caper

poblano and red bell peppers stuffed with saffron rice

by Stevie on February 3, 2011

I was desperate to create something lively and flavorful for dinner the other night without a huge amount of prep or excessive amounts of grocery shopping. Inexplicably, our fridge was filled with beautiful poblano and red bell peppers, so I thought, “Why not stuff these?”

poblano and red bell peppers stuffed with saffron rice

poblano and red bell peppers stuffed with saffron rice

Visually, stuffed peppers are always a delight. Don’t you agree? Marcella Hazan has a really tasty recipe for peppers stuffed with eggplant and anchovies. Yum! I even like them when the stuffing gets all over the place, like when I made chile rellenos. Messy can be very good.

The problem with a lot of these recipes is that they require you to remove the outer skin of the pepper. That is a lot of work! And it is the step in which I’ll inevitably accidentally destroy the peppers, thus stuffing them becomes difficult to impossible. Well, thank goodness for the 1997 Joy of Cooking. That book came to the rescue again. In their stuffed pepper dish, they call for steaming the peppers with no peeling at all. This is so much easier, and equally delicious!

I used poblanos as well as reds. The recipe in the book calls only for the reds. Also I used pepitas instead of pine nuts, added more herbs than they recommended as well as capers and green olives to give the dish a little kick.

These stuffed peppers had an extremely delicate flavor that was marvelous. We preferred the poblanos over the reds as they had a more complex taste. We ate ours with arugula salad and an extremely aromatic pinot noir from Eric Kent. What a memorable meal!

poblano and red bell peppers stuffed with saffron rice

2 fresh poblano peppers
2 fresh medium red bell peppers
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, peeled and cut in thin slices
3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 pinch saffron threads
1½ cups basmati rice, well rinsed
2½ cups vegetable stock
2 cups shredded provolone cheese
¼ cup pepitas, lightly toasted in a dry pan
¼ cup each chopped basil, parsley and cilantro
salt to taste
black pepper to taste
¼ cup green olives and capers

Carefully cut peppers in half to create little boat-shapes while preserving stems as much as possible. Remove inner seeds and ribs. Steam for about 8 minutes. Remove from heat and cool under running water. Set aside.

steaming poblano and red bell peppers: I took off the lid for this picture

steaming poblano and red bell peppers: I took off the lid part-way through steaming for this picture

Sauté onion, garlic and saffron in olive oil on medium heat until onions start to brown (about five minutes). Add rice and stir to mix with oil. Add vegetable stock. Bring to boil then lower temperature to simmer, covered, until rice gets cooked and all the water gets absorbed (about 10 to 15 minutes). Set aside to cool.

Pre-heat oven to 350.

Pour cooled rice in a large bowl. Add cheese, fresh herbs, pepitas, salt, black pepper and olives and capers. Gently stir.

Carefully fill peppers with rice mixture. Place them in an oven-proof baking dish, fitting them tightly together. After all peppers are stuffed, carefully pour ¼ cup water around them into the base of the dish. Cover with foil and bake for thirty minutes to warm through.

Serve with salad.

stuffed peppers crowded together ready for the oven

stuffed peppers crowded together ready for the oven

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grilled artichokes with mint, caper and anchovy

by Heguiberto on November 8, 2010

My friend John made this antepasto several times for us. It is so tasty that I requested, no, firmly insisted, on the recipe from him. He spotted it on Epicurious. He did make some minimal changes to the dish, mostly with the amounts of ingredients. This is his version as best as I can make it.

grilled artichokes with mint, caper and anchovy

grilled artichokes with mint, caper and anchovy

I adore artichokes. Do you? If so, then this is a must-make dish.

I bought eight gorgeous artichokes at our local TJ’s the other day. They came from nearby Castroville, the land of artichokes in America. They were cheap: just 59 cents each! It is a pain to prepare them but I don’t mind it at all. I used the steps that I described in pickled artichokes to get these ready.

use your fresh artichokes as a table decoration before making them into a meal

use your fresh artichokes as a table decoration before making them into a meal

grilled artichokes with mint, caper and anchovy

½ to ¾ cup olive oil
8 filets of anchovy, minced
4 tbsp drained capers, minced
½ cup mint leaves chopped fine
Freshly ground black pepper
4 tbsp white wine vinegar
8 artichokes, cleaned and cut in halves
½ lemon
1 bowl filled with cold water

Prepare the marinade by whisking together olive oil, anchovies, capers, mint, black pepper and vinegar. Set aside.

