Herbed Garlic Squash Fries

The credit for the concept of squash fries totally goes to my beautiful friend Clara, who is very clever in the kitchen and also good at the “use up what’s left from the CSA” game. She mentioned the idea in a facebook status, and since Charlie is not the biggest fan of squash (but I am), and we both like oven fries, and since we have a ton of squash from our CSA, it had to be done.

Clara gave me some basic directions, but I promptly forgot them and may have even deleted them. I did not go on an internet hunt for them. Instead, I ran with Clara’s concept and made up my own lovely little side dish. I had a delicata squash that looked like it would be a perfect size for Charlie and I to share. Since I love thyme and squash together, I went out to the back deck, in my slippers, in the cold, in the dark, with my pair of kitchen scissors, and stabbed at my herb garden, hoping that some of the thyme was still alive. Some of it was… but not a lot. Thyme is a pain in the ass to deal with when all of it is in good condition, so when some of it is sad, it is a frustrating time indeed.

The next roadblock was the cheese. My dream of these fries included them being crusty with garlic and parmesan cheese, but when I looked in the fridge, the familiar canister was not in its home. I then remembered the wonderful spinach fettucini with homemade alfredo, served with a breadcrumb stuffed portabella mushroom that Charlie had made for me the other night. It was awesome. What was not awesome was that he forgot to tell me that we were out of both parmesan cheese and parchment paper. (I can easily forgive him after a dinner like the one I just described.)

Time to go to Plan B. I really wanted that coated, crispy brown edge that the cheese would have given. I looked in the cabinets. Nutritional yeast to the rescue! If you’ve never used nutritional yeast before, you can get it in the bulk section of most natural foods stores, or in a shaky container just like parmesan cheese! It’s actually a great vegan substitute for parmesan cheese, so I liberally sprinkled that into my mix instead. Most nutritional yeast is also fortified with Vitamin B12, which is difficult for veg*ns to get enough of, so sprinkle some on your garlic bread and mix it in your mac & cheese. Or… make these fries! We served this meal with Milo’s Kale Chips (currently in season in the tri-state area!) and Gardein Veg*n “Chicken” Tenders.

P.S. I’m still looking for awesome apple suggestions! What would you do with a half bushel of apples?

Ingredients

1 medium delicata squash (butternut or other similar variety would be fine, too)
extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup nutritional yeast (or parmesan cheese)
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
3-5 cloves garlic, minced
coarse salt to taste

Directions

Peel the squash, cut lengthwise, and remove all the seeds and stringy bits. Slice into small strips. Try to cut them evenly so they’ll cook evenly.

Dump the squash into an appropriately sized bowl. Add just enough olive oil to coat them. Toss them with your preferred utensil to make sure they’re evenly coated. Add the garlic and thyme and toss again. Add nutritional yeast and mix it up a bit more to ensure that the nutritional yeast evenly coats the pieces.

Spread the fries in a single layer on a nonstick baking sheet coated with a quick spray of oil, or, if your partner didn’t use up the rest of the parchment paper without telling you, you could use that if it’s more convenient.

Bake at 400*F for 20 minutes or until the fries are soft in the middle and browning on the outside. Don’t forget to give them a good shuffle once in a while when they’re in there. If you feel like it, put them on broil for about two minutes at the end to get them a bit more crispy.

Earl Grey Tea Cakes

(Shh, they’re vegan!)

I have just realized the tragedy that has occurred. These cakes never got posted. I made them ages ago!

I’d made Casey’s Chai Cake when we had company because I thought it would be more popular than the slightly odder sounding Earl Grey cakes, but we have a fabulously fragrant Earl Grey that I’ve been dying to bake with. After I made the Chai cake, I knew I had to do it, pronto!

I made these in a new (to me) silicone baking pan my mom gave me since she never uses it. I’ve never used silicone pans before, and it was a muffin tin that was very deep. I’ve been very skeptical about silicone before, but they popped right out and looked adorable! I’m very happy to add this to my collection and I’m sure I’ll use it often.

I had some soymilk to use up, so I took the opportunity to make these vegan, and Charlie had no idea until I told him. Be sure that if you’re going to glaze these, you use the Earl Grey infused soymilk as the liquid for the frosting, otherwise, the somewhat subtle taste of the tea will be lost underneath the sweetness of the plain glaze! Be careful about your tea selection – you want an Earl Grey that has a lot of bergamot in it.

Love how the blueberries got the glaze all pink!

