Thanksgiving dinner

Ok! So that menu didn't happen exactly as planned. I think it was probably good overall, though, since the changes essentially reduced the total amount of food.

Actual thanksgiving dinner:

- Several kinds of red wine
- Havarti with dill, goat cheese, crackers
- Black bean sweet potato soup, take two
- Sauteed kale with garlic
- More or less classic stuffing with shallot
- Apple pie

Yeah, that's plenty for two people. We ate all of it except a serving of soup (now in the freezer) and half the pie. Then I woke up at 6:30 this morning, couldn't get back to sleep, and went down the street to get a whole wheat bagel with basil cream cheese. Apparently my body really wanted all the food, which is good, because the food was awesome.

Red wine is self-explanatory. I went to the Trader Joe's wine store at Union Square on Wednesday. There was a line halfway down the block, so I got in and waited. Fortunately, the wait was pretty short. Everyone was clearly into grabbing things and getting out as instantly as possible. I got: Old Moon 2006 Zinfandel, Gascon 2007 Mendoza Malbec, Ripasso Tenimenti Conti Neri 2006 Valpolicella, and Reserve de l'Estey 2005 Bordeaux Medoc. We actually had the zin Wednesday night, but you know. These were all pretty passable for wines under $10.

Cheese and crackers are even more self-explanatory. We ate them. I made the mistake of getting an assorted box of crackers, which turned out to include digestive biscuits, but that was ok. They would be good with brie, or cheese and fruit pairs, but not the cheese we had. So when we ran out of crackers, we just ate the cheese.


Black bean sweet potato soup.

This one was a little different from my previous attempt, and turned out much, much better.

soaked and/or cooked black beans
vegetable broth
sweet potato
garlic
olive oil
bay leaf
cayenne pepper
salt, pepper

Stick your soaked black beans and a bay leaf in a pot and boil them in a couple cups of water or broth for at least an hour, or until tender. If your beans are already cooked, bring them to a boil in all broth. Let them simmer, adding cupfuls of broth as the water evaporates, while you roast the sweet potato.

Peel a sweet potato or two roughly equal in volume to your beans. I had a gargantuan potato, so I only used half of it. Cut your potato into big slices about half an inch thick, then toss to coat in some olive oil. Spread the slices on a baking sheet in one layer, season with salt, pepper, and cayenne, and stick a crushed clove of garlic on each slice. Roast them at 350F for about a half hour, or until they're golden brown around the edges and soft in the middle.

Slide your roasted potatoes into the soup pot, then simmer it some more while you cook everything else. After simmering at least 15 minutes, fish out the bay leaves, pull the pan off the heat, and puree the soup with a stick blender. You could also roughly break up the sweet potato with a big spoon if you want a chunky soup.

Now you can stick the lid on the pot, stick it over low heat, and wait until you're ready to serve. The nice thing about this soup is that it can pretty much stay on the back of the stove forever.

Eat with lots of greens.


Sauteed kale with garlic

olive oil
garlic
kale

This is super easy and takes very little time, so make it right before you want to eat. Warm a largish splash of olive oil in a saute pan while you crush, peel, and chop a handful of garlic. Cook the garlic slowly in the olive oil. This way the garlic will caramelize and the oil will get good and garlicky at the same time.

In the meantime, cut out the tough stems of a handful of kale leaves. I had flatleaf purple kale, but any kind should be fine. Chop your deveined kale into big rough pieces.

Add the kale to the pan, stir to distribute the oil, and cook on medium for about five to seven minutes. When the kale turns bright green and wilts, it's ready.

Serve bowls of soup, then garnish them with big whacks of kale.


Stuffing with shallot

shallots
butter/olive oil
carrot
bread
vegetable broth
sage, thyme
salt, pepper

This one is also super easy, as well as open to improvisation. I assembled it first of everything, minus the broth, then let it sit on the counter while we made everything else. Eventually we baked it with the pie.

Ok. Melt some butter or warm some oil in a saute pan. Peel and finely mince a couple shallots, then soften them in the butter. Peel and finely chop some carrot roughly equal in volume to the shallot, add it to the pan, and continue to soften. Other vegetables to use: onion instead of/in combination with shallot, celery with the carrot. Mirepoix is clearly the classic choice for stuffing, but I somehow managed not to get any onions or celery. Fortunately, the shallot and carrot were totally delicious.

