Turnips Anna

Last week we got a whole bag of turnips in our share. Turnips!

Pommes Anna is a French dish of thinly sliced potatoes, baked in a cocotte à pommes Anna (or, you know, a skillet) with lots of butter to form a cake. (The Epicurious recipe has exactly two ingredients: potatoes and butter).

Martha extends the dish to include rutabaga in her "roots Anna," and her somewhat more complicated recipe was the one I happened on first. I substituted turnips for the rutabaga, used our whole bag of turnips instead of a mere two pounds, and felt extremely dubious that a turnip dish was going to be an appealing centerpiece at dinner.

An hour later ... I was impressed. I wasn't daring enough to try to turn the cake out of the pan, but the slices were tender and buttery, and purply and deeply caramelized on the bottom, and probably the best turnips I've ever cooked (no, that's not a high bar). Not a leftover turnip to be seen this morning.

I'm pretty sure you could use any combination of roots and tubers you have on hand (potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, celeriac, parsnips). Slice them as thinly as possible, and arrange the slices in concentric circles in the bottom of a buttered ovenproof skillet. Add salt, pepper, and more butter between each layer. Cover the top layer with foil, weigh it down (Martha suggests putting a cast iron pan on top), and bake for an hour at 450 degrees. If you're brave, try to turn it out of the skillet.

Apple Cake

This is not a story about a brilliant idea for using up unloved farm share produce that went exactly as imagined.

The recipe is basically Marie-Helene's Apple Cake from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table. (Here's David Lebovitz's appreciation of it. I do not fault the recipe; all errors are my own.)

I got slightly carried away with the apples. We had part of a four-pound bag of bruisy, mushy Macintosh apples from last week's CSA I wanted to finish off. Because the recipe called for an assortment of apples, I also threw in one of the enormous crispy delicious Empire apples from the week before.

My cake was shaping up to be a more-apples-less-cake kind of cake.

Other substitutions: I couldn't find our vanilla, so I used lemon extract (because, you know, the bottle is the same shape), and I substituted yogurt for half the melted butter (because I sort of had a French yogurt cake in mind).

It was delicious (particularly topped with a jar of salted caramel sauce Sara brought us). But what I made could not in any sense be called a cake. It was more like baked apples stuck together with little bits of cake, or, charitably, something like an apple cobbler or buckle. 

I put it on the kitchen counter and it was demolished within hours.

New Year's Day Traditions

After a Christmas of bacon, salmon, and hollandaise, and an unplanned low-key New Year's Eve (ninjabread, pickup ultimate Frisbee, and late-night jam session), we were ready to start 2012 with appropriated ethnic traditions and, of course, vegetables.

Thought to bring prosperity ("since they swell when cooked"), black-eyed peas are traditional food for New Year's Day. Eating black-eyed peas for luck on the Jewish new year has been noted since around 500 AD; Southerners appropriated the tradition (adding pork) around the Civil War. Anna cooked our peas in fine Southern fashion, making hoppin' John with bacon, onion, garlic, tomatoes, and farm share collard greens (which are "the color of money").

It's not the Chinese new year yet, but as an additional New Year's Day course, we had long Chinese noodles (for longevity, especially if you manage not to break them) stir-fried with onion, garlic, ginger, tofu, and farm share bok choy.

Wishing you wealth, long life, and lots of vegetables in 2012!

Sushi Squares

Jack had bought the Wilton silicone bite-size brownie pan (with the intention of making mini cheesecakes), and we had an invitation to a hors d'oeuvres party, so we were looking for something interesting to make in it.

I turned to the Internet, but sadly, it turns out that most people are just using their brownie pans to make brownies. (Okay, here's someone doing sesame candy.) BORING.

Thinking about "fancy" and "bite-size" got me to sushi, so we improvised these sushi squares:

Sprinkle some furikake (fishy-tasting nori and sesame seeds) in the bottom of each cavity, pack each with sushi rice (short-grain rice mixed with rice wine vinegar, sugar, and salt), turn out the rice cubes, and top with a bit of wasabi, cucumber, and avocado.

I'm pretty sure this is more time-consuming than rolling your own sushi (which we like to stuff with creative farm share ingredients), but there you have it.

Cranberry Orange Jam

I was feeling a little cocky about last week's fast, easy, recipe-free grapefruit jam, so I set out to prove I could do improvised jam-making again, 1) cooking it quickly at high temperature, while 2) making dinner.

(Turns out I can't.)

After I paused the project to finish the dinner and scrubbed the boiled-over sticky burnt mess out of my stove, I finished making this.

Cranberry Orange Jam

5-6 small oranges (or clementines, or satsumas, or tangerines), peeled and more-or-less seeded
1/2 bag fresh cranberries (left over from Thanksgiving)
1 cup sugar

Process oranges into a juicy slurry (I used the blender). Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and cook, stirring frequently, until thickened and jammy.

On the way to jam, I realized that fruit topping, cranberry sauce, and jam are all the same recipe, cooked to different thicknesses -- stop cooking when you've gotten as far as you want to go (and expect it to thicken just a tiny bit more in the fridge).

Quick Grapefruit Jam

Enterprise Farm sent us some beautiful Florida grapefruit last week, and seeing my roommate (usually a meat and potatoes guy) eat one for dinner inspired me to claim the other two for grapefruit jam.*

We've made proper marmalade (with a recipe and everything!) before, but our food processor is on strike at the moment (so including the peels wasn't feasible), and I was a bit distracted (because I was trying to make four cheesecakes at the same time). I was also feeling a bit cocky about improvised jam making after our Concord grape fest, so I didn't bother looking for instructions.

Here's what I did: Put flesh and juice of 2 grapefruit (and plenty of pith and membranes; I have in my mind that this helps it set, so it wasn't merely sloth) in a saucepan. Stir in 1 cup of sugar. Cook, stirring regularly, until reduced and thickened to a jamlike consistency. (Recipes will tell you to cook over low heat, which takes a long time; I started it hotter and cooked it faster, which just means you have be vigilant about burning.)

I used the jam as topping on a vodka-and-grapefruit cheesecake, and then ate the leftovers on waffles and toast. (In retrospect, more carefully removing the large pieces of the membranes would have made it more spreadable.)

* Jam includes the fruit's flesh; marmalade goes the extra step of including the peel; jelly is made from just the juice.

Video: Picadilly Farm CSA

The kitchen has been given over to cheesecake cooking for the last few days (as is annual tradition), so no new adventures in vegetables this week.

Instead, here's a little promotional video for our weekly potluck Picadilly Farm (which provided one of our CSAs this summer), by our own filmmaker in residence.



Farmshare from Ben Pender-Cudlip on Vimeo