Category Archives: autumn

Pumpkin Mushroom Lasagna

Usually, I am responsible about not overscheduling myself. I know that I need plenty of time each week to do Nothing in Particular, by myself, on my own time. These past few weeks, though, have been full of activity, and while I love, absolutely love, spending time with so many friends, I’m near the point where I just want to sit and stare at the wall for an hour. All of this nonstop busyness will stop on Wednesday, though, when I plan on drawing a bath and turning my phone off.

What does this have to do with food? Well, I’m making this lasagna for a potluck today. And there will still be enough for me to have for dinner on Wednesday. Half an hour of cooking (and an hour in the oven) is going to set me up with wonderful leftovers for the next few days. This is by far my favorite nontraditional lasagna, easily adored with the matchup of sweet squash and hearty mushrooms, set off by the tang of ricotta salata. The next time you’re thinking about making a wintery baked dish that will last you for three days, I excitedly recommend this wonderful Moosewood recipe.

Pumpkin Mushroom Lasagna
very closely based on a recipe from the Moosewood Collective
makes a 9″x13″ pan

2 yellow onions, diced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 lb sliced cremini or other mushrooms
1/4 cup chopped fresh sage leaves
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup sherry, vegetable stock, or a combination
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 15-ounce cans pumpkin
3 cups ricotta
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
3/4 pound uncooked lasagna noodles
1 1/2 cups crumbled ricotta salata
1/2 cup grated romano or parmesan

In a large pot, saute onions in oil for 5 minutes. Add mushrooms and saute another 5 minutes, until mushrooms are somewhat wilted. Add sage, salt, and sherry or stock and simmer on low heat for 5 minutes. Set aside.

In a large bowl stir together eggs, pumpkin, ricotta, pepper, and nutmeg. Set aside.

Preheat to 375F and lightly oil a 9″x13″ baking dish.

Dip out about 1/2 cup liquid from the sauteed mushrooms and pour into the prepared baking dish. Cover bottom with a layer of lasagna noodles arranged close together. Evenly spread on half of the pumpkin mixture. Spoon on about a third of the mushrooms and sprinkle with a third of the ricotta salata. Add a second layer of noodles followed by the remaining pumpkin mixture, another third of the sauteed mushrooms, and another third of the ricotta salata. Finish with a layer of noodles thoroughly moistened by the last third of the sauteed mushrooms. Evenly sprinkle on the last third of the ricotta salata and top with the grated romano.

Cover and bake 50 minutes. Uncover and bake for an additional 10 minutes, until lasagna is bubbly, noodles are tender, and the top is browned. Remove from oven and let stand 10 minutes before serving.

Sweet Potato and Pear Hand Pies

Every few days since I wrote the last entry, I would say to myself, “I really should update the blog.” I’ve been cooking, and taking pictures, but when it comes to writing things down, I’ve just gotten lazy. Let’s blame it on… shorter days, less sunlight, hibernation-with-book tendencies, busyness at work, misaligned planets, rain on Tuesdays? Finally today, Nico said to me, “You know, you’ve been making Thai tea ice cream for ages.”

I made these a couple of weeks ago. On the phone with my dad one Saturday morning, I said, “What should I cook today?” and he relied, “Sweet potatoes and wine.” Very doable. I felt like some weekend baking, and I wanted something that I could eat casually but didn’t mind taking some time to work on. Stumbling across this recipe on Real Food Rehab, I cooed and headed straight into the kitchen.

This is a great pie crust recipe, using an egg to help it stand up to the little bit of mauling necessary to make the half-moon shapes. I’d never made little pastry pockets like this before, and as I pressed the ends of these together with a fork, I kept looking at them and going, “….aw.” When I ate them, though, cuteness turned into lustiness. Rich sweet potatoes spiked with wine and laced with 7-spice powder: how can you go wrong?

Lebanese 7-spice powder (in some cases it’s Syrian) is the ace up my spice rack’s sleeve. If you can find this in a Middle Eastern grocery, you’re in like Flynn. If you can’t, don’t despair – use a combination of allspice and black pepper. I made the filling vegan by using soy creamer and Earth Balance, but I’d be hard-pressed to let go of that egg in the crust.