Ingredients

Cakes
1/2 cup Earth Balance
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2-3 tablespoons natural sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/4 cup Earl Grey Soymilk* (I used vanilla soymilk as a base – you may want to add 1 tsp vanilla if you’re using plain milk or plain soymilk)
1 tablespoon commercial egg replacer (or milled flax + 2 tablespoons warm water)
1 teaspoon Earl Grey loose leaf tea leaves, finely ground with mortar & pestle
dash of lemon juice

*To make Earl Grey Soymilk, heat 1 3/4 cups milk in a saucepan on low-medium heat. When bubbles form around the edge of the pot, add about 9 grams of loose leaf tea (about 3 teaspoons) in a filter or 3-4 tea bags. Let steep for 5 minutes. Cool.

Glaze
1/4 cup Earl Grey Soymilk
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice (or to taste)
1 cup confectioners sugar (or to desired consistency)
1/4 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (optional, for decoration)

Directions

Cream the Earth Balance and natural sugar together in a medium or large bowl. Since the ratio wasn’t totally even, it won’t come out perfectly creamed, so just give it a good mix. In a separate small bowl, mix the milled flax and warm water together until it gets gooey, then add that to the sugar mixture. Add the dash of lemon juice.

In a separate bowl, mix the whole wheat pastry flour, the baking powder, and the salt together. Slowly add a bit of this dry mixture to the creamed mixture, stirring constantly or mixing with the paddle attachment of your stand mixer. Alternate from time to time with some of the 1 1/4 cups of Earl Grey soymilk. Add a little of each until they are all mixed in. Stir in the Earl Grey tea leaves.

Pour into the silicone baking pans. You can use prepared cupcake pans with liners or that have been greased if you don’t have silicone pans.

Bake at 375*F for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Let the cakes cool for several minutes before removing them from the silicone molds.

Meanwhile, make the glaze. Add the remaining Earl Grey soymilk, lemon juice, and confectioner’s sugar until you reach the desired consistency. Making the glaze too thick with confectioner’s sugar may take away from the Earl Grey flavor. If you desire a super thick glaze, you may want to consider using bergamot extract.

Dip the tops of the cakes into the bowl of glaze and garnish with blueberries if desired.

Apple Walnut Salad with Grilled Portabella

Just thought I’d share an incredibly amazing salad that I just threw together consisting of almost all local produce. In fact, I think the only veggie in here that isn’t local is the portabella mushroom.

I got a bunch of great salad-y things in the farm share today, and Charlie (not the biggest salad eater) won’t be home for dinner. I basically started throwing things in until this monster was born. It’s got protein (including a tiny little bug I just fished out… hmmm, guess I should wash the lettuce more thoroughly next time) and good fats and it tastes incredible.

leftover grilled portabella mushroom (in a soy sauce marinade)
red leaf lettuce
carrots
celery
sweet peppers
cutting celery (it’s a really green, almost herby thing)
small apple, chopped
couple tablespoons of walnuts
tablespoon or two of pepitas (shelled pumpkin seeds)

I’d originally thought about throwing some cheddar cheese in there, but it just didn’t need it. The smokiness of the mushroom, the sweetness of the apple, and the depth of the walnuts, and since my pepitas were salted, the saltiness of that… It was awesome! Highly recommend you try it… minus the tiny bug.

On another note, we went apple picking a week ago, and I have nearly a half bushel of apples still. I did make turnovers, and I did make two mini pies, but you see, that baking was done when our friends Ben & Emily came to visit after they were in the area apple picking. So, we really didn’t use many of our apples since they brought a ton with them, too.

My Harvest Fruit Crisp has been on my brain (I can almost taste it), but I’m definitely going to have apples left after that. If all else fails, I’ll make Overflow Apple Butter and give it away, since clearly, for me, it’s all about the actual experience of picking apples rather than the need to have nine million apples in my house. I’ve made it abundantly clear that I prefer pumpkin for my fall baking and cooking.

So what should I do with all these apples?

This is what we’re working with, here. You can see there’s even a few extra hidden back there in my bowl of squash. Do you have a favorite recipe that I should try? Or is there something you wish you knew how to make that you want me to experiment with?

Lentil Leftovers Hand Pies

Usually I try to post things that are my own brilliant ideas, creative creations, or invented recipes, but this week, I saw something someone else had made and I just had to make it and share it with everyone.

