Fall Pseudo-Stuffing is Freakin' Delicious!

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So last night I got a hankering for some fall flavors when the weather finally turned a bit cooler and gourds are everywhere you turn in preparation for Halloween. A slow Friday night with nothing on the agenda, I wandered through the Central Market aisles looking for inspiration. I gathered a few types of mushrooms (the woodsy flavor always reminds me of fall), some butternut squash, sage and pecans. Aha, I thought, I've got the perfect ingredients for a little Autumn hash. I grabbed a bottle of wine and was busily dreaming up how to cook this little number in under an hour due to the grumblings in my tummy, which is probably why the dish made it from the kitchen to my mouth without the chance for a good photo op.

I used a combination of locally grown white button mushrooms (pre-sliced for convenience) and a small handful of deliciously expensive shiitakes, but you could gather up an assortment of any of your favorite fungi. The wild mushrooms in particular add a woodsy aroma and flavor that just can't be matched by button mushrooms alone. I recently learned the trick to a good saute for mushrooms (here), the main trick being high heat, oil and room for the fungi to breathe.

Another key to this dish if expediency is your goal, is to buy a package of frozen, cubed butternut squash. You could take the time to roast the squash for 45 minutes yourself, but sometimes convenience wins out over bragging rights. But if you've got the time, a good roast would only add to the medley of fall flavors in this stuffing. Somehow, without even really trying, I think I've found my go-to stuffing for Thanksgiving, and it's completely grain free. The boyfriend thought the butternut squash was the regular old starchy stuffing bits, so you can probably fool the diehard grain lovers in your family. And I bet it would be spectacular cooked with some sausage mixed in too. Go crazy!

Ingredients:

1 package frozen butternut squash, cubed
6 oz. button mushrooms, sliced
handfull wild mushrooms (or as many as your pocketbook will allow, sliced in large chunks or whole)
1/2 sweet onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp dried whole sage (you can use fresh, but dried keeps way longer)
1/2 c. pecans
coconut oil (olive oil will work too)
salt to taste

Directions:

1. In a medium skillet on medium heat, dry toast the pecans. Set aside.

2. In the same skillet, heat 1 tbsp oil. Add wild mushrooms and a pinch of salt, but don't crowd the pan. Let brown, then turn mushrooms and finish searing. Set aside.

3. Same skillet (yes, a 1-pot dish!), heat a bit more oil then add button mushrooms. Don't worry about crowding these little guys, they're not as special or delicate as the wild bunch. When they start to shrink in size, add the diced onion. Cook for about 10 minutes, or until all the moisture has evaporated and the veggies are browning. In the last minute of cooking, add the minced garlic. Set aside.

4. In our heroic skillet, throw the frozen butternut squash in and let cook until you get browning on all sides. Throw in the sage, then add back in all the ingredients you've set aside, preferably on one plate to minimize dish duty afterwards. Mix it all together in the skillet and enjoy the intoxicating aroma coming from your now exhausted little skillet.

5. Serve with grilled chicken, sausage, steak, fish, pretty much anything you like, and enjoy!

I had the leftovers this morning mixed in with scrambled eggs and it was heavenly. Nothing better on a cool morning.  And if you're like me, you can eat this and pretend that you live in a place with an actual autumn.

Caution: Pseudo-Stuffing may transport you here

Recipe Half-Win

While I'm sure The Boyfriend would tell you that he loves everything I cook, there are times when I'm better able to please my palate than his. Last night would be a case in point, although he was very gracious about it (well, mostly).  Despite his initial reaction to my concoction, I found it to be a delicious and easy way to use up extra zucchini (Thanks Mel!) that might otherwise shrivel in my fridge for want of a good recipe. See, I want to love zucchini the way I love most vegetables, but I just can't always bring myself to throw it into a dish without wrinkling my nose at it first. I needed a solution, and a healthy one at that, so I browsed around and found some delectable and heavy recipes for zucchini fritters. Mmm, I thought, I can definitely fry me some zucchini drowned in batter! But the health-conscious part of my brain intervened and helped me create a very reasonable facsimile full of good stuff for the body and soul. It may not have done the trick for my vegetable-averse man, but it worked like magic for me. I'll celebrate this one as a half-win, and maybe it will satisfy at least one person in your household as well. You can't win 'em all, right?

