Stephencooks

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, Apples and Onions

 

I know, I know, I promised last week to leave Brussels sprouts alone for a while....But when I arrived at my daughter's house to help with Thanksgiving Dinner, I found a bag of sprouts waiting for my attention. Of course I didn't want to do the same thing I'd done with them last week!

This time, for a side to the turkey and trimmings of an American Thanksgiving dinner, I thought it would be nice to roast, rather than steam, the sprouts, and add in the hearty flavors of bacon, apple and onions and finish the dish with a balsamic vinegar/brown sugar/mustard glaze. The result was quite pleasing -- and it was the only dish we made that day that yielded no leftovers at the end of the dinner!

Quick Rosemary Focaccia

 

Traditional focaccia is not a quick or easy process. I have recipes that take three risings, a lot of kneading and 6 hours of clock time. While I think the chewy, almost rubbery structure of traditional focaccia is worth the work, I make this  no-knead, two-rising focaccia a lot more frequently, and get rave reviews for it too. The structure is cakier but the crust has a satisfying chewiness that almost makes up for that, and the flavor is very good.

I developed this as an adaptation from my pizza dough. It's a welcome addition to almost any meal, and it's so easy that there's really no excuse not to have fresh bread at the table. Also, the variations for toppings and flavorings are nearly as endless as they are for pizza!

Tennessee Bourbon Cookies

  

My friend Kevin at Seriously Good posted his grandmother Mummo's Bourbon Cake recipe a couple of weeks ago, which he tells us is a Christmas tradition that goes back in Kevin's family to the early 1900's, at least. The cake is brimming with nuts and raisins and seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg and, of course, bourbon.  Not only is there bourbon in the batter, but the cake is made a month or so before Christmas and then soaked once a week with MORE bourbon. It sounds great and I already made mine for this year. I especially like the once-a-week dousing sessions, which I take as a good excuse for a nip or two...

Of course, tradition or no, I've never seen a recipe that I didn't want to mess with and this one's no exception. So when Jennifer, the wonderful Domestic Goddess and creative inventor of Sugar High Friday, decreed that this week we should all make cookies and swap recipes, I decided to adapt Kevin's ancestral cake into a cookie.  The results were very pleasing, all Christmassy spice and a hint of bourbon, though I'm sure they're not as tipsy as Mummo's cake since the only bourbon is in the batter (no followup soakings). Thanks Kevin, for another inspiration!

Brussels Sprouts Pancakes with Onion Marmalade

 

I promise this is the end of the Brussels sprouts for a while!  But I thought I'd throw this one in because if you have a sprout-hater coming to your table (and since B. sprouts have such a bad rep there are a lot of haters out there), this is a nice way to disguise them almost beyond recognition, at least until the first bite. The taste, however, is indubitably Brussels sprouts, which is good for us sprout-lovers, but for the true hater of the cruciferous orb the disguise will be found out soon enough.

I served this as a first course, with the sweet-and-sour onion marmalade providing a nice counterpoint, but it could also accompany a roast meat, perhaps with a dollop of sour cream instead of the marmalade. Also, I could see it tucking in nicely next to some scrambled eggs, again with the sour cream, for a breakfast or brunch. The pancake mixture can be made the night before (as can the marmalade) and kept refrigerated, so whether for dinner or breakfast all you have to do is cook them up.

Okay, honest: this is the end of the sprouts around here for a while, so those of you planning an intervention can just chill out!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone...my next post will be cookies on Friday, for Sugar High Friday.

Oysters, Brussels Sprouts and Pancetta Gratin

 

Okay, somebody has to stop me! Last week I went crazy with Brussels sprouts and I thought I had it out of my system. But yesterday Molly at Orangette posted a lovely meditation about sprouts and all their glory and it got me thinking about another round of things we can do with sprouts. This one is great for  brunches or as a first course for a holiday meal.

Dirty Rice Stuffed Peppers

 

This dish, while not of the quick and easy variety, can be made ahead of time, so it's a good candidate for the upcoming holiday weekend. Not for the main event but for the other meals that come with having a houseful of holiday visitors: Wednesday night supper, when you're busy thinking about the next day and don't want to cook dinner, or Saturday evening when everyone's sick of turkey sandwiches. Pull these babies out of the refrigerator, pop them in the oven and you've got an interesting casual dinner ready to go.

