Harissa How-To

I've never been a big fan of ketchup, even as a kid. On French fries I prefer aioli, and condiments like chutney, sriracha and harissa ring my chimes way more than the sugary sweetness of Heinz. Contributor Jim Dixon of Real Good Food shares his recipe for making your own harissa, a version I guarantee is going to beat the pants off anything you'll find in a squeeze bottle.

Cauliflower, Chickpea and Harissa

Harissa, the North African condiment sometimes called Tunisian ketchup, provides a smoky-sweet chile flavor that's particularly good with vegetables. While some of the commercial brands can be very hot, you can adjust the chile heat to suit your palate if you make it yourself.

You'll need a couple of roasted red bell peppers, blackened skin and most of the seeds removed, a few cloves of garlic, a half cup or so of mild or hot chile powder (or dried chiles that you've soaked and drained; there are a lot of recipes online), about a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil and a teaspoon or so each of ground coriander and caraway (you'll have to grind the caraway yourself, or at least crush the seeds in a mortar and pestle). Combine everything with a good pinch of salt in the food processor until it forms a smooth paste. This makes about a pint, but it stores in the refrigerator for a few weeks.

Chop a head of cauliflower (I include the leaves and core; just chop into smaller bits) and cook it in a heavy skillet with enough extra virgin olive oil to cover the bottom. Add some salt and cook over medium high heat until it's starting to brown, maybe 15 minutes. Add a chopped red onion, cook for another 5 minutes, then add a couple of cups of cooked chickpeas (aka garbanzos or ceci). Stir in a healthy dollop of your harissa, squeeze half a lemon over the whole thing and eat warm or at room temperature.

Winter Soup to Warm Your Bones

Contributor Jim Dixon's annual olive oil garage sale is an institution among aficionados of good cooking and good eating in town. In the tradition of his beloved New Orleans, he always offers a lagniappe, or a little something extra, to his Real Good Food customers, usually something warming to drink and a cup of his famous "garage sale soup."

Garbanzo, Farro & Squash Soup

Soak about a cup each of garbanzos and farro together in plenty of water overnight. Drain, add enough water to cover, stir in some salt, and simmer for an hour—longer is even better—or until the beans are tender. Cut up the rest of the ingredients while the beans and farro cook.

Chop an onion, 3-4 stalks of celery and a few cloves of garlic. Chiffonade a bunch of collard greens (leave the center stalk attached; it'll cook enough to get tender).

While I like to use one of the big, pumpkin-y squashes (Cucurbita maxima, like kabocha or Hubbard), for this, almost any winter squash would work. Cut it in half, pick out the seeds (roast them with olive oil and salt for about 25 minutes) then grate the raw pieces (and leave the skin on, even with the gnarly-looking kabochas). It’s easiest in the food processor, but a box grater works, too. You want about 2 cups worth.

Add the grated squash, onion, celery, garlic and collards to the pot. Add a large can of diced tomatoes (or the tomatoes you roasted and froze last summer). Sprinkle in a good handful of Pantellerian oregano, pour in plenty of good olive oil, taste for salt and let the soup simmer for a couple of hours if you can. Soup always tastes best with long, slow cooking.

Just before serving taste it again; if it seems to need a little something, add a splash of Katz Gravenstein apple cider vinegar [good quality regular cider vinegar works, too. - KB]. Drizzle with more oil at the table, and a pinch of Parmigiano would be good, too.

The Hummus Among Us

I totally agree with contributor Jim Dixon of Real Good Food: store-bought hummus is ridiculously expensive and producers don't always use the best ingredients, while making it at home is so easy, costs so little and is way more flavorful. This version adds roasted peppers to give it an extra flavor boost…try some sweet red peppers from the farmers' market like Jimmy Nardellos, Italian peppers or Cubanelles.

I used to sell garbanzos grown by Haricot Farms, the same folks who grow the rojo chiquito red beans. But they haven't been available for the past few years (I suspect they all go to the Truitt Bros. for canning). So when I learned that Koda Farms, producers of Kokuho Rose rice (Mark Bittman called it the "best rice grown in America."), also grows garbanzos, I ordered a bag. They're small, organically grown and delicious.

Hummus with Roasted Chiles



If you have a food processor, there's no reason to buy hummus at the store. It never has enough tahini, anyway, and it's almost always made with fake extra virgin olive oil (the blends of refined and virgin olive oils often labeled "extra virgin"). This version includes some roasted chiles, but you can leave them out for traditional hummus.



In your processor combine 2 cups of cooked garbanzos, 1/2 cup of roasted chiles (available now in varying levels of heat at the farmers market; substitute roasted red bell peppers [recipe] or roast your own chiles), 1/2 cup of tahini, 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, 2 coarsely chopped garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, 1 teaspoon salt, and the juice of a lemon (or 2 tablespoons Katz Sparkling Wine vinegar). Process until smooth, adding a little of the garbanzo cooking water if you like a thinner spread. Drizzle with more extra virgin, dust with paprika (I like the smoky note from Spanish pimenton) and eat with bread or anything else that will scoop it up.

You can find Jim and the products he loves on most Mondays at his Real Good Food "warehouse," from 4-7 pm at Activspace, 833 SE Main St. #122. Look for the "olive oil" sign out front.

The Greening of Dinner

Here's a list of things I didn't expect when I started this blog:

• That anyone, aside from a few friends, would ever read it.
• That it would start me on the path to a new career as a writer.
• That I would still be doing it more than four years and some 1800-plus posts later.
• That I would get on e-mail lists for nice things like media dinners but also on those promoting the latest books from new age/horror/makeover authors (wait, is that a new genre?).
• That boxes would appear on my front porch containing books, locally roasted coffee, snack chips and garbanzo beans.

