Wednesday: Beet + goat cheese + X = tasty

Salad of beets, goat cheese, and wilted chickweed, served on quinoa.

We improvised this second use for chickweed: a simple sautee in olive oil with some garlic, to which we added pre-roasted beets.  We also crumbled in some goat cheese.  Beet + goat cheese + greens is a pretty standard combination which is easy to change up by throwing in seasonal foraged greens.

For leftovers the next day, we actually supplemented this dish with some sauteed left-over wild arugula we hadn't used yet. 

Tuesday: Burgers and pickles, vegan-style

Beet and tofu "hamburgers" on Portuguese sandwich bread bun, served with dilly bean and green tomato pickles.

So we've had this nutritional yeast sitting on our spice rack for an embarrassingly long time. We bought it at the insistence of author Crescent Dragonwagon, whose tome Passionate Vegetarian was one of our very first cookbooks. Although she wanted us to put it into everything from omelets to stir-fries, we never really got into the habit. (Supposedly it's a good source of vitamin B12.) Finally, with this recipe, the opportunity arrived.

We also added some of our smoky paprika, which provides nice depth of flavor to dishes you wish you were cooking over live coals.

Both varieties of pickles seen here are courtesy of our winter CSA. The green tomatoes had an amazing flavor - almost saffron-like, though we never quite figured out what had given them that flavor. The pickled wax beans had a great summery crunch.

Monday: How sweet the onion

Roasted beet salad with pickled onion and feta, served over quinoa.

In this recipe, the shallots (here, onions since we were out of shallots) are simmered in a sugar-vinegar mixture. The end result is something like a quick, sweet pickle. They contrasted perfectly with the earthiness of the beets, and cut the dense creaminess of the feta. This salad could probably be served on its own or on a bed of greens, but we actually liked it on top of quinoa, which made it more like a grain salad.

Tuesday: Yo mama(liga)

Mamaliga with roasted beets and dill garnish.

You might better know "mamaliga" by the name polenta, which is the Italian iteration of this creamy food. Mamaliga/polenta is ground cornmeal cooked in liquid (typically water, or sometimes milk) until it reaches a final texture which can range from creamy-soft to stiff and cakelike. Cooled pieces of hard polenta can also be fried or broiled.

Lizz first encountered mamaliga on a trip to Moldova, where it may have been served with some type of cheese or cream folded in. Whatever it was, it was rich and comforting. Mamaliga is also made in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and we couldn't find a consensus recipe on the internet, so there seems to be some variation in its preparation across the region. Here, we cooked our cornmeal with milk and then stirred in crumbled pieces of Bulgarian feta when it had reached our desired texture. (We left this mamaliga quite soft.)

The beets were just roasted, and we topped it all off with some chopped dill. We considered calling this "deconstructed borscht" and charging you all $15, but thought better of it at the last minute.

Sunday lunch: Roasted Root Vegetables

A winter favorite: roasted root vegetables.

This easily varied, super-simple recipe is something we make every winter when we find ourselves with odds and ends left in the fridge. It's a way to use up any hard root vegetables you might have on hand - that can include carrots, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes...etc. Don't mix in softer, summer vegetables because they will burn during the time the others need to cook through.

Here's the basic formula, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (D4SA required reading):

Roasted Root Vegetables

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, butter, or a mixture
1 1/2 - 2 lbs mixed root vegetables, peeled and cut into 1 1/2 - 2 inch chunks
several springs fresh thyme, or about 1 tbsp fresh rosemary leaves (optional)
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 head garlic, broken into unpeeled cloves (optional)
onion cut into quarters (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 425F.

2. In a large bowl, toss the chopped root vegetables in the oil and herbs with salt and pepper. Dump onto a baking sheet so that the vegetables are approximately in a single layer.

3. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes, stirring or shaking about every ten minutes.

4. If you are using garlic, DON'T include it from the start - instead, add it at the 30 minute mark. (If you add it earlier, it will burn.)

5. After 30 minutes, continue to check every ten minutes or so until the vegetables are done. It should take about 45 minutes to an hour total, depending on the size of the vegetables and your oven.

Saturday: Beet-kes

First D4SA dinner of 2010: Beet-kes (shredded beet pancakes) on sauteed rainbow chard.

