Red Beans and Rice

I decided to make red beans and rice when I realized we had quite a few cans of kidney beans in the pantry. I turned to trusty Deborah Madison for a recipe. Of course her recipe called for dry beans with overnight soaking which wasn't necessary with canned beans, so I did my best to adapt the recipe using the canned beans. It was good news that we had the rest of the ingredients on hand (or some reasonable substitution) since our grocery store trip wasn't scheduled until the day after I made this.

I started by dicing a small onion, one garlic clove, a stalk of celery and the rest of a red bell pepper that I had used in a recipe last week. I sauteéd the vegetables in Chipotle Olive Oil. Once the veggies were soft I added some bay leaves, thyme, oregano, parsley, and some salt and pepper. I let it all cook on low for about 20 minutes and then added the beans and then cooked for another 7 minutes.

Meanwhile I cooked the rice, which turned out to be a bigger project than it should have been. I left the heat on too high and the water evaporated before the rice fully cooked, so I added some more water and turned the heat down, and then I had to do it again, and again, and again. Some to the individual rice grains had burned to the bottom of the pan, but we just scraped them off added them to the rest and called it cajun.

My First Turnovers

James recently discovered a Greek grocery store and picked up a tub of feta cheese and then suggested that I find a recipe with which to use it. Deborah Madison to the rescue! The first thing in the ingredient list is Galette Dough, and refers the cook to p. 696. The recipe for the dough was quite simple with ingredients of 2 cups flour; 1/2 t salt;  2 t. sugar, and a bit of water. Once the dough was combined it was placed in the refrigerator while I prepared the filling (goat cheese, feta, scallions, dill, thyme, and pepper.

After preparing the filling I divided the dough into four more or less equal size pieces and rolled each into a small circle and placed 1/4 of the filling into each and pinched the edges closed.

Each turnover was brushed with a bit of beaten egg, and sprinkled liberally with sesame seeds. Then baked at 375 for 35 minutes.

Yum!

Applesauce!

My last post told of my adventures in apple harvesting and a simple bread-machine recipe using some of my bounty. Over the weekend I used some more of the fruit to make applesauce. I found an easy recipe in my trusty old Deborah Madison Cooks at Home cookbook. After peeling and slicing the apples I put them in a big pot with a bit of water, lemon juice, honey, brown sugar, cinnamon, and ground cloves. Madison suggested using sugar or honey, and cinnamon or cloves, but I knew more was better in this case. I let the ingredients cook on the stovetop until the apples broke down into a chunky sauce.

 We had some as a side dish for the tuna steaks with mushroom sauce James made for dinner, and also used it as a topping on our waffles the next morning.

The last bit of sauce was added as an ingredient to a big skillet cake that we shared for breakfast on Monday.

Candied Sweet Potatoes

I made this side dish from Deborah Madison so long ago I can't even remember what our main dish was, but I do know it was not a nueva receta. I think we must have gotten the sweet potato from the last Fairhaven Farmer's Market of the 2017 season. I do remember adding some "pumpkin spice" to this recipe by sprinking on some cinnamon and ground cloves. Madison never lets us down.

Cobbler's Helper

(This post jointly authored by James & Pam.)

Pam notices yard sales as she walks the pooch around Fairhaven, and wisely does not try to make purchases with the dog pulling on her leash. At the end of Saturday's walk, she dropped the dog off and popped back out to revisit some treasures she had noticed. Most notable -- especially for this blog -- was this very old-school apple corer & slicer.

If not quite mint-in-box, certainly excellent-in-box. We were excited to have it, but also completely clueless about its use. Fortunately, we both have 2017 information literacy, which suggests only one solution: YouTube. Searching on the brand name (because there are many contraptions of this sort out there), we quickly found all the information we needed in just three minutes:



I (Pam) of course couldn't wait to use my new (to me) gadget, so on Sunday at the Fairhaven Farmer's Market we bought a half dozen apples and got out our trusty Deborah Madison Cookbook (this is so essential we now keep copies both at home and in our beach house). I found a recipe for a simple cobbler, put the sliced apples in a pie tin, topped them with the dough, and baked at 350 for about half an hour for a lovely dessert.