Zucchini Coconut Fritters

Ingredients:

2 zucchini

2 eggs

4 tbsp coconut flour 

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp paprika

salt & pepper to taste

coconut oil for pan-frying

Directions:

1. Shred zucchini using a cheese grater or mandoline, then squeeze out the water with your hands. Get messy.

2. Heat 1-2 tbsp coconut oil in frying pan over medium heat, just enough to coat the bottom.

3. In a mixing bowl, scramble the eggs, then add the zucchini and all other ingredients, stirring together.

4. In small dollops, drop spoonfuls of the mixture in the heated pan, pressing lightly to form a disc.

5. Just like a pancake, let one side cook to a light brown, then flip and brown the other side.

I served these warm and with a sprinkle of fresh tomato, but they'd probably be delicious dressed up with (non-paleo) creme fraiche or a pico de gallo. They went great with my sauteed bell peppers and sausage. Good luck and remember to celebrate even the recipes that are only successful for you!

Tapas with Don Draper

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I've anticipated the new season of Mad Men with the most excitement since My So-Called Life, probably more than is healthy for a television show.  Sunday night the wait was finally over, and if you haven't watched the season premiere yet, stop what you're doing and pick up your remote.  Without any spoilers, I will say that while the BF felt it lacked a little spark, I felt like it was the perfect buildup to what promises to be a challenging new season in the Mad world.  They can't give it all away in the first episode, right?  As my friend Ethan put it, it's foreplay.

In celebration of the arrival of season four, I decided some celebratory food was in order.  A nightshade
celebration, to be precise.  See, it turns out that the BF and his steel cable tendons just weren't responding to our nightshade withholdings like they had been.  After a few trial runs with reintroducing the illicit vegetables, he's thrown himself with full force back into the delicious world of tomatoes & peppers (and sometimes potatoes).  What better cuisine to welcome his return to civilization than Spanish tapas?  After a visit to Granada a few years ago and a summer study in Santander at 16, I've had a passion for Spanish food that's only deepened since I've become a bit of a cook myself.  A lovely friend gifted me with a tapas cookbook that is incredibly difficult to track down online, but you can find it here, and I relished the opportunity to rip out all my nightshade-free tabs and track down tomato & pepper filled vittles for the Mad Men tapeo.

The Alhambra in Granada

In my characteristically excessive cooking nature, I made way too much of everything, but have been eating my way through leftovers happily for two days.  Here's what we had, in no particular order: traditional tortilla española, romesco sauce, albondigas in almond sauce and sautéed green beans with toasted pine nuts.  Plus vino, of course.  The almond sauce for the albondigas, or Spanish meatballs, was like heaven and I will definitely make that again to top everything from beef, pork or chicken to squash, sweet potatoes or leafy greens.  It was that good.  The version in my cookbook called for white bread, but I omitted it without any ill effects (to my American tastes), so here's basically what I did:

Salsa de Almendra (Almond Sauce)

Ingredients:

Olive oil

1/2 cup blanched almonds

2 cloves garlic

2/3 c. white wine (can omit & sub stock if not using alcohol)

1 1/2 c. vegetable, chicken or beef stock

salt & pepper

*If you are not using blanched (de-skinned) almonds, you can quickly blanch them yourself by boiling skin-on almonds for 30 seconds, running cold water over them to stop the cooking process, letting them cool to the touch, then pinching each almond between your fingers to slip off the skins.  Not too taxing, just a little tedious.  You can find blanched almonds in the bulk section of most grocery stores and save yourself the trouble, though.

Directions:
Heat 1-2 tbsp olive oil in skillet on medium (you can use the same skillet you cooked your meat in)
Toast the almonds in the oil until beginning to brown, 3-5 minutes
Mince the garlic & toss it in with the almonds, stirring until lightly browned
Pour in the wine and boil for a couple minutes
Remove from heat & cool slightly, then pour mixture into food processor along with stock
Process until smooth (or if you're impatient like me, until it's a texture you like)
Season to taste with salt & pepper

You can serve it immediately with just about anything, you can save it and serve it at room temperature as a veggie dip, or you can add it to your scrambled eggs the next morning like me.  It's that tasty & versatile.

The Best BLT You Will Ever Eat

I'm just gonna say right off the bat that this recipe is not paleo.  For those of you reading who follow those principles, as I myself *generally* do, please close your browser and walk away from the computer.  Pretend you never saw this, because you may be too tempted by the mouth-wateringly decadent flavors (although, sadly, not the underwhelming photographic evidence).

For the rest of you, here's how the sandwich went down.  I visited the Barton Creek Farmer's Market with my Dad yesterday and acquired some uncured, super-fresh pork belly bacon from Richardson Farms.  I made a quick stop at Whole Foods on the way home to grab a crusty loaf of sourdough, local sprouts and a ripe avocado.  I returned home as quickly as possible to assemble the remaining ingredients of a garden tomato and Smith & Smith Family eggs.

I fried up the bacon with a light sprinkling of hickory smoked salt, toasted thin slices of sourdough in the broiler, then fried two eggs in the bacon grease.  I layered tomato slices, sprouts, avocado and bacon, and placed an over-medium egg on top.

