GOON MANDU FILLING (2)
(adapted from Copeland Marks’sThe Korean Kitchen )
[to fill about 8 dozen dumplings]
¼ pound each bean sprouts and Chinese garlic chives
(nira—see above recipe) or fresh chives
1 pound hand-minced or coarsely ground beef
1 small onion, chopped fine
1 egg
½-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon salt
freshly ground pepper to taste
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds (see above recipe)
Toss the bean sprouts into boiling water, cook for 15 seconds, then drain in a sieve. Shake dry and chop coarsely. Chop off and discard the white root ends of the garlic chives and mince the rest. (If substituting plain chives, simply mince.) Thoroughly blend the chopped garlic chives and bean sprouts with the other ingredients in a mixing bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes to allow the flavors to meld. Then proceed to make and cook the dumplings as directed on pages 189–90.
Further Reading
The aspiring Chinese-dumpling maker will find these books especially helpful: Fu Pei Mei,Pei Mei’s Chinese Snacks & Desserts; Mai Leung,The Chinese People’s Cookbook; Florence Lin’s Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and Breads; and Nina Simonds,Classic Chinese Cuisine andChina Express.
PASTA AND VEGETABLES
A very simple recipe for pasta and pumpkin appears in Vincenzo Buonassisi’s compendium of Italian pasta dishes,Il codice della pasta. To make it, you take a pound each of the two main ingredients and cook the pasta while you sauté cubes of the pumpkin in a mixture of butter, olive oil, and some minced parsley. The two are then tossed together with grated Parmesan and a little more melted butter, seasoned with salt and pepper, and served. About such a dish, Giuliano Bugialli writes in hisBugialli on Pasta,
If I may reveal my own most personal taste, I would say that a dish made with is the most satisfying thing I can eat. It is just the right combination of taste, texture, nourishment and lightness. I feel completely satisfied afterward, and any dishes that might follow are simply an embellishment.
This is one of many similar recipes in a category of pasta dishes that, for the most part, until recently, I had left virtually unexplored. I ate pasta regularly, but in my mind it emblematized a certain kind of hearty meal, and I didn’t see any heartiness in a meal of pumpkin and spaghetti. But because this sort of pasta dish attracted Matt, I found myself eating more of them … and changing my mind. I realized that, as much as I had been thinking about pasta, there was still a lot I didn’t understand.
For example, I had grown up thinking of pasta as an ingredient—as a starch, like rice or potatoes. The Italians, however, think of it as a course—the equivalent of soup, salad, or dessert. I knew this, but I had always treated this information suspiciously, especially because it was often used by writers to justify smaller portions. And yet, a bowl of soup, a plate of antipasto, a salad, even a dessert, in the right circumstances can satisfy all by itself—because, in miniature, it already has the contours of a meal.
When Giuliano Bugialli writes that a dish of is “the most satisfying thing I can eat,” we know that he means that it is more than a mere vegetable mélange. But none of his explanatory categories—taste, texture, nourishment, lightness—tells us why. For a dish to make a meal it must make the eater feel human, which is the difference between assuaging appetite and placating brute hunger.
Considering our dish of pasta and pumpkin, it is easy to see how it meets Bugialli’s criteria: the vegetable furnishes the flavor and texture, the Parmesan some piquant zest, the olive oil and butter a variable sufficiency of richness. The pasta, then, is left with the job of transforming this plain eating into an event.
The worddelicious has two meanings: the first is simply “pleasing to the mouth”; the other, harder to define, denotes a kind of ticklish mental pleasure, as in the phrase “a delicious sense of humor.” Pasta is one of the rare foods possessing both these elements of deliciousness, heightened further by an air of theatricality—those strands and whirls and tubes and bows in which it makes its appearance on the stage. If a roast turkey can be said to possess tragedic dignity, lying prone on its platter, pasta is a kind of Papageno—irrepressible, vulnerable, merry, even a little sly.
