10/20 pasta with butternut squash and tomatoes

Mark Bittman ("The Minimalist") wrote a great piece last week about the ratio of pasta-to-sauce. I have to say I've always been a bit of a fan of the 1/3 pasta - to - 2/3 sauce ratio (when cooking with dried pasta - not fresh), so this was merely a nice reinforcement of an informal practice I was already observing to some degree. I decided to try out one of the featured recipes with this article, because - guess what - I had more squash from the CSA.

I modified Bittman's recipe a bit, making it a little more complex. For one thing, I blanched, peeled, and seeded the tomatoes, reserving the juice and throwing it back in with the sauce. For another thing, I cooked the sauce longer than Bittman seems to recommend here (probably close to 45 minutes). This ensured that the tomatoes had broken down and bit more and that the sauce had time to thicken. The squash, while tender, didn't break down with the increased cooking time. I also added several good glugs of olive oil at the end to give the sauce a bit more flavor and a nice sheen.

Experiment = successful! I'll be adding this to the rotation.

10/18 Breakfast: black eyed peas and brown rice

I have this thing for savory/spicy breakfast foods. Waking up to a cold bowl of sugary flakes and milk does nothing for me - I like a nice hot bowl of ramen noodles with a poached egg, or pho, or grits and grilled veggies.

Before embarking on an epic drive up to Sacramento for "state business", I needed some fuel for the fire. Leftover spicey black eyed peas and brown rice with red kale did just the trick.

10/20 Battle Chestnut

As usual, I waited till the last minute to cook my chestnut dishes, but here they are. It was my mom's birthday, so it was a good opportunity to try out some dishes. The first is a chestnut ravioli from the french laundry cookbook. Now, i've cooked a few of Keller's dishes, and every single time, I realize why they charge as much as they do at the Laundry. This food is complicated, and doing it alone is a tall task. So, definitely want to thank my mom for the help pulling all of this together. So back to the ravioli... the filling was a puree of roasted chestnuts, mascarpone and butter. The recipe was actually for agnolotti, but after struggling to roll out the pasta dough, i decided ravioli was going to be far easier. The sauce was made with pureed celery root, potato, heavy cream and fontina cheese. The sauce to me was the highlight, it was amazingly light and refined.

The second dish was quite a bit easier. Just a chestnut and fennel soup recipe I found in Gourmet. The fennel provided a nice bright finish to the chestnuts. The soup could have been a bit smoother, but the flavors were there.

To be honest, i'm somewhat happy battle chestnuts is over. Peeling 4lbs of roasted chestnuts was not fun. Rolling out the pasta dough was frustrating and trying to do all this in one meal was maybe a bit much. But, everything worked out in the end and the food was quite tasty. What else can you ask for.

10/18 Meat and Potatoes

Once in a while everyone needs a pick-me-up kindda meal. A meal where calories just don't matter and you're just after delicious satisfaction. Thursday night was one of those meals. I coated a rib-eye, my favorite cut of meat, with three kinds of peppercorns (green, black and szechuan). At the same time i boiled some parsnips, potatoes and carrots to make a mash. I heated up my cast iron skillet and seared the meat nicely. Flipped it over and and threw it in the oven. While it finished, i mashed up the root vegetables with a fork and added heavy cream. yup. no skim milk here. 3 minutes later the rib-eye was done and it was time to max out the calories. Accordingly I made a nice heavy cream & mustard sauce in the skillet. Oh I did serve all this with a nice arugula salad - but fear not, i did cover it with some tasty olive oil.