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Sweet Potato and Pear Hand Pies
crust recipe from Kate Neumann, as printed by Dana Joy Altman
makes about 16

crust
3 2/3 cups all purpose flour
2 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
10.5 ounces (about 2.5 sticks) unsalted butter, very cold and cubed
2 eggs, cold & gently beaten
1/4 cup ice water

filling
1 medium-sized sweet potato, 1″ dice
sweet white wine
1 medium-sized pear, peeled and cut into 1/2″ dice
1 teaspoon Lebanese 7-spice powder
2 tablespoons cream
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup apple butter
1/4 cup brown sugar

Combine flour, sugar, salt and butter in a large mixing bowl. Using your hands or a pastry cutter, work the fat in until it’s broken down into pea-sized pieces. Add one of the eggs and mix with a wooden spoon. Then, pour ice water in tablespoon increments until dough looks “shaggy”, feels a bit wet, and holds together only if you smush a bit in your hands. Knead the dough together by hand, no more than a minute, and form into a round disc, cover with plastic wrap and let chill in fridge for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, make filling: Bring salted water to a boil in a 2-quart saucepan and add diced sweet potato, along with maybe half a cup of wine. Cook until sweet potato is very soft, then drain. Put sweet potato in a large mixing bowl along with remaining filling ingredients. Mash until… well, until it’s mashed. Add another glug of white wine and stir that in.

On a well-floured counter or pastry board, roll dough out to 3/16″ thickness and cut out 4″ rounds. (You can use the outline of the rim of a bowl and trace it out with a knife.) Place each cut round on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and a light dusting of flour. The scraps can be combined and rolled out again. Place a heaping tablespoon of filling in the center of each disc.

Whisk the egg. Brush a half circle of egg around the edge of exposed pastry to act as “glue.” Fold the circle in half and press down the edges with a fork to seal. Chill for at least one hour, and preheat the oven to 375F.

Before baking, brush surface of the crust with egg, cut three slits as vents and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for about 45 minutes until golden brown.

Thai Tea Ice Cream

All summer long, I’ve been thinking of ice cream. And sherbet, and sorbet. And all the wonderful things I could do if only I were to drop fifty bucks on a kitchen appliance instead of on a fancy dinner. (It’s really hard for me to not spend money on a fancy dinner, especially in Portland.) With every new frozen dessert recipe and idea I saw, I would say it louder: “I’m totally getting an ice cream maker next week.”

Before I knew it, September arrived, and the vapidity of my promises reared its head. I couldn’t let the summer close without that icy churn sitting on my countertop, and so, on Labor Day weekend, I made good. After an agonizing week’s wait, I greeted the UPS man on Friday with a cheer, and I immediately dissected the delivery. I’d already made a couple of bases to go in the bucket as soon as it froze – for grapefruit-fennel sorbet and Thai tea ice cream. I’d had the latter at Staccato Gelato earlier this year and quickly lost the ability to recall my life without it. Since the flavors at Staccato change all the time, I hadn’t had it since, and as soon as I entered my shipping details I knew that this was going to be in the first round.

Thai tea is a cantaloupe-colored drink, rich with sweetened condensed milk. I first heard mention of it from Aunt Carole, whom I always considered the family foodie, when I was a teenager. Her ability to get Thai food in Chicago, however, was much greater than mine in North Carolina. I finally tasted some in college and immediately understood what all the fuss was about. I don’t know what’s in it, and I’m not sure I want to know – I sacrifice some things for the sake of mystery. Its taste is almost rustic, but there’s enough exotic bliss to keep you going, and on a hot day it’s one of the few dairy-laden beverages that cool me off.

I found this recipe from Mac & Cheese, a Philadelphia vegetarian blog. Since most of my extended family is in Philly, and I went to high school there, I’m all about supporting the Delaware Valley foodies. (Tell Grandmom I said hi.) I adore this not only because it tastes great but because it’s got 3 ingredients. Can’t get much more simple than that.

thai tea ice cream

Thai Tea Ice Cream
from Taylor at Mac & Cheese
makes about a quart

1/3 cup loose leaf Thai tea
2 1/2 cups boiling water
1 cup sweetened condensed milk
1 cup half and half

Steep tea in water 20 minutes, then strain and let cool to room temperature. Mix 1 1/2 cups brewed tea with sweetened condensed milk and half and half. Freeze mixture in your ice cream maker, according to manufacturer’s directions.

Spiced Fried Apples with Apricot Butter

I travel light.

After doing the requisite college European backpacking trip with a giant black pack that necessitated very few stops for laundry but a grumble every time I tried to lift it, I came home and stuffed the cumbersome luggage into the bowels of my parents’ basement, never to be seen again. Now I’ve got an oversized daypck that I use for everything from weekend trips to month-long round-the-world jaunts. (Yes, I did that once. Not recommended.) It’s always been important for me to be able to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, because you never know when you’ll get a last-minute deal on tickets to Greece or an acquaintance whose parents’ friends’ cousins have a summer house on the Red Sea coast that they won’t use next weekend. Underwear, three shirts, toothbrush, go.

