Zuni Cafe's Kale & Poached Eggs

For the first time this week I cooked out of a Christmas present from my mom, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.  A big fan of Zuni from when I lived in SF during the 90's, I still enjoy stopping in on a Sunday morning for brunch and a Bloody Mary with the paper straw and minced red onions.  In a Passover state of mind (whatever that means for a waspy girl), I decided to use my roast chicken carcass to make stock then allow myself to be inspired by Judy Rodgers.

For the stock, I threw in the remains of my roast chicken and whatever veg I had on hand: broccoli, an onion, entire daikon radish, garlic, etc.  Covered with water, added a little salt and let simmer away on a medium-low heat while I napped the late afternoon away.

      

I came away with lots of lovely stock to use for immediate cooking and froze one cup servings in zip lock plastic bags for further use later in the spring.  I freeze lots of things this way. Ratatouille, homemade pesto, ice cream, gizzards, etc.

     

In response to the great beef ingestion (indigestion) of March 27th at Totoraku, I am focusing intently on vegetables the rest of this week.  I chose to be inspired by boiled kale and poached eggs, however, instead of boiling the kale in water as the recipe calls for I boiled it in fresh chicken stock.

I also decided the meal needed some carbs for my tennis playing maniac husband and some broccolini for good measure.  At the store, I noticed a box of "express polenta", or polenta that cooks in under two minutes. I can only assume there was some extra processing done to the corn meal to make it absorb water faster, and since last week's challenge was to avoid food pretending to be something they're not I went for regular corn meal.  (It's not like polenta is overly time consuming to begin with). Kale, olive oil and broccolini also made it into the cart along with cara cara oranges (my fruit obsession du saison), new potatoes and Fage yogurt.

  

Start by sauteing a minced onion in olive oil, add garlic and chile pepper flakes at will.  After the onion reaches a rich translucency, saute the heaps of kale until it wilts into a thick mass of greenery. You will be surprised at how much kale can fit in your pot as you wilt it a little at a time.

Cover the kale with liquid, lid the pot and cook for about 30 minutes.  At the end of the thirty, I took the lid off the pot and allowed some of the liquid to reduce.

Typically I make polenta with water, I learned somewhere years ago that this is the way peasants make their polenta in Italy, and normally I see no difference to veer from the norm except in seasoning.  But with fresh chicken broth in the kitchen (a rarity I tell ya), I went thataway.  At the end I added a drizzle of olive oil for some extra richness. No dairy.

Quickly blanched the broccolini, the sauteed in olive oil, rosemary and a little garlic.

I no longer use a fancy egg poacher. I had one when I first got married and used it often, but damn it was hard to clean. Eff that. Into the bin. Now I simply poach them in an almost simmering water bath with balsamic vinegar then gently flip them with a slotted spoon.

Sprinkle a little parm on top of the warm polenta for some cheesy pop without a lot of dairy weighing you down.

And while my poached eggs may look more irregular than the ones served atop your Frisee au Lardons at Anisette on Sundays, they are just as tasty.  With this meal, I have adhered to several of Pollan's call outs: avoid advertised foods, the low-fat and lite, foods claiming to promote good health on their labels and the unpronounceable.  The really great thing about the meal, aside from the flavor and its quality as leftovers for lunch this afternoon? I didn't set out to meet one of more of Pollan's advisories, I actually just craved kale and poached eggs.  This could be contagious.

Week 11: Avoid Foods Your See Advertised on TV

Pollan theorizes that the best way to avoid overly processed foods and the current processing trend du jour is to avoid the marketing of said foods. Hence, don;t eat food you have seen advertised on TV.  He writes that more than 2/3 of food advertising is spent marketing processed foods, thus I would posit you only need to avoid 2/3 of the food you see advertised on TV.  He also mentions that common sense would tell one that we needn't avoid foods like prunes or almonds, both advertised quite heavily on TV. Naturally, I might add that given a little reading about whole foods and clean eating, one might not need this book at all.  However!

Week 10: Avoid Foods Pretending to be Something They Are Not

Margarine, non-fat cream cheese, soy-based faux meats, artificial sweeteners, non-dairy creamers and so on.


