Pumpkins, Your Reign Is Over

Here at ES, we like to do things a little differently.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you at least have to give us points for trying.  So when someone questioned the pumpkin’s dominance as the Halloween carving medium, I saw a potential avenue for exploration.  And let me tell you, now that I’ve been down that road, I may never go back.  Carving a pepper was faster, easier and way less mess than a pumpkin.  Heck, I did most of it while waiting in the car for a friend.

Here’s what you’ll need:

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A Far East Inspired Tomato Salad

With the first night of freeze nearing in on New Jersey, I plucked plenty of near-red tomatoes from my Dad’s garden this past weekend. I don’t know how the Garden State does it, but these tomatoes, picked way past the fiery days of August, still pack a wonderful, real tomato flavor. The texture is intact and not reminiscent of those winter, mealy faux-tomatoes.

Savoring these tomatoes came easy: a simple salad. But I ditched the normal Italian-seasoning of mozzarella, oil and balsamic vinegar and traveled a little East. Topping the bright red hunks is not basil, but seaweed. I crumbled Green Chopsticks‘ Roasted Seaweed Crisps over top for a slight taste of the sea and a definitive crunch. With chunky Maldon sea salt and a few grinds of pepper, this salad found all it needed.

The Endless Road Trip — Philadelphia’s Top 10 Eats 1. There Will Be Blood…and Beets

Endless Simmer is expanding our food travel coverage to bring you reports from cities around the country. First stop: Philly. Enjoy Part 1 in our series of 10 incredible edibles the ES team found while stuffing our faces through the city of brotherly love.

I’ll admit…it’s hard for me to get excited about beets.  They are nice in a simple salad and I certainly get why vegetarians hold them in high esteem, since they add heft and substance to a meatless dish.  Still, they’ve never been something I would go out of my way to order.

But how could I resist when the menu promised Bloody Beet Steak?

This appetizer, available at The Farm and Fisherman, has been generating buzz on the local Philly restaurant scene, and for good reason. It’s not your everyday beet salad.  The Bloody Beet Steak, shown above, is about the diameter of a CD and comes accompanied by homemade yogurt and a pan jus, under a layer of (probably unnecessary) amaranth. But it’s the preparation of the beet itself that really makes the dish really unique.

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Artsy Photo of the Day

Already waiting for spring. [Grantoftegaard Farm / Ballerup, Denmark]

Friday Fuck-Up: Spinach Salad with Water Dressing

Bennett, in a post-hangover primal urge, ordered a pepperoni and onion pizza. After flipping through a few cookbooks (Cook with JamieThe Ginger Pig Meat Cookbook, Cook This Now) earlier that day, I wanted to be in the kitchen. But only for a second.

I washed some spinach and let it drain in a colander. I also threw in some flat-leaf parsley and—my latest experiment—carrot tops. I’ll stop there for a second. While buying said spinach, which was next to the carrots, at Truck Patch’s stand at the farmers market, there was a whole stack of carrot tops. Without carrots.

Apparently someone didn’t want the tops, so somehow they got chopped off and they were just sitting on the table. Looking pretty sad and lonely, actually.

That’s when I remembered this article touting the uses of vegetable parts usually discarded, like cauliflower leaves and apple cores. I asked what could be done with them and the lady said “juicing.” I didn’t have a juicer, but she gave them to me anyway. They tasted exactly like carrots. I know it’s not shocking, but it was kinda weird not to be eating an actual carrot and still tasting a carrot. Almost like smelling strawberries in wine and knowing strawberries never actually touched that drink. (I just watched Sideways, go with it.)

I finally get to the fuck-up after the jump.

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Where There’s Smoke…There’s Bacon

I appreciate the idea of hummus because it’s such a stinking fantastic dip and it’s not even based in fatty sour cream or cream cheese. I think eggplant based dips, to be honest, aren’t as delightful as bean dips, but I keep trying anyway, especially with almost-out-of-season eggplants filling crates at the farmers market.

I googled for a few baba ganosh recipes and turned to my friend Justin’s fav, David Lebovitz. Lebovitz accentuated the smoky qualities of the dip and I ran with it, adding extra smoky flavor everywhere I could.

Smoky Eggplant Dip with Bacon-fried Tortillas

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Friday Fuck Up: The Failed Unitasker and Nuclear Peppers

Maybe they were just doomed from the start.

My mom’s colleague in Texas sent us this pepper holder for the grill. I went over for dinner last night and she decided we’d try it out with some grilled jalapeno poppers. She cored the jalapenos (with the jalapeno corer) and stuffed the peppers with manchego cheese.

What you can’t see in the picture is how many times the damn things fell out of the holder. First, my dad put it on the grill the wrong way, so the legs of the holder fell through the grates and the peppers went everywhere.

Even after that though, every time we moved it, another one tumbled down onto the grill. All three of us kept scrambling to pick them up before the cheese melted onto the grates. As soon as one went in, another would fall out. We chalked this up to the peppers being too big for the holder (TWSS?) or our Pennsylvanian inability to figure out this device.

We left it on the grill for 30 minutes and the peppers remained pretty crunchy. I tried one and my mouth was on fire, like, running into the kitchen to drink milk out of the carton, on fire. We gave up on the grill and put them on a baking sheet in a 400 degree oven for another 20 minutes.

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