Not Havanas

The annual festival of food is nearly over. The report so far:

Tuesday:
roast acorn squash with brown sugar topping

Wednesday:
Indian food at Saffron Grill

Thursday:
20.6 lbs of turkey
bird bacon
gravy
stuffing with sausage and bread
whole cranberry sauce
mashed potatoes
brandy-glazed carrots
vegetarian stuffing
brownie pie
(dinner for five)

Friday:
green chile sauce
turkey burritos with same
corn soup with bacon
[generated a nice canful of grease]
(dinner for ten)
sourdough starter
turkey stock

Saturday:
sourdough pancakes
some sort of cookies
(dinner at Pinecoon with Dave's lasagna)

I'm not cooking again for weeks.

I have done probably the last thing I shall do with my CSA this year, which is this:
Boil quartered brussels sprouts for 5 minutes and florets of cauliflower for 3. Plunge into ice water and drain. Reduce 1.5 cups of cream, with some onions and sage, to maybe around 0.5 cups. Place half the veggies in a greased 9x13 pan, top with salt, pepper, and 3/4 cup Parmesan. Add the rest of the veggies, another 0.75 cups Parmesan, and the reduced cream. Bake covered for 40 minutes at 375 °F. Meanwhile, toast 1/3 cup pine nuts. Fry 1/3 cup dry bread crumbs (I used some fresh-today honey oatmeal bread, and toasted it to get the moisture out first) in a little olive oil, with parsley. Combine with the pine nuts. After the 40 minutes, top the casserole with the breadcrumb mixture and bake uncovered 15 minutes.
Cream is such a wonderful sauce, reduced like that, and with the cauliflower it was just decadent. The little mini cabbagey brussels sprouts were fantastic as well. mmmmm.

I love having Granny Ruth's cast iron bread pans. I'm sure they're her mother's, if not older, and they have such a beautiful cured surface I never have to wash them. Plus, they are massive enough to make two loaves out of a 9-cups-of-flour batch of bread.
Alas, I still have to wait for the bread to cool down before eating it.

Neil Gaiman is a favorite author of mine. His latest book, The Graveyard Book, tells the story of a boy raised by dead people in a graveyard. The blog NeedCoffee.com issued a challenge to create a Graveyard Book inspired dessert. I decided to build part of the graveyard out of cake, because I watch too much Ace of Cakes.



( Click this link to see many more pictures and read about the process and the design. )

Things I made which were good:

Grilled Mexican Corn, from Cooks Illustrated, with a spicy creamy sauce. They have you rub the corn in oil mixed with chile powder before grilling, which gives it a great flavor. I used the broiler, since we weren't grilling anything else.

Vegetable stock, two giant pots full. I didn't bother sauteing any of the vegetables this time. I have made stock ice cubes from some of it, and used some of it in...

Vegetable soup that was sort of supposed to be borscht. Mainly it had a couple beets in it. It ended up being your standard tasty veggie soup with carrots and celery and potatoes and things.

Squash dumplings with brown butter. Thank you, Alton Brown! These were fantastic. You bake some potatoes and some squash (I had delicata, not butternut) and mash their fleshes together. You add salt and nutmeg and flour, then shape into little balls. I couldn't get the dough to become non-sticky, so I just sort of hand-shaped some blobs. I refrigerated them overnight (okay, I left them out in the garage) and boiled them in salted water the next day, until they float. Then you cool them in ice water and toss them with a touch of oil. Before you serve them, you brown them in butter which has first been browned itself, with some sage leaves. So fantastic, rich and decadent and relatively healthy, as decadence goes.

The advantage of living with a vegetarian and someone who doesn't like fish is that I get to eat it all myself.
Loki Fish Co. has the best smoked salmon I've ever tasted. I suspect buying from the fishermen goes a long way, there.
I keep meaning to get a whole fish from their boat (F/V Loki. It makes me a little twitchy, buying from the god of chaos.) and grill it up some day.

I made Moosewood's spinach-cheese calzones (featuring ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan) with a mixture of spinach and chard. They came out fabulously, I must say.
That recipe always makes too much filling for the amount of bread. I should try 1.5x the dough recipe next time.

I am extraordinarily fond of powdered buttermilk. It turns a perishable, rarely-used ingredient into a common staple. This way, I can spontaneously make pesto biscuits, pancakes, or Irish soda bread (today's tasty thing) without having to go to the store and then decide what to do with the rest of the buttermilk.

I am currently rising sourdough pretzel dough in a patch of sunshine on my kitchen counter.

