Smashed Potatoes

Inspired by the Boston Globe Magazine's Roasted Punched Potatoes (recipe probably paywalled), I smashed my own potatoes. (Upon reviewing the magazine photo, it seems I punched mine rather less genteely than the recipe called for.)

The trick is to bake them twice -- bake whole potatoes until very soft; smash with the bottom of a glass; and then drizzle with oil, salt, and pepper and bake again. The recipe called for 80 minutes of baking in all, which seemed excessive for a weeknight, so I did the first bake in the microwave (fork potatoes; microwave 5 minutes, flip over and microwave another 5 minutes; add minutes until done). The second bake is in the oven at rather high temperature (I did 475) to crisp up the edges.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't smash the potatoes quite so flat, for more fluffy soft potato between the crispy bits. I ate mine plain, but either ketchup or baked potato toppings (sour cream, cheese, bacon, chives) would be nice.

(Local social media celebrity Steve Garfield has a more faithful walkthrough of the Globe recipe.)

Christopher Kimball Does Not Approve of This French Onion Soup

No such thing as a pretty picture of French onion soup. Okay, there is, just not here.

When you come home cranky and tired late on a Friday, and your partner arrives soon after, having consumed nothing but a G&T and bar snacks, what better recipe for domestic bliss than caramelizing onions for 45 minutes before you can even think about starting to cook?

There were tears, but only from cutting onions.

The CSA had sent us a bag of onions each of the previous two weeks, so we reprised Ray's French onion soup. Changes this time

• Instead of 2-3 onions, we used ALL THE ONIONS (maybe 12 smallish onions, some with spoiled parts removed)
• Chicken bouillon cubes instead of beef stock (all we had)
• Cider instead of brandy (Ben saw us sweating the onions and brought me a bottle from the fridge, so it was in my hand and half-drunk while cooking)
• Hunk of rosemary lopped off the top of my plant instead of proper bouquet garni

A pretty good easy fall dinner. Don't skip broiling the bread and cheese on top!

P.S. He would disapprove of the way we cook around here, but I sort of loved the New York Times Magazine piece on Christopher Kimball and Cook's Illustrated last week: Cooking Isn't Creative and It Isn't Easy.

Mushroom Surprise

You might remember our feisty mushroom growing kit from last winter. By tossing the mycelium block into a plastic storage bin and feeding it new coffee grounds (thanks, Johnny D's!), we managed to grow a couple more mushroom crops over the spring and summer.

When we moved, the block was pretty spent, so I stuck it in a cabinet and forgot about it. (It's the "Teresa's creepy science projects" cabinet: mushrooms on top and worms on the bottom.)

Fast forward four or five weeks, and we noticed that the cabinet was slightly ajar.

Here's what it looked like inside. Yum! Jack fried them up for dinner.

P.S. There is a lid on the plastic container. The mushrooms figured out how to get out through where it hinges.

Foodie Penpals: September

September was my second month as part of Foodie Penpals, a blogger food swap organized by The Lean Green Bean. You send a package of foodie treats (spending limit $15) to a food blogger or food blog reader (mine was a lactose-free selection for April in Montgomery, Alabama), and someone else sends one to you.

My penpal was Katie from Knoxville, Tennessee, who writes Fitness, Food and Photography. I came home to her box on a Friday after a long week at work, and it's possible that I immediately opened the sweet potato chips and ate them in bed while reading comic books. (The BBQ habanero almonds, on the other hand, I spirited away to work, where I wouldn't have to share them.)

I'd told Katie that we'd just moved, and she very sweetly sent some spices and staples to stock our new cabinets. The most on-topic for this blog is the Weber Kick'n Chicken seasoning, which she promised was good on grilled vegetables as well as meat, and which we've already enjoyed on potatoes and pasta and in a CSA-leftovers cabbage and carrot stir-fry.