The set up

First apple placed

The spinning starts...

The cores went into the compost bucket

Before baking

Ready to eat! Delicious!

Irish Soda Bread

It has been over a week since St. Patrick's Day and I am finally catching up on my blogging. We eschewed the not-really-traditional corned beef and cabbage and had some truly inauthentic shamrock-shaped pasta instead (purchased from Costco). As suggested on the package I made some vodka sauce to go on top.

However, so as not to forgo an opportunity to prepare a new recipe I decided to make some Irish Soda bread to go with it. I found a good recipe in my trusty Deborah Madison vegetarian cookbook. The recipe is above. I made two changes to the ingredients as listed. I used wheat germ in place of wheat bran, and I added raisins. The bread was just a bit sweet and made a nice complement to the pasta, and made us feel like we celebrated St. Patrick's Day as we should have.

Cream of Tomato Soup

One of the things I like about fall is that it is such a great time to have soup. I found this recipe in Deborah Madison's New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. 

I followed the recipe mostly as written. I skipped the optional tomato paste, and used my immersion blender rather than pouring the soup back and forth between the pot and my regular blender. The soup was flavorful and perfect for a chilly evening. I served it with some crusty yogurt bread that I made in my bread machine.

Whaling House Waffle Surprise

Spoiler alert: The surprise is simply an improvement in a traditional waffle recipe.

When our artisan friend Dave realized that whaling would be the theme of our weekend getaway, he made us this spiffy whale. Meanwhile, his brother Paul -- who lives nearby -- painted it mint-chocolate-chip, a combo that Pam had always longed for in a house. This photo predates the #whalinghouse solar panels.

When figuring out how to divide equipment between our main kitchen and the galley of our smaller weekend place, Pam wisely suggested that the waffle iron belonged in the weekend kitchen, since that is when we tend to make waffles. 

Just a few years ago we finally got a waffle iron that allows us to make good waffles consistently. Once the electricity had been upgraded, we made the move, and indeed we have waffles a bit more often now.

We keep the weekend larder stocked with all of the Hayes-Boh essentials for baking and basic cookery, but not in large quantities. And so it was this morning that I started preparing the batter before I realized that there was not enough flour for a batch. If nothing else, we are resourceful, so I decided to take a risk on two substitutions: baking powder for baking soda and corn meal for part of the white flour.

The basic recipe from Deborah Madison was thus modified more or less as follows:

2 eggs, beaten (she calls for three, which I think makes waffles that are too eggy)

1 tsp vanilla

1-1/2 cups milk (Madison calls for milk or buttermilk; I put about 1/4 cup of plain yogurt, vanilla yogurt, or sour cream in the measuring cup and then fill up the rest of the way. This morning it was sour cream.)

1 Tsp oil

*optional: 1/4 cup mashed blueberries (see below)

1-1/2 cups white flour

1/2 cup fine-ground corn meal

2 t baking powder (instead of 1 t powder and 1/2 t baking soda)

1/4 t salt

dash of nutmeg

2 Tsp organic sugar (Madison does not call for this, but I could not see any reason not to include it.)

*optional: 1 cup whole blueberries, rinsed and drained

I mixed the dry and wet ingredients thoroughly in separate bowls and then combined them without overmixing. I let the batter sit and rise slightly while I heated the waffle iron. I then used cooking spray for each round and transferred each waffle to a plate in the warm (250F) oven.

The result was by far the best waffles I have made -- they slide easily off the iron and were a bit extra fluffy and delicious!

