Rösti with sweet potato

We've talked about rösti a few times before. This Swiss concoction is essentially a big pan-fried shredded potato cake, not unlike hash browns. We like to eat it for big weekend brunches, with plenty of coffee and possibly an egg or two. It's easy, impressive, delicious, and cheap. What's not to love?

This weekend I decided to switch it up and try adding sweet potato to rösti. Since sweet potatoes are significantly harder and less fluffy than the standard white boiling potato -- not to mention sweeter -- I decided against a 1:1 switch. Instead, I used about 1/3 sweet potatoes and 2/3 mixed yukon gold and red. This turned out to be a good ratio: we got some nice sweet potato flavor and color, but preserved the general texture of a classic rösti.

Now, of course, we are thinking about more things to shred and add to rösti. Carrot? Zucchini? Beets could be really excellent if you wanted to top your rösti with a classic sour cream and smoked salmon combination. Fennel might be interesting there as well. And a mixed-veg rösti would certainly be a good way to use up broccoli stems and the odd heads of kohlrabi that come in our CSA box. I'm definitely going to keep this in mind for next fall.

Rösti with sweet potato

6-8 medium boiling potatoes
1 sweet potato
4-6 green onions
salt, pepper
oil or butter to cook (not olive oil -- the smoke point is too low.)

Start out by peeling your potatoes and sweet potato. Shred them with a box grater or food processor, using the largest size shred.

Squeeze the liquid out of your potatoes. We just take big handfuls and squeeze them out over the sink before depositing them into a mixing bowl. You can also use a dish towel or paper towel if you prefer. This step is critical to ensure that your rösti cooks well, so don't skip it!

Slice up your green onions and add them to the bowl. Add a generous seasoning of salt and pepper. Mix everything together.

Heat a 10-inch frying pan or skillet of your choice over medium-high to high heat. I think a well-seasoned cast iron pan is your best bet here, followed by nonstick. When your pan is hot, add a generous tablespoon of oil, butter, or a mix of the two. Swirl the pan to coat well.

Add your potato mixture to the pan, pressing with a spatula to get it reasonably even. Cook for 8-10 minutes, or until lovely and golden brown on the first side, adjusting the heat down a bit if necessary. You'll be able to see the color coming up around the edges. The potatoes should also come free of the pan in one big solid cake when shaken back and forth a few times.

Next, flip your rösti. To do this, you'll need some intact oven mitts and a wooden (or otherwise unmeltable) cutting board big enough to cover your pan. Wearing the oven mitts, put the cutting board on top of the pan. Grab the pan and board at opposite sides and flip the entire contraption over onto your counter. Remove the pan to the stove, add a bit more oil if needed, and slide the flipped rösti back into the pan, uncooked side down. You did it!

Cook another 8-10 minutes, or until the second side is just as beautiful as the first. Slide the finished rösti onto your cutting board, cut it into wedges, and serve.

Just about anything that sounds good with potato should be good with rösti. I had mine with plain yogurt and pickled peppers. John had his with ketchup. If you are a proponent of fried eggs with runny yolks, this is an excellent place to apply them.

How do you like to eat your brunch-hour potatoes?

Mashed potato pancakes with yogurt and pickled peppers

I don't know about you, but I have been SUPER BUSY lately. For the past couple days I've been working setup for Stitches West, a gigantic yarn convention, and if you think that doesn't sound like a lot of work, you've never hauled around a bunch of 100-lb boxes of yarn. The transition between brainwork and physical labor is interesting, to say the least.

So I've had to actually eat breakfast every morning. This is emphatically not normal for me; I've pretty much always felt nauseous if I ate anything within an hour of waking up. My usual breakfast is a lot of tea, but this week that was not going to fly. So it was a good thing that I had half a massive batch of mashed potatoes with spinach hanging out in the fridge, because that meant I could have simple mashed potato pancakes every single morning. They're the perfect solution: they're fast, easy, NOT SWEET (crucial for a non-sugar-crashy breakfast), and don't make me feel sick.

On top of that, mashed potato pancakes are a good vehicle for a variety of toppings. I went in the yogurt direction because I love yogurt and have a big vat of it around. Besides, we all know that sour cream works well with creamy potato--and yogurt, with its similar rich tang, does too.

Super mashed potato pancake!

leftover mashed potato
butter as needed
to top: plain yogurt, herbs, mustard, pepper, etc.

Form palm-sized patties out of cold leftover mashed potatoes. Fry over medium-high heat in the pan of your choice. If you had a lot of butter and cream in the initial mash, you may need no butter whatever in the pan. I certainly didn't, although I was also using a nonstick pan.

Cook for about three to five minutes per side, or until golden brown. The timing will depend on the strength of your burner. If your patties are very thick, you may want to put the lid on the pan for a few minutes to ensure that the middles are hot through.

When your pancakes are done, slide them onto a plate. Top with the savory deliciousness of your choice and eat immediately, as hot as possible.

I ate my pancakes with two different yogurt toppings. #1: thick labneh (i.e. drained yogurt) with whey-fermented brown mustard and black pepper. #2: ordinary plain yogurt with pickled peppers and black pepper. Both of these were excellent choices, although I think I prefer the latter for sheer inclusion of homemade pickles. Hot pancakes with a crispy coating and soft center, topped with creamy yogurt and crunchy, spicy pickled peppers? They were SO good.

Lots of other additions would work really well here, though. If I had fresh dill, you know I would have added some of that to my yogurt. A straight-up tzatziki, such as my tzatziki, would also be amazing.

Hooray for mashed potato pancakes! What's your favorite savory pancake?

Twice-baked sweet potatoes with black beans and broccoli

More comforting food at its finest!

