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Acorn Squash with Wheatberry and Cremini Mushroom Stuffing

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal (buy)

Ha! Remember me? This fall was an eventful one. A new niece, a new job, travel, what have you. Not that I'm making excuses, but... I'm totally making excuses.

So here we are. 2008 is drawing to a close, and I'm sitting in my breakfast room here in Brooklyn, watching the snow blowing around outside and listening to sad bastard songs about winter with a cup of lukewarm coffee in hand. I'm on an unprecedented two week vacation, which is thankfully giving me some time to experiment in the kitchen again, and so I've come out of hiding to share a hearty winter recipe I whipped up last night.

Acorn squash is one of my favorite winter vegetables, and this recipe was inspired by one I made from the Joy of Cooking for a winter dinner party last year, for quinoa-stuffed acorn squash. I've already documented my love for cooking with grains, but I thought the quinoa was too delicate to keep up with a veggie like acorn squash, so for this recipe I used wheatberries instead. I wanted to add a bit more heft to the stuffing, too, and the gigantic bin of cremini mushrooms at Fairway served as a delicious inspiration.

Quinoa Salad with Spring Onions, Tomato, and Feta

Of Montreal - Know Your Onion! (Shins cover)

The term "spring onion" is often used interchangeably with "green onion" and "scallion," but actually, none of these are the same thing. Steve Albert over at Harvest to Table offers a helpful breakdown of the three, explaining that each refers to a different stage of onion growth and offers its own flavor and use. You might hear spring onions referred to as salad onions, since they have a similar bite to mature onions but are usually mild enough to eat raw, in salads or otherwise.

Spring onions surfaced at my Greenmarket last week, and since I had never cooked with them before I thought I'd give them a try. I wasn't sure what I would do with them at first, but when I decided last night that my mint needed some serious pruning -- mint is a notoriously vigorous plant -- its clippings ended up being my inspiration for a salad.

Cold grain salads are one of my favorite things to make during the summer. Grains are a heartier (and usually healthier) substitute for pastas, and are just as amenable to any number of ingredients. I had some quinoa in my pantry cupboard, so I decided to combine my mint and onions with it and a few other ingredients for a simple, summery dinner.

Garlic Scape Deviled Eggs

Daniel Johnston - Devil Town (buy)

I refused to eat hard boiled eggs when I was a kid. Every Easter egg hunt ended with me emptying my basket out on the living room coffee table, separating its eggs into piles of hard boiled and chocolate varieties, and leaving the non-foil-wrapped ones for dead. Needless to say, I wasn't a fan of the egg salad that inevitably surfaced in our fridge after the festivities were over, either.

This all changed when my mom made deviled eggs for my dad's 60th birthday party a few years back. The recipe was a pesto variation, loaded with fresh basil and pine nuts. Turns out, they were also highly addictive. Since then, my opinion of hard boiled eggs has completely reversed; last summer I probably made three or four big batches of egg salad over the course of a couple months. And I ate it ALL.

About two weeks ago, I started craving deviled eggs like nobody's business. Maybe because they're one of the world's perfect picnic foods, or because that hard-boiled egg white is so cooling on the tongue on a hot day, but they just seem to perfectly encapsulate summer to me. So I set out on a mission to make some this past weekend.

What's more, we got another bunch of beautiful garlic scape in this week's CSA share, so they became my not-so-secret ingredient.

Scapes are spicy and pungent when raw, packing a similar initial punch to raw mature garlic, but the flavor is subtler and subsides quickly enough that it doesn't overwhelm the senses. This is not to say you won't experience a little garlic breath, but I guarantee it's of a much gentler variety. And well worth it.

These eggs start with Ruth Reichl's recommended method of hard boiling eggs, found in the latest edition of The Gourmet Cookbook and -- aside from peeling the eggs, perhaps -- are incredibly easy to make.

Hearty Roots Braised Bok Choy

This spring, my roommate Emily and I signed up for a vegetable share from the Greenwood Heights CSA, which gets its produce from Hearty Roots Community Farm in Tivoli, NY (yes, it's the farm that got the hipster treatment in that New York Times piece a few months back). Apart from feeling particularly good about local veggies in light of yet more food safety trouble -- we're now at 36 states reporting salmonella illness from tomatoes -- I am loving the element of surprise. We don't know what we'll get until the morning we pick it up; it's just whatever is ready for harvesting at the end of a given week.

The bonus is that the newsletter Hearty Roots sends along each week includes a recipe for one of the vegetables they're harvesting, and since some of what we've gotten so far is completely foreign to me (sweet Japanese turnips, anyone?) it's a very helpful thing. That's where this recipe for braised bok choy comes from. Braising makes the bok choy very tender and brings out the sweetness of the red onions, which is subtly offset by the acid of the rice vinegar. Easy and delicious, which was just what this lady needed after a wonderfully tiring weekend.

Blanched Sugar Snap Peas with Shallots and Thyme

As much as I might gripe that working in my neighborhood has stunted my experience of New York City over the last year (I hardly ever even ride the subway any more... it's just not right), there are distinct advantages to it. One of them is my weekly lunch break stop at the Bartel-Pritchard Greenmarket. I go right by it on my walk home, and it offers just enough to tide me over until the weekend.