The first bite had the yolk oozing out, coating everything in its golden richness.  The crunch of the toast with the creaminess of the avocado, the chewy saltiness of the bacon and the garden-freshness of the vegetables made this, quite possibly, the Best BLT Ever.  If you really want to take your sandwich to the over-the-top tier of decadence, throw in some room-temperature Brie right over that fried egg and experience culinary nirvana.  I dare you.

Pigs and Figs

It's fig season here in Austin, but what's a girl to do when she doesn't know more about figs than what comes in a Newton?  I got fresh figs in my Urban Roots CSA and I also discovered fresh figs down in the neighborhood park, so I'm on the lookout for fun ways to prepare this foreign fruit.  And at the risk of exposing my true figgy colors, I actually haven't enjoyed the taste of figs in previous concoctions I've sampled at others' hands.  So I'm taking back the reins, and looking for a new way to prepare figs that might appeal to me more.  A quick recipe search linked this little guy with figs regularly:

By the way, did you know that a fig was the original object of desire in Eden, not the apple we see today?  I'm partway through In the Devil's Garden, a book that traces the "sinful history of forbidden food" and I'm gathering all sorts of interesting food factoids to bring out at dinner parties.

And just look at that sensuous fig. I'd have taken a bite, too.







The recipe is simple, the results a sinful combination of salty & sweet.  It's almost enough to make a fig-lover out of me.  Of course, bacon makes everything better.

Bacon-wrapped Figs

Ingredients:

As many figs as you find

Uncured bacon (no nitrites added)

Directions:

Cut the tips off each fig.  Wrap each whole fig in 1/2 slice bacon.  Pan-fry with seam side down to secure bacon around fig.  Slowly turn until all sides of bacon are fully cooked.  Let cool on paper towels to absorb the delicious bacon grease & pop into your mouth.  Feel free to fry an egg or two in the pan drippings. Why waste a good thing?

Canning with Jamlady

Yesterday at Half Price Books, I picked up a copy of Pickles to Relish, which is apparently written by a woman named Beverly Schoonmaker Alfeld and her alter ego Jamlady. Really. I tried to read the book from cover to cover, but it's written in this informative yet strangely opaque manner that makes it tough to get through whole pages, let alone whole paragraphs. You see, Jamlady is a fan of bold type, presumably for emphasis, but the end result is pages of dense wording with half of every other line in bold. If only she had followed these important rules.

Her love affair with bold type aside, the pictures of the more savory side of canning were enough to get me out into my garden in the heat to pick some green tomatoes and peppers for my first attempt at a Jamlady recipe. The recipes themselves are densely packed throughout this book, and the author has created her own canning notation system, that she alternately calls (in bold) the Alfeld Nomenclature System and the Alfeld Notation System. Sounds pretty professional, right? Somewhere in this book, I missed the explanation that the system is hers alone, and instead made the incorrect assumption that this is standard canning shorthand. Let me give you an example. For the recipe I'm going to try today, here's the ANS: JSP/RWB10(16OZ)A. Think you can just slap that label on your canned goods and the rest of the canning world will actually know what you're talking about? Think again, my friends. What that label means is "Jam/Seal/Process in a Rolling Water Bath for 10 minutes for a 16oz jar with an Adjustment for altitudes above 1,000 feet." So it's great shorthand, it's just that no one but you and Jamlady (and me!) will know what you mean when you use it. Read a little more about what others are saying about Jamlady and her books here and here.

Her linguistic exercises shouldn't dissuade you from trying out her book, however. It's filled with interesting minutiae on the history of canning, the scientific basis for the recipes and detailed explanations of the importance of pH balance in home canning. For a novice canner like myself, it's a great guide. I'll let you know how the canned green tomatoes and peppers turn out when I crack 'em open. If you're new to canning like me, it's a good idea to look around for yourself on the web for a primer on canning and sterilization, as the health risks are aplenty if you take a wrong turn. Try here, here and here for the basics.

And in case you were wondering, this recipe does not qualify as nightshade-free in any form or fashion. Sorry, honey.

If you're like me, you aren't using an actual canner, but instead are using a deep stainless steel or other nonreactive pot, deep enough to cover upright jars with 1 to 2 inches of water without boiling over and making a huge mess (guilty!). I actually used an asparagus steamer, which is perfect for canning one can at a time but not much for making edible asparagus, and it comes with it's own steamer basket that lets you easily lift the can out of the pot. You can use any type of basket or colander to keep the jars off the bottom of the pot (breakage potential), or string lid rings together with twist ties per Jamlady's suggestion. I used one pint Mason jar with a metal lid and band. You can reuse jars an d bands, but the lids will only seal properly for one use, so make sure you get fresh lids. You can buy them at most grocery stores and here in Austin at Callahan's.