Even More Better

UPDATE February 19, 2017

This morning we had blueberries on hand, which I was going to add in the usual way -- about a cup to the batter just after it was combined. But Pam -- who already gets credit for remembering this post about corn meal -- suggested that I mash some of the blueberries, as she had recently done for Jordan Marsh muffins. So in addition to the cup of whole blueberries, I used a fork to mash about 1/4 cup, and put it in the liquid mix before combining. I just whisked the skins and pulp together into the egg-milk mixture. 

Clean-out-the-fridge Cream of Asparagus and Leek Soup

We still have a few things left in the freezer from last season's CSA farm box, but I used up the last of the leeks on this soup. The recipe is one I created myself after reading several different leek soup recipes in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I started by soaking the frozen leek slices in water, this was both to thaw them, and to remove the sand. I melted some butter in a cast iron soup pot and added the leeks, and then chopped up the half onion I found in the refrigerator and put that in the pot as well. I also found some fresh dill, and fresh tarragon in the 'fridge, so I put that in as well, along with a bay leaf. I added a cup of prepared chicken broth, and then put in the chopped asparagus. I let everything simmer until the leeks and asparagus were tender, then added 1 tablespoon of flour, some garlic salt, and some pepper. Finally I put in 5 more cups of broth, and let everything simmer for about 20 minutes. When it was done simmering I removed the bay leaf, added about a 1/2 cup of half-and-half and used my immersion blender to puree the soup.

We served this with a green salad and some bread for a wonderful early spring dinner.

This can easily be made vegetarian by using vegetable stock.

Pigs in Blankets

This week we've been enjoying a visit from some Wisconsin cousins. Extending our table with friends and family makes mealtime an especially relaxing part of our day. 

We revived an old favorite recipe at the request of our former vegetarian daughter. The last time we made this kid-pleasing dish was probably almost a decade ago, and we surely used Pillsbury refrigerated crescent dough. I wasn't about to do that at this point in my cooking journey, so I got out Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (with emphasis on Everyone) and prepared some biscuit dough. 

I sifted together 2 c. flour; 2 t. baking powder; and 1/2 t. each baking soda and salt. I cut in 6 T. of butter, and then stirred in 1 c. of plain yogurt. I rolled out the dough and cut it into strips. My cousin assisted with assembly by slicing the hot dogs and wrapping a slice of cheese around them. We then wrapped a strip of dough around each dog. There was just enough dough for one pack of 8 hot dogs. I placed the wrapped hot dogs on a baking stone and baked for 16 minutes at 400 degrees  They turned out perfect! I put out some mustard and ketchup for dipping the "pigs". The adults enjoyed this with sangria.

Applish Waffles

Deborah Madison is back -- among our heaviest and most-used cook tomes is Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, about which we have written frequently. Even such carnivores as Bill Clinton enjoy a good waffle; so Madison's inclusion of waffle recipes is indeed a service to "everyone."

Gary Trudeau alienated his friend Bill Clinton when he chose the waffle as the president's icon in Doonesbury. 

It is especially a service to me, the chief waffler of this house. (Insert snide commentaries here.) We had a waffle iron back in grad-school days, but it was the small-square variety, whose non-stick surface made a kind of cement of our batter. After many mornings spent scraping our waffles out of the iron with chopsticks, we concluded that this would be a restaurant-only meal for us, though we did spend some of our early parenting years in an unseemly relationship with Eggo.

Eventually, we took a chance on a Belgian-style waffle iron at a church rummage sale, and found that it worked well for us, at least long enough for us to get hooked on the concept again. We eventually purchased a new Waring Pro, which has worked out very well for us. The recipe that came with the iron was a strange, two-part riddle like something out of the Common Core, so I turned to Madison, whose batter is quite simple:

3 eggs, beaten
1-1/2 cups milk or buttermilk
1/4 cup canola oil or melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (we use pure vanilla at Casa Hayes-Boh)
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

I sifted the dry ingredients together into a bowl. (Up until recently I would have whisked them, but our baking-expert friend Betty recently convinced us of the value of a sifter. We purchase gadgetry for our kitchen only after months or years of deliberation!)

