I grew radishes!

Big ones too.

 

...and arugula

Mushroom Risotto and Old-Fashioneds

Lately I just cannot get enough of mushrooms. I also happen to be a huge fan of risotto, a meal that I feel strikes the perfect balance between seemingly fancy but also really easy to make taste delicious. Also, there are so so many excellent variations. So when I saw this recipe on The Kitchen Sink I knew immediately I had to make it that night. I picked up some Brussels sprouts to accompany the risotto and some bitters and bourbon for some Mad Men style Old Fashioneds, Don Draper's drink of choice.

Mushroom Risotto

1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided
2 1/2 cups sliced mushrooms (about two little cartons)
1/2 large onion, diced
2 shallots, minced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or dried thyme, plus more for serving
kosher salt
freshly-ground black pepper
1 cup arborio rice
1 cup dry white wine
4 cups vegetable stock
1/4 cup freshly-grated parmesan, plus more for serving

1. Melt the butter and 1 tablespoon of the oil a skillet over medium heat. Add the sliced mushrooms and thyme, season with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are browned and soft.
2. If the mushrooms get too watery, drain the pan and scrape the mushrooms into a bowl to reserve for later.

3. Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil.  Add the onion, shallots and garlic, stirring occasionally, until the onions are translucent and softened.
4. Add the arborio, season with salt and pepper, and stir for about a minute.
5. Add the wine, and stir constantly until the rice has absorbed the wine.
6. Warm the vegetable broth. Laddle in about 1/2 cup of broth every time the rice absorbs what's already been added. Slowly but surely the rice will thicken.
7. When the rice is cooked to your taste, add the cooked mushrooms and grated cheese. Serve immediately, with additional fresh thyme and grated cheese, if desired.

Brussels Sprouts 
This recipe was recommended to me by my father.

Small brussels sprouts, however many you desire
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for rubbing
fine-grain sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup parmesan

1. Wash the Brussels sprouts well. Trim the stem ends and remove any ragged outer leaves. Cut in half from stem to top and make a small X in the base of the stem. This is important because the leaves cook faster than the stems which causes the bitterness that most people dislike about Brussels sprouts. This trick maintains the buttery sweetness that makes these veggies utterly delectable.
2. Boil a pot of water and fill a bowl with salted ice water. Blanche the Brussels sprouts for about 3 minutes in the boiling water then drop the in the salted ice water.
3. Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in your largest skillet over medium heat. Don't go too hot.
4. Rub the Brussels sprouts with olive oil. Place the Brussels sprouts in the pan flat side down in a single-layer, sprinkle with a couple pinches of salt, cover, and cook for roughly 5 minutes.
5. This is optional: once just tender, uncover, turn up the heat, and cook until the flat sides are deep brown and caramelized. Use a metal spatula to toss them once or twice to get some browning on the rounded side.
6. Season with more salt, a few grinds of pepper, and some grated cheese. Eat immediately if possible and reheat for snacks later.


Now for drinks...

 Old-Fashioned

• 2 dashes aromatic bitters
• 2 dashes of rhubarb bitters (recommended by the Five Points Bottle Shop guy)
• ½ tsp sugar dissolved with water and bitters
• 1½ oz of bourbon
• 1 cherry (optional)
• 1 orange slice
• Some orange juice squeezed in
• 1 lemon wedge

Instructions

Fill glass with ice. Add cherry, orange slice and lemon wedge. Pour in bourbon. Serve in a rocks glass over ice.

If you prefer, you could also make a whiskey sour or mint julep using the same bourbon you've already purchased. Salut!

What can be used instead....

Last night was one of my most absent-minded moments. I went into the kitchen, ready to make Brazilian Soup from my new, graphically favorite, cookbook I Know How To Cook. Now, before I go to the grocery store, I find my self thumbing through all the various recipes I have bookmarked, added to my delicious or starred on my reader in the past weeks. This inevitably leads me to purchasing far too many ingredients for far too many meals...although miraculously I've gotten pretty good at using every last bit before they reach "beyond banana bread" if you will.

 
So I had purchased the ingredients for Brazilian Soup weeks ago, only to find out, an hour before dinner was meant to be ready, that I didn't have the following: (and what they had gone to)

• Onion (Salsa) - Replaced by shallots
• Tomatoes (Salsa) - Excluded
• Consomme (Actually I didn't even get ingredients for this in the first place for unknown reasons) - Replaced by veggie stock
• Butter (Everything...my roommate and I use a sick amount of butter) - Borrowed from the Stephensons
• Nearly carrots. They were reaching floppy but luckily I caught them just in time. - Used anyway. Ya.

To give up and cancel dinner or to make something out of what I have and hope it works?

