Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Better mixing instructions, new & improved filling formula. Take a look – (click the picture)

Farm Cakes, September 30th

I was thinking about writing about all the haters I’ve been observing recently – it’s an election year, and the Republicans who are running are running some pretty nasty ads. My current “favorite” is the one by Scott Walker, a candidate for governor, who’s the current county supervisor for Milwaukee County, where they have the lowest rate of high school graduation in the state, talking about how he’ll save money on education – and spend it on roads (the Republicans want to give back the money Wisconsin is supposed to get for high speed rail) – by cutting teacher’s health insurance. Walker says those teachers don’t need those fancy benefits!

Wisconsin is swing state this election, so Barack Obama’s coming to Madison to rally democrats next Tuesday. I made the mistake of reading the comments on the announcement of the event in the online Milwaukee paper – Man, lotta hating there too.

The Co-op that I’m on the Board of Directors of has outgrown its parking lot, and they’re also going to dig up the street it’s on next summer, so we’re planning to put a driveway out the back. The building used to be an Eagles Club, before it was a grocery co-op, and it had two driveways going out that back then.  A small group of very vocal neighbors is hating on the co-op for that too.

But instead, mostly, today I just cooked. Well, I shopped at the farmers market, and went for what turned out to be a long bike ride: started going west to the credit union to drop off yet one more document for my mortgage refinance, then to Food for Thought, to see the cookoff, then to East Wash to unload the dishwasher and take out the trash. And finally back home, where I made challah, and soup, and roasted tomato sauce. And birthday pie, for Mark & Ethan. I tried a new method, where you drain the apple juices before putting them in the pie, and then make them into a syrup with cornstarch and pour them back in when the pie’s done. The recipe’s from the Greyston Bakery Cookbook, another one of those Zen monastery cooking operations, like Tassajara, but in New York instead of CA. The challah is a long skinny one – it’s fate might be french toast next week. I wanted a vegetable beef soup like my mommy used to make, and this soup came close – doesn’t have the shreds of soup meat, but it’s beef broth, and I diced up one strip of bacon and fried it and then cooked the onions in the fat – and left the bacon bits in the soup. The roasted tomato sauce was made from slicing tomatoes, what I got in my CSA box, and I froze about 2 cups of it; a cottage cheese container’s worth – it’ll be good for pizza. There was a little left in the cooking pot, so I used it to flavor the soup.

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In the most recent Bob Apetit, in her Cooking Life column, Molly Wizenberg was talking about how great it is (can be) to put recipes together and come up with your own. Her melding was Cafe Lago meatballs sauced with Marcella Hazan’s  tomato-butter-onion sauce. I made this tomato tart today, that was a combo of a recipe from Gourmet, and instructions on the box of puff paste for how to make a shell. The tart recipe was originally in Gourmet’s August 2002 issue; one of those “good” issues that I’ve made at least three or four dishes from. August ’02 it’s the tart, the yellow cake, the wine jelly, the nectarine bars, the chicken breasts, and the zucchini-tomato-corn salad – of course, all not necessarily as quite written, or even, like the chicken breasts, I’d already made, just not necessarily this way.  Gourmet’s editors liked the tart recipe enough that it’s in the 2009 Gourmet cookbook (Gourmet Today, that I got for my birthday this year), with improved instructions – bake the thing instead of broiling, so the tomatoes actually get cooked.  I made two tarts. I used caramelized onions on one, and on the other, Molly’s leek confit.

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It’s getting cooler in WI; somehow, I’m not quite ready to commit to saying it’s fall, even though I wore gloves yesterday when I was biking in. The fall produce is showing up at the market, and my brother says I should submit to this NYT potluck recipes contest. It’s hard for me to say what my signature potluck dish is, though, because my favorite dish is always the one I just made, if it came out the way I wanted it to. It’s just like how my favorite movie or book is always the one I just saw or read, if I liked it, of course.

Last night I made a squash gratin that I’ve always liked – it’s basically from the Greens Cook Book, by Deborah Madison & Ed Espe Brown  – Greens being one of the first, maybe THE first, fine dining vegetarian restaurant in the country. I’ve always liked the book, but I’ve always grumbled when reading the recipes, “Sure, they can say to use that because they have 3 farms in the Sacramento Valley growing exquisite organic baby vegetables just for them.”

I tried to take lots of pictures so maybe I can submit.

Winter squash gratin
The original uses butternut, peeled and sliced and fried. When I use butternut in this, I usually peel and slice and roast it, using less oil. This time I had delicata, so I made rings and pan-fried them.

