4 Ingredients: White Beans.....a versatile addition to salads and main dishes

I get a little jazzed up about good beans. Think about a semi-fancy salad that has had small white beans sprinkled over the top. Or an Italian appetizer of white beans with garlic, olive oil and herbs (with maybe with a little pancetta or prscioutto). A hearty French stew or cassoulet.

But I also think of bean cooking as a total hassle. Soaking overnight, rinsing, etc. ending up with mush. So sometimes I've resorted to a can of 'high quality' imported white beans. Well, that's not too great a solution either.

Here's what might work best - soak dried beans for 'a while', then cook them with some aromatics until they taste  right. The longer you soak the shorter the cooking. Big beans take longer too. Keeping it that simple, and not obsessing about cooking times and procedures should help make bean cooking less intimidating. 

Using the beans with monkfish and shrimp creates a pretty enjoyable result. 

Braised Monkfish and Shrimp with Fennel, Tomato and White Beans

White Beans

1 cup dried white beans
1 carrot
1 small onion
1 bay leaf

1. Soak the beans in cold water overnight, or for a few hours. Put beans in a pot and cover with cold water. 
2. Bring to a simmer, stir occasionally and cook for 30 minutes or up to two hours. Taste a few along the way, and as soon as they have a texture you like, take them off the heat and drain them. 
3. Add a little olive oil, salt and pepper. 

Serving suggestions: 

- Toss with olive oil, drained flaky tuna, chopped herbs and chopped hardboiled eggs. 

- Serve as an accompaniment to most any soup

- Mash a few tablespoons with fork, add garlic, herbs and spread on a cracker

- Use as a replacement for rice

Four Ingredients: Fried Eggs, Bread Crumbs and Herbs

These pictures are even in the ballpark for how good this tastes - just try it some weekend morning when you've got a slice of high quality bread lying around. I’ve used leftover grilled polenta as well, but big fresh bread crumbs are better than the polenta.

1. Pulse a piece of rustic bread in a food processor or blender to make coarse bread crumbs.
2. Cook bread crumbs over med-high heat in oil or butter to toast. Reserve a few on the side. 
3. Add two eggs. If you want to, flip them with a spatula after 2 minutes. Or do the sunny side up thing. 
4. Sprinkle some chopped fresh herbs atop. Top with reserved crumbs. 
5. Further, top with a slice of crispy pancetta, if that happens to be lying around your kitchen too. Bacon or bacon crumbles would be good. But frankly, the egg, crumbs and herbs don't need the pig.    

This dish was inspired by Judy Rodgers, Zuni Cafe.

Four Ingredient Dishes

Quick and Easy Dishes in 10 Minutes
68 Fresh and Healthy Recipes
Dinner for 4 for $10
30 Minute Meals


 --- >  Link to a cranky review of Cooking Light magazine
 --- >  Link re: how long it takes to make a 30 minute meal, and why. Semi-cranky review of Rachel Ray

These lines are the stuff of popular cooking magazines and TV shows. They make me think of a line from a  literary journal (sort of) called McSweeney's. "Print submissions cannot be less than one word, and cannot be over 100,000 words, unless there is a compelling reason to have them longer or shorter, in which case you can do as you wish." Not sure that has much to do with Four Ingredient Dishes or cooking magazine headlines, but it is funny.

Anyway.

For decades Gourmet Magazine tried to publish really quick recipes that used only a few ingredients. Rarely did they work well, because they were too.....stripped down. No layers of flavor. Certainly a high quality ingredient here or there made a dish spectacular. But somehow I never thought they pulled it off on a regular basis.

The popular cooking magazines are worse because they promise so much, then deliver even less than what Gourmet tried to do. Jarred and pre-packaged ingredients, accessible but expensive produce (e.g., sugar snap peas), ill-conceived and ill-composed recipes.....I could go on an on. And I did. Follow the link to the article above.

