As I promised last night, here are pictures of our Thanksgiving meal, some in-progress shots, and some of the finished dishes.
We first worked on the pies. I don’t like making pie crust, but my partner is good at it and likes it. The situation is the opposite with the filling, so while she was cutting butter and rolling dough, I was peeling, coring, and slicing apples. We put together 2 pies , and here they are before they went in the oven:
The pattern on the first one may look familiar to you.
There is generally extra dough leftover after pies are assembled, so we put it in small pieces on cookie sheets, and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar:
We had enough of those to fill 3 sheets (not to the wind).
Here are the finished pies (in late afternoon sun):
After the pies were done, I went out while there was still daylight and picked kale and chives in the garden (yes, both are still alive):
I spent about 2 hours on the cooking of dinner, and I made all the following dishes, except for the popovers.
Sweet potatoes that have been steamed, before mixing in the dressing:
After dressing (they got a little mashed from then stirring):
Mashed potatoes and celeriac (with minced chives):
Beets (white and striped):
Broccoli and purple cauliflower:
The cooked kale:
Salad:
The sauerkraut (which was merely taken out of the fridge – we made it weeks ago):
Warm, fresh popovers:
We finished dinner a little while ago, and are waiting to have room for pie. The aftermath of all this food includes, of course, a lot of dirty dishes to do:
We do have a dishwasher, but I expect it will still take a day or so to get caught up on those. We also have plenty of leftover food, so we’ll have nice big dinners for a few nights, yet.
So, I’ve been planning our Thanksgiving meal the last few days, and was working this evening on the cooking schedule. During this process, I realized that a lot of the meal is composed of very locally produced foods.
To wit, here’s what will be having, with the local connections:
- Popovers, made with eggs from a free range chicken farm about 10 miles away
- We may have some crab apple jelly on those, made by us from crab apples grown in our yard and on some trees half a mile from here
- Mashed potatoes and celery root (both from the Hampshire College CSA), with chives from our garden
- Steamed sweet potatoes with miso/brown sugar dressing
- Boiled beets (from HC CSA)
- Broccoli and cauliflower (from HC CSA)
- Sauteed red Russian kale (from our garden)
- Sauerkraut, made by us from red cabbage from the HC CSA
- Mixed green salad with dried cranberries
- Apple pies, made with Cortland apples from Atkins Farms (whose store is 1 mile from our house, and the orchard about 2 miles away)
So only the salad and sweet potatoes don’t involve products from our immediate area. Pretty neat.
Tomorrow, I’ll provide some pictures of this fine repast.
(Note: I’m writing this post while sitting in the airport. I’m about to fly to Las Vegas – more about the trip in subsequent posts.)
Last weekend I drove down to West Springfield to drop some people off at the Big E fairgrounds, and to pick up a birthday cake from a bakery there (not my birthday). I got to the bakery a little earlier than the time I was supposed to pick up the cake, so I took a short walk around the area (which I believe is the city center).
I saw this dog statue outside the public library:
Here’s the library building itself:
I thought the dog might be a unique thing, but a few blocks later I spotted another one, outside a bar/restaurant:
I suspect that these are remnants of one of those events where a city gets a bunch of fiberglass statues of a given shape, and has local artists decorate them in different ways (Easthampton did it with bears, and Springfield with athletic shoes, for example).
I then picked up the cake (which turned out to be pretty tasty – definitely better than other bakeries we’ve tried in the area).
While killing some time before I needed to pick people up at the Big E, I drove around, and ended up passing a place called Victory International Market (they don’t have a website). I thought it might be an interesting place to stop. In fact, it was. Most of the products on the shelves appear to be Russian, and there were customers and staff speaking Russian around me, so I imagine it is run by a Russian family. What I found most exciting about the place was a whole aisle full of candy. Some of the candy was from other European countries, but much of it seemed to be Russian. I got a few varieties of Russian ones, though they weren’t all actually imported. A closer inspection of the wrappers later showed that some of them are manufactured in New York.
Still, I’ll want to visit the place again sometime. I hadn’t even known it existed before, and it was just chance that I found it that day.
The other night I was cutting up several leeks to make soup. When I sliced one of them open, I found that there was some waviness inside:
I’m not sure what could have caused this. It seems like something was pushing down on the middle of the plant, forcing those center layers to buckle. Maybe it was the snowstorm of a couple weeks ago (this leek came from the CSA we participate in at the nearby Hampshire College Farm Center). I could imagine a weight of snow on the leek pushing down in such a way as to cause this, and maybe the dirt would have provided enough support to keep the outer layers intact. This is pure speculation, of course.
