CSA Week 9 and its Uses

"Gargouillou" apparently was originally a humble French peasant dish of potatoes and ham. But it was made famous by Chef Michel Bras, who reinvented it as a composition of dozens (really - often 50 to 60 separate components) of various fresh seasonal vegetables, herbs, and flowers, painstakingly assembled onto a riotously colorful plate. It has been much talked about and much imitated; chefs the world over have used Bras' gargouillou as the inspiration or springboard for countless dishes, like David Kinch's "Into the Vegetable Garden." You can read about it in this New York Times piece, see a slideshow in this Wall Street Journal, catch it in video form here, or, just do a Google image search for "gargouillou." The pictures are so beautiful you can't help but smile.

So when I picked up my most recent share from Little River Market Garden and saw flowering hon tsai tai, perky Caraflex cabbage, "purple haze" carrots, and wispy fresh dill, among other goodies, a very simple take on gargouillous is what came to mind. The cabbage, hon tsai tai leaves and stems, and carrots were quickly blanched in salted boiling water. Last week's dinosaur kale was tossed with olive oil and oven-roasted till crispy and a bit charred. Last week's cutting celery, this week's dill, and the gorgeous yellow flower buds from the hon tsai tai went in raw. A dollop of last week's marcona almond brown butter vinaigrette, and an herbaceous salsa verde, both found their way onto the plate. I also took the blanching liquid from the vegetables, which had picked up some of their flavors and a nice soft green hue, gave it a bit of viscosity with some agar agar, and drizzled it around the plate.

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Harry's Pizzeria - Miami Design District

When it comes to pizza, there are many styles. There's your basic Neapolitan. There's your hardcore Verace Pizza Napoletana. There's New York-style pizza. There's your more esoteric thin-crusted Lazio style pizza, Sicilian, grandma pizza, New Haven style apizza, Chicago deep dish ... pizza maven Adam Kuban came up with a list of 21 different regional styles, and surely there were many more that were overlooked.

The pizzas at Harry's Pizzeria, the new pizza joint from local hero Michael Schwartz, are precisely none of those. But they are quintessentially in the style of Chef Schwartz and his namesake Michael's Genuine Food & Drink: great flavors, with a focus on local ingredients and in-house preparations.

Almost five years ago (!) Schwartz opened MGF&D in Miami's Design District. It was an instant hit, and for good reason: the menu was accessible but exciting, it focused on local products without being sanctimonious or dogmatic about it, and both the food and the place had a relaxed, unfussy style that was perfectly in tune with the impending economic meltdown. MGF&D immediately became one of the most popular and well-regarded restaurants in town and has continued to hold that status to this date.

Though success came quickly for MGF&D,^[1] Chef Schwartz was deliberately slow in building upon it. The expansion bug finally bit in 2010 when he added a second Michael's Genuine in Grand Cayman. This past year has seen several new projects, not only Harry's Pizzeria, named after his son Harrison, but also a consulting gig for Royal Caribbean's 150 Central Park on the Oasis of the Seas cruise ship, and the in-progress takeover of the restaurant and dining operations at the Raleigh Hotel on South Beach.

(You can see all my pictures in this Harry's Pizzeria flickr set).

Harry's is the most modest of those projects. The space, right down the street from MGF&D, became available when Jonathan Eismann's Pizza Volante (which was one of my favorite local pizza places) shut down. It already had the same kind of wood-burning oven that was installed at MGF&D, where a pizza of some sort has been a fixture on the menu since they opened. They kept the oven, revamped the rest of the space with a small bar and casual dark wood furniture similar to that at Michael's, got Friends With You to supply some decorations, and opened up for business in late September.

The menu is a simple affair: a short list of "snacks" and salads, followed by about ten different pizza options. It's typically rounded out by a few specials, usually a soup, a starter, and a pizza of the day. And that's it. If you're not in the mood for a pizza, you'll struggle to find something to make a complete meal.

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CSA Weeks 7-8 and its Uses

The lack of posts on this season's CSA crop should not be seen in any way as a reflection on the degree of my happiness with its supplier, Little River Market Garden. Quite to the contrary, we've been getting a wonderful variety of stuff and have been doing our best to use all of it effectively. Sometimes it's really easy. This week brought a gorgeous assortment of tomatoes, fresh arugula, cutting celery, eggplants, turnips, dinosaur kale, bananas, and a papaya.

Now, I'm not one to "fix myself a salad," but when the vegetables are this fresh, and this tasty, even I yield.

No bacon, no eggs, no croutons - just arugula, tomatoes, cutting celery, slivers of last week's radishes, a drizzle of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, coarse salt and freshly cracked pepper, and a dollop of creme fraiche to pull everything together. I recognize this is not terribly interesting as a recipe or a dining experience. But it's a testament to the joy of great produce, grown with care, that this was one of the best things I ate all weekend. Those tomatoes are an emotional experience.

For something just a bit more involved, I would highly recommend this recipe for Grilled Carrots with Brown Butter Vinaigrette, courtesy of Chef Bryce Gilmore of Austin's Barley Swine. The carrots (from last week's CSA pickup) are first marinated in olive oil spiked with pimentón, fennel, coriander, garlic and thyme, then grilled and dressed in a vinaigrette of browned butter blended with marcona almonds and sherry vinegar. There's a lot of subtle brilliance in this recipe: the carrots take well to the spices, the pimentón and grilling bring out a smoky aspect, while the brown butter and marcona almonds highlight the carrots' nutty flavors. I made just a few variations to the published recipe: I left the fennel seeds whole because I like their pop of flavor, I grilled these larger carrots (halved or quartered as appropriate) for closer to 10 minutes than 6 and covered the grill pan with a lid to steam them at the same time, and I added a bit of the remaining spice-infused oil from the marinade into the dressing to reinforce the flavors.

When prepared this way, the firm but yielding texture of the carrots and the smoky flavors actually calls to mind the experience of eating a grilled steak. This could, if you were inclined to such things, make a fine vegetarian entrée, and indeed you could sub olive oil for the brown butter and make it an entirely vegan - and still very satisfying - dish. Now I'm not ready to try the Vegan Experience, like Serious Eats writer J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is doing for the next month, but if I were, there are worse things I can imagine eating.