Charity Robey

Cauliflower, the beige bouquet

 

 

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Here comes the bride, with a beautiful cauliflower bouquet

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 20, 2016

A fresh cauliflower looks like a bridal bouquet, and by some earthy brides, is used as one. In fact, cauliflower is actually a huge, dense cluster of underdeveloped blossoms. Commercially-grown cauliflower, by the time it is picked, cut out of its nest of broad green leaves, shrink-wrapped and shipped to the grocery store, is a homely wedge of beige — one of the least-likely looking vegetables in the beauty pageant of fall crops. Fortunately for us, at local farm stands you can buy one you can hardly lift, steps away from where it was grown. 

Such abundance calls for action, and here are two ways to deal with a sudden surge of cauliflower in your life.

First, make steak.

Like most vegetables, cauliflower gets soft when you cook it, but it turns out that heating it at a low temperature before you roast helps keep its shape, a definite plus if you are trying to brown it in the oven. A large, closely packed cauliflower cut into slabs about an inch thick can be heated at 130-140 degrees for 20 minutes to help it hold its shape, and then roasted at a high heat. For a flashy side dish, I serve dramatic walnut-tipped slabs topped with a caper and wine sauce.

After you’ve cut those cauliflower steaks, you are likely to have several handfuls of florets to spare, and with those I recommend you make soup. My go-to recipe is a hearty soup from Mollie Katzen’s classic Moosewood Cookbook. This soup freezes well, and a quart of cauliflower-cheddar soup in the freezer gives me a feeling of security as I anticipate that Tuesday night in January when there is no way I’m going to the grocery store.

For years I resisted buying an immersion blender, a handheld device that works like a magic wand for soup making. I had a perfectly good blender, right? What did I need with the hand-held version? I changed my mind when I made the mistake of trying to puree an entire batch of cauliflower soup in the blender at one go. Hours later, I was still finding puddles of soup that had leaked out of the top and bottom of the blender, seeped between the countertop and the stove, and continued in a waterfall to the kitchen floor. On the plus side, it was nicely pureed, and very tasty, or at least that’s what my dog seemed to think.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Cauliflower steaks with a caper wine sauce.

Cauliflower Steaks

5 servings as a side dish

1 large, tightly packed head of white cauliflower

3 tablespoons of olive oil

1 tablespoon capers, rinsed and drained

1 tablespoon of butter

¼ cup white wine

Salt, pepper

1.  Heat the oven to 140 degrees.

2.  Cut the cauliflower in half. Remove the main stem from each half, but don’t cut away the smaller stems that hold the florets together.

3.  Slice each half into three or four slabs about an inch thick, cutting from the tops of the florets down.

4.  Arrange the slabs on two baking sheets lined with parchment paper.

5.  Heat the cauliflower for 20 minutes at 140 degrees, remove from the oven and increase the heat to 400 degrees.

6.  Brush both sides of each cauliflower slab with olive oil.

7.  Roast uncovered in a 400-degree oven for 25 minutes. If the heating element is on the bottom of your oven, put the pan on the bottom rack of the oven.

8.  When the undersides show some brown, turn each slab with a spatula and return to the oven for 15 minutes, or until the other side is brown.

9.  While the cauliflower is roasting, melt the butter in a small skillet until it foams, add the capers, and cook briefly at medium heat. Add the wine and continue to cook over medium heat until it reduces and is syrupy.

10.  Transfer the cauliflower slabs to a serving plate and spoon the caper sauce over to serve.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Cauliflower cheese soup

Cauliflower Cheese Soup

Adapted from Mollie Katzen’s
Moosewood Cookbook.

5 servings

2 cups unpeeled new potatoes cut into chunks

3 and ½ cups cauliflower florets and stems cut about the same size as the potatoes

1 cup carrot unpeeled and cut into the same size chunks as the potatoes and cauliflower.

3 cloves of garlic, peeled

I cup chopped onion

1 ½ teaspoons salt

4 cups of water

2 cups grated extra sharp cheddar cheese

¾ cup whole milk

¼ teaspoon dried dill or 3 sprigs of fresh

¼ teaspoon caraway seed

¼ teaspoon Coleman’s dry mustard

Freshly ground black pepper

¾ cup buttermilk

Plain yogurt or dill for topping

1.  Put the potatoes, 2 cups of the cauliflower (reserve one and a half cups of the florets), carrot, garlic, onion, salt, water in a large pot, bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft.

