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I’m always searching around for foods that symbolize good luck in the coming year as New Years approaches. I’ve covered a number them on Recipes for Health – favorites like my delicious salad made with black eyed peas in a cumin vinaigrette. This year I had a lot of fun playing around with ring-shaped pastries. The rings symbolize the year’s coming full circle, and also eternity. Donuts come to mind, but that doesn’t quite fit the Recipes for Health profile. I made wonderful 100 percent whole wheat bagels and a couple of delicious, moist Bundt cakes, one with poppy seeds and lemon and the other with walnuts and dried apricots. I also made two of my favorite Mediterranean snacks, sesame-covered rings popular in Greece, Turkey and Egypt called simit, and taralli, small, hard twice-baked ring-A Southern Italian ring-shaped snacks flavored with pepper or fennel, and fragrant with olive oil. They are irresistible, and I made so many that I am bound to have a productive New Year. I hope all of you do as well.
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My 16-year old son Liam came home from boarding school for holidays last week, and he appears to be more hungry than usual – which was already pretty hungry. Unlike most of us, he tells me he is trying to put on weight – muscle, that is. He’s spending a lot of time at the gym and it shows. Love having somebody around the house to do the heavy lifting!
I meanwhile am trying to keep up with feeding Liam and his friends. This week I’ve devoted Recipes for Health to do-ahead casseroles – a couple of lasagnas, a couple of Provençal style gratins (three green, winter squash), and a wonderful Macaroni and Cheese made with terrific whole wheat noodles from MagNoodles, with an olive oil-based béchamel and some broccoli thrown into the mix. I tested the recipes a few weeks ago and froze them. They are coming in very handy this week as I am so busy getting ahead on Christmas, going to parties, and testing recipes for upcoming Recipes for Health. Of course, they go more quickly when the eaters are 16 year old boys just home from the basketball court; luckily I’m also working on hearty soups, coming soon…. One of the perks of testing 5 new recipes every week for Recipes for Health is that I can freeze those dishes that freeze well and pull them out when I need them, for hungry boys home from school for Thanksgiving, for a quick dinner for myself, for a dinner party or for Thanksgiving itself.
I did just that last week for the Thanksgiving dinner I go to every year. A few weeks earlier I had made a delicious salmon spread – Salmon Rillettes – made with steamed fresh and smoked salmon, coming up next week on Recipes for Health as one of 5 different recipes for fish rillettes. It was so good, and there was a lot of it, so I decided to freeze it right away and bring it as an appetizer for Thanksgiving dinner. The spread was a great hit, and did not suffer in the least for being frozen. Rillettes is a rustic French pâté that is traditionally made by cooking pork belly or shoulder slowly in abundant fat, allowing it to cool in the fat, then raking the mixture into a spreadable paste. Other meats – game and rabbit primarily – are also made into rillettes, and lately I’ve been seeing seafood rillettes on lots of menus in Paris and New York. Fish rillettes don’t require the quantity of fat that is needed for meat rillettes. The fat is stirred into the cooked or smoked fish, and you can substitute Greek yogurt for ingredients like butter or crème fraîche if you want to reduce fats and calories. I worked with smoked trout and salmon, smoked sardines and tuna, and couldn’t resist crabmeat as well, as it breaks down so nicely. You can serve the rillettes with bread or crackers, but also as a delicious accompaniment to lentils, or on top of endive leaves or inside mini peppers or cherry tomatoes. If you want to get ahead on healthy hors d’oeuvres for your Christmas parties, these will fit the bill. Recipes will be posted on Recipes for Health the week of December 22.
I began my cooking career decades ago as a vegetarian cook determined to bring delightful, and not ascetic, vegetarian dishes to the public. I am still devoted to this, though I am no longer a strict vegetarian as I was then. Still, it’s the way I eat most of the time. I do partake of turkey and trimmings with pleasure at Thanksgiving, but I am also always assigned a vegetarian main dish as one of my contributions to the dinner I go to every year.