Winter is definitely the best time for those dishes that require you to run the oven for multiple hours. Twice-baked potatoes are a prime example. First you bake the potatoes whole. Then you hollow them out, stuff them with filling, and bake them again. End result? A toasty warm kitchen and a plateful of soothing starchy goodness. Perfect.

The standard twice-baked potato is generally seen as a side dish, but I make mine into the star of the show. How? By adding not only cheese and vegetables, but protein, generally in the form of beans. This creates an entire little mini-casserole stuffed with every good thing, and perfect for a one-dish meal. Add a salad on the side and you're completely covered.

This time I picked out a couple of beautiful sweet potatoes, added some refried black beans, broccoli, and kale, and topped the finished product with some chunks of herbed goat cheese. This made for an intense & delicious winter dinner combination.

Not the best pictures, but the potatoes in question are still delicious. Let's go.

Twice-baked sweet potatoes with black beans and broccoli

sweet potato
onion or garlic
cooked black beans, refried or roughly mashed
broccoli
kale
salt, pepper, paprika or cayenne
optional cheese

Scrub your sweet potatoes well under running water, pat dry, and stab all over with a fork. Bake at 400F for 45-60 minutes, or until they're cooked through. You can also choose the quick method and microwave them for about 6-7 minutes if you happen to own a microwave. I don't, so the oven method always wins.

Let your potatoes cool enough to work with them. Cut them in half longways and scoop out the cooked sweet potato flesh, leaving behind a thin but intact shell.

Mix the flesh with some chopped onion or garlic, a few big spoonfuls of black beans, some diced broccoli (including the peeled stems--and if you have a random kohlrabi lying around, peel that, cube it up, and throw it in too. Kohlrabi: it's totally a big, round broccoli stem.), and a few leaves of kale. You can definitely go for either all broccoli or all kale, but I had a few odds and ends lying around and I wanted to use them all up at once. That's the beauty of a stuffed potato--practically anything goes.

Season your stuffing mixture with salt, pepper, and paprika or cayenne to taste. If you want cheese, go nuts; if not, no problem. I've mixed in a few handfuls of grated sharp cheddar to excellent effect. This time I decided to rebake my potatoes sans dairy & garnish with cheese at the end.

Stuff your potato shells with the filling mixture, dividing it up as evenly as possible. Arrange them on a baking sheet and bake at 375F for about a half hour, or until heated completely through. If you want to, you can throw on a few handfuls of grated cheese and finish them under the broiler; otherwise, you can just call them done when hot.

Serve with salad or soup for a full and hearty lunch. Garnish with anything you think sounds good. I added chunks of goat cheese, which melted nicely as I mashed them in with my fork. Some fresh chopped parsley or a spoonful or two of thick Greek yogurt would be excellent too.

Hooray: potatoes. Don't you feel better?

How are you eating your potatoes lately?

Thanksgiving in pictures

Everyone needs some arts and crafts to start off the holiday right. We ate a lot of Paper Doll Parade's maple rosemary roasted nuts while searching through every shade of brown, orange, yellow, and red the Crayola 64 assortment had to offer.

This was the first Thanksgiving at which I've had meat since 2006. I made some salami tidbits (which, true to form, everyone stood around the stove and ate as soon as possible) and Veronica and Simon, who were so kind as to host, brined and roasted a chicken.

The full dinner menu: the aforementioned chicken, roasted potatoes and carrots, mashed sweet potatoes mirepoix, salad, and lots of gravy. I also made apple dumplings for dessert. Needless to say, everyone was VERY FULL.

Here's my plate before liberal application of gravy. SO MUCH GRAVY. That was by far the best part of having meat for Thanksgiving. I can totally cook and eat a gigantic vegan celebratory meal with no problem except for the lack of good gravy.

SO MANY LEFTOVERS. The chicken carcass got tossed immediately into a stockpot for stock. (I also made stock a couple days later from the few bones and skin and etc that came home with me.)

Of course you know what leftovers mean. They mean that the next morning you can cut open a bagel, toast it nicely, and layer on all the sweet potato, chicken, and salad greens in the land. Some cream cheese made an appearance as well. So did a big cup of hot black tea with the season's first big whack of eggnog.

Definitely the perfect ending to a celebratory weekend.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!

Potato harvest equals Spanish tortilla

A few days ago, my potato vine died back for the season. If you haven't ever grown potatoes, this is normal for fall--and a clear indicator that the plant is ready for harvest. You know what that means: fresh potatoes!

This was a volunteer potato that came up randomly behind my tomatoes, which meant I didn't have the space to make a real potato mound. Next year maybe I'll find a good spot for an actual devoted potato area. But our one tiny crowded potato vine actually produced quite a few potatoes, considering its competition. Hooray, two big handfuls of tiny tender fingerlings!

Clearly, we needed to cook something super potato-y to take advantage of our beautiful fresh potatoes. That meant Spanish tortilla: a massive and delicious pan-fried cake of potato and egg.

This is one of those dishes that is far more than the sum of its parts, and that's good, because (fantastic homegrown potatoes notwithstanding) the parts are just potatoes, eggs, oil or butter, and salt and pepper, with optional herbs & etc. of your choice. Super simple, super cheap, and super delicious.

We didn't have quite enough potatoes for a full potato-centric dish (although a nice baby potato and green bean vinaigrette salad would have been amazing too), so we ended up combining our harvest with a bag of baby redskin potatoes. No problem!

Spanish tortilla is the greatest

potatoes
butter/oil of your choice
eggs
green onion
salt, pepper

Start by scrubbing all your potatoes and cutting them into thin slices. Ours were about an eighth of an inch thick, but you can go as thin as you like. It's all good, especially if you have a mandoline. You want about enough potatoes to make a layer half an inch thick in your pan of choice.

