Miniature Pumpkins with Goat Cheese and Sage

Two baby pumpkins arrived in our CSA box last week (they called them miniature Chinese squash, but as far as we can tell, they're the same as the mini-pumpkins you see around Halloween time). Never knew you could eat them before. Something tells me we shouldn't try this on the two from last fall that we still have left over from Thanksgiving decorations. (Something also tells me we shouldn't still have Thanksgiving decorations out, but another, larger, lazier part points out quite reasonably that it would be wasteful to throw them out now when we're so close to an appropriate season again.) These are pretty easy to make (it took us only a few minutes to prepare them, and then they just sit in the oven for awhile), and, you know, they're cute.

Ingredients
2 miniature pumpkins
Olive oil
1/2 clove garlic, minced or pressed
2 leaves of sage, halved lengthwise and then sliced crosswise into ribbons
A few pine nuts or some crumbled pecans
2 pinches lemon zest (preferably Meyer)
Salt & pepper
Freshly grated nutmeg (or a pinch of ground nutmeg)
Grated parmesan
A little goat cheese, crumbled

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut tops off of pumpkins (save the tops) and scoop out seeds. Rub insides and the underside of the top with olive oil and garlic, then sprinkle with sage, nuts, lemon zest, salt, and pepper.

Put the tops on the pumpkins, and bake on a cookie sheet or baking pan for 40-50 minutes or until tender. Uncover, sprinkle with nutmeg and parmesan, and add goat cheese. Leave tops stem-side-down on the sides of the pumpkins, and bake for another 5 minutes or so until the cheese is hot and the pumpkin feels soft when you poke it. Let cool for a couple of minutes, and serve.

The Pizza Chronicles, Continued: Potato Pizza and A Glimpse of Crust Perfection

Potato pizza has long been a (rare but beloved) favorite of mine, and we had a particularly delectable version at Pizzaiolo in Oakland recently enough that it's been on my mind. That one came with an egg on top, which is the most amazing thing ever and which I think is relatively common in Italy and Australia but tragically uncommon here. Clearly, our next pizza attempt had to involve an egg. And potatoes. And something to give the crust a bit of flair.


Ingredients
Crust (adapted from the NYTimes recipe):
1 tsp dry active yeast
1/2 cup warm water (about 110 degrees F)
1/4 tsp sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
5/8 cups stone-ground whole wheat bread flour
3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp plus one pinch salt
3 pinches chopped fresh rosemary leaves (2-3 sprigs)
2 pinches lemon zest (grated on a microplane, else very finely minced)
Coarsely-ground cornmeal
Olive oil for brushing on the crust at the end

Top:
1 clove garlic, pressed or minced
Cheese, ideally from pastured cows (e.g., jack and parmesan, or goat gouda might work well here)
3 medium-sized red, white, purple, and/or yellow potatoes
1/2 red onion, sliced
Leaves from 1 sprig of rosemary (left whole)
1 egg, from a pastured chicken

Sprinkle the yeast over the warm water, add the sugar, and stir gently. Let sit 3-8 minutes until it looks a little foamy. Add the olive oil.

Combine the wheat flour, white flour, salt, minced rosemary, and lemon zest in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Pulse a few times to mix. With the machine running, slowly add the yeast mixture in through the top, and let it keep mixing until the dough forms a ball.

Lightly sprinkle a wooden cutting board or other flat surface with flour. Dampen your hands with a little water, then remove the dough from the food processor. Knead on the cutting board for 3-4 minutes, sprinkling more flour if necessary (you want the dough to be smooth and not sticky -- a little tacky is fine, and you want it to stick to itself when you fold it over, but it shouldn't stick to your hands). Form the dough into a ball.

Lightly grease a bowl with olive oil. Place the ball of dough in the bowl so that a smooth, round side faces down, then turn over so that this side is up (you want the top to be smooth for the dough to rise properly). Cover tightly with plastic wrap and set in a warm place to rise for 80-90 minutes until doubled in size. (An ideal rising temperature is around 80 degrees. If your house is on the coolish side, turn the oven on for literally just 2-3 seconds after you hear the burner come on, then leave the bowl in the slightly warmed oven.)

Meanwhile, gently boil the potatoes in a small pot until just tender (about 10-20 minutes, depending on their size). Drain, run under cold water to cool slightly, and slice.

Saute onion over medium-low heat until soft. Set aside.

