Eggplant Avalanche

I think that I have mentioned that I have never had any luck growing eggplant before. Well, that worm has turned. This year we have had oodles of the fruits. The white variety, which reminds me of ostrich eggs, have probably been the most prolific, but the purple ones are coming on strong, and I have harvested a few Chinese eggplant too.

So far we have had them in salads, pastas, a tart, and an Indian stew, but several nights ago I decided to make some eggplant sandwiches for dinner. I sliced the eggplant thick, sprinkled the slices with salt, and let them sweat for fifteen minutes or so while heating my little convection oven up to 400 degrees. After blotting the eggplant slices with a paper towel to absorb the bitter juice that they gave up, I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt and pepper before popping them in the oven, where I baked them about 12 minutes or so on each side, until they were brown and soft. I brushed the eggplant slices again with a balsamic vinaigrette after they came out of the oven. While they were cooling a bit, I toasted the bread and sliced some tomatoes and fresh mozzarella. To assemble the sandwich, I stacked the eggplant, some arugula leaves, the mozzarella, the tomatoes (which I sprinkled with salt and pepper), and a few basil leaves on the bottom slice of toasted bread. I spread the top slice of bread with some lemon mayonnaise and added it to the sandwich.

We both pronounced it delicious, but I found myself wondering what it would have been like with some prosciutto...

Summertime

I have a long-time friend who moved away a couple of years ago, but I always think of her when I eat a fresh tomato and mozzarella salad. I have known her for more than twenty years, and every time I have ever seen her eat one of these salads, she has said something to the effect of "Man, this is what I love about summer." Who could argue with her? Tonight's version involved three different tomato varieties (including a succulent Brandywine) on a bed of arugula, several little balls of fresh mozzarella, and a nice scattering of julienned basil, all dressed with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

We had the salad with some grilled chicken and roasted fingerling potatoes. I only have a couple of those left, and I used the last of the onions today in a big pot of eggplant-tomato-pepper pasta sauce. The eggplant continue to produce and the zucchini are really just starting, but everything else is ramping down, even the tomatoes. We are leaving later this week for a visit to some family in California, and I can tell that, by the time we get back, the days of tomato abundance will be over. We will still have some to eat into September, but the summer is inevitably starting to fade. I think that next week I will start some things for fall, so that we will have turnips and chard and lettuce when the weather turns cooler.

I used some more tomatoes and eggplant last night in a savory tart, the recipe for which is in the original Greens Cookbook, by Deborah Madison. It was quite delicious, and it paired very nicely with a fruity French rose wine.

Tomato Heaven

I was happy to find a trickle of fresh tomatoes when I returned from vacation. It wasn't long before that trickle turned into a flood, despite what has been a very unpleasantly hot summer. They're not all beautiful fruits, but some of the ugliest are actually the tastiest.

I have given quite a few away, and I tried to soak up some of the surplus today by making some tomato chutney and a pitcher of gazpacho. The chutney turned out great; I melded together two different recipes I found on epicurious.com. I spiced it with ginger, coriander, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, black mustard, cayenne, nigella seeds, and a cinnamon stick, and I added golden raisins and onions along with the tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar. The taste I tried was delicious; we'll see how the flavors develop.

Tonight we are having a very locavore kind of dinner. Whole Foods had some locally raised lamb loin chops, which I am grilling. (They really seem to be carrying a lot more locally raised food; their consumer research must have shown that is a key value for their customers.) With them we're having some roasted fingerling potatoes from the garden, along with some purple pole beans (there are a few in the photograph above), which actually turn green when you cook them. I was going to open a Virginia wine to go with it, but we have a really great Cotes-du-Rhone that will pair well with the lamb, so that's the direction I decided to go.

On Vacation

The Little Red Wagon will be back on July 16. Have a great 4th of July!

Harvest Day

I dug all of the potatoes today. The haul was about sixteen pounds worth, which was a little disappointing. The French fingerlings had a better yield than the Yellow Finns, some of which I impaled on the pitchfork and hence became squirrel food. I may need to rethink having potatoes next year. They are unbelievably delicious, but they take up a lot of room. I have given up a lot of other crops for my spuds.