By the way, the soup I was making is a pretty common recipe – potato, kale, and leek soup. My version is based on a recipe out of a cook book (the New Basics Cookbook, page 100, “Winter Vegetable Soup”), but I’ve made so many alterations and omissions that it’s really its own thing now. Basically, I saute a bunch of leeks (sometimes adding celery in I don’t have a ton of leek) in oil for 10 to 15 minutes, add some thyme and tarragon and saute a bit more, then add salt and many (12-14) cups of water. Bring that to a boil, and add cubed potatoes (about 5 pounds), and boil until the potatoes are near done, then add a pile of chopped kale, turn off the heat and set aside. The kale will cook fine with the residual heat. I soak and cook the chick peas separately (2 cups dried), and then add them after the rest of the soup is done. The soup is great with a big slice of bread.
Oh, and there was no discernible difference in taste because of the waviness of the leek.
We’ve collected a number of recipes that use chestnuts, some of which we didn’t end up liking. The one that has been the best was chestnut flour pancakes. This is the recipe that we started with, and I converted the metric measurements to English (and the weights to volumes). I further changed the proportion of white flour to chestnut flour. Here is the form of the recipe I currently use:
.75 cups white flour
.5 cup chestnut flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 tbsp oil
To make the chestnut flour, we just take the good meats and grind them up in a small food processor. Then we store the flour in the freezer until we want to use it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, peeling the roasted chestnuts is hard on the hands. We did roasting again in 2010, though we hardly got any chestnuts that year. This year, we wanted to see if there was a way to make things softer and easier. From some more research, we decided to try boiling the chestnuts instead of roasting them. The prep is the same – cutting an X in each nut – and then they get boiled in a pot for 20 minutes.
Boiling seems to make a big difference in the softness of the shells as well as the tenderness of the meats. Our hands no longer hurt from the peeling, and we weren’t finding a significant number of hard nut meats. Some sites say that it’s nice to boil the nuts and then roast them briefly to finish them, but we found with the nuts this year that the boiled ones taste just fine. They’ve been great, and we’ve got a lot of flour put up at this point, as we had another bumper crop of nuts.
And chestnut pancakes have become our regular Saturday breakfast for the past 6 weeks or so. We’ll probably have them again tomorrow.
I have alluded briefly in previous posts to our having chestnut trees on our property. There is one in the front of the house, by the driveway, and one on the edge of the backyard. Both are by the property line with one of our neighbors.
Chestnut trees are odd for a couple of reasons. One is the flower shape (the male flowers, as the trees do have 2 kinds). They are very long and thin flowers. Then there are the fruits in which the nuts themselves grow. The fruits are spiny all over, and those spines are very sharp and painful (you only want to pick the things up with thick gloves on).
In the late summer, the fruits begin to fall off the trees, and split open (sometimes in that order, sometimes in the reverse). We usually try to do a daily check to pick up the latest nuts that can be found on the ground. The empty spiny husks we leave to dry out (eventually we collect them to be burnt in our wood stove).
The first year we lived in this house (2008), we discovered the hard way that chestnuts provide a home for babies. Baby insects, that is. The first time we had collected a lot of nuts we just put them in a paper bag on the kitchen counter. After several days, we could hear noises coming from the bag – and it turned out that lots of little larvae had chewed their way out of the nuts and through the bag, and were crawling around on the counter (presumably looking for someplace to pupate). We ended up throwing out a lot of those nuts.
In 2009, we got tons of nuts, and figured out from various sites on the Internets that refrigerating the nuts was a good way to keep the larvae at bay. So we’d leave the nuts on the counter to dry for a day or so, then bag them and put them in the fridge. When we had a chance, we’d cook them.
Cooking them involved first cutting an ‘X’ in each one, i.e. making two intersecting cuts with a knife, so that steam doesn’t cause the nut to explode. That cutting is not hard to do, as the shells are fairly soft compared to other nuts. We initially roasted them in the oven for 20 minutes or so, and then wrapped them in a towel to steam for a few minutes (to help soften the skins and make them easier to peel). Peeling them was the worst part, as the flaps of shell created by the cuts would have opened outward, but also hardened a bit, so one would have to grasp pointy parts and pull them apart. This could be somewhat painful, and on a few occasions drew blood.