Mark Bittman endorses latke-style shredded veggie pancakes made out of plenty of things other than potatoes. Here, we used part of our strategic stockpile of CSA beets. The beets were shredded on a box grater and mixed with shredded onion, one beaten egg, and a cup of flour. Then the mixture was formed into patties and pan-fried.

These came out really well - the texture was surprisingly light, and they retained the characteristic sweet earthiness of beets. We didn't have anything in the way of sour cream or soft cheese, which might have added something, but they went well with a glass of local milk. They also worked well as sandwiches, layered with a few anchovies.

The chard from our CSA held up remarkably well while we were out of town, although it needed a bath before use:

Christmas Dinner 2: The Kugel Strikes Back

Clockwise, starting at top: cornbread, cranberry-beet sauce, quick-pickled collards, mushroom-leek kugel, mashed potatoes, gingered collards, and turnips in mustard sauce.

This was the sequel to last week's Christmas dinner. Like all good sequels, it is primarily derivative of the first dinner, but with a few new twists. In addition to the gingered collards, we made a quick pickle (more or less this, but without the pineapple). We also substituted Tokyo turnips in mustard sauce for the red cabbage. In this dish, the turnips are fried until lightly browned, braised in stock, and finally tossed in a thickened mustard-stock sauce.

And with that, we put Christmas dinner 2009 to a rest...or did we??

Wednesday: Bare Cupboard

Green onion omelette with roasted beets.

We're down to our last vegetables here at D4SA, since we didn't make it to a greenmarket over the Thanksgiving holiday. Fortunately this is our last dinner before our regular Thursday supplement. Anyway, this meal wasn't half bad - plain roasted beets make a nice side dish.

Thanksgiving 2009: Turkey-free edition

Thanksgiving 2009, clockwise from top: polenta cakes with cranberries, kohlrabi-carrot slaw, prosciutto-wrapped sweet potatoes with sage, pumpkin noodle kugel, garlic-roasted Brussels sprouts in balsamic vinegar, and cranberry-beet sauce.

Welcome to a special traveling edition of D4SA! We cooked this year's Thanksgiving dinner at Lizz's parents' house in Philadelphia. None of us are crazy about turkey, so instead we decided to pick several smaller, mostly-vegetarian dishes that were seasonally appropriate and called on traditional Thanksgiving flavors. For this we relied heavily on this list created by Mark Bittman, author of the standby cookbook How to Cook Everything. It contains tons of ideas for holiday dishes that can be made in advance so that everything isn't competing for the oven at the last minute. Although most of these dishes could be prepared ahead of time, we decided instead to do the traditional Thanksgiving cooking marathon for several hours before dinner. Below are some before-and-after photos of each dish, for your viewing pleasure.

Some beautiful fresh local cranberries:



In a traditional cranberry sauce, the berries are just simmered with water and sugar until they all pop and break down. (Some people add gelatin for a firmer texture.) But Mark Bittman suggested adding sweet and earthy grated beets:



The beet and cranberry are simmered together with a little orange juice, grated orange rind, and maple syrup to taste:



With time the ingredients broke down and combined; the sauce ended up with a naturally and pleasantly thick texture, and a more earthy, complex flavor.


Check out the museum-quality flatware!

For the only meat dish of the meal, we wrapped wedges of pre-boiled sweet potatoes in sheets of prosciutto, enclosing a sage leaf in each one.



The wraps are thrown into the oven to roast briefly, just until they have attained a nice crispy texture.



The pumpkin-noodle kugel required a couple more steps than some of our other dishes, but would have been easy to do if we had started with some frozen pureed pumpkin. Instead we used this beautiful white "moonshine" cooking pumpkin, purchased by Lizz's parents at a local food stand:



The pumpkin was scraped out and cut into quarters, then placed cut side down on a baking sheet and baked until soft. We then scraped out the flesh (using a grapefruit spoon....very high-tech) and pureed it in the blender.



From that point, it was simple to add it to the kugel: we just boiled some egg noodles, and separately mixed eggs, milk, pumpkin puree, melted butter, and cinnamon in a bowl. We then layered the noodles and the milk mixture in a couple large casseroles and topped both with breadcrumbs. The kugel baked for a little under an hour, until a knife inserted in the center came out clean.

Meanwhile, we made the kohlrabi-carrot slaw our faithful readers may remember from its recent appearance on our blog. Here the kohlrabi slices are draining in a colander after being tossed with salt:



For a big holiday meal, it's nice to mix dishes you already know how to cook with ones that are new to you - we enjoyed making the easy kohlrabi dish but also trying out our first kugel.