I am more or less at the point where I am doing this anyway (forgetting the cheese-like food product incident of last night).  I gave up my soy milk creamer because of phyto-estrogen in an attempt to hopefully ease my raging PMS, and in turn gave up my coconut milk creamer due to inconvenience and weird stuff in the ingredient list. I returned a couple weeks ago to the OG half and half of my youth for my tea.


I am scratching my head thinking where in my current diet I might be eating something masquerading as something else, but I things are going pretty well in this area.  I also think I will have that last crab stuffed poblano for lunch today.

Week 9: This Process is Not About Perfection, Clearly

Josh's Crab Stuffed Poblano Chiles

Makes 4

1 ½ pounds of crab legs (Josh prefers the large crab claws)*

4 large poblano chiles

1 egg*

½ cup panko breadcrumbs*

1 chopped Serrano chili

1 tablespoon (or to taste) of cumin*

1 tablespoon (or to taste) of chile powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Crushed red chile flakes (to taste)

2-3 tablespoons of chopped fennel*

2-3 tablespoons of chopped green onion*

Cheese-to taste-we use Casero or Cotija (sliced)*

Mix the crabmeat in a bowl with all of the above ingredients.  Set aside.

Wash chiles and cut a 3 inch rectangle out of the top, save the cut out portion.  Keeping the seeds intact, put some of the cheese in the bottom of each one.

Stuff the crab mixture on top of the cheese and pack into each poblano.  Put another slice of chees on top and replace the cut out portion to form a lid.

Bake in a 350 oven for 25 minutes with a foil cover.  Remove foil and bake for another 20 minutes uncovered.

* items changed for convenience not for quality, all exchanges slightly compromised the wondefulness of the original recipe. But WTF.

 

This blog is not about perfection. This blog is about trying to consciously make better choices, exploring the reasoning behind Pollan's madness and when and why it does not work in my life. It did not work yesterday.  To start, I ended up using canned crab.  Canned crab, in addition to crab, contains citric acid (used as a preservative), calcium disodium edta (used in crabmeat to retard crystallization), sodium pyrophosphate (used as a buffer and emulsifier) and sodium sulfite (to prevent discoloration).

Why not just swoop on over to the next closest grocer and buy my regular king crab legs? I buy them about once every month or so to eat with lemon or a little miso salad dressing. Because. I flew in Sunday afternoon from Detroit and boy, were my arms tired. I worked a long week and then the entire weekend. Good work, but work nonetheless. I was released to work from home early Monday afternoon by KT, my boss-ish and a really good human. At any rate, on the way home I ended up at the ghetto Von's very close to my house and even though it has improved in contents and presentation in the last few years, it is still not the best market. But it is the closest market. I wanted a shopgasm at the hip and groovy loft local Ralph's downtown at 8th and Flower but a GD CHP made me miss my exit by not letting me move over to the right on the 101 heading north. Bastard.  Anyway, in the middle of grocery shopping a tsunami of fatigue hit, it was all I could do to grab a few more items and get home before narcolepsy set in.  I had great eggs at home from the yup-mart...Nutri-Fresh Fertile Eggs from Chino Valley Ranchers.  Locally produced, a blurb from their website,

The hens that produce our Nutri-Fresh Fertile eggs are fed the same diet as our Veg-a-Fed and Humane Harvest (diet with added vegetable seed, grain, soybean, and limestone meal, we have eliminated the need for fish and animal by-products that are commonly used for commercially produced eggs) producing hens. These hens however, have some roosters living along side of them and with their help produce naturally fertilized eggs. We never use artificial insemination for our fertile eggs, only the way nature intended. These fertile eggs are produced in both white and brown and are packaged in the same recycled cartons as the rest of our products.

Non-organic fennel, I used more than the called for three tablespoons. I wanted some crunch and some lift so I added about .5 cup.

Maybe 5 TBS of only the green parts of the green onions. Below, see my iPhone. I usually read Barbie's recipes from my iPhone while cooking. She always sends them as attachments.

I threw in two of the Chino Valley Rancher Eggs, one didn't seem to be enough to really hold the mixture together. Out of cumin, I used instead cayenne and ancho chile powder. And also, out of breadcrumbs I tossed in about two tablespoons of plain flour for a little volume.

