The nasturtium plants have taken over a portion our backyard, climbing their way onto our deck with hundreds of blooms and even more beautifully dark and circular leaves.  We grew the nasturtium for the edible blossoms, but a month or so ago, I found out the leaves could be used like watercress.  Sort of.  They are deliciously peppery and tender -even the larger leaves- as such, but their shape is tricky to dress as a salad.  When left whole or even torn, the flat shape creates too many layers to permeate, and shredding them didn’t make for a very attractive salad.

But the leaves are perfect for stuffing.  No inconvenient protrusions to tuck in like grape leaves, nor tough ribs to cut out like cabbage.  Tender enough to eat raw, but sturdy enough to contain rigid fillings.  Pretty and easy.  Perfect finger food for parties, which always seem to lack enough green options.

If you didn’t grown them, nasturtium leaves might be hard to find, but they are incredible easy to grow from seed for next year.

While there are plenty of options to wrap, you can’t go wrong with fruit, cheese and herbs.  I used Honeycrisp apple slices, Gruyere and tarragon, tying up the parcel with chives and serving a walnut vinaigrette for dipping, but next time I might try pears, blue cheese and  fennel fronds.  Both would go well with several nut oils: hazelnut, pistachio, pecan.  Let me know what you come up with.

nasturtium leaf, apple and Gruyere salad parcels with walnut vinaigrette dip
If you prefer, you can omit the tarragon leaves in the parcels and use a tarragon vinegar in the dip.

20 nasturtium leaves, washed and patted dry
1 Honeycrisp apple, quartered, cored and sliced into at least 20 thin slices, tossed with lemon juice if not serving right away.
20 thin slices of Gruyere cheese, about 1/2 inch wide
1-2 sprigs tarragon (optional)
10-15 chives
walnut vinaigrette dip, recipe follows

Place a nasturtium leaf stem-side up, dark side down on your work surface.  Just above where the leaf was cut from the stem place a slice of cheese and a slice of apple, letting the apple stick up just above the top of the leaf.  Tuck in three of the thin leaves of the tarragon, one at the bottom, and two at the top.  Fold the bottom of the nasturtium leaf up over the apple, then roll from side to side.  One third of the way up tie a piece of chive around the parcel. Continue with the remainder of the leaves and serve on a platter with a small bowl of the dip.

for the walnut vinaigrette dip:
2 tablespoons sherry or tarragon vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon mayonnaise (to emulsify)
2 tablespoons walnut oil
4 tablespoons olive oil (doesn’t need to be extra-virgen)

In a medium bowl, place the vinegar and salt, and whisk until the salt is dissolved.  Add the mayonnaise and blend.  Slowly add the walnut oil, whisking until completely emulsified after each addition.  Continue with the olive oil, until all is incorporated.

Inexplicably delicious and blissfully simple.  It can’t get any better than that.  Oh, wait: my kids were fighting over bites from my bowl the next day.

This is a great basic recipe -perfect on it’s own, but it is also great for improvising if you’re into that.  You could go very Latino with this dish, adding cilantro stems or epazote to the beans while they cook, frying chopped tomato with the onions for the tiganissi, or topping the dish with avocado.  Or you could use black-eyed peas and chard and flavor it with lemon (skip the honey), as in my original inspiration for this dish (Cypriot Black-eyed Peas and Swiss Chard from World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey.)  The basic formula is cooked beans and greens with a splash of something sour, topped with fried onions and garlic in oil.

black beans and kale with tiganissi

Tiganissi is a type of garnish I’ve found in recipes from Cyprus, in which onions and other vegetables are quickly fried in plenty of oil and poured over a dish, resulting in unbelievable amounts of flavor.

for the beans and kale:
1 1/4 cup black beans, uncooked
1 bunch kale, stems removed, leaves chopped into small pieces
salt, to taste
1/4 cup lime juice, or to taste
small spoonful honey (or agave for vegans)

for the tiganissi:
1/4 cup olive oil
pinch of red pepper flakes or 1 jalapeno, minced
1 medium onion, finely diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced

cooked rice, to serve

Put the beans in a large heavy pot, cover with several inches of water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the beans are almost cooked through, about 2 hours, but start checking sooner.  Add the kale and salt, to taste. Simmer until both the beans and kale are tender. Add the lime juice and honey to taste, as well as more salt if needed.

Heat the oil for the tiganissi in a medium frying pan over fairly high heat. Add the red pepper flakes or jalapeno, and stir for about 5 seconds. Add the onion and garlic. The temperature of the oil is important. You want the onions to turn brown around the edges. If the temperature is too cool, the onions will caramelize evenly, which is not what you want for this dish. The cooking should not take very long. Pour the tiganissi over the beans, and serve mixed with rice.

I don’t know if I’m the only parent who routinely forgets to save food for the kids.  Around here it happens at least once a week: I get carried away enjoying my food and *expletive* it’s gone and the kids are still hungry.  After managing to cook a meal for the family, while keeping 2 eyes on the kids, I have to come up with something else.

Well, I like making my own gnocchi, but the evening inevitably ends with me staring in the fridge wishing I hadn’t been so selfish.  Doubling the recipe isn’t really an option, because of the labor involved in cooking them.  Perhaps I just haven’t gotten a good system down, but it doesn’t really make a difference at this point.

