recipe: roasted red pepper and almond dip (salsa cremosa di peperoni rossi arrosto e mandorle)

March 12, 2014 | Simona

Roasted red pepper and almond dip

by Simona Carini

Prep Time: 45 minutes total

Cook Time: 1 hour total

Keywords: blender bake roast appetizer sugar-free vegetarian vegan almond red pepper

Ingredients (1 1/2 cup)

1/2 cup whole almonds, blanched, peeled and toasted in the oven for 12 minutes at 350 F
[Note: I measure the almonds after I toast them; the weight is 75 g]
1 cup drained oven-roasted Round of Hungary peppers or red bell peppers (see Note below)
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
A generous pinch of dried grated orange zest
3 garlic cloves, roasted with the skin on and then peeled (see Note below)
1 tablespoon fresh bread crumbs (made from my homemade bread)
1 teaspoon olive oil
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Instructions

Note: Given their shape, I roast this kind of peppers whole, at 375 F. After 25 minutes or so, I turn them stem-side down and complete the roasting. When done, I put them in a paper bag to steam and then peel them and remove the seeds. I wrap the garlic cloves in a piece of foil and roast them with the peppers, taking them out when I turn the peppers. When cooled, I peel the cloves. If using red bell peppers, place them on their side and turn them 90 degrees every 15 minutes until done, then proceed as above.

Finely chop the almonds in a food processor. Add roasted peppers, bread crumbs, orange zest, vinegar, lemon juice and garlic and process to a coarse purée.

With the machine running, pour the olive oil through the feed tube and process a little longer.

Season the dip with sea salt and pepper to taste. Transfer to a small bowl.

Cover and refrigerate. Bring the dip to room temperature before serving.

If you don’t need the whole batch, spoon half in a one-cup container. Cover the surface with a small piece of wax paper, put the lid and freeze. Thaw before serving.

Go to the full post on salsa cremosa di peperoni rossi arrosto e mandorle / roasted red pepper and almond dip

ful medames: Egyptian fava bean dish

January 19, 2012 | Simona

For the current edition of Cook the Books, we are reading Outlaw Cook by John Thorne, with Matt Lewis Thorne (1992). I started reading the book from the beginning, but then decided to follow my interests and jump around, choosing chapters based on their subject.

I enjoyed the chapter on plowman's lunch, which includes various recipes, like those for Welsh rabbit (yes, rabbit, not rarebit), soused cheese, and bread and cheese pudding. Considering that various types of homemade cheese are always available in my kitchen, I could have chosen one of the recipes, but I discarded the idea, because I don't like beer (birra), my knowledge of alcoholic beverages is very limited, and my knowledge of ale or stout is nil, so choosing a pairing with my cheese would have been a wild guess.

I read the chapter Monet À Table, which is the review of a book about the cooking journals of Claude Monet, with a special perspective: by pure chance, we are watching the TV mini-series The Impressionists, where an old Claude Monet tells the story of his career and his relationship with Renoir, Bazille, Degas, Cézanne and Manet to a journalist, and at some point offers him some of his homemade plum brandy. From Thorne's piece I learned that Monet grew greengage plums for it in his two-and-a-half-acre walled kitchen garden.

I also read with interest the chapter on ful medames, "Egypt's national dish" (piatto nazionale egiziano). From reading this post by Kalinda of Wheat-Free Meat-Free, I knew that ful medames is prepared using a special kind of small fava beans, but I had other plans. The dish had been for a while on my to do list as a way of making use of the locally grown and dried fava beans (fave secche) that I get as part of my mostly-grain CSA and that I have mentioned in the post about macco di fave.

You can read the chapter and Thorne's recipe. I halved the quantity of fava beans, used the optional lentils (lenticchie) as a belated homage to the New Year, and then adjusted the other ingredients to my taste:

1 cup of dried fava beans, soaked for 16 hours (or as needed) in plenty of water, then skin removed
1/4 cup green lentils
1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice, plus to taste
a pinch of dried lemon zest (this was my idea)
a generous pinch of ground cumin (from freshly toasted and ground cumin seeds), plus to taste
a garlic clove (spicchio d'aglio), peeled and chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
two small sprigs of fresh parsley (prezzemolo)

Bring to a boil 3 cups of cold water in a saucepan. Add the fava beans and cover. Bring back to a boil, cook for 10 minutes then lower the heath, add the lentils, cover again and simmer until the legumes are soft and can easily be mashed. (I cooked them for 50 minutes.) Note: I realized afterward that this 10 minutes are planned within the context of fava beans still in their skin. The next time I prepare this dish, I will add fava beans and lentils to the boiling water at the same time. This may well affect the cooking time. Mash the legumes roughly with a potato masher and let cool. The mash will absorb the water as it cools.

