Couscous

About a year ago, a reader suggested that I check out a recipe in Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Plenty for something he calls Ultimate Winter Couscous (also available on his blog on the Guardian). Well, it took a while for me to get around to it, but I finally made it for dinner a few weeks ago. It should come as no surprise at all that it’s another winner. I admit, the ingredient list is a bit long. But if you are someone who cooks a lot, chances are most of these things are in your pantry anyway. And if they’re not, then this is an excellent excuse to go out and buy some saffron and preserved lemons, and to make up a batch of harissa. 

Start with a roasting pan, with chopped carrots and parsnips, peeled shallots, cinnamon sticks, star anise, bay leaves, ginger, turmeric, paprika, and chili flakes. Toss with olive oil and salt, and roast in a moderately hot oven for 15 minutes.

Add some cubed winter squash, and stick it back in the oven for another half hour or so, until the veggies are tender.

While that’s doing its thing, get the couscous ready. Mix the dry couscous with a pinch of saffron, salt, and olive oil in a big bowl. Pour boiling water (or veggie stock, if you’ve got it) over it, stir it up, and stick a plate on top of the bowl until the water is absorbed, about 10 minutes. Stir in a little butter and put the plate back on top until you’re ready to serve.

Add some chopped dried apricots, cooked (or canned) chickpeas, and some water (or the chickpea cooking liquid) to the roasting pan and cook another 10 minutes. 

Just before serving, stir in some harissa paste and chopped preserved lemon skin into the veggies. 

Serve a couple of big spoonfuls of the vegetables over a plate of the couscous, and top with a lot of fresh cilantro.

It’s a very flavorful dish without being overwhelming, and filling without being too rich. It may no longer be winter, technically, but the pickings are still pretty slim at my greenmarket, so a dinner based on root vegetables and legumes isn’t out of the question just yet.

Fancy Pants

I have this ridiculous cookbook that is a vanity publication from Relais & Châteaux, highlighting all the wonderful things that come out of their North American-based celebrity chefs’ kitchens. Chefs with last names like Keller, Vongerichten, and Boulud. Each glossy spread includes multiple recipes–for example, a 3-step pork brine, a sauce, lentils, and cauliflower 2 ways. You know, you’re typical Tuesday night dinner. It’s a really enormous, beautiful, & useless book. Or so I thought until I was looking for something to do with these short ribs I bought from Lewis Waite Farm a few months ago. They’d been taking up space in my freezer for too long, so I decided that the menu for dinner the other night was going to include some beef. 

The plan was not to make anything especially fancy, but my cookbooks tend to lean vegetarian, so I pulled this massive thing off my shelf and, naturally (given current trends in high-end restaurants), discovered multiple options. And one, even, from the Rancho Valencia in Rancho Santa Fe, California, that looked like my little galley kitchen could handle it. So I ran to the greenmarket, picked up a few missing ingredients, and got to work. 

First, an acorn squash, split, seeded, and roasted:

And then pureed with butter, cream, brown sugar, and star anise. 

Then a pile of shallots, peeled and simmered in red wine, with a sachet (or teabag) of black peppercorns, a bay leaf, and thyme.

Peeling shallots is definitely a job for your kitchen bitch. Or sous chef. 

But then we get to move onto the meat. After seasoning it with salt and letting it sit in the fridge overnight, it gets browned on both sides in a hot pan. 

Cook some onions, carrots, and celery over medium-high heat until they are more or less caramelized. 

Add tomato paste, crushed garlic cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, star anise, and bay leaf. 

Then in go some thyme, parsley, and red wine, followed by the ribs. Cover with water and veal demiglace (or stock, if you’re me), bring to a boil, and then simmer in the oven for about 3 hours. 

The very specific plating instructions involve something called a siphon, which requires an N2O charge. Alternately, spoon a little of the squash puree onto a plate, place a rib on top. Place a few shallots around the outside, and pour some of the wine reduction on top. 

There’s also something called a cocoa bordelaise (not pictured), with which you “nape” (?) the meat, but this was kind of a disaster for me, possibly because of the stock/demiglace switch. Hence the lack of picture.