Warm a generous slug of your oil in a wide frying pan. I used a mix of oil and butter. Toss in your potatoes and stir briefly to coat. Add a sprinkle of salt and pepper and let cook over medium-high heat, tossing occasionally, until the potatoes are tender and turning golden brown on all sides.

While your potatoes are cooking, slice a big handful of green onions. Throw the whites in to cook with the potatoes and save the greens to add later. If you want to add any other green herbs, like parsley, chop those up and set them aside with the onion greens.

Next, crack as many eggs as you want to eat into a mixing bowl. You want roughly the same volume of egg as potato, or a little bit less. We used six eggs, which was not quite enough, but worked out ok anyway. Season with salt and pepper and beat well with a fork. Mix in the onion greens and any other herbs or spices you like. I think some red pepper flake would be pretty great here.

When your potatoes are edible, pour in your egg mixture, turning the pan to get it evenly distributed. Turn the heat down a touch and let the egg cook.

When the bottom layer of the tortilla is done, you have two options for cooking the top. Option one: flip the entire tortilla by topping the pan with a plate, inverting both together, and sliding the flipped tortilla back into the pan to cook on the other side. Option two: put the whole pan under the broiler for a minute or two, until the top layer is cooked. We chose option two, mostly because we were using our biggest pan, which meant that none of the regular plates was big enough for flipping action.

Slide your finished tortilla out of the pan and onto a cutting board or plate. Slice it up and serve with a big green salad or your green vegetable of choice. And yes, a big cake of egg and cheese is definitely rich enough that you're going to want a major amount of greens to go with it.

Now eat it! Hooray, potato harvest!

What lovely new fall vegetables are you eating lately?

Sweet potato soup with black beans, corn, and jalapeno

It has actually started to get chilly here in scenic NorCal! You know what that means: SOUP. On the other hand, "chilly" in NorCal really means "highs of under 80F during the day, with lots of sun," so while the fall vegetables are certainly emerging, we still have tomatoes and corn and zucchini and hot chili peppers everywhere. Okay! Let's make a hearty soup full of both late summer and fall produce!

I took some inspiration from Joanne's sweet potato corn & jalapeno bisque and made this soup. The catch is that we needed protein, but that was easy enough to fix with the addition of bean broth and black beans. It also balanced out the serious sweetness of the potato and corn.

So, to sum up: this is an easy, delicious, filling, spicy vegetarian main dish soup with protein and seasonal vegetables. And if you use oil instead of butter, it's vegan! Convenient as hell.

I wanted a big vat of thick, creamy puree studded with bits of barely-cooked corn, so I reserved the corn to add at the end. If you want a more highly textured soup, you can always add the whole black beans to the pot after your puree the potatoes and broth, or you can just hold off on pureeing altogether. It's delicious in every case.

Sweet potato soup with black beans, corn, and jalapeno

butter/oil of your choice
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
2+ hot peppers
cumin, oregano, red pepper flake
salt, pepper
2 big sweet potatoes
3-4 cups veg and/or bean broth
2 cups black beans, refried or whole
2+ ears fresh corn (frozen also ok)
lemon or lime juice to finish
garnishes of your choice: curtido de repollo, sour cream, cilantro, green onion, lime wedges, corn tortillas, avocado...

Start by warming a good slug of oil over medium-high heat in the large soup pot of your choice. Dice up your onion and add it to the pot, stirring to coat with oil. Smash and mince your cloves of garlic and add them as well.

Destem and mince your hot peppers. I used one garden jalapeno and one random red hot pepper from the farmer's market; you can use whatever combination you so desire. I imagine these hot peppers would be a particularly great addition if you roasted them and flaked off the skin beforehand, but I was in the WANT FOOD NOW zone and so didn't bother.

Add your hot peppers to the pot. Season with cumin and oregano to your taste, and add a sprinkle of salt. If you want extra spice, you can add in some red pepper flake as well. I used some hot red hatch chile flake, because that's how we roll, and also because my parents brought us a gigantic bag of it last year, and we're still nowhere near making a dent even though we use it all the time.

Stir everything together and cook, lowering the heat a bit if necessary, to soften. In the meantime, peel and cube your sweet potatoes.

When your vegetables have softened and the onion is golden brown, add your broth to the pot. I used a mix of frozen pinto bean broth and vegetable broth; the bean broth adds protein and the veg broth adds flavor. If you're on the meat boat you can use chicken stock, but it's really not necessary. (Now I'm having a horrible flash of what "the meat boat" might look like. Curse you, personal slang!)

Add your sweet potatoes and black beans to the pot and bring everything to a boil. Cover, lower the heat, and simmer until your potatoes are cooked through. This took about 20 minutes for me, but the time will vary depending on the size of your potato cubes.

Pull your pan off the heat and puree with an immersion blender until the soup reaches your desired texture. Taste and correct the seasonings. You may want to add some more broth or water if the soup is too thick for your tastes.

Put the pan back on the heat and let it simmer gently while you husk your ears of corn and cut the kernels off the cobs. Add the corn to your soup, stir, and continue to simmer for another 5 minutes, or until your corn kernels are hot and delicious. Take the pan off the heat, add any final sprinklings of pepper, and mix the juice of a lime or half a lemon into the pot. Done!

Serve your soup with the garnishes of your choice, preferably of the "fresh and crispy" category. We had ours with big whacks of well-drained curtido de repollo, which provided an excellent crunchy contrast plus some extra acidity. A wedge of extra lime and a stack of corn tortillas charred over the gas flame are also good ideas.

The best part? We had enough soup to feed us for two dinners, plus a few extra servings to stash in the freezer. Hooray!

How are you bridging the gap between summer and fall?