Pour the legumes into the food processor and add olive oil, lemon juice and zest, cumin, garlic, a bit of salt and pepper and parsley. Process until garlic and parsley are well distributed, then taste and adjust salt and pepper. Refrigerate until ready to use. Adjust lemon juice and cumin after the ful medames has rested for a while (I added more cumin). I think that the flavor matures and improves with time (at least one day).

The photo shows a plate I prepared for my husband's lunch, which included, besides the ful medames, drained homemade kefir (think of labneh made with kefir instead of yogurt), a hard-boiled egg (uovo sodo) and slices of my homemade challah.

This is my contribution to the current edition of Cook the Books, hosted by Rachel of The Crispy Cook. You can find the guidelines for participating in the event here, and here is the announcement.

This post contains the roundup of the event.

The fave secche make this post suitable for My Legume Love Affair 43, the current edition of the popular, legume-centered event created by Susan, The Well-Seasoned Cook, and hosted this month by Claire of Chez Cayenne.

This post contains the roundup of the event.

I contribute my ful medames to the 9th installment of the Abbecedario culinario mondiale (World Culinary ABC), an event organized by Trattoria MuVarA that will bring us to visit 27 countries of the world using the alphabet as guide. I like Il Cairo (Egypt) is hosted by Terry of Crumpets & Co.

Click on the button to hear me pronounce the Italian words mentioned in the post:

ful medames

or launch the ful medames audio file [mp3].

[Depending on your set-up, the audio file will be played within the browser or by your mp3 player application. Please, contact me if you encounter any problems.]

fava bean, Egypt

burro di noci / walnut butter

July 10, 2010 | Simona

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

Margie and Natashya put together an impressive amount of information on nut butters and a nice selection of recipes. You can find everything on this page. From the array of choices offered, I selected to make burro di noci (walnut butter) and use it in the preparation of Walnut White Bean Dip with Rosemary & Sage (salsa cremosa di fagioli bianchi e noci con rosmarino e salvia). The most important adjustment I made to the original recipe is that I started from dry beans — cannellini, to be precise (a.k.a, white kidney beans).

Cooking dry beans. The way I cook beans for further use comes from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (Beans with Aromatics). After soaking half a cup of dry beans for several hours or overnight in enough water to cover them by about an inch (I use two cups), empty the whole bowl into a saucepan and add half of a small onion (or a quarter of a medium one), halved, a bay leaf, a small clove of garlic, sliced, and a couple of sprigs of fresh parsley. Bring the water to a lively boil quickly, and keep it there for five minutes, then turn down the heat and let the beans simmer, covered, until they are ready. How long this takes depends on the type of beans and their freshness. Let them cool in their broth, then remove the aromatics and discard them.

The walnuts I used to make walnut butter are local and came to me still in their shells (gusci). While I recognize the ease of use of shelled walnuts, I like to do the shelling myself, playing the same game I played as a child, nutcracker (schiaccianoci) in hand, i.e., to crack the shell leaving the gheriglio whole. The whole walnut (noce) will soon be broken into pieces by my teeth, but I enjoy the skill displayed into imparting the right amount of pressure to the nutcracker to achieve the stated goal.

The process I apply to walnuts before I use them comes also from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, and is described in this post. If I don’t use all the walnuts I have prepared, I store the leftovers in the fridge. Finally, the fresh rosmarino and salvia (rosemary and sage) for the dip came from my herb garden.

Once the ingredients were ready, the food processor made the preparation of the walnut butter and then of the dip a breeze. My husband and I enjoyed the dip for dinner. By chance, on the table there was a trio of foods all including walnuts: besides the dip, the other two were my homemade Walnut Sourdough Bread and my homemade Stirred-Curd Cheddar with Walnuts. You may remember that in a recent post, I showed a photo of this cheese when it was still in the aging phase and I mentioned a secret ingredient. The secret is now revealed: chopped walnuts. I must say I love the result: The walnuts pair well with the slightly sharp cheddar.

You will find a lot of variety, both in terms of the kind of nut butter made and the dish in which it was used, when you browse the creations of my fellow Daring Cooks. A special thank to Margie and Natashya for an interesting and fun challenge. I will certainly revisit it later to make another type of nut butter.

Click on the button to hear me pronounce the Italian words mentioned in the post:

burro di noci

or launch the burro di noci audio file [mp3].