Yesterday I not only got my paws on yet another pint of strawberries, but it was also the first week for sugar snap peas there. Sugar snap peas! They're like candy! Only with more fiber.

I figured I'd just leave them at the front of the fridge for easy grabbing by the handful whenever I wanted a snack, but when I got home from work last night and realized I hadn't thought at all about what I'd make for dinner, it was time to get a little more creative. This preparation calls for blanching the peas -- which both brightens them and crisps them up -- and then serving them cold. Very refreshing on yet another humid Brooklyn evening.

Parmesan Roasted Asparagus

This is a little late in coming now that asparagus season is pretty much past its peak, but if you're still coming across bunches of it at your farmers market, I highly recommend you snag some and enjoy while you can. Grocery store asparagus has nothing on the fresh stuff. (Read Barbara Kingsolver's thoughts on the matter in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and you'll start to understand the significant difference.)

Because fresh asparagus is so delicious in its simplest state, I'm usually loathe to doctor it up too much. Other times, though, I can't help myself... especially when it involves cheese. I'm a sucker for cheese.

So If you must do something to your asparagus, whether to make it more palatable to your kids or to satisfy a craving for a little something salty and fatty, here's a simple but tasty preparation.

Sautéed Kale with Toasted Walnuts and Bacon

As I mentioned in the other day's catch-all, I've spent some time in the kitchen recently saying a happy goodbye to the last of my winter veggies. Sweet potatoes, swiss chard, kale... they're all delicious, but these longer days and warmer temperatures have cranked my spring vegetable craving to 11.

Kale received my favorite send-off last week, sautéed and complemented with toasted walnuts, some nice salty bacon, and a little black currant red wine vinegar, which might just be my favorite thing in the pantry cupboard right now.

Inaugural Cookout Red Cabbage Cole Slaw

Spring is always a tricky time in the northeast. It can be nearly 80 degrees on a given day, but as soon as the clouds roll in or the sun sets the temperature drops 30 degrees, and boy howdy do you start wishing you'd worn socks. Such was the case on Saturday, when my friend Eric threw his first cookout of 2008.

I'd walked up to Grand Army Plaza that morning and wandered through the Greenmarket, loving the sunshine and all the colors of the flower vendors, getting excited for the first spring produce. None was there yet, of course, but it's only a matter of time before I get the sweet peas I've been craving for months. It was so warm that I broke a sweat walking my goodies home from the market, so I was sure we'd have a long afternoon of warm sunshine and fresh air ahead of us.

Ha.

By six, it was both cloudy and cold. By 9, I was wearing Eric's parka. But we stayed outside! And that's what counts. Plus the rewards for doing so were great: a boatload of spicy grilled chicken wings, burgers the size of my face, grilled shrimp and zucchini, grilled jalapenos with melted cheese and chive sour cream, spare ribs...

My contribution to the feast was inspired by my last stop at the Greenmarket that morning, where I'd come across some beautiful red cabbage. Remembering the deep purple cole slaw I'd enjoyed at Sparky's a few weeks ago, I thought I'd take a shot at making my own. Sure, cabbage isn't as sexy as some slow-cooked pork, but everyone needs to eat their veggies.

Fresh cole slaw is incredibly easy to make, and tastes much better than the stuff in a tub. Later in the summer, local cabbage may not be as easy to come by (it's a decidedly cool-weather crop, harvested from fall through early spring), but it definitely makes a good addition to those first barbecues of the season.

Turkey Day

It says a lot that "Turkey Day" is synonymous with Thanksgiving at this point.  I have never met a person who had much interest in the history of the holiday, but I think just about everyone I know agrees it's not Thanksgiving if you don't stuff your face.

Thanksgiving in my family happens at my parents' house with my dad's side of the family and occasionally an aunt or my grammie on my mom's side.  Regardless, there are always at least 16 people and enough food to feed each of them for about five days.

There was the requisite bird, weighing in at almost 20 pounds.

Our one attempt at raw, healthy vegetables -- a salad my mom concocted of red leaf lettuce, clementines, cranberry Wensleydale, and spiced pecans, with a dressing of almond oil and ginger vinegar.

And everything else.

The two staples we have at every Thanksgiving are thanks to my dad's Portuguese roots: simple Portuguese rolls, which aren't terribly different from other rolls except that they are inexplicably superior, and my aunt Winnie's stuffing, which is spicy with chourico.  This year, I was thankful for the fact that she made a double recipe.

Dinner was topped off with four pies -- pumpkin, squash, orange-pecan, and apple -- and a plate of cupcakes, since two of the kids in our family have birthdays right around the holiday.  A vanilla cupcake with sprinkles and chocolate frosting may not be traditional, but dear god it tasted good.

The rest of my weekend was spent at the Scrabble board, eating leftovers, and/or visiting with friends from home.  It was lovely.

I hope everyone's Thanksgiving was peaceful, delicious, and lazy.  Enjoy those leftovers.