First, a confession: I am the worst person at making the most ridiculous, giant pots of soup on the planet. They come out delicious and wonderful, but… in obscene quantities. I put on some stock simmering, then chop up some of this vegetable, then decide that some of that vegetable could go in, then, OOH, I didn’t realize we had some of this left! and so on and so forth. And then the beans and the grains expand more than you thought they would, you have to transfer to a bigger pot, et cetera, et cetera. Even when I try to make a small batch of soup, we have leftovers for days.

And that’s what happened this week. It had been raining for days and the forecast said more rain. It was cold in our house. So I made a thick lentil stew with veggies from the farm share. (This is your recipe, if you’re wanting one…) An onion. Some garlic. A potato. A couple of carrots. Some miscellaneous greens (beet greens and something else that I’ve never been able to identify but tastes mildly cabbagey). Some barley. A giant, ripe heirloom tomato. Most of a cup of lentils. I threw it together with some bullion cubes and a few bay leaves, some parsley and thyme from the garden, and let it all cook down for a long while.

The soup was great, and incredibly filling, which is why there was way too much soup. Another contributing factor was that Charlie stopped by our favorite local bakery to pick up some hearty marbled rye bread to go with it. So, in our fridge there was a big container of leftovers.

And that day, The Cast-Iron Darling posted a recipe for Chili Hand Pies made with leftover chili.

Brilliant! Perfect! It’s a rare treat to find empanadas that are vegetarian, let alone hand pies. I thought about mixing in some cumin and making the lentils more like a taco filling, and I thought about putting some cheese in there, but in the end, I just left them alone. I made a pie crust from scratch using (you guessed it) Charlie’s Consistent Win Pie Crust, except I used half whole wheat flour and half all purpose flour. I would have tried out The Cast Iron Darling’s recipe, but it required eggs and we had zero, which is also why there is no eggwash on my hand pie.

I got about six out of Charlie’s recipe, though I still have lentil stew left and am thinking of making another round.

Charlie and I had them for dinner one night, and I also had one for a snack after I’d frozen them. I put it in the microwave for two minutes and it came out perfectly. The crust stayed crusty and everything.

Thanks, Cast-Iron Darling, for this awesome idea!

And the winner is…

When I posted the teapot for the giveaway last week, I was a bit jealous that one of you was going to get it. And the more I looked at it, the more jealous I got. In fact, if I hadn’t just bought a really sweet teapot a few weeks ago, I probably would have to snatch one of these up for myself.

But what you all probably want to know is who gets to serve tea from that lovely little thing.

With help from random.org, the winner is Julia! Julia, I’ll be emailing you to get your information so we can get you your new teapot.

Thanks again to the folks at CSN Stores for providing us with this lovely gift. If you’re totally bummed that you weren’t the winner, you can buy one for yourself here. They even come in a whole bunch of other fancy colors, so check them all out. It’s just too cute to pass up.

And finally, thanks to all of you who came by to check out this giveaway. I hope you’ll stick around to try some of my recipes. :)

Season Wrap Up

I’ve pretty much thrown in the towel in terms of my garden for the fall. I got a lot busier than expected (which is great! I’m taking an art class and a yoga class!) and the weather has been really weird. It’s hot, then it’s cold, it’s dry, then it rains buckets. Sure, these are things that farmers have to contend with, but even the farmers I know have said that it’s been a rough season in some ways.

A few weeks ago it seemed like our groundhog friend was gone for the year. They tend to have a summer home (under our shed) and a winter home, and in September, ours wasn’t appearing in our yard multiple times a day. I thought again about planting some greens like spinach and kale, but being busy, then the weather, and then having a flare of my fibromyalgia decided for me that it would not be so.

Due to the groundhog’s frantic eating of everything, our pumpkins never really got anywhere. They’re still flowering (we’re thinking about eating the squash blossoms) but it’s obviously too late for them to make pumpkins.

Let me run down the other things I’ve planted and whether or not it was successful.

Broccoli: Total fail. I planted it in a spot that I thought would be sunny enough, and it was not sunny enough. They looked a bit like frankenstein broccoli because of all the twisting and turning they did to try to get to the sun.

Peas: Died in the ridiculous temperatures.

Honeydew: Made several melons, though we had a hard time figuring out what the right time to harvest them was.

Container Kale: Bolted.

Watermelon: SUCESS! We ate one of them on a camping trip. I couldn’t believe it.

(That’s my partner, Charlie, by the way… I’m not sure if he’s ever appeared in photos on here!)

Corn: It was majestic. But the squirrels ate most of it before we did. It was a sight to see.