When the dough is ready, preheat oven to 450 degrees. Brush the flour off your cutting board and sprinkle it with cornmeal. Take the dough out of the bowl and gently form a ball, then place on the cutting board and begin gently pressing and stretching it outward to form a flat pancake. You want to end up with a flat disc that's about 12" in diameter (the outside crust should not be raised or pinched or anything -- the whole thing is flat).

Rub the dough with the minced garlic, then sprinkle with enough grated cheese to lightly cover everything but a ring around the outside. (If you're using parmesan, you might grate a little into the outside crust as well).

Lightly oil a pizza pan or baking pan and sprinkle with cornmeal. Gently transfer the pizza to the pan, using your hands or a spatula. Next, arrange the potato slices in concentric circles on top of the pizza, then sprinkle with the onion and top with the rosemary leaves. Make sure the center of the pizza has a flat spot (potato slices are fine, just be sure they're not overlapping here), and carefully crack the egg onto the middle of the pizza.

Bake in the oven on the middle rack for 10-15 minutes, until crust starts to turn golden and egg white is white. 

Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and brush the crust with a little olive oil (you can add a small pinch of lemon zest to the olive oil if you love lemon zest -- this will make the crust taste delectably close to a lemon bar -- or a little minced garlic). Slice creatively to avoid breaking the yolk (think parallelograms), and serve.

Serves 2 with something leafy and green on the side.

Good enough to dream about. Not that I necessarily did. But if one were prone to dreaming about food, one might select, as a centrally featured topic one night, this pizza.

Or, you know, just eat it.

Ew.

This has to win some sort of prize.

I have, in the palm of my hand, a small, silvery, innocent looking packet of snack mix, obtained on a Horizon Airlines flight.

It is called Northwest Nibbles (first eyebrow raised) and is manufactured by some corporation called Delyse. The back of the packet has a little metallic pink fleur-de-lys, next to which is printed in cursive: "J'adore Delyse" (oops, there went the second eyebrow).

It contains -- are you ready? -- no fewer than forty-four ingredients. That's counting the ingredients-within-the-ingredients (the parenthetical ingredients, as it were) rather than what I guess you would have to call superordinate ingredients (the things that the ingredients-within-the-ingredients make up). For example, one superordinate ingredient is Ranch Rice Triangles. But obviously that's not an actual ingredient, so they have to list the actual ingredients within that ingredient, like so: "Ranch Rice Triangles (Rice Flour, Yellow Corn Masa, Safflower Oil, Ranch Seasoning (Buttermilk, Salt, Dried Onion, Garlic and Tomato, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Toru a Yeast, Corn Syrup Solids, Nonfat milk, Whey, Soy Grits, Dried Cheddar Cheese (..."

I had several thoughts while transcribing that small portion of the ingredients list, which I put below in chronological order of occurrence. I would have put them in parentheses as I went, but there seemed to be a run on that particular punctuation mark at the time. Speaking of which:

1. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to close the parentheses, once you open them. You can't just keep parenthetically listing subingredients for all time. It's unfair to the grammarians of the world, and to the expectant reader who continues on, word after word, in increasing confusion about which sub-sub-sub-subingredient is being listed now. I thought there might be a collection of lost closing parentheses at the end -- something like "...Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate, Salt) ))))" -- but there was nothing of the sort. I feel disoriented and linguistically distraught.

2. This thing must fail every single food rule that Michael Pollan has in his book of that name. It is like the Anti-Pollan. I wonder what would happen if they collided. Possibly a new project of interest for CERN.

3.  I'm not generally prone to paranoid thinking, but why does the internet disconnect whenever I rest the packet on the edge of my laptop?

4. Why is "Garlic and Tomato" one ingredient?

5. What in the world is Toru a Yeast? Surely that must be a typo? A typo for what?

6. Why does Corn Syrup Solids merit capitalization for every word, whereas Nonfat milk only gets a capital N?

7. They still haven't closed the parentheses??

8. Ew.

In Search of the Perfect Pizza

For the last few weeks, I have been slowly but surely gearing myself up to take on The Pizza. The thing is...well actually, there are several things. First, I do not bake. Or rather, I bake occasionally, when the moon is a nice bright shade of blue, but it is not my thing. I do not have an intuition for what proportions will make bread rise, or what combination of whatnot belongs in the cake batter. I bake with teaspoons at the ready and a close eye on the recipe, and a healthy amount of skepticism about what will happen to the thing once I put it in the oven.

