This post brought to you by foods that start with the letter G

Food is arriving weekly through Henry's Farm CSA again ("what's a CSA?" check this link), and at the beginning and end of the season, the major vegetable group is GREENS. We eat a lot of salad and stir-fries and search around for other options to keep up our interest in greens. When gnocchi (small Italian potato dumplings) went on sale recently, I bought a couple packages and figured they'd eventually come in handy, so bring on the unfamiliar greens!

Lamb's quarters showed up at the CSA pickup, and I traded some onions to get some more of this stuff in the hopes that we'd like it enough to eat it for two meals.
"Use as you would spinach" was the take-home message about this edible weed on the Brockman Family Farming blog. So Andrew and I did so with this earthy-tasting dish that was a team effort. We discovered that like most of the cooking greens, these are great cooked with garlic. Garlic shows up twice in our recipe: once as minced cloves, once in the pesto.
If you have leftovers, I recommend adding a bit of liquid when reheating to soften up the gnocchi.

Earthy Greens and Gnocchi
serves 4

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large clove garlic, minced
12 oz white button or cremini mushrooms, sliced 
One 17-oz package potato gnocchi
grated parmesan cheese, optional
1 bunch (about 8 oz. by weight) lamb's quarters, spinach, or Swiss chard
1 Tbsp basil pesto
1 Tbsp dried Italian seasoning
salt and pepper to taste

Clean all dirt and grit from greens, remove stems and chop greens down to bite-size if needed. Heat water to cook gnocchi according to package directions. Cook other ingredients while waiting for water to heat. Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet. Saute onion until tender, then add garlic and mushrooms and continue cooking. Stir in lamb's quarters, then Italian seasoning. Keep warm on low heat while waiting for gnocchi to cook. When greens are wilted, turn off heat and stir in pesto. Drain gnocchi and add to mixture in skillet. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with grated parmesan if desired.

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Sometimes, you just want the traditional ingredient

After eating a favorite of my Minnesota childhood, tater tot hotdish, while visiting at the in-laws' recently (my sister-in-law Katie made it), I had a hankering for it again when I got home.
At its most basic, this casserole (casseroles are known as "hotdish" in Minnesota) is ground meat (usually beef) in a dish with some mixed vegetables held together with a sauce of condensed cream of mushroom soup (straight from the can) and topped with frozen tater tots, which brown on top while the casserole mixture underneath is getting up to bubbling heat in the oven.

But hey, I'm in Illinois, where even the mixed vegetables are optional (so I'm told by a co-worker who knows this dish from his rural Illinois childhood), so why not have a different option for the meat? And why does it have to be cream of mushroom soup? Couldn't I make a perfectly good nondairy white sauce to serve the purpose of holding the casserole together?

The answer to "why does it have to be cream of mushroom soup?" is that it's easy. And as for the question about making white sauce myself, well, my sister-in-law did so for hers. And yes, yes I can make a perfectly serviceable white sauce that holds stuff together just fine. I do it all the time at work. Did I do it this time? No. And I won't go blaming the nondairy milk. I'll blame failing to measure out how much milk I was putting in the pan. I had too much liquid for the amount of starch I used, and I ended up with a sauce that was too loose, entirely unlike the consistency of condensed soup. My sauce was like sauce, nothing like the congealed mass that holds its shape while squooging out of the can. I'll also blame not having mushrooms. Didn't have them on the grocery list. I think I'd have liked the hotdish much better with mushrooms instead of the small amount of grated cheddar I desperately added to give the sauce a bit more flavor and body.

Why not have a different option for the meat? Well, no real reason, unless you're very attached to the flavor of browned ground beef. If I had been thinking straight when making the grocery list, I would have used ground turkey, but instead I decided to go out on a limb entirely and borrow a meat substitute option I learned from a vegan enchilada recipe on the New York Times website: crumbled tofu, cooked until it is browned and chewy.

The browned tofu has excellent texture, but I missed part of the lesson of the vegan enchilada recipe: the tofu needs to be heavily seasoned. I went straight from browning tofu to cooking vegetables and white sauce in the same oil. And I wasn't even patient enough to fully brown the tofu this time around. The flavor of my casserole is, as a result, a bit thin, despite my additions of other spices and herbs to the sauce. With every bite of tofu, I was wishing I had used meat.

Fortunately, I was not tempted to also spend the time and effort making my own tater tots, although this guy can tell you how.

