Author: girl

persimmon cookies

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Wild persimmons.

Last year we foraged wild (American) persimmons from an undisclosed location in our county. All the hippies we know seemed to be wild about the fruit, and having stumbled across a few trees we decided to give them a try. Persimmons being extremely astringent when not quite ripe, it was hard to gain a sense of what the fruit actually tasted like. But I collected them, made sure they were soft, and mushed them through a strainer (a process that took several hours to glean a total of two cups of pulp, making me suspect that the thrill of the chase has more to do with their underground popularity than any aspect of the fruits themselves).

Having collected the fruit in that way, I stuck the pulp in the freezer and tried to find out what to do with them. There seem to be two ways to use persimmon pulp: (1) in an English-style Christmas pudding and (2) in cookies. Because the pudding recipes I could find were heavy on the milk and best served with whipped cream, I was hesitant to go there. I didn’t want to waste my hard-scavenged persimmon pulp on a modified recipe that risked being terrible, but neither did I want to commit to something that I wouldn’t be able to eat. Also, cookies seemed kind of boring.

I stayed in this persimmon limbo for a year, and finally decided that I needed to make something with the pulp, if only to decide whether to forage again this year. After scouring the internet — by which I mean ‘using Tastebook‘ — I came up with two recipes for my first attempt. One is an English-style pudding, liberal on the brandy, which I’ll test when it gets cold and possibly make for my birthday (just as soon as I figure out how to rig up the steaming container). The other is a spice cookie recipe, advertised as ‘an old family recipe’ which I am hopeful means it was designed for use with native persimmons. The cookie recipe I made last night, with much effort — I locked up my touchy shoulder mixing up the dough; I recommend a mixer — and not a small amount of trepidation. The cookies turned out well, though, much to my relief. Substituting in canola oil and egg beaters worked fine; the persimmon flavor is not strong, but the texture is nice so even just as a spice cookie they’re enjoyable.


Persimmon cookies.

persimmon cookies

gingery butternut squash soup

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Four kinds of apples, two for eating and two for cooking.

I am generally hard-pressed to choose a favorite aspect of autumn, but apples are very close to the top of the list. Each time I come home from the farmers’ market, I bring more apples with me. More types in greater volume on every trip. Today I went in search of apples for eating (my partner takes them in his lunch, and we have decided that local minimally-sprayed-and-delicious is better than shipped-from-another-continent-and-tasteless organic) and for cooking. The soup I was planning to make last week to use up some of the squash includes apples, and I’ve been waiting to get going on it since Thursday’s market was rained out. In addition to using one of the butternut squashes, it required the last of the fresh ginger from the container in the freezer and a container of broth, so I have been excited about it for many reasons. Yes, my college Tetris addiction is manifesting in an obsession with constantly rearranging the freezer to maximize space, I admit that.

Today I made it to the afternoon market and collected more apples than I currently know what to do with, including the two I need for the soup. I’ll worry about the rest of the apples later. The soup is easy (again from Simply In Season): sauté two chopped onions and two tablespoons of minced fresh ginger in oil until the onions are translucent; add 1 chopped (peeled, deseeded) butternut squash, two chopped (peeled, cored) apples, and 4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock; bring to a boil and then simmer until the squash is tender.


Soup, in the beginning.

You are then directed to puree the soup, but I hate pureeing soups so I just usually mash everything in the pot with the potato masher instead. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever used the masher to actually mash potatoes, only for soup, although a friend once used it to get holiday cookie frosting to the right consistency before I bought the hand mixer two years ago. Back to the soup: mashing works pretty well if you are not French and don’t mind having slightly lumpy soup (the onions don’t mash). You’ll also probably want to add salt, unless you put a lot of salt in your stock. I don’t include any, and I’ve had to add salt for taste to every recipe in this book that calls for stock, which makes me suspect they’re assuming salty broth.


Soup, at the end.

And there you have it: soup. This recipe would probably adapt fine to the stronger, less sweetly flavored courge longue de Nice, which is good because figuring out what to do with all that squash is next week’s task.

gingery butternut squash soup

winter squash bars

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The freezer.

