EatLocal365 » leftovers

Preparing for Baby with Soup

Lindsay — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:31:36 +0000

Good afternoon!

Now that I’m entering the home stretch of pregnancy, I’m hit with a double whammy. I’m too tired to cook many nights, but I also want to make sure we have a good store of freezer and pantry meals ready for the little one’s arrival in a month or so. This has resulted in a lot of boring, but nutritionally sound, meals that just aren’t that much fun to talk about. Mostly, a TON of soup. Since most soup recipes serve 6-8, one batch will yield enough for Erik and I to eat for two meals plus one or two quart jars of soup in the freezer. Not exciting, but very practical.

We finally did hit on a meal that is both. This wild rice soup is based on a recipe from the very “ladies who lunch” River Room at Dayton’s in St. Paul. Yep, Dayton’s. It was hard enough to call it Marshall Fields, although I finally got used to it, but I am NOT calling it Macy’s. Anyway…I digress. We’d sometimes meet my dad there for lunch on special occasions when we didn’t have school, but he had to work. I always felt pretty special and grown up. This is, hands-down, the best wild rice soup out there. It’s not overly rich, but is nonetheless silky and delicious. If you’re feeling very indulgent, make some popovers and have a real River Room experience.

Note I: I’ve tweaked the recipe to use a very unattractive leftover roast chicken.

If you don’t happen to have one sitting in your refrigerator, you can use homemade or canned chicken stock and some sort of pre-cooked chicken – grilled or poached breasts or thighs would work well. You could also pick up a rotisserie chicken for dinner and then make this the next day. The possibilities abound!

Note II: You’ll need to pre-cook the wild rice. My favorite way to do this is to mix 1 cup of wild rice with 3 cups of water in a covered baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for an hour to an hour-and-a-half or until the rice has absorbed the water and is nice and fluffy. This will give you WAY more rice than you need for this dish, but I happen to like having extra in the refrigerator. It makes a quick side dish or an interesting addition to oatmeal in the morning.

Minnesota Wild Rice Soup

Makes about 6 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Notes
1 leftover	Roast chicken	Or 6 cups of chicken broth and about 1-1/2 cups of chopped meat (see Note I)	Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm
6 TBsp	Butter	Substitute chicken fat, if you’ve got some handy from that leftover roast chicken	Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm
1 cup	Onion	Chopped	Red Fire Farm
1 large	Scallion	Thinly sliced	Hutchins Farm
10 ounces	Button mushrooms	Sliced	Whole Foods from Pennsylvania
3/4 cup	Carrots	Diced	Red Fire Farm
1/2 cups	Flour
1-1/2 cups	Wild rice	Cooked (see Note II)	Care package from my parents in Minnesota
1 cup	Cream		Highlawn Farm
5 TBsp	Dry sherry
2 tsp	Kosher salt
1-1/2 tsp	Black pepper	Freshly ground
2 TBsp	Parsley	Finely chopped	Drumlin Farm
1 tsp	Thyme leaves		Red Fire Farm

Directions

Pull the remaining meat off of your roast chicken. Aim for about 1-1/2 cups, but more or less won’t ruin anything. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Combine the chicken bones and 8 cups of water in a pot or slow cooker and simmer for as long as you can. In the slow cooker, I aim for 8 hours on low. On the stove, I let it go for at least a couple of hours, but it depends on when I have to leave the house or go to bed.

Strain the chicken broth through a colander to remove the large bits and then a lint-free towel to catch the smaller pieces. You should end up with about 6 cups of broth. If you have more, hurray! Save it for later. If you have less, just add a bit of water to make up the difference. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Chop up all your vegetables.

In a large pot, melt the butter and add the onions. Saute over medium heat until the onions have started to soften, 5 minutes or so.

Add the scallion, mushrooms, and carrots to the onions and cook until softened, about another 5 minutes.

Sprinkle the flour over the veggies and stir until the flour and butter form a paste coating the vegetables, about a minute.

While whisking, pour the chicken broth into the pot. The flour will help thicken the broth, but could also make it chunky. Whisking and slow pouring help to create a smooth soup. Simmer for 20 minutes (more or less…this is soup, after all, not wedding cake).

