Good Real Food

I could tell you about an excellent jullienned salad with habenero powder, parsley, carrots and celleriac (not necessarily in that order) I made to go with father Agnew’s steaks (everyone should have an upstairs neighbor with a cattle ranching father) but I’m most excited about the volume of butter we’ve been going through lately. I don’t usually get into holiday baking, maybe because my mother’s fruit cake is a production that my galley kitchen is not even remotely fit for and comes out way better when my mother makes it anyhow. Or maybe because I’m lazy (shh. don’t tell) or worried about my waist-line but it just doesn’t happen. This year, though, I’ve been on a roll.

First, for a holiday party I experimented with greek butter cookies, which didn’t make it to the party since the whole part about chilling the dough for an hour sounded optional and was decidedly not so. I made them with plain brandy and they came out a little plain, but I took another batch upstairs with my celeriac and habenero salad and for those I stuck to 1 inch balls and grated lemon zest into the dough. Lovely, though a bit fragile. Especially with Seth’s Sambuca. As with so many cookies, the really nice thing is that you can make a batch at a time and always be pulling cookies out of the oven. Something I never noticed was impressive until I realized recently that other people’s mothers don’t keep cookie dough in the fridge unless they bought the dough in a tube.

And then, for no particular reason at all I took a stab at Lena Corwin’s mother’s pumkin bread with pecans and whole cranberries which I’ve been studying for the last year since the photos all look so very pretty.  It is crazy dense and rich, but I think it could take twice as many cranberries and pecans. Maybe I’m just hankering for my mother’s boiled fruit cake, which does have approximately twice as much in the way of fruits and nuts.

Gingerbread men may or may not be next up. Holiday baking recipes?

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It’s winter again, or near enough, which means that I’m back in the kitchen after a summer and fall of making quick and easy foods so I could spend my time gallivanting around. Oh, and we had a kid. Anyway.

This dish of celeriac and carrots was influenced by other recipes and accompanied a pork roast that was also inspired by other recipes. I might write about the roast later, but the veggies really stole the show.

What you need:

• one or more celeriac
• about the same amount of carrots
• garlic and ginger, minced - go for about 1 Tbsp of per celeriac
• cumin seeds - 1 tsp
• cumin powder again, around a tsp, maybe a bit more
• cayenne powder - 1/2 tsp
• stock of some sort, or water
• chopped cilantro

What to do:

Cut your celeriac and carrots into roughly 1/2 inch cubes - no need to be precise. Heat oil in a pan big enough to hold your veggies. When it’s hot, add your cumin seeds, and reduce heat to medium if it wasn’t there already. When the cumin seeds begin to get aromatic, add your garlic and ginger. Toss that around a bit, and when it starts to take on a bit of color and smell lovely, add in your cut up carrots and celeriac. Stir that around for a bit till the veggies take on a bit of color - 5 to 7 minutes or so and add some salt and pepper while you’re doing that. Add in about 1/4 cup of your stock or water, cover, and reduce heat to low. After about another 7-10 minutes, you veggies should be pretty much tender. If they are, remove lid, and add the cumin powder, maybe a bit of cayenne if you want it, and stir to mix. Cook for a few more minutes, stirring a bit to let the flavors meld and to let the cumin powder flavor mellow. Toward the end of the cooking time, mush up some (but not all - maybe 1/4 to 1/3) of the celeriac and carrots. Top with chopped cilantro. Enjoy.

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I had such a craving for a nice hot bowl of clam chowder last week! It really does not have to be the thick mass of cream and potato that can give it a bad rap for being unhealthy. Just a cup of half and half will do you for 6 servings. Clam chowder is also a great “pantry recipe” meaning that almost all of the ingredients can be picked up on sale and used weeks later when you feel like making chowder. It is also fairly quick to make, so it can be a last minute lunch or light supper.

What you need:
2-3 cans minced clams
1-2 bottles clam juice
2 strips bacon (optional)
1 onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/4 cup all purpose flour
3-5 medium potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1 can of corn
2 bay leaves
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1 cup heavy cream or half and half
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley
salt and pepper

1. cook the bacon until crisp in a large dutch oven or sturdy soup pot. Add onions and cook 5 minutes.
2. stir in garlic, then add flour to coat. Gradually add the clam juice plus the juice from the canned clams. Stir in the potatoes, bay leaves and thyme. Bring to a simmer until potatoes are tender.
3. Stir in the clams, corn, cream, and parsley. Simmer briefly, remove from heat, and season with salt and pepper.