While the vegetables are softening, cube up several pieces of bread. I used four or five pieces of our regular seedy wheat bread, and it worked fine, so probably anything you have will be ok. The bread is supposed to be day-old or dry, but whatever. Mine wasn't.

In a baking dish, mix the cooked vegetables, the bread, and a large seasoning of sage and thyme. These two are key to make the stuffing taste stuffingy, so be generous and season until the pan smells right. Add salt and pepper if you want. I think I didn't add any, actually.

When you're ready to bake, add vegetable broth halfway up the side of the pan. Bake at 350F until the liquid is all absorbed and the stuffing is hot through.

Seriously, I am going to have to make way more stuffing in the future. It was a more than worthwhile endeavor. We ate the entire pan, and I for one wanted more.


Apple pie.

You can berate me for not making pumpkin pie later.

I totally used the exact crust recipe and technique from Smitten Kitchen the other day. The only thing I changed was to use whole wheat flour. I also didn't bother to let the dough chill after I'd made it, but went straight to rolling and pieing.

I'm going to say this was one of the easiest and best pie crusts I've ever made. I'm not sure why, since the great majority of crusts I've made have been from slight variation on this recipe, but still. Visible butter! Two sticks of visible butter!

It may have helped that the butter was actually frozen to start with.

Filling.

Ok, technically this was an apple and pear and also asian pear pie, but it was mostly apples so I'm calling it apple.

five or six apples
two little pears
one asian pear
sugar
cinnamon
lemon juice
butter

Peel, core, and slice up all your fruit. You want enough fruit to make a big mound in the pie dish, so add more if you need more.

Put the fruit in a bowl with a couple tablespoons of sugar, several big shakes of cinnamon, and the juice of a lemon. Mix it all up, then pile it into your unbaked pie crust. Dot chunks of butter all over the top of the fruit.

Top with your second crust. Crimp the edges together as prettily as possible. My edges were Not pretty, but whatever. Cut a bunch of slits in the top crust, then pop the business into the oven.

Bake at 350F until the crust is browned. Let it cool on the stove while you're eating dinner. Then cut it up and eat it.

Eat another piece later.

Be full.

Pre-holiday

Tuesday we had an office thanksgiving potluck. I can't remember the last time I went to a potluck without being constrained to only bring something that would both 1. fit in my backpack and 2. not spill while I biked the five miles in. So what did I do? I brought something that would both 1. fit in my backpack and 2. not spill while I rode the train the three or four miles in. Yes.

Spinach salad with walnuts and dried cranberries

spinach
walnuts
dried cranberries
vinaigrette

Wash and dry a lot of spinach, trim out any massive stems, and cut the leaves into realistic salad-sized pieces. Stick them in a salad bowl.

Chop some walnuts, maybe 1/3 cup, into rough chunks. Stick them in a frying pan over medium heat and cook, stirring, until they're toasted. This should take about five minutes. Then take them out of the pan and let them cool.

Mix the cooled walnuts and another 1/3 cup of dried cranberries with the spinach. You could use other dried fruit, like cherries or chopped apricots, in place of the cranberries. Or you could use fresh apple or pear pieces. It's all good.

Dress sparingly with a mild vinaigrette, which you can bring to the office in its own little container. When someone at your office asks why you're using your hands to mix your salad, you can say, "actually, it's best to toss salad with your hands so as not to bruise the leaves." Then, when they're laughing, you can add, "and the olive oil is really good for your skin!"

Then you can eat it with a huge spread of office potluck, including grocery store rotisserie chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, and extremely damp, dense brownies.

What's wrong with this picture?

How do people eat this proportion of meat to everything else?

How can a person possibly plate themselves FOUR pieces of turkey, one of which is a gargantuan leg, vs a tablespoon of cranberry sauce and two of stuffing?

Why is this being presented by a major food magazine as the correct way to celebrate?

Seriously, we aren't having turkey for thanksgiving. We rarely do, since we rarely see relatives on thanksgiving, and what's the point of making even a big breast of turkey for one vegetarian and one omnivore who only eats meat maybe once a week? I'm not going to eat leftover turkey sandwiches afterward. Maybe I'll make some kind of grain salad and black bean or squash soup and garlic sauteed winter greens to stick in the middle of our bowls. Maybe we'll bake a baguette and eat cheese and olives and pears. There won't be any meat at all, let alone a gargantuan misproportion of turkey.