Yukon gold oven fries

Are you ready to turn on the oven yet? I am. Of course, this may have something to do with living in Northern California, where it was actually grey all morning a few days ago. Grey skies!! They're so rare I can't help but get excited. Today we're back to standard super-blue skies and glaring sun, but in the interim, I turned on the oven and baked up some of the best snacks on the planet: Yukon gold oven fries.

Deep frying is not a normal practice at our house, so baking has been my french fry method of choice for quite awhile. The results are a bit more like roasted potatoes in convenient baton form than crusty coated fries, but I'm okay with that. It's a super easy and tasty method, and that's all I need.

Yukon gold oven fries

Yukon gold potatoes
olive oil or your choice of sub
red pepper flake
mustard powder
salt, pepper

Preheat your oven to 425F.

Scrub your potatoes well, removing any eyes. Cut then into appropriate steak fry batons. I don't peel my potatoes for fries, but you can feel free to do so. Personally, I think the skins give the fries a bit more structure, and they're certainly delicious. Besides, you can't beat the laziness factor.

Put your potatoes in a mixing bowl and toss them with a few teaspoons of oil and seasoning to taste. I like to use lots of black pepper, several good shakes of salt and red pepper flakes, and just a little ground mustard, but feel free to go as spicy as you like.

Arrange your fries in one layer on a baking sheet of your choice. These guys can stick, so if you have parchment paper or a silpat, you may want to break them out for this. I used tinfoil because we were out of parchment, but it's an inferior substitute.

Bake for about 20 minutes, or until your fries are golden brown on the bottom and move easily when you shake the pan. Then flip them over and continue baking until cooked through. The timing is going to depend on the thickness of your fries. I believe mine took about 35 minutes total.

Eat immediately with ketchup and the burger or sandwich of your choice. You definitely want a dill pickle spear on the side too.

John and I had our fries with a couple of good good things' bbq pinto bean burgers, which we made in a huge batch and froze for instant dinner application a couple weeks ago. That was a Very Good Idea, let's just say. Note Emmycooks' amazing pickled peppers and giant slice of homegrown tomato as well. Together, it was one of the best late summer dinners I could possibly ask for.

Are you guys ready to turn on the oven, or are you still happily submerged in a pile of raw veg and fruit?

Baby leek and potato gratin

Spring means ramp season across much of the US, and the foodbloggers are starting to sit up and take notice. Ramp chimichurri, ramp pasta, ramp foraging and preserving guides--it's all ramps all the time.

Guess what I have never once seen in California? That's right: ramps.

Instead, when I went to the farmer's market last weekend, guess what I found?

That's right: it's the new season's first baby leeks. So tiny! So delightful! They aren't ramps, but they're still beautiful new fragrant alliums barely as thick as my index finger--and at $1.75 a bunch, I'll definitely take them.

And then I'll smother them in cream sauce and bake them into a fragrant potato gratin. Sure! Why not?

This recipe requires three main components: sauce, vegetables, and breadcrumb crust. If you are working by yourself, you may want to get the vegetables prepped in advance, but you can also cut them up afterward as long as you remember to watch the sauce and stir it occasionally. If you're working with someone else, you can do the veg and sauce at the same time. The breadcrumbs can go last with no problem.

All the leftover leek greens went immediately into a batch of vegetable broth destined for the freezer. Because it's great to make veg broth on the fly and everything, but sometimes you just want to whack a chunk of premade broth into a pot and walk away.

Baby leek and potato gratin

butter
flour
half and half/cream
milk
nutmeg, pepper
gruyere
leeks
potatoes
breadcrumbs
olive oil
dijon mustard

For the sauce, start by melting half a stick of butter over medium heat in a saucepan of your choice. (We used the gratin dish, so as to avoid an extra dirty pot, but I wouldn't recommend it.) Add 4 tablespoons of flour and whisk together, cooking for about three minutes, to make a roux. Add a pint of cream or half and half and continue to cook, whisking frequently, for a good five minutes or so. The sauce will thicken as it cooks. You can add a bit of milk to thin it down if you think it needs it.

Season your thickened sauce with a tiny bit of nutmeg and a copious amount of ground black pepper. Gradually whisk in several large handfuls of grated gruyere cheese. If you want to use another cheese, feel free; just keep in mind that any highly flavored cheeses are going to dominate the finished product.

Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of a pan of sauce mornay!

Okay. The vegetables mostly require a lot of cleaning and chopping. I used five little leeks and five boiling potatoes. Trim the roots and the ends of the tough greens off your leeks, split them in half, and wash them really well under cold running water. Slice them into inch-long chunks.

Scrub your potatoes well, removing any eyes. You can peel them if you like; I don't bother. Cut them in half, rest each half on its cut side, and slice into the thinnest slices you can manage. If you're prepping potatoes in advance, make sure to put them into a bowl of cold water; otherwise they can oxidize and turn to black mush in an astonishingly short period of time. Then just drain and pat them with a paper towel before assembling the gratin.

When your sauce and veg are ready, mix them together and pour them into a gratin dish or casserole of your choice. I also splashed a bit of milk over the top of mine, since the sauce was pretty thick and I wanted to make sure the potatoes had enough liquid to absorb.

Now it's time for the crust. This is easy. Just mix a cup or so of breadcrumbs with a sprinkling of olive oil, a couple spoonfuls of dijon mustard, and a bit of pepper. We usually end up cubing pieces of fresh bread for our crumbs, but whatever you have should work. Mix everything together, making sure you have enough oil to coat the bread. Then spread your breadcrumb mixture over the top of your gratin dish. If you have extra grated cheese, scatter it on last. Otherwise, the breadcrumbs work well by themselves.

Now put the whole thing in the oven and bake at 350F for about forty minutes, or until your potatoes are tender to the point of a knife and your breadcrumbs are golden and sizzling.

Hooray! Beautiful, golden, fragrant gratin!