Since moving to Portland, I have discovered that I may travel light but I don’t necessarily live light. I find myself nesting. Acquiring things. This is a struggle for me, because while I realize that I am still aware enough to avoid buying non-useful things, every blanket, set of candles, pack of clothes hangers that I get roots me further in this apartment, this city, this country. The bookshelf I bought when I moved here is slowly being filled – thanks to living within walking distance of Powell’s – and my space is starting to look more and more inhabited.

In cultivating a relationship to Things, and finding a balance between materialism and simplicity, I spend time thinking about how I came to acquire them. If you’re going to own something, I feel you should remember the handing-over, have a story – a word, at the very least – to mark the moment they passed into your space. I was looking through my food photos this morning, saw this one, and thought about what went into it.

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I made this for breakfast the day that my friend Ravi and I drove out to the coast – to Seaside, full of charming tackiness and home to the worst sandwich I’ve ever eaten, and to Astoria, a town I’d love to live in if I had a car and a tolerance for months on end of gray skies.

Of the objects in the picture, the cloth came from Istanbul. Everywhere I travel I buy scarves and earrings – they pack easily (travel light!) and are beautiful but useful. (I have a very firm no-knickknack policy, especially when it comes to souvenirs.) I’m up to about 35 scarves at this point, so I always have a backdrop for food styling!

The scarf in this photo was bought at the spice bazaar in Sultanahmet, sold for tourists but stunning nonetheless, ocean blues and strands of silver. A few minutes after I bought it, my friends and I turned a corner and found an entire street full of scarf shops – and one of them turned to another and said, “Uh oh, we’re about to lose Lauren.” I restrained myself and left the alley with only… 7 scarves. Maybe 8.

The plate is from Ikea, in a shopping trip I took thanks to some extra money in my paycheck. The food – the most important part – is from the first farmers’ market of the season! Signaling the end of a weary gray winter, I woke up on Saturday and walked the seven blocks from my house, canvas bag in hand, to a comfortably crowded, energetic collection of foodies and farmers where I picked up sunchokes, parsnips, apples, eggs, and a beautiful loaf of flour-dusted whole wheat bread. What better way to start the farmers’ market season than with a little fry-up in a cast iron pan?

Spiced Friend Apples with Apricot Butter
serves 2

2 tablespoons butter or Earth Balance
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
3 winesap apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
2 heaping tablespoons apricot butter (or any fruit butter of your choosing)
2 slices good bread
maple syrup

In a pan over medium-high heat, melt butter. Add cinnamon and cloves and cook, stirring, for about 15 seconds. Add apples, stir until coated with butter, and cover. Let cook for 3-4 minutes or until easily split with a fork. Uncover and brown for 1 minute. Stir in apricot butter, empty mixture into a bowl, and set aside.

Put more butter in the pan if necessary and fry bread on both sides until browned, 2-3 minutes per side. Serve apples over bread and top with maple syrup.

Spaghetti Squash with Sarsaparilla and Sage

When I first started cooking with any intention, I wasted a tremendous amount of money. One day, years ago, I was home from college for the summer and a few friends came to visit for the weekend, and we decided to make a curry for dinner. The recipe we picked was, of course, one with thirty ingredients, most of which were spices. My parents tossed me their debit card and we went to the store.

We spent eighty-four dollars. To make one pot of curry. And you know why? Because we bought a jar of every spice on that list. All of which were, of course, organic. And at least five bucks a pop. I have learned since that the most wonderful thing about health food stores is the bulk section, specifically the bulk herbs and spices. Heed this!: Never buy a jar of spices, because you can buy them by the teaspoon (or tablespoon, or whatever) at your local co-op for fifty cents, which saves you tons of money – and, since you’re not buying a whole jarful at a time, you don’t have to worry about it going stale. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes we make when stocking our pantry: spices, especially pre-ground spices, lose their potency quickly, and when you leave a jar of curry powder in the cabinet for a year before you finally get around to making that great vindaloo recipe you’ve been hanging on to, I can promise you it will hardly taste like anything except the twenty chilies you had to put in.

So there’s tip number one for the day. Tip number two, which I try to emphasize often in this blog: substitute whenever and wherever you can. When I was first getting the hang of cooking for myself, I made sure to follow new recipes to the letter the first time I made them, and then allowed myself to adapt them as needed. I think this is important for a beginning cook, but now that I’ve got a better sense of things, I do it less often, and have become more of a recipe-as-guide person, as opposed to a recipe-as-law. I love reading a recipe that has notes for variation, because it means that whoever developed it played around with it a lot before releasing it to the wind, and it also gives more of a springboard for ideas of different directions that I can take with it.

