Late Nite Kitchen

Like playing a video game

2011-12-14T19:56:00.001-08:00

We have a holiday tradition of making yummy moist coffee- and molasses-infused gingerbread loaves & tonight was the night for baking. It's often tricky to come up with important cooking jobs for everyone without risking a major fail (3 year old egg-cracking...fail. 6 year old milk measuring...fail. You get the picture). This year, the 3 year old was in charge of the stand mixer (a popular assignment!) while the 6 year old was in charge of buttering & flour-dusting the little pans. At first I worried he'd be jealous of the mixer operator. But I was wrong; he loved his job. Apparently shaking the pans to evenly distribute flour is 'just like playing a video game!'

And, yes, that is apparently a real video game. With Back to the Bakery expansion pack.

Four Fall Favorites

2011-12-02T16:08:00.001-08:00

1. Pumpkin butter. Stirred into lattes, shakes, and hot water for easy pumpkin spice lattes, shakes, and cider.

2. Dahl. Red lentils, shallot, and broth, cooked to mush and served over brown rice. So easy & delicious! Twice a week lately...

3. Kale chips. Chopped kale, a little olive oil and sea salt, and baked til crispy. These are good. The only green food my children will eat.

4. I really only had three, but liked the alliteration.

PumpkinPalooza

2011-11-06T11:36:00.001-08:00

Last night: pumpkin soup

This morning: pumpkin spice lattes (http://www.thepastryaffair.com/blog/2011/9/29/pumpkin-spice-latte.html) & roasted pumpkin seeds

Tonight: pumpkin pie

Salsa

2011-09-17T09:50:00.001-07:00

Salsa

2011-09-17T09:49:00.003-07:00

Salsa

2011-09-17T09:49:00.001-07:00

In a pickle

2011-08-22T20:10:00.001-07:00

Operation Fermentation: Sauerkraut

2011-08-21T09:46:00.001-07:00

45 frozen and jammed pounds later....

2011-08-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Blueberry Pie

Pickled hot carrots

2011-07-23T14:52:00.001-07:00

I have been wanting to make these for years, and after our farmer's talk of a pickling party, I got excited that this might be the year I finally try it.

Now, just to find a day to do it...

Dad cooks dinner's take on pickling hot carrots.

Fava: a labor of love

2011-07-23T12:14:00.001-07:00

I <3 Summer Food!!

2011-07-22T14:19:00.001-07:00

Kale hand pies: a wish come true

2011-07-18T20:06:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned here before, I have been wanting to make Martha Stewart's chicken and kale handpies with cheddar crust. Well, today was finally my day. Of course, per my mantra to 'use what I have,' I had collards instead of kale, garlic scapes instead of leeks, hazelnuts rather than chicken, and white wine in place of broth. And they are fabulous! My mind is racing now with handpie possibilities!

Last week of cherries

2011-07-17T14:25:00.001-07:00

Wash, stem, pit, freeze. With lots of sampling. It's so fun to share household work with the little ones, who make everything a game. A battle game with sound effects & projectile cherry pits, true. But, hey, they're helping.

A beautiful (ice cream) cake

2011-07-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

A bowl of cherries

2011-07-03T18:22:00.001-07:00

In addition to allowing my family to consume roughly half their day's calories in cherries and pitting & freezing enough to cheer us through a few gray winter weeks, I also made Angry Chicken's *new and improved* up-side down plum cake - with cherries, of course! Turns out my 6-year old is an amazing cherry-pitter! The trick, of course, is for him to be so sick of cherries he can't imagine ever eating another! And letting him make battle noises.

We got Queen Anne, Bing, and Brooke cherries today. Brookes are always a favorite, and today was no exception. Summer here is so fabulous!

On a side note, I purged & organized our garage & made a shelf, next to my deep freezer, to keep my canning supplies. The organization and efficiency are mind-boggling!

A tiny kitchen garden

2011-07-01T12:19:00.001-07:00

A day's work

2011-07-01T00:03:00.001-07:00

Cilantro: frozen

Mint: dried

Strawberries: jammed

Me: off to work a night shift

Wish List

2011-06-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

I wish for a free afternoon to try this recipe!

Learning healthy choices

2011-06-29T06:25:00.001-07:00

The 6 year old got himself this snack. The dip:carrot ratio is not exactly what I would have served him, but I am proud of his choice to eat a carrot. *A* carrot.

Summer Salads

2011-06-26T19:57:00.001-07:00

http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/grilled-flank-steak-salad

We have been making a variation of this salad about once a week since we started getting salad greens - it's so great!

I make my own croutons, by tossing last week's bread with olive oil, salt, & pepper, and broiling them a few moments.

And I buy closer to 3 oz serving sizes of steak, and broil them 4 or 5 minutes per side, since I don't have a grill.

And the salad contents are determined by what came in our CSA share for the week. Today, we had mixed salad greens, pea shoots, radish rat-tails (my new fav!!!), and roasted scapes. And some sprouts we grew in a jar on our counter!

Try it out & enjoy! And if there are radish rat-tails at the farmers market, definitely try them! They're fabulous!

A trifle

2011-06-19T20:13:00.001-07:00

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/m/recipe/strawberry-mascarpone-trifle.html

I made this trifle with some Hood strawberries this weekend for a BBQ & it was fabulous! I skimped on the sugar & bought ladyfingers to line the edge, but otherwise followed the recipe. Mascarpone whipped cream is a huge improvement over the instant pudding/cool whip I grew up eating!

First Fruits

2011-06-05T14:38:00.001-07:00

After 10 months of waiting, we got to the Farmers Market 10 minutes too late to enjoy the first local crop of berries! They sold out!! Looks like we'll wait another week to satisfy our fruit longing. Ah, the ups & downs of trying to eat local. I might be there waiting next week when the market opens!

And no worries, we will surely be sick of strawberries in 6 weeks after daily over-consumption, picking, jamming, and freezing! We'll be longing for blueberries, peaches, cherries...

Perfectly normal cookies

2011-05-05T19:05:00.001-07:00

6 sticks of butter

6 eggs

6 cups of flour

6 cups of sugar

6 cups of chocolate chips

6 teaspoons vanilla

and 9 cups of oats

Halfway through my 2nd of 2 weeks of nights, and I am not feeling normal.

At first, nights are fun. I work during the night, and then get the day off, to do as I please, since the kids are in school and I have no responsibilities. I run in the sun, hit mid-day yoga classes, and go to accupuncture. I cook up fabulous meals with beautiful food from the Farmer's Market.

But, it doesn't take long for the schedule to start to get to me. I work all night, alone, in a dark and lonely little room. My pager beeps approximately 15 times per hour. I can't sleep during the day, so I get by on 2 and 3 hour naps here and there. I am in a haze. My kids sadly ask me at night whether I will still be at work when they get up in the morning. Nothing feels normal.

And when I don't feel normal, I bake. Somehow baking cookies with my kids makes the world feel normal again. Plus, it makes them like me. We have a system worked out. I let them crack the eggs and measure the flour. And I haphazardly drop a few chocolate chips in their workspace while measuring them for the recipe. Every single time the kids think I don't notice the spilled chocolate and that they just pulled off the greatest hoodwinking ever known to kid-dom. Yes, I sweep approximately a cup of flour and oats off the floor every time. And, yes, they have each tasted flour, butter, baking soda, vanilla, and brown sugar. They are learning. And we are doing something fun together that does not involve pretending to be battle droids.

Today, in my effort to feel normal, I decided to make a triple batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Totally normal thing to do, right? My helpers and I measured out all the ingredients. Then we started mixing it up in my amazing stand mixer. Funny thing, though. 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 9 = too much for the mixer. My stand mixer bowl overfloweth.
The only thing I could find to fit all the dough in was this enormous graduated cylinder I use to rise dough. The dough all fit in here, but I have no spoons long enough to reach down to the bottom to mix it up. So, there I was, up to my elbow in the deep vat of cookie dough, trying to mix oats and chocolate chips into the smooth, buttery dough base. With two drooling little boys eagerly watching, hoping their forearms would be called upon next.
Of course, I have no use for 3 batches of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I baked just 9 cookies tonight. So, the rest got divided up and frozen for another day. It seemed like such a great idea at first, to be able to quickly pull out some pre-made dough and bake it up. But, honestly, I think what I like about baking cookies might be more the messy kid egg-cracking, spilled flour, haphazardly dropped chocolate chips, and little spoon-lickers. What feels normal is working on a project with little boys who are heavily vested in the outcome.
Pleased with the fruits of his labors. No, he didn't get to eat them all. Just one. We have to maintain some sense of normalcy around here.

Raab: because dinner should come with flowers!

2011-05-05T18:46:00.001-07:00

Spring Recipes

2011-05-01T15:40:00.001-07:00

Some links to recipes we have been enjoying making (and altering) this week:

For rhubarb, the first "fruit" of spring:
Strawberry Rhubarb Tarts from Joy of Baking
Rhubarb Hand Pies from Angry Chicken

Because we're still eating last year's roots!! I did add spring greens instead of mushrooms:
Chicken Pot Pie with Sweet Potato Crust from John and Caprial Pence

Because fiddleheads are ubiquitous right now in Portland, and they are so cute and tasty too:
Fiddlehead Shrimp Scampi from Closet Cooking

And because asparagus is one of the more widely appreciated harbingers of spring green:
Asparagus and wild mushroom fritatta like this one

Spring green salad with wheatberries with raab and greens

Farmer's Market

2011-05-01T09:04:00.001-07:00

After exploring the forest on a little hike yesterday, my boys are excited to taste fiddleheads! We did not harvest these, as we were in a state park. Luckily, though, today is the start of our neighborhood farmer's market summer season! It is open all year, but on every-other-week basis, and pretty limited offerings. But today, we are excited to look for early spring treats, like fiddleheads, asparagus, morels, and rhubarb!

A list without love

2011-04-25T16:23:00.001-07:00

The following items have fallen off the *love* list in my kitchen:

1. Quinoa. I was once enamored with this little grain. It's quick-cooking, nutty flavor, chewy texture, complete protein source, and ancientness captured my heart. But, every time I made it, I noticed a problem. A terrible, achey, hot, stomach problem. At first it was noticeable. Then it became uncomfortable. Eventually it was unbearable. My stomach hurt so bad! I kept blaming it on other dietary indiscretions, but the pattern was there. Quinoa -> tummy ache. After a sleepless post-quinoa night, I did some googling and discovered this is a fairly common reaction. So, Costco bag of organic quinoa, adieu.

2. Cake. Really? Cake?? Yep. I made too many cakes and too much fabulous buttercream frosting for the 6 year old's birthday. Practice cake. Party cake. Decorate-your-own cake. Left over cake. An extra-for-next-week cake. Now, the thought of cake induces nausea. Maybe I'll bake a pie...

3. Pulled pork. Once my one true pork-love, now off the list. Why? Well, there was this one night when I threw together an assortment of things I found in our kitchen, including, but not limited to:
- pulled pork
- roasted potatoes
- blue cheese
It was gross. But that's not why it's off the list. No, it's off the list because, 2 bites in, the 6 year old points out how it looks AND smells like a poop he had that morning! From then on the mental association was set: pulled pork = poop.

4. Strawberries. Oregon has some of the most flavorful berries I have ever tried. They are small, dark red, sweet, juicy, organic, and usually fresh-picked the day we buy them. 20 miles from where we buy them. Now, it has been a long winter. We are sick of local warehoused apples and we are out of our frozen berries from last summer. Fruit is so decadently tempting right now. Costco has crates of large, pale berries. From Mexico. Still sprinkled with pesticides. They are off the list. My house will wait.

Lunches

2011-04-01T18:50:00.000-07:00

I added a new blog to the link list: http://thislunchrox.com/

We struggle to get lunches packed for ourselves and the kindgergartener each day, and are starting to understand why people buy convenience foods. Individual sized chips, juices, cookies, cheese sticks, you name it. None of it real food and all of it in wasteful packaging. It is a constant struggle for me, to keep things real and realistic while also trying to be a good steward of the planet and an advocate for my family's healthful eating.

Anyhow, this blog has some really cute food ideas and presentation for lunch boxing. I think she has more time than I do (although I'm sure not much), WAY more creativity, and less self-imposed restrictions about local sourcing of food. BUT, all the same, I had a great time looking through her posts and feel inspired to try harder with the K-garten lunch. And my own!

2011-03-07T18:00:00.001-08:00

I have been loving on this caramel apple cake lately, with our enormous stash of canned & frozen homemade applesauce. The caramel butterceam frosting is nothing short of amazing, but the cake itself is pretty fabulous un-frosted, baked in a 9x13 pan, and cut into squares. As usual with cake, we call it breakfast.

High 5 For That!!

2011-03-03T22:20:00.001-08:00

As most meals I prepare are met by shrill little boy exclamations of, "NO!!' or 'Dis-duuuuusting!', accompanied by multiple mid-meal bathroom trips during which the 2 year old spits partially chewed food out into the trash can when he thinks we are not looking, I was surprised by tonight's dinner proclamation.

A few minutes into the meal, the 5 year old suspiciously asks, 'Who made this dinner?' I confess, awaiting the explanation of why eating it will cause him to throw up a little, just in the back of his mouth, but enough that eating it is probably not good for him (yeah, he's an over-explainer). But, instead, he says, 'Well, high 5 for that!!'

While not quite so verbally exuberant, his little brother also ate the meal with gusto, asked for seconds, and threw none of it across the room in 'dis-dust' as he is wont to do.

I think the meal's winning attributes include its monochromicity (all tan), its mono-texture-icity (all almost mushy), high carbohydrate content, and, most importantly, lack of anything GREEN. A high 5- deserving meal should be remembered.

Coen's High Five Pasta

2 cups Cooked whole wheat rotini pasta
1/2 can rinsed white beans
Generous slab of butter
Generous sprinkling of salt
Handful of grated cheese

Mix and serve room temperature. In the fire truck bowl. With the gorilla fork.

The rest of the noodles & beans were tossed with 1/2 jar Trader Joe's pesto, sun dried tomatoes, and sauteed onions and collard greens. The little people would not touch this with a ten-foot gorilla fork.

S'mores

2011-02-22T08:42:00.000-08:00

We brightened up a cold, drear, low-energy weekend with some summer-camping treats. Homemade style.

