Breaded and frozen

I tweeted about this a few minutes ago, but it is perhaps worth a bit more than two dozen words.

When I was a kid, one of the few frozen foods my mother kept in the house was breaded fish sticks (I wonder what they were made of back in the 1950s and ’60s). They were a favorite of mine, charred to a cinder and laid three abreast onto white bread for an appallingly dry sandwich. I liked dry sandwiches in those days.

I thought of this a couple of weeks ago, when I’d breaded a couple of slices of excellent Tamworth-breed pork with a view to a schnitzel dinner. Just before I put the frying pan on the fire, Jackie and I looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Not tonight. A meat dinner is too much to contemplate, so let’s just have spaghetti with some of those ripe tomatoes.” Or words to that effect.

So, wondering whether breaded food could be frozen at home, I put the schnitzels onto a sheet pan lined with waxed paper and slipped them into the freezer. When they were frozen solid I sealed them in a bag with a sheet of plastic between them to keep them from sticking to each other.

Some days later we were able to face a pork dinner with equanimity, so I unwrapped the breaded schnitzels and put them on a rack to defrost, which didn’t take long, given their 3/8-inch thickness – I hadn’t pounded them too thin. Happily, almost no breading fell off as they thawed and there was no sign of moisture beneath the rack: good signs, I felt. 

I then cooked them in the normal way, in abundant neutral oil with a little clarified butter for flavor. They behaved very much like freshly breaded schnitzels in the pan. 

On the plate they were convincingly crisp and tender too. I felt that the flesh had a very slightly “steamy” quality to it, presumably owing to water artifacts in the defrosted meat, but I doubt that I’d have noticed this if I hadn’t been looking for it. It could be that industrial pork would have exuded enough moisture to spoil the crispness, and I wouldn’t do this with meat from anyone but a trusted farmer or butcher.

So, at least with high-quality meat, you can indeed freeze pre-breaded schnitzels / escallops / cutlets without any special ingredients or techniques. Useful to know. Maybe I’ll try making frozen fish sticks next time. Or maybe not.

Linguine with raw tuna: Beautiful but blah

In today’s “Cooking Off the Cuff” at WashingtonPost.com, I write about a really delicious tuna dish made in a kind of Sicilian style – including the doneness of the fish, which is cooked through but still nice and moist. Prepared this way, the fish stands up beautifully to the very flavorful garnish/sauce of tomatoes, garlic, olives and herbs.

A week or so later, I had what seemed like a brilliant idea for dinner using similar ingredients, this time in a pasta dish. But it turned out to be not so brilliant: I ignored my own advice about using cooked-through tuna with these strong flavors.

The idea was to make a pasta sauce very much like the garnish for the tuna dish I wrote about in The Post, then to add, at the table, diced raw tuna, which I figured would cook a bit in the heat of the linguine. It looked gorgeous, like little jewels (or maybe diced gummi bears). 

But the little points of blandness among all the higher flavors were almost disgusting. Dressing raw tuna with big flavors is one thing; putting it in a standalone environment of equally big flavors is quite another. An interesting lesson: Next time I’ll give the diced tuna a quick sauté, then add it to the sauce.

One successful thing about that dish (which was lovely apart from the tuna) was that I "filleted" the tomatoes beforehand and cooked the goo and seeds with herbs, garlic and lots of oil, then pressed this through a strainer and added it to the sauce when the time came. 

Delicious – I could have dressed pasta with this on its own or spooned it onto grilled bread. It reminded me of a lobster sauce base but without the lobster, if you see what I mean: viscous, concentrated, flavorsome.

Another salsa verde variation

Last month I made an Italian-style salsa verde using the season’s first field-grown local arugula (rocket) and described it on line in my Washington Post “Cooking Off the Cuff” column.

Last night, after that non-Chinese non-scallion scallion pancake, we had plain pan-fried fish - and peas, which continue to appear in our local farmers’ market. As a condiment, I made a similar salsa verde, but with a great market find: celery leaves. “Cutting celery” is a variety grown specifically for its leaves rather than its stalks. It is very powerful stuff on its own – the flavor of even a single leaf can be pretty mouth-filling, and not in an especially pleasant way. But food-processed into salsa verde it was excellent and aromatic. Even with all the anchovies and cornichons and capers and garlic and mustard and lemon juice and olive oil, its herby celery flavor sang through. Distinctive, and a great success. Surprisingly, it was very wine-friendly, perhaps more so than classic versions of this green sauce.

As other flavorful greens come my way in the course of the summer, I’ll be trying new variations. If any are worth mentioning, I’ll not fail to provide an update.

A scallion-less scallion pancake taken even further from its Chinese roots

In my Washington Post “Cooking Off the Cuff” column last week, I wrote about a Chinese-style scallion pancake made with spring garlic in place of the scallions: http://wapo.st/LN89gy. I said there that by tinkering with the fat/oil used to make and fry the pancake you could move it further from its Asian roots.

Here’s an example that we had with drinks earlier this evening. The dough is the same, but I brushed the rolled-out surface with olive oil rather than lard, and I seasoned it with sage and black pepper in addition to the chopped spring garlic and crunchy salt.

