I’ve been dreaming of country-living, growing vegetables, and putting up food for the winter, so when I read Molly of Orangette’s description of all the pickles she and her husband made to serve at their wedding, I couldn’t resist.

There are lots of different types of pickles, from fresh pickles that stay in the fridge, the vinegared type that will stay good in your pantry for years. (Just this Christmas, we got to enjoy a last jar of my Grandmother’s famous sweet pickles. My Grandmother passed away several years ago, and it was lovely remember her with a taste of something she made herself. That’s not too morbid, is it?)

Anyways, I got in the mood to make some pickles, put up food for the winter, prepare for the cold season, and all of that. Then I realized it’s already the middle of winter, and I live in California, where we can get fresh vegetables all year, right down the street at the best Farmer’s Market in the area… but I still love the IDEA of putting up food to last the winter, or at least to last while things are out of season, which does happen even here in California. And besides, that sweet/sour pickley taste sounded awfully good!

Deb at Smitten Kitchen had recently posted a recipe for pickled carrot sticks. And then, the day I was pickle-obsessed, Elise at Simply Recipes posted a recipe for pickled red onions, so the fates were conspiring towards pickles, and I listened.

They’re both quite lovely. Not to be eaten in large quantities, but to add a little zing to the side of a meal, or quick bit right out of the fridge, these are both fantastic. We’ve enjoyed both in numerous salads, and the pickled onion made a tasty addition to a bowl of hummus.

Here they are…

Deb’s pickled carrot sticks call for dill seed, but also list dill weed as a subsititute, so not having the seed on hand, I used a healthy dose of the dill we dried from our CSA in the fall.

Pickled Carrot Sticks
adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Some carrots, a pound would be good, cut into sticks
1 1/4 cups water
1 cup cider or plain vinegar (the former makes a sweeter, milder brine)
1/4 cup sugar
2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed
1 1/2 tablespoons dried dill weed
1 1/2 tablespoons salt

Place carrots in a heatproof bowl. Bring remaining ingredients to a boil in saucepan, then reduce heat and simmer 2 minutes. Pour pickling liquid over carrots and cool, uncovered. Chill carrots, covered, at least 1 day for flavors to develop.

Carrots keep, chilled in an airtight container, 1 month.

The brine makes such a lovely vinegary aroma in the house, although it can make you cough if you breath in too deeply.

On to the onions…
Some other recipes I found called for blanching and rinsing the red onions several times. This one doesn’t, and while I’m sure that technique is worth the effort, I was interested in trying a quicker recipe, and it turned out quite well I think, without all that extra boiling and cooling and such.

Also, Elise’s pickled red onions call for cloves, and bay leaves, which I didn’t have on hand, so I went with a star anise, and some ground cinnamon, which I thought worked just fine. She also lists a variety of other spices which will work well, such as “fresh ginger slices, allspice berries, oregano, garlic, cumin seeds, mustard seeds,” so feel free to experiment.

Pickled Red Onions
adapted from Simply Recipes

2 medium or 1 large red onions, thinly sliced
1 1/2 C. white vinegar
1/2 C. sugar
1/2 T. ground cinnamon
1 star anise
a few peppercorns

Blanch red onions in a saucepan of boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain in colander.
While the water is heating in step 1, in a separate saucepan combine the vinegar, sugar and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to simmer, cover and simmer for 5 minutes.
Add blanched, drained onions to the vinegar mixture. Simmer for 1 minute.
Transfer to a glass jar. Allow to stand until cooled. Will keep several weeks refrigerated.

This picture, by the way, is both jars after we’ve been eating from them for a couple weeks.
(You can also see that we like to reuse our jars, AND that I haven’t put that Christmas pine cone away yet.)

I’ve always thought of Eggs in a Nest as the dish where you cut a hole in a piece of bread and fry an egg in the center of it, but I recently found this version, which is a family dish of delicious leafy greens, with poached eggs nested in them. I found it in Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s year of growing and eating local food. It’s a fabulous, poignant, funny, and informative book, and if you haven’t read it, you should grab a copy. It includes recipes appropriate to every season’s harvest, and this one is for the spring when roots and seeds and beans are not yet mature, but leafy greens are popping up all over.

