Monthly Archives: November 2009

Pillows of Delight

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Following my new habit of “borrowing” recipes from restaurants by pillaging their menu descriptions, I want to report another recent triumph.  “Borrowing” and “pillaging” sound so naughty, as though I’ve done something vaguely wrong or shameful.  But most of the time I’ve never even tried the dish, I’m just taking suggestions about ingredient combinations.  Really it’s more sensible behavior.  Sensible and well grounded, and a little bit sly and spicy.  Like this dish, in fact.  How convenient!

Gnocchi with butternut squash, carmelized pears, and swiss chard in a nutmeg brown butter sauce

Ingredients:
2 boxes pre-made refrigerated gnocchi (ours were from Market of Choice)
2 pears, a little underripe
1 big bunch of swiss, red, or rainbow chard (the Saturday Market had enormous bunches of the most beautiful rainbow chard I have ever seen)
1 medium butternut squash (a back garden triumph!)
olive oil
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
salt and pepper
freshly grated nutmeg
splash of white wine (optional)

Procedure:

* I preheated the oven to 350F while I peeled, halved, de-seeded, and diced the butternut squash into squares about the same size as the gnocchi.  Then I tossed the chunks in olive oil, salt and pepper on a baking sheet and baked them until the squash is tender, maybe about 45 minutes. When they were soft inside and gave slightly to the touch outside, I set them aside to cool.

* When the squash was close to done, I began melting the butter over medium to medium-high heat in a big pan. At the same time, I put some salted water on to boil for the gnocchi in a pot.

* With the butter melted and starting to darken in color a little, I added the two pears. Like the squash, these should be cubed in about the same size as the gnocchi.  If all the major players are about the same size, they play better on the fork and in your mouth.  I cranked up the heat to medium high so the pears could take on a little color, being careful not to break them up when I gently turned them so they could coat in the hot buttery bath.  After about ten minutes, when they were just getting golden, I added salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste.  Then, for a little tang, a splash of white wine.

* While pears were cooking (oh mighty multi-tasker I), I prepped the chard, tearing the leaves off the stems and chopping the stems up into fairly small pieces.  For extra flavor and extra vegetation, I mixed the stems in with the pears and let them cook until they got tender, which probably took another five or ten minutes.  I sliced the remaining chard leaves into manageable, fork friendly slices.

* With the water boiling, I plopped in the little pillowy gnocchi to the pot and the chard to the vegetable pan at about the same time.  Though the chard almost overflowed my largest skillet, while I gently incorporated it into the pears and butter sauce it wilted down amazingly quickly.

* When the gnocchi floated to the surface (that’s not true, they boiled up and threatened to overflow my stovetop!) I drained them well before adding them and the reserved butternut squash squares to the pan for some gentle incorporation.  Bearing in mind the constant food show recommendation to season each layer of a dish, I added more salt, pepper, and more grated nutmeg to taste.  When the squash squares were heated through to my liking, I served up big bowlfuls.

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The combination was delicious.  The gnocchi were soft and chewy, and though the pears and butternut squash were also soft, I didn’t feel that there was an unpleasing lack of textural variety in the dish.  The pears almost melted when they touched my tongue, and the butternut squash had taken on some crunch on the outside from being in the oven.  The bitterness of the chard with the sweetness of the pears and the warmth of the nutmeg worked amazingly well together.  Best of all, the next day the flavors had really had time to mingle and meld, and the spice of the nutmeg deepened into a more pronounced seasoning throughout the dish.  A freshly brewed, well-spiced hot cider or rum punch might be a delightful and unusual accompaniment to this, but I just had a glass of some of the chardonnay that I added to the sauce.  And that was good too.  I told my Mom about this one, and she demanded it as a weekend-after-Thanksgiving-remedy-from-too-much-turkey.  Sounds like a win to me!

Homage to Stratigraphy: Lasagna #2

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After both taking and making suggestions for improvement about the lasagna I made here, I decided to take advantage of the last few weeks of outdoor Farmers’ Markets and take a second stab.  I believe I have now created the ultimate: Wild Mushroom and Spinach Lasagna with Arugula Pesto and Sundried Tomato Cream Sauce.  Since I have had several requests, I am willing to share the recipe with y’all.  Here goes, and keep in mind that most of my measurements are approximations.

Preheat oven to 350F and make sure you have a 9×9 square glass baking dish.

Ingredients:
1/2 lb (?) mixed wild mushrooms (I used reconstituted dried shiitakes and golden chanterelles from the Saturday Market)
1-2 bags baby spinach leaves
2 bunches arugula
(your own mix for pesto, or my cheat: 3-4 TB premade pesto, to blend with arugula)
Olive oil
4 TB butter
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/4 cup flour
2 cups milk or cream (or a mixture)
Splash of white wine (if desired)
salt and pepper
2-4 TB sundried tomatoes, finely chopped
1 16oz. container ricotta cheese
1/2 cup grated mozzarella cheese
1/4-1/2 cup grated Parmesan
no boil lasagna noodles

