Melissa Clark wrote about garlicky sesame-cured broccoli ages ago. It is such a winner. One of those odd, offbeat recipes with an unprepossessing ingredient list—broccoli and cumin, big whoop, right?—it yields a finished result that is ridiculously, transcendentally good. I make gigantic vats of it every once in a while, and we keep it in the fridge to munch on for days. Dang, it’s good.
Recipes after the jump.
Farfalle is one of your rare pasta shapes that can be made quickly enough for a weeknight dinner. They are respectable sauce carriers, with their chunk-trapping crevices and crannies. And they are fun to eat—they can be kind of grown up, topped with suavely bitter greens and strong sheepy cheese. Or you could go the little kid route with mild tomatoes and cream or butter and cheese. Either way, they are awesome.
Farfalle by hand
Begin with a structured, resilient flour-and-egg pasta dough (three large eggs and about 10.5 ounces of bread flour or a bread flour/semolina combination should do it. Whiz with a quarter teaspoon of salt in the food processor for a full two minutes, until it is one large stretchy and bouncy lump). Let it rest, covered, for at least twenty minutes.
full how-to after the jump
Still hot. Still eating cold Asian noodles. When will it end?
Cold soba (buckwheat noodles) are more about method than recipe. Good soba noodles (look for 100% buckwheat if you can find them) and good tsuyu (dipping sauce) will get you like 90% of the way there. There is nothing more refreshing on a hot night than a plate of cold, well-cooked soba noodles and maybe a fast cucumber salad (cucmbers, rice wine vinegar, sugar, and sesame seeds).
Recipe after the jump.
It is somehow the end of the pea season already. We’ve picked our share of small, sweet-as-candy specimens. Some of them even made it as far as the kitchen. But now we’re left with the big horsey peas, slightly starchy and significantly less magical.
In The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, Judy Rodgers prescribes long braising to turn the converted sugars of day-old peas into creamy smoothness. “Day-old” is a little optimistic for our peas, but the method is still a nice way for them to meet their fate.
Recipe after the jump.
More cold Asian noodles, this time Korean-style. If the food equivalent of a punch to the head—serious raw garlic and onion, sharp vinegar, strong heat—sounds good, then you might like bibim naengmyun. If not, you will definitely hate it.
For me, naengmyun (literally, “cold noodles”) epitomizes summer, with its layered flavors and textures. Earthy heat against cooling pear; chewy beef and noodles contrasting with silky sauce and crunchy cucumber; sour vinegar mellowed by sesame oil and sugar. If everything is cold enough, the big bowl o’ food somehow becomes refreshing, even interesting to heat-wearied mouths.
Bibim Naengmyun
There are two broad schools of naengmyun: you have the not-spicy mul naengmyun (watered cold noodles), which is served in a pool of iced beef broth, and bibim naengmyun (mixed cold noodles), which forgoes the broth in favor of a viscous, brick-red pepper sauce. Bibim naengmyun can be topped with slices of poached beef, slices of marinated raw skate wing, or no meat at all. Both mul and bibim types are generally served in enormous stainless-steel bowls chilled ahead of time so they arrive sweating with condensation.
Recipe after the jump.
So hot lately. I’m going running at the only time of day it’s cool enough to bear—at approximately OMG o’ clock in the morning—and “cooking” cold things to save and eat when we can work up the energy to chew. Seriously, it’s so hot.
Here are some sesame noodles to cook at night when it’s a little less warm, stick in the fridge, and eat while splayed out on the cool kitchen floor.
Sesame Noodles with Shrimp (or whatever you like)
These are nice and light and very variable. You can enrich them with more oil if you like, or add more veggies, or replace the shrimp with chicken/pork/tofu/what have you, and so on.
Gather:
And whiz them in the blender until you have a uniform runny paste. Scrape into a bowl and add two teaspoons of sesame oil; then taste and start correcting for salt (add more soy), sour (add more vinegar), and sweet (add more mirin for mellow sweetness, add more sugar for just straight sweetness). The sauce should be intensely and evenly flavored, with a strong sesame flavor. Now add a couple tablespoons of water to thin it out.
Boil a package of Asian wheat noodles (or fettucine in a pinch). Prep some protein (I just cook my shrimp together with my noodles). Drain the noodles when they are tender and rinse under cold water to cool them down and keep them from sticking.
Julienne or grate a carrot and a bell pepper. Cucumber is good here, too. So is slivered red onion. Or whatever.
Toss everything together with the sauce, correcting the seasoning. Stir in a handful of cilantro.
Colette Patterns’ adorable Macaron dress, in gingham with bias-cut pieces for the contrast yoke and waistband. {love}
Notes: I cut a 6 for the top and waist and tapered down to a 2 at the hip. I pulled the shoulder line a little bit forward and made the cups a little deeper. I probably should have dropped the waist and put some hymo on the band.
Material: About 2 yards of cotton poplin with a woven black and white gingham check—the pattern calls for a lot more, but I squeeze my pieces together to use every inch—bought at Mama Said Sew for $12 per yard.
