Purple Stuff: Mystery Vegetable

Please help us identify this leafy, purple vegetable.

We bought it the other day at our green grocer's, not really caring what it was, just that it looked very good. It was among the other seasonal greens (yeah, it's purple...) without any labeling. I asked the cashier what it was, and she enthusiastically told me they were... beet leaves!

This was a bit surprising to me, as I've been eating beet greens since I could remember, and they've always been green, with just a hint of red in the stem sometimes.

Before diving into them tonight, I did a little online research. The closest thing I could come up with is orach (based on this photo at The Kitchn) aka German mountain spinach. But I'm still not convinced...

We tasted some of it raw, and it actually tasted not like beet greens, but a bit like beet root! Sweet, sugary, a bit mineral-y. After lightly wilting it, though, it gave off a beet-like juice (only much less intense) and lost its sweetness, tasting more or less like spinach.

So how did we have it? I added spinach to the pan while wilting in garlic-tinged olive oil, and served it both over and under buta-no-kakuni (Japanese style braised pork belly) over chestnut basmati rice.

And yeah, it was as good as it looks.

And although Alannah wasn't as intrigued by the whole beet-like flavor (notice the beet juice coloring tinting the rice, above) I'm ready to have the rest raw in a salad, maybe with a citrusy zest.

So does anyone know what this is? And how it's normally eaten? First definitive answer wins a moist, sticky date.

No, not with Alannah, but a nice, sugary deglet noor from North Africa. (Winner must take delivery in Paris, as fruit products generally do not pass customs. Kthxbai.)

[Insert Italian Sausage Joke]

This post is dedicated to another couple in Paris, as it wouldn't have been possible without them.

They recently shared with us some goodies shipped over from family in Italy, and we had to honor the gift by consuming it as elegantly as possible. As much as I'd personally have no problem simply biting chunks out of a hunk of twine-wrapped provolone cheese, or shave off chunks of spiced soppresatta sausage with my pocket knife like a country bumpkin, I have to pretend I'm as classy as the wife sometimes.


So we went all trendy and had it on the cutting board, along with a super fresh baby spinach leaf salad drizzled in olive oil, balsamic, and freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. There's something almost primal about eating off of a well-used cutting board - maybe the way it invites you to pick things up with your fingers and lick off bits of olive oil here and there, rolling slices of cheese and meat between your fingers... That whole classy thing went right out the window.

Sticking with the board theme, we served up a from-scratch pizza the same way. The smell of the proofing pizza dough (yeast + warm water + flour) drove me nuts all day, and it remained untainted and perfect by being baked as the simplest and best of all pizzas: The Margherita. Mozarella cheese, tomatoes, basil. Nothing else.


The simplicity of this pizza demands the best ingredients, as it can reveal any and all faults. Our only shortcoming was not having a pizza stone or slab to really retain the necessary heat underneath the crust as it cooks. While our oven is pretty admirable, reaching 260ºC/500ºF, that's still nowhere near the heat of a proper pizza oven. And somehow, I don't think installing a wood-burning oven with a reflector dome to achieve 375ºC/700ºF would really be up to code... Mmm, but think of the tandoori we could make!

'Til then, these simple Italian fixin's will do us just fine... We'll put up with slightly less than perfect, as long as the ingredients are...

Naked Food: May Day Market Haul

It's May (Labor) Day weekend, and you'd think that in a country vilified by its transatlantic friends as some sort of socialist/communist/Marxist/pinko utopia, that everything would be closed in honor of the proletariat, and we'd all be waiting in Soviet bread lines for the small ration of food being handed to us by the state.


So to all our friends who worship at the altar of unrestricted capitalism and fear the S-word, we invite you to suck on our fresh basil (note the roots), sweet miniature bananas, long firm white asparagus, grit-free baby spinach, ridiculously red and juicy plum tomatoes, succulent gariguette strawberries, round and firm Paris mushrooms, and hairy brown kiwis.

Anyway, now to go line up at the bakery to get our gigantic baguette at the government-mandated price of 80 cents.