On the whole, though, this was a big success. Even S., a notoriously finicky eater, asked for seconds. 

Skin and All

The silver lining I’m forcing myself to see about Hurricane Irene is that it forced me to do the annual re-learning how to shop for produce during peak harvest season. Normally, by the time my farm stops delivering, all that’s at the greenmarket is potatoes and apples, which means I go back to spending my entire paycheck at the Italian market up the street, where I have my pick of all kinds of non-seasonal and exotic fruits & veggies. But this year, I have spent a lot of time (and money) at the Union Square Greenmarket, opening up my kitchen to a much wider variety of local, seasonal things to cook with. Not that Stoneledge’s harvest is a monoculture by any means, but we typically get one variety of potato, 2 alternating kinds of Swiss chard, a few tomatoes, maybe some funky heirloom eggplants in addition to the more usual Italian. And it is all wonderful. But they don’t grow yellow carrots*, or purple potatoes, or red kuri squash, the key ingredient in a very tempting soup from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours.

Red kuri is a funny beast. It is a variety of winter squash that can grow quite large. It can be lumpy and kind of intimidating, but it has a couple of secrets, revealed to me by Dorie. One, it tastes a like chestnuts. And two, the skin is edible.

I abandoned the French Fridays with Dorie project after about 6 months, because that was about as much time as I was willing to have other people guide my choice of what to make for dinner (even just two or three nights a month). Also, I felt I had gotten a pretty good idea of the book we were cooking from, and I was just as happy to keep exploring it at my own pace, and at my own direction. Or to retread some ground. (I made her poached spiced pears for dessert just last night, I’ve done several varieties of the savory cheese quick bread, and I really enjoyed the tomato variation on the mustard tart.)

So I don’t know if the group has done this recipe yet, and it’s not Friday, but even so, this soup is worth some attention. There are very few ingredients, usually a good sign to my mind, so do try to find the highest quality available to you if you decide to make this for dinner. The squash needs to be washed thoroughly–dirt can very easily sneak into the funny crevices, and you’ll be eating the beautiful red-orange skin, so really give it a scrub. Then cut it in half:

and scoop out the seeds & membranes. Kuri seeds are awfully hard & thick, so they are not really the best for toasting, but give it a try if you want (I did not). Then cut it all up into big chunks. The color contrast between the skin and the flesh is much more striking in person than on a computer screen.

Wash and cut up a couple of leeks, too (though possibly not in that order, depending on your preferred leek-washing method). Also big chunks.

Toss the veggies in a big pot with equal parts milk & water, and a good bit of salt.

It’ll need to simmer for about a half an hour, until the squash is soft enough to mash up. But instead of mashing it up, run it through a food mill, or puree it in a blender, or with the brand new emersion blender your mom got you as a birthday gift (thanks, mom!). I recommend not blending it TOO much, though, because it’s so lovely to be able to see the flecks of dark skin mixed into the lighter base of the soup.

Dorie’s suggestion for serving is to add diced apple, toasted walnuts, and a little creme fraiche, and as with so many of her suggestions, it is excellent and flexible. Asian pear would probably be great, or try some other varieties of nuts. And as always in my kitchen, sour cream is a good creme fraiche alternative for this kind of thing. Some other suggested variations are on Dorie’s own post about this (along with the complete recipe).

A bit of good bread, toasted and spread thinly with some blue cheese, is also quite nice.

*When I was up at the farm to help with a garlic planting this fall, the farm explained to us that some heirloom varieties just don’t grow as well for them, and require a lot more attention–especially the weird colored veggies.

Soup Out of Season

Yes, I made this sweetcorn soup with chipotle and lime a while ago. It’s been a busy couple of months, and the CSA Files has taken a back seat. I’ve made a lot of great meals that won’t be featured on this blog anytime soon, unless I make them again and manage to take some pictures. Which I just might, because that polenta with sauteed mushrooms and tomatillo sauce was really kind of amazing (especially garnished with some pickled jalapenos and onions, courtesy of M. and S.). And there was a rhubarb crisp that C. and I made, mostly sweetened with honey, and flavored with coriander, that was quite good–and even better with some Greek yogurt on top. And there was a really lovely, simple frittata that resulted from my inability to resist ramps, asparagus, and green garlic at the little farmer’s market near my apartment.