Also I am all set to make one of my favorite dishes, chard-saffron tart with pine nuts and a yeasted crust, for dinner tonight.

And there will be PESTO BISCUITS later in the week, maybe tomorrow. That's really the entire reason I made 2.75 lbs of basil into pesto. That, and tasty homemade gifts.

This may be the best batch of sourdough bread I've ever made. It had just the right sort of tang and a hint of saltiness, with a beautiful crackly crust and a just-soft inside. I will try to leave some for when my housemates get home in an hour or so.

I suspect the key is making round loaves and slashing them--with asterisks, in this case.

So back on the 22nd I threw a party for 50 people.

Beverages were 8 2-liters and 2 6-packs of cola, plus 3 6-packs of beers and 4 bottles of wine. All the cans and most of the soda disappeared and we had about 2 full bottles worth of wine leftover, plus 3 bottles of beer.
I made a pitcher of chai from Savory Spice Shop's mix and didn't get any of it, so I don't know how that tasted. It smelled good while it was cooking, though.

I had two kinds of salsa from TJ's, with leftovers. There were tortilla chips and vegetable chips (those all got eaten) and a variety of meats and cheeses, plus Triscuits and wheat thins.

I snagged some oyster crackers at the last minute and got my mom's recipe for seasoning them. As I didn't have ranch dressing mix, I improvised like whoa with some powdered buttermilk and miscellaneous spices. They turned out very tasty.

I finally used up a gift to become tuna spread with Italian tuna packed in olive oil, butter, and some seasonings.

Larger projects:
Pot stickers with pork filling. I made those early, froze them, and cooked up as many as would fit in Vixy's giant skillet. The rest are still in our freezer, waiting.
Cheese-filo appetizers with gouda and green olives: again made in advance.
Zucchini pancakes with basil sour cream: these were amazingly delicious and very easy. I've done them again since.
Grilled Corn and Poblano Chile Chowder: which I made vegetarian by replacing bacon with olive oil and bacon salt, and chicken stock with vegetable stock. This is delicious and thick. You could eat it with a fork, if you liked. I was talked out of grilling the chiles in the gas flame; I used the broiler instead.
"Sacrilicious" bread, which is a Vixy recipe for very small loaves of whole wheat bread.

Seanan made salsa with heirloom tomatoes, nectarines, and cilantro.

Dessertwise, there were espresso chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies with real vanilla that Vixy painstakingly hand-decorated, and an impromptu blackberry pie from berries three blocks south of our house.

Dave brought onion dip, because he does that, and someone else brought different blackberries and fresh whipped cream, and someone else again brought inari sushi.

The oven works again! To celebrate, and to use up some apricots, I made this, from a recipe on Recipezaar. Unfortunately, the author left out the amount of sugar. I skimmed through some cookbooks and made a semi-educated guess, which seems to have worked. It comes out very much like cobbler or crumble with a dough solid enough to eat out of hand.

Apricot Crumble Squares

* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 cup butter, softened
* 2/3 cup sugar
* 1 egg
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 2 cups sliced apricots (drained if canned)
* 1 teaspoon sugar
* 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large bowl beat butter and sugar until smooth and creamy. Beat in egg and vanilla until incorporated. Blend in flour, salt, and powder, just until a dough forms. Spread dough evenly in pan. Bake in preheated oven for 6 to 7 minutes, until lightly browned. (I'd go up to 8 minutes next time.) Arrange apricots evenly over top of base. Mix sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over top of fruit. Bake 10 to 12 minutes longer or until golden brown. Place pan on a wire rack to cool completely, then cut into squares.

This was from Alton Brown.
While the water boiled, I chopped the chard, separating the stems and leaves, onions, and garlic. The chard leaves blanched for 3 minutes, then I fished it out and put the pasta (stripy bowties!) in the same pot. I cooled and chopped the chard, then sautéd the aromatics (including the chard stems, which were yellow) in some olive oil. I added a paste of equal parts butter and flour, cooking that for about 5 minutes, and then added lots of canned diced tomatoes. The next step was to add chicken broth, which I substituted with my homemade vegetable stock. I will be sad when I use all of that up. Then I added the chard and the pasta and tossed it to warm everything up, and finished with probably more Parmesan than it called for, a little rosemary, and some salt and pepper.

This is fantastic. The sauce has some of the same tomato-garlic flavor that makes our pasta sauce so amazing, but it's tempered by the roux and the stock, so it is a little creamy and the bitter chard really shines.
I did a lot of the prep in advance, as the water heated and as the chard and pasta cooked, so the actual cooking part went very smoothly.

