TONIGHT: Baked winter squash, cannelini beans, and red chard

The weather turned crappy overnight -- substantial rain, and a high today of only 60. We've been favoured with an extended Indian summer right up to yesterday: sunny and dry and into the 70s most days in October, but now it's over for the year, I think. The previous day I had harvested my shelling beans (speckled bays) and also seed heads from my fennel and lovage plants, knowing this was coming, and tomorrow I'll pick my remaining tomatoes and zucchini. The bell peppers can hang on for a while yet, unless it turns really damp and cold for days on end.

So this was a fine meal for a fall night -- thick slices of Blue Kuri squash tossed in olive oil with salt and pepper and baked in the oven for half an hour or so; red chard braised with onion and garlic, and cannelini beans cooked with garlic and sage, seasoned with salt and pepper and lots of olive oil. With grated pecorino cheese, it made a substantial and colourful meal.

This is my first entry for several months. An eventful summer made it hard to write and do as much gardening and cooking as I would have liked, but in any case it's always easier to write in the fall . . .

GUMBO Z’HERBES: taken from Gulf Coast Kitchens, by Constance Snow (2003), which explores how a range of cuisines -- Mexican, Spanish, French, African, Creole, Italian, and Asian -- have intermingled in the coastal areas from the Yucatan peninsula to Key West. There are first-rate versions of dishes I already knew (red beans and rice, jambalaya, grilled vegetable salsa), and most of the recipes involve seafood or meat, so I didn’t spend too much time with this book, though it seemed well thought out and trustworthy for the most part, with only the occasional fusiony excess.

The recipe I found most interesting is for a gumbo made with lots of greens and herbs and traditionally served on Good Friday in southern Louisiana, when for all the wrong reasons people tend to do the right thing and not eat meat or fish. The story goes that you will make a new friend for each different kind of greens you throw into the pot.

GUMBO Z’HERBES

Simmer 2 lbs. mixed greens in 3 to 4 cups water in a large pot for 30 mins. Drain, reserving the stock, and chop the greens.
(I used the greens I had on hand: chard, spinach, parsley, dandelion leaves, mustard greens, and collards; other options include kale, turnip greens, cabbage, watercress, beet greens).

Warm 2 tbs. oil in the same pot over medium heat, then gradually stir in 2 tbs. flour. Cook until a pale golden color. Then add 1 cup chopped onion, 1 cup chopped green bell pepper, 1/2 cup chopped celery, and 1/4 cup chopped scallions. Cook until the vegetables are limp. Add 2 cloves minced garlic and reserved cooked greens; simmer for several minutes. Stir in the reserved stock, add a bay leaf and a sprig or two each of fresh thyme and marjoram (or oregano), and simmer for 2 hours, adding additional liquid if required to avoid sticking. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Turn off the heat and stir in 2 tbs. filé powder (or let people add this at the table, along with generous amounts of chopped parsley.) Serve in bowls over plain boiled rice.

THE LATIN AMERICAN KITCHEN by Elizabeth Luard (2003) is a book I find very helpful. I get it out of the library every so often and keep it for months. It has entries with pictures for around 100 essential ingredients in Latin American cooking, from achiote to zapote, grouped into vegetables, chiles, grains, legumes, herbs, spices, fruit, and nuts, as well as meat and seafood. Each entry has pictures and descriptions, and 2 or 3 recipes, so it's great if, for example, you want to know what chayote, amaranth, or masa harina are, and what you can do with them. I always wanted to find something to do with the waxy brown tubers I saw in the market, variously called cassava, yuca, or manioc in different parts of South America. The waxy coating, it turns out, is a preservative layer, which is removed along with the rough bark underneath it. The white inside is bland and starchy, but absorbs spicy flavors wonderfully. Cut into chunks, and boiled or steamed (be careful not to overcook or it turns gluey), the flesh becomes almost translucent and buttery in flavor. Here's one of Luard's recipes, from Cuba, a great dish to serve alongside beans and greens, or enchiladas:

Yuca con mojo

Peel 3 lbs. cassava root and cut into chunks. Boil in salted water for 30 minutes until soft, then drain thoroughly. Meanwhile heat 1/4 cup olive oil in a small skillet and lightly fry 4 cloves mashed garlic. Add 1/4 cup lime juice and bring to a boil. Pour over the cassava chunks immediately after draining them, and top with chopped cilantro.

You can substitute lemon juice for the lime, and I like to add a pinch or more of red pepper flakes with the garlic, too.

P.S. The leftovers fry up wonderfully too -- they get a great crisp exterior while staying moist inside. I fried them for 10 mins. in olive oil, then for another 10 mins. after adding big strips of red bell pepper, then added red kidney beans and some finely chopped roasted serrano chili for the last couple of minutes.

