From California, With Love

This is not New Year’s resolution food, at least not unless your goals for 2013 involve incorporating more carbohydrates and fat into your diet. But it’s February, so even setting aside my antagonism toward the whole concept of resolutions, you’ve all had over a month to compensate with whole grains, dark leafy greens, etc., in which case one rich pasta dish isn’t going to utterly corrupt you, or you’ve already fallen off the wagon and this bit of indulgence isn’t going to do any additional damage.

Beautifully silky, creamy and elegant, with the warmth of lightly toasted walnuts and the brightness of good extra-virgin olive oil, this walnut sauce is neither complicated nor time-consuming to prepare. However, there is one catch, and it’s critically important to heed it: you really do need to make this with the freshest, highest-quality walnuts, because it will make the difference between a sauce that’s luscious nutty perfection and one that’s flat and dull or, even worse, bitter or rancid.

My walnuts were backyard-grown, very recently harvested, and lovingly shipped to me from northern California by His Lordship’s cousin. The first time I made this, I did it on-site during a holiday visit with walnuts from the same source. If you’re not lucky enough to have a West Coast connection, either wait until locally-grown walnuts in season are available in your farmers market, or seek out the best vendor you can find, preferably get them still in the shell, and make sure to taste the nuts before trying this recipe. If they don’t taste fresh and mild and sweet, use them for a more forgiving sauce, like pesto.

Slight post-facto edit: A rousing discussion with my Facebook friends made me think of a possible alternative if you can’t get really good walnuts.  Pistachios still in the shell are readily available year-round just about everywhere, and would definitely work as an alternative.  It will taste and look quite different, of course, but it should still give you the nutty, creamy unctuousness that’s the heart of this sauce.  As a bonus, if you have children, it will be entertainingly green and you can tell them it will make them strong like The Hulk.

Pasta with Fresh Walnut Sauce
(Mash-up of two recipes, one from Nigella Lawson’s Christmas Special, and one from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)
Serves 4 as a main course, 6-8 as a side dish

1 slice bread, crusts removed
½ cup cream or whole milk
1 cup walnuts, as fresh as possible and preferably hand-shelled
2 cloves garlic, peeled
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and freshly grated black pepper
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup Italian parsley, chopped
1 pound dried spaghetti rigate, fettucini, or other substantial ribbon pasta

Roughly tear up the bread and place it in a shallow bowl, pouring over the cream or milk. While it soaks, very carefully toast the walnuts in a dry pan over medium-low heat, tossing frequently to avoid burning, just until the nuts have barely started to turn golden and release a faint toasty aroma. Allow to cool briefly.

Place the nuts, garlic and cheese in a food processor and pulse a few times, until the nuts are broken up. Add the soaked bread and the liquid, with a hefty few pinches of salt and several grinds of pepper, and run the processor again until a paste forms. With the processor running, pour the olive oil down the feed tube and process just until you have a homogenous sauce that looks like a slightly grainy mayonnaise. Taste and correct the salt and pepper as necessary.

Boil the pasta in very well-salted water until al dente according to the package instructions. When you drain the pasta, reserve a good cup of the pasta water and set it aside. Toss the pasta with the sauce and the parsley, adding as much pasta water as needed to thin the sauce to a creamy consistency that evenly coats the pasta and allows the strands to caress each other instead of clumping. Serve immediately in warmed bowls.

Notes:

All resolution-bashing aside, there are some things you can do to lighten this up just a teeny bit, although it’s never going to be exactly what your doctor ordered. You can use low-fat milk instead of cream, whole wheat pasta and multigrain bread (provided it’s not too dense and chewy), and cut back a bit on the cheese, or you could serve smaller portions as a side dish beside a suitably healthy protein and a very large salad.

This would also work just fine as a vegan dish with non-dairy milk and omitting the cheese entirely, although in that case you’ll need to salt a little more aggressively, and you might want to toast the walnuts a tiny bit darker for added flavor. I’d also be tempted to add a very light grating of nutmeg for complexity.