Add the remaining ingredients and simmer until warmed through, another 5 minutes or so. Enjoy!

What to do with a half-drunk bottle of Champagne?

Lindsay — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:46:38 +0000

Happy New Year!

For us, New Year’s Eve is an excuse to host a dinner party, so we invited our closest friends over and had a low key evening. We started with homemade French bread (recipe to come) with local butter and quick-pickled radishes. Then we had braised pork belly with turnips and an arugula-parsley salad. For dessert, Erik fried Twinkies. Yeah, we had fried Twinkies after such a homemade old-school meal. They were fantastic. He promises to post the recipe soon.

The pork came from this great, relatively new butcher in our town. He sources from small, local farmers and is really knowledgeable about his art. He tries hard to sell the whole animal, even the parts that aren’t so popular, so the shop is full of cookbooks and he’ll suggest ways to prepare, for example, trotters (pig feet). When there wasn’t enough pork belly in the case, he shouldered half a pig and filled our order right there and then. Take a look!

Anyway…after dinner, we rang in the new year with Champagne from Westport Rivers in southern Massachusetts. Since none of us are huge Champagne fans, we awoke this morning to at least half a bottle of warm, kind of flat Champagne sitting on the kitchen counter. As you know, I have trouble wasting food, so I found two recipes for using the last bits of Champagne in the bottle.

The first, Champagne vinegar, isn’t much of a recipe. For every cup of leftover Champagne, add one tablespoon of homemade apple cider vinegar or a store-bought apple cider vinegar with the “mother” (Bragg is a good brand). Pour the mixture back into the bottle and cover the top with a thin towel or cheesecloth, secured by a rubber band or piece of string. Let it ferment in a dark, cool place for a month or so. It’s ready when you like the taste.

The second, Champagne sorbet, is from the Flour cookbook, which I LOVE for special occasion baking. It has a nice Champagne taste, but it’s not overwhelming. We might make it next year for a fancy-schmancy New Year’s Eve dessert – we certainly can’t get less fancy than fried Twinkies.

Champagne Sorbet

Makes a generous 2 cups

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Notes
2/3 cup	White sugar
1 cup	Water
1 cup	Champagne	Substitute another sparkling beverage, e.g. Prosecco or sparkling cider	Westport Rivers
3 TBsp	Lemon juice	Fresh, if you have it (1 large lemon)
Pinch	Kosher salt

Directions

Combine the sugar and water in a small pot and heat to boiling over medium-high heat.

Boil, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves. When you think it’s fully dissolved, turn off the heat and wait a minute until the water is still. Check the bottom of the pan for undissolved sugar. If you spot some, bring it back to a boil for another couple of minutes and then check again.

Let the syrup cool in the pot. Transfer it to a small bowl and refrigerate for two to three hours.

After the syrup has chilled, add the Champagne, lemon juice, and salt.

Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker and freeze according to the maker’s directions. For ours, this was 45 minutes.

If you want a firmer sorbet, pack into a freezer-safe container (we used a pint jar) and freeze overnight.

Dark Days Challenge: Breakfast

Lindsay — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:31:33 +0000

The final week of the Dark Days Challenge is focused on breakfast. We’ve done a bunch of breakfast posts, so we were a bit stumped.

I wanted to do another baked good, but didn’t want to split two dozen muffins or a whole coffee cake with Erik over the next two days.

Yogurt and granola parfait with strawberries? I just couldn’t decide. So then I forgot all about it…

….until this morning. I was out for a run in the beautiful almost-spring weather and remembered. Dang it! So here’s what I had for breakfast – two poached eggs on leftover mixed green salad with sunflower thyme pesto. Completely local, but maybe not breakfast-y enough for some people. It totally hit the spot for me, though. Maybe I’ll have a muffin for lunch to even things out.

Is this the best kale salad ever?

Lindsay — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:03:58 +0000

It’s a bold statement. I’m not shy about it. It could be the best salad salad ever. I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to decide for yourself.

