The local growing season is winding down, and it’s time, before the first frost, to preserve your herb garden. I’m gonna start with basil.
Genovese Basil in my garden.
Every year I plant a lot of basil; “a lot’ is a relative term; it’s a lot for my personal use, usually in the range of a dozen plants. This year was no different. I planted 8 Genovese (Sweet Italian) Basil plants, 2 Thai Basil and 2 Piccolo Basil plants.
Throughout the growing season, I pick leaves and use them as needed. Genovese in salads, on pizza, sandwiches, and whatever Mediterranean-style recipe calling for fresh basil. The Thai basil gets used in, you guessed it, Thai dishes as well as other Asian style stir-fries, salads, or wraps I happen to make. The Piccolo, I mostly use for dried basil; I will probably write about this in another upcoming “Preserving the Season” blog about drying herbs.
Throughout the season, as the plants produce buds, I pull them off and place them in little bowls on a sunny windowsill in my kitchen to let them dry, before placing them in airtight containers for use throughout the year.
Basil buds drying on my windowsill.
The bulk of the basil that I grow goes into making pesto. Using the Genovese basil, toasted pine nuts, Parmigiano Reggiano, EVOO, garlic, and salt, I make big batches. After making the pesto, I separate it into 4-ounce cups and freeze it for later use. As of now, I have about 30 of these 4-ounce pesto cups in my freezer, ready to go.
We will be having a lot of pesto-based meals in the future; this is not a bad thing. Pasta with some veggies and pesto can be made in the time it takes to cook some high-quality dried Italian pasta. A delicious, inexpensive 20-minute dinner is at times just what is needed.
Don’t limit the pesto use to just pasta; it’s also great on chicken, pork, salmon, in sandwiches, with burrata, drizzled on a rustic soup, in potato or bean salads. It’s very versatile; just use a little bit of imagination and run with it. If you’re adding pesto to a dish, you’re bound to be making that dish better.
My go-to recipe uses pine nuts; you don’t have to, they tend to be expensive and sometimes hard to find. I have seen them at Costco, in bulk, 2-pound bags, at reasonable pricing. You can substitute other nuts with great results. I have made pesto with almonds, walnuts, and hazelnuts in the past; all were great.
At EVOO, we always had big buckets full of dill pickles. At lunch, we served them as a side on our sandwich plates; we also used them in whatever recipes called for dill pickles, such as roasted pepper-pickle relish, which we sometimes served with grilled meats. I also remember an olive-pickle compote that paired very well with grilled striped bass. Another favorite is potato-pickle salad, which I still make regularly. Of course, we would use these delicious dills in tartar sauce. We would also serve them as an accompaniment to many of our homemade charcuterie items, such as smoked bluefish pate, country pate, and liver mousse.
I miss these pickles.
That’s why I decided it was about time to make them at home.
I figured if I bought about 8 lbs, that would be sufficient to get me through until next year’s harvest.
Once again, I headed off to my local farmers’ market; the Arlington Market is my go-to on Wednesdays. I picked through the bin of pickling cucumbers; I favor the small to medium-sized firm cucumbers. In my opinion, they make the best pickles. If they’re too big, they tend to be soft and seedy. I like to pick cucumbers all around the same size, so that they all pickle evenly.
The first thing that I did was to trim the blossom end off of the cucumbers. There are some enzymes in the blossom end that will soften the pickles; I like firm, crisp pickles.
Be sure to rinse the cucumbers thoroughly under cold water.
All the ingredients are divided into 2 each 8 quart containers. Well, almost all the ingredients are in there; I still need to add a couple of grape leaves to each container. The grape leaves are tannic and will also help keep the pickles crisp and firm.
The Pickles are all set to be placed in the back of my refrigerator for at least a month before I give them a try; this I am looking forward to.
An added bonus to this recipe is that the onions and garlic are delicious pickles in their own right. At EVOO, we often batter and fry the pickled onion rings. I also recall making pickled garlic aioli that we used on several different dishes, including on a few versions of our “Burger of the Week” as well as an accompaniment to fried seafood. The pickled garlic is also great sliced thin and put on salads; the pickling takes the hot bite out of the garlic, leaving a nice crisp, flavorful garlic pickle.
Go to your local farmers’ market. Do it this week before it’s too late; the season will be over before you know it. Make it happen, grab several ears of corn, and process them. It’s just too easy not to do it. A little bit of effort provides you with delicious local corn throughout the year.
Corn from my local farmers’ market.
Here’s what I do: I shuck the corn, discard the husks, and wipe away the silk. Then, using a large, sharp knife, I cut the kernels off the cobs, making sure to cut as close to the cob as possible without cutting too deep; you don’t want hard bits of cob in with the kernels.
