boom, roasted

I know what I'll do with that squash, I said. I'll make a soup with cumin in it.

Everything else grew out of that, using stuff I happened to have in the house.

Roasted squash soup with cumin and lime; with brown butter peanuts and goat cheese.

I chopped the squash into pieces that would fit in the pan and roasted them at 375 for several hours - you can roast a squash in about an hour, I just wanted bigger, deeper flavor.


Meanwhile I used my kitchen torch to roast some red chiles.



I scooped the roasted squash out of the shells and pureed it with the chiles, the juice of two limes, a good deal of cumin, a tablespoon of red miso, two cloves of black garlic, a teaspoon or so of "black mint" (use cilantro or whatever other herb you like), and a bit of hot water, and strained it. The seasonings were picked partly because they go well with cumin, and partly for the earthy umami flavor they contribute.

The strained soup was topped with hoja santa goat cheese and brown butter peanuts (heat butter until it starts to brown, add Trader Joe's blistered peanuts and stir until you smell peanut).



You can see the soup clinging to the tortilla chip in the upper left.

Spicy, warm, not overwhelmingly rich or monochromatically earthy thanks to the lime juice.

sandwich creamery

While we were up at the lake, we made the journey out to Sandwich Creamery, which makes ice cream, sorbet, and cheese, and has a little store on-site that's open to the public. When I say little, I mean little: there's a cooler of cheese (only cheddar and fresh cheese when we went) and organic eggs, a freezer of ice cream and sorbet, and a table of amazing sourdough bread. No staff, cash only - you put paper money in one slot and coins in another, and a video camera enforces your honesty.

The Creamery is kind of in the middle of nowhere.



... no, seriously:


You drive through the center of Sandwich - which was at the time hosting the Sandwich Fair - and then down a country road, turning off that country road onto another country road (marked by the sign above), then another country road, then another. The winding dirt roads reminded me of Hollis when I was a kid, before everything was paved and they put a traffic light in.



There were a few people eating ice cream at the tables when we got there, but they'd left before I took photos.


The little shack on the left is the part open to the public:


Cooler of cheese and eggs.


Bread. I apparently forgot to take a photo of the ice cream! We picked up three small containers of ice cream (each about two small servings): cranberry, cinnamon, and "tipsy turtle," which tasted like chocolate, amaretto, and pecans. All excellent, as always.


Like most cheesemakers these days, Sandwich Creamery buys its milk from other farmers, so there are no cows there - we did see sheep, pigs, and chickens.

columbus day weekend

Columbus Day weekend up at the lake!



Caitlin got the fire going when necessary - it was certainly colder than last year - and I handled the cooking.


We started with that most autumnal of dinners, the roast chicken:


That's an eight pound chicken - don't be fooled by the enormity of my pan, which I've roasted turkeys and fresh hams in. It's covered in zaatar - sumac, thyme, and sesame seeds - and drizzled with a little olive oil, and resting on top of chunks of parsnip, celery root, and fennel.

Really, the parsnips were my favorite part here - sweet and rich and caramelized from roasting underneath the chicken. We had sides of freekeh cooked with garlic. Freekeh is similar to the marginally more common wheat berry, but the wheat is picked green, roasted in an open flame, thrashed, and sun-dried. The result is extremely flavorful and nutty - I wish I weren't out of it now!




Leftover chicken gave us a few more meals - to start with, I made a chicken stock from the bones and vegetable scraps (which wound up very dark because I cooked it down too far - the stove up there heats up much hotter than mine on low and medium), with bits of chicken, parsnip, celery root, kale, the leftover freekeh, and the drippings from the chicken.



Most of the rest of the chicken went into a chicken hash. I'd boiled potatoes ahead of time, let them cool, and chopped them into chunks - crisped them up in butter, added chopped cooked chicken, smoked mushrooms, and cream.

Yeah, smoked mushrooms: straight-up supermarket button mushrooms, marinated in olive oil and soy sauce for a day, smoked for half an hour.

Topped with a fried egg.



Other odds and ends.  Quince!  Quince - chopped, cored - covered in ginger beer and roasted, covered, until soft, then uncovered until the ginger beer got syrupy.


We had the quince with ice cream from Sandwich Creamery - both their cinnamon ice cream and their cranberry ice cream.

Finally, a Campari drink inspired by Dave Wondrich's Corn Goddess:


Roughly equal parts of strained corn juice, gin (The Botanist), Campari, and lime juice.

Listen.

I thought everyone was clear on this by now.

If you insist that you only like "bone dry martinis," if you recite ridiculous things like "just tap the bottle of vermouth against the shaker" or "whisper 'vermouth' across the ice," if you pour a little vermouth in the shaker and then pour it right back out so it just coats the glass ...

... you don't like martinis. You don't drink martinis.

You like glasses of gin. There's nothing wrong with liking gin. But a glass of gin isn't a martini.

Here is a bone-dry cheeseburger to have with your martini. After assembling the bread and cheese, I waved my hands over it and whispered the word "cow."



(Grilled cheese and vegemite, which I'd meant to post on National Grilled Cheese Day but forgot.)

chicken pot chicken pot

Chicken Pot Pie, Day 1:

Morning:

Roast a chicken. My chicken roasting method has been the same for a decade: spatchcock it (cut through one side with a sharp knife and split it open) and roast it at high heat, 450, for an hour to an hour and a half depending on the size of the chicken.

Seasonings are unnecessary unless you plan to eat some of the chicken without putting it in the pot pie.

Let the chicken cool completely.

Noon:

Remove meat from chicken carcass, chop up, and put in the refrigerator.