The major challenge I face with regard to processing and storing all the produce we receive with our farm share is the limited space in the freezer. We agreed to get a chest freezer this summer, but haven’t wanted to go ahead with that purchase until we get the basement repairs taken care of. Which leaves us with the fridge freezer, which is about half full of fruit from the summer (tart cherries, blueberries, and rhubarb) and 1/4 full of other prepared food (pesto, hummus, baba ghanouj, chicken stock, and tomato sauce). Which leaves about 1/4 of the freezer for regular things (butter, bread, coffee beans, salmon, and turkey burgers) and any additional prepared food I might try to fit in. You begin to see my problem, and this is after removing the bottle of gin with an inch at the bottom that my partner pointed out was occupying prime real estate in the door (‘Gin? What gin? I don’t have a bottle of gin in the freezer, what kind of alcoholic do you think I am, sheesh. Oh, that bottle of gin…’). I really should just drink that and be done with it.

One of the other containers taking up space in the freezer was a quart of cooked squash from last winter, most likely butternut. At any rate, 4 cups of squash. In order to make room in the freezer for the cooked pumpkin from this year that is destined to be pie in a few weeks, I thawed out the already-frozen squash and used it to make Winter Squash Bars:

Winter Squash Bars, from Simply in Season
(yields 24-32 bars)

Beat together in a mixing bowl:
2 cups winter squash (cooked, pureed)
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup oil
4 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt

Combine separately and then mix into the wet ingredients:
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon

Pour into lightly greased 11 x 17” jelly roll pan. Bake in preheated oven at 350F for 25-30 minutes.

As with just about every recipe I’ve made from Simply In Season, the bars were really good. In addition to using up squash, they use up eggs, 4 per batch (so if you also have more eggs than you know what to do with from, for example, your CSA, this recipe will help get rid of them). More like gingerbread than cookie bars, they were a hit with everyone: me, my partner, my friend from high school, her mother, my partner’s gaming guys. Four cups made two batches, about 5 dozen bars in all. While they still tasted good after being stored in tupperware overnight, the tops went from a nice bright orange to a bit brown; don’t be put off by that if it happens to you.

The next squash plan is soup, if I can (1) get some apples at the farmers’ market and (2) make some room in the freezer.

winter squash bars

debate number one, live!

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Dude: use The Google! Senator Kennedy was home by the time the pre-game chatter ended.

Dude: your running mate suspended them NEVER! I wonder if Obama has been told by his handlers (1) do not mention the hockey mom and (2) do not call McCain on outright lies.

Jim: I hope you are not personally responsible for the talk amongst yourselves thing you’ve got going here. Because I don’t like it. If I had a cell phone I’d text you to that effect.

Whoah there cowboy: taxing health care benefits? What? That must be true because you didn’t deny it.

First blood: ‘That’s just not true.’ I fear to make a drinking game out of how many times that phrase comes up because I’m just not that young anymore.

Dude: um, now you’re against ethanol? I’m sure it’s not because you’re overly concerned about the supply of organic-corn-fed sliced chicken. You do realize that the popularity of ehtanol has contributed to a major global corn shortage?

Dude: a spending freeze on everything except for defense? You sound an awful lot like Mister I-would-eliminate-the-IRS-and-the-Department-of-Education there.

And by ‘hard to swallow’ I mean ‘a steaming pile of poo.’

Whoah, dude: did you really just introduce Ms. Kookalooka into this debate yourself?

See, oversee, the verb of sight is see.

You forgot the one about being there a hundred years. Also, dude: didn’t locals ratting out their neighbors as a military strategy go out with the USSR?

You’re right, it’s only good to call your wife a c–t out loud, not say things like you’re going to engage a foreign country on the topic of their behavior with regard to terrorists hiding within their borders.

Second blood: Reagan name drop! Loss of limb: ‘I’ve got a bracelet, too!’

Um, isn’t Petreaus out now? Also, since when has a General ever said, ‘we’re gonna lose, but keep sending me your kids!’ Or maybe I was laughing too much about the bracelet still to have heard that right.

Whoah, dude, wtf? Holocaust whut? Yup, my concern with Iran is that if they get a nuclear weapon they’re going to start firing up the ovens? Not the same thing as starting a war with a sovereign nation, which we all agree might happen there.

