Colcannon in color

Colcannon with  real and fake squash, plus a pear.

It was a stormy Friday night, snowing and blowing so that the evening dog walk was severely truncated. It was fun to walk (or in Parker's case gallop in excited circles) with my back to the wind as the snow zipped by and whirled around in the street, but facing into it was another matter. I needed full Sumas Northeaster gear instead of the girly little scarf and hat I'd grabbed on the way out the door. It was hard to breathe, and the sleety flakes stung.

So we came back early and I made some colcannon, the Irish potato/cabbage combo that got many a poor family through winters like these, until the potato famine wiped out even this basic fare. Colcannon is mashed potatoes, boiled cabbage, butter and salt, and maybe some scallions. Winter Harvest has a recipe, but you don't really need one.

There's a nostalgic song about colcannon, which the Kulshan Chorus will be singing at our concert this December 11. One verse goes:

Well did you ever make colcannon,

Made with lovely pickled cream

With the greens and scallions mingled

Like a picture in a dream

Did you ever make a hole on top

To hold the meltin' flake

Of the creamy flavoured butter

That our mothers used to make...

Well, I like colcannon well enough, and I like the song, but I don't seem to be true enough to my Celtic roots to dream about it. It's not exactly exciting stuff. And that got me thinking....what if it were more colorful, literally?  So I whipped some up with the purple potatoes and red cabbage from my Osprey Farms CSA, with results seen above. Whether this is a picture from a sweet dream or a nightmare depends on how you feel about purple food, I guess. My housemate says it would look better on a hotrod. The bread is celeriac bread (also in Winter Harvest), which is basically Irish soda bread, with celeriac. It's tasty.

Costco here I come

One of the great things about my Bellingham neighborhood is that I can walk or bike to the grocery store, or make a quick stop on the way to somewhere else. So I haven't set foot in a Costco for years, probably since the girls moved out on their own.  But I'll make a day of it Saturday for Winter Harvest book signings: Burlington from 1 p.m. (ish) until 5 and Marysville from 7 to 9. Greg Atkinson--a James Beard Award winner and nice guy--will be there too, promoting his latest cookbook, Northwest Essentials.

My winter CSA, weeks 1 and 2

What I’ve gotten so far

Week One --Nov 4-10

Onions, garlic, red cabbage, parsnips, pea vines (with November flowers!), rainbow chard, baby beets with greens, purple potatoes, pickled garlic scapes.

Week Two  -- Nov. 11-17

Shallots, garlic, fennel, fingerling potatoes, romanesco, kale, canned heritage tomatoes, specialty carrots—Purple Haze and a pale, pale yellow variety, rosemary

What I’ve made so far

Mashed potatoes and parsnips with chopped garlic scapes and a splash of Worcestershire

Beet greens and chard braised with garlic, garlic scapes, and kalamata olives

Stir-fried pea vines: Ehhh. This is the first time I've cooked pea vines and I was underwhelmed. I'll try a different approach before I give up on them.

Lentils with garlic, roasted sweet potato and roasted purple potato; this was good, and was further improved by the addition of caramelized onions.

Risotto with pureed fennel and romanesco. Nice, but the kind of risotto that is clearly meant to accompany a meat course. I like my risotto as the main event.

Kale and carrots braised with shallots, a few olives, and a smidgeon of bacon. I added a few tiny boiled potatoes in there too. 

I think the next project is going to be a Day-glo Colcannon, with purple potatoes and red cabbage. 

I also need to do something with the beets and remaining parsnips, pronto. I'll feel lousy if I let this beautiful produce go to waste.

Squashed, but not complaining

I am proud of this recipe (which I recently invented myself, so any duplicates are due to independent inspiration). The name comes both from the mystery ingredient and the fact that the first time I made it I inadvisedly used a tube pan and then turned it upside-down to cool like an angel food cake.  So instead of a nice round creation with a tidy hole in the middle I ended up with a pile of moist and tasty chunks. I put it in a casserole for transport to school, where it passed the teenage test and was quickly polished off. Even when I told them it contained baked squash, they still came back for more. That’s because it was moist (the squash), but not leaden (the egg whites), and just flavorful enough (the spices) to be interesting without getting in the way of the chocolate. 

If you’re not wedded to pumpkin pie, this could be a good addition to the Thanksgiving table.