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I know, I know

I’m just going to stop even talking about the lapses.  Moving right along…

This was one of my absolute favorite dishes as a kid.  It’s creamed corn, but with the critically important additions of gently sauteed onions and red pepper, paprika and parmesan cheese.  The same term is used for either corn cakes or tamales elsewhere in Latin America (and in some of Argentina’s provinces as well), but what it means in Buenos Aires is this side dish, which can also be used as a great filling for empanadas.

In the off-season it can be made with frozen corn, blitzed briefly in food processor or immersion blender until creamy but not completely liquefied.  If you absolutely must, canned creamed corn is an option — just don’t tell me about it.

Humita (Argentine Creamed Corn)
Serves 4-6

6 ears fresh corn, shucked
1 small onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ teaspoon sweet or smoked paprika
1 teaspoon sugar (optional, if corn isn’t sweet)
Salt and pepper
1 cup grated parmesan

Grate the corn on the large holes of a box grater, placed inside a large bowl.

Heat the oil in a large saute pan over medium heat, and add the onion with a pinch of salt.  Cook until the onion is wilted but not browning, then add the red pepper and continue cooking until softened. Add the paprika and stir for a few seconds more, then add in the corn, sugar if necessary, and a generous sprinkling of salt and black pepper.  Cook for 2-3 more minutes, until the corn has just lost its rawness.

Off the heat, stir in the parmesan.  Taste and correct for salt and pepper if necessary, and serve immediately.

Notes: You could leave the cheese out to make this vegan.  If you have really, really good corn, it should come out rich and creamy enough all by itself.

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I’ve Been Slimed!

Only, you know, not, because if you’re okra-averse due to the slime factor, fried is definitely the way to go. Frying gives you a completely un-slimy result, which more than justifies the inconvenience and mess.

I first fell in love with okra not in this form, or in any typically southern application like gumbo, but in Thai food. One of our regular hang-outs adds okra to their vegetarian red and green curries. The okra’s mucilage melts into the surrounding coconut milk to create a velvety sauce, and the de-slimed rounds have a fabulously crunchy-firm texture and fresh green flavor, the exact opposite of all of offensive things I’d always heard about okra.

Since I had no time for Thai curry on the Monday I made these, I went looking for the easiest fried okra recipe I could find. Mark Bittman’s sounded almost perfect, except that I wasn’t going to batter each individual piece of okra. I opted instead for whisking together the dry ingredients, stirring in the buttermilk, then dumping in the okra to coat. It worked perfectly, the slime from the okra leaching into the cornmeal batter and thickening it so efficiently that you would have thought I’d used eggs.

We had these fritters for dinner with leftover cauliflower and potato soup from Sunday, dipping the crunchy little bites into a cocktail sauce thrown together by His Lordship from ketchup, mayo, horseradish, and some homemade hot sauce. The hot sauce was originally intended to serve as a basic red enchilada sauce, but the peppers, probably mislabeled at the farmers market, were so infernally spicy that we ended up having to dilute it down with vinegar and put it in tiny bottles to use as a pants-kicking alternative to the two commercial hot sauces we already have on hand. If I can reconstruct what went into it, I’ll write it up, because it might have been serious overkill for enchiladas, but is really quite good as a condiment.

Okra Fritters
(Adapted from Fried Okra in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)
Serves 2

1/4 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
4-5 grinds black pepper
1/4 teaspoon each chipotle and ancho powder
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 pound okra, trimmed and sliced into 1/2-inch rounds

Canola or vegetable oil for deep frying

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Stir in the buttermilk to form a thinnish batter, then fold in the okra. Let the batter sit for several minutes, long enough for the slime to release into the batter and thicken it up.

In the meantime, heat several inches of oil in a medium, high-sided pot until it burbles around a wooden chopstick or spoon handle (technically around 350 F).

With two soup spoons, scoop up around two tablespoons of batter and drop it into the hot oil. The fritters should consist of no more than three slices of okra and its surrounding batter, to keep them small enough to cook through all the way without burning the outside. Once the fritters are a deep golden brown, remove from the oil with a slotted spoon or mesh strainer and set on a rack over brown paper to drain the excess oil and cool to edible temperature.

Notes:

Should you have peanut oil around instead, I imagine that would give the fritters that much more genuine Southern appeal.

Since it’s the okra that thickens the batter, I would think that you could probably make this successfully vegan by swapping the buttermilk for soy milk.