RECYCLING WORKS: with meals, too, sometimes . . .

Saturday night, feeling lazy, I threw together a kind of ratatouille/puttanesca sauce mixture -- sauteed onions, red bell peppers, zucchini and chopped tomatoes, plus olives, capers, thyme, and red chile flakes -- to eat with garlic mashed potatoes. It wasn't amazing -- the flavors were a bit rough, but it was satisfying comfort food.

Sunday lunchtime, I pureed what was left of the ratatouille, and added it to a skillet in which I'd sauteed garlic and more red chile flakes & thyme in olive oil, then added and simmered down 1/2 a cup of white wine. Cooked the whole mixture together for 5 minutes until it was the right thickness and we ate it over spaghetti. Yum -- much more subtle flavors than the night before.

Sunday night, I wanted to make a kind of cassoulet with flageolet beans, those very small greenish-white French dried beans. I used a cross between Elizabeth David's recipe (from "French Provincial Cooking," p. 448) for Cassoulet Colombié (minus the many kinds of meat) and a Deborah Madison recipe for Flageolet Beans with Tomatoes ("Veg. Cooking for Everyone," p. 322). I didn't have any tomatoes, but there was still a little sauce left from lunch time. So it went like this:

I cup flageolet beans, quick soaked (boil for one minute in 6 cups water then let sit for an hour and drain). Bring soaked beans to boil in fresh water (to cover by 2 ins.) and boil hard for 10 mins. Add generous number of parsley branches and thyme sprigs, plus a couple of bay leaves and 2 cloves lightly crushed garlic and cook for 45 mins. Add 1 tsp. salt, then cook for another 15-30 mins or until tender. Remove parsley, thyme & bay leaves, and drain, reserving cooking liquid.

Sautee 1/2 onion in olive oil until soft, add 1/3 cup white wine and cook unril most of the wine has evaporated. Mix with the drained beans and 3 chopped tomatoes (this is where I used my leftover sauce) and enough reserved broth to moisten the mixture. Season with salt & black pepper and turn into a shallow overproof dish. Scatter breadcrumbs over the top and drizzle or spray olive oil over the breadcrumbs. Bake in 375-degree oven until heated though and browned on top (about 25 minutes. Fantastic.

TONIGHT: Sephardic green beans with kasha.

Green beans ($1/lb. at Safeway), braised with previously sauteed onion, chopped tomatoes, 1/2 teaspoon allspice, salt, pepper, and a cup of water until the beans are tender and the liquid reduced to about 1/4 cup's worth. Kasha cooked according to the recipe on the Bob's Red Mill packet, with 1 tbsp. fresh lemon thyme added. Katherine ate hers with the leftover glazed carrots from last night; I added crumbled feta to mine.

TONIGHT: Green hominy stew, pinto beans, collard greens, and glazed carrots.

Actually I made the hominy stew last night, when we ate it with cornbread. It was even better tonight. It's yet another recipe from Deborah Madison's indispensable "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" -- a green mole made from cooked tomatillos, ground pumpkin seeds, jalapeños, and tons of cilantro, and sorrel is combined with hominy cooked with onion and garlic. I cheated a bit and substituted supermarket pipian (a ready-made mixture) for the ground pumpkin seeds and jalapeños; and I used canned hominy/pozole (which must really be zooming in sales -- Safeway even markets their own brand now). The stew tasted pretty good --a little on the tart side, but not bitter. I don't think I used enough of the pipian. Maybe next time I'll make the whole thing from scratch and grind my own pumpkin seeds.

The collard greens were wilted over high heat in olive oil, then braised slowly for 20 mins. with a little salt. The water clinging to the leaves after they'd been washed provided enough moisture for the cooking process. The pinto beans were cooked from scratch with garlic, parsley, and a dried chipotle chile. The carrots were cooked in maple syrup and water, with sauteed onion, nutmeg, and salt and pepper until tender, then the remaining liquid was reduced to a glaze (recipe from Jack Bishop's "Vegetables Every Day").

MILLET

is not just for the birds. I cup of millet rinsed in a sieve and shaken to get rid of most of the water, then toasted in a dry skillet until the remaining water has evaporated, each grain is separate, and the millet gives off a pleasant, toasty aroma. Add to 3 cups of boiling salted water, reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes. Then let stand for 5 minutes and serve. A little like brown rice, but less chewy, very tasty, and full of vitamins. Eaten tonight with braised collard greens, candied yams/sweet potatoes, pan-fried cubes of marinated tempeh, and creole sauce.

Credits: Deborah Madison's "Veg. Cooking for Everyone" for the toasted millet, Damon Fowler's "New Southern Cooking" for the creole sauce, and the same author's "Beans, Greens, and Sweet Georgia Peaches" for the collard greens technique.