I think I can revisit this process sometime after I've finished off the leftovers of the disappointing hotdish and try again to make a low-fat, possibly even still vegetarian version.

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No exact amounts of anything!

Some delicious ideas from this month's cooking experiments, but no exact recipes.

1. Eggplant and potato stew with lemon basil

• one small Italian-style eggplant
• new red potatoes from Henry's Farm CSA box -- the potatoes are pink inside!
• chicken broth powder and water
• one sprig's worth of leaves from Henry's Farm lemon basil
• cook together over low-ish heat on camp stove for a very lemony-tasting stew that is almost too sophisticated for camping

2. "I don't feel like turning on the oven when it's 90-plus degrees outside" zucchini casserole

•  one pound of ground turkey
•  a whole bunch of zucchini, thinly sliced
• my favorite seasonings that go well with turkey: Penzey's Spices Mural of Flavor mix, sage, Lawry's seasoned salt, pepper
• one can condensed cream of mushroom soup
• the rest of the box of potatoes from Henry's Farm plus some more that were in the cupboard
• brown the turkey in a bit of oil, add spices, add potatoes, soup, zucchini and a splash of water and simmer covered until the zucchini and potatoes are fully cooked. Could all be covered and baked instead on a cooler day.

3.  Sausage and kale pasta

• heat salted water for a pound of pasta
• when water is just about ready to add pasta, put first ingredients into pan for sauce, then cook pasta while waiting for sausage to brown
• sauce: olive oil with 3 cloves smashed garlic and about one pound Italian sausage (I would have used local turkey sausage, but I only could find local pork sausage -- Twin Oak Meats sausage is very lean) is all cooked together until sausage is mildly browned. A few ladlefuls of pasta water and a couple handfuls of kale are added at the same time. Cook covered until saucy but no longer watery, then mix together with drained pasta.

4. Tourteletes
A modern-equipment take on tiny medieval fig pies. The original recipe in Forme of Cury calls for deep-frying the pies, but I decided to bake them instead.

• 1 part butter cut together with 2 parts flour, a sprinkling of water to bind into rollable crust
• filling: chopped dried mission figs, ground cloves, ground nutmeg, ground pepper, all moistened with a) water with saffron moistened and crushed in it and b) honey
• roll out crust thinly, cut into circles with large cookie cutter, place filling into circles and fold over to make little half-moon-shaped pies, seal pies and bake at 350 degrees until starting to turn golden-brown

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Summer sweet corn revival

Sweet corn is sunny and yellow, storing up in its sugars the energy of the grilling-hot summer sunshine. In the winter, looking at the sweet corn from August that I stored in the freezer is a reminder of when I enjoyed longer hours of daylight, farmer's markets and CSA boxes and seeing green growing things outside.

In Bloomington-Normal, the arrival of the sweet corn harvest is cause for a public celebration. In the photo, I'm at the Sweet Corn Blues Festival in Normal, eating an ear of the crop that covers our county and listening to blues music. I bought a sack of corn at the latest festival to take home. This week, on the day of the first snowstorm of the winter season, I made a soup from some of that corn to bring back a little of summer's warmth.

Corn Chowder
recommended vessel: stockpot of at least 8 quarts

4 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
4 medium carrots, peeled and sliced
2 medium onions, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
2 Tbsp flour (for a thicker soup, use 4 Tbsp)
4 medium potatoes, peeled and sliced
8 cups chicken stock or vegetable stock
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp dried epazote
1 tsp cumin powder
2 pounds sweet corn kernels
2 cups soy milk (unsweetened) or dairy milk (for a thicker soup, use cream)
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat butter with the oil in the stockpot. Cook the carrots a couple of minutes, then add the onions and cook a couple of minutes, then add the bell pepper. When the vegetables start to become tender, sprinkle with flour and stir well. Add stock and scrape the bottom of the pot thoroughly to pull up any flour stuck to the bottom. Add potatoes and spices. Bring to a rapid boil, then turn down the heat and simmer until potatoes are tender. Add corn and milk and heat through. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Possible garnishes: yogurt/sour cream and chopped chives, chopped fresh basil, sliced scallions, drizzle of cumin-infused olive oil

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Spanish Tortilla

This one's not a flat, floppy bread. Tortilla in Spain is a thick, eggy dish fried in a skillet, filled with potatoes and possibly other vegetables and meat. It is reminiscent of an omelette in that it's eggs filled with whatever you think would taste good, but it isn't an egg wrapped around the filling. It is reminiscent of quiche in that it's solid and served in wedges, but it does not have a crust and isn't baked. Tortilla has commonalities with other dishes, but it isn't really exactly like anything else.