Marshmallows. Unlike graham crackers (see below), marshmallows were more of a stretch. We had basically none of the ingredients in the recipe, and don't typically see things like corn syrup in our usual shopping location. So, anyway, it took a trip to the store to make these. I did, surprisingly, find a candy thermometer in the cabinet while looking for something else.

Little good this candy thermometer did me. I watched it diligently as it rose from 100 to 230. Then, I got distracted checking facebook on my phone and missed the 240 endpoint. According to the thermometer, I flew right past "soft ball" into "hard ball" temperature. I have no idea what that means, but the over-cooked sugars became marshmallows just fine. Which leaves me wondering if I ever even needed it.

After beating the cooked sugars with gelatin and egg whites. Sticky!

Cut, dusted with powdered sugar, and being loaded onto the waiting graham crackers with chocolate.

Graham Crackers. Usually relegated to camping supplies, graham crackers are kind of the lowest form of cookie. A few years ago my girlfriend made graham crackers from Martha Stewart's page, and they were really good! Sort of a whole wheat short bread, more cookie than cracker, and not all crumbly like the store ones. I have wanted to try them ever since, and this holiday weekend, between overnight call shifts, I finally had the chance. All the ingredients are things I have around anyway. I used Martha Stewart's recipe.

Measuring (I thought I'd give measuring ingredients a whirl).

Mixing. The most important part here is to prevent the 2 year old from dropping metal measuring cups into the bowl, as that jams the mixing blade and wears out the motor.

Rolling. Rolling between sheets of parchment helps with the stickiness. It also helps keep the sticky fingers of my helpers out of the dough.

Cutting. I used a pasta wheel and cut squares (and rectangles, my 5 year old points out).

Baked and cooling.

Mexican chocolate cake. For breakfast.

2011-01-30T08:26:00.001-08:00

Despite its rare beauty, this was not the rich, spicy, chocolate cake of my dreams. The biggest detractor from the recipe was the texture. Nevermind that I substituted brown sugar for white and whole wheat pastry flour for white. I'm sure that had NOTHING to do with it :)The following week, I made a second attempt, using my own favorite chocolate cake recipe and adding cinnamon, chili powder, and cayenne to the batter. It was more what I was looking for.

On my List

2011-01-17T17:54:00.001-08:00

A few recipes on my to do list, as soon as I get a minute...

Smitten Kitten's marshmallows

Martha Stewart's graham crackers - my girlfriend made these a few years ago and they were fabulous!

Homemade Hot Pockets, sort of like these, filled with curry or spicy vegetables and beans.

Churros

Mexican chocolate cake

And, finally, my biscuit recipe, that I have been making several nights a week lately.

Pulled Pork Tutorial

2011-01-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

Pulled Pork. It is sort of an anomaly in our house. I am not very experienced or skilled with meat preparation and typically disappointed in the results. Besides, as part of our food ethic, we try to rely more heavily on plant-based foods. And, I have all sorts of issues with industrialized meat production. So, that leaves us with free range birds and their eggs and field-finished beasts from the farmer's market. If you have ever decided to get picky, issue-y, snooty, and local about your animal products, I'm sure you have noticed one thing. The price. Yep, it's expensive. I suspect that cheap meat is a big part of my country's health status right now, and the real cost of the corn-fed meat is paid through the hospital system. But, don't get me started. Expensive meat is fine for me. The price forces me to eat less. So, there you go.

On the other hand, I am an athlete. Amateur at best, and haphazard at all times. But, an athlete I am. And, when my weekly miles get up above 40 or so, I really start to crave red meat. And salt. I figure my body is smarter than any other source of nutrition information and try to listen to and respond to its messages. If my body wants salty meat, then salty meat it gets.

That's where the pulled pork comes in. A nice, hazelnut-fed, local pig shoulder is a relatively inexpensive cut of meat, all things considered. The cooking process involves leaving it in the crockpot all day, a skill I have mastered. And it makes a LOT, so we can eat it for 6 or 7 meals total. So, I learned how to make pulled pork.

Here is my pulled pork tutorial. Based on no scientific research. And without pics.

To buy: When you go to the market or butcher or store to get the meat, look for 'pork shoulder' or 'picnic roast.' Or just ask.

To season: There are a ton of ways you can season a pork shoulder.

- I think the easiest method is to pour barbeque sauce over the roast after setting it in the crockpot. I have a yummy chipotle and coffee infused BBQ sauce out of a (coffee) recipe book, but I think any BBQ sauce would be brilliant.

- Slightly more work, and what I like to do, is to rub the pork with salt/cumin/chili powder/pepper and set it over chopped onions, garlic, cilantro, peppers, and lime juice in the crock pot. Again, any spice rub is likely going to be delicious.

To make: Put it in the crockpot, fat pad up, and leave it on low all day. When it's time to eat, pull it out, slip off & toss the fat pad, and shred the meat with 2 forks (this is the "pulled" part - you pull it apart with the forks). This takes about 5 minutes.

To eat: One of our favorite ways to eat pulled pork is on tacos, with salsa verde and white cheese. It is also good on sandwiches, over rice, in tortilla soup, or with eggs and salsa.

To keep: I put left-overs in freezer containers in the freezer for easy eating later. It freezes brilliantly.

Red Lentil and Corn Chowder

2011-01-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Every recipe I have made from the out of print book Coffee: The essential guide to the essential bean has been amazing. I have made all these recipes over and over again. While the book is presumably about coffee (I have never actually read it), the recipes in back are coffee-shop style breakfast and lunch foods and desserts. Many of them include coffee, of course.

I like to make this red lentil and corn chowder with corn we froze in the summer. I like that the chowder consistency is acheived with pureed lentils, rather than cream. And I like that it freezes well.

Ingredients:

1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
3 Tb olive oil
5 cups cooked red lentils
6 cups broth
3 cups corn
1 tsp Thai seasoning
salt & pepper

To make:

Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil 3-5 minutes, til the onion is translucent. Add lentils and enough broth to cover. Simmer partially covered 15-20 minutes.

Puree the lentils in a food processor, or with an immersion blender, until they are smooth. Now add the remaining broth, corn, Thai seasoning, salt and pepper. Cook 10-15 minutes more.

WPMP

2011-01-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

WPMP. Weekend Planning and Meal Prep. It's my MO. I swore off it for a while, but found the stress of coming home to a hungry family and throwing together some mediocre frozen food stressful and unappetizing. Except the days we grabbed Laughing Planet burritos, which seemed to be getting more and more frequent. Even that was getting old. So, my hiatus from cooking ahead is over. One day last week, I worked a long, 14ish hour day, mostly spent on my feet, and not interrupted by a lunch break. It was so unbelievably nice to come home to a yummy homemade meal.

- Pasta with oven-roasted tomato sauce (that we made and froze last August) and frozen chicken breasts

- Adzuki Butternut Squash Soup from 101 cookbooks

- Roasted roots (we have potatos, beets, and an unidentified) with pulled pork (I have a pork shoulder in the freezer)

- Pulled pork tacos (a pork shoulder makes a lot - I'll still end up freezing more than half for other days!)

- Red lentil corn chowder (from the freezer; I froze half a batch last time I made it)

Love this recipe book!

2010-11-07T07:10:00.000-08:00

Pear raspberry pandowdy.

Apples for sauce

2010-10-19T13:30:00.001-07:00

More tomato sauce

2010-10-04T11:42:00.001-07:00

Tomato .... Sauce

2010-10-01T12:36:00.001-07:00

2010-10-01T12:35:00.003-07:00

Headspace

2010-09-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

In case, like me, you ever wondered what 'leave 1/2" of headspace' meant. Apparently the over-full jar will forcefully reject the screwed-on lid and leave your precious soup vulnerable to freezer burn. Don't let it happen to you.

Summer Beauties

2010-09-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

Late summer treats us to peaches, tomatoes, peppers, and corn. I thought we could share & document some of our frequent favorites for this time of year. We have made the Grand Central Bakery peach cobbler recipe about 25 times this summer, this corn & pepper recipe several times, and enough of this salsa to last a while.

Happy last days of summer!

2010-09-19T20:31:00.001-07:00

2010-09-19T20:31:00.000-07:00

I had some help

2010-08-31T20:02:00.001-07:00

Canned & jammed

2010-08-31T15:20:00.001-07:00

Peaches

2010-08-31T09:16:00.001-07:00

Grunt

2010-07-25T20:02:00.001-07:00

2010-07-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

2010-07-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

Peaches are in our market right now, and a welcome addition to our
menu! I intended to make a peach-blueberry cobbler with cornmeal
topping, but as I was thumbing through my cookbooks, hoping to
'cobble' together a recipe for what I had in mind, I got distracted by
the 'Peach Caramel Grunt' recipe in Rustic Fruit Desserts. It is a
cross between peach cobbler and tarte tatin, with gooey caramel-soaked
peaches baked under a sweet crunchy bready topping.

So fabulous, it's worth heating up the house with the oven!

Crepe Cake

2010-06-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

Ever since the thought crossed my mind, I've been itching to try it. A crepe cake. I thought of it when I was icing big boy's second 5th birthday cake (I wasn't pleased with how the first rendition turned out). I split 2 layers of cake into 2 - resulting in 4 layers. What if I could split the cake thinner and have more layers? It would be brilliant! Taking thin cake layers to the extreme led me to crepes. A quick internet searched let me know I was not the first to dream up such sugary layered madness. And provided some recipes. I liked these two, from Cream Puffs in Venice and from a familiar favorite, Smitten Kitchen.

Idea and recipes in hand, I just needed a few more stars to align. Well, my mother gave me a creme brulee torch last year. We had some gift money just itching to be spent a nice new crepe pan. I had a weekend coming up with no races, trips, or other activities planned. And, then, the final piece fell into place: a dinner invite. Yep, that was all the excuse I needed to try out a ridiculously sugary, rich, layered treat.

The crepe batter needs to rest overnight, so it and the pastry cream will be waiting in the fridge for me to assemble the cake in the morning. I can't wait!!

Cooking for the week

2010-05-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

As I go through our first weekly CSA basket, and the remnants of last summer in our freezer, to plan and pre-cook next week's meals, I thought I'd just post about my planning. I do this every week, to allow us to eat good, homemade meals during the week, before 9 pm. Our weeks have been a little redundant - only so many things are easy to throw together, with last summer's frozen produce, into something that will be easy to re-heat and eat several days later. I make a lot of vegetable lasagna, vegetable enchilada, soups, fritattas, pre-cooked beans and vegetables for last-minute quesadillas, and pre-cooked grains and vegetables to eat with last-minute-cooked-eggs. These meals all also freeze well, and I often make two pans of enchiladas at once (only 5% more work, really) and freeze one for another week.

Cooking for the week takes me 3-5 hours on a weekend day, depending on how involved the cooking is, and how cooperative the kids are. It seems worth it to be able to eat how we want during the week, despite getting home from work at 6:30, tired, to kids who need undivided attention and food, with an empty stomach. It is a bit like eating left-overs every night, as the only fresh-cooked meals are on the weekends. So, if you have an issue with left-overs, cooking for the week is not for you.

This week's food, which relies heavily on spring greens and our over-zealous squash freezing:

Pizzas & salad
- make pizza dough, except with very little yeast, so that it will rise slowly on the counter for 24 hours, until we are ready for it. Or, you could use half the amount of yeast, and rise it in the fridge for several days.
- defrost last summer's homemade tomato sauce
- grate cheeses
- cut up vegetables for toppings, caramelize onions, cook bacon (what? we like bacon on our pizza!), and wash and dry salad, make vinaigrette
= we will have to put the pizzas together and bake them, and put salad on a plate = 20 minutes

Adzuki butternut squash soup & beer bread
- soak the beans overnight, cook all day in crockpot, then make the soup (butternut squash from freezer)
- bake beer bread
= just warm up to eat

Pasta with raab, bacon, squash & butter sauce
- pre-cook bacon
- clean, chop, and par-cook raab
- defrost some squash
- make butter sauce
= we will need to cook pasta and throw everything else in to warm up = 15 minutes

Braising greens with bacon over polenta
- braise the greens with bacon and onions
- make polenta
- grate cheese
= just warm up and layer cheese on vegetables on polenta to eat

Kale and squash enchiladas
- wash, cut, and saute kale with onions and some squash from the freezer
- layer vegetables with cheese and enchilada sauce and whole wheat tortillas; cook; cool
= just warm up to eat

Zucchini bread
- yes, more zucchini from the freezer
- I substitute whole wheat for the flour, honey for the sugar, and butter for the oil. But otherwise, follow the recipe exactly :)

Yogurt
- again, another post on another day

Spring Strawberries

2010-05-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Spring is in full swing, our CSA is about to start, and the Farmer's Markets in town are brimming with early season offerings! Some parts of Oregon are sunnier than others, and allow us an earlier season than we would get otherwise with Portland gray. The stars of the market right now, and for good reason, are the pints of Albion strawberries from central Oregon. We know much better varietals of berries, from much closer farms, are in store for us. But, after months of nothing but warehoused apples and pears, a new local fruit option is irresistible! Besides, all of my family's jams and frozen berries are long gone.(The freezer now only contains summer squashes, which we will probably never get through!)

When you pick strawberries or buy them from the farmer's market, they are picked ripe, for the best flavor, and not for potential shelf life. That means two things - 1) they are as good of strawberries as you can get, and, 2) they will not store in your fridge very long. So, if you want to eat them the same or next day, go right ahead. They will be sweet, ripe, and melt in your mouth. But, if you want to buy them Saturday to eat next Friday, you should probably wash, dry, slice, and macerate in sugar to keep them in the fridge til then. Or freeze them with or without a simple syrup for any time. Or jam them.

Our favorite way to eat strawberries (well, besides the first pint or two that we eat before even leaving the market) is with shortcake. Shortcakes are quick to make on a weekend morning or a weekday night after dinner. They are flaky, buttery, and the whole wheat and bran give them more flavor. I make them into 2 1/2 inch squares, good for little hands to hold. The square shape lets me cut the dough with a pastry knife and not re-roll the edges from around a circle biscuit cutter. The strawberries are so sweet they don't need added sugar. Then we add whipped heavy cream (for dessert) or plain yogurt (for breakfast). I have been making the yogurt, too...but that's another story.