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Drama-Free Rye Bread

While there are a number of advantages to living in our neighborhood, which is one of the outermost zip codes but still technically-within-the-urbs, access to stores is not one of them. We have just one tiny mom and pop convenience store within walking distance, so any real grocery shopping requires a car trip.

Even then, the stores that are handiest to us do not, alas, offer particularly good pickings when it comes to the bakery section. During the summer and fall months, there’s a farmer’s market near work at which I can conveniently pick up artisan bread along with vegetables during a lunchtime walk, but that hasn’t started up yet. Since we aren’t going to make a special trip into the city every weekend just for the bakeries or the farmers markets that have already phased in, that frequently means settling for whichever of the supermarket’s bland offerings don’t have a shelf life of eight months thanks to corn syrup or transfats.

This ongoing frustration is what recently prompted me to resume my long-dormant habit of baking bread on the weekends. I have neither the time nor the patience to maintain a sourdough starter again, but I have been making some lower-impact breads every few weeks while the oven is already warmed up for the Monday office treat baking.

One of my newfound favorites is this dark rye bread, which gives you deli-style payoffs with just a little more time and effort than your average quick bread. It uses a bit of a cheat, getting the complex, tangy flavor that usually comes from long fermentation from buttermilk instead, but you’d never know the difference if I didn’t tell you. It also packs in some extra heartiness by using one third whole wheat flour and a spoonful of wheat germ along with the rye and some bread flour for stretch and lift. You’d think, given all that whole grain, that it would be a dense and heavy bread, but it’s actually delightfully soft and easy to slice.

While it makes great sandwiches, the best topping I can think of for a just-baked slice of this bread is a smear of cream cheese and a glistening, sweet and tangy layer of my mother’s pepper jelly, which she was kind enough to make and mail to me after I expressed nostalgia for it. Should you have a less accommodating mom, raspberry jam or currant jelly work very nearly as well.

Buttermilk Rye Whole Wheat Bread
(From Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads)
Makes one loaf

1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) dry yeast
1 cup dark rye flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon wheat germ
1 tablespoon caraway seeds
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons molasses
2 tablespoons canola oil
2/3 to 1 cup bread flour

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the yeast, rye and whole wheat flours, wheat germ, caraway seeds, and salt. Run the mixer briefly to integrate the dry ingredients.

Heat the buttermilk, molasses and oil together in the microwave or a small saucepan until hot, 120-130 F. Add to the dry ingredients and mix at medium speed for 3 minutes. Gradually add just enough bread flour for a firm but not stiff dough to form.

Exchange the paddle for the dough hook and knead the dough in the mixer for 8 more minutes. If necessary, add more bread flour, but err on the side of a slightly sticky dough.

Place the dough in a large greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, approximately 1 hour.

Pat out the dough on a lightly floured surface to a 14 x 7 inch rectangle. Roll the dough up tightly, pinch the edges to seal, and tuck into a nonstick or greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pan. Lightly cover the pan with plastic wrap and let rise again until doubled, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until it’s well browned and sounds hollow when thumped on the bottom.

Turn out of the pan and cool completely on a rack before slicing.

Notes:

As with all yeast breads, resist the urge to slice it when it’s still warm, since the steam will promote gumminess in the still-cooling crumb.

This loaf keeps well on the counter in a loosely folded brown paper bag for several days, but you’ll probably devour the loaf well before staleness is a going concern. You can also tightly wrap the loaf in plastic and a layer of foil and freeze it for later use.

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A Tale of Two Polentas

Two polentas, both alike in dignity. They use the same coarsely-ground organic corn, the same simple seasoning of butter and grated Parmigiano Reggiano, and the same no-stirring concept. They should taste as identical as they look, right?

WRONG.

What we have here is not Shakespeare but Dickens: it was the best of no-stir polentas; it was the worst of no-stir polentas. One of them is smooth and creamy, with deep corny flavor and a wonderful, just slightly resilient body, and the other is thin, watery, and utterly flavorless. It’s with regret that I have to say that the scurvy knave responsible for the latter atrocity is Chris Kimball, for not keeping a tighter leash on his Cook’s Illustrated minions.