Shucked.
You could stop there, bag and freeze the kernels, and be done. However, I add a couple more steps to preserve even more corn flavor.
Corn cobs and kernels separated.
First, using the back side of the same large knife, I scrape the cobs, releasing the germ and some corn pulp that I will add to soup or risotto for a deeper corn flavor.
Scraped cobs for that little bit extra.
The other thing that I do is bag and freeze the cobs; I will use them to make the corn stock that I will use for soup and risotto.
The scraping do add up.
Another thing that I have done in the past is dry the cobs and use them in my smoker, adding a nice sweet smoke flavor to whatever I am smoking; this works best with fish and pork.
Cobs, kernels and scrapings bagged and ready for the freezer.
At EVOO, we did this every summer to smoke bluefish for our very popular Cob Smoked Bluefish Fillet with Corn Risotto, Grilled Zucchini, Tomato-Basil Relish and Spiced Popcorn.
EVOO’s bluefish with corn 3 ways.
Keep in mind that when the local corn season ends, Za’s very popular Corn Za will also be done until sometime next July. Get it while you can!
I love poblanos! Their mild earthy bitter pepper flavor is something I look forward to every summer. Every so often you may find one that is quite spicy, however that is not the norm.
For many years, at the height of the season, late summer, I have bought several pounds of poblanos to process them for use throughout the year.
Red and green poblanos on the grill.
Here’s what I do: on my outdoor gas grill set to high heat, I char the peppers, blistering the skins, which loosens the skin so that I can peel them, as well as cooks the peppers. After charring them, I let them sit covered, at room temperature, this step steams them a bit, which also helps loosen the skin for easier peeling. I then peel, de-stem and de-seed the peppers. From there I separate them onto small ziplock bags and freeze them for later use.
Separated into small bags and frozen poblanos
They are quite versatile, and I use them in several ways; this year, I have already made a batch of corn-poblano chowder. Throughout the year, I will use them in salsas, on salads, as a topping for baked potatoes, in enchiladas, and in chili. I also pick the nicest, most intact ones to use for making rellenos; for this dish I leave the peppers whole, making a slit from the stem to the tip, so that I can remove the seeds. I then stuff the pepper with whatever filling I choose at the time; chicken, beef, roasted butternut squash, and cheese are some of my favorites.
A blast from the past, a dish that was on EVOO’s autumn menu back in 2021: Poblano Chili Relleno with creamed corn and fresh tomato salsa.
With not too much effort, poblanos can be a year round staple in your local kitchen too.
At Za we have always made our own desserts. We almost always have some sort of cheesecake on our menu; our most recent version is this salted caramel one. Salted caramel seems to be everywhere these days- candies, cookies, sauce, coffee flavoring, I’ve even seen it as a whiskey flavor; there is a simple reason for that…It’s delicious.
Cheesecake is easy to make, it just takes a bit of time. You have to have the correct pan, a 9 or 10 inch springform pan. And you need to plan ahead, you can’t decide at 4pm that your going to make a cheesecake for that nights dinner party. This cheesecake recipe calls for you to bake it for an hour and a half and then it needs to set, preferably overnight, before it can be cut and enjoyed.
So, if you have a springform pan and the time to prepare this recipe, you wont be disappointed.
At Za we serve this cheesecake with some homemade chocolate sauce, freshly whipped cream and cashew – coconut crunch.
Don’t worry if you don’t have the time, or desire, to make it for yourself, we will be happy to make it for you.
Bluefish… “blecchkk”, “it’s too fishy”, It’s too strong”, “it’s oily”.
Ahhhm, no, no, no and no!
Bluefish in the hands of someone who knows how to cook it, is an amazing versatile fish. Canned tuna and smoked salmon are perennial favorites to most and are way fishier, stronger and oilier than bluefish. Treat her right and you will end up with some great results.
Enter our end of summer bluefish:
cobb smoked Bluefish Fillet with corn risotto, grilled zucchini, tomato-basil relish and spiced popcorn
This dish is a hyper-local ode to New England. The fish is from the Cape, The corn and basil are from Verrill Farm in Concord, the zucchini is from Wards Berry Farm in Sharon, the tomatoes are from Kimball Fruit Farm in Pepperrell and the popping corn is from Hurricane Flats, in S. Royalton, VT. You can’t get much more local than this. We have been making this dish for many years. Some years, unlike this one, local peaches are available and we substitute peaches for the tomatoes in the relish.