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The shortcakes I have been making lately:

1 1/2 cup white flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup wheat bran
1 Tb baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup butter
3 Tb honey
3/4 cup buttermilk (or sour cream mixed half & half with milk)

Mix the dry ingredients. Cut in cold butter. Stir in honey and buttermilk.
Turn the dough onto floured surface. Pat into a rectangle. Fold in thirds. Turn, pat into rectangle and fold in thirds twice more. Pat again into rectangle and roll out about 1/2 inch thick.
Cut into squares or circles, transfer to baking sheet, and bake at 450 for 10-15 minutes, until browned.
Serve with LOTS of berries and cream.
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So, buy some fresh, delicious, organic, local treats, and find your own favorite way to feast on them.

I have posted on strawberry shortcake before and strawberry jam. I just love strawberries.

Chocolate decadence

2010-05-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

Making this morning a family favorite: flourless chocolate cake. This is a recipe from a San Francisco foodie spot, Rose Pistola. It is so rich and dense, it hardly qualifies as cake, and instead is more of a pudding. A dense, fudgy, bittersweet, coffee and hazelnut-infused pudding. While this is a grown-up cake, the little people live it, too. It is so rich & chocolately, a few bites will satisfy most, so I halve the recipe, bake in a springform pan, and slice it thin. Today, I am making a hazelnuttier version of this florentine recipe to accompany the smooth, rich cake with a salty crunch.

Stroganoff

2010-04-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

The man in the house grew up eating beef stroganoff, and always considered it a special treat. My initial experiences with this traditionally Russian dish did not inspire much hope for enduring marital bliss. My new husband's favorite meal was gross. Bland chunks of meat that wore out my jaw, chewy and bland extra wide egg noodles, squeaky canned mushrooms, salty packets of beef stroganoff powder, and fat free sour cream. Not a recipe for success.

Early in our marriage, I tried several times, without success, to like the meal. Then, the scientist/cook in me started to experiment. I varied the ingredients, tried different recipes, and consulted a Northwest cooking icon, James Beard. Even his recipe left me dissatisfied.

After much fumbling about in the kitchen, I stumbled upon a Beef Stroganoff we could both sink our teeth into. The difference:
1. No mixes, no cans, no fat free
2. Real mushrooms to enhance the flavor, and often replace the meat
3. Cook the meat and/or mushrooms til it melts in the mouth (not a few minutes like James Beard suggests, more like an hour)
4. The starch should be good on its own

My version (probably nothing like its Russian ancestor, but we like it)

1 pound of beef (or buffalo or portobello), cut into bite size chunks
(I am not a frequent beef buyer, so I have to ask every time which cut will be good)
1 onion, chopped
1-3 cups beef or mushroom broth
1 Tb worcestershire sauce
1-2 cups sliced mushrooms (baby bellos or crimini or button or a mix)
1 cup sour cream
3 Tb flour
Homemade noodles or hash browns (my favorite) to serve it over

- Cook onion in oil til it starts to get translucent.
- Add the beef and/or mushrooms and cook until browned .
- Add broth and worcestershire, cover, and simmer about an hour. Add more broth if it starts to dry out.
(I like to cook meals ahead, so I stop here and store this in the fridge, and add the sour cream/flour when I reheat)
- make noodles or potatoes. Be sure to season these with salt/pepper and butter.
- Mix sour cream and flour and blend into the meat mixture. Serve over the starch.

Pone

2010-03-03T20:05:00.000-08:00

In medicine, doctors and nurses are called on to bear witness to all manner of human suffering. Some you can imagine, having seen it in your own family or circle of friends. Some is unimaginable, even to the unlucky person who is himself suffering. I believe this bearing witness is the hardest part of medicine, harder than medical school, harder than 30 hour shifts and 80 hour work weeks, and harder than the constant feelings of inadequacy. As humans, doctors, nurses, and others who endure great amounts of stress, resort to coping mechanisms to stay sane. One such coping mechanism, considered a "mature" and an "emotional" coping mechanism, is humor. That's right. We make jokes about the horrors, the disease, the ways we struggle. We do it to survive.

One such joke that I never did understand was the reference to the CAT scan appearance of a head bump as a "pone." I had no idea what that meant. But, it is used, especially by those who trained in the south, as in, "Wow, that's a big 'pone' on the back of his head." Pone? In medicine there is SO MUCH vocabulary to learn, that sometimes non-words sneak in with all the real words we have to learn, and it takes a while to realize that 'pone' is not a word at all. And it is certainly not something I need to include in my dictations.

Don't worry; this is, in fact, related to cooking. I'm getting to that part. Today, after seeing such a head injury on a CAT scan, I decided to look up this term and see what exactly it meant. An official medical term it is not. In fact, according to Dr. Google, it is a food item. I found this definition, which made no mention at all of head injuries. It only describes cornmeal griddle cakes. Hmmm. Fried cornmeal. Maybe cornmeal griddle cakes and head injuries look somehow similar?

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I can't let a question like that go unanswered. Hence, the blog post. I salted some cornmeal and added enough water to get a pancake consistency. I then skillet-fried dollops of batter in butter until they were firm enough to flip. I flipped and cooked the other side. Then we ate them. The verdict: mixed response. Tasty (I mean, fried in butter...), these were somewhere between pancakes, crepes, and cornbread. In a good way; it was the best of the three quickbread worlds combined. Crispy edges, soft chewy center, cormeal toothiness. Certainly easy. And fit right into the winter-carb infatuation at our house. Sadly, though, they looked NOTHING like head bumps. I am no closer to solving the head 'pone' mystery, but I did find a quick, tasty, cornbread 'pone' to feed my carb and butter cravings til the sun comes out.

A little too late, I did an internet search for actual corn pone recipes and found this one. It sounds like their batter was a thicker consistency than mine. Will try it that way next time.

.Pones.

Now I just hope I don't end up with any head 'pones' of my own!

2010-02-06T12:58:00.000-08:00

We haven't had much of anything to post in a while. It is not that we haven't been cooking; we just haven't been experimenting as much. We are still baking and cooking for the week on weekend days, but sticking with a few standard meals, considering the limited produce options this time of year. I have been trying to increase the protein content of our typical meals, by adding legumes or meat, in an effort to improve my race pace. I will try it for a few months and see how it goes...

We have been baking our way through two new cookbooks:
The Grand Central Baking Book
Rustic Fruit Desserts

Our frozen and canned bounty from last summer is treating us well. We have a weekly some-berry-muffin or pancake batch. The kids continue to eat applesauce and jam and canned peaches like crazy. And the tomato sauces we made and froze are super handy and delicious! By far, the best is the oven-roasted recipe.

One genius thing we did last fall was make apple pie filling and freeze it in a pie pan shape. So now, when we need an apple pie, we just have to make the crust and slide in the pre-formed, pre-made, still-frozen filling right before sliding it into the oven. Genius.

A not-so-genius thing we did involved individually freezing cookie-sized cookie dough balls. The idea behind this was to be able to bake a few cookies on any given evening without making dough or baking more than we need. The not-so-genius part of this is that the frozen cookie dough balls are delicious frozen, like the best bon-bons you ever had. So very few of them have made it to the oven.

Spring is around the corner, with the CSA and farmer's market and the creativity they inspire. Until then, we'll keep eating roots and winter squash and baking too many sweet treats.

Biscuits

2010-01-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

As I searched through all our stray paper on the cookbook shelf and in kitchen cabinets this morning, in search of the one crumpled, stained, smudged piece with the bisucuit recipe on it, I remembered the reason I started this blog. To keep all our favorite recipes in one place. So, here it is. Biscuits.

Seemingly very basic, we had a hard time making biscuits we were excited about. We tried all sorts of recipes, which are essentially all the same anyway. Finally, a cooking class for Christmas dinner, which included some scallion biscuits, cleared things up. The key to making moist, flaky, flavorful biscuits was in the technique. I think there was this Bisquick/Grands Canned revolution that took over for a generation, and we lost a basic cooking tradition. The replacement, via box or can, has never been a worthy one. These are so good, they are worth the extra 10 minutes of measuring and mixing. And I like to think they taste like what my southern great grandmother used to make.

The ingredients:

1 cup heavy cream + 2 T white vinegar (or 1 cup buttermilk or 1 cup sour cream. Buttermilk is usually pretty low-fat, so making your own soured cream with vinegar gives you the flavor of buttermilk and the moisture of cream.)

1/2 cup butter (put in freezer 20ish minutes before you will need it)

1 cup flour + 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1 T sugar

2 1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

The technique:

Preheat oven to 500. Turn it down to 450 after you put in the biscuits. (This is so all the heat you lose when opening the oven door doesn't get your biscuits below 450 and keeps them crisp on the outside.)

Combine the dry ingredients.

Grate the frozen butter with a large-hole cheese grater. Stir the butter into the dry ingredients. (The idea is to evenly mix in lots of tiny pieces of butter without letting it melt. You want the butter to melt in the oven, creating flaky biscuits, not in your flour, creating hard biscuits.)

Add the cream or buttermilk and gently mix. Add more liquid if you need, to make a soft dough.

On a floured board, use your hands to pat the dough into a rectangle about 1/2 inch thick. Fold the rectangle into thirds. Rotate the smaller, folded rectangle 90 degrees, and pat it out to 1/2 inch again. Repeat this for a total of 4 fold-overs. After the last fold-over, rotate again and pat out/roll with a rolling pin to 1/2 inch again.

Cut into squares or rounds and transfer to a sheet pan. If you use circles, re-rolling the extras can over-work the dough and make the biscuits tough, so cut them close together to reduce re-rolling.

Refrigerate until ready to bake, or put right in the oven. Remember to turn the oven down to 450 after the biscuits are in. Bake 12-15 minutes, until golden brown.

Edible Snowman

2009-12-13T13:41:00.001-08:00

The edible snowman contest is over. Phil took 2nd place with this frosty little guy. Calling him edible may be a stretch, as many of his body parts came out of a vending machine.

His body is plain rice krispy treats, rolled into balls. The balls were flattened a little to sit on a plate and each other. After they cooled, a layer of icing covered the structure, followed by a fresh coat of snow (coconut). Then, the vending machine raid began, with M&Ms, chocolate donut hat, marshmallow candy scarf, and Poky arms to round out his frosty ensemble.

The winning snowman was bigger, closer to the 18" limit, iced without a coconut dusting, and decorated with gum drops. The larger size of the winner led to some architectural failures, which were offset with buttressing forks. The forks probably emphasized the "edible" criterion and pushed her over the tipping point to first place. That or she bribed the judges.

Several of his smaller cousins joined us in our gingerbread village, including this one, who had "scary eyes," and gift-hat, and purple buttons. He is one of the lucky ones. I think, maybe, his scary eyes prevented him from having his head bitten off by a hungry kid, a sad fate that befell many of his peers.

Cooking projects

2009-12-06T07:58:00.001-08:00

Late at night in my kitchen, a series of culinary projects are underway.

The funniest project, I think, needs a little explaining. As the office-foodie, my husband is a bit of an enigma to his co-workers. He has been known to bring in snacks to share, such as homemade cheddar and homemade crackers, all sorts of cookies, flourless chocolate cake, carrot cake, etc, on random weekdays. But, every single office potluck he brings in a big pan of...rice krispy treats. That's right. Rice krispies and marshmallows. I don't know why. Holding this reputation, he was nominated to make an 18" tall edible snowman out of rice krispy treats for the office holiday competition. We figured it might require a practice round to get the engineering principles and carrot nose figured out. I saw this scary looking thing at another recipe site...hopefully ours turns out cuter.

Phil is also still working out the apple pie obsession. Four tarte tatins and 1 American-style apple pie later, he is still not satisfied, and bought more apples at the market. If he ever finds the "perfect" combination of buttery flaky crust, caramel sauce, and apples, we will surely post it here. Maybe in time for next year's apples!

Another project has been holiday cookies. Way too many holiday cookies. "Good morning, mom, did you make any new cookies for me to try?" cookies. Thankfully, Phil takes most of them to work. But I just keep baking more. Some notable mentions include:

Cocoa Nib Cookies from the new Grand Central Baking Book.
These Swedish Rye Cookies posted at 101 Cookbooks last year.
And some Pumpkin Cranberry Cookies heavily adapted from here.

In addition to cookies, we have been working on biscuits. Just regular, southern-style, flaky, buttery, buttermilk biscuits. We thought we were getting good at them until I went to the cooking class (below) and learned the technique that seemed to make all the difference. I will try it out - who can complain about bisucuits for breakfast (again)? I think the keys are more fat (always a bonus) and more folding of the dough. Almost like croissant or puff pastry.

This weekend I was able to go to a Christmas Dinner-themed cooking class with a friend. We have been going to a series of cooking classes taught by John and Caprial Pence. They give us the recipes but do all the cooking in the center of a big table we are all sitting around. The classes really focus on demonstration of techniques, like how to mince an onion or cure a slab of bacon. They give us recipes but loosely follow them in class, usually pointing out all the different variations they like to use. As the class goes on, more things go in the fridge or oven, and they start serving courses. So, we might watch them make dessert, then appetizers. Then eat the appetizers while they make the entree and side dishes. All the time we are asking questions and chatting. The Pences really try to focus on local, organic, and ethically-raised animal products, some food values we share. They have lots of tips on where to get the best ingredients here in town. If you are in Portland, want a lovely meal and a little learning, too, I definitely recommend trying it out.

That's enough projects underway for now. Hopefully I will have some time to update you on outcomes soon. Plus a friend requested a few recipes...

Chocolate Cake

2009-11-27T14:04:00.001-08:00

I have tried many chocolate cake recipes over the years, looking for 'the one.' As a lover of chocolate, and of cake, it seemed like a worthy task. Surprisingly, many chocolate cakes turn out dry, inadequately chocolatey, too sweet, or lacking in depth of flavor. We have settled on two family favorites, one traditional and one flourless, for those occassions when a chocolate cake is in order. We also have a favorite in JaCiva's seventh heaven chocolate cake, but that is another story entirely.

A few surprises for us regarding cake-baking went against our usual baking philosophy:

Oil is better than butter. Usually, butter is best, and good butter is even better (bester?). But, for cake that sits around for a few days being nibbled on, butter tends to dry out and get stale. Canola oil seems to stay moister longer.

Layers of flavor. The recipes we liked ended up having flavor combos that left our palates interested throughout the entire bite. Chocolate is fabulous, but not enough to deserve an entire cake. The coffe and buttermilk in this recipe provide some depth.