Clean the artichokes following the recipe for pickled artichokes.

Steam cleaned artichokes until tender, about ten minutes. Then transfer to a bowl filled with ice water to stop cooking process. Drain once cool.

Drizzle some olive oil from marinade over artichokes and grill them for 10 minutes or until slightly charred. My grill was dirty so instead I broiled these in the oven. The charred flavor the grill imparts to the chokes is better but the oven does a great job too. Depending on how hot your grill gets, you may need less time. Transfer grilled artichokes to a serving platter and pour marinade over them. Toss to combine then let sit for 20 minutes to fully blend flavors. Serve at room temperature.

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reminiscing on rev-sharing with my cranberry beans

by Heguiberto on November 3, 2009

fresh cranberry beans

fresh cranberry beans

Rev sharing (revenue sharing) is one of many methods used in online advertising when two parties decide to join forces to promote a product. On one side you have someone who owns a website with a targeted audience; on the other side you have a client wishing to market his or her product to such an audience. So these two parties join forces and whatever revenue gets generated by the association is later shared between these parties. I think that’s what my dad did in the past for some of his crops…..

Last Sunday while shopping for veggies at the UN plaza, I spotted a tent selling fresh cranberry beans in their pods. They looked so nice I ended up buying about 4lbs of them. Selecting the pods brought me back memories from my childhood. Even though I lived in the country, my family never really owned enough land so that we could grow our own commodities crops such as beans, rice, or corn. Due to that my dad resorted to lavoura de meia or “crop sharing” in Portuguese. As a “share cropper” my dad would work the fallow land and then share some of the produce with the landowner in lieu of rent. In this case he planted beans, which is why I’m thinking of the cranberry bean pods from the farmers market.

Looking back now, I don’t think my brothers enjoyed sharecropping too much. They were older than me and had to actually toil in the fields with my dad. All I had to do was deliver a fresh lunch my mom prepared for them each day. Pretty easy! I did help in other ways: by carrying bushels of beans, laying them on the paved patio for further drying, threshing them and watching them to prevent animals from snatching them away.

The cranberry beans particularly reminded me of this childhood experience because the pods were a little damp with this earthy smell; a sign that they were exposed to rain. That’s the absolute worst thing that can happen to beans during the drying process! Depending on how much water gets in, the beans will either sprout or rot in the pod. That means a loss of time, labor, money and energy. It can potentially ruin the Planter. My mom would say extra prayers or reza para as almas around harvest time so ‘gods’ would be kind to us by preventing rain from falling till our beans were fully harvested. Everyone was always super stressed out about it. In the end things worked out well. Maybe her gods were listening to her entreaties after all?

It is magical to watch plants grow and produce fabulous and flavorful foods to entice our palates and nurture all living beings!

warm cranberry beans

warm cranberry beans

So after shelling the beans I ended up with about 5 and ½ cups. The beans look gorgeous at first: white dotted with burgundy color flecks, but they turn brownish and the dots disappear with cooking. It’s too bad because they are stunning when raw. Fresh beans taste a bit different than the dry type: they’re nuttier.

To cook the beans, place them in a deep pan. Fill it with enough water to cover the beans with at least one to 1 and ½ inches above the beans. Bring them to a boil then reduce to medium temperature and cook for 25 to 30 minutes.

For this dish I used about 2 cups of cooked bean and froze the rest for future concoctions. Here’s the recipe:

2 cups of fresh cooked cranberry beans
1 medium white onion cut into thin slices
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper thinly sliced
Salt and pepper to taste
4 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp capers with brine juices
1/3 bunch chopped cilantro leaves

How to:
Heat 2 tablespoon olive oil in a pan on medium heat. Sauté onion and pepper for 5 to 10 minutes till soft. Add garlic for the last 2 minutes and stir. Stir in beans, salt and pepper. Add capers and cilantro. Drizzle the rest of the olive oil over the beans. Adjust seasoning and serve warm or at room temperature. We enjoyed this dish with sautéed collard greens, a butternut squash-tempeh stew and steamed Thai black sweet rice.