There’s a great restaurant near where we used to live in NYC called Northern Spy. Definitely give it a try if you’re in the area – it was one of our favorites. They make a kale salad for dinner that’s really simple, but almost perfect. For brunch, they add a poached egg and make it perfect. Yum yum yum. Erik and I have been eating a lot of kale salads with poached eggs lately. It sounds kind of strange, but give it a shot. It makes a quick, filling, and nutrious meal any time of day. Two nights ago, I was HANGRY (so hungry I was angry) and Erik soothed me with one. Before I had time to protest, BAM! it was on the table and calming me down.

Perfect Kale Salad

Makes 4 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it
1 small	Squash		Red Fire Farm CSA (Honey Nut Squash)
1/4 cup	Slivered almonds
1 1/2 TBsp	Lemon juice
1 1/2 TBsp	Olive or sunflower oil
To taste	Salt and black pepper
1 bunch	Kale	Red Russian and Lacinato are great for salads.	Red Fire Farm CSA
4 to 8	Eggs		Red Fire Farm CSA
1/4 cup	Cheddar	Cut into small cubes or crumbled	Narragansett Creamery (Atwell’s Gold)

Directions

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the squash in half and place, cut side down, in a small baking dish. Bake the squash until soft, about an hour, depending on the size of your squash. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees.

Spread the almonds on a baking sheet (or pizza pan) and bake for about 15 minutes or until browned. Watch them carefully, because they’ll go from nicely browned to burnt very quickly. You can do all these steps a few days ahead, if you want.

Once the squash is cooled, remove the skin and chop into bite-sized, but small pieces. Reserve about 1 cup for the salad. Refrigerate the rest for a quick side dish another time.

Start a pot of water boiling to poach the eggs.

Pour the lemon juice into a large salad bowl. While whisking, add the olive oil in a thin stream to help it emulsify. Whisk in the salt and pepper.

Prep the kale, following these instructions, but slicing the ribbons only about 1/4 inch wide. As you finish the kale, toss it into the bowl with the dressing.

Toss the kale in the dressing, making sure to coat all the leaves. I usually just use my (clean) hands, because I seem to be unable to keep salad in a bowl any other way. It also gives me a chance to give the kale a little tenderizing massage.

Once the water is at a rolling boil and the kale is dressed, poach the eggs. Only make as many as you want to eat that meal. This salad keeps well in the refrigerator, so you can make a quick meal of the leftover tossed salad and a newly poached egg. We use nifty egg poachers, like these, and cook our eggs for two and a half to three minutes for a cooked, but runny, egg. You could also just crack them gently into the boiling water and then fish them out with a slotted spoon. It takes a little practice, but works.

Put a pile of kale on each plate. Top with the squash, cheddar, almonds, and a poached egg (or 2).

How to Make Pizza

Lindsay — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:12:38 +0000

Pizza is a definite DIY situation. It’s cheaper, less likely to be delivered cold, and only covered in surplus commodity cheese if you like that kind of thing. The most time-consuming part is making the dough, which has to rise for an hour or so (although you could cut this to 30 minutes if you were in a big hurry). Because of this, we usually save pizza for weekends and plan to work out, call our parents, or catch up on the DVR while the dough’s doing its thing.

The dough recipe is adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, which I got for making a donation to WNYC. Actually, I made the donation to WNYC to get the cookbook and it has totally paid off – good recipes and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…a seriously good deal. He uses a food processor, but we prefer to use the stand mixer, because our tiny food processor would probably burst into flames if we asked this of it. This NY Times article has the food processor instructions, if you’re so inclined.

Homemade Pizza
Makes 2 12-inch diameter pizzas (You can make larger pizzas with thinner crusts or smaller pizzas with thicker crusts, but this is fits nicely in our oven).