To prepare this dish, first we fillet, portion and then brine the fish in a salt, brown sugar, water solution in the refrigerator overnight. The next day we give it a quick hot-ish smoke, over corn cobbs, (that have been dehydrated and are left over from making the risotto), being careful to not cook the fish through. At this point we’re looking to just add some smoke flavor and not cook the fish. The cobb smoke really shines with bluefish, it’s offers a sweet and not too pungent smoke flavor.
bluefish fillets in our smokerdehydrated corn cobbs, ready for the smoker
When an order comes into the kitchen we take a portion, give it a healthy dusting of our not so secret spice mix and pop it in a pan with a mixture of white wine, garlic and vegetable stock and into a hot, 450 degree oven. Then we bake it until it’s just cooked through. This could be anywhere from 3 to 9 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fillet. The best way to test the doneness of fish is with a cake tester, after a few minutes of cooking poke the thickest part of the fillet with the cake tester, if there is a change in resistance, it needs to cook longer, if it slides right through, it’s done.
I know this is a great dish, customers have been raving about it since it first hit our menu. However it was validated by the Great American Seafood Cook-off, an annual cooking contest held in New Orleans. In 2016 I was asked to represent Massachusetts. Of course, I was happy to do it; a weekend in The Big Easy, yes please. I went with Mark Dieffenbach, one of EVOO’s longtime sous chefs. I chose to cook this dish because, to me, it really does represent summer in Massachusetts and that was what I was asked to do. We had a blast, eating great food, a bit of drinking and I kind of remember some late night bowling with shots of whisky, and, oh yeah a cooking contest… We placed third, I wanted to win and if I said I was happy with third, I’d be lying.
not first placeMark digging the New Orleans vibes
Now let me digress, I have a family bluefish memory. It’s from when I was probably 8 or 10 years old. Some weekends my father would hook up with some of his buddies, head out on his boat in the Boston area or go to the cape on one of his friend’s boats to go fishing. Their goal was to to catch striped bass, but, inevitably the catch was bluefish, which my dad would bring home. My mom, a woman who’s lips, very rarely, if at all, allowed fish or any seafood what-so-ever to pass, would dutifully put the catch into the freezer and ultimately into the trash. However, one time, I’m thinking she wasn’t too happy with dad going fishing again, so she decided to cook it. She took the whole fish, guts, scales and all, covered it with mayonnaise, don’t ask me why, because I don’t know, and into the oven it went. About 2 hours later, which is at least an hour too long. Sunday dinner was served. The whole dried out stinking mess right in the middle of the dining room table. To my young eyes, it was scary. When mom served us fish, it was in the form of frozen fish sticks, never mind this big whole fish with sunken cooked out eyes and jutting teeth. I don’t think that anyone, including my father actually did anything more than poke at it. The stink of overcooked fish and guts remained for days. That was the only time that I can remember bluefish being cooked at home. On top of that my dad’s fishing trips with his buddy’s were scaled way back; I think he wanted Sunday dinner to remain as the usual- roasted meat and potatoes. This experience embedded lasting scars, it was a good 15 years until I tried bluefish again, not that I really tried it the first time. Which is another degression for a future blog post about fishing while sailing and cooking our catch.
grilled roasted garlic studded pastured MA Beef Tenderloin with sour cream whipped potatoes and orange bearnaise.
This dish has been on our menu since we opened in June of ’98. Yeah, that’s 25 years of making the same dish over and over again. We have perfected it.
I came up with this dish while I was still the chef of The Bostonian Hotel and it’s since closed, highly acclaimed restaurant Seasons. I was roasting lamb legs for a sandwich we had on the lunch menu, for extra flavor we would poke holes in the meat and stuff them with garlic before popping them into the oven. While the legs roasted the garlic would also cook seeping mellow sweet slightly caramelized garlic flavor into the meat. This process got me thinking about doing the same thing with individual beef tenderloin steaks. Since the beef would cook much faster than the lamb, I thought that using garlic that was already roasted would work with similar results. I was right, this dish is fantastic. The dish never made on to the Seasons menu, it came close though. I was planning on adding it to the fall menu when I decided that after almost 10 years at the hotel it was time for me to move on and open my own place. I knew then that this dish was coming with me and would be the star of EVOO’s menu for the foreseeable future, I was right.
The pastured beef we use is almost exclusively from Carne Locale, a Waltham, MA, based company, run by Andy Carbone. Andy works directly with Massachusetts livestock farms distributing their products to some of the areas finest restaurants.
The vegetable accompaniments change with as the local growing seasons change. Depending on the time of year you can get it served with carrots, mushrooms, broccoli, asparagus or as we are now serving it with green beans.
An testament to the love that this dish receives, my wife has often commented, hopefully jokingly, that she would “dump my ass” if I ever took it off the menu. So it remains…
Well, it’s that time of year where restaurants like ours try to entice you to bring your paramour to their establishment for what is promised to be an exquisite evening of fine food and wine, and, as a possible / hopeful prelude to uhm… other enticements.
