2010 Thanksgiving Menu

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Chelsea

I get excited about holidays that involve cooking waaaayyyyy earlier than I should (then again, since our Target already has a Christmas section erected, complete with at least six artificial trees, maybe I’m not totally unhealthy). I even told my mom over the phone this past Sunday that I’d probably go grocery shopping for the holiday late this week or this weekend. Right, with two weeks to go. I was already a week ahead of myself and willing to completely skip seven days of reality so I could buy a turkey.

But I love the way food impacts a holiday, and not just because I love eating. For my family, food has a binding quality. I love to cook, my mom taught me how and she loves to cook, my sister is developing an enjoyment and adventuresome spirit in the kitchen, and my dad… likes eating the food we make. But still, it gives us something to talk about, something to share with each other, and something to do together, when we are in the same kitchen. I feel close to them through the food we create.

At Thanksgiving, my mom and I make most of the dinner, my sister pipes in with seasoning suggestions, my dad carves the turkey, N. tastes things and generally tries to stay out of the way, and Lucy’s nose never stops twitching. Every hour or so, little click-clacking dog claws tiptoe into the kitchen to take a sniff and clean the floor.

So I’ve already thought through the entire menu. I know exactly what we’re having. I’m even contemplating spending my evening tonight making a detailed grocery list for the big shopping trip. Excessive? Premature? Perhaps. But so delicious.

Here’s the menu for our Thanksgiving this year:

Appetizers: whole heads of roasted garlic with soft goat cheese and toasted baguette, roasted nuts with brown sugar and rosemary, assorted dried fruit.

Dinner: herb roasted turkey with giblet gravy, stuffing, chipotle mashed sweet potatoes, creamed spinach and artichoke bake, and whole berry cranberry sauce.

Desserts: Mom’s pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and pumpkin cheesecake squares. My sister doesn’t love pumpkin pie, so this year there will be two desserts. If the recipe I invent for her works out well, I’ll post it here.

What are you having for Thanksgiving dinner this year?

Dinner for one

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Chelsea

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:

First Bounty

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Chelsea

Though we have been harvesting sugar snap peas by the bowlful for the past few weeks, and though we probably still have enough preparing for maturity on the vine for me to freeze a bagful, it didn’t feel like we really had a harvest on our hands until a few days ago, when I picked these:

I know it seems crazy, and I know I’ll be sick of it before August is over, but despite the heat and despite the impending pounds of zucchini and despite my encouragement to myself to eat better at breakfast time, I couldn’t resist. Despite all that, I made zucchini bread.

As you can see, whether it was the monster zucchini I grated up that exceeded the recipe’s requirement a little bit, or whether it was because my thrift store loaf pan was on the small side, I had extra batter. Fortunately, my sweet little too-seldom-used ramekins called to me from the cupboard, and I heeded their siren song. In addition to the loaf, we also had four big muffin-sized servings. The advantage of this was that they were ready for consumption much sooner, and consume we did. Here’s my serving suggestion:

The recipe I use for zucchini bread right now is from Bon Appetit’s latest cookbook. This isn’t the magazine, it’s the full book, and this particular version is called Zucchini Spice Bread. It has a hefty teaspoon of cinnamon added to the standard mix, and with 2 cups of zucchini as well as a cup of toasted nuts (I used pecans because I was out of walnuts, and may have liked it better with the substitution), it seems like one of the healthier quickbreads out there, as well as using up a decent amount of zucchini. And the flavor. The flavor is stupendous. Since the nuts are toasted, they donate more of a crunch and a warm richness to the bread. Because there is so much zucchini, they don’t dry out the bread too much, which is sometimes a complaint I have about nuts. The zucchini itself is mild but still present, and the bread is not too sweet. It has a nice moist crumb to it but the top gets crusty, so the whole thing is just a medley of textures that I really enjoy. Here’s to the joy of baked goods, the joy of home grown vegetables, and the very special joy of being able to eat them both at the same time!

