moosewood’s cauliflower cheese pie

For nearly four months this blog has languished here, neglected and forlorn, half-heartedly attempting to entice passersby with embarrassingly out-of-season recipes for things like zucchini and raspberries and — good lord — rhubarb.  It’s not the blog’s fault, really. In September I started an awesome new job and, awesome though it is, it required some settling in to.  Then all of a sudden it was Thanksgiving, followed immediately by the inevitable Christmas craziness — a month-long stretch during which we saw our pizza dude far more frequently than I care to admit.  On the rare occasions that I found time to make something worth mentioning here, I looked at my calendar and realized it would be weeks before I was likely to do so again.

But I have things under control now.  For the past month I’ve managed to cook almost every night.  Real meals.  Made from actual food!  Last week I signed up for Eat Your Books, a handy-dandy new website that allows me to search the index of every cookbook I own in a matter of seconds.  As I contemplated a lone head of cauliflower yesterday, Eat Your Books informed me that my library contains 99 recipes for cauliflower — a whole world of possibilities.  And from that world of possibilities I selected a recipe I’ve made a dozen times before.  Hey, baby steps.

Moosewood’s Cauliflower Cheese Pie worked its way into my repertoire five years ago, when  a recipe for a slimmed-down version of it appeared in The Washington Post.  I wasn’t much of a fan of cauliflower at the time — I’d had steamed cauliflower and raw cauliflower, and I found them equally unappetizing.  But this recipe involved cheese and garlic and — be still my beating heart — a crispy potato crust.  I made it that night with my mom, and then the two of us made a rather unladylike production of devouring the whole damn thing.

It’s been a cool weather staple ever since, which is hardly surprising considering how freakin’ good it is.  It starts with the aforementioned crispy potato crust and ends, as all good things do, with cheese.  In between there’s cauliflower — tender, pan-roasted, and flecked with bits of garlic and caramelized onion.  All of this is bound together by the soft custard of a mere two eggs and a splash of milk.  It’s crispy and comforting and sweet and nutty and cheesy, and when my mom called last night it was bubbling away in the oven.  ”Oh yum,” she gushed, “yum, yum, yum.”

Cauliflower Cheese Pie
from Mollie Katzen’s The New Moosewood  Cookbook, via The Washington Post
(serves, um, 2)

for the crust

2 c. grated raw potato (from 2-3 peeled potatoes)
½ t. salt
1 egg white, beaten
¼ c. grated onion

for the filling

1 T. olive oil
1 c. diced onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ t. salt
freshly ground black pepper
¼ t. dried thyme
½ t. dried basil
1 head cauliflower, broken into florets
1 c. (4-5 oz.) grated cheddar cheese
2 eggs
¼ c. milk

1) Preheat the oven to 400°F and generously oil a 9″ pie dish.  Seriously, be generous.  This is the difference between ending up with the crispy potato crust attached to your pie and the crispy potato crust attached to your pie dish.

2) Keeping each separate, grate the cheese, then the potatoes, then the onion using a food processor or box grater.

3) To make the crust, place the grated potatoes in a colander and toss them with the salt.  Wait ten minutes, then squeeze out the excess water.  A salad spinner works well for this, or you can wring the potatoes out in a dishtowel.  Stir together the potatoes, egg white and onion in a large bowl, then pat the mixture evenly into your pie dish , building them up the sides to form the crust.

4) Bake for 30 minutes, then brush the crust lightly with olive oil and bake for 10 more minutes.  Remove from oven and lower the temp to 375°F.

5) While the crust bakes, heat 1 T. olive oil in a large saute pan over medium heat.  Add the onion, garlic, salt, pepper (to taste) and herbs and sauté for about 5 minutes until the onions are translucent.  Add the cauliflower and stir well to coat.  Cover and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the cauliflower is tender, 8-10 minutes.  Add a tablespoon of water if the cauliflower begins to stick to the pan.

6) Spread half the cheese over the crust and spoon the cauliflower mixture over, then sprinkle with the rest of the cheese.  Whisk together the eggs and the milk, then pour this mixture over the cauliflower cheese mixture.