Squashed Cake

1¾ cups flour

1½ teaspoons baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

1¼ cups sugar

3-4 tablespoons cocoa powder

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ginger

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1 cup baked, pureed pumpkin or winter squash (I used a small kabocha)

½ teaspoon vanilla

3 egg whites

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Mix together the flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, cocoa powder, and spices.

In a separate bowl, beat the oil, squash, and vanilla. Add the oil and squash mixture to the dry ingredients and stir or beat to form a stiff batter.

Whip the eggs into stiff peaks and fold into the batter.

Spoon into a lightly greased Bundt pan or a rectangular cake pan and bake until the cake springs back when pressed in the center. Baking time will vary with the pan and moisture content of the squash. Start checking at 25-30 minutes. 

A well flavored squash keeps more familiar company here in this simple dish from the  Winter Harvest Cookbook, which, I am happy to say, is starting to hit the stores.

            

 Coming up on November 26 is International Onion Day, which is the kind of holiday I can get behind. It’s also my son-in-law Ronny’s birthday, another big day around here. I’m very fond of both—Ronny and onions. This Greek recipe reminds me of good diner food—maybe those sweet potato fries that even the healthiest eater can’t resist every now and then.

2/3 cup flour
salt and pepper
2 cups cubed winter squash

3 cups diced yellow onions
1 teaspoon dried thyme
olive oil

Put the flour, salt and pepper in a large mixing bowl (or you can do what my mom did when flouring stew meat and put it in a paper bag). Add the squash and onions and coat evenly, by tossing the veggies in the bowl or shaking the bag.

Heat ½ inch of olive oil in a large, heavy skillet. Watch it carefully and don’t let it smoke. Olive oil has a lower smoking point than many frying oils, but you want it for the flavor. Use a slotted spoon (to remove extra flour) to add the vegetables in two or three batches, depending on the size of the pan. They need enough room to fry rather than steam from the moisture in the onions.

Fry until browned on one side and then turn over and brown the other side, maybe 4 minutes per side. Remove from heat and drain. Repeat with the remaining squash and onions.

Sprinkle with thyme, check for more salt and pepper if needed, and serve hot.

SERVES 4

Vegan

The Coolness of Cauliflower, the Charm of Chard

photos are from Growing Whatcom's winter produce list

When my mom took Home Ec in the Great Depression, Lincoln High School couldn’t afford much in the way of ingredients for cooking classes. She remembered making shirred eggs, over and over.  A little margarine to line the custard cup, an egg, a splash of milk, salt and pepper---bake and done. However she learned to be a cook legendary among our friends, that wasn’t it. 

Thinking back to my own Home Ec classes in the 1960s, it’s probably telling that I cannot recall a single thing we cooked, although I’m pretty sure Jello was involved. I can remember meals going back to early childhood, but that class at Sumner High with Mrs. Boushay, who was very nice, is a culinary blank spot. (Recalling the madras miniskirt suit I made in the sewing unit is another matter. I was not born to match seams in plaid.)

I’m pretty sure that the students taking Lois Rienstra’s cooking classes at the high school where I teach will remember what they ate. The other day Bobbi Sue came to my English class bubbling about the dish she and her cooking partner had made that was “pure awesomeness.”  When I asked her about it, she zipped back down the hall and brought me some, and she was right. Bobbi Sue is not one of your teenage vegan greenie types, nor does she think a whole lot of things in life are awesome, but the recipe that made us both happy featured cauliflower, chard and potatoes, fresh from the Growing Whatcom CSA. 

Obviously, things are changing in high school kitchens. Lois has put a portion of her program’s buying power into local food this year, which is particularly appropriate at our rural school since many of the students are from farming and farm-working families. Some of her young cooks spend summers and vacations growing the very vegetables that they are learning to cook with imagination and respect. It’s good to see those transformations—fieldworkers into chefs, a kid’s response to Swiss chard going from “gross!” to “awesomeness!”   Lois’s catering class takes the local food message back out into the community by including CSA produce in their monthly Lions Club dinners and other commercial jobs. 

Growing Washington has recently added a Winter CSA, extending the season another 8 weeks into late December. This is good news for me, because the catering class has agreed to make food from Winter Harvest for our Literature Live night at Village Books, Dec. 8. I hope that any local readers will stop by to say hi, have a snack,  and see what good work they do. 

