Mushrooms roasting on an open fire

On my birthday, I invited some friends over for a patio party, featuring food cooked on sticks over the fire in our chimenea. Of course, we roasted marshmallows and made s'mores, but we were also pleasantly surprised by how well some less-obvious foods turned out. People were holding their skewers both down at the usual front opening and also over the top of the chimney part. We discovered both spots are at the right temperature for cooking foods.

Experiment 1: Mushrooms
Thread several whole washed white button mushrooms on a skewer, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Patiently hold over an open fire, turning frequently, until they start to exude some liquid and get browned. I ate several skewers of these.

Experiment 2: Rather large beef kebabs
Big chunks of marinated beef, held at the right distance from the fire and frequently turned, cooks up to a juicy medium-rare right around the same time as the vegetables start to really soften. Careful not to hold so close to the hottest part of the flames that things scorch before the meat is cooked.

Experiment 3: Halloumi cheese
The label on this cheese claimed it was "the grilling cheese," so I decided to take it at its word and cut it into cubes to toast on my skewer. It does not really melt, so that keeps it on the skewer long enough to brown the outside and make the cube puff up a little. Crispy texture on the outside contrasts with fluffy center.

Try these yourself the next time you're building a fire!

In other fantastic flame-cooking news, the indoor barbecue grill is working great!

 It was a huge success for making s'mores and toasting strawberries and angel food cake bits at a party on a rainy day the week before my birthday. Hooray for whoever installed that ventilation system when the outdoor barbecue was enclosed in the addition!

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Roasting, baking and blanching on the fire

This weekend at my local SCA shire's event, we had a potluck lunch. I decided to challenge myself a bit by trying recipes and techniques that could have been used in Italy during the 16th Century. Only one recipe was an original from an Italian cookbook, the other two were more based on known ingredients and techniques from the time period.

I wish I had made some arrangements for photography, because I probably looked delightfully goofy standing over this large open-fire grill outside the event all morning, standing in the smoke, wearing my apron over my coat and with a very-not-appropriate-to-period Polartec fleece hat for warmth. The day was quite windy, so starting the fire was difficult and keeping it at a constant temperature was impossible.

The plan: get to the event site to unload the woodpile and start the fire at about 8 a.m., have three items prepared for lunch by 11 or 11:30. Planned items: spit-roasted leg of lamb, blanched asparagus with dressing and herbs, bread baked in a pot in the coals. And if anyone showed up to watch me cook, I intended to ask that person to roll marzipan stuffing to put inside dates for something to do while we chatted.

Considering the setbacks with the fire and the fact that I've never tried to cook over an open fire on a deadline before, I was pleased that my plan worked. It only did because I had an assistant, who turned up without being asked, who could watch the fire while I did a few last-minute preparations or who could deliver plated items while I continued cooking the last item. She also stuffed the majority of the dates.

Spit-roasted leg of lamb
recipe inspired by Buon Appetito, Your Holiness: Secrets of the Papal Table by Mariangela Rinaldo and Mariangela Vicini
four-pound leg of lamb, organic and free-range (mine also happened to be certified halal, which becomes irrelevant when you see the next ingredient)
1/2 pound pork fat (I used a very fatty bacon)
1 Tbsp dried rosemary leaves
5 cloves garlic
salt and pepper
2 cups red wine

Mince the pork fat and cut it together with rosemary and garlic that have been minced. Cut lamb into two nearly-equal pieces. One piece will likely have the bone in it. Make deep incisions on the side of each pieces of meat and stuff with the pork-garlic-rosemary mixture. Meat may need to be tied with kitchen twine so the stuffing does not fall apart while loading it onto the rotisserie spit. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and roast indirectly over hot coals that are still sending up a little bit of flame. Turn occasionally while the lamb roasts at a temperature that is hot enough to cause some sizzling, but not hot enough to quickly burn the lamb. Baste by brushing occasionally with wine.

The leg of lamb was the item that got the most effusive praise from eaters, and it proved to be the most difficult. Lesson one: spit-roasting is to be done with indirect heat, not flames leaping up to the food. On the other hand, having a bit of an overbrowned (okay, blackened) crust did add lots of flavor until I figured out how far away from the flame to place the spit. Lesson two: bring a secondary cooking vessel in case roasted meat needs finishing in a pan or covered pot. So glad I had that cast-iron skillet handy so I could pour in the rest of my wine for basting and just cook off the lamb in pieces in the skillet. The wind was cooling off the lamb leg on the other sides while it cooked on one side over the fire, so the very center never came up to temperature on the spit. If I'd had an extra hour to leave it over the fire, it eventually would have cooked fully, but I didn't have the time to wait. If the fire hadn't been constantly blown around by wind, I think the 2 1/2 hours the lamb roasted on the spit would have been long enough.

