Vegetables

Roasted Winter Vegetables

April 12, 2009 by Charles Leave a Comment

Spring officially arrived a few weeks back, but from the look of it here in St. Louis, you would never know it. Between a light snowstorm to start the week, and freezing rain at week’s end, the thaw of Spring remains in hiding. Given the wintry conditions, I decided a few winter vegetables would make a suitable side.

Roasting over high heat gives the vegetables a crisp outer skin while keeping the inner flesh moist. The high heat also serves to caramelize the natural sugars in the sweet potatoes and carrots, for a sweet, yet healthy, cold-weather treat.

If you like, …

Sauteed Broccolini

March 23, 2009 by Charles Leave a Comment

Like the Camry, the Walkman, and the Wii, broccolini is one more Japanese product making its way into the American household. And like its predecessors, the vegetable is one part engineering and one part marketing.

Broccolini was developed in 1993, when the Sakata Seed Corporation crossed broccoli with gai lan, or Chinese broccoli. Sakata originally marketed the green as “aspiration,” perhaps a not so subtle allusion to its hopes for the product. The name may have also been designed to suggest a connection to asparagus. Indeed, Sakata also tried calling it asprobroc and asprospeer – never mind its misleading nature. Crossing broccoli with asparagus, one article noted, would be like breeding a chipmunk with a tree: it can’t be done.

Ultimately, the more accurate broccolini prevailed, though brocoletti was in the running for some time.

Broccolini is basically …

Seven-Layer Spinach Lasagna

February 9, 2009 by Charles 4 Comments

Choosing a recipe is a lot like playing the Kevin Bacon game.

The Kevin Bacon game, or Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon, centers around the small-world principle, or the idea that any two people are linked by a finite number of connections. With Kevin Bacon, the goal is to link him to any other actor using no more than six intermediary actors. For instance, Elvis and Kevin Bacon are separated by only one intermediary – Edward Asner, who appeared with Elvis in Change of Habit, and with Bacon in JFK. At last count, over one million actors can be linked to Bacon in fewer than six steps.

The principle can be applied to any number of disciplines or phenomena – from linking baseball players in various decades, to demonstrating the thought process in choosing a recipe….

Marinated Broccoli

February 6, 2009 by Charles Leave a Comment

Broccoli hasn’t had it easy in this country.

Broccoli was first cultivated in Italy, and came to the United States in the late 19th Century, with the incoming crop of Italian immigrants. Albert Broccoli, the producer responsible for putting Ian Fleming’s James Bond on the big screen, boasted that his uncle brought the first broccoli seeds to the States in the 1870s. By the 1920s broccoli had become a commercial crop, with the D’Arrigo Brothers Company shipping the product to Boston’s growing Italian population.

But despite its loose association with the debonair spy, broccoli has never been all that popular.

Early in his presidency, …

Home Fries

January 18, 2009 by Charles 3 Comments

Whenever I go out to breakfast with my siblings, my two brothers always order hash browns. No matter where we go or what they order, there is going to be a side of hash browns. They love their hash browns – or so they think.

What my brothers really love are home fries. And the confusion is not their fault. For whatever reason, hash browns, especially outside the South, has become a generic term to describe almost any sort of fried potato. This is incorrect, and I’m here to set the record straight.

Hash browns are shredded or finely diced potatoes that are pan-fried to a crisp brown. Typically, hash browns do not have anything added to them. Home fries, meanwhile, …