To treat my friend Laura yesterday for lunch, I improvised a tortilla, made in the spirit of one that I've made before at work. Not having a photo of the whole thing, I'll describe it in words. My tortilla was a thick, seasoned "cake" of eggs holding together a lot of potatoes and parsley, browned on all sides by the frying pan. Here's how the recipe works:

Spanish Tortilla
serves 6 as main dish, 8 to 12 as tapas dish

7 large eggs
4 medium-sized potatoes, diced
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1 tsp smoked paprika (Spanish pimentón)
seasoned salt to taste (the kind with garlic and spices mixed w/the salt)
fresh-ground pepper to taste
4 Tbsp olive oil

Heat olive oil in a nonstick 10-inch skillet with sloping sides. Fill the bottom of the pan with diced potatoes and fry until golden brown on most sides. While potatoes are cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk until yolks are fully incorporated. When potatoes are browned, sprinkle with paprika and stir until oil is red. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with parsley, then pour over the eggs. Cook over medium heat. When eggs start to set, use a heatproof spatula to pull up edges and lean the pan so egg mixture that is still liquid gets to the edge of the pan. When eggs are fully set and starting to get a bit of a crispy skin on the bottom, put a large plate over the skillet. Flip the pan upside down, depositing the tortilla on the plate. Slide it back into the pan to cook the other side. When the second side also gets a crispy skin, cut the tortilla into 6 wedges and serve hot.

Serve in smaller wedges if you are making the tortilla as a tapa (appetizer to go with drinks). I served the tortilla with a salad for a light lunch. More fillings to go with the potatoes might include chickpeas, Spanish chorizo sausage, greens, cooked mushrooms, cooked garden vegetables, anything that tastes good with eggs and isn't going to give off a bunch of liquid to make the tortilla lose its texture.

I'm told that the tortilla tastes good cold as leftovers, but I'm more excited about eating it hot.

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What else can we do with mustard greens?

I brought some mustard greens home from the supermarket last week in the hopes of making something with them myself instead of only relying on the packaged pickled mustard greens I like to get at the Asian grocery and serve on white rice.

The ideas tried so far:
1. sauteed mustard greens with turkey kielbasa slices and onions, served over leftover colcannon
2. more mustard greens and the kielbasa/greens leftovers in a curried potato soup
3. raw mustard greens on sandwich of corned beef on rye
4. bell pepper, zucchini and shredded mustard greens stir fry with sweet soy sauce and fresh ginger

All these applications of mustard greens were delicious, and my husband was downright shocked at the difference in spiciness between the very mild and limp cooked greens and the raw greens on his sandwich, which were as peppery as nasturtiums.

In five minutes of poking around on the Internet, I've found recipes that treat the mustard green much like greens of other sorts:
1. just like collard greens with pot liquor
2. just like sauteed kale with garlic and chile flakes
3. just like bok choy, stir-fried and braised and served with soy sauce and sesame oil
4. as part of a mixed salad, especially baby greens

With their frilly edges and bright, spring-green color, the mustard greens available here are just begging me to use them more often with less cooking time. Perhaps blanched and simply dressed as a wilted salad, or tossed into a pot of beans at the last minute so they don't lose their peppery bite.

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Creating again in time for St. Pat's Day

I've had a short hiatus because I wasn't doing any recipe creation that was noteworthy for a few weeks. I experimented with some new recipes from the New York Times that turned out to be fantastic, the Hungarian casserole rakott krumpli and vegan enchiladas (but used a canned sauce I like, so can't comment on whether this chef's enchilada sauce is good). I did some home versions of recipes I liked from work. But nothing that I could call my own and write up here.

For St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to bring home some of the excitement that was going on in the kitchen at work as our chef and baker turned out Irish-inspired dishes for the holiday: soda bread, potato and mushroom soup with cabbage, and the most decadent colcannon ever topped with sausages. And cheese. That colcannon was delicious, but had crazy amounts of cream and meat. Waaaaay too rich for me to eat more than one bite.