Polenta is not particularly challenging to prepare, but all that stirring is labor-intensive. No one wants to be standing over the stove for half an hour on a Wednesday, which is why the pre-made varieties in plastic tubes are such brisk sellers. Since I have those Wednesdays too, I’ve been using a no-stir, oven-baked polenta recipe from Madhur Jaffrey for years, but when I saw a new recipe in last month’s CI that promised to produce extra-creamy polenta in 30 minutes instead of Madhur’s 50, I was intrigued and hopeful.

On top of cooking the polenta, covered, over such low heat that burning wouldn’t be a factor, the recipe seized on the idea of using baking soda to soften the cell walls and speed up the cornmeal’s absorption of liquid. Both seemed perfectly sound in principle. What could go wrong?

Everything, it turns out.

This baking soda idea speeds up liquid absorption, all right. It lyses the hell out of the poor little starch granules and lets the water rush in like a tsunami, bloating them grotesquely up. Instead of “creamy”, what you get is gluey, and any flavor potential the corn ever might have had is diluted out into the gelatinized substrate, giving you a bowl of water-logged, gummy nothingness. It was so vile that my first impulse was to blame myself, for using cornmeal that was too fine and not up to the treatment. The recipe did insist on coarse-ground, an admonition I had not heeded because I hadn’t wanted to make another trip to the store.

So, giving the CI people every previously-earned benefit of the doubt, I marched out and bought proper, organic, coarse polenta. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I also decided to run a control by making Madhur’s recipe alongside, timing things so they would be ready at the exact same time. I would season them identically with a tablespoon of butter, two ounces of grated cheese, and several grinds of pepper, and use His Lordship as a blind taste tester. I gave CI a perfectly level playing field and a scrupulously fair chance.

It was, to quote His Lordship, “not even a contest”. It took him exactly one bite to identify which was which, and to refuse a second bite of the CI version. Even with exactly the right kind of polenta, it was still weak, watery, and wretched. Madhur’s version was not only bursting with sweet, rich golden flavor and perfect texture, but also had some lovely caramelized bits along the edges that were just a little bit chewy, like good corn bread. Giving it just twenty extra minutes and refraining from any Frankenstein’s experimentation meant the difference between a pleasure and a punishment.

The only way I could salvage the CI batch was to pour it onto a foil-lined sheet pan, cut it into squares once (further) congealed, pan-fry them until golden-brown, cover with a cloud of additional grated cheese, and broil them. If I have to give something the Full Nacho Treatment to make it palatable, Kimball, it is not anywhere in the same galaxy as “a better way”.

So it pains me to have to do this, Chris, but I’m going to have to give you the same cold shoulder I gave Alton when he let me down. There are some corners you can’t and shouldn’t cut. My departed ancestors, whose ranks now include my beloved grandmother, are very disappointed in you and your lackey, who apparently doesn’t know the difference between polenta and library paste. I want you both to go to the corner and meditate on your shameful conduct, and don’t come back out until you’ve adequately atoned.

I am not even going to share the CI recipe, because I refuse to perpetuate that atrocity. Instead, I’m going to give Madhur’s, with my full, empirically-backed stamp of approval. There’s nothing remotely shameful about this one.

In terms of what to do with polenta, while a bowl of really good soft polenta is fabulously comforting all by itself, my current favorite topping is garlicky sauteed broccoli rabe and a fried egg. The crunchy, punchy greens against the unctuousness of the yolk and on top of the creaminess of the polenta is just about perfection, which is why what CI did to the poor unoffending cornmeal is such a travesty.

Oven-Baked Almost-No-Stir Polenta
(Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian)
Serves 2

3 3/4 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup coarse-ground yellow cornmeal (polenta)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, plus more for greasing
2 ounces Parmegiano Reggiano, grated
Freshly-cracked pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 F, and thoroughly butter a lidded casserole approximately 8 inches across and 4 inches deep.

In a bowl, mix the cornmeal with 1 1/2 cups of the water.

Bring the rest of the water to a boil in a large saucepan. Salt the water, then stir the cornmeal mixture and pour it slowly into the boiling water, stirring as you go. Return to a boil, still stirring, until it thickens, which will happen almost instantly.

Immediately pour the polenta into the buttered dish, cover, and bake for 50 minutes.