I've been on a campaign to use up ingredients that have my freezers pushing back at the doors when I try to close them, and this combination of two old favorites was developed to respond to my discovery of a pound of chicken livers and a bag of chicken trimmings waiting to be made into broth. Putting that together with the fact that I had some peppers that wanted to be used up and, as always, some leftover rice on hand, I just naturally ended up with Dirty Rice Stuffed Peppers. It's Cajun food lite, since it can be made mildly spiced, allowing diners can heat it up with hot sauce if they like, which makes it perfect for a dinner which might include picky eaters, as often happens when the extended family gathers.

Served with a simple green salad, some crusty bread, a nice pale ale and some leftover pumpkin pie, this dish will keep the hordes happy for another day.

Brussels Sprout and Celeriac Cream Soup, with Parsley Pesto

 

This simple soup -- which was inspired by a comment from Dylan of Eat, Drink & Be Merry -- has a unique and memorable flavor which would work very well as a sophisticated first course for Thanksgiving dinner.  It uses two late-harvest vegetables, Brussels sprouts and celeriac, which, though they are available year-round in most markets these days, are best in the late fall, the natural time for their harvest in temperate climates.

Tuscan Roast Pork Tenderloin

  

This pan-roasted pork tenderloin makes an easy midweek supper. The combination of fennel, garlic and other spices brings a satisfying flavor to the meat and perfumes the vegetables roasted with it. While the meat is roasting I steam some brocolli or make some bok choi Italiano. A crusty ciabatta and a bottle of Chianti Classico and dinner's ready!

Quick Sundried Tomato Crostini

 

The holidays are coming fast so it's time to brush up on all the fast and yummy apps and finger foods you'll be needing. This one is so simple that it feels like cheating, but the ingredients are all top quality, they look  homemade and they taste great. Nothing wrong with that!

Makes 12 crostini.

1 sheet frozen puff pastry dough
4 T Parmeggiano Reggiano, shredded
2 T tomato paste
1 clove garlic, minced
4 black oil-cured olives, minced
2 T minced fresh herbs (parsley, basil, thyme or oregano are all good for this)
1 egg yolk
1 tsp water
salt, hot sauce to taste
4 medium sundried tomatoes, chopped

Allow the pastry sheet to thaw 20 - 30 min at room temperature, until flexible enough to unfold.  Cut in 12 rectangles. Place the cut pieces on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Mix the cheese, tomato paste, garlic, olives and herbs. Season to taste. Beat the egg yolk with the water and brush the egg wash on the crostini.

Spread the cheese mixture on each and then top with a few pieces of the sundried tomato. Bake about 12 minutes in a preheated 400º oven (watch carefully the first time: small variations in ovens can make a big difference with puff pastry).

Allow to cool five minutes before serving.

Brussels Sprouts Antipasto Salad

 

Okay, now that we've got the Brussels sprouts ball rolling, I'm going to riff on it a little. With the holidays coming we're all going to need lots of interesting sides and befores. This wonderful antipasto salad emerged one Saturday night when I had an improptu dinner party taking shape and some leftover Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta Garlic and Basil.  If the sprouts are just sitting by their lonesome in the fridge waiting to be eaten, this goes together in a matter of minutes. Even if you start from scratch it only takes about 15 or 20 minutes.

Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta and Basil

 

A few weeks ago Kevin at Seriously Good made some Brussels sprouts flavored with mustard and vinegar. Even though I have a longtime favorite Brussels sprouts treatment, I fell quickly under the spell of Kevin's version.

However, when you stray from your true love it usually doesn't take long before you want to go home. So tonight, faced with a bag of sprouts, I went sheepishly back to my old standby. It's been a crowd-pleaser for more than a decade so what can I do?

Smelt with Parsley Pasta

  

As readers of this blog know, I love wild-harvested and locally produced foods and look forward to the return of  seasonal crops. One of my favorite seasonal wild-harvested foods is the smelt, which showed up for the first time this fall the other day at the fish market. I grabbed a pound and made one of the simplest and most satisfying dishes in my repertoire: smelt baked with garlic, oil and parsley and served with pasta. Simple, easy, honest food made from a wonderful and overlooked wild-harvested seasonal ingredient: my absolute favorite way to cook.

    Smelt Memories

For the last hundred years, as a result of stocking, there have been populations in the Great Lakes that never live in salt water, although they still return to their upstream spawning grounds.