The fingerlings did contribute to a very tasty dinner, though. I simmered several of them until they were just tender, and then I sliced them and placed them in a baking dish, forming a bed. After drizzling olive oil over them and seasoning with salt and pepper, I added a halibut fillet and put the whole thing in my little convection oven, set to 450 degrees. (I had also drizzled the fish with some oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.) Thirteen minutes was about right. If the fish had contact with the pan, rather than resting on the potatoes, I think that ten minutes in the oven would probably be sufficient. I had the fish and potatoes along with some beets (a dark red and a salmon-colored) that I had diced small, tossed with chopped oil-cured olives, some julienned basil, and a few minced anchovies, all dressed with olive oil and sherry vinegar. This beet relish was the highlight of the meal. The combination of sweet beets, bitter olives, fragrant basil, and salty anchovies really did it for me, and it married extremely well with the fish and potatoes.

I paired the food with an albariño, a very pleasant white wine from Spain that I had heard about recently on "The Splendid Table." I thought that this quaffable wine would work well because of the Spanish feel of the food, and I wasn't disappointed.

New Potatoes

Potatoes are about the easiest thing there is to grow. I plant them around St. Patrick's Day, pay a little bit of attention to them during the spring (mounding up dirt around the hills, watering occasionally), and then summer arrives with a harvest of buried treasure. I dug the first hill this morning at 7:00 am, and we ate the spuds exactly twelve hours later. The flavor was absolutely sublime, enhanced only by a little butter, some cream, fresh chives, and salt and pepper. I could have eaten a whole plateful, but I had also prepared some pan-sauteed catfish and a beet and endive salad which, frankly, was disappointing. Something about it just didn't hang together. Maybe it was the rather bland goat cheese, which had none of the tang that the beets needed. Oh well, I'll try again. I think that beets and potatoes are the only things that will be coming out of the garden for the next week. But there are a lot of things on the horizon...

...provided that they stay alive. My volunteer cucumber vine succumbed over the weekend to the wilt that always seems to get them. Last week I planted some replacements that have come up nicely, so we will see if it is really a timing issue. Sometimes it is possible to plant things at a time that allows them to miss the insect that spreads plant viruses, and I have read that such a strategy can work with cucumbers. I choose to be optimistic. Meanwhile, my eggplant have been attacked by waves of flea beetles, and I actually have given in and started spraying them with a relatively benign, chrysanthemum-derived insecticide. I am trying to be sparing, because the spray is also toxic for beneficial insects, especially bees, which we have in abundance in the community garden. (We now have a beehive, one of several that have been deployed in community gardens in DC.) I just decided that I was unwilling to give up any hope of having eggplant, even if it meant having to make (very mild) organic compromises. And even with the spray, the leaves on the plants have plenty of little pin holes. So the pests are getting their fair share.

Sharing in the Garden

People share a lot in the community garden where I have my plot. It is probably just a part of the DNA of a place like that. Advice, seeds, watering help, and surplus produce all pass from one person to the next. Oh, there are also petty conflicts, territorial disputes, and grumpiness about weeds that are allowed to thrive, but the level of communitarian spirit is pretty high.

I have the good fortune to have the same neighbor at home and in the garden. Last year I gave her some surplus onion plants that I had left over, and she put them in her plot. I was a little puzzled when she didn't harvest the onions after they were ready, but they came up again this year and produced the flowers that my neighbor had been hoping for all along. Onions are biennial, meaning that they flower and produce seed in the second year of their lives. The flowers are beautiful, and she has a nice group of them that stand guard over my beets.

I, however, always harvest my onions, so I doubt that I will ever have onion flowers to show off. Tonight I grilled a couple, dressed them with a balsamic vinaigrette, and had them with a delicious New York strip steak. I also prepared some packets of little red potatoes for the grill; I boiled them for 15 minutes and then placed them in foil packets with rosemary sprigs, olive oil, some butter, and some seasoned salt from the Spice House, and then I put them on the grill with the rest of the food. We ended with an arugula and red lettuce salad, also dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette, but I used the really good vinegar for the salad. It almost seems obligatory to have some red wine with a dinner like that, so we had a Malbec from Argentina.

I had initially thought that I would make some kind of biryani tonight, to try something new. That would have been a real project, with a long list of ingredients and a melange of subtle flavors. The meal we actually had was nothing like that. In fact, it was pretty basic cooking, but it was probably just as satisfying.