Ingredients for Crust

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (* Union Sq. Greenmarket)
11 3/4 ounces	1/2 white flour	a.k.a. “brown” flour (half all-purpose and half whole wheat bread flour), about 2 1/2 cups, volumetrically	Cayuga Pure Organics *
2 ounces	Cornmeal	About 1/2 cup, volumetrically	Cayuga Pure Organics *
2 tsp	Instant yeast	Not to be confused with active dry yeast	We use this brand.
2 TBsp	Sunflower oil		Stolor Organics *
2 tsp	Coarse kosher or sea salt

Topping Ideas (per pizza)

1/2 cup prepared pizza sauce
About 5 ounces of cheese, such as fresh mozzarella or ricotta
Veggies! Onions, mushrooms, sautéed greens, peppers, tomatoes. Really whatever’s in season.
Your favorite precooked meat
Any leftovers you find in the refrigerator

Directions

Weigh flour and cornmeal in stand mixer bowl using the tare (zero-out) function on your scale. That is, put the bowl on the scale, press tare, add 11 3/4 ounces of flour, press tare, and add 2 ounces of cornmeal. No dirty measuring cups!
Add the yeast and salt to the flour mixture. Because they’re such a small amounts, it’s best to measure them in teaspoons, rather than by weight.
In a measuring cup, combine 1 cup of water and the sunflower oil.
With the paddle attachment and the mixer on low, slowly add the liquids to the dry ingredients. Mix until there isn’t any dry flour on the bottom of the bowl, about a minute.
Switch to the dough hook and knead the dough on speed 2 or 4 for 3 or 4 minutes. I just let it knead until I’m done cleaning everything else up and it forms a nice ball around the hook.
Remove the dough from the bowl. Put a small puddle of oil (a teaspoon or so) in the bottom of the stand mixer bowl, drop the dough in, and roll it around so that it’s covered in oil. This will make sure it doesn’t stick to the bowl while rising. You could use a second bowl if you want, but I don’t like to do dishes. Actually, Erik usually does the dishes, so I don’t like feeling guilty about NOT doing the dishes. It’s easy to do as long as you remember to unscrew the cap of the oil before you get your hands all doughy.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (or the shower cap you took from the hotel you stayed in last week) and let the dough rise for an hour or 2. Ideally, you should wait for it to double in size, but you can cut this short if you’re in a hurry.
Once the dough has risen, preheat your oven to 500 degrees, or as hot as it will go. Set a baking stone or cookie sheet in the top third of the oven to preheat. Lay out two sheets of parchment paper that are about 16 inches long.
Dump the dough out onto a lightly floured counter. Cut it in half and gently shape each into a ball. At this point, you could tightly wrap one of the dough balls in plastic and freeze it, but we like pizza leftovers, so we never do. Drape a towel over the dough and let it rest for 20 minutes. This will make it easier to shape.
While the dough is resting, prepare your toppings. We made two different pizzas. One had a sliced portobello mushroom (from Bulich Mushrooms), half a sliced red onion (Paffenroth Gardens), and about 5 ounces of sliced fresh mozzarella (from Eataly, since we forgot to get it at the greenmarket). The other had about 5 ounces of sliced fresh mozzarella and 5 ounces of ricotta (also from Eataly, but made in Brooklyn).
Lay one of the sheets of parchment paper on a pizza peel or (our preferred method) an upside-down cookie sheet. We flip the cookie sheet over, so that the pizza will slide off cleanly without bumping into the raised edges.
To shape the dough into pies, start by patting out one of the balls into a circle. After a while, the dough will start resisting, so use gravity. Hold the disc at the top with both hands and turn it like a steering wheel, using your thumbs to create a lip around the edge. It won’t get perfectly round, but you can fix that later. Once it’s as big as you want it, lay it down on the prepared parchment paper and pat or stretch it into a nicer shape. Fix any holes by pinching the dough together.

Spread the first crust with about 1/2 cup of prepared pizza sauce. We canned our own this summer following this recipe. Lay on your toppings. If you’re using anything delicate, like greens or herbs, tuck them under the cheese so they won’t burn.
Once your pizza is dressed up and ready to go, open the oven door and pull out the rack as far as it will go. Use an oven mitt! In a smooth motion, pull the pizza onto the stone or baking sheet using the corner of the parchment paper. Be careful!
Check the pizza after 8 minutes and then every 1 or 2 minutes thereafter until it’s done. Our oven usually takes about 12 minutes, but it depends on how long it preheated and what toppings we used. You want a dark brown crust and some brown spots on the cheese.
While the first pizza is baking, prepare the second following the same steps.
This is the hard part. Don’t eat it right away! If you cut it too soon, it will just be a big juicy mess. Wait 5 minutes (more if you can) for it to cool and firm up.