As usual, I modified the recipe in a few ways, you can find the original here (alas, Kingsolver and her family didn’t seem to get a picture either in the dim winter light). I halved the recipe since it was just for my husband and myself, and I didn’t fancy poached eggs going into the refrigerator for leftovers. I also used what I had on hand, such as dinosaur kale, and, I hate to admit, a little ketchup in lieu of dried tomatoes. The result, however, was outstanding; healthy, flavorful, low-fat, and very filling. I highly recommend trying your OWN version of this recipe.

Eggs in a Nest

2 T. olive oil
1 medium onion
2-3 cloves of garlic, smashed with the flat of a large knife
2 carrotts, sliced into rounds
1 bunch kale or other dark cooking green, washed and chopped
1/4 C. or so of water
salt and pepper to taste
4 eggs

Saute the onions and garlic in the olive oil in a large skillet or pot until translucent. Add carrots, and continue to saute for a few more minutes. Add kale, and enough water to have a little bit of liquid pooling on the bottom of the pan. Cover. When the greens are soft, make 4 depressions in the vegetable mixture for the eggs. If there is not enough liquid to poach the eggs, add a little more water. Drop eggs in each depression, being careful not to crack the yolks. Cover until eggs are done to your liking, 3-5 minutes.

The Gluten-Free Version.

When I saw this recipe on Smitten Kitchen, I just knew I had to make it for Thanksgiving. The first time I had brown butter sauce at a fancy restaurant, I was hooked. The flavor of good brown butter sauce is, in my opinion, one of the best flavors there is.

I wanted to make the recipe gluten-free, as well as remedy the problems that Deb reported with the recipe, mostly that there was more sauce than there should have been. To achieve those two things I decided to replace the flour with cornstarch, and to reduce the amount of broth, as well as watch the broth as I added it to make sure it thickened the way I wanted it to. I also just got lazy about the chestnuts, and didn’t use the fresh ones I’d bought, but tried out a can of French chestnuts in water, to see how they worked out. Also, Whole Foods was out of shallots the night before Thanksgiving, so I tried Cipollini onions.

The result was quite good. I overdid the cornstarch a little, resulting in a the brown butter flavor getting a bit obscured, and the canned chestnuts were OK, but I’d go to the effort of prepping the fresh ones next time. The Cipollini onions were perfect, and the brown butter flavor was oh so delicious.

See the last couple of posts for a picture of the Thanksgiving meal on the plate.

Here’s the recipe, as I made it.

2 pounds brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
4 T. butter
2 very thinly sliced cipollini onions
1 T. cornstarch, mixed with a few T. warm stock
1-1 1/2 C. hot chicken or vegetable stock
2 T. lemon juice
Ground black pepper
1/4 t. nutmeg
1 C. roasted, peeled chestnuts, broken into pieces.

Bring 4 cups salted water to a boil, add brussels sprouts and cook 10 minutes. Drain and refresh under cold water. Drain again.

Meanwhile, melt butter in a 3-quart saucepan. Add cipollini onions and cook over medium heat, stirring, until light brown. Pour contents of pan through a fine strainer into a dish, pressing to remove as much butter as possible from the onions. Place onions on paper towel to drain. Return butter to saucepan.

If serving immediately, preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place saucepan over medium heat and cook until butter has a nutty aroma and is turning brown. Whisk in cornstarch and water mixture and cook until mixture is light brown. Whisk in stock and cook until sauce has thickened. Add lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste, and nutmeg. Add chestnuts and brussels sprouts, folding ingredients together.

Transfer to an 8-cup baking dish. Scatter onions on top. Bake about 15 minutes. Serve.

I’ve got one more Thanksgiving recipe to post, but I thought I’d take a break for a day with a little holiday party hors d’oeuvres fare.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, I’m a big fan of salty pork products, like bacon, ham, and especially prosciutto. We were at a fancy holiday party last weekend where they served this dish, and I thought it was a great idea. Incredibly simple and delicious. I tried it at home, and it lived up to my expectations.

There’s really no recipe, just take a look at the picture.