Christmas Food part 1: Mom’s tradition

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Chelsea

Though it is a bit late for a Christmas entry (or three), between driving up and down the western coast of the country through dubious weather, packing and unpacking car, dog, and husband, and figuring out up- and downloading procedures for the new camera, whose glories are displayed below, this is the first chance I’ve had to share my festive food frolickings.Since this is (or was) a time of year for celebrating togetherness, family, and traditions, I’ll start with a contribution from Mom.

In the late days of the 20^th century (hah!), my mom cut a recipe for Cranberry-Nut Bread out of her local newspaper.Since that time, she has probably made at least 50 loaves of this moist, crumbly, fresh tasting holiday quickbread.Okay, some of them were made in the mini aluminum tins that you give out to neighbors you don’t feel that close to, but still… We’ve distributed these loaves of tart tastiness to not only neighbors, but family friends, teachers, coworkers, and this year I took up the tradition, handing out a few to our neighbors before arriving in California just in time to make more!

One of the nicest things about this bread is that it is not overly sweet.Not only do the cranberries contribute their customary tartness, but the walnuts add an edge of strangely creamy bitterness that cuts through what might otherwise be a dessert-like batter.The walnuts, and the small amount of fat in the recipe, also keep this from being an overly oily bread, though it is still quite moist.Using fresh orange juice rather than juice from a carton results, I have found, in a bread that tastes bright and sparkling, almost as if it were carbonated.The flavor is fine with premade juice, but the extra oomph from the fresh squeezed is worth the minimal extra work, in my opinion.

Mom says I can share the recipe, since after all, she received it through an act of free and willing disclosure in the first place:

Mom’s Cranberry Nut Bread

2 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 ½ tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking soda

¾ cup orange juice (I prefer freshly squeezed)

1 TB finely grated orange peel (rind only, no white pith)

2 TB shortening

1 egg, well beaten

1 ½ cups fresh cranberries, coarsely chopped (the food processor works well for this.Otherwise the cranberries roll and burst all over your cutting board, kitchen counter, and floor)

½ cup chopped walnuts

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Preheat oven to 350 degrees.Grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan.Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl.Stir in the orange juice, orange peel, shortening, and egg.Mix until well blended.Stir cranberries and nuts into the thick batter.Spread evenly in the loaf pan and bake for 55 minutes or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.Sometimes this takes as long as an hour and ten minutes, depending on the batter and the oven.Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the loaf pan to cool completely.If distributing these as gifts, it is nice to cook them in disposable aluminum tins, so that you can leave the loaf in the tin, wrap it in colored saran wrap, and bedeck with ribbons of festive colors.Makes a lovely presentation, and a welcome snack, in the late morning on Christmas Day.

Winter warm-ups

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Chelsea

Weather forecasters are often wrong.On the days when they are not, we often wish they were.So it is today, where the expected high in Eugene is to be around 30°F.At the moment, the thermometer perched precariously outside our home office window reads about 28°F.The snow that fell Sunday night and Monday morning is still coating our backyard, though the front street is now glistening wet with melted ice thanks to the brilliant sunlight today.

To combat this expected but still unusual chill, I’m using our dinner party tonight as an excuse to have the oven on for as long today as possible.With three space heaters running at full strength, the house is still cold thanks to protective, sun-blocking eaves, and house-wide hardwood floors.Last night I mixed the batter and patted out the logs for Almond and Orange Biscotti.I’ve amended the recipe for Lemon Walnut Biscotti from Bon Appetit magazine, seen here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Lemon-Walnut-Biscotti-231901.I’m substituting almonds for the walnuts, orange peel for the lemon peel, and a mixture of freshly squeezed orange juice and orange liqueur for the lemon juice in the original recipe.Then I drizzled some of them with melted semi-sweet chocolate to really make them a dessert item.These cookies require not one, but two sessions in the oven; an excellent plot for subversive house heating.

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Later, I’ll make baked acorn squash, coating the flesh with a mixture of honey, brown mustard and melted butter before shutting them up for their hour and a half required cooking time.The spinach risotto with lemon and goat cheese (courtesy of Jaime Oliver) does not call for the use of my oven, but I should be able to accomplish a healthy amount of steam from the stovetop.

Here’s to my kitchen and keeping warm!

"blackberry-eating in late September"

food, in so many words.

Category Archives: Nuts