Wicked Tasty Harvest

Brigadoon Cake

by April Paffrath

Chocolate is unnecessary, but still nice.

Have you noticed that when people love to cook, they often don’t like to bake? Vice versa, too. I know some spectacular bakers who would rather not turn on the stove top, and some stellar cooks who don’t want to measure flour—ever.

But I love baking and I love cooking. Cooking dinner is improvisational and baking is meditative. Even if getting dinner ready at a reasonable time was stressful, I’d be likely to return to the kitchen late in the evening to mix up a chocolate cake (hey, chocolate cake makes a great breakfast). In fact, I’m more likely to bake if things that day have stressed me out.

So often dinner is a high-energy, fly-by-the-seat experience where you look at what you have and blend it together with spices, styles, and know-how to come up with something yummy. With rare exceptions, I don’t follow recipes for dinner. I follow ideas and I look for inspiration everywhere. I look at the produce grown by farmers we know and I let the inherent flavors guide us. It can be an enjoyable and energetic experience.

When people talk about baking, though, you’ll hear them say emphatically that you have to be exact, that you have to measure precisely, that baking is really a science. OK, that’s sort of true. If you want to recreate exactly what someone has done before, you follow it precisely. If you go way off message, you’ll get dense scary things—or a goopy mess. People seem to fear that the kitchen may explode if they don’t level off a teaspoon of baking powder. But once upon a time, someone made that recipe up. They were flying by the seat of their pants then, and it worked out. What’s life without a little risk?

With that, I give you Brigadoon Cake. Brigadoon is our family name for something wonderful and elusive. It’s a dessert style I developed years ago and it’s never the same. Ever. There is no recipe, only good ingredients, hope, experience, and love—just like dinner. It’s called Brigadoon because it appears like a perfect wonder once every hundred years in the foggy highlands of Scotland. You love it, you’re moved by it, and then it’s gone (much to Gene Kelly’s dismay). You can’t hang onto it, and when it’s gone you have to let it go. In a way, the ephemeral quality is what’s beautiful, like a spontaneous poem that no one wrote down.

Brigadoon is what we call the successes, because they’re magic and haunting; the experiments that were driven by a vision and a hunger for cake—and they were perfect. The ones that didn’t work out so well? Well, they don’t get a name, they’re just the necessary failures that inform future Brigadoons. (Although, Wikipedia may inspire me to call the failures Germelshausen because they're cursed in that same rare way.)

My prod to myself and everyone else is to not be a slave to the recipe, whether cooking or baking. Experience tells you how to do a stir fry and it can tell you what a cake batter should feel like, too. If you’ve never walked out on that limb, it won’t be long before you know what a batter should feel like and look like. If you are unwilling to jump in blind, seek out Michael Ruhlman’s book Ratio. His sensical approach to recipe-free baking is wonderful (although I’ve made banana bread from his book and it wasn’t as magic as this cake I made the other day.)

I made this Brigadoon cake because we had a banana that was threatening a life of crime if I didn’t make an honest baked good out of it. One banana. I have a few tiny loaf pans and I thought one would hold about a banana and a little extra. Plus, what’s a banana and a tiny loaf cake worth of ingredients and time if it doesn’t turn out? I’ve lost very little if it all goes flat, literally. I mixed and approximated and stirred. Then I added chocolate chips (a great equalizer in case it’s sub-par instead of sublime). Frankly, it turned out they were gilding the lily, but I’ll take them. If I were to do it over again (which I can’t by definition of a Brigadoon cake) I would use Taza chocolate.

Past Brigadoons have been pumpkin cake, rum cake with a rum glaze, lemon poundcake, cheesecake and more. All live on in a part of my brain that reminds me to take risks with things. Dinner is better when you let passion guide you. Baked goods can be stunning, too.