2.  Puree in the pot with an immersion blender, or transfer it to a blender, and puree it in two to three batches.

3.  Finely chop the remaining cauliflower florets.

4.  Put the pureed soup over a low heat and add the diced florets, 1 ½ cups of the cheese (reserve ½ cup), milk, dill, caraway seed, mustard and black pepper to taste. At this point you can freeze the soup.

5.  To finish the soup, stir in the buttermilk and let the soup heat up, but not come to a boil. Serve topped with reserved cheese or a dab of plain yogurt with another sprig of dill.

Island Profile: Julia Labrozzi, preserving memories and history

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Julia Labrozzi at the Shelter Island School, with students from past years on display behind her.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 6, 2016

Julia Labrozzi, who has just started her senior year at the Shelter Island School, is eager to tell me something important about her early school days.

Once upon a time the wide white-striped street crossing in front of the school led to a tiny store, known as Carol’s Luncheonette that was every schoolchild’s delight. Stocked with lollipops and gum, with a refrigerator full of Yoo-hoo chocolate drink and shelves full of knickknacks, magazines, newspapers and toys, it was an after school hangout that figures prominently in the memories of many local people.

Julia is one of the last Island children to remember the store, which was called John’s by the time she was old enough to go there and was eventually replaced by a real estate office. The urge to preserve memories of the recent past as well as the history of the Island that has been home to her family for generations is strong in Julia.

“I have deep connections here,” Julia said. Her mother, Eleanor, was a Piccozzi and her grandmother, Williette Piccozzi, still lives here as does her uncle, Angelo Piccozzi and aunts, Willette, Prudence and Joann. Her father, Matthew Labrozzi, also comes from an Island family with deep roots, and her brother, Nicholas, is now in the 9th grade at the school.

While working as an intern at the Shelter Island Historical Society in 2015, Julia was involved with a project called “Living History,” an initiative to document Island history by archiving interviews with residents. She began by working with audio-taped interviews the Historical Society had made, but by 2016, the project shifted to making audio and video recorded interviews with middle school and high school students, to be followed up at regular five-year intervals, documenting the ways their lives are shaped by growing up on Shelter Island.

Julia conducted the first round of interviews, recruiting Emily Hyatt, who is now in her freshman year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, seniors Will Garrison, Sophia Strauss and Sydney Clark, and junior Taylor McNemar to participate. She asked each student questions such as, “Once you graduate, will you go away?”

Although Julia knows the students she interviewed, she said she was excited with their responses. “Four out of five described the Shelter Island community as a family,” she said.

She said a grant from the Shelter Island Educational Foundation (SIEF) paid for much of the equipment and software needed to record and edit the interviews. Julia noted this is not the first time SIEF support has made good things happen for her. “They have helped me so much through my whole life,” she said.

In addition to Nanette Breiner-Lawrenson and Belle Lareau from the Historical Society, Julia said her collaborators on the Living History project, Tim Purtell and Martin Levenstein, taught her how to conduct interviews and work with video and audio files to edit them into coherent six-minute versions that Tim and Martin are now completing.

“She wasn’t waiting for us to tell her what to do,” Tim said. “She made it all happen.”

The six-minute introduction to the Living History project will be screened for the Shelter Island Historical Society Board on October 10, for the SIEF Board later in October and later this year for students at the school.

Julia’s lineup of school activities is extensive and sustained: eight years as a member of the Drama club, five years a member of the science club and jazz band (perhaps you heard her trumpet at Bucks games and Memorial Day parades), four years in select choir and two years in the DECA club and National Honor Society. She’s now President of the National Honor Society, helping organize and execute service events that benefit organizations such as Habitat for Humanity.

“I like feeling that I am helping someone in need,” she said.

She’s also active in school sports, especially varsity softball, a game she’s played for years, coached by Ian Kanarvogel. “I got my first home run at Wyandanch two years ago, with 2 RBIs,” she said. “I’ve been trying to do that for so long.”

And in a defiant act of independence, Julia has declared she is no longer a Giants fan like her father. “I’m actually a Redskins fan, and my Dad is going to kill me,” she said.

In a life of mostly good days, Julia remembered a bad one, the day she failed her driving test. In retrospect she wondered if it was such a good idea to travel with her dad an hour and a half each way to the DMV in Centereach to avoid waiting months for an appointment in Riverhead. “I’m an impatient person,” she explained.

