Squash festival

We are still drowning in a sea of vegetables, even after last night, when I halved an entire four-pound bag of tomatoes to freeze. Freezer full of tomatoes! Yeah! However, that doesn't do anything to empty the crisper drawers, which are still drowning in squash, dark greens, lots of different peppers, eggplant, cilantro, potatoes: it's a total harvest festival in there.

With that in mind, I set off to butcher a butternut squash.

At this point, we're at the full collision of summer and fall veg, so I decided to make a squash risotto with a tomato melted into it. While that seemed like a good idea, that combination ended up way too sweet. Just don't put a tomato in it and you'll end up with a thick, hot, squishy bowl of caramelized veg and grain sustenance.

Winter squash barley risotto

onion
olive oil
barley
dry vermouth
butternut squash
(no tomato)
veg broth
fresh sage
salt, pepper
optional grating cheese/toasted nuts

For this one, start with the squash. We had butternut (and continue to have a couple more of those, plus two acorn, one spaghetti, and an endless mass of zucchini). You can use any reasonable hard-fleshed winter squash or pumpkin; it's fine.

Peel the squash, seed it, and dice it into 1-inchish cubes. Toss it with a little olive oil, spread it in one layer on a baking sheet, and roast it at about 375F until it's nice and soft and has beautiful caramelized golden brown edges. I think this took us about a half hour or 45 minutes. Give the squash at least fifteen or twenty minutes to cook before you start on the actual risotto; that way it will actually be done by the time you want to add it to the barley.

Ok! Risotto! Peel and dice a medium onion (pref yellow, but whatever). Warm some olive oil in a 3 quart pot, add the onion, and soften. While you're waiting, make some vegetable broth in a separate small pot: just add your onion trimmings, plus any other non-brassica vegetable scraps you have around, to a pot of water. Simmer it for at least ten minutes. You now have broth! Hooray! I really need to just write a page of the top ten cooking techniques I use for freaking everything, because "making broth" is definitely one of them.

When the onion has collapsed, add a cup or barley and another cup of dry vermouth or white wine to the pot. Cook on medium-high, stirring reasonably often, until the vermouth has been absorbed. Now just stick to the basic risotto method, adding a cup or so of hot broth at a time and cooking, stirring often, until the barley is cooked almost entirely through.

By this time your squash should be done roasting. Add it to the risotto pot, along with a last cup of broth, and cook as usual.

When the barley is cooked through, you're done. Take the pan off the heat and add a handful of chopped sage. (If you use dry sage, I'd add that near the end of cooking, so it can have a chance to rehydrate.) Salt and pepper. Add grated parmesan, romano or even gruyere or emmenthaler if you want cheese. You could also toast some walnuts or pecans in a little pan and break them up over the top of each serving.

Put it in a bowl, throw a little more sage over it, and eat it! This risotto really wants some serious winter greens on the side, and maybe a glass of lightish red wine like valpolicella. Thus concludes my knowledge of wine for the evening.

Leftovers: you cannot do better than fried risotto cakes for breakfast. Form them with wet hands so the risotto won't completely engooen you. If you feel fancy, you can put a little bit of cheese or maybe cooked greens in the middle of each cake. Then fry them in maybe a drop of oil, turning to brown each side. If you have cheese in the middle, make sure to let the cakes cook a while on low so said cheese melts.

Then you can eat them, with scrambled eggs and green onion optional. Voila! Breakfast is awesome!

Lie around all day hard and fast lying club

Weekend eatings are the best. We get up on Saturday morning, get all our responsible things done, and then immediately traipse off to the farmer's market to swathe ourselves in bountiful tomatoes, free range eggs, and sourdough. OK, so maybe we don't physically swathe ourselves, but the mental concept holds true!

Then we come home (coffee at Bidonville optional) and proceed to whip the tomatoes and eggs and sourdough into awesome, awesome breakfast.