Brigadoon Cake, banana version

Find a banana that is threatening to go bad. Put it in a bowl and mash it while thinking about how good tea time will be if the cake works out. Stir in some sugar (a bit less than a half a cup? Was anyone looking?). I know I added some oil, and I probably didn’t skimp. Crack in an egg. Stir it in and notice how it gels everything together. Suddenly it’s starting to look like it wants to be cake. Pour in some vanilla bean paste. Add in a spoon of baking powder and think light thoughts. When I’m making something up, I tend to go a bit heavy on leavening, just in case the mix is tending toward leaden. I figure that if it’s too much it’s just a little salty. If it’s not enough, it’s inedible. Add flour (less than a cup). I add it slowly as I stir and I look for the consistency that says “cake!”  I don’t stir too much. I stop adding the flour when the batter is sticky but not liquidy. Pour into a well-greased loaf pan (3x6?), top with a small handful of chocolate chips, and bake at 350 or so. The high heat makes the baking powder jump to life. The sugar helps it brown. Take it out when the top is browned, it’s springy to the touch, and a sharp knife comes out clean.

Take it out of the oven and let it cool. As soon as it no longer burns your fingers, take a slice and have it with a cup of tea. All the while, consider that this cake never existed before and you made it without rules. Enjoy every slice, knowing that you can’t replenish your supply, even though the cake is light as air and so tender, the banana flavor is divine, and the chocolate is just enough to make it decadent. In short, this cake is magic.

And, hey, if it turned out a dud, you’re out a banana, very few ingredients, and only about 15 minutes of mixing and prepping time. That’s a good risk for something as wonderful as Brigadoon. Hey, do I hear bagpipes?

Barely cooled and we're slicing it for tea.

Winter Soup

Fortifies you against winter chill.

This soup tastes of winter. The best kind of winter—warm, cozy and sweet—not blistering winds, snow plows, and buffeted cheeks. We're talking deep flavors, dreams of skiing, fluffy sweaters, and far off harvests in a bowl of steaming soup. Top it with a fine grating of parmesan and you can bring on the blizzards, especially if someone else agrees to do the shoveling. Hey, that’s fair if you’ve made them this soup, right? This soup will get you through February.

Everything in this soup is winter-appropriate. I didn’t want to put in anything that you couldn’t get mid-winter, just so I could get a true taste of the season. With foods shipped in from all over, it’s hard to find a real winter flavor. This meal is all storage vegetables, stock I made this summer and froze, jarred tomato sauce, and chick peas that I made from dried. In other words, things you can find in the middle of the winter in your own home. I even added a bit of mid-winter greenhouse goodness (from my Red Fire Farm deep winter CSA!).

But first, we need to talk about the massive cabbage fail. I had three heads of cabbage from the end of the CSA season. I packaged them up and stored them in the fridge; they’re supposed to keep for a long time. OK, probably not as long as I kept them, but I didn’t have time to make the cabbage things I wanted around the holidays…life got complicated…I thought they were going to call me…I lost their number. In short, three gorgeous cabbages that probably could have lasted, didn’t make it. When I wanted to make this soup, it was crying out for cabbage, but the cabbage was too far gone. I opened it up and it was dreary, flaccid, and off-color. Next year I’m going to have to get even better at storing veggies. Over the year, any of our CSA food loss (which still wasn’t much) came from food that had just started to go bad but still conspired to make head, body and allergies rebel. (I'm just super sensitive to food mold, even when it's invisible, blast it.) The cabbage, though? I kept it in the hopes that under the top leaves it was fine. Sigh. Next year’s goal? To store veggies even better. It will take some research.

