NY Girl Eats World

Our Days of Moro

 

"When we look back on newlywed life, Mark and I will recall it divided into two periods: the pre-Moro days, and the post-Moro days. It is no great exaggeration to say that your gift has changed our lives — or at least our kitchen."

That was the beginning of a thank-you card I wrote this week to my cousin-in-law and his wife, who recently gifted my husband and me with a series of cookbooks — Moro, Casa Moro and Moro East — by Samuel and Samantha Clark, the husband and wife behind the wildly successful London restaurant, Moro.

Their cooking is rooted in traditional recipes from the Moorish south of Spain (a country you know is dear to me), Morocco and the northern coast of Africa, Turkey (a country I fell in love with on a recent visit), and the Mediterranean countries of the Middle East.

The food is unassuming, unpretentious, rustic and uncomplicated. No one would call it art. It's too real for that. Too sincere. These are recipes that appeal to the cook who wants people to swoon from the flavors in their mouth, but doesn't need them to gasp when the plate is set before them:

Smoky eggplant salad with tahini dressing, fresh mint, sweet cherry tomato and the pop of juicy pomegranate seeds.

Cold yogurt soup with grated cucumber and mint, with a healthy drizzle of olive oil on top.

Spinach cooked with saffron and chickpeas, crowned with a golden heap of toasty migas — fried breadcrumbs, Spanish-style.

Or how about: fresh spinach salad, slick with sumac dressing, tossed with tangy feta and toasted pine nuts.

Moro's meals cry out to be served in chipped ceramic bowls -- lots of them -- with heaping piles of bread and shallow dishes filled with glistening olive oil surrounding damp islands of za'atar. These recipes are for feasting but never with your fancy bone china. It's the kind of food that wants to be eaten outdoors, communing with nature, or in a damp, dark tavern near the heat of a charcoal grill.

A quick glance at the recipes in Moro East (the newest book), with the beautiful blue patterned dust jacket, I felt my heart expand with a kind of palpable joy. I bit my lower lip, steadying the emotion that was poised to reveal itself in tears, and told my husband Mark that these were the recipes I've always wanted to make (though I'd never actually known them).

This is the way, I said, I've always longed to cook.

The recipes in Moro East are grouped by season — inspired by the vegetables and herbs the Clarks grew on their plot of land in the east end of London. I tend to read cookbooks like novels, from cover to cover, and with this one, I was completely rapt. By the end, when I learned the Clarks's allotment was bulldozed to make way for Olympic stadiums, I felt like an old friend had died. All that life — old fruit trees, asparagus that took years to grow, plants that were lovingly tended in neighboring plots by a rainbow of immigrants — are all gone.

When it comes to Moro, and the cookbooks, I'm frightfully late to the party. The restaurant opened in 1997 and has steadily stacked up awards from top food critics. The first cookbook came out in 2001, though they remain difficult to buy in the US.

Coincidentally, before I met him, Mark actually lived a stone's throw from Moro, in King's Cross.

Today we are back in London, and tomorrow, Thursday, I make a pilgrimage. I go to Moro — home of the recipes that have inspired my lunches and dinners of the past couple months.

We will arrive somewhere around the tail end of lunch. I want to take a seat at the bar with my husband and order a feast of tapas. I want to watch the faces of the cooks (the Clarks or otherwise) in the open kitchen as they make the food that inspires so much love in me — not to mention a great longing to move away from the city to the countryside, where I can grow my own vegetables and cook by the seasons.

Mark has, somewhat cheekily, cautioned me not to get too excited. "What if it's not as good as what you've already made?" he, so sweetly, suggests.

But I'm not expecting a life-changing experience — that already happened when I cracked open the Moro books. I only hope to feel the way I do when I eat Moro's food at home: deeply, and indescribably, satisfied.

Grande Lakes Orlando: Char and Chug

Inspired by the Calcotada, an annual Catalan onion festival, Chef Yates cooked baby leeks over a smoking outdoor grill.  He served the charred onions with traditional romesco sauce as well as olive oil and hibiscus salt.