Brazilian Soup
Adapted from I Know How to Cook
 
A bunch of carrots (about 6 medium sized), thinly sliced
2 leeks, thinly sliced
3 shallots, minced
5 turnips
3 celery stocks, thinly sliced
1 Cayenne or Santaka pepper, minced
5 Tbsp. Butter
1 1/2 cups long-grained rice
13 cups of water
Salt, pepper
A few drops of truffle oil
Dash of ginger powder
1 can of black beans
1 can of pinto beans
Vegetable stock

*The actual recipe had very exact amounts in ounces and I do not attempt to claim that my amounts are best or different really or anything of the sort. I figure with soup, it's all the same.*

1. Boil 13 cups of water. When it reaches a rapid boil, add the rice and stir once. Let cook for 10-12 minutes or until it tastes cooked to the proper softness. 
2. Drain the rice in a collander and rinse with cold water. 
3. Melt 2 heaping tablespoons of butter in pan. Once melted, add the rice and reheat on low-medium, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking to the pan and to coat with butter.
4. While the rice is cooking, melt 3 Tbsp. of butter in a large pan. Add the carrots, leeks, shallots, celery, turnips, and cayenne or santaka pepper. Cover and let cook stirring occasionally for 30 minutes.
5. Add salt, pepper, truffle oil and ginger powder to the vegetables to taste.
6. Puree the beans in a blender or food processor. 
7. After 30 minutes, add the vegetable stock (about 4 cups) to the vegetables. If you want to thicken the soup, add some corn starch mixed into a bit of cold water. Let simmer for 10 minutes.
8. Add the bean puree.
9. Serve by pouring the soup over rice in a bowl. I also buttered some onion hamburger buns, topped them with fresh grated parmesan and toasted them in over for 5 minutes or so.

Mondays are back!

 

 And yes, admittedly, I'm a little late on this, since there have already been 2 weeks of  Gossip Girl, but for me and my busy self this was the first week things returned to the norm. My roomie and I cooked up a delicious feast and watched the newest Gossip Girl over a bottle of red wine. C'est perfectament!

For this special inauguration of the semester, we cooked up something quite special indeed. On the menu: boiled artichokes with hollandaise, rosemary and olive rolls, and roasted vegetable lasagna.

Appetizer: Boiled Artichokes with Hollandaise Sauce
2-4 artichokes, depending on the crowd and your appetite
3 egg yolks
1/2 lemon of fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
Dash cayenne pepper
1/2 cup butter, melted and bubbling

1. Start a large pot of water to boil with a dash of salt.

2. Cut the stems of the artichokes so they might stand flat. Then cut off the top inch-ish of the artichoke. Rub the cut edges with a lemon, to be used later in the Hollandaise Sauce, to prevent browning.

3. Plop the artichokes in the pot, and yes, they will float, but they need to be covered by the water. If someone has a trick to this I will love you forever. As for now I am risking my safety each time I come up with a new, probably unsafe, but heavy item to set on top of the artichokes to keep them down in the water.

4. Let them cook for about 45 minutes or until a bottom leaf pulls off readily and tastes done.
5. About 5 minutes before they are done or even just after they are done, start making the Hollandaise.
6. Add egg yolks, lemon juice, salt and cayenne pepper to the blender, and blend about 5 seconds. With blender running, and partially covering top, pour in bubbling hot butter in a steady stream. Blend until thickened, about 30 seconds. Serve immediately.

Bread: Olive and Rosemary Rolls
*Start these first because they have to rise for about 2 hours, plus prep/kneading/cooking*

1 tsp. dry active yeast [very important you use "dry active yeast" NOT "instant" or "rapid rise"]
1 tsp. sugar
1 cup lukewarm whole milk
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. olive oil
1/2 cup-ish black olives, diced
11/2 Tbsp.-ish rosemary leaves, chopped
Flour, for kneading
Olive oil, for brushing

1. Place the yeast, sugar and milk in a bowl and mix to combine. Set aside in a warm place for 5 minutes, or until bubbles appear on the surface. [In my past breads this bubbling business has always happened, but for whatever reason it didn't for me this time. Have no fear though, this bread still turned out amazing. Conclusion: if you don't get bubbles, carry on carry on.]
2. Add the flour, salt and olive oil to the yeast mixture and mix until a smooth dough forms.
3. Knead on a lightly floured surface for 5 minutes or until smooth and elastic, adding a little extra flour if the dough becomes too sticky, and luckily this dough is not too sticky to knead comfortably. Cover with plastic wrap, set aside in a warm place/on the table for 1 hour or until doubled in size. [Also to note, my dough didn't really magically double in size as usually happens in bread making, but it did expand some and this was fine too]

4. Brush 1 or 2 round cake pans with olive oil. Mine took 8in cake pan plus 2 rolls, so yeah.
5. Knead the olives and rosemary leaves into the dough on a generously floured surface. Divide into 16-ish pieces and roll into balls. Place in prepared pans, cover with a clean tea towel and set aside in a warm place for 45 minutes or until the dough is doubled in size. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 350°F.
[Now that I think about it, I don't think we let them rise this second time officially. We probably left them out for a bit before sticking them in the oven, but none of this tea cloth and doubling again business. Oh well, again they were scrumptious and perfect.]