Regular icing is the best. I don't like cream cheese frosting, but if you do, it might be a nice option. Initially we tried several varieties of chocolate ganache for the icing, but a layer of fudge atop a rich chocolate cake was just too much. I still use a ganache to glue back together any fault lines I create when removing cake from the pan, but I stick with the Hershey's cocoa frosting recipe for the rest of the cake.

The chocolate cake recipe I like was clipped from a Portland Monthly magazine.

3 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/3 cup canola oil
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
3 large eggs
1 1/2 cups hot extra-strong brewed coffee
1 teaspoon vanilla

Ganache:

1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup heavy cream

Frosting:

1/2 cup butter
2/3 cup cocoa
3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

I basically add the ingredients, in the order listed, to the stand mixer. Mix it up until it is a pretty thin, uniform batter. Then pour into 2 9 inch cake pans and bake at 350 for 35-50 minutes. (If you are less freaked out by non-stick spray, it would probably help a lot. I just can't bring myself to use it...) Cake should bounce back when lightly touched, and a toothpick should come out clean with moist crumbs.

Let it cool in pans, then out of pans, til room temperature. Cut off the tops to make two equal cylinders. Easier said than done.

Make a ganache by melting 1 cup chocolate chips with 1/2 cup heavy cream. Melt in the microwave for 1 minute, or over a double boiler. This works well for gluing the cake mistakes back together, and fixing the two layers together.

Whip up the frosting and dump it all on top of the top layer of cake. Using a spatula, mush the frosting back and forth without picking the spatula up. This helps reduce crumbs. Mush it back and forth and over the edge and smooth the spatula down over the sides until the whole cake is covered. Icing is good, but also important for sealing in the moisture, so cover all the surfaces.

I keep mine in a covered cake stand for several days. It usually ends up an odd shape due to the slivering off of nibbles...

Pumpkin Soup

2009-10-30T18:56:00.000-07:00

The pumpkin mania continues at our house. Our latest pumpkin invention was surely not original, but I have not found another recipe like it. Most pumpkin soups are made with cream and nutmeg. Ours was fairly simple, and without cream a little less filling. But it was delicious and made fabulous next-day lunches all week!

I am sure I have mentioned before that one should put as little effort as possible into preparing fresh squash, so that it is a task you will be willing to do once and again. I bake a pumpkin whole, at 350, for an hour. This entire baked pumpkin can sit on the counter cooling for a few hours, or rest quietly in the fridge for days until you are ready to process it. To process the pumpkin, cut it in half (easy now that it is soft!), use an ice cream scoop to scrape out the seeds, then use the scoop to scrape out the pumpkin flesh. If you have more than you need, scoop the extra right into a freezer bag to enjoy another day.

Also, please experiment with different squash. Our favorite is the kabocha pumpkin, which was introduced to us by our CSA.

Pumpkin Soup

1 small-medium pumpkin, baked, scraped
1 onion
1 clove garlic
3 Tbs butter
3-4 small-medium yellow potatoes, diced
3-4 cups broth
1 tsp dry/1Tbs fresh thyme
salt
pepper

Saute the onion and garlic in butter. When they start to soften, add the potatoes and stir around. Add pepper and thyme. Add the pumpkin and broth. Let it simmer 30 min - a few hours, however long you like. The potatoes should soften and their starchiness will thicken the soup. Salt to taste at the end (about 1 Tbs). You could use a hand mixer to blend it smoother if that is what you like.

The best applesauce EVER

2009-10-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

That's right, my 4 year old said it; it is official. We have made the best applesauce ever.

I will say that making applesauce IS more work than buying it. It is not technically hard, but does take a little time, knives and heat - a tricky experience with little helpers. This batch we made moderately late at night, after little guy was asleep, but while bigger-little guy was still awake to help. He especially enjoyed cranking the food mill. This applesauce is, in fact, delicious, the best we ever had, single-ingredient, organic, local, and WAY cheaper than the store-bought options. And, totally scale-able. You could make enough applesauce for a week, rather than enough for a year like we did. No canning required. Just make it as yummy dessert and enjoy.
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Our recipes came from http://www.pickyourown.org/, a great site for local farms (in any area) that have farm-stands or pick-your-own operations and for lots of recipes and canning/freezing/drying tips. We pretty much followed the site's instructions. No cinnamon for these floral apples, and we bought the $25 hand-crank food mill at Sur La Table. You can borrow it if you, too, decide to get saucy.

Canning applesauce
Small batch applesauce
Apple butter

Our apples were jonagolds and came from a random hand-made sign on the side of the road that said "apples" and pointed toward a large home with a self-serve apple stand in the front yard. We grabbed a bushel of apples, left some cash in a lock-box, and continued on our way.

This was lots of fun, not very hard, and tastes so good we probably should have made more.

Pasta e Fagioli

2009-10-05T21:15:00.000-07:00

We got borlotti beans in our CSA this week and I was so excited remembering this delicious pasta e fagioli we had made last year. Until I couldn't find the recipe. Anywhere. In line with our cooking philosophy of 'use what we have' we created a "summer stew e pasta e fagioli" that definately hit the spot. If you don't have 'what we have,' by all means substitute as needed!

fresh shelled beans - about 2 cups (you can use dried or canned if you don't have fresh)
garlic 3 cloves minced
1/4 cup olive oil
basil and oregano
freshly ground pepper
2-3 cups vegetable broth

2 sweet peppers
1 hot pepper
1 ear of corn, kernels cut off
4 tomatoes
1/4 cup minced dried tomatoes
1 cup chopped greens
1 cup cubed summer squash

10 oz. rotini pasta

1. Shell the beans.
2. Warm the olive oil, then soften garlic and basil, oregano, and pepper in it.
3. Add beans and broth. The broth should just cover the beans. Simmer about 20 minutes until the beans are soft. (If you use dried beans, this will take more broth and more like 2 hours. For canned beans, no broth and maybe 2 minutes)
4. Using a hand blender, food processor, or whatever you have, coarsely puree the beans. Add a little more oil if needed to make tne bean puree creamy.

While the beans are cooking, prepare the vegetables.

5. In a soup pot, toss in all the vegetables and heat over medium heat to let the vegetables stew in their juices.
6. Add the bean puree to the vegetables and keep cooking over medium-low heat. Add a bit of vegetable broth or pasta water if it is too dry.
7. Boil the pasta according to the directions, rinse with cold water, then warm back up in the soup.
8. The consistency is more like saucy pasta than soup.
9. Consider parmesan cheese as a topping.

I made this in 2 nights, cooking the beans and preparing the vegetables late one night, then heating the vegetables and beans the next day while cooking pasta.

Pumpkins

2009-10-05T20:59:00.001-07:00

Fall snuck up on us and took over while our backs were turned! One day we are eating tomatoes and corn salad outside on the porch late in the evening, the next day it is dark and cold by 7 and pumpkins are showing up in our CSA! We were excited to flip back to some prior posts to make some old favorites with our new batch of winter squashes.

Maple Pumpkin Pancakes for breakfast.

Pumpkin Risotto for dinner.

Pumpkin Pie for dessert.

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds for snacking.

Actually, we have a funny memory of a pumpkin season gone by when we were on a similar binge of the great orange fruit of fall and had family in town. After feasting on our pumpkin bounty, the family member visited our in-laws, took one look at the pumpkin on their counter, and proclaimed, "No more pumpkin for me!!" in a mild panicked tone. I guess we do tend to overdo it at times. But, YUM!

To make prep-work easier, we often microwave or oven bake (depending on size) the pumpkin whole for 10 minutes in the microwave or 30 in the oven. That way it is easier to saw into pieces, scrape out the seeds, and then put back in for steaming or roasting. Bake it to mushy softness for risotto, pies, muffins, and pancakes. Bake it to almost-ripe pear consistency to cube for stews and curries. Bake a whole pumpkin, toast the seeds, and freeze any you don't use that day. It keeps quite well in the freezer mashed or cubed and will be an easy meal or baking project starter later this winter!

To toast the seeds, we scoop them out of the pumpkin and straight into a bowl of salted water. After getting the pumpkin all cut up, back in the oven, and mostly baked, the seeds have soaked in salt water a good half hour. At this point, the stringies should fall right off the seeds. Shake them loose, drain the water, and pat the seeds dry. When the pumpkin is out of the oven, turn it down to 250 and lay the seeds out on a baking sheet. Bake them 20-40 minutes, until you taste one and it is crunch and dry through. Let them cool and store in a jar in your pantry. I just finished the last of mine from last year in oatmeal a few weeks ago. Not too bad for spending almost a year in a recycled applesauce jar in my cabinet!

Putting Away

2009-09-25T20:41:00.001-07:00

After expanding our freezer space to my sister's apartment freezer, and then having mine burst under the pressure of too many contents, we finally invested in a deep freezer for the garage. As I happily moved my frozen treasures from the last months into their new frozen home tonight, I took inventory of my efforts.

Other than 2 dedicated projects (tomato sauce and blueberries), most of our freezing is ad hoc when we have more of something from our week's CSA share than we can eat. I will prepare what I am about to use, then just slice/chop/grate the rest the same way and freeze it. I have been packaging it with a vaccuum sealer and then randomly tossing it in our freezer. No blanching or anything like that. We did this last year with zucchini, corn, green beans, onion, butternut squash (half-cooked), and pumpkin (half-cooked) with good outcomes.

Here is what I found:

strawberry jam: 2 (most of my many jams this year were cooked jams, which turned out much better than the one batch of freezer jam I tried)
tomato sauce: 22
corn: 1
green beans: 2
summer squash: 25
berries: 30
rhubarb: 2
onion: 5

1. That is a lot of summer squash. And the season is not yet over! Looks like I will be throwing that into meals a few times a week all winter!
2. Our new deep freezer is 3/4 full. And our fridge freezer now has space for ice cube trays, extra loaves of bread, and the other normal things I like to have handy!

Tomato Sauce

2009-09-13T05:39:00.000-07:00

Here it is: the long-awaited, much-anticipated, and oft-requested tomato sauce blog. And there is still time to sauce tomatoes this summer! I am in laptop-less land lately, as one child is typically awake till 10 and the other likes to wake up at 5. Not a lot of mommy-laptop time left after that!

As frequent consumers of jars of spaghetti sauce for quick dinners through the winter, we have been wanting to try our hand at our own sauce, using local organic tomatoes, to use through the year. After much discouragement about how hard it is, how time-consuming, how large the ratio of tomato:jar of sauce, we got inspired at a pizza cooking class. The hosts made a quick oven-roasted tomato sauce for the pizzas, during the class, while we watched, and it was fabulous! Their recipe in hand, we set out to do some research, try some recipes, and figure out how to preserve the result.

I will tell you what we settled on as our favorite/easiest recipe, let you in on some tips we learned, and then point you toward the recipes we looked at to come up with our own.

Tomato Sauce Ingredients (Ingredients are per 5 pounds of tomato. Makes 2-3 jars or 3-4 freezer containers.)

tomatoes (see note)
Onion - 1 med, roughly chopped
Garlic - 0-4 cloves (see note)
Anchovy filets- 3 or 4
Basil - handful fresh chopped
Oregano - 2 tsp dried
Red wine - 1/3 cup
olive oil
salt - 2-3 tsp

Special tools

1. To "sauce" the stewed tomatoes, most recipes call for a food mill. We don't have one. We don't even have a food processor. We used a hand blender that we like to use for soups. But any of the above will work.
2. Big pot. My 16 quart pot held about 15 pounds of tomatoes at a time.

Process

1. Prepare the tomatoes (see note on tomatoes)
2. In the smaller pot, caramelize the onion in about 1/4 cup olive oil per onion. Just sort of cook it over medium-low heat for about 30-40 minutes, til it is sweet-smelling. At this point, just dump the onions into the tomato pot.
3. Once the onions have been transferred to the tomatoes, if you were so diligent as to juice your tomatoes, pour the juice and wine into the now-empty onion pot and cook them down to a much smaller volume.
4. In the larger pot, in about 1/2 cup of olive oil, warm the garlic (if using) and anchovy over medium-high heat, then add the tomatoes.
5. "Cook down" the tomaotes, or let them turn into mush.
6. Add onion, basil, oregano, salt, and wine (or wine-tomato juice reduction) to the tomatoes.
7. Use the hand blender, or batch the tomatoes through a food mill or stand blender or food processor, or go crazy with a potato masher, and make those mushy tomatoes look like sauce. We don't mind chunkiness, so we weren't fanatic about this. But you could be.
8. Now, if your tomato sauce looks like pasta sauce, you are done. If it is too juicy, put a spatter screen over the pot and let it cook down. You will need to stir it every 10 minutes or so and adjust the heat to keep it simmering. This could be up to an hour, depending on the juiciness of your tomatoes and the desired thickness of your sauce.
9. Put it away - in your mouth, your freezer, or canned in your pantry (see note).

Notes:

1. Tomatoes. The "right" way to make tomato sauce is with Roma tomatoes that have been blanched, peeled, juiced, and halved. We tried romas and heirlooms. We tried peeled/juiced and straight from the field. And we even tried oven-roasted. Here's the DL:

Tomato Type. Romas are easier to sauce, as they have less juice than heirlooms, but heirlooms have more mad tomato flavor. (More juice = more "cooking down" time.) Also, the heirlooms are a variety of yellow-orange-red colors, so the resulting sauce is....orangey. Roma tomato sauce is a nice, bright, expected red.

Tomato Prep. Blanching and peeling was NOT for us. The unpeeled tomato sauce we ate fresh was fabulous. The test batch we froze and defrosted did have some chewy tomato peels. I don't know what happens to canned tomato peels. Oven-roasting tomatoes offered the most mad flavor of all, and did not add too much time to the whole operation.

Roasting Tomatoes. Basically, we halved the tomatoes, put them in baking pans with hot olive oil and garlic cloves, then roasted at 450 degrees for a total of about 40 minutes. We stirred them every 10 minutes, and drained out the juice that had accumulated, into the simmering pot to reduce. They are done roasting when they start to get a brown crust around the edges. After roasting, just pop them in the pot and you are basically at step #6.

