The Hungry Tiger

Roasted vegetable and grain gratin

Roast vegetables are good in themselves, and a surprising number of vegetables respond pleasingly to the treatment. Broccoli, cauliflower, parsnips, peppers, sweet potatoes, fennel, asparagus, carrots, green beans, onions, summer or winter squash, mushrooms -- any and all are delicious hot out of the oven, dressed only in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roasted garlic scapes are outrageously good, and next spring you should be sure to make them in vast quantities. Roast eggplant is so delicious that I have pretty much given up on cooking it any other way; when I make dishes that call for fried or sauteed eggplant, I roast it instead (with plenty of oil - it's still usually less than it would soak up in a hot pan) and am never disappointed.



This last point raises the question: yes, what about roast vegetables as ingredients in more complicated dishes? When it is seven in the evening on a Wednesday, who wants to peel, cut, and roast several vegetables first, and then assemble them into something else? Not I. I do, however, very much like to reach into the refrigerator and mix and match from containers of several different vegetables that I thoughtfully roasted on the previous Sunday.

This gratin is good with nearly any combination of grains and vegetables that suit your fancy, though I would strongly urge you to include roast onions among them. What pleases your tastes and looks good to you at the market should be your guide otherwise. Add some greens, too, if you like, as I did in the batch shown in the photo. Cheese on top is good as well, though for some reason I seem to have skipped it in the photographed batch (foolish me), and it was still delicious.

Leftover grains work nicely here, and go with the theme of assembling pre-cooked elements into something else, though of course you can make something fresh for the occasion. I like using quinoa -- especially since I've started cooking it in the rice cooker -- or brown rice, or a mix of the two. Aside from the white sauce, which is the same one I use for baked pasta, quantities are very flexible.

Eggs with braised pale green vegetables, mustard cream sauce

Okay, eggs, butter, and milk are certainly not roughage, but this frittata, which verges on being a crustless quiche, is mostly a tangle of flavorful, if pale, vegetables, with just enough egg to hold them together. If you accompany it with a big green salad, no one should have anything to complain about. The mustard cream, which can be made with creme fraiche, full-fat yogurt, less-fat yogurt, or sour cream, is an idea from Deborah Madison that I find pulls the dish together magnificently. (It's fantastic with asparagus, too, by the way.)

You can prepare the cabbage and leeks ahead and refrigerate for a few days, in which case assembling the final dish is really a snap. It's not too much work for a weeknight, even so. Also, if you dislike cabbage, just substitute another leek or two.

Baked pasta two ways

We don't eat pasta very often these days (alas), for the sake of Snark's pancreas, but when we have guests and want to make something we're sure everyone will love, it's hard to beat really good baked pasta with cheese. Bad cheesy pasta is gluey, or worse, runny, grainy, watery and lumpy. Bad cheesy pasta is too bland or too weird-tasting, and reminds the eater of cafeteria steam tables. But the good stuff is heavenly. Here are two equally delicious variations, one that's essentially the best macaroni and cheese I know, and one that's a little more chic and autumnal, with butternut squash.

This time of year, I like to get a squash and just bake it on the weekend, when I'm doing something else. Once it's cool, I scoop out the flesh and give it a rough mash. Then it goes into the fridge, all ready to be used in a recipe like this one. This baked pasta is rich and creamy, but never bland or soupy, with plenty of both crispy chewy top bits and pillowy inner bits. I like to serve it with lots of crisp salad -- with vinaigrette and thiny sliced red onions, please! -- and beer. I think that the first iteration of these recipes might have been something from an issue of Cook's Illustrated, but I like my way better than theirs, no matter how much they tested it. (So there!) It's a bit of work, but totally worth it. Serves 4-5 people.

More baked eggs

Julius Meinl in Chicago serves baked eggs much like the ones I wrote about last week. (I think we may even have the same baking dishes.) They are excellent, especially the spinach, mushroom, and feta version. I haven't tried replicating it yet, but I think it could be done quickly and easily, especially with good-quality frozen spinach.

