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Make-ahead vegetables, minus the cream

December 22nd, 2008 · Food preparation

I’ve drawn the vegetable card again this year, but, unlike last year, I’m not worrying about it as much. I’m going to roast Brussels sprouts with olive oil and lemon rind. I’ll also do a green-bean dish for the I-hate-cruciferous-vegetables fools.

“Another Diane” raised the make-ahead-vegetable question in the comments from last year’s entry, pointing specifically to the fact that was on my mind but unexpressed last year: that most make-ahead vegetable recipes rely on some kind of heavy cream sauce or cheese. I think the sauces and cheese are favored because they mask overcooked or otherwise tasteless vegetables. That matter has underlain my make-ahead vegetable dilemma.

I’ve come to this conclusion: Although roasted vegetables taste marvelous hot from the oven, they’re quite good at room temperature. I think roasting somehow amps up the flavor enough that they don’t require the sauces to give them flavor when not fresh from the oven. Try Ina Garten’s super-simple Brussels sprouts recipe if you’re interested. You can dress up the results if you like with toasted nuts or lemon zest or a sprinkling of grated Parmesan.

One alternative

Another Diane, however, implies that she doesn’t want to roast her green vegetables for one reason or another. I therefore offer this green bean recipe for her consideration. It’s quick and easy, and you can do it ahead and get satisfactory results. Me, I’m not crazy about it; the honey doesn’t work for me. My family loves it, however, so maybe yours will, too:

Cashew green beans

  • 1 pound fresh green beans, trimmed and cut into 2-inch pieces
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped salted cashews
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  1. Drop beans into a pot of boiling, salted water. Boil 3 minutes. Drain and set aside.
  2. Melt butter in skillet over medium heat. Add cashews and cook 3-5 minutes, stirring, to flavor the butter. Add honey and cook 1 minute to blend flavors.
  3. Pour nut mixture over beans and toss until coated, then serve immediately. Makes 6-8 servings.

Do-ahead notes: To prepare this dish in advance, complete step 1 and step 2. Refrigerate beans and sauce in separate dishes. When almost time to serve, place sauce (which will have solidified) in skillet large enough to accommodate the beans, and set heat to medium. Stir until sauce is thoroughly melted, then add the beans, and toss to coat. Reduce heat to low, cover and heat a few minutes more, checking often until beans are heated through. Serve immediately.

Photo credits: Top, from Eric Hunt at Wikimedia; beans from Sam, aka Kahanaboy, at morguefile.com.

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Winter doesn’t end eating local foods

December 19th, 2008 · Food selection, local food

Yes, there’s snow on the ground and winter officially begins Sunday, but you don’t need to give up on local foods. I was reminded of this today when I got an email from the National Resources Defense Council that linked to its nifty local-food-in-season tool. You enter your state and choose the half-month “season” you’re interested in, and it produces a list of locally available crops.

Mushrooms, anyone?

The shortcoming

Don’t be discouraged, though, if you enter “late December” as your season, and the tool tells you nothing is available. That’s what happened with me. Turns out the tool, while very handy, is only as good as its sources. In the case of Kansas, the source was a Kansas City-area gardening site and its table from the K-State Vegetable Garden Planting Guide (PDF). It shows planting and harvest times, which aren’t the same as availability. The New York listing, on the other hand, references the state’s harvest calendar, which shows harvest and availability (rather than planting) dates.

Availability, however, is tied to storage and marketing, so it’s true that highly storable potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squashes, onions, garlic and some apple varieties are probably available somewhere in Kansas, but they aren’t necessarily easily gotten. The local farmers market is closed for the season, and markets like the Community Mercantile and the Casbah Market aren’t set up to store produce. So, unless the local farmers have a means to store such produce, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to find much local produce of that variety.

There’s more

There’s much more to local food than fresh fruits and vegetables, though.

