Zuni Pepper Relish

September 30, 2013 Rivka

This past Sunday, thousands of DC residents who work for government frantically checked email to see whether they'd be considered essential staff in the event of a government shutdown. Politicians continued to refine the art of ignorant obstructionism. This town became even more this town-ish.

...and the rest of us? Well, we went outside.

Government shutdown notwithstanding September 2013 should go down in the history books as a glorious time in this town. The weather has been incredible: clear skies, cool breeze, not too much rain. It's practically screaming at you to stop being an idiot, get up off your butt, and get stuff done. The pols may not listen, but I will.

We spent the morning at the National Arboretum, an outdoor oasis owned by the Department of Agriculture (government! Ahh!) right in the middle of Northeast. It's got big, green pastures, hundreds of varietals of plants, trees, and herbs, and even a separate garden with twenty kinds of chile peppers. The first time we went was for a birthday party that actually happened elsewhere -- oops! -- but we were so taken with the expanses of green in the middle of the city, we decided to go back.

We roamed the grounds for an hour, and then -- because what's a hike without a picnic? -- we chose a speckled sunny spot in the middle of one of the gardens, put down a big blanket, and laid out a majorly awesome spread of food. We covered the blanket with fresh harissa, hummus, three kinds of bread, zaatar-roasted eggplant, cucs, sprouts, avocados, and plenty of feta cheese.

Oh, and of course, some of this pepper spread.

Put thoughts of saccharine, mushy relish out of your mind. Would the Zuni Cafe ever commit such a crime? Of course not. It's more of a salad, this pepper relish. It's meaty and rich, the perfect balance of tangy and sweet. At Zuni, they pair it with lamb, quail, and sea bass. I've yet to try any of these combinations, as I've been too busy spooning heaps of it onto sourdough toast.

For our Sunday outing, I added about 1/2 a cup of the relish to a big bowl of simply cooked white kidney beans, and tossed the mixture with whole peppercorns and plenty of olive oil. The resulting bean-pepper salad was great on its own, but especially tasty piled on baguette with avocado and feta. One of these days, I'll get around to using it for its intended purpose. But between you and me, there's no rush.

Zuni Pepper RelishAdapted from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook makes about 1 1/3 cups (I doubled it)
2 medium bell peppers (I like red or yellow) 1 1/2 tablespoons dried currants 2 teaspoons sherry or red wine vinegar 1/2 teaspoon warm water 3 tablespoons pine nuts 1 tablespoon freshly chopped basil 2 small garlic cloves, pounded into a paste 3 tablespoons good olive oil 1 to 2 tablespoons sweet sherry or marsala (or substitute 1 teaspoon sherry/wine vinegar and a pinch of sugar) salt
Combine the currants, vinegar, and warm water. Set aside to plump up while you roast the peppers.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Lay peppers on a shallow roasting pan and place on the top rack of the oven. Turn the peppers as their skins start to brown, and roast them for 25-30 minutes, until they are blistered all over and have nearly collapsed.
On a separate, smaller, roasting pan, roast the pine nuts just to warm through, about 4 minutes. Remove and set aside.
Transfer the roasted peppers to a bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Once the peppers are cool enough to handle (about 15 minutes), slip the skins off of the peppers. It's okay if bits of skin remain on the peppers; try to avoid running them under water, since you'll lose much of their flavor that way. Instead, peel the skins over a bowl to catch the juices; if the skins stubbornly stick to your hands, run your hands under water.
Remove the stems, membrane, and seeds from the peppers. Dice the peppers and combine in a bowl with their juices, holding back any seeds that may have fallen in with the pepper liquid.
Combine the peppers, pine nuts, currants, basil, garlic, oil, and sherry/marsala. Taste, and season as desired. Serve at room temperature.
Serving suggestions:
alongside lamb, quail, or chicken
as bruschetta on toast
stirred into a big bowl of cooked white beans for a great fall salad
on pizza, topped with smoked mozzarella
as a sauce for grilled white fish (tilapia, rockfish, snapper, etc)

| LATEST |

Featured

Blue Chair Fruit's Black Raspberry Jam

One Saturday night a few weeks ago, friends tipped us off that Butler's Orchard had snap peas and blueberries and black raspberries all ready to go at once. Needless to say, we canceled all other plans for the next day, and by 8:30 am Sunday morning, we were off to the races.