While the oven is preheating, sauté some minced onions or shallots, add the mushrooms, salt, and pepper, and then just toss in the spinach and heat through. (I'm thinking that frozen spinach would be nice because it tends to give off less liquid, thereby not stewing the mushrooms, plus of course the prep is quicker -- parboiled greens would be nice too.) Perhaps a splash of cream. And then the usual egg-baking process, with a thicker coat of feta and a bit more time under the broiler. What do you think? Anyway, take a look at their menu. You may be inspired to try some of the other variations:

Baked eggs

Refined eggplant sludge

Here's something nice I made. I suppose it's in the same general family as ratatouille, but it's different enough. It's delicious cold; we had half for dinner last night and half for lunch this morning. Admittedly I am fonder than many people of various sorts of sludgy eggplant (in my view the main thing you can do wrong with an eggplant is to fail to cook it enough), but I think you will like this, too.

Summertime: several ideas, and a recipe for ajvar

It's getting to be that time of year again -- the time when we can go to the farmer's market and get ridiculous quantities of tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, and the other vegetables of high summer for what seems like almost no money at all. Here are a few recipes from the past that make great use of this bounty: Ratatouille.

This is, of course, an obvious one, but this version is -- to my mind, anyway -- particularly good. The vegetables strike the right balance of melding together and keeping their integrity. You do have to turn on the oven and turn on the burners (oof, hot!) but the advantage is that you don't have to spend ages sauteeing each vegetable in turn. This means things move more quickly and you have to spend less time hovering over the hot stove in question, for a net win on the hot-and-sticky axis.

Frittata with zucchini and ricotta. This is so good that I have been known to buy zucchini out of season in order to make it.

Summer squash gratin. For when you have more summer squash than these other recipes can absorb. It's simple and savory, and pleasantly not-soggy. I think it's nice to save yellow squash for this one and use green zucchini for the frittata.

Tomato salad. Well, obviously.

Ajvar. This is a green vegetable concoction in rough puree, not the smooth sludgy red stuff I've seen in jars at the grocery store. It's made with eggplant and green peppers, and lots of olive oil. It's spectacular, and one of the few things that actually makes me eager to buy green peppers (I generally prefer red). I see that I never did give a recipe for it, and I think I've made enough little tweaks to the original Paula Wolfert recipe by now that I feel comfortable writing it up here. I'll put it at the end of this entry.

Meanwhile, I'm eager to make one or the other of these gazpacho recipes from Lobstersquad -- or both! But first I need to buy a pitcher to put it in, which is something I'm long overdue to do anyhow. This skillet corn from my own mama's website looks fantastic, too. What summer vegetable dishes are you making?

The ends are odd.

Made the celery root gratin again, this time skipping the parsnips and using a bit of cheddar cheese on top instead of parmesan. Hazlenuts and everything else from the original recipe still in place. I defy anyone to think that this looks anything but delicious. It smells divine as well.

Clearly we are entering an era of celery root obsession. Also of gratin obsession, I suspect, as I'm feeling that it's time to start making Deborah Madison's superb leek and cabbage gratin again. Unfortunately the market had beautiful leeks but only very sad savoy cabbages, though, so it will have to wait for a bit.

Meanwhile, I bought a young coconut and now have no idea what I'm going to do with it. This goes with my having a weird attraction to messing about not with any kind of actual raw-foods diet but various odds and ends of the recipes that go with it, because they have a certain mud-pie appeal: dump a bunch of stuff into your food processor and whirr it all together like a mad scientist/eight-year-old kid. Then, if you are me, stop about halfway through and cook it.

For example, I wound up making a very nice piping hot corn pudding out of something that was originally intended to end its life as mock tortillas full of this and that kind of lovingly maintained raw enzymes or other. Anyway, I think if one were pursuing the Pure Food and Wine aesthetic, one would be supposed to turn the young coconut flesh into noodles or samosa wrappers or something. What I should actually do with it, who knows? Suggestions more than welcome.

A very nice root vegetable gratin

Long time no see. I'm just writing quickly to make a note of this week's exciting new recipe. We don't generally eat many potatoes here, because they are not good friends with S's pancreas. However! I recently discovered that celery root is absolutely delicious*, and it turns out that it is also S-friendly. It was obvious from the start that it would work nicely in a gratin. Then the works of Deborah Madison soon gave me to know that it is, furthermore, good with hazelnuts and mushrooms, and the recipe below was born. We will be having this again very soon indeed.

*Even though I don't particularly like celery qua celery.

