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.

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.

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. 

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!

Watermelon-Lime-Mint-Feta salad

From the ultimate authority on vegetarian cooking, Deborah Madison, comes this unlikely taste treat. We got a small watermelon in a recent CSA pick up, and since James is allergic to them, it was up to me to make sure it got its proper due. I noticed this recipe in Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone while I was looking for a good squash recipe (stay tuned - James will blog about same, soon). I cut up half the watermelon into chunks, squeezed the juice from half a lime, tore up some fresh mint leaves, and a sprinkled a bit of feta plus a dash each of salt and pepper on top. This was quite refreshing, and made a perfect light meal. Total prep time - about 5 minutes (including going to my garden to get the mint). My greatest challenge was spitting out all the seeds. Either eat this alone, or make sure you are among good friends.

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.

Ricotta Pancakes

 When I saw this on a friend's page recently, I was intrigued:

I have been honing my approach to Deborah Madison's pancake recipe for close to two decades and had dedicated a page on my faculty web site to it before we began this blog. 

Ina Garten's recipe is at first notable for the very forward use of lemon and fig, but her approach is also different in the fundamentals: half of the liquid portion is ricotta and a fifth of the dry portion is corn starch. I was intrigued and decided to give this a try, in part because we had some ricotta on hand. 

The video itself does not provide enough detail to make this recipe work; when I tried to follow links associated with it, I was invited to download an app. Since I do not cook from my phone, I was at a bit of a loss, until the same friend who posted the video sent me the link to the full recipe -- from the app.

In fact, we had most of the ingredients except the figs and lemon on hand, but we had lemon juice. We also did not have buttermilk, but Deborah Madison teaches us that milk with a splash of lemon juice is a good substitute, after being allowed to rest for 10 minutes. Since I never drink buttermilk, I almost never buy it, always using this trick. In this case, I just used more than the usual lemon juice.

In place of figs, I chopped up a couple of small apples we had on hand, scattering them on top of the pancakes as in the video, rather than mixing them in the batter as I usually do. Incidentally, I usually do not peel apples before cooking with them -- it is easier to leave the skin on, and gives them an agreeable texture.

The batter had a distinctive texture -- almost spongy -- and the pancakes were as fluffy as they were delicious. I am glad that I did take time in the afternoon to buy some maple syrup at our local neighborhood farmstand. We had put it off for quite a while, and it was great to have the good stuff for these delicious, breakfast-for-dinner pancakes! 

I rarely find figs in the wild (or supermarket), though I did take care of a fig tree for a rich family in Baltimore during my landscaping days. When I next encounter them (hint to local friends who might know a source), I will revisit this recipe.

Image (complete with figs): Food Network

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.

Favorite Biscuit Variation

Pam:
It seems that we've mentioned Deborah Madison's Buttermilk Biscuits on several posts, but have been remiss in providing the recipe. This is likely because we've been enjoying these for so long they are hardly "new" to us. However, this week we did a few variations on the recipe, making it new again.

The recipe, as described in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, calls for
2 cups of flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 cup of buttermilk

First, I will point out that we almost never use buttermilk, but substitute plain yogurt instead. Earlier this week when preparing to make these I realized we had only regular milk (no buttermilk, no yogurt). We learned a trick once of making a buttermilk substitute in 10 minutes by adding some vinegar to plain milk. Alas, we had no vinegar either. (Our larder was indeed spare as we had diligently eaten virtually everything in both our houses before taking an eight-day road trip to drop our daughter at college in the mid-west).

However, I was not about to let the lack of necessary ingredients stop me from having my biscuits. I used a substitute for the substitute -a meta-substitute- lemon juice did the same job of curdling the milk as vinegar. I also whisked in a dollop of sour cream. My next problem was that we were quite low on flour, and I discovered we were short by about 1/3 cup. I considered making a smaller batch of biscuits, but then I remembered that James improved on our waffle recipe earlier this year by putting in some corn meal in place of flour (see the entry here) and so I decided to try the same with the biscuits. I sifted the flour and corn meal in with the rest of the dry ingredients, then cut the butter into it with a pastry cutter. The sour milk/cream mix was added to the dry ingredients and mixed. James took over from there.

James:
I believe this is the second time we have used the Big Green Egg for biscuits. Thanks to the innovations Pam describes above, these were delicious! But thanks to my still-limited skills with the kamado-style grill, they were not beautiful. They look lovely in this photograph, taken a few minutes before they were done --

-- but they did not look quite so lovely as I scraped them from the baking stone. I had heated the grill to 500F, but had put the stone in for only a few minutes when I added the dough. I should have let it heat more thoroughly. The result was rather hot knuckles and a fair bit of batter left on the stone. By the time it cooled thoroughly, those remnants were quite charred, and the stone is soaking for a couple days as I write this.

The good news, though, is that the delicious biscuit tops had all the advantages of muffin tops.

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.

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.

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.