For the wet ingredients, I took a somewhat different approach. If buttermilk is an option for a batter, I rarely buy that ingredient, but nor do I like to use ordinary, flat milk. To get the right texture, I will sometimes add a bit of lemon or lime juice to milk, giving it a few minutes to curdle slightly. More often, I mix plain yogurt with plain milk. In fact, this is why we usually keep plain yogurt on hand (in addition to its use as a healthy alternative to sour cream as a taco topping). But I had neglected to pick any up lately, so I took a walk on the wild side: I put a cup of apple-flavored Greek yogurt in a measuring cup, and added plain milk to bring it to 1-1/2 cups.

I then used Pam (no relation) to prepare the iron, and made two waffles. The second smart thing I did was to wait until our darling teen was awake to offer her a waffle, rather than trying to wake her on a Saturday for the purpose. Win-win-win!

Blizzard warning

We lost power here for three days, thanks to winter storm Nemo. The house got terribly cold, but we were able to prepare hot meals whenever we wanted thanks to our gas stove, which we can light with a match. We cannot however, use the oven in a power outage, so knowing that we would likely experience an interruption in service we found a recipe to bake on Friday evening, just as the first flakes began to fall. Our freezer is still stocked with frozen veggies from our summer CSA deliveries so I used some puréed squash to make squash flans, based on a recipe from good ol' Deborah Madison. The recipe also called for mixed greens, which I also had in my freezer. I started by mixing the thawed squash with1/4 t cumin and 1/4 t cinnamon, two eggs and 1/3 c milk. This mixture was divided into custard cups, which were then placed in a baking pan, filled halfway with boiling water. The pan was then put into a preheated 375 degree oven for 45 minutes. Meanwhile I prepared the sauce on the stovetop. I melted 2 T butter into a saucepan, and added a small chopped onion (Madison calls for a shallot, but I had none and was not prepared to fight the panicked storm shoppers at the grocery store). When the onions were browned I added red cooking wine, fresh ground peppers, and 2 t. Gin (a substitute for juniper berries according to ehow.com http://www.ehow.com/way_5344941_cooking-substitute-juniper-berry.html). This was cooked down by about half, then 2 more T butter were whisked in along with a few dashes of balsamic vinegar. The greens were defrosted in the microwave, then quickly heated on in a cast iron skillet with some olive oil. When the flan was cooked through I removed them from the oven and let them sit for a few minutes, then they were turned onto plates and topped with the sauce, with greens on the side. These were savory treat for a winter's eve. Next time I will use a bit more spice.

Green Beans Simmered with Tomato

I made this recipe several weeks ago, but just never got around to writing the blog post.

Just before our first frost (about a month ago) I picked all the unripe tomatoes from my garden and wrapped them in paper to ripen in our basement. Over the past few weeks I have been able to "harvest" the ripe tomatoes little by little. I was happy to use some of them in this simple recipe, from the ever popular Deborah Madison. Sliced onions were sauteed in olive oil for about 5 minutes, to which I then added a pound of frozen green beans, 2 diced tomatoes, a minced garlic clove, and a bit of water. This was simmered until the beans were just cooked when I added some fresh sage and parsley. Everything was simmered a few minutes more and served as a savory side dish to the rather salty and completely vegetable-less frozen chicken pie we had as our main dish. We rarely eat commercial frozen food, and this was a good example as to why.

Eggplant, again?

