Middleton - Fast, fresh & green: how to cook vegetables every night of the week

More Than 90 Delicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers

By Susie Middleton
Photographs by Ben Fink

Text copyright 2010 by Susie Middleton.
Photographs copyright 2010 by Ben Fink.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

eISBN: 978-1-4521-0015-9

Prop styling by Susie Middleton
Food styling by Michelli Knauer

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
http://www.chroniclebooks.com

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I start thinking about dinner when I wake up in the morning. I knowIm crazy like that. Fortunately, I usually get distracted by breakfast. Most mornings Im busy figuring out how I can design yet another killer egg sandwich. Today I stuffed my butterbroiled English muffin with some really sharp Vermont cheddar cheese, one of my roasted tomatoes (), and an egg from a farm I like to visit, scrambled up with a bit of cream and a few chives. Did I mention I like to cook? For myself, my friends, my ninetythreeyearold father-in-law, even the dog.

Im sorry, I dont mean to be making a big deal out of it; its just that I want you to know that this is a cookbookand a highly personal one at that. Its my gift to you, because I love helping people learn to become better cooks. And I dont mean that in the I am wearing a chefs coat and you are quivering in your clogs wondering when the fun begins kind of way. Im just offering up all the tips and techniques I know about cooking vegetablesand more than 90 recipes to mess around with. In my years as editor of Fine Cooking magazine, I got downright evangelical about vegetablesnot because Im a health nut, but because I think they taste so much better when properly cooked. And because I know everyone would like to eat more of them.

Despite the name of this bookFast, Fresh & GreenI dont want you to think that its all about speed. You will absolutely learn to turn out delicious vegetable side dishesmany, many of them in under 30 minutes. I promise. But you will also be chopping and stirringcookingand, well, loving it. At first, you may stumble a bit and find that some things take you a little longer than youd like. (If that happens, just stop and make a recipe like Sauted Sugar Snap Peas with Salami Crisps on and you will feel better. Theyre ultraeasy and fast.) A few (very delicious) recipes may even take 45 or 50 minutes. But once you start tasting what youve cookedand hear the roars from your crowdyoull feel great.

Then one day youll find yourself coming home from work or school or a busy round of errands and automatically turning the oven on or pulling out your saut panbecause youve already decided how youll cook your veggies, and what you want to make with them. You might not even need to look at the recipe anymore. It might be Sauted Carrots with Warm Olive and Mint Dressing (). Youll be dreaming about how delicious it is going to be before you even start. You may just forget about the steak or chicken altogether.

How is all this going to happen? you might be asking. Well, Im going to encourage you to make a little mind shift. I want you to think about how youre going to cook before you think about what youre going to cook. Do you feel like grilling tonight (easy on the cleanup)? Want to turn the oven on to do some roasting, which means handsoff cooking? Maybe you feel like stirfrying or sauting to ease your tensions. Deciding which method youll use to cook your vegetables (there are nine in this book) is the first step in a strategy Im going to share with you for creating yummy vegetable side dishes every night. Its an approach Ive developed over the years, which I think will help prevent the problem weve all had of standing in front of the refrigerator at six oclock in the evening, staring dumbfounded at a bag of carrots.

When I get home from a long day, the first thing I do (after petting my dog, feeding my dog, letting my dog out, and, oh, petting my dog again) is turn on the oven, light my grill, or get out my saut pan or skillet. Next I rummage through that fridge, or more precisely, the vegetable bin. I begin to look at what Ive got and imagine some kind of yummy vegetable thing. (I almost always keep meats simple on weeknightsgrilled skirt steak, roasted chicken thighs, seared pork tenderloinand let my vegetable side dishes bring the interest and excitement to the plate.) If Im lucky, theres a stash of good stuff in that vegetable bin. I buy local produce directly from the farm or the farmers market when I can these days, and, not surprisingly, it usually lasts a lot longer than the storebought, trucked-in, polybagged stuff. But like everyone else, Im often stuck with whatever Ive managed to get at the grocery store on Sunday, and it may not be the absolute freshest. (I realize that may seem like a heretical admission in a book like this, but we all have to do our best.)

Once Ive pulled a few vegetables out of the fridge, I rifle through the pantryand the fridge againto look for flavor ideas, like hoisin sauce, fresh ginger, and a few scallions; or sherry vinegar, briny capers, lemon, and fresh parsley (see The Pantry, on ). Once Ive got the flavors going, if I havent already, I grab the right pan for the jobheavyduty sheet pans for roasting, a heavyduty straightsided saut pan for sauting or braising, or a midweight stirfry pan for stirfrying. Then I start slicing and dicing my vegetables. So my weeknight vegetable improvisation goes like this:

1. I pick my cooking method.

2. I pick my vegetables.

3. I pick my flavorings.

4. I start chopping.

I say improvisation, because thats a word Im comfortable with after years of developing vegetable recipes. But dont be scared by that expression, because Im not asking you to improvise in this book (unless you want to!). What Im really offering you is a strategy, and a wealth of recipes organized around eight simple techniques: quickroasting, quickbraising, handson sauting, walkaway sauting, twostepping, no cooking, stirfrying, and grilling. (As a bonus, Ive included a ninth slowerbutworthit chapter, Baking Gratins, for weekend vegetable cooking, because making these yummy casseroles is so satisfying.) With these techniques, you, too, can start thinking about what to cook based on what you want to turn on, how involved you want to be in the cooking, how much time you have, what flavors youre craving, and what results youre looking for. Now youve got options, no matter what youve got in the vegetable bin.