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Green Beans with Cherry Tomatoes and Caramelized Lemon-Balsamic Onions

8 Sep

Every year it seems as though Portland teases us through most of the summer with its cold, misty mornings, overcast days, and utter lack of regard for those of us who try time and time again to coax our vegetable gardens into producing even the smallest amount of fresh rewards.  And then, come the end of August, everything seems to explode with abundance.  All at once, tomatoes are ripening, cucumbers are growing fat, and long-awaited peppers of all types are finally starting to showcase a veritable rainbow of colors.

Somewhat  miraculously, the one vegetable that seems undaunted by the chill of Portland summers is green beans.  When your garden’s tomatoes are rock hard and still hiding from the cold behind their pale skins, green beans of all sorts will be waiting for you, their crispness like a friendly welcome to the growing season.  I’ve been known to snap beans right off of the vine and immediately start munching, but, when feeling a bit more refined, it’s never a chore to find ways to dress the beans up a bit.

Unfortunately, having now introduced myself to fancied up green beans with a layer of lemony-bright caramelized onions, topped with a blanket of sweet-tart cherry tomatoes, I now feel as though there will never be another way for me to eat fresh garden beans.  While I will never disparage the simple steamed green bean, it’s been a long time since I have found myself so enamored with a green bean dish that I want to make it—and eat it in its entirely—every single day.  This combination of richly caramelized onions and crisp beans has become my most beloved summer side dish, the dish I want to bring to potlucks, make for a family dinner, or just eat straight from the platter while standing in the kitchen.  It’s summery and satisfying, and it makes me think that next year, when the sun is still hibernating and the garden sitting in waiting, I might have to set aside a large plot of yard space for beans to help me make it through the chilly beginnings of another Pacific Northwest summer.

Green Beans with Cherry Tomatoes and Caramelized Lemon-Balsamic Onions

1 ½ pounds green beans, both ends trimmed and any tough strings removed

1 pound onions (I used 1 very large sweet onion)

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 generous tablespoon lemon zest

8 ounces cherry or grape tomatoes

salt and pepper

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil.  Boil beans until bright green and crisp-tender, anywhere from 3-5 minutes, depending on the size of your beans (larger beans will need to cook longer, and smaller, skinnier beans will need less time).  Drain the beans and immediately plunge into an ice water bath (this will stop the beans from cooking any further, and also help them retain their bright green color).  When the beans have cooled, drain and set aside.

Cut onions in half from end to end, then slice into thin ribs.  In a large pan, heat olive oil over medium-low heat.  Add the onions to the pan, throw on a pinch of salt, and slowly cook onions, stirring occasionally, until they turn golden, about 20 minutes.  Turn heat down to low, add balsamic vinegar, stir to combine, and cook an additional 5 minutes.  Remove from heat and add lemon zest.  Add salt and pepper to taste, and stir to combine.

Slice each cherry or grape tomato in half.  Arrange cooked beans on a large platter, and top with caramelized onions.  Sprinkle tomato halves over the onions and beans.

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Mimi’s Ginger Lemon Tea

29 Aug

I used to work with the most wonderful woman named Mimi.  She was a writer, a teacher, a lover of books, and, back in the ‘70s, she was a single mother who shared with her son a small apartment on Haight Street in San Francisco while she worked, went to school, and took care of her child’s chronic breathing problems that eventually resulted in him being fitted with a tracheostomy tube.  Mimi was, and is, an admirable woman.

When we worked together, Mimi would bring by the gallon the most wonderful ginger lemon tea, kept cold in the work refrigerator and available for free to whoever wanted to partake of it.  No matter the season, this tea was like a magical tonic that cured all ills, mental and physical.  In the summertime, consumed over ice, the tea was the most brisk and refreshing thing you could ever imagine drinking.  Though it seems impossible when I really think about it, I swear it actually perked people up enough to actually want to work more (a feat you’d definitely find impossible to believe if you knew where exactly we worked.  Ahem).  In the wintertime, warmed in a mug in the break room’s microwave, the tea was a soothing, calming respite from the persistent gloom and chill of Pacific Northwest winters and the ever-present insanity of the holiday season.  If you were feeling under the weather, a mug of Mimi’s tea made you feel, while not completely healed, at least a bit more cared for and comforted.

