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.

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.

Delicious and Funny-Sounding, It's Rhubarb!

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I lived the first 27 and a half years of my life without ever knowingly consuming rhubarb. What?!

Happily, that changed yesterday. I'd gone up to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket this past Saturday and rhubarb seemed to be everywhere, its red and green stalks poking out of crates at more than a couple stands. They were a hard sight to resist, so I went ahead and bought myself a bunch despite having no idea what I would do with it.

Remembering that I had some boneless pork chops in my freezer, I thought I might try out a sauce for them. I love sweet and savory combinations like pork chops and apple sauce, so maybe something similar could be done with rhubarb, which is so tart on its own it almost always needs to be sweetened.

The result of this experiment was a simple compote. Combining the rhubarb with shallots and fresh thyme yielded a dish that's indicative of this time of year for me - somewhere between winter and spring, at once hearty, fresh, and crisp. Needless to say, I was pleased. And, by the end of it, quite full.

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.

White Chili, My New Best Friend

It's a cold, very blustery gray day in Brooklyn today - the kind that makes it hard to believe it's the first day of spring. And since I evidently have the circulation of an 85-year-old, my fingers and nose are freezing as I sit here typing. So, what better time to talk about cooking up a big pot of bubbling chili?

When we were in North Carolina for the New Year, D and I spent a night at his folks' place in Raleigh before heading out to the coast. His mom sent us on our way with a fresh batch of white chili, which I'd somehow never encountered in all my years of eating. How sad not to have experienced such deliciousness earlier in life! But Jean made it easy for me to play catch-up... when she packed up the chili, she also packed up a copy of her recipe.

White chili is so called because its primary ingredients are white beans and chicken, making it a considerably paler relative of what the word "chili" normally conjures up. Most recipes for it tend to be milder, too, but that's easily remedied.

Not long ago, I spent a couple afternoons preparing for and tinkering with my own pot of white chili.

I probably opted for the most time-consuming method possible (read on), but in the end it was worth it.

Chickeny Goodness

I think chicken gets a bad rap sometimes. It's become this sort of default protein that just gets fried, drowned in sauce, or reconstituted into fun shapes to distract from how supposedly boring it is on its own. Not so! Give the chicken its bones and skin back and then give it a chance, I say.

Last winter, I was turned on to the whole roasted chicken. Not those sticky rotisserie jobs at the supermarket, but rather the raw thing, rinsed, seasoned, and then tucked into my oven for a couple hours. It's incredibly easy, plus it makes the kitchen (and then some) smell delightful.

The only trouble with roasting a chicken for one or two people is that, once I've enjoyed my serving fresh from the oven, the remaining chicken goes into the fridge, after which it's impossible to duplicate that fresh-from-the-oven taste ever again. So what does a person do with all that cold chicken?

Well, it may be February, but I'll tell you what: roasted chicken makes the best chicken salad I've ever had. Lots of recipes call for boiled chicken, particularly of the boneless and skinless variety, which almost always makes for a dry and generally disappointing chicken experience. But roasted chicken holds on to the fat and juices that keep the meat from drying out, and using a whole bird also means being able to use the dark meat, which I've always found to be more moist and flavorful, anyway.

(Chicken salad pictured here with Bread Alone's whole grain health bread, my new sandwich love.)

And hey, once you've carved all that meat off for the salad, plunk that chicken carcass into 4 quarts of water with some onions, celery, carrots, garlic, fresh parsley, salt, peppercorns, and cloves; simmer for a few hours; and you've got yourself the base for some nice hot soup. (In my case, it was kale and turkey meatball.)

Vive le poulet!

Can It.

The absence! The neglect! Oh, the humanity!

Hi friends. It’s been one heck of a summer. Between starting gainful, full-time employment and attending approximately 236 weddings, there was little time left for blogging. But food adventures abounded, and my next few entries will be dedicated to the ones worth sharing, if well after the fact.

Most recently was my first foray into canning, which was inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s first book of non-fiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver, an author whose fiction I’ve always loved, documented a year in which her family moved from their home in Arizona for a more sustainable location – their family farm in Virginia. The work is inspiring; they raise almost all of the food they consume in a year on their own land, both consuming it fresh and preserving it to last them through the winter. They raise and harvest their own poultry, bake their own bread, and case their own sausage. And while it may not be feasible for us all to do exactly the same things, Kingsolver’s partner Steven Hopp and daughter Camille offer sidebars of wisdom about how to adapt the same principles for where and how we live, even in the city (fire escape gardens, anyone?).

