Grapefruit beurre blanc

This is so the opposite of the kind of thing I usually recommend preparing.  You cannot make this sauce ahead of time and reheat it.  You cannot divert your attention while you're making it.  You have to serve it as soon as you finish making it.  You have to stand at the stove for a solid 15-20 minutes, whisking all the while,  timed to coincide with the rest of dinner being ready, and under no circumstances should you walk away or fiddle around with other dishes or pay attention to your screaming children while you are making it.

But it is so tasty that it's worth it.

The traditional beurre blanc sauce is made with white wine and white wine vinegar in addition to a small vat of butter.  The tanginess of the vinegar cuts the richness of the butter and compliments a simply-prepared but full-flavored dish, often a seafood dish like lobster.  Since I was making grapefruit shrimp on the grill, I had 2 grapefruits' worth of juice to do something with (having used the zest for the marinade).  I decided to make a beurre blanc, replacing the white wine vinegar with grapefruit juice.  I'm sure Martha Stewart is rolling her eyes in despair, but it was delicious.

You can get some of the work done ahead of time for this sauce.  In fact, the butter needs to be really cold so it's better to cut it up and put it back in the fridge for a bit.  You can make the wine/juice reduction ahead of time too.  Since it boils down to just a tablespoon or two of syrup, leave the reduction in the saucepan rather than transferring it to a container...you always lose a little liquid when you pour back and forth between pots and there's just not much to start with.  Put the saucepan back on the stove over low heat for a couple minutes to warm it back up, then proceed to whisk in the cold-cold butter.

Really, do not get distracted.  Not while you're boiling down the wine and juice, not while you're whisking in the butter.  Reducing the wine-juice combo is something that just takes as long as it takes...you can't set a timer and come back to it.  It makes a syrup, and like working with an actual sugar syrup, it goes from not ready to ready to burned in a flash.  Adding the butter gradually keeps the sauce, well, saucy.  If you rush things, or let the sauce sit around too long after it's finished, it will separate (or "break") and you'll have a melted butter swirled around with syrupy juice rather than a cohesive, thick, rich sauce.  Not the end of the world, but not what the point of the exercise was.

A quick tip about reducing liquids...I am terrible at estimating volume so if I have a recipe that calls for boiling a liquid down to a certain amount, I pour that amount of water into my pan before I start cooking so I have a visual target (and then of course, I pour out the water and dry the pan before starting the recipe).

Plan to serve this with either a quick-to-cook protein (like grilled shrimp) that you can do pretty fast after you've got the sauce made, or something that doesn't require a lot of babysitting (like baked chicken or fish) to cook without attention while you prepare the sauce..

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Green Tomato and Corn Soup

I had a boatload of green tomatoes at the end of the garden season this past fall. In the past I've done a variety of things with green tomatoes...pickles (meh), relish (meh), cake (yum but...) ...these just aren't dishes that move real well at my house.

The house favorite remains fried green tomatoes. You can slice, dredge and freeze green tomatoes for quick cooking later.  But at the time of our last garden harvest, I was 38 weeks pregnant and had ankles with the same diameter as my neck so I just didn't feel like doing it. I now have gallons of naked frozen green tomatoes that I still don't feel like dredging!

Some interwebs surfing turned up a suggestion to use green tomatoes in soup. This is my all-green-tomato version of what I found.  It is going on our menu until our green tomatoes are used up, and into next year once our garden starts producing tomatoes.

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Beer Bread

Not that kind of beer bread (although I like that kind too).  This kind is the the kind that repurposes ingredients from beer making.

There are any number of bread recipes that call for whole grains (bulgur, wheat berries, sprouted wheat, chopped wheat) or seeds and I finally decided to try one using the grain cooked in the process of brewing beer.  I substituted equal parts spent grain (for homebrew geeks, a mixture of 60L and chocolate malt) for cooked grain/seeds called for.  Delicious!


It made outstanding ham sandwiches and also a tasty-tasty platform for cherry jam.  I highly recommend this as an accompaniment to soup as well.

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Crockpot Green Pepper Pork

I'm working through the stash of garden veggies I froze this fall instead of canning or dehydrating.  Right now, it's bell peppers.  The frozen ones work well in this dish because they're meant to stew very soft anyway (and you lose the crunch when you freeze peppers).  You can of course make this with fresh peppers.

I served this dish over rice, but you can also put it in tortillas as a wrap or serve it with biscuits or cornbread.

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Roast Redux Salad

Leftovers can sometimes be a hard sell.  Not many people like eating exactly the same thing for dinner then lunch, then dinner again.  Which can be a problem if you've made, say, a large roast and a LOT is left in the fridge.  For some reason, leftover roast (be it beef, pork or lamb) lingers at our house.  Maybe because no one wants to deal with slicing it once it's cold, maybe because reheated roast tends to get dry, or maybe because it can be just plain boring to eat the same meat-plus-two-veggies for back-to-back meals.

Interestingly, I couldn't persuade anyone to eat the leftovers of the roast I used to make this dish, but my husband took the leftovers of the repurposed leftovers twice for lunch.  This leftover salad is just that good.

This grain-based salad is inspired by a recipe from Julia Child's The Way to Cook for managing leftover lamb roast.  I did make this with thinly sliced leftover leg of lamb, but I think it would be good with beef or pork roast too.  I made it with bulgur as the grain base (per Julia's directions), but rice, quinoa or couscous would be good too...just be sure to cook the grain according to package directions.