Summer Cocktails

Several years ago at my physical my doctor asked me how many alcoholic drinks I have per week. He did not seem entirely pleased with my response of 1 - 2 beers or glasses of wine per night, so since then I have been careful to low-ball my estimates. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, and I am convinced that, in this area at least, it won't hurt me, either. I once had a landlady who had reached the ripe old age of ninety-three, and every night she and her husband (who was even older) had two 7 & 7 cocktails, one tall and one short. They didn't seem any worse for wear, so I am just following their example, though I think that I measure out the alcohol more carefully than they did.

I generally gravitate to wine, and somewhat less frequently to beer, but recently I have also been drinking the occasional cocktail. My plan to sample a new cocktail every week never materialized, but lately I have been trying my hand at mixing new things, like the Leland Palmers we had last week on Memorial Day. I made something similar for myself tonight, essentially a grownup lemonade. I am sure that there must be many versions out there, but here is the one that I mixed.

Lemon-Lime Fizz

Juice of half of a lemon

Juice of half of a lime

1 teaspoon superfine sugar

1 oz. limoncello

1 oz. vodka

ice

club soda

lemon slice

Muddle the sugar with the juices in a highball glass, add the spirits and ice, top with club soda, and garnish with lemon slice.

It is very refreshing, and would probably also be good with gin in place of vodka for a variation on a Tom Collins, which is itself a nice break from the ubiquitous gin and tonic. It's going to be pretty hot tomorrow, so I'll probably need something like that after all of the weeding that I'll be doing.

A Beet Salad

This entry could have been titled "Your Mother Knows Best." I was in Kansas City over the weekend, visiting my parents and sisters, and I baked an angel food cake for my younger sister's birthday. It was only the second "from scratch" angel food cake I have ever made, and I don't have the technique quite down. It ended up being fine, but I took it out of the oven a few minutes early, even though Mom advised leaving it in just a little longer. As soon as it cooled I was worried that it would be a little too, well, wet. I expect that angel food cake is one of those things that benefit from practice. But what is a person to do with all of those egg yolks?

Tonight we had a very simple supper. Chicken leg quarters roasted in a cast iron skillet with whole cloves of garlic, baked Yukon gold potatoes, and a very nice roasted beet salad, which also included a few steamed sugar snap peas, sweet onion, and fennel fronds, all dressed with a vinaigrette made of olive oil, walnut oil, and sherry vinegar. This year I planted Chioggia beets, along with golden and dark red varieties, so the salad had a nice mixture. I commented to Glen during dinner that I had started the salad back in the middle of March, when I planted the peas and onions. It was worth the wait.

Memorial Day Cookout

We had a few friends over for a Memorial Day cookout, and I decided that it might be fun to do hamburgers. Now, there are at least two reasons why I almost never cook hamburgers. First, I don't trust ground meat from the grocery store, even from Whole Foods. I have read that, in the typical package of supermarket hamburger, it is possible to detect the DNA of dozens of animals. Pretty scary. Second, I really dislike purchased hamburger buns. So I decided to address both issues in my hamburgers.

A friend gave me a copy of the cookbook from the Zuni Cafe in San Francisco several years ago, and one of the recipes that it includes is for the famous Zuni Cafe hamburger. It involves using whole chuck, which is cut into chunks and salted the day before, and then ground fresh on the day it is cooked. The method is pretty simple, even if it is a little time-consuming. My main concern was that the meat was a little too lean; I had bought grass-fed beef, so it was not very marbled. To raise the fat content a bit I ground some bacon in with the meat. It ended up being pretty juicy, and I did not detect any pronounced bacon flavor. I thought the meat might have been a little under seasoned, but otherwise it was tasty.

To go along with the burgers I made the hamburger buns from the Martha Stewart Living Cookbook. They were much better than the typical supermarket bun, and I was surprised at how quickly they went together. I was going to make her spicy ketchup, too, but I think that I will wait for tomato season. Instead, I made the gorgeous pink pickled onions in the photograph, which are also from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I honestly think that these onions were my favorite part of the meal, and I am glad that we only ate one of the two pints, so I'll have some to eat with sandwiches.

While I was finishing the prep we drank Leland Palmer cocktails, which are featured in the new issue of Bon Appetit (http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2010/06/the_leland_palmer). This is essentially a blend of iced tea and lemonade that is spiked with gin and limoncello. Very refreshing.