I have a little section of the pantry that is our version of a root cellar. Onions, squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, shallots, garlic, and more in near darkness with plenty of air circulation. Every now and then I find an onion or a potato that gave up the ghost, but for the most part, we’re progressing through the winter using up the fall’s harvest slowly. This soup was inspired by a need for a hearty meal to combat the onslaught of February, as well as a chance to use a relatively large amount of veggies that wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

In the fridge I had carrots and celeriac and even some radishes left from my Siena Farms CSA. The onions and potatoes in the pantry made a strong showing and made it to a dish before losing their firmness. The Red Fire Farm deep winter CSA (which I have delivered through Metro Pedal Power, by the way) had a massive, gigantic parsnip this week. I’ve never seen anything like it. It looked like some prop from a Harry Potter movie, to be honest. (Look, I went a little crazy with OnDemand movies when I was under the weather recently. Let’s blame the cabbage.)

Whoa. Alarmingly large parsnip. And yet, so sweet.

I stood it up and used a knife to peel down the sides. Then I cut it into massive rings and cut the tender flesh off of the woody, hard center. Some of it went in the soup, and some of it went in the roasting pan with a bunch of other lovely veggies. The celeriac, another beauty, got the usual treatment—peel it with a knife, like you would a citrus you’re about to supreme and then chop chop chop. I love celery in a soup. Seeing as how green celery is not a winter crop, though, I opted for the root, which I think is sweeter and nuttier. Since the cabbage was not meant to be, I used some of the greens from the CSA. You could use cabbage, kale, escarole, or lettuce. The chick peas I added were made from dried, which I cook with carrot, onion, and a bit of parmesan rind. Since it’s low-salt and so good, I use the liquid, too. If you use canned, drain the liquid away because it tends to be bitter. You could use any number of beans grown locally, too. For this soup, I think the white beans work best.

Winter Soup

• frozen stock, about a pot of soup’s worth
• 4 potatoes, cubed
• part of one alarmingly huge parsnip, cubed
• 8 carrots, cubed
• 1/2 celeriac, cubed
• 4 watermelon radishes, cubed
• 1/2 red onion, chopped fine
• 1 cup jarred tomato sauce, plain or with basil
• 1 cup chick peas
• 3/4 c. hearty greens, chopped

1. Heat the stock.
2. Add the cubed potatoes, carrots, celeriac, parsnip, and onions. Cook until the veggies are getting tender, but still have some tooth.
3. Add the jarred tomato sauce.
4. After it comes back to a simmer, add in the chick peas.
5. Right before it’s done, add in the handful of greens. Don’t over cook them or they will not be pleasant. Kale and cabbage can withstand a bit of time and heat. More delicate greens will only take a minute.

Ladle it into a bowl that fits nicely in your hands. Grate a bit of good parmesan on top and watch it melt like snow on the window. Toast up some rustic bread, grab and deep spoon and enjoy.

Now I’m wondering. What are your food storage secrets?

Tips from Ken Oringer

We receive a lot of ground beef in our monthly Chestnut Farms meat share. The beef itself is exceptionally tasty, but we are always looking for ways to better our burgers. 

Fortunately, KO Prime’s Ken Oringer--organizer of Boston's All Star Burger Bash on February 1--was kind enough to share his top three tips for winning a patty duke-out:

1. Don't over-handle ground beef; use a minimum amount of manipulation to form patties.
2. Don't season beef with salt until just before grilling, but then be generous, as burgers can stand up to a lot of seasoning.
3. Watch the temperature; a medium-hot grill allows better control than one that is smoking-hot.

  
Photo courtesy of Kimpton Hotels.  

Winter Eats

by Cynthia Graber

 

I'm feeling lucky. It's been snowing for days, and I've gotten to cozy up to baby bok choi stir-fried with tofu, and a fresh salad mix. 

In the course of reporting a story for Edible Boston on no- or low-heat winter greenhouse growing, I found out about Red Fire Farm's deep winter CSA. They were full, but to my great delight I got off the wait list. In last Friday's first drop, I picked up a colorful mix of salad mix, baby bok choi, sweet potatoes, onions, turnips, apple cider, honey, and sauerkraut made from their cabbage. Seriously, if Ryan Voiland (farmer/owner) would let me, I think I'd invest in his entire winter bok choi crop.