Recipe adapted from Pickles to Relish by Beverly Ellen Schoonmaker Alfeld (sweet name, BTW):

Kosher-Style Dilled Green Tomatoes

Per pint jar:

Fresh, firm green tomatoes

2 garlic cloves

1/2 tsp dill seed

1/4 tsp celery seed

10 peppercorns
5 allspice berries

4 mixed garden peppers (Anaheim, bell)

For the brine:

2 1/2 cups cider vinegar

4 cups hot water

1/2 cup salt + 1 tbsp pickling salt (no iodine added)
*You'll have leftover brine if you only use one pint.

Directions:

Fill pot with hot water and bring to a rolling boil. Sterilize jars, lids, bands & funnel (if you're using one, which I didn't) in rolling water bath for 10 minutes. Remove carefully with tongs and place on clean dishtowel. Meanwhile, bring brine to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Bring water in pot back to a rolling boil. Fill jar with vegetables and spices and pour hot brine over them with a ladle or a funnel. Leave approximately 1/2 inch of headspace in jars. The seal is formed when the product cools and a vacuum is created, making the product shelf-stable. Put the lids on the jars and secure with the rings, but you don't have to use all your might to secure the lids. Just close the jar and the processing will take care of the rest.

Process jars by placing in the rolling water bath for 10 minutes. Jamlady instructs us to put a lid on the pot, but mine just isn't deep enough for that without it boiling over, so fair warning. Remove jars *very carefully* and place on dishtowel overnight to cool. You should hear a popping noise as the jars seal, and you can check each jar after it cools by pressing in the middle of the metal lid. Resist the urge to tighten the lid during the cooling off period! If the lid is depressed, you've got a seal. If the lid pops back, just refrigerate the jars and eat them within the month.

A Twist on Antwhistle

I grew up eating a funky dish my dad called Antwhistle that I always associated with this guy. According to family tradition, Antwhistle is a sort of pauper's meal made with ground beef, peanuts & raisins. Sounds kinda disgusting, but is actually pretty good. So last night I found myself with Richardson Farms ground beef, Urban Roots CSA carrots & onions, and some cashews. By the way, did you know cashews come from that gorgeous tree?

While I sauteed three carrots, half an onion, some garlic and a handful of cashews in a little coconut oil, I whipped up a batch of nightshade-free guacamole. What's a nightshade, you ask?

Strangely enough, they include tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers. Why would you want to make guacamole without those delicious peppers? Well, besides being the bane of my

culinary existence, nightshades also contribute to inflammation for some people with conditions like tendonitis, like my man. Here's a good article explaining the ins and outs of the cantankerous nightshade family. When we took nightshades off the menu for three months, he went from chowing down 20 advil a day to going days without any pain medication at all. Since we've continued to abstain, he's been able to get his pain levels under control in a way that even physical therapy wasn't able to do.

But is your boyfriend really worth giving up tomatoes and peppers? Well, my friends, I go back and forth on this one. When I have the urge to cook a big pot of chili (mmmm) or chicken parmigiana or basically anything in the Mexican/Italian/Indian tradition, I definitely curse the day his tendons turned into steel cables. But I digress.

The nightshade-free guacamole turned out delicious, the revamped farm-fresh Antwhistle was delicious, and it made me forget for a moment those delicious tomatoes. Almost.

*As with all recipes, feel free to substitute, change amounts and generally make them your own.

Cashew Antwhistle

1 lb. ground beef

3 carrots, peeled

1/2 onion

1 clove garlic

1/2 cup cashews

herbs (thyme, sage, oregano, etc.)

salt & pepper

coconut oil

1. Cut carrots into rounds or dice to your pleasure, dice onion, mince garlic.

2. Place veggies and cashews into deep skillet with 1 tbsp coconut oil and cook over medium heat until softened, covering briefly with a lid.

3. Put veggies aside and add beef to skillet, along with salt, pepper and herbs to taste. Sautee until meat is cooked through.

4. Pour off excess fat and put veggie mixture back in.

5. Eat and enjoy.

Nightshade-Free Guacamole

1 avocado

garlic

mustard powder

cumin

salt & pepper

lemon or lime juice

1. Scoop out avocado flesh into small bowl.

2. Mince one clove garlic or use garlic powder to taste & add it in.

3. Add a dash of mustard powder, cumin, salt & pepper. Remember you can always add more, but you can't take it out.

4. Squeeze half of one lemon or lime into bowl & mash it all together.

5. Cilantro would make a great addition if you have any on hand.

6. Serve with julienned vegetables like carrots, jicama, cucumbers or your traditional tortilla chips. We went with jicama and it was delish.