Add skin and bones and drippings from the pan to a pot (crockpot's fine), cover with water, and let simmer all day and night.

You can season the chicken stock with any vegetable scraps you happen to have, but carrot, celery, turnip, and onion work especially well.

Chicken Pot Pie, Day 2:

Midday:

Make pie crust and refrigerate until needed.

Strain chicken stock and reduce until it's no bigger than the volume of a pie plate.

Refrigerate chicken stock.

Chop vegetables: celery, carrot, onion. (I have interesting things in my freezer, so actually used celery, onion, green chile, and ramps.)

When it's time to make dinner:

Remove solidified chicken fat - schmaltz - from the surface of the chilled chicken stock. Melt in a pan big enough to hold the stock, chicken, and vegetables. Add a little flour and stir together until the flour is no longer raw.

Add vegetables to the roux, stir for a few minutes, and add the stock. Cook down as needed. Add chicken, salt and pepper (do not skimp on the salt), and pour into a pie plate lined with pie crust. Cover with second crust. Brush top crust with a little butter.

Bake at 350 for an hour.

Let cool 15 minutes before eating.

(It's raining, I can't get a good photo. You know what chicken pot pie looks like.)

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

I've talked about Buffalo wings before. A lot.

I've also talked about how good home-grown celery is, what an intense flavor it has. This year my mother grew celery root, and I've been using the thin stalks and leaves to flavor, well, everything.

I grew Tabasco peppers this year, and because we got such a long growing season, they actually turned red. So I tried my hand at pepper mash again, which is the Tabasco method of making hot sauce: you mash peppers with salt, let it ferment, and then mix it with vinegar. This is the classic Louisiana style hot sauce.

In the past, my peppers have dried out without fermenting. I could have just added water and gone about it much like sauerkraut, but since the last time I tried making Tabasco sauce, I've gotten into kimchi. So I treated it similarly: mixing the main ingredient (the peppers) with seasonings, salt, and something with enough liquid and sweetness in it to kickstart the anaerobic fermentation.

The seasonings were the celery leaves and stalks - the liquid, half of a tomato. I blended those together with red ripe Tabasco peppers and salt, jarred it up, and let it ferment for a week, until it was bubbling like mad - then blended that with apple cider vinegar and red miso, and strained it. I also added a pinch of xanthan gum - it's a thickener, but it also helps keep the pepper from coming out of suspension, so that the pepper sauce doesn't separate.

Already I had something amazing - a rich, full-flavored hot sauce with a pronounced celery flavor, like the celery sticks you eat with your Buffalo wings. (After sitting a week, the tomato flavor became more noticeable, almost gazpachoey.)

But wait. I divided the sauce in half. One I left as is, as just described. To the other I added a stick of butter that had been cooked until browned. Again, the xanthan gum helps keep the sauce from separating, though in this case I think a bit of mustard would do the same.

It's like premixed Buffalo sauce, but ... so much better.

more coolage, less normalcy

As hot as summer was, fall arrived right on schedule - early even, shouldering its way in in a succession of days that alternated between the 80s and the 50s. This morning is an unequivocally fall day - most of the leaves have turned, and there's grey mist hanging on everything. Fall is like that friend whose spouse you can't stand - you're glad to see them, but it's never just them you have to deal with. It's not even the cold of winter that I mind as much - there's a good chance New England has settled into a pattern of mild winters punctuated by extremely cold or snowy ones - it's the darkness, which is so so much worse at northern latitudes.

I'm definitely very affected by that darkness, and have trouble waking up in the morning - despite being a morning person the rest of the year - and just as much trouble having any energy throughout the day. I have a Philips blue light - they didn't give me a free sample or anything, it was a Christmas present - and it works wonders, but it's still not as good as, you know, spring.

But for now it's fall. It's fall and I'm drinking my coffee waiting for Meet the Press to start, after which I'll get back to work on a horror story. Let's get you caught up in the meantime on the doings round the kitchen.

First, I won the internal poll in the Marx Foods cocktail/mocktail contest, and selected the Japanese juice sampler - bottles of yuzu, kabosu, and sudachi juice! - as my prize. Very very cool, and congratulations to Scofflaws Den, winner of the public poll.

Two important notions Caitlin had! First, corn and okra fritters - a basic fritter batter recipe (I winged it - flour cornmeal buttermilk egg baking soda and salt - and added more flour after the first few) with corn off the cob and chopped up okra, fried up in the deep fryer and served with deep-fried Cornish game hen and drizzled with honey:



And a sandwich that started out as "what if we did a tomato sandwich Croque Madame style," i.e. in a grilled ham and cheese sandwich topped with a fried egg and cheese sauce; my tweak was to replace the ham with leftover corned beef:


And then! Nikki and I did our annual green chile / apple exchange - I sent her a box of apples (which I should have packed better, since the chestnut crabapples were crushed in transit), she sent me this:




So many chiles!

I made green chile mac and cheese and green chile cheeseburgers, as I always do. But the new thing ... oh man. You know, we have been doing this for some years now, and I was aware that green chile apple pie existed. I don't know why this was the first time I made it. This is the "test pie" - a hand-pie of apple and green chile filling inside puff pastry, just to see whether it was worth doing a full pie. It was.




Maybe you're thinking, why the fuck would you put vegetables in your apple pie, and I don't even have to go off at you about how the fruit|vegetable divide in cooking is recent, artificial, and mostly imaginary - because the green chiles just don't play like a vegetable here, they play like a seasoning. Like ginger or cinnamon. What vegetal character they have just accentuates the sweetness of the apples - the way sharp cheddar does, maybe? - and the heat goes perfectly with apple pie spices. It works really, really well.