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07/28/2005 Archived Entry: "Summer Recipes, Hamptons Appearances"

I was just sitting here contemplating what to cook in the next few days and weeks. I go to the Greenmarket and some days I don’t know where to start there is so much gorgeous produce from which to choose. I am always trying new recipes – it’s my job. But then, I miss many of the dishes I used to make, and to that end I was reading through the Maven’s Index, the section on my website that I feel is much underused by you all.

Do you realize how many recipes have accumulated on The Food Maven website over the years? More than a couple hundred! There is a veritable cookbook’s worth of recipes there. For instance, one thing that I have been craving -- and I knew this was the right moment to make it – is my dear departed friend Nika Hazelton’s Garden Vegetable Soup, a soup with no broth. When made in the right season – NOW – it is so sweet and special. Even sort of magical. The list could go on, and on.

Look through the Maven’s Index for other things you may want to cook right now. By the way, if you are looking for a recipe for a specific ingredient, put the word in the search box and it will find recipes mentioning that ingredient.

Here are some other links to recipes I want to cook right now:
Nika Hazelton’s Garden Vegetable Soup
Summer Pudding and Blueberry Buckle
Skirt Steak with Salsa Verde, Raw and Roasted Garlic and Pineapple Flan
Bert Greene’s Famous Ziti Salad
Al Di La’s Farro Salad
Three-Bean Vegetarian Chili
Chinese Eggplant with Garlic Sauce

One food I have been playing with lately is hanger steak, which is now being sold, all trimmed and more or less ready to be cooked, by Fresh Direct for only $3.99 a pound. I hope you realize that the higher the price of fuel oil and gas, the higher the price of grain, which in turn, among other factors, increases the price of beef and other meats. You’ve probably noticed how expensive good steaks have gotten – New York strips (shell), Porterhouse, T-bone, fillet. This has made the more novel cuts of steak more appealing. Don’t you think?

For me there is no hardship here. I prefer skirt steak to almost any other cut. It’s the cut I grew up eating as “steak,” since we could not afford those fancy cuts on any regular basis. Skirt Steak is also called Romanian Tenderloin, and sometimes Plate Steak, because it comes from a primal cut called the Plate, which is the underbelly of the animal. Two related steaks are Flank Steak and Hanger Steak.

Flank steak is, to my taste, the least flavorful of the three but it takes to marinating so well that you can make it flavorful. Its fibers are more porous than the others, so it soaks up flavor more readily. For maximum flavor and optimum tenderness, just don’t cook it to more than medium –better yet, medium-rare -- and slice it on a sharp bias.

The Hanger Steak used to be called Butcher’s Tenderloin because the butcher’s would save this singular muscle for his own family, or turn it into chopped meat. In France, it is the steak of bistros – as in steak frites -- and it is called l’onglet. It was the French bistros in New York that made it popular here just a few years ago.

Here’s a memory: My mother’s standard hamburger and meatloaf order at the butcher was “two pounds ground neck and tenderloin.” That’s what she told me to say. It was like a mantra. When I was old enough to know about filet mignon and that it was also called tenderloin – somewhere in my mid teens – I wondered why my mother used “tenderloin” for chopped meat. Naturally, it was the Butcher’s Tenderloin.

Anyway, Hanger Steak is tough and needs to be tenderized with a marinade. I have been experimenting using papaya seeds to tenderize the meat, as well as some red wine vinegar mixed with extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, and dried thyme to flavor it. Vinegar, or any acidic ingredient, is a tenderizer, too.

To release the tenderizing substance in the papaya seeds, I crush them with my meat pounder. Don’t pound the round seeds. They will jump from under the pounder. Just use pressure to crush them. Spread them on both sides of the meat. For each 1 ½-pound steak, use the seeds from a half of a papaya. Season the meat with salt and pepper, and pour on two tablespoons each vinegar and oil, plus sprinkle with about a teaspoon of crushed dried thyme. I have been doing a 24-hour marination – in the refrigerator – and everyone has loved the meat, which I serve sliced, rare to medium rare. I am, however, about to abandon the papaya seed marination in favor of my friend Rozanne Gold’s recipe using green salsa – tomatilla-based salsa, tomatillas being acid enough to tenderize. She used the marinade for Skirt Steak, but it will work equally well with Hanger. That’s one of the links you’ll find in the Maven’s Diary right now.

On another note, a reminder :
I will be in the Hamptons this weekend, for the first time in ages.

I will attend Joan Hamburg’s remote broadcast from the Blue Parrot tonight (Thursday) at 6 p.m. – so I am sure to see some of you this weekend.

Tomorrow morning, Friday, at about 0 a.m., I will be on the Hampton’s Morning Show broadcast live on Plum TV (channel 18) from B. Smith’s restaurant in Sag Harbor.

Tomorrow evening at 7 p.m., I will be at Bookhampton meeting and greeting and signing books. (You all come out.)

On Saturday evening I am the auctioneer at the benefit party for ECCO Farm, the ecological farm that does such good work in teaching children about food and their environment. Check Maven’s Personal Appearances for more information on these doings.