I was very excited about the bread for its flavor and texture. It came out of the baking pot with a black bottom, a caramelized-looking top and springy texture. I have learned quite a bit about bread from another shire member, Simon, in the past year or two, plus I have received tips whenever I ask from Laura, who bakes where I work. A bit more practice with baking hasn't hurt me either. Simon got me started with using sourdough starter instead of always relying on packaged yeast. Finding motivation to start sourdough is simple when Simon hands out little packets of dried sourdough starter from his own collection at a class. Sourdough starter is a pre-1600 technique, as is baking in a pot buried in hot coals. To accentuate sour flavor and add a bit of beery yeasty taste that could have come from using ale barm for yeast, I followed the recipe for Almost No-Knead Bread from Cooks Illustrated. That recipe uses beer and vinegar for part of the liquid. Instead of the instant yeast called for in the recipe, I added some of Simon's sourdough starter. The bread dough sits in a bowl at room temperature overnight to develop flavor. The pot I used for baking was not made of the correct materials, being a cast-iron pot instead of the more-likely-for-pre-1600 Italy clay baking pot, but it was the only heavy covered pot I have that I'd be willing to put in a fire. Lesson from this experiment: the bread probably only needs half as much baking time as in the oven at home. I checked it after 45 minutes of the expected hour, but I think I could have gotten away with only 30 minutes of baking time and had less burnt crust to cut off.

The part I know would turn out fine in this experiment even if nothing else did was the asparagus. I found some directions from a Renaissance Italian cook indicating that asparagus should be boiled until just tender, then dressed with oil and vinegar and fresh herbs. Even at my worst with outdoor cooking, I can manage to boil water as long as I have enough fuel. The vegetable was perfectly crisp-tender the way I like it, then I dressed it with a simple red wine vinegar-olive oil vinaigrette (with a dash of sugar), salt, pepper, and chopped fresh parsley. No need for the cold-water shocking after blanching. The air was brisk enough that the asparagus cooled off right quick after I put it on the serving plate. I was pleased to see that the plate of vegetable disappeared just as quickly as my other dishes. I guess the people who like asparagus ate it enthusiastically.

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Easter menu: violets and some other food

It's the start of the third year of having a yard without chemicals like fertilizer or pesticide (I don't know what the previous owners did, so I'm starting from when we moved in). To celebrate, this year we're eating edible flowers that appear in the yard.

At the special Easter lunch I made for myself and my husband, violets were the stars. They are the first of the edible flowers to show up in the spring. We went out in the morning to pick a bowl of the teeny purple flowers from our backyard.

In documenting the Easter lunch here, let's start with dessert. I found a recipe for flower pudding with dates and spices in Lorna Sass' To the King's Taste, a collection of recipes from the time of King Richard II of England and Sass' modern interpretations of the recipes. The original recipe called for roses, but Sass indicated violets might be appropriate in early spring, so I tried it out. Into the saucepan go the flowers and some almond milk along with thickeners, spices, and sweeteners.

After chilling and setting and a bit of garnishing with some fresh flowers, here's the end result:

This dish did not meet expectations, but I would not call it a failure. The pudding is delicious despite the drawbacks of its slightly grayish purple color and the fact that the pudding ends up tasting much more like dates than like violets, which have a very light and subtle flavor that may have been destroyed by cooking. I'll try the same recipe again in a few weeks when the first roses bloom and see if the stronger flavor of roses holds up better in the pudding.

Violets turned up again in the first course of lunch, which was spring mix greens and sauteed asparagus with a balsamic vinegar reduction sauce.

Next year, I'm going to have to pick more violets for salads. They are fantastic with greens!

The usual main attraction of Easter dinner, the ham, was hardly an afterthought, it just didn't have the same level of novelty as the edible flowers. I've never made a glazed ham before, and Andrew and I recalled Easter hams of our growing-up years were unglazed. I pulled the basic ham glaze ideas from  Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook of 1950 and dressed it up with balsamic vinegar. It was served with buttered peas with caramelized shallots.