The most mind-blowing item was the Biscoff spread, which I gather is a Foodie Penpals thing (Katie says she was introduced to it by one of her penpals, and I've seen it on a few other blogs). It is a sweet spread made of cookies. Speculoos (spicy ginger cookies), to be precise. So you can take your cookies and spread them on toast or pretzels or other cookies, because nothing isn't better with cookies spread on it. (If you're feeling decadent, you can use the Nutella, too.)

Canning and Ebooks

This is a post ostensibly about canning but it is actually about ebooks (disclosure: making ebooks is my day job).

First, and most importantly, Workman has a special on canning and preserving ebooks for September, with six books on sale for $2.99. (There's also a free vegetable PDF-ebook for the low, low price of your email address.) Feel free to stop reading here.

I wanted Put 'Em Up. You get seven buying choices: Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google, Indiebound, Kobo, and Sony. I was going to read it on my iPad, but that still meant lots of choices. Which behemoth to support?

Apple is the obvious choice on an iPad, and it's the easiest: just open iBooks, find the book in the store, and Apple already knows your credit card information. You're reading within thirty seconds. Here's the sample in Apple's iBooks.

Amazon probably comes to mind first when you think about buying books, and many people use the Kindle iPad app to read Amazon ebooks on the iPad. To buy books from Amazon for my iPad, I have to switch to my laptop, but the book automatically is sent to my iPad.

I have a lot of quibbles with Amazon, including their insistence on their proprietary ebook format over the open EPUB standard. However, if you are intent on saving money at the expense of civilization, I should point out that the book is actually $2.51 at Amazon, a savings of an additional 48 cents. Here's the sample in Amazon's Kindle iPad app.

I buy most of my ebooks from Google, and here's why: through their partnership with Indiebound, you can buy ebooks from your local independent bookstore. So most of my ebook purchases are through the Harvard Book Store or Brookline Booksmith, bricks-and-mortar stores that I heart so, so much, and I consider the many extra clicks required to do that a reasonable tax on having such wonderful places in the world.

Here's the book in Google Play.

But wait, what's this? Google Play also has a "scanned pages" option that shows you how the actual book looks (like a PDF of the book). You can't zoom in or change the text size, but for me, this is the right way to experience a nicely designed cookbook.

Tomato Seconds

The Copley farmer's market had "seconds tomatoes" (at the Atlas Farm booth) at twenty pounds for $12 on Friday, which was too tempting to pass up, even lacking the inclination to process tomatoes all weekend. Fortunately, I could only carry one box.

I got a new canning book (more on that to come), so I checked out the tomato section, with laziness my chief criterion. (Did you know you can just freeze whole tomatoes?) 

I settled on marinara sauce, which allowed food milling out the skins and seeds (no blanching and peeling here). My laziness did, however, extend to refusing to go out to buy the onions the recipe called for, so the "marinara sauce" is plain old tomato juice and pulp. (I'm thinking I can doctor it, Smitten Kitchen three-ingredient sauce style, when we eat it.) The recipe said to cook for one or two hours to thicken the sauce; I'm past three hours and still sadly runny. 

On the bright side, dinner couldn't wait, so we took the discarded skins and seeds, ran them through the food processor with an onion (we had one), garlic, and carrots, and cooked with some water and olive oil for a faster, chunky sauce. Nose-to-tail tomato eating.

P.S. Another personal recipe modification. Smashing partially cooked tomatoes with a wooden spoon? Not very fun. Crushing halved tomatoes with your bare hands? Amazingly satisfying.

Baked Corn Casserole

Here's a riddle: How do you buy corn for an eight-ear recipe, make the recipe, and still have eight ears left?

The Sunday Globe magazine (love the recipe section; hate the paywall) had an article on baked corn casseroles this week, offering variants with parmesan and basil, goat cheese, chorizo and red pepper, mushrooms and bacon, and salmon and leeks.