Stir in the butter, cheese and pepper. Serve immediately with sauce or toppings of choice, or pour into a foil-lined baking sheet for cutting into shapes and grilling or pan-frying later.

Notes:

The recipe can be doubled or tripled, or scaled even further up, as much as your needs and your casserole capacity can take.

If you want super-rich polenta, you can swap milk for half of the water.

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As Promised

Since I somehow seem to have stumbled into a tradition of posting a lentil recipe early in every new year, here is another of my favorites.

Although it’s called lentil hummus, all it really has in common with the chickpea-based original is that it’s a chunky puree of spiced and herbed legumes. Where conventional hummus can often be bland and pasty, this is deeply dark, meaty, and savory, more like a pate. While it’s perfectly good as a dip with pita wedges or chips, I like to use it as a spread on crackers and in sandwiches, and it also works very nicely as a filling for stuffed pastas like ravioli.

The recipe originally came from Todd English’s The Olives Table, but as this is one of the books I left in storage when we were on the other coast last year, I had to recreate it as best I could from memory. When I unpacked the book and looked at the original again, I noticed that I had changed the procedure quite a bit, although I had remembered most of the ingredients wth acceptable accuracy. On reflection, I think my procedure is a little bit more forgiving of wandering away from the stove, and the results are just as good.

The idea of seasoning lentils with this mixture of theoretically clashing spices and herbs may seem weird, but I assure you that they actually all play exceptionally well together. The cinnamon, rosemary, hot pepper and allspice all wrap around each other and lift up the low notes of the lentils, giving the whole the kind of intensity you’d never expect from such a humble base of plain brown legumes and vegetables.

The fact that lentils can metamorphose into something this scrumptiously good for you is one of the reasons I’m their biggest fan, and why, if I ever rebrand this blog, it would probably have to be called something like “Cookies and Lentils”. Incidentally, this is officially my hundredth post, so it’s a particularly auspicious lentil recipe!

Lentil Hummus
(Approximated from Lentil Hummus in Todd English’s The Olives Table)
Makes 2 cups

1 cup lentils, preferably brown
3 cups water
Half of a cinnamon stick
1 whole sprig fresh rosemary or 5-6 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
3 cloves garlic, peeled
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 cup minced carrots
1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper, or 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/2 cup white wine
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary or 4 tablespoons minced fresh parsley or cilantro
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for garnishing
Salt and pepper

Combine lentils, cinnamon, rosemary or thyme, bay and garlic in a medium saucepan and cover with the water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer the until water has nearly evaporated and lentils are very soft, approximately 30 minutes. Remove the cinnamon, rosemary sprig and bay leaf. (If you used thyme instead, it will have fallen apart and can stay with the lentils.)

Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan and add the onions and a generous pinch of salt. Cook until the onions have softened, then the add carrots, hot pepper and allspice and continue cooking until the vegetables have just begun to brown. Add the wine, cover the pan and lower the heat. When the vegetables are soft, remove the cover and cook until the remaining wine has evaporated.

In a food processor or in a bowl with an immersion blender, combine the lentils and the vegetables and process until mostly smooth. Add the fresh herbs, olive oil, and additional salt and pepper and pulse again to combine. Taste and add more salt and pepper if needed.

Serve warm or at room temperature, garnished with additional olive oil. Leftovers will keep for about a week in the refrigerator, or can be frozen for later use as a pasta filling.

Notes:

This is one of those times when brown lentils are preferable to my usual-favorite green or Puy, because you actually want them to break down. I haven’t tried it yet, but red lentils should also work beautifully in this for the same reason. In that case, I’d shift the spices in a more Indian or perhaps Ethiopian direction.

The herbs and spices can be swapped around fairly liberally. For example, if you don’t have fresh rosemary, you can substitute half a teaspoon of dried rosemary in the lentil-boiling step. Similarly, if you don’t have cinnamon sticks, you can use 4 or 5 whole allspice berries in the lentil-boiling step, and add 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon to the vegetables later in place of the ground allspice. I have also thrown in lemongrass stalks or strips of lemon peel for a citrusy note in past iterations. As long as you maintain the basic idea of contrasting a sweet spice against an assertive herb, you’ll be fine.