I also had the good fortune, errr, work assignment, to check out Ryan's presentation on winter farming at the Northeast Organic Farming Association's winter meeting. (Can you imagine a 750-person potluck? That's the type of conference this was. For Michael Pollan geeks, the keynote speaker was Polyface's own Joel Salatin, as hell-raising as ever.) Based on the standing-room-only attendance at Ryan's talk, I'd say there's a great deal of interest in winter farming. If we buy it, they'll grow it!

So let's do it. You can find all sorts of great local produce out there, even in the depths of winter. Natick Community Farm sells it every day right on the farm. And despite the fact that Boston still doesn't have a winter market, Natick does, as does Wayland. In the city, Sherman Market in Union Square sells local produce. 

As for the beans from my previous post? I used the flavors suggested in the comments, and I made a salad out of farro, cubed and steamed sweet potatoes, cooked red beans, plenty of olive oil, herbs de provence, and some spicy harissa powder. It's great on its own, and even tastier with some feta or goat cheese. 

Photo courtesy of Clagett Farm CSA on Flickr Creative Commons.

Beans

by Cynthia Graber

 

I accidentally made chili the other day.

This sounds bizarre, true, as if I tripped, fell against the stove, and poof! A pot of chili. It wasn't quite like that, though close. I had a mixture of fresh dried beans (not an oxymoron) that I'd picked up in Greenmarket in New York, from the wonderful Cayuga Organics. I say "wonderful" because I just finished up a container of flavorful, chewy spelt that I'd bought the same day, and I'm sad to see it go. I'm considering calling to see if they take orders.

I also bought this bean mixture that came with a bit of grain, too, as a soup base, and it was time to give it a try. Hmmm, I had one red onion, a shallot, a small onion, a couple of somewhat limp celery stalks. Perfect for soup, right? I chopped it all up with an entire head of garlic. Then I noticed canned tomatoes, left over from the cabbage recipe I posted earlier this week. After sauteing the aforementioned vegetables, I threw in the canned tomatoes and bean mixture and covered the whole thing with water. Suddenly, it no longer looked like soup. That mixture wanted to be chili. So as it bubbled away, I tossed in some tomato paste, dried chiles, and chipote and ancho chile powder. 

Three hours later - accidental chili.

But here's the real reason I'm posting. In my December CSA, I received the local kidney beans from Baer's Best, pictured above. I'm not quite sure yet what to do with them. Does anyone have any ideas?

Cozy Wintery Potatoes

by April Paffrath

I heart potatoes. We always eat the dish so fast I missed getting a photo—again!

I’m crazy about potatoes. Gratin potatoes, scalloped potatoes, pommes Anna, gratin dauphinois….Are you catching the theme? Creamy, creamy oven-baked potatoes that warm you inside and out.

The creamy starchiness seems to do something magical and transform a rainy dreary day into a cozy one. It elevates the mood (and also important health numbers if you don’t enjoy in moderation) and grounds any meal with its solid, hearty round flavors. Serve this with a steak and you might get actual applause. Eat it on its own an you’ve got a perfect winter snack. Have it alongside haricot verts and you’re having a Parisian moment worthy of Proust. The universe will smile.

When I was a young girl, my family created an adaptation of gratin dauphinois—I think the secret was the bacon. We’d slice it up into the 1980s Midwestern version of lardons and the dish was all we wanted when dinner was served. The bacon added the hefty salt that shows off the cream and the starch. Without it, the impressive flavors are lost to unctuous round tones. It’s no accident that I don’t have a single memory of what we ever served with the potatoes. When those made their way out of the oven and to the table, I had potato blinders on and my heart belonged to that single dish.

We made it back then by slicing potatoes and laying the slices in the pan, splayed out like a dealer's deck of cards. Then we poured on the heavy cream, added bacon and a few other toppings and put them in the oven for a long time. These days, I do it differently, more in keeping with French tradition and with less time in the oven.