So, it was back to the drawing board at home, going for something a little more in the traditional meatless variety of colcannon. I won't claim that this is a low-fat dish. In fact, if I were to make it again next year, I'd probably go whole hog and use more cream and (maybe) less butter.

Colcannon with Kale
serves 4 to 6
serve as a main dish with other brightly colored vegetables, as a side to a soup or Irish stew, as a colorful topping to a shepherd's pie

2 pounds red potatoes
2 medium-sized onions
1 pound bunch of kale
8 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup milk (dairy milk or unsweetened soy/almond/rice milk)
dash of mace
white pepper and salt to taste

Scrub potatoes well and cut into large chunks. Peeling is optional. Place in large pot, cover with water, and boil until tender (approximately 20 to 30 minutes). Wash the kale and strip the leaves off the tough stems. Cut the kale into ribbons or other small shapes. Saute the onions in 4 Tbsp of butter until tender, then add the kale and saute for 5 to 10 minutes until tender. When the potatoes are ready, drain them and let them dry a little in the colander or in the pot. Warm the milk, then mash together the potatoes with the milk, 4 Tbsp butter, mace, pepper and salt. Stir in the kale/onion mixture and serve hot.

The leftovers of this dish taste great browned in a pan as hash the next day.

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Colorful winter potluck dish

This dish garnered many positive comments at a potluck today. The original recipe comes from the cookbook Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets by Deborah Madison. Here, I have adjusted the amounts of just about everything to make the dish for a larger group.

Sweet Potatoes Braised in Cider

Also good for winter squashes, perhaps yams, and carrots

4 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-sized chunks (prepared weight is about 3 pounds)
4 Tbsp unsalted butter (for vegan version, use vegan margarine)
1 Tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary
2 c or more of apple cider, enough to nearly cover vegetables in pot
salt and pepper if desired (I used none)
apple cider vinegar to taste (optional, I also used none)

Melt butter in a large pot, cook the rosemary on medium heat about 3 minutes to flavor the butter. Toss the vegetables in the butter, add liquid until vegetables are nearly covered. Cover pot with lid and bring to a boil. Turn heat down and simmer 20 to 25 minutes until vegetables are tender. If the juices have not reduced to a glaze yet, uncover and boil quickly on high heat until liquid reduces. Season with salt, pepper, vinegar to taste.

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Dressing up dinner with ajvar

Our favorite red pepper spread, ajvar or "Serbian salsa," has had a long hiatus from our house since we no longer live right down the street from a store that sells it at a reasonable price. I love the puree of roasted red peppers and eggplants mixed with garlic and oil. It tastes wonderful on sandwiches, on crackers, mixed into dips or casseroles or pasta dishes. I missed it so much that I made sure to put it on my list for a shopping outing that included returning to that favorite Asian market in our old neighborhood in Madison, WI. It comes in a rather large jar, so once we open one, it's imperative to use it frequently before it goes bad. 

A recent "meat" and potatoes type of dinner was a chance to try something new with ajvar. I made potatoes with lemon-garlic drizzle and tofu cutlets with blackened pepper coating. For a dessert/side, I served pears.

The recipes:

Tofu cutlets with blackened pepper coating
serves 3 to 4

1 block of firm tofu
ajvar red pepper spread
1 to 2 Tbsp oil for the pan

Squeeze the liquid out of the tofu, slice into six cutlets and spread each of them thickly on both sides with ajvar. Allow the cutlets to sit while you prepare potatoes.

Note: this part of the recipe could have been more successful if the time sitting was longer and if I had done more to turn the ajvar into a marinade. Next time I try this recipe, I'll try mixing the ajvar with oil and perhaps a little vinegar to see if it pulls more pepper flavor into the centers of the tofu pieces, which ended up tasting pretty plain this time around, and start marinating at least an hour before starting the potatoes.

When the potatoes are very close to done, heat oil in a large frying pan on high heat. Lay the ajvar-covered cutlets in the oil and fry on both sides until the pepper mixture is blackened.

Potatoes with lemon-garlic drizzle
serves 4

2 pounds Klondike Red potatoes (other boiling potatoes with pretty skins are acceptable), scrubbed but not peeled
2 Tbsp olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp lemon juice

Boil potatoes in salted water until tender. Drain, leave potatoes in the pot and cover so they dry out a little while you prepare the drizzle. Heat the oil in a saucepan, add garlic and cook until very light golden, then whisk in the lemon juice and heat through. Put the potatoes in the serving dish and drizzle the sauce over them. Season with salt and pepper if desired. Garnish with fresh parsley if desired.