Cheese and nut loaf

Back when I wrote about the ever-popular red lentil kibbe, I mentioned that I had a retro kind of craving for some kind of stodgy vegetarian loaf. In the comments, Wendy pointed me to what has become a fast favorite in our household, a Deborah Madison recipe for what we now call simply Loaf. We love it ardently and eat our way through one nearly every week.

Hot is just fine, but we prefer it cold, either alone or in a sandwich, topped with brown mustard. It is not pretty. I don't care. No doubt this is precisely the dish our future children will find unbelievably disgusting. Too bad for them. They can tell lurid stories about it on HyperNeuroGullet and get lots of sympathy; we will still know it is great.

I will not lie to you: Loaf is going to be a pain in the ass to make unless you're in the habit of preparing the constituent parts in quantities large enough to provide for multiple batches. There are nuts to toast and chop, mushrooms and onions to saute, rice to cook, cheese to grate (and I will also say that if ever there was a place for pre-grated cheese, this is it). But if you love it as we do, then you will know that you will be making it week after week, and so you will toast and chop several cups of nuts at once, saute mushrooms in bulk, and portion out big pots of rice into little tubs containing one and a half cups apiece.

It is also a fact that a single loaf is quite a lot of food. Two and a half slices is a hearty serving. I have made a few minor modifications to the recipe after finding out what little variations made for particularly successful iterations.

Summer squash gratin

I do not hate summer squash, but it is not my favorite. Yet subscribing to a CSA, like having a neighbor with a vegetable garden, means that a certain time of year arrives when one is utterly deluged with squash. White squash, yellow squash, long squash, squat squash, pounds and pounds and pounds of squash.

Of course there is always ratatouille, which never seemed more comprehensible to me than the first time we subscribed to a CSA and learned that eggplant, zucchini, green peppers, tomatoes, and basil arrive together as reliably as Laurel and Hardy. But there is so much more squash than any amount of ratatouille will consume, enough squash that it really must find its way into dishes that are pretty much ALL SQUASH. And that's where I get worried.

Tidbits, and what to do with ratatouille

I had been having rotten trouble falling asleep of late, but I have found my remedy: a cup of Sleepytime Extra tea (motto: "VALERIAN makes it EXTRA!") and crossword puzzles. No fiction or theory reading allowed, nor midnight snacks.

Tonight's dinner consisted of the first tomato salad of the year (glory be) over crisps of homemade pita bread, followed by ratatouille. For those of you who have been wanting more ideas of what to do with preserved lemons, a couple of quarters make an excellent addition to ratatouille. Ratatouille is not beautiful, but it is very good when made with tender loving care. We had lots of unusual summer squash in this week's farm delivery, so ratatouille was in order. I put some in a little gratin dish and broke two eggs over top. Then I baked the lot at 400 degrees until the eggs were done, and grated some cheese over that. It was a lovely thing.

Gnocchi with kale, garlic, and cream

The other day, we picked up a nice package of vacuum-packed gnocchi at the nice Italian shop in Dupont Circle. They were excellent, both light and toothsome, labeled "Emilia Brand." I make lots of things from scratch, but never, ever gnocchi. It daunts me. So it was a pleasant treat to have the opportunity to be able to make a gnocchi dish at home. We were both eager to try something that combined the gnocchi with pungent greens, of which we had some on hand, and it did turn out to be a great combination. Here's what I did:

First I took a bunch of red kale and trimmed it. Then I braised it with about a tablespoon of leftover oniony olive oil, about 1/2 cup water, 3 large cloves of sliced garlic, and some salt, over medium-low heat for about 25 minutes, until it was limp and glossy. I drained the kale, let it cool, and then chopped it roughly. Unlike spinach, kale doesn't give off a lot of liquid and thus doesn't lose too much volume. But still, it does shrink to about a third of its original fluffy size.

Meanwhile, I preheated the oven to 400° F.* and put a pot of salted water on to boil. The kale went back in my heavy Le Crueset pot (you could use any gratin) along with 3/4 cup half and half, some salt, and some nutmeg. I cooked the gnocchi in batches of about a quarter of a pound: drop em in, wait till they float, count ten, scoop em out with a slotted spoon. They got nestled into the kale and gently turned with a silicon spatula to mix. The kale dyed the garlic, the sauce, and the gnocchi various lovely shades of magenta.