For dessert I made vanilla and strawberry ice creams, which we had with some very fudgy brownies. I was thinking of a Neapolitan-style sundae where the brownie stands in for the chocolate ice cream. When I was growing up we always had homemade ice cream for summer holidays. My family had one of the old-fashioned hand-crank White Mountain ice cream churns. It seemed like we had to turn that crank forever! It is a lot easier now just to pour the custard into the cylinder and flip the switch, but I sometimes miss the elbow grease method. The anticipation was almost as much fun as finally digging into a big bowl of pillowy frozen goodness.

Cold Suppers

In Washington, the approach of summer means that a heavy blanket of hot, humid air will soon be thrown over the city. Once that happens, eating hot food, much less preparing it, is not very appealing. And so the cold supper just makes sense.

That was the direction I went last night, even though it wasn't particularly hot. Instead, my motivation was a good combination of ingredients from the garden: A Tom Thumb mini-head lettuce, some sugar snap peas, sweet Walla Walla onions, and a couple of radishes. I added some chopped oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, and one yellow bell pepper that was left over from the marketing early this week. I poached some chicken breasts in broth, shredded them, made a lemon vinaigrette, and put the whole mess together. I should have walked out to the backyard to get a handful of herbs (some lemon thyme and parsley, maybe, or some marjoram), but I was too lazy. The salad was still pretty tasty.

To go along with the salad I made some buttermilk biscuits, which I think are one of the most perfect foods around. I use a recipe from a cookbook called Soul Food: Recipes and Reflections from African American Churches, by Joyce White. I am a little ashamed that the biscuit recipe is the only one in the book that I really use; I have just never gotten around to exploring the rest of the collection. But it is a really good biscuit recipe, so I probably should inaugurate a weekly soul food night for at least a couple of months.

Little Growing Things

I definitely have some little growing things in the garden. And yet I still am in that period when I have put a lot of time, energy, and sweat into the garden, and it is really just teasing me with the promise of a bountiful harvest. Yes, there have been some radishes, and arugula, and lettuce, and just in the past few days some sugar snap peas and spring onions. But I still need to buy a lot of vegetables at the store. That is really the test, for me. Being able to go and harvest something for dinner, planned menus be damned.

My garden is a little different this year than in the past. More eggplant and peppers, no rapini and not so many salad greens. And somehow I have ended up with nine tomato plants, which is an all time high. It would take really terrible luck (or some really pernicious pests) to strike out in the tomato department this year.

It is always interesting to see what comes up on its own. This year I have tons of fennel, a lone cucumber, and three sturdy potato plants (Yukon Gold, I think) that I reluctantly had to pull up, since they were just in the wrong place. My dad calls these plants "volunteers," which is a term that really appeals to me. I suppose that these plants are also little gifts from the previous year, and sometimes rather unexpected. I was frankly stunned to see the cucumber. My cucumbers were a disaster last year as usual, victims of my reluctance to use chemicals. I picked only a few before the vines succumbed to some sort of virus that always seems to claim them. I don't even recall discarding a fully ripe fruit that might have yielded a seed that came up this year. I suppose that I'll just have to wait a few weeks to find out if it is the same variety that I tried to grow last year.

Well, time to go check on dinner.

All Trussed Up

Last weekend was a big cooking weekend. We had some friends over for dinner on Saturday, and I made a menu of carrot soup with star anise, braised beef short ribs with caramelized shallot mashed potatoes and roasted broccoli, and sliced oranges drizzled with Grand Marnier, along with some nut cookies. The recipe for the soup called for using two bags of baby carrots, but I substituted two bunches of fresh carrots, and I made a nice chicken stock to use in place of store-bought. I was inspired to do the short ribs by the current issue of Fine Cooking, which has a great guide to cooking these tasty nuggets. After the heavy meal, I thought that a light dessert was appropriate. though I did augment the oranges with some Greek yogurt, into which I mixed some chopped preserved clementines. (I have been trying to work through a whole quart of them that I made.)

