gourd yourself on this

We have Christmas down to a routine at my house. My grandmother always makes the same dishes. Every single year. She seems to haphazardly add spices and salt and pepper. I'm always skeptical that something won't go right. Somehow though, her instinct is always perfect and all of her dishes come out tasting delicious.

Upon my arrival to Knoxville, my mother had directed me to not make any more food. "We have too much." But she finally gave in and allowed me to make one side dish for Christmas Day dinner. Since the menu is so set in stone, this was kind of a big deal. She had originally requested a dish featuring asparagus. But asparagus is not in season right now (and thus very expensive, especially if you are feeding 14 people, and not very tasty), so I opted for a winter squash combination. The recipe called for butternut squash, kabocha squash, and parsnips. The grocery store did not have kabocha squash so I substituted in its place acorn squash. Of course, I ended up buying way too much squash and thus, omitted the parsnips entirely.

Squash is hard for me to account for because (a) I am never sure how much fruit I will lose when peeling the skin off; (b) I am never sure how much innards will be inside (there seems to be quite a large range); and (c) I am not good at estimating the weight of things. It is always better though, I think, to have too much than not enough. Plus everyone loves cold leftovers. For my family, I actually ended up more than doubling the recipe. Also, I spent a small fortune on organic rosemary (it was the only available kind) only to learn that rosemary is essentially a weed that grows healthily in my backyard.

Roasted Winter Squash with Maple Syrup Glaze and Marcona Almonds (adapted from Bon Appetit)

8 cups of winter squash (I probably had a 3:2 ratio of butternut squash to acorn squash)
5 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup real maple syrup (though I recommend cutting this a bit...maybe 2/5 cup)
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
3/4 cup coarsely chopped Marcona almonds

Peel all of the squash. It can be a difficult task, often more easily accomplished by simply cutting off the skin with a sharp knife. However, we happened to have a very sharp, sturdy vegetable peeler at my house that worked quite nicely. You lose less of the squash this way though it is still tedious. Chop into 1/2 inch cubes.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small saucepan, melt the butter. Whisk in the maple syrup, garlic, rosemary, salt, and pepper. Remove from heat. In a large bowl, toss the squash with the maple syrup mixture until thoroughly coated.

Transfer to a large, buttered glass baking dish. Cover with aluminum foil. Bake for approximately 40 minutes. Remove from oven and uncover. Sprinkle with almonds and bake for an additional 10 minutes (or more time, if needed).

obligatory christmas-themed post

I did not intend to post three dessert recipes in a row, but I think that I ought to write about Christmas cookies before the actual holiday passes.

These cookies were a bit tricky for me to make since I didn’t have a hand mixer at the time (though I received a very nice one for Christmas). But to get by, I basically mixed the dough up with my hands.

And as for the decorating (which is definitely the best part), I had a lot of help from Willa, Milena, and Ella. They are probably the sweetest, brightest, cutest, most entertaining little girls ever. I am quite fond of them, in case you can't tell. It was a bit messy (like when Milena dropped an entire container of sprinkles on the floor or when the icing-covered butter knives fell repeatedly on to the carpet below), but still lots of fun.

Christmas Sugar Cookies (adapted from Simply Recipes)

3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks!) butter
1 egg, slightly beaten
3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut in butter. Add other ingredients. Blend until thoroughly mixed. Now I was a bit confused by these directions in the original recipe. And that is all it said. Usually when you make cookies, you cream the butter, eggs, and sugar together and then slowly beat in the dry ingredients but that would probably make a dough that was too soft to roll out. Anyway, I had trouble just “cutting in” the butter so I used my (washed) hands to kind of knead the dough and to ensure the butter was properly distributed.

Roll dough into a ball. Wrap in wax paper and chill for several hours. It should be very cold when you go to roll it out.

Flatten out a portion of the dough on a large, smooth surface (such as a cutting board or cleaned table top). Mix together 2 parts flour with 1 part sugar to sprinkle on the board to prevent sticking. The sugar will ensure that the cookies don’t lose their sweetness. Using a floured rolling pin, roll cookies out until approximately ¼ inch thick. Cut out with assorted Christmas-themed cutters and place on ungreased baking sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for probably 6-8 minutes but remove from oven as soon as they start to turn color. Let cool on a cooling rack.

Icing

1/3 cup softened butter
1 pound confectioner’s sugar
¼ cup of milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Combine ingredients and beat with hand mixer until smooth (I did this step at the girls’ house and luckily, their kitchen was properly equipped. Though I have made icing in my food processor before). Separate out into smaller bowls and add food coloring to obtain different colors.