Second, pizza is so often a fast food, if not in the Domino's sort of way, then in the (no doubt light-years healthier but still highly processed) Trader Joe's pop-something-gourmet-in-the-oven sort of way. And, even if it's homemade, it seems difficult to avoid the highly processed thing, given that the base is made of white flour. Nothing whole-grain about it. Even if you made it out of whole wheat flour. Unless...unless you made it out of stone-ground whole wheat flour.

Unless that.

Here then was the tripartite mission that began to form in the shadowy culinary corners of my brain: Learn how to (a) make pizza using (b) stone-ground whole wheat flour for the crust in a way that is (c) delicious. Right then.

Step 1: Find stone-ground whole wheat bread flour. This part was actually easy -- Bob's Red Mill makes stone-ground everything (not to mention lovely steel cut oats) and was well-stocked at our coop.

Step 2: Find a whole wheat pizza crust recipe. Also easy: The New York Times has one here.

Step 3: Make a pizza.

Have I mentioned that I don't bake?

Okay, here goes:


First, I made the dough for the crust from the NYTimes recipe. This picture is meant not so much to showcase my nonexistent kneading skills, as to record for all time the fact that I was in remarkably close proximity to bread dough and it did not burst into flames.



After flattening the dough on a cornmeal-dusted surface, I brushed it with 1-2 cloves pressed garlic mixed with a little olive oil, then topped with some grated Parmesan and pastured jack cheese (enough to lightly cover the crust up to about an inch from the outside), then sliced ripe tomatoes, Genovese basil chiffonade, and a little crumbled local goat cheese.

Then, I baked it for about 15 minutes at 450 until the crust was golden brown. I may or may not have spent a large portion of that time staring through the oven door at it as the crust started to look like an actual pizza crust, and I am sure I did not hoot with glee when the first pizza crust bubble formed. I mean, that would be ridiculous.


And the finished product?

Decidedly gorgeous, and pretty darn tasty. The toppings were amazing, thanks in large part to our produce box (which supplied the incredible tomatoes and fresh Genovese basil), and the crust was definitely decent.

Nonetheless, Step 4: Achieve Pizza Crust Perfection is still a work in progress. Stay tuned.

Cucumber Gazpacho with Lemon Basil Infusion

Clearly, our diet yesterday had to involve a lot of ice cream and sorbet, but we did manage to work in a cold, soft vegetable course as well with the cucumbers from our CSA box. We had one Armenian cucumber and several round, light colored ones that I think are called apple cucumbers, along with some lemon basil that we still hadn't used in anything.

After a little Google detective work, I came across this recipe for gazpacho, toward which I normally feel ambivalent at best, but this version was delicious and surprisingly easy to make. I followed the recipe she gives fairly closely (the "Home Version" one) except that I used less olive oil and a bit less lemon juice, Aleppo pepper instead of cayenne (enough to give it a little kick), and made a lemon basil infusion to drizzle over the top (mince some lemon basil leaves and combine with a bit of olive oil and a pinch of salt, and let sit for a little while before using).

Toasted Polenta with Tomato and Avocado

The husband had his wisdom teeth out today, which meant the plan for open-faced sandwiches had to morph into something more soft and smushy. So voila: A recipe for the puffy-cheeked that doesn't involve canned soup. And best of all, it was delicious enough that we'd make it again, even on a day without dental trauma.

Ingredients
1 cup organic polenta/coarsely ground cornmeal
2 cups water
1/4 cup milk (optional)
1/3 cup grated pepper jack (or substitute Monterey Jack or cheddar)*
1-2 ripe tomatoes, peeled and diced (or just diced, if you're not post-dentist)
1 avocado, diced

Heat some water in a teapot. Meanwhile, place a smallish pot over medium-high heat. Add polenta and toast, stirring or tossing from time to time, for a minute. Push to the side of the pot, drizzle in a little olive oil, and stir to coat the grains. Adjust heat to medium. Continue toasting and stirring until polenta is fragrant and just starting to turn golden.

Add two cups of hot water to the polenta and stir, breaking up any clumps. Add the milk and a pinch of salt, bring to a simmer, and cook gently, stirring, for 2 minutes or until it thickens to just a little wetter than the desired consistency. Cover, remove from heat, and let sit for a minute.