Yes, like beets, James and I have discovered a special fondness for what we previously considered to be the Rodney Dangerfield of our farm box. From James' exceptional Ratatatatouille, to our tasty eggplant/squash/tomato stifado from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, and our son's delight at Eggplant Paremesan we now look forward to getting this funny purple vegetable in our weekly haul. Our latest  recipe discovery comes once again from Deborah Madison: Eggplant with Feta Cheese and Tomato. The name says it all. There aren't many more ingredients than what we find in the title of the recipe. The eggplant was sliced in half lengthwise, scored and fried in olive oil, cut-side down, in our indispensable cast-iron skillet until a nice golden color, then flipped over for frying for a few minutes on the other side. Removed from the pan and placed in a small casserole dish they were sprinkled with the garlic salt provided in the season's first farm box delivery (this was not called for in the recipe, but when you cook a lot, you just know what will be good!) and topped with feta. Finally, I skinned, peeled, and cooked down two large tomatoes into a chunky sauce, which was spooned on top of the feta.The eggplant was then cooked for about 40 minutes at 350 in the convection oven. These turned out to be a delightful, crispy, flavorful, and satisfying meal.

Something you can do with all that squash

Once again, we turn to Deborah Madison for help in finding out what we can prepare with our farm box bounty. We received a variety of different squashes this week, including a spaghetti squash. Adapting a recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone we selected a recipe that called for parsley (still growing fresh in our garden), garlic (also still have plenty from previous farm box hauls) and cheese. We began by simply putting the whole darn squash into a 375 degree oven. After one hour, we took it out and cut it in half lengthwise. The flesh was soft, and the seeds spilled out easily. We scraped the flesh out and added it to a heated pan with some butter, along with the minced garlic and parsley, as well as a red bell pepper (not part of the original recipe, but another fresh offering from our farm box.). To this we added some shredded asiago cheese, then we scrambled up some eggs to serve on the side. James and I both agreed that the garlic was a bit over powering, and the squash probably would have been better if we'd used sauteed onions instead. The dish was colorful though, and not unpleasant.

Leek & Potato Soup

I took advantage of the leeks that came in our weekly farm box delivery to try a soup that I had been curious  about for a while. I turned to our mainstay for vegetarian cooking - Deborah Madison - for the recipe, which was so simple I felt the need to embellish it a bit. With just seven ingredients listed (in addition to water): leeks (white part only); potatoes; butter; salt and pepper & and milk. I replaced half of the water with vegetarian soup stock to give this a little more body. Madison actually uses the word "meager" in her own description. This was very easy to make. I cooked the chopped leeks and potatoes in butter for about 10 minutes in the soup pot, then added the liquid (2 cups of soup stock + 2 cups of water) and simmered for about half an hour. Then added some milk and heated again before serving. While I wouldn't exactly use the word meager, it did seem to be lacking in flavor. Next time I will use a higher proportion of soup stock, more milk, and add garlic and a few more herbs. I did learn something very important in preparing this meal: the instructions said to "set the leeks in a bowl of water to soak while you prepare the potatoes, then lift them out with a strainer, letting any sand fall to the bottom". Good thing I followed that. I had no idea. I would have been pretty disappointed if I'd ended up with gritty soup. James made some potato bread in our bread machine to go with this, which made the meal more hearty.

Milk is optional in this recipe, so it can easily be made vegan.

Parm Perfection

Nueva Receta has been a bit quiet of late, as our late summer has had us enjoying some familiar recipes and more than our usual amount of dining out, during a lot of short family trips far from our recipe shelf. But now we are back in our culinary groove, and our attention returns to, yes, eggplant.

Over the weekend, we enjoyed a terrific end-of-summer party with friends who shared all kinds of local bounty. Our contribution included our raspberry whitbeer and the first bottle of our Barolo -- which turned out very well indeed, and is expected to get even better --  any my second batch of weapons-grade ratatouille of the year.

Because our daughter became very fond of eggplant Parmesan, my attention the next day turned to that vegetarian mainstay. I have seen her enjoy it at quite a few restaurants and though my previous attempts have been less than stellar, I decided to try again, with particular attention to texture. As regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn, I turned once again to kitchen goddess Deborah Madison, only slightly modifying her recipe on page 279 of Vegetarian Cooking for All.