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I don’t know about you, but I have been trying to think of ways to cut down our food budget as things are tight and all the current events are causing me to draw on my Dutch genes that tell me to plan for the worst. So, I have been finding ways to cook with what is in the house and garden and waiting way longer than I usually would to restore the food supplies. Apples are abundant and if you save the one expensive honey crisp for a raw sliced dessert and use the other less expensive ones for cooking, you can make a $7 bag of apples go a long way. When I was a kid we had four apple trees in our back yard. Every year we made apple cider, dried apples, and my favorite, apple sauce. We were not allowed store bought sweets in our house, so I made up snacks for myself using plain yogurt and apple sauce that is still one of my favorite things to eat, though my family thinks it looks gross. Apple sauce is perhaps one of the easiest things you will ever make, and it freezes really well so you can enjoy hot apple sauce in the dead of winter.

Slice and core (but do not peel) as many apples as you have around and put them in a large pot. Cover with water and simmer until soft. Place cooked apples in a food processor or food mill and make the consistency you want. Chunky-fine. Return mixture to the pot, add sugar and cinnamon to taste. Freeze in air tight containers.

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I can’t tell you how glad I am to be back! You all missed roast vegetables, more roast vegetables and, oh, roast root vegetables. With and without garlic. Before I go pitch my cold frame (think warming thoughts about my turnips, folks. Please. Thank you.) and harvest my beets (instead of sitting right here with a blanket and hot cider, which is so much more appealing than midnight beet harvesting) I want to ask for pickling recipes. I have a ton of green tomatoes, salvaged from plants I pulled out this weekend.

I need fridge pickles. I’m way too lazy to sterilize. Eh? Scott?

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anyone who tells you that two kids more than doubles the work is totally correct. Wow.

Anyway, in addition to being up to my eyeballs in kids, this site’s software lost it’s marbles for a bit and none of our intrepid authors could login to share their culinary adventures. Apologies that it has taken me so long to get things sorted out.

And being back, I thought I should share something food-ish. In fact, I have two things to share: squash stuffings, and a nifty thing to do with soup.

Squash Stuffings:

I don’t know what’s happening where you live, but we are well into fall here, and that means squash.

In the past weeks, our CSA share has provided a few butternuts, a couple of acorn, a kombucha and some truly amazing delicata. I’ve been kind of down on the peel, roast, eat practice recently - maybe since that was all I ever did with squash so lately, I’ve been stuffing it. Below are two suggestions for stuff squash - the sausage one filled out the roasted delicata, while the bean and greens stuffing filled out roasted acorn squash. The butternuts and kombucha are likely to find themselves in a soup or pie in the not too distant future.

Sausage stuffing for squash: This couldn’t be simpler. Get some good bulk italian sausage. Cook it. Make a simple tomato sauce - I put fennel and peppers and garlic and onions and capers in mine. Halve, scoop, lightly oil and roast your squash (cut side down) - I did ours at 400 and tucked a sprig of thyme under each half of squash. When cooked, spoon sausage into squash and top with tomato sauce and some grated pecorino or parmesan.

Beans and Greens stuffing for squash: Another simple one. Cook some great northern beans. Chop some bacon, cook until it’s mostly done, then add diced onion, garlic, carrots, and peppers assuming you’ve got some from your market or CSA. Cook down, adding some salt and pepper and some crushed red chili along the way. Add your greens. I used some lovely “saute greens” from our CSA - a mix of all kinds of little greens. You could use any greens you like. I think dino kale, chard, spinach, or arugula would all be lovely. Beet greens would be fantastic, and you’d have beets too! Once the greens are wilted, add your cooked beans without the liquid they cooked in, and reduce heat and let it hang out for a bit, stirring occasionally and maybe adding a bit of water if it looks like it needs it. Once again, roast your squash, stuff it with this mixture, and enjoy.

Really, these are shared not because there’s anything terribly interesting about them - you likely already do stuff like this all the time - I just find that sharing and hearing about what others do with their veggies inspires me to get a bit more creative with my cooking from time to time.

Nifty soup trick: Yes, I was rather proud of myself when I thought of this one. Does that make me a food nerd? Fine, then I’m a food nerd.

