butternut squash galette with carmelized onions and fontina

 photos by Stella Chen

My friend Stella and I continued our cooking "lessons" this week, and this time she came to my place to learn some new recipes, "Western style." We made the butternut squash galette from Smitten Kitchen (the cookbook version, which is only slightly different), and a kale salad with shaved brussels sprouts (one of my favorites). And she brought her fancy camera over, so for the first time I have blog photos not taken on my camera phone. :) It was a really nice meal, and the crispy kale salad was a perfect pair for the rich galette - which had the warm winter flavors of squash, onion, sage, and fontina cheese. Delicious! Deb Perelman's dough recipe is pretty easy, too, although I somehow found we ended up with a bit more dough than we needed, and the crust was a bit too thick. But all in all, a great recipe and I want to try further variations with other vegetable fillings. 

fragrant lamb tagine with prunes and almonds

This recipe comes slightly ill-timed...as it's a great hearty, spiced winter stew, and today is the first day in Ann Arbor that truly, truly feels like spring. (Please, be here to stay!) Anyways, it's so fragrant I can't wait to eat it anyways. It's a recipe from David Tanis's Heart of the Artichoke. Tanis describes visiting Morocco and tasting this dish, "on top of the world" in the sand dunes of the Sahara. It's good, but I found that it had a bit too much sweetness. I would maybe reduce the golden raisins and prunes to 1 cup total when making it again, and adding some lemon juice and cilantro.

Wild Rice Salad with Butter Beans, Garlic-Roasted Carrots and Fennel

This is a good one... I saw the salad on My New Roots and loved the combination of wild rice and carrots. It smelled soo good as the fennel, carrots and garlic were roasting. It packs well as a lunch, too.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup wild rice (uncooked)
1 can butter beans (or navy, cannellini), or from dried (+ 8 hours)
4-5 medium carrots, cut into diagonal discs
1/2 fennel bulb, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 small red onion, sliced thin (or about 1/4 of a larger red onion)
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 bunch fresh dill
fennel fronds
salt, black pepper

Dressing:
olive oil / cider vinegar / dijon mustard / maple syrup / salt

Beans: If making beans from dried, soak overnight, or 8 hours. Drain, rinse, and cook about 45 mins.

Make wild rice: rinse wild rice, drain, and put in a pot, cover with cold water. Add salt, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer, and cook until tender (about 45 minutes). Drain the excess water.

Roast carrots and fennel: Preheat oven to 400.  Wash carrots and slice on diagonal. Cut fennel into pieces roughly the same size, and mince the garlic. Add with oil salt and pepper to a baking sheet. Bake 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Don't let the vegetables get too soft.

Combine ingredients: Mix dressing and add to warm beans, rice, carrots. Add paper-thin onions, and dill and fennel fronds. Tip: add the red onions to the vinegar to soak while you cook so they lose a bit of their raw bite. You can also salt them, let them sit, and run them under cold water to rinse. This also makes them a bit more neutralized.

Recipe inspired by My New Roots: Warm Salad Month: Wild Rice Butter Bean and Garlic Roasted Carrot Salad

winter comfort: pancetta, white bean, swiss chard pot pies

Monday night Katie and I cooked pot pies from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. It was a little bit of work, making the pastry dough from scratch as well, but if you have two cooks in the kitchen it all gets done pretty efficiently. :) Deb Perelman suggests making these for company, because you can also do the components in advance and bake them later. To make: first make the pastry dough, make the pot pie filling (swiss chard, pancetta) and a gravy-like sauce (white beans), fill oven-save bowls, top with the pastry, and bake. The pastry is really flaky, buttery and delicious. If you left out the pancetta and used vegetable stock it would be great as a vegetarian recipe as well.

how to use your winter CSA, part II

The selection doesn't look any different yet from last time...The farm is still giving us a mix of some hoophouse greens and fall/winter storage vegetables. I am looking forward to spring! Here's what we made the last two weeks:

butternut squash (from last box): winter couscous and red curry butternut soup
celeriac (from last box): apple-celeriac salad
sweet dumpling squash: quinoa-stuffed squash, and we still have more to use up
carrots: minestrone, plus raw for lunches
kale: crepes and minestrone
red onions: beet risotto, winter couscous, got thrown in everything!
potatoes: minestrone and more of those delicious potato chips
beets: beet stew with lamb, beet risotto, Jessica also made a roasted beet salad, and still more beets....I'm afraid it's turning into a beet blog...