Decorate cookies!

My talented decorators.

Okay, so these are some that I decorated. The girls found some black icing using for writing on baked goods and went to town with it on their cookies. Some of them looked less than appetizing, to say the least.

The Best Ice Cream in the World

Ice cream has always been one of my very favorite foods. At home in Tennessee, we generally have at least three or four flavors open in the freezer at any one time. My grandmother has been known, not infrequently, to eat solely ice cream for dinner. And one of the main events of the biennial Ellis family reunion is the homemade ice cream social. My love for it must be genetic.

Being an avid food blog and cookbook reader, I had been wanting to make my own ice cream after encountering so many intriguing flavors. But the old-fashioned crank machines tend to be huge and a bit cumbersome. You need a ton of rock salt and the ice cream never seems to reach a proper consistency, always too runny.

So I bought this. Compact and perpetually on sale on Amazon.com. It can make 1.5 quarts at a time.

When it arrived, I experimented with a number of the flavors that I had been eyeing. Complicated, but not necessarily great. Impressive though, at least. So when my new roommate Jenn requested vanilla ice cream to be made for her birthday, I was quite disappointed. I wanted a chance to dazzle.

I have to admit though; it was incredibly delicious. And when I made it again with a real vanilla bean (not just vanilla extract), what I thought was just plain, boring vanilla ice cream became The Best Ice Cream in the World. A very rich, very intense vanilla flavor, and almost custard-like in taste. It coats the tongue. It steals the show from whatever pie/cake/cookie I serve it with. And since I have started making it, I can barely bring myself to make any other flavor. Vanilla beans can be expensive but it is well-worth the price. I buy mine from Polcari's in the North End for $2 a bean.

Vanilla Ice Cream (from David Lebovitz...though I have used this recipe so much that I now have it memorized!)

1 cup whole milk (2% milk will do as well)
3/4 cup sugar
pinch of salt
1 vanilla bean
5 egg yolks
2 cups of heavy cream
a few drops of vanilla extract

Heat the milk, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan. Split the vanilla bean in two lengthwise with a sharp knife. Scrape the seeds out of the bean pod with the end of the knife. Add the bean and seeds to the milk. Heat until just steaming.

While the milk is heating up, whisk the five egg yolks in a small bowl. If you remember, save the egg whites for an omelet later. Add in some of the warm milk to temper the eggs. Whisk together. Slowly pour the warmed egg mixture into the saucepan.

Turn heat down to low. Continue stirring and scraping the bottom of the saucepan until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon.

Once thickened, remove custard from heat. Strain the custard through a sieve into the heavy cream. Add a few more drops of vanilla extract just for extra richness. Remove and rinse vanilla bean, but return to custard to let steep. Chill the custard thoroughly.

Once chilled, remove bean and process in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions, probably 25 minutes or so. The ice cream will be thick but still soft, so if you prefer a more frozen consistency, place in freezer for additional hardening.



What a vanilla bean looks like, in case you were wondering.

What the ice cream maker looks like, in case you were wondering.

pumpkins o' plenty

I don't love pumpkin. In fact, of all the pies that I will eat, pumpkin is my least favorite. (The pies that I will not eat being pecan and mincemeat). But in anticipation of fall and other seasonal merrymaking, I had somehow found my pantry stocked with three cans of the stuff. This is in addition to a pumpkin that Sydney had already roasted, another one that I had dutifully carved the night before Halloween and all of the resulting seeds that we had extracted and toasted.

On an unrelated note, a recent vice of mine has been bread. I shouldn't call it that, but with all of the silly diets out there, the idea that bread is "bad" for you always lingers in the back of my head. Then I remember my eating habits in Geneva and how I came away from that not weighing 200 lbs. And of course, I remember how wonderfully delicious fresh, warm bread is. The Whole Foods near my house sells freshly baked French and sourdough bread. It is cheap. It is generally warm (I don't buy it otherwise). It makes a perfect snack, accompanied with some cheddar cheese and some quince paste or apple butter. The downside to this bread (which is sold in long baguettes that I alone am surprisingly incapable of eating in one seating) is that it loses its appeal by the next morning. And by the second day, it is stale to the point of unappetizing.

Enter Pumpkin Bread Pudding. Perfect for the night when you have already roasted an entire pheasant but you still want dessert (which is always), but not one that involves seventeen ingredients, twelve steps, and three hours of chilling. And people may scoff at the idea of something called "bread pudding" being dessert. But they are very wrong.

