Standing Up for Brown Rice Risotto

Pixabay Image

I had to try a recent recipe from Food 52 that touted roasted cauliflower and a brown rice risotto. What's not to like?

Probably the part of the recipe that says you can incorporate 7.5 cups of liquid into brown rice in 25 minutes to produce a risotto.

I am here to stand up and testify that it takes 45 minutes of standing and stirring to get to the desired risotto result.

Lesson learned: risotto takes the same amount of time as simmering the rice would.  I'd still make it again!

Celery Root Magic

Tasty soup from a celery root

We love cooking with the seasons. It lets us have a huge variety of food during the year and feel good about indulging ourselves intensely during brief veggie seasons (Ah those ramps! Ah those peas! Ah those tomatoes!).

In Wisconsin, the late fall and early winter vegetables last quite a bit longer. These are the keepers - the long storage vegetables that sustain us into January and, for a few, into February: cabbages, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, onions, beets, onions, garlic. The darkest days of winter are filled with these intensely earthy and intensely sustaining vegetables. I love them for their taste and I love them because they are so abundant locally.

The newest at our table, thanks to our CSA farmers, is celery root or celeriac. It is often a huge and ungainly looking beast of a root. But that flavor! It has a bright and spring-like celery taste that can substitute for celery in recipes or, better yet, shine out on its own. Peeling off the thick skin reveals a creamy, crunchy interior that begs you to make a soup or puree.

Here is one tasty way we have made this root.

Celery Root Soup
 - from Faye Levy's International Vegetable Cookbook (Warner Books, 1993)

This eastern European soup can be adjusted to reflect the weight of your celery root!

3/4# celery root, peeled, quartered and sliced 1/8" thick
3/4# boiling potatoes, peeled, quartered and sliced  14" thick
1 T oil or butter
1 medium onion chopped
2 c. chicken stock or 2 cups water w/ veggie bouillon
Salt and pepper to taste
1.5 c. milk (whole or 2%)

Saute the onion in fat over medium low heat until soft.  Add liquid and celery root, bring to a boil, cover and cook five minutes. Add potatoes and seasoning to taste. Cover and cook 25 minutes or until veggies are soft. Puree with an immersion blender. Add the milk off the heat. To reheat, microwave. Serve with crusty warm bread or a lefse round or two.

Makes 4 cups of soup.

P.S. If you want to add some additional substance, add some cooked wild rice and sauteed leeks to the soup. Heavenly!

Late Fall Eating

We all enjoy the robust summer growing season that brings us a ton of fresh fruits and veggies throughout May-October. It's simple to make meals with the bounty.

Late fall and into winter are more challenging. But in many ways we find the food more interesting.

Many years ago, Steve Keune, offered a year round CSA. Lloyd and I thought it was the perfect time to challenge ourselves to eat with the seasons as much as possible. We had to be uber inventive as the winter closed in with all the root and "keeper" veggies. They took a starring role in our cooking.

We discovered it was easier than we expected to enjoy the vegetables we had available in late fall and early winter. And we got a little hooked on those humble roots in our eating. We have found ourselves in fall or winter CSA's ever since.

Harmony Valley CSA will be providing veggies through January for us this year. Squash, rutabagas, potatoes, onions, beets, brussel sprouts, cabbage, turnips, celeriac, carrots, parsnips, winter radish, sweet potatoes - these all become the stars of braises, stews, mashes, veggie roasts, soups and salads. We buy salad greens at the co-op. This year we are thinking about making sprouts to keep fresh healthy greens at our fingertips too.

Let me share a favorite recipe that lets rutabagas shine out. It's inspired by a recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone : Turnip or Rutabaga Puree with Leeks

Rutabaga/Potato Mash

• 2 small buttery potatoes (russet,  yukon gold, kennebac, yellow finn), peeled & chopped
• 1 medium rutabaga, peeled and chopped to about half the size of the potato chunks
• 1 medium leek, white parts only chopped
• splash of buttermilk 
• 1-2 T butter, depending on your taste
• S & P

Add water to cover veggies, some salt and simmer, partially covered 15-20 minutes or until tender. Drain the liquid. Mash the veggies with butter and buttermilk until smooth. Eat 'em up!

Cold weather coming? We are ready!

Making Beef Broth

I make foundational beef or chicken broths about 3-4 times a year.  When I do, they last us for many months of cooking and recipes.

Fall and winter is the big broth making season for us because our soup and stew making increases by leaps and bounds in the dark, cold, hibernating seasons. To make the broth for these, all we need is a day when we will be hanging around the house - puttering, reading, doing the laundry, blogging or staying close.

Preparation is easy and results in a deeply rich flavored beef broth. The organic ingredients (since we are extracting the essence of all these, we don't want pesticide or hormone-laden stuff) don't need to be prepared in a fussy way. Carrots go in washed with ends nipped off. Celery, we cut in half to make sure it gets immersed. Onions go in peeled and whole. The long slow cooking time will reduce these veggies down.

