Wednesday: Trouts and tarts

Rainbow trout baked with fennel, carrot and sweet peppers.

We improvised this bake to take advantage of the sweet, fatty flavor of upstate rainbow trout, which bears some resemblance to salmon.  (On the basis of that resemblance, we also added a generous amount of dill.)  We sauteed the vegetables with some onion before layering them over the fish in a casserole, and then baked it at 350F for about fifteen minutes.  We probably could have gotten away with a minute or two less - but this all depends on the size of the fish.

We also had a special dessert tonight: a red currant tart, cooked in the brand new ramekins we acquired thanks to Giselle's end-of-law-school Westlaw Points redemption extravaganza.

Tuesday: Spaghetti alla carbonara....sort of

"Spaghetti alla carbonara" with summer squash.

This recipe, from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, substitutes summer squash and an onion for the bacon or pancetta that gives spaghetti alla carbonara its artery-clogging goodness. Never fear, cholesterol lovers: this recipe still calls for some eggs and Parmesan, so we trust it's not TOO healthy.

Monday: Springtime standard

 

Roasted asparagus with a white bean salad with almond, scallions and dill.

Friday: Cold cuke salad

Cucumber-dill-yogurt salad.

This was our improvised cool dinner for a rather hot evening.  We ate it with some crusty bread and Pawlet cheese, and followed up with strawberries.  It's quite similar to this soup, except we didn't bother with marination and didn't add quite as much liquid.

These "burpless" cucumbers had a funny gradient-like coloration.

Saturday: Tea Sandwiches

Tea sandwiches with several fillings: egg salad, smoked salmon-dill-caper, red radish, watercress, and marinated cucumber.

For a change of pace, this meal was almost entirely NON-local (with the exception of the egg salad we made, which included some local pickles from Rick's Picks, and the smoked Atlantic salmon). But Santa promised Lizz's parents some tea sandwiches, and tea sandwiches are what they got!

Tea sandwiches are generally made with very thin-sliced soft white bread from which the crusts have been removed, and usually contain mayonnaise. They can have many types of fillings, but we made a few classic ones. The radishes were sliced into slim rounds, salted and left to sit for twenty minutes or so, and then rinsed. This process removes a little of the bitterness and makes them crisp.

Our favorite may have been the cucumbers, which we marinated in this improvised manner: two medium-large cucumbers were peeled and sliced as finely as possible. Then we mixed together two minced garlic cloves, about four tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, the juice of one entire lemon, about 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne, and some salt to taste. The cucumbers were added, stirred in thoroughly, and left to marinate for maybe twenty minutes to a half hour. We stirred the mixture every once in a while; at first the liquid collected at the bottom, but it accumulated as the cukes marinated.

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!

Monday: Kohlrabi-slaw

Kohlrabi-carrot slaw with baked tofu.

Since it consists of shredded carrots, kohlrabi, and vinegar, plus the flavors of anise seed and dill, this dish bears a resemblance to cole slaw. It's no coincidence that "kohl" sounds like "cole" - both those prefixes derive from the German word for cabbage. (The "slaw" part is derived from the word for "salad," which is itself actually derived from the word "salt" - making "cole slaw" "salty cabbage salad.")

As for kohlrabi, it's a cruciferous vegetable which grows a bulbous enlarged above-ground stem. The leaves are edible if you happen to find them in good shape, but they don't keep well. The kohlrabi "bulb" itself has a fibrous outer layer that varies in thickness, so it's not enough just to peel off the skin - you have to be sure to cut down deep enough to remove the portion with an unpleasant grain. The soft interior is greenish-white in color, and has a consistency similar to broccoli stems, with a fresh, slightly green, crisp taste.

Kohlrabi tastes pleasant raw and is a good fresh green vegetable in the winter months; it can also be braised or used in soups, where it reaches a softer, smooth consistency.

Monday: "Anchovied" eggs

Wax beans Hungarian-style and "anchovied" eggs.

Wax beans look like yellow "green beans," but they taste different:


No, these are not french fries

The world of fresh beans has always been kind of confusing to us - apparently, all "string" or "snap" bean types are just baby versions of the "common bean," Phaseolus vulgaris. Anyway, this recipe called for an interesting preparation: first you trim and boil the beans separately. Then you saute onion, parsley, and garlic in butter, and then add flour to make a light roux; you thin that with stock or water and then simmer until it's the consistency of a sauce. We seasoned with smoky paprika, some minced dill, and a little bit each of sugar and lemon juice. The beans are tossed in the sauce to coat.

"Anchovied" eggs are Mark Bittman's cutesy name for deviled eggs made without the mayonnaise and with some chopped-up anchovy and olive oil mixed in. Being anchovy devotees, we like them better than the normal version.

Wednesday: A Summery Chilled Soup

Chilled cucumber-dill-yogurt soup.

Although we're not opposed to making hot soups in summer, there's a certain logic to a chilled soup on a hot day. This is a quick and easy recipe that I got from my parents, and something that Giselle and I managed to cook when we were first starting out.

Good ingredients are always important, but this is the kind of dish where quality really matters, because it's so simple. We used heirloom Kirby cucumbers, Rocambole garlic, and fresh yogurt from our local dairy, Milk Thistle Farm.

CHILLED CUCUMBER SOUP

1 1/2 cups cucumber, peeled, seeded, then diced
2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 - 1/2 cup walnut, chopped (optional)
1 - 1 1/2 cups plain yogurt

Mix all but yogurt and refrigerate, letting it marinate, 5 hours or more (overnight is fine). When ready to serve, add the yogurt and stir to mix. Serves 2.

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.

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.

Herbed rice with favas and zucchini-purslane soup....and butter!

Herbed rice with fava beans and zucchini-purslane soup.

Our friend Tom came in from out of town last night (because he happens to like New York) and he kindly joined us for dinner. The rice dish was somewhat like a pilaf, but baked, so that the herbs infused the surrounding rice with flavor. It contained dill, parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes (our substitute for scallions), and we threw in some chopped walnuts at the end for added texture. Lizz picked up local summer squash at the Morningside Heights greenmarket to supplement last week's haul.

For dessert, Lizz also picked up some local blueberries. We were so enchanted with our discovery of last night that we planned to use our last quarter-cup of cream to make whipped cream for a topping. We supplemented it with a little bit of milkfat from the top of a nonhomogenized bottle. However, as Tom graciously whisked the cream with a little sugar, the mixture didn't seem to be reaching the same hard peaks stage we had seen the previous night. And then, in just a couple of seconds, it suddenly turned into THIS:



After we all got done exclaiming in shock and horror at the unexpected transformation, Lizz bravely took a taste, and suggested that perhaps we had just accidentally made butter. It seemed too good to be true that we would stumble on TWO different whipped dairy products within two days, but indeed, a little internet research confirmed that this actually IS how butter is made! If you continue whipping plain cream past the hard stage, it will in a matter of seconds fall out into butter and the thin buttermilk you see in the picture.

So we didn't have any whipped cream with our blueberries, but we were extremely pleased with the discovery nonetheless, and decided to incorporate it into the dessert in another way.



Blueberries with cinnamon toast....with homemade butter.

Monday: Stuffed Squash

Cousa squash stuffed with a mix of squash innards, quinoa, millet, chickpeas, dill, paprika, and Parmesan cheese. (Cousa is a Middle Eastern variety of summer squash.)