We’re no different, this post is a shameless promotion of our Valentine’s Menu. Our locally sourced Here’s the Love Menu will be available starting at 5 pm on Friday, February 14. The menu is a prix fixe menu with several choices available in each course, priced at $65 for 3 courses and $95 paired with wines chosen by our beverage director Dan Harrington. The menu is vegetarian friendly and we can always accommodate our vegan friends.
Dock, Duck
Marinated baked Cod
If you’re trying to impress your date, don’t go to the super expensive, over-the-top formal place where their only concern is their bottom line. Impress them at EVOO where we believe that if we take care of our co-workers and our community, our bottom line will take care of itself.
We take pride in being the Massachusetts’s only Good Food 100 Restaurant. This is a really big deal to us. We have their highest rating of 6 links, which is solely based on our food purchases; it means the vast majority of the food we serve is sourced locally and ethically. The point i’m trying to make is- dining at EVOO will not only impress your Valentine, it will help us support our local farming community.
Me and my Valentine!
So, come on in and spend some time with me and my Valentine, we’ll both be here, working hard to exceed your Valentine’s expectations.
Continuing with the lamb we received from Feather Brook Farm- A sandwich on our lunch menu.
Slices of Roast Lamb Leg with Smoked Cloumage, Pickled Green Tomatoes, Lettuce, Red Onion and Carolina White Barbecue Sauce on Mark’s Cumin Focaccia
lamb leg in the immersion circulator
We marinated the legs in a mixture of garlic and spices and then sous vide’ the legs at 137 degrees for 3 hours. We then chilled them in an ice bath, finally put a nice sear on them before slicing them.
The cloumage is an artisanal fresh, creamy cheese from Shy Brothers Farm in Westport MA, which we smoked in our backroom smoker. The Lettuce was grown in The Food Project’s greenhouse in Roxbury, MA. We pickled the Kimball Fruit Farm’s green tomatoes last September. Mark our excellent lunch sous chef made the Focaccia.
Sous vide, which means “under vacuum” in French, refers to the process of vacuum-sealing food in a bag, then cooking it to a very precise temperature in a water bath. This technique produces results that are impossible to achieve through any other cooking method. – Anovaculinary
Our sous vide station.
I have been cooking for a long time, starting in the late 1970’s. First as a prep cook in a neighborhood restaurant, while in high school, making beer money. I had no passion for food at the time. I was still feeling my way through life, not sure what I was going to do. Slowly, and I mean really slowly, I found that I not only was pretty good at cooking, I was actually enjoying it. Looking back I don’t think it was the food that I was falling for. Rather, I was an impressionable young man who enjoyed the camaraderie, the manual work and the fact that a free beer was never far from reach. However, the more I cooked and discovered new foods my passion finally blossomed…I digress.
This post is supposed to be about sous vide, my digression stems from- In those many years of cooking there have been a few techniques or processes that I have learned which have changed the way I cook and think about food. Cooking sous vide is probably the biggest one for me, with whole animal butchery / charcuterie being a close second (see my 10 part “Death of a Pig” blog post).
When I first encountered cooking sous vide I remember thinking- cooking something in a pot of water in a plastic bag…how lame; what skill does that take? Well, I was quite wrong.
About 14 years ago we started experimenting using a big pot of water, Ziplock Bags and an instant read thermometer on a burner where we would constantly check the temp and adjust the heat. I quickly realized that this was a great cooking method. We could perfectly cook a piece of meat ahead of time, taking the guess work and timing with a lot more possibilities of screwing something up out of the equation. Once the meat was cooked ahead of time, perfectly, all we had to do is once the customer ordered and it was time to pick-up the meat all you had to do give a quick sear to the meat and serve it. No more inexperienced cook fucking-up an expensive piece of meat.
lamb leg in the immersion circulator
lamb loin going into an ice bath after being immersed
duck confit, made sous vide
Our experiments started with meats using the ziplock method, now we have several immersion circulators and a restaurant size vacuum sealer that are in constant use cooking all sorts of different things; red meats, burgers, chicken, vegetables, eggs, fish and even an occasional pudding for part of a dessert. Gone are the days of over cooked chicken breast (sorry, Trisha), every chicken breast we serve is moist and tender.
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My initial trepidation was replaced with “why wouldn’t we cook this way”…a little bit more forethought (prep before service) equals serving a better, more consistent product, it only makes sense.
Sous vide cooking is not just for the professional kitchen, My Anovaimmersion circulator and FoodSaver vacuum sealer have been an integral parts of my home kitchen for the past 10 years.
I highly recommend all cooks- pros, wanna-be pros and amateurs to get into sous vide cooking.
The below link is to an informative article in Bon Appetit Magazine.