Bread is the humanizing foodpar excellence and is used to being—expects to be—treated with respect; those who love it break it with their hands at table and use it as a cooking ingredient only when it stales. Pasta, on the contrary, has no dignity, throws itself into anything, and yet manages to remain itself. “What are you doing inthere, you rascal?” we want to say … except, of course, we know: giving the dish this double deliciousness.
Pasta and vegetable combinations are often very simple: a vegetable—Buonassisi mentions, among others, onions, zucchini, asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli, and green beans—is tossed with pasta, seasoned, and eaten. At first glance such dishes seem to spring from the cooking of the Italian poor—la cucina povera—cut from very much the same cloth as, say, the hearty pasta and dried bean dishpasta e fagioli. They are both pastas meant to be eaten as a main course, not a first one; the vegetables are added not to make a sauce but to make the meal.
The difference, however, and it is an important one, is that vegetable and pasta dishes are simultaneously hearty and light. They aren’t something, that is, that would sustain a farm laborer or factory worker, as much as they might seem to want to. To separate eaters into delicately picky ar istocrats and hearty peasants ignores the fact that one can be genteel and trim and still want to help oneself to something good without chastising oneself, mumbling about sin. Once upon a time there were eaters who, even if careful about overindulgence, found eating a natural and delightful pleasure.
Hence, ourCommedia della Pasta: a fantasy stage where a comedy of flavor is acted out. The landscape is bucolic; the players are dressed in simple rustic garb. But, because the substance of this delicious illusion is mostly cellulose and water, I found I had to eat a lot not to leave the table feeling empty. At first, it was unnerving to eat something so good that is so innocent of guile, and I suspect that those who are made nervous by appetite will have trouble with these dishes. Those who wish they could exercise theirs more, however, will find them—as I have—a revelation. It is such a pleasant change for the stomach to feel full of something good without any accompanying sense of glut or guilt. It’s about as close as you can come to having your cake and eating it, too.
I don’t know how Italians would portion these dishes, and—as I have explained in the essay “Mangiamaccheroni” (which appears inOutlaw Cook )—I don’t trust the portioning given in Italian cookbooks. Because we serve them as a complete one-dish weekday supper, we’ve simply expanded on the logic inherent in these dishes, amplifying the presence of the vegetables until we had a meal that left us feeling comfortably, happily full. If we were to decide to use the more generous amounts of olive oil that Italian recipes often call for, to eat bread with the meal (or serve dessert after it)—we most often don’t—we would downscale the proportions accordingly, and so should you.
Nor is liberating generosity all that these pasta and vegetable dishes have to give. Their simplicity makes them easy to adapt to whatever is fresh and best in the supermarket produce section. In Maine, especially in winter, while we can almost always find something good there, we never know exactly what it will be. Suddenly, all the red bell peppers have vanished, but generous bundles of fresh spinach appear instead. On other occasions, there are chubby, tender leeks, bunches of pungent broccoli rabe, giant snowy-white heads of cauliflower, piles of crisp yellow wax beans. Out of these foragings—some of them not at all usual pasta ingredients—we make our meal.
As already noted, in Italian recipes a single vegetable is often used alone. Even at their best, our su
permarket vegetables don’t really have that kind of presence; except when locally grown produce is available, we get the best flavor using a combination. Something fresh and green-tasting (this can range from a head of romaine or a heap of green beans to a small bundle of parsley) might be combined with something mellow and creamy (flageolets, cauliflower, wax beans) and another something sweetly pungent (leeks, scallions, or onions in generous amounts—plus, occasionally, a red bell pepper), all sautéed in our standardsoffritto of olive oil, a little hot red pepper, and, usually, garlic and a fresh herb. The results are then tossed with the pasta and served.
Read through the recipe for linguine with green beans, leeks, and flageolets—with its variations—below and you will get a good sense of how we mix and match the best the produce section has to offer. The important thing is to find a balance of flavors and textures in which the whole is somehow greater than—without ever obscuring—its parts. Try them; adapt them. We think you, too, will find them economical, filling, warming, liberating, doubly delicious meals.