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fresh baby artichokes for dinner

by Heguiberto on June 21, 2009

I love Mediterranean style cooking. The food is always fresh, never too heavy in sauces, you can taste each individual item, it’s almost always lean…hummm. Among the vegetables used in Mediterranean cuisine, the artichoke is one of my favorite. They are beautiful plants. I’ve seen them planted as decorations in gardens here in California. The leaves are greenish gray and when left to mature the artichoke produces a beautiful purple flower that looks just like an oversized thistle. They look alike for a reason: both the artichoke and the thistle are members of the same family of plants. Isn’t that neat?

finished Mediterranean baby artichokes

finished Mediterranean baby artichokes

Fresh artichokes filled every Greek market that I used to shop at back in the day when I lived in Astoria, NY. A few years ago, shortly after moving to the West Coast, we went on a driving trip along the Pacific to Big Sur. We ended up traveling through miles and miles of artichoke fields somewhere near Santa Cruz. They were breathtakingly beautiful. Steven imagined that those plants looked pre-historic because of their unusual coloring, the shape of the leaves, the long thorns and the actual artichokes themselves, sticking incongruously, almost menacingly, up in the air like primitive weapons. Well, maybe the fog was confounding his vision. I’ve heard that California produces 90% of the artichokes consumed in America, and that most of them come from that area.

A-ha! So this was where my “Greek” artichokes had been growing all along!

While passing by these romantic artichoke fields, we suddenly had the urge to indulge our taste buds with some of these incredible flower buds. Luckily the area caters to all things artichoke, so we had no problem finding the perfect place. Almost perfect, anyway: the only way they made them was deep… no, deeply fried….served with their popular aioli sauce on the side. I don’t normally go for fried food (well, sometimes ;) ) but here we were in the Mystical, Misty Land of Artichokes! How could we pass on this rare opportunity? We ordered a couple servings and just devoured them almost instantly. The Mexican beer that we ordered was excellent, too!

I never tried frying artichokes at home. Maybe I should sometime…?

Last week I found a perfect box of baby artichokes at Trader Joe’s. They were very fresh with a deep olive green color that turned a little purplish at the base and on the stems. They’re easy to make the way I prepared them though cleaning the things is a pain and a lot of laborious work!

cleaned artichokes, soaking in lemon bath

cleaned artichokes, soaking in lemon bath

To clean artichokes:

Rinse baby artichokes in cold water. Using your fingers, remove about 3 to 4 layers of the outer leaves. Then cut about ½ of artichoke top off. Using a potato peeler, shave the rough outer layer off the stem and base. Don’t cut the stems off! These taste great and make the finished dish look much more interesting and exotic. Cut the very tip of the stem off. Then split artichoke in half cutting it lengthwise (from stem through the crown of the bud.) Carve the choke (the hairy/spiny center) out with a spoon or a sharp paring knife. Immediately toss prepared artichoke into a large bowl filled with cold water and the juice of a lemon along with the squeezed lemon peel itself. This will keep the artichoke from turning brown. Repeat with all artichokes. You see, a lot of painful and laborious work.

Fresh Baby Artichokes for Dinner

Ingredients:
12 to 15 baby artichokes prepared as above, rinsed
3 cloves of garlic, cut into fine slivers
1 small onion, chopped fine
2 spring onions, chopped coarsely
2-3 tbsp water for steaming
½ bunch Italian parsley, chopped roughly
3 sprigs of fresh oregano, stems removed
1 tbsp Spanish capers with 1 tbsp caper brine
5 Spanish stuffed olives, cut into rounds
salt
fresh black pepper
red chili pepper flakes
3 tsp olive oil
a few slivers of peeled Parmigiano-reggiano cheese (cut with potato peeler) or 2 tbsp grated. Spend a little more cashola on this! There’s no substitute.

blooming decorative artichoke

blooming decorative artichoke

How to:
1-heat olive oil in frying pan on high heat. Add onion, sauté for a couple of minutes, then add garlic and further sauté for another couple of minutes. Toss in artichokes. Sprinkle with salt. Add spring onion followed by a couple of tbsp of water. Cover the pan and let artichokes cook till al dente, about 5 minutes. Add Italian parsley, oregano, capers with brine, olives, pepper flakes and fresh pepper. Adjust salt. Transfer to a serving dish. Drizzle with a bit more of olive oil; add cheese to the top and serve! It goes well with red or white wine. Bon appétit!

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