• 2 big tomatoes, or 4 – 5 plum, or even a can of diced tomatoes – enough so that you end up with about 2 cups of peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes
• 2 – 4 TBLS olive oil
• chopped or sliced leeks or onions, 3/4 cup or so
• splash to about 1/2 cup white wine
• chopped fresh herbs – thyme, sage, or parsley whatever you’ve got, or some of all three – about 2-3 TBLS
• 1 delicata squash
• 4 – 5 ounces Jarlsberg or Gruyere cheese, sliced thinly – or whatever you’ve got!

Blanch the tomatoes, peel, seed and chop – or open a can! Pour 1 -2 TBLS olive oil in a skillet, warm it, and add the chopped onions or leeks. Cook until the onions have softened, and then pour in the wine. Let most of it boil off, and then add the tomatoes. Cook down until most of the liquid is evaporated, season with salt & pepper, and stir in the herbs. Remove from the heat.

Meanwhile, peel the squash, cut it into rings, and seed it. Pour a little more olive oil in another skillet, and add the rings, and saute over medium high heat, turning, until they have a little color on both sides, then cover, and reduce the heat and cook until the squash is cooked though, but still firm.

Assemble the gratin: lightly oil a baking dish (I put too much oil in the skillet for frying the squash so I poured that into my baking dish), and spoon in a thin layer of tomato sauce. Arrange the squash rings artfully over the sauce. Tuck the cheese slices in here and there, and then top with the rest of the tomato sauce. Cover the dish with foil, and bake at 375° for 15 minutes, then uncover and bake 15 minutes more. Two of us ate about half the dish with rice, but a greedy squash-lover could easily consume the whole thing – alternatively, it might feed 6 if there were other dishes on offer.

Wednesday night I celebrated Rosh Hashanah by grilling pork. I was so encouraged by the success of Monday’s slow-roasted meat that I did almost 6 pounds of Willow Creek pork shoulder, with the same chile rub, so that I’d have pulled pork for pulled pork pizza tomorrow.

Pizza night was fun – 12 people, a bunch of different kinds of pizza:

1. Pulled pork & corn & with bbq sauce & a few dabs of tomatilla salsa, topped with mozzarella
2. Veg version, with black beans instead of pork and Farmer John’s quite spicey Pepper Jack instead of mozzarella
3. Roasted broccoli, caramelized onions, a few olives and roasted peppers, on whole wheat crust. I was going to top this one with goat cheese, but I forgot to bring it, so this pizza got mozzarella, too.
4. deep dish sausage with Willow Creek sausage, and a cornmeal crust
5. Thin layer of pesto, chopped tomatoes, and mozzarella

Today I’ve been cooking for the pantry – I got a box of red peppers, and one of plum tomatoes from my CSA. I roasted most of the peppers, pickled a few, and I’m going to make what Deborah Madison calls pepper confit and I call pepperonata with the last one, along with some nice orange and red frying peppers that came in the regular box. It’s kind of a pepper relish – peppers and onions cooked slowly with herbs, and a little tomato paste, with some balsamic vinegar added at the end – to eat with eggs, or spread on bread. I used some peppers I’d roasted the other day, and some of the tomatoes, to make about a quart of pizza sauce. And tomorrow I’ll finish the  rest of the tomatoes: I blanch and skin them, and squeeze out the seeds and freeze them in pint bags – the equivalent of a 14-oz. can of diced tomatoes. I’ll I’ll roast some of them, too – I’m just trying to remember if I did it skins on or skins off other years – I think it was skins off.

The peppers are quick pickled peppers (called quick because you don’t have to can them; process them – you just put them in a brine, and then refrigerate) from Anna Thomas’ Vegetarian Epicure Book Two. Use 4 large bell peppers – I usually like to use yellow, red and green, but I only had red ones this time, one of which had green patches. Cut them into thick strips, and save the tops and seeds of two of them. Mix 1 cup of cidar vinegar, 3 cups of water, 1/3 cup sugar (Anna says 1/2) in a pot, and add 1 1/2 TBLS coarse salt, and 2 TBLS mixed pickling spices (or make your own mix, with whole spices like bay leaf, clove, mustard seeds, hot pepper flakes, fennel seed, cinnamon sticks ….). Heat the liquids to a boil, and add the peppers. Simmer for 15 minutes, then remove from the heat and let the peppers sit in the brine another 15 minutes or so. Using tongs or a slotted spoon, fish out the pepper strips and place them in glass jars (I use 2 of the quart mason jars I get with honey in them). Strain the brine over them, cover and refrigerate overnight before eating. They’ll keep all winter in the fridge. They’re great in cheese sandwiches.

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