After years of telling Mimi how much I loved her tea, and how appreciative I was of her always sharing it with everyone, she surprised me one day by pulling out a pad of Post-It notes and conspiratorially leaning in to me and saying, “You know what?  I’m going to give you the recipe.”

One Post-It note, four ingredients, and years of enjoyment later, I can’t help feeling that the time has come to share Mimi’s recipe with the world.  In part, I am doing it because I want to share this fantastic and borderline magical recipe with the world, but there is no small part of me that is doing it because I haven’t seen Mimi in over four years and lately I’ve been missing her.  An old email address no longer connects me to her, and several stabs at a Google-fest involving her name have led me to only past employers and dead ends.  I have only Mimi’s tea left to connect me to her, and, while I enjoy the tea immensely, I have to admit, I still feel as though something is missing.  The tea is just not the same without the conversation, care, and compassion that Mimi supplied to go along with it.

Mimi’s Ginger Lemon Tea

This is the recipe exactly as Mimi wrote it down for me many years ago.  As you can see, it makes a batch of tea by the gallon-plus.  In the interest of moderation, I generally quarter the recipe and make a generous quart of tea.

Though this tea is perfect as-is, there are a number of delicious ways to dress it up.  In the wintertime, served hot with a splash of bourbon, it’s the prefect night cap.  In the summertime, chilled ice cold and served with a few leaves of fresh basil muddled in the bottom of your glass, it makes for a brisk and refreshing cooler.  All in all, however, you’ll never go wrong just drinking it as Mimi wrote it.

1 gallon water

1 cup fresh ginger, peeled and sliced thin

2 cups freshly squeezed lemon juice

16 ounces (2 cups) honey

Combine water and ginger in a large pot and bring to a boil.  Simmer for 30 minutes, then remove from heat and strain into a large bowl.

Stir in lemon juice and honey.

That’s it.

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Lemon Cream and Strawberry Trifle

30 Jun

Summer fruit in this area of the country is a long time coming.  Sure, we’ve had rhubarb for a few weeks now, but can rhubarb, in all its puckery a tart glory, really be counted as a summer fruit?  If you toss rhubarb with a lot of sugar, it can do some mighty fine things, but, straight from the ground, eating it is going to cause you some serious malcontent.  With those parameters in mind, I am sorry to say that I just don’t think rhubarb is going to make the cut.  So what do we do here in Portland when we want to eat our first local summer fruit?  We wait for the strawberries.

It’s been a cold, wet, and (let’s be honest) semi-miserable spring and summer, but our fortitude seems to have paid off.  Fresh strawberries began to show up at the farmers market just a few short weeks ago and, just last week, strawberries made their arrival in our home garden.  Despite the slow start our garden suffered in its beginning stages, a very short burst of warm weather seems to have coaxed some of our fruit into vibrant life, rewarding us with, upon our first harvest, 3 pounds of strawberries.  Not a typo.  3 pounds.

And then, four days later, we harvested another 3 pounds.  Two days after that came another 2 pounds.  We are swimming in sweet, juicy berries, and I could not be happier.

There have been strawberries in our granola, strawberries in our yogurt, strawberries straight from the plant, strawberries on leftover biscuits, and, in what I now realize I subconsciously created as a bit of a strawberry coming out celebration after we harvested our first basket of berries, this astonishingly good strawberry and lemon cream trifle, which, besides tasting somewhat like a heavenly dream, also happens to look quite like one.

Until it comes time to serve it, that is.  Upon being released from its pristine confines, this wonderful dessert morphs into a sloppy, goopy mess that, were one determining dessert worthiness purely by looks alone, certainly would not be in the running to win any beauty pageants.

But, if we are to continue with this pageant metaphor, let us all remember that true beauty is not represented by what one sees on the outside, but rather what one possess on the inside, which in this case happens to be fresh garden strawberries, lush lemon cream, and soft peaks of whipped cream, all nestled in between layers of a delectable semolina cake that, unlike the cake layers in many a trifle I have eaten, will not succumb to a soggy and spongy fate when inundated with a veritable flood of delicious creams.  Combine those virtues, and you’ve got what I consider to be a dessert that qualifies as a true and deserving winner.

Strawberry and Lemon Cream Trifle

Orange Semolina Cake

If you want to go all lemon with this trifle, you can certainly swap out freshly squeezed lemon juice for the orange juice, though I find that the subtle orange flavor of this cake is a welcome addition to the overall composition of the trifle. (I previously wrote about this cake recipe here.)

