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.

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.

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.

On Tomatoes

My love of the tomato blossomed relatively late in life.  I did that thing kids often do, swearing off the actual fruit (probably without even having tasted it) and only eating its most un-tomato-ey incarnations: ketchup, canned tomato soup, artificially sweetened pasta sauce. 

It wasn't until I was a sophomore in high school that I ate my first slice of raw tomato in earnest, in a turkey sandwich made for me by my friend's aunt on Long Island.  (It goes to show how momentous the experience was that I still remember it so vividly.) By the time my mother's landmark Summer of the Tomato came around, I was finally able to pop one in my mouth in its most naked state without so much as a wince. 

Since then, I've taken it upon myself to make up for lost time.  Thankfully, this season is off to a spectacular start. It began when I was home with my parents, with some startlingly sweet and juicy yellow gooseberry tomatoes from Walker's Roadside Stand in Little Compton, Rhode Island (261 West Main Road). 

(I will keep from saying more about Walker's now; it most assuredly deserves its own post.)

And just today I experienced what can only be described as tomato bliss, in the form of one Yellow Perfection (aptly named) and a handful of red grape tomatoes, all from a farm in upstate New York that I swear the man I spoke to said was called Standard Farm, though I've found no evidence of them online.  And we all know if it's not on the Internet, it must not exist.*

Anyway, the tomatoes needed very little adornment, but I took the liberty of dressing them up with a sprinkle of extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and some chopped Anise Hyssop that I got from Pumpkin's Organic Market (1302 8th Avenue, Brooklyn) this past week.  It's a member of the mint family, with a strong licorice scent but very subtle flavor--a very nice alternative to basil.

In hindsight, the tomatoes didn't need even those little additions, so I think I'll polish the rest off tomorrow in their natural state.

* August 21 update: After some investigating, I discovered that the farm is actually called Stannard Farm, and they are located in Johnsonville, NY.