Thursday Farmers' Market

OK, as promised, a little on my new neighborhood. Of course I could come right out and say where I'm living now, but where's the fun in that? So let the games begin!

This collection of photos comes from my first visit to the weekly farmers' market. It's a modest gathering of mostly upstate fruit and vegetable farmers who set up tented stalls on a side street across from my apartment building. My first purchases were complete whims -- no plan of attack whatsoever: fresh cilantro, lettuce, cranberry beans, rosa bianca eggplants, and two types of apples.

I ended up using the cilantro and lettuce for a cold salad with chicken and avocado (the latter of which I purchased from a fruit vendor on a nearby corner and quickly learned an important lesson: when the sign reads "two for $1," one avocado is going to be overripe and moldy unless you pick the fruit yourself.) On another day I boiled the cranberry beans and let them stew in a dish of warm garlic-infused oil, diced tomato and onion. I diced up the eggplant and sauteed them in garlic and oil until they were melt-in-your-mouth tender. Then I showered them in grated grana. And the apples, well, they were meant for munching.

But the loot I toted home in plastic bags that day wasn't my favorite part of the farmers' market. It was being there in the thick of it and realizing that my neighbors were as beautifully diverse as the cornucopia of produce laid out for purchase. Have a look...

Shameless

I'm not even going to try to spin this. It's simply straight-up food porn. You know you love it.

Insatiable

An apology to my future husband: I’m going to make one irritating pregnant lady.

Relax. I’m not getting married yet. And I’m certainly not pregnant. But I’ve already experienced how powerful and strange exotic my cravings can be.

There’s been one particular craving smoldering in the back of my belly for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s almost embarrassing. Borderline obsessive, too. There’s actually a food that I’ve quietly longed for since the day I packed my bags and left Madrid – six years ago.

No, it’s not Iberico ham. I’ve kept that one at bay by chomping on imported cousins – non-Iberico serrano, Italian prosciutto, and the like. It’s not tortilla española, either. Although I haven’t mastered the Spanish egg-and-potato omelet-cake, I can make a pretty good frittata. See, for all my favorite dishes, I’ve been able to find at least a semi-adequate substitute. Though admittedly inferior to the originals, they’ve at least been able to douse the flame of longing. But there’s one food that has no substitute or second cousin.

OK, have I tortured you enough? Well, good! Now you know 1/100th of what I’ve been feeling.

So here it is: See those innocent green peppers in the pictures? That's it. Nothing more. They're called pimientos de Padrón -- or, peppers from Padrón, a damp, chilly town in northwestern Spain.

This may be a let-down for people familiar with these thumb-sized  vegetables. Because, well, that’s just what they are – rabbit food. Funny thing is that I don’t even like green peppers. The only way I’ll eat green bell peppers is if they’re sautéed (never raw! ew!) with onions or mixed with the sweeter red or orange kinds.

But Padrón peppers are different. They’re actually sweet. And when they’re properly cooked in olive oil then sprinkled with really fine sea salt, they’re smoky and irresistible. Occasionally – maybe one in every 10 – you'll find a hot one that can sear the surface of your tongue and light up the soft insides of your cheeks. But that’s the sport of eating these “innocent” peppers.

In Spain, pimientos de Padrón are commonplace bar food. My taste-memory brings me back to a dim, narrow tapas joint – maybe six tables and a beat-up bar – just off a grooved cobblestone street in Madrid. One hand cradling a water glass of inky-red vino, I use the other to pluck Padrón from a tiny ceramic dish in the center of the table. The peppers recline in a pool of honey-colored oil, their skins charred, wrinkled and blistered. I hold the stem on the other side of my clenched teeth and pull. A pile of frayed stems builds on my bread dish. Few of my friends are actually eating the Padrón with equal fervor. They’re going for the cheese and the olives, the shrimp in garlic-oil and the croquettes, instead.

