Recipes By Martha Rose Shulman
1499 recipes found
Herb Fritters
Inspired by a recipe in Clifford A. Wright’s “The Little Foods of the Mediterranean,” these fritters are light and delicate. You can use a mix of herbs and finely chopped greens – mild ones like spinach and chard, or more robust greens like dandelion or arugula – or all herbs, or all greens. You can also use this batter as a vehicle for other finely chopped or grated vegetables, like cabbage or carrots, onions or leeks. The fritters make a great hors d’oeuvre or side dish.
Teff Polenta With Toasted Hazelnut Oil
Teff is a challenging grain to work with. The flavor is strong, the grains tiny, and the mixture stiffens up very quickly once the grains are cooked. The chef Jason Bond makes a comforting teff polenta at his Bondir restaurants in Cambridge and Concord, Mass. He cooks the teff on top of the stove, in milk, and adds a finely chopped chipotle chile to the mix, which contributes a nice smoky/hot flavor. I liked the idea of teff polenta, and tried a few different methods for it. Teff will cook up in about 20 minutes on top of the stove, but if you use the oven-baked method outlined here, modeled on the method I often use for cornmeal polenta, you will get a creamier result. The oven method takes much longer, but the time is unsupervised – no frequent stirring as you must do on the top of the stove. This method doesn’t work so well if you use milk, however, because the milk forms too much skin in the oven, which forms curds when you stir the mixture (though I do like the flavor of the teff cooked in milk a lot). I tested the recipe using both stock and water, and liked both results equally. The chipotle adds a nice smoky/spicy flavor to the teff, but you can leave it out and just focus on the nutty flavor of the teff alone, with the hazelnut oil. I love the toasted hazelnut oil finish; it harmonizes with the nutty/earthy flavor of this grain. Serve the teff as a side dish or top with roasted vegetables or a vegetable or bean stew. You can also allow the teff to stiffen, then cut into squares and fry in the squares oil or grill them. You will get best results if you soak the teff for a few hours or overnight.
Collard Greens With Farro
Farro with anything is comfort food, and the combination of farro and collard greens is particularly hearty and nutritious. The time required to cook the farro will depend on how long it has been sitting on your shelf. When it’s less than a year old, farro softens nicely. The older it is, the longer it will need to cook.
Skillet Beet and Farro Salad
This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting. Cook your farro until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.
Monkfish à la Provençale
Gigot de Mer à la Provençale is roasted monkfish seasoned with rosemary, thyme, bay leaf and garlic that is served on a bed of ratatouille. What could be more Provençale?
Endive, Apple and Kasha Salad
Nutty, earthy grains of kasha go beautifully with crunchy, juicy apples and bitter endive, long a favorite salad combo. Cut the apple into small dice – 1/4 to 1/2 inch – to maximize this marriage of grain, fruit, nut and bitter salad green. The acid to oil quotient in the dressing is on the low side; I use lemon juice only and sweeten the mix with a little honey. You could also use agave nectar, and leave out the Gruyère in the salad for a vegan version; though I love the Gruyère here because it, too, has a nutty flavor. This salad holds up well on a buffet.
Orzo With Peas and Parsley Pesto
This is like a pasta version of the classic rice and peas risotto, risi e bisi. It’s a beautiful springtime dish. You can make a whole batch of pesto so that you have it on hand for other uses (like sandwiches), but for this dish you’ll need only a half batch.
Teff Polenta Croutons or Cakes
One of the things I like most about teff is the texture of the tiny grains. This is particularly nice when you cut up stiff teff polenta into rounds or squares and fry them in oil. The surface browns beautifully and the little round grains on the surface become toasty and crunchy while the centers remain soft. I serve thin slices with salads, or in place of a cracker, topped with something. The thicker cakes can be used the same way you would use the softer teff polenta, drizzled with oil, topped with a sauce or a vegetable dish, or sprinkled with Parmesan, feta or blue cheese. They can serve as a side dish or at the center of the plate or bowl.
Seared Belgian Endive With Walnut Gremolata
The French serve seared endive as a side, but I’ve been enjoying this dish as the main event for lunch, with a nice slice of blue cheese or Roquefort accompanying it on the plate.
Moussaka With Roasted Mushrooms
In this Balkan style Moussaka I have substituted the roasted mushroom mix for half the meat. But you can also make a vegetarian version with no meat at all. It is delicious either way, with a complex, slightly sweet Eastern Mediterranean sauce spiced with a little cinnamon, a pinch of allspice and a few cloves. Greek moussaka is topped with béchamel, which can be heavy, even gummy. But this one has a light, fluffy topping made with yogurt and eggs. There are a few steps involved here and the sauce is a long-cooking one, but you can get that started while the eggplant is roasting in the oven to speed things along or make the sauce the day before.