Blueberries are awesome to pick with an 18-month old. They free from the bush easily, they're plentiful at toddler height, and us oldies can reach the higher ones and save our backs while the kid gets the low-hanging fruit. We came home with 5 pounds of blueberries, 5 pounds of black raspberries, and stains just about everywhere.

Thai Grapefruit Salad

If you've seen me in the past few weeks and expressed even vague interest in Asian food and/or cooking, I've probably bored you to tears gushing on about the best cookbook of the year (IMHO), 101 Easy Asian Recipes. The title is both accurate and a bit tongue-in-cheek, since it makes the book sound like something fusion-y and inauthentic and terrible, when in fact, it inauthentic, and unabashedly so, and wonderful. The back of the book has big speech bubbles boasting "100% inauthentic" and "very good" and "easy, really." It's fab.

The book comes from Peter Meehan, who has worked with David Chang (Momofuku) and Danny Bowein (Mission Chinese) for years, co-authored the Momofuku cookbook, and now edits Lucky Peach magazine. He's clearly a meticulous guy who gets how Asian food works -- the balance of flavors, the precision with cooking times, etc. But this book takes a step away from the "this has 500 ingredients/steps, but it's worth it"-style of recipes, opting instead for formulas that follow two important ground rules: no deep-frying, and no recipes within recipes. The rationale: Asian food isn't just for Sunday projects, it's for weeknight dinner with kids. Good bless you, Peter Meehan.

Mango Sticky Rice

've had this Thai glutinous rice sitting in the bottom of my cupboard for months, but never quite worked up the guts to make it into something until, a few weeks ago, the waiter at our little Laotian spot in the neighborhood told me that sticky rice may be the easiest thing on their menu to make at home. That doesn't necessarily say much, considering the menu includes items like crispy rice salad (involving rice that's cooked, mixed with other stuff, formed into balls, deep-fried, broken into pieces, and tossed with a gazillion other ingredients, which I know only because I've made it and whoa, pain in the butt doesn't even start). Still: "easier" was motivation enough not to let that rice sit untouched.

Winter 2016: Odds and Ends

Not a full post today, but a bunch of odds and ends that I've been meaning to share.

Marmalading: That's what kept me out of trouble and away from insanity during our two-ish weeks of hibernation under an impenetrable and, apparently, unplowable 30 inches of snow. (Attention DC officials: occasionally, it snows here. Surprise! Buy another plow or two.) Fortunately, my fridge was chock-full of citrus you've never heard us, because Cathy went to Texas for a marathon series of cooking classes, and her trip coincided with Central Market's wonderful Citrus Festival, and she is a goddess and a wonderful friend and a crazy lover of citrus like yours truly. (I paid her in Barcelonian anchovies, yes). For most of last weekend, our home smelled like a heavenly mix of chartreuse hot cocoa (thank you Pam!) and boiling citrus peel. Not shabby. Not shabby at all.

Povitica: The Best Babka Ever

It's snowing! It's snowing! THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING! I hope you bought flour and sugar. I hope you happen to have walnuts in the house. Yes? Wonderful.

Meet my latest, love, the Povitica. It comes from my other latest love, the Great British Baking Show. If I may, for just a moment, evangelize on its (the show's) behalf, it is the sweetest, coziest little food show on television. Contestants do their preparation in advance, and come to weekly competition with dog-eared copies of recipes they’ve developed. If someone runs behind, others pitch in to help out. Even the hosts of the show sometimes provide assistance. There’s a lot of smiling and hugging, absolutely no product placement, and so much Englishness, you won’t know what to do with yourself. It's Victorian sponge for miles.

Don't let the coziness fool you: each episode brings a "bake" more ambitious than the last. There are hot-water pastries and raised yeasted loaves, tiered pies and sculptured cakes. There are desserts you’ve never heard of, from Germany and Poland and France and Croatia, which if you saw in a cookbook might give you pause: lots of ingredients, pages of instruction, no sense of what the thing is supposed to look like if baked correctly. But when a bunch of (okay, very accomplished) home bakers give these recipes a go, under the pressure of a short timeline a televised competition, you watch them, and you think, yeah, maybe I could do that. One minute I’m watching the show, then next, I’m all I must have this in my oven now. That is why last week I up and baked a dobos torte, just because. And then this week, I got baking shpilkes again, so I went totally mad and baked my beloved povitica.

