by Sam Tackeff | Jan 5, 2015 | Salads
For the past several years I’ve done a Whole30 at the beginning of the new year, using the momentum of everyone else’s New Year’s enthusiasm to carry me through a month of unprocessed foods and smart eating habits. It’s really much easier to be virtuous when you don’t have the added stress of having to explain yourself to others when you are abstaining from office snacks and extra meals on the town. And in January, everyone is being virtuous. The Whole30 isn’t a crash diet – I personally don’t do it to lose weight, but rather to re-calibrate – reminding myself how much I love home cooking, adding a substantial amount of vegetables to my diet, eating mindfully, and to curb my snack habit. It’s a lot easier for me to make smart choices when the decision has already been made to abstain from the bad ones, and each time that I’ve taken on a Whole30, I’ve finished with new habits that I’ve carried through the year with me. This January, I’m not starting with a Whole30 – truthfully, because I didn’t plan – but I’ve committed myself to eating wholesome, home cooked food, bringing my lunches to work every day, and generally eating to support my health and wellness.
Fennel salad was one of the first recipes that I posted on this blog, and I’ve made it dozens of times in the years since. The base salad is one I go back to again and again when I’m feeling the need to be virtuous (or not so virtuous – this particular one has a healthy dose of cheese), so it’s a perfect dish to herald in the new year on good footing. It’s a versatile side dish to serve with grilled fish or chicken, and it lasts for a few days in the fridge, and in my opinion improves as it sits, so I can pack my lunches with it if I have leftovers.
This is my usual base recipe – sliced fennel, assorted other crunchy green vegetables, nuts, and cheese, tossed with a lemony vinaigrette, but I rarely make the same version twice.
What else could you do with this salad?
There’s a lot you can play with. Sometimes I’ll substitute pistachios or hazelnuts for the walnuts. You can change up the herbs – parsley, mint or dill are also nice. If you’d like, you can add citrus – orange or grapefruit segments work well. As do sliced grapes. Mixed greens, and avocado make special additions, but if you are making the salad in advance (as you should!), these should be tossed in at the very end, right before serving.
Crunchy Fennel Salad with Celery, Walnuts, and Parmesan
serves 4 as a side
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1/2 teaspoon flaky salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 garlic clove, finely chopped (optional)
1/4 cup good olive oil
1/3 cup walnuts, gently toasted, chopped
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded
1 bulb of fennel, finely sliced, fronds reserved for garnish
3 sticks of celery, thinly chopped
Start by making the dressing: in a small bowl, put the lemon juice, salt, and pepper. If using garlic, put in the lemon juice, and let sit for five minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients so that the garlic will not be too harsh. Add olive oil, and whisk briskly until well mixed. Add the walnuts and the cheese to the dressing, and mix well.
Toss the fennel and celery with the dressing, and taste to see if you need more salt or pepper. You can make serve this salad right away, but it benefits from a few hours in the fridge. To serve, sprinkle with parmesan and the fennel fronds.
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 27, 2014 | Salads
Okay, I know that technically summer was over a week ago. But I’m refusing to let the season go. Here’s one last recipe that you can make year round to remind you of the glory of the summer season. It’s a dish that I’ll affectionately refer to here as the “whoops, I have to bring something to a party and I’m already 20 minutes late salad”. The great thing about this dish is that you can make it a few hours in advance, and it only tastes better as it sits. You can use fresh corn or frozen, gorgeous bursting summer tomatoes or those year round grape tomatoes – just make sure they are ripe!
This recipe also makes great use of my favorite kitchen tool: kitchen shears. You don’t have to be all fancy and get a real pair of kitchen shears, you can also just buy a great pair of scissors, and re-purpose them as “kitchen-only”. They work through cherry tomatoes and fresh herbs in no time.
{Pretend That It Is} Summer Corn + Tomato Salad
16 ounces sweet corn kernels (frozen or about 4 cobs worth of corn)
3 tablespoons salted butter
salt and pepper
16 ounces of cherry tomatoes
a dozen or so basil leaves
a container of mini-mozzarella balls (marinated are good!)
drizzle of good balsamic (optional)
In a skillet over medium high heat, melt butter and heat corn kernels until warmed through. Take off heat, transfer to a large bowl. With a pair of kitchen shears, chop cherry tomatoes in half directly into the bowl. Tear a handful of basil into the bowl, and toss in a container of mini mozzarella balls. (Choose the size of your choice – they make these in a range of tiny to medium size. All will work! Toss everything together, taste, season with salt and pepper, toss again – you likely won’t need much salt if you used salted butter – and drizzle, if you’d like, with a bit of good balsamic vinegar. Let sit for an hour at room temperature for flavors to meld, or stick in the fridge for several hours, take out, and let settle to room temperature before serving.