Waste Not Want Not: Open-faced Portobello Mushroom Burgers

Erik — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:19:09 +0000

We had leftover ingredients from a number of meals this past week: spinach from our roasted squash and black bean salad, one solitary English muffin from quinoa black bean burgers (we plan to post them next time we make them), and ricotta cheese and portobello mushrooms from the pizza we made on Saturday. We bought three big mushrooms, and it turned out we only needed one for the pizza.

This creative meal took about 15 minutes total, and used up all the leftovers.

We marinated the mushrooms in a mix of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper, for about 10 minutes. Then we put them under the broiler for 5 minutes. We toasted the English muffin halves in the broiler for 3 minutes. We spread a little ricotta on each English muffin half, added the spinach, and topped with a mushroom. These open-faced sandwiches were delicious.

On the side we ate some of Lindsay’s dehydrated vegetable chips. We had dried carrot, parsnip, and Daikon radish chips:

Dark Days: Attacking Food Storage Clutter

Lindsay — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 01:00:02 +0000

Our food storage situation was getting out of control. Half a duck fell out of the freezer and landed on my shoe-less toes. Random bags of grains leftover from this fall made getting the breakfast granola a daily battle. And somehow we had a whole shopping bag full of mushrooms in the refrigerator. Time to take charge!!

We sautéed two chopped onions (Paffenroth Gardens) with some garlic (Keith’s Farm) in sunflower oil (Stolor Organics). To that, we added a mountain of sliced mushrooms (Bulich Mushroom Farm) and sautéed them until soft with a little salt and pepper and a splash of Riesling (Chateau Renaissance). Then poured everything into the slow cooker.

We trimmed any excess fat and skin off of the duck parts (Hudson Valley Duck Farm) and used the same pan to brown them for a few minutes on each side (just until the duck released easily from the pan). Into the slow cooker it went, topped off by small handfull of farro (Cayuga Pure Organics), a few red sunchokes and a couple of handfulls of little potatoes (Berried Treasures) and covered in water.

We let it cook on high for six hours. We then removed the bones, shredded the meat, and returned it to the slow cooker for another two hours on low.

Served up with some (failed and very flat, but tasty) sourdough bread (flour from Cayuga Pure Organics, yeast from the Manhattan air) it was a very satisfying improvisation.

How to Make Stuffed Squash – Mushroom and Wild Rice Stuffing

Erik — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 02:21:46 +0000

Squash Stuffed with Mushrooms and Wild Rice, with Mushroom Gravy

Introduction / Methodology:

This recipe has five parts to it, plus an additional step to combine the parts. It would be easiest to explain by going through each part individually, but if you cooked it that way, it would take too long. So, I’ve rewritten the recipe to reflect the actual way that we cook it. This version jumps back and forth to achieve the most efficient timing. I hope that it remains relatively easy to follow.

First, let’s review the five component parts:

Cooking wild rice in vegetable broth
Preparing and roasting the squash
Sautéing mushrooms, shallots, and garlic for the stuffing
Sautéing mushrooms and onions for the sauce
Making the sauce

In each step below, I’ve indicated which part you are working on in order to help make it more clear. The component parts use a lot of the same ingredients. To make it easy to prepare a shopping list, I’ve combined any repeating occurrences into a single measurement (with the exception of the soy sauce; adding 1.5 teaspoons to 0.5 cups would result in something unmeasurable). In the “preparation” section I’ve noted the necessary splits that you need to make to fit with the multiple uses in the recipe.

One nice thing about this recipe is that other than the sauce, you don’t have to worry about the timing of the components other than trying to get them started in the right order to get them done as quickly as possible. If something is finished early, you can just set it aside because the final step is to combine everything and reheat for 15 minutes in the oven. The exception is the sauce, which you should aim to have finished as written, just as the reheated stuffed squash are coming out of the oven.

