Tomato Braised Celery

This Sunday at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market you will find fresh eggs and pastured chicken, beef, pork, and lamb from Fair Valley Farm and Fog Hollow Farm, fresh cut flower bouquets from Tiger Lily Art Company, and plenty of fresh produce from Camas Swale Farm including sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, delicata squash, potatoes, leeks, and celery.

Celery is typically relegated to a supporting role in soups and stews, but apparently for Victorians it was a luxury ingredient displayed ostentatiously in special celery vases. For my beautiful Camas Swale celery bunch, I took inspiration from this tribute to long-cooked vegetables by Samit Nosrat in the New York Times, which reminded me of a Marcella Hazan recipe, deemed genius by food52. Hazan's recipe calls for pancetta to add some umami to the tomatoey braising liquid, but I opted for a few anchovy fillets because I love the flavors of celery and seafood.

If you, like me, happen to have momentarily succumb to the illusion that a kitchen appliance will solve all of your problems associated with anxieties about the impending school year, noxious smoke-filled air, and natural disasters related to climate change, and you recently invested in an Instant Pot, you could use it for this recipe. You could also cook this on the stove top. Either way, it is delicious and very soothing. 

Tomato Braised Celery

adapted from Marcella Hazan

1 bunch celery
2 large shallots, peeled and diced
1/4 cup olive oil
4 anchovy fillets in oil
15 ounce can of peeled and diced plum tomatoes, with their juice
red pepper flakes to taste
salt to tatse

1. Cut off the celery's leafy tops, saving the leaves for another use, and detach all the stalks from their base. Use a peeler to pare away most of the strings, and cut the stalks into pieces about 3 inches long (cutting on a diagonal looks nice). Alternately, if you plan on cooking long past tender (an hour or more), you can skip peeling the strings. 

2. Heat a saute pan over medium heat. Put in the oil and the anchovies and cook, breaking up the anchovies, until they dissolve into the oil. Add the red pepper flakes and stir, and then add the diced shallots. Cook until the shallots are cooked through and golden. 

3. Add the tomatoes with their juice, the celery, and salt, and toss thoroughly to coat well. Adjust heat to cook at a steady simmer, and put a cover on the pan. After 15 minutes check the celery, cooking it until it feels tender when prodded with a fork. The longer you cook them, the softer and sweeter they will become. If while the celery is cooking, the pan juices become insufficient, replenish with 2 to 3 tablespoons of water as needed. If on the contrary, when the celery is done, the pan juices are watery, uncover, raise the heat to high, and boil the juices away rapidly.

To make in an Instant Pot:
Perform step 2 using the Saute function. Press cancel, add the remaining ingredients for step 3, then cook with the pressure cooker function on low pressure for 15 minutes and allow the pressure to release naturally.

Kale Salad with Crispy Fried Shallots and Poached Egg

Food trends can sweep nations, but they can also catch hold on a very local scale, in your own household, like the red lentil soup I couldn't stop making the winter I was pregnant with my son. When my parents visited recently, I exposed them to various uses for the vegetable du jour, kale, which has even been making inroads into Parisian cuisine and has certainly been trending in our household. Reminiscing with my parents reminded my of another household food trend from my youth, following a summer trip to Paris, when my father could not get enough frisee salad with lardons and poached eggs.

Now my parents are mostly vegetarian, and bacon is passé, so I decided to recreate a kale version of Salad Lyonnaise with crispy fried shallots in lieu of lardon. It was quite delicious, and I'm convinced that these shallots, a common condiment in Vietnamese cuisine, will be the next big food trend. At least they will be in our household.

Kale Salad with Crispy Fried Shallots and Poached Egg

serves four for a side or two for a main dish

1 bunch lacinato kale

2 shallots

1/2 cup olive oil

4 Tbsp red wine vinegar

salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

4 eggs

1. Rinse the kale leaves, cut out the center stems, and chop into 1 inch ribbons. Dry thoroughly.

2. Prepare the crispy fried shallots. Peel and chop the shallots. Heat a wok or skillet and warm the oil. Add a piece of shallot and if it sizzles, add the rest of the shallots and a generous pinch of salt. Cook the shallot pieces over medium low heat, stirring frequently, until they develop a deep brown color, but without burning. Remove the shallots with a slotted spoon and reserve. To the shallot-scented oil add the vinegar and heat, stirring, for a minute. Now drizzle the hot vinaigrette over the kale and toss to coat. Sample a leaf and add salt and pepper to taste.

3. Heat water in a wide pan for poaching the eggs. When the water is ready, poach four eggs following these instructions (or you can cheat and use these), such that the yokes are still runny (they will serve to further dress the kale leaves in the salad). You can also poach the eggs ahead of time and reheat them gently in a bath of hot water.

4. Assemble the salads by plating the dressed kale, top with a poached egg or two, and sprinkle over the crispy fried shallots. Eat right away.  

Easy Soft Polenta with Olive Oil Simmered Leeks

Some recipes are intuitive and transparent, like throwing together a fresh salad with seasonal produce, and they serve as a helpful reminder or inspiration. Other recipes pique our interest because they seem mysterious, improbable, and opaque. There's a special pleasure that comes from suspending one's best judgement, trying such a recipe, and having it succeed. Here are two such recipes from Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, a manifesto on the pleasures of slow cooked foods. The first recipe if for oven-baked polenta, which I was inspired to try with our ample supply of polenta from our Lonesome Whistle Farm CSA. Stirring your polenta continuously over a hot stove can be rewarding (and bicep building). But if you have time, and especially if you already have your oven on for a roast or stew, Wolfert's method is remarkably effortless and produces deliciously creamy polenta from an unpromising-looking sedentary sludge of water and cornmeal.