For a green veggie, we reprised the balsamic Brussels sprouts which were also featured on the blog recently.



We put a twist on the traditional cornbread by instead making Mark Bittman's polenta cakes this year. Polenta can be a soft, creamy "pudding"-like dish or it can appear in a more solid form like this. The final texture is determined by the amount of liquid you add and how long you cook it, but you can also crisp up polenta by pan-frying or (as we did here) broiling the individual pieces. For this recipe we made polenta as usual, using a relatively smaller amount of liquid, and also mixing in some chopped fresh cranberries. After spreading the polenta in a baking dish to cool, we cut it into these little cakes and put them on a baking sheet under the broiler until they became crisp on both sides.



As Bob Dylan once said, behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain - and this meal was no exception. Sadly, Lizz's bicep was a casualty of the baking process. It made some inopportune contact with a hot oven door and now bears a dramatic two-inch-long burn mark.


...but ya shoulda seen the door!

Of course, the meal wouldn't have been complete without dessert. But in this, D4SA had the assistance of a special guest chef - Lizz's dad made one of his famous pies. We had requested pecan, and that is what we got:



For those of our faithful readers who made it this far - we're thankful for you this year!

Thursday: Red beet pasta

Penne pasta with red beet, rainbow chard, and walnuts.

The world of pasta sauces is truly vast: this is another of our favorite non-tomato-based options. We usually use goat cheese rather than walnuts, but it's good both ways.

Chard, for anyone unaware of this fact, is actually a variety of beet grown for its big, glossy leaves rather than for the root. For that reason, chard and beet greens are more or less interchangeable. (When we buy beets with nice-looking greens, we just use the beet tops in this recipe.)

Monday: Beet with anchovy

Beet with anchovy, beet greens, and roasted Yukon Gold potatoes.

Even to two anchovy lovers such as ourselves, beet and anchovy initially sounded like a strange combination. But there's something about the sweet richness of the beets and the saltiness of the anchovies that really works. Little other than a clove or two of garlic and a simple olive oil-vinegar dressing is required.

You can make this dish with any type of beets, but this week we used Chioggia, little candy-striped pink and white beets with a more delicate flavor. We suspect these particular Chioggias might have been a little too near the golden beets out in the field, because they looked suspiciously yellow-tinged...

Saturday borscht

Chilled beet borscht (with scallion, dill, and cucumber).

There are many different variations on borscht - we wanted something seasonally appropriate, so we made this recipe in which a cucumber and some cooked beets are grated and mixed with other seasonings to make a chilled soup.

Tuesday: Beet It

Beet bechamel with polenta smothered in garlicky beet greens.

This meal was almost entirely local - everything down to milk, butter and cornmeal, except for a quarter cup of non-local flour. It was, however, entirely delicious. We didn't add any butter or cheese to the polenta, but the cornmeal (which we got at the Union Square market) had so much flavor that it needed no accompaniment.

For you beet lovers out there, some more experimentation with our new camera:



Beet texture close-up:



Lizz notes that she never used to eat her parents' polenta as a child. Sorry about that.



The beets were boiled, peeled, and then sliced and baked in a bechamel sauce. After about 40 minutes, the beet flavor and color had infused the entire dish.

Tuesday night risotto

Beet and beet greens risotto.

...The picture doesn't really do justice to the color.

Dinners this week

Pardon the prolonged absence, faithful readers. We've been too busy cooking up a storm to actually... update the blog about our cooking. Here's what we've cooked in the past week:


Monday, 7-6-09: White bean croquettes with mashed purple heirloom potatoes




Tuesday 7-7-09: Fresh fava beans sauteed with thyme and sardine-caper toast




Wednesday 7-8-09: Hake with red chard and couscous


Thursday 7-9-09: Curry of golden beet, red cabbage and adzuki beans




Friday 7-10-09: Garlic scape omelettes with a purslane, arugula, and chickpea salad




Saturday 7-11-09: White bean salad with red quinoa and sauteed field mustard greens




Other miscellaneous cooking: a purslane frittata, a blackcurrant cake (sort of a coffee-cake style recipe, using no leavening), and a green gooseberry crumble. Lots of baked goods lately for all of the sour berries that are in season - we have been using local stone-milled pastry flour from Wild Hive Farm.