This is a tasty, vegan winter dish. Although I don’t care for fennel raw, I really love it roasted.
Warm White Beans with Roasted Fennel & Red Pepper
Adapted from Cooking Light
2 medium fennel bulbs, trimmed and cut in 1/2″ slices
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut in 1/2″ slices
2 Tbsp. olive oil, divided
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 small onion, sliced
2 15-oz. cans cannellini beans, drained (or any white bean)
7 oz. package of fresh baby spinach, washed (about 4 c.)
1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper (optional)
salt & pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 450° F.
Toss fennel, red pepper, and half the oil on a baking sheet, and bake for about 20 minutes until vegetables soften and begin to brown.
While the fennel and pepper are in the oven, add remaining oil to a large skillet and saute the onions over medium-high heat. Cook for 10 minutes, until they caramelize. Add beans to the onions and cook for an additional 5 minutes; add the fennel mixture when ready. Stir in the spinach and continue cooking for a few minutes over medium heat until the leaves wilt slightly. Season and serve warm.
Arugula is not my favorite green, but I do aim to eat everything I get from my farm share. There is almost always a preparation that makes a ho-hum vegetable into something closer to palatable. Several readers told me they love arugula raw in a salad, but that route is not for me. Since I also had a lot of potatoes from my CSA, I thought this light potato salad — Potato Salad with Yogurt, Arugula, and Dill — would be a good accompaniment to a dinner of soup.
J. doesn’t like mayo, so I adjusted the recipe by using a 6 oz. contained of non-fat Greek yogurt plus 2 Tbsp. of apple cider vinegar to thin it out and add some acid. I also used green onions instead of shallots. The combination of yogurt and dill screams “tzatziki!” to me, so I think this side dish would be a nice addition to a Greek-flavored chicken (lots of oregano and lemon) or just to round out a meal of a Greek salad.
The flavor is surprising, because your brain expects mayo when you see a creamy potato salad. But the taste is far from that traditional dish; it’s very springy and light, and super-tangy. We liked it well enough to finish leftovers, but it is probably not a dish I’d repeat. Still, if you like dill and yogurt, you’ll probably like this easy, fat-free dish.
I first tried gigantes at Lefteris Gyro, a local Greek restaurant. “Gigantes,” which is both the name of the large white beans used to make the dish and the name of the prepared beans themselves, means “giant” in Greek. And these beans are enormous. In the past I was able to find gigante beans locally; most recently I could only find large lima beans which are slightly smaller. I love Greek food, but no one else in my immediate family does so I rarely get to eat it when we go out. Once I’d tried gigantes at Lefteris, though, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I had to try to make them at home, since I knew it would be a long time until I could have them again at the restaurant. Now that I know how easy they are to make, I’ve made them several times. They keep well in the fridge so even though I make a large batch, I can eat them over the course of the week — even if no one else shares them with me.
I use Closet Cooking’s Gigantes Plaki recipe and I think it’s perfect as written, though I tend to add a little more dill (that’s my mom’s influence… she loves dill!). Even though the beans are soaked overnight and then baked, the finished dish is light and has a very fresh flavor thanks to the herbs. This recipe is naturally super-healthy: minimal oil, lots of vegetables, and protein from the beans. Better yet, it is seriously delicious. (I have eaten a bowl of gigantes for breakfast — it’s that good.) You could serve gigantes as a side dish for roasted chicken or grilled fish, but I like it best as a vegetarian meal unto itself.
When I was growing up, there were many special things I looked forward to at my grandparents’ apartment in Queens. For instance, my Grandpa Alfred, who had been a pattern maker for Simplicity and was an excellent tailor, had made a custom fabric clubhouse that cleverly spanned the small space between the arm of a couch and the spindles on a wall divider between the living room and dining room. When it was up, it was like a magic tree house — a perfect, private spot for me to hide. Then, with just a quick undoing of fabric ties, it could fold away until my next visit.
Visiting my grandparents also meant Alfred’s Delights, the only food I remember my grandpa cooking aside from making charoset at Passover. He’d cut a potato into quarter-inch slices, and then blister them in a cast iron pan, without any oil. A sprinkle of salt finished them off. I remember them being scalding on the outside, and just cooked and chewy on the inside. It wasn’t so much that I loved their flavor, but I loved that my grandpa made them for me, and they were a special location-specific treat. I can’t help but thing of Alfred’s Delights whenever I am slicing potatoes, so he was on my mind as I prepped the spuds for this side dish.
Making these chips was an experiment. The first potato was sliced on a mandoline, at about a 1/8″ thickness. But I thought these would be too thick. I sliced the next potato by hand, using my super-sharp santoku. I don’t normally love this knife, but for this type of work it’s perfect — I was able to easily halve the thickness of the first batch and make semi-transparent, 1/16″ slices of potato.
Potatoes are naturally really wet, and I wanted to make sure that they’d crisp up like a proper chip when I baked them. So I let all the slices dry, in a single layer, on some tea towels on my kitchen counter. I left them out for 3 hours, until they were all dry to the touch. Yes, they did discolor a bit, but once they are baked you won’t notice it.
I preheated the oven to 450° F. I arranged the potato slices in a single layer on a non-stick cookie sheet, and then lightly brushed each slice with a scant amount of olive oil. I use a silicone brush, which I love — no bristles left behind! You need to be sparing with the oil, because it won’t really absorb into the potato and you don’t want them to be greasy. Flip each slice and brush them again. Sprinkle with salt, sparingly — you can always add more later. My 1/16″ chips were done in 18 minutes, but start checking at 15 minutes. The 1/8″ chips took longer, about 22 minutes.
My motivation for making potato chips was simply to see if I could prepare some of our farm share potatoes in a way my boys would try. My friend Jen suggested chips, and she was right — they tried them. Unfortunately, I did over-salt them a bit, and that was the boys’ complaint. They were pretty impressed that potato chips came out of our own oven, though! The chips stayed crispy stored, sealed, on the counter overnight.
I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two school-aged boys and husband. Feeding my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more about me and CITK, and keep in touch:
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Cheesy Kale Crisps: We rarely eat kale now that our farm share is over, and I want to fix that. I've wanted to try using nutritional yeast, and this recipe looks like a tasty way to do it.
I'm Dara, the Chick in the Kitchen. Living in the suburbs of Manhattan with my two school-aged boys and husband. Feeding my family something more diverse than a different shape of pasta each night. Read more 
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