Spiced Green Beans and Baby Broccoli Tempura
Deep-frying is not something I do often, but after I’ve eaten well-executed tempura at a restaurant and can’t shake the memory of delicious batter-fried vegetables, I get out my wok. I turn on the hood fan, open the window and start heating up oil. I like to play around with different batters and coatings. This spicy, delicate batter is somewhere between a puffy beignet-type coating and a simpler egg, flour and bread-crumb dusting. It’s mostly cornstarch, with a small amount of cornmeal and whole wheat flour — just enough to hold the batter together. I add dukkah, cilantro and cumin for flavor and texture. Ice-cold sparkling water helps keep the batter light; it fries up crispy rather than bready because there’s very little gluten to toughen it. You can use this batter with all sorts of vegetables, but I particularly love green beans and baby broccoli. The batter wraps itself nicely around the smooth beans and nestles in among the spindly flowers at the end of a baby broccoli stem, resulting in lacy, extra-crispy tempura. A wok is ideal for deep-frying. It can accommodate a lot of vegetables at one time without crowding, and it holds heat well. The oil should hover between 350 and 375 degrees so that the vegetables cook quickly and crisp up without absorbing too much oil. Be sure to let the oil come back up to temperature between batches, and use a thermometer. You will be amazed to find a green bean tender and hot inside its crispy coating in two minutes or less.
Freekeh, Chickpea and Herb Salad
There is a lot to love about freekeh, an earthy grain that I’d like to see catch on in more kitchens. It cooks up in about 25 minutes, and it’s light, like coarse bulgur, which it resembles, except that the color is darker and greener. But freekeh has a more complex flavor than bulgur. What stands out is its smokiness, a result of the production process, in which durum wheat — the type used for many pastas — is harvested while still green and soft, and carefully roasted in the husk over open fires. The wheat is beaten to remove the chaff, and in the Middle East it is sold whole or cracked. The cracked version is what you’re more likely to find here in the United States, and happily it’s become easy to do so. Look on the shelves of Middle Eastern markets, at whole-food markets or online. Cracked freekeh is tastier and easier to work with than whole freekeh. Add it to soups or stews, or use in the same way you would use rice or bulgur. The cracked wheat has a grassy, herbal quality that also makes it great for use in lemony salads like this one, in which the freekeh is tossed with chickpeas, scallions and a welcome dash of bright green in the form of fresh mint and parsley.
Kasha
For years I have had uneven results with buckwheat groats, or kasha, as the dry-roasted grains are called. I have tried different methods, both stovetop and oven, and usually mixed the grains with an egg before cooking. Sometimes my grains cooked up to a mush, other times they held their shape but still seemed rather soft and indistinct. I sort of gave up on kasha for a while, opting for more predictable grains and pseudo-grains like quinoa and spelt. But I love the flavor of buckwheat, so this week I took another stab at buckwheat groats with a box of medium-grain kasha I bought at the supermarket – and everything changed. These grains were cracked, like bulgur, something I hadn’t seen before. I followed the directions on the box, and they turned out perfect -- dry and fluffy, with the wonderful nutty/earthy buckwheat flavor I find so appealing. To see if it was the cut of the grain only or the combination of the cut of the grain and the cooking method that gave me such good results, I used the exact same cooking method using whole toasted buckwheat groats. The whole groats turned out better than any I had made before, but they took three times as long to cook than the cracked groats, yielded a little less, and because all of the egg is not absorbed by the whole grains the way it is by the cracked grains, which have more cut surfaces to absorb the egg, you get some egg flakes floating on the top of the cooked kasha, which is not very attractive (though it’s easy to remove them).
Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
Mushrooms and spinach together is always a match made in heaven. I use a mix of wild and regular white or cremini mushrooms for this, but don’t hesitate to make it if regular mushrooms are all that is available.
Taralli
Taralli are delicious ring shaped rusk-like Italian snacks from Apulia and Campania. Now that I know how easy they are to make I could be in big trouble, as whenever I’ve bought them from one of my favorite Italian delis I have a hard time resisting them. It’s the olive oil, I now know, that makes them special and different from other twice-baked breads. They are crisp but not hard, and this whole wheat version is as good as any traditional taralli I’ve tasted. I particularly like the version with black pepper. But I like them plain, without any embellishment, as well. The olive oil gives them so much flavor on its own. This recipe is based on a recipe in Carol Field’s “Italy In Small Bites.”
Frittata With Peas, Herbs and Feta or Parmesan
This frittata is just one good reason to stock peas in your freezer. My favorite herbs to use are tarragon and chives.
Italian Meat Sauce With Half the Meat
It’s been a long time since I have made tomato sauce with meat, and this one transported me back to the first recipe I learned to make. I called it spaghetti sauce, and it was a simple tomato sauce with ground beef. It didn’t taste that much different from this sauce, which has only a quarter pound of meat in it – but that is all it needs to have a rich flavor and a meaty texture. The mushroom base is a perfect stand-in for half the meat; you could double the amount for a vegetarian sauce.