Equipment:

Silicone brush or pasty brush
A good knife and cutting board
Metal whisk
Stock pot, dutch oven, or any decently thick large pot with lid that will distribute heat evenly
Sauté pan
Sauce pan
Pyrex or other baking dish

Ingredients:

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (* Union Square Greenmarket)
1 quart	Vegetable broth		From a box or see here
1.5 cups	Wild rice	Rinsed	Lindsay’s mom sent from Minnesota
Pinch and to taste	Kosher salt
2 – 4	Winter squash (carnival, acorn, or delicata)	See notes in recipe	Oak Grove Plantation *
7 tsp	Olive oil	Split into 1 tsp, 1 tsp, 2 tsp, and 3 tsp	The Filling Station
3 TBsp	(Real) maple syrup		Deep Mountain Maple *
1 tsp	Ground cinnamon
0.75 lbs	Mushrooms (we used crimini)	Split into 0.5 lbs sliced and 0.25 lbs finely chopped	Bulich Mushrooms *
3	Large shallots	Chopped (coarsely)	Paffenroth Gardens *
1 large	Yellow or white onion	Diced / finely chopped (about 2 cups diced)	Paffenroth Gardens *
3 cloves	Garlic	Minced (finely)	Keith’s Farm *
0.5 cups plus 1.5 tsp	Soy sauce, preferably Shoyu or Tamari	Split to 0.5 cups and 1.5 tsp
0.5 tsp	Dried thyme
0.5 cups	All-purpose flour		Cayuga Pure Organics *
1.5 tsp	Dried sage
3 tsp	Herbs de Provence
To taste	Black pepper	Freshly ground

Directions:

Roasted squash: Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Wild Rice: Start with the wild rice because this component takes the longest. Pour the vegetable broth into a stock pot or dutch oven. On the stove top, put the broth on high heat and bring to a boil. Put the lid on the pot to accelerate the process.
Wild Rice: Add the wild rice and pinch of kosher salt, replace the lid, and bring it back to a boil, which shouldn’t take long. Reduce the heat to low and let it simmer for about 40 minutes, or until most of the water is absorbed. You may want to check on it and stir it 2 or 3 times during the process. Once it’s done, turn the heat off and/or move the pot off the stove.
Roasted squash: The reason this recipe calls for “2 – 4″ squash is because you can use a few different types and size can vary. With the smaller carnival squash that we used, we needed four in order to use up all of the stuffing. If you buy larger acorn squash, you may need only two.
With smaller squash you want to cut the tops off and stuff the whole squash (like we did). With larger squash you want to cut them in half vertically and stuff each half separately. Either way, it should make four servings.

