Doing runners

 

 

Recently returned from a trip back to the UK where there was only one concern for serious-minded people: what to do with the glut of garden runner beans?

My mother’s vegetable garden has been in runner terms the gift that keeps on giving. However many times my father goes down to water the plants he returns with an armful of long, green, rough-skinned beans. My parents have had them as a side dish for pretty much everything they’ve eaten for the last month. And they work very well, with just a minimum of additions: a little salt and pepper, a glug of olive oil perhaps or knob of butter. There’s something deliciously moreish about them, something to do with the slightly yielding bite in the mouth and slippery finish.

I smuggled a bundle in my luggage back to China. Not that they don’t have them here, or at least a variety. Unfortunately the selections in the greengrocer’s always tend to be on the pale and dry side, and unappealing for that. While on the plane, between sleep, dreams and the films on the small screen, I concocted recipes, imagined cooking in the kitchen.

What goes better with beans than other beans? Italian soups like minestrone are good examples of bean pairings and the idea of different genera together in varying shapes and sizes tickled my tastebuds as I tried in vain to get some sleep in the darkened cabin. In this case it would be Phaseolus coccineus paired with Phaseolus vulgaris, that’s runners and cannellini. A kind of warm slightly stewed salad-y dish.

Cannellini bean stew with runner beans. 

• big handful of runner beans, prepared (rinsed, topped and tailed, sides trimmed and sliced thinly on the diagonal).
• 1 x 400g tin cannellini beans (or any kidney bean variety).
• half an onion, sliced.
• palmful of lemon thyme, chopped.
• generous pinch of paprika.
• half a big tomato, or one medium, chopped roughly.
• vegetable stock, about half a coffee cup
• couple of bay leaves
• salt and pepper
• olive oil
• one clove of garlic, sliced thinly

 

First cook the runners by placing them in a largeish pan of salted boiling water. They’ll take about five minutes, maybe less, until tender. You want them slightly floppy but gently al dente. Meanwhile lightly fry the onions and garlic in oil in a flat-bottomed pan until softened then stir in the cannellini, drained and rinsed from the tin, and the herbs. Pour in the stock and let everything bubble and stew away on a low heat for about three to five minutes. Add the tomatoes and paprika, stir in well and let cook for another minute or so. Finally jumble in the runners and season, making sure everything is amalgamated. Remove the bay leaves. I let this sit for ten minutes or so before serving and you could even chill it in the fridge or eat it while hot. Some bread might be a good idea to, as the Italians say, fare la scarpetta. Basically to mop things up.

Allow me a whimsical digression. The above Italianism, and its translation, I think hold perhaps the key to the origin of a literary character’s name: Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta , protagonist of a series of crime novels. Fare la scarpetta, as already suggested, translates at least in culinary terms to a mopping up, bread used to wipe around the pan or plate containing the meal just eaten as a way of soaking up the delectable juices and flavours left behind. Furthermore the word che in Italian is often used in exclamations, such as che palle! (what a drag!) or che casino! (what a mess!). The forename Kay and che are homophones. So that, and this is just a theory, the name given by Patricia Cornwell to her US-born sleuth could translate as: What a Clean-Up! Suitable name for a crime-solver, methinks…case closed?

For the remaining runners the next day I made a simple ratatouille. The prepared beans went into a lidded saucepan with half an aubergine, chunkily chopped, a tomato similarly dissected, half a quartered onion, dash of tomato puree, bay leaves, garlic clove sliced, good scattering of dried oregano, generous glug of olive oil, salt and pepper. Lid on, low heat and everythig just left to cook gently for about forty minutes. Bread was the only other thing needed. And that cleans this one up.

 

 

 

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I’ve developed a penchant for potato salads. Warm ones. The kind where the freshly-cooked spuds, still steaming from the pan or crisp from the oven, are immediately mingled with a selection of other ingredients, tossed with a dressing, then devoured.

The principal reason for this relatively sudden tuber-titillation is I’ve at last discovered a good source of them. Every Sunday in the basement of one of the large shopping centres near my workplace a market is held selling all variety of organic produce, from soaps to shoes. In one corner there’s a little – but bountiful – farmer’s market and one stall in particular always has a good tub of spuds. They’re the waxy variety and as such perfect for jumbling into a salad.

Back home, laden with brown paper bags (aside from the environmental benefits, the crinkle of these carriers is aesthetically superior to the slippery shuffle of plastic), I begin preparing the potatoes. Scrubbed and washed I then cut each along the diagonal, quartering those of slightly bigger size so all the pieces are of similar proportions.

Into a pan of cold salted water they go, with a sprig of mint, and brought up to the boil. The smell of mint and boiling spuds is evocative of summer days in Somerset and I think I add the herb for that reason alone. I either par-boil or fully cook the potatoes, depending what I’m going to do with them afterwards.

The first salad I made was a combination of the freshly-boiled potatoes, delicious peppery rocket and a kind of camembert (both these bought from the same market), all tossed together with quite a robust dressing of olive oil, salt and cider vinegar. The cheese melted superbly and the rocket had a snap to it that only the freshest variety has. Didn’t neeed anything else apart from a glass of white wine to wash it down.

