Indian soup redux

Remember that Indian meatball soup made from leftover curry broth a couple weeks back? We ate all the meatballs out of it (funny how that happens) and there was plenty of broth left, so I froze it. And remember the delectable pork and dal? I froze the leftovers of those, too. On Monday I grabbed all those containers and dumped them into a pot and heated them up together, then added a diced zucchini from our garden and called it dinner. Fantastic. I’d make it again if I could figure out how.

Salmon with beets & fennel

Saturday night’s dinner was pretty exciting (and filling), so I made us a “recovery” dinner for Sunday, just a fillet of wild-caught sockeye salmon, pan-seared in olive oil, and a head of fennel and some beets, cut up and roasted in the oven. It was beautiful, fresh tasting and sweet, and it turns out that salmon and fennel are really good together (note for future experiments).

Of course, we may have undone some of the good of this dinner by also baking up the rest of the gougères and eating them all. Whoops.

Cheese puffs and khachapuri

Friends came over for dinner on Saturday. The weather was actually decent enough that we fired up the grill one last time, producing some truly excellent lemony lamb kebabs and spiced eggplant (I have no pictures, sorry - we ate everything). To go with the lamb and eggplant I whipped up a batch of khachapuri, Georgian cheese-filled yogurt flatbreads (again, forgot to take any pictures before they were gone, but here’s a borrowed image that looks similar). The recipe for these is out of Flatbreads & Flavors by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and they were described by our friend as tasting like “Mac and cheese in a bun!” I assume that’s a good thing - anyway, I like them. Come to think of it, they’d be really good stuffed with eggplant. Or lamb.

Lamb & couscous

This was one of those surprisingly wonderful Wednesday night dinners. I mean, I always hope that my cooking is going to turn out well, but sometimes it just seems like everything comes together particularly nicely - and when it does, it makes even a normal worknight seem like a special holiday.

 In our weekly browse through the grocery store meat case we found some exceptionally nice looking lamb loin chops - we buy these often for weeknight dinners when they’re available, but they’re not always worth the money. I got them seasoned before I left for work in the morning - I trimmed off the outer fat, rubbed them with kosher salt and pepper, and tossed them in a ziploc bag with olive oil, garlic and oregano. I’ve found that the preseasoning really helps the flavor of the meat, instead of just the outside crust.

Ah, autumn!

 Fall really came in with a bang this year. One week, we were having the most gorgeous warm evenings of the entire year, then the next week it rained. And rained. And the wind started blowing. Then it hailed. So much for summer. At least the leaf colors have been fabulous this year, when it stops raining enough to see them.

On the down side, we’ll miss the grill. But on the plus side, we can get going on the braises, the roasts, and casseroles, and the squash and greens. I love the first really seasonal food of any time of year, whether it’s the first asparagus of spring, the first cold noodle salad of summer, or the first batch of holiday cookies. Because we try not to buy out-of-season produce (much), it makes it all the tastier when its time does come. On our last couple of forays to Dunbar Gardens we’ve bought Delicata squash, leeks, Burgundy apples, lettuce, poblanos, tomatoes and chard. At the farmer’s market we’ve gotten potatoes, cheese, cauliflower and eggplant. Eventually the farmstand and market will close for the winter and we’ll be free to buy brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes at the store, and they will seem like a treat because we’ve been waiting for them.

Pear custard pie

I gave J a bottle of Vin Santo dessert wine last Christmas. I believe we had tried some at a wine tasting not long before, and been rather excited by it. But then the bottle lurked in our cellar all year, waiting for the appropriate occasion. Of late, though, I’ve decided that wine-opening occasions have to be created, not just awaited, so I went searching for possible accompaniments.

We recently bought ourselves a copy of What to Drink with What You Eat, so I looked up Vin Santo. Along with the usual recommendations of biscotti and nut-based desserts, I saw pears. Aha! We are definitely in the heart of fresh pear season around here, so I went digging for a recipe I remembered liking back in the mists of time - a pear custard pie that my mother used to make. She got the recipe at a farmer’s market meeting and then printed it in the Cashmere Valley Record newspaper’s recipe collection. Usually when we eat pears around here we poach them in sugar water and top them with pecans, brandy and sour cream. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that, but pie sounded fun.

Star Bar revisited

 

I wrote an account of our visit to Star Bar, a new restaurant in Anacortes, a few weeks ago. I will certainly admit that events were not optimal for enjoyment at the time, what with us and our friends being a bit stressed out and our waitress being a bit novice. I thought the food was good and had promise, but I was not blown away. Now I have been.

Last Friday after work we felt like going out. Mount Vernon doesn’t have a lot of good options for after-work drinks (besides the Porterhouse and the Brewery, of course, but they don’t do hard likker), and we remembered admiring the lounge area at Star Bar, so out to Anacortes we went.

Delectable pork & rai masala

One of J’s very favorite things to cook is a recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen (a super nifty little book) called, appropriately, Delectable Pork. It consists of pork chunks braised in highly flavored liquid which is then reduced to nothing but a very highly flavored coating on the pork. The meat is tender and spicy and goes great with rice, chapati, yogurt, vegetables…it would probably make a great sandwich, too, although I haven’t tried that yet. When J made this for dinner last Monday, he discovered we were out of rai masala, which is a key flavor component, so he made more:

 One batch of rai masala is made by toasting:

• 2 Tbsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fenugreek seeds
• 1 tsp brown mustard seeds
• 1 tsp whole peppercorns
• 1-2 hot dried red chiles
• 5 cloves

Chorizo-poblano quiche

I can’t remember when I started making quiche. In the early years of my marriage when I was vegetarian I made lots of things out of the Moosewood cookbooks, especially things like the ricotta-spinach pie and big gooey casseroles. Eventually I discovered the “quiche formula” in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest and I was converted.

Basically, the idea is that as long as you have the right proportions of egg and milk for the size of pan you’re using, and plenty of cheese to coat the bottom and protect the crust from sogginess, you can put whatever the heck you want in there. It’s easy to make and easy to remember (I made two quiches from scratch, from memory, for a wedding in Knik, Alaska, and felt very smug about it). I have tried many things, from chard and mushrooms to broccoli and ham, and they all come out pretty good. But the winner in our household, especially in the late summer when peppers are in season, is my patented Chorizo-Poblano Quiche. It’s rich and spicy with lots of cheesy goodness, set off by the whole-wheat flavor of the crust. We make this as often as possible every fall while we can get beautiful fresh poblano peppers from our friend Steve at Dunbar Gardens. The loose Mexican-style chorizo comes from a local producer as well, Hempler’s in Bellingham.

Apples, apples and more apples

‘Tis the season for apples. We live in an area where apples are locally available, and some of them are very good, but I grew up in the heart of apple country, the Wenatchee Valley, and west-of-the-Cascades apples just never taste as good to me. So every year I make a point of buying a box of Jonagolds at a fruitstand near my parents’ house. Many of them are destined to become applesauce, but there are always leftovers.