Finally, I dotted the top with butter, sprinkled over a generous dusting of freshly grated parmesan, and popped it in the oven for about 15 minutes. Oh my, was it good. If we'd had bread and salad, what I made would have easily served 4, but I hadn't provided anything else, so between us we ate the whole thing.

The idea of baking the gnocchi in this way came primarily from Deborah Madison, in the ubiquitous Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. It is a Good Idea. However, you should be smarter than me and make sure to butter your gratin thoroughly before you add the gnocchi or anything else.

* At last I purchased an oven thermometer and discovered: Not only does our oven run between 50 and 100 degrees cool, it takes a really, really, REALLY long time to heat up. After 20 minutes set to 400 degrees, the thermometer read 275. After a mere 25 minutes, however, it was up to 300. Is there a leak somewhere? It is a holy mystery. No wonder I hate baking bread in there, though -- it just won't be possible to get things really truly hot in there. Translations so far:

to get 300, set to 400
to get 400, set to 450


When I've compiled a comprehensive list, I will write it up nicely and post it above the stove. Stupid stove.

Alchemical pasta with eggplant and ricotta

What was supposed to be a day filled with lovely, productive work work working was instead filled, for the most part, with migraines, befuddled druggedness, and Persons from Porlock. But now that the narcotic haze has lifted, I'm hungry! There will be no more working here until I've filled my poor scholar's belly, and that's flat.

Fortunately, we've been quite ambitious in our grocery shopping of late, which means I've got plenty of gourmet odds and ends to work with. So, while replenishing my fluids with plenty of elderflower saft, I've thrown together a nice and totally unreproducable variation on the perennial eggplant-and-pasta combination. What follows is in no way a recipe, merely a report of what went in.

There's something so pleasurable about mixing together the contents of many little jars and stepping back to see what happens. It reminds me of a very wonderful "cookbook" I owned when I was a wee lassie, of recipes along the lines of mud pies, raised to an art form. I remember only that the final recipe (featuring dandelion fluff, I think) recommended that it be consumed with Mumm's, not stooping to mention even that Mumm's was champagne. That should give you an idea of the tone. I miss that book terribly, and wish I could remember anything more about it, such as, say, the title.

Anyway, in the interests of documenting all, here (in my best approximation) are the components:

1. 1 medium eggplant, cut into 1" cubes, baked until tender, and chopped roughly
2. 1 lb. rombi (little ruffled parallelograms of pasta), cooked to an al dente state in heavily salted water.
3. 1/2 tub of organic ricotta cheese
4. 3 fat cloves of garlic, chopped fine
5. A couple of tablespoons of ultra-fancy tomato paste
6. A tablespoon or two of artichoke spread
7. About a tablespoon of roasted red pepper dip
8. A splash of olive oil
9. A few handsful of baby spinach (raw)
10. Lots of freshly ground pepper
11. Grated odds and ends of cheese


Items 1 and 3-8 were mixed separately into a kind of sauce. I tossed the pasta in the sauce and then tossed in the spinach, which would cook just fine when I put the whole thing in to bake. I layered the pasta mixture and the cheese in a deep round baking dish, adding extra spinach where it seemed appropriate, and plenty of pepper along the way. The results, so delicious, will never be heard of again.

Leeks, wonderful leeks!

We had some enormous leeks from the farmer's market this week. I'd originally thought of putting them in a gratin with something else (potatoes, turnips, greens...), but the leeks were quite plentiful enough on their own. I love leeks as a dish all to themselves; they are so sweet and squeaky! If you can make a bechamel sauce, this gratin is simplicity itself, and delectable to boot.

LEEK GRATIN

1. Make a bechamel sauce with 2 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons flour, 3 minced garlic cloves, a pinch of nutmeg, and 2 cups milk.

2. Prepare the leeks: cut the root end and dry greens from four medium or three large leeks. Cut the firm stalks into 1/2" rounds and clean very thoroughly under cold running water.

3. Bring a pot of salted water to the boil. Add the leeks. Cook for about 2 minutes and drain immediately.

4. Butter a casserole. Heap the leeks inside. Pour the bechamel over top and spread around evenly. Sprinkle breadcrumbs on top. Bake, covered, for about 20 minutes at 375°. Uncover and bake about 10 minutes more, until golden and bubbly.

Alongside, we had sweet potato cut into cubes, tossed with olive oil, thyme, and salt, and roasted. A little gruyere cheese grated over top was just the thing. Mm!