If you want two servings, just roast half of the squash and leave the other half raw. This recipe makes great leftovers; see the end of the post for details.
Roasted squash: Per above, if using small squash like ours, cut the tops off. If using larger squash, remove the stem area and then cut in half vertically. Using a metal spoon, scoop out the seeds and stringy bits of pulp. If you have time while waiting for the broth to come to a boil in step 1, you may want to get a head start on this step.
Roasted squash: In a small bowl, combine the 2 tsp of olive oil with the maple syrup. Brush the rim and hollowed interior of the squash with the mixture, and sprinkle-over with cinnamon. Place the squash in the baking pan (Pyrex will work best) and roast in the oven until the flesh is tender and can be pulled away from the skin easily with a fork (20 – 30 minutes). When it’s done, take it out of the oven and place it aside on a trivet. Leave the oven at 350 because you will use the oven again shortly.
Chopping for the stuffing and sauce: It makes sense to do all this chopping at the same time, but the mushrooms have to be chopped in two different ways. For the stuffing you want thin but complete slices. For the sauce you want tiny bits. The same goes for the shallots/onions.
Take 2/3 of the mushrooms (0.5 lbs) and slice thinly (left). Place these into one bowl. Chop the remaining mushrooms (0.25 lbs) as finely as you can tolerate (right). I probably should have chopped them a bit finer. Place these into a second bowl.
Chopping for the stuffing and sauce: Chop the shallots and mince the garlic. You can put these directly into your sauté pan.
Chopping for the stuffing and sauce: Peel the onions and dice them into small pieces. Set them aside in yet another bowl.
Sautéing for the stuffing: Pour the the 1 tsp of olive oil into the sauté with the shallots and garlic. Put the pan over medium heat. Once things start to sizzle, turn the heat down to a medium/low and sauté for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until the shallots and garlic are browned and caramelized.
Sautéing for the stuffing:Add the sliced mushrooms to the pan and continue to sauté, stirring occasionally. If the pan gets too dry you can add a small amount of additional olive oil at a time. The mushrooms will eventually release their water into the pan. Once this happens and the mushrooms “shrink”, add the 1.5 tsp of soy sauce / Shoyu, the dried thyme, and pepper to taste. Cook while stirring until the liquid is mostly evaporated.
Sautéing for the stuffing: By now, the wild rice has probably been finished for some time. Transfer the contents of the sauté pan into the pot with the wild rice. Mix it up and set it aside until the squash is finished roasting. This is your stuffing.
Roasted squash: Whenever the squash is finished roasting, remove the pan from the oven and place it on a trivet or an oven burner. Carefully spoon stuffing into each squash until it is filled to the top, plus a bit more. Put the squash pan back in the oven for 15 minutes.
Sautéing for the sauce: Put 1 tsp of olive oil back into the (dirty) sauté pan. Heat it over medium heat. Once it is hot, lower the heat a little and add the onion and finely chopped mushrooms. Sauté for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. In the meantime, move immediately on to the next step (do steps 14 and 15 simultaneously).
Making the sauce: In a sauce pan, heat 3 tsp of olive out over low heat. Whisk in the flour, a little at a time, then add 2 cups of water. To get technical, you are making a roux. When I did it, there was too much flour and it made a paste. If this happens, add a little bit of water at a time, whisking constantly, until it loosens into a sauce. Be careful when adding water, though, because it is easier to add additional water than it is to evaporate it out if you add too much.
Making the sauce: Once you get the roux to the right consistency, add the remaining soy sauce / Shoyu, the sage, and the herbs de Provence. Mix well with the whisk. Raise the heat to medium and bring it all to a boil, then lower the heat and let it simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the sauce has thickened to the consistency shown below.
Making the sauce: Add the contents of the sauté pan to sauce pan. Mix together over low heat until warmed-through. If the sauce is too thick, add 1 tsp of water at a time and mix, until you get to your desired consistency.
Finishing up: The 15 minute re-warm of the stuffed squash should be done around the same time that the sauce is finished. Transfer the squash to your plates and spoon sauce over the top. We also added a nice dollop of sauce on the side. Enjoy!

Lindsay ate hers very carefully out of the skin. I tore into mine with a knife and fork, making an absolute mess, cutting away the skin as I ate my way through. Both methods were delicious, but Lindsay’s gave us one last picture to add to the end of this post.

Leftover Instructions:

If you only made two servings and left the other half of your squash raw and intact, refrigerate the leftover stuffing and sauce in separate containers. To prepare the leftovers, repeat steps 5 and 6 with the remaining raw squash. Stuff with the leftover stuffing and repeat step 13. Reheat the sauce and repeat step 18. It might be a little more work than your normal leftovers, but the good news is that for once, the leftovers are every bit as good as the first-run.

You will get a better result if you reheat the sauce in a pot on the stove over low heat. If you want to microwave it, do so for 30 seconds, stir in a little water to counter-act the fact that the microwave dries food, and heat for another 30 seconds.

It’s complicated to explain, and the first time you make it be sure to give yourself some time, but we absolutely love this meal.

Yum!

Using Up Leftover Polenta: Pan-Fried Polenta Cakes

Erik — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:49:47 +0000

We had a lot of leftovers from Saturday’s celeriac polenta. Lindsay came up with a great idea to use it up: pan-fried polenta cakes for breakfast.

We tried two versions. We went savory with the first batch, to which we added salt, pepper, and smoked Spanish paprika. This really worked. The smoked paprika really came through. We ate it with poached eggs, fresh pepper, and a black finishing salt.