We ate our gratin as dinner, with big mesclun and grape tomato salads. Then I ate the leftovers for breakfast the next day, after a short encrispening in the toaster oven. I didn't put a fried egg on top, but I was tempted. That would be pretty perfect, especially with another big bed of greens.

The tomatoes were also at the farmer's market, incidentally, as were a vast array of heirloom tomato plants. I got two. Soon they will be in my garden. SOON.

Which alliums are popping up at your market? What are you making with them?

Minimal Salade Niçoise for busy days and nights

Things have been crazy for the past couple weeks. All work all the time, even on our birthdays. Especially on our birthdays, actually. I'm finishing my first product for my own company, which--well--it's a little surreal. I don't know how to describe it. And I still have a lot more to do before launch.

I'm exhausted. Here, have a salad.

Minimal Salade Niçoise

butter lettuce
boiling potatoes
eggs
green beans
vinaigrette of your choice

Make as much of each ingredient as you like. I used three potatoes, four medium eggs, and two big handfuls of green beans for two people, and that was a bit too much.

Put a pot of salted water on to boil while you scrub your potatoes and remove eyes. Chop the potatoes into reasonable bite-sized chunks. When your water boils, add the potatoes. Bring the water up to boiling again, reduce to a fast simmer, and let cook until tender. This should take maybe 30 minutes for small chunks of potato. You can do everything else while the potatoes are cooking.

Put your eggs in the pot with the potatoes and let them cook for 9 minutes before you pull them out. Give it a minute or two longer if your eggs are cold from the fridge. Put your finished eggs into an ice water bath and let them chill while the potatoes keep cooking.

Trim your green beans, chop them into bite-sized pieces, and put them in a steamer basket that fits over the potato pot. If you don't have one, that's ok--you can just quickly boil them in a separate pot. Steam or boil until done to your tastes. I put mine on for about four minutes. When done, take them off the heat. You can ice them if you want to, but I left mine hot.

Core your lettuce, wash it, dry it, and chop it into reasonable salad pieces.

When your eggs are cool enough to peel, go ahead and peel them. Chop them into halves or quarters.

When the potatoes are done, drain them well. Let them sit for a minute while you arrange your lettuce on plates. Top the lettuce with potatoes, beans, and eggs.

For vinaigrette, I smashed a clove of garlic and added it to a measuring cup with a splash of white wine vinegar, a big spoonful of seedy dijon mustard, salt and pepper, and some chopped parsley. Then I whisked in olive oil until it all emulsified into dressing. I didn't measure at all, so I have no measurements to give you. Use your favorite vinaigrette recipe, or just go get the Newman's Head out of the fridge.

Pour your vinaigrette over your salad, pick up your fork, and eat it all.

Sleep the sleep of the weary.

What do you make when you're too busy to cook?

Roast chicken; mashed potatoes

It's fall. Okay, it's technically fall. That doesn't mean much here in NorCal--hey, we didn't really have a summer either!--so it's no surprise that the weather is still constantly 75F and sunny, 75F and sunny, 75F and sunny.

BORING. I want rain and clouds and wind! I certainly want to start wearing jackets and scarves and inhaling cool, crisp air and eating hot and homey fall foods. Well, I can at least have that last one.

So this week we made roasted chicken with thyme butter and garlic mashed potatoes, for one of the most classic fall dinners ever.

Since I am the only meat-eater in the house, we decided not to roast an entire chicken. Instead, we went to the butcher counter and got a bone-in and skin-on breast. This worked out admirably, especially considering our current lack of freezer space for leftover storage. You can use this same method to roast an entire chicken; just be sure to adjust the roasting time up.

Roast chicken with thyme butter and cherry tomatoes

bone-in skin-on chicken
butter
fresh thyme
salt, pepper
cherry tomatoes

Preheat your oven to 400F.

While the oven is heating, prep your chicken. Wash it, pat it dry with a paper towel, and trim off any unnecessary pieces. John was prepping our chicken, so he chopped off a bit of attached ribcage (too thin; would have burnt) and some extra fat. We saved the trimmings to make stock later, and you should too.

Strip a bunch of fresh thyme leaves off their stems. Use a fork to mix them with a chunk of softened butter. Then use your fingers to butter your chicken both under and over the skin. Really get in there and grease it up. If you want to, you can put a few branches of fresh thyme in the pan or under the skin too. Salt and pepper your chicken on both sides as well.

Roast in a baking dish of your choice, basting occasionally.

We weren't sure how long to roast our chicken because it wasn't an entire bird. So instead of doing the intelligent thing and looking up how many minutes a bird generally cooks per pound, we just stuck it in the oven and kept an eye on it. It took about 45 minutes to cook completely, with golden brown skin and clear juices when tested with a knife.

In the last ten minutes or so of cooking, add as many cherry tomatoes as you like to the roasting pan. Fifteen or twenty per person is a reasonable amount; more is probably better. They'll collapse a bit into the rendered chicken fat and become a delicious acidic mess.

When your chicken is done, take it out of the oven and let it rest for at least a good five to ten minutes before carving. This lets the juices absorb back into the meat, so the finished product isn't dry.

Hooray! Chicken!

Be sure to save the bones for stock-making.

Garlic mashed potatoes

boiling potatoes
garlic
olive oil/butter
salt, pepper
milk

Put a big pot of water on to boil while you scrub, peel, and chunk as many potatoes as you want to eat. When the water comes to a boil, add your potatoes. Give it a minute to boil again before you lid the pan, turn down the heat, and simmer. Let cook until the potatoes are cooked through. This took about forty minutes for us.

In the last fifteen minutes or so of potato cooking, warm some olive oil or butter in a small pan. Add a bunch of smashed, peeled garlic cloves. Cook very slowly over the lowest heat, letting the garlic soften and steep in the oil.

