Eat Simply, Eat Well

Healthy recipes & tips to help you live the good life. by Ann Plough

A new salad and what I’m reading now: The Flavor Bible

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Honey-Mustard-Orange Roasted Beet Salad with Chickpea, Halloumi, Walnut and Spinach

I finally received a long-awaited book in the mail from Amazon. The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg was the worthy recipient of the 2009 James Beard Book Award and I’d been eyeing the book for a long time.

The beauty of this book is that it is not about directions and formulas and recipes; it’s about making you more creative in the kitchen. It’s an impressive work of research and scholarship:  Eight years in the making, the book is a guide through hundreds of main ingredients and spices, giving you wisdom and tips and experience from a vast variety of food experts on what ingredients to pair together in order to make magic in the kitchen.

The Flavor Bible

Perhaps you, like me, have been at the grocery store or farmer’s market and have picked up an ingredient the is a bit unfamiliar or with which you haven’t cooked before. The food looks beautiful, enticing: you decide to go ahead and buy it and take it home with you.  It sits on the counter or in the fridge, waiting. Every now and again, you pick it up and wonder: how do you use this? What do I use it with?  Do I cook it or eat it raw?  What will bring out the best of its flavor.

I have been there many, many times.  And I often get the question “what you do with x ingredient?” This is the book with answers to those questions.

As you open up the pages, your creative juices will immediately begin to flow:  what are the role of the individual tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty?  Which ingredients work best together?  What is the role of acid in the food I’m making?  How do I get a deeper, more satisfying flavor by combining various ingredients?  What are some new ways I can incorporate herbs and spices into my food?

The main ingredient I wanted to play with when I opened the book was the humble beet. It’s a food I’ve been familiar with for years, but only learned to love one fine evening in 2008 in Gothenburg, Sweden when my colleague and I ordered the beet appetizer before our meal. I ordered it more out of curiosity than anything; my parents had grown beets, but they and my older sister were the only ones to like them as far as I remember – the rest of us ran as far away as we could get when the beets arrived at the table.  We were completely unimpressed.  Beets in my experience up until that day in Gothenburg came in two forms:  boiled or pickled.  The former was slightly more palatable than the latter; nevertheless it wasn’t a food that held any memories of joy for me. Nope. I never craved beets nor thought about them at all.

A main ingredient in successful travel is the willingness to try something new – to challenge your own assumptions and reservations for the possibility of falling in love with some aspect of life or culture…or way of cooking…you’d never dreamed of.  And so we placed our order and the humble beet arrived at my table, roasted & caramelized, drizzled lightly with olive oil, and topped with a portion of goat cheese that had been baked just long enough to turn the top a beautiful, golden brown. It was a beautiful combination, and I’ve made varieties on that them of beet + goat cheese many times since. Please try this at home.

Beets, p. 77

Looking at my bag of unassuming beets, I was ready for something new. As my eye ran down page 77, where BEETS fell in line directly after BEER, I took in the basics about them:

Season:  year-round
Taste: sweet
Function: heating
Weight: medium
Volume: moderate
Techniques: bake, boil, carpaccio, chips, roast, soup, steam (note: no mention of pickling)

I’d already decided to roast them; the question was with what.  Following an overview like the one above for each ingredient in the book is list of compatible ingredients.  They are listed in plain text (for works OK); bold text (works well), and BOLD CAPS (an outstanding partner).

And here’s what caught my eye: CHEESE, blue, cambozola, cheddar, GOAT, PARMESAN, ROQUEFORT, SALTY; honey; LEMON: juice, zest; MUSTARD, DIJON; OLIVE OIL; ORANGE: JUICE AND ZEST; PEPPER: BLACK, WHITE; SALT: kosher, sea; spinach; WALNUTS AND WALNUT OIL.

I started to grin. This was going to be fun.

And it was – fully enjoyable to take a list of ingredients that someone else had already tested and believes works well together and use them as a guideline to create something brand new – at least to me.  The resulting warm salad is both beautiful to look at and satisfying to eat – marrying a variety of flavors into a single dish that pleases all the senses.

Try this recipe, and then take a look at the book yourself – my guess is you’ll end up surprising yourself with what you come up with – I sure did.



Honey-Mustard-Orange Roasted Beets, Chickpea, Halloumi, Walnut and Spinach Salad

5 large beets, scrubbed clean, tops and tails cut away
zest of one organic orange
1 teaspoon mustard, preferably Dijon
1 teaspoon honey
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup cooked chickpeas
1 cup spinach, washed
150 g Halloumi, cut into bite-size pieces
handful of walnuts, lightly chopped

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F.

Cut the beets into 5 slices; then cut each slice into thirds.  Combine the orange zest, mustard, honey (melt in the microwave if it is the firm variety), salt, pepper and lemon juice in a small bowl and whisk well to combine to make a dressing.  Add the beets and toss well to cover the beets thoroughly with the dressing.  Pour the dressed beets and all of any liquid from the bowl onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.  Bake 30-40 minutes, or until the beets can be easily pierced with a fork and are beginning to brown around the edges.  Remove from oven.