by Sam Tackeff | Jul 23, 2014 | Salads, Vegetables
You guys, it’s hot around here. It’s hard not to feel sluggish. And back when I was bragging a few weeks ago that the extra air conditioners didn’t raise the electric bill? Well, I lied. Or at least this month we ran them harder than ever. Today I woke up at 5:05 to make my way to November Project, and going back on my verbal with a coworker, promptly fell back asleep. The heat made me do it! I spent part of the day racked with guilt, and then got over it to go to my favorite class of the week – olympic lifting at my gym. We worked on snatch balances and power snatching. Snatches are my most dreaded lift – more reason to practice them! I’m always looking to bring power to the lift, execute an efficient bar path, and reduce my tendency of muscling up the weight, which *surprise, surprise* doesn’t work when you aim to lift heavier!
When it’s blazing hot outside, it’s doubly hot in my kitchen, so if anything is going to be cooked, it has to be quick! Here’s my dinner tonight.
Summer Scallop Salad
I’m always on the lookout for light summer salads with seafood of any kind. Some of my favorites are Greek salad with grilled shrimp, Niçoise salad with the addition of smoked fish, and this scallop salad, which is equally good with scallops, shrimp, mussels, or lobster.
Serves 2
scallops 9 or 10 large
olive oil
tomato 1 large
cucumber 1 medium
romaine lettuce a few cups per person
assorted antipasti (optional) olives, gigande beans, crisped prosciutto, corn, feta, roasted peppers are all good!
lemon 1
olive oil
chopped fresh herbs (a handful of dill, basil)
Season scallops with salt and pepper. Heat a few glugs olive oil in a large skillet until shimmering. Add scallops, and cook over high heat until browned on the bottom, about two to three minutes. While they are cooking, go ahead and slice up a cucumber, and cut a tomato into wedges. Turn the scallops and cook for another minute, then take out of the pan immediately to avoid overcooking them! I like arranging this salad on a plate. Layer the bottom with romaine lettuce, and sprinkle on fresh herbs. Add the cucumber and tomato. Add on any extra antipasti (tonight I went for kalamata olives and gigande beans from the Whole Foods Antipasti bar). Drizzle with olive oil, squeeze the lemon wedge over top, and season, if you’d like, with a little bit of extra salt and pepper.
Some reading:
Good coaches and trainers don’t let their athletes work irresponsibly through injury. Great post by Alyssa Royse on why she kicked an athlete out of her gym.
The Man Booker Long List has been released! I’m likely going to team up with some other voracious readers to work my way through the list this summer. Anyone else in?
Also:
I’m currently signed up for B.A.A. Half, and Newton Chilly Half. Should I add Hampton Rock Fest to the mix? (Home turf race!) Maybe Newburyport Half? Do I even like running??
by Sam Tackeff | Apr 15, 2013 | Braises, Meat, Salads
Editor’s note: thank you so much to everyone who voted for me in the competition! This was not only the winning recipe, but the winning competition dish. What a blast!
Last week I ran out of my office in Haymarket, laden with my massive computer bag, and wearing flats, managed to sprint over to Tavern Road, a little over a mile, in 14 minutes. For a lamb party.
Tavern Road is the newest restaurant to pop up on Congress Street in Fort Point, and I’ve loved what I’ve seen (and tasted) so far. The restaurant is modern American, with as much attention paid to vegetables as to charcuterie. Last week I stopped by for a little pre-dinner, where I made my way through three vegetable dishes and a few slices of ham. The one that stood out was the grilled broccoli rabe with vanilla and hazelnuts, but everything was very good. They also have a well worn selection of cookbooks on the open kitchen counter, including Bertolli’s ‘Cooking by Hand’, which always leads me to judge a cook favorably. I’ll be stopping by often, so I’ll be sure to report back soon. {The only warning I have is that most of the parking turns into residential past 6pm. I learned this not because of the signs, but because of the 40 dollar parking ticket I earned last week for moving my car two blocks over from the lot to near the restaurant… yeesh.}
So about this party – the kind folks at BostonChefs.com invited me to participate in the American Lamb Board Lamb Pro-Am – a promotional event hooking up bloggers with local chefs to celebrate the most delicious of meats. (Seriously, I love it more than bacon.) At the party, we were served lamb meatballs, and provided with lamb swag, and a *massive* boneless leg of lamb to have our way with (and come up with a recipe for the competition).
