This week's menu

Hello folks, I'm back! I'm not sure how often I'll get to post with a new little one in the house, but I'll try. Our baby was born on October 1st, 2009, and it's been quite a ride! We had some amazing friends bringing over their homemade food for the first couple of months which helped us immensely, and we've recently started cooking food that's typical for us instead of just take out or prepared stuff. I started up our CSA again so have had to think about a menu for this week. Here we go!



This week's box:
Navel oranges
Fuji apples
Savoy cabbage
Collard greens
Leeks
Red leaf lettuce
Yellow onions
French fingerling potatoes

And the resulting dinner menu:

• Pan-grilled chicken & fingerlings with saffron aoli and side salad
• Feijoada (with sausage instead of tofu) & collards with rice and oranges
• Farmer's market ravioli with Pasta Cosi roasted garlic sauce (a gift from a friend from the holidays)
• Beans and cabbage with shrimp (Joy of Cooking)
• Fish in a bag over greens with country bread
• Pappardelle with cabbage, prosciutto and sage

Garden Vegetable Polenta Lasagna

We recently joined another CSA, called Farm Fresh to You. What I really like about it is the choice of boxes from small to large, from mixed, fruit only, to quick and easy to cook fruits and veggies. Since it's only my husband and myself for now, we're currently getting a weekly small box, and it is working out well. They send wonderful recipes with the box, and the vegetables are adequately cleaned before arrival. The best part is that they deliver to your home or workplace. These are all things that I missed with our last CSA.

So, I'm back to getting creative to finish off the veggies. This week, we had an assortment of cheeses left in the fridge, as well as some herbs and veggies. I had made an heirloom tomato sauce earlier in the week. Not only was this simple to make, it was actually quite delicious. I recommend serving it with a simple, green salad and some fruit for dessert. Sorry, there are no pictures -- we dug in too fast!

Garden Vegetable Polenta Lasagna
Serves 4-6

2 tubes Trader Joe's Polenta, sliced into 1/2 inch slices
1/2 recipe heirloom tomato sauce (I added small bits of smoked ham at the beginning of cooking the sauce)
15 oz. container ricotta cheese
1/3 cup chopped basil
1 egg
pinch nutmeg
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion (I used a white spring onion...not a green onion, but a young onion with the green tops still attached), chopped
8 oz. blue lake green beans, washed and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Heat olive oil in a skillet and add onions. Cook until soft. Add green beans and 1/4 teaspoon salt and cook until the beans are crisp-tender.

Combine ricotta, basil, egg, nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste in a small bowl.

Pour 1/4 cup or so of tomato sauce on the bottom of an 8 by 11 glass baking dish and swirl to coat the bottom. Layer slices of polenta from one of the tubes. Top with ricotta mixture, followed by the cooked green beans and onions. Top with the rest of the polenta. Pour the remainder of the sauce on top and sprinkle the mozzarella cheese. Cook for 35 minutes in the oven.

This Week's Menu

Early spring is about to hit, and we've had a mixture of rainy vs. very sunny days. I'm inspired to eat the fresh, young fruits and veggies that are starting to show up in our farmer's markets, like asparagus and artichokes.

We also recently found out that we're expecting a baby in early October, so my goal is to eat as healthy as possible, with as many fresh fruits and veggies that I can fit into my diet.

Here's the goal for the week (I don't plan a dinner for every night since we tend to have leftovers or something comes up. We always have standbys, like risotto or pizza to use up leftover veggies and ingredients):

Breakfasts
Whole wheat english muffins with egg, cheddar cheese, and tomato slices
Nut cluster cereal with milk and orange juice
Berry shakes

Lunch group
Artichoke phyllo pie with side salad of spinach and oranges

Dinner
Sun: Artichoke phyllo pie
Mon: Fresh pasta
Tue: White fish with baby bok choy
Wed: Feijoada with greens and rice
Thu: Chicken milanese with side salad of tomato, cucumber, and avocado and bread

Chestnut Stuffing

This is my version of my paternal grandfather's Chestnut Stuffing. It's meant for stuffing the turkey for Thanksgiving (18 pounds of turkey, in fact, which is why I halved the recipe and why you'll see the smaller recipe here), but I love it on its own. I've updated the ingredients a bit and wrote out in more detail the sequence in which I think things should happen. The original recipe is written on a small index card and is very short-hand. For example, the original recipe called for two pounds of chestnuts, to be shelled and prepared, page 780. The other day, on a whim, I looked in the oldest published cookbook I have, which happens to be the cookbook that my father recieved from his parents when he went off to college, and the page did correspond to preparing chestnuts. Check out the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, original copyright in 1948. Fortunately, the book has been recently republished, so we can all see what Americans used to eat in the 1950's and what techniques were recommended for the housewife. Anyway, I guarantee you that once you try this stuffing based on rice instead of bread and with the earthy flavors of chestnuts and mushrooms, you'll never want to eat another stuffing again!