Serve into bowls, sprinkle with cheese, and top with tomato and avocado.

Serves 2.

*If you live in northern California, Petaluma Creamery's pepper jack is creamier and pepperier than any other we've tasted and comes from local pastured cows (as does anything from Spring Hill Cheese Company). It's also somehow ridiculously inexpensive despite all that.

Update: See also this variation.

Nicoise(ish) Salad

Leftover quail eggs, green and yellow beans, and baby greens in the fridge, and a toasty 106 degrees outside? Clearly the evening called for a cool summertime salad and a distinct lack of grocery-shopping. I've never found Nicoise salads to be particularly appealing (partly because I don't like most olives, so here I substituted a green variety that isn't pickled, which makes it taste much more olive oil-esque and less olive-y), but this adulterated version was pretty darn good.

 

Ingredients
Mixed baby greens & (optional) a handful of baby arugula
1 1/2 cups cooked cannellini beans* (or substitute canned)
1 can (hook-and-line/troll caught) albacore tuna, drained
2-3 shallots, halved and thinly sliced
1 tsp black mustard seeds
Several handfuls green and/or yellow beans
4 quail eggs (or sub 1 regular egg, boiled & sliced)
2-3 tbsp good quality extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp sherry vinegar
Zest of 1 lemon
Sliced olives (green or black)
1 tbsp chopped parsley, plus a little extra for garnish
2 sprigs oregano, finely chopped
Salt & freshly ground black pepper

In a wide pan, heat a little olive oil over medium-high heat. Add shallot and mustard seeds and saute for 1-2 minutes till soft, then add green beans and continue to saute, stirring, until just tender (after a couple minutes, you can add a tbsp of water and cover for a minute or two to cook them quickly without letting them dry out). Set aside to cool.



In a small pot, bring water to a simmer. Carefully poke holes in the big end of each quail egg with a pushpin (start very gently and twist the pin back and forth, just until it goes through the shell). Lay the eggs in a slotted spoon, then lower into the simmering water for just under 3 minutes. Raise spoon out of water, drain, and run under cool water for about 20 seconds. Peel each quail egg (by far the best way I found to do this was to gently crack the shell on all sides to smithereens, then gently peel while holding the egg under a light drizzle of cold water). Cut each egg in half and set aside. (As far as we can tell, after eating this salad, quail eggs were invented so that one could eat a medium-boiled egg with some yolk in every bite. If you by any chance feel exceedingly warm and fuzzy toward egg yolks, which certain authors of certain blogs do, quail eggs would be a good thing to track down somewhere and incorporate into some sort of arrangement where they go into your mouth, and you smile in blissful happiness.)

Combine tuna with a little olive oil in a bowl, then add cannellini beans and a little salt and pepper (unless your tuna and/or beans are already very salty -- if so, make sure to taste before you salt more).

Whisk olive oil, sherry vinegar, lemon zest, oregano, parsley, salt, and pepper together in a small bowl.

Toss the greens with a couple spoonfuls of dressing and arrange as a bed on each plate. Top with green beans on one side, white beans and tuna on the other. Drizzle with 1-2 more spoonfuls of dressing per plate. Sprinkle extra shallots from the pan over the top, along with the olives and extra parsley, and arrange the eggs on the top. Garnish with a sprig of parsley or oregano, and serve. (If it tastes at all bland, it needs a bit more salt and/or pepper to help the flavors pop out.)

Serves 2.


*Rinse and pick through dried beans carefully, then soak overnight in cold water, or put in a pot with enough water to cover by 1-2 inches and bring to a boil, simmer for 2-3 minutes, then turn off heat and let soak for an hour. Then, put in a pot with fresh water (about an inch above the beans), a bay leaf, and a few whole peeled garlic cloves, bring to a boil, and simmer for 60-90 minutes until tender.

Cucumber Salad with Toasted Sesame Seeds

Found in our CSA box: Armenian cucumbers (light-colored and long, and apparently actually a melon impersonating a cucumber, which seems pretty impressive as melon acting skills go.)

Ingredients
2 long Armenian cucumbers, peeled and diced (or substitute any sweet, crunchy cucumber)
1 tsp black sesame seeds
Seasoned rice vinegar


Heat a small pan over medium-high heat. When hot, put in the sesame seeds and toast, shaking the pan or stirring frequently, for 2-3 minutes until fragrant. Remove from heat.