Half a batch of this hummus can be used to turn approximately half a package of wonton wrappers into four dozen ravioli. Of course, if you have access to or can make your own fresh pasta, so much the better.

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It’s Not a Bug; It’s a Feature

Don’t you, like me, hate that moment when, in making pancakes or waffles, you mix the melted butter into the other liquid dairy products and the butter immediately seizes up? Yes, the resulting clumpy mess still works in the recipe, but it’s a dismaying sight.

What if I told you I had a recipe that not only makes that clumpy mess a good thing, but also lets you have light, crumbly, yummy biscuits with such little effort that you can add them to any working-day dinner? Or, given what is coming upon us in a matter of days, so that you can instantly have bread for your Thanksgiving table if you were so tied up with turkey wrangling that you didn’t realize until twenty minutes before eating that you forgot the rolls?

I will not say these are the best buttermilk biscuits ever, because that honor so clearly goes to Shirley Corriher’s Touch of Grace Biscuits from Cookwise that we might as well not waste time debating it. If you’ve never tried them, go out right now, do whatever you have to do to find southern self-rising flour, and make these biscuits, because they will blow your mind. (Incidentally, the first time I had them was from Shirley’s very own hand, since we happened upon her giving a cooking demonstration in Reading Terminal Market years ago when the cookbook first came out. You may envy me if you choose. I wouldn’t blame you.)

These are not as good, because they couldn’t possibly be. They do have, however, an amazingly high excellence-to-effort ratio. They come together in minutes, give you crisp edges and fluffy interiors perfect for absorbing extra butter, and you can play around to your heart’s content with adding herbs or grated cheese, or even a little extra sugar and lemon zest for a lightning-quick shortcake base.

The fact that deliberately causing clumping makes you feel like a teeny bit like a mad scientist is nothing to sneeze at either.

Buttermilk Drop Biscuits
(Adapted from America’s Test Kitchen’s Best Drop Biscuits)
Makes 1 dozen

1 cup each unbleached all-purpose and “white” whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup cold buttermilk

Adjust the oven rack to the middle position, and heat the oven to 475F.

Whisk the flours, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt in large bowl.

Melt the butter and allow to cool for 5 minutes. Add in the buttermilk, stirring until the butter seizes into small clumps.

Add the buttermilk mixture to the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until just incorporated. Using an ice cream scoop or a greased 1/4-cup measuring cup, scoop the batter and drop onto the baking sheet, spacing 1 1/2 inches apart.

Bake 12-14 minutes, until golden brown and crisp on top. Transfer to wire rack and let cool 5 minutes before serving.

Notes:

The reason that clumpy butter is a good thing is that melting and resolidifying butter into little bits accomplishes the same thing cutting cold butter into flour under the traditional method does: dispersing solid fat throughout the dough creates a fluffy end product. This gets you to the same place with much less work and mess.

ATK says you can use clabbered milk if you don’t have buttermilk on hand. To make it, add 1 tablespoon lemon juice to 1 cup of milk and let it stand until it curdles, around 10 minutes.

If you really are making these for Thanksgiving, I would use 2 cups total of all-purpose flour for a holiday-appropriate, lighter biscuit instead of the half-and-half mix I prefer for a more workaday dinner or post-Thanksgiving I-should-dial-it-back recovery brunch.

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Merci, Maman

I have been madly in love with Jacques Pepin’s mother, and more importantly with her reckless ingenuity, ever since I read The Apprentice.  I immediately knew I’d have to try her every-known-rule-breaking cheese souffle, and it was everything I had hoped and more.  I have made all kinds of variations on it since, and it has become a favorite dinner with a simple salad. Naturally, it’s a perfect brunch dish as well.

It’s flatter than a traditional souffle and just a smidge heavier, somewhere between a traditional souffle and a frittata, but it’s so beautifully, perfectly eyes-closed easy and no-compromises delicious that nothing whatsoever is lost.  For all its luxuriousness, it’s also quite a recession-friendly dish, since eggs are cheap and while it’s amazing with imported Gruyere, it’s also great with less exalted domestic cheeses.

It’s the most sublime way of using up all kinds of leftovers, too.  Previous incarnations have included pepper jack with green onion, and aged gouda with cremini mushrooms sauteed in Marsala.

