0 Enchiladish

For a dinner at our church this weekend, I had volunteered to make a casserole, with no specific choice in mind. When the time came, I almost reverted to a potato-mushroom casserole with sun-dried tomatoes that I have not made in some while (and which seems to be absent from this blog). In the spirit of Nueva Receta, however, I decided to go to the cookbook shelves, and found a likely candidate in the second book I picked up -- Extending the Table.

The index includes several items under the heading "casserole" and confirms that lasagna can be considered part of the category. I chose, however, to try the Enchilada Casserole, also known as Locro, from Paraguay. As the recipe promises, this is far easier to make than actual enchiladas would be.

As published, the recipe is for a tiny casserole, so I doubled it. The result was still rather shallow in the pan, so I will probably make a larger batch next time. This is not baking, so the proportions need not be exact. For example, the recipe calls for 1/3 cup of chopped green pepper, which I "doubled" to one large green pepper plus two jalapeños.

I preheated the oven to 350F and then browned a pound of ground turkey, a chopped onion, the peppers mentioned above. I omitted the salt called for in the recipe because it also calls for tomato sauce, which always has plenty of salt. I did, however, add a lot of chili powder and oregano. I will also add cayenne next time.

The recipe indicates that fat should be "skimmed" at this stage, because it calls for ground beef. The lean ground turkey did not require skimming. I added one can of tomato sauce and 3 cups -- one full bag -- of frozen corn. (The recipe suggests hominy, which we have given an honest try a couple years ago and just don't like, or canned corn, which is just gross. )

I simmered this for just a few minutes and poured it into the casserole, baking for 20 minutes. I then added a generous shredding of pepper-jack cheese and baked for five more minutes.

This was a crowd pleaser: we brought home a clean dish!

Detail: Enchiladish

0 Feast with Friends

Cranberries (James)

The day before Thanksgiving, as an icy drizzle began to fall on our town, I called a friend a few blocks away, to let her know I would be driving to her house. She waited at the door, so that she would be ready to trot out with a precious cargo -- a large bag of large cranberries -- so that I could rush them from her freezer to ours.

During this year's harvest, she had been moonlighting in quality control at Ocean Spray, the grower-owned cooperative that markets our region's most important crop. Work in QC means taking samples that cannot be put back into the commercial supply chain, so our friend has more delicious cranberries than she can handle, and she rightly surmised that we would put some of them to good use. 

Image: Chiltepin was Chile of the Month last April for the World of Chiles online chile club.

Rather than our usual rum-based preparation, we decided to try something from our previous home in Arizona, from a survey of Thanksgiving culinary traditions recently published in the NY Times. Of course cranberries do not grow in Arizona, but chiles do, so this would be another entry in our sweet-hot series.

I made a few substitutions in the recipe; if it is successful, I'll invest some time next year in getting it right. First, whereas our local grocery store in Tucson had an entire aisle dedicated to chile peppers, here our options are much narrower. I am certain I could have found the chiltepin called for in this recipe, but used some dried peppers of unknown provenance we keep on hand for just such emergencies. Two other omissions I cannot blame on geography: I simply forgot to put a lime and an orange on my shopping list, and decided four grocery runs in two days would have to be my limit. So I omitted the lime-zest garnish and substituted a splash of Triple Sec for the orange zest.

Preparation was quite simple, actually: I brought everything (including the cranberries directly from the freezer) to a simmer in our indispensable cast-iron skillet and then kept it on a very low simmer for about 20 minutes. I then transferred it back to the fridge.

I am especially intrigued by the chiltepin, which resembles both coffee and cranberry fruits. We have a good location for chiles in the sunny front yard of our house, so hope to have some harvested and dried by this time next year.

The Bird (James)
As we have for the past couple of years, we purchased a free-range turkey from Misty Knoll Farms in Vermont, delivered as part of our regular dairy order from Crescent Ridge. Among the many things for which we are thankful are companies such as these, and our financial ability to support them. One should not ask why ethical, healthy food is so expensive, but rather what corners are cut to make so many other foods relatively cheap. A few years ago, we learned that we could free up room in the ovens -- and have better turkey -- if we prepared the turkey outside. Rob began preparing the coals in an ordinary grill early in the morning, and when we arrived he put a pan on them to hold some white wine and to catch drippings. I had rubbed the turkey with a paste of paprika, garlic, and olive oil, and we set it right on the grilling surface, but over such low heat that it just roasted in a winy mist. As it neared the safe-food target temperature, Rob added a couple of slivers of milled oak for smoking. (Stuffing, by the way, was prepared in separate baking pans.)

Roasted, not grilled.

Beets from the Farm Box (Pam)
Our last farm box pick up for this season was several weeks ago. We had eaten and/or frozen most of what we had from this year's "harvest," except for the last of the beets. We are not crazy about beets, and have tried all manner of ways of preparing them to hide the flavor. Some recipes have turned out better than others. I ran a search on allrecipes.com for beets to see if there was something new to try and found a recipe actually called Thanksgiving Beets which was pretty simple, and made use of a lot of spices. so I figured it would do a good job in covering the bitterness that we don't like. Although there were not a lot of beets, and there was a fair number of people (13) at dinner, only about half of this dish was eaten. We did have one true beet lover at the meal though, who was happy to take all the leftovers.