Truthfully, though, I haven’t been cooking as much as I’d like to lately. My office has moved right near the greenmarket, but shopping there is so much more expensive than the (often superior) produce I get through Stoneledge, so I haven’t taken as much advantage as I’d expected. Though what I keep forgetting is that eating out isn’t really much cheaper, unless you live on falafel sandwiches and mediocre Chinese food. 

So to fill in some blanks before deliveries start again in two weeks (!), here’s something from a few months ago, back when it was cold enough that winter squash soup was a very welcome prospect. Ottolenghi is always welcome in my kitchen, but I’m going to have to dig into some of the faster cooking recipes in the coming months, if this weekend’s weather is a sign of heat & humidity to come. 

Start with some shallots, celery, garlic, and spices in a pot with olive oil. Saute over low heat until they soften.

Add pumpkin (I think I used some of the pureed butternut squash we got over the winter–it seemed to work fine, though the recipe calls for chunks), bay leaves, lime zest (an acceptable substitute for lime leaves), water, and a softened, chopped chipotle chile. Simmer a bit and then add corn kernels (frozen is fine, especially if it’s late winter). 

Cook another five minutes, and then puree the soup as much as you feel like. M. and I did not feel like it at all, so we just removed the bay leaves & lime zest and served as is. 

Serve with sour cream, fresh lime juice, and cilantro. 

Loves Winter, Snow, and Ice (Cream)

Oh my goodness, I made this pumpkin ice cream so long ago I’ve even come up with a use for the egg whites by now (coconut macaroons). (Note that egg whites freeze very well, but you should write on the container how many there are.) And it was the second time I made it, even. But until someone invents a technology whereby I can share the actual food via this blog, like J. and I used to wish we could do over the phone in high school, then it doesn’t really matter how long it takes until I get around to writing it up, does it?

Start off with a potful of milk, cream, sugar, and the spices. Lebovitz calls for ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg, though you could definitely play around with that mix depending on your personal inclinations. Heat it up until the sugar dissolves and the milk begins to bubble around the edges.

Slowly mix a bit of that hot milk into your egg yolks to temper them (whites saved for the aforementioned macaroons, or angel food cake, or meringues…)

and then pour the contents of the bowl back into the pot with the rest of the milk, and slowly heat it up to the point of custard. I decided to (try to) be exact and use a candy thermometer instead of my usual eyeballing method. This was a mistake. 

Here is why: if the liquid in the pot is shallow enough that the tip of the thermometer touches the bottom of the pot when it’s submersed enough to read the temperature, then it will give you a false reading. The pot will be hotter than the contents. Similarly, if you are trying to use a meat thermometer, you can’t let it touch the bone (of a chicken thigh, for example). Therefore, you should just learn to cook the old-fashioned gadget-free way, by using your eyes and your nose and your fingers, and save your money for more fun/useful gadgets like ice cream makers, Sodastreams, and mandolins. Just try and julienne a bowl full of beets with only your knife. It’s possible, and it will improve your knife skills, but it’s a pain in the ass. I also do not recommend a hand-cranked ice cream maker, unless your dad is around to take over when you get tired/bored after 2 minutes.

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After you’ve got your custard, strain it into a bowl over an ice bath, and mix in some brown sugar. Chill it, and then before churning, add in some vanilla extract, the pumpkin puree (bonus points for homemade, though canned is perfectly good), and whatever else you like. Maybe some rum. Or bourbon would probably be good. And walnuts are great. Chocolate chips would be wonderful, I think, given how great the pumpkin-chocolate combination works in cake form. Or crushed up gingersnaps. Or speculoos. Have a ball. And then churn away.

Not Your Grandmother’s Flan

I have been noticing this month that many of the other participants in French Fridays* with Dorie were expressing slight anxiety about making this particular recipe. Some of them even conceded, after making it, that it was not really to their liking. I guess this is fine. Admittedly, there are a few things that even I do not enjoy eating (smoked fish, caviar, and tapioca are on the short list). But, really, this is eggs, pumpkin, cheese, and nuts. What’s not to like?