Alas, this recipe yields a wonderfully light and custardy dish. Kind of like pumpkin-flavored baked French toast. Best right out of the oven. It is not too sweet though, so it is a good accompaniment to (homemade) vanilla ice cream. But that will be another post.

Pumpkin Bread Pudding (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

1 1/2 cups whole milk
3/4 cup canned pumpkin (which is really annoying, because you still have half of a can left)
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
Pinch of ground cloves
5 1/2 cups cubed (1-inch) day-old French or some other crusty bread
3/4 stick of unsalted butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk together in a large bowl the pumpkin, milk, sugar, eggs, salt, and spices.

Toss bread cubes with butter in another large bowl. Add pumpkin mixture and toss until evenly coated. Transfer to an ungreased 8-inch square baking dish and bake until the liquid has set like a custard, about 25-30 minutes.

This may or may not look appetizing. I can't tell. Since it is largely an orange mass of bread and pumpkin. But trust me, it is delicious!


Proof that people are willing to eat it even if it looks sort of garish.

that time someone gave me a pheasant

At work last week, I was gifted a pheasant. One of the attorneys in my building had received it from a client of his. Of course, the attorney's freezer was already full of pheasants and other wild game (being an avid hunter himself) so he brought birds in to share with the rest of us. I think I was the only one keen to make use of my pheasant present.

Luckily for me, the bird was already plucked, gutted, and generally cleaned. The hard part was deciding (or even finding, really) a good recipe to prepare it with. I got the idea to pan-roast the pheasant with carrots, leeks, and bacon. The recipe was modified somewhat, because I had read that pheasant dries out easily. To fix that, and since I didn't have time to brine the bird prior to cooking, I draped (uncooked) bacon over the top of the bird. As a nice complement to the meal, Sydney made some quinoa with sauteed carrots, garlic, and onions. She ran the vegetables through the food processor until they were sufficiently diced and added them to the quinoa as it cooked down.

Pheasant with Carrots, Leeks and Bacon

-1 whole pheasant
-3-4 large carrots, chopped
-1 leek, chopped
-2 or 3 strips bacon, plus 5 strips to drape over the bird
-2 garlic cloves, crushed
-1/2 cup chicken stock
-1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
-olive oil
-salt and fresh ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Rinse pheasant thoroughly and pat dry (The pheasant I received was still a lot bloody). Rub seasonings over entire bird, including in the cavity. Heat up a large, thick, oven-safe saucepan with olive oil. Brown all sides of the pheasant, about 2-3 minutes per side, on medium-high heat. Remove pheasant and set aside.

Cook bacon over medium-high heat in remaining olive oil for 1-2 minutes. Remove and chop up (be careful not to touch the bacon with your fingers as it is probably hot). Put bacon back in saucepan along with carrots, leeks, and garlic. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Stir for another minute. Add the stock and cover for about 2 minutes. Remove from heat.

Clear out an aisle down the center of the pan to make room for the main attraction. Place the pheasant breast-side up in the center of the saucepan. Roast for some minutes. (This is where I lost track of time, because the recipe I was following had two problems: 1. the heat was not hot enough; and 2. the time was not long enough). Let's say 50 minutes. Keep an eye on it. When the juices run clear, it is done. Or if you have a food thermometer, when the internal temperature of the thigh read 135 degrees.



My pheasant had some dark coloring on its skin. But the meat underneath was mostly fine. Except one of the thighs was kind of bloody (I think this was perhaps where it was shot or suffered trauma from the dogs).

My plate. As you can see, I am not a very good poultry carver. Of course, I ate the accompanying bacon as well. The pheasant tasted a lot like chicken except it had more depth and a meatier flavor (gamey, is how it has been described, which is not very helpful if you never really eat game). Bacon never hurts a dish. It was a very satisfying meal, especially considering that it was 15 degrees outside.

Sydney is very resourceful, so she suggested we make pheasant stock with the remaining carcass. Chicken stock is good to have on hand for making soups. So I can only imagine that pheasant stock is equally useful (and undoubtedly more flavorful). She threw in some onions, garlic, leeks, carrots, mushrooms, cloves, whole peppercorns, and parsley. It should simmer for about three hours.

hello and welcome

So I have started this blog in an attempt to document some of the culinary creations that I concoct in my kitchen. Until I get a nicer camera, the pictures might be of sub-par quality. I will try to include recipes, except when I don't really follow them (which is quite often, since I never seem to have the exact ingredients I need for the recipe that I want to make).

Also, I might post interesting articles that I find that happen to pertain to cooking, local food, or nutrition.