When your potatoes are done, drain them well. Add the olive oil and garlic mixture to the potatoes, along with salt and pepper to taste and a dash of milk. Mash everything together to your liking.

To serve, deposit a whack of mashed potatoes on your plate, and a piece of chicken on the side. Cover the potatoes with a couple spoonfuls of roasted tomatoes. Have some salad on the side. Voila!

What classic fall dinners are you eating?

Burger & fries, so nice

Meat doesn't usually play that large a role at our house. John doesn't eat meat, so he's obviously out of any meat-based plan. I do eat meat, but I don't eat very much of it. An overabundance of meat--by which I mean "more than one meat-based meal within two to three days"--makes me feel pretty awful. So when I do eat meat, I want it to be GREAT.

Enter the lamb burger.

Lamb is my favorite meat by any measure. Beef does not do it for me except on extremely limited "MUST HAVE STEAK NOW" occasions, which happen no more than once a year. Bacon is okay and everything, but I certainly don't fetishize it to the extent that the rest of popular culture seems to. I tend to use pork as a flavoring instead of a main ingredient anyway. Chicken and turkey are okay, but they can be boring, and are certainly pretty disgusting to work with raw. That leaves lamb--rich, flavorful, and great to use in any number of complex savory applications. What's not to love?

So the other day we set out to make the most satisfying of burger feasts. Spiced lamb burger for me; veggie burger for John; oven fries and onion rings and delicious sourdough buns and caramelized onions for us both. Hooray!

Oven fries are pretty standard at our house: cut potatoes into fries, toss in olive oil, salt, and any spices you like, and bake until delicious. We decided to try out using garam masala, which worked admirably. The onion rings were a much more iffy endeavor--we didn't have any parchment paper, so they really wanted to stick to the pan. I think I'm going to have to work on that one a little more.

The burger, however, was excellent.

Spiced lamb burger

ground lamb
breadcrumbs
olive oil
finely minced garlic
chopped scallion
chopped red pepper
salt, pepper

I made four burgers with half a pound of ground lamb and about 2/3 cup of breadcrumbs. The proportions of all the other additions are up to your personal taste. In fact, go ahead and mix and match your burger additions--practically any vegetable or spice that sounds like it'll be good with lamb should work out. Just make sure to chop all your vegetables very finely, so they can integrate well with the overall mixture. I used a couple cloves of garlic, a small handful of scallion greens, and about a quarter of a red pepper.

Mix all your burger ingredients together with your hands. When you have a relatively uniform texture, wash your hands, wet them, and form the mixture into burger patties. Keep in mind that they're going to shrink up a bit when cooked.

Fry your burger in a hot pan for about three minutes. Shake the pan to loosen the burger before you flip it. Cook another three minutes, or until the meat is done to your taste. Timing is definitely going to vary based on the strength of your stove.

When you're nearly done cooking your burger, toast the bun of your choice. I split my bun and stuck it straight into the pan with my rendered lamb fat, which worked out extremely well.

Serve your burger on your bun with all the various bits and pieces you like. For this application, I added dijon mustard, goat cheese, caramelized onions, and a big handful of spicy greens, to imitate the most excellent Lafayette burger at Cafe Lafayette in Brooklyn--probably my favorite burger of all time. John had his veggie burger with everything but the goat cheese. And we both had fries and onion rings and lots of ketchup.

Eat your finished burger whatever you like best--fries or onion rings or chips or pickles or a salad or anything else at all. Hooray!

I was only going to eat one burger, but my meat mixture produced four patties. No problem--we have a freezer for a reason.

So I layered each raw patty on a piece of tinfoil (the curse of no parchment paper strikes again!) and stacked them up in a 2-cup deli container. Then I just stuck the entire thing in the freezer. Now I have a stash of nearly instant burgers, ready for future application.

What's your favorite burger? What combinations of condiments do you guys like best?

Tofu scramble and potatoes rösti

This weekend our friend Chrissy came up from Santa Cruz to hang out. At our house, "hang out" includes not only staying up until all hours gossiping, but also getting up in the morning for a delightful farmer's market expedition and a massive brunch at home. Best brunching forever!

This time, we decided to make a vegetable-heavy tofu scramble and a panful of rösti.

Tofu scramble is obviously pretty widely known as the breakfast of vegetarians and vegans--but what is rösti? Well. It's a Swiss potato cake that bears a reasonable resemblance to hash browns. Essentially, it's grated potatoes cooked in butter or oil until they form a delightful cake. Who wouldn't want one of those at brunch?

Wikipedia tells me that rösti is only eaten in German-speaking parts of Switzerland, but this seems off. For one thing, I first heard of it in a book of essays by Laurie Colwin, a longtime denizen of NYC. For another, we've watched Jacques Pepin not only make a rösti but also tell us what it's traditionally called in France--pommes paillasson, which translates to "doormat potatoes"--so obviously rösti is also made in French-speaking areas at the very least. The finished cake does indeed look like a doormat! It's just a much tastier doormat than you can find just about anywhere else.

Let's go!

Tofu scramble with fresh garden veg and basil

olive oil
scallion/other onion of your choice
tomato
bell pepper
hot pepper
chard or other greens
firm tofu
turmeric, oregano, marjoram, salt, pepper
fresh basil or parsley

Start by sauteing chopped scallion or onion in some olive oil in a frying pan of your choice. When it's soft, start adding any other vegetable you think would be tasty. I put in a bunch of various sweet peppers, a tomato or two, and a jalapeno. Keep any greens and fresh herbs to the side for last-minute addition.

While your vegetables are cooking, prep your tofu. In a large bowl, break up a block of tofu roughly with a fork. Season with a little turmeric, some oregano and marjoram, and salt and pepper. If you want to go for a totally different spice mix, that should work too. Anything that works with your vegetables should turn out fine.