When I reached the chapter about August and Kingsolver began talking about preserving peaches and tomatoes for the winter months, it got me thinking. While I was home in Massachusetts for a vacation at the end of the summer, my mother made and canned beach plum jelly from fruit we’d picked off the trees in the front yard. I loved the idea of making these little fruits, which I definitely would not find anywhere in Brooklyn, both transportable and longer-lasting. Just having that little jar in my Park Slope refrigerator reminds me of the trees growing out of the sandy soil of our front yard and of spending an hour in the sun with a giant bowl, plucking the dark purple fruit off the trees (and maybe snitching a few in the process).

Since September is really the last hurrah for a lot of wonderful fruits, I got to thinking about this canning stuff. At first it seemed too daunting to try at home (I just count my mother among the wizards whose success in the kitchen is unattainable by mere mortals), but the more I read about it, the more I realized you don’t need a water bath canner or a magnetic lid lifter. Sure, they help, but with a deep sauce pot, a good pair of tongs, and a couple other standard kitchen utensils, it’s not hard at all.

So a couple Sundays ago, when I realized I had some time on my hands and the farmers market up the block was still selling beautiful New Jersey tomatoes, I went and bought three bagsful and started in on some Family Secret Tomato Sauce. Much to my amazement, the sauce turned out great, my jars did not explode in the canning bath, and the next morning I had four beautiful, sealed jars of fresh tomato sauce to use at my leisure over the winter months.

There are tips on home canning all over the web, so I'd suggest just typing that phrase into your search engine. I definitely plan on using this newfound knowledge again soon; with green tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and green beans filling tables at the farmers markets these days, I’m planning on taking a stab at homemade pickles. In the meantime, I’ll continue to stare fondly at my marinara every time I go to the pantry cupboard.

A Reemergence, or: Adventures in Peanuts

Oh, dear.  In case any of you are still around to wonder, there have been extenuating circumstances in the life of yours truly that have made it increasingly difficult to keep up appearances in these parts.  I hope you'll forgive my absence as I start in on a much-needed spring break and try to get things back on track around here.

First order of business: a new food adventure. 

I was recently made aware of the phenomenon of Southern cooking known as boiled (which, if you want to be authentic about it, should be pronounced "bald") peanuts, a phrase that had never passed my Yankee ears until a few weeks ago.  Lo and behold, boiled peanuts are evidently so popular that they warrant their own Wikipedia entry.  I had no idea. 

Over a game of dominoes the other night, one particular southerner with a bag of raw peanuts on his kitchen shelf decided it was time to have a go at boiling his own.  I was lucky enough to bear witness.  I can't say there was much of a recipe involved, but the idea here is to heavily salt and season a very large pot of water and then boil the peanuts in their shells until they've turned purple and very, very soft. 

This particular pot of water contained a healthy dose of sea salt and Old Bay, as well as a liberal handful of dried chilli peppers.  Once the water came to a boil, in went the peanuts, and there they stayed for a little over two hours.  The water boiled down a lot, so some had to be added back in every once in a while. After frequent testing once the peanuts had reached the two-hour mark, they finally turned the requisite shade of pale purple and squished between our fingers if we weren't careful enough popping open the shells (what a wonderful sound). 

Word on the street is that boiled peanuts should be eaten warm, and if you're feeling particularly hardcore, you can eat them whole, shell and all.  Any leftovers should be stored in the fridge to prevent slime.

And so begins my return to the blogosphere.  More to come, I promise.

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!).

Best of All, There's Only One Pot to Wash

A trip to the Tompkins Square Farmers Market this fall yielded some ground turkey from DiPaola Turkey Farm (Hamilton Square, NJ), which I immediately froze.  I realized today that I should probably come up with a use for it and decided to whip up a batch of chili.

I love chili for so many reasons -- it's really cheap and easy to make, it freezes well, and it's yummy.  A pot of decent chili can cost less than $15 plus labor time to make, and for someone like me who's generally only cooking for one or two, one recipe can make six or eight meals' worth of soup.

Winter in New York has been mild thus far, but I'm prepared for the cold snap if and when it arrives.