7) Bake 35-40 minutes, until set.

chocolate chip oatmeal zucchini cookies

I didn’t mean for this to happen. I meant to make zucchini bread, though why it’s considered perfectly normal to put zucchini in bread but not in cookies is beyond me.  I’d actually already done the whole zucchini in cookies thing, with little success — those cookies turned out fluffy and cakey and sort of slimy because, duh, I put zucchini in them.

So really, I thought this time I’d just put my excess zucchini in bread, where fluffy and cakey are generally welcome.  But when I read through my zucchini bread recipe I discovered a tip for maximizing zucchini flavor while minimizing zucchini moisture and I became a teensy bit obsessed with the idea that this also might be the key to non-slimy zucchini cookies.

It is.  Well, that and I used a completely different cookie recipe as my base, one that contains both oatmeal and pecans in addition to the chocolate chips.  The resulting cookie is exactly the kind of chocolate chip cookie I like to eat — thick and dense and chewy with melty bits of chocolate, crunchy pecans, flecks of mellow oatmeal, and the delicate sweetness of shredded zucchini.   Plus, no slime.

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Zucchini Cookies
adapted from Cook’s Illustrated’s Baking Illustrated and Carole Walter’s Great Cookies
(makes about 4½ dozen 2½” cookies)

½ lb. zucchini
¾ c.  lightly packed dark brown sugar
2½ c. old fashioned oats
2/3 c. + 2 T. sugar
1¼ c. flour
¾ t. salt
½ t. baking soda
¼ t. nutmeg
1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temp
1 egg
2 t. vanilla extract
2 c. chocolate chips
2 c. chopped pecans (or walnuts)

1) Preheat your oven to 375°F and lightly butter two cookie sheets.

2) Grate the zucchini using a food processor or box grater to yield 1 c. grated zucchini.   Toss the zucchini with 2 T. of sugar, transfer to the mixture to a fine-mesh strainer and set it over a bowl to drain for at least 30 minutes.  This draws moisture out of the zucchini and prevents the cookies from becoming cakey and slimy, so don’t skip this step.

3) Meanwhile, place the brown sugar, 2/3 c. sugar and ½ c. oatmeal in the bowl of a food processor and process for 2 -3 minutes until the oatmeal is finely ground.  (you could also do this in a blender)

4) In a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining dry ingredients and set aside.

5) In the bowl of your food processor (or of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment), process or mix the butter until it’s light and fluffy.  Add the oatmeal-sugar mixture in three stages, mixing well after each addition.  Add the egg and vanilla and mix until well incorporated.  Add the dry ingredients in three stages, mixing just until blended.  If you’ve done all this in the food processor, transfer the batter to a large bowl and stir in the chocolate chips and nuts, otherwise just stir the chips and nuts into your mixing bowl.

6) After the zucchini has drained, squeeze it between several layers of paper towels or cheesecloth or a dishtowel to absorb excess moisture.  You want to remove as much moisture as possible, so you’ll have to work at it a bit.  Fold the shredded zucchini into the cookie batter.

7) Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared cookie sheets, spacing them about an inch or two apart.  They’re not going to spread much so they don’t need a whole lot of room.  Bake for 18-20 minutes or until the edges begin to turn golden brown.  Remove the cookies from the oven and cool on the sheets for 2-3 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.  I think these taste best slightly warm, when the inside is still a bit melty and the outside is still a bit crisp, but they’re also quite nice completely cool and pretty tasty even when frozen.

raspberry french 75

What kind of college has no football, no fraternities or sororities, and believes that one person can change the world?  The kind of college my twelfth grade self had her little seventeen-year-old heart set on.  More specifically, Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.  In the wave of post-SAT college literature that flooded my mailbox (I must have checked a box:  ”Would you like to receive information from every college on the planet?”), Warren Wilson stood out.   They had a farm, right there at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the green and the blue and the fog all merge into one misty cavalcade of beauty.  A farm, which presumably you could work on instead of, say, going to Biology class.

In retrospect, that’s probably what freaked my parents out.  Because no way in hell was I going to Warren Wilson College, a hippie school.  So I didn’t.  I went to a nice little state school, with no football and no fraternities or sororities.  And, incidentally, no shortage of hippies.