With my polenta and a Fair Valley Farm ham baking in the oven, and no stirring to occupy me, I got to flipping through Wolfert's cookbook and came across a recipe for slow cooked leeks and root vegetables simmered in olive oil that seemed perfect for my latest haul from Open Oak Farm's CSA. This recipe, which Wolfert described as "Mediterranean alchemy", offered the intrigue of a secret ingredient (a tablespoon of soaked rice) and an unusual cooking techniques (a parchment paper sealed pot). The final dish was a revelation: a meltingly sweet concoction of leeks and shallots that tempered the sharpness of a purple winter radish without cooking it to mush. And unexpectedly, the vegetables made a wonderful topping for the creamy polenta. The dinner was especially tasty resulting from the leisurely suspension of disbelief.

Oven-Baked Polenta

from Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen
serves 6-8

2 cups polenta 
2 Tbsp butter or olive oil
2 tsp salt
8 cups cool water

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large ovenproof pan, melt the butter or add the oil and swill to coat the bottom and sides. Combine the remaining ingredients and stir with a fork. Bake, uncovered for 1 hour and 20 minutes. 

2. Stir the polenta with a fork, season with additional salt to taste, and bake for about 10 more minutes, or to the desired consistency. Remove from the oven and let rest for 5 minutes. Serve warm. 

Note: Leftovers can be reheated in a microwave, mixing between heating, and the polenta will become creamy again.

Leeks Simmered in Olive Oil

from Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen

2 pounds leeks
1/3 cup chopped onion or shallot
1/4 cup olive oil
2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced, or substitute other root vegetables such as turnips or winter radishes
2 tsp sugar
1 Tbsp rice
salt and pepper to taste
juice of 1/2 lemon, or more to taste
1/4 cup chopped flat leaf parsley

1. Clean the leeks thoroughly (I like to trim the roots and green tops and then cut them lengthwise and wash them, splayed open, under running water, then drain well.) Cut them into two inch lengths. 

2. Combine the onions, olive oil, and root vegetables in a heavy Dutch oven and cook over medium heat, stirring, for 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the leeks and sugar, cover with a sheet of parchment paper or foil and a tight-fitting lid, reduce the heat to low and cook for 20 minutes (Leeks and root vegetables should cook in their own moisture. If necessary, add 1 Tbsp of water).

3. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, soak the rice in hot water for ten minutes. Drain.

4. Add the rice to the leeks. Season with salt and pepper, and cook, tightly covered, for 20 minutes longer.

5. Remove from the heat and add the lemon juice. Wolfert recommend serving the leeks and vegetables at room temperature or chilled, but they are also delicious warm on top of polenta with grated parmesan cheese.

Salsify Sachets

Thanks to our Open Oak Farm CSA, I've been introduced to a vegetable I'd never heard of before: salsify. According to Amanda Hesser's Essential New York Times Cookbook, salsify was last popular in the 1880s, and indeed one of the first items recovered from a search for salsify recipes is a listing of vintage recipes, including instructions for scalloping, stewing, and sauteing. It occurred to me that these gnarly root vegetables might do well baked in foil packets like this. And because they are supposed to have a mild oyster flavor (they are also called oyster plants), I thought they would taste nice with shallots and a lemony dressing, paired with fish.

Like awkward adolescents, salsify roots are gangly and hairy, and they start to blush brown as soon as you try to open them up. But a toss in lemony vinaigrette halted the discoloration. And after 30 minutes of roasting and steaming, they emerged from their foil packets mature and refined, with a delicate flavor more like artichoke hearts than oysters. I'm convinced that this charming vegetable is due for a comeback.

Salsify Sachets

serves two

2-3 salsify roots
1 lemon
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp dijon mustard
1 Tbsp white vermouth
salt and pepper
2 shallots, peeled and sliced


1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.


2. Prepare the vinaigrette. In a medium bowl, mix together zest from the lemon (a microplane grater works well for zesting), juice from 1/2 lemon, mustard, olive oil, white vermouth, and salt and pepper.


3. Peel the salsify with a vegetable peeler, cut the thicker parts into matchsticks the width of the thinner parts, and quickly toss the pieces into the vinaigrette as you go to slow the browning.


4. On a baking sheet, spread out two sheets of aluminum foil, about 10 inches long. Divide the salsify and vinaigrette between the two foils and sprinkle over the chopped shallots. For each foil sheet, fold one half over the other and then crimp the edges to make a packet. Place the foil packets on the baking sheet into the oven and bake for about 30-40 minutes until the contents are soft and have started to caramelize. Serve warm, pouring all of the accumulated juices over the vegetables. 


Note: If you can't find salsify, this recipe would also work nicely with other root vegetables like parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, or fennel bulbs.

Pan Fried Cod with Capers

serves two

2 cod fillets

wondra or flour
salt and pepper
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp capers
juice from 1/2 lemon
splash of white vermouth


1. Start heating a skillet over medium high heat. Season the cod fillets with salt and pepper and sprinkle over some wondra flour, shaking off the excess. When the pan is hot, melt the butter. Then add the fillets, press down with a spatula, and let them cook until nicely browned, about 4 minutes. Flip them and cook on the second side until browned and cooked through, about 3 minutes. Remove the filets to warm plates.


2. Add the capers to the browned butter in the pan and saute for a minute. Then add the lemon juice and white vermouth. Let the caper sauce cook down for a minute and then pour over the fish fillets. Serve at once with roasted vegetables and couscous to soak up the sauces.