Perhaps next time I have a hankerin' for ajvar I'll have to try out this recipe http://easteuropeanfood.about.com/od/vegetables/r/ajvar.htm or the one at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6430271 and can it myself.

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Looking forward to lefse

Today I'm cooking up some mashed potatoes in anticipation of our New Year's Day tradition of five or six years running: making lefse.

Lefse is a Norwegian flatbread made with both flour and cooked potatoes, baked (not fried in oil) with a griddle or frying pan, rather than in an oven, until it gets brown spots on it. It's delicious spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar, the traditional serving method in our family.  I've also enjoyed it wrapped around a piece of fish, spread with peanut butter and jelly, or sprinkled with cinnamon added to the sugar.

Grandma Evert's recipe specifically calls for leftover mashed potatoes, making lefse baking a great activity on the day after a holiday meal. Fresh and hot mashed potatoes would be too sticky to make lefse dough. Usually at our family gatherings the potatoes are passed through a ricer and may not be mixed with butter and cream, but the amounts of oil and flour in the family recipe can be adjusted to account for additional fat in the potatoes.

I've never taken pictures of my husband and me making lefse because we are both too covered in flour and busy watching pans on the stove to touch the camera. We've got an efficient system: I make the dough and roll out all the little dough balls, and my husband takes care of knowing when to flip the lefse in the four pans we have going at once. We don't have the traditional flat flipping stick (according to lore I was told as a child, the stick should be blessed by a troll), but a spatula works just fine for our small rounds. If we make a double batch, we have enough lefse to share with friends and neighbors.

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The big pot of vegetable beef soup

Sorry for the long hiatus. When I started volunteering for a weekly show on my local college radio station, the blogs started suffering accordingly. This recipe has been kicking around in draft for a long time, so it's about time I get it finalized and out there for folks to read.

I was asked to do something soup-like with about three pounds of beef leftovers at work, and this is what I created.


Vegetable beef soup with potatoes and fresh herbs

1/4 cup olive oil
4 large onions, chopped
2 to 3 cups diced celery
6 carrots, sliced or diced
6 medium-sized zucchinis, quartered and sliced (or cubed)
1/4 cup chopped fresh rosemary
1 to 2 tsp dried thyme
about 4 pounds potatoes, diced
about 3 pounds beef leftovers: brisket, roast beef
6 quarts beef broth
1/2 cup chopped parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Sweat the carrots, onions and celery in olive oil until tender. Add other vegetables, broth, herbs (except parsley) and beef bits and bring to boil. Simmer until potatoes are tender and flavors have blended, add parsley and season to taste. Best when served one day after cooking.

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First squash soup of autumn

Fall has truly arrived in the kitchen when one of us makes the first soup from farmer's market squash. Butternut is definitely the favorite soup squash in our household. In fall and winter, we often have a container of roasted squash hanging around in the refrigerator or freezer, waiting to be turned into stew or casserole or dessert. My long-time favorite squash soup recipe is a spicy bisque with coriander and jalapeño scalded with the (soy) milk, and Andrew's is a thick curry stew with potatoes.

This year's first squash soup was a team effort. We both were hungry and in a little bit of a hurry to get to other engagements after dinner, so we tossed together a quick soup that combined elements of both favorite recipes, plus the new additions of apples and The Spice House's Vadovan curry mixture.

Curry Squash Bisque with Apples
makes four large servings

2 or 3 Tbsp oil or butter
1 medium-sized butternut squash, previously roasted
1 pound potatoes, peeled and diced large
3 carrots, sliced thickly
4 small apples, sliced thickly
1 medium-sized onion, chopped
2 or 3 hot peppers (jalapeño preferred, but others are great too), halved
2 cups unsweetened soy milk or 2 percent milk
1 tsp whole coriander seeds
1 or 2 Tbsp Spice House Vadovan curry mix
4 cups chicken broth or vegetable broth
salt and pepper to taste

In a soup pot, heat oil/butter and cook potatoes, carrots, onion until the onion is tender. In a separate pot, scald the milk with the hot peppers and coriander seeds. When hot, remove from heat and cover. Let stand until other soup ingredients are cooked. Going back to the vegetable pot, sprinkle on the curry mix and toss in the apples. After a minute of stirring, add the butternut squash and the stock. Bring to a boil, then cook covered over medium-low heat until the potatoes and carrots are tender (about 20 minutes). Stir occasionally. Lastly, pour the milk through a strainer held over the vegetable pot. Heat through, stirring often, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

[To roast squash, cut in half, oil cut sides and place cut-side-down in a baking pan and roast at 400 degrees until tender, then scoop out flesh from squash halves]

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What to call this potato salad?

