baking

winter squash bars

girl, , , Leave a comment


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

butternut squash galette

girl, , Leave a comment


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

summer of pie

girl, , Leave a comment


My first cherry pie.

This summer has been full of pies, and I expect I’m not quite done yet as I’ve promised a friend a peach pie for her September birthday. The peach pie will be the sixth pie of the summer, and I think that’s a nice round number. I’m sure there will be apple pies and sweet potato pies and the like in autumn, but we’ll take those when they come.

To kick off the pie making, we celebrated the 4th of July by having dinner with the family of my good friend from college, to which my contribution was a cherry pie. I had planned to make a peach pie, knowing that was a favorite of our host, but the folks at the fruit stand assured me that the only local peaches good for pie-making didn’t ripen until later in the summer. Despite my best efforts to seek assurances that the peaches they sold for eating fresh would be fine in pies, they held steady and advised me to go with their fresh tart cherries. I wasn’t a hard sell; cherry pie is my favorite. Knowing that tart fresh cherries are hard to find and wouldn’t be available long, I took the plunge and snapped up ten quarts, enough for five pies. Two of those quarts I made into a delicious pie, and eight of those quarts I pitted and froze for use later in the year.

Despite what we might assume about pie, it wasn’t a given that the cherry pie would be delicious. Mostly because I have been experimenting with whole wheat crusts and wasn’t entirely sure how that was going to turn out. Using the newly widely available Organic White Whole Wheat flour from King Arthur, I can say that their ‘just like white flour but brown!’ advertising is truthful. Unlike with traditional whole wheat flour, the white whole wheat flour performs pretty much the same in recipes; it has a subtly different taste, but it’s not as grainy or flat as replacement with traditional whole wheat flour tends to be. It’s more brown, which bothers some people but I personally like. I’ve also discovered that the crust recipe I use is perfectly suited for assembly in a food processor, which boosts the performance of the wheat flour as the dough is only minimally handled. The other factor in the cherry pie, which wasn’t likely to impact the taste, was the lattice top, another first for me. I went, shall we say, rustic with it: I made the strips of dough wider and included fewer of them, making the whole lattice assembly go more quickly and easily. In the end, of course, it was a delicious homemade cherry pie and nobody noticed any of the things I’d worried about (the above plus my concern that there was more juice than there should have been in the filling and my overcompensating by adding in some tapioca).

Following the cherry pie success, I made an apricot-ginger pie just because the fruit folks had fresh apricots that reminded me of the tree my grandparents used to have at the side of their house. That pie was ok — it was a homemade pie — but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy apricots again in the future. If I had a tree in my yard, the pie would be a perfectly reasonable way of using them if I weren’t planning to spend hours making jam. Since I don’t, it was a good experiment that I fed mostly to my partner’s weekly gaming crew.

After a lull in pie-making during which we traveled around and recovered from being ill, I made three blueberry pies in the course of a couple of weeks. In the past I’ve been loathe to use the fresh blueberries for pies, but by the time they make it back to our fridge the oldest ones are invariably starting to wilt a bit, making them ideal for baking. Blueberry pies are always an appreciated contribution to a dinner with friends, which was the destiny of two of the pies, and a handy way to welcome new neighbors, which was the destiny of a portion of the third pie. Not all pies get more tasty after a day in the fridge, but I find that my favorites typically do: cherry, apple and blueberry (now you know).

In the course of all this pie-making and transporting, I had the opportunity to use my handy pie carrier — for which I was heartily mocked last year when I purchased it, I must say, the phrase of choice being something like ‘how often are you taking a pie somewhere really?’ I still think it’s one of the best investments of $8 I’ve made for the house, and have found that almost every time I make a pie it’s headed to someone else’s house. I was, though, disappointed to discover that the crust guard I received as a gift a couple of years ago doesn’t fit on my large pie plates, but I’m hopeful that it will still fit on the smaller metal one. And, I can continue to heartily recommend the Williams-Sonoma Pie and Tart cookbook, as the blueberry and apricot-ginger recipes came from them (the cherry pie recipe did not, but instead from Bon Appétit via the internet, as the Williams-Sonoma recipe called for canned cherries).


Pie never lasts long at our house.

summer of pie

Even’ Star Organic Farm party

girl, , , , , , Leave a comment


Rhubarb Ginger Galette, round two.

We celebrated Memorial Day by attending a party at ‘our’ farm: Even’ Star Organic Farm, where we’re members of the CSA. We’d had a fun time at the autumn party and enjoyed the drive down, which included stopping on the way for pumpkins and honey at a farm stand in Dunkirk. This time we drove straight through, and arrived for a gorgeous afternoon.

Having taken the farm tour last autumn, we opted for eating the delicious food, drinking the tasty Weiss beer, and lounging around. My contribution to the desserts was a Rhubarb Ginger Galette with a half-whole-wheat crust; it was meant to be all whole wheat, but I mistook the bags of flour and dumped the remaining white flour into the bin by mistake. I was glad that I had planned to make and bring two galettes, as that meant I already had a backup plan in place when the first one wasn’t ready for prime time: I forgot to strain out the excess liquid from the fruit and inadvertently omitted the butter that would have thickened the filling, which combined with a small tear in the crust to create a gooey puddle around one half of the pan. This first round also helped make clear that the galette needed to cool on the sheet; once we’d let it cool that way overnight it slid off onto a board without a problem. Probably the French have some large flat galette-removing spatula-type implement, but I certainly don’t.