When guests dig into these potatoes, most are surprised to find out there’s no cheese…just more cream than you should probably think about. (Quick! rainbows, unicorns, the Red Sox, happiness and peace on earth. Phew! Lalalalala....)

In this version, adapted both from the traditional method and Tom Colicchio’s Craft cookbook, you boil the sliced potatoes in the cream and then pop them into a hot oven with just enough of the cooking cream for finishing and browning. It works perfectly because you never end up with potatoes that are too dry, or too wet and therefore not creamy-lovely. You instead end up with creamy starchy lovely fantastic gratin potatoes at dinner. It’s practically no-fail.

Potato Gratin (adapted from tradition and Tom Colicchio's Craft)

• 4 or 5 medium potatoes—enough to fill a baking dish.
• 2-3 cloves garlic, peeled
• a few springs of fresh thyme 
• a few pints of heavy cream
• knob of butter to coat the baking dish
• salt

1. Peel and slice the potatoes thinly 1/8-1/4 inch thick. Don’t worry about it too much, just be consistent.
2. Put the potatoes in a large pot.
3. Add the garlic and potatoes and a good pinch of salt.
4. Cover with cream by about 1/2 inch. It takes a lot of cream—not all of it goes into the final dish, so don’t panic. You’re cooking the potatoes in the cream, and only using some of the cream for the final baking. You’re paid off in flavor.
5. Put on to boil and reduce to a low boil/simmer.
6. When the potatoes are cooked but not falling apart yet (about 15 min based on how thick I cut mine and how high the heat is), take it off the heat.
7. Using a large slotted spoon, scoop the potatoes into a buttered baking dish. Try to keep the slices as intact as possible. Let's have a little pretty, shall we? Just don't go crazy—these potatoes are for eating.
8. When the potatoes have been settled in their new home, pour on some of the cooking cream. As Tom Colicchio says, you want to add enough that if you press lightly on the potatoes, the cream floods up where you’re pressing. Basically, don’t drown it, but leave plenty of cream there to bubble up as the dish finishes. It’s sort of like a potato-cream bog. Mmmm.
9. Pop it in a hot oven and let it bubble and bake until the top browns and the cream is thick and lovely. I just pick a temperature (400?) because the potatoes are already cooked and what you’re looking for is the browned flavor and the hot creamy casserole that gets everyone elbowing others out of their way.

Eat it with anything. You won’t remember what else you cooked anyway.

(cc) photo courtesy of cuorhome

Cabbage

by Cynthia Graber

My lips, tongue, and teeth have turned a bluish purple, the kind usually reserved for overindulging on Smurf-themed cupcakes. My discoloring comes from a different source, though I'm not sure if it's the cabbage, the molasses, the reduced balsamic vinegar, or some strange compounds created by the simmering of all three with deeply hued spices. Whatever the cause, I'm going to have to wash and brush thoroughly before going out to a bar tonight, or I might scare the waiter.

I had a cabbage sitting in the fridge for far too long - so long that I can't even admit to myself just how much time had passed. No particularly appealing treatments had jumped to mind. So it just sat there. Luckily, it didn't go bad, and luckily, I was flipping through my friend's copy of Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone last weekend in New York. There was a recipe for sweet and sour cabbage. It sounded good, and I picked up the whole spices required in bulk at Harvest. (After all, who needs an entire jar of whole cloves?) Also, I recently bought a simple crank spice grinder at Kitchen Arts. 

Other than that, there wasn't much to the recipe. Molasses, balsamic, an onion, canned tomatoes. My only advice is this: make sure at the very end that you let it cook at high heat long enough, maybe about five minutes, for the watery liquid to evaporate and leave a glaze.

If you had asked me a couple of hours ago, I'd have told you that I like the dish, but I don't love it. Somehow, though I can't stop eating it! It would go great with fish and rice, or tofu. Or, apparently, all by itself. Just look at your tongue carefully in the mirror afterwards.

