The garden is getting to the point now where my job is simply to produce substrates, mediums, and vehicles which can allow the plants to shine. Our escarole is perfect, so I lopped off the inaugural head and sautéed it briefly with a couple of cloves of garlic then deglazed the pan with smoked duck broth. If you’re noticing a pattern here, it’s one of our favorite ways to eat greens- sometimes with lemon in place of broth- and smoked duck broth does to greens what you might expect the heavenly offspring of chicken broth and bacon to do.
For the main course, I wanted to do cold soba with a sesame sauce, but since we were out of soba I used rice noodles instead, and changed to a peanut sauce for a little more of a Pad Thai feeling. The peanut sauce- peanut butter, lime juice, sesame oil, rice vinegar, agave syrup, nam pla, soy sauce, sriracha, truffle oil- coated the noodles, with none left over to pool in the bottom of the bowl. I blanched peas and broccoli and tossed them into the noodles along with lots of lime and Thai basil. The slightly bitter, smoky escarole cut right through the rich, sweet, spicy noodles, and the sweet peas added a high note. To drink, a cocktail I invented during a bout of insomnia last weekend and tried for the first time. I’m going to refine it with ingredients I bought today; I’ll describe it in the next post.
Sometimes pasta, or in your case, alimentary paste, is just the thing to float some garden greens.
Alimentary, my dear Cookie.
I never thought of truffle oil as being particularly Thai, but whatever floats yer boat.
The last cocktail I made for Thai food was a lychee martini with Asian pear sake (instead of vermouth) and vodka. It cuts through the heat without cloying.
We eat almost all of our greens with bacon, orange zest and vinegar, but I recently tried the grilled chee with escarole (from Gourmet), and it was to die.
Love all dishes ending in “pasta” hehe :). Now seriously, there are big chances I would’ve asked for a refill. The sauce sounds particularly intriguing.
Hi Lore: The sauce is really easy, good, and infinitely adjustable depending on circumstances.
Oh, and Heather: I find that the fresher and better the greens, the less they need.
And I am so not a cocktail guy, but I had the idea and it seemed worth pursuing.
truffle oil in the peanut dish took me by surprise too.
i need to smoke some duck. but i probably won’t. because it would require too much work. like the pie crusts.
you know peter, you just kinda just make a lot of us folks look bad with all the MAJOR CULINARY PROJECTS. you know, the ones that just KEEP COMING.