Feeling confident, she got into the car with the examiner, flashed her smile, and said, “Hello! How are you?” The examiner replied, “Drive.”

In minutes Julia was back at the DMV with a slip of paper informing her she had flunked due to “Failure to follow directions,” although she was unclear what directions she failed to follow. At the time, she was the only one in her class who didn’t get a license on the first try.

On the sad drive home, Julia had just about stopped crying when she and her dad reached the Chevrolet dealership in Riverhead and he handed her a set of car keys. Confident that she would get her license that day, he had bought her a car. Instead of driving it home, Julia had to settle for a test drive, sobbing at the thought of letting him down when he had believed in her.

She got her license the next time she tried, passing in four minutes. “I rocked that parallel park,” she said.

Julia called the 2015 school trip to Spain the best travel experience she’s ever had. For a week, she and her roommate Olivia lived near the ocean in Cadiz, in the home of their host mother who didn’t speak English. Julia said to overcome the language barrier, “We did a lot of pointing.”

“Being a senior is extremely bittersweet,” she said. “I don’t want to leave, but at the same time want to start the next part of my life.”

Since Julia has not decided what she wants to study in college, she plans to go to Suffolk County Community College, live at home and save money, and then transfer to a four-year college once she decides what to major in.

Even though she’s seen a little bit of the world, she’s convinced no place compares to home. “You could never say ‘This place is just like Shelter Island,’” she said. “There is no place like this.”

Off the Fork: Doing right by those beautiful sweet peppers

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | For this recipe I used ‘Carmen’ sweet peppers grown at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 22, 2016

When the sweet peppers ripen in the fall, figuring out how to cook them becomes a moral question. Everywhere I look there are baskets of beautiful, inexpensive bell peppers, Carmens, Cubanelles and Anaheims. Will I stash them in the refrigerator, only to find them turned to mush days later, or will I stand up and do what needs to be done?

At Sylvester Manor Educational Farm they grow the Carmen variety of sweet pepper, according to farmer Julia Trunzo, a beautiful pepper striped with red, green and yellow. All sweet peppers are green before they ripen, including the big round bell peppers you find in the grocery store. As a sweet pepper begins to ripen it gets sweeter, and shows a streak of yellow and red that gets bigger until the entire pepper turns red. At Sylvester Manor the farmers try hard to harvest their sweet peppers when the first streak of red shows, ensuring the perfect ripeness for the best flavor.

One of my bibles is Marcella Hazen’s “Marcella’s Italian Kitchen”, where I can always find ways to use sweet peppers. This recipe is a riff on hers for sweet peppers stuffed with zucchini. I skip the zucchini she calls for in favor of onion because I like the sweet taste that slow-cooked onions give the dish, and I use ricotta cheese. I don’t bother peeling the peppers because I generally use the small tender-skinned peppers that are shaped like bananas, instead of the big bell peppers shaped like mini pumpkins.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Baked Sweet Peppers with Ricotta and Golden Onions

Baked Sweet Peppers with Ricotta and Golden Onions

4 to 6 servings as a side dish, 2 as a main dish.

4 to 6 sweet peppers (4 bell peppers or 6 Carmens or Cubanelles)

1 large onion, diced

2 cloves garlic chopped coarsely

½ cup olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

8 ounces of ricotta

¾ cup and 2 tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs

Two sprigs of fresh thyme

Salt, pepper

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Remove the top of the peppers close to the stems. Remove the seeds and white membrane inside the peppers. Cut each pepper in half to form a boat or hollow cup to hold the stuffing.

3. Cook the onion until soft and golden in two tablespoons of the olive oil over a medium heat. Add the chopped garlic and continue to cook until you smell the fragrance of garlic.

4. Mix the remaining olive oil, with the parsley, ricotta, ½ cup of breadcrumbs, and thyme, salt, pepper in a one-quart bowl, and add the cooked onion and garlic.

5. Put a thin layer of olive oil in a shallow baking dish, big enough to hold the peppers in one layer with sides touching.

6. Stuff the peppers with the cheese mixture, allowing the mixture to mound up and place them in the baking dish.

7. Sprinkle with the remaining breadcrumbs and drizzle with more olive oil.

8. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until the peppers are tender, and the tops lightly browned.

9. You can serve these warm, or at room temperature. They make a hearty side dish, or a main dish for vegetable-lovers.