The smelt run in Michgan takes place in early spring -- late March or early April -- just after the ice has broken up on the streams but usually when there is still snow on the ground.

Going to the streams to net smelt, usually on snowshoes by lantern light in the cold dawn, is a well established Michigan tradition. A phone call comes in from a friend who was watching the stream and off go the fishermen, crashing through the woods to pull them in by the netfull. Later the little fish are rolled in flour and cornmeal,  then fried and piled on a platter for a once-a-year treat.

Smelt are small (6 - 7") relatives of trout and salmon, and like their larger more popular cousins they are anadromous -- that is, they live their adult lives in salt water and then travel back to their ancestral fresh water river to spawn. In the fall and winter they return from their summer grounds to mass off the shore in anticipation of whatever environmental trigger it is that starts them on their journey up the rivers. This cold-weather massing behavior makes smelt a good off-season catch for commercial fisherman, so sometime in the fall we begin to see the silvery fish lying in schools in the fish market case, and many people traditionally eat smelts around Christmas because of its seasonal appearance.

The fish, which is usually sold gutted and headless, has a sweet firm white flesh similar to trout. Like trout, their skin is scale-free, thin and edible. The most popular and common preparation for smelt is to roll them in flour or cornmeal and fry them crisp. Eaten this way, the fine bones, tails and fins just become contributors to the crunchiness of the fried fish. In boiled or baked preparations, like the one presented here, the fins and tail are less appetizing and so are removed.

This dish is an adaptation of one of Elizabeth David's succinct recipes, in Italian Food, for Alici al Gratin (Anchovies au Gratin). The dish is simplicity itself and takes only a few minutes to make.

Black Bass with Fennel-Orange Cream

  

The other day I looked in on Helen's fish-oriented blog, Beyond Salmon, and found this wonderful-looking  Sea Bream with Fennel and Oranges, just at the moment when I had a fennel bulb and some oranges (left over from the Paper Chef entry last week) in the fridge. I also had a trip scheduled to Portland, the home of super fresh fish, so I resolved to pick up some suitable whole fish and broil away, à la Helen.

I always think bass is a particularly good fish for interesting sauces, because while fresh and firm the white meat is very delicately flavored, and so makes a good non-competitive background for a sauce with some complexity and depth. Of course I couldn't resist making a few changes for my version of Helen's dish, so I added some basil and leeks to the mix, seasoned with my new love, fish sauce, and then puréed the vegetable/fruit mélange and added some cream. The result: excellent. The orange, fennel and basil all maintained their identity, the leeks added some flavor depth, and it all combined well with the cream to a give me a satisfying whole-that-was-greater-than-its-parts concoction with a pleasing mouth feel, aroma and taste. The bass, for its part, carried the sauce extremely well, as expected. Thanks, Helen for your inspiring leadership along this path!

Roasted Butternut Soup, Savory Red Rice Pudding and Sage Foam

 

Here's a nice first course for the Thanksgiving table: a creamy soup made of roasted butternut squash, with a little island of red rice pudding in the middle, topped with light-as-air foamed milk flavored with sage. With the exception of the foaming of the milk it can all be done a day ahead, with only assembly to do on the big day.

A lot of recipes for butternut soup call for roasting the butternut "until fork tender," which usually turns out to be about 45 minutes to an hour at 375 - 400º. However, I've found that an hour and a half at 400º -- after which the situation looks quite dire, with the squash a mottled mahogany brown and looking quite saggy -- results in a sweeter, more flavorful taste and a completely yielding texture, the better for easily making an extremely smooth purée. I'm sure Professor Alton Brown could explicate the chemistry going on inside my squash, but all I know is that I like it better.

By the way, I learned this when a nap ran a little long one afternoon and I woke up in a house redolent with long-roasted squash. I expected to find an unusable cinder in the oven but instead found the best roasted squash ever. This is typically the way I learn new stuff in the kitchen: by screwing up, and observing the results. (I'm not saying I never throw it out when I burn something -- that's part of life -- I just taste it before I give up!)

This dish also marks the first in a series of experiments I plan with savory rice puddings. Emboldened by my investigations into savory bread puddings (click on "Veggies" in the directory on the upper right to see them), and ever looking for new ways to use the leftover rice that's always in my refrigerator, I plunge on. The red rice (which can be replaced with brown rice if you like) provides an interesting and unexpected chewiness to the dish, since it's invisible on presentation. On attacking the island with the spoon, however, the rice reveals itself, and as the soup is consumed the rice spreads into the soup, providing interest and texture as well as flavor.

