Thursday: Where's the chicken?

Polenta with braised maitake mushrooms and parmesan, served with sweet-spiced carrots with chickweed.

What would we do without Elizabeth Schneider's Vegetables: From Amaranth to Zucchini? We don't know. Both of these recipes come from her book, which is always our go-to source when we encounter a wholly new veggie (or fungus, as the case may be). Chickweed, another foraged spring green, has a flavor reminiscent of cornsilk when raw, but it wilted into a mild, chewy mass when mixed with simmered carrots, ginger powder and allspice. It was traditionally given to chickens, who apparently like it - hence the name. Maitake, also known as "hen of the woods," has a meaty - even gamy - flavor and aroma. Here it was braised with garlic, rosemary and sherry, and used as a topping for soft polenta.

(We suppose the use of chickweed and hen-of-the-woods mushroom makes this a chicken-themed meal, despite the lack of actual chicken.)

As a belated celebration of Giselle's last-EVER day of law school classes, we cracked open this pretty bottle of dandelion wine:


Bottle of wine, fruit of the dandelion

Giselle has been curious about dandelion wine for years, ever since reading the Ray Bradbury book of the same name. It really is made with dandelion petals, mixed with sugar, a souring agent, and some other substances which assist in fermentation. (As the man at the Chateau Rennaisance stand told us, "it takes a lot of flowers.") Dandelion wine did not disappoint: it was lightly herbal but not over-sweet like some fruit wines can be, and not at all flowery. It was more similar to a mildly sweet white grape wine than you might think.

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.

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??

Christmas Dinner 1

Clockwise from top: mushroom-leek kugel, gingered collard greens with fried cashews, cranberry sauce, cornbread, Lukas's red cabbage, and mashed potatoes.

We had a few friends over for an early Christmas dinner at our apartment, the first of two. (When you have a small apartment, it takes multiple Christmas dinners to accommodate all your friends. We suppose there are worse problems to have.) Many of the dishes above are familiar holiday fixtures, but a few deserve further comment.

Faithful readers will remember the pumpkin kugel that we made at Thanksgiving. The mushroom-leek kugel above was a variation in which we substituted sauteed leeks and mushrooms for the pumpkin puree and added two types of soft cheese, ricotta and fromage blanc. Finally, thyme and chopped sage were mixed in. We found this semi-original creation more interesting than the pumpkin version.

Lukas's cabbage is a recipe given to us by a former roommate. It's sort of a sweet-and-sour quick pickle of red cabbage. The cabbage is cooked with green apple, red onion, a little sugar, and a lot of balsamic vinegar.

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!

Saturday lunch: Fall Feast

Butternut squash braised with spices (from Madhur Jaffrey via Nate - thanks Nate!), turnip greens with roasted cashews in sesame oil, and cornbread.

We made the cornbread with local whole wheat bread flour, which in our opinion really improved the flavor and texture. We also omitted the canola oil that was in the original recipe (since Giselle has purged the canola from the house) and added an extra egg instead.

The turnips themselves are destined for another recipe later this week, but today we used their greens, which don't store very well. One nice way to add a little protein and bulk to greens is to throw in some roasted chopped nuts, so that's what we did.

These butternut squash were an AMAZING saturated dark orange color on the inside, as you can see in the photo of their innards below.


squash, deconstructed

They also provided the opportunity to make one of our favorite snacks - roasted winter squash seeds. This is a fun thing to do anytime you carve a pumpkin or make any variety of winter squash for dinner. First, pick out the seeds from the pulp and wash them in a few changes of water until they are fairly clean:



Pat as dry as possible with paper towels. There are a few ways to go, flavor-wise, with the actual roasting: one option is to stir the seeds with some olive oil and salt. Another is to stir them with a clear oil (we used peanut), some ground cinnamon, and a little sugar. Either way, next spread the seeds into a single layer on a baking sheet, and roast in the oven at 350F for about a half hour, stirring occasionally so they roast evenly.


cinnamon-sugar seeds

Sunday polenta

Polenta with heirloom tomato sauce and mixed bean salad.

You may have noticed that we often make a quick bean salad to accompany dishes that take a little more thought (like polenta, which does require a little stirring when made from real cornmeal rather than an instant mix). We generally use canned beans for these salads, for convenience's sake. We've found that adding a couple tablespoons of vinegar (balsamic, white or red wine vinegar - whatever you have around) to the standard olive oil and lemon dressing really brightens the flavor and pulls a bean salad together.

The nice thing about these quick salads is that you can use up whatever you have on hand. Tonight we combined white beans and chickpeas, and added some extra dill and scallions that didn't end up in last night's dinner.

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.