So it comes as little surprise to my parents that I’ve spent a portion of my summer volunteering at a farm, or that I’ve taken such pleasure in it.  My favorite farm chore — for reasons I can’t even begin to explain — turns out to be picking raspberries, though I’m also rather fond of weeding.  On my family’s most recent visit, when I returned dirty-kneed from a morning at the farm with red-stained fingers and bramble-scratched arms and a contented smile, I heard my father mutter to my mother, “Maybe we should have let her go to Warren Wilson.”  Maybe. Perhaps in some parallel universe they did, and my parallel self became exactly the sort of left-wing radical they’d always feared she would, throwing herself in front of bulldozers and chasing nuclear submarines around in a rubber dinghy with buckets of blood at the ready.  Or perhaps — as I believe was my dad’s point — she, too turned out to be a quiet sort of hippie, the kind of girl who believes you’re much more likely to save the world with raspberries than with blood.

Yes, these are the things I think about as I wend my way gingerly through the raspberry thicket, cradling soft red berries in my hands and contemplating the nature of fate.  You can see what my parents were up against.

But really, the point here is that the amount of raspberries we’ve had around our house lately is directly proportional to the pleasure I take in picking them.  Which is to say there’s been a lot of raspberries.  A particularly easy and particularly nice way to enjoy an abundance of raspberries — particularly on a hot Sunday afternoon — is with gin.  And champagne.  Need I go on?  I mean, there’s raspberries and gin and champagne.  What more do you need to know, aside from proportions?  Oh, fine.  The raspberries get muddled with a bit of sage and a splash of sweetened lemon juice to create a lovely fusion of tangy sweet earthiness which is then combined with the crispness of gin and the effervescence of champagne.  It’s wonderful.  And dangerous.  And ridiculously pink.  But mostly wonderful.

Raspberry French 75
adapted from Bridget Albert & Mary  Barranco’s Market Fresh Mixology
makes 1

2-4 fresh sage leaves (depending on the size of the leaves and how much you like sage)
5-10 fresh raspberries (same)
1 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ oz. simple syrup
1½ oz. gin
ice
splash of champagne or sparkling wine

In a mixing glass (a Mason jar works just fine) muddle sage leaves, raspberries, lemon juice, and simple syrup.  Add gin and a few ice cubes and shake well.  Add a splash of champagne and rock gently to combine.  Strain into glass to serve.

If, for some reason, you decide to serve this in a ridiculously large 16 oz. glass, you’ll have to make, like, three of these to fill one glass.  You’ll also have to cancel everything else on your schedule for the rest of the day because we’re talking three shots of gin and at least a glass of champagne.

I suspect this would also be nice with mint instead of sage, especially if you’re not into sage.

chocolate beet cake

When I discovered beets in my CSA basket this week I figured I had two choices: toss them directly onto the compost heap or bake them into a cake.

I don’t like cake and I don’t like beets, so I’m not sure what made me think I would like a cake made out of beets.  Possibly it was the assurance that “even confirmed beet-bashers will love this cake” in the introduction to the recipe or the fact that my foodie friend Katie mentioned that she’d tried it and liked it, but I suspect it was the chocolate.  Of all the ingredients on this earth, chocolate seems the most likely candidate for transforming beets from a mouthful of musty dirt into something that people might actually want to eat.

whitefish hushpuppies

One major drawback to living in a place like Northern Michigan is that there are no hushpuppies.  Oh sure, a handful of restaurants in the area claim to serve hushpuppies but, as it turns out, those things are not hushpuppies.  I’m not sure what they are, but trust me when I tell you that they’re not hushpuppies. Hushpuppies — so named for their power to quiet the barking dogs of hunters and fishermen gathered around their campfires or of Confederate soldiers hoping to prevent Union scouts from discovering their campfires or of fugitive slave hunters attempting to thwart runaway slaves’ passage along the Underground Railroad or, well, nobody really knows for sure — have long been a staple of Southern cuisine. They’re hot, delicious little morsels of fried cornmeal dough, golden-crisp on the outside and densely bready on the inside.  In the South, they’re a standard accompaniment to just about everything from barbecue sandwiches to crabcakes; in the Midwest, if you want a hushpuppy you’ll have to make it yourself.