Dessert (Pam)
One of the special things about Thanksgiving dinner is that there are so many desserts to try. This year's options included homemade double-crust apple pie; homemade pumpkin pie; homemade bread pudding; homemade Dark Chocolate Guinness Cake with Bailey's Cream Cheese Icing (Pam's contribution). I emphasize that all of these are homemade because virtually all those who partook in yesterday's meal also had a hand in preparing it.

We got the Bailey's Bristol Cream a few months ago from an estate sale (the same one where I got the biggest bottle of wine. Ever. Which was also enjoyed at yesterday's dinner). The cake was rich, but not too sweet, and appeared to be a bigger hit than the beets.

It was a feast of foodies, with many of the victuals grown locally, in some cases at the same house where they were prepared.

Franksgiving Follow-Up

Thanksgiving is the holiday that keeps on giving -- in the form of leftovers -- and as we continue to reflect with gratitude on our many blessings, we also continue the feast, beginning with our Franksgiving hash.

Detail: Feast with Friends

0 Foursquare Comfort Food

She was Italian; this dish is not.

This is rather a belated post, and I'm recognizing the advantages of blogging about food while the memories are fresh. Still, I'd like to share a new (to us) recipe I prepared more than a week ago.

True to the original intent of this blog project, I went took a book from our shelf and searched it for a new recipe. We have made such great use of Jane Brody's Good Food Book, perhaps the first cook book we purchased together. We are actually on our second copy, having worn out the first. Readers of this blog will know we make frequent use of it, but at 700 pages, we may never complete more than a tithe of its treasures.

For some reason, I was in the mood for pasta, but had no other criteria for my search than the use some of the spaghetti we already had in our cupboard. The index led me to Turkey Tetrazzini on page 363. The name was vaguely familiar, and since Brody highlights four main ingredients -- sphaghetti, turkey, cheese, and milk -- I assumed that the name had something to do with the number four, as in Carbon tetrachloride (CCl₄).

Although the word "leftover" is used twice in Brody's short introduction, I actually went shopping for this dish, getting some thick slices of turkey from the deli counter. I did use a frozen green pepper we already had on hand.

I started by sauteing a half pound of mushrooms in butter,  then added a bit of flour and pepper (skipping the called-for salt) I stirred in two cups of milk and then added Worcestershire sauce (giving the dish an odd greyness). After this was thickened, I added a half cup of shredded Cheddar and a diced pepper (frozen from our farmbox harvest last year), and scallions. Into a casserole dish prepared with a bit of olive oil, I stirred in a half pound of diced turkey and half pound of spaghetti, which I had cooked while preparing the rest. I topped this with a mixture of Parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs. This I convected at 350 until evenly browned on top.

Thankfully, this dish has nothing to do with the toxic compound, and in fact is quite yummy. The name is an homage to the Italian opera star Luisa Tetrazzini, and I think its main advantage is that it lends an exotic air to what is a very mainstream suburban dish. So mainstream, in fact, that I instantly declared it fit for any kind of suburban club or senior-center gathering.

What I realized after the fact is that I might be the first person ever to go shopping for ingredients to make this dish. According to the same NPR story on musical leftovers from which I learned of the opera connection, I learned that turkey tetrazzini is commonly associated  with Thanksgiving leftovers, and this makes a great deal of sense. The online version of the story includes a recipe that sounds a little more interesting, with a bit of dry sherry (I should have thought of that) and a couple of spices.

A quick image search for turkey tetrazzini validates my decision not to post a photo. This is definitely a dish that is more appetizing in person than it is in a photograph!

Detail: Foursquare Comfort Food

0 Another Ish Turkey Dish

Earlier this week, Pam made one of our comfort foods, known as Crusty Mexican Bean Bake. It is essentially a Sloppy Joe casserole on a biscuit-like base. Sometimes we make it with just beans, but since #1 Daughter was enjoying the Big Apple without us, we splurged and used a half-pound of ground turkey along with the kidney beans in that recipe.

Which left us with the second half-pound and several options on Wednesday night. On the short list was Turkish Turkey Taco, a favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla that is emblematic of the situation that gave rise to this Nueva Receta project in the first place: at least 50 percent of our use of the book was that one recipe. Because we had all we needed for that recipe except tortillas (we've found somewhat reasonable tortillas for sale locally) and a jalapeño, we were about to follow that tried-and-true path again, when Pam decided to open the trusty tortilla tome in search of something a little different.

She found Spanish-style Ground Beef and Pork on pages 84-85, the name similarly connoting a dish that is probably as Spanish-ish as its precursor is Turkish-ish. No matter, it seemed -- and turned out to be -- both simple and delicious.