Ok, yes, it is blue cheese (gorgonzola, specifically), and I guess there are more people with an aversion to that particular variety than to, say, cheddar. I am quite impressed that so many people signed up for a project that included something they were so nervous about–and that so many followed through and made the damn thing. But for me, this is recipe a small piece of bliss. And incredibly simple to make.

Normal flan is not my thing. Give me a creme brulee any day of the week, but keep your soggy flans. Maybe if they all had the crunch of toasted walnuts on top, I’d be a flan fan.

For this savory one, you need some cooked winter squash, eggs, and milk. If you’ve got a can of pumpkin, wonderful. If not, or if you’d rather use up some of the excess of butternut you’ve been getting in your CSA box (ahem), roast it or steam it and stick it in the blender with the other ingredients.

Puree away, and then pour into buttered ramekins in a bain-marie. I gotta say, I don’t quite understand why Dorie has us put a piece of paper towel under the ramekins, but I kind of trust her not to steer me wrong.

Sprinkle on top some crumbled gorgonzola and chopped walnuts. Stick in a hot oven for as long as it takes. The size of my ramekins was not the size of Dorie’s, so the timing was not accurate, but it’s easy enough to see when they start to puff up and pull away from the sides, and also when a knife comes out clean. Serve with something green, just for the sake of appearances.**

*Yes, it still is a Friday thing. I was busy this week, hence a day late.
**By which I mean visual aesthetics. I would never order you to eat your vegetables. Plus, pumpkin is a vegetable already, so you’ve got that covered.

For the Love of Harissa

I have been craving harissa lately. Harissa is a Tunisian condiment, common all over North Africa (and beyond). It is sweet and spicy and rich with olive oil and hot chile peppers. Try it on bread, eggs, vegetables, meat–I’ve even seen it used on pasta. Much like chimichurri in South America or sriracha in Southeast Asia, there are dozens upon dozens of variations, both homemade and available commercially. You may well have your own favorite recipe or brand; mine is from David Tanis’s book A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes. It’s got fennel, caraway, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and garlic. And I’ve had a serious yen for it the last few weeks. Luckily, my spice cabinet is very well stocked, so made up a batch the other night–and then had to figure out what to eat with it.

Something drew me to the combination of harissa and turnips. I’ve found turnips to be a little astringent in the past–I can’t help thinking of horseradish when I cut them up.  So I thought roasting them (with some other vegetables) would bring out some sweetness, and then drizzling with harissa would add a welcome bass note to the flavor profile of the dish.

“Other vegetables” ended up being carrots, Carnival squash, and beets. I wasn’t sure how beets and harissa would do together, but since it seems some recipes for harissa include pureed beets, I figured it would turn out ok.

While the veggies roasted (with a couple cloves of garlic, some thyme, a bay leaf, and a dried chile pepper), I cooked up a pot of bulgur. This involves boiling some water, dumping in the bulgur, turning off the heat, and leaving to sit (covered) until the rest of the meal is ready. It’s that easy, as Ina would say. You can use stock, too, if you like. I did not, but I added the same aromatics as I did to the veggies–bay, thyme, dried chile. And then when it was properly soaked, I drained it and mixed in some fresh parsley and mint.

By that time, the veggies were all nicely roasted. Note that many recipes for “roasted root vegetables” advise you to cut everything into roughly equal-sized pieces. This is not actually the best way to go, in my mind, in retrospect. Carrots are nice when there is still a little crunch to them. Turnips cook quicker than beets, and both must be cooked all the way through to be enjoyable. Sweet potatoes would be nice, but I had winter squash, and that cooks faster than anything else in the baking dish. Just something to think about for next time.

In the end, this is basically a salad: grain + vegetable + dressing. Normally I don’t bother to write about such simple meals, but there’s so much good flavor in this one that I’m making an exception.