Only a few farms in the U.S. actually grow Padrón. Naturally none of them are close to me. But I’d known for a while that I could get them through La Tienda, an online shop specializing in Spanish products. I don’t know what made me finally do it. The price had always been intimidating; at $14/pound and then added shipping costs, it wasn’t encouraging. But then something inside me snapped. As if someone had puffed up their cheeks and exhaled a mouthful of oxygen on my craving-flame; I had no choice: I HAD TO HAVE THEM.

NOW.

They arrived encased like Russian nesting dolls – first a cardboard box, then a Styrofoam cooler and finally a plastic container. I’d never watched anyone cook them in Spain so I went with my instincts. I washed the peppers – about 80 in a pound – and filled a saute pan with a generous amount of oil. In anticipation, I’d bought really good sea salt to grind over them just before serving. I put the flame on medium-high and started with a handful of peppers. I quickly learned that their skins are thin and tender. They soften quickly and char even faster. I turned down the flame and worked at a clip.

In no time I had a platter of Padrón that in Spain would’ve fed no less than ten groups of bar-hoppers. But I ate them all. No, I shared them with a friend. But together we polished off the platter in one sitting. In one 15-minute period they were gone – vaporized into another taste-memory. But what a glorious 15 minutes! A desire that had lain dormant for six years suddenly satisfied in one feverish feeding frenzy.

I turned to Phil and asked him if they were as good as I had made them out to be. He smiled, nodded enthusiastically, and assured me they were. Of course the reason I’d asked him was to check if I was crazy –  to gauge whether years of longing for Spain had reshaped the memory of Padrón into something that it really wasn’t.

As I gnashed my last pepper I began to understand what this whole craving had been about. Yes, I'd longed for the taste of Padrón, but also something deeper: a life in Spain as inaccessible to me now as those little green peppers.

Cooking Mexican with Little Miss Ecuador

Nelly rocks onto her toes when I slide the course disk of a white corn tortilla into a pan on the stovetop. "What's that?" she asks, her big brown eyes squinting quizzically.

"It's a torrrrtilla!" I say brightly, really milking the Spanish tongue roll. Nelly is Ecuadorian and I feel a ridiculous need to impress her with my accent, even though she's only 10 years old.

I press a spatula down on the oiled tortilla and it sizzles. I ask Nelly, "You don't know these?"

"Um, yeah," she says unconvincingly. "Yeah, I know them. What are you going to do with them?"

"Make them into chips that we'll eat with guacamole."

"Guacamole?" she says, wrinkling her nose the way she does when she thinks she doesn't like something.

I grab a black avocado from a bowl on the counter and put the reptile fruit into her hands so she can feel the bumpy, rubbery skin. "It's made of mashed avocado and chopped tomato," I explain.

"Oh, I know these!" she says enthusiastically. "We eat these with salt."

Nelly often uses the royal we, as though she's the ambassador of Ecuador.

"You eat everything with salt," I tease her.

Nelly is the only child I know who is content to eat an entire plate of cherry tomatoes coated in salt. This and dinosaur chicken nuggets with lots of ketchup were about the only meals my mother was able to get her to eat when she babysat Nelly.

I begin to make the guacamole. I slide a knife along the pit of each fruit, twist the two halves free and scoop out the flesh. Nelly tells me that's how her mother does it, only she cuts the avocado into squares. I take a serving fork to it, mashing, stabbing and twisting the buttery green flesh inside a large bowl. When I tell Nelly I may put onion in the guacamole, she says she won't eat anything with onion.

"I won't put a lot in," I assure her. "You'll be able to eat around it."

"No, I can't eat anything that even touches onion," she insists, wrinkling her nose again. "I hate it."

I leave out the onion.

   Nelly follows me to the oven. I peek in on wedges of beefsteak tomato and red onion charring beneath the broiler. I shove my hand into an oven mitt and use the other to hold my shadow back so I can slide the hot pan out safely. I leave the vegetables to cool on the counter and prepare the rest of the ingredients for a roasted tomato and chipotle salsa.