One adjustment I made was to heat olive oil infused with Persian lime, in place of ordinary olive oil, simmering onion, bell pepper (we used a frozen medley of this), pine nuts (the real deal this time), orange zest and thyme. I then added the ground turkey and a small amount of frozen breakfast sausage to get some of the mix intended in the recipe without buying more meat. Of course this was all browned in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, after which I added a generous pour-over of our home-vinted Chardonnay.

The result: warm and delicious! The next time I try this, I would avoid pre-cooked sausage, though I managed to chop it in pretty well. I would either use just turkey or perhaps a mix of ground turkey and Italian-style turkey sausage.

Detail: Another Ish Turkey Dish

0 Green Potato Soup

As described on my
Geography of Food
page, 2008 was YOP.
It is over, but we still
celebrate.

The soup is green, not the potatoes!

(If Dan Quayle could have done what I just did -- spelling the spud as singular and plural -- he might have been an ex-president by now.)

This evening we have a gratuitously non-vegetarian dinner because we are being thrifty with our Thanksgiving turkey. After the main meal, the sandwiches, the hash, the stuffing-egg cups, and the amazing turkey-rice soup, we still had broth. I am sure this evening's recipe could be made with a vegetable-based broth just as successfully. We we would never have found this recipe without broth, however, because it was broth that led us finally to open Jean Childress' little Soup Cookbook from the Country Kitchen Collection.

This booklet combines the author's interest in simple dishes, drawing, and calligraphy -- each of its 32 recipes is hand-lettered. She published a few dozen thematic booklets, mainly in the 1980s, and they seem to be out of print these days, though circulating among used-book shops. We have no idea where or when or how we received our copy.

I began the green potato by peeling and cubing six medium potatoes (the recipe calls for four large) in four cups of broth. After 15 minutes, I added one medium onion, finely chopped, and two bags of greens frozen from our summer farm share. The recipe calls for one pound of kale, and this seems to be roughly equivalent. Throughout the summer, Pam would blanch and freeze any greens we did not use, so that we could do exactly this with them in the winter. I added another four cups of broth and salt and pepper to the soup, though not the 2 teaspoons of salt called for!

After cooking another 20 minutes (extended by 5 because the greens were frozen), I ran all of contents in a blender and returned it to the cooking pot, where I added one half cup of light cream and blended through. In retrospect, I should have baked some bread to go with this. In the event, we had it with "liquid bread" in the form of our home-brewed English Ale.

Verdict: YUM! The broth actually makes a difference. Thanksgiving Day, we slowly roasted our free-range, Vermont turkey from Misty Knoll, between two small piles of briquettes in an old-school Weber grill. Near the end, we put in hardwood to make this a smoker, and the flavor combined well with the garlic-paprika-olive oil rub I had applied hours earlier. Now weeks later, we got a creamy, delicious, and smokey potato soup with plenty of nutrients.

Detail: Green Potato Soup

0 Oh, Currant!

This recipe is another favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla. It is very tolerant of variation. We have used raisins instead of currants, for example, and look forward to doing it “right” for the first time with the currants in this week’s share from our CSA at Colchester Neighborhood Farm.

The currants were beautiful during cooking; they eventually merged
with the overall grayness of the filling.

We do not know how authentically Turkish this is, but it has been a favorite recipe of ours for many years. Note that the recipe calls for 2-1/2 pounds of ground turkey; we usually use 1 pound and diminish all other ingredients accordingly. 
Turkish-Style Ground Turkey

3 T peanut or olive oil
2 large onions, finely chopped
¾ cup slivered almonds
2/3 Cup currants I separated the currants from their stems, which was somewhat tedious and perhaps not necessary, as the stems were very fine and the currants essentially disappeared into the mix.)
2-1/2 pounds ground turkey
¾ teaspoon ground cumin
¾ teaspoon salt (we usually skip)
2/3 cup dry red wine
18 corn or 12 flour tortillas, warmed just before serving (We often roll in waxed paper and heat in the microwave, and we just start with however many we need for the first round to be served.)

TOPPINGS – optional

1 cup sliced jalapeño chili peppers – preferably fresh (In recent years, commercially-available jalapeños have become larger and milder; the ones we purchased for this recipe were an exception, and I am still regretting that I did not take more precautions while slicing -- the capsaicin still stings!)
4 cups shredded lettuce (we usually skip)
2 cups sour cream (we usually use plain yogurt)
1 cup thinly shredded mint

Heat oil and add onions, almonds, and currants until onions are wilted and almonds browned; stir in turkey cumin salt, and red wine, cooking until most liquid is absorbed. Assemble with about 1/3 cup turkey in the middle of each warmed tortilla; add toppings, fold over, and serve

Good with beer or the rest of the red wine! Yesterday we used a very modest Pinot Noir, which worked well with the filling, but the piquant peppers would have gone better with a highly-hopped IPA.

Detail: Oh, Currant!