The recipe takes a little time and focus: you cut the corn off the cobs, then cook it on the stovetop, then cook an onion and garlic, then make a roux, which with milk and cheese becomes a sauce, then pour the corn back in, and then bake it for half an hour. So maybe it is not the smartest side dish to try for the first time when you are also trying to make a whole dinner. Just saying.

Here's a Pioneer Woman version that looks a bit faster and easier (no precooking the corn, no roux, no onions or garlic, made with cream).

I went to the Copley farmer's market to buy corn at lunchtime. The recipe called for eight ears, but I always round up for potluck (you never know who will show up), so I picked out twelve. Went to pay, and the seller pointed out that their baroque pricing scheme (discounts for buying seven ears or fourteen) meant I would actually save money by taking two more ears.

Came home with my fourteen ears, but only six ears worth fit in my skillet (we moved and have very few pans; digression, I am so close to just breaking down and buying this, which, in the smaller size, was Cook's Illustrated's best-value saute pan). So voila, delicious corn casserole, and eight ears left for next time. Might make a chowder.

Foodie Penpals: August

August was my first month trying Foodie Penpals, a blogger food swap organized by The Lean Green Bean. You send a package of foodie treats (spending limit $15) to a food blogger or food blog reader (mine went to Wanderlust Hearts, who wrote about it here), and someone else sends one to you.

The box arrived a day late for August reveal day, when all the recipients blog about what came in their boxes, but was an amazing surprise precisely in the middle of my moving day (which was also the moving day of approximately one billion other people in and around Boston). It was literally the best part of a day of waiting a couple extra hours for the previous tenants to leave the apartment, abandoning a box spring and bed frame that couldn't make it up the stairs, and discovering that we didn't own a shower curtain.

My penpal was The Baking Band Geek (check out her sex cookies), and she sent me an excellent box of mostly South American treats. Mango jam (YUM) and guanabana and papaya juice, two pieces of Panda licorice, two kinds of granola, freshly ground peanut butter, and an intriguing (flan-like?) eggnog-flavored gelatin dessert mix. The box was literally the first food (and at this point, pretty much only real food) to enter our new apartment.

Tomorrow will be our first day of not subsisting solely on takeout, and you can bet that there will be granola and peanut-butter-and-mango-jam-sandwiches. I may or may not have already scarfed the licorice while taking a break from the unpacking chaos in a closet.

Fresh Peach Greek Yogurt Cake

So, last we talked, I had about seven pounds of peeled and pitted peach chunks in the fridge that were too ragged and juicy to freeze.

When I checked on them the next morning, they were also rapidly browning and starting to look pretty unappealing. I used most of them to make another quart of peach jam (this time with brandy), but diverted a few into a peach breakfast cake.

The recipe is based on Boulder Locavore's Fresh Peach Sour Cream Coffee Cake, except that I used Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, omitted the streusel/nut topping, substituted lemon extract for almond (would have used vanilla, but it all went into the jam), and chopped up my unlovely peaches to put inside instead of on top.

It was excellent fuel for a day of putting things in boxes and socializing with friends and strangers who dropped by for our book swap.

Fresh Peach Greek Yogurt Cake

Cream 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Add 1 egg and mix. Add 1/2 cup Greek yogurt and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla or your extract/flavoring of choice.

Add 1/2 teaspoon each baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon (and/or other spices of choice). Add 1 1/2 cups flour and mix until well combined. Fold in a couple big handfuls of chopped peaches, drained of any juice.

Pour batter into a 9-inch square pan or something similarly sized. (I used a 10.5 x 7-inch Le Crueset baking dish.) Bake at 350 degrees for 45 to 55 minutes, or until a fork comes out clean.

Eat topped with additional Greek yogurt, fresh peaches, or peach jam.

Peach Jam and Peaches in Syrup

Sara brought me twenty-three pounds of peaches from a couple untended trees at her school. (That's nowhere near keeping up with the amazing League of Urban Canners, but it's our humble contribution to harvesting otherwise unwanted fruit.)