The most active part of the recipe is roasting the beef bones before I begin. I learned this trick from the cookbook "Caprial's Bistro Style of Cuisine." Set the oven at 450F. Put the bones on a lipped tray with an unpeeled garlic or two and roast in the oven for an hour.  Put the bones in the soup pot, squish the garlic into the pot and then the fun part. Deglaze the roasting pan with a little red wine and scrape up all the little tasty, roasted bits and add to the soup pot.

Add water to cover and simmer 6-8 hours. Strain the broth through a cheese cloth (toss out the cooked out veggies - they've done their job flavoring and enriching the broth). Refrigerate (or put outside) until cool. Skim off the fat, put into 1 or 2 cup containers and freeze. Pop the big cubes out the next day into a freezer bag and voila - heart and soul warming broth that YOU made, ready for every recipe!

And So It Begins...

Today, I went to the garden and dug my first garlic of the season.  I love nothing better than pulling these first delicate slips. It means spring really is here and the growing season is upon us.

Last fall, I buried many individual cloves and covered them heavily with straw. Since then, these  little beauties have been sleeping away the winter.  The first hint of light and warmth brings their shoots up above the ground.

When I dig them, the clove is wet and withered. I peel off that layer, and inside there is a thin shoot, looking much like scallion.

This first garlic is sweet and mild enough to put raw in salads.  Tonight, we're making Miniera, a Brazilian dish that marries thinly sliced collard greens with bacon (yes, greens and bacon - a match made in heaven). A few slices of this sprightly spring garlic serves as a perfect mild flavor maid of honor.

Collard Greens Miniera

1/2 # collard greens, halved lengthwise and stems and center ribs discarded
2 slices of bacon, finely chopped

Stack the collard leaf halves and roill cross-wise into a cigar shape. Cut crosswise into very thin slices (1/8"). Cook bacon til crisp. Add collards, tossing to coat and cook until just bright green (about 1 minute. Season with salt and serve.

Gourmet Magazine January 2001

Getting Some Morroccan Roots On

One of the fun parts of any CSA share (community supported agriculture) is the surprise of just which veggies and fruits are found in the box each week. We have tried all kinds of new tastes and found real excitement in exploring recipes to enjoy them. We received shares in both November and December from Ridgeland Harvest, our CSA, that were full of great root vegetables - turnips, rutabagas, beets, potatoes, carrots.

We don't often eat rutabagas and turnips so we wanted something tasty that could be a "keeper" recipe to return to annually when the bounty of root vegetables comes. We found a winter-satisfying recipe that really elevated them into something scrumptious - I know, I know, for some people root veggies are never described that way -
Morroccan Style Chicken with Root Vegetables from Epicurious.

Although it broke my 10-ingredient rule, we had everything the recipe called for on hand or a close substitute to keep it rocking. The roots used were rutabaga, turnips, carrots and sweet potatoes.We had home canned tomatoes; chicken stock; currants and even cilantro hanging around. Biggest prep time was just peeling & cutting up the veggies - about 7 cups worth. That took as long as the quick cooking of the stew.  But with curry, cumin and cinnamon perfuming the root vegetables, it was worth every chop. This is indeed a root-recipe keeper!

Oats! Oats! Oats!

Mom made lots of oatmeal for us as kids. I can safely say I, um, hated it. The rolled oats were gluey and mushy and no amount of brown sugar and milk could make it tasty. As I pecked at the edges and learned to eat it without tasting, it quickly cooled and then the parent child face-off began - cajoling; stern orders; finally veiled threats to have it appear in the lunch soup if not eaten right now (some of my siblings insist this did indeed happen; seems apocryphal to me). I happily left that oatmeal past of my childhood behind.

As an adult, some friends came back from a trip to the UK with pinhead oatmeal and raved about the taste. They made me some. Holy smokies - that was oatmeal?!?!?! Dense; tasty, delightfully nutty and chewy. Yeah baby! It was the first time I thought about oats as a grain - a savory grain like rice or barley - rather than a sugary cereal or a penance from hell. Luckily, we didn't have to go across the ocean to buy it - we found pinhead and steel cut oats at natural food stores and co-ops.

We really hit the taste jackpot when we discovered  War Eagle Mill in Rogers AR, a waterwheel-powered stoneground mill that sources organic grains. Oh, man, oh man, those oats are worth every penny. Fresh, fresh, fresh. When we ran out and went back to store-bought, the difference was stunning. We are hooked on War Eagle (oh, plus they come in cool cloth bags and give us a recipe for bannock cakes - see below).

We also figured out a good way to make it easily and quickly on an electric stove: using an asparagas cooker (the tall, lean pot), cover 1/2 c.oats and a pinch or two of salt with a cup of water; put the cover on & turn on high. As soon as it begins to boil, turn off the heat and let it sit for 20-25 minutes. The residual heat from the burner keeps it cooking and the high sides of the cooker keep it from boiling over. Give it a quick stir and serve. When we decide oatmeal for breakfast, it makes us sing "O-o-o-oats!"