Uh-oh, Russia not a democracy? I’m not sure we can all agree on that, shady elections and all.

I love it when they demonize Chavez! Darn you for nationalizing something valuable in your country, we are so jealous, you commie!

Dude, Kissinger is advising you? How retro is that!

Nice Spain shot!

Russia: democracy or no? Oh wait, that’s not the question. Aaand we get the Lugar shoutout! That one’s for you, Indiana peeps. Putin is getting confident and rearing his head over Alaska…oh sorry, wrong debate.

One: saying you voted for alternative energy is just a bald-faced lie.

Two (thanks, Mike B.!):

This is what we former teachers call A Visual Aid.

Dude: blood and treasure? Talk Like A Pirate Day was last week, my friend.

P-PPPP-OW! I guess I have to drink those 10 shots after all.

debate number one, live!

butternut squash galette

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Squash!

This summer we received a lot of squash from our farm share, and I do mean that nearly literally. Four butternut squashes and about that much again of an enormous squash called courge longue de Nice, which I had neither heard of nor seen before joining our CSA. In addition to this bounty, I picked up a couple of small pie pumpkins when they appeared at the market last week, as I’ll be bringing pies to our friends’ Thanksgiving dinner this year. When we received the first hunk of courge longue — a squash so big that only a piece of it nearly filled our weekly box — I cubed it, tossed the pieces with olive oil, minced garlic, salt, and pepper and then roasted it into submission until it was soft and sweet. I confess that I tried this approach last year and didn’t peel it or cook it long enough and it was bitter; as a result I let one of last year’s lovely huge specimens go to waste, a loss I am trying to avoid this year.

At any rate, we ate an entire dinner of squash (pretty much) and it didn’t seem to make any kind of dent in the stores. Which is good in the return on investment framework and not as good for the hope of ever eating anything other than squash again. With this in mind, I set out to discover what else I could make from our squash. For last night’s dinner (and today’s lunch) I chose the Winter Squash Galette recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I knew from my experience in the spring that I was capable of making a galette, and I happened to have everything in the recipe already in the house, which is less common than I would like when I’m trying to use Deborah Madison’s recipes. In only a few easy (but somewhat time-consuming) steps, we had dinner.

Step one: halve and deseed the squash, brush it in olive oil, stick a head’s worth of cloves of garlic (separated but not peeled) into one of the cavities, and bake facedown on a cookie sheet at 375F for about 40-50 minutes (my large squash took 50, the recipe says 40, the main thing is that the squash be tender when it comes out):

The squash cooling before being mashed up.

Step two: sauté one chopped onion in a skillet with 1 tbsp olive oil and 2 tsp dried sage (or 2 tbsp chopped fresh) for about 12 minutes until onions are soft and have changed color:

Delicious smelling onions.

Step three: mash up the squash, squeeze the soft garlic cloves out of their husks and mix it in, mix in the onions, and mix in 1/2 cup of grated parmesan or pecorino cheese (I used pecorino, because that’s what I happened to have bought on a whim on my most recent trip to the store):

Cheese! In a bowl from the White Dog Café!

Step four: let the filling cool, salt and pepper to taste, make one big galette or several personal galettes with the dough that you made already and rolled out and has been chillin in the fridge, and bake on a cookie sheet for 25 minutes at 375F (if you are making small ones, they can go on a sheet with an edge as they can be lifted out with a spatula; for a single large one I recommend no edge and sliding them off onto a wire rack pronto while they are still very hot and before the butter cools and makes the galette stick to the sheet). [Aside: I was unable to get a good photo of the finished product, so that will have to wait until the next time I make these.]

If you aren’t going to eat the whole recipe at once, Madison recommends that you store the extra dough and the filling separately and bake the galettes up fresh, and I concur. We made two more today for lunch, and I used the last piece of dough (somehow I was able to divide more evenly by five than six) to make a galette with some of last winter’s membrillo that we still have in the fridge. I haven’t had a jam tart in a very long time, and I have to say that this version was delicious. I highly recommend what I have been known to refer to as ‘sugar pie’ to everyone.

butternut squash galette