Vinegar-Roasted Beets with Spring Onions by Alison Roman

The summer after I graduated college, I lived in a friend’s basement for a month while trying to find my own place. Kate and her husband and two children, had a local farmer’s produce subscription box that she picked up at the local farmer’s market every other Saturday morning. That box was our entertainment all week long. Kate made it an activity to find creative ways to use up all of the vegetables in the box before they went bad. Every night I came from work and she’d be chopping up a rutabaga or slicing a yellow squash for the third night that week, and we’d talk about her strategy for that night’s veggie variation. One of the most common vegetables included were beets. I knew practically nothing about them at the start, but over that  month, I helped chop, peel, roast, boil, and slice more beets than I thought possible. And I fell in love with them.

Alison has two beet recipes and both are great. The first is her Beets with Buttermilk and Walnuts, which my friends still talk about as “life-changing.” The second are her vinegar-roasted beets which I think I like even more.

The first step is to roast the beets whole and unpeeled in tin foil packets, doused in white distilled vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Once a fork can easily pierce them, they’re ready to cool. After letting them lose their too-hot-to-handle status, it’s safe to grab a paper towel and shrug the outer skin off. The skin on my beets clung a little more tightly, so I used a paring knife to shave off the stubborn parts.

Since these beets were planned as a side dish to a larger meal that required lots of oven time, I chose to roast these first and let them cool completely while I prepared the other dishes. Alison doesn’t mention anything about serving the beets cold, but I can tell you that it worked wonderfully.

Closer to dinner time, I seared the scallions in my cast iron and mixed the yogurt and lime juice at the bottom of my serving bowl. I placed the quartered beats onto the yogurt and scattered the scallions and lots of dill over everything.

The beets were a hit! They were the only dish to be finished completely on the table. I served them with Alison’s Sour Cream Flatbreads, and most people chose to dip their breads into the yogurt mixture at the bottom of the beet bowl after the beets were all served. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to buy more beets for this coming week to repeat the dish. And that’s saying something.

217 recipes cooked, 8 to go.

Vinegar-Braised Chicken with Farro and Watercress by Alison Roman

For the past 8 months, the vinegar-braised chicken recipe  has sat unwritten in my blog’s Google Doc. Every time I saw the title sitting there, unaccompanied, I opted to write about another recipe. I didn’t have much to say about this chicken when I first made it, but now I’ve really put myself in a pickle because I can’t remember anything about how I made it or how it tasted. All I know is that I made it on April 5, 2021 because there’s photo evidence that tells me as much. 

What I can deduce from all of this is that the chicken wasn’t a ton to write home about. I had to skip on the farro because of my gluten-aversion, which left only watercress and a simple roasted chicken to try. This recipe also has one of the shortest ingredient lists of all of Alison’s main course dishes, leaving the burden of flavor to just salt, pepper, vinegar, garlic, and a tablespoon of Yuzu Kosho. 

Now hear me out, there are plenty of tasty chickens that use the same small amount of ingredients for flavor. But such a short list is off brand for Alison. One of her defining features is bold, in-your-face flavor. She doesn’t hold back. Which is why this recipe felt like a departure from her normal routine. 

Perhaps I’d find this chicken refreshing if I made it again. I’ll probably give it a try! If you’re reading this and felt differently, please tell me? 

216 recipes cooked, 9 to go.

Persimmon Salads Two Ways: ft. Apples, Cheddar, Spicy Pecans and Blue Cheese by Alison Roman

Until these salads, I’m not sure I understood the purpose of the persimmon. They’re like a slightly sweet, mostly flavorless person at a party that always looks put together with their bright orange outfits and pretty little leafy bows on top, but when you talk to them, you realize that meaningful, deep conversation isn’t their strong suit. Perfectly pleasant persimmon, but does it really make the party a richer event? Alison sure thinks so. In fact, it’s the persimmon’s subtlety she praises. Perhaps I get what she means. 

When it comes to standard vegetable salads, there’s a wealth of virtually flavorless leafy options to populate most of the bowl: romaine, kale, iceberg, spinach, butter lettuce, the list goes on. The leaves give us something to dress, something to pair toppings with. When it comes to fruit salads, what options do we have? Very few fruits don’t make a statement. In fact, I can only think of the persimmon. 