This year I was inspired, as I was a few months ago, by Rancho Gordo beans. I thought it would be particularly fitting to develop some vegetarian main dishes (and a side) with beans that are native to North America and Mexico (which covers many), particularly some of the beautiful heirloom varieties I’ve been buying from Rancho Gordo. I cooked them with sweet potatoes for one delicious Thanksgiving dish, and in a couple of dishes with winter squash, which we also associate with Thanksgiving. These will appeal to everyone at your Thanksgiving table, vegetarian or otherwise. But for the vegetarians they will definitely be welcome at the center of the plate. What are some of the other dishes I will be bringing to the table this Thanksgiving? In addition to the colcannons I told you about a few weeks ago, I could never do without my favorite sweet potato recipe, Sweet Potato and Apple Puree, which I would make every week if I weren’t so busy testing new recipes. I also never miss an opportunity to make Pecan Pie, one of my true weaknesses in life. Mine is less cloying than the authentic version; but it’s pretty darned sweet and it has much more flavor, with honey and Lyle’s Golden Syrup pinch hitting for corn syrup. I often bring a salad to our collective Thanksgiving as well, and always I focus on endive, sometimes with apple as I will this year, sometimes with beets, as I have other years. I do so many new recipe tests every week, getting back to these tried and true dishes next week is a comforting thought, something I’m looking forward to. Apples, like landscapes, change from place to place, defining local in autumn farmers markets. October was a month of travel, and one of my great pleasures was checking out the different varieties of this fruit from city to city. Thus I found myself at a small New York City farmers market across from Lincoln Center on a rainy October market lingering among the Jonamacs and Jonagolds, Idareds and Mutsus, Macouns and McIntoshes, Spartans, Cortlands, and Empires, and a week later doing the same in Cambridge, where I saw some varieties that were new to me, Brocks, Spencers, Blushing Goldens and Golden Russets. The West Coast apples I work with are excellent (Braeburns, Galas, Pink Lady, Fuji, Granny Smith), but there are fewer varieties to chose from in Los Angeles, and there is something about the tart, juicy crispness of a New England apple on a cool day that can’t be outdone. Inspired, I worked on apple recipes with Thanksgiving in mind. I didn’t work on pies -- there are plenty of great apple pie recipes in the NYTCooking data base. I worked on salads and sides, scones and some other desserts, all coming up on Recipes for Health. New York and Boston were two stops on my way to Paris, where every meal I ate reminded me that it was wild mushroom season. Cèpes or girolles, or both, were on all the menus and I never resisted a dish that featured them. At the wonderful Ecailler du Bistrot in the 11th arrondissment, where the fish is so fresh it glistens and melts in your mouth, I reveled in a roasted barbue (brill) garnished with a girolle-studded parsley sauce; at a nondescript Italian place in the 6th I took a chance on risotto with cèpes (I usually avoid ordering risotto in restaurants because it is so often overcooked) and bet right; a ravioli with cèpes at Z Kitchen Gallerie was stunning. I bought as many wild mushrooms as I could afford (not many) at the marché on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir with the intention of making a risotto with mushrooms and pumpkin; but the guests I had hoped to cook for weren’t available and as the week began to get away, fearing my mushrooms would too, I nipped home between outings one day, cooked them quickly in a pan with garlic and wine, piled them onto toast and crumbled on the Parmesan I’d bought for the risotto. That was a perfect lunch.