Roasted Vegetables with Bulgur and Harissa
serves 4

1/2 lb each of:
    turnips
    carrots
    beets
    winter squash (or whatever sturdy vegetables you like and have on hand)
2 garlic cloves, lightly smashed and peeled
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
2 dried chile peppers
1 c bulgur
2 c water
2 Tbsp parsley, chopped
1 Tbsp mint, chopped
olive oil
salt
fresh ground pepper
harissa, to taste (Tanis’s recipe is available here, among other places–or use your own)

Preheat the oven to 400F.
Peel the vegetables and cut them into roughly bite-sized pieces, going a little smaller on tougher things like beets and larger on things that cook faster, like winter squash. Toss them into a baking dish with some olive oil, salt, the garlic cloves, 1 thyme sprig, 1 bay leaf, and 1 dried pepper. Roast for 25-35 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked to your liking.
Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a saucepan. Pour in a teaspoon or two of salt, and then the bulgur, along with the remaining thyme, bay, and pepper. Turn off the heat and slap a lid on the pot. Let it sit, 15-20 minutes, until the bulgur has absorbed all (or most) of the water. If there’s still water left in the pot when the texture of the grain is right, strain it through a sieve. Then stir in the chopped parsley and mint.
Pick out the aromatics from both the bulgur and the veggies, and combine in a big bowl. Serve with as much harissa as you like.

Improv Night

Q: After your pizza party, what can be made with the leftover tomato sauce, ricotta, mozzarella, and caramelized onions, that also uses up some kale and winter squash?

A: Lasagne.

As I may have mentioned in the past, my mom makes fantastic lasagne. (Family tradition holds that it’s the best we’ve ever tasted, every time.) It’s a pretty traditional version, with tomato sauce, ground beef, a little sausage, and a lot of shredded mozzarella and ricotta. I’ve never attempted to make her recipe, mostly because my instinct is that it would not live up to the standard. So instead I’ve learned to make vegetarian lasagne. Usually it’s with Swiss chard and roasted eggplant (a Deborah Madison recipe, of course), but that’s not what was in the fridge this week. So I decided to be brave and wing it. 

First, I blanched and chopped some kale (stems removed). Then, I mixed that up with the ricotta, an egg, and the caramelized onions. 

I bought some sheets of fresh pasta at my favorite Italian market, which were about as wide as my baking dish, and quite a bit longer. I trimmed them to be the right size before parboiling for a minute, only to be reminded that things get bigger when they’ve absorbed some water. So my pasta sheets wound up a bit too big; I decided not to care.

The order of the layers doesn’t really matter, I don’t think. I started with a little tomato sauce in the bottom of the dish, because that’s how mom does it. Then a layer of pasta, followed by some of the kale/ricotta mixture.

Next, some roasted squash (acorn) mashed up with chopped fresh sage. 

Then thin slices of fresh mozzarella, a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce, and a generous handful of grated parmesan. Repeat, with three layers of filling sandwiched between 4 layers of noodle. Top the last pasta layer with tomato sauce and parmesan, then cover with foil and bake.

Let it be said that I don’t actually recommend making this dish unless you have several of the elements already on hand. It would be preposterous to make a batch of tomato sauce just for this occasion, or to caramelize onions (which takes a good hour to do it properly). And then there’s the kale-blanching and squash-roasting. But damn, I do love lasagne. And when you have a sort of random day off from work, is there really a better thing to do than to linger in the kitchen and cook up a dish of it in a very leisurely fashion? C. and I enjoyed it greatly, with some sage-garlic bread, followed by almost-the-last pink peppercorn ice cream.

Kale and Winter Squash Lasagne

4 sheets of fresh pasta, or 12 individual lasagne noodles
2 c tomato sauce
1-1 1/2 c ricotta
1/2 lb mozzarella (fresh is awesome, but dried and grated works just as well)
1 egg
1 lb kale
1/4 c caramelized onions
2 acorn squash, roasted
grated parmesan
fresh sage
salt & pepper

Preheat the oven to 400F.
Parboil the pasta and put in a bowl of cool water to hold while you get the rest of the elements together. (Or, alternately, use no-boil lasagne, which is practically all you can find these days anyway.)
Remove the stems from the kale and blanch the leaves in salted water. Drain and chop coarsely. Mix together with the ricotta, egg, and onions. Season with salt & pepper.
Chop up the sage finely and mix it up with the roasted squash.
If using fresh mozzarella, slice it as thin as you can.
Pour a bit of tomato sauce in the bottom of your (9″ x 12″) lasagne pan. Add a layer of noodles, followed by layers of the kale/ricotta, the squash mixture, the mozzarella, more tomato sauce, and a handful of grated parmesan. Slap on another noodle layer, squish it down a little to get out any air, and repeat the layers. And again. On top of the final layer of pasta, pour the last of the tomato sauce and some more grated parmesan.
Cover with tin foil (tented, if you can, so the sauce and cheese don’t just stick to it) and bake for 35-45 minutes. Remove the foil and bake another 15 minutes.
Serve, traditionally, with garlic bread.