This is the picture from our Thanksgiving dinner this year when my father made the recipe his way:



Chestnut Stuffing
Inspired by my grandfather
Makes 8 servings, or stuffing for a small to medium turkey

1 pound sweet Italian sausages, casings removed
1 pound crimini mushrooms, sliced
5 stalks celery, finely chopped
Same quantity chopped onion as the celery (about 1 medium)
1 1/2 cups cooked long-grain rice
1 pound chestnuts with shell or 8 ounces pre-peeled chestnuts (Trader Joe's is currently selling vacuum-sealed, peeled and steamed chestnuts)
2 tablespoons Bell's Seasoning (or more to taste)
Salt and pepper to taste

If you bought chestnuts with the shells, peel and cook the chestnuts until they are chewy. I followed the advice in the Joy of Cooking for peeling the chestnuts, which involved scoring the chestnuts on the flat side with an X, bringing water to a boil in a pot and boiling the chestnuts for 5 minutes. Then, you turn off the heat, and leave the chestnuts in the hot water. Take only a few chestnuts at a time and peel away the top layer, as well as the finer, papery layers. If the peels resist, toss the chestnuts back in the water. Reboil the water if it cools before you are done. This takes patience. After peeling the chestnuts, be sure to boil them again in salted water or broth until they are chewy. If you bought the prepared chestnuts, making this stuffing is much simpler!

Fry out the sausage in a large pot or pan and pour off most of the grease. Add the celery, onions, and Bell's Seasoning and cook until they are clear. Add the rice and heat through. Add the mushrooms and chestnuts. Bring to a boil and simmer, adding water if the mixture starts to dry out. Simmer for 5 to 10 minutes or until the mushrooms are cooked. Allow to cool if it will be used as a stuffing for turkey. Otherwise, dig in! I find that the stuffing tastes better the next day after it has time to sit and meld flavors. Hope you like it!

Bell's Seasoning

If you live in the Northeast, you probably have easy access to this seasoning, but back in the Wild West, it isn't stocked often. In fact, I've never seen it. My grandfather once wrote down a recipe for chestnut stuffing, and the seasoning he lists is Bell's Seasoning. Having grown up in South America and the Midwest, and having been born after my grandfather died, I think my family assumed it was just a brand of some old seasoning that no longer exists. My dad rightly assumed that this was a poultry seasoning, so he would always just make up his own combination of spices to do the chestnut stuffing. Well, as a librarian, I am a researcher by nature, and I had to at least check to see if I could find any information about it. To my surprise, the company still exists, and you can still buy the seasoning! Bell's Seasoning. In addition to the corporate site, I found mention of this seasoning on many forums, and it seems that folks consistently agree that Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without this seasoning. I had to give it a try! Unfortunately, we can't buy it here (as far as I know), and I needed it soon for a company potluck. So, I found a simple recipe on a forum that seems accurate according to the corporate site (although, I'm not sure how the original tastes). All amounts call for dried herbs rather than fresh. Someday, I'll try out chestnut stuffing with a fresh version of this with similar proportions.



Bell's Seasoning
Makes 1/2 cup

4 1/2 tsp rosemary
4 tsp oregano
3 3/4 tsp sage
3 1/2 tsp ginger
3 tsp marjoram
2 3/4 tsp thyme
3/4 tsp black pepper

Pomegranate Ginger Muffins

It's now pomegranate season at my parents' house in Santa Barbara. My mother made a couple of batches while we were visiting for Thanksgiving, and I took a few pieces of fruit home with me to try this recipe for myself. I was surprised to find that I had already printed out the recipe about two years ago from RecipeZaar, and my mother found the same recipe on myrecipes.com, published by Sunset magazine. See the recipe here. The bits of pomegranate surprise you with a sweet tartness in every bite, and the lemon peel adds to a very fragrant muffin batter. This is definitely going to be an annual affair as pomegranates come back into season. I like to eat these warm for breakfast with some plain yogurt.

This Week's Menu

This is going to be a busy week for me! We're nearing the holidays, and we have a new director at work in my department starting this week, and I have a concert on Thursday, in which I will be a soloist. We're having a gathering for our director that will involve cookies and cider, and I'm supposed to bring a treat to the concert. My parents are also coming into town to watch me play, and Friday is my mother's birthday, so I'm taking her out for some high tea. Here's my plan for the week:

Treats for the director and the concert (makes a very large batch of cookies, so it should last for both): Docinhos de goiabada (or goiaba cookies. Sorry, I can't share the recipe here since this is a family recipe that has been sworn to secrecy)

Lunch for the lunch group:
Burritos made with "refried beans with cinnamon and clove" from "The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper" (the recipe was given to me from a coworker whose partner is a chef and loves this recipe) and with roasted sweet potato, guacamole, micro greens, green onions, olives, and sour cream (inspired by Fran's Spicy Sweet Potato Burritos)

Dinners:
Sunday: Burritos (see above)
Monday: Fresh pasta from the farmer's market
Tuesday: Baked polenta with mushrooms, and marinated beans and spinach salad on the side
Wednesday: Coconut mung bean soup
Thursday: Another fresh pasta from the market
Friday: out for dinner with my parents

You'll notice that a couple of recipes either come from or are inspired by a blog I just found today that I think will become my new favorite blog, Fran's House of Ayurveda. This is the kind of blog I would have loved to create if I knew enough about Ayurvedic cooking, so I know I'm going to learn a lot! I've been looking for good Vata recipes (my dosha, or constitution, is Vata-Pitta), and I've also been looking for some good breakfast recipes. I'm always amazed at how difficult it is to find healthy and satisfying breakfast recipes since we all know that this is the first meal of the day and is quite important. I'm looking forward to it. Have a great week, everyone!