While the beets cook, supreme the orange: Cut off the top and bottom of the orange and place it on the cutting board with one cut side down.  Cut the peel away from the orange, including the white pith, using curving slices from top to bottom so that you see only the flesh of the orange.  Take the orange into the palm of your hand, place a small bowl in front of you, and using a paring knife, carefully cut the segments of oranges from between the orange membranes and into the bowl.  When you have cut out all the segments, squeeze what is left of the orange over the bowl to extract all the juices.

Put the chickpeas and their liquid into a small pot and warm them until the liquid just begins to bubble.  Turn off the heat.  (If you don’t have any of the chickpea liquid, add water to just cover the chickpeas instead)

Once the beets are ready and out of the oven, place a frying pan on the stovetop and heat to medium high.  Pour in the walnut pieces and stir and toss until the walnuts just begin to brown; about 2 minutes.  Pour the walnuts onto a plate to cool slightly.  Put the pan back on the stove. Add the halloumi pieces and fry them on both sides until they are golden brown. Remove the halloumi from the pan to a plate. Put the washed spinach into the hot pan and cook briefly, about 60 seconds, until it just begins to wilt.  Turn off the pan.

To assemble: 
Arrange the beet slices evenly on four plates.  Divide the chickpeas evenly between the four plates. Sprinkle and equal amount of the wilted spinach over each plate.  Divide the halloumi between the four plates.  Arrange a few orange slices on top of each salad and sprinkle with a few of the walnuts. Finish the salads by drizzling any remaining orange juice over the top of each plate and adding a drizzle of olive oil. Alternatively, you can arrange all of the ingredients on a serving platter, layering them as indicated above.

Serves 4.

A different kind of fish soup: Sweet Potato, Kale, Fish and Coconut Curry Soup

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Sweet Potato, Kale, Fish and Coconut Curry Soup

With the rain dripping down the side of the window at a steady and soothing rate, a little relaxing classical piano music streaming through the computer speakers, and an evening of relaxation ahead, soup seemed to be the perfect dinner.  I’ve been in the mood for something spicy all day, so “making something with curry” was the starting point for tonight’s dinner.

With a sweet potato that had been languishing on the countertop for a couple of weeks, a huge pile of fresh cilantro I’d just picked up from the local Turkish grocery store, and coconut milk I’d made this morning on a “just in case” whim waiting in the fridge alongside a hunk of Greenland halibut that we’d put there to thaw last night, the creative wheels started turning.

The crunchy pieces of fish from the frying pan add a nice texture to the soup, too.

First of all, although that had been the plan, I really didn’t want a dinner centered around that hunk of fish.  Don’t get me wrong: I love fish, especially halibut.  But a hunk of fish requires side dishes and sauces and things that I wasn’t in the mood to make.  Plus, this hunk of fish was fairly small, so as a resource it needed to be stretched a bit. I decided to treat the fish as a garnish to the main course, and with that we were off and running.

This soup isn’t overly spicy, but you can easily adjust the spice level by adjusting the amount of red curry paste you use.  I also felt that the curry paste together with the fish sauce provided enough salt; feel free to adjust the level of salt to your liking.

Not only does this soup taste delicious with a all favor flavors including umami at play, it’s good for you.  The sweet potato packs a strong punch of vitamin A, the kale is one of the super greens with more phytonutrients than nearly any other plant out there, and the cilantro packed into this soup has been shown to have anti-diabetic effects, is used as an anti-inflammatory in India, has been studied in the US for its ability to lower cholesterol.  And if you’ve been having trouble getting your omega 3, the fish will add a healthy dose of that, too.

Full of satisfying flavor, it tastes as good as it looks.

Sweet Potato, Kale, Fish and Coconut Curry Soup

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, diced
1 large garlic clove, minced 
1 liter chicken broth
1 cup water
1 cup coconut milk
2-4 teaspoons Thai red curry paste, depending on how spicy you like it
1 1/2 teaspoons Fish sauce
1 small bunch cilantro, roots trimmed; stems and leaves chopped
1 sweet potato, peeled and cut into small cubes
3 cups Kale, washed, stems removed and chopped small
300 g halibut (or other white fish)
lemon juice, salt and pepper, for seasoning halibut
oil, for pan

Season the halibut with a sprinkle of salt, and a few grinds of pepper.  Set aside while you prepare the soup.

Pour the tablespoon of olive oil into a medium-sized pot over medium heat.  Add the onion and cook until the onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic and cook for one minute more. Add the chicken broth, water, coconut milk, curry paste, fish sauce and cilantro stems.  Allow the broth to simmer gently for 5 minutes. Add the sweet potato and cook for 5 minutes.  Add the kale and cook for one minute.  Add the cilantro leaves, reserving a few leaves for garnish. Cover the pot and turn off the heat.

