We celebrated the end of 2010 our usual way, with oysters and potato chips and onion dip and Good Luck Noodles and bubbly, then rang in the new year with cassoulet, followed by a serious need to lay off the carbohydrates for a while. Here’s to the new year – may it be a good one!
We finally got out to Samish Island last week to check out a new addition to the local food scene, Golden Distillery. We had just stocked up on bread, cheese and salami in Edison and were heading for Taylor Shellfish in preparation for Christmas Eve dinner, so it made for an easy (and scenic) detour.
It’s a small operation, and the owners are happy to give you a tour of the premises. They grind, brew, distill and age all their ingredients on site, using entirely Washington-grown grain and fruit.
We met the distillery dogs, who take their job as greeters very seriously. And we tasted our way through the current lineup, which includes single-malt whiskey, several brandies and a white barley whiskey called White Gold. My favorites were the White Gold, which had a clean flavor and light burn, and the Cabernet brandy, which was just a nice smooth brandy, very easy to sip.
The apple brandy, which is made from locally grown Jonagolds, has a very different flavor from most apple spirits – instead of an overall essence-of-apples effect, it really does taste of Jonagolds. Interesting. The raspberry brandy is distilled from Pasek Cellars raspberry wine, something we used to like a lot but have lost our taste for. I gather it’s popular with many women customers, but not really my thing.
Over all, I think they’re doing some nice work. And it’s a good excuse to go driving out to Samish Island.
I hope everyone had as fun a Christmas as we did. We went to my parents’ house, bearing five pounds of fresh mussels, two loaves of bread, several packages of salumi, a bottle of wine and some cheese. My father brined and roasted a turkey and I baked a sweet potato pie. We shoveled snow to work up our appetites. It was a good weekend.
What are the holidays for if not to take on elaborate cooking projects that involve plenty of butter? Exactly. This week I decided to try out a gnocchi recipe from Bouchon
Once the gnocchi are cooked and chilled, you could use them lots of different ways, or freeze them for later. This particular recipe combines pan-fried herbed gnocchi with squash, fresh sage and shiitake mushrooms. Keller wants you to use butternut squash, which is certainly easy to work with, but you could use any sweet squash. We had delicatas and what I think are Carnival squash, or perhaps Little Dumpling, that we bought at the farmer’s market in October – I used a delicata. They’re very mild, but I like how they do in this sort of recipe.
We served our gnocchi with a simple pork chop and a very nice aged Italian wine. It was delicious and festive – I’d definitely recommend it for a holiday dinner. And since I’d made a full recipe, there were plenty of leftovers…
…which made a very, very fine breakfast with an egg on top. Mmmmm. Buttery.
I tend to make pretty chunky borsch – I like the smooth kind served cold with a bit of vinegar stirred in, but I also like a big hearty soup with pieces of beet and potato and beef and plenty of cabbage, and that’s the sort we usually have at home. I usually use beef or lamb broth for the base, if I have any, and dill as the main seasoning. And sour cream on top, of course.
This particular batch had a slightly different flavor than usual, as I braised the beef in beer before assembling the rest of the soup, instead of using broth. A friend brought a growler of excellent locally-brewed stout to our holiday party this weekend, and I wanted to use some of it up. I seared the beef stew meat with onions, added a cup of stout, and let it simmer covered for an hour and a half while I roasted the beets and sliced the cabbage. I topped up the soup pot with a little water and added everything else, then let it cook another half hour or so. It was a really good borsch, and the beer made it less sweet and a bit earthier. A slice of buttered rye bread would have been the only thing to make it better.
Every year or two we try making injera bread, and are usually crushed by disappointment when it sticks to the pan, tastes weird and is just generally unsuccessful. This time it actually sort of worked.
Injera is a traditional Ethiopian flatbread made by souring a batter made of teff flour for several days, then cooking it like a large pancake to produce a stretchy, spongy sour bread which is perfect for mopping up spicy stews and is also used as a plate. Many cookbooks assume that you can’t get teff flour in the United States, and so suggest a blend of wheat flours. However, that adds gluten, and doesn’t really have the right flavor – teff is easier to find now that gluten-free baking is more popular, so I strongly suggest seeking it out. I also don’t recommend “quick” injera recipes that use baking soda instead of a slow yeast rise or sourdough starter. It’s not just supposed to be bubbly, you want it sour. Plan ahead!
After trying various recipes over the years, I decided to go back to the one really traditional version that I’ve found, from Flatbreads & Flavors
When I was a kid, oatmeal always meant rolled oats. Not instant, just the regular oats that need some cooking but don’t take very long. I liked it all right but was never wild about it – the texture was a little slimy, the flavor dull. Then we discovered steel-cut oats.
Because they take longer to cook, they require a bit of planning ahead to be able to do them on a work morning, but a bowl of good oats is well worth a little trouble. I like to set out my pans, measure my water and oats, and generally have everything ready to go the night before, which lets me get them ready in about half an hour after we get up.
We learned this great way of cooking them from Cook’s Illustrated (which we’ve simplified a bit to be slightly less rich) – you toast the oats before you add them to your boiling water. It speeds up the cooking process a bit, and gives the oatmeal a lovely warmth and depth. If you want to go the whole hog, Cook’s has you saute the oats in butter, then cook them in part water, part milk – it’s very tasty but makes it unnecessary to add cream, which for us is sort of the whole point of oatmeal.
After the rigors of NaBloPoMo, it’s been a relief to not be constantly looking for new blog material. I’m rather enjoying the novelty of eating something and not documenting it (gasp). I daresay we’ll be back on track soon. In the meantime, here are some cute kitty ears for Caturday.
I know everyone and their mother probably has a recipe for potato pancakes, but I recently discovered a new method for making them and it’s SO GOOD. And since Hanukkah, that celebration of fried food, begins tomorrow, it seemed like a fine time to mention it.
The secret is onion – quite a lot of onion, too. Really, it makes a huge difference! Mitchell Davis, author of the very useful book Kitchen Sense
And by the way, today marks the end of another National Blog Posting Month – I made it all 30 days! Daily posting is not likely to continue, but we’ll see where inspiration leads me. As always, thanks for reading!
Recipe after the jump…
We went to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving this year.
It was very cold.
But there was coffee. And coffeecake.
And later, Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house. My mother and I made the pies. Everything was fantastic.
Food on the Brain 