10/15 The Quickfire Challenge

Hungry and with not very few things other than beer in the fridge, I watched the Top Chef season 3 reunion show last night. For those of you who don't watch it (shame on you!), chef's compete against one another each week in various, often ridiculous, challenges. This is not a gimmicky show however. The contestants are very skilled executive or at the very least sous-chefs and the food they make is top notch stuff. Unlike anything shown on the food network, they actually cook on this show (it's on Bravo). Anyway, each week, the show begins with a "quickfire" challenge, where contestants are given a very limited time frame (often 10-30 minutes) to come up with something based on some ingredients or theme. So... as I was watching the reunion show and some of the quickfire highlights, I decided I should do the same and make something quick and tasty with whatever I could scrounge up in the house... (my theme was "be less hungry"). So here it is: Gnocchi with Apples, Turnips and Gruyeres.

I guess it's pretty self explanatory, I pan seared the frozen gnocchi i'd made a few weeks back, while I cooked a finely diced apple and turnip in butter in another skillet. Tossed each a few times before adding them to one another with some parseley and grated gruyeres. All in all a very successful 10 minute meal if I do say so myself.

10/14 Apple Picking

Although I was at Lisa + Nate's wedding in Groton, MA most of the weekend I did manage to convince a few of the people there to go apple picking on Sunday morning. For the most part, produce on this side of the country can't hold a candle to what comes out of California, except, of course, apples. As it turns out mid-October is pretty much the peak of apple season and Groton is pretty much the center of apple picking land in Massachusetts. So going apple picking on Sunday seemed like the only logical thing that we could possibly do.

So off we went to visit Phil and his less famous twin brother to drink some cider and pick enterprise, cortlands, mcintosh, macouns (my favorite) and a couple other varietals. As you can see, many apples were picked and I'll be eating them for some time to come - so keep an eye out for them to show up in my dishes...

10/10 Bo Kho

Alright, I'm back! Well sort of... After a week long (or more?) hiatus, and an overwhelming number of posts by my blog partner I decided it was time I post a little somethin'-somethin' myself. Much to my chagrin, weddings and several other things have essentially kept me away from the kitchen for the last couple weeks. Anyways, last week - I forget exactly when - I did cook some delicious beef stew. Of course this wasn't your average beef stew served over egg noodles, this was Bo Kho, which is a very traditional Vietnamese dish. Apparently, it's one of those dishes that every Vietnamese family has a different version of. So in that spirit I decided to take the recipe out of the same vietnamese cookbook i'd mentioned in a previous post and switch it up just a bit. Of course the end result was a brown beef stew, which frankly makes for a bad picture, so you'll have to forgive the photography on this one, and just take my word on it, it was good!

So what goes into Bo Kho? Well its a tomato based stew with Chinese five spice, star anise, lemon grass and ginger. Of course, there are a few splashes of fish sauce in there too (ask my roommates about that one...). the whole thing is cooked with some carrots and onions for about 3 hours. Now what I decided to change up was the cut of meat. I used short ribs instead of "stew" meat (whatever that's supposed to be). I think the bones gave the stew more flavor, and frankly few cuts of meat are better than a braised short rib. The whole thing fed me for almost all of last week.

10/15 "classy" grilled cheese and tomato soup

Taking yet another queue from my good friend Mario, we have here a sort of "italian" french toast. A bufalo mozzarella sandwich is dipped in an egg/milk batter with thyme and nutmeg.



Serve with leftover yellow tomato/yellow pepper soup.

*slurp*

10/14 there's a method to my madness

I'm sure all you out there in readerland stay awake at night wondering: just how does she do this - week after week? Where does the inspiration come from? Does she really go through almost a liter of olive oil every three weeks?

Well, the answers to all the above questions, folks, are yes.

Here's my workspace on Sunday afternoon. One observes the piles of cookbooks, the shopping list, and the good-for-nothing cat.

10/14 enchiladas rojas

I feel like it would be unfair of me to all of the beautiful enchilada colors and ethnicities of the world to make enchiladas verdes without a follow-up of enchiladas rojas. This is an improvised recipe that started off with a memory of one of my favorite childhood dishes: broccoli and potato enchiladas. I don't know how "authentic" this combo is, but it sure hits the spot. I also had a pint of frozen red chile from the New Mexico extravaganza.