2. Garlic. Garlic tastes really good, especially in the oven-roasted sauce. I read that frozen garlic can end up tasting moldy. And I read that canned garlic can end up a lot stronger than it started. So, if you are freezing, skip the garlic and add it fresh when you re-heat in a few months. If you are canning, go easy on the garlic. If you eat the sauce fresh, use a ton of garlic.

3. Put it away. Tomatoes used to be acidic enough for hot water canning, but have been unnaturally selected for sweetness for enough generations that they are iffy to can, especially with added garlic, onion, etc. So, if you can, you will need to use a pressure cooker or add citric acid or lemon juice to each jar. If you add the citric acid or lemon juice, most recipes recommend adding a tablespoon of sugar to offset the acid taste. Too nervous to can, we chose to freeze. We froze in square freezer containers, although bags or jars would also work. The test batch that we defrosted was delicious and retained its color and texture fabulously.

The Pick Your Own website has some nice instructions for the details of canning tomato sauce.
The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food has a spicy spaghetti sauce recipe with instructions for canning, as well as tomato freezing tips.
In Season has a recipe for Rich Tomato Sauce and instructions for freezing.
National Center for Home Food Preservation tomato canning guidelines.
Our favorite local chefs, John and Caprial Pence, have a tasty tomato sauce recipe on their site.

Canning Peaches

2009-08-23T21:24:00.001-07:00

Tonight (in between countless trips to put the baby back to sleep) we decided to can some extra peaches we bought at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market. We have been eating peaches and peach cobbler daily the last several weeks, enjoying the sweet summery flavors of each variety as it comes to the market. The man of the house has many childhood memories of home-canned peaches, and how exciting it was in the winter to pull out a Mason jar full of sunny yellow peaches floating in sweet syrup on a cold gray afternoon. For years we have been hearing how easy it is to re-create such memories by canning one's own. Today we decided to give it a try.

We followed the directions in the book The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food. We used left-over spaghetti sauce jars that have been re-used for many months, holding dried beans and nuts and such in our pantry. We bought new lids and rings for them. And we used a freestone peach variety

The basic process is to blanch and cool the peaches, peel them ("slip off the skins" as the book says), halve them, dip them in ascorbic acid, pack them in jars, pour syrup in the jars, boil the jars. For the most part, our experience went like the book. For the most part.

"Slip off the skins" seems to be a euphemism for peeling peaches. Maybe 3 of the peaches slipped out of their skins after a 1 minute boiling water bath followed by ice water. For the most part, we were using a paring knife to scrape the skins off.

Halve the peaches. Well, one half comes off fine, but the second half... it is almost impossible to get the 2nd half of a slimy soft fruit off the stone without demolishing it. These were freestone peaches, too. Maybe if they were less ripe it would be easier to remove the stone with 2 halves intact? We ended up slicing the peaches, which worked out better with our re-used spaghetti jars anyway, as their mouths are not wide enough to slip a half peach in.

Pack them in jars. The first batch we packed in, shook around, packed more, but when they were done processing, there were 3 or more inches of syrup in the bottom of the jar. We needed to pack those slices much tighter. The second round we packed much tighter and it looked more like we expected after processing.

Whether we have captured the taste of summer for our future enjoyment remains to be seen. The jars look lovely, and I'm sure will be even more attractive one cold, gray February afternoon!

Summer Bounty

2009-07-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

We have not had much blog time lately. Somehow with the longer daylight hours and an easier work schedule, every minute is filled up even more than ever!

With summer, the Farmer's Markets and CSA are bursting with options. Vegetables have finally moved beyond cold-weather greens to milder greens, peas, fava beans, broccoli, summer squash, artichokes... And the berry extravaganza continues, along with cherry jubilee!

Our meals have been simple, typically a salad or "fill-in-the-blank fritatta" or "fill-in-the-blank pasta with butter sauce,"with whichever vegetable we have that week. We are still baking bread (on cooler days), rolling pasta, and baking pies and scones for weekend breakfasts. Many of our spare late-night kitchen moments, though, have been occupied with our effort to preserve some of the summer bounty for winter.

We have frozen rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, marionberries, raspberries, onion, and vegetable stock. We have jammed strawberries and mixed berries. And we have 2 jars of canned cherries. Our little freezer is FULL - like don't-open-with-a-kid-standing-below-full. Now we are in desparate need of an accessory freezer if we are going to have any chance of freezing summer squash, corn, winter squash, carrots, and anything else we decide to try to keep. Plus, we plan to try canning peaches and applesauce, too, though that doesn't require freezer space.

Rather than trying out new recipes this weekend, we are off to pick more blueberries and look for a freezer on Craigslist. With any luck, we'll be freezing blueberries and vaccuum sealing them in bags for a special treat this winter. Hope you are enjoying summer and all the yummy summer foods as much as we are!

(We have been using The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food for guidance, as well as tips from the Pick Your Own website.)

Strawberry Jam

2009-06-20T22:40:00.001-07:00

Strawberry Pick 'N Jam - now an annual event!

I blogged last year about making jam, and this is just a refresher post. Making jam is so super easy! We just follow the recipe in the low-sugar Sure-Jell box. It takes about 45 minutes, total (with the aid of a kid-friendly movie to distract our little guys from sneaking countless berries off the counter).

Equipment needed:
1. jars and lids
2. large pot for cooking the jam
3. larger pot for boiling the jars of jam
4. rack to set inside the larger pot, to set the jam jars on (we use a cooling rack that happens to fit in our pot)
5. tongs to lower the jars into/lift out of the boiling water
6. sugar, berries, sure-jell (6 pints of berries => 9 jars of jam)

General directions:
1. stem, rinse, dry, and mash berries
2. cook berries with sure-jell and sugar
3. pour jam into jars, put on lids
4. boil the jars of jam for 10 minutes
5. leave overnight to cool

Jamming is so super easy, and the result is fantastic, and it is so fun to pull out your own home-made jam all year!

Strawberry Shortcakes

2009-06-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about June is eating a light salad for dinner and having strawberry shortcake for dessert. Every night. Strawberries are so outrageously good when they are picked ripe and eaten fresh! Every week at the Farmer's Market, we buy berries and usually eat at least a pint before even getting home. Picked ripe, these berries don't last too long (never been a problem for us), so we buy them Thursday at the Multnomah Village market, and again Sunday at the Hillsdale market!

Here is our favorite way to make strawberry shortcakes. The shortcake recipe is a James Beard one that has been adjusted to our liking.

Strawberries, 1 cup per person, hulled, halved or sliced
optional: 1 tsp sweetener per cup of berries (our favorite is blackberry honey)

1 3/4 cups flour + 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 Tb baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tb sugar
4 Tb butter
3/4 cup cream (or milk or milk substitute)
1 Tb butter for the tops
2 Tb raw sugar

whipping cream, about 3 Tb per person

To make:
1. Prepare strawberries, toss with sweetener if using (sweeteners bring out the syrupy juice)
2. Mix the flours, powder, salt, sugar, and butter by hand with a pastry cutter or in the mixer. Stir in the cream to make a smooth dough that is not too sticky. The dough should be a little crumbly in the bowl but hold together when pressed into a ball.
3. On a floured surface, mash the dough into a round. Roll it briefly with a rolling pin until it is about 1 inch thick. Use a biscuit cutter (or drinking glass) to cut 10-12 circles.
4. Arrange the shortcakes on a baking sheet. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle raw sugar over the tops (this give it a light crunch).
5. Bake at 450 for 12-15 minutes.
6. Just before serving, pour some whipping cream in the mixer and use the whisk attachment. On high speed, let it whip 2-3 minutes, until stiff peaks form. Do try to avoid getting distracted, as over-whipping cream is a quick way to make butter. Cream is naturally quite sweet and rarely in need of additional sugar. About 3 Tb cream will make about 1 cup of whipped cream.
7. When the shortcakes are ready, split one or two in half on a plate, add strawberries and juice, and a generous dollop of whipped cream.

We also like to make strawberry jam, to enjoy all year.
This site has some nice info on freezing strawberries.

A new take on bacon sandwiches

2009-05-24T20:05:00.000-07:00

So it's spring, and we're in need of a quick dinner. And we have some gorgeous artisan bacon from the farmer's market. And we have a few pieces of homemade bread left in the fridge. BLT sounds nice, but the L and T are not quite in abundance yet here in Oregon. So, as always, we improvise. Use what we have. It's our cooking motto. And, often, a stroke of genius.

What we have: radishes and kale. Young, tender, purple and green leaves of kale.
So, we invent the BRK sandwich: Bacon, radish, kale. And, I must, say, it gives lettuce and tomato a run for the money! The radishes and kale bring a little touch of heat and crunch, the bacon brings smoky saltiness, and the bread and butter are the sweet backdrop to this quick, tasty dinner.

For each BRK Sandwich:

2 pieces bread
butter
1 radish, sliced thin and salted
2 small young kale leaves, washed and dried
2 pieces bacon

Cook bacon until crispy then drain. Butter both pieces of bread. Lay salted radish slices in the butter on one piece of bread, kale leaves in butter on the other piece. Layer on the bacon and assemble your sandwich.

Our Daily Bread

2009-05-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

I would like to encourage everyone to try baking bread. It is not nearly as hard as you might think, and the result is so much tastier and healthier than anything on the grocery shelves. Just look at the ingredients on your average loaf of bread. What is that stuff?? Anyway, baking bread has become a relaxing project in our house, and something we do every 3 or 4 weeks. Ever since we got the Kitchenaid stand mixer, we let it do all the mixing and kneading. So that basically leaves us with measuring ingredients and turning on the oven. And waiting.

Baking bread does take about 3 hours, which means you can't do it unless you can be at your house at least once an hour during that time. It is actually only about 25 minutes of work, for a month's worth of bread, made fresh by you, with anything you want in it, and nothing you don't want in it!

15 minutes to measure out ingredients and watch the mixer knead the dough. Then leave it to rise while doing something else for an hour.

2 minutes to move the dough into loaf pans, then leave it to rise while doing something else for an hour.

2 minutes to turn on the oven and put the pans inside. Then leave it to bake while doing something else for 45 minutes.

1 minute to pull out of the oven and leave to cool.

5 minutes to slice, bag, and store in frigde or freezer.

------------------------------------------------

=25 minutes of work

When I bake bread, I make at least 2 loaves, and often 4, at a time. Since I use the stand mixer, the additional work for an additional loaf is minimal. I push the same button to knead whether it is for 1 loaf or 4. Bread freezes quite nicely and tastes delicious defrosted a week or more after being baked. Homemade bread has never lasted in our freezer longer than a few weeks, so I cannot to speak to long-term storage potential. But for 1-3 weeks, we have had excellent results. We slice the cooled bread, then put in a gallon-sized freezer bag. Whenever we pull it out, it defrosts quickly and is ready for use about an hour out of the freezer.

As a side, note, I do not recommend trying to use a vaccuum sealing device to package fresh baked bread for the freezer. It sucks out all the air. Including all those beautiful holes left by industrious yeast during their fermentation process.

I ruined a beautiful loaf experimenting with the vaccuum sealer recently. Oops.

Our 2 favorite bread recipes are not our own. One, Rose's Basic Hearth Bread (pic above), uses mostly white bread flour with some whole wheat for flavor. It is actually a recipe from the back of the Harvest King flour bag. We have had great luck with this recipe, usually double it, and make it in loaf pans. It has a crusty crust but a dense enough body to hold up well to slicing for sandwiches or french toast. Our other favorite recipe, Honey Oatmeal Bread (pic below), is from the back of the Bob's Red Mill gluten bag. It uses whole wheat flour with some added gluten for dough elasticity and rise.

Check out our favorite bread recipes or discover your own. Give bread-baking a try! The process is relaxing (you just can't rush those unicellular eukaryotes "farting" away in your dough - ask my 4 year old), the smell is phenomenal, and for 25 minutes of work (ok, 3 hours of time), you can eat homemade bread all month!

Asparagus & Morels

2009-05-09T15:29:00.000-07:00

Two lovely spring treats, asparagus and morels, appear about the same time at the farmer's market, and are both around for a few short weeks. This is a simple way to enjoy them together.

Asparagus & Morels

1 bunch of asparagus, ends trimmed
1 cup (or more) of morels - we like the smaller ones because they look cute
2 cloves garlic, minced
olive oil

Pasta, rice, quinoa, or toast

To prepare:
Cook pasta (or other grain). Morels should be soaked in water for several minutes, drained, halved, then soaked again. Once they are good and clean, saute them with garlic in olive oil over med-high heat. After several minutes, add the asparagus. Continue to saute, turning the asparagus spears periodically, until they are vibrant green and tender-crisp. Remove from heat, add another splash of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Serve vegetables over pasta.

Rhubarb Crisp

2009-04-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

We were so excited to see rhubarb in the market this week! We bought plenty, then rushed to check if our friend (who has a big rhubarb in her kitchen garden, but doesn't know what it is) had any growth. There it was, the plant with long brilliant red stems and large green leaves, next to the rosemary bush. Looks like I'll be helping her "weed" every chance I get the next few weeks! Rhubarb is a spring vegetable that can be tricked out to taste like fruit when you get tired of warehoused apples and pears but don't have any berries yet. They are also delicious and colorful when cooked as a vegetable, but for today, they are our first-fruits of spring.

I never liked rhubarb as a child. I realized why when, as an adult, I searched for rhubarb recipes. They are all loaded with sugar! Now, rhubarb is very tart, and needs sugar to make it edible, much less fruit-like. But most of the recipes I found would make even celery taste like candy. I wanted a recipe that still tasted like rhubarb, rather than pure sweet on sweet. Especially if you plan to eat this hot with ice cream melting over it. You need some tart to offset the sweet cream! My other main complaint about rhubarb desserts was texture. Rhubarb cooks into mush. Mushy rhubarb, mixed with mushy strawberries, under a mushy topping, served with ice cream. Not much for the teeth to do. So I aimed to create a topping with bite.

If you are lucky enough to grow rhubarb in your yard (or in the yard of an unsuspecting friend, like us), you should harvest the outer stalks by twisting them off at the ground when they are about the size of a fat thumb. Take about 1/3 of the stalks at a time, leaving the rest to continue growing. Pinch off any flowers to prolong the harvest. The edible stalks can vary in color from white to green to red to almost purple depending on variety. All varieties have inedible, poisonous leaves. Stalks will keep in your fridge for a week or so, or washed, chopped, and frozen for up to a year.

