This post brought to you by foods that start with the letter G

Food is arriving weekly through Henry's Farm CSA again ("what's a CSA?" check this link), and at the beginning and end of the season, the major vegetable group is GREENS. We eat a lot of salad and stir-fries and search around for other options to keep up our interest in greens. When gnocchi (small Italian potato dumplings) went on sale recently, I bought a couple packages and figured they'd eventually come in handy, so bring on the unfamiliar greens!

Lamb's quarters showed up at the CSA pickup, and I traded some onions to get some more of this stuff in the hopes that we'd like it enough to eat it for two meals.
"Use as you would spinach" was the take-home message about this edible weed on the Brockman Family Farming blog. So Andrew and I did so with this earthy-tasting dish that was a team effort. We discovered that like most of the cooking greens, these are great cooked with garlic. Garlic shows up twice in our recipe: once as minced cloves, once in the pesto.
If you have leftovers, I recommend adding a bit of liquid when reheating to soften up the gnocchi.

Earthy Greens and Gnocchi
serves 4

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large clove garlic, minced
12 oz white button or cremini mushrooms, sliced 
One 17-oz package potato gnocchi
grated parmesan cheese, optional
1 bunch (about 8 oz. by weight) lamb's quarters, spinach, or Swiss chard
1 Tbsp basil pesto
1 Tbsp dried Italian seasoning
salt and pepper to taste

Clean all dirt and grit from greens, remove stems and chop greens down to bite-size if needed. Heat water to cook gnocchi according to package directions. Cook other ingredients while waiting for water to heat. Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet. Saute onion until tender, then add garlic and mushrooms and continue cooking. Stir in lamb's quarters, then Italian seasoning. Keep warm on low heat while waiting for gnocchi to cook. When greens are wilted, turn off heat and stir in pesto. Drain gnocchi and add to mixture in skillet. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with grated parmesan if desired.

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Mushrooms roasting on an open fire

On my birthday, I invited some friends over for a patio party, featuring food cooked on sticks over the fire in our chimenea. Of course, we roasted marshmallows and made s'mores, but we were also pleasantly surprised by how well some less-obvious foods turned out. People were holding their skewers both down at the usual front opening and also over the top of the chimney part. We discovered both spots are at the right temperature for cooking foods.

Experiment 1: Mushrooms
Thread several whole washed white button mushrooms on a skewer, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Patiently hold over an open fire, turning frequently, until they start to exude some liquid and get browned. I ate several skewers of these.

Experiment 2: Rather large beef kebabs
Big chunks of marinated beef, held at the right distance from the fire and frequently turned, cooks up to a juicy medium-rare right around the same time as the vegetables start to really soften. Careful not to hold so close to the hottest part of the flames that things scorch before the meat is cooked.

Experiment 3: Halloumi cheese
The label on this cheese claimed it was "the grilling cheese," so I decided to take it at its word and cut it into cubes to toast on my skewer. It does not really melt, so that keeps it on the skewer long enough to brown the outside and make the cube puff up a little. Crispy texture on the outside contrasts with fluffy center.

Try these yourself the next time you're building a fire!

In other fantastic flame-cooking news, the indoor barbecue grill is working great!

 It was a huge success for making s'mores and toasting strawberries and angel food cake bits at a party on a rainy day the week before my birthday. Hooray for whoever installed that ventilation system when the outdoor barbecue was enclosed in the addition!

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This is a corn fungus. Instead of throwing it out, I ate it for lunch.

Sitting on my cutting board here in nice little slices is huitlacoche, or corn smut. It's a fungal disease that happens to corn kernels, turning them into giant gray bulbous mushrooms instead of tightly packed rows of yellow kernels. It's not considered a problem so much as an alternate food source to our Mexican neighbors, and they introduced the idea to Americans.
More info about huitlacoche and a scarier-looking photo available at http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Articles/Mexican-Ingredients-1032/huitlacoche.aspx
I'm sure it's easy to come by here in Illinois corn country, but I've only seen one seller of huitlacoche so far, the person I talked to at the Bloomington Farmer's Market who sold me a little clump for a dollar.

My plan: cut it in slices, saute it and add it with some sauteed zucchini to a quesadilla.

The result: my huitlacoche did not live up to its vaunted reputation for truffle-like smoky goodness. Maybe there wasn't enough, maybe I didn't use the correct method for cooking it, maybe the batch I had was unusually bland, but you know your corn fungus isn't impressive when zucchini has a more pronounced flavor. I found that although there was fungus in every bite of my lunch, it was too subtle for me to notice it most of the time.