I am also excited to start getting my own winter CSA box from Osprey Hill Farm in Acme, starting next weekend.

Both programs have information online:

http://www.growingwashington.org/foodbox/csadetail_winter.php

http://www.ospreyhillfarm.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/CSA_info__sign_up.pdf

And here’s the recipe for Bobbi Sue’s “pure awesomeness,” courtesy of Growing Whatcom CSA:

Cauliflower, Chard and Leek Gratin

1 medium head of cauliflower, florets only

1 bunch of chard, cleaned, stem removed and chopped

1 leek, white and light green parts only, washed well and chopped

¼ cup chopped shallot

1 T olive oil

2T butter

2T flour

¼ cup cream

1¾ cup 2 percent milk

1 cup grated Grana Padano cheese (optional)

 ½ cup grated Parmesan

salt and pepper to taste

Steam the cauliflower until tender crisp, about 10 minutes. Set aside. Heat the olive oil in a large pan, sauté the leek and shallot for a few minutes until just starting to turn golden. Add the chard and sauté until just wilted. Mix with the cauliflower in a roasting pan.

Make the béchamel. Start by melting the butter in a sauce pan. Add the flour and whisk until it begins to turn golden and smells “nutty” and no longer like raw flour. Add the cream and milk slowly, whisking as you go to keep it smooth. Add the nutmeg. Whisk over low heat until it thickens. Add the Grana Padano cheese and whisk until melted and smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour the sauce evenly over the cauliflower mixture. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350 F for about 15-20 minutes until the top turns golden and is heated through.

Sweet Potato Report

Probably I couldn’t have picked a less promising summer for my first try at Pacific Northwest sweet potatoes.  

I bought five slips from Territorial Seeds, rooted them in water, waited in vain for that burst of June warm weather to get them started in dirt, and finally had to put them in their container ready or not, because I was about to leave for Romania. When I got back in mid-July, three of the babies had given up the ghost, presumably discouraged by the endless chilly rain. The last two hung on, and I wheeled them around the deck like invalids on a cruise ship, following the fickle sun. 

They sat, and sat, and sat, neither growing nor dying, until August when they finally perked up during our brief heat wave and put on a little growth. Then they sat some more. A week ago I upended the pot and harvest about a dozen hairy little roots. Little is the operative word. The entire “crop” probably came in at under a pound. 

I roasted them along with some romano beans that weren’t going to make it to the shell stage but were getting too stringy to sauté. The flavor was excellent, actually--not as sweet as the garnet yams I get at the Co-op, but rich and fresh. I realized I’ve never knowingly eaten fresh sweet potatoes. Unless our forecast is for another non-summer, I’ll try them again next year.

Another semi-casualty of a cool summer in my shady yard was my kabocha squash. It actually produced four fruits on the one vine, which impressed me, but each one was the size of a medium cantaloupe, about half the usual girth. 

Oh well.  In a couple of weeks my winter CSA will start from Osprey Hill Farm, and while I doubt it will include sweet potatoes, I’ll bet I will have all the squash I could want.

Spiced Lentils and Collard Greens

Another recipe from Winter Harvest:  I have a lot of collards this year, and I've been using them in all sorts of ways. This one is an East African combination familiar to fans of Ethiopian restaurants. The blend of strongly flavored greens, mellow lentils and hot spices makes a feast out of plain materials, and a dab of yogurt or cottage cheese adds a cool counterpoint, rather like the Indian curry/raita pairing. Despite their association with tropical cuisines, hot peppers are more reliable producers in cool summers than are most sweet varieties. Their smaller size and thinner flesh require less sun and heat to develop. My friend Mary Jean preserves her hot peppers from the garden by removing the seeds and freezing them on trays. They stay in freezer bags until needed for cooked recipes and they retain their fresh taste although not their crisp texture.

2 tablespoons canola oil, butter, or niter kibbeh (an Ethiopian spiced butter)

1 medium onion, chopped fine

1 tablespoon finely chopped ginger root

4 cloves garlic, minced

2-3 fresh or frozen hot green chilies

1 cup lentils, rinsed and drained

2 cups water

½ pound trimmed collard greens, shredded or chopped (about 3 cups)

1 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 teaspoon salt

black pepper

yogurt

Heat oil or butter in a large heavy saucepan or skillet. Sauté onion, ginger, garlic, and chilies over medium heat until the vegetables soften, maybe 5 minutes. Add lentils, water, and collards. Bring to a simmer, and then cook over low to moderate heat, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes. Lentils should be tender but not dissolved into mush and the whole mixture should be more like porridge than soup. Stir in cardamom, salt and pepper. Add hot sauce or sprinkle with cayenne if you like it hotter.