Kohlrabi: Another winner. Tasted great! I already bought some seeds to try purple kohlrabi early next year.

Eggplant: As you might remember, these were not from seed, they were seedlings from Farmer Rich. They were awesome! They produced all summer (we might even get another one or two small ones out of it) and we’ve had some delicious dinners from them. I’ve got more in the freezer, too.

Carrots: The jury is still out on these. Not sure if they’re really doing what they’re supposed to underground. We’ll try them again next year if they don’t work out.

Herb garden: It was awesome! I’ve been drying bits of the herbs to save for the winter.

Scallions: Better late than never. They are beautiful – not quite as big as the ones Farmer Rich sends us, but still delicious.

And one final surprise…

I planted that winter squash a while back, and then we had a heat wave, and it was really dry, and it just looked dead. It was only about six inches tall, and it was just totally flopped over and looked un-saveable. I ignored it, thinking it was dead.

Last week, I looked out the window, and lo and behold… it was flowering!

I raced outside and not only was it flowering, but it was fruiting!!!

So, we’ll see how that turns out. Hopefully we’ll get some squash out of it!

Dressmaker’s Double Stout Cookies

I don’t even like chocolate cookies, and I like these.

The “double” in the name is for double chocolate – chocolate cookie, chocolate chips. I also made them twice in the last week, which is really unusual for me. Generally, I like to experiment with new and unusual varieties of recipes, so for a nearly identical version of a recipe to turn up in the house more than once in a short period of time is almost unheard of. (The only exception to this is my go-to brownie recipe since I can throw it together super quickly and everyone loves it.)

Charlie only got to taste a few of these cookies during the first round, since batch number one was a gift for an old employer of mine (a dressmaker, which is where the name comes from), and most of the leftovers went home with my brother, Jon, who was around when I was making them. Charlie and I had a few friends over for a non-poker card night (games like Spoons, Bullshit, Egyptian Ratscrew, Asshole, and Fluxx are on our agenda), and I decided to whip them up again (though I substituted a Shipyard Pumpkin Ale instead of the Lion’s Stout). Charlie said he was so glad I made them again right away because sometimes I make something he really loves and then he has to wait for ages for it to come back into circulation again! They were a huge hit with our friends that came over, and I spread the goodness around a bit further by sharing some with my sister and my art teacher.

I’m generally a fan of the “puffy” cookie when I’m baking, but when it comes to chocolate chocolate chip, I definitely think chewy is the way to go. I’d acquired some bulk vital wheat gluten when we were at our friend’s hippie co-op in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, so I added extra into the recipe to make them really chewy, and the texture was awesome.

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway of that darling teapot! Details are here.

Jon helped me with the dishes and “helped” with this photo…

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten*
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 12 oz can of Lion’s Stout (or other dark stout)
1/2 a bag of dark chocolate chips, give or take

*If you don’t have vital wheat gluten, it’s not the end of the world. It just makes the cookies chewier (and even add a little protein!). Another option for making chewier cookies is to substitute bread flour for all-purpose flour. The cookies will still be delicious, chocolatey stout cookies without either of those changes.

Directions

First things first. Start your stout simmering in a small saucepan on the stove on low heat… that’s going to take a while. You want to reduce it until it’s a syrup-y consistancy. Make sure that you check on it occasionally and stir it. At the beginning, it may be inclined to form a “head” like when you pour beer into a glass, except way more extreme, so keep an eye on it or it will be all over your stove.

Cream together the butter and the brown sugar and the white sugar in the bowl of your stand mixer, or in a large bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing as you go. Add the vanilla extract after that and give it a good stir. Check on the stout.

In a separate medium bowl, combine the flour, vital wheat gluten, cocoa powder, salt, and baking soda. Stir them with a wisk (since I never bother to sift my flour) to get the big lumps out.

Check on the stout. If it’s not looking very much reduced, turn up the heat a little, but watch it even more closely. (While I was writing this, my laptop was directly next to the stove with my trusty wooden spoon in between to stir it up if needed.) You’ll notice that the stout starts to coat the bottom of the pan when it’s almost ready. The final amount of stout will be a little less than 1/4 cup. It will obviously be quite hot, so I pour it into a glass measuring cup and put that in an ice bath before putting it into the cookie dough mixture.

When the syrup is finally the proper consistency, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Mix the dry ingredients and the syrup into the creamed mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips.

On a parchment lined baking sheet, drop tablespoons of the cookie dough. Bake for 10-14 minutes depending on your oven and your preference for softer or crispier cookies.