I do not want to give the impression that cheese is always the route to bliss in Madison's pages, but it did once again contribute to the success of this dish.

I started with one large eggplant from Hanson Farm -- about as local as possible. It was fresher than anything from the grocery store would be, but it did take me a couple of days to get to this recipe. So where Madison writes that the slices (1/3-inch) should be salted for 30 to 60 minutes unless the eggplant is farm fresh, I decided to compromise. I very lightly salted the slices on both sides and left them out for 15 minutes while packing up the car for said daughter's return to school (this was to be a farewell dinner).

I then blotted them, remembering an overly salty try at this recipe last year, and brushed both sides with olive oil. I placed them under the broiler, first a bit close, then a bit far, then back close, until both sides were browned, almost charred. It is the nature of eggplant that they never got crisp (as they might if I had let the salting go longer), but I got them to a nice, caramelized state.

Meanwhile, I had mixed a small can of tomato paste with a 15-ounce can of tomato sauce, in lieu of the fresh tomato sauce that Madison calls for. As this heated, I stirred in slivers of basil cut directly from our garden. I then brushed a very small amount of oil into a baking pan, spooned in some of the sauce, and layered the semi-charred eggplant -- I had just one layer, but more would have been great. Over this I sprinkled shredded mozzarella (Madison recommends slices of fresh mozz if available) and spooned over the remaining sauce.

And then, of course, I sprinkled some cheese from our friends in Parma, grateful that the earthquake earlier this year did not get it all! I then baked for 25 minutes at 475 (convection), so that the sauce itself became sweet and sticky, along with the cheese. I had managed not to exceed the recipe's cheese parameters -- as I am often tempted to do -- but the meltiness made this dish just perfect for our daughter's sendoff.

We Got the Beet

The Go Go's always had the beet! The Rockefeller Center version confirms that these young ladies are part of our generation.

Readers of this blog might already know that beets are among our biggest local-food challenges. We try to eat all of our vegetables, but the icky texture and the aggressive blandness seem to dominate anything we prepare with beets. Once again, kitchen goddess Deborah Madison came to our rescue, with a green salad based on her "Grated Beet Salad with Cumin" (itself a variation of another salad on page 155 of Vegetarian Cooking for All).

I started by preparing the lime-cumin vinaigrette (p 185), a complex and savory sauce whose flavor could not be beeten. I began by mashing one garlic clove (from our Cochester Neighborhood Farm share) with 1/8t salt in our small mortar. Then I combined this with the zest of two limes and the juice of one lime (reserving a little straight lime juice for the chef!), 2T chopped scallions (also farm box) and half a chopped jalapeño. Then I toasted 1t cumin seeds in a dry cast-iron skillet (Madison calls for 1/2t each of cumin and coriander, but I could not find the latter). I cleaned out the mortar in order to crush the toasted seeds, and mixed them in, then whisked in 1/4t dry mustard and 1/3 cup olive oil (completely forgetting that I could have used jalapeño oil from L.O.V.E. --- more on that in a future post).

Now for the star of this salad, which we improved by demoting it to a supporting role. The recipe calls for one pound of beets -- I knew we did not have that much, but I used all we had, which was four or five small beets. I peeled and shredded them (again, see last year's gratin post for shredder details) and blanched them in boiling salt water (that is, I put them in only for a minute). I then drained, blotted, and sieved them so that I would not have a wet mess. At this point, we realized that -- for the first time in our lives -- we did not have enough beets! We were actually sharing this salad with friends, so Pam had the brilliant idea of combining it with cucumbers and greens -- also from this week's farm share -- before applying the lime-cumin concoction.

The result was actually delicious -- the greens solved the texture problem and the vinaigrette provided more flavor than even beets could absorb.