With the second batch we tried to go sweet, adding cinnamon and sugar, and served with maple syrup. Because we were afraid of burning it in the pan, we went light on the sugar. This version was “meh”. The sweet flavors weren’t very strong and were a bit overpowered by the celeriac. I think sweet polenta cakes would normally good bet, but with the celeriac involved I would stick to the savory.

Polenta cakes: left = savory version; right = sweet version.

After plopping the brick of polenta out of its glass tupperware container, we sliced it into strips:

We heated a cast iron pan over medium heat and added the polenta strips. Because we keep it well-seasoned, we didn’t need to add any oil or butter to the pan, although that is an option for additional browning and to keep them from sticking. We then sprinkled the seasoning on top.

We cooked them until they firmed up and don’t stick, then we flipped them and repeated.

How to Make a Frittata – The Cook’s Leftover Disposal

Erik — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:11:03 +0000

Lindsay and I always make sure to have at least half-dozen eggs in the fridge. As an aside, we make sure to buy good eggs from healthy chickens, usually from Knoll Krest, Flying Pigs Farm, or Grazin’ Angus Acres. More about our eggs in a future post. The primary reason that we make sure to keep eggs on hand is that when we have leftover vegetables that are getting long in the tooth, we often like to make a frittata.

A frittata is a baked omelet. That’s all it is. Because there is no folding involved it’s actually a lot easier than a “normal” French omelet. And you can pretty much dump the kitchen sink into it.

Frittata isn’t a recipe so much as it is a universal technique. It’s the swiss army knife of leftover disposal.

If we have bell peppers that are getting wrinkled and rubbery and are no longer salad-worthy, we use them in a frittata. If we sauté leafy greens and don’t eat all of them, they don’t reheat well, so we use them in frittata. In today’s photos, we had been getting tired of eating leftovers of my roasted vegetables.

Get out a cast iron skillet. If you have more than one cast iron skillet, your choice will depend on how deep the ingredients are that you want to add. In our photos, the roasted vegetables are pretty thick, so we used a smaller pan to get a deeper frittata. If you only have one cast iron skillet, it’ll still be fine. If you don’t have a cast iron skillet, get one.
Start by mixing the eggs as if you were making an omelet or scrambled eggs. We use 4 -6 eggs depending on the amount of “leftovers”. In these pictures we used 5 eggs. Crack the eggs into a bowl, add a little milk (optional), and whisk.
Put the “leftovers” in the cast iron skillet and space them evenly. Pour in the egg mixture and heat the skillet over medium to medium-high heat.
Once you have the heat going, add some (Kosher) salt and freshly ground pepper. If you want to mix in cheese, now is the time to do so.
At this point, you should turn on your broiler. Frittata works best of you have a gas oven with a separate broiler at the bottom, because those literally shoot fire balls straight over the pan. However, it works fine if you simply have an oven that has a “broiler” setting for the main compartment.
Leave the pan alone on the stove top for a few minutes. The next step comes when the edges of the eggs start to brown against the side of the skillet:
If you want to add grated cheese on top of the frittata (as opposed to mixed in), add it now. Remove the skillet from the stove top and put the entire skillet into the broiler / oven. This step is why it is important to use a cast iron skillet. Do not put a non-stick pan in the oven. Set a timer for 3 minutes. Check in on the frittata every minute after that until it is nicely browned but not burned:
Get out a trivet, because you don’t want to scorch your counter. As a bone-headed man, I have damaged many things. Also remember to use a thick oven mitt or pot holder, because the handle of the pan will be hot. Among the many things I have burned is myself.
Let the skillet cool (on the trivet) for a few minutes. This will also give the frittata time to set. Once it is no longer steaming, cut into it with a spatula. If you cut cleanly and straight through, your first slice should come out of the pan quite cleanly.
Frittata can make a great breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Stocked full of leftover vegetables, it’s a healthy option.

If you have leftover frittata (meta-leftovers?), let the pan cool completely, and cut it into individual slices before refrigerating. It reheats well in the microwave.

In order to make our lives easier, Lindsay and I tend to cook in volume so that a meal will stretch a few days. The downside is that repetition eventually gets boring. Frittata makes the old new again. Enjoy!