Finally, let me share the gist of the Bannock Cake recipe from War Eagle Mill with you. Oatier than pancakes but just as darn good.  
Mix together:
-1 egg
-pinch of sugar
-1/3 c. butter milk
Add:
-1 c. cooked steel cut oats
-1/2 c. flour of choice
-1/2 t. baking soda
-1T. oil
-pinch of cinnamon

Then cook in a lightly oiled skillet over medium low heat til bubbly, flip, cook a little longer and eat like pancakes. Extras can be kept for week in fridge or frozen and toastered when ready! This recipe makes about 7-8 little beauties.

Making Chicken Broth

My mom made her own broths for our many soups. I learned that from her and have been glad of it. I've tried canned and boxed broths and...meh. It took me awhile to get a tasty result - I had bouillon cubes at the ready to get that "chicken" taste when I first started cooking on my own. I learned to use organic chicken and with their profound flavor, I never used bouillon again. It was then I realized that factory-farmed birds had lost their true chicken taste.

I hear people say it takes too much time and work to make a broth. Maybe so. But it's mindful, meditative cooking of the best kind. It's a great weekend activity and the broth can be frozen and used in ensuing months. The prep time is pretty small and much book reading can be done while the pot simmers.

The broth-making always starts with organic ingredients. I am extracting everything I can in the making of it and the thought of added pesticides, hormones and chemicals simmering out is more than I can bear. All my broths are made in a big honkin' 3 gallon stock pot - plenty of room for the good stuff.

I put a whole chicken in the pot (with heart and gizzard - no liver) and throw in whole onions, carrots and celery; then cover with water; and toss in salt and a bouquet garni of thyme, parsley and bay leaf. After an hour, I remove the breast and leg meat (it is nicely poached and can be used for anything) and put the carcass back in the soup pot to simmer happily another 4 -5 hours. Then I drain the broth through cheesecloth and refrigerate. I discard all the mushy solids - they've done their work and made the broth rich.

The next day I skim the congealed fat off the top and pour the broth into 1 cup and 2 cup containers to freeze. The day after I pop them out like ice cubes into a freezer bag and use as needed in soups and recipes over the next few months.

It's satisfying and nothing tastes better!

Simple Pasta

True confession: we don't eat a ton of pasta (I know, I know, heinous crime and all that). Red sauce is ok; white sauce is too rich; pesto is a favorite back-up but even that gets old every time and olive oil, while tasty, is too one-note to use constantly.  But there is one pasta recipe we revisit often.

Found in my ubiquitous Fine Cooking magazine (and online here) this is a barely sauced number that gives me everything I like - an outrageously fun pasta shape, peas, leeks, a chance to play with different sausages; a place for home-made chicken broth and a bracing asiago finish. And my mantra of ten ingredients or less!

The cheese binds lightly with the broth to impart a light and almost floral sauce to the dish. The leeks and shallot lend a sweet carmelized taste that works with the peas to make you want to lick the pasta bowl out. We use a hint of butter for taste and olive oil to replace most of the rest suggested in the recipe.

The best recipes in my mind are those that offer a guiding set of foods but that are open to endless play. This is one of those. If you don't have campanelle pasta (trumpet shape), then shells or other open shapes that sweet little peas can nest in work just fine. Don't have peas? Then try another sweet veggie like carrots or rutabagas cut up small. Leeks not on hand? Then play with any allium hanging about the pantry.  Don't like italian sausage? Then try turkey sausage or brats cut up or substitute capers and have no meat at all. Add more meat, less meat, more peas, fewer leeks and you still come out with a simple and delicious dish.

With a bright salad of greens and shaved radishes lightly dressed with olive oil and rice wine vinegar, a satisfying meal is the result. Simple.

New Year's Cassoulet

For almost ten years now, we've been making cassoulet for New Year's Day. It takes awhile to put it together so I always need about three days off to get it prepped. The run up to New Year's Day affords me the time and leisure to make this savory peasant stew. Nothing is overwhelming in the preparation but it has many parts - duck legs to confit (or buy already prepared); lamb and bean stew to make a day ahead; chicken broth to make; bread to put out to grow stale for crumbs.

I discovered the pleasures of this stew in the January 2002 issue of Fine Cooking  in an article written by Chef Jean-Pierre Moulle (online at their website  for the short version). Now the pages of that article and it's recipe are crinkled, spotted and thin. I start looking at it in October and thinking about where I will find my ingredients. That article is with me all the time over those months running up to January.

Each year, we play with the contents - changing a thing or two: growing the shell beans in the garden; looking for local artisan sausage to include; using our home-baked bread for the crumbs; skipping the pancetta and using the dark applewood flavor of a chunk of Nueske's bacon. The next year we do it entirely differently. Cassoulet isn't fussy.

It's meaty and plain and rich and delicious. It is always a party dish - friends have joined us for years - there are seldom many left-overs. It is mindful cooking in the deepest way I know. It starts the new year. The pleasure of good food, good wine and good friends warms us in the winter.