Xocolatl de David manufactures a "Raleigh Bar" containing pecan, nougat, bacon, caramel, and sea salt. It is amazing and exquisite.

I threw a birthday party for one of my roommates, which turned out to be dinner and cake for 13 people. No pressure for my first dinner party! :D
Monday I baked the cake, using White Cake II from the '97 Joy of Cooking. I added an awful lot of food coloring and made a green and yellow checkerboard cake with three layers.
Tuesday I did the rest of the prep. I filled the cake with raspberry preserves (heated and strained directly onto the layers), frosted it with Butter Frosting (from Better Homes and Gardens Baking Book) tinted a lovely shade of purple, and decorated it. Sooj added some lovely flowers, lavender and sweet pea. Then I baked Olive Oil Bread, using 1.5 cups white flour and 1 cup white whole wheat. I keep trying to use a pizza stone and it keeps coming out thin and crispy, and oddly shaped. I need to reduce baking time a lot, and maybe try a better improvised peel. I set up the standard tomato-and-garlic pasta sauce, using 4 15-oz cans of tomatoes and scaling up appropriately. I measured out the oil, which ended up being a little too much. Next time I just eyeball it, as usual. After the sauce was simmering, with some Yellowtail Shiraz added, I prepped 5 ears of corn, cutting the tips and ends off and cutting each ear in half. That was a little harder than I expected, but I stuck them in a dish in the microwave, with some water added and saran wrap over them, and just let them wait. They eventually got microwaved for 4 minutes on high, and came out excellent.
The salad consisted of lots of different lettuces and also arugula, all from Boistfort Valley Farm, and I put the birthday girl in charge of other vegetables (carrots, red bell peppers, and celery).
I brought my food processor to a standstill making pasta with seven egg whites and five cups of flour (three white, two whole wheat). I ended up turning it out onto the counter to mix and add more water and oil to, and then back into the processor to finish. The dough came out just fine despite that.
That much pasta just barely fit into the pot, and it did boil over once or twice. I served the salad and the corn while waiting for the noodles to finish cooking, and then brought the pot and the skillet to the table.
Everyone loved all of it, which made me very happy. The sauce was exquisite, the noodles were tasty, and the cake was rich and buttery and very very colorful!
Pictures of the cake, the food, and the party to follow.

Or in other words, Kale.
Kale is this weird curly-leaved thing that tastes a lot like broccoli, but you strip it off its stems like chard. Then you add it to some garlic flowers sauteing in olive oil, with the water clinging to the leaves from washing and a little bit more. You cover it and let it cook for a little while, until it's bright green and maybe some bits are a little browned. Then you can serve it over couscous. Or other starch thing. Or maybe you could have made some sort of main dish, if you like that sort of thing.

a thing with the stuff that used to be in my old freezer
--this was basically pork fajitas, with bell peppers and tortillas.
vegetable and tofu stir fry with honey-soy-sauce glaze
--a good way to use up some stuff from my CSA box.
Beet/pea salad with dijon dressing
roast beets with feta and balsamic vinegar
Stir Crazy Cake
Sundry saladry

I was reading through one of my new roommates’ cookbooks, and found a recipe for toasted lemon pound cake with pears cooked in port. We just happened to have all the ingredients: pears at the right stage of ripeness, port, spices, and chocolate sheet cake instead of pound cake (Stir Crazy Cake, which is not too sweet or too rich, but is chocolate).

Combine 2 peeled, cored, and sliced firm pears with 1 cup port, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 stick cinnamon (broken), and 5 juniper berries. Cook until pears are medium-soft, then remove pears and cook the wine down to a syrup. Spoon pears over cake and vanilla ice cream, then drizzle all with port syrup.
I don’t think I can explain how incredibly decadent this is, and it was literally all stuff we had on hand.

Bunch carrots
Radishes
Garlic
Sugar snap peas
Shell peas
Salad bowl lettuce
Chives
Strawberries

Lilies

Last week's foods: misc salad with lettuce, radish, kohlrabi. Roast beets with feta, balsamic vinegar. Peas, strawberries, apples all eaten as-was.

Wines I liked enough to save the empty bottles:

Monkey Bay Sauvignon Blanc, from New Zealand. This was vintage 2006.
-described as "offer[ing] style and assertive fruit flavors, showing a remarkable wine with elegance and a lasting impression."

Red Sky Semillon, from Washington State. Vintage 2005
-no description, but this particular year was fantastic. Semillon is an unusual grape, but very tasty.

Page Cellars Preface Cabernet Sauvignon, 2003. Also a Washington local.
-again no description. A very complicated and dark wine, very excellent.