There, that’s it! Persimmons can be the romaine of our fruit salads, at least for the two months a year when they’re in season! To take advantage of their limited seasonality, Alison provided us with two somewhat similar, but truly tasty salad recipes. Even Jordan said both salads top his list for the project. 

< Quick interjection about Alison’s salad recipes -- I think I accidentally chose to make the salads I’d like the least at the beginning. For the first few months, it felt like most every salad I made struck out. It wasn’t so much the recipes themselves, I can see merit to them and why they were included in the book. The flavors just didn’t do it for me. They were usually more acidic and less balanced with salty and sweet. I didn’t want to save the leftovers. But in the last two months or so, every salad has been a hit. > 

Both persimmon salads are lovely, I think I prefer the Persimmon and Pear one a bit more - I love the combination of sweet/spicy nuts and strong, salty cheese with crisp fruit. 

A few notes about Persimmon and Pear Salad with Spicy Pecans and Blue Cheese: 

• Be sure to buy Bosc pears like Alison suggests. They’re typically a firmer pear that keeps its shape - perfect for plating in a salad. They’re also perfectly sweet and tangy. 

• I’ve never liked blue cheese. The smell is too potent and the taste too funky. Alison calls for a firm blue cheese so I bought the smallest block I could find. Much to my surprise, I could tolerate, and even slightly enjoy, the thin shavings of this hard cheese. If you also have a hard time with blue cheese, maybe the stiffer kind will be better? (The smell is still awful though, be forewarned.)

• The pecans were easily the best part, and so easy to make. Saute pecans in maple syrup and Aleppo pepper until bubbling and sort of “fuzzy” in appearance (Alison’s term, not mine, but it’s true!). Remove from heat and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Chop once cooled. 

A few notes about Vinegared Apples with Persimmon and White Cheddar: 

• Not much different from the first salad, except no nuts, and less strong of a choice of cheese. If you’re super, super opposed to blue cheese, I recommend making the other salad and swapping blue cheese for sharp white cheddar. Now you’ll have the best of both worlds!

Both salads are doused with white wine vinegar and drizzled with olive oil, salt, and pepper, which, together, unify the other ingredients. 

182 and 183 recipes cooked, 42 to go.

Butter Beans, Tangy Mushrooms, Baked Pasta with Artichokes and Cheese, and Margaret

This is a Margaret Winchell Appreciation Post. 

Margaret is one of the dearest friends I have ever known. She’s one of the few people I can talk on the phone with for hours and forget how long it’s been. Her phone calls are like menthol when you have a bad cold. They clear your head, open up your chest, and lead you to hope that you’ll feel better very soon. 

Margaret is brilliant. Not in a tongue and cheek way. She’s actually brilliant, especially when it comes to music, teaching, cooking, baking, musical theater, leadership, and multi-tasking. Her brilliance can sometimes intimidate others when they first meet her. But after spending time with Margaret, you realize she uses her brilliance to draw others in. 

Margaret, as I just mentioned, is a phenomenal, intuition-driven cook, with instincts so sharp, they could pierce a stale loaf of bread like a tip of a Global knife. It’s her passion for food and hospitality that turned me on to cooking as well. We became real friends after college, right at the time that I was learning to cook myself. She showed me the way. She took me under her wing and had me cook alongside her in preparation for our weekly dinners with Amy, and then usually at some point over the weekends, too. We did a lot of cooking together those days. Margaret also introduced me to New York Times Cooking, which revolutionized what I cook. 

Margaret visited me last weekend, along with her grad school pal, Evan. A most delightful duo. I went into my suburban office on Friday for work, and took the 4:57pm train home. I walked through the door to find my dearest friend Margaret already through two of Alison’s recipes, and half way through a third. This spoke volumes to me. I could almost cry. When this project felt close to impossible, far out of reach from my energy coffers, Margaret stood in the gap, and darn well filled it. 

I can claim essentially no credit for cooking these three recipes, and that’s okay. I’ll let my friend serve me in this way. I did, however, eat all three dishes, and talked to Margaret at length about their preparation. So in lieu of describing a cooking process, I’ll offer here just a few thoughts and takeaways about each one: 

Vinegar-Marinated Butter Beans: 

• Something was UP with these beans. I had on hand a can of Eden Organic Butter Beans that had not expired, and were, you know, supposedly organic. But the best word to describe the final dish is “bitter.” We mused over this conundrum. Vinegar is acidic, but it shouldn’t taste bitter. Garlic can be bitter if you leave the green tips that sometimes sprout out the tops, but Margaret didn’t do this. What we’re left with are the beans. Something must be wrong with the beans. This dish has potential if you don’t have weird beans. It even keeps leftovers for up to two weeks, which I would normally do. But alas, we tossed our bitter beans. 