When your vegetables are cooked through, add your tofu to the pan and stir to mix. Add a couple big handfuls of chopped greens of your choice too. When the tofu is hot through and the greens are just wilted, taste for seasoning and take the pan off the heat. Stir in a couple handfuls of fresh chopped basil right before serving.

Hooray! Scrambled tofu for all!

Rösti aka Pommes Paillasson aka Doormat Potatoes

boiling potatoes
scallion greens
olive oil
salt, pepper

Start by prepping your potatoes. Peel them, grate them, and squeeze them in a dishcloth (or over a bowl) to remove as much liquid as possible. The secret is squeezing out all the water in the potatoes! Be thorough!

Chop up some scallion greens or other onion device of your choice. Add them to the dry potato shreds and season well with salt and pepper. Mix well.

Now heat up a large frying pan of your choice on medium-high. Cast iron is probably the best choice here; we used a large nonstick pan. I'd choose the widest pan you can manage, keeping in mind that you're going to have to flip the potato cake eventually. The thinner you can make your potato cake, the better.

Pour a large slug of olive oil into the pan and swirl to coat. Then lay in your potato mixture, pressing it down firmly as you go. Cook, shaking the pan occasionally, until your potato cake is dark golden brown on the underside. This should take somewhere around eight to ten minutes, depending on your stove.

Now it's time to flip. Wear oven mitts while you're doing this. Essentially, you want to cover your pan with a similarly sized plate or platter, hold the two together, and turn the entire thing over to release the potatoes onto the plate. Add a bit more oil to the pan before sliding the potatoes back in, uncooked side down. Hooray! You did it!

Continue cooking until the underside of your potato cake matches the golden brown of the top. Slide the finished cake onto a cutting board, cut into triangles, and eat.

Rösti cries out for a variety of delicious garnishes. (Or is "garnish" already a mass noun? Hmm.) Anything you put on a traditional potato pancake will be great here. Applesauce? Yes. Sour cream or creme fraiche--maybe with some chopped dill or more scallion greens? Yes. Chopped hard-boiled egg and crunchy salt? Yes. Capers and finely chopped red onion? Yep. Smoked salmon or caviar? Sure, if you like that kind of thing. All of the above at once? Well, maybe not applesauce, but everything else--yes.

Hooray for brunch! What do you guys like to cook on lazy weekend mornings?

Spanish tortilla!

Man, what is with me and the eggs lately? Constant eggs! I'm in that part of the phase where I still love eggs and want them, but am starting to feel like it's too much. Time to break out the spring vegetables instead.

In the meantime, I totally made and ate a 3-egg tortilla the other night. I wanted tapas; this worked fine.

Spanish tortillas are so good! The egg here really should be only a binding agent for lots of delicious potatoes, plus any other addenda you like. I wanted zucchini, so I added some of that. Then everything worked together in perfect harmony, and I ate my tortilla and went to bed.

That said, it's 3 eggs and butter and oil and it's a good thing it's been a year and a half since the last time I had one.

Tortilla with potato and zucchini

butter/olive oil
onion
potatoes
zucchini
eggs
salt, pepper, paprika

Warm some olive oil on medium in a small nonstick frying pan. Chop up a yellow onion and throw it into the oil to start softening. Scrub and dice a couple of potatoes. I used one yukon gold and one redskin, which turned out fine for just me; use more if you are feeding more than one person.

Add the potatoes to the onions, stir, and cook to brown on all sides. Potatoes can suck up a lot of oil, so watch it and add some if you need to. Otherwise, just keep shaking the pan and flipping potato bits every couple minutes until they are nice and crispy and clearly awesome. When they're done, tip them all out into a bowl and set them aside for a minute.

Dice up a zucchini, add it to the hot pan, and do the same with it. You want roughly as much zucchini as potato, or maybe a little less. Crispy zucchini bits!

Now you can dump the potato and onion mix back into the pan with the zucchini. Mix it all up and make sure everything is hot through.

Crack a couple eggs into a bowl, beat them with a fork, season them with salt, pepper, and paprika, and pour them over the zucchini and potato. Tilt the pan to get egg good and everywhere; it should run down between the vegetables to cover them. When two eggs turned out not to be enough to cover my pan, I just beat and added another one. Flexible!

Cook, shaking the pan and running a silicon or wooden spatula around the edge, until the eggs are partly set and the whole creation is fully loose from the bottom of the pan. This should take maybe three or four minutes.

Now we get to flip the tortilla. This can be intimidating, but don't worry! You can do it!

First, get out a plate the same size or larger than your pan. Use your spatula to coax the entire tortilla out of the pan and onto your plate. Hold the plate on the palm of one hand and pick up the pan in the other. Then flip the frying pan directly over the plated tortilla.

Holding the pan and plate firmly together, carefully flip them over. Remove the plate; the tortilla should have fallen into the pan upside down. Put the pan back over the heat and cook to set the eggs on the other side, maybe two minutes.


Then coax the whole business out of the pan again, cut it into substantial sixths, and eat it.

A tortilla really wants to be eaten with a massive salad, which in my case I had not got. Instead I had it with sour cream, for ultimate dairy explosion. I did have the also requisite red wine, however: malbec.

This whole experience was way too rich, so I ended up only having 2/3 a tortilla for dinner. The other two sixths I ate cold for breakfast the next day. This works admirably well. Tapas! Tapas for breakfast! I mean, I didn't get any tapenade to go with it, but I can deal with that.

Cakes cakes potato cakes

I wasn't remotely intending to make something seasonal, since St Patrick's Day is one of those holidays that floats unseen over my head, but this year I was in New York, home of Tammany Hall, the draft riots of 1863, and the annual St. Patrick's Day parade. This last goes up 5th Avenue, and has a huge media/public speaking stand at 5th and 64th, about a hundred yards from my office. It was impossible to ignore.