Braised Rabbit

  

Inspired by a comment from Helen at Beyond Salmon on my Braised Beef Short Ribs post, I decided to cook a rabbit for the first time. I followed my usual procedure when venturing into a new ingredient or preparation, researching about a dozen recipes from all sources and then closing the books and leaving the computer and just cooking. By the way, most of the recipes I read included tomatoes, but since I've been on a braised meat jag lately, doing Short Ribs and Lamb Shanks in the last few weeks, and both of those included tomatoes, in the interest of variety I cut the tomato component in this down to a squirt of paste, to deepen the color slightly without giving it so much tomato flavor.

The sauce was excellent (my last-minute impulse to throw in a piece of cinnamon worked particularly well) but the rabbit itself was a bit chewy, I'm sure because it started out frozen. Tana at Small Farms has been urging me (and everyone else) to seek out the small-farm local suppliers, and I'm edging my way closer to doing that, and this is a prime example. I've had tender rabbit in restaurants, and I know that fresh rabbits must be available near me. According to the excellent article in the Times Style Magazine last Sunday ("The Two Portlands"), Maine has "one of the highest percentages of organic farms in the country." (The article is heavy on Fore Street, Duckfat, Browne Trading, Hugo's, Flatbread and Standard Baking Company, all among the best Portland has to offer, so they pretty much hit the high points.)

I served this with the Camargue Red Rice with Almonds, Herbs and Braised Leeks and a salad of baby spinach, red onions, tomatoes and goat cheese, with fresh chives and a simple Dijon vinaigrette. Very nice for a casual Fall supper.

Shiso-Marinated Lamb Chops with Orange Curry Gastrique

  

Once again it's time for the Paper Chef competition. I love this event because every month it challenges me to deal with a new combination of ingredients...and sometimes, like this month, to get better acquainted with a great ingredient that I knew about but hadn't yet appreciated fully.

Fish sauce! Wow! It's like liquid anchovies!

Okay, I got a little ahead of myself.

Paper Chef is a web event which is celebrating its first anniversary this month. In the food blogging world, a one year anniversary means it's long of tooth and gray of hair! This is stature, in spades! Invented by Owen, of Tomatilla! (who is also the publisher of Digital Dish), this event challenges food bloggers all over the world to come up with a dish using four assigned ingredients in a space of 72 hours.

The Paper Chef hosts (and judges) this month -- since they won last month -- are the phenomenal, incredible duo of Mrs. D and Chopper Dave at Belly-Timber. Ever creative, this dynamic duo has assigned us to a devilishly challenging set of ingredients: basil, fish sauce, oranges and lamb. (See this post for a summary of the loosey-goosey rules, and see Owen's post for a history of the event.)

Camargue Red Rice with Almonds, Herbs and Braised Leeks

  

Culinary discoveries are always just around the corner! On my visit to Micucci's Italian market the other day I spotted a package of Carmargue red rice on a shelf. I'd heard about this rice but never had tried it, so of course I bought a bag.

Camargue is a unique and unusual region of France, a low-lying Mediterranean effluvial plain west of Marseilles, between the Medi-Pyranees and the Provence Alpes/Cote d'Azur. Camargue red rice is a recently-developed hybrid (discovered in 1980, put into commercial production in 1992) of the indiginous wild red rice of the region and the cultivated short grain rice which is also produced there. Fleur de sel (marsh-harvested sea salt) is also produced the Camargue, and the region has been famous since antiquity for the white Camargue horses and the cowboys (gardiens) who ride them to wrangle cattle.

This rice has a longish grain and a nutty flavor, like brown rice, with a nice chewy quality reminiscent of wild rice. The addition of braised leeks, toasted almonds, sweet red peppers and fresh herbs made a memorable, satisfying side for a Fall meal of wine-braised rabbit (subject of a future post) with Kevin's brussel sprouts.

Pumpkin Parmesan Ravioli with Pumpkin Cream Sauce

 

I had more pumpkin left over from Halloween carving fun so I decided to look ahead and think about how I might use pumpkin for Thanksgiving in something other than a pie. These fresh ravioli, stuffed with pumpkin, parmesan cheese and herbs and served in a garlicky pumpkin cream, would make a good primi piatti for an Italian-style holiday meal.