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Black garlic: seems weird, tastes delicious

My co-worker introduced me to an ingredient an Asian friend of hers insisted that she try: black garlic. The description of its flavor was intriguing to me, so my co-worker brought me some from her stash at home.

I looked up a little more information about the process of creating black garlic and found these sites about it helpful: http://blackgarlic.com/how-its-made; http://passionatefoodie.blogspot.com/2009/04/black-garlic.html; http://www.philly.com/inquirer/food/20100107_Garlic_in_a_new_hue__Black.html?viewAll=y
I had no idea that the process of creating black garlic out of ordinary garlic was so time-consuming. We're talking fermentation for weeks and then a drying process.

Straight out of the papery skin, the name "black garlic" is not kidding about the color. The skin is brown and smoky-smelling, and the cloves themselves are black and shriveled. They pull away pretty easily from their papery cases because they have shriveled and have fairly dry exteriors. When I cut them, they had a gummy texture a bit like licorice candy, which is the same color as black garlic. The flavor is reminiscent of roasted garlic, but there is an added tang from fermentation.

Not knowing quite where to start with the stuff, I thought I'd just substitute it for ordinary sauteed garlic in a recipe I already had planned for the week: meatless mushroom Stroganoff sauce on pasta. Here is the garlic on the cutting board with the mushrooms:

I halved a few cloves lengthwise and sliced them, putting the garlic into the saute pan with the mushrooms to cook in olive oil. Then in went the sour cream, lots of pepper, a little salt. I served the sauce on spaghetti noodles.

The smell in the pan was fascinating: garlicky, something a little smoky or roasted with that faint whiff of fermented tanginess, mixed with the savory scent of cooking mushrooms. The mixture was intriguing to my nose and heavenly on the tongue, especially since every drop of the sour cream was imbued with a light black garlic flavor. I came away from the meal believing that black garlic and mushrooms were eternal soul mates.

The next experiment with the rest of the black garlic was using it to dress up some smashed potatoes (a more rustic mashed potato in which I don't bother peeling and don't bother mashing until smooth). Again, I just substituted the black garlic for ordinary garlic. When I make a potful of smashed potatoes, I often put five or six cloves of whole, peeled garlic in the cooking water to cook along with the potatoes. When the potatoes are done, the garlic is softened enough that it just melts into the potato mash. No so with the black garlic. Those cloves, even after cooking longer than 20 minutes, were determined to remain intact and squishy-rubbery. The potato masher cut a couple into some thick slices, at best. The black garlic flavor didn't really transfer to the potato mass as a whole, but some bites were punctuated by strong smoky-tangy flavor and the garlic gave a bit more resistance to the teeth than the potato chunks. Nothing unpleasant about it, but the experience left me wishing I had cut the garlic cloves in smaller pieces before cooking.

Fried potato mush made from the leftovers was an awakening for the nasal cavities as the black garlic pieces touching the frying pan launched a smell that was like dark brown toast close to burning, smeared with roasted garlic. A couple of times, I flavored my mush with slices of leftover turkey Italian sausage. The sausage and garlic were bright lights in a fog of plain potato, making for a more exciting mush than I've ever eaten before.

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Stuffed dough pockets: the food of many folk

These scrumptious, savory pockets of bready dough with a surprise inside are beloved in many cultures. They come in fried versions, like empanadas in Latin America or samosas in India. Some are boiled, like German Klösse and (sometimes, when not fried or baked) Polish pierogi. Some are baked, like Italian calzone or Jamaican patties or like this week's experiment, Russian pirozhki.

A Russian-speaking colleague of Andrew's and neighbor of ours in Calgary gave me a cookbook for my last birthday, Cuisines of the Caucasus Mountains by Kay Shaw Nelson. Following her recipes, I made pirozhki and a vegetable-anchovy relish that tasted pretty good as a dip for the bready pockets. Our dinner was freshly-baked pirozhki (including one for each of us that I stuffed with cherry jam for dessert), relish and leftovers of lentil-barley stew flavored with smoked turkey tail.

Most interesting parts of the recipes: the mushroom filling for the pirozhki is flavored with nutmeg and the thickener for the relish is ground almonds. I had plenty of both to spare for a meal for two new parents.

I was amazed at how much the relish's flavor mellowed out over time. The first meal, eight hours after I made the relish, the taste was predominantly green onion and anchovy. Two days later, when I ate leftovers, the flavors were fully incorporated into a fresh, herby mixture with a hint of salt and fish. 

Note to self for next time: seal the pirozhki better before baking. Many of them broke open along the seam and leaked some juices onto the baking pan. Maybe instead of just folding over and pressing closed, I should have rolled the filled bundles in my hands to make them seamless.

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