Sweet and sour cabbage, from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

• Red cabbage, abou 1.5 lbs, quartered, cored, and sliced into strips about .5 inches wide
• One onion, diced
• 1.5 Tbsp oil (I used olive oil)
• 3 bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp allspice berries
• 4 cloves
• 1.5 tsp coriander seeds
• 1 Tbsp brown sugar or molasses (I used molasses)
• 1/4 cup diced tomatoes, either fresh or canned
• 1/2 cup liquid from the tomatoes/can or plain water
• 2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

(Use a wide pan for this one.) Heat up the oil, add the bay leaves. Grind the spices in a mill, add to the oil. Cook until the onion is translucent, then add the sugar or molasses and cook for another minute or so. 

Place the cabbage in a layer over the onion, then sprinkle on 1 tsp of salt, and the tomatoes over top. Pour the 1/2 cup of tomato liquid or water over top. Cover the dish and cook until the cabbage has softened, about 15 minutes.

Uncover, and mix it all together. Then add the balsamic vinegar, and raise the heat to high. Cook it until the watery liquid evaporates and turns into a glaze. 

Photo courtesy of Dru! on Flickr Creative Commons

Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em

By Genevieve Rajewski

Ah, what a leap of daring (and potential Fail Blog entry) it seemed to buy Nate, the charcoal-grilling fiend, a Gourmet Mini Smoker for Christmas.

How could such a silly-sounding device ever deliver real smoke flavor?

However, recently, a board member (and apparent Wicked Tasty Harvest reader) told me that he had enjoyed reading about our turkey-cooking adventure—and that he, too, had found it easier than expected to over-smoke food.

The conversation centered on commiseration, not revelation, until he dropped the bomb that he had over-smoked food using his stovetop smoker. Apparently, he uses his all the time with great success. (In fact, tonight, he and his wife are kicking off dinner with a smoked cauliflower and chestnut soup!)

So I went ahead and gave one to Nate as a gift. We hoped to try it out the next day to smoke bluefish, which is delicious but cooks so quickly it seems hardly worth all the effort to fire up the grill. New Deal Fish Market in Cambridge didn’t have any bluefish that day, but the excellent staff pointed us toward sustainable Spanish mackerel. (For the verdict, sneak a peek at my story in tomorrow’s Boston Globe.)

The mini-smoker is just the right size for many of Chestnut Farms' lean cuts of meat. This past Sunday, we used it to cook two pork chops in 20 minutes. They tasted great; however, next time, I’d cook them for maybe 15 minutes as the chops were well-done and we prefer them medium-rare.

We also are looking forward to trying the smoker out on numerous winter vegetables, cheeses and sea salt...though not all at the same time. 

Photo courtesy of Camerons Professional Cookware.

A Bonne Année Feast

This year, we were excited to make our traditional NYE beef burgundy using only meat from our CSA share.

By Genevieve Rajewski

This New Year’s Eve, as has been our tradition, Nate and I cooked a French bistro-style meal at home to ring in 2010. The menu not only reminds us of Paris (where we got engaged) but also provides the kind of comfort food necessary when it’s snowing outside and wind chills are diving into the single digits.

Pulling it off required a full day of cooking and carefully paced eating. Should you attempt this gluttony at home, remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Our day should have looked something like this:

3:00 pm    Get beef burgundy mise en place

3:30 pm    Snack on cheese 

4:00 pm    Brown meat (takes about 45 minutes)

4:45 pm    Put beef burgundy (first stage) into oven

5:00 pm    Mince shallot/garlic for escargots and let butter soften

5:15 pm    Make chocolate mousse and put into refrigerator to set 

6:00 pm    Assemble escargots, bake, eat 

6:15 pm    Brown onions and mushrooms in butter

6:45 pm    Add mushrooms and onions to beef burgundy in oven

8:00 pm    Enjoy main course 

10:00 pm   Use Calvados to make room for more 

10:30 pm   Savor dessert

...but my impromptu nap on the couch threw us off by about 30 minutes from where we should've been at 5:00 pm.