I started off by blanching the broccoli and boiling and cubing potatoes. I searched through my recipe books for something on red sauce, but didn't find an exact match for the red chiles, so I ended up sauteing an onion, adding some toasted/ground cumin and oregano, a big can of whole tomatoes (pureed until smooth), the chiles, and salt. I simmered this for about 15 minutes and decided that was all it needed. I assembled the enchiladas per the usual technique (filling was brocc and potatoes, sauted onions, plus a cheese blend of grated monterey jack and white cheddar).
As usual, I had lots of leftovers.

Blog Action Day: Food and Sustainability

It's blog action day - and I would be greatly amiss in not taking the opportunity to participate in the discussion, especially since my food ethics are so bound up in my environmental and community ethics. As a reminder, I'm not just an amateur home food experimenter. Food - where and how its grown, how it gets into salsas and bread and plastic wrappers, and how people find and purchase it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about professionally. In particular, since my graduate school days (while not quite salad days), I've been exploring how food impacts community sustainability, health, and economic vitality. The farm bill, which has been a new target of activist attention (especially those concerned with conservation and community food security) can be seen as a major piece of environmental legislation, since it sets the rules of the game (i.e., programs and subsidies) for what gets grown and what gets eaten in the U.S. If we want to see the preservation of family farms, programs that encourage farmers to go organic, and funding for farmers to practice landscape stewardship by creating biodiverse farms that support native species and habitats, we need a better farm bill. And if we want consumers to have better, cheaper access to fresh, local produce, we need a better farm bill. I'll just make passing mention to great sources on the farm bill: anything Michael Pollan has written this year, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's fact sheets on understanding the farm bill are both excellent places to start. Yes, this is a blog about a very small subject: what I (and my esteemed colleague) cook. But I try to remember that what I cook is also about the environment...and that without a substantial redirection of the farm and food policy in this country, buying from the farmers' market and the CSA (while something I'm thrilled to support) won't cut it in the long run.

10/10 ligurian pesto

Molto, molto italiano (yes, I know this is a terrible indulgence to write these words). I have been dying to try a classic ligurian pesto (with blanched green beans and boiled potatoes along with pasta), and I have no idea what I was waiting for.

Here you go folks:One thing of note here. I got the "fancy" pasta (because that's the only kind that you can find at the Berkeley Bowl in the appropriate trennette variety). This happened to cost FIVE DOLLARS, which is a lot to pay for dried pasta. However, perhaps unfortunately (for my budget and underlying belief in what's right and fair), this pasta was amazing. The flavor was outstanding. It really made the rest of the dish shine. Those expensive pasta bastards.

10/09 sweet and sour butternut squash

My first Mario Batali recipe! As usual, the inspiration came from a CSA box item I hadn't planned for. This time, it was butternut squash. Maro has a recipe for sweet and sour pumpkin (zucca agrodulce) that caught my eye while flipping through the book, so I appropriated the recipe for butternut squash.

First, I peeled and diced the squash (approx. 3 pounds) into 1-inch cubes. I sauted the squash with a good 1/2 cup olive oil and several cloves of thinly sliced garlic. After this began to get golden and lovely smelling, I added add 6 tbsp of honey and 6 tbsp of red wine vinegar plus 2 tsps of red pepper flakes, then simmered for 12 minutes or so until the sauce was syrupy and the squash tender.

Mario suggests serving this with pasta (which I did, along with mint and grated parm), and it came out great. Prepare-ahead note: minus the mint and cheese, this kept in the fridge so all I had to do was boil pasta and prep the toppings.

The dish was so good, in fact, that I've thought of a brilliant hack that I plan on trying out soon. The idea is: Prepare per the instructions above, subbing peanut or veg oil for the olive oil. At the end, stir in a can of coconut milk and some lovely shrimps, and simmer gently until tender. Serve over rice with chopped mint and/or cilantro. Yum!