We launched a large-scale blanch, pit, and peel operation this morning (yes, after unsuccessfully searching the Internet for "no peel peach jam"), and quickly learned that we had two varieties of peaches (one clingstone and one freestone). To heap insult upon insult, the clingstones also refused to peel neatly.

I used ten pounds of the peaches to make twelve half-pints of jam. I like Punk Domestics for unusual peach recipes (peach vanilla prosecco jelly, spicy peach jalapeno jam), but I went with a pretty straight-up peach-vanilla-ginger recipe (variant of this one) today, hoping for a simple classic to rival last summer's Concord grape jam. Yum!

I was thinking I'd freeze the rest of the peaches for another day, but they were less-neat-wedges and more-soupy-mess and would have frozen into a solid block of peach popsicle.

So thinking of pies and crisps and crumbles, I stumbled on this discussion ("Too many peaches"), and was inspired back into canning action. I canned three quarts of the pieces, covering them with hot simple syrup, tucking in sprigs of fresh rosemary and basil, and boiling ten minutes to seal. Hoping that the fruit and syrup will seem like an inspired dessert served over pound cake this winter.

P.S. Some people use their peach pits and peels to make things like peach pit jelly and peach butter. I got as far as chopping up all the peels in the food processor and cooking the slurry down to butter-like consistency, but I didn't like the texture and didn't feel like cooking them for two more days to see if it improved. Ended up straining the results for a couple cups of spiced peach syrup.

Bread and Butter Pickles

Hello, all! It's been a busy summer here (we got engaged, woo!), which means there hasn't been a lot of blogging, and, much worse, no canning. No pickles, no blueberry jam. No dilly beans. No applesauce.

I opened the last jar of last summer's bread and butter pickles (recipe) a week ago, and was pretty sure that I'd missed my chance to make another batch this year. So when I saw pickling cukes for $1/pound at the Davis Flea today, it wasn't a hard decision to acquire ten pounds and a project for the afternoon.

Fortunately, we had a handful of fresh lids leftover from last year, an endless supply of canning salt (that's just regular salt, right?), a giant jug of vinegar (we've been painting the cabinets to keep down the grain moths), and a recipe-blind willfulness that makes substituting red pepper flakes for mustard seed seem reasonable.

Five pints and five quarts later (and ignoring the fact that we'll have to move 'em all in three weeks), I am happy to report that we are back in the canning swing of things.

Novelty Cabbage

On a recent visit, our farmer friends gifted us with this baby cone-shaped cabbage (Caraflex). We had a good time browsing their seed catalogs -- on the novelty vegetable side, I'm pretty excited about "flower sprouts," a brussels/kale cross. You heard it here first!

Zucchini Crab(less)cakes

A bumper crop of zucchini is not always our favorite, but Jack has been making these "zucchini crabcakes," which contain no crab but are disconcertingly crablike. The seafoody taste comes from the Old Bay seasoning (which he doubled on the second trial), but the moist zucchini shreds also have an inexplicably crablike texture.

Pan-Fried Fennel

This week's box came with two enormous bulbs of fennel, even more enormous stalks and fronds attached. (We might have sort of also maybe had a bulb from the previous week still hanging around, too.)

All the greenery is a bit hard to know what to do with (I'd compost it if certain waste-not types weren't watching), though it has a rhapsodic admirer on Gilt Taste. Between Chowhound and Serious Eats, the best suggestion I saw for the stems was "use them to make stock." Maybe not on a ninety-degree day, guys.

The fronds found their unoriginal end in a large amount of fennel pesto (house recipe, today with walnuts and garlic). The taste is fresh and green -- not excessively licorice-like, I don't think.

There are lots of recipes, however, for the bulbs. Here are two dozen by Martha Stewart and fourteen more from the Huffington Post.