Here is the actual plan:

- crackers, havarti with dill, goat cheese
- a huge sweet potato cooked somehow, but I'm not sure how yet
- purple farmer's market kale sauteed with garlic
- spinach salad with roasted kabocha squash, pecans, maybe dried cranberries
- spicy black bean and butternut squash soup, or some variation
- a pie of some sort, pref. apple, possibly apple/pear if we don't eat the pears with cheese
- a variety of red wine
- Bulleit bourbon

We'll see how much of that actually happens.

I also want to do something with the tiny squeaky head of savoy cabbage I got for a dollar at the farmer's market, but I'm not sure what to do. It may end up sitting around until Friday being sufficiently squeaky and cute to earn its room and board.

Farmer's market dinner

Last weekend I went to the farmer's market and it was good.

You might say something like "Eileen, you were just living in California. How can the New York farmer's market compare to that?" Well. For one thing, the apples here are real, edible apples. You don't get decent apples in California. You do get boatloads of heirloom tomatoes, really cheap, tiny avocados, and all kinds of berries deep into non-berry season, but you don't get apples. For that matter, you don't get the good, frost-driven versions of any northern fruit or vegetable. It's a question of personal preference: are you warm-blooded or cold? I myself am cold-blooded, something the general population of California was at a complete loss to understand.

So I went to the farmer's market and got butternut squash and potatoes and mushrooms and tiny individual stalks of broccoli and beets and little onions and is that APPLE CIDER?

Ha ha! I haven't had real apple cider in four years. The best California can do is Martinelli's. Granted, Martinelli's is pretty good, but it's not real cider mill cider that you drink outside with an apple turnover and a long, twisted, crystal-sugared doughnut, or that you mull on the stove and serve in big mugs with nutmeg and cream.

I took all my booty home and proceeded to eat it.

Scalloped potatoes

potatoes (mine were redskin)
garlic
cream
butter
salt, pepper

Scalloped potatoes, aka dauphinoise, are the easiest thing ever.

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Slice your potatoes into lots of thin slices. Some people, such as Nigel Slater, king of meat, will want you to peel the potatoes first. You can if you want; I just scrub mine. You can avoid rings of skin by cutting the potato in half before slicing.

Smash and peel a couple of cloves of garlic for every 3 or so potatoes, then slice them into almond-sliver slices.

Get out a reasonable casserole dish for your amount of potatoes. I was just making a little pan for me, so I used a pie plate. Pour a little cream (or milk; you can use milk) into the bottom of the pan and use a spatula or spoon to spread it around. Make sure there's some liquid over the entire surface. You could also butter the pan; it just needs some dairy or oil to keep the potatoes from sticking.

Put a single layer of potatoes into the pan. Tuck some bits of garlic into the cracks. Grind some pepper over the layer, add a splash of cream, then add another layer. Repeat until you are out of potatoes, finishing with a lot of cream or milk and a similar lot of pepper. You want the potatoes to be just barely covered by liquid. If you don't have enough cream, you can do what I did and add a splash or two of water to bring the liquid level halfway up the side of the pan. It's totally fine.

Add a couple bits of butter over the top of the pan and stick it into the oven. Give it 15 minutes before you check and turn it. I usually tilt the pan to get a little of the liquid onto the top layer at this point. Stick the pan back in the oven and give it another ten minutes before you check it again. You can tell it's done by the golden-brown crispy top.

Eat with

Awesome farmer's market broccoli.

broccoli
water
nothing else unless you want some butter or salt

Oh man, this broccoli was so good. Tiny little individual blue-purple sprigs! Not a tough stalk in sight! I didn't even have to trim the leaves.

Bring a couple inches of water to boil in a saucepan with a lid. When it's boiling, you can either steam the broccoli over it or in it. My steamer insert doesn't fit the pan I used, so I just chucked my broccoli pieces into the pan. The water came about halfway up them. It was perfectly adequate for steaming.

Clap on the pan lid and steam for about three minutes. This is going to depend on the toughness of your broccoli, so give it a taste if you need to.

When the broccoli is brilliant emerald green, whip it out of the pan and run it under cold water to stop the cooking. Then put it on a plate, salt or butter it if you feel like it (I didn't), and serve it with the scalloped potatoes.

Eat it and feel better.

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!