Heat a heavy bottom frying pan or cast iron grill pan over medium-high heat.  Squeeze lemon juice over the halibut, brush the top side with oil, and place the fish, oil side down, in the pan.  Brush the side of the fish that is now facing up with oil.  Cover the pan and allow the fish to cook and steam until it is cooked about halfway through: 2-3 minutes.  Now, using a flat spatula, gently lift the fish up from the pan and flip it over.

Cover the pan again and allow the fish to cook for 2-3 minutes until cooked through and slightly crisp. Transfer the fish from the pan to a cutting board and cut it into all cubes.  If you can, use the spatula to scrape some of the crispy bits from the bottom of the pan as well. Be careful to remove any bones during this process.

Ladle the soup into four bowls.  Divide the fish and the crispy pieces and arrange it over the top of the four bowls.  Garnish each bowl with cilantro leaves and serve.

Serves 4.

Pomegranate, Mint and Beluga Lentil Salad

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Pomegranate, Mint and Beluga Lentil Salad

I feel like celebrating.  Why?  Because I was walking along my normal route last night and heard the waves lapping against the shoreline for the first time in months.  Yes, there are still ice floes bobbing up and down out there, but still – waves. I love the sound of waves.  Today, I also noticed that the ground is more green than white.  So while my friends in Seattle are posting pictures of blooming forsythia and daffodils and magnolia (you know who you are my dear people), I will settle for the few tiny buds I see forming on the ends of branches, the signs of weeds working their way up through the thawing soil and the grass emerging under the mostly melted snow.

If I had grown up in a place with serious winters, this might seem commonplace.  But every year I feel a sense of dread as the cold days arrive (the darkness doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the cold).  And every year, I am first in line to celebrate even the smallest indication that yes indeed, we’ve made it through another one, and Spring is on its way. And I am probably one of the first to break out my summer dresses and flip flops as the days start to get longer and brighter and warmer.

Pomegranate: one of the most beautiful fruits I’ve ever seen.

Which means pretty soon it’ll be summer, and maybe then it will be hot around here.  And if it’s hot, we’ll be needing a long list of salad options that include items fresh from the garden, including vast quantities of mint – about the only thing that grows with great abundance all over the place, especially in the spots in which it has not been planted, but nevertheless wishes to take over.  And there I am, applying human emotion to things in nature, an error my college English professor would have called “pathetic fallacy”, and would have reminded me that an inanimate object, in truth, never actually wishes anything or thinks at all.  But never mind, Spring and it’s abundance of mint and other green things does strange things to our behavior, so I’ll forgive myself that little slip.

Mint is one of the few things this salad has in common with the warmer months.  Otherwise, this salad highlights the jewel-like pomegranate, still abundant now; the earthy lentils that are harvested each fall, and is flavored with lemon and orange, arguably fruits of Winter but available anytime.

I made this salad for dinner and served it with whole grain sunflower seed sourdough on the side. It’d work well as a side salad too, but with the abundance of legumes, vegetables and seeds, it’s perfectly filling on its own. So make the best of the last of the Winter produce – we’ll be dining on rhubarb, strawberries and asparagus soon.

The colors are ready for a celebration too…

Pomegranate, Mint and Beluga Lentil Salad

1/2 cup / 1 dl dried Beluga Lentils 
2 cups / 500 ml water
2 spring onions, thinly sliced
1/2 English cucumber, diced (about 1 cup)
10 Brussels sprouts, halved, core removed, thinly sliced
1/4 cup / 1/2 dl mint leaves, roughly chopped
seeds from 1/2 pomegranate*
2 tablespoon raw sunflower seeds
juice of one lemon
zest of one orange
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Rinse the lentils in a fine sieve.  Combine the lentils and water in a small pot, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for 20 minutes.

While the lentils cook, prepare the rest of your ingredients.  Combine all of the ingredients in a medium-sized bowl, reserving a few mint leaves and pomegranate seeds for garnish.  When the lentils are ready, drain through a fine sieve, then pour the hot lentils directly onto the vegetables.  Stir well to combine.

Salad may be served immediately as a warm salad, or refrigerated and served later.  It travels well, and can be made up to one day ahead if you want to make it for lunch the next day or for a picnic or potluck.

Serves 2 as a main course.

*To deseed a pomegranate, roll it around on the countertop, pressing down lightly as you hear a slight popping sound.  Cut the pomegranate in half around the middle i.e. “equator” just deep enough to puncture the skin.  Using your fingertips, and holding the pomegranate over a bowl to catch any drips or wayward seeds, pull the two halves apart.  Set one half on the countertop.  Use your fingers again to break the pomegranate open slightly. Then hold the pomegranate half, seed side down, in your open palm with your fingers spread open.  Using the handle of a wooden spoon, rap the top of the pomegranate firmly to knock the juicy seeds out and into the waiting bowl.  Continue until most of the seeds are removed.  There are always the stubborn few you’ll need to remove with your fingers, but most will fall easily into the bowl.  Remove any wait pith that has fallen into the bowl.  Continue happily with the recipe.