Last week’s Recipes for Health were inspired by a wonderful new cookbook by Jennifer McLagan called Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor, with Recipes. In the book, Ms. McLagan explores the pleasures of bitter foods, everything from lettuces like radicchio to beer to Campari to chocolate. My five recipes focus on lettuces like escarole, radicchio, arugula and endive, but they’re not all salads. These lettuces are robust and you can cook them in stir-fries, toss them with pasta, and sear them in a skillet. But they also make wonderful salads; I think my favorite was the endive wedges with blue cheese dressing. All of the salads are worth keeping in mind for your Thanksgiving menu. Speaking of Thanksgiving, with November upon us I’ve devoted all of this month’s Recipes for Health to vegetarian ideas for turkey day, and for those who are enjoying turkey, there will be a week of recipes with ideas for turkey leftovers. I begin this week with thoughts on mashed potatoes. We love mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving and there’s no reason to give them up, carbs and butter notwithstanding. But you can play around with mashed potatoes and combine them with cooked vegetables, which brings down the carb count and introduces color, flavor, and nutrients. I decided to make a number of potato-vegetable combos, based on a classic Irish dish called colcannon, which is usually made with potatoes and cabbage or kale. I went all out with color, and you have a rainbow of recipes to choose from as I’ve combined potatoes with broccoli and leeks, carrots and parsnips, winter squash and apple, celeriac and purple cabbage, and dandelion greens or chard. One of my favorite lines about food is in Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste: "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star." That’s the way I feel about discovering any new food that I like, and the latest one on my list is one many of you may have never heard of. It’s called trahana. Trahana is a wheat product that is eaten throughout Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. Traditionally it was a way to preserve milk for the winter, when production was always lower, by mixing it with wheat and drying it. There are many versions, some made with milk only (usually goat’s or sheep’s milk, this type is called sweet trahana), some with milk and yogurt (called sour trahana). In Greece there is even a lenten version made with vegetable pulp. Some trahana is made with flour, some with semolina, and some with bulgur. The ingredients are mixed to form a dough or a porridge, then spread out to dry (in the sun in the Mediterranean), and once dry and brittle broken up into a pebbly meal, which is easily reconstituted. It has a wonderful tart, grainy flavor and a comforting texture. Inspired by a very simple recipe for trahana made with bulgur, yogurt, and a mix of goat’s milk and cow’s milk, in Diane Kochilas’s wonderful new book Ikaria: Lessons on Food, Life, and Longevity from the Greek Island Where People Forget to Die, I made a few batches of sour trahana, and devote this week’s Recipes for Health to delicious and comforting soups and pilafs I made with the product. I’ve been working with lentils. You’d think I’d run out of ideas but I never do; I love this legume and never tire of working on new recipes. One of my earliest food memories of being struck by the taste of a new food (in a good way) revolves around a lentil soup. I was about 8 years old, at a friend’s house for a play date. The friend was named Celia and I will forever remember her and her mother, not because Celia became a good friend – that may have been the only play date we ever had -- but because her mother served up cups of lentil soup for lunch. There were slices of frankfurter in the broth, and I remember the distinct flavor of bay leaf (another new flavor). It was the first thing I told my mother about when I went home; I wanted it again. I can’t remember whether or not my mother then went out and bought cans of Campbell’s Lentil Soup (she certainly didn’t make it). But when I began to cook I delved into lentils, and not just because they were cheap and I was vegetarian. It’s the distinctive, profound flavor of this small, easy to cook legume that has always had a hold on me. Their delicious broth is as comfortable with seasonings from every corner of the Mediterranean basin as it is with Indian or even Mexican spices. I made two new lentil salads this week, a simple lentil and tomato stew and a lentil and quinoa pilaf. I also made a wonderful new Greek phyllo pie filled with the leftovers of the lentil and tomato stew. All posting on Recipes for Health and NYTCooking the week of October 12, 2014. These pilafs, grains, and lentils are an essential part of my autumnal repertoire: a big bowl of hearty and healthy nourishment is the perfect way to end these increasingly chilly and dark days. I absolutely recommend my Big Bowls online class for those interested in adding more zest and flair to their humble bowls!
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Martha Rose ShulmanWelcome to my blog, where I’ll keep you up to date on what I’ve been up to in my kitchen as I test recipes for my Recipes for Health feature on the New York Times; what I’ll be up to with my online classes at Craftsy and my actual classes at other cooking schools; my new books and latest publications; and any other upcoming appearances and events. ClassesArchives
August 2020
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