PENNE WITH BROCCOLI, RED PEPPERS, AND GARLIC
[serves 2 generously]
1 head broccoli
sea salt
8 ounces penne
2 or 3 cloves garlic
sprig of fresh oregano
1 red bell pepper
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon crushed hot red pepper
freshly ground black pepper
grated Romano (optional)
Trim and pare the broccoli. Break the head into individual florets and cut the stalks into bite-sized pieces. Cook these in a large pot of boiling salted water (we use 1 tablespoon sea salt to 4 quarts of water) until tender but still crisp. Remove to a bowl with a slotted spoon. Add the penne to the vegetable water and cook.
While the pasta cooks, mince the garlic cloves and oregano together with a pinch more of salt. Stem, core, and seed the bell pepper and cut it into small pieces. Heat the oil in a medium skillet over a low flame. Stir in the minced garlic-oregano mixture and the hot pepper. Cook this, stirring, for a minute, then add the bell pepper pieces. Sauté these until soft. About 3 minutes before the pasta is done, stir in the broccoli pieces and mix well, adding salt and pepper to taste. Strain the pasta, reserving the liquid. Divide the pasta into large bowls and spoon the vegetable mixture over each, then ladle in some of the cooking water (a few tablespoons to make a sauce or a cup or two to make a delicious soup). Serve with the grated Romano if desired.
Variation.With cauliflower: Prepare as above, substituting cauliflower for the broccoli, adding one chopped onion and minced parsley to the sautéed vegetables, and stirring in a spoonful of red wine vinegar. Or, if desired, omit the vinegar and add a few minced capers and a handful of pitted and coarsely chopped Mediterranean black olives. Use only a few tablespoons of the liquid: it does not make a good soup. Do not use cheese with this version.
LINGUINE WITH GREEN BEANS, LEEKS, AND FLAGEOLETS
[serves 2 generously]
Our natural foods store sells excellent, locally grown flageolets; this is one of our favorite ways to prepare them. In this dish, the green beans and leeks are cut into long, thin strips so that they can be twirled up on the fork with the linguine.
¼ cup dried flageolets
1 pound green beans
2 medium leeks
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon crushed hot red pepper
2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced
sprig of fresh thyme, minced
8 ounces linguine
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
grated Parmesan (optional)
Pick over and rinse the dried beans. Put to soak in an adequate amount of water for 4 to 6 hours. Drain away and discard this liquid 2 hours before preparing the meal. Put the beans in a small pot, cover with water, and boil for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the beans are tender. Do not overcook. When done, drain and reserve the beans and the cooking liquid separately.
Trim the green beans and french them—we push them through a “krisker” (an ingenious little device with several tiny razor blades embedded in it that make short work of this task)—into long slivers. Heat 4 quarts of salted water in a large pot. Cook the slivered green beans until just tender, about 6 minutes. Remove the beans but keep the water boiling.
Discard the tough outer green fronds of the leeks and slice the white and tender green parts into long, slender strips. Wash these carefully. Heat the butter and oil in a medium skillet. Add the hot pepper, garlic, and thyme, cook for 1 minute, then stir in the leek strips. When these have softened, start the pasta cooking in the green-bean water.
After 10 minutes, add the cooked flageolets and a little of their liquid to the skillet. Mix the green beans in with the flageolets and leeks a few minutes before the pasta is done, seasoning to taste with salt and black pepper. Drain the pasta and return to the pot. Toss in the vegetable mixture and serve with grated Parmesan if desired.
Variations.This dish has proven especially amenable to substitutions. Scallions are often asked to fill in for absent leeks, and when green beans are old and tough we switch to tender greens, like escarole, romaine, or Swiss chard. Other mild-flavored dried beans can replace the flageolets, but we usually prefer to replicate their texture with some entirely different presence, like the wax beans or summer squash in the first two variations below.