So far, this potato salad

has no well-written recipe, and no name. I threw the sauce for it together in a bit of a hurry to get out the door and on to my birthday hike and picnic in the county park yesterday.

The ingredient list, use these items to taste:
potatoes, scrubbed and boiled with skins on in salted water, then chilled and chopped
mayonnaise
plain yogurt
finely chopped pickles (I used kosher dills)
Worcestershire sauce
freshly ground black pepper
spicy brown mustard (I used a mix of store-bought and homemade-by-friend spicy brown mustards)
cider vinegar
fresh rosemary (from my herb pots), chopped very fine
fresh parsley (from my herb pots), chopped
fresh cilantro, chopped

Salad tasted wicked spicy and reeked of rosemary when the dear husband and I ate it three hours after mixing, but mellowed out and tasted more blended and mustardy on Day Two. Obligatory food safety tip: with salads dressed in mayonnaise, be sure that they are kept very cold in your picnic cooler and aren't left outside the cooler more than half an hour before or after serving.

I'll measure the ingredients next time. So far, the best name I've come up with is a pretty lame pun: "Herb-y Birthday" Potato Salad. Any suggestion from the readers?

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Easter dinner and other springtime foods

Mmmm, I like serving springtime food at Easter. There is always a fun mix of stuff that has kept over the winter and new spring produce.
Here are some photos of our Easter foods.

The food above is called Osterbrötchen in German, and they are a yeast-raised bun with dried fruits. I serve them as a breakfast food about every other year, alternating with a German cake (which is not served for breakfast), Osterlamm. The cake is baked in a lamb-shaped mold. Here I am with last year's cake, which has homemade chocolate frosting for a black sheep.

At this year's Easter dinner, the first course was a deceptively "cream"-y soup (soymilk thickened with a little roux) filled with carrots, spinach and peas, accompanied by blanched asparagus with a faux bernaise sauce. I found another application in which Ener-G egg substitute is a terrible idea. The sauce texture was sticky and elastic, meaning that it acted a bit like melted cheese when we dipped asparagus in it. It had a lot of lemon juice, which tasted nice on the asparagus, so at least it was edible. Here's the table shot before we eat the soup and asparagus. Daffodils are from the backyard. The wine is Beaujolais.

And for the main course at Easter dinner, I had planned something that wasn't an Easter ham, but did have ham in it. I had some minced ham left over in the freezer after ham pie, and I wanted to add it to fried potatoes. I boiled sliced potatoes in salted water, then fried them, and although they tasted fully cooked and well-salted like I wanted them to, I had to adjust to a new textural reality from what I had in mind. The potato slices fell apart when I turned them in the pan, so now I had potato hash. No big problem. The hash tasted great with the ham bits and a generous sprinkling of fresh-ground black pepper.

Also wonderful in springtime are mangoes and the new crops of berries. Of course, none of these items grows anywhere near here in April, so they are an occasional indulgence until the local fruit appears in May or June. This week, Andrew mixed blackberries with the banana slices I had in the freezer for an impromptu fruit salad.

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Asafoetida for the first time

Yesterday, I brought a new spice into use in the kitchen: asafoetida. The reason for trying it was to experiment with a potato curry recipe. The one I chose to start with was "Indian Curried Potatoes, Peas and Carrots" from Heather Van Vorous' book Eating for IBS.

I usually enjoy Heather's lowfat and gut-friendly recipes using flavors from around the world, but this one was a real stinker. In the literal sense. With an entire tablespoon of asafoetida in the recipe, the curry reeked of this spice to high heaven (I'm convinced it's not coincidence that part of the name of this spice is "fetid") and the house still has a faint lingering odor of it in the air on the next day. The smell of the spice is far worse than its taste, which is pleasing to some of the same taste/smell receptors that like onion, garlic and stinky cheeses.