Lately the eggs have been scrambled eggs with sambal oelek, which is Vietnamese hot pepper paste. It's essentially unblended sriracha sauce, full of seeds and chunks of hot pepper.

Scrambled eggs with sambal oelek

eggs
butter
sambal oelek
salt, pepper

Crack eggs into a bowl and mix them relatively gently with a fork. Many people (such as Eliz. David et al) will tell you only to stir the eggs together, but I like mine a little more completely amalgamated than that. Warm a (pref. nonstick) pan on medium-low, melt some butter in it, and pour in the eggs. Salt and pepper, add a spoonful or two of sambal if you want hot spicy scramble, and start stirring with a decent unmeltable spatula. This is important: you will have the spatula in the pan for a long time, and no one likes melted plastic in their eggs. Cook slowly, stirring often, until eggs are done to your liking. At a low enough heat this can take up to ten or even fifteen minutes, but it is totally worth it. Slow-cooked scrambled eggs are the best thing ever.

When done, eat your eggs with lots of toast, coffee, and a vinaigretted salad. The salad can be just leaves with dressing, or it can be something like this:

All day salad

red onion
lettuce
tomato
mushroom
salt, pepper
vinaigrette

If you want red onion, slice it into appropriate pieces for your taste and soak it in warm water while you assemble everything else. This will make it a little less pungent and easier to eat raw, while not pickling it or changing its overall flavor.

Wash, dry, and tear up various lettuce; arrange it on a plate. Cut up a tomato and spread it on top. Trim and slice a couple of mushrooms and spread them on top. Drain the red onion and spread it on top. If you want any other vegetables, slice them into appropriate bits and spread them on top.

Salt, pepper, and vinaigrette it.

Eat as much as you can with your eggs, then pick at it slowly all afternoon while you do things like "read books" and "play video games". Yay salad!

THIS IS TEACUBE.

Behold! This is what happens when you unsuspectingly (or, you know, suspectingly) wander into the remaindered food aisle at TJ Maxx: you end up buying a massive teacube, containing 100 bags of green tea, for six dollars. Then you take it home to discover that the tea is not only subpar but also packaged individually, and not in paper, like any self-respecting Asian grocery bagged green tea, but in plastic.

So even though each of the individually wrapped tea bags cost you six cents, which is cheaper than nearly any prebagged tea on the market, and definitely cheaper than paying 75 cents on the street corner for a cup of coffee, the whole transaction is kind of crap. Every time you make a cup of tea you have to deal with a little sliver of plastic, the stuff you have eight assorted reusable shopping bags to eliminate. Then the tea itself is slightly stale and off. That's not surprising, considering that tea sold in bags is consistently lower quality than tea sold in leaf. Then consider that this tea was also REMAINDERED.

In conclusion, go to the food co-op and buy green tea in bulk instead.

Oh yeah

Also, leftover lentil soup makes the best, quickest, most completely perfect pasta fagioli in the west. Er, east. Yeah.

Pasta lenticchie

That's "pasta lentils", much like "pasta fagioli" is "pasta beans". Say it: len/TEE/chee/ae.

1. Cook some ditalini or other small, chunky pasta.
2. Heat up your leftover lentil soup.
3. Combine drained pasta with soup.
4. Add parsley, shredded grating cheese and/or toasted nuts.
5. Eat it! EAT IT HARD.


In addition, I wasn't kidding about the pasta and greens.

Yes! It's mesclun!

Pasta pomodoro with mesclun

"Pomodoro" is Italian for "tomato". It also supposedly means "apple of gold", i.e. "pomo d'oro". However, through copious internet research, I have discovered that the word for "apple" is actually "mela", and "pomo" actually means "knob". Whatever! "Pomme" is definitely "apple" in French! IT REMAINS AWESOME.

1. Soften onion, garlic, and good tomato with olive oil and salt.
2. Cook it slowly! Slowly! until the tomato dissolves.
3. While the tomato melts, cook gemelli or other pasta of choice.
4. Season the tomato business with oregano, basil, pepper.
5. Mix drained pasta with tomato business.
6. Serve over a plate of washed mesclun or other salad greens.
7. Add parsley, grating cheese, and/or nuts.
8. Mix it up! Eat it hard!