Pass yogurt on the side.

SERVES 6

Vegetarian, gluten-free

To check out a collards discussion by folks who really care, eg, Southerners, go to http://blogs.ajc.com/food-and-more/2010/10/07/alternative-recipe-for-collard-greens/  

The new Winter Harvest should be off the press next week! At that point in a book project, when it's too late to make changes, anticipation always turns to fear that some glitch got through that will frustrate any cooks who use it.  But right now I'm very excited to see it between covers. New Society has done a beautiful job with the design, and Celeste Henriquez's vegetable drawings are exquisite. I'm really glad they will be getting another viewing.

Arugula

For years, actually decades, I’ve grown arugula, loved it in salads and sandwiches when it was young and zippy, then felt bad and yanked it when it inevitably and quickly got big and too hot for comfort. For some reason it never occurred to me to try cooking it. 

Arugula, by Celeste Henriquez, from Winter Harvest Cookbook

But now I have, and of course a bit of checking online makes me realize that many have gotten there before me. It’s good stuff. Cooking takes away the extra bite, so it goes back to being a strongly flavored green with a pleasant note of sesame, somewhat similar to cooked nettles. Last night I pulled some arugulas that were crowding out the winter lettuce and braised them in a splash of water and olive oil. I roasted a head of cauliflower (in florets) with some Cajun spice mixture and garlic cloves; added some partially boiled potato slices (Yukon golds) to the roasting pan to get just a little crusty, and mixed the whole shebang together with a little grated Romano for a quick green, white, and yellow dinner that was the perfect transition from “long day at work” to “new songs to learn at chorus rehearsal.” There was just a bite left this morning, and it tasted fine cold, too.

I found a number of intriguing arugula recipes at Mariquita Farm’s website: 

http://www.mariquita.com and next I figure to take their version of Arugula Vichyssoise and make it into a hot potato/leek/arugula soup. Mariquita (Spanish for ladybug) is in Watsonville, California, where vichyssoise in October makes perfect sense. Here the rain is pelting down and it’s dark before dinnertime, so I want something warmer.

Apple Applesauce Pie, Oh My

The new Winter Harvest will be in stores in a few weeks, which means I'll be doing some promotion, which means it's time to reacquaint myself with some of the recipes I haven't made in awhile, and with the whole idea of following recipes faithfully. Once the manuscript went to the publisher, I mostly went back to my casual approach to measurements and cooking times. That works fine for real life, but less so for food demonstrations when I want to be able to assure people that if they follow the same procedure, they will get similar results. 

So tonight I made an old favorite from the book, Apple Applesauce Pie, and it was reassuringly good. I used Tsugaru apples from Bellewood Acres, the last of last year's applesauce from Sumas apples, Breckenridge Farms milk and butter, an Organic Valley egg, and Grace Harbor Farms Guernsey yogurt, which gets my vote for the world's best. Tsugarus are maybe not the ideal pie apple as they are very crisp and resist softening up much during cooking, but they taste just great. 

Here's the recipe, from the book: 

APPLE APPLESAUCE PIE

One day I set out to make Mrs. Anderson’s Sour Cream Apple Pie (the recipe is in Lila Gault’s Northwest Cookbook and it’s great) and found I didn’t have any sour cream. The following improvisation is a bit easier on the arteries, and it got raves. I hate making pie crust so I use a pat-in-the-pan kuchen pastry whenever possible.

1 3/4 cups unbleached flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon sugar

1/3 cup butter

Sift flour, baking powder, and sugar into a bowl. Add shortening, cut into small pieces, and blend with a fork or your fingers until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Press mixture into a pie pan and bake 10 minutes at 400°F. Remove from oven and cool before filling.

Filling

2 1/2 to 3 cups apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced

2 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup unsweetened yogurt

1/2 cup applesauce

1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 375°F. Place apples in pie shell. Combine flour, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl. Add yogurt, applesauce, egg, and vanilla and mix well. Pour over apples and bake for about 30 minutes or until mixture has set.

SERVES 6.