And of course I fried it in olive oil too; otherwise, it was the same as the pancake I describe in the column. It smelled great as it cooked (but then it did in peanut oil and lard too – it’s the aroma of caramelizing alliums is what it is), and - although it evoked a normal scallion pancake - it did indeed taste not-Chinese.

It reminded me of a crisper, flakier version of the fried dough – gnocco fritto – they serve in Emilia-Romagna with prosciutto and other cured meats. In fact, it would be a pretty good alternative to that if you wanted something crunchy and greasy to accompany a salumi platter. Though it would take pretty amazing salumi to hold their own against this treat.

Leftovers + leftovers = cannelloni

Today I peered into the refrigerator and found leftover potatoes from this and leftover turnip greens from a dish that will eventually be featured in “CookingOff the Cuff” over at The Washington Post. We’re going away for a couple weeks, and if I’d put those things into the freezer neither would have been worth defrosting. Just imagine a container of grainy, watery frozen boiled potatoes. What a thought!

I didn’t want to throw them away, of course, and I got to thinking about variations on bubble and squeak: We could have had something like that with fried eggs. Or I could have combined the vegetables with beaten eggs and made a frittata or a Spanish tortilla, which I could have topped with a spoonful of tomato sauce (a little of which remained in the fridge too).

The tomato sauce, however, made me think of pasta; the problem would be to integrate the potatoes without pushing the resulting dish over the top. Then I recalled that one (though by no means the only) way to make a sensible pasta dish with both potatoes and greens is to roll them up into cannelloni – which could be topped with the tomato sauce and baked.

So that’s what I did: I made an egg and a half’s worth of pasta dough, rolled it out, cut it into squares (well, more or less squares) and parboiled it. I put the turnip greens and potatoes (and some leftover arugula salsa verde) into the food processor and pulsed until everything was broken up. To that mixture I added a handful of grated pecorino, tasted the result and added some more pecorino. The cheese also tightened the mixture, which had inherited a fair bit of liquid from those greens.

I spooned portions of this onto the partially cooked pasta squares/rectangles (which I’d dried on a towel), rolled them up, laid them into an oiled baking pan, topped them with tomato sauce thinned with vegetable stock and baked them, covered with aluminum foil, in a 360 F (180 C) oven for half an hour.

Then I removed the foil, sprinkled the top with grated pecorino and a few slivered sage leaves and baked for another 15 minutes.

This turnip and potato filling made delicious cannelloni, and the few tablespoons of salsa verde in the mixture lent an unusual tart/savory dimension. And we ate them all up: there was not a leftover in sight.

Ignoring my own advice: the wages of stubbornness

Earlier this month, in The Washington Post’s “Cooking Off the Cuff,” I wrote about a nice way of cooking potatoes – here. In that posting I warned, “I don’t recommend doing this with potatoes that are less firm than my Russian bananas [fingerlings]. Something like a russet potato cut into chunks would too readily fall apart, not that it wouldn’t taste good.”

Well, a couple of nights ago I ignored my own sage advice and took a chance: I used russets for what could have been a nice variation on that dish. I’d been to the farmers’ market and bought some of that charming spring garlic whose pearly white cloves have not yet formed the papery skins that separate them in the mature heads. I thought it would be lovely quartered and butter-glazed along with potatoes.

Those firm-fleshed fingerlings were no longer available, and I stubbornly went forward with the plan using cut-up russets from the supermarket, to which I added the garlic heads, quartered, and then cooked with chicken stock, butter and rosemary.

As I’d known perfectly well, the potatoes couldn’t stand up to this treatment; they were just too fragile by the time they were tender. So I took a fork and mashed everything up, coarsely. It looked like hell, but tasted fine. I can’t say I was disappointed, because I knew just what was going to happen. But I felt silly for having hoped, even for a moment, that my original advice had been over-cautious.

Here’s what I ought to have done: I should have glazed the garlic separately, then added it to potatoes I’d cooked in a different way.

Next time, perhaps I’ll pay attention to my own warnings.

Another asparagus season, another asparagus pizza

At some point each spring, Jackie and I have asparagus pizza, most often with ricotta. Here’s an example from a couple of years ago. That one used little lengths of asparagus strewn over a buffalo-milk ricotta mixture.

Tonight – in mid-April, no less, very early for local asparagus – I did it differently: having used the top third of my asparagus stalks for another dish, which you’ll soon read about in The Washington Post’s “Cooking Off the Cuff,” I briefly boiled, then pureed, the other two thirds (barring a few tough and woody segments). Seasoned with salt and pepper, spread over pizza dough and drizzled with olive oil, this was baked for five minutes at 500 degrees F (260 C), then was topped with blobs of well drained sheep’s milk ricotta mixed with some grated pecorino, salt and pepper. The pizza went back into the oven and cooked for another six or seven minutes. If you have a real pizza oven, you’ll cut the 11- or 12-minute cooking time by two thirds, no doubt.

This worked very well: the asparagus puree was moist enough that it did not dry out during baking, and it made a more pizza-like dish than the scattering of asparagus tips had in my earlier version. And fluffy ricotta is a great topping, so long as you remember to season it well.

Yet another good way to use the rest of your asparagus (apart from just eating it, of course).