Peel and dice cucumber. Sprinkle liberally with rice vinegar to taste (it should taste flavorful but not strong). Stick in the fridge for a couple minutes to let the cucumbers crisp, then toss, adjust rice vinegar if necessary, and serve sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Serves 3, or 2 very greedy diners, and goes well with the salmon below.

Grilled Salmon with Mustard and Scallions

I realize that there are several salmon recipes already on here, but Costco has wild sockeye right now for a ridiculously low price and we feel obligated to take full, weekly advantage.

Ingredients
Marinade:
2 scallions, sliced and then coarsely diced a few times (white and light green parts)
1 clove garlic, pressed
1 tsp whole grain dijon mustard
A slosh of soy sauce
2 sloshes of rice wine
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp toasted sesame oil

Wild salmon (enough for 2)
1/2 avocado, diced, for garnish (optional)

Whisk marinade ingredients together. Pour over the salmon and let marinate in the fridge for 20-30 minutes.

Grill on high for about 3 minutes (skin side down), then flip. Spoon extra scallions over the top, and grill another 1-3 minutes on the second side, depending on how thick the salmon is. (We were once told, in a friendly but firm way, that the only way to eat salmon was medium rare, by the co-owner of one of our favorite French restaurants in Manhattan. After taking her advice for our dinner that night, we were converted. I can't pull off the same Parisian flair or authoritative gaze, but seriously: try it. You'll feel warm fuzzies for the French and possibly all humankind.)

Serve over rice (e.g., Bhutanese red rice: saute a little olive oil and onion over medium heat until soft, then add 3/4 cups red rice and saute for another minute. Add 1 cup water, cover, and bring to a boil. Turn heat down to low and simmer for 20 minutes, then uncover and turn heat to medium, stirring until the excess water evaporates. Push rice to the side of the pan, add a tsp of pasture butter and a sprinkling of mustard seeds to the bottom of the pan and let simmer for a few seconds, then turn off the heat and stir the rice to coat).

Serves 2. Goes well with cucumber salad (above).

One More Reason to Eat Local

The egg recall this week underscored for me yet one more reason to eat local. While the headlines blared with long lists of brands and plant numbers that might have been affected, and readers from coast to coast went to check whether the eggs they bought in a nearby supermarket that were labeled Lucerne, or Albertson, or Farm Fresh (that one is particularly ironic), or Dutch Farms, or nine (nine!) other different brands could have been affected by a salmonella outbreak all the way over in Iowa, I thought about the eggs I ate that morning and how they came from a farm in Orland, CA, about 90 minutes away from where I live, and went on to read something else in the newspaper.

In fact, I can look up the farm where our eggs are laid on Google Maps and see the grass where the chickens are pastured. Given that an increasing number of industrialized egg producers are starting to market one or two of the many brands they produce to appeal to the organic/health-conscious crowd, plastering buzzwords like "free-range" and "all-vegetarian feed!" on the outside of the carton (which doesn't mean much of anything -- you want to look for the word pastured), it's nice to be able to look up the actual farm and see actual grass. (In contrast, it turns out that many of the seemingly-small-farm egg brands sold around here come from one centralized, industrialized plant with a few big chicken warehouses and no grass in sight, including "Judy's Family Farm" organic eggs and Uncle Eddie's free-range eggs and several others that pretend to be local, family-run enterprises. Eatwild.com is a good resource for tracking down real local farms and ranches in your area that produce grass-fed meat and poultry.)

It's not that eating local protects you from ever possibly getting contaminated food (although as the film "Food, Inc" points out, a number of industrialized food practices do increase the chances of disease, either for the animals or for the people eating the food or both). But it seems kind of crazy that a contamination problem in Galt, Iowa, could affect half a billion eggs sold nationwide. And according to this article, the huge livestock firm that may be responsible for the outbreak has already been associated with an array of charges from violating environmental laws to mistreating female workers. How insane is it to think that the store-brand eggs you can buy at a nearby supermarket might come from 2,000 miles away, and that buying those eggs sends your money to an immense and almost invisible firm that has a record of mistreating employees and the environment, not to mention its animals?

I would never in a million years hand my money to people who were known to do things like leave chickens to suffocate in garbage cans, fire employees for their (lack of) religious beliefs, maintain a work environment that a Labor Secretary called "as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen," and sexually assault their female workers. But apparently, up until just a few weeks ago, I was doing exactly that.