Sautéed Jerusalem Artichokes with Sunflower Seeds

Earlier this month we began picking up our annual CSA farm box from Colchester Neighborhood Farm. This week we received Jerusalem Artichokes (or Sunchokes). We had never had these before and looked to Deborah Madison, author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for guidance. Her cookbook is over 700 pages long and has recipes for every kind of vegetable you've never heard of. I decided to try the sautéed with sunflower seeds recipe for the jerusalem artichokes. This root vegetable looks a lot like ginger, but is bitter in flavor. I cut the 'chokes into rounds and sautéed in canola oil. I added salt and pepper, then topped with toasted sunflower seeds and parsley and some other herb (the parsley and unknown herb also came from our farm box). James pointed out that I should have shelled the sunflowers first. Well, yes. I was so glad to be using the sunflower seeds that have been in our cupboard for over a year that I didn't think about this part. Mostly we ended up eating around them. I was glad to use the ingredients from the farm box, but I have to say I wouldn't buy jersusalem artichokes on purpose. This was used as a side dish to an old favorite - grilled cheddar, bacon and red pepper sandwiches. We got the recipe from the newspaper a few years ago. We were glad to find it as we were not sure what to do with the red pepper jelly we got in the big basket of  homemade jellies we won at our church auction that year. We ended up liking these sandwiches so much that red pepper jelly has become a "staple on Maple". Of course we made the change of grating the cheese this time! And prepared them on fresh yogurt bread, still warm from the bread machine. We paired this with sweet pineau de pinot from from Westport Rivers vineyard.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Pancake Bush

When I got home yesterday afternoon, I was proud to find that our daughter and a visiting friend had made themselves a brunch of pancakes. We do not keep a lot of "food" in the house, though we keep a lot of "ingredients" and fortunately Paloma has been raised to know what to do with them. Our indispensable Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (aka Hayes-Boh Family Bible) was on the counter, opened to the page that is the basis of my James' Famous Pancakes (Readers of this blog will know that we have a favorite approach and many other quite-nice pancake recipes.)

For breakfast this morning, I offered to make pancakes, using the batter leftover from the efforts of our young chefs the day before as a starting point. There was not enough for the whole family and guest, so I augmented it with the ingredients from my own version of the recipe. This time I used 1/2 cup whole-wheat flour and 1 cup all-purpose, as I sometimes do. I used a spatula to alternate dry and wet ingredients (yogurt, vanilla, milk) and beat in one egg and a little canola oil.

Then came the fun part. Last year I had planted a blackberry bush, and in recent weeks had noticed it already starting to bear fruit. I had nibbled a few directly from the bush, and decided it was time to cook with them. We also had a few blueberries on hand and some butterscotch chips. Rather than mixing in any of these ingredients, I simply scattered them onto individual pancakes, so that we ended up with three different choices, all of which proved to be quite popular, especially when served with warmed, genuine maple syrup.

The blackberries were so big that I had to press them down a bit into the cooking pancakes.

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!

Quiche La Poodle

Notice: No actual poodles were involved in this dinner. Rather ... 

As regular readers of Nueva Receta will have realized, we often let the National Day Calendar inspire our culinary choices. The pandemic has affected this tendency in two somewhat contradictory ways. We are more likely to have spare time to browse the site, but we are also less likely to dash out to grab ingredients for a last-minute recognition of a made-up holiday. (Additional notice: all holidays are made up, but that is a discussion for, well, another day.)

Fortunately, Pam noticed National Quiche Lorraine Day before I set out for our weekly grocery run, so I I managed to get all the bacon and chives needed to do complete the main version found on the Simply Recipes Quiche Loriaine page. Writer Elise Bauer suggests several options for the crust (including a crust-free variation), so we of course turned to Deborah Madison's tome for a basic recipe.

The "we" in the previous sentence is a bit different this time -- our wonderful kid Harvey is here for a long visit. Since he watches British baking shows a lot, I pressed him into service! He made the pie crust with both wheat and white flour, salt, butter and a tiny bit of ice water. We put it in the fridge in our Pyrex pie plate, because I have learned that even on a mildly warm day, "room" temperature is the wrong temperature for a pie crust. I sat down to read the recipe with more care, and realized that we needed to put the pie in the oven earlier than I thought -- Bauer calls for it to bake for 40 minutes ahead of the filling. We came pretty close to this by the time we had other ingredients ready; we ignored the suggestions for pie weights, foil (which I do not even understand), and whatnot. The crust was beautiful, though Harvey thought it not quite as thin and uniform as he would have hoped.

I started cooking the bacon in our indispensable cast-iron skillet. In just the past year I have finally gotten good at this -- starting at medium high and gradually reducing the heat, removing each piece to drain when it reaches perfect doneness. While I did this, Harvey made the custard -- whisking five eggs very fresh from our friends at Maribett farm (the recipe calls only for three) and then adding the seasonings, milk, cream, and chives.

I shredded cheddar and Monterey jack cheeses together (Gruyere would have been even better, but we already had a lot of cheese in the house and decided we should use some of it) and put a small amount in the bottom of the crust. I then cut the bacon into 1/2-inch bits and distributed it evenly in the crust. We carefully poured the custard over this and put it in the oven. I turned around and discovered I had left most of the freshly-shredded cheese on the Gilligan (our kitchen island). I panicked a bit, because it should have been in the pan before the custard, so that the entire pie would be cheesy. Harvey advised calm, and suggested it might even be nice to have the cheesiness concentrated at the top. 

So I carefully added the cheese and set the oven timer for 30 minutes. At that time, the top looked perfect as Harvey had predicted, but I could tell that the custard was still a bit jiggly. Worried about over-cooking the top, I reduced the heat from 350F to 325F and set the timer for 15 more minutes. 

#RoundPieSquarePhoto

The ding-ding sounded again just as Pam finished a (rather dumb) Zoom meeting -- perfect timing! And this was the perfect meal to enjoy on our deck with some apple sauce on the side and Chardonnay in our glasses.

We followed this with some raspberry Entenmann's in honor of the attainment day of Pam's father Jack, who would have been 99 years old.

So what about that poodle, anyway?

I played the B52s song at the start of preparing this meal because it was not just a day to celebrate eggy custard pie (aka quiche), but also National Rescue Dog Day -- and this is a song about the singer's complicated relationship with his dog. As the people belonging to a rescue dog, we can certainly relate!