After that I began to experiment more, with dressings – I’ve used combinations of all or some of: lemon juice, grain mustard, different flavoured vinegars and oils,  capers, olives, different herbs, sun-dried tomatoes. I’m planning an Asian twist soon, using miso and soy, among other flavours.

For my most recent confection I par-boiled the spuds, drained them, then returned them to the pan with a lid on. Here I shook them around, to rough up the edges. I was going to put them in the oven and I wanted that kind of crispiness this sort of treatment gives. While the potatoes were roasting in oil I made a basic pesto of basil, pine nuts, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and grated parmesan, all the ingredients whizzed up until I got a smooth paste.

When the potatoes were verging on being ready I added some small tomatoes, halved, to the oven. I have a thing about crisp potatoes and softening tomatoes cooking together. At the end I sprinkled over some dukkah – a spice and nut mix used in Egyptian cookery – just to lift the whole thing. I’d had a jar in my cupboard for a while and was looking for a good opportunity to use it; this was it.

Spuds and tomatoes on the plate, rinsed baby spinach ripped over  pesto drizzled on with a little more oil just to loosen things up. Once again, nothing more needed except a glass of chilled white wine.

So it goes

 

 

 

What have I gone and done? Even after proselytising just the other day about the necessity for sticking to the script when it comes to certain dishes I am now guilty of messing things up, of free-associating, of going all stream-of-consciousness – on a salad, of all things.

It’s not just a salad either. Gloria wouldn’t like me calling it that, neither would she appreciate it if I left out cucumber from the recipe, despite my naive incredulity at its traditional presence as a key ingredient. I’m talking about panzanella, of course – the keen-eyed of you will have noticed the pictorial clues –  although given my experimentation I’m tempted to rename it as ‘canzanella’ for reasons which will become apparent.

Sitting at work I was, where I am wont to mull over the food preparation for the evening, a multi-stranded thought process encompassing the presence or otherwise of required ingredients in my store cupboard (singular), following that the detail of where I can purchase those items which, as I scan, are absent from my shelves. That detail involves a mental geographical assimilation of the city: the likely routes I am to take, which means of transport will be most favourable in each case, whether I go home first, how far I can totter on an overloaded bicycle, why there isn’t a magic shop very near to where I live where all the things I need are always available.

But half the fun is finding everything. I like a mini-adventure, a quest if you will. I knew that at home I had half a stale ciabatta, I want to say loafing about, getting staler. But I wasn’t sure if it had got to the point where even a douse of red-wine vinegar and oil wouldn’t revive it. That’s when, mid-afternoon, the clock ticking, I decided to augment the ‘salad’ with beans. Yes. Cannellini, borlotti. That kind.

The route home was made, as ever, by way of Twin’s where I was able to get the aforementioned vinegar as well as sundry other items. But then, arriving home, I realised I had no red onions and so a visit to the unfriendly greengrocer’s had to be made. The woman grunted at me as usual and by now our conversation exists entirely of my nervous half-smile and her throaty non-committance. I know my onions here, that’s for sure.

The bread was salvageable and, indeed, ideal. I soused it and left it to soak, before halving tomatoes, letting them macerate with salt, pepper and oil. I love the word macerate, it seems so violent-sounding for what is in fact an exercise in softening. A mix of lacerate and massacre. Meanwhile I cooked the beans – the horror, the horror – having decided that I wanted a more substantial dish than the original version affords. These I cooked gently with the onion so the flavours combined. Everything else could just be jumbled in together: the cucumber – yes – skinned and chopped, capers, torn basil leaves, all combined with the bread and tomatoes, both oozing delectable juices. I left the beans to cool before chucking those in too. In the end they didn’t really add anything except a little more bulk.

Probably the jury’s out on canzanella. Typing the word into a popular search engine reveals its popularity as a surname. There is also a B&B in Naples named so – the city I can vouch for, the establishment not – which makes me think that I haven’t just coined a word but merely appropriated it from some other context. Possible derivation from ‘canzone’ which means song, and so I get an image, ludicrously, of the old stereotypes of the moustachioed mandolin player at the window of some local Lollobrigida, the cicadas humming in the olive groves and everybody blissfully uncaring of economic meltdown, social deprivation and political corruption. Eppur si muove.

There is a way.

In China when they ask me what I like to cook, and I don’t respond with ‘Chinese food’, I receive a kind of incredulous stare and barely suppressed snort of laughter. ‘You cook English food then?’ Because there cannot be an alternative. Describing that cooking is not totally about culturally- accepted and well-known dishes and more about putting together ingredients that have a natural affinity with each other, is, it seems, conceptually too difficult to grasp. If it doesn’t have a name, it isn’t worth bothering with. I could say, ‘Italian food’ and then there are the sighs of approval, the knowing looks: ‘Ah yes, pizza and pasta.’ It’s really not that simple….