"What's that?" Nelly asks as I pop the top off a small can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.

"It's a kind of smoky hot pepper." I pull one from the can with a spoon, lay it on the cutting board and lick the spoon before tossing it in the sink. "They're spicy," I warn her.

"I don't like spicy things," Nelly tells me.

I know this and recall a time when she shocked my mother by declaring she didn't eat chili. "You don't like chili?" my mother had said in total disbelief. Boundaries within Central and South America did not exist for my mother at that time. Everyone was Mexican until she got to know Nelly.

I put the cooled tomatoes and onion into the blender and Nelly drags the footstool over so she can peer into the glass pitcher. "Ohhh," she says delightedly. "The onion looks like a flower."

I take a look and impressively she's right. It reminds me of a purple orchid.

The chipotle pepper goes in next and a bunch of cilantro. Nelly tells me she knows this stuff and slips into Spanish: "Es una hierba."

I commend her knowledge and set the blender whirling.

When we finally sit down to eat, Nelly won't even touch the soft corn tacos stuffed with chunks of tilapia, shredded bibb lettuce, diced mango, a smear of guacamole and a healthy squeeze of lime. She doesn't try the salsa either. But she nearly devours an entire soup bowl of guacamole, which she shovels with nearly mechanical continuity using the home-baked chips. It may be a Mexican dish but as far as Nelly is concerned it has two of her favorite "Ecuadorian" ingredients: tomatoes and salt.

Favarito

If there’s any way to eat your broad beans, it’s this way.

Phil, a self-professed lima bean hater, was skeptical when he came into the kitchen and peered down at the cutting board. (Yes, he “peered down” – he’s 6’1” and incidentally I’m 5’2.”) Popped from their long velvety green pods, fava beans (another name for broad bean) look a lot like lima beans.

I assured him he’d like the favas, pointing to the finely diced onion and prosciutto melting in a saute pan. Everything tastes better with prosciutto and onion. He went away satisfied.

I’d never cooked fresh fava beans before. I saw them in the grocery store and couldn’t resist the preternaturally large pods. Picking one up, it weighed heavy in my hand and seemed to be covered in short downy fur. I bought two handfuls.

I kept them in my refrigerator for a few days as I plotted their fate. I thought of making an Asturian bean stew called fabada. But I knew I hadn’t bought enough beans for that. Also, it’s a slow-cooking stew, so dried beans are probably best. Nevertheless, I consulted Teresa Barrenechea’s cookbook The Cuisines of Spain, a gorgeous collection of authentic recipes and photographs of food and life in Spain. That’s when I found her recipe for habas rondeñas – fava beans with jamon serrano and hard boiled egg – which she learned to make in Ronda, an Andalusian town perched on a rocky plateau that inspired Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke to name it “the dreamed-of city.”

The recipe calls for jamon serrano, an addictive dry-cured Spanish ham. However I had prosciutto on hand and it turned out to be a successful substitute. I also left out the hard-boiled eggs (see recipe below).

Preparing the fava beans is a two-step process: First, you shell the beans and blanch them, and then you peel the milky skins off each individual bean. It’s time-consuming. But on a lazy Sunday, with a warm breeze rustling the sheer kitchen curtains, I didn’t mind losing myself in the monotony of the process. And Phil made sure to puncture the time now and again with a slurp in my ear and a Hannibal Lecter line.

Once the beans were prepped, I finished them in the saute pan with the onion and ham. The result was something so irresistible I had to fight Phil for a few spoonfuls. Next time, I’ll definitely buy more beans.

Habas Rondeñas
Recipe from The Cuisines of Spain, by Teresa Barrenechea.

• 2 tsp salt
• 3 lbs fresh fava beans in the shell
• ¼ cup olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 (1/4-inch-thick) slice jamon serrano or other dry-cured ham, about 3 oz., finely diced
• 3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled
• 1 Tbsp chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Fill a saucepan with water and bring to a boil. Add the salt and the beans and boil for 15 minutes. Drain, reserving one cup of the cooking water. Peel the fresh beans to uncover their sparkling green color.