Anyway, I was making some celeriac, carrot, and beet soup, and I thought it would be swell with a poached egg in each bowl. So, instead of poaching them separately, I just broke the eggs directly into the simmering soup and waited till they were cooked to my liking. Just don’t forget how many eggs you put in!

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I have been trying to work japanese style home cooking into my repertoire. And we have three cabbages from our CSA aging in our fridge. Madhur Jaffrey delivers: 1/2 of a medium cabbage, sliced thin.  1/2 tsp salt, cooked in some oil 3-4 minutes just until the cabbage is starting to wilt.  Add in 4-8 umoboshi plums and 1/2 tsp sugar that you pounded or mashed into a paste. We had it with an egg (scrambled, with scotch bonnet since we’re still working through those) and rice. Easy.

Might give me gas (cabbage seems to do that) but I did just move through a serious amount of brassica.

My next challenge: a monster eggplant. I haven’t decided what to do with it.

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Like so many midwesterners in late August, I find myself completly overrun with monster zucchini and summer squash. I have included a recipe in this post that I made up to use up the bunnies in unique and yummy ways: Chocholate Zucchini Bread. But first, as an homage to my father, Jim Heynen, I want to share with you his short story about zucchini.

Garden Rabbits, by Jim Heynen
There were the fuzzy sharp-toothed ones that nipped tender shoots of lettuce and cabbage before they could dream of the salad bowl, the kind that multiplied as quickly as aphids and were as hard to discourage from their nibbling ways. But there was another kind of garden rabbit. These too were fruitful and multiplied in great abundance, though they did not hop. They were zucchini.
The boys did not like to eat zucchini very much. The taste was as dull as potatoes without salt or butter or sour cream, and the texture was slimy as cooked okra. But in August when the lettuce had bolted and the cabbage had died, when even most of the tomatoes had ripened and the wine-colored beets bulged from the earth ready for harvest, the zucchini caught a second breath: the yellow blossoms quickly turned into small green fingers that within a week were the size of cucumbers and in two weeks the size of small watermelons. Why couldn’t the animal garden rabbits eat these vegetable garden rabbits instead of the carrots and lettuce?
If the boys didn’t do something, they knew it would mean zucchini in eggs for breakfast, fried zucchini and onions for dinner, boiled zucchini for supper. Zucchini casseroles! Zucchini salads! Zucchini pie if there was a recipe for one hiding somewhere!
The oldest boy had a plan. Over supper, as they all swallowed the soggy chunks of zucchini, he said, We have so many zucchini, we should give some to the poor people who don’t have anything to eat.
The oldest boy had never in his life suggested giving anything to anybody, not even to his friends. And now he was thinking of poor people he didn’t even know?
The grown-ups thought it was a wonderful idea and even brought it up in their family devotions: That the abundance of the earth should be given to all, they prayed. Yea, even to the neediest of our number.
On Saturday night the boys loaded the car trunk with big zucchini before they went into town. The boys agreed that they would spend the evening giving the zucchini to poor people they met.
Look at them, said one of the grown-ups, as the boys loaded their arms with zucchini and started down the streets looking for poor people. Aren’t they wonderful?
The boys couldn’t really tell a poor person from a rich person, so they started offering zucchini to everyone they met. They figured the rich people wouldn’t take them and the poor people would. But it seemed that poor people were few and far between when it came to feeding them zucchini.
When the boys got to the big parking lot next to a WalMart that had just replaced most of the stores downtown, the oldest boy said, Let’s just put some in the back seat of everybody’s car. We might not be getting them to poor people, but at least we’re still giving them away.
This is what they did and within a half hour they were rid of all the zucchini. The grown-ups thoughts the boys’ charity had been so successful that they let the boys load up the trunk of the car with zucchini the next Saturday night too.
The boys went straight to the WalMart parking lot. But word had gotten out that if you didn’t lock your car doors somebody would fill the back seat of your car with giant zucchini.
Oh no, said the oldest boy, after they had tried all the car doors in the parking lot. We’re stuck with them. We’ll be eating zucchini until Christmas!
Then one of the boys pretended to drop one on the street as he crossed on the way back toward their car. The other boys followed suit, dropping zucchini, one after another. Whoops, whoops, whoops, as the zucchini dropped to the street.
The boys stood on the sidewalk and watched the cars pass by, some of them slowing down and swerving to miss the shattered vegetables. But in a few minutes the zucchini had been mushed up and the cars didn’t even slow doen. And that was how the last of the green garden rabbits died. Smeared out on the street like so much road kill.