Final verdict from the eaters? Glazed ham is here to stay on our Easter menu, for as long as we don't mind all our ham leftovers being a little sweet. The payoff of taste sensations was definitely worth the extra effort of pulling out the ham in the middle of baking, scoring and glazing. Also, I love how the pink and green food looks so appetizing on my pink-and-white china.

Wine served: a surprisingly apt German Riesling from the Mosel, Ernst Loosen's Dr. L from 2010. Hooray to the liquor store that has everything, including good wine recommendations for ham!

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Quiet Thanksgiving dinner for two

Thanksgiving Day was not a large celebration this year, just me and my husband. Since we both had the day off work, I slept in and spent the rest of the morning cooking up a special small feast with lots of local items.

Here's our feast table just before we dig in:

The menu

Main dish:
a locally-raised organic chicken, roasted with rosemary sprigs (from my own backyard) stuffed in the cavity

Side dishes:
golden beets from the special Thanksgiving farmer's market, roasted in the pan with the chicken
spaghetti squash from a friend's backyard, roasted and seasoned with salt and pepper, butter and brown sugar
rose heart radishes from the CSA, boiled and then sauced with a roux-based white sauce with chicken bouillon base and lactose-free milk

Dessert:
pumpkin custard in pie form, with prosciutto bits rolled into the crust

To drink:
a California Chardonnay

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All I want this week is a pot of stew

It's all about stew and soup this week at our house, with seaweed soup early in the week followed by red lentil and vegetable stew that we took to friends for a shared dinner Wednesday, then spinach and lentil soup the next day, and finally, Friday night's cold-weather vegetable stew with spicy sausage. Since I have a head cold that started really bothering me on Thursday, I'm glad there are lots of soupy leftovers today.

Friday night special: Cold-weather vegetable stew with spicy sausage
serves 4 to 6

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 lb hot Italian turkey sausage (bulk sausage, not in casings)
2 celery ribs, sliced
3 carrots, sliced
2 parsnips, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 lb white mushrooms, halved
1 tsp Penzey's Spices Adobo seasoning (www.penzeys.com) or 1/4 tsp each of Mexican oregano, fresh ground pepper, cumin and cayenne pepper
3 to 4 cups chicken stock (more if you like it more soupy, less if you like thick stew)
flesh of 1 roasted pie pumpkin (see note)
salt to taste

Saute onion in a large soup pot in olive oil until translucent, then add sausage and break up into small pieces while it browns. When sausage is almost done, add celery, carrots, parsnips and garlic and stir occasionally until vegetables are starting to cook. Add mushrooms and keep stirring and cooking until some liquid appears at the bottom of the pot. Pour in stock and seasonings. When stock comes to a boil, turn down to a simmer and cook the vegetables about 10 minutes. Add in the pumpkin flesh, bring to a boil and simmer again for 20 minutes. Add salt if you wish and served piping hot.

Note: to roast a pie pumpkin, place the entire pumpkin on a baking pan in a 375 degree oven and bake one hour. Cut pumpkin in half, scoop out seeds and discard, then scoop out the cooked flesh.

Beware, this stew is spicy, and the cayenne pepper will need to be skipped if you can't handle a lot of spice. You may even have to mix mild and spicy sausages, because the sausage itself has a good spice kick. I like to eat extra spicy foods when I have a head cold because they encourage my nose to run.

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Falling in love with fall produce: sweet and spicy squash

For this invention, I put together yummy late-season hot peppers from the garden of a colleague at work, a squash from the farmer's market, and a little of the brown sugar-cayenne pepper mixture left behind by a friend after our last mini-bonfire party (it was a originally a coating for skewered pineapple).

Sweet and Spicy Squash

Cut a winter squash in half and put it cut side down on a greased or parchment-paper-covered baking pan. Be sure the pan has a lip around all the edges because squashes give up some juice while baking. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until, when poking at the skin with your finger, the flesh underneath feels mushy.

In another pan at the same time, roast a handful of whole hot peppers, turning peppers occasionally. The peppers will be done when the skins are dark brown and starting to char, long before the squash is ready. Put the peppers in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Leave to steam until the squash is ready, then peel the paper-thin skins off the peppers and discard skins, seeds and stems. Mince the roasted peppers.

Scoop the squash out of its skin into a bowl and mix in about one tablespoon of butter/vegan margarine for each pound of squash. Depending on how hot the peppers are, add all of them to the squash or just some until the desired level of heat is achieved. Sweeten to taste with brown sugar and add cayenne pepper if the roasted peppers just aren't spicy enough for your taste. Season with salt and pepper and serve.

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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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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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