The most serious problem in the recipe is that asafoetida in such a large quantity overpowers all the other spices in the dish. We couldn't even taste a hint of the chili powder, cumin or coriander. We started thinking maybe what was missing from this one-note curry was ginger and garlic, but a small bit of research I did last night with another Indian cookbook in my collection, Vegetarische Indische Küche by Sumana Ray, alerted me to two patterns: 1) curries consisting mostly of potatoes and including asafoetida do not usually also have garlic and ginger and 2) asafoetida is used by the dash, not by the tablespoon.

I'd like to continue looking in other collections of recipes from India to determine whether this pattern holds true in other Indian curry collections. My other three sources of Indian or Indian-style recipes do not use asafoetida at all or don't put it in the potato dishes.

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Rosettes, attempt #2

Ah, rosettes, one of my favorite Christmas treats from childhood. For those who are unfamiliar with them, they are a Swedish fried-dough cookie with sugar on top, formed by putting a hot iron with the rosette pattern into the bowl of batter, then dipping the iron, now partially covered in a thin layer of batter, into hot oil and frying. The last time I made Swedish rosettes with my grandma's recipe, the result was this (as I described in writing to some friends):

"Yesterday I made my first stab at making one of my grandma's traditional holiday treats: Swedish rosettes.
Hoping that the first batch ever would be great, against all indications from experienced rosette makers including my mom's mother, a friend in Madison and my dad's mother that the first batch would be disappointing, I dove with gusto into the frying process.
At six o’clock, I was sad and gave up before I even came close to running out of batter. Entering the third dozen of them, I only had one that looked and tasted and crisped right. Andrew and I shared it. The rest, which after half an hour were floppy and tasted like cold grease, I trashed so they would stop sitting there and reminding me of failure.
Someday I will try making this treat again, but I need a little time to get over being sad about the wasted batch."

For the second attempt this weekend, I tried to control more of the elements that can be finicky. Those include: weather conditions, oil type, oil temperature, oil depth, batter consistency, iron temperature, fry time, cooling apparatus, getting the rosette off the iron without breaking. Really, as Grandma would say, every part about it is finicky.

Weather
Grandma recommends making rosettes on a clear, dry, sunny winter day. These don't come around all too often in central Illinois, and I've decided that the attempt #1, which was closer to Christmas, must have been on the wrong day because it was too warm. There was a little snow melting, which I think must have added moisture into the air. The temperature on Saturday was below freezing, it was sunny, and the humidity level according to the local weather website I checked said humidity was 50 percent.

Oil
I had already fried before with canola oil and I didn't think that the oil was the problem, so I used canola again. Last time, I fried in my 9-inch cast-iron skillet. The oil didn't seem all too deep, but I forged ahead anyway. This time, I trotted out the cast-iron Dutch oven and filled it halfway. This ends up being about a quart of oil, which is 2 or 3 inches deep in my pot. Wanted to have more oil so that the temperature would be easier to maintain. The recommended frying temperature in Grandma's recipe was 375 degrees Fahrenheit. This time, I checked that temperature with the instant-read thermometer before the first rosette and after every other one thereafter. At the very least, the temperature was easier to read reliably with the deeper oil, because I could dip the entire end of the thermometer into the oil without coming close to touching the bottom of the pan.

Batter
As the recipe is not my own, I won't be providing it here on this site. There are usually recipes included with the rosette irons when you buy them. For added friendliness to my tummy, I substituted two egg whites for each egg and used soy milk instead of dairy milk. I also measured the flour differently, measuring with the cup before sifting instead of the other way around. I think I ended up with a little more flour in the batter, because it looked slightly thicker than the batter from attempt #1. That seemed to be a good thing in the end.

I'll go back to the original recipe when making them again, I think, as I always want to eat so many that the grease itself starts making my tummy unhappy. Maybe I'll rein it in a little when I know they are chock-full of dairy and egg.

Irons
Thanks to my employer making a special order for me and giving me some extra rosette irons that were laying around in ancient inventory, I have a nice little set of irons now. There are two different cup shapes, one five-pointed star and one eight-pointed star. They really are made of iron so they can hold heat and not warp. In both rosette attempts, I seasoned the irons properly before frying and between each rosette, I let the iron sit in the oil to heat up before putting it in the batter.