  • Local meat, poultry and dairy are plentiful on the farms and at the Merc (and the Casbah, I think). Check out Local Harvest and Eat Wild for sources where you live.
  • Honey, being infinitely storable, is generally available year round, and often even in supermarkets. Find sources also at Local Harvest. Larger producers can be found at Honey Locator. A favorite Lawrence supplier is Anthony’s Beehive.
  • Here in Lawrence, we can usually get mesclun and mushrooms yearround from Wakarusa Valley Farm by way of the Merc.
  • Prepared foods also are plentiful. You can find, often in supermarkets and certainly (around here) at natural foods stores, prepared local foods such as jams, jellies, salsas, tofu. Again, Local Harvest can help you find sources.

So keep eating local food as best you can. It will serve you, your community and the environment well.

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Store’s pecans fail to live up to past standard

December 17th, 2008 · Food selection

Holiday baking has me thinking of my dad. As I previously noted, Dad liked pecans (understandable for a Southern boy), and for the past few years he has treated his daughters at Christmastime to 2 pounds of shelled pecans from Sunnyland Farms in Albany, Georgia.

I thought those pecans were nice and tasted good, but extravagant, as they cost more than $30 for 2 pounds of the “extra fancy ‘Junior’ pecan halves” that he always sent. On the other hand, I never had trouble working my way through those 2 pounds.

When this holiday season came round, however, no pecans were in sight. I got a flier from Sunnyland but decided the nuts were indeed extravagant. When I first needed pecans this fall—for the topping on Thanksgiving sweet potatoes—I bought a pound of California pecans at the grocery store. I hesitated before I bought them. The pecan halves were a fairly dark brown, a sign they weren’t very fresh, according to Dad’s folk wisdom. So I bought the pieces instead, because they were paler. The first bite of the sweet potatoes immediately revealed that these nuts just weren’t of the same caliber as the Georgia pecans. I sighed at the memory.

Now that it’s holiday baking time at my house, I’m in a quandary. My usual cookies are usually pecan-laden. Although the nuts I have aren’t rancid, they just aren’t good. When I stirred up Chocolate Crinkle Cookies yesterday, I put in only 1/4 cup of those nuts rather than the usual 1/2 cup. And I decided it wasn’t worth it to make the Russian Tea Cakes with substandard pecans, since nuts are a major reason for those cookies. And toffee? Haven’t decided whether to make it yet or not. Again, a nut-driven issue.

I suppose I can get used to the grocery-store nuts’ flavor, but I’m not sure I want to give them as gifts. Sadly, toasting doesn’t turn them into the wonderfulness that was the Georgia pecans. Next year, I’m going to check out the pecans from my neighbors’ trees, although I gather that they don’t have much meat in their shells. And then, assuming those nuts are inadequate in number or flavor, I’m going to have to be extravagant and bake with nuts that are worth their price. Thanks, Dad. I think.

Photo credit: University of Florida Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences

P.S. If you’re shopping Amazon.com, please start here or at the link in the sidebar to the right. I appreciate your support!

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By request: How to section grapefruit without membranes

December 15th, 2008 · Cooking tips

It’s funny the kitchen tasks you take for granted. My friend and her souffles, for example, or me and my grapefruits sections (or my orange sections—same idea). But this weekend I took a salad that included grapefruit sections to a gathering, and Ann recalled the tedious task from her childhood of removing the membranes from grapefruit sections. She requested a tutorial on how to do it easily, so here it is.

How to: Membrane-free citrus sections

1. First slice off top an bottom of the fruit with a knife, aiming to cut through the peel and just down to the outer membranes.

2. Next, cut off the outer peel in the same way…

Until you have yourself a naked grapefruit.

3. Now, insert your knife blade between the flesh of one section and its outer membrane, and gently cut to the “core” of the fruit.

4. When the blade hits the relatively hard center, rotate the blade toward the other side of the section. You might need to saw just a bit to start, but the section will lift quite easily out of its last bit of “casing” at this stage.

Repeat the process with each section of the fruit. You might want to work over a bowl to catch the juices.

5. When you’re done, you have a bowl full of sections and juice and a little flower of grapefruit membranes.

Footnotes

I might add that this process is much easier than taking pictures of yourself while doing it, even with the benefit of a tripod and a camera timer. Thus, the focus isn’t always ideal, but, hopefully, you can see what’s going on.