For my recipe, I try to keep it simple, and less sweet. The whole wheat takes away a little sweetness, and cutting the sugar makes the rhubarb stand out for the tart treat that it is. If you have an orange, you might squeeze its juice into the filling and grate its peel into the topping. And you can always add those strawberries to the filling (slice 1 cup).

Rhubarb Crisp

Filling:
4 cups rhubarb cut in 1-inch slices
3 Tb flour
1/2 - 2/3 cup sweetener (sugar, syrup, honey - honey is the best!)

Topping:
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/2 cup loose brown sugar
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup chopped nuts (we use almonds)
dash salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
4 Tb butter

Preheat oven to 375.
1. Cut rhubarb, and mix with flour and sweetener. Pour into 8x8 baking dish.
2. Mix all topping ingredients except butter. Pour over rhubarb mixture.
3. Dot with butter.
4. Bake at 375 for 35 minutes, or until the rhubarb syrup is bubbling up through cracks in the topping.
5. Serve with cream or ice cream.

A note on fruity desserts with bread-based toppings:
Crisp (American) or Crumble (British) denotes a crumb or streusel topping (as I have used)
Cobblers have a biscuit topping (think of a fruit stew with dumplings)
Brown Betty has crumb topping between layers of fruit
A pie, obviously, has a pie crust below (and often above) the fruit
Buckles are cakes with fruit added to the batter, with a streusel topping

Browned Butter Sauce

2009-04-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

That is a huge butter sculpture, by the way, from the 2008 NY State Fair. I would love to make a butter sculpture - but I would probably keep licking my fingers!! My mom tells me that as a toddler I snuck into the fridge to eat butter. Not surprising, I still like to snack on butter :)

We found this simple sauce in a John and Caprial cookbook, where it was served over seared cauliflower. It is a sauce we make often enough that we don't need to look it up anymore. It is delicious over any variety of vegetables and pasta. We have a saying in our house regarding the strange new vegetable varietals we like to try: "Anything tastes good with butter and salt." This browned butter sauce makes that statement true for many plants!

This is a quick and easy sauce, but spatters quite a bit when we add the vinegar, so it has potential to be a dangerous sauce as well. Keep your body and any babies' bodies away after adding the vinegar! For the vinegar, we have tried white, white wine, and apple cider. All were great! The apple cider vinegar had an off smell initially, but the final smell and taste were fabulous!

Ingredients:
4T butter (unsalted)
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tsp vinegar
1T chopped fresh herb or 1/2 tsp dried herb (optional - thyme and parsley both work well)
salt & pepper

Instructions:
1. Warm butter in a saucepan over med-high heat until it is melted and bubbly.
2. Continue cooking and stirring the butter until it is brown.
Sometimes it will get quite brown, if I get distracted - tastes fine! Sometimes it gets little burnt butter flecks in it if I don't stir - also taste fine.
3. Remove from heat and stir in garlic and vinegar.
4. Stand back while hot butter spatters.
5. Stir in herbs, salt, pepper.
6. You can use it right away or let it sit up to a half hour while you are preparing other parts of your meal. Re-warming over low heat seems to work as well.

If you discover a less spatter-y way to add the vinegar, please let me know! My water-and-elbow-grease cleaning solution is maxed out!

Spring Market Ragout

2009-04-08T08:02:00.000-07:00

Turnips

So excited about my farmer's market finds, I struggled with which beautiful vegetable to turn into dinner that night. Finally I couldn't decide and settled for a ragout featuring all the vegetables. Ragout just means a slow-cooked stew, and encompasses a wide variety of dishes. This one has no meat, features slow-simmered spring greens and turnips in a browned butter sauce, tossed over some homemade noodles.

Broccoli Raab (or Rabe or Rapini)

Ragout
1T butter
1 bunch of turnips (about 8), cut into wedges
1/2 of the turnip greens, washed, spun and coarsely chopped
1 onion, cut in thick slices
2 spring carrots, cut in slices
water
2 cups spinach leaves, washed, spun, coarsely chopped
1 cup broccoli raab, cut in 2 1/2 inch lengths

Browned Butter Sauce
4T butter
1 clove garlic, minced
1t vinegar
salt & pepper
(detailed instructions for this sauce here)

Cooked noodles (we used homemade)
1/4 cup grated parmesan-reggiano Carrots

To make the ragout:
1. In a saucepan, melt the butter
2. Add the onion, turnip, and turnip greens and saute in butter for 2-3 minutes until they start to soften and brown
3. Add water to just see it through the vegetables and simmer over low-medium heat for 15-20 minutes. Add more water as needed to keep from sticking or burning.
4. When the turnips are getting soft (stick a fork in one), add the broccoli raab and spinach and cook until the water is mostly cooked off, 3-5 more minutes.

Meanwhile, cook noodles and prepare brown butter sauce (detailed instructions for this sauce here). Toss everything, including cheese, together and serve.

Spring green salad with wheatberries

2009-04-07T20:54:00.000-07:00

Inspired by a yummy wheatberry salad at the Farmer's Market made by Tastebud Farms, I decided to try out wheatberries at home. After all, wheat grows in Oregon in abudance, and the wheat berry looks much like rice or barley. The market is bursting with spring greens, and wanted a recipe that could feature the strong points of the greens (their vibrant color and sharp flavors) while minimizing their negatives (reputation for bitterness and bacon drippings). I think most vinaigrettes would work as the dressing; I tried a tahini vinaigrette.

Salad
2/3 cup cooked wheatberries (see below)
turnip greens from half a bunch of turnips (~4 turnips), pulled off the central stem, washed and spun
1 bunch of broccoli raab cut into thirds lengthwise (2 1/2 inches long segments), washed and spun
2 spring scallions, cut on the bias into thick slices
2T olive oil

Vinaigrette
1T tahini
1T water
1/2-1 clove minced garlic
1-2T olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1/3 cup plain yogurt
salt to taste

1. Prepare wheat berries. Soak overnight then simmer about an hour. They should be soft but not mushy. You could also try quinoa or rice or barley if you are pressed for time. Drain.
2. Sear the greens: heat about 2T oil in a large skillet over high heat. When the oil starts to smoke, add the greens, raab, and scallions. Stir them around til they get browned on all sides, and turnip greens shrink to about 1/4 their raw size; about 4-5 minutes.
3. Put vegetables in bowl to cool to room temperature.
4. Whisk together tahini, water, garlic, olive oil, yogurt, and salt. Taste for garlic, oil, and salt; add more as necessary. Pour over wheat berries and stir.
5. Add the wheat berries to the greens and toss.
6. Serve at room temperature.

Cooking Class

2009-04-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

Fans of local chefs John and Caprial Pence, we have watched their OPB cooking shows, read their cookbooks, dined in their bistro, and attended a few of their cooking classes. Last night we enjoyed another cooking class at their place.

The cooking class is a pretty informal event, in a back room of thier bistro. Several 2-person tables are set up, seating a total of 10-16 people, facing a work counter and stove, which also have ceiling-mounted video cameras trained on them to project to a few monitors above the cooks' heads. Classes are taught by both John and Caprial, who divide up the tasks, and bicker in a married couple sort of way about how thick a sauce should be or how much salt should be added, etc. There is also a server who pours the coffee or wine that correlates with the course of meal we are on, and brings out the plates as the teachers fill them up.

There is always an appetizer, main meal, often side dishes, and dessert. We get printed out menus at the beginning, and most people take notes and ask questions as we go through the class. In addition to the menu items, they often share great tips about where to get certain ingredients, which brands of canned tomatoes are best, how to make extra and freeze for later, and why and how one should make their own bacon.

This class was an Italian Spring Dinner. The menu was:

Crostini with 3 toppings - red pepper, mushroom, and white bean
Roman egg drop soup
Lasagne Bolognese with homemade pasta
Carnival donuts filled with sweet pastry cream

It was great timing for us, since we have been making pasta! And we got some great pointers on the pasta that we are excited to try out! They used a pasta roller attachment to the Kitchenaid that did not impress us too much. I think for feeding our family the pasta roller attachment to Phil, aka rolling pin, works just fine. I'm sure if I were rolling out pasta for a restaurant's worth I would change my mind! We were also really excited to learn a delicious meat sauce recipe, since we don't cook with much meat and are therefore not so great at it. The appetizers I can see making, especially the white bean crostini topping; it was just so easy and tasty! The egg drop soup surprised me, I liked it, and can imagine making it as well.

The best part about the class, though, is just the encouragement to make things ourselves, and have a good time doing it!

We will post recipes and our experience trying them on our own soon. Meanwhile, they have many recipes on their website that you can check out: http://www.caprialandjohnskitchen.com/recipes/index.php

Lasagne with Chard, ricotta, and hazelnuts

2009-03-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

Lasange is a go-to meal in our house. Pretty much anything that grows in the garden tastes good when blended with cheeses and garlic and stacked between tasty noodle layers. Plus, lasagna is easy to make in multiple batches and freezes well. I seldom make one pan, or even just 2. I like to make a lot of 8x8 pans and freeze the spares for easy future dinners.

This lasagne deserves special commendation. It utilizes milk and ricotta rather than tomato sauce, letting the rainbow chard and spring garlic flavors really shine. Making our own noodles is really just for fun. Granted, they are delicious, but it probably only adds 10% to the deliciousness of the meal. We have also, in the past, made our own mozarella and ricotta -we are not yet good enough at these to claim any flavor or texture improvement over what we can buy at our coop market. None of these is difficult and they are all fun to make. And it is a nice exercise to remind ourselves how different food products are made. But, then, I have not seen a single episode of Lost or American Idol, so you pick your projects...

This recipe is mainly from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors. Of course, some things have been altered to make it easier, or to accomodate ingredients we have here in Oregon. This makes 1-9x13 or 2-8x8 pans. We made the 9x13, which was 4 generous servings

1 cup hazelnuts (she uses walnuts)
olive oil
bunch of chard, chopped (she uses leaves only, but I love the colorful stems)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup white wine
1 cup ricotta
salt, pepper
1/4 cup grated parmesan
1-2 cups grated mozarella
1 cup milk
12 freshly rolled and cut noodles (she uses no-boil noodles dipped in hot water. We made the white pasta recipe, same as for ravioli, just cut in rectangles)

Heat oven to 400.

1. Saute the chard stems and garlic in olive oil 2-3 minutes. Add the chopped chard leaves and saute til most of the liquid is cooked off.
2. Roast the nuts in a skillet over medium heat. Just shake them around in the skillet for 7 or 8 minutes til you smell them and they get a little browned. Let them cool, then chop finely.
3. In a bowl, mix ricotta, wine, parmesan, all but 1/2 cup mozarella, chard & garlic, salt and pepper
4. Put a little milk in the pan.
5. Layer noodles, 1/4 cup milk, 1/3 of the ricotta mixture, 1/4 of the nuts - 3 times.
6. Top with a layer of noodles, remaining milk, remaining 1/2 cup of mozarella, and remaining 1/4 of nuts.
7. Bake, covered, 25 minutes. Remove cover and bake 10 minutes more. Let cool 10 minutes.

Granola

2009-03-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

Granola - no I'm not talking about a slang term for people who eat local, organic food and line-dry organic cotton cloth diapers! I'm talking about the food, granola, and granola bars, the ultimate in portable energy food!

We have been making granola bars recently, and lost the recipe again, only to discover the big boy had used it as a background to a rendition of the solar system he drew for his gramma. SO, we will post it here for our future reference.

Some friends found this granola bar recipe at Joyful Abode. It is so nice to make bars the size we like, with the ingredients we like, without any wasteful packaging. These are pretty filling, portable morning treats!

We have tried to re-create this from memory since the Joyful Abode site is no longer functioning, and we mailed the printed-off copy to Grandma after the big kid "arted" on it.

Granola bars:
2 cups old-fashioned oats
3/4 cup wheat germ (or oat germ)
3/4 cup sunflower seeds
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
4Tb butter
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup dried fruit (we keep it simple with raisins and dates)
1 cup nuts (we use chopped almonds or hzelnuts)

Toast oats, seeds, nuts, and wheat germ in a 425 oven for 20 minutes.
Warm brown sugar, honey, vutter, vanilla in a saucepan over medium heat until mixed and bubbly. Mix the toasted dry ingredients with the warm wet ingredients (think rice krispy treats). Then, toss in dried fruit and press into a baking pan. We use the back of a flat spatula to press them in. Let them cool then cut into bars (again, rice krispy treat style).

On another note, we have also been known to make big batches of granola for cereal/snacking. Our family favorite granola recipe is also from an on-line recipe from a B&B. We leave out dried coconut (not my favorite and definately not local) and, again, stick to seeds and nuts we like. This recipe makes a ton, it is made with 2 pounds of oats! So we usually make half, and that fills up 2 cereal containers plus some for eating right away.

What a fun way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon - making breakfast and snacks for the next 2 weeks! And, can I just mention how lovely baking molasses and vanilla smell??

Carrot Top Soup * updated *

2009-03-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

This is a premier at my house. We have not tried it before, but I hate to waste the lovely carrot tops, and Deborah Madison says they are tender and delicious. Here is her recipe (a little altered for my use, she uses 2 leeks in place of the onion):

6 small to medium carrots with their tops
2 T butter
3 T rice
1 onion, chopped
2 T chopped parsley
1/2 tsp thyme
salt & pepper
6 cups water or broth

Grate carrots. Chop carrot tops (leave out the stems). Melt butter in soup pan. Cook carrot tops, carrots,rice,onion, parsley for several minutes. Add 3/4 tsp salt and water. Bring to a boil then simmer about 18 minutes (til rice is cooked). Season with salt & pepper to taste and serve.

We'll let you know what we think.

**Update: this soup was, in fact, quite good. It had a mild, earthy, nutty flavor, mainly from the spring carrots, with a hint of green from, well, the greens. The greeniness was not overwhelming at all. A few points, though. (1) Our carrots were a tan color, which is lovely, but the aesthetic value of our soup was adversely affected. I think some orange contrast to the green leaves would be welcome. (2) This mild, earthy soup did not hold up well next to hearty beer bread. It is better suited to plain old toast. (3) We chopped the carrots, somewhat coarsely, and they still had a little "bite" when we served the soup. All the better, I think. (4) Our 3 year old thought it looked too "green" and wouldn't touch it, so we had some left over. (5) The left-over soup made for several great lunches!