5. Brush with the oil and bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden.

Roasted Vegetable Lasagna
One 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes
Two 14 oz. cans of fire roasted diced tomatoes
One medium onion, diced
Tsp-ish of fennel seeds
Tsp-ish of chili flakes
2 garlic cloves, minced
Slice of butter
1 container ricotta cheese
Mozzarella cheese
Fresh grated parmesan cheese
1/2 package of Lasagna noodles
[All of the following ingredients could be increased, decreased, added to, eliminated etc, according to your preference and available veggies.]
4 delicata squash, halved longwise
3 thin eggplants, halved longwise
2 packages of whole baby bella mushrooms
1/2 cup of black olives, diced (leftover from bread)
1 package frozen chopped spinach
Artichoke hearts (leftover from appetizer)

1. Preheat the oven to 450F.
2. Cut up all of your veggies as described above. Spoon out the seeds from the squash. Rub the squash, eggplant and mushrooms with olive oil, pepper, salt and oregano. Stick them all on a baking sheet and put them in the oven to roast for about 20 minutes, or until they look done. Beware that eggplant will be ready first so check on them and take them out before they crisp...like I forgot to do a little bit.

3.  Start on the sauce. Saute in olive oil the onions, fennel seeds, chile pepper flakes, butter and garlic in a large pan. Then add the cans of tomatoes, including the juices, and bring it to a boil. Once boiling bring it down to a simmer and let it go until you taste it to be ready. [Some may puree it all at this point but I found that just mashing the whole tomatoes with my wooden spoon as it cooked resulted in a delightfully chunky sauce.]

4. Mix the defrosted spinach (just like Mama made it) into the ricotta cheese and add your leftover olives from the bread too. You might just add in some chopped up artichoke hearts that you have so cleverly already prepared for another purpose.

5. Get the pasta cooked and shred the parmasan.

6. Slightly mash up the squash (keep the skin or remove to your personal preference), chop the eggplant and half or quarter the mushrooms.

7. Now for the layers. Start with sauce, then add the ricotta mixture, then noodles, then roasted veggies, then parmesan, repeat. Finally top it off with chunks of fresh mozzarella to seal it all in and make sure no pasta is exposed because it will get all crunchy then.

8. Bake in a pyrex pan for 20-40 minutes. Just check on it and when the cheese on top begins to get lightly brown and bubbly, take it out.

9. Let it rest for at least 15 minutes before eating.

P.S. I dedicate this post to Charlemagne, my cat, who helped choose what to cook this week. See?

My fall dance includes squash curry

Welcome back readers, I'm sorry it has been so long since we've seen each other.

Life is crazy here in my new little brown house with my new big orange cat. School is back with a vengeance, I've taken up a new hobby and there's always something fun to do, especially when your friends are just around the corner.

About that hobby, it's gardening. I've spent long, very long days digging out a pretty large garden by hand and making many a trip to Lowe's. I can now say that I'm a proud owner of a wheel barrow, I have a stocked shed of gardening tools and have purchased at least one bag of most varieties of organic fertilizer, soil and manure. I'll start posting pictures as the garden grows, but at this point I'm waiting for seeds to germinate and I don't want to jinx anything.

Back to the food.

This week, because the farmers market has been treating me so well and for a couple days it actually seemed like fall might be on its way here, I decided to make a vegetarian squash curry. I was so inspired by this incredibly gorgeous (and large) green Hubbard squash grown by my favorite Cedar Grove Farm.

Now let's talk about dancing, or eating in this case, to bring on fall. This dish is the perfect blend of wintery spices with a bright orange and yellow color palette to honor the summer days. The winter squash and sweet potato say a brief hello/goodbye to summer's bell peppers, grape tomatoes and basil in this visually delightful meal. Surely fall will stop by for a taste.

