herb salt and pepper
Paprika
Sumak

The spiced popcorn goes well with nuts and yogurt, or with fruit, or on its own. Enjoy!

The Magical Study Aid Lentil Soup

So, the nice person brought us carrots. And tomatoes. And celery stalks. And celery root. And, I had to do some work over the weekend. So I recalled my very favorite culinary study aid.

Lentil soup.

Yes, it’s not a mistake. I work well with lentil soup. I don’t drink coffee – not any more – and while I am an obsessive consumer of herbal teas of all sorts, lentil soup is one of my foods of choice for times when I have to work. This is mostly due to nostalgia.

When I was a student in Jerusalem – living next door to the mythological Frida – my life was full of study-related stress. The well-known method of filling myself with black Turkish coffee would leave me jittery, irritable and, well, quite tired once the effect wore off. In addition, we were all encouraged to work in groups on our assignments. A typical assignment, in law school, would be a story, about half-a-page long, resembling a soap opera or a nonsense stand-up comedy, starring demented people with funny names like Mr. Mean and Mr. Belligerent, who incur the most improbable mishaps and complications in their personal and professional lives. We were expected to solve the mess and say who would win the case, and who would argue what. Some of us were quite good at this, and others found it difficult to dig all the important points out of the story. Me, I was often so fascinated with the crazy plot that I found it hard to focus on the legal issues it included; my mind would run wild, thinking about those people and why their lives had gone awry.

The solution to this problem was to invite my three or four favorite pals from school to my 1970s apartment and work on the assignment together, figuring that four brains were better than one. And it was Jerusalem in the winter, and folks would ride two buses to get to the fun-but-slummy neighborhood where I lived, and they would be cold, and wet. So I would feed them soup.

I had several lentil soup recipes, and they all served me well; this one, I think, is a combination of two different recipes. Naturally, this works really well with many sorts of vegetables one might have in one’s house, and it becomes even better after a day or two. Give it a try; it’s really good stuff. And who knows, perhaps if we fed it to Mr. Mean and Mr. Belligerent, they’d stop arguing, cancel the lawsuit, and we could all sleep in peace.

Magical Study Aid Lentil Soup

Ingredients
Olive oil
5-6 Garlic Cloves
1 large yellow onion
3 tomatoes
3-4 carrots
2 cups of black/green lentils
3 celery stalks, preferrably with the leaves
2 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp curcum (Middle Eastern yellow spice – optional)
a handful of coarsely chopped parsley
water, or vegetable broth
grated good quality goat cheese (optional)

You could soak the lentils beforehand, and it is preferrable, but not essential. If you decide to do it, simply place them in a bowl with water; they’ll swell up. Discard the water.
Start with a large soup pot. Heat it over the stove a bit, then pour some olive oil in. When the oil is hot and nearly smoking, chop in garlic cloves and onions, and add cumin, curcum and some of the parsley. Stir until the vegetables are golden and the onions begin to brown.
Then, add the lentils, and chop in the tomatoes, carrots and celery stalks. stir in a bit and mix with the garlic, onion and spices. After everything seems mixed and warmed up, add water or broth to cover. Bring to a boil, then put the lid on and cook for another, say, forty minutes, or until the lentils are very tender. If you make this recipe with red lentils, they’ll all dissolve and become puree by now, but black and green lentils tend to retain their shape even when they are tender. Sprinkle the remaining parsley and, if you so wish, the goat cheese, and serve in deep bowls or in large mugs.

There’s an interesting twist to this soup. If it’s made with less water, you basically end up with a lentil dish which can be served, cold, as a salad. Also yummy, but I find that, to serve this cold, you need to slightly inrease the amount of each spice.

Double Fennel!

When I started studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (fourteen years ago!), I moved into a very large, railway-like building. My apartment had a spacious kitchen right out of the seventies. It had bright orange cupboards, a leaky and moist fridge, and an oven which sometimes worked and sometimes went on strike. In this land of wonders, I first taught myself how to cook.

Before leaving home, food would miraculously appear in the fridge and then on my plate; my mom, who was extremely busy working, didn’t enjoy cooking, except when she had to, and I was never playing around the kitchen. But my newfound independence as a student had made shopping for food, and cooking it, a necessity. Fortunately, my new neighbor, Frida, was there to help me!

Frida was, at the time, in her early thirties, already married with three kids and one on the way. In addition, she ran a daycare center from her home, and excelled at it. At any given point you could walk into Frida’s immaculately clean house and find her holding a child (hers or someone else’s) in one arm, stirring something delicious on the stove with the other hand, and providing some excellent explanations to the kids’ questions. She had huge amounts of patience. I admired her, and thought she should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for housekeeping (why don’t they award those, actually?). Her household dwarfed my modest cleaning and cooking skills in comparison, and I felt like the rebellious, dysfunctional neighbor. Naturally, we immediately took to each other.

