Fast, Fresh & Green (7 page)

3
Meanwhile, in a small bowl
, combine the lemon juice, soy sauce, brown sugar, cocoa, ginger, garlic, and the remaining 1 tsp olive oil. Whisk vigorously to mix and dissolve the cocoa. (This may take a few minutes.)

4
Transfer the vegetables
to a large mixing bowl and drizzle the dressing over them while stirring and folding them gently with a silicone spatula. It may look like a lot of liquid, but continue to stir gently, and the vegetables will absorb most or all of it. Add the parsley and basil and stir well to incorporate. Transfer to a serving platter and serve warm or at room temperature.

Serves 6

There’s a lovely balance in this autumn side dish between the sweet pears and the, well, not—so—sweet turnips, and between the floral honey and the piney rosemary. All of the flavors come together in a way that just might be palatable for people who normally wouldn’t eat turnips. These would be especially good nestled next to a braised lamb shank or a piece of pot roast. Purple—topped turnips don’t need peeling; nor do I peel pears when I’m roasting them, so this is an easy dish to put together.

3 MEDIUM PURPLE—TOPPED TURNIPS (
14 to 15 oz/400 to 425 g total), unpeeled, cut into ½—to ¾-in/1.25—to 2-cm dice

1 FIRM BUT RIPE BOSC PEAR (
about 7 oz/200 g), unpeeled, cored, and cut into ½-in/1.25-cm dice

2 TBSP VEGETABLE OIL

1 TSP KOSHER SALT

1 TBSP UNSALTED BUTTER

1 TBSP HONEY

2 TSP CHOPPED FRESH ROSEMARY

1
Preheat the oven
to 475°F/245°C (Gas Mark 9). Line a large (18-×-13-×-1-in/45.5-×-33-×-2.5-cm) heavy—duty rimmed sheet pan with a piece of parchment paper.

2
In a mixing bowl
, toss the turnips and pear with the vegetable oil and salt. Spread out the turnips and pear in one layer on the sheet pan. Roast, flipping with a spatula once or twice during cooking if you like, until the turnips are tender when pierced with a paring knife or spatula, 25 to 30 minutes (the turnips will be brown on some sides, the pears will be a bit darker).

3
Meanwhile, melt the butter
in a small saucepan and add the honey and rosemary. Simmer for a few seconds and remove from the heat.

4
Transfer the cooked turnips and pears
to a mixing bowl and drizzle the butter mixture over all, scraping all of the mixture out of the saucepan. Toss well and transfer to a serving dish.

Serves 3

The buttery glaze that tops these delicious squash rings is more subtly flavored than it sounds. But it adds just the right amount of sweetness and interest to the earthy flavor and silky texture of roasted acorn squash. You might be accustomed to roasting acorn squash in halves or quarters, but it’s easy to quick—roast it by cutting it into pretty rings or half—rings. Because of the relatively thin slices, I find the skin perfectly edible, but it’s also easy enough to eat the flesh and leave the roasted skin behind.

If you wanted to serve these for Thanksgiving, they could go in the oven when the turkey comes out, because they cook quickly. And with a second baking sheet, you can easily double or triple the recipe. Rotate the baking sheets halfway through cooking. You can also substitute delicata squash in this recipe. Because the rings will be smaller, the cooking time will be slightly shorter, so you might want to flip the rings after 8 minutes.

1 SMALL ACORN SQUASH (
1 to 1¼ lb/455 to 570 g)

2 TBSP UNSALTED BUTTER,
plus 2 tsp more if needed

2 TSP PURE MAPLE SYRUP

1½ TSP VANILLA EXTRACT

¹
/
₈
TSP GROUND CARDAMOM

KOSHER SALT

1
Preheat the oven
to 475°F/245°C (Gas Mark 9). Line a large (18-×-13-×-1-in/45.5-×-33-×-2.5-cm) heavy—duty rimmed sheet pan with a piece of parchment paper.

2
With a sharp chef’s knife
, cut the acorn squash in half lengthwise (through both the stem end and the pointy end). Scrape out the seeds and fibers with a spoon. Put each half, cut side down, on a cutting board. Slice off about ¾ in/2 cm from each end, and discard. Slice the squash crosswise into ½-in-/1.25-cm—thick half—rings. If you want, you can trim away any remaining fibers from the rings by running a paring knife around the inside of each. Put the half—rings on the parchment paper.

3
In a small saucepan
, melt the 2 Tbsp butter over low heat. Remove the pan from the heat and add the maple syrup, vanilla, and cardamom. Stir well. Use a pastry brush to lightly brush the squash pieces with a little less than half of the mixture. Season the pieces very lightly with salt and turn them over. Brush this side with more of the mixture, but reserve about 1 Tbsp for brushing on after cooking. (If using a larger squash and you wind up with a little bit less than 1 Tbsp of liquid, add 1 or 2 tsp more butter to the saucepan.) Season the tops very lightly with salt.

4
Roast the squash
for 12 minutes. Use tongs to flip the pieces over. Continue to roast until they are nicely browned (the bottoms will be browner then the tops) and tender when pierced with a paring knife, 10 to 12 minutes. Flip the pieces over again when they come out of the oven so that the browner side is up.

5
Reheat the butter mixture
briefly over low heat if necessary (or to melt the additional butter). Brush the butter mixture over the squash slices and serve.

Serves 2 or 3

Tip:
To cut whole squash rings, trim away about ¾ in/2 cm of both ends of the squash and carefully slice it crosswise into ½-in/1.25-cm rings. Run a paring knife around the insides of the rings to remove excess fibers.

