Category: Food

Our lovely CSA (Riverdog Farm) had given us Kabocha squash several weeks in a row, so we had to do something with it. This is one of the reasons why we belong to a CSA, and one of the recurring challenges with our weekly produce box. Every Wednesday we pick up the box of produce, not knowing what’s in it, and every week we try to use it all up. Or, well, give it away, if it’s something particularly wrong, like that absolutely disgusting Romanesque Broccoli.

In any event, we’ve got all of this squash. So, we baked it, pureed it, and turned it into noodles. Basically, take semolina flour, give it a spin in the food processor with the cutting blade and your herbs (fresh rosemary, onion maybe), and then add your squash. When things have come together into a somewhat moist ball, pull it out and refrigerate overnight. (The resting step doesn’t have to go overnight, but it hydrates the flour quite well, and will make the noodling process easier.) Divide the dough into manageable bits, roll out, run through your pasta roller if you’ve got one, or simply roll as thinly as you can, and cut with a pizza cutter. You’re done, there, but we went the extra step of laying them out for our food dehydrator & running them overnight, so that they’d store well.

Nice, toothsome, thick noodles. Relatives took them all.

To find more about CSA’s, check out KQED’s Blog Entry about them.

Nuts are supposed to be good for you and all … and I suppose they don’t lose any of their virtue if they’re candied, right?

A friend gave us a large bag of walnuts, saying that they didn’t know what to do with them. So, we took them home and did some thinking. We thought that if we were to candy them then we’d be able to share. Yes. That’s what we thought. They never made it out of the house.

The “recipe” for candied walnuts isn’t really all that deep. The one thing which made the real difference in flavor? That’d be having blanched the walnuts in boiling water first, to remove the tannins from the skin of the meat. It turned the water a nasty brownish color, and the walnuts ended up quite pale in color. From there, it was a matter of letting them dry & mixing up some caramel.

For the caramel, we added some molasses (1/4 cup), sugar (2 cups), water (1/8 cup), and spices (cayenne pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, salt) to a pot and let it go until it was well above the Hard Ball stage, to 265 degrees Fahrenheit. Take it off the heat at this point and carefully add in about 1 tsp vanilla extract. Then just dump the sugar over the nuts in a large bowl, mix until coated, dump out on parchment, and wait. After a couple of hours the caramel will have sugared out a bit, leaving you with something almost the consistency of maple sugar coating the nuts.

Cayenne pepper makes them quite addictive. Don’t leave it out, and don’t be chicken about it, either. We think that it’s what kept these from being gifts … and we’re glad that we don’t get walnuts all that often!

Eventually, it happens.

You go straight home without stopping to pick up the makings for supper. You collapse at the end of the week, rheumy eyed and shuffling, and absolutely cannot face the five o’clock crowd at your neighborhood Safeway, Whole Foods, Tesco or Raley’s. When your resistance is lowest, and a couch-coma with a hot drink seems to be a distant mirage, it will strike: that loving, hopeful helpfulness. That dewey-eyed affection. That off-hand offer.

“Oh, I’ll go to the store, hon.”

Oh, it sounds innocent enough. It’s all very loving and sweet. But then he goes to the store. He’s gone for more than an hour. He comes home laden with bags, nine-tenths of what you didn’t need. He protests, “Well, you let me go by myself,” which puts the blame all back on you. And this time, he’s really done it. This time, you’ve ended up with… Vegemite.

(Cue danger music.)

Now, it’s a … food. Of sorts. Wikifolk say it’s made from leftover brewers’ yeast extract, a by-product of beer. In October of 2006, there was some huge internet flap about the U.S. banning it, but no, it’s still stocked quite freely on my grocery store shelf — someone just started that rumor about Customs checking people for fun (The U.S. Customs and Border Protection states on its website that “there is no known prohibition on the importation of Vegemite” and “there is no official policy within CBP targeting Vegemite for interception.”). But now that it’s staring me in the face — something that’s always been available, but never purchased — I don’t really know… yet… what to do with it.

Granted, we routinely use smoked nutritional yeast (which appears to be a by-product of paper production — who knew we ate recycled food?) as a flavoring; (it works well with tofu), and we even grew Shitakes, once, in the kitchen, for fun, so it’s not like we don’t know from fungi. I’m just… okay, it’s in this thick brown jar, and it’s oily and deeply sticky and disturbing. I’m not sure where to take it from here. All the Australians I’ve known like it on… toast. Um, maybe not for me. Soup bases, I can see, but vegemite on toast seems to be the equivalent of eating bouillon on toast, from the look of it. Sodium lovers might enjoy, but I think I need a few more options.

After roaming around fruitlessly on the web, I finally made a foray onto the vegemite recipe site and came up with some options.

Roast Pumpkin And Leek Risotto

Serves: 4

Preparation: 10-15 mins

Cooking: 40 mins

500g butternut pumpkin (by which I assume they mean squash?), cut into cubes

olive oil spray

1 teaspoon butter

1 leek, sliced and washed

125g rashers bacon, rind removed and chopped

(Who knew bacon had rinds!? I’d better improvise…)

1 clove garlic, crushed

11/4 cups short grain rice

1 tablespoon VEGEMITE

1 litre (4 cups) boiling water pepper, to taste

1/4 cup finely chopped parsley

40g butter (Haven’t we already had butter?!)

shredded Parmesan cheese

SPRAY pumpkin with olive oil spray and bake at 200ºC for 25-30 minutes or until golden. Heat butter in a pan and cook the sliced leek, bacon and garlic for 2-3 minutes or until bacon is browned.