Don't worry: We didn't come close to eating all this cheese. Well, except for the Truffle Tremor.

We started with a cheese course from provisions from the new Beacon Hill Wine & Gourmet in Melrose. The store has a small but well-curated cheese cooler, but we saw nothing French. So we just grabbed a baguette and followed three of cheese guru Robert J. Aguilera's four rules for a good cheese plate. We settled on Truffle Tremor, a ripened goat-milk cheese from California; Brenta Stagionato, a hard cow-milk cheese from northeastern Italy; and Bayley Hazen Blue, a whole-milk blue cheese from Vermont.

Next up, was escargot, prepared by yours truly. We have never tried to source this locally or buy fresh snails—always considering ourselves lucky if we can find a can of Roland snails imported from France. (This year, we struck out at the South End Formaggio and all the local grocery stores, before finally finding them at J. Pace & Son in Saugus.) In fact, in his Les Halles Cookbook, Anthony Bourdain scoffs at the idea of any chef actually using fresh snails (even if they are serving escargots to you in shells). I did recently read an article in New York Magazine about a woman who decided to solve her garden "snail problem" by cooking them up, but I can't seem to find it online or remember how the escargots turned out. In any case, I'd never actually go there.

Of course, the sole purpose of the snails is to serve as a vehicle for garlicky butter, with the baking dishes creating perfect little pools for dunking your bread. So when it comes to “preparing” escargot, it is really all about making the butter.

Note the cracked dish in the background. Whoops.

Escargots (adapted from a recipe in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook)

1 can of escargots (12 snails)


6 tablespoons of butter (3/4 of a stick)

1 shallot, minced

1 clove of garlic, minced

a splash of Calvados

special equipment: escargot dishes

Soften the butter at room temperature and mash in the shallot and garlic. Stir in the Calvados--a French apple brandy made in Normandy, which (as a bonus) can be sipped to create a “Norman hole” in your belly mid-meal. (Brix recommended Le Compte Original and it is an incredibly, nay dangerously, smooth digestif.)

Drain and rinse the snails. Put a dollop of the prepared butter in each hollow in the escargot dishes, place snails on top of the butter, then top snails with butter. Bake at 400 degrees until butter is bubbling. Serve at once with bread.

Because we had the beef burgundy in the oven, we decided to bake it on the gas grill. Even though it only takes 5 minutes to bake, we didn’t carefully watch the temperature, which shot up to 500 degrees, and cracked one of our dishes. Another warning: hot snails tend to explode. 

 

Beef Burgundy (adapted from a recipe by Elvira Johnson, Nate's mom)

olive oil for browning meat (We used three strips of bacon from Chestnut Farms)

2lbs of lean beef, cubed into 2-inch pieces (we used 1lb sirloin top round and 1lb beef chuck shoulder steak from Chestnut Farms)

salt and pepper

2 tablespoons of flour

3/4 of a bottle of red wine

2 and 1/2 cups of water

a garni bouquet: 2 sprigs of fresh parsley, two sprigs of fresh thyme and two bay leaves tied together with cooking twine

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup and 1/2 of carrots, cut on the diagonal into 1-inch pieces

butter for browning onions and mushrooms

1 cup and 1/2 of pearl onions, peeled and left whole 

1 cup and 1/2 of mushrooms, sliced thin (we like a mix of shitake, Portabella and oyster)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sprinkle salt, pepper and flour over the cubed meat. 

On stovetop, heat olive oil in a large Dutch oven over high heat and sear the cubed meat in batches, until it’s browned on all sides--placing browned meat aside on a plate. (We had leftover bacon to use up, so we substituted three strips for the olive oil.) 