Having an afternoon party meant no bonfire, but it did mean that we could explore the woods a bit more. Once we’d eaten, we trooped off in search of new birds. As promised, we sighted several Indigo Buntings in the fallow fields near the house. Buntings, like bluebirds, are common in the right habitat in this region, but I’d yet to see one. I still haven’t gotten over the surprise of seeing such blue birds, so it was a thrill to see them popping up over the grasses. On the drive in we’d seen a true Black Vulture in a group that was devouring something on the grassy median of the road. It was unmistakable with its deep black plumage, gray face and white beak, and it was a thrill to get such a good look at it on the ground after years of peering into the skies hoping not to see the flash of red on the faces of what always turned out to be Turkey Vultures. In addition to those long sought after life birds, we lucked out and spotted a mature Bald Eagle circling over the treeline. It was only the second time I’ve seen an eagle in adult plumage, and the first for my partner, so that was a great treat. No trip to a farm is complete for me without sighting a few amphibians, and the best part of the day was seeing a juvenile salamander that the kids had collected from the stream. The frogs and tadpoles were lovely, of course, but the little guy with gills still on was particularly nice.

On the way back home we stopped to check on Solomon’s Island Winery, which is quite small and run by a couple basically out of their home. The property is smaller than my family’s blueberry farm, which means that it would be virtually impossible for them to grow their own grapes. The wines were largely low alcohol fruit-flavored varieties—coolers in a bottle seem to be a popular item in Maryland—with only a couple of serious labels. The Meritage was decent and tasted like a Bordeaux, as advertised. The Icewine was also a fine dessert wine; we bought a bottle, and it made me regret not tasting the Eisling when we were at Boordy Vineyards earlier in the weekend. Overall, though, I would recommend sticking with wines by actual vineyards, from regions where the terrain is more suitable to growing grapes.

Having fulfilled our farm-related duties for the season—sent in our check, attended the party—we now sit back and let the food come to us. Not too shabby!

Even’ Star Organic Farm party

high fiber muffins

girl, , , , Leave a comment

Over the past month we’ve been shifting to a high-fiber low-saturated-fat way of eating in our house. Because of my eating choices — no mammal flesh, no dairy — we largely ate this way already. Largely hasn’t been good enough, though: my partner’s cholesterol is unacceptably high. Not just high overall, but inverted on each individual measure (high triglycerides, low HDLs, high LDLs). So, we’re (as my students used to say) taking it to the next level.

The next level, such as it is, involves no butter, egg substitutes, and whole wheat flour (we already bought whole wheat bread and high fiber cereal, just because those generally contained the smallest amounts of sugar). It also involves salads every day, which isn’t difficult with the food from our farm share and the community garden streaming in, and fish oil supplements. In addition to boosting fiber and shifting to exclusively using non-animal fats, I’ve also been trying to include things like rhubarb and walnuts in our meals, both of which are purported to specifically contribute to lower cholesterol.

In the course of trying to find something that’s tasty and moderately sweet that meets these criteria, I have been baking variations of the muffin recipe from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home (one of my favorite cookbooks for food that’s delicious and easy to make). While the recipe doesn’t call for whole wheat flour, I find that I actually like the muffins better when made that way. And, most of the variations call for walnuts!

Muffin Madness

wet ingredients
1/2 cup egg substitute (equal to 2 large eggs)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3/4-1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

dry ingredients
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

additional ingredients
blueberry lemon
1 1/2 cup blueberries (add to wet ingredients)
1 tbsp freshly grated lemon peel (add to wet ingredients)

banana nut
1 1/2 cup mashed bananas (add to wet ingredients)
1 cup chopped walnuts (add last)
optional: handful of blueberries

zucchini
2 cups grated zucchini (add to wet ingredients)
1 tsp cinnamon (add to dry ingredients)
1/2 tsp cardamom (add to dry ingredients)
1/2 cup raisins (add at end)
3/4 cup chopped walnuts (add at end)

apple
2 cups grated apples (add to wet ingredients)
1 tsp grated lemon peel (add to wet ingredients)
1/2 tsp cinnamon (add to dry ingredients)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (add at the end)

rhubarb
1 1/2 cup diced rhubarb (add to wet ingredients)
1/2 to 1 cup chopped walnuts (add at end)
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon (add to dry ingredients)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, mix together the wet ingredients, then stir in the additional ingredients and mix well. In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients. Combine wet and dry, being careful not to overmix the batter. Spoon the batter into oiled standard muffin tins, and bake for 20-25 minutes, until puffed and golden (test with toothpick; they are done in my oven, which tends to need more time, after 23 minutes). If you are using mini-muffin trays, only bake for 10-15 minutes. Each plain muffin is listed as having 220 calories; I don’t know how much the adjustments to the recipe might change that.

Finally, the recipe emphasizes that the basic ingredients do not make a plain muffin: you must choose a variation to get the delicious end product!

I’ve been making a batch of these at least once, usually twice a week. We eat them warm for breakfast or as dessert in the evening, and then with our lunches through the week. I like each of the variations in their own way. The banana ones are sweeter, and I tend to use less sugar (more like 1/2 cup, especially when I’m putting in blueberries). The zucchini ones require more sugar because of the strong spices; they were more like a savory bread when I used only a minimal amount of sugar. I’ve made the rhubarb ones most often (and tucked away chopped rhubarb in the freezer, for when the season’s over), and the tartness of the rhubarb is nice. Maybe you have to have grown up in the Midwest to appreciate rhubarb? At any rate, we like it.

My serving recommendation: warm, with a big cup of strong coffee.

high fiber muffins