Yes, garbanzo beans. Flash-frozen green garbanzo beans. Which I had never cooked with before. And now I had a case of them.

I'd seen green garbanzos once before in their husks (left) at the Forest Grove Farmers' Market. Fortunately someone had already done the work of de-husking these, making them much more attractive when it came to actually doing something with them. Asking around, I heard they made great hummus and could be used in stir fries, soups and stews.

So when I was stuck (again) for something to make for dinner last night and, ever the optimist, opened the door to the freezer to see if some fairy might have magically left a whole frozen lasagne buried under the bags of parmesan rinds, nuts and bread ends, I saw one of those big green bags staring at me. Since I'd been hankering for some curry, I grabbed it and some rice and tomatoes from the pantry and, within a half hour, had dinner on the table. Talk about side benefits!

Green Garbanzo and Tomato Curry

2 Tbsp. canola oil
1 yellow onion quartered and thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, quartered and thinly sliced
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/4 tsp. cumin
1/8 tsp. coriander
2 c. crushed tomatoes
2 c. green garbanzo beans
Splash fish sauce (optional)
Salt to taste

Heat oil in deep skillet. When it shimmers, add onion and garlic and sauté over medium heat till the onion is transparent. Add the red bell peppers and sauté till tender. Add spices and stir for 30 seconds, then add tomatoes and garbanzo beans. Salt to taste and, if desired, add a splash of fish sauce. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Serve with rice and chutneys (we particularly like Patak brand, especially their Lime Relish).

Beans and Pasta

I guess it's because I'm lacking that particular floaty toy in my Irish-Scottish-Alsatian-Austrian-Native American gene pool, but I've never really been attracted to the Italian penchant for combining pasta with beans. But this very tempting-sounding recipe from contributor Jim Dixon of Real Good Food has piqued my curiousity to do some culinary exploring.

The red beans in this recipe are grown by Haricot Farms in Quincy, Washington (near Yakima), and are certified sustainable by the Food Alliance. They’re fresher than the average supermarket bean and have great flavor.

I cook them using my no-soak, slow-cook approach. And ever since seeing a quote from a grizzled Tuscan (they are known as mangiafagiole or bean eaters, after all) to the effect that “beans cooked in a metal pot aren’t worth eating,” I’ve used a garage sale ceramic bean pot. I fill it about a third full, add a good pinch of sea salt, a healthy glug of extra virgin olive oil, and fill it most of the way up with water. A few hours in a 250° oven and they’re usually tender, though sometimes I need to add a little more water.

Add the cooked beans to soup, use them for composed salads, or eat them plain, drizzled with more extra virgin olive oil. Try a bowl topped with a poached or fried egg for breakfast.

Garbanzos need soaking, or least they seem to hold together better during cooking if they’re rehydrated. I soak overnight, then simmer in salted water until tender (on top of the stove, in a metal pot....go figure). Don’t discard the stock; it’s delicious and can be used in soup or added to pasta-garbanzo dishes like this:

Rapini, ceci, e pasta

Cook a bunch of rapini (aka broccoli raab) in plenty of well-salted boiling water for about 5 minutes. Drain, let cool a little and chop coarsely.

Chop a few garlic cloves and cook briefly in extra virgin olive oil. Add the chopped rapini, about a cup and half of cooked garbanzos (ceci in Italian), and a half cup or so of the garbanzo cooking liquid.

Have a pot of water boiling so you can drop in a pound of good pasta at about the same time. An extruded shape, rather than a long noodle, works better for this, and I like to use 100% semolina Italian pasta.

Cook the rapini and ceci for about 10 minutes, or until the pasta is done. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the pasta to the pan with the rapini, add a quarter cup or so of pasta water, and cook together for a few minutes. Serve with grated Parmigiano Reggiano.

Committing Hummus-cide

Hummus, in my view, is a much-maligned quantity. It was the barely edible, dry stuff you brought to parties in college because it was "ethnic" but in reality was a cheap way to feed your friends. And there are still very few who make a decent version, outside of Middle-Eastern restaurants like Ya Hala or Hoda's who also make their own pita bread.

I'd give my own efforts an "OK" rating back then and, even at that, it was way better than most of the stuff sold at even our most effete grocery stores, which range from chemical-tasting to having that certain je-ne-sais-quoi cardboard flavor.

Then all was made better by a recipe that my parents brought back from their pre-retirement sojourn in Liberia (yes, in Africa) where they met several Lebanese couples, teachers at the college they were working for. My mother, being a resourceful sort and knowing a good thing when she tasted it, begged a couple of recipes from them that she shared when she eventually returned home.

Ever since, our lives and the success of many a gathering have been aided and abetted by her ingenuity. I hope you agree her efforts weren't in vain.

Hummus

Taratoor sauce:
2 small garlic cloves
1/2 c. tahini paste (sesame butter)
1/4 c. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. salt

Hummus:
1 15-oz can garbanzo beans or 2 c. cooked beans
2 tsp. salt
3 garlic cloves
1/4 c. lemon juice

You can make this in one step by placing all the ingredients in the food processor and processing till it all turns to a smooth consistency. Add water if necessary to keep it blending (I don't). Garnish with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of paprika (or better yet, Spanish pimenton) or the traditional sumac.

The taratoor by itself makes a terrific sauce for pork or meats, or drizzle it over rice, vegetables or appetizers like stuffed grape leaves.