I had planned on just having leftovers on Sunday, but instead I decided to debone a chicken and then fill it with a rice stuffing before trussing it. When we were in Kansas City for Christmas we made the ritual pilgrimage to Pryde's Old Westport, which is surely one of the greatest kitchen stores in the world, and I had picked up some pins that you use to truss birds. As should be apparent in the photo, the chicken is pinned together, and then kitchen twine is criss-crossed around the pins, almost like shoelaces. That part worked really well, though I was a bit disappointed in the stuffing, which needs a little work. Something about the seasoning combination, which included cumin, paprika, bay leaves, green olives, orange zest, some capers and sundried tomatoes, just did not work. I guess I'll just need to work on that.

Welcome to 2010

I decided to make stuffed cabbage leaves from the current issue of Martha Stewart Living for the second dinner I've cooked in the new year. The first was a simple supper of rosemary roasted potatoes and steamed mussels with a spinach salad. Tonight I wanted something a bit heartier, since we are freezing, and the cabbage leaves appealed to me. I followed the recipe pretty faithfully, though I did substitute some cooked barley for the rice in the filling of ground beef and pork. I thought that this worked pretty well, and the acupuncturist I was seeing for my back told me that I needed to eat more barley and kale. (Kale soup is on the menu for Tuesday.) It is a pretty spicy filling, containing a tablespoon of hot Hungarian paprika. I actually purchased mine in Budapest when I was there for work eighteen months ago, and I need to use it up. (I took advantage of that trip to eat a fair number of delicious pastries, as well...It's hard to go wrong at Ruszwurm, up at the castle.) We had the cabbage leaves with some roasted carrots and parsnips, which I did very simply with olive oil, kosher salt, and herbes de Provence. With dinner I opened a 2004 Blauer Zweigelt from Paul Lehrner, a spicy Austrian red wine, which was an excellent pairing, and we finished with a bit of goat cheese from Firefly Farms, a local cheese maker. All in all, this was probably my favorite meal of the year so far.

Holiday Blizzard

Washington and points north are experiencing the full fury of a Nor' easter today, less than a week before Christmas. We have probably fifteen inches of snow now, and it is still coming down pretty hard. Fortunately I managed to get to the grocery store last night after work. Though it was mobbed, I did lay in enough supplies to make it through the weekend without any problem. I always suspect that we could last a couple of weeks if it were necessary, but I hope that I never need to put that suspicion to the test.

Last night's dinner included some of my favorite things that I haven't cooked in a long while. We started with a cauliflower and Stilton cheese soup, which is delicious and very easy. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 small onion or 1/2 large onion, diced

1 rib celery, diced

2 T butter

One head cauliflower, cut into florets

1 potato, peeled and cut into large dice

2 c. chicken stock

1 c. milk

5 oz. (or to taste) Stilton, crumbled

salt and white pepper

In saucepan over medium heat saute the onion and celery until soft. Add cauliflower, potato, and stock, and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer, cover, and cook until cauliflower is tender, 20 - 25 minutes. Puree soup with blender (for smooth texture) or immersion blender (for slightly chunkier texture). Add milk to soup in pan over low heat, stir to combine, and add Stilton. Heat soup to melt cheese, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

For the main course I prepared a roasted chicken with a bulgur stuffing under the skin. Here is that recipe:

Bulgur Stuffing

Ingredients:

1 small or 1/2 large onion, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 T olive oil

1 c. bulgur

2 c. chicken stock (actually I used some leftover turkey stock)

1 pinch saffron threads

Saute onion and garlic in oil in medium saucepan over medium flame. After they turn golden add the bulgur and stir to coat with oil. Add chicken stock and saffron, and bring to boil. Cover and turn heat to low; cook 15 minutes. Take off of the heat and let it stand for 10 minutes. (Can be prepared ahead.) Fluff the bulgur and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Chicken:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Spatchcock a 3 1/2 - 4 pound chicken. (Spatchcocking involves removing the backbone and flattening the chicken out.) Work your hand under the skin on the breast, and loosen the skin over the breast and down both leg quarters. When the stuffing is cool enough to work with, put it under the skin of the bird, down both leg quarters and over the breast. If there is leftover stuffing, make a bed of it in a lightly greased roasting pan (I actually used a large cast iron skillet) and place the chicken on top of it. It will absorb the drippings, which will make it even more delicious. When the chicken is ready to go into the oven, sprinkle the skin with some kosher salt. Place the chicken in the oven and turn the temperature down to 375 degrees. Roast, basting several times, until chicken is done, approximately 1 hour. (I generally shoot for a thigh temperature of about 165 degrees, and then let the meat rest for 10 minutes or so. A spatchcocked bird cooks faster than an intact bird.)