Today's winner was Martha's pan-fried fennel, which has an easy flour-egg-breadcrumb coating (you don't really need a recipe). Three fennel bulbs later, however, I still do not know how she cut the finger-like strips you see in her photo (and I would have ended up with fewer odd-shaped bits if I hadn't tried).

The result, I thought, was not unlike fried seafood -- I'm not sure if that's the Cajun seasoning I added to the flour, a flavor present in the oil (we reuse our fry oil), or some piscine affinity of the vegetable (which is, in fact, often served with fish).

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

This pie contains both lard and vodka.

This week was the first week of the Enterprise farm share, and they sent us rhubarb and strawberries.

(Long-time readers may remember last year's eight ways not to make rhubarb pie. Having learned my lesson, I followed recipes this year.)

The pie filling is Smitten Kitchen's "Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, Improved," which recipe I followed pretty much to the letter, and which I am abashed to report turned out entirely delicious. The unexpected ingredient was instant tapioca, which turns the otherwise runny mess of strawberries and rhubarb into a proper pie filling. (Our strawberries weren't very sweet, so if I had a do-over, I might add a smidge more sugar.)

The crust directions came from Smitten Kitchen's "Pie Crust 101," which uses Cook's Illustrated's "Foolproof Pie Dough" recipe. The secret ingredient is vodka (which provides moisture for mixing the crust, but doesn't toughen it like water, and evaporates in the oven). I substituted half a cup of lard for the half cup of vegetable shortening called for (influenced by this extraordinarily thorough New York Times investigation of various pie crust fats). With neither a food processor nor a pastry blender, I settled in for the tedium of cutting the butter and lard into little pieces and then using two knives to cut them into the flour.

Above is what the pie look likes if you ignore Smitten Kitchen's instruction to let the pie cool and the tapioca  set up for several hours. Because -- seriously -- who makes a pie and then doesn't eat it for several hours?

Later slices, more cool-headedly taken from the refrigerator, were as solid and lovely as one might hope.

This Year's Tomatoes

Because it wouldn't be summer without some scraggly tomatoes being ineptly coached along the fence, I stopped by the opening day of the Union Square Farmers Market on Sunday to pick up some plants.

The starts I got from Kimball Fruit Farm (Twitter) did well last year, and four plants for $4 proved so irresistible that I came home with eight. (Requiring a substantially larger investment in buckets and container mix, sigh.)

I never have any idea what I'm buying when I pick out the plants, so half the fun is looking up what kind of tomatoes I've planted later. Looks like a substantial bias toward pink-red medium-large tomatoes this year.

Brandywine: large (1-pound) pink beefsteak tomatoes
Carbon: medium-large black-red tomatoes
Cherokee Chocolate: medium chocolate-mahogany tomatoes
Church: large (1-pound) red beefsteak tomatoes
Fenda: medium pink hybrid tomatoes
Mexico: huge (1- to 2-pound) pink beefsteak tomatoes
Rose: medium dusty-rose ribbed tomatoes
Yellow Pear: bite-size bright-yellow pear-shaped tomatoes

Herbed Olives: Correction

We tried making herbed olives (cheap Market Basket olives + cheap olive oil + herbs and spices + Mason jars) for the first time in February, and I may erroneously have given you the impression that they looked good but tasted sort of ... meh.

This is not true. If you jar them and then promptly refrigerate them, not much happens. But if you let the olives sit out at room temperature*, the olives start picking up amazing flavors and the oil can season your dinner by itself.

We've filled our jars twice more since we last talked (so we've made six quarts of olives in total, using about $15 worth of olives). For the first refill, I didn't replace any of the seasonings; just added more olives and olive oil on top of them in the jars. For the second refill, I did start over (whole dry chiles and red pepper flakes in one jar; lemon peel and peppercorns in a second; rosemary, garlic, bay leaves, and mustard seed in both). After a day or so of sitting on our counter through a heat wave, those olives were pretty much the best olives EVER.