Procedure:
1. Roughly chop the mushrooms and fry them in a medium saucepan in olive oil or butter to your liking.  Don’t rush them.  Keep them on about medium heat and wait, patiently or impatiently, until they have sucked up all the butter, expelled their own liquids, and then regained those liquids to become browned but still tender.
2. Add the spinach and cook just until it has wilted but still retains its bright green color, then set the mushroom and spinach mixture aside.
3. Meanwhile, whir together arugula, premade pesto, and a little extra olive oil in a blender or food processor (or just make your own arugula pesto).
4. In a medium saucepan, melt butter. Add garlic and cook just until fragrant. Add flour and combine well to make a roux. When flour is well incorporated and has cooked for a minute or two, add milk or cream slowly, stirring or whisking well until clumps are incorporated. Season with salt, pepper and white wine to taste.  A little grating of fresh nutmeg might also not be amiss.  Add sundried tomatoes and stir gently until thickened to your liking.
5. Combine all three cheeses
6. Assembly: spread a layer of sauce in the bottom of your pan and add a layer of no-boil lasagna noodles. Then, add layers in your preferred order. I stacked cheese, arugula pesto, mushroom and spinach mixture, then sauce in that order before adding another layer of noodles and repeating the process. Repeat until you run out of filling ingredients (should be about half a box of noodles, if you are using Barilla and a square pan). After adding the final layer of pasta, top with any remaining sauce, cheese, and/or pesto, and then add a generous layer of grated Parmesan. (If you don’t have sauce to add to the top, the final layer of noodles will not soften as nicely as they should.  I discovered this as I made my first cut.)
7. Bake for 45 minutes or until the cheese on top is browned and looks a little crunchy, and the fillings are bubbling up on the sides. If possible, wait for five minutes before cutting in, because the slices will hold together better this way.

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Enjoy.  Gorge.  Disintegrate.  Burn your mouth on the cheese and decide you don’t care, eat chilled slices you cut out of hand straight from the fridge at midnight, or have your neighbors over and just decimate the whole thing in one sitting, for I declare this the ultimate spinach and mushroom lasagna.

Dinner for one

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At the beginning of October, N. went to a literary conference in Spearfish, South Dakota.  That’s right, Spearfish.  For almost a week.  Now, I don’t even like eating dinner alone, much less rattling around the empty (all-but-dog) house in the evening and settling into bed by myself (again, aside from the dog who spent each night usurping more of my blankets).  You hear the creaking and settling of an old house much more clearly when something is out of the ordinary.

To assuage my loneliness, of course, I turned to food.  There are several items in this wonderful culinary world that N. doesn’t like.  One of them is shrimp.  I know, I must be crazy for having married him with such a deficiency (another of his dislikes is coconut.  Crazy!), but otherwise he’s pretty perfect.  So in his absence, I ate shrimp.  A recent issue of Cooking Light had a wonderful looking shrimp pasta recipe that I wanted to try out, and with the crustacean hater a full time zone away, this was my opportunity.

Shrimp, pine nuts, a little white wine, basil, and some nutmeg and pepper spiced cream made the sauce, and I tossed spaghetti into it and folded the creamy sauce around the long strands of pasta before adding a generous grating of Parmesan cheese.  Though this sounded like an excellent meal all on its own, I have been making an effort lately to be sure I include some kind of vegetable (or fruit) material in my meals, and a few julienned leaves of basil wasn’t going to cut it on this one.

I turned to tomatoes.  Our sungold cherry tomato plant, with which I’ve been having a serious love affair all summer, provided me with several generous handfuls of tiny, deep orangey-gold spheres of sweet juicy flavor explosions.  I drizzled a little olive oil over them in a small skillet and agitated them in the pan until they started to burst their skins.  Then I added salt, pepper, and two big glugs of balsamic vinegar and let it heat through until barely simmering.  Then I couldn’t stand it anymore, and ate a huge helping of tomatoes and pasta.

It was delicious.  The sauce for the pasta was creamy and luscious, punctuated by bursts of freshness from the basil, and deep, complex buttery nuttiness from the pine nuts and nutmeg.  The tomatoes, meanwhile, were tart and sweet – almost sweet enough to be dessert.  When I went back for a second helping (what can I say, I was all by myself with no one to help me enjoy the feast!), an amazing thing had happened.  Though I had turned off the stove (safety first!), I had left the pan containing the tomatoes on the cooling burner, and there was enough residual heat to begin to reduce the balsamic vinegar.  What remained was a slowly thickening syrup of balsamic and sweet cherry tomato juice, sticky and oozing among the deflating tomatoes.  I couldn’t stand it, I gobbled up the remaining spoonfuls and left the rest of the pasta for another day.

At my house, dinner for one looked like this:

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Trick or treat!

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Since Halloween was on a Saturday this year, we donned devil horns, walked downtown, and found a window seat at Davis’ Restaurant and Bar.  Right across the street from John Henry’s, Jameson’s, and The Horsehead, it offered a tantalizing view of the night’s revelers.  We whetted our appetites for the festivities with the Mezze plate, which consisted of babaganoush, hummus, and tzatziki with warm pita triangles.  I thought the cumin flavor in the hummus was a little bit too strong, but the babaganoush was really excellent.  Then our server brought around the dessert tray.  Among other delicious looking choices (two flavors of cheesecakes in tiny round presentation, a huge and luscious parfait, and a butternut squash pie) there was a creme brulee.  A chocolate and cayenne creme brulee.  I had to have it.

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Sweet, spicy, hard crackling sugar shell with a soft and creamy chocolate mousse underneath, dark and delicious.  A perfect Halloween treat.  And trick.