With dinner we had a 2006 white wine from Domaine du Tunnel, the Saint Peray Cuvee Prestige, 80% Roussane and 20% Marsanne. It was a very pleasant though subtle wine, and it paired well with the chicken.

An Impromptu Cassoulet

We had our first snowfall in DC yesterday. The flakes were big and wet, and they quickly began to accumulate, at least at our relatively high elevation (around 400 feet above sea level). By the end of it we had maybe three inches on the ground, and even after a 40 degree day today some is still sticking around. That kind of weather makes me crave something hearty and stew-like, and the thought of cassoulet popped into my head as I hid under the comforter this morning. Cassoulet is true French peasant fare, full of beans, duck, and sausages. I don't think I have ever made it before, and I didn't really feel like consulting a recipe, so I just made something up that (I think) is relatively close. It is cooking now, so I guess we will see in an hour or so.

Here is what I did:

Cook about a pound and a quarter of Great Northern beans.

Start with a duck. Cut off the wings, legs, and thighs and season them with salt and pepper. Debone the breasts, and save them for a nice dinner later in the week. Brown the wings, legs and thighs in fat (preferably rendered duck fat) until they are nice and deep brown. (Or if you have plenty of time, make some real duck confit. Or if you have less time but access to a good market, buy some duck confit and you can dispense with the duck entirely.) Make some stock from the assorted leftover bones and skin and parts. After the stock has simmered an hour, degrease it. (If you know what is good for you, you will save the duck fat to use for other things, like sauteeing certain vegetables.)

Saute a few slices of chopped bacon in the Dutch oven that you will use to cook the cassoulet. After the bacon is crisp, remove it with a slotted spoon. Add one large sliced onion, two ribs of chopped celery, and two chopped carrots. Saute until soft, and then add two bay leaves, 3 cloves of chopped garlic, and 1 1/2 t of herbes de Provence. Continue sauteeing until the vegetables start to caramelize. Stir in 1 T or so of tomato paste, and then deglaze the pan with some stock or water. Add the cooked beans, the duck, the bacon, and 12 ounces or so of sliced smoked sausages. Add about two cups of stock, season with salt and pepper to taste. Put in a 325 degree oven for an hour or so.

We are having this with some roasted butternut squash chunks (leftover from the risotto), and a 2006 Bogle Phantom, which is a very hearty red.

(...a couple of hours later...) Dinner was quite tasty, though the andouille sausages I used were so spicy that it became more of a Cajun dish than French peasant...not that there is anything wrong with that. I'll have to try again with something less assertive, and perhaps I should read a few recipes. The wine, by the way, was a very good match. Big, fruity, just a touch hot. It definitely warmed the cockles of my heart.

Don't Look a Gift Squash in the Mouth

Although the photograph is of the apple pie I made for Thanksgiving

(from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook), this post is about something else. One of Glen's colleagues gave us a butternut squash several weeks ago, and I have been procrastinating about using it. I finally got around to it tonight, when I made a risotto. I'm not exactly sure why, but sometimes my risotto turns out better than other times. Perhaps it has something to do with cooking it longer, and developing a starchier sauciness. I usually suspect that it is the quality of the stock. Tonight I used a mix of homemade and prepared, about half and half, and it was pretty tasty. Anyway, here's the recipe.

Toss about two cups of cubed (1/2 inch cubes) butternut squash with some olive oil, and put into a 375 degree oven to roast. Roast for 30 minutes or so, until the squash starts to brown. Add 1/2 c boiling water to a small amount of porcini mushrooms; let them steep until soft, then chop and reserve the mushrooms and reserve the soaking liquid. Saute two leeks (white and pale green part only) in 1 T of butter and 1 T olive oil over medium heat; add 1 1/4 cups arborio rice after the leeks are soft. Saute the rice for a few minutes, taking care to ensure that all of the grains are coated with oil. Add 1/2 c of white wine, and stir until the liquid cooks off. Start adding warm broth (you will need about 4 cups) in 1/2 cup amounts, stirring well. After you have added about half of the broth, add in the reserved porcini liquid, taking care to leave any sediment behind. Add the chopped mushrooms. Continue cooking, adding more broth and some salt to taste. Check the texture; it should still be a bit toothy when it is about done. Add water and continue cooking if necessary. Once the texture is close to done stir in the roasted squash. To finish stir in a few tablespoons of whipping cream, 1/4 cup Parmesan and a few tablespoons of chopped fresh sage. Garnish with additional Parmesan and some sage leaves, if desired.

