Food Notes: 11/18
Beans, Greens, Alison Roman's pop-up shop, an interview with Katie Parla, and more
We made beans flavored with gourmet harissa, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a long way to go here before we get to these beans.
It was a cold November night and we decided to make a pasta e fagioli, or as the ancestors would say: pasta fazool. My preferred term for this Americanized Italian American dish is to call it pasta fazooli, because pluralizing it sounds more fun.
If you’re unfamiliar with pasta e fagioli, its essentially a bean and vegetable soup served with small pasta floating in it, a very cucina povera meal. The fazool pronunciation of fagioli is a century-old dialect, a holdover from immigrants coming from southern Italy. It’s the same reason Tony Soprano says gabagool instead of capicola.
My wife cooked this one up, heavy with rosemary, and thick cut vegetables. There’s actually an endless number of combinations, but the basic premise is: vegetables, beans, tiny pasta.
While eating the soup, we talked about other recipes of the soup. It was soup inception. My wife’s grandmother for instance, would make a pasta fazool that was much more similar to a consommé with a few beans and handful of pasta floating in it. She of course would make her own broth, boiling vegetables and chicken parts all day long and infusing broth with flavor that simply can’t be replicated from a can.
We dug a bag of Rancho Gordo beans from our bean supply. We have a lot of fancy dried beans on hand and try to rotate through them to make sure they never get too old. But we only needed about half the bag for the soup, leaving us with a Tupperware full of beans.
But that brings us to the second part of this story.
Saturday afternoon we wandered over the Williamsburg Bridge and got ourselves to Alison Roman’s shoppy shop pop-up. The pop-up, sponsored by the Infatuation, is a tiny spinoff of the upstate shop profiled in the Washington Post a few weeks back, part of a publicity push for her new cookbook, Something From Nothing, released last week. The pop-up goes through November 30th, so there’s still plenty of time to head over yourself.
The twee little shop overflows with color and dainty products of all varieties. It was, like the original Bloom, a mix of curated small objects, fancy shelf-stable products, and surprisingly, fresh baked bread and vegetables.
The shoppy shop, filled with eager fans, and I was navigating with a stroller. Luckily the bouncer held open the door while I wheeled the four-year-old into the shop. When a Shoppy Shop requires a bouncer for crowd control, you know you’ve really arrived.
The shelves teemed with precious tiny household goods. The little egg cups caught my eye, not that anything ceramic would last very long in our house. Its amazing to think anyone has heirloom-anything-breakable after raising children.
The tinned fish section too dazzled with delights, but I didn’t dare check the price (reader, I already knew the price of those tins from far less twee pop-ups). I was disappointed that I didn’t see any Cheez-Its, a Roman favorite that she stocks upstate.
The pop-up shares space with Casetta a wine bar 61 Hester Street, and on the warmer than usual Saturday afternoon, Casetta’a outdoor tables were filled with young people in chic camel colored long coats sipping wine. I get the feeling the Venn diagram of Casetta’s beautiful youthful crowd and the aging hipsters amped for Roman’s pop-up are two circles side-by-side. So rizz, amiright?
I hurried out of the shoppy shop before our four-year-old had the chance shatter one of the delicate pieces, but this allowed my wife the opportunity to browse the twee items unencumbered.
She selected a few items, one of which was a jar of fancy, gourmet harissa, a hot chili pepper paste found in north Africa. (Her total was still far short of the free tote bag that came with a $50 purchase).
Harissa comes from the Arabic word, meaning to pound or crush. Traditionally, chili peppers are ground with a mortar and pestle (thus, the name), along with garlic, and a variety of herbs and spices. Harissa can also be made from rose pedals for a more fragrant, less spicy variation.
The earliest versions of harissa date back to the 7th century and were added to meats and fish, becoming a popular condiment across north Africa. But it wasn’t until the 2000s that saw harissa take on a global market, and now available in your local shoppy shops.
And now back to our beans.
We had in the refrigerator all those leftover beans that never went into the soup, and a fresh jar of harissa we needed to sample. I suggested two dinner concepts that were shut down due to banality, but then we landed on a white beans with bitter greens.
Great.
There are a wide variety of options when it comes to mixing white beans with greens as my initial Google search revealed. I browsed through plenty of delicious looking photos, including a parmy, garlicky, oily, peppery version I intended to cook up. Off to the store and back again with the spinach and a handful of other things (raspberries for $3.49? Yes, please).
That’s when my wife whipped out the harissa. My dreams of a buttery, creamy spinach and beans were scuttled. Instead she cooked up this spicy, sultry harissa-y bean dish.
We served it alongside couscous flavored with cacio e pepe. You might be thinking couscous was a great accompaniment for a dish from north Africa, and you’d be absolutely right. But we didn’t plan it this way. Instead, our four-year-old had demanded couscous for dinner. Sometimes these things just work out.
Beans & Greens With Gourmet Harissa
INGREDIENTS
1 bunch of Spinach
1 quart cooked white beans
Several garlic cloves
1/2 cup of bean broth
2 tablespoons fancy harissa
1 teaspoon of red pepper flakes
Leftover goat cheese
Olive oil
INSTRUCTIONS
Warm garlic in olive oil
Add red pepper flakes, salt and pepper
Add beans and harissa
Wash spinach in two batches
Add drippy spinach to pan
Stir while simmering
Allow liquid to evaporate and spinach to wilt
Serve in bowls and top with goat cheese and drizzle of olive oil
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