Stripping A Negroni To Its Very Foundations, Then Making It Unrecognizable

I very much enjoy a negroni but it also seems stale, unboozy and uninspired. Negroni variations are interesting in the way they play on the theme, and then sometimes they fuck with it so much that it’s unintelligible. The B Squared original creation is very much a go-to, especially after I got this new bitter from the liquor store (Foro Amaro Specie).

The drink is good, by the way.

A Vegetable That Tastes Like Unripe Fruit; Of Course!

Sorrel, which appears at least once a season in a CSA share, is strange. I’m pretty sure the tea is made from the flower, but when you get the sorrel in the share it’s a bunch of leaves that look sort of like spinach but taste like unripe raspberries. I hope it’s at least healthy.

I’m pretty sure I just sauteed it last year, which is something you can do except that it turns a supremely unappetizing brown color. So I dug around and looked for other things to do. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot. Or at least nothing obvious. There’s this Old Tymey-Tyme Amanda Hesser article from the days of cooking for Theodore or whatever. I just googled her and didn’t really realize what she’s been doing. I certainly remember how odd those Magazine articles read. None of that negates the good advice on what the fuck to do with sorrel, however.

I hid half the bunch in a salad last night. Not sure you could even perceive it, to be honest. Goober and Cake thought it tasted like unripe strawberries raw. Tonight I sauteed it with fava beans, basil and a restaurant-sized portion of butter. The taste was pretty good, overall, though I think I put too much salt in the whole thing.

Incidentally, if you google “fava beans” — which you invariably will because you will never remember that you have to shell them, then blanch them for three minutes, then remove the safety covering before cooking them for real — you will see that no one can resist bringing up that line from Silence of the Lambs. Googling “fava bean wine pairing” does not bring up “Chianti,” however — mostly whites. Something tells me that liver might demand something more tannic, but really what do I know? Also, I’ve never seen the film.

Too Much Pork Tenderloin + Too Much Lettuce = Pork Tenderloin Salad

The problem with pork tenderloin is that the packages it comes in give you two long logs of loin, and two is usually too much. The question becomes what to do with extra loin. Sandwiches are solid, but there’s not a lot of opportunity to eat sandwiches — or at least we don’t usually eat sandwiches. I’ve used it in pasta, and it’s only OK. Then I found this The Splendid Table Grilled Pork Tenderloin Salad recipe and sort of tweaked it so it became useful.

I should back up slightly.

The problem with community-supported agriculture is that you get so much fucking lettuce. We don’t really eat or even like salads, so it’s sort of deflating to get so much really wonderful lettuce every goddamn week. Of course I feel compelled to use it, and this year I’ve at least started out really determined to use all the lettuce we get. Thus the pork tenderloin salad.

The great thing about leftover pork is that you don’t have to bother grilling pork, like this recipe calls for. And the great thing about leftover ginger-scallion sauce (I first learned about and continue to refer to the recipe in David Chang’s Momofuku book, which Martha Stewart graciously reprints here) is that you can use it instead of the vinaigrette-y dressing in the recipe above.

So anyway, pork tenderloin, red potatoes, some fucking goddamn CSA lettuce, CSA sugar snap peas (but could have been anything probably), that ginger-scallion sauce and cheddar cheese. A word about cheddar cheese: the recipe above calls for blue cheese or some such so given that I didn’t use the original dressing, I googled it and cheddar goes with both ginger and scallion, so I figured it would probably work with ginger-scallion sauce, right?

I can report that this tasted good.

Hacking Pasta, And By “Hacking,” I Mean Cutting Into It So It’s Unrecognizable

I like pasta, and I want to eat pasta over and over and over and over, but I know that it’s not particularly healthy, especially for the children, so lately I’ve been looking for pasta alternatives. The first one I tried was Mrs. Leeper’s Corn Vegetable Radiatore. It was pretty OK. I was sold on these carrot and spinach powders. I have no idea if the bulk of it was just corn though. I also tried their similar rice vegetable twists. I suppose I need to figure out whether any of this stuff is actually healthier. Not for nothing, right?

Tonight we had these Molino Andriani Felicia Bio buckwheat penne things. Plain, they were very buckwheaty. Like my grandmother’s kasha; fuckin’ full-on groat. I was worried they’d taste too buckwheaty, but in sauce they sort of lost that intense flavor. They were very chewy, however. That said, the boys happily ate them.

We’ll keep looking.

What To Do With: Spinach

This rankumphant recipe was good: useful for when you get stuck in a rut with spinach: it adds basil (we have a bunch of basil now out back) and pine nuts.