Chocolate-Zucchini Bread
-1 1/2 cups brown sugar
-3/4 cup sunflower or safflower oil
-3 eggs beaten
-1 1/2 tbsp melted butter
-1 tsp vanilla
-2 cups grated zucchini
-1 1/2 cups white flour
-1 cup whole wheat flour
-2 tsp baking soda
-1 tsp baking powder
-1 tsp salt
-2-3 tbsp good quality cocoa powder
-1 tsp cinnamon
-1 tsp ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 350F
1. In a large bowl combine the sugar, oil, eggs, butter and vanilla and beat well with a whisk. Mix in the grated zucchini. 2. In a separate bowl, combine all the remaining dry ingredients and mix well. Gently stir the dry mixture into the wet. Pour the batter into a well-oiled loaf pan and bake for approximately 1 hour, until firm and a toothpick comes out of the center clean. Cool for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.

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My parents brought a dozen meyer lemons from their tree in San Francisco. Used some in salad dressing, been putting them in water glasses. I’m not used to having lemons around.  Do you keep lemons always? For what? Can I freeze the zest of the last three? Can I just freeze lemon slices? I know their days are numbered.

And, also, we have five scotch bonnets and there is no way I can eat them on my own and N. is leaving me for almost a week. What to do? Make some kind of salsa? Pickle them? Dry them?

PS, from the eat your vegetables department, mystery greens (Mr. Prince, the gardener up the street, calls it spinach, but it isn’t. More kale-y) cooked up with mint, leftover brown rice, a dash of habanero powder that Paul gave us for some reason. (You know I’m the last one to say that a gift has to be new, but there must be a story behind half a jar of powdered spice with the label faded and wearing off.) It was most excellent. Mmm, and some Parmesan.  I am going to have to start working on my protein intake, I think. I tend to just assume that they’re right when they say most Americans eat too much protein and I shouldn’t fret.  And, um, ice cream with almonds is a good source of protein, right? That is my other new trick, salted almonds in my ice cream.  I finished Reading Lolita in Tehran which is the subject of one strangely obtuse and contentious wikipedia entry, and which features a narrator who regularly pours cold coffee over toasted walnuts and ice cream and which, somehow for me turned into salted almonds and ice cream. And looking more closely at what I can learn from fiction.

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Caroline wants pickling advice and I’m afraid to tell her I don’t know a thing. I mean, I know a lot right? I know everything. But I’m too lazy to do much more than put more vegetables in the turnip pickle juice when the turnips start to run out. Sliced white onions are good for that. So are green tomatoes. Sliced or whole. Then you can put them on sandwiches. Mmmm. Sometimes I put carrots in, which don’t go well on sandwiches and are better fresh anyway. After a few rounds of onions the brine starts to get funky and I dump it.

This week, though, I made a batch of Korean turnip pickles, that came out pretty great in a garlic skunk kind of a way. Hsuan offered a book of simple Japanese pickles (which she still hasn’t delivered. I gave her some pickled turnip today to help her remember …) which got me thinking that Madhur Jaffrey would probably have some useful advice. I had to adapt a little, since I don’t have any dried Korean chilies and I couldn’t find scallions and I wanted to pickle a lot more than three small turnips.

Note: I think preserving things is one of those adventures that can lead to botulism, so, um … you know. Think for yourself here. Look up a recipe. When in doubt, throw it out.

I started with 4 or 5 really really big turnips, which I sliced about a quarter inch thick, sprinkled lightly with salt, and let sit for a few hours in a glass bowl. I gather that glass is important if you don’t want rust and funky reactions going on. I rinsed and rinsed and chopped up two monster cloves of garlic (I’m thinking now that one would have done it) and one small white onion and one nice hot chili. I don’t remember what variety it was, it was from the green market and it was super spicy. Only you know how spicy you like your pickles. I added ~2tsp of salt and a tsp of sugar and stirred it all around and added enough water to cover the whole business in a glass jar. I added three or four impossibly small beets because pink pickles rule and what else are you going to do with three or four impossibly small beets?

Rest a saucer loosely on top. It was supposed to sit for 6-8 days but I put a real lid on it and stuck it in the fridge on day 5, for no good reason. I had them in my lunch today. Like I said, I think one clove of garlic would have done it–I won’t be getting any mosquito bites tonight!

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