I drizzled my asparagus with just a little olive oil before wrapping to help the prosciutto stick, baked for about 10 minutes in a 425 oven, and squeezed half a lemon over the whole thing after baking.

Doesn’t that make your mouth water?

This item was a last minute addition to the Thanksgiving menu, as someone else had promised to make gravy with the turkey drippings, but I knew my husband wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, since it would be made with wheat flour. And then another friend joined the party who is a vegetarian, so I had all the more reason to make an alternative gravy. I checked with Gluten-Free Girl, who swears that “its absurdly easy to make gluten-free gravy”, with sweet rice flour. I decided to go with a mushroom gravy since I remembered it being tasty from my own vegetarian days, and I couldn’t imagine vegetable stock alone providing enough flavor. Here’s a shot of the production taken by my husband, who remembered to take pictures for my blog when I forgot.

You can see the Sweet Rice Flour from Trader Joe’s, as well as the Mushroom Broth, that made this recipe a snap to make.

Sweet Rice Flour actually works much like regular flour, added slowly to melted butter, it makes something resembling a roux, which then makes a nice thick delicious sauce as liquid is added. I’m not a purist about the roux step, so I go ahead and sprinkle the flour right on the sauteing mushrooms. It works fine.

You could use a wide variety of mushrooms for this gravy, it all depends how much mushroom flavor you want. White button mushrooms are going to give you a fairly simple gravy without too much mushroom flavor, while the more flavorful varieties (oysters, chanterelles, shitakes, porcinis) will of course make a much more mushroomy, and even meaty tasting gravy. I used a pack of Royal Trumpets, and a pack of a type that I think was called Velvet Pelliopini, but I’m not sure. The closest I can find on line is called Flammulina velutipes, and seems to look similar, but what do I know. They tasted mighty good.

Mushroom Gravy (gluten-free)

4 T Butter
1 1/2 C Diced Mushrooms
1 t Italian Herb Mix
3-4 T Sweet Rice Flour
1 1/2 C Mushroom Broth

Saute the mushrooms in the butter with the herbs. Add salt and pepper to taste. When the mushrooms are nice and soft, sprinkle in the sweet rice flour, one Tablespoon at a time. Allow the flour to fully soak in to the butter before adding more flour. When you have a thick flour butter mixture surrounding the mushrooms, add the broth, a little at a time, allowing it to cook and begin to thicken before adding the next half cup.

That’s it! Easy-peasy.

Lots of people have a good refried beans recipe, and for good reason, it’s really pretty simple. I’d never made them from scratch, as I always thought it must be a complicated process. I mean they are fried once, and then refried, right? Actually, wrong. Turns out the term refried beans is just a mistranslation of frijoles refritos, which doesn’t mean RE-fried at all, just plain fried beans.

It’s easy to make vegetarian refried beans by starting with oil, but refried beans are well-known (infamous?) for containing lard. And, for good reason, it’s darn tasty. Some recipes call for rendering some bacon for the lard and then removing the pieces, but since I always love me some bacon, I left it in.

One thing I don’t understand is why all the refried beans I’ve ever had from a can or in a restaurant have such a uniform brown color. When you cook a pinto bean, the outside loses its pinto spots and turns that pinkish brown color, but the inside of the bean is white. So my refried beans always turn out a bit pale and washed out and bit unappetizing in photos. Ah, well. They sure are tasty though.

Refried Beans (with Bacon)

3 C. dried pinto beans
water
salt
8 oz. bacon, chopped (or 2 T. vegetable oil for a vegetarian version)
1 medium onion, small dice
1 T. chili powder

Soak the dried beans over night in a large pot, filled to the top with water. After soaking, drain the beans, cover with plenty of fresh water add some salt, bring to a boil, and simmer for about an hour, or until the beans are very tender and splitting open, but not disintegrating.

While the beans are simmering, in another large part, cook the bacon until crispy. Removing the bacon at this point is optional. (If you are making vegetarian refried beans, heat the oil for a minute or two in a large pot.) Add the diced onion to and cook on medium low heat until very soft. Add the chili powder.