Top Your Own Pizza Party

This past Sunday, L., M., P., and our respective +1s came over for the latest round of Cook Club. We had all semi-tacitly agreed that it would be a more casual affair this time, and for whatever reason, I settled on making pizza. I made a bunch of antipasti/salads, prepped the toppings, made the dough, went a little crazy at Murrays’, and let everyone do their own thing. 

The pre-pizza spread: kidney beans with shallots and parsley; pan-seared shishito peppers; Treviso potato salad (with radicchio, from Lynne Rossetto Kasper); Sweet and Sour Grilled Pumpkin (which I’ve made before); Shredded Collard Greens with Walnuts and Pickled Apples; and sweet-tart salad of basil, sorrel, and apple (also from Rossetto Kasper–this was the star of the show, I think).

Really, though, the point is the pizza. Because of the limited amount of space in my oven, and also in my kitchen, we made our pizzas in pairs. But pizza only takes 10 minutes to cook (which I know to be a fact, from my summer working at Panzone’s) and cheese retains heat better than just about anything, so we all still ate at roughly the same time. I’d made pesto, and tomato sauce (from the many pounds of tomatoes A. and I picked up at Stoneledge), roasted peppers, made “oven-candied” tomatoes, cooked up some sausage, caramelize some onions, and bough pepperoni and mushrooms.

Enough with the preamble. Here are our beautiful creations:

For dessert, we had cookies and ice cream. There had been a request for a repeat of the pink peppercorn ice cream I made back in May, and who am I to deny someone ice cream? It’s a pretty basic vanilla custard base, with the addition of a tablespoon of ground pink peppercorns (separate post to come on that, probably). And then when you make ice cream, you wind up with a lot of unused egg whites–so I was pleased to find a recipe for something called Chocolate Puddle Cookies on 101 Cookbooks that requires a lot of them.

More photos of everything here.

It was, as always, a lovely evening in wonderful company. I am so, so glad that we started Cook Club. I think we could probably be eating take out and drinking box wine (not to knock box wine–there are some really good ones out there) and have just as good a time together, but thankfully, we have the option to have homemade meals with good friends, and who could ask for more than that?

Finished Products – Winter meets Summer

After making the bread pudding, I had about a cup of pureed butternut squash left. I was wondering what to do with it when E. brought over some millet, which reminded me of some millet muffins I’d made last year. A quick google for “pumpkin millet muffins” turned up (surprise!) Pumpkin and Millet Muffins courtesy of Whole Foods. I replaced the sour cream with plain yogurt, and used 1% milk instead of whole. Next time I’m going to halve the cloves, but other than that, the recipe was a success.

Incidentally, the irregular quadrilateral shape of the muffins is the result of my not actually having a muffin tin. So I just stick as many paper liners as I can in a lasagne dish and let them all squish up against each other. It works well enough as long as I have enough batter to make JUST the right number of muffins that fit in the dish.

Then I had half of the package of broccoli left, after putting some curry M. and I had one night. Also in the freezer were some chicken (cooked) and some pesto, made (I think) from the opal basil I got back in August and waiting patiently in frozen form ever since. Combine all that with a half a pound of whole wheat pasta and call it dinner. And then lunch for a few days.

Not pictured is a big mess of bell peppers, onions, black beans, and cubes of butternut squash, sauteed, and rolled up in a tortilla with grated cheddar and the tomatillo salsa that had only been in the freezer since October. And since the black beans were freezer goods also, I felt, on the whole, very accomplished because now there’s actually room in there for next week’s pick-up!