In a saute pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and saute, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, or until the onion is soft and lightly caramelized. Add the jamon serrano and saute for two minutes, or until its fat turns shiny. Add the beans and the reserved cooking liquid, cover, decrease the heat to medium-low, and cook for 15 minutes, or until the beans are tender.

Cut each egg lengthwise into eight wedges, or chop the eggs coarsely. Add the eggs to the beans and mix well. Serve hot, garnished with the parsley.

Purple Cauliflower

I’m a sucker for unusual produce. To regular NYGEW readers this is no surprise. Talk about impulse buying: If I spot something I’ve never seen, I buy it. Usually I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do with it. All I know is that I have to have it.

Curiously I’ve been stumbling on unusual purple vegetables. This time it was purple cauliflower, packaged under the Foxy brand. The company touts it as high in antioxidants and attributes the color to anthocyanins, also found in red wine and red cabbage.

I love regular cauliflower. I used to drive my family crazy because I ate it so much. The smell of boiling cauliflower, I admit, is not pleasant, and my father was particularly loath to suffer through it as frequently as he had to. I recall my mother encouraging me to cook a lot of it at once, when my father would be out of the house for a while.

Today, in the sanctuary of my own kitchen, I wanted to cook the purple kind with ingredients that could stand up to it not only in taste but also in visual impact. On an impulse I took out Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, a cookbook Italian goddess Marcella Hazan published in 1986. I checked the index for cauliflower and spotted a recipe preparing it with raisins and pine nuts. Before I even flipped to the recipe I had a vision of purple cauliflower florets sprinkled with gemlike golden raisins. Checking my pantry I was thrilled to find I had them. The pignoli I was less worried about; for me, they're a staple.

I have to note that Marcella’s recipe calls for white cauliflower and does not specify the type of raisin. But, to her credit, the recipe turned out beautifully with the fuchsia vegetable and the honey-colored raisins.

One more thing: I read some online complaints that the color bleeds from purple cauliflower when boiled. Marcella's recipe calls for parboiling the head (it finishes in a pan with olive oil.) When I did this, the water indeed turned an unnatural color – as if I’d been washing paint brushes in it. Yet as much as it bled, the vegetable still retained its vibrant hue.

   

Cavalfiore con l’Uvetta e I Pignoli
Cauliflower with Raisins and Pine Nuts, by Marcella Hazan

For 4 to 6 persons.

• 1 oz seedless raisins
• 1 young head cauliflower, about 1 ½ lbs
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tsp garlic, chopped fine
• 1 oz pine nuts
• salt
• black pepper in a grinder
• 2 Tbsp parsley

Soak the raisins in water for 15 to 20 minutes.

Trim the cauliflower of all its outer leaves except for the tender, almost totally white ones. [When I flipped over the purple head and plucked away the tough green leaves I was dazzled to find the young ones also had a lovely purple hue.] Drop the head into 4 quarts of boiling water. After the water returns to a boil, cook for 6 to 7 minutes until it is halfway done, that is, until you feel resistance when pricking it with a fork. Drain it and cut it into 1 ½-inch pieces.

When the raisins have finished soaking, drain them and squeeze them gently in your hands to force off excess liquid.

Choose a lidded saute pan that can subsequently accommodate all the cauliflower pieces without overlapping. Put in the oil and the garlic and turn on the heat to medium without covering the pan.

When the garlic becomes colored a pale gold, add the cauliflower, raisins, pine nuts, salt, generous grindings of pepper, cover the pan, and turn down the heat to low. Cook for 8 to 10 minutes or more, stirring from time to time, until the cauliflower feels tender when tested with a fork. Sprinkle on the chopped parsley and serve hot. [I didn’t have parsley on hand, and frankly I didn’t miss it.]