10/08/07 smoked salmon with brown rice and a poached egg

This was a totally improvised recipe based on something similar (though not as good) I had at a tea house. I got the brown rice in my CSA box as a "substitute" because of their problems filling boxes with the normal mix of veg - all caused by a quarantine on tomatoes/peppers/similar fruits in the Dixon, CA area to contain a Mediterranean Fruit Fly infestation. Massa Organics grows rice in the Sacramento delta and is a friend/neighbor of Eatwell Farms.

What to do with brown rice? It takes forever to cook (a whole hour) and I personally believe it needs lots of soy sauce to make it worthwhile. Here I composed a dish of four parts:

1. smoked salmon from the farmers' market
   
2. brown rice seasoned with plenty of soy sauce
3. carrots stir fried in sesame oil with a little bit of ginger and chile powder, plus sesame seeds
4. a poached egg

This is a good meal for a person still recovering from a cold (aka, me).

10/07 sweet potato pizza

I had planned on making this days ago, but I've already told you of my grave illness and my lack of cooking. In any case, good thing sweet potatoes are stable at room temperature for a couple of weeks.

This pizza has:

• olive oil
• baby leeks and garlic (sauted until golden)
• roasted sweet potatoes (375 degree oven for about 35 minutes)
• gruyere and parmesan cheese
  
• minced thyme and sage
• red pepper flakes
  
• and trader joe's refrigerated pizza crust

The oven was a little hot so some of these sweet potatoes got a little crunchy, but all in all it was a decent show.

10/03 Birthday wishes

Since it was my birthday, I thought I would share a birthday acquisition: Molto Italiano. I haven't made anything out of it yet, but it looks awesome. Lots of veg recipes that build on classic, straight forward ingredients and technique.

In case you all are feeling sad that you didn't shower me with material objects in commemoration of this momentous moment, cast thine eyes upon other food-based objects of my lust:
Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
and, my Williams Sonoma gift registry (event was 10/03/2007).

That's right. A food mill.

10/01 hearty late summer spaghetti, aka, return to form

I got sick this week. And it was my birthday. And that stellar combination appears to result in statistically fewer meals cooked at home. I did manage to sneak one in - and that was Monday night. A long time ago. And I still haven't posted about it. The shame.
This is a delicious hearty spaghetti recipe filled with the goodness of late summer. It all starts with some juicy anchovies sauted with garlic and onions, whilst eggplant and peppers are roasted. A pound or so of fresh tomatoes and a handful of green and niçoise olives later, all this is simmered for half an hour or so. Served over whole wheat spaghetti and shown here with a typical amount of pecorino and parsley. Too much parsley you say? That's nonsense! More parsley equals more better.

10/02 Home Cured Salmon

I was gonna wax poetic about how awesome curing foods is, but if you're reading this you probably already know this. If not, this post should convince you. I've been eyeing a gravlax recipe from Rick Stein's Complete Seafood cookbook ever since I bought it a couple years ago. I highly recommend this book for anyone who really loves seafood btw. Gravlax is a Scandinavian dish consisting of salmon cured in salt, sugar and dill. This is not quite as refined as smoked salmon, but it's pretty damn good nonetheless - maybe a bit saltier. So what exactly is involved in making this? Well actually it's remarkably simple. Take your salmon (in this case wild pacific coho) and cover it in coarse sea salt, sugar and dill. Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 48 hours, flipping it every 12 hours. That's it. Seriously. It's dead easy. When you're done rinse off all the salt, slice and enjoy. This will keep in the fridge for a week, maybe longer.

So thats all nice and well, but what are you gonna do with a pound of cured salmon now? Well here's a simple idea that brings me back to my childhood. Take some tagliatelle - in this case the spinach varietal - add in some of that salmon, some creme fraiche (ok, lots of creme fraiche) and chives. Again, this is dead easy and yet so damn good. Over the winter I hope to explore this wonderful world of cured foods further, so stay tuned and try it out for yourself!