This second tip is the main reason I’ve never made spaghetti squash – well, at least not until this afternoon. It feels like such a… unitasker. If I’m going to make something with winter squash, I grab one arbitrarily from the pile at the grocery store. (Or farmers’ market. Of course.) Spaghetti squash seemed almost gimmicky to me – it’s squash, and it can be made into ribbons? Who cares?

I picked one up last week. I caved.

Okay, okay, the pastasquash is fun. I admit it. You can wrap it around your fork, suck a piece down like a noodle, and pile it up into a lovely orange tower of angel hair. But it’s squash, which everyone in their right mind loves, and so it goes terrifically with simple, earthy flavors. I’m using only two – sarsaparilla and sage. One trendy, one classic, both delicious.

You know how you make broth with a bundle of aromatic herbs? I followed the same idea here. When I split the squash down the middle to bake, I put sarsaparilla in the pan, underneath the cavity of the squash. This helped the flavor really permeate, without that annoying texture of, well, wood. No one likes eating bits of wood.

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Spaghetti Squash with Sarsaparilla and Sage
serves 2-3

1 spaghetti squash
olive oil
2 teaspoons sarsaparilla
2 dried sage leaves, crushed
salt to taste

Preheat to 350. Halve spaghetti squash lengthwise, and scrape out seeds and goop. Put 1/4″ of water in the bottom of a pan large enough to hold both squash halves, and put a teaspoon of sarsaparilla in the place of where you’ll put each half. Drizzle a bit of olive oil in there, too, then put each squash half over the little piles of sarsaparilla. Cover tightly with aluminum foil or a good lid, then put in the oven and bake until soft, 30-45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for a few minutes.

Take a look at which way the strands are going. You meat-eaters will know that it’s best to cut meat to make the fibers as short as possible – the opposite is true here. With a fork, gently loosen the strands of squash – with the grain, not against it. Pile onto a plate and top with sage and some good salt.

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Smoked Paprika and Rutabaga Bisque

This weekend, my goals have been:

1. Above all, do as little as possible.
2.  Spend many happy minutes looking at Mt St Helens and Mt Adams from my window, as it’s often too cloudy to see them.
3.  Listen to NPR in live form, not podcast.
4.  Make the rutabaga bisque whose recipe has been sitting in my inbox for weeks.
5.  Change out of my bathrobe only when absolutely necessary.

I’d like to report that I have done all of these with great aplomb.

This bisque is perfect.  Just perfect.  I don’t like anything that tastes like a radish, and rutabaga falls in that category, but smoked paprika takes that bitter sourness and turns it into something pristine and hearty all at once.  The original recipe called for celery, as so many soup recipes do, but I can’t stand celery, plus I didn’t have any, so I left it out.  If you want to keep it in, it’s 2 stalks, diced.  But if you ask me, Enemy Extraordinaire of Celery, it doesn’t need it.

I could go on about this soup, but that would take too much time away from your marching to the kitchen to make it.  And I’ve really got to get back to working on goal #1.

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Smoked Paprika and Rutabaga Bisque
adapted from a recipe by Kate Ramos for chow.com
serves 6-8

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 1/2 pounds rutabaga, peeled and cubed (about 4 1/4 cups)
4 cups (1 quart) low-sodium vegetable broth
2 cups half-and-half
2 1/2 teaspoons good quality smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ground black or white pepper

Melt butter in a large pot over medium heat. Once butter foams, add onion, and season generously with salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion is tender but not browned, about 5 minutes.

Add rutabaga and broth, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer until rutabaga is tender when pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes. Add half-and-half, paprika, and pepper and stir to combine. Allow soup to cool slightly, then purée in a blender until smooth. (You will have to do this in batches.) Taste and season with more salt and pepper as needed.

Cranberry-Orange Cornbread with Five-Spice Glaze

A few months ago, I mentioned my love for Crescent Dragonwagon, a self-professed “closet vegetarian” for years who finally outed herself in her wonderful cookbooks.  She’s done a lot to influence the way I think about food, and has much to do with my refusal to see vegetarianism as a limitation.

So imagine my surprise when I saw that she had commented on the entry!  She had her publishers send me a promo copy of her newest book, The Cornbread Gospels, and while I think it is indeed possible to beat a single food item into the ground, I trust Crescent to make anything well.  I finally cracked it open last week, to make her Cornmeal-Oatmeal Cranberry-Orange Loaf.  The bread itself was definitely above average, cakey and moist and everything it should be in Crescent’s magical kitchen, but I was astonished to see that the recipe called for orange zest without making use of the orange juice that would be left over!

