Minestrone for All Seasons

We've already discussed how we make a minestrone around here (hint: recklessly), so I'm just here to argue that a hearty vegetable soup is as good in April as it is in November. (Particularly on a 40-degrees and rainy long weekend.)

Our formula this time was aromatics (onions, parsnips, carrots, garlic) + long-cooking vegetables (potatoes, sweet potato, kale) + broth and canned tomatoes + quick-cooking vegetables and add-ins (green beans, parsley, canned red and white kidney beans, fried tofu cubes, Asiago cheese).

Footnotes

1. Epicurious offers a minestrone recipe for winter, autumn, summer, and late summer, but none for spring.

2. The Epicurious winter minestrone recipe suggested caramelizing tomato paste before adding it to the soup. Jack attempted to replicate the idea by browning our canned diced tomatoes in a skillet. We're not sure what effect that had, but it kept him out of trouble for a while.

3. It's hard to stir the minestrone when you've filled the pot to the brim with vegetables. However, the leftovers have so far warmed me up after a run in the 40-degree rain and carried us through an impromptu dinner party, so I can't in good conscience advocate making less.

Shepherd's Pie

What I love about this house is that I can come home from work, announce "I was thinking of making a shepherd's pie," and rustle up enough sous chefs to have one on the table in an hour. (This is a speedy inspired-by-Rachael-Ray version, not a takes-three-hours Gourmet Magazine version.)

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

0:00 -- Start water boiling for potatoes. Peel potatoes and cut into smallish chunks. Dump into the water.
0:05 -- Wash and peel vegetables for the filling. We used onions, carrots, parsnips, and turnips.
0:10 -- Vegetables start going into a pan on the stovetop as they're ready. Saute in oil (or steam, as the pan starts getting overly full).

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.


0:10 -- Start making the gravy. (You guys know I always delegate sauce-making projects to Jack; if he weren't around I might have used canned gravy or a can of cream of mushroom soup.) Start with a flour-butter roux, add vegetable broth, consider some cornstarch to thicken, then dress up with salt, pepper, rosemary, or other flavors to taste.
0:15 -- Fork potatoes. If tender enough to mash, drain. Let cool for a moment.
0:20 -- Mash potatoes with milk, butter, salt and pepper, or your favorite accompaniments.
0:25 -- Add frozen or canned vegetables (edamame, peas, corn) to pan of sauteed veggies. We didn't, but herbs would be good at this point, too.

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

0:30 -- Assemble the shepherd's pie. Spoon the sauteed vegetables into a baking dish, pour the gravy over, and then spread the mashed potatoes on top.
0:35 -- Top with cheese, bread crumbs, or anything that sounds good. (We had extra-locally-grown chives, which had popped up in our backyard by surprise.)
0:40 -- Into the oven (400 degrees) for a bit to warm through and melt the cheese. (Not strictly necessary.)
0:55 -- Under the broiler to brown the top. (Also not strictly necessary.)

Et voila!

Potato Week: Mashed Potatoes (and Friends)

You get used to all kinds of strange things living in a co-op (spoons appearing in your mailbox; a challah costume on the dining room table), so Liz didn't ask a lot of questions when she came upon us in the kitchen at 10:30 p.m., up to our elbows in potato peelings.

I hesitate to confess, but I only wanted to make mashed potatoes because most of the appealing potato recipes I found online called for leftover mashed potatoes.

We were on a roll after peeling all the potatoes, so we peeled our parsnips and celeriac and put them in the pot, too. (I'm calling it "mashed potatoes" this time, but this is really about the same thing as the various celeriac purees we talked about before, just with a higher potatoes: other white things ratio.)

I was going to add what I thought was a turnip, too, but it started bleeding when I peeled it: apparently a white beet? Abort!

We boiled all the veggies in our biggest pot (not big enough!) and mashed them with butter and milk, salt and pepper.

We garnished half with copious parsley and a pat of butter and took it to a potluck; the rest went into the refrigerator to be repurposed. Stay tuned ...

Winter Vegetable Borscht

We had beets, so it was time to make borscht. According to James Meek, this was not without geopolitical implications:

What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch?

(The full article from the Guardian is worth reading for murder, intrigue, travelogue, etc.)


As usual, we got the basic recipe from Epicurious (Beet and Cabbage Borscht), following the reader suggestions to increase the proportion of vegetables to broth, to omit the tomatoes, to add apple cider vinegar as well as lemon juice, and not puree the soup at the end.

A local blogger's Ukrainian-style borscht recipe gave us the confidence to throw in all our accumulated winter CSA vegetables: beets, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips/rutabagas, onions.

(Caution: Housemate Liz insisted to us 1) that she doesn't like borscht, and 2) that borscht is white. These claims seemed so absurd that we were forced to research them. It turns out Liz finds our borscht delectable and that there is a Polish white borscht, which has no beets but which includes such delicious ingredients as "sausage cooking water, fat removed" and hard-boiled eggs.)

P.S. I also made Mark Bittman's whole-wheat muffins with a last, giant, slightly bruised CSA apple to accompany the copious borscht leftovers.

Roasted Winter Vegetable Curry

Our usual solution for accumulated winter root vegetables is to peel and cube them and roast them all together (tossed with salt and oil, roasted at about 400 degrees for, say, 30 minutes for fairly small dice). This week we've been eating a mixture of squashes (butternut and delicata), turnips, beets, parsnips, carrots, and sweet potatoes we roasted on Monday.

Usually we eat our roasted vegetables plain (or seasoned with herbs/lime juice/cook's choice) as a side dish, but this week, Jack made the leftovers into a curry that proved immensely popular (and used the two underripe tomatoes we got in our box a couple weeks ago, to boot).

I'm told that the recipe is alarmingly simple:

• Dice the underripe tomatoes and cook them into submission in a large pan. Push them to the side of the pan.

• Fry a bunch of curry powder in the pan until fragrant. (Our house asserts that Indian spices taste better cooked--and cooking them certainly makes the kitchen smell like curry. If your lover doesn't like smelling curry in your hair hours later, adjust to taste.) Mix the curry powder with the tomato sauce.

• Add the mixed roasted vegetables.

• Add cream and coconut flakes (or coconut milk in place of both, if your kitchen is better stocked for Indian cooking than ours on a random Tuesday). Season to taste with salt, cayenne pepper, and additional curry powder to taste.

• Serve over rice.

(The chef speculates that you should use yogurt or something tangier than cream if your tomatoes are not underripe. Judging from the amenability of curry to the flavor of underripe tomatoes, he also speculates, correctly, that there must exist some kind of green tomato curry.)

Again, apologies for limited posting: December has been more about travel than home cooking. I've been enjoying childhood favorites and Midwestern specialties like green Jello salad (with mini marshmallows and canned fruit cocktail), which underscored just how much my eating habits have changed since I've moved to Boston (much less started subscribing to a CSA and living in a co-op). Now when I read a blog post about someone buying 80 bunches of kale, I'm not like, "how weird," but instead, "hey, I know that guy."