Ladle off and reserve a spoonful or two of the bean broth and drain the beans. Add the drained beans to the cooked onions, and go at ‘em with a potato masher. Leave the beans on the stove as you go, allowing them to continue cooking, and add bean broth as necessary to get the consistency you want.

I’ve been looking for interesting things to do with the surplus winter squash we’ve been getting for weeks and weeks from our CSA. I’ve made Elise’s Pumpkin Bread, with the addition of a streusel topping, for the folks at the office several times. The other obvious thing to do with the squash is soup, but I’m not too fond of traditional sweet squash soups with cinnamon and pumpkin pie spices. Then Deb over at Smitten Kitchen posted a recipe for Black Bean Pumpkin Soup, which sounded awfully good. The problem was, when I went to make it today, I hadn’t paid much attention to the ingredients list, so instead of 3 cans of black beans, I had 1 can of pinto beans, and instead of canned tomatoes, I had tomato paste, and instead of cumin, I had curry powder, and then I wanted to experiment with this new smoked pimento I got the other day, so the recipe underwent a bit of a metamorphosis. Like the Black Bean Pumpkin Soup that was the inspiration for this recipe, this is squash soup in which the squash is not the main character, but plays an important supporting role. The tomato paste and the smoked pimento give it a richness and a depth, and a deliciously subtle spice.

Smoky Spanish Soup

3 or 4 T. butter
2 medium onions, chopped
3 or 4 ribs of celery, chopped
2 t. curry powder
2 t. smoked pimento
1/2 t. black pepper
1 can of beans
1 small can of tomato paste
1 1/2 cups pumpkin or winter squash puree
4 cups water
10-12 oz. cooked ham, diced small
3 T. balsamic vinegar

Saute the celery and onions in butter with the curry powder, smoked paprika, and black pepper. When the onions have softened and are beginning to brown, add the beans and tomato paste. Mash up the beans a bit in the can with a fork before tossing them in. Add the squash and the water and simmer for 10-15 minutes for the flavors to meld. After the soup has simmered a bit, add the ham and vinegar, and its ready to serve.

Delicious!

or, This Blogging Thing is Harder Than I Thought

I started prepping those baby artichokes in the post below, remembered to take a picture of the prep, and then, wouldn’t you know it, I ate those babies right up without taking a picture of the final product. Well, anyway, I’ll learn eventually. Here’s the baby artichokes as I prepped them. At least I got one picture taken.

I learned from Elise that baby artichokes are completely edible once they are stripped of their outside leaves. They are a variety of artichoke that is fully mature when it’s smaller, but it also does not have a fully developed choke.

As usual, I started with her recipe, and then altered it to suit my tastes and my ingredients on hand. I was in the mood for that delicious lingering taste that’s completely distinctive to artichoke to artichokes and butter so I eliminated any other flavors except salt and pepper. You could add herbs or cheeses or any number of other ingredients for variety of flavor.

This is enough for two as a side dish.

Sauteed Baby Artichokes

8-10 baby artichokes
2 T. lemon juice
3 + 1 C. cold water
1/2 T. olive oil
1-2 T. butter
salt and pepper to taste

Put the cold water and lemon juice (or you can use vinegar) into a large pot or bowl. This is to prevent the artichokes from discoloring as you prepare them. Cut the stem off each artichoke to about 1/4 inch. Peel the outside leaves off until the artichoke is at least 2/3 pale green, (the one I’ve started on in the picture has a few more layers to go) and then chop off the darker green tip. Trim any remaining darker green bits and then cut the artichoke in halves or quarters depending on its size. Toss them into the bowl of acidified water while you prepare the others.

When the artichokes are ready to go, drain them and put them in a saute pan with another cup of water and simmer for 4-5 minutes. Drain again and drizzle with the olive oil. Saute for 2 minutes then add a pat of butter. After 2 minutes add another pat of butter. Add salt and pepper to taste. When they’re starting to just brown, they’re ready to go.

Did I mention these babies are delicious? I didn’t even get a photo, they were gone too soon!

Aren’t these baby artichokes adorable and delicious looking? I haven’t figured out what to do with them yet, but I’ll definitely post it when I do.