I served this with some turnip and fennel wedges that had been tossed with olive oil, herbes de Provence, salt and pepper, and roasted in the oven along with the butternut squash. It was autumnal bliss.

Old Fashioned Pork

One of the highlights of Thanksgiving weekend was a day trip out to the horse country in Virginia, with our friend Suzanne, who raises ponies and teaches with Glen. We had a great time visiting the Vintage Ridge Vineyard in Rectortown. Instead of the regular tasting room experience, they seat you at a bistro table and bring a plate of food pairings to enjoy with half a dozen wines. The tasting costs $12, but it is really worth it. I bought three bottles and joined their wine club, which obligates me to purchase one case per year in exchange for a 20 percent discount. Virginia definitely is not Napa, but these people have made some very serviceable wine, and their passion is infectious. I also like the idea of supporting more local agriculture.

One of the wines that I purchased was a 2005 Cabernet Franc, which is fairly common in Virginia. We drank it on Saturday with the most amazing pork chops I've ever had. I picked them up in Middleburg, just down the road from Rectortown, at a place called Home Farm, which sells locally and humanely raised organic meats. They specialize in the old heritage varieties. Boy, those chops were marbled with the most delicious fat imaginable. I butterflied them and stuffed them with a mixture of wild rice, shallots, mushrooms, dried cherries, pecans, sage and parsley, and then I seared them and finished them in the oven for 20 minutes or so at 375 degrees. We ate them along with some Brussels sprouts tossed with butter and whole grain mustard. Sheer heaven, and a really nice match for the Cab Franc.

And then two more curries for dinner last night. And a great pot of vegetable soup tonight.

Autumn really is the best time of the year for cooking.

Impromptu Indian Dinner

Before doing the grocery shopping on Sunday I always plan a full set of menus for the week. I find the discipline helpful; it certainly cuts down on wasted food, and it eliminates nightly dithering about what's for dinner. And yet it is still important to be flexible and willing to deviate from the plan. Tonight was supposed to be a porcini and cremini mushroom pasta, which is one of my old standard recipes, but somehow that just did not appeal. So instead I improvised some miscellaneous veggies (part of a head of cauliflower, a lone potato, some frozen peas, a carrot, an onion and garlic) along with some spices into a curry, and a quick consultation with 660 Curries gave me a vague roadmap to do something else with the mushrooms. A little adaptation yielded a very passable mushroom curry, fragrant with garlic, whole cumin, black cardamom seeds, a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf, the very last ripe tomato from the garden, some Punjabi garam masala, and a dash of Vulcan salt from the Spice House in Chicago. Some toasted papadum, yogurt, and chutney made the dinner complete. My only regret was that we didn't have any ginger on hand, but I still called dibs on the leftovers for lunch.

I'll figure something else out to do with the porcinis.

Sunday Night Roasted Chicken

For Sunday dinner we had pollo al mattone, also known as "chicken under a brick." This is the cover recipe from a recent Bon Appetit issue, and it deviates slightly from the traditional method that involves grilling. Instead, the marinated and butterflied chicken is cooked in a skillet, pressed down by the foil wrapped brick. I used my black cast-iron skillet, which I had recently used to roast some chicken leg quarters and wings that turned out very nice. Tonight the chicken's skin was almost sinfully delicious. I am sure that most nutrition obsessives would frown on eating it, but it would be a crime to waste something that tastes so good. I am willing to lose a few months at the end of my life, or even a few years, to be able to eat such things.

Along with the chicken we had some standard smashed red potatoes and roasted cauliflower. Everyone should discover the joys of roasting the cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, caulifower, Brussels sprouts, etc.). Toss them with some olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe a sprinkling of the roasted garlic and red pepper sprinkles I get at Planter's Seed Co. in Kansas City, finished with a squeeze of lemon or some scattered parsley after they have roasted long enough to get a little browned and tender. There's no comparison between this and the steamed version.