So yeah. Uh, I like potatoes, and I accidentally made something very potatoey and warm and delicious right before St. Patrick's Day. If only I'd also accidentally used corned beef, cabbage, and green beer.

Yogurt mushroom potato cakes

boiling potatoes
butter/olive oil
salt, pepper
garlic
mushrooms
frozen/fresh peas
paprika
plain, good yogurt/soy

This takes three steps as I did it, but you can just as easily (well, more easily) either mix everything together and serve as a massive bowl of mashed potato and vegetable, or serve the two components separately. Then you could either forgo yogurt completely or use it as a garnish. It's mashed potatoes and vegetables: you can do whatever you want.

Boil and mash potatoes; saute vegetables; mix; fry into cakes.

Put a pot of water on to boil while you scrub and peel your potatoes. I think I used three or four medium yukon golds. Throw the peels into the freezer to make soup with later, then chop the potatoes into small cubes. When the water boils, add a pinch of salt and your potatoes. Simmer covered until cooked through. Drain your potatoes and mash them roughly with some butter, salt, pepper, and plain, pungent yogurt. You could also use sour cream, cream cheese, or a soy dairy thing of your choice. I would also say goat cheese if I hadn't gotten the worst food poisoning of my life from goat cheese, such that for months I haven't even wanted to think about it. Moving on.

Warm some olive oil or butter in a nonstick saute pan. Peel and mince some garlic, then toss it into the pan. Let it soften slowly while you slice a couple handfuls of mushrooms. When garlic is soft, throw the mushrooms in as well. Season with lots of paprika and a little salt, stir to mix, and cook for five minutes or so, letting mushrooms express their juices. When your mushrooms are getting close to done, and beginning to turn golden, add some peas. I used the end of a bag in the freezer, which ended up being about 1/2 cup of peas. You can defrost them under warm water before adding if you feel like it; I didn't. Cook until peas are hot through and any extra liquid in the pan has evaporated.

If you want to use other vegetables, you could try pretty much anything that's good with potatoes: shredded carrots, corn, green onion, winter greens, or finely minced cabbage.

If you want just mashed potatoes and vegetables, stop now and eat them. Otherwise, mix the pan of veg directly into the potatoes. Wipe out the saute pan, add a little dribble of olive oil, put the heat on medium, and whack in a couple spoonfuls of potatoes. Cook for about five minutes on each side, or until they attain a nice golden-brown crust. Keep your finished cakes warm on a plate in the oven while you cook the rest.

Voila: potato cakes. Eat them with a lot of salad.

Black bean sweet potato soup

It's fall and I have a freezer! That means STOCKPILE.

I wanted to make a gigantic pot of soup: some to eat now, some to eat for lunch tomorrow, and some to freeze. This meant I used Lots of every ingredient: two medium onions, three or four potatoes, not enough beans (I used a can; 3 cups would've been better). The most important thing is to get the ratio of beans to sweet potato roughly even, with a little smaller proportion of onion. You can make this soup in any quantity; just make sure your pot is big enough.

Black bean sweet potato soup

cooked black beans
sweet potato
regular boiling potato if needed
olive oil
yellow onion
jalapeno pepper
water
cumin, cayenne, salt, pepper, bay leaf
avocado garnish

Warm some olive oil in the bottom of a big soup pot. Dice up an onion or two and toss it in. Finely mince a jalapeno and toss that in too. Add several good shakes of cumin and a little cayenne pepper, mix it up, and let it all soften.

Peel and dice at least one sweet potato. We only had one, so we had to make up the difference with some plain redskin potatoes. Clearly, two sweet potatoes would be a better idea and get you a more intense soup, so if you have them, use them. I wanted more sweet potatoes!

When the onion business is soft and translucent, tip in the sweet potato and a bay leaf or two. Then fill the pot about halfway with water. HALFWAY. We were using a 3 quart pan, and managed to get the water level within an inch of the top. Go us! The subsequent boil and simmer were eventful.

Yeah. If you're making a bigger batch of soup, use a bigger pot.

So bring your pot to a boil, lower the heat, clap on the lid (unless you need to evaporate off some of the extra water and splatter every surface in the kitchen with soup in process. Go us!), and simmer until the potatoes are soft. This should take maybe a half hour or 45 minutes.

At this point you have some puree-oriented choices. You can leave the business chunky, add your black beans, heat though, and eat. You can puree the soup, then add your black beans, heat through, and eat. Or you can add your black beans, heat through, puree, and eat. In any of these cases, make sure the pot of soup is off the heat while you puree! This won't be an issue is you're using a stand blender, but for the stick blender: be aware.

John wanted a puree with chunks of black bean, so we went for option 2.

Put it in a bowl and eat it!

On the first occasion, I had the soup plain and it was good.

On the second occasion, I also had a ripe avocado. So I diced up some avocado and strewed it over my soup. This was an excellent idea, and let me use the rest of the avocado for a boatload of guacamole besides. The avocado gives you some of the same effects as dairy garnish (i.e. sour cream or drained yogurt, which would also work here): a smooth, cool, fatty component to take out some of the spice and sting.

I used the avocado trick to dice my avocado. Do you know the avocado trick? Probably, since it's been over the blogs.

First, cut the avocado in half lengthwise. To get out the pit, whack your knife blade into it, then twist. The pit will come loose and remain stuck to the blade. Pry it off and chuck it, or start an avocado tree if you want.

Now use your knife to cut a grid into the avocado flesh without breaking the skin. You'll end up with a bunch of diced avocado still organized nicely. Push your thumb into the back of the skin, effectively turning the business inside out, to pop out the pieces of avocado.

Voila: avocado trick.

Eat it eat it!