METHOD: Quick-braising

EQUIPMENT: 10-in/25-cm straight-sided sauté pan with lid, tongs, silicone spatula, wooden spoon

HEAT: The stove top, starting high and turning down to low

RECIPES:
Foundation Recipe for Quick-Braising •
58

Quick-Braised Asparagus with Dijon, White Wine, and Fresh Thyme Pan Sauce •
60

Quick-Braised Green Beans with Pomegranate-Balsamic Pan Sauce •
61

Gingery Braised Brussels Sprouts •
62

Cider-Braised Baby Bok Choy and Golden Apples •
63

Braised Carrots with Blood Orange
–
Fresh Tarragon Pan Sauce •
64

Summer Vegetable Ragout with Zucchini, Green Beans, and Corn •
65

Creole Vegetable Ragout with Corn, Okra, and Cherry Tomatoes •
68

Crisp-Tender Broccoflower with Lemon-Dijon Pan Sauce and Toasted Parmigiano Bread Crumbs •
69

Braised Fingerlings with Rosemary and Mellow Garlic •
73

Silky Braised Fennel in Pink Sauce •
74

Brown-Braised Baby Artichokes and Shallots with Pancetta •
76

Braising may just be my favorite cooking method, because it delivers the best of both worlds—browning for deep flavor, simmering for tender texture. You’re probably familiar with braising as a great way to cook tough meats like lamb shanks and short ribs as well as meat for pot roast. After a serious sear on the stove top to give the meat a beautiful brown exterior, liquids and aromatics are added to the pot, and the meat simmers, on the stove top or in the oven, very slowly until really tender. I know, this doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do to your fresh, delicate vegetables—or that you’d have time for, either. But humor me here for a minute.

For weeknight vegetables, you take the same idea and just shorten the cooking times and liquid amounts radically. A very quick sear in a sauté pan, followed by a simmer in a very small amount of liquid, produces vegetables with rich flavor that are perfectly cooked through, pleasantly moist, and lightly sauced. Because the vegetables—think green beans, asparagus, broccoli, carrots—get browned first, they produce some yummy browned bits on the bottom of the pan. Those in turn add a lot of flavor to the finished dish when the pan is deglazed by that little bit of liquid.

I first developed my version of this quick-braising technique for an article I did for
Fine Cooking
magazine several years ago. And I have to tell you, a lot of my coworkers (and our readers!) wound up adding quick-braising to their weeknight repertoires. So please don’t be intimidated if you’ve never tried this before. I’ll give you a few tips before you get started, and then you might want to dive in and just try one of the recipes from the list on
page 55
. But don’t forget that you can always go back to the foundation recipe on
page 58
on a night when you just have a bunch of carrots you’re looking to cook. I’ve kept the ingredients list short and the flavors simpler in the foundation recipe, so that you don’t get overwhelmed with too many choices. But once you get the hang of the technique, feel free to embellish the foundation recipe with flavor ideas from the other recipes or to combine two or more vegetables in one braise.

For the best results with any of the recipes, be sure to cut your vegetables into small or medium-size pieces (no large chunks) so that they can cook through quickly and evenly. Long,
narrow vegetables like green beans and asparagus are perfect for this method, as they hardly need more than a trim. I like to cut vegetables like carrots into sticks, not coins, because sticks have more browning area and also tend not to smother each other like coin shapes do. Try to cut other veggies in consistenly sized pieces, not because they’ll look pretty, but because they’ll cook more evenly. Then, be sure that your vegetables are all in one layer on the bottom of the pan. That way, every piece of vegetable gets a chance to brown by being in contact with the pan. Also, overcrowding the pan would mean some vegetables would not get cooked through during the simmering stage.

Before you even turn on your stove to make one of these recipes, please buy a good-quality straight-sided sauté pan! I am a firm believer in the promise that good equipment will give good results, and this workhorse pan is incredibly versatile. What I call a 10-inch pan is usually labeled a “3-qt/3-L” pan, so there can be some slight differences in width and depth. I am partial to my All-Clad, which is about 10½ in/26.5 cm wide and 2½ in/6.5 cm deep. Whatever brand you buy, be sure you’re getting a three-ply pan with a stainless-steel exterior and interior (not nonstick) and an aluminum or copper core.

You’ll notice that I use a few different utensils for handling vegetables in these recipes. First, I find tongs (short, comfortable ones) easiest for turning and flipping vegetables. Then, I will sometimes use a wooden spoon to scrape up browned bits from the bottom of the pan. But more often these days, I find that one of those colorful heat-proof silicone spatulas does a good job of stirring in sauce ingredients and incorporating browned bits at the end.

There’s one last piece of equipment that I use constantly when making these recipes—a scale. Weighing awkwardly shaped vegetables is a lot more accurate than trying to pack them in cups; so you’ll have better control over the end results if you can weigh your veggies. And once you buy a scale, you’ll find you use it a lot for baking and other savory recipes, too. If this seems like a bother, at least try using the scale, the first few times you make a recipe; after that you might get good at eye-balling what amounts work.

You will feel like Houdini once you learn to improvise braised vegetables on a weeknight, because they deliver such amazing flavor in less than 30 minutes. The technique’s not hard; it’s just that you’ll need to pay close attention to a few things the first couple of times you do this. The reason: The cooking times in this recipe are dependent on the heat of your own individual stove top and, to a lesser degree, the brand of pan you use. So you’ll want to use the cooking times and the amount of liquid I suggest as guidelines—you can always lower the heat if your veggies are browning too fast, or add a little more liquid if they don’t feel tender enough after the liquid reduces. In most cases
¹
/
₃
cup/75 ml of liquid will work fine, but I’ve suggested adding a few more tablespoons when cooking the Brussels sprouts or potatoes, which are fairly dense. If you do not
want to use chicken broth, you could use half vegetable broth and half water. The recipe would work, too, with all water. The sauce would not have the gloss that broth gives it, but the dish will still be flavorful.