I don’t usually participate in contests – let’s face it, they usually end up being a popularity thing – but I couldn’t turn down all this meaty goodness (especially in the midst of my gym challenge!). So here’s the deal – voting will begin on 4/17, and if you like lamb, and the possibility of hooking me up with a local chef to make you delicious noms, ewe should vote for me! {UPDATE: Please VOTE for me here: http://bit.ly/ProAm2013 !! Click on that Lamb Mechoui + Moroccan Marinated Carrots on the right, and help me be victorious! Voting will end next Friday, 4/26 at 5pm}
If you, like me, missed out on the Lamb Jam last month (everyone who went managed to make me jealous and bitter), never fear, the winners will be cooking up food for the masses at the official Lamb Pro-Am event on May 19th. If you’d like to gorge yourselves on the winning dishes, Pro-Am ticket sales have begun! Here’s a link to the event page: http://bit.ly/ProAm2013 and here’s a link to the ticket sales page: http://bit.ly/ProAmTix
Without further ado, let me wax poetic about lamb. It’s a little long, forgive me. If you get bored, just scroll though the photos – I did my best to make them lamb-tastic.
I think I’ve mentioned it often enough, but if you are new here, much of my culinary background comes from my Jewish and Turkish heritage, with a smattering of influence from French, Greek, and Moroccan relatives. I’ve grown up in a family who loves to cook, and who more importantly loves to eat – and so I’ve done a lot of it, all over the world, with dedication and gusto.
In my kitchen, Middle Eastern and North African flavors are the most prevalent. I love the rich, warm, sometimes smoky spices. I like spices that pack a punch – I cook with fistfuls of fresh herbs, particularly parsley and mint, and I use a lot of citrus.
Turks eat a lot of lamb – for centuries it has been the most popular type of meat, and pops up in hundreds of different dishes. You’ll commonly find it made into kebabs, pilafs, köfte (meatballs), and stews. Ground lamb is mixed with rice and stuffed into grape leaves, called dolma. It is roasted on spits, and strewn onto little flatbreads called lahmacun, or stuffed in tiny dumplings called mantı, topped with yogurt sauce. I’ve probably eaten a small herd’s worth in my lifetime.
For this recipe, I opted to draw from the flavors and techniques of Moroccan cooking, which feel deeply rooted in my hands and heart, despite never having been on Moroccan soil. (My uncle, however, grew up in Tangiers, so I’ve been gleefully eating Moroccan food since childhood.)
I decided to take a stab at Lamb Mechoui, a slow cooked lamb that is either cooked on a spit, or steamed, until it is falling apart tender, and can be pulled (like southern barbecue) with a fork. I flicked through a dozen cookbooks on my shelf for inspiration – I have a large collection of Middle Eastern, Moroccan, and Mediterranean cookbooks, fantastic titles by Claudia Roden, Paula Wolfert, Joyce Goldstein, Sam & Sam Clark, and Mourad Lahlou to name a few. I settled on the lamb and carrot salad combination from Jamie Oliver’s ‘Jamie Does‘, and decided to punch up the saffron and opt for a steaming/braising method at the suggestion of Mourad Lahlou’s ‘New Moroccan’.
Lamb Mechoui is typically a large cut of lamb such as a leg or a shoulder, smothered in smen (a type of fermented, aged butter), and coated liberally with spices. It’s not impossible to find smen around here (I’ve seen it at Russo’s), but it is expensive.
Joyce Goldstein mentions in ‘Saffron Shores: Jewish Cooking of the Southern Mediterranean’ that the Jews actually made a version of Mechoui, although it certainly wouldn’t have had any butter, as Jews don’t mix milk and meat.
For this recipe, I decided to use Ghee – clarified butter which has been removed of dairy solids. Ghee is sweeter than smen, but plays well with the spices, and I cook with it often. It’s also Paleo friendly and Whole 30 approved, if that matters to you! I’ve made my own with Kerrygold Butter, but was in a pinch this weekend, so picked up a large jar from Purity Farms.
I usually keep ghee at room temperature, but I softened it for a few seconds in the microwave so I could work the spices into it easily. The first step was to work in the salt and the saffron.
You don’t have to make this with saffron, but it lends a lovely unique flavor. When my mom went to Istanbul this summer, I asked her to bring me back kilos of spices from the spice bazaar, including a good amount of saffron threads. These come from Turkey, but I also have a stash from Spain. There’s always a big controversy over the legitimacy of saffron, but as far as I can tell, these both are as real as you can get. A small amount of saffron goes a long way!
