Viking Sunday Dinner

Vegetable extremes!

My favorite ways to cook vegetables are miles away from one another.  The first involves the very gentlest of cooking – so much so that you’re not even doing it over the stove – the second, roasting the holy hell out of them.  In either case, this is a way to make vegetables that are robust enough to complete the meal when paired with a nice piece of meat, chicken or fish.

Technique 1: the teakettle technique

If you have an electric kettle, you’ll love this approach (if not, just use your stovetop kettle).  Fill it up full with water and bring it to a boil; meanwhile, trim your veggies, and rinse them in a metal colander.  When the kettle’s on the boil, set the metal colander in the sink and slowly and carefully pour the boiling water over your veggies.  When you’re out of boiling water, the veggies are done.  Blast them with cold water from the faucet for about a minute to stop the cooking.  You’re done. 

This is a green bean’s heaven.  Green beans cooked this way are tender and perfect; toss them with olive oil and salt, or a vinaigrette, or some plain old melted butter.  Snow peas also are amazing cooked like this, and respond well to a bit of sesame oil for seasoning.  Broccoli can be tossed with olive oil and lemon juice and served as a side – or any of these can be mixed into salad greens.

Technique 2:  the holy-hell roast

Big roasting pan, a few big glugs of oil (olive or canola) and some high heat – around 450 degrees.  The only variable is how long it will take for the vegetable in question to achieve the critical brown caramelized quality that makes this so tasty.  Brussels sprouts, halved lengthwise with a few cloves of chopped garlic, were made for this technique (don’t even consider boiling a Brussels sprout, no matter what your mother says) and will take about 20 minutes.  Broccoli, amazingly, also takes this method well, but will only take about 8 minutes.  Hard root vegetables like carrots and parsnips will be around 25 minutes.

Eat your veggies!

Basic pie crust

When my brother was trying to impress the girl that he met at Burning Man by bringing her apples that he grew on his backyard tree for them to make a pie together (I'm serious), he turned to me for advice.  This is, pretty much verbatim, the e-mail I sent to him on pie crust.  It makes a really nice pie, either sweet or savory - and he's still with the girl, whatever that tells you.

This may be more crust than you need for a basic two-crust pie, but it's traditional to have some extra dough that you can roll in brown sugar and bake as little cookies.  Or stick in a ramikin and top with a beaten egg and some cheese for a microscopic quiche.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces (I actually like to use 50% butter, 50% Smart Balance; there's a nice rich/light thing that they do together
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup water

Mix the dry ingredients, then use a pastry cutter to cut the butter and shortening into the dry ingredients until it's about the consistency of cream of wheat (you can also do this with two knives... or your clean fingers, just basically rubbing the butter into the flour).

Put in a couple of tablespoons of cold water and mix (gently) until pieces of dough start to appear; you can pull out the dough as it shows up. It'll be crumbly. You can keep adding water until it's all dough, but again you WANT it to be crumbly, not wet at all, and you want to be very gentle with it; if you stir too much, you activate the glutens in the wheat too much and then it gets chewy (like bread) not flakey. There should be some flour left over in the bowl when you are done, probably.

Wrap it all up in some plastic wrap and pack it gently into a ball, then stick it in the fridge for about an hour.

Take it out, cut it in half and roll it out on a floured surface - a couple of pieces of wax paper are also useful here; you can put the dough between them and roll them on your counter, if that's easier. Roll it until you have a rough circle, about a inch bigger than your dish on all sides. Gently flip or slide one circle into a buttered pie dish, then roll out the other one and let it rest while you get on with the filling.