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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Split-pea soup: worth giving up your inheritance

I made a soup I was proud of on Monday and shared some of it with one of our neighbors to thank him for surprising us by shoveling our driveway on Saturday morning. Let's start with the recipe, so this post does not become anti-climactic.

Split-Pea and Vegetable Soup with Turkey Sausage
serves 6 to 8

1 pound turkey sausage (note, not just ground turkey, and not sausages in casings)
3 carrots, chopped
3 celery ribs, sliced
2 medium onions, chopped
2 cups yellow split peas (actually, in my soup it was channa dal, which are split black chickpeas)
8 cups water
1 tsp dried rosemary leaves
garlic salt, black pepper and paprika to taste

Brown sausage in a few tablespoons of mildly flavored oil. Add in the vegetables and sweat until onions start to look translucent. Add all other ingredients, cover, and bring to a boil. When boiling, turn down the heat and simmer until split peas are tender and at least some are breaking apart when soup is stirred. Eat some, store some in the refrigerator for later, and share some with a friend or neighbor.

Today, our neighbor returned the container in which I'd delivered the soup, with a card attached that read:

There's a Bible story that says Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. If the soup tasted this good, I can understand why.

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Greens: welcome back into my life

For more than a year I avoided greens like lettuce and spinach and kale and so on due to my touchy stomach and guts. When I had a garden the year before last, I experimented with the occasional very small lettuce salad eaten at the end of the meal and it went modestly well, but not swimmingly. Since then, I have only eaten greens occasionally, in small amounts and still only after eating most of the rest of a meal.

This winter, inspired by some greens-based dishes I've been cooking for work, I've played around a couple of times at home with kale as a part of main dishes consisting of other Heather-friendly ingredients. This week's addition to that list of experiments was declared "amazing" by the spouse and the smell was admired greatly by co-workers when I brought leftovers to eat for my lunch at work.

As for the touchy stomach, well, it was a bit grumbly, but this dish was well worth the small amount of complaining from the guts a few hours later. Note to self: next time for a happier tummy, make plain potatoes the main dish and this dish the side instead of eating this dish with a side slice of bread. For folks with hardier digestive systems, this dish is great with a side chunk of focaccia bread.

Spicy sausage and greens
four servings

20 oz hot Italian turkey sausage, cut into chunks
1 large bunch kale, leaves stripped from stalks and chopped for about 2 quarts of leaves
2 leeks, white parts only, sliced thinly
1 handful fresh parsley leaves, chopped
1 onion, sliced thinly (optional)
salt and pepper to taste

Cook sausage chunks in a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a large frying pan. When sausage is half cooked, add onion and leek slices around the sausage and fry until tender. Fill the pan with kale and stir until wilted, then continue adding batches of kale and wilting until all the kale is in the pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, until kale is tender and sausage is cooked through. Stir in parsley and season to taste.

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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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Autumn Loaf

Turkey meatloaf tends to get a bit dry, so I looked for another option for keeping it moist. Also, I had a bunch of cloves of roasted garlic hanging around from the weekend that needed to be used. The initial working recipe I created yesterday:

Autumn Loaf
Serves 4

1 pound ground turkey
10 cloves roasted garlic
1/2 cup roasted squash (leftovers of unseasoned roasted, mashed squash)
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Grease a bread pan. Mash garlic in a bowl with a fork. Add meat, squash, seasonings and combine thoroughly with your hands. Press mixture into pan and bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes.

Observations
This recipe's cooking instructions didn't work. Especially when I tried to bake a pan of potato wedges at the same time. I put the potatoes in 10 minutes before the loaf (needed some time to create the recipe, take some notes and mash everything together), but neither was done after 45 minutes. I turned up the oven to 400 degrees and left everything in another 20 minutes to get some browning, which worked a little for the loaf, but the potatoes still weren't tender in the middle, so they got another 10 minutes in the oven. To make this dinner again, I'd start out at 400 degrees and still put the potatoes into the oven before making up the loaf. The potatoes baking so long at a lower temperature were tougher and less golden than my usual crispy baked wedges done at a higher temperature for only 30 to 45 minutes.

The loaf was moist, but still held together fine without being too crumbly, which was exactly the texture I wanted. The loaf mix recipe needs a bit of salt and pepper. We sprinkled salt on each portion as we ate it.

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