Seasonal Cooking 01 Jul 2012 09:50 pm
Puntarelle Chicory Greens from Paisley Farm
Mike Kokas of Paisley Farm says on his website that he “plants with the chef in mind.” That is, he grows things he thinks adventurous cooks are going to like. This year he’s growing something called “Chicory Catalogna Puntarelle.”
The leafy bundle of chicory greens was a curious sight to Paisley’s CSA members when they picked up this week’s delivery. My girlfriend Karol (a site coordinator for Paisley Farm’s CSA) wanted to find the best way to use this unfamiliar vegetable, so we asked our friend Inger-Lise McMillan to come over.
Lise is an excellent cook and an inveterate Italophile. She spent an undergraduate year in Bologna, then went back after graduation for a three-year stay. While she was there, one of her roommates taught her the classic Roman preparation for puntarelle dressed with a rustic sauce made from anchovies and garlic.
The long-stemmed leafy greens we got from Paisley were not actually the same puntarelle that Lise was familiar with. She was used to seeing the pinecone-shaped puntarelle head, which Romans slice thinly and cause to curl by soaking in water. What we got in our CSA delivery, apparently, were the puntarelle leaf ends.
Puntarelle chicory is a bitter-tasting green, and the pungency of anchovies is a perfect match for its bold flavor. If you want to take the edge off of puntarelle’s bitterness, a quick blanch in boiling water or a long soak in cold water is said to mellow them. When Lise came over to teach us her recipe, however, she opted to give the leaves a quick soak then chop them. Instead trying to make them taste milder, she upped the amount of anchovies in the dressing to balance the flavor.
For the dressing, she pounded several anchovy fillets in a mortar with garlic, salt, 
white pepper and white wine vinegar, then added just enough olive oil to bind everything together. If you prefer a smoother consistency you can mix everything in a blender or food processor, but we all liked the way the rustic, slightly chunky texture mixed with the crunchy greens.
The punterelle salad was ready in a flash, 
and we still had plenty of wine left to drink, so we set out to make orecchiette to accompany it. Pasta making is formost among Lise’s culinary talents, and none of us were quite able to match her perfectly-shaped “little ears” of pasta. We made a quick tomato sauce loaded with Paisley Farm basil to complete this great summer night’s dinner.
I’m happy as a clam because it’s early summer and that means peas in the farmers markets. Sugar snaps and shelling peas are at their short season’s peak and I’m eating them at every opportunity. I’ve made some simple dishes like steamed shelling peas with roasted potatoes, but this week I wanted to get a bit fancier. Crepes, I thought, would make a nice wrapper for some sautéed sugar snaps, and would put a dent besides in the binfull of buckwheat flour aging in my fridge, needing to be used up.
market: plump, crisp, so tender you can eat them raw. I brought some home and prepped them carefully, snapping off the stem ends and pulling them down along the pods’ undersides to pull out any strings. For good measure I do the same along the backside of the pod, in case there are any ‘back’ stings, but these were so tender I needn’t have bothered.
far so good, but the dish needed a sauce to round it out. My repertoire of sauces is, I must confess, pretty limited, so at first all I could think to do was make some variation on that familiar mainstay, the Béchamel. But a flour-thickened sauce didn’t seem quite right. It wouldn’t be summery enough for this dish.
technique to thicken a flavor base made from the greens tops of the spring onion, sauteed in butter. To this I added white wine and stock, cooking until the liquid was mostly evaporated. Then I added a mixture of cream and crème fraiche, and cooked it down until it reached a thick, spoon-coating consistency. I flavored it with some prepared mustard, chopped herbs, salt and white pepper. (I’ve written up these steps 
Living in New York gives you a sense of constant access. There’s always something open, so you always assume you can find what you want whenever you want it. In other cities you wake up to the reality that in most places markets close for the holidays. This awakening happened to me last week as I drove around my home town, searching for a grocery store open for business on Christmas morning.
I’d bought a plump ‘Amish’ chicken from a local butcher shop, and took stock of what was on hand in my mom’s cupboard: potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, spaghetti squash. But about the details of my menu I dawdled. “I’ll just run to the grocery store in the morning to get what I need” I thought.
p: some fresh herbs to stuff inside the chicken; some mushrooms to sauté with the spaghetti squash; chicken stock for extra gravy; a green veggie for an additional side dish.I hopped in my car and headed for the store. But every supermarket was surrounded by a vast, empty expanse of parking lot. My errand was in vain. I was incensed. I just couldn’t comprehend that there was nowhere to get my hands on some fresh parsley.
plenty of gravy for the three of us from the pan drippings augmented with a splash of the potato water. I had homemade applesauce I’d brought from home and sourdough bread from my Brooklyn neighborhood. And to keep true to my Mennonite roots I made a relish tray from the Amish cheese and sweet pickles my mom had on hand for the next day’s big feast. For dessert there were Christmas cookies. Mini Christmas Dinner was a robust, simple, homey success.