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

2 cups fine semolina

¾ cup sugar

2 tablespoons grated orange zest

4 eggs, separated

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup vegetable oil

½ cup orange juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Grease and flour an 8” x 8” square cake pan.  Place flour, baking powder, and semolina in a bowl and mix to combine.  Combine sugar and orange zest in the bowl of a food processor or in a blender, and pulse to combine thoroughly.  Place egg yolks, orange-sugar mixture, and oils in a bowl and beat until well combined.  Fold egg yolk mixture into flour mixture with orange juice.

Place egg whites in a bowl and beat until soft peaks form.  Fold egg whites into flour and egg yolk mixture and pour into prepared pan.  Bake in preheated oven for 25-30 minutes, or until cake is lightly browned on top and a wooden skewer inserted into center of cake comes out clean.  Cool cake in pan for ten minutes, then release onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Lemon Cream

Adapted from Tartine

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons (5 ounces) of freshly squeezed lemon juice

3 whole large eggs

1 large egg yolk

¾ cup (6 ounces) sugar

pinch of salt

½ cup (4 ounces or 1 stick) cool unsalted butter, cut into 1 tablespoon pieces

Bring about 2 inches of water to a simmer in a saucepan set over medium heat.  In a non-reactive bowl that is able to rest securely in the rim of the saucepan without touching the water, combine lemon juice, whole eggs, egg yolk, sugar, and salt.  Whisk the ingredients together.  Do not allow the egg yolks and sugar sit together without being stirred constantly, as the sugar will react with the eggs and turn them granular.  Place the bowl over the saucepan of simmering water and continue to whisk for around 10-12 minutes, until the mixture thickens considerably and reaches a temperature of 180 degrees F.  Remove the bowl from above the water and allow the mixture to cool to 140 degrees F.  Stir from time to time to help the mixture cool and release its heat.

When the cream has reached 140 degrees, pour it into a blender, or leave it in the bowl if you will be using an immersion blender to mix the lemon cream.  Add the butter to the lemon cream, 1 tablespoon at a time, blending the mixture continuously until each piece of butter is completely incorporated before you add the next one.  The cream will be pale yellow and quite thick.

The lemon cream can be used immediately, or it can be made ahead and kept in the refrigerator, tightly sealed, for up to 5 days.  Makes about 2 cups of lemon cream.

Whipped Cream

1 cup (8 ounces) heavy whipping cream

½ teaspoon sugar

¼ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Combine whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla in a medium bowl.  Using an electric mixer, whip on low speed until sugar and vanilla have dissolved.  Increase mixer speed to high, and whip until cream forms soft peaks.

Assemble the Trifle

You will need 1 pound of strawberries, each berry hulled and sliced in half from top to bottom.

When cake has cooled, cut it in half so you have two pieces that measure 8” x 4.”  You will only need half of the cake, so tightly wrap the unused half and store it for later use or enjoyment.  Then cut the remaining 8” x 4” piece in half horizontally, separating the top from the bottom.

Line the bottom of a trifle dish, or a similarly-sized glass bowl with a flat bottom (I used a 1.75 quart Pyrex storage dish, and found that I could have benefited from a dish that was taller and allowed for a bit more security of the top layers) with 1/3 of the cake layers, cutting the cake into strips and pieces as needed to fill in as much of the bottom space as possible.  Spoon 1/3 of the lemon cream mixture on top of the cake layer.  Spoon 1/3 of the strawberries on top of the lemon cream.  Spoon 1/3 of the whipped cream on top of the strawberries.  Repeat layering process one more time.  When you get to the third layer, deviate slightly from the layering order by first making a cake layer, followed by a lemon cream layer, then a whipped cream layer, then a strawberry layer.  Laying the strawberries on top of the cake, rather than under a layer of whipped cream, simply looks prettier.

Chill the trifle well before serving.  Trifle can be made ahead and left to wait in the refrigerator, fully assembled, for up to 1 day.

This trifle should serve at least 10 people very generously.  I’d tell you how long leftovers can last in the refrigerator, but ours was completely demolished within 2 days, leaving me to only guess as to how long it could last past that.  I’d say no longer than 3 or 4 days, but I’ll bet yours will be gone long before that as well.

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