We will make this again with our carrots and tops! For the slim pickins that are March vegetables, this was a good, quick, easy, and tasty dinner.

Head over to 101 Cookbooks for a similar quick carrot soup, sans carrot tops.

Rainbow Chard Frittata

2009-03-22T18:05:00.001-07:00

This is an in-my-head recipe that I made up, and sort of wing-it every time. It is also the type of recipe that accomodates whatever we have in the house. It has been made with chicken, sausage, bacon, and ham. The cheese has been goat cheese, swiss cheese, cheddar, and homemade ricotta. It has been embellished with mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and leeks. It is an easy go-to recipe for weeknights.

I LOVE rainbow chard. I think it is the most beautiful thing to grow from the earth in early spring and late fall. The pink, orange, yellow, and green are so cheery and bright. And it is a tender, sweeter green, making it easy to prepare and serve.

Here is the basic recipe, and how I plan on making it this week:

1 bunch of rainbow chard, chopped stems and leaves
1/2 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
olive oil
salt, pepper
3-4 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese

Heat oven to 400. In an oven-proof skillet, saute onion, garlic, and chard stems in olive oil 3-4 minutes, til soft. Add chard leaves and saute 2-3 minutes longer. Turn heat to medium. Beat eggs with milk, cheese, and salt and pepper. Pour egg mixture over vegetables in skillet. Cook a few minutes, lifting the edges to let the runny eggs run underneath, until set around the edges. Transfer to the hot oven and bake 10 minutes or so, until puffy and browned on top. Let cool for 5-10 minutes before cutting into wedges to serve.

New potato, spinach, and bacon soup

2009-03-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

My sis-in-law made a yummy soup recently with sweet potatoes, spinach, and spicy sausage from this Bon appetit recipe. I recommend the recipe; it was very good. Being a proponent of the use-what-you-have philosophy of cooking, I tried a riff on this recipe with, well, what we had. The farmer's market this week had plenty of spinach, and new potatoes, and onions. And we had some nice artisan bacon... New potato, spinach, and bacon soup. It was a little spicy, lots of smoky bacon flavor, and had enough green to make us feel like we were eating "mostly plants." It took less than 30 minutes, and was a generous amount for 2 hungry adults and one toddler who picked at it.

New potato, spinach, and bacon soup
4 slices bacon, sliced
2 cups of new potatoes, washed and halved
1 small onion, chopped
1/2 cup white wine
2 cups broth
5-6 cups trimmed and washed spinach (you could even use the bag of prewashed)
freshly ground black pepper to taste
crushed red pepper to taste, about 1/2 tsp

1. In a large stock pan over medium-high heat, cook the bacon slices 3-4 minutes, until they start releasing fat.
2. Add onion, stir, and cook 3-4 minutes more.
3. Add potatoes, wine, broth, pepper and red pepper. Simmer on low-medium heat until potatoes are just soft, about 20 minutes.
4. Add the spinach, remove from heat, and cover while the leaves wilt into the soup, 2-3 minutes.

Handmade ravioli with mushroom sauce

2009-02-12T12:48:00.000-08:00

Handmade Ravioli with Mushroom Sauce

I have been wanting to try pasta making for quite a while. It seems like it should be at least as easy as making cookies. It is just dough that is rolled, cut, and cooked. I do not have a pasta maker, and never saw the need for one....until I started making this ravioli. So that's how to get it nice and thin. A pasta maker. All the same, I don't think I'll be buying a new piece of kitchen equipment for now. The less thin version we've been making is pretty tasty and easy enough, if a bit rustic. I have been trying white and green noodles. We think the green noodles have a lot more flavor, but variety is good, so I will include both pasta recipes here. We used a simple filling of ricotta and parmesan. The mushroom sauce is flexible and could accomodate added meat, or substituing squash or tomatoes for the mushrooms.

Filling
1 1/2 cups ricotta (homemade ricotta is easy, by the way, but that is another post...)
1/3 cup grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
1 egg

Mix ingredients together and set aside until ready to assemble raviolis.

Mushroom Sauce (Caprial and John's Kitchen: recipes for cooking together)
1/4 cup EVOO
3 cups sliced mushrooms (wild or crimini taste best)
1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup white wine
1 1/2 cups broth
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
salt and pepper to taste

Heat 1 Tb oil in large saute pan over med-high heat. Add mushrooms and saute 3 minutes. Add onion and garlic and saute 1 minute. Add wine and cook until the mixture is almost dry. Add broth and reduce until about 3/4 cup of liquid remains. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside until pasta is ready. At the last minute, add basil and remaining oil and toss with pasta.

Green Noodles (James Beard, slightly amended)
1/2 cup cooked spinach (about 2 cups frozen chopped spinach defrosted and squeezed dry)
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 T EVOO
1 egg

White Noodles
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 T EVOO

Noodles:

Blend flours, spinach (for green noodles), salt, EVOO for about 2 minutes. Add the egg(s) and blend until it forms a ball of stiff, dry dough, less than a minute.

At this point, James Beard recommends kneading the dough for 8-10 minutes. Honestly, I don't. I bet the noodles would be easier to roll and stretch better over filling if you kneaded it, but kneading takes 2 hands - a luxury I seldom enjoy. After kneading (or not) cover with a dish towel and let it "rest" for a 1/2 hour or so.
When the dough has rested, cut the ball in half and roll each half as thin as you can. It is hard to get it very thin, and this must be what the pasta maker is for. Ours turn out about twice as thick as what we would buy at the store. We roll it in 2 batches because our board is big enough for about that much. Use a 2" biscuit cutter to make an even number of pasta circles.Put a glop of filling on half the circles. To make raviolis, use water on your fingertip to dampen the edges of one filled circle and one empty cirlce, then press the edges together.
Just a reminder of the reality of cooking with baby on one hip and toddler "helping."
When the raviolis are assembled, boil them in gently boiling salted water. The time depends on how thin you got the dough. I generally estimate the time it takes them to float to the top, then cook them that long again. So, if it takes 3 minutes before they start to float up, I will cook them 6 mintues total. Finally, drain and toss with sauce.

Winter Taco Soup

2009-01-06T19:24:00.001-08:00

Taco Soup

We make this hearty taco soup all year round, about once a month, in large quantities. It is quick to put together, and leftovers portioned out in dinner-sized amounts freeze and reheat well. We make this year-round and just change the vegetable content based on what is available when we make it. This is a winter version.

Ingredients
1 pound of ground turkey or beef
1 bag of dried beans (or 4 cans beans)
1 large can of stewed tomatos
1 can tomato sauce
1 onion, chopped
1 freezer bag of butternut squash cubes (about 2 cups)
1 sweet potato, cubed
1 packet taco seasoning (or 1Tb chili powder, 1 1/2 tsp cumin, 1 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp paprika, 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes)

When I use dried beans, I put them in water to soak in the morning before work. Then, once they've soaked all day, after toddler bedtime, I drain and rinse them, and cook them in water over medium heat 1 1/2 - 2 hours until soft. Then I drain off most of the water.

In a large stock pot over medium heat, cook the ground meat and onion until the meat is cooked through and the onion is soft. Add the stewed tomatoes, chopping them up with the stirring spoon. Add the other ingredients and simmer 1/2 hour or so until the squash and potatoes are cooked through.

At this point, I usually dish it out in freezer containers in the amount to feed my family. I put one in the fridge for the next day and the rest in the freezer for quick freezer-to-microwave-to-table dinners in the future. This is good plain, or embellished with sour cream or grated cheese, or scooped up with tortillas.

In other times of year, we use fresh tomatoes and corn and cauliflower, or zucchini chunks and fresh peppers and scallions.

Butternut Squash to spare

2009-01-06T19:23:00.001-08:00

We got from our CSA a 20 pound butternut squash. We washed it and cold stored it in the garage for a few months. But when it was time to eat it, we knew we would be storing A LOT for the weeks to come. This versatile and tasty winter squash that will see us through many meals.

When I cut this monster squash open, I half-baked the whole thing (in 2 batches because only half would fit in my oven at a time!!). First I baked the whole squash on the rack at 350 for about a half hour. Then, I cut in half lengthwise, and cut each half in half to fit in a 10x13 inch pan. I baked 2 fourths at a time, in two pans, with a 1/2 cup of water in the pan. Again at 350, for 30 minutes.

Once they were the semi-cooked (softer than a carrot, but firmer than a pear), I let them cool, then peeled, seeded, and cubed the whole thing. Then I measured 2 generous cups full into freezer bags, sucked out the air, and tossed them in the freezer. It has been super handy to pull out these little goody bags, microwave their contents for 4-5 minutes til they are both defrosted and finished cooking, and throwing them into quick, tasty, and nurtritious meals! The frozen and re-heated squash tastes fresh, holds it's cubed shape well in soups and pastas, and retained its buttery color.

This sort of approach should work well for any winter squash, even the ones that are small enough to be baked in the microwave. Although I must warn against microwaving whole squash for too long... (winter squash advisory)

Butternut Squash & Basil Pasta

2009-01-04T17:06:00.000-08:00

I had a hankering for a summer taste, in the dark of winter. Some bright greenhouse basil did the trick, without having to buy produce grown more than 100 miles away. (well, the olives and pine nuts are a different story)
Some bonuses with a meal like this: 1) I can pull out some plain noodles for my toddler before mixing in anything "green" or "yucky," and 2) I can mash up some of the squash to feed my infant, and 3) the whole meal takes less than 20 minutes to prepare.

Butternut Squash and Basil Pasta

1 box whole wheat thin spaghetti (mainly because these are the noodles my toddler will eat)
extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic
1/4 yellow onion
about 2 cups cooked butternut squash cubes (you could also buy the bag of pre-diced and micro-steam)
2 handsful fresh basil, coarsely chopped
4 oz crumbled feta
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans will work)
1/4 cup kalamata olives

1. Boil the noodles to "al dente" then rinse with cold water
2. Toast the nuts: warm an empty skillet over med-high heat, drop in the nuts and stir them around until they are tan and smell good. Then set aside
3. Heat olive oil in the now-empty skillet. Cook onion and garlic til translucent. Toss in squash and mix to coat and brown slightly.
4. Put noodles in serving dish, mix in squash mixture, basil, feta, nuts, and olives. Drizzle on a generous portion of olive oil. Salt and pepper. Toss well and serve.

Bacon & Basil Gnocchi

2008-12-27T19:17:00.000-08:00

Queen of the "use what you have" philosophy of cooking, I was once again pressed with the task of inventing something tasty to eat from a bare cupboard and ghost town fridge. The fridge was inhabited by a few bits and pieces left over from holiday meals and entertaining, and had a few rare treats for December in Oregon, like hothouse basil and pine nuts. The only protein source around was a few stray pieces of bacon. Short on rices or pastas, we had plenty of milled grains, like cornmeal. Thus was conceived the new family favorite: Bacon and Basil Gnocchi. This hit the spot, had a comfort-food feel from the bacon, cheese, and cornmeal; a nice crunch from the toasted pine nuts; and the basil gave it a bright note. Gnocchi is a soft noodlelump; here I've made gnocchi by cutting up polenta, or boiled cornmeal. Feel free to use what you have for any of the ingredients and see what new family favorite you invent!

Bacon and Basil Gnocchi

1 cup cornmeal
3 cups water
1 tsp salt
1 Tb butter
1/4 cup grated cheese (we had an Italian blend)
1/4 cup pine nuts
2 slices bacon, diced
1/4 yellow onion, diced
1 Tb flour
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup milk
1/2-1 cup grated cheese
2 oz crumbled feta
1-2 hands full fresh basil, rinsed, dried, coarsely chopped
salt
pepper

Make the gnocchi.
1. Boil the water with 1tsp salt; slowly add the corn meal, stirring constantly. This should get thick and smooth.
2. Remove from heat, add 1 Tb butter and 1/4 cup cheese.
3. Pour this into an 8x8" pan and set aside to firm up.

Make the sauce.
1. Warm an empty saucepan over medium heat. Toss in the pine nuts and shake them around in the pan until you can smell them and they are lightly toasted. Set them aside.
2. In the now empty saucepan, cook the bacon 5-6 minutes. Add the onion and cook 1-2 minutes more.
3. Turn the heat to low medium. Stir in the 1Tb flour to make a paste. Add the milk and cream slowly, while stirring until it is a medium thick sauce.
4. Remove from heat, add the feta, 1/2 cup grated cheese, pine nuts, basil, salt and pepper.

Assemble.
1. Heat oven to 350.
2. Put a flat plate over the casserole with the gnocchi in it and flip it over, so you end up with a cornmeal square on the plate. Cut this into 16 squares. Put the squares back in the casserole, except overlap them a little in the pan so they are all in there angled a little.
3. Pour the sauce over the squares.
4. Bake 10-15 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling all over. Turn on the broiler, and brown the top for 2-3 mintues.

Serves 4.

Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese

2008-12-16T20:25:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, we decided in our house to try our hand at not-out-of-the-box mac and cheese. So we did a little research and found a few different recipes for the classic dish. We couldn't decide which to try and ended up making FOUR macaroni and cheeses PLUS a box of good ol' orangey Kraft. Yes, we made 5 full macaroni recipes. It was a lot of pasta, so we called in a few friends and conducted a carb-load/taste test. The winner had creamy cheesey texture, complex flavors, all "real" ingredients (nothing powdered or canned), and a sense of comfort.

We like this recipe a lot, and like having another way to use our bountiful butternut squash (we got a 20-pounder from our CSA this year!!). And we are always losing the piece of paper I cut out of a magazine with the recipe on it. This takes about 20 minute to put together, and about 20 minutes to bake. Sometimes we prep it after toddler bedtime one night and bake it the next night for dinner. So, here it is. Enjoy!
Autumn Comfort Mac and Cheese - This recipe was created by Veronica Vadakan.

Ingredients
1 butternut squash (approximately 2 pounds), peeled and cubed into 1-inchpieces (or a bag of pre-cubed butternut squash)
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 ounces pancetta, diced (I use bacon if I am too busy to run to the store with good pancetta)
1 shallot, minced
12 ounces cavatappi pasta (I use any corkscrew or penne style that catches my eye)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 cups italian blend shredded cheese mix
1-1/2 tablespoons fresh chopped sage (sometimes I use dried rosemary)
1 teaspoon black pepper
4 ounces crumbled goat cheese

Topping
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 cup panko bread crumbs
1/2 tablespoon fresh chopped sage (again, dried rosemary works)
1/2 cup italian blend shredded cheese mix

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 450°F. Toss butternut squash pieces with olive oil. Spread squash pieces in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Bake for 20 minutes, stirring once halfway. Remove when squash is tender and caramel brown. Set aside and reduce oven heat to 350°F.

