To Raab: Daughters of the Earth are Poets!

Our friend Eloisa Stapledutton from NY was up this weekend. Normally visitors from Imperium get a big dinner but we had a prescheduled benefit bean dinner to attend for daughter Zed, who is raising money for a school trip to Panama. I had grim forebodings about the bean dinner but they were misplaced: it was delicious. Nevertheless, earlier in the day, at the farmer’s market, misgivings echoing about the nutshell, I thought, why not a delicious, decadent lunch? From Stick and Stone farm I bought a juicy bunch of Asian mustard greens. Early spring mustard is sweet. Several of the stalks were putting out flower heads. The farmer said, ‘Yes, it’s raabing.’ To Raab! I was thrilled. I said, ‘Is that what you call it, when it puts out a flower shoot?’ She laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s what we say.’ Delightful daughters of the earth are poets! ‘The stalks,’ she said, ‘look tough but they’re tender.’ I bought two bunches, a mustard mix for braising (but which I’ll use for salad), and a lettuce mix. Next stop, The Piggery, the local palace of artisanal meat and charcuterie. I bought an Andouille sausage (short, like a hot dog, and smoky and spicy and toothsome), and a 1.85 lb piece of skirt steak. Now I had all the makings for a lunch. Time was short, so I cut up three baking potatoes and put them in an iron frying pan (they fit in a single layer) and scattered in chopped garlic, a lemon cut into small pieces, a few pinches of rosemary, salt and pepper and added a ¼ cup olive oil and 1/3 cup of water. I tossed it together and then lit the grill to get it blazing hot. The greens got a soak in water and I roughly chopped them. I sliced a few cloves of garlic and cut the Andouille sausage into cubes. All the skirt steak needed was rubbing with a crushed clove of garlic and a generous shower of salt and pepper, then a slick of olive oil. Everything was set to go.

Because the meat would cook in ten minutes I needed to get the potatoes going first. They take about twenty minutes. While the grill was heating I covered the pan with the potatoes and put the heat to high. Once they started to cook I lowered the heat to a strong simmer. This is medium, perhaps medium low. After ten minutes I used a spatula to toss the potatoes. It’s best not open the lid until all the water has evaporated but I was in a hurry. The greens could be served warm, so I browned the sausage in a little olive oil, then added the garlic and sautéed it until golden and then threw in the greens, with just the water that clung to the leaves. I mixed it all up and covered it and let it gently cook. Next was the steak: onto the grill it went with a hiss. I didn’t time it, just got it good and brown on each side, leaving the meat medium rare. It rested while the potatoes finished, browning in the oil and until just done. A squeeze of lemon finished the greens. And there it was, an early spring lunch of pan roasted potatoes with rosemary, garlic and lemon; braised greens with Andouille sausage; and grilled skirt steak cooked medium rare and sliced then. A Fat Boy Bakery loaf of Pain Levain with Kalamata olives rounded it out, delicious dipped in the greens liquid and steak juices. It was early in the day but a glass of red wine was perfect.

Sunday Ms. Stapledutton left and I spent the afternoon, which was blustery and cold with blue patches of sky and a warm, aspirational sun, mulching and fertilizing the asparagus patch, turning over a garden bed and planting peas, broccoli and kale, and putting in some lettuce plants—6—in hopes of an early salad. Then we ate the last of Outboard Dave’s delicious turkeys, a ten pounder with an intense turkey flavor. Because it was such a free range bird I roasted it 325 degrees. And we ate some of those Stick and Stone salad greens, with a generous handful of fresh dandelion greens, which I dug out with a knife as I gardened. It really is a shame to throw them on the compost, they are tender, bitter and sweet in the early spring, and full of vitamins and micronutrients. I learned to eat dandelion greens as a child, from Marisa, the woman from northern Italy who took care of my brother and sister and me. In the spring she would go out into the field across the dirt road from our house in Mt. Kisco with a paring knife and dig up the earliest dandelions. She cut them before they put up a flower, or ‘raab’. Yes! ‘Cut dandelions before they raab.’ She poured hot bacon fat with garlic over them and tossed them with a squeeze of lemon. Unbelievable. 47 years later I can taste them.