ADD rice and stir for 2 minutes or until coated in butter mixture. Stir in combined Vegemite and water. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally until water is absorbed and rice is cooked.

REMOVE from heat and stir in pepper, parsley, and butter. Spoon into serving bowls and top with shredded Parmesan. Serve immediately.

I came up with a few more options — they run the gamut from just the bread-and-butter on toast plus Vegemite, to the stripes of Vegemite and melty cheese to Vegemite … milkshakes. Which sound to me like a horrible, terrible mistake. I still can’t force myself to taste the stuff on the edge of a spoon — it just smells too strong for that — but I’m off to the kitchen, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Soup: one of those dishes that seems so easy… and can be so good. And then it can totally, fully, thoroughly screw up on you. It’s the alchemical thing, methinks. Some of us want to just throw everything and the kitchen sink in there. Consider mi papí, with his penchant for flinging fleshy huge mushrooms in EVERYTHING, or mi mama, with that unholy Creole trinity of green bell peppers, onions and celery — and I loathe bitter green bells and celery cooked. Shudder. Those were the soups of my childhood — limp, overcooked vegetables in a watery broth; or horrible broccoli soups with garish flavors all competing; soups layered with some floaty unidentifiable green stuff with a green bitterness undergirding it all. Long ago I determined that these are not the soups I will spend my adult life eating.

One of the best things I’ve discovered with soups is that it’s not too hard to tell what things go together, and what things don’t. Summer soups are easy — chuck fresh veggies in a clear broth, and serve with tortilla strips and a sprinkling of cheese or croûtons, and you’re good to go. Corn soup, fresh tomato gazpacho — yum. In the autumn, it becomes only slightly more complex: beans generally go with other beans, and tomatoes. (The Italians do that well with minestrone, or Pasta y fagioli.) Root vegetables go with root vegetables — carrots and potatoes go nicely with onions, and the Germans have even been known to add apples to that mix. (Or sweet potatoes and chestnuts! Mmmm!) It may not be to your particular taste, but they go well together, or well enough, anyway. Winter squashes make great creamy soups into which you can add pears or apples, and dried tomatoes make a great creamy soup all alone. It’s just when you start mixing things like broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, mushrooms and beans that you run into trouble. Just add huge mushrooms, and you’re living my father’s dream, and my personal culinary nightmare

You know, the best fix for a bad soup? The stick blender, that model of culinary helpfulness, and a block of plain, pale, creamy, silken tofu. Theoretically you could fix a blended soup with mashed potatoes, but the consistency wouldn’t be quite as velvety. Ditto white cheeses or rice. The glutinous nature of these things means that eventually your soup would either break, and you’d have watery/creamy divisions, or it’d clump into something truly vile looking, or after blending it, you could be left with a grainy consistency like you get when you blend certain kinds of lentils (and note to the universe? Lentils? NOT meant to be pulverize-blended, okay? Let’s just all — stop that. Unless you’re going to add crème fraîche or curry powder, please don’t fully blend lentils into some hideous paste. Just. Don’t. Lentil soups deserve some chunks.). Tofu and a stick blender has turned out to be the ultimate soup saver for me. Too many veggies and hideously vying tastes? No worries. Just add plain tofu and blend. Funny colors, weird consistencies, and odd textures from limp, overcooked veg vanish magically when blended. I add a pinch of salt, a little wine, a dash of curry, and all is well. Because it’s not dairy based, the acid doesn’t curdle the tofu, and really, the soy protein in your soups means your meal will just stick with you a bit longer.

Since it really and truly is freezing for this part of the world — it was 22°F this morning (5.5°C for those Fahrenheit impaired), I am inspired to make a soup a day as the cold weather ramps up. I have a monster head of Nappa Cabbage in the fridge, so this is what I will try this afternoon:

Baechu Gook, As Adapted from Dok Suni, A Korean Cookbook

• Ingredients:
• 12 ounces Nappa cabbage
• 4 ounces white radish
• 4 ounces beef short ribs – or some vegetarian equivalent
• 4 ounces scallions
• 2 tablespoons soybean paste
• 6 cups water
• 1 teaspoon red pepper sauce
• 2 teaspoons crushed garlic

Instructions:

Clean the cabbage and shred with hands as desired, but in a wringing motion that will help soften the cabbage. Thinly slice the radish. Thinly slice the beef (or for me, it will be Quorn Naked Cutlets, which hold up well, and have scared some vegetarians into thinking I was feeing them chicken. Hee!) Cut the scallions (or leeks or onions, what have you) into 1-inch lengths. In a pot, dissolve soybean paste in the water (I think just adding a little silken tofu for smoothness will also work). For a smooth consistency, use a fine-mesh strainer with handle to remove the chunks of soybean paste floating in the soup and discard. Add the red pepper paste (Which I actually have! I knew I bought that for some reason), cabbage, beef, radish, scallion, and garlic and cook for 7 minutes over a high flame, then for 3 more minutes over a medium flame. Serve hot with white rice, kimchi, and sautéed anchovy (Um, again – an adaptation… no anchovies for me! And I’m amused at serving cabbage soup with kimchi, which is yet more cabbage, but… hey – this way I’ll use it up, right?).

I believe I’ll rummage around in the freezer and see if we have any frozen egg rolls left, steam a basket of rice, and voilá… dinner. I’ll let you know how it all goes.