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A New Era of 4 Ingredient Dishes

Funny, though, during the last generation of chef and restaurant evolution, there have been major movements toward simple, high quality cooking that focuses on great ingredients, new pairings and even new techniques. This has resulted in a body of work, sprinkled here and there, that includes a number of excellent recipes / dishes / approaches that use few ingredients yet produce exceptional results.

For example - earlier today we had Fried Eggs with Toasted Breadcrumbs, as published by Judy Rodgers in the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. It might be a 2 ingredient dish - salt and olive oil can't really count. Nor do herbs and vinegar, which are optional. 

Ingredients:

1. Bread
2. Eggs
3. Salt and olive oil
4. Fresh herb(s) - optional
5. Vinegar - optional.

The approach is to create a few tablespoons of breadcrumbs from a semi-fresh loaf of rustic / hearty bread (which also can be made with four ingredients - see this article from my other blog). Toss the crumbs in olive oil, heat in a pan until just starting to brown. Add a little more olive oil and crack a couple eggs into the pan. That's it. Optionally, flip the eggs for over-easy (adding a few breadcrumbs to the uncooked side before you flip). If you've got 'em, throw a few fresh herbs in at some point. Splash a little balsamic or sherry vinegar in the pan after removing the eggs, swirl it and immediately drizzle. Even better.

I just got this cookbook and am impressed. It's as much a cooking instruction book as it is filled with great recipes. I'm looking forward to working through it and will share a detailed review someday for you all.

First dish I made based on ZCC was Fish Fillets with Romesco Sauce and Asparagus. Excellent, Romesco was complex but time intensive.

Homemade Oriental Chicken Ramen Noodles

If you get a chance, pick up a copy of the new quarterly food / cooking publication called Lucky Peach. It's published by a really innovative literary / cutting edge group called McSweeney's. The cooking mind behind it is David Chang, who I always want to call Michael Chang, the tennis player. Chang has been the hottest young star-chef / restaurateur of the last few years.

A warning - the magazine is esoteric, at times raunchy, highly entertaining, informative, creative and geared primarily to high end cooking. BUT, there are a few really approachable recipes that anyone could tackle. Oh, did I mention the art? No. The journal is creative and  aesthetically brilliant  in several dimensions.

Anyway, you can find it most easily online. McSweeney's Lucky Peach.

The first issue is focused on Ramen, the real thing from Japan, not our $0.11 packages. And eggs. Why eggs? No clue. But hey - they're the publishers, they can do what they want.

As my readers, you know that I won't publish recipes directly from other's sources. But I will share the concept of this recipe, which Chang really presents as chicken soup (with noodles), not as ramen. However, the Asian flavors make it ramen-like (especially to closet packaged ramen lovers).

• Create a three ingredient chicken stock - water, chicken, salt - simmered (not boiled) for an hour or a little more. The simmer concept is a simple yet critical  technique. Remove the chicken and cool. 
• In parallel, create a concentrated vegetable stock (called a nage) using Asian ingredients: onion, kombu (a seaweed), ginger, Sichuan peppercorns, garlic, shallots, scallions. 
• I substituted leeks for onion, which added further subtlety. 
• Combine the stock and nage. Add cooked noodles and chunks of chicken. 

The subtle Asian seasonings were sublime. 

Two Skewers for Grilled Swordfish

Mark Bittman published a little e-book called "What I Grill and Why". It's only available on Kindle, but if you have a Kindle it's worth far more than the 99 cents it's selling for at the moment.

The best thing I discovered in it was his technique for using two skewers to better grill chunks of fish. A single skewer allows a line of fish pieces to individually stick to a grill grate, then spin around the skewer when trying to remove it. Two skewers allows for a more unified solid 'rack' of fish pieces, which can better be released from the grill.

AWESOME idea. It will work for most firm-fleshed fish.

Bittman provides a recipe that marinates swordfish chunks in lime juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, cilantro and Tabasco. I used a sprinkling of red pepper flakes instead of cilantro. With freshly caught swordfish from the gulf, it was wonderful.