Once each nut was peeled, we’d cut it open and examine it. Some nut meats would need bad spots cut out, and some would be really hard and would just get rejected outright. We’d always eat a few while doing this, and then put the rest away for later use.
As you can probably tell, processing chestnuts is a bit time consuming. The process of cutting slits in a batch of nuts (approximately 70 to 80 of them), roasting, peeling, sorting and such, would generally take 2 to 3 hours. That second year, we had so many that we had to devote most of our evenings over 3 weeks or so to dealing with them.
Next post: What we do with the nut meats, and finding a better way.
Not long after I started this blog, in the Autumn of 2005, I posted a recipe for pumpkin pizza. I’ve recently made another (delicious) variant on that recipe.
The crust is the same, as is the amount of gouda cheese. This version uses more pumpkin or squash, covering most of the cheese surface. Besides the gourd, the other topping is sauteed leeks, which are placed between the cheese and crust (i.e. the leeks go on the crust after it’s spread, followed by the cheese and then squash). It’s a wonderful meld of flavors, and needs nothing else. I made this variation for the first time a couple of weeks ago, using pie pumpkins, and made some more such pizzas tonight, this time with acorn squash. Yum.
So this evening well after dinner, as often happens in our house, I was cooking a meal that we’ll eat for dinner the next few nights. I was criticized for the fact that it smelled good, but was not to be eaten right away. The conversation turned to the suggestion that perhaps I should make things that are unappetizing, so as to avoid this situation.
Among the ideas we came up with were things like franks and beans (somewhat unappetizing even to those in the household who aren’t vegetarians). This ended up morphing into pieces of hot dog in sloppy joe sauce. We quickly dubbed these Sloppy Dogs, and had a good laugh.
Then, we thought to check Google, and found that they already exist.
(and, dare I say it, some of them sound kind of good)
P.S.: In related news, I saw this post this evening on the blog Cookrookery, and couldn’t resist adding some suggestions in the comments.
On a trip to Michigan over the July 4 weekend, I decided to finally go visit a place that I’ve known about for over 15 years. For that length of time, I’ve been cooking using recipes in various cookbooks published by The Moosewood Restaurant (or rather, by members of the collective that runs the restaurant).
The restaurant is located in Ithaca, NY, which is just far enough from expressways in the state that it isn’t a convenient stop if one is crossing through. I figured I should finally take the extra time required to go have a meal there, and see just what the place is like.
It’s located in an old building that’s been made into a little mall. This is the building:
And here are exterior and interior entrances to the restaurant:
They have a very large repertoire of recipes, as they’ve put out more than a dozen different books over the years. As a result, they don’t have a set menu – they offer small lunch and dinner menus that change daily.
I had a bean burrito with onions, peppers and hot sauce, served on a bed of brown rice. Also had a bottle of local ginger beer, and a blueberry-apple cobbler for dessert. The food was good, but ultimately no better than I’ve had at other vegetarian restaurants, and somewhat pricier. I’m glad I made the trip once, and I’ll certainly eat there again if I find myself in Ithaca, but I won’t go out of my way to return to the place.
One of the more fun presents I got for Xmas was a package of Giant Pocky. For those not familiar with the Japanese confection known as Pocky, it is crunchy sticks coated in chocolate (or other flavors not shown on the page I linked to – of which there are many). I’m a big fan of Pocky, though don’t eat it all the time because it tends not to be cheap. I’ve tried several flavors, but never the Giant ones, though I believe they were probably reviewed by Ms. Boo (though I can’t find a review in her snack review archives). The Giant version are quite a bit bigger than the normal kind; I photographed them here next to an ice-cream truck for comparison:
As you can see, the scale is well above that of a human vehicle. Giant, indeed.
Regular-sized Pocky has the sticks grouped in bags within the box – at least 4 sticks to a bag. These are individually wrapped:
When unwrapped, they look like the usual chocolate kind, only bigger:
And they taste about the same, except that the biscuity stick taste (kind of like a barely-sweet cracker) dominates the chocolate more, perhaps because the chocolate layer is not as thick in proportion. They’re still tasty, as they use a slightly bitter chocolate on these (as opposed to Men’s Pocky, which is even more bitter). They’re still good, and I’ll definitely eat the whole box (though it will take a while to go through).
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