Add garlic and the garni bouquet to Dutch oven and pour in the water and wine. Scrape frond off the bottom of pan and bring the mixture to a boil. Return the meat to the pot and add the carrots, cover, and move pot to inside the oven.

After an hour and 45 minutes, sauté the onions and mushrooms in butter until browned and soft (about 15 minutes). Add the browned vegetables to the pot in the oven and cook an additional hour. (If the liquid looks too reduced, add the remaining wine.) At the three-hour mark, take beef burgundy out and serve.

 

Chocolate Mousse

Many years ago, I attempted to make Nate chocolate mousse--and ended up with chocolate soup. A Facebook plea for a fail-proof recipe yielded this gem from Craigie on Main (passed on by Cynthia). The original recipes makes 8 to 10 servings, so I halved it, using a bar and a half of the darkest Vahlrona chocolate available at Trader Joe’s, five eggs and Calvados. It turned out amazing and has given Nate new faith in my dessert-making abilities.

Purple

by Cynthia Graber

 
 

I'm not even going to bother regaling you with the tale of the curried butternut squash red lentil soup that used up the last of the squash in the refrigerator. Yes, it was quite tasty. But it can be summed up in one word: orange.

Instead, I'll go for a different color today - purple.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy fruit in the winter is to turn frozen blueberries into a royal shade of blueberry soup. It takes about one minute. Take frozen blueberries out of the freezer (in the past I've bought frozen Maine blueberries, but this year I picked loads with C. and froze my own bags). Pour some into a glass bowl, sprinkle in some sugar, mix it up. Stick the bowl in the microwave for, oh, about a minute. The blueberries should express their liquid into a deep purple broth. If it's not hot and brothy yet, stick it back in the microwave for another 30 or so seconds, until it's done.

Then stir in a few spoonfuls of yoghurt, just enough to make it creamy, but still deeply purple. There, blueberry soup, a perfect mid-afternoon snack.

Onto another purple tale. In the last CSA bunch, I received, once again, a bunch of beets. You may recall that I lack a certain fondness for most root vegetables. There have, though, been beet dishes I've tried that I've enjoyed. They usually have a tangy marinade, perhaps citrus, paired with another flavor, such as goat cheese.

I flipped through a cookbook I'd taken out of the library (a revelation! taking cookbooks out of the library!). It's called The Book of New Israeli Food, by Janna Gur, and it's a stunning coffee-table book of Israeli cuisine. It contained a recipe for beet salad with pomegranates. I absolutely adore pomegranates, with their perfect jewel-like seeds, surrounded with a burst of flavor.

The recipe called for pomegranate concentrate, which I assumed to be pomegranate molasses. (When you look at the ingredients in pomegranate molasses, it contains, well, concentrated pomegranate juice.) It calls for cilantro, but I substituted parsley. She says to boil the beets, but I roasted them until tender and rubbed the skin off. 

It takes a while to deal with the beets, and a while longer to coax the pomegranate seeds from their white pithy cocoons. And be warned, your fingers and nails may remain purple for a couple of days. But it's worth it. The resulting dish was sweet and tart and exploding with flavor. I may have found a beet dish that I not only tolerate, but actually love.

Beet and Pomegranate Salad

• 3-4 medium beets
• 2 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses
• 2-3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 2-3 dried chili peppers crushed (I left this out, but you can add it in, or add in a sprinkle of your favorite chili powder)
• Coarse sea salt
• 1/4 cup delicate olive oil
• 1/2 cup of torn cilantro leaves (I used parsley)
• 1 cup pomegranate seeds

Either boil the beets until tender or roast in a 350 oven until tender. Cool, the peel (if you roast them you can rub off the skin). Cut into small cubes. 

Mix with pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, pepper and sea salt, and let sit for about 15 minutes.

Add in torn/chopped cilantro or parsley and pomegranate seeds, then pour olive oil over top. 

Photo courtesy of Darwin Bell for Flickr Creative Commons