Dipping the iron in batter

Fry time
In attempt #1, I counted to 30 after plunging the battered iron into the oil. In attempt #2, I tried to get a closer approximation of 30 to 35 seconds, as I think I had been counting too fast before. I also took a more critical look at the browning before pulling the rosette from the oil. If I'd already counted to 35 and the thing wasn't golden brown yet, I kept it in the oil a little longer. In all, the rosettes in attempt #2 each had a longer frying time than most of those in attempt #1.

Frying the rosette

Cooling apparatus
As in attempt #1, I made do with the cooling rack possibilities available to me, as I don't own a proper cookie cooling rack. I pulled a rack out of the oven and laid it on the counter, covered with paper towels to soak up stray oil. This worked out fine.

Rosette cups waiting to be eaten, cooling upside down so the bottoms won't sit on the oily paper

Removing rosette from the iron
My preferred method after attempt #2: run a very small knife around the pattern to loosen the edges from the iron, push off gently with a fork. Attempt #1 was no problem getting the rosettes to come off: some came off right in the oil, some just flopped off the iron as soon as they came out of the oil, some needed a little push from the fork.

The end result
Success!! Attempt #2 yielded crispy rosettes, and dipped in granulated sugar they were sweet and delightful. I have to admit there were still a few soggy ones, which I ate before letting Andrew pick which ones he wanted to eat.

I didn't notice any difference in taste between the original recipe and the one with Heather-friendly substitutes. I recall when Grandma made them Heather-friendly once she commented that they were a bit tougher than with the original recipe. I didn't notice this until eating the ones that were still left on Sunday. But hey, a little tougher than the original was better than "floppy and tasting of cold grease."

The learning curve for me on these cookies is about as steep as for pie crust. With limited success under my belt, I'm motivated to try again.

As long as I had a pot full of oil, I fried up some homemade "chips" for dinner. I like crispy homemade potato chips, but Andrew prefers something thicker like potato wedges, so I compromised and cut my potato chips thick. They ended up being extra-crispy on the outside and soft in the center, and we were both very happy. I first boiled them all in low-temperature oil at 250 degrees Fahrenheit until they were tender. For the second fry, I turned up the oil temperature to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and waited till they were light brown. This is a picture of "almost done."

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Andrew's going-away dinner

This dinner is from a few weeks ago. The night before the dear husband took off for a week-long conference trip, I cooked up something special for our last dinner together.

The menu:

Roasted chicken with peach chutney that I canned in the summer

Chili potatoes

Roasted squash with butter and brown sugar

The finished plate:

For the potatoes, I was improving on the recipe I used for Christmas dinner, which included zucchini in the sauté. I didn't like the way the zucchini was skillet-blackened by the time the potatoes were golden brown, so I took them out. Also, I needed to use up some purple Peruvian potatoes from the last farmer's market, so into the sauté they went.

The recipe:

Chili Potatoes

2 pounds potatoes, peeled

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp chili pepper flakes

salt and pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes whole in salted water, drain and cool. When cool enough to touch, cut potatoes into small chunks. Heat vegetable oil in a large pan, toss in chili pepper flakes, then sauté potatoes until they are golden on all sides. Season to taste.

With the chicken, I dried it off before roasting in the hopes that it would not spit so much as it baked in a hot oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. I salted it only a little on the skin and inside the cavity for seasoning and roasted it on a rack inside the pot I usually use for chickens. Most of the flavor in this dish comes from the peach chutney. I roasted it approximately one hour, until the meat thermometer read 170 degrees Fahrenheit.

The peach chutney recipe is in the Bernardin company’s Guide to Home Preserving. The peaches are from this summer’s local farmer’s markets. This was a fantastic year for peaches, so I bought 6 to 8 pounds of them every week and made lots of preserves to hang onto the peaches for a few more months. For this dinner, I heated the chutney on the stove before pouring over the plated chicken pieces.

The squash baked at the same temperature for the same amount of time as the chicken, on a pan underneath it in the oven. I brushed a little oil on it to keep the exposed squash parts moister.

Sweet Roasted Squash

One large winter squash

2 Tbsp brown sugar per pound of roasted squash

1 Tbsp butter per pound of roasted squash

salt and pepper to taste

Cut squash open and scoop out seeds. Brush cut sides with oil. Roast at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until tender, about one hour. Scoop squash out of its skin and mash it. Mix with butter and brown sugar. Season with salt and pepper.

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