Pasta with asparagus, lemon, and herbs

Last Tuesday James posted Class of Ambition in which he recounts having his students over to our house to cook and dine with us. I noticed we still had aspargus in the refrigerator, leftover from this lofty endeavor, and set out to find a recipe to use them up before they spoiled. Once again Deborah Madison to the rescue! Not only did this recipe call for asparagus, also listed among the ingredients were scallions, another vegetable that was waiting to be used in our refrigerator. This dish was a bit complicated. There were a lot of ingredients and I needed to do a bit of chopping, sautéeing and boiling. Scallions, lemon zest, and herbs (including dried thyme, and sage) were sautéed in butter and olive oil. Meanwhile, the asparagus was cut and placed in boiling water for three minutes. Then the asparagus was added to the skillet with the scallions, etc. and the spaghetti was put into the same water the asparagus came from. Chopped walnuts, along with fresh parsley and chives (from my yard!) were added to the skillet while the pasta cooked. Once the pasta was ready, it too, went into the skillet. I did not drain the pasta thoroughly as the recipe said to "add it to the pan with some of the water clinging to the strands." All was mixed together, divided onto plates and topped with parmesan cheese. This was very tasty, and the nuts added a good texture as well as some extra protien.

To completely complicate things, I also prepared fettuccini alfredo while I was making this. My daughter was unwilling to try this one.

You Had Me at Gratin

We do have other good cook books, but as readers of this blog have surely noticed by now, Deborah Madison's tome is the Bible of our kitchen. As the name implies, it is full of vegetarian recipes, but they are available to everyone. Of course that is true of all vegetarian recipes, but I think what Madison means is that these are recipes that are so enjoyable that carnivores will not whine about the "sacrifice" they are making by eating lower on the food chain for a meal or two.

Our latest foray began in an interesting way. We had accumulated a few squash and fresh herbs over the past couple weeks, and were looking for an original way to use them. Pam turned to the index of VCE and found something that used the stuff we had -- or reasonable substitutions, such as butternut and pattypan (flying saucer) squash for the zucchini squash specified.

I must say that I consented to the choice Sunday night without looking at it, and in fact on Monday morning I realized that I had failed even to note the name or page number -- Summer Squash, Herb and Rice Gratin on page 286. Fortunately, Pam marked the recipe itself and noted the link back to the Béchamel sauce required. Unfortunately, the combination was not going to fit well between the evening's scheduled meetings.

In the end, all was well, as I was able to substitute ingredients and cut corners enough to make the dish fit in our time and ingredient constraints. The shredding of butternut squash is more time-consuming than zucchini, especially since we insist on shredding with our high-karma manual shredder, rather than any kind of electric gizmo. I did the shredding as quickly as I could, in order to give the lightly salted squash a bit of time to drain while I worked on the sauce and cooked the rice.

Béchamel sauce is sometimes described simply as "white sauce," but in the case of this recipe the scalded milk is first infused with onions and other herbs. We took a walk on the wild side -- as we so often do -- and just threw in all the herbs we had on hand. The infusion is done simply by scalding the milk with these ingredients and letting the chopped onion and herbs sit in the hot milk. Given the need to hurry, I kept the milk over a very low flame (cooking with gas!) and let it steep for just 5-7 minutes or so.

Here is the tricky bit, which I somehow actually did as instructed: Once I was satisfied that the milk was adequately aromatic, I poured it through a sieve into the bubbling butter-and-flour roux. As I write this, I realize that I could have sieved the milk and then whisked it into the roux, but that's not what Deborah Madison told me to do!

The basic idea of this recipe is to divide this herbish/onionish white sauce into two parts, mixing one part with rice and shredded squash for the bottom of the pan and mixing the other part with shredded Parmesan (see trusty shredder above; it got a work out) as a cheesy top layer. Then the whole thing gets browned in the oven.

"Gratin" means cheese, at least to me, which is why I dove into this recipe, despite my better judgment. The result was good enough that we will try this again, when we have a bit of leisure to do it right. We will refrain from mint, which was interesting but probably not ideal with the other herbs.