YES.

Celery and mustard greens

Behold! A terrible muddy-looking picture of lentil soup!

I was trying to remember what all went into this, because lo, it was really good lentil soup. I think the secrets were 1. lots and lots of good celery (cut off a celery root and everything!) and 2. baby mustard greens.

Ok. Celery is nothing new in lentil soup, or really any soup, but this particular celery was so good! At first I was really focused on the root, since we'd never had such a thing just lying around the kitchen before. I spent a couple days fantasizing over remoulade recipes before I really thought about the stems at all.

Then, of course, I made lentil soup, and the celery stems suddenly transformed into the greatest things ever.

We didn't even have any carrots! No mirepoix!

The mustard greens were a different story. The CSA gave us three bags of different baby greens in one week. Great! Except that there are only two of us! It's hard to get through that amount of tiny baby greens before they curl up and die. We were putting them in Everything: multiple pastas with spinach, grilled cheese with mushrooms and mustard, and the aforementioned huge salads.

Mustard was the hardest green to use. I tried taking some to work and just eating it as plain salad, like I'd do with any baby green, but they were just too strong. We had to cook them. In this case, they made up for my pitiful lack of mustard seed perfectly.

A lentil soup with good celery and mustard greens.

olive oil
onion
celery
curry spices: curry powder, ginger
(I had some fresh ginger; why didn't that go in? Oh well.)
bay leaf
red lentils
a small potato
veg broth/water
white wine vinegar/other acid (lemon juice)
salt, pepper
mustard greens/other greens
sourdough toast to eat it with.

This is not a particularly innovative soup. It's just good.

First, warm some olive oil in a soup pot. Peel and dice an onion, then soften it slowly in the oil. Finely dice some stems of celery as well. I like to do this by making a long cut or three up the stalk, then dicing across. A fine dice is important, since it eliminates any issue with long unwieldy celery strings. You're welcome. Also, if your stalks happen to have leaves, throw them in too! I used all of mine, and the result was awesome.

Throw the celery in the pot with the onion, season with whatever curry/lentil spices you find appropriate, and cook on medium, stirring occasionally. You'd traditionally have some carrot dice in here as well, but I didn't have any, and it turned out fine. For spices, our cabinet is still lacking a bunch of odds and ends (such as mustard seed), so I just used a store curry blend and some ground ginger. I know! It was still good.

While things are cooking, peel and dice your potato. The finer the dice here, the less time that potato will take to cook. You can also make veg broth if you want, or wash some dishes. Etc.

When the onion and celery have softened, add several cups of water or broth, a big handful of red lentils (I used maybe 2/3 cup?), your potato, and a bay leaf. Stir it all up, put on the lid, and bring the business to a boil. Lower to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the lentils and potato are fully cooked and dissolving into the soup. This should take maybe twenty minutes; taste both the potato and lentil to make sure things are done to your liking. You can simmer it longer if your soup is too watery; this will let the extra liquid evaporate. Then remove the bay leaf, add salt and pepper, and make any other seasoning correction.

At this point I took my soup off the heat and puréed it with the stick blender. If you like a more chunky soup, feel free to leave it as-is.

Add a tablespoon or so of white wine vinegar to the pot, stir it up, taste it to make absolutely sure of seasonings, and you're done.

Serving: take a handful of mustard greens for each bowl. Keep in mind that mine were BABY greens; full-grown mustard may need a short dunk in the actual soup pot over the heat. Other greens should work fine too, as long as you keep in mind their various cooking needs.

Anyway. For baby mustard, chop the greens roughly and divide them into your bowls. Then ladle your soup directly onto them. Let the soup sit for a minute or two before eating, so the greens wilt just a touch. Perfect!

Eat it with toast or warm pita. Hummus is always a good idea here. So are olives. I'm just saying.