Summer squash, romaine, and leeks with fusilli: Here, summer squash replaces the flageolets; romaine, or some other flavorful green, replaces the green beans; and oregano replaces the thyme. Otherwise, prepare and season as above. Cut 2 or 3 summer squash into bite-sized pieces. Sauté the leeks and summer squash together over low heat in a large skillet. Use a stubby pasta like fusilli or penne instead of linguine and start the pasta cooking only after the leeks are limp. Cut the romaine into bite-sized pieces and add to the skillet during the last few minutes of cooking. Serve as above.
Wax beans, romaine, and leeks with penne: Prepare and season as above, using yellow wax beans instead of the flageolets, and romaine (or other flavorful green) instead of the green beans. Cut the wax beans into bite-sized pieces and blanch in pasta water. Sauté the leeks over low heat in a large skillet. Use a stubby pasta like fusilli or penne instead of linguine and start the pasta cooking only after the leeks are limp. Cut the romaine into bite-sized pieces and add these and the cooked wax beans to the skillet during the last few minutes of cooking. Serve as above.
Escarole and scallions: This simplified version eschews the bean presence entirely. Prepare and season as above, using linguine as the pasta and 2 tablespoons of olive oil instead of the oil/butter mixture. Cut 2 bunches of scallions into long, linguine-like strips and a head of escarole into bite-sized pieces. Start the pasta when the vegetables are prepared. Sauté the scallions until tender, but do not overcook. (If necessary, turn off the heat under the skillet.) Add the escarole pieces a few minutes before the pasta is done, so that they are just wilted through. Serve as above.
SPINACH AND CHICKPEAS WITH FUSILLI
[serves 2 generously]
The following is based on a recipe from one of our favorite vegetable cookbooks,The Cook’s Garden,by British food writer Lynda Brown .
cup dried chickpeas
2 bunches fresh spinach
8 ounces fusilli
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon crushed hot red pepper
2 or 3 cloves garlic, minced
sea salt and black pepper
grated Parmesan
Pick over and rinse the dried beans. Put to soak in an adequate amount of water for 4 to 6 hours. Two hours before preparing the meal, drain away and discard this liquid. Put the beans in a small pot, cover with water, and boil for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until they are tender. Do not overcook. When done, drain, reserving both beans and cooking liquid separa
tely.
Prep the spinach carefully, discarding damaged leaves and tough stems. Wash 3 times. Put the spinach dripping wet into a large pot, cover, and wilt over high heat. Turn into a colander and press out the liquid with the back of a spatula into a bowl. Drink this liquid—cook’s treat—while preparing the rest of the meal. Coarsely chop the pressed spinach and reserve.
Cook the pasta in boiling salted water. After it has been cooking for 5 minutes, heat the oil in a medium skillet over a low flame. Add the hot pepper and minced garlic, cook for 1 minute, then stir in the chickpeas, the chopped spinach, and some of the chickpea liquid to make a sauce. Season to taste with salt and black pepper. Drain the pasta and return to the pot. Toss in the vegetable mixture, divide into large bowls, and serve with grated Parmesan.
“THE BEST COOKIES IN THE WORLD”
As the quotation marks suggest, this claim comes not from us but from Roald Dahl, who begins his account of these confections inMemories with Food at Gipsy House33 with this typically abrupt and unanswerable assertion:
This is a true story about the best cookies in the world.
Now, if a phrase like were as self-explanatory as it might at first glance seem, we could ignore all the introduction and cut straight to the chase. But it isn’t. Replace it with, say, “the best little boy in the world,” and you see that if you know nothing about the person who is saying this, you can’t know what they mean. Such assertions are not statements of fact but volcanic eruptions from the heart.
That this particular eruption comes from the somewhat twisted heart of Roald Dahl, author of (among other wildly popular children’s books)Charlie and the Chocolate Factory andJames and the Giant Peach, as well as some hauntingly sardonic short stories for adults, only adds some piquancy to our anticipation—all the more so when we learn that he was writing the book between bouts of illness during the last year of his life (he died in 1990).
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