Cheese and Asparagus Souffle
(adapted from Maman’s Cheese Souffle, in Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice)
Serves 4-6

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the dish
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
7 large eggs, well beaten
2 1/2 cups (approximately 6 ounces) grated cheese, preferably Gruyere
1 bunch fresh asparagus, roasted or steamed

Butter a 6-cup gratin dish and set aside.

In a saucepan, melt the 6 tablespoons butter over medium heat, then add flour and whisk over the heat until fully absorbed and starting to simmer. Whisk in the milk, and continue stirring until the sauce is thick and smooth and comes to a boil, 1-2 minutes.

Pour into a large bowl and allow to cool for 10 minutes.  In the meantime, preheat the oven to 400F.

When the sauce has cooled, fold in the eggs and cheese. Slice the lower stalks of the asparagus thinly and stir into the egg mixture, reserving the tips for garnish.

Pour the mixture into the buttered dish and bake until puffy and well browned on top, 30-40 minutes.  Serve immediately, garnished with the reserved asparagus tips and accompanied by a simply dressed green salad.

The deflated leftovers are delicious cold or reheated the next day.

Notes:

The original recipe called for five extra-large eggs, but the time I mistakenly made it with an extra egg, I preferred the additional lightness.  Since I  have to make a special point of buying extra-large but always have large on hand, I’ve scaled the recipe for the equivalent of six extra-large eggs.

I had milder Madrigal instead of Gruyere on hand, so I substituted Parmesan for the last half-cup to add sharpness.  Do the same if you’re using standard American swiss or cheddar.

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New Year, New Lentil Recipe

I no more hold with New Year’s resolutions than I do with the stupid, pointless holiday itself, but I do find myself wanting to eat slightly healthier this time of year purely out of fat and sugar fatigue.  The impulse will wear off by the next major holiday (either my birthday or Chinese New Year, depending on the year), I assure you.

Until then, this is one of my favorite dinners, just right for these post-holiday, undo-the-damage, back-to-work busy days. Lentils are healthy and frugal, so if you are the sort who makes resolutions about either diet or finances, this fits both bills. If you’re also of a superstitious bent, Italians eat lentils in order to attract prosperity in the new year, and since all the economic signs point to a crappy 2009, it might not hurt to try observing the tradition.

This is a lazy modification of mujaddarah, a lentil, rice and caramelized onion dish found around the Levant. To save time, and also because I utterly adore and completely depend on it, I cook the rice separately in the rice cooker while I make the lentils and onions on the stove, then I mix the two together in roughly equal proportions.  Doing it this way also means that any extra rice is plain and therefore suitable for other uses — say, rice pudding, if your holiday crapulence recovery time is quicker than mine.

This is a wonderfully satisfying main course with or without the optional garnish of hard boiled eggs, and it also makes a great side dish for a simply roasted chicken, fish, or other protein if you’re not a vegetarian.

Cheater’s Mujaddarah
Serves 4 as a main dish, or 6 as a side dish

2 cups basmati rice
3 whole allspice berries
1 cup lentils, preferably green or black
2 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
1 large bay leaf
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions or 4-6 large shallots, sliced as thinly as possible
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1-2 teaspoons soy sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Hard boiled eggs for garnish (optional)

Cook the rice with several pinches of salt and the allspice berries in a rice cooker or on the stove, as you prefer.

Combine the lentils with the garlic and bay leaf in a medium pot. Cover with water, bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to a vigorous simmer and cook until tender, 20-30 minutes.  Remove the garlic and bay leaf but do not drain, since the lentil liquid will be used for flavoring and moistening the rice later.

In a large skillet, cook the onions in the olive oil over medium-high heat until completely browned and beginning to crisp at the edges.  Set aside a few tablespoons of onions for garnishing the final dish, and add the ground allspice to the remainder.  Deglaze the pan with 1 to 1 1/2 cups of the lentil cooking liquid, then drain the lentils and add to the pan with 1 teaspoon of soy sauce and several grinds of pepper.

Turn off the heat and stir in half to all of the rice, depending on your prefered proportions.  Add additional soy and/or pepper to taste.