The rest of the spices I added were coriander (typically I use ground, but I had run out, and it’s always easy to bash some in the mortar and pestle), cumin, chile powder (I get mine from Rancho Gordo), paprika, and turmeric.
Before spreading on the paste, I stabbed the lamb a dozen times, and stuffed the holes with sliced cloves of garlic. Then, I did my best to coat both sides with the spice mixture.
After coating the lamb, I let it sit at room temperature for two hours, to let the flavors permeate, and to ensure that the large piece of meat was fully at room temperature to help it cook evenly. I then transferred it to my large Le Creuset dutch oven, added a half cup or so of water, covered the pot with the heavy lid, and popped it in a 350 degree oven.
While in the oven, it requires a little attention – basting every 30-45 minutes with a turkey baster. I let it cook for just under three hours, then uncovered the pot, and let the skin crisp up a little bit for about 30 minutes. Then I took the lamb out to rest, put the pot on the stove top, and cooked down the juices into a thick, lamb-y sauce.
The final result was moist, tender, and exceedingly delicious. For an authentic eating experience, you might just ladle a bowl full of sauce, and dip pieces of lamb first in the sauce, then in some cumin and salt. I decided to have some balanced vegetables, and made some carrot salad to accompany it – the recipe is below!
Lamb Mechoui
The boneless leg of lamb from the American Lamb Board was a hefty 8 pounds, but this recipe is scaled down to a four to five pound roast.
1 leg of lamb (or shoulder)
4-5 cloves of garlic, sliced
50 grams of smen or ghee (about 1/2 stick of butter), at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon of saffron threads
1 Tablespoon kosher salt
1 Tablespoon ground coriander
1 Tablespoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons chile powder
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
Take the lamb out of the refrigerator, and cut slits in the lamb. Slice the cloves of garlic, and insert into slits.
In a small bowl, mix softened ghee (or smen or butter) with threads of saffron and salt. Then add cumin, coriander, chile powder, paprika, and turmeric, and stir into a paste. Liberally rub the lamb on the inside and out with the mixture, and let rest for an hour or two at room temperature.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees for half an hour. Place the lamb in a large dutch oven, skin side up. Pour about half a cup of water into the bottom of the pot, cover, and place into the hot oven. You can also make this in a deep roasting pan, being sure to cover tightly with a double layer of foil. Cook for about 3 hours, basting every 30 – 45 minutes. (It could take shorter or longer depending on the size of your roast.) The meat should be tender, and pull apart with a fork. For the last half hour, remove the lid, and let the skin crisp up.
Transfer the lamb to a platter, and let rest for 10 minutes, before shredding with a fork. While the meat is resting, put the pot with all the juices on the stove, and bring to a low boil, reducing for 10-15 minutes until the liquid is concentrated. Serve the shredded lamb with the lamb reduction, wedges of lemon, and salad accompaniments. (A little bit of yogurt, drizzled with a little bit of olive oil, topped with a few pomegranate seeds is nice here.)
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This lamb dish is quite rich, and needs a tart salad to brighten things up. For our feast, I put together Moroccan Marinated Carrots – my favorite go to salad.
Moroccan Marinated Carrots
I make a version of this salad on a regular basis, sometimes substituting roasted, or even raw shredded carrots for the steamed ones I’ve used here. The garlic powder is untraditional (and possibly tacky), but it dissolves well in the dressing. Sometimes, I add a little bit of runny honey to bring out the sweetness. It’s a bright, spiced side, that goes well with all types of roasted and grilled meats. Or, you could add chickpeas and toasted almonds, for a vegetarian meal. A fistful of mint is also a nice addition.1 pound carrots, peeled and cut on the bias into thick rounds.
1 clove garlic
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
a few large pinches kosher salt
juice of a lemon
olive oil
a large handful chopped parsley
In a large pot of boil in boiling, salted water, add the carrots and garlic, and boil 6-8 minutes until soft. Drain. (Or, steam carrots in the microwave for 5 minutes with a little bit of water.)
In a small bowl, add cumin, coriander, paprika, cayenne, salt and lemon juice. Whisk together, and slowly pour in olive oil, whisking to combine. Pour over warm carrots, and then let marinate – at least half an hour, or overnight in the fridge. Lasts quite well for three to four days, although I usually add a new handful of fresh herbs to perk things up.
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Please vote for me here: http://bit.ly/ProAm2013 (Voting will end next Friday, 4/26 at 5pm)
I received a leg of lamb from the American Lamb Board and BostonChefs.com to create a recipe with, although I was not compensated for this post. My opinions of lamb are my own – ewe can count on it!