Vegetarian Squash Curry

• 1 gorgeous local winter squash, preferably orange on the inside [Actually I probably used to much squash, so maybe go for only half a large squash. But I also have enjoyed yummy leftovers for quite a while]
• 1/2 large sweet potato, peeled and cubed into roughly 1/2 inch cubes
• 3-4 medium carrots, cut into thick slices
• 1 yellow bell pepper, cut into bite-size pieces
• 1 cup grape tomatoes, locally grown if possible. In face those really neat multi-colored ones would probably look lovely in this recipe
• 1/2 can chick peas, drained
• 1 orange's zest
  

CURRY SAUCE A.K.A. The Best Part

• 3-4 cloves garlic
• 1-2 tsp Thai chili sauce
• 1 can coconut milk
• Juice of one large lime
• Juice of one medium-large orange
• 2 1/2 - 3 Tbsp. soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp. brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp. rice wine
• 1 Tbsp. ground cumin,1 tsp. fennel seed, 1 tsp curry powder
• 1 Tbsp. red curry paste, optional
• 1/3 purple onion, sliced
  

GARNISH: handful of fresh basil leaves leftover from sweet summer

 

Preparation:

I like to start by cutting everything up, mostly because I am slow and I never remember to go get my knives sharpened. This made for an amusing time hacking at this incredibly immense and hard-skinned squash. I think next time I might try route of roasting the squash and sweet potato in the oven and gently scooping them from their skins instead.

1. Prepare squash by cutting it open and scooping out the seeds with a spoon. Either save the seeds for roasting or discard. Cut the squash into roughly 1/2 inch cubes, slicing off the skin. Prepare the rest of the vegetables plus the orange zest.
2. To make the curry sauce, place all sauce ingredients together in a food processor (or blender if your food processor is always mysteriously missing a piece that makes it go). Process well. The sauce may only taste so so at this point, but as I discovered, it's the cooking that makes it simply divine.
3. Place the squash, yam and carrots in the wok (ideally, but you could use a very large frying pan) together with the curry sauce over medium-high heat. Stir well.
4. When the curry begins to boil, reduce heat to medium, stirring occasionally. Allow to simmer for 6-20 minutes, or until vegetables have softened. Ha. I didn't cube my squash and sweet potato small enough, so it took mine a while to cook. This is why I suggest 1/2 inch cubes.
5. Add the bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, chick peas, and orange zest, stirring to incorporate. Simmer for 2ish more minutes.
6. Do a taste test for salt and spice. If not salty enough, add a little more soy sauce. If not spicy enough add more chili sauce. If too sour, add a little more sugar.
7. Serve in a bowl with a few fresh basil leaves on top and make a toast to fall.

A great thing also about this recipe and making a whole lot of it is that tonight I pureed the remainder with a bit of stock and had some yummy soup with even more of that amazing curry sauce flavor.

Beet It

This is not a beet.

Beets get a bad rap. It's the unfortunate fault, I believe, of the image above and also of pickling. For me, there is nothing more sweet, gorgeous and delicious then a lighly boiled beet. The vibrant color of both golden and red varieties make me want to cook only in the name of visual appeal.

 

My Beet Love ignited with an insalate I ate at Fritti in Atlanta, Ga., called Bietole e Mele (Roasted Beets, Granny Smith Apples, arugula, toasted hazelnuts, lemon and olive oil). I don't joke when I say beets are sweet, and completmented by the sour apples and sharp arugula...MAN.

The journey continued when I was visiting my grandpa in Butler, Pa. - yes, home of Night of the Living Dead. I stopped at a small farmers market in the neighboring town Mars. The beets this man was selling had literally been pulled from the ground an hour prior, causing me to practically jump for joy at the amount of dirt caked on these fresh red beauties. All it took was a good scrub (no peeling or cutting), some boiled water and enough time to get the beets fork tender to enjoy some truly scrumptious (and plain, might I add) veggies.

Now, this blog entry is about not only the value of fresh, local veggies, but also about how much your food experience can improve if you just explore the wonderful world of vegetables.

Enter Spaghetti Squash...

Now, maybe if you are a mother you already know about this miraculous and mysterious member of the squash family (apparetly commonly used to fool young children into eating vegetables). Spaghetti squash looks fairly normal from the outside, but after its cooked, the insides just peel apart into spaghetti-like strands. The flavor is fairly mild and with a bit of spaghetti sauce and parmesan you might even be convinced to trade in your typical carb-fare with this vegetable treat.

Now make it a meal!

I combined my squash and beets meal with mini portobello burgers, featured before on this blog yet this time cooked in the oven, and a small beet, radish and ginger dressing salad. These choices were inspired by my first trip to the Dekalb Farmers Market, a true wonder to behold for anyone who enjoys food. We paired it with Strong Arms wine from Australia which was cheap, yummy and had a really neat graphic design on the label.

A few secret veggies lovers:

You might even entice a sly cat to visit with smells you'll create

Be sure to enjoy your veggies with a sweet pup with eyes that deserve a few scraps from the table