Ingredients

• 1lb fresh tomatillos, husked
• 1/4 cup onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 jalapeno or other hot chilies, seeded and chopped
• 2 tbsp fresh cilantro, chopped
• 2 tsp lime juice
• Salt as desired

Preparation

Bring a pan of water to boil. Put tomatillos into water and simmer gently until tender. Turn them frequently so they do not split. Drain

Mix together onion, garlic, chilies and cilantro. In a blender or food processor, blend tomatillos to make a course puree. Add remaining ingredients and blend together. Season with salt to taste.

Allow to cool. Will keep for several days in the refrigerator. Can be frozen and will keep for several months.

Excellent with grilled chicken or fish, or served with tortilla chips as an appetizer.

Ingredients

• 2 Tablespoons olive oil
• 3-4# chicken, halved, rib cage and thigh bones removed (try it yourself or ask your butcher)
• coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
• 1 Tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1/3 cup chicken stock

Preparation

Heat oil in a 10″ skillet over high heat.

Season chicken generously with salt and pepper. Add chicken to skillet skin side down and place a 10″ heavy-bottomed skillet on top of the chicken.  Place two heavy soup cans or a brick in second skillet to weigh down and flatten.

Reduce heat to medium and cook chicken until skin is golden brown and crisp, about 18 minutes.

Remove top skillet and weights and turn chicken. Pour off excess fat from skillet. Squeeze lemon juice over chicken and ad stock. Cook until instant-read thermometer inserted into the chicken thigh registers 160 degrees, or about 3 minutes.

Place each chicken half on a plate and serve immediately with pan juices.

Photo credit: Bob Krasner

Recipe Source

The Diner Journal

]]> http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/08/brick-chicken-recipe/feed/ 3 http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/07/recipe-peaches-with-ricotta-honey-and-thyme/ http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/07/recipe-peaches-with-ricotta-honey-and-thyme/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:36:06 +0000 David Becker http://friendofthefarmer.com/?p=2075

“The Essence of Summer”

Ingredients

• 4 peaches
• 1 cup fresh ricotta
• honey
• 2 Tablespoons thyme, picked
• extra virgin olive oil
• sea salt

Preparation

Cut the peaches in half and remove the stones. If they are not too soft you can twist the cut peach to get at the stone more easily. Toss the halved peaches with olive oil and honey and place on a sheet tray, cut side down.

Roast in a 400 degree oven until just soft but not mushy, about 10 minutes. Removes peaches from the oven and let cool.

Place peaches on a plate and put a spoonful of ricotta on each half. Drizzle with additional honey and olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt and a little thyme. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Photo credit: Bob Krasner

Recipe Source

The Diner Journal

Another Winning Recipe

Simple and Satisfying Farmhouse Apple Tart ]]> http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/07/recipe-peaches-with-ricotta-honey-and-thyme/feed/ 0 http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/05/3-ways-to-use-leftovers/ http://friendofthefarmer.com/2010/05/3-ways-to-use-leftovers/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 03:39:10 +0000 David Becker http://friendofthefarmer.com/?p=2019 To which School of Leftovers do you belong?

1. Throw them out immediately because you know you’ll never eat them.
2. Put them in airtight containers to be thrown out after they have had a chance to putrefy.
3. Anticipate the quick and easy meal that you can make in one-quarter of the time—thanks to leftovers.

I was a follower of the first and second principals but I’ve recently converted to the third.

When I was growing up my parents prodded me to finish my dinners by invoking starving Biafran children. But even after that admonition I often didn’t finish my meal—and yet I never saw the dish in a new incarnation the next day. All those calories wasted!

Working with leftovers tends to be a great way to stretch a tight budget. It turns out you’re making a huge environmental contribution in the process. More on that in a minute.

The great chefs, like Jacques Pepin, know that to make the most of their food budget they need to be creative:

1. Leftover salmon can be transformed into salmon cakes with little more than Old Bay Seasoning, an egg, onion and old bread. I like to use Panko breadcrumbs for a crunchy exterior.
2. Turkey can be given a second life when served with mole sauce.
3. Almost any vegetable will live happily ever after in pasta primavera.

In the process you save time and money, and feel as smart as any celebrity chef. Take those savings and buy a new book, kitchen utensil, even a new outfit.

Stop Us Before We Toss Again

When you reuse rather than toss you’re cutting down on the millions of tons of food that goes into the waste stream every year. Fully 12% of the entire US waste stream—both residential and commercial—is made up of food waste.

An estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption is discarded, according to a government study. It happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen.

The Department of Agriculture estimated that 96.4 billion pounds of the annual 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. That’s 3,000 pounds per second or one pound per person every day. With 36 million people going hungry, we can do better.

Groups like City Harvest in New York do step in, annually saving more than 26 million pounds of excess food from establishments across the country. A tray of lasagna that was never served, bread that’s a day old, tomatoes with a minor bruise that would be great in sauce or a salad—all can be repurposed.

City Harvest’s 17 trucks and three bikes pick up food from sources as varied as the St. Regis Hotel and Trader Joe’s, 7-Eleven and Goldman Sachs, Le Bernardin and the Delta Shuttle. The food is delivered to 600 community programs at a cost of 22 cents per pound.

Two More Ways to Recycle Leftovers

If you didn’t make that casserole or shred the pork for a sandwich, you still have options. Of course, you can freeze it and feast another day (be sure to put a date on the bag).

Or, turn food waste into lovely compost for your garden. There are small sink-side composting units for urban living and larger ones for those with more outdoor space.

When I calculated how much effort goes into food production and how many people go without, coming up with a simple strategy to transform leftovers into something tasty seemed like a pretty easy thing to do.

Useful Links:

City Harvest

Compost: An Incredible Transformation

How Long Can I Store _________ Before It Is No Longer Safe to Eat?

Clever Composting for Urban Dwellers

75 Things You Can Compost, But Thought You Couldn’t

I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion.  The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed.  But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.

Weed ‘Em and Eat

In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:

“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”

Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.

And it’s a rare weed indeed that  has a book named after it:  Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

I tried dandelion wine for the first time at Moon on the Pond Farm, where farmer Dominic Palumbo had just steeped a pot of dandelion flowers and was adding orange and lemons to a huge crock.

Dominic Stirs Summer with a Spoon

Then he poured a glass from a bottle of dandelion wine that had been produced last summer.

The wine was light—Prosecco light— and captivating. I wanted more. I could imagine serving it to friends with fish. Or a summer salad with watermelon. Sipping it by a lazy stream as the sun disappears into a warm, steamy night. More.

It’s time to make my own. So I am heading out late Sunday morning to pick a bag of dandelion flowers and try my hand at bottling summer.

Further Reading and Recipes

Jack Keller: More Than 42 Dandelion Wine Recipes