Serve topped with the reserved onions and quartered hard boiled eggs, if desired.

Notes:

Soy is not at all customary in this dish, but it adds depths of flavor salt alone does not, and compensates for the fact that the lentils and rice didn’t cook together.

No matter how many onions I caramelize for this dish, it never seems like too much, so if you’d like to up the quantity, you have my wholehearted blessing.  Red onions or shallots will produce an even sweeter, darker garnish, but plain old yellow onions work fine.

If you want to be exhaustively virtuous, you could use brown rice in place of the basmati.

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You Can Go Your Own Way

People tend to get touchy about any foods deeply tied to holiday tradition, and the humble cranberry sauce is no exception.  What seems like a simple matter of fruit and sugar has the potential to set off firestorms of difference of opinion.

My mother, for example, is a purist.  She insists on the absolute bare basics: berries, sugar, orange juice.  That’s it; no spices, no weird additions, and do not even think about chutney-izing it.  His Lordship is a fan of the congealed kind that plops out of a can in one tubular, sliceable mass — much to my initial horror, although I’ve since come to accept that we all have our food quirks and you can’t fight them.  You, for all I know, might be of the cabernet and cloves persuasion, or one of those people who blitzes raw berries and whole oranges in the food processor to create a salsa, and that’s okay too.

Me, I’m of a kitchen-sink bent.  I have been known to do all manner of messing with my Thanksgiving condimentation.  For a few years, I was determined to figure out exactly how much of my spice cabinet I could cram into there. (In case you’re curious, allspice and cranberries get along quite nicely together).  Since then, the mania has dampened and I’ve settled on a variant that is neither Mom-simple nor out-of-control wacky, one that is bright and interesting and seasonal and undoubtedly mine.

More than that, it’s me.  In this one ruby concoction is a snapshot of who I am.  Each component offers a fragment of my story and a hint about my experiences and my tastes:  cranberries for the bog obsession I developed in my New England years and quinces for my childhood, orange for my citrus addiction, ginger for all the Asian influences in my California upbringing and adult life, and vanilla bean for my food snobbery.  It all works together and, unlike my earlier spicy pyrotechnics, won’t clash with your turkey.  It’s also versatile enough to spoon over ice cream or use in my favorite post-Thanksgiving leftover application: grilled cheese sandwiches with cranberry sauce.

You’re welcome to try my story, or stick with your own.  Either way, I wish you a rich and vibrant start to your holiday season.

(Unless you’re Canadian, in which case keep up the good work!)

Cranberry Sauce with Quince, Pear and Vanilla
Makes 4 cups

One 12-ounce bag cranberries
2 fresh quinces, peeled, cored and diced OR 1/2 cup quince jam
2 ripe pears, peeled, cored and diced
1 cup granulated sugar
Grated zest of one orange
Juice of one orange, plus enough water to make 1 cup
1 pinkie-sized knob of ginger, grated (approximately 2 teaspoons)
1/2 vanilla bean, split
Pinch of salt

Pick over the cranberries and remove any squishy ones.

If using quince jam, set aside for later addition.  Combine all (remaining) ingredients in a saucepan.

Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer until the cranberries have popped and the quinces and pears are tender.  Remove from heat and let cool. If using quince jam, stir into the sauce as soon as it comes off the heat.

Cover and refrigerate or freeze until needed.

Notes:

Dumping the cranberries into a large bowl of cold water will help you sort them, since the really squishy ones will sink to the bottom while the good or mostly-good ones will float on the surface.  I then scoop small handfuls of the floating berries and run them between my fingers to catch the partially-squishy ones.

If you can find fresh quinces, they are absolutely worth buying, but some waste is inevitable because of the toughness of the peel and core.  If necessary, use a paring knife instead of a peeler, and slice as close as you can to the core without cutting into it to get as much of the fruit as possible.

If you can’t find fresh quinces, quince jam or paste can frequently be found at Latin American, Indian, Pakistani, Greek and Middle Eastern groceries.

Since this makes a large amount of sauce and we’re a small household even with holiday guests, I usually freeze half the batch for Christmas.  It will keep perfectly well for even longer than that month in the freezer, and that’s one less thing to do when you’re up to your eyeballs in holiday cookie baking and gift wrapping.

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