Well, I said to myself, we’ll just fix that.

So I made this glaze and holy cannoli, it’s amazing.  I understand that part of the point of having a food blog is to toot one’s own horn, and I try not to do that too much, but, really, I am a GENIUS.  I had my doubts when this stuff first started heating up on the stove – the five-spice powder + Cointreau was a bit overpowering – but once it started to thicken, any sharpness mellowed and I considered buying a funnel so that I could just pour it directly down my throat.  That method, however, would neglect the cornbread itself, with which this goes brilliantly.  I’ll mention that all of the measurements for the glaze should end with “or so”, since I added a bit of this and a sprinkle of that. All raves aside, I can say no more other than that you really need to drop whatever you’re doing and make this.  You know, now.

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Cranberry-Orange Cornbread with Five-Spice Glaze
adapted, and in some cases, directly copied, from a recipe by Crescent Dragonwagon

vegetable oil cooking spray
1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
1/3 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
3 tablespoons mild vegetable oil
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk (I used half milk and half yogurt)
finely grated zest of 1 orange – save the juice!
1 cup cranberries, washed, picked over, and coarsely chopped
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup rolled oats

Preheat the oven to 350F. Coat an 8″x8″ pan with oil. Sift together flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt into a large bowl. In a separate bowl whisk together eggs, oil, buttermilk, and orange zest. In a third bowl combine cranberries, pecans, and oatmeal. Sprinkle a tablespoon of flour mixture over them, and toss well.

Quickly combine flour mixture and egg mixture, using as few strokes as possible. Gently stir in the cranberry mixture. The batter should be stiff. Spoon batter into prepared pan and bake 45-55 minutes. Check two-thirds of the way through the baking period; if the loaves are browning excessively, tent them loosely with foil.

Let the baked bread cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then run a thin knife around the edge of the pan and turn the loaf out. Drizzle with glaze: in a saucepan, combine…

1/2 cup powdered raw sugar (I used Mexican sugar)
juice from the orange you zested
a splash of Cointreau
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder

Bring to a boil and cook, stirring constantly, until reduced to a thick glaze. (This will go fast – watch it!) Pour it on, baby.

Sweet Potato and Corn Chowder

Today is a monumental day in the Lauren Mitchell History of October: it’s the second day in a row that I have off from work.  My days have been going thus: wake up. Go to work. Come home. Don’t go out for fear that I’ll get back too late to get enough sleep. Shower. Sleep. Repeat.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the work.  I doubt I could ever get tired of chopping up vegetables.  I love being around other people who spend their waking hours thinking about food; I love to know that I’m in a place where I can learn about the ideals of taste.  I knew I’d be saying goodbye to a social life when I started doing this work, though, and boy have I ever.  I’ve been starting to make myself go out, though – there’s so much great stuff going on in this town, and I’m realizing, if only by the fantastic percentage of cookbooks taking up my shelves, that I risk losing balance.  Today when I went to Powell’s I bought four books that have nothing to do with food.  I didn’t even go near the cookbook room.  (But then, of course, I went to Whole Foods, and I came home and put a crazy brown sugar glaze on some cranberry-orange cornbread.  More on that next week.)

So this is the kind of food that comes from me when I don’t necessarily want to think about cooking in the sense that I’ll be chopping vegetables all day – but that doesn’t mean it’s not delicious, because it is.  This the result of some leftovers from a farmers’ market trip a couple of weeks ago, and a smile at the bunch of sage I just took down from drying.

It’s also a real effort made to use fake meat.  I have many hesitations when it comes to soysage, but the patties that Morningstar makes are actually quite good, and they go terrifically with that dry, earthy punch of sage.  If you’re an omnivore and want to use real sausage, ease up on the butter.  I also added a couple of tablespoons of goat cheese when I made it, but it was really just to use up the end of the log.  I won’t note it in the recipe, but throwing it in certainly doesn’t hurt.  Apologies for the mediocre photo.

Sweet Potato and Corn Chowder
serves 4-6

2 tablespoons butter
2 soysage patties (Morningstar highly recommended), diced
1 fist-sized white onion, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon dried sage
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
kernels from 2 ears corn
1 medium-sized sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1″ pieces
2 cups vegetable broth
2 cups milk

In a soup pot over medium heat, melt butter. Add soysage, onion, garlic, sage, salt, and pepper. Cook until onions soften, 5-7 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then drop to a simmer and cook until sweet potatoes and corn are cooked through and flavors are combined, about 20-25 minutes.