So I tried packaged gnocchi, and I’m not ashamed to say I like it.  And I can easily cook enough for the whole family with a little leftover.  This is one of those meals that I look forward to making because cooking goes so fast, it’s the perfect balance of light and filling, and bursts with flavor.

gnocchi with broccoli, tomato, olives, capers & pine nuts
serves 4

1/3 cup olive oil, plus 3 tablespoons, divided
1 3/4 lb. ripe tomatoes, chopped
generous 1/4 cup green olives, chopped
2 spoonfuls capers
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/4 cup pine nuts
1 3/4 lb. broccoli, broken into bit sized pieces, stem peeled and chopped as well
2 lbs. packaged potato gnocchi
big handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Heat 1/3 cup of the oil in a large frying pan over medium high heat.  Drain the excess juice from the tomaotes, if any, and reserve. Add the tomatoes to the pan and fry until tasty.  This may be as quick as 1 minute if the tomatoes are ripe and in season.  Add the capers, olives and reserved tomato juice.  Heat through.  Remove from the heat and cover.

In a small frying pan, heat the remaining 3 tablespoons of olive oil over very low heat.  Add the pine nuts and garlic, and fry very gently until first the garlic is cooked through, then the pine nuts and garlic turn golden.  Remove from heat and reserve.

In a large pot of salted boiling water,  cook the broccoli until crisp-tender.  Remove with a slotted spoon or spider whisk.  Add the gnocchi to the same water and cook according to package directions, about two minutes or until they float to the top.  Drain.

Toss together the gnocchi, broccoli, tomato mixture, pine nut mixture and parsley and serve.

Around the world, there is a great divide between local restaurant cuisine and local home cooking.  And maybe I’m biased because I’ve never been able to afford three star Michelin restaurants, but I’m a home-cooking girl.  Sure there are great affordable restaurants everywhere, but they have their limits.  At the end of every day, wherever I am, I really just want a home-cooked meal.  If I can’t have it, I’ll settle for a plate at a restaurant with varying degrees of satisfaction.

So if I tell you that I didn’t fall in love with Spanish food after living in Spain 6 months maybe you can forgive me, because I never got a home-cooked Spanish meal.  I had some unforgettable fare, to be sure: my first Spanish tortilla, fried eggplant, tapas at a crowded bar, bocadillos with jamón Serrano or chorizo and churros with thick hot chocolate.  But honestly, the best Spanish food I’ve had has come from my kitchen these past couple of weeks.  Mostly because of Penelope Casas’ extraordinary book La Cocina de Mamá: The Great Home Cooking of Spain.  I’ve already remade every recipe I’ve tried, and can’t get enough.

So here’s a paella recipe from the book, like nothing I tried while in Spain.  My adaptations of using a short-grain brown rice instead of white Bomba rice and a cast-iron pan instead of a traditional paella pan make it slightly less authentic, but it’s everyday home cooking and it’s delicious.

Isabel’s vegetable paella

adapted from La Cocina de Mamá: The Great Home Cooking of Spain by Penelope Casas

I honestly prefer brown rice here, just be sure to use a short-grain variety.  And a quick tip that I’ve used here: to substitute brown rice for white rice, bring a generous pot of water to a boil, add brown rice and cook for 10 minutes, then drain.  Use as directed for white rice in nearly any recipe.

2 carrots
2 small celery stalks, or the heart with leaves
1/2 medium onion
4 oz. shitake mushrooms cleaned, stems only (reserve caps for the paella)
1 clove of garlic
4 cups water
1/8 teaspoon saffron
salt, to taste

Roughly chop the vegetables, and put in a saucepan with the water.  Bring to a simmer, cover and cook 20-30 minutes.  Remove the vegetables and discard.  Add salt to taste.  Add the saffron, cover and turn the heat down very low, or off completely.

1 1/4 cup short-grain brown rice
1/3 cup olive oil
1 cup frozen lima beans, thawed
1 medium carrot (3 oz.) scrubbed and chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
reserved shitake mushroom caps, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
1/4 lb. green beens, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces (about 35 beans or 1 heaping cup chopped)
2 red bell peppers, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
6 oz. zuchhini, choppeed into 1/2 inch cubes (1 1/3 cup)
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup chopped whole canned plum tomatoes
1 teaspoon pimentón de la Vera- sweet smoked Spanish paprika

In a large saucepan, bring a generous amount of water to a boil. Add the rice and cook, continuing to boil for 10 minutes.  Remove any scum that comes to the top. Drain. Let continue to drain in a colander until ready to use.

Preheat the oven to 400 (gas) or 450 (electric).  Heat the oil in a large 12-14 inch cast iron pan over fairly high heat (just one less than the highest setting).  Add all the vegetables except the garlic and tomato.  Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring regularly until the vegetables pick up some nice color and are crisp-tender.  Add the garlic and cook 2 minutes more, still stirring.  Add the tomato and paprika, and continue cooking for a minute more.  Taste for salt.

Add 3 cups of the broth and the rice, reduce the heat and simmer about 10 minutes, until the rice is getting relatively soft.  If needed, add the remaining broth.  There should be enough to finish cooking the rice.

Transfer to the oven, and cook about 10(gas) to 15(electric) minutes more, until nearly al dente.  Remove from the oven, cover with foil and let sit 5-10 minutes until the rice is cooked.  Return the pan to the stovetop and cook undisturbed over high heat for about 3 minutes until a crust (the socarrat) has formed on the bottom .