Who would’ve thought that I’d ever make from scratch such a hard-core Germanic food as sauerkraut (which by the way, in German just means sour cabbage). But it turns out that sauerkraut is amazingly easy to make, and filled with those special bacteria that are so good for the tum-tum.

Before I go into the recipe, I’ve got to explain the color. You see, this is my second home-made batch of sauerkraut. I made the first batch with purple cabbage. This one is made with all white cabbage, but I used some of the deep purple liquid from the first batch to kick-start the fermentation process. Aside from giving this batch it’s interesting pinkish color, it worked great, and that nice sour flavor matured much more quickly in this batch. However, after a quick google search I found out that pink sauerkraut is usually a sign that the cabbage growing something called leucoanthocyanidin, and should be discarded. So if you’ve actually heard of leucoanthocyanidin, or just knew anecdotally that pink sauerkraut is bad, DO NOT BE ALARMED!!! …the sauerkraut is just fine. Delicious, in fact!

I found the basic recipe at Wild Fermentation, a website by Sandor Ellix Katz discussing and selling his book of the same title. The book is definitely on my wanted list, as it has recipes and instructions for making all things fermented, including yogurt, sourdough, vinegar, and mead! The website just explains how to make basic sauerkraut, which is VERY simple. I found other recipes online, but they all called for cooking the jars of sauerkraut after they’ve been fermented, which I would do if I needed the stuff to last through a winter in the backwoods with no refrigeration, but which I find totally find totally missing the point of sauerkraut otherwise. (The point being that it’s filled with live beneficial bacteria, which promote healthy flora in your digestive system.)

Sauerkraut

Equipment

• You have to have a large wide-mouth crock, urn, or jar to ferment it in. About a gallon capacity will hold one medium head of cabbage.
• A plate or something with a flat bottom that will fit inside the mouth of the jar, and cover as much surface area on the top of it as possible.
• Something heavy to weigh down the plate in the top of the jar.

Ingredients

• One medium head of cabbage
• A whole bunch of salt
• Some water, if needed

The basic instructions are to chop up the cabbage, mix it with the salt, weigh it down with the plate and something heavy, wait a few weeks, and voila! Sauerkraut!

Here’s how I do it, in considerably more detail and with not exactly the called-for materials. I don’t have an appropriate container, so I commandeered a large, cylinder-shaped flower vase that was made of heavy glass (thoroughly disinfecting it first), and I used a little ramekin-type ceramic dish with a flat bottom in lieu of a plate. And for the weight, I simply filled a large pickle jar with water, which I balance on top of the ramekin.

You can apparently ferment any size cabbage chunks you want, even whole heads, but I like fine shreds so I chop mine in thin slices so that it ends up as close to shreds as possible. When you’re chopping a cabbage, you discover how much vegetable matter is really packed into a cabbage as it seems to grow and grow as you chop. Rather than measuring the salt carefully, I follow Katz’s advice and toss a handful of cabbage into a large bowl, sprinkle salt all over it, chop another handful, throw it in, sprinkle salt, etc. When the bowl starts to get full, sprinkle some more salt on the whole thing and toss it all together to make sure the salt is well distributed, and then start packing the cabbage down into the jar. Using a wooden spoon, tamp the cabbage down so that there isn’t room for air bubbles. As the cabbage sits, the salt will draw the water out of the cabbage, which will form the liquid. Continue the process of chopping, sprinkling, tossing, and tamping, till all the sauerkraut is in the jar. If the liquid is not yet enough to cover all the cabbage, add some water to just cover the top of the cabbage.

Now, place the plate on top of the cabbage and use the weight to press it down. Throughout that day, I continue to press down the cabbage whenever I think of it.

After that, I drape a cloth over the whole thing to prevent dust falling it, tuck it into a dark corner of the kitchen where it won’t be forgotten, and check it once a day to make sure no pieces are sticking up out of the brine.

With a fresh batch from scratch, you should have a very mild sauerkraut in about two weeks, and you can continue to ferment it for about 6 weeks total. Whenever the taste reaches the strength you prefer, jar it up and put it in the fridge, where the flavor will continue to develop, but much more slowly.