Now the tomato and onion roasting is NOT a fast process and you don't really have to do it (Julia didn't, she just put these ingredients in her salad raw).  But it made the winter hothouse tomatoes de-lish-us and roasting takes that sharp, bitey heat out of the onion that you'll get if you leave it raw.

You can do all of this a day in advance, which is precisely what I did (if you roast the veggies, I'd fridge them for 2 or 3 days even, for as long as you fridge your leftover roast).  I got to walk in the door after work to a fully prepared meal.  And THAT, in addition to how good it tasted, is the real beauty of this meal.

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Pumpkin Gnocchi

Gnocchi are sturdy little bite-size dumplings that are often made with mashed potatoes, but other veggies can form the basis for them too.  They usually have an egg as a binder, and I like that this recipe uses an alternate (therefore allergy-free and vegan) binder that takes advantage of leftovers, if you have leftover rice.  There original recipe comes from a PBS vegan cooking show called Christina Cooks.  I choose to serve mine with a non-vegan browned butter and sage sauce.

The tricky thing about this recipe is controlling for moisture content...you can't.  Your pumpkin may have more or less water than average, and even how soon you puree and use your cooked rice alters its moisture content.  I made rice special for this recipe and (as usual) made too much.  I pureed all the rice immediately (thinking I'd freeze some as "rice cereal" for the baby) and clouds of steam poured out of the food processor.  By the time I finished the gnocchi dough, the rice left in the processor was dry and sticky...I suspect that if I'd used the rice at that stage, I would have needed less semolina in my gnocchi dough.  I also suspect using leftover rice rather than freshly prepared hot rice would have had the same effect.  So the amount of semolina you use is very approximate...keep adding until it's the right consistency.

Which, by the way, is like a soft cookie dough.  You want the dough to hold together when you boil the dumplings but you don't want the dough so stiff that the dumplings are like concrete when you cook them.  So you want a dough that can be controlled with a light dusting of flour on your hands and work surface when you roll it out, but not as stiff as, say, a pie dough or cutout cookie dough.

And the semolina...I don't know if you could easily substitute regular wheat flour for the semolina flour.  They're both wheat products, but the semolina feels like cornmeal.  It's also a higher-gluten flour than regular all purpose flour.  You can't substitute cornmeal either because cornmeal doesn't form gluten bonds and therefore won't bind properly.  I didn't have a hard time at all finding semolina flour...it was on the baking aisle at my decidedly non-fancy grocery store with "specialty" flours.  Bob's Red Mill was the brand available.  For what it's worth, I've made other gnocchi-type dumplings before from different recipes that used regular flour and I thought they were heavier and chewier than the gnocchi I made with the semolina.

Lastly, this recipe calls for 1 cup pureed pumpkin.  I used canned pumpkin.  1 cup is about 1/2 a 15 oz. can.  I HATE having half-a-can of stuff leftover.  You could double up the recipe (especially since you can freeze the uncooked gnocchi!) or make pumpkin muffins, pumpkin seafood chowder, or pumpkin pancakes.  You can use homemade pureed pumpkin or I bet even other types of pureed squash though, again, these changes will affect the moisture content of the dough and change how much semolina you need.


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Pear Muffins

Pears are available year-round, but fall really is pear season.  My favorite way to eat pears is actually a no-recipe dish...a fully, juicy, tender ripe pear sliced thinly with thin slices of Havarti cheese.  I'll eat that for breakfast, dessert, snack, you name it. 

Pears are a valuable addition to one's diet for reasons other than their deliciousness though. 

WARNING: things are about to get a little gross. 

Pears contain sorbitol which is a natural osmotic laxative (the type of laxative that "just makes it easier to go", as the commercials say).  So do prunes and plums, but I know a lot of folks are anti-prune even though you shouldn't be...but that's another post.

If you're thinking about prepping some snacks and meals ahead in preparation for having a baby, pears should be on your list somehow.  If you've just ejected another human being from your body, whether via the baby chute or through the "sunroof", chances are there's gonna be some issues in the osmotic laxative department (personal experience speaking here).  If you're helping someone who is laid up after a surgery or long illness, chance are they're having some issues in the osmotic laxative department.  If you're caring for an elderly person, chances are...well, you get it.  Medication (particularly pain medication), surgeries, inactivity due to injury or bed rest, dehydration from illness, normal aging all tend to cause constipation, and pears will help.

OK, enough poop talk.  Pears are good for what ails you.

I've frozen batches of these muffins before just as is.  They are gooood, but get a little soggy on top in the freezer.  I've played with different ways to freezer-fortify them, and what I've come up with is a good solution I think that can be applied to any type of muffin.  A streusel topping that incorporates nuts or coconut will stand up to the freezer pretty well.  The nuts/coconut doesn't lose crunch and keeps the otherwise-soggy muffin tops covered up.

You can always make the batter and freeze it for later baking which totally side-steps the freezer-sog problem, but it does require back-end time to bake.  If you freeze before baking, spoon the batter into paper cupcake liners in a muffin pan.  Freeze the whole pan, then remove the filled liners to a ziptop bag for storage.  To thaw, put the liner-cups in the muffin pan while still frozen and let thaw in the fridge or at room temp.

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