Yet in Italy too there exists a similar culinary snobbery. There is a way of making things. There is a way, and there is no argument. On my recent trip I stayed in Arezzo with some friends and, on the first night, Gloria, a feisty Florentine, made us caponata. A Sicilian dish, yes, but the way I was invited to watch the procedure left me in no doubt this was the correct cooking method.

‘You should always blanch the celery first. Shouldn’t you.’ She was not asking for my approval.

Over the nine days I spent in the Beautiful Country I ate cappellacci di zucca in Ferrara, cacio e pepe in Rome and many delicious seafood antipasti in Pescara but that caponata, the mingling of the sweet and sour, was the one that tingled my tastebuds the most. Even better when we had it cold as part of a picnic lunch high in the Tuscan hills the following day.

So it was the first meal I made when I came back. Sourcing the ingredients was not difficult, a cycle down to Twin’s was sufficient and pop to the greengrocer’s. And what I wanted most of all, was craving actually, was to have celery as the star. Controversial, perhaps, as the vegetable gets a poor press, relegated to a support act in various sauce bases and derided usually for its lack of flavour. However I noticed that, on the Adriatic coast, as a motif through many of the fish dishes, from insalata di mare to the stock for the mussels, little ridged pieces of celery came to prominence.

In my recreation of the Sicilian speciality I stuck as close as I could to how I remembered Gloria go about it. The tedious woman in the newspaper put chocolate in hers, and I wasn’t going to do that. There is a way, after all.

First job was to cook the aubergine. I could only find one of the large round varieties, but I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as the veg is cut up into bite-sized chunks and salted for at least half an hour then patted dry.  Did it in batches, frying the pieces until brown in very hot oil – I used a shallow pan – before removing. At the same time the celery, chopped up into similar-sized briquettes, was blanched in boiling water for about thirty seconds.

I think the original recipe calls for shallots, and now I remember Gloria used a leek, but I had an onion and so that’s what I used. Diced and gently sautéed in the same oil with the celery. Then I basically jumbled most of the other ingredients in, the olives – green, which I hate on their own, but seem to enjoy in things these days – capers (Gloria said to only use the ones in salt as the vinegar-soaked variety have little flavour – but, again, I didn’t have/couldn’t find any of those), raisins and finally the passata which I made myself by combining a tin of chopped tomatoes with some olive oil, salt and pepper and reducing for about fifteen minutes. I was salivating. Then the aubergines got their welcome return, the lid was closed and I walked away to watch an episode of this, leaving the – what would you call it – the stew, I suppose, on a low heat to combine in a heavenly way.

My friend from Firenze bemoaned slightly the lack of a vinegary finish to her dish, and perhaps she was right. I had something on hand to add if necessary. But first, the caponata was ready and I toasted some pine nuts and tore up basil leaves as a garnish. Tasting, I realised that a little acidity was needed to offset the agrodolce. Splash of apple cider vinegar and the dish was ready.

And I have some left. Those Tuscan hills are only memories now though.

 

Assembly line

As the days get sunnier, the evenings warmer, I find I am less inclined to stand at the kitchen stove, stirring and ruminating. Much more likely to be sitting outside somewhere, watching the world go by.

Any cooking I have done recently has been of the quick and necessary variety: a swift dish of aglio e oglio perhaps, that failsafe combination of spaghetti, garlic, oil, parmesan, chilli flakes and, in my version, chopped parsley: steak or chicken breasts, grilled with seasoning and herbs and served with a salad. Indeed, it has become less about cooking and more about assembling. Jumbling things together that require little or no actual stove-time but just some judicious chopping, slicing and adding of condiments.

In an effort to ween myself off my diet of lunchtime sandwiches at work I’ve spent some evenings preparing large and fairly elaborate salads which serve not only as an effortless supper option but a ready-made lunchbox the next day. I took a leaf from the good people at Leon and adapted their Original Superfood Salad to something that I could replicate with what was at hand. I found some asparagus and mange-tout, walnuts, pine-nuts, feta, chicken and bundles of fresh herbs – basil, mint and parsley. The chicken I lathered in ras-el-hanout and fried until golden and sticky. The nuts I chopped and toasted lightly. The whole lot I threw into a bowl and mixed with oil and lemon juice. Turned out to be pretty good.

Next time I was a bit more ambitious and, to that end, possibly less successful.  Went for a meatball-based melange this time, with spiced aubergines, tomatoes and cucumber as well as those nuts and herbs. I used beef and meant to run some chermoula through it, though I forgot. Result was a little dry due I think to the predominance of lean to fat in the mince. Still it was a worthy and fairly tasty affair and the feeling of being able to produce it at lunch – look what I made – made up for what might have been lacking in flavour.

Oh, and I also made pesto. Quite a good vibrant one with plenty of salty cheese, the way I like it. I ate it over four days with gnocchi and nothing else. I didn’t make my own pasta because I couldn’t be bothered although I feel sure, as the days darken, you will find me once again hunched over the metal worktop, head in the simmer, mind on the boil. I think I will use these warmer months to experiment a little more, to post some more abstract pieces and I’m also preparing something musical which, I hope, should emerge soon….