2. Cook pasta according to directions for 'al dente.' Drain well.

3. On the stovetop, cook the pancetta (or bacon) over medium heat in a skillet for 6 minutes. Add shallots and cook 2 minutes more. Remove from heat.

4. In a 2 quart sauce pan, melt butter. Add flour and, stirring constantly, cook approximately 2 minutes or until golden brown. Add milk and cream in a slow, steady stream, whisking constantly until smooth. Add 2 cups of cheese and stir until melted. Remove from heat. Stir in 1-1/2 tablespoons of chopped sage. Add 1 teaspoon black pepper.

5. Mix cooked pasta, cheese sauce and pancetta together in a large bowl. Gently fold in roasted butternut squash and crumbled goat cheese. Pour into a lightly greased 9" x 13" baking pan.

6. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in the microwave in a large glass bowl. Stir in sage, cheese and panko crumbs. Sprinkle over the top of the pasta mixture in the pan.

7. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until cheese is bubbling.

8. Turn on broiler and move pan to the top rack of the oven. Brown for 3 minutes or until golden brown.

9. Remove from oven and wait 10 minutes before serving. Sprinkle each serving with minced fresh sage, if desired.

Spicy Sweet Potato Soup

2008-12-12T16:06:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I picked up a book called "Coffee" that had some stories about...coffee. Turns out, it also had several coffee shop recipes in the back, every one of them a HOME RUN! This is one of my favorites for cold wintry days. It is a hot seasonal soup with some chipotle heat to warm you up twice as fast. And it cooks up in about a half hour. This goes well with Beer Bread or toasted whole wheat tortillas.

1 chopped onion
3 minced garlic cloves
1/2 stick unsalted butter
4-5 cups peeled and cubed (1 1/2 in) sweet potatoes or yams
8 cups stock or broth
1 Tb pureed chipotle chiles in adobo sauce (little can in the Hispanic foods section, or roast and can your own in summer time...)
2 Tb lemon juice (or apple cider vinegar, since lemons don't grown in Oregon in December)
salt, pepper
sour cream for garnish

1. In 4 qt stock pot, saute onion and garlic in butter. Add sweet potatoes, stir to coat, and cook 2-3 minutes.
2. Add stock or breoth, bring to boil, then simmer until sweet potatoes are soft (20 minutes)
3. Use the hand held blender to puree the soup in the pan.
4. Add chipotle puree and lemon juice (or vinegar), salt and pepper to taste.
5. Serve with a dollop of sour cream.

Coffee: The Essential Guide to the Essential Bean by Catherine Calvert ISBN 0-688-13328-2

Beer Bread

2008-12-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

On a cold winter day, nothing warms up the house like a hot oven and the yeasty smell of fresh baking bread. I love to make bread and on months when my interning requires less than the average 80 hours per week, we make a loaf every week. But, on other weeks, we just do not have time to knead, rise, rise again, and bake bread, no matter how delicious and healthful the result is. So, we often turn to quick and tasty beer bread. Lots of yeasty flavor, no kneading, no rising. Just a quick mix and toss it in the oven and turn it on. Some versions we have tried are enhanced with sliced green olives, or cheese, or caramelized onions. But our favorite is just plain bread.

As with any recipe, the product is as good as the ingredients, ie, better beer makes better beer bread. Even if you are not a beer consumer, buying a single bottle of Guinness, or a local porter or ale, will give so much more flavor than the standard American Bud Light. I would even try a St. Pauli's Girl (non alcoholic) if you are shy to buy beer.

3 cups flour (we often mix 1/3 to 1/2 whole wheat with white)
3 Tb sugar
4 Tb active dry yeast
1 12 oz bottle beer

1. Combine dry ingredients. Add beer and mix well.
2. Pour into loaf pan.
3. Place in cold oven. Set to 350 degrees.
4. Bake 45 minutes, or til knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
5. Cool a few minutes before removing from pan.

from The Healthy College Cookbook that I keep around despite being more than 10 years out of college.

Smoked Salmon Frittata

2008-12-06T08:43:00.001-08:00

Smoked Salmon Frittata

We frequently make a meal in the crustless-quiche/frittata/omelet category. Eggs and cheese are always around, and we just add a cup or so of whatever is in season, and occassionally whatever cured meat caught our eye. In the summer I posted a Tomato Corn Pie recipe along these lines. All these recipes are similar, in that they use several eggs, a little milk, and cheese. The main difference is how much time they are cooked on the stovetop vs in the oven. Omelets are cooked solely on the stovetop, fritatta a little in both places, and quiche is solely cooked in the oven. We cribbed this frittata recipe from Whole Foods website. Smoked salmon sounded so good for cold fall weather that we bought out-of-season organic hot house tomatoes and chives to make this!

From Whole Foods: Salty smoked salmon, rich cream cheese, plump tomatoes and zesty red onion bring a wonderful mix of flavors to this baked frittata. Enjoy it for breakfast, snack on it for lunch, or serve it for dinner with a simple green salad.

Ingredients

8 large eggs

2/3 cup milk

2 tablespoons finely chopped chives

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 to 2 tablespoons butter

1 cup thinly sliced red onion

4 ounces cream cheese, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

4 ounces smoked salmon, cut into small cubes

2 to 3 plum tomatoes, sliced

Method

1. Preheat oven to 400°F.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk eggs until well beaten and slightly frothy. Whisk in milk, chives and black pepper and set aside.

3. In a large ovenproof skillet, heat olive oil over medium heat until hot but not smoking. Add egg mixture to skillet, and then quickly arrange remaining ingredients, in order, on top of eggs, distributing evenly and attractively.

4. Cook for 3 minutes on the stovetop without stirring, then transfer to oven.

5. Bake until the top is golden brown and the frittata is set, about 30 minutes. (Baking time will vary with the size of the skillet, so continue to bake until center is just firm to the touch).

6. Let cool slightly before serving. Cut into wedges.

A pie of thanksgiving

2008-12-03T22:28:00.000-08:00

No time to post, now, but thought this strawberry jam (homemade of course) tart was Obama-rific!

Cold Brew for a Quick Fix

2008-11-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

We live in Portland. We know coffee. We can differentiate between lattes, au laits, cappucinos, and con cremas. Our experienced palates can differentiate beans from Peru, Mexico, Sumatra, Kona, and Ethiopia. We went to Hawaii in part to tour coffee plantations and learn more about harvesting and roasting practices. We choose brunch locations based on whether they serve Stumptown coffee. We are addicted and in love with the "dark magic."

Green Kona coffee cherries on the tree

All this to say that we take seriously how our morning brew tastes. Unfortunately, with 80 hour work weeks and 2 little kids, running by the local coffee house in the mornings is a bit of a challenge. So we make our own dark magic. We got turned on to cold brew coffee a few years ago, and have remained devotees ever since. There are several benefits to cold-brewing coffee: less acidity, less caffeine, less grinding of the beans, full rich flavor, and most importantly for us, we can brew a pound of beans all at once and it stays fresh in the fridge for 2 weeks. For real. If you have been around the Midwest, and tried Caribou Coffee, they cold brew their coffee for cold drinks.

Kona coffee cherries from green to ripe and the seed or "bean" inside

We use a Toddy cold brew system. Another great cold brew system is made by Filtron. The process is easy (official directions here):

1. Coarsely grind 1 pound of beans. (We try to find fair trade, organic beans - easy enough in greenie Portland, and still way cheaper than stopping by the 'bucks!)
2. Layer the beans and filtered water in the brewing container.
3. Leave for 12 hours while the beans infuse the water with their rich goodness.
4. Remove the rubber stopper and drain the coffee into the glass decanter.
5. Store in the fridge up to 2 weeks (ours never lasts that long because we drink it!)
6. Warm your milk or water, pour it and cold brew into travel mug, jet out front door.
7. Try not to spill the hot coffee on the infant carrier or bag of fresh cloth diapers while shlepping it all out to the car.

Drying the beans

The Toddy comes with several recipes for hot and cold coffee drinks. Here are our faves:

His: 3 parts 2% milk warmed in microwave, 1 part cold brew, 1T chocolate syrup, 1T raw sugar.

Hers: 3 parts hot water, 1 part cold brew.

Winter Squash Advisory

2008-11-22T23:50:00.000-08:00

Winter Squash
Winter squash are so versatile, easy to cook, and easy to throw in most dishes, sauces, and desserts. To save time, we often microwave a squash whole for 4-5 minutes to soften it up. Then, we halve and seed the squash, and steam the halves in a pan of water in the microwave 4-7 minutes more, until soft. The softened flesh can be scooped out and used immediately, or frozen in 1 or 2 cup quantities in freezer bags for another day. Just today I pulled out a baggie of frozen pumpkin to make Maple Pumpkin Pancakes.

However, do not try to save EVEN more time by microwaving a whole squash until it is fully cooked. You may end up, as I did, with a mess...

Beet Salad with Sage Pesto

2008-11-22T23:36:00.000-08:00

Beet Salad with Sage Pesto (adapted from recipes in Local Flavors)

I LOVE beets. I like to bake them like potatoes, roast them in olive oil, and toss them in stews. Their vibrant color reflects the beautiful leaves outside. Their rich, sweet flavor adds variety to a season of primarily roots. This recipe is particularly flavorful, and makes it easy to use the greens as well. If you do not enjoy canned crinkle cut beets, don't despair. They are completely devoid of flavor, and have somehow lost the ability to stain your urine pink (one of the perks of eating beets hehe). You have to give fresh beets a try.

1 Bunch of beets with greens (we had red and golden beets)

1/2 red onion, thinly sliced

white wine vinegar

olive oil

1 slice bread, torn into chunks

apple cider vinegar

3T capers

1/4 cup olives

1/2 cup olive oil

1/2 cup pine nuts

1 clove garlic

10-12 sage leaves

1. Soak the onion slices in white wine vinegar to cover while preparing the rest of the salad.

2. Steam the beet greens for 5 minutes. Chop the cooked greens and toss with olive oil and salt.

3. Steam the beets in the microwave for 7 minutes. Peel the cooked beets and cut into wedges.

4. Put the bread in your food processor fitted with the 'S' blade. Sprinkle apple cider vinegar over to moisten the bread. Add in capers, olives, pine nuts, garlic, sage. Start the food processor and drizzle in olive oil until you have a nice pesto paste.

5. Assemble the salad: layer greens, then pesto, then beet wedges, then marinated onion rings.

Butternut Squash Enchiladas

2008-11-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

Butternut Squash Enchiladas With Peanut Sauce

These are a lot of work, but so yummy! We usually make extra and freeze a few pans for later. The sauce is a little spicy for kids, but mild enough for most adults. If you are worried about spiciness, you can use just one chipotle, or even none, and still have pretty good flavor!

FILLING
1 sm Butternut squash (about 1 -2 cups) or a bag of pre-diced butternut squash
2 tb oil
1 medium Carrot; peeled, quartered, sliced
1/4 lb Fresh mushrooms; diced (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/2 c Diced onion
1/2 c Diced jicama
1 small granny smith apple; peeled and diced
1/4 c Shelled sunflower seeds
1 tb White vinegar
1/2 ts Salt
2 tb Chopped fresh cilantro

SAUCE
2 cups broth
1/2 ts Salt
1/2 ts Ground cumin
1/2 ts Minced garlic (1/2 clove)
2 Canned chipotle chilies, chopped (I just use one)
3 tb New mexican chili powder
1 tb Vegetable oil
1/2 ts Dried oregano
1 tb Minced onion
1 tb All-purpose flour
3/4 c Creamy peanut butter

8-10 Corn tortillas
1 c Grated cheddar cheese
1 c Grated monterey jack cheese

To make filling:

1. Bake butternut squash. Cut the butternut squash in half and scoop out seeds. Place cut side down on a baking pan with a small amount of water; bake at 400 degrees about 1 hour, or until tender. OR microwave whole 5 minutes, cut in half, then microwave 5-10 more minutes, until tender. OR buy pre-diced butternut squash and steam in microwave 5 minutes. When cool enough to handle, scoop cooked squash out of shell and set aside.

2. In a large skillet, saute carrot, mushrooms and onion in the oil until the carrot is tender-crisp.

3. Add the cooked squash, jicama, apple, sunflower seeds, vinegar, salt and cilantro; mix well and set aside while preparing sauce.

To make sauce:

1. In a medium saucepan, combine broth, salt, cumin, garlic, chipotle chilies and chili powder. Bring to a boil.

2. Meanwhile, in a small saute pan, heat oil over low heat. Add oregano and onion; saute until onion is soft. Add flour and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

3. Stir the onion mixture into the chile mixture. Bring to a boil and cook about 2 minutes; remove from heat and strain.

4. Add peanut butter and stir until well-combined; set aside.

To assemble:

1. I actually pour a little sauce in the bottom of the pan, cover with a layer of tortillas cut into strips, a layer of the filling, followed by a layer of remaining tortilla strips. (Lazy, yes, but saves time and tastes just as good)

2. The not lazy way: Heat a small amount of oil in a shallow skillet. Dip each tortilla in the oil for a few seconds to soften. Lay softened tortillas on paper towels to drain. (If you prefer, tortillas may be softened in the microwave: Place four or five between two damp microwavable paper towels. Heat 45 seconds.) Fill these tortillas, then repeat with remaining tortillas. Place a spoonful of squash mixture down the center of each tortilla. Roll up and place seam side down in a lightly oiled 9-by-13-inch baking pan.

3. Pour peanut sauce over the top and sprinkle with cheddar and jack cheeses.

4. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, or until cheese is melted and enchiladas are hot in the center.

Note:

1. Chipotle chilies are available in cans in the Hispanic food section.

2. New Mexican chili powder is available in the Hispanic foods section.

From Chez Jose restaurant, Portland, Oregon. Published in Oregonian FoodDay 2/23/99 (also 1994). Recipe by: Chez Jose restaurant, Portland, Oregon