fauren

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.

You Can Do Your Homework While It Rises

Fauren has taken a back seat to school lately, but after buying some flax seeds last week and then realizing I didn't particularly know what to do with them, I found a little time to bake some bread.  I'm not a big baker (cooking is so much more sympathetic to those of us who don't like measuring), but the thought of filling the apartment with smell of fresh-baked bread on one of these ungodly cold days was pretty appealing.

This bread is relatively dense since spelt and whole wheat don't rise quite as well as white flour, but it's hearty, a little sweet, and makes a good sandwich.

Fauren's Spelt-Whole Wheat Bread
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
2 cups warm water
3 tablespoons agave nectar (or honey)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2 teaspoons salt
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
4 cups spelt flour
1 cup flax seeds

Stir the yeast, water, and agave together in a bowl and let sit until yeast softens, about 10 minutes. Add butter, salt, and whole wheat flour.  Stir until blended, then add spelt flour one cup at a time until dough is too thick to stir.  Remove dough from bowl and knead on a lightly floured surface for 5-6 minutes, until it is well-blended and elastic.

Place dough in lightly greased bowl and cover with a towel or dish rag.  Let rise until the dough has doubled in size, about 2 hours.

Punch down the dough and separate into two halves, placing each in a lightly greased 8.5" x 4.5" bread pan.  Cover again and let rise again for one more hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Bake loaves for about 45 minutes, or until bread is light brown and crusty on top.  Remove from oven and let cool completely on a wire rack before storing (but feel free to start eating anytime!).

Organic Shmorganic

On my way home from the gym today, I walked past my corner bodega and glimpsed something in the window that made my brain stop whatever it was doing (not much) and go whooooa.  Kellogg's ORGANIC Raisin Bran?! I could not believe my eyes.

Sure enough, shortly after launching Toasteds Organic Harvest Wheat Crackers in June of last year, Kellogg's came out with a line of organic versions of three of their more popular breakfast cereals.  If I wasn't convinced of the usurping of the word "organic" by Big Food before, this is pretty much the nail in the coffin.  As far as I can tell, the effort by Kellogg's was the result of Wal-Mart's decision to claim their piece of the organics market, and, as Melanie Warner said in the New York Times, "because of its size and power, Wal-Mart usually gets what it wants."

Yuck.

Mark Morford of the SF Gate almost perfectly sums up how I feel, if with a little more snark:

Did you know? Did you already understand the real definition? Because that's what "organic" was really supposed to mean, way back when: local, sustainable, ethical, connected to source, pesticide- and hormone-free. But the vast majority of organic product now flooding the market only gloms on to that last aspect (and sometimes, barely even that), to meet the USDA's impotent organic guidelines. Ah, government. There's just nothing like it to make you want to smack yourself in the skull with a brick.

SF Gate: The Sad Death of Organic
New York Times: Wal-Mart Eyes Organic Foods (registration required)

Silver Spoon Strawberry Risotto

I decided on Saturday to finally purchase The Silver Spoon, the storied Italian cookbook that was translated into English for the first time last year.  If nothing else, it's very pretty.

When I got home from the bookstore, I opened it up to browse some of the recipes.  The very first recipe I laid eyes on was for strawberry risotto, something that struck me as both strange and serendipitous; strange simply because I'd never encountered a savory dish featuring strawberries before, and serendipitous because I'd just purchased some beautiful Tristar strawberries from Fantasy Fruit Farm at the farmer's market in Tompkins Square Park (corner of Avenue A and East 7th Street, New York), which takes place every Sunday.  It was a clear sign that the risotto should be my first attempted Silver Spoon recipe, so this afternoon I headed over to my neighborhood supermarket to purchase the remaining ingredients for the dish. 

First, a couple of liberties I took: 

• I substituted short-grain brown rice for a standard white risotto rice.  I may have sacrificed some of the creaminess as a result, but brown rice is a bit more nutritious (it has more fiber and nutrients than white rice, and it has a lower glycemic index). 

• I used 3/4 of a cup fewer strawberries than the recipe called for because the flavor of the Tristars was so robust.  I also did not completely hull them; they were so ripe that removing the caps was all that was necessary.

• Rather than using the full 7 tablespoons of butter the recipe called for, I used only two and substituted extra virgin olive oil for the rest.

I also debated about the cup of light cream that finishes off the recipe.  It seemed a bit like cheating for the right texture, but admittedly I couldn't resist the idea of an entrée that managed to have both strawberries and cream in it.

The risotto took just over an hour to make from prep to dinner time.  Aside from the constant stirring required of any risotto, it was very little work for a meal with a surprisingly complex flavor.

I was more than happy with my first bite.

The flavor of the strawberries had mellowed considerably, making room for the savory ingredients, and the cream added a delightful richness that I'm sure I would have missed if I'd decided against using it.  As a result, each bite had a nice trajectory from tart to buttery to nutty.

The garnish is more of my Anise Hyssop.  It worked very well here, too.