By the way, if you work quickly, you might wind up with a little grapefruit flesh clinging to some of those membranes. If so, just go back through after you’ve removed all the sections and lift/scrape off the remaining fruit.

Grapefruit is in season and is wonderfully juicy. Try it for a change for nice flavor and color in salads or desserts. Having your sections without the membranes isn’t necessary (and, in fact, provides less fiber), but preparing them this way certainly highlights their color and makes for a more elegrant presentation.

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Curried Butternut Squash Soup fits with season

December 4th, 2008 · Food preparation, Healthy eating, recipes

Soup season is definitely here. I have several favorite soups (Butternut Vegetable Soup, Lentil Soup and Tuscan Five-Bean Soup come to mind), but I decided I needed to try something I hadn’t made before, Curried Butternut Squash Soup. It was an easy choice because (a) I have all that end-of-market squash in the basement and (b) I got an immersion blender for my birthday, and, naturally, I had to try it out.

Of course, I was missing an item or two from the ingredient list, so I made do with what I had on hand, which yielded a lovely soup, saved me a trip to the store and resulted in a recipe for which more people probably have the ingredients handy.

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

  • 4 tablespoons butter
  • 2 cups finely chopped yellow onion
  • 4 teaspoons curry powder (that’s 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon)
  • 1/4 teaspoon thyme
  • 1 3-pound butternut squash
  • 2 cups peeled, sliced tart apples
  • 3 cups water
  • 1/2 cup orange juice
  • Leafy tops of celery stalk
  • 1 bay leaf
  • Salt and ground black pepper, to taste
  1. Melt butter in heavy 4- to 5-quart pot over medium heat. Add onions, curry powder and thyme; reduce heat to low. Cover, and let onions cook slowly till tender, about 20 minutes. Stir occasionally, and check to make sure onions don’t burn.
  2. Meanwhile, wash squash. Pierce in a few places and place in microwave oven. Cook on high 3 minutes. Remove and peel. (Microwave step is optional, but it makes for easier peeling.) Cut open, remove seeds and cut squash in chunks.
  3. Add squash and apple slices to tender onions. Add water, juice, celery tops and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook, partially covered, until squash and apples are very tender, 20-30 minutes. Stir occasionally.
  4. Remove celery and bay leaf. Puree soup mixture with immersion blender or press through a sieve or food mill. Taste, and then add salt and black pepper as desired. (I used about 1/2 teaspoon salt.) Serve hot. Makes about 8 servings.

Healthy and tasty

My friends and I loved the soup, and it could hardly be healthier. There’s not enough butter in there to hurt you, while the squash, apples and onions provide tons of vitamins, minerals and fiber. It’s amazing how rich the soup seems.

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Foodperson opens unabashed exchange division

December 3rd, 2008 · Books, Tools

As I’ve been working to develop a new website (less personal, more helpful, more commercial), I put together an Amazon.com “aStore,” which designates various products and lets readers order products I recommend via Amazon. It occurred to me that there was no reason (except for my general reluctance to appear to be a shill) not to show Foodperson.com readers all my faves too.

So, if you’re interested in buying things through Amazon that I recommend, go to Foodperson Suggests and take a look around. I’ve also put a link in the sidebar on the right so that you can go straight to that page from anywhere on Foodperson.com. There are pages for equipment, essential tools, books and gadgets. I’ll probably add products now and then as they occur to me. If you’re interested and you have questions about any of them, drop me a note (see the Contact page), and I’ll get back to you.

Just so you know, I generally prefer local merchants, but when you’re shipping a gift somewhere or you can’t find what you want locally, online retailers are a huge help. That link again is Foodperson Suggests.

Thanks for your tolerance of this pitch, and thanks especially for your readership.

Addendum: I was going to call this post the “shameless commerce division” in honor of the Car Talk guys, but I see they’ve registered Shameless Commerce as their trademark. Pity.

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