These poblanos were gorgeous. 

I couldn't figure out why, at a grocery store in a latino neighborhood, that a chile I recognize as a poblano was actually labeled pasilla, until I got home and read this thread on Chowhound. I do know, from working at a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant in Sacramento in the 1980's, that a pasilla is not too spicy to eat stuffed and roasted. Now I know poblanos and pasillas are one and the same.

And then there's the cheese choice. Le sigh.  I forgot to buy cheese in my state of abject exhaustion.  And we didn't have cheese at home. We have a cheese product. D likes Kraft fat-free processed cheese slices, everything this week of eating is against. Fat-free, preservatives, over-processed, over-packaged, over-etc.  And one thing the ghetto Von's has going for it is an abundance of beautiful Mexican cheeses. Major Food Rules fail. Nevertheless, I placed a few slices down on the bottom of the peppers.

Next I stuffed the peppers with the crab mixture.  If you have small hands like me, you can really get in there stuffing all the pointy ends and crevices with crab and whatnot.  That was fun.

These turned out delicious and super conservative calorie-wise.  A couple caveats.  Caveat #1: Do not bother with the fake cheese. I couldn't taste it nor detect it texture wise in the outcome. Get some delicious Mexican cheese or even a spicy jack. Or don't bother.  Caveat #2: In my oven the cooking time was not sufficient. Mine turned out about 10 minutes too crispy. Maybe Josh and Barb's oven is a little hotter than mine. Josh's were just the right balance between a touch of crispy freshness and roasted soft velvety chile. I wanted mine a hair more roasted.

Despite it all, they were easy to make and super good. We ate these while drinking a Zotovich Family 2006 pinot noir from Santa Rita Hills.  Personally, I suggest you get Jeff from Rosso to get this for you.  Now, onto week 10!

Week 9: Avoid "Lite", "Low-Fat", or "Nonfat"

Why, Michael? Why I ask you as I sit here about to eat my Fage 0% Fat Greek yogurt with agave nectar. Why?

Pollan's argument around fat is about balance and imbalance in our diets. By villainizing fat in our diets we give a free pass to all other nutrients, such as calorie dense starches and carbohydrates.  During the fat-free craze of the 70's and 80's the western world stayed or became fat eating lower fat diets. We need to look at our daily diet as a whole, not compartmentalize certain nutrients in a way that places a temporary band-aid on a broken leg.

I am going to finish my breakfast of fat free yogurt, counting the calories in my yogurt and agave nectar as part of my daily whole, but also make sure I am eating some good fats today. Fish, avocado, olive oil. Later in the day, when I head to the grocery store to buy ingredients for the dinner I will cook tonight, I will buy a week's worth of Greek yogurt that is not fat-free, planning to balance out the fat calories from my morning yogurt by eating more veggies later in the day instead of processed carbs or starches.

Going to the Dogs

When life is a little stressful, my blog(s) tend to get seriously neglected. Apparently so do my dietary aspirations of greatness.  In the last week there have been mall food, Taco Bell, lots of drinking and the incident with the Campbell's Soup-at-Hand.

Driving to and from Sacramento last weekend was a junk food fest. The beef jerky tasted disgusting.  Shrimp tacos from Taco Bell off the 5 near the sweet, sweet smell of cow dung were satisfyingly salty and I am sure frighteningly laden with every kind of thing Pollan warns against.  But it was the Campbell's soup that tipped me over the edge.  Soup-at-Hand is a great concept. A single serving of soup in a microwaveable container you can carry around with one hand and drink without spilling.  Genius for travel and I used to keep several of these in my car.  However...

Having eaten consciously clean over the last 8 or 9 weeks, I think my system is no longer used to so many chemicals.  I started to drink the Campbell's chicken soup and about halfway through the options were a) toss the soup or b) toss my cookies.  The soup landed in the bin.

Today I ate a hot dog from Aunty Anne's pretzels at the West Covina mall. *hangs head in shame*.  I have a long and busy weekend ahead of me with no food in the fridge, no time or convenient way to get or make food and the incline of a long slide down a slippery slope behind me.

Monday I plan to be back on track.