I keep the two jars of the olives next to the stove, so they're always handy for snacking and the oil is nearby to use for cooking.

* There is a slight risk of botulism (an uncommon but serious form of food poisoning) associated with garlic stored in olive oil kept at room temperature. To lower the risk, you might omit the garlic or cook it in advance, heat the oil (per the original recipe), add lemon juice (for acid), or just refrigerate the darn things. Health Canada says commercial olive oil products that contain salt are fine, so the (incredibly salty) olives help, too.

(This correction post inspired by the Alexes, who not only read but also remember everything I write here.)

Fiddlehead Facts and Fiction

A couple weeks ago, Enterprise Farm sent us a bag of fiddleheads (which we've enjoyed before). Anna popped one in her mouth while putting the rest of the vegetables away, and then found the note in the bottom of the box:

***Fiddleheads should always be cooked thoroughly before eating.*** Fiddleheads contain a somewhat mysterious toxin that when eaten raw can cause symptoms similar to food poisoning. After a good washing, the greens should always be cooked in boiling water for 15 minutes or steamed for 10 to 12 minutes until tender.

She spat out the partially masticated vegetable, and then helpfully highlighted "toxin," "food poisoning," and "should always be cooked" in the note, which Jack and I found when we decided to eat the fiddleheads a few days later.

We were torn. Fifteen minutes of boiling is not the kind of treatment we would subject any nice tender green vegetable (asparagus, green beans, Brussels sprouts) to, much less our once-a-year fiddlehead treat.

On the other hand. Killing your housemates. Also not our favorite.

To the Internet!

It seems that most of the concerns about eating raw (or lightly cooked) ostrich fern fiddleheads stem from a couple sets of food poisoning cases in 1994. (Oh, actually, here's a more recent case from Alaska.) Because the cause of the food poisoning-like symptoms were not determined, but it is suspected to be a toxin in the ferns that is destroyed or inactivated by heat, we now have these long-cooking requirements. (There may also be some confusion with another type of fern, bracken fern, which does contain carcinogens.)

We split the difference, and steamed our fiddleheads for 6 minutes. Then we mixed them with some homemade hollandaise and fettucine, yum. So, while I can't actually recommend that you not follow well-meaning and Canadian-government-endorsed guidelines, I can add the anecdata that we are still alive and kicking.

(I later asked some fledgling farmers/urban homesteaders for advice, and they also suggested cooking times in the five-minute range.)

Miner's Lettuce

I visited Nathaniel and Ariel at the Farm School last weekend, and they sent me home with a jar of leaf lard, two bottles of homebrew kombucha, a homemade chutney, a shopping bag stuffed with baby kale and miner's lettuce we'd picked, and memories of a fine stinging-nettle pesto. So, score!

Miner's lettuce, or claytonia, is really not at all like lettuce (it has long stems and small leaves). It's a native of California that the forty-niners ate to stave off scurvy. (It's probably more commonly foraged than deliberately grown.) People think it has a kind of spinachy taste and use it mainly in salads; I snapped off the leaves into a glass bowl and let the potluck guests take it from there.

Cold-Oil Sunchoke French Fries

Our first foray into sunchokes, as sunchoke chips, was well received, so when we got a few more in our box a week or two ago, we leveled up to French fries.

I alluded to our new French fry technique last fall but didn't properly describe it. I won't now, either, but the gist is this: Put the fries in a single layer in a pan and add enough oil to just cover them. Then turn the heat on, bring the oil to a gentle boil, and hold them there -- don't stir! -- until the fries look crispy and delicious (maybe 15 minutes). In exchange for your time, you're saved the fuss, muss, and mess of a giant pot of extremely high-temperature oil, not to mention the two-step frying of traditional French fry recipes.

(Here's some fuller explanation of the method from Cook's Illustrated and The New York Times.)

What you see above are mostly potatoes, but that's because the sunchoke fries -- tasting something like a lighter, sweeter, better potato fry -- were first to go.