Simple Pencil Cob Breakfast Grits
Sometimes the taste of a humble, simple food can be a life-changing event. This recipe, courtesy of Kay Rentschler, creative director of Anson Mills, is a fail-safe method for making the mill’s luxuriously flavored heirloom grits. When properly cooked – over very low heat after an overnight soak – the resulting grits are incredibly creamy and almost as sweet as fresh corn. It is important to understand why you must cook these grits over the lowest possible heat: these are coarse grits, and if they are over-hydrated or boiled after they begin to thicken they will take forever to cook. (In technical terms, thickening is the point at which the first starch takes hold, or the point after continuous gentle stirring when the grits particles remain suspended in the liquid and you no longer have to stir continuously). Moreover, as Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts explained to me, if the heat is too high the new crop flavors of the corn will be blown out, in the same way that the flavor of fresh herbs is diminished by high heat.
Cracked Farro Risotto (Farrotto) With Parsley and Marjoram
Finally, a way to make something as comforting as an Italian rice risotto using farro. The chef Barry Maiden revealed this ingenious method to me. Soak the farro, drain and then crack the grains slightly in a food processor. This allows the thickly hulled wheat berries to release their starch, creating the creamy sauce that defines the dish. Farro has so much flavor and the resulting farrotto is much more robust than a rice risotto. It needs little more than fresh herbs as embellishment, but of course you could add any vegetable you like to use in risotto.
Grilled Albacore With Yogurt-Dill Sauce on a Bed of Arugula
This is based on a recipe for red mullet from “Classic Turkish Cooking” by Ghillie Basan. Red mullet isn’t so easy to come by in the United States, and albacore works well here. In the authentic Turkish dish, the red mullet is marinated in a mixture of onion juice and lemon juice with bay leaf. This step is optional; it tenderizes the fish and adds terrific flavor, but grilled albacore is nice enough on its own. Dill is the traditional herb for this recipe, but mint is very nice as well.
Garlic Broth
Whole cloves of garlic, uncut and simmered gently for an hour with aromatics, yield a mild, sweet tasting, comforting broth that makes an ideal vegetarian stand-in for chicken broth. According to nutritionist Johnny Bowden, garlic needs to be crushed, sliced, or chopped in order for its compounds to be released. For this broth, I just crush the cloves lightly by leaning on them with the flat side of my knife. The less crushed they are, the milder the broth will taste.
Peter Reinhart’s Whole Wheat Bagels
When I order a whole wheat bagel in a coffee shop what I get is a white bagel with a little bit of whole wheat flour thrown in. These bagels are different; they are truly whole grain. I’ve been enthralled lately with Peter Reinhart’s new cookbook, Bread Revolution. Reinhart, a baking teacher and cookbook author whom I have long admired, has discovered the magic of sprouted whole grain flours, which he uses in the recipes in this book (you can get sprouted whole wheat flour in whole foods stores and from several online sources). He also illuminates many of the mysteries of baking with whole grain flours in general. The recipes that I have tried work with regular whole wheat flour as well; I have Community Grains whole wheat flour on hand but did not have sprouted whole wheat flour when I was developing this week’s Recipes for Health, so that is what I used. One of the important things I learned – relearned really – from Peter is that when you make dough with whole wheat flour, which absorbs liquid more readily than white flour, it is important to give the dough a little time to absorb the water so that it will be workable. So there is a rest after you add the liquid to the flour; you’ll think the dough is going to be way too wet, then it miraculously firms up, in very little time. Reinhart has two methods for bagels in his cookbook; one requires an overnight rest in the refrigerator after shaping (that is the method I have used in the past), the other, made with sprouted wheat flour, can be boiled and baked after rising and shaping. If you use sprouted whole wheat flour Reinhart says the overnight rise isn’t required because the sprouted wheat allows the bagels to develop optimum flavor in a shorter time. I couldn’t discern much of a difference between the flavor of my overnight regular whole wheat bagels and those I made with the shorter rise; and the ones I made with the shorter rise were prettier. Barley malt is the traditional sweetener used in bagel dough and in the water bath, but either honey or agave syrup can be substituted.
Celery Risotto With Dandelion Greens or Kale
Celery is both vegetable and aromatic in this risotto. It retains some texture as it cooks, contrasting nicely with the rice. Dandelion greens are very nice here, but you can usually only find them in a farmers’ market; kale, especially dark green cavolo nero, is a fine substitute.
Strata With Mushrooms and Chard
I make stratas — savory bread puddings — when I find myself with a stale baguette on hand, even if it’s so hard that the only way to slice it is to saw it. A strata is as comforting as macaroni and cheese, and it makes a great one-dish meal.