Tangy-Roasted Mushrooms: 

• Mushrooms, a good variety of them, are expensive, but worth it, IMO. 

• Mushrooms don’t shrink much when you roast them. They just get silkier in texture. 

• Thinly sliced onions add some fun bits of crunch here. 

• I would serve this at many a gathering. 

Baked Pasta with Artichokes and Too Much Cheese:

• Alison absolutely nails the flavor here. Perfect balance of salty, sour (from the artichokes) and creamy (from all that cheese). Pro tip: the flavor gets a glow-up when you add a few tangy-roasted mushrooms on the side. 

• We are floored that Alison doesn’t mention any options for ready-to-bake noodles. This feels like an obvious miss for the many people who don’t want to deal with the labor of parboiling noodles before assembling the dish. We simply refused to parboil, and so put our ready-to-bake noodles straight into the casserole. The top layer of noodles sure stayed tough and became like noodle chips. Not the worst outcome, but certainly not the most optimal. 

• In our humble, yet knowledgeable opinions, we don’t love the lasagna noodle choice. We believe in using a penne or rigatoni. We want to avoid the noodle chip effect.

171, 172, 173 recipes cooked, 52 to go.

Grilled Squid with Spicy, Garlicky White Beans and Vinegared Tomatoes by Alison Roman

I had a dream. That I’d cook all ten of Alison’s recipes intending for grilling with an actual grill. I got so close -- I made it to eight out of ten. Until recently, we lived a short drive away from my in-law’s who graciously let me use their grill for these recipes. I fed them great food, so why wouldn’t they? Then, three weeks ago now, we moved to Chicago. A city I love with all my heart, though it lacks many of the people I love in it. And once again, I’ve found myself grill-less. The last two grilling recipes -- this squid and the shrimp I posted over the weekend -- had to be cooked in a skillet on my stove, which, though a fine substitute, did not deliver the same flavor or texture that a grill could accomplish. If you make either of these recipes, do yourself a favor and find a grill. Even if that means a community grill at your local park. But bring a grill pan. Shrimp and squid will most definitely fall through the cracks! 

The flavors in this dish are right up my alley -- vinegary, a tinge of spicy heat, and the right balance of acid and creaminess between the tomatoes and beans. I got home from my commute around 6:10pm, and we were ready to eat by 6:40pm! This is a quick, satisfying, don’t-need-another-side-dish, kind of meal that’s perfect for a summer night after work. 

One of the very first recipes I cooked for this blog was Alison’s Spicy Garlicky White Beans. That was eight months ago now, and I had forgotten how simple they are! You can read all about them in the link above. I started the beans first before moving onto the squid. 

Want to know about my prep process for squid? Read about it here. Essentially, if you’re going to use a skillet instead of a grill, the tubes should be cut into half inch pieces, and the tentacles cut in half lengthwise prior to cooking. If you use a grill, Alison recommends cutting them after cooking, which makes sense. Squid shrinks quite fast, and it could prove challenging to keep them from falling into the grates.  

In her instructions for both grilling and sauteing, she tells us to look for the squid to turn a golden brown color. I’m not sure what she means. A very pale golden tint, maybe. But golden brown? Not only do I not see my shrimp turn that color, but the picture in her book doesn’t show squid that color either! So if you too don’t see that color appear, don’t be disheartened. Give it the six to eight minutes she instructs, and then move on. 

While sauteing the shrimp in batches till “golden brown,” I sliced the tomatoes. I couldn’t find heirloom tomatoes at my TJ’s, so I used organic tomatoes on the vine instead. They were delicious. (Do your best to find tomatoes that won’t be mealy or watery. That will honestly ruin the dish.) Then I covered them in red wine vinegar, and topped them with the beans and squid.

Like I said, Jordan and I ate this as our only dish for dinner, and nearly finished the whole plate. The tomatoes paired perfectly with the beans (which pack quite the heat!), and the salty squid added the right balance of protein and chewiness. 

137 recipes cooked, 88 to go.