Frida was a fabulous cook, and I got to eat her concoctions every Wednesday at our “tea at 10am” meeting, and often on Friday nights, at their beautiful Shabbat meal, over which her husband, Moshe, presided with a fresh and shiny kippa on his head. Being of Bulgarian descent, Frida knew a lot about Balkan and Middle Eastern cooking, to which I was never exposed in my Ashkenazi family. One vegetable I had never seen before was fennel.

It looked strange, like some sort of a deformed hand with chubby, stick-like fingers, which smelled a bit like dill, only more fragrant. “What do you do with it?” I asked. amazed. Frida, not fearing the monstrous green hand, picked up her big kitchen knife and nonchalantly chopped it to pieces, reserving the feathery leaves. She then made two simple recipes which have become my favorites, and which I made again this week: Fennel salad and fennel yogurt soup. Here they are:

Frida’s Fennel Salad

2 fennels

1/2 cup olive oil

juice from one lemon

3-4 garlic cloves, chopped

fresh parsley and cilantro

Chop the fennels up – fear them not! They can be chopped any direction, though preferrably against the grain. Put in a large bowl. Mix all other ingredients and pour over fennel. Mix well. Now, keep in the fridge for at least four hours, so the flavors mix.

Bulgarian Fennel Yogurt Soup

1 quart good quality goat yogurt (unflavored)

3 nice cucumbers, very finely chopped (this is important, folks. It just doesn’t taste right if the bits are too large).

about a cup of chopped fennel feathery leaves

5 garlic cloves (or more, or less, to taste)

a bit of black pepper

olive oil, lemon juice

optional: a few finely-chopped radishes

Mix well and refrigerate. That’s all, folks. Super wonderful on a warm day.

Vegetable Adventures Launch




Hello Friends, Old and New!

This blog follows my culinary adventures with vegetables, and particularly, with a surprise box of vegetables, delivering various wonderful edible toys right to my door. You can expect to read of Chinese medicine and nutrition, various interesting types of vegetables, lots of recipes, mostly with a Middle-Eastern twist, healing with food and herbs, and occasionally some other issues might sneak in: ecology, music, dance, martial arts, jewelry making, a dash of healthy idealism, and way too many books.

We may want to start with the folks who grow the vegetables. Oh, wait, we may want to set the stage for the vegetable arrival.

My partner, Chad, and I live in a lovely small apartment right near the Tel Aviv beach, in a neighborhood called “The Yemenite Vine”. The neighborhood is a colorful, vibrant and honest mix of folks who came to Israel from Yemen in the 1960s and of newcomers – young Israelis and many African, Asian, Eastern European and South American workers. The heart of the community is Hakarmel Market, a huge Middle Eastern market selling all kinds of produce, groceries, house equipment, etc. On the other side of the neighborhood is the Mediterranean Sea – on the shore of which are the Tel Aviv skyscrapers and Jaffa’s ancient buildings. Tel Aviv is a culinary heaven, offering endless restaurants and cafes, and Jaffa offers the very best Middle Eastern food one can think of. Under such ideal conditions, how can there not be a Yemenite Vine food blog?

Now, here’s where the vegetables come in.

About a month ago I made friends with some environmentalist friends, who introduced me to community farming and organc produce, and who let me know of such farms in Israel. Ecology, organic agriculture and recycling is not a very high priority here yet, save for a few isolated areas. Naturally, we were thrilled to give these folks a try. So, we are now the proud members of the Chubeza organic farm:

http://www.chubeza.com

(that’s where the lovely lettuce picture comes from, actually)

Every Monday afternoon, a nice person knocks on our door and delivers us a big box of vegetables. We have no control over the contents of the box, which makes all this even more fun! We get a great variety of seasonal vegetables. Our whole grains, beans and occasional dairy products and eggs come from the nearby market, or from Jaffa’s Middle-Eastern stores. Our mission is to cook and consume all this goodness within a week; your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read of our adventures in the kitchen, provide advice, ask and answer questions, and suggest your own recipes, if you feel like it.

Ah, but there are tricky rules. We’re both vegetarians (I rarely and occasionally eat fish, but not usually at home); being a big fan of Traditional Chinese Medicine, my cooking is geared toward healing rather than just pleasure and at least tries to follow Five Element Theory (zang-fu). We’re not big fans of sugar, refined grains, or processed foods; and we don’t usually combine animal protein with hard-core starches. Nevertheless, we’ve been known to make mean dinners, and to produce fun giant weekend brunches; we both love to cook and do it often.

This week, the lovely people of Chubeza have graced us with the following ingredients:
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Arabic lettuce (like Romaine, only large and a tad stiffer)
Manguld (wild beet leaves)
Collard Greens
Kohlrabi
Turnips
Fennel
Carrots
Potatoes
Cauliflower
Cabbage

Let the fun begin!