Also, take a look at this recent NYT article, Winter Poses Challenges for Chefs with a Local Ethos
From the article: "Locally grown. Market-sourced. Farm to table: These phrases have become the mantras of the American menu, promising ingredients that are supremely fresh, in season and produced within a tight radius of the restaurant. But what can they possibly mean in the dead of winter, in northerly climes where farms are battened down and the earth is as hard as a raw cabbage?"

see here for our last CSA box and what we made. Preview for next time: beets + greens, carrots, squash, greens, potatoes, kohlrabi

hearty soups IV: porotos granados, Chilean bean and corn stew

 This soup is adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's cookbook Veg: River Cottage Everyday. Again, another great British chef I had not heard of...I saw this book at Synne's and fell in love with the images and simple recipe ideas. I just had to have it, although it doesn't come out in the US edition until May 2013. So we're using grams and liters, and "tinned" beans instead of canned. :) If you have a kitchen scale, metric is easier anyways than measuring cups, and for things like soups the measurements don't need to be exact anyways.

This is a take on the traditional Chilean stew porotos granados, a combination of old-world ingredients that (according to the internet) pre-dates the Spanish, from the Mapuche Indians. I guess it is traditionally made with cranberry beans. See here for how beautiful they are, by "Hungry Sofia." I am dealing with winter and the lack of fresh most things, so I used canned cannellini beans.  Other recipes call for the addition of bell pepper and basil instead of cilantro. But the common ingredients are sqaush/pumpkin, beans, sweet paprika, corn. I followed the lead of a recommendation on Saveur to add a swirl of a garlicy-herb paste into the soup. I found it a bit bland without the addition of lots of salt, pepper and herbs at the end. Then it was nice and fresh tasting - so season well.

hearty soups III: jamaican jerk chicken chili

 This soup relates to one of my favorite cooking memories with Michael. We were making this chili in Berlin , and in German grocery stores you of course can't buy Jamaican Jerk seasoning. So Michael made the seasoning from scratch, combining various spices and herbs with the mortar and pestle. Very impressive. But then he forgot to check how much of the spice blend the recipe called for - just adding all of it to the soup. It was so spicy we were both crying, trying to eat the (really good!) soup with yogurt on it. haha!  Here is the recipe, with the addition of chicken.  It's a good one...Michael said it's his favorite so far in the hearty soups series. Just watch the spice level. :)

By the way, I could have called this post: no horse meat in this chili. Have you heard about the latest Horse Meat Scandal, aka "Burgergate," in Europe? Horse meat has been "masquerading" as beef across Europe, mislabeled in all kinds of prepared dinners, and now in Nestle products. A poll in Britain found that 1 in 4 people is now eating less meat, and 65% mistrust food labels. See also NPR, Why is some food taboo? and Salon's 5 Lessons from the Horse Meat Scandal. It's strange: in the US I very rarely eat meat that has been processed in any way. In Germany, however, where you can get so much good sausage, I do occasionally do so, in Salami form. Stories like this do make me cringe a bit though. What do you think?

hearty soups II: french lentil stew with roasted carrots and mint

Synne made this recipe a while back and told me it's a good one. It's a basic French Lentil soup with the addition of mint, lemon, harissa, and oven-roasted carrots and onions. It's amazing that something so simple (roasting the onions in the oven and not sauteing them) can make such a difference. They smelled so sweet - the whole apartment smelled amazing as they were roasting.

roommate dinner: quinoa stuffed squash and apple-celeriac salad

Jessica and I were both finally home on a Friday night, so we cooked and caught up on our Top Chef episodes (We love Sheldon! And we want to cook for the Iditarod mushers! That was the coolest challenge ever!). This was a recipe on our to-cook list for a while, plus a recipe to use up more CSA ingredients. The two recipes actually paired really well together, both using green apples. One hot and one raw dish. Even after a great dinner, watching Top Chef still made me hungry...especially for some seafood! (this episode took place in Alaska, and they had a salmon/sourdough challenge!) I wish I had access to my dad's freezer full of wild salmon...

Ottolenghi's ultimate winter couscous

This recipe is from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty, a vegetarian cookbook. Thanks to Synne for introducing me to this Israeli-born British chef, who also regularly writes for The Guardian. The flavors are always amazing in his recipes. This one was great for using our winter produce. I love recipes that are just so vibrant. This one, with the squash, carrots, parsnips, and warm spices, is very orange and very beautiful.