Persimmon Walnut Bread

This is a happy-accident story, but it doesn't start that way. This past fall, I was determined to make hachiya persimmons into smooth, spiced butter. But each time I tried, I created something so ruined, so mouth-dryingly inedible, that I had to dump the entire thing. I did this too many times. cough three.

Fuyu persimmons are sweet and crunchy. They can be eaten as you would an apple. Hachiya persimmons are not as friendly. If you buy them hard, you must wait to eat them, or you will take a bite and your entire mouth will turn dry and chalky, like what tannins in wine do to your mouth but unpleasant, a thousand times unpleasant. To avoid this, you must tend to your hachiyas: put them in a paper bag, set them somewhere warm but not too warm, encourage them to ripen but protect them dutifully against spoilage. Hachiyas can be eaten when they are soft all over, and plump like a balloon. At that point, their astringency goes away, leaving behind soft, floral-flavored flesh that's wonderful as is, or in dozens of baked goods.

The catch, though, is that if even one bit of the persimmon hasn't reached that perfect stage of ripeness, its astringency will infiltrate and ruin whatever you're making with it. This is especially true in the case of butter, where the persimmons are cooked together and then pureed. And so it was for me, time after time, I found persimmons, coddled them to ripeness, cooked them, blended them, tasted them, cursed, and tossed the mixture into the trash. So wasteful, so frustrating. There must be a better way.

Sprout Chaat Salad + New Site!

I want desperately to tell you all about this chaat-style salad I've been making almost daily, but it's probably rude to offer guests something to eat without first saying hi, so:

Hi! I've got a new home.

Not Derby Pie is still there - go see for yourself - but it was time for a fresh start. I never really had the technical wherewithal to manage my own website. I faked it pretty well for 8 (!) years, but with every automatic Wordpress update, my site would break a little bit more – the header, gone! the comments, gone! etc – and late last year, I finally decided I needed a full reboot. So, here we are: From now on, I'll be sharing new recipes over here, at rivkafriedman.net.

I used Squarespace to build this site, and I hope you love its clean interface as much as I do. The search function is simpler, the design is 100% mobile-friendly, and I've managed to haul all of my old posts over to this new home, with only minor glitches in spacing and captions and whatnot. I'm 90% of the way there. The biggest issue is that ingredient lists in recipes transfer as a block, not a list. You may see some other minor formatting issues for a little while longer. If a recipe looks particularly garbled, you can always find it back on NDP.

New year, new start. I'm so excited to finally share this with you.

Now then, onto business. 2016's first sprouts are ready for a salad.

Maple Walnut Squares

I know it's almost Christmas, but I'm about one month behind (on everything) and right now, I need to commit a tiny act of Thanksgiving blasphemy. I tell you this: the best dessert I ate on Thanksgiving was not pie.

By 7 pm the evening of the holiday, our house was full of neighbors who had decided to stay local. Our table was overflowing with pies, many of which our friends had brought: a glistening, lattice-topped sour cherry pie; several bourbon/brandy-filled pumpkin pies; a gorgeous rendition of Deb's chocolate tart with gingersnap crust (a slice of which I carefully set aside for myself, which my unsuspecting and always-cleaning lady accidentally threw away, *sob*) and many more. I tried too many; I loved them all. But I think my favorite bite of all was a slice of these maple walnut squares.

How to Give Thanks

Croissants (really, I made croissants) + other croissant-ish things

| hEALTHY |

Featured

Sprout Chaat Salad + New Site!

I want desperately to tell you all about this chaat-style salad I've been making almost daily, but it's probably rude to offer guests something to eat without first saying hi, so:

Hi! I've got a new home.

New year, new start. I'm so excited to finally share this with you.

Now then, onto business. 2016's first sprouts are ready for a salad.

Fennel frond pesto + what to do with those pesky stalks

Asparagus Toasts with Pistachios and Mint

Eggplant-Walnut Pâté + Passover Ideas

Best Mushroom Pizza (or any white pie, really)

Lentils and Rice with Tamarind Sauce and Dukkah

Big Kale Salad with Pomegranate and Feta

Punchy Crunchy Ginger Salad

| BreakfAST |

Featured

Povitica: The Best Babka Ever

It's snowing! It's snowing! THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING! I hope you bought flour and sugar. I hope you happen to have walnuts in the house. Yes? Wonderful.