For Reference

Chris sent me this photo of the deer we ate on Friday. It looks to me like Chester is surveying his trophy, but I'm pretty sure he had nothing to do with it.

I appreciate knowing where my food comes from and what it originally looked like. I don't think I'd ever go deer hunting, but I was just telling Sam last night that I'd be interested in getting my own wild turkey for Thanksgiving one of these years.

Venison sukiyaki

Chris brought over some venison from a deer he harvested last week, and we're making Wisconsin-style sukiyaki for dinner.

Venison, carrots, cabbage, tofu, daikon, bean sprouts, mushrooms, leeks, shallots, and scallions coked in a soy sauce-based broth and dipped in raw egg (or not, if you're Sam).

Delicious.

Winter food coma

It's been both busy and lazy in our house the past two days.

Yesterday, I was not feeling well.  I stayed on the couch while Sam did amazing things in the kitchen.  Adding this to his Sunday adventures in food, he has recently made:

Vegetable barley soup
Veggie chili with bulgar
Harisa
Chili-cheese polenta
TVP sloppy joes
Mushroom barley casserole
Vegetable barley soup (2nd version)
Falafal and tahini sauce

Today, Sam was not feeling well, so he took the couch position, and I made:

English Barleywine
Spent grain banana bread
Spent grain dog treats

We're feeling productive.

Dinner time

Chester came over for another visit this weekend.  The humans made food, and the dogs patiently waited for scraps to fall.  See how patiently they wait?

We humans made sukiyaki for dinner.  Chris brought over an electric skillet and we ate Japanese family style at the table with a skillet full of vegetables, tofu, and noodles in a delicious sauce.  It was wonderful, and it made me want to buy my own electric skillet and try out some nabe recipes this winter.

wading through piles of squash

This is a dinner I made with ingredients readily available in my house.  That is, I had lots of squash and cabbage to use up.

On the right are butternut squash croquettes (or korokke in Japanese), breaded and deep-fried squash.  I should have combined the mashed squash with mashed potatoes to provide a little more rigidity, but the creaminess of the roasted squash would not have come through so well.

On the left is a red cabbage and carrot salad with a rice vinegar dressing.  Cabbage is always a great side to croquettes, and the colors here make me happy.

as i like it

I also bought konyaku at Mitsuwa. Konyaku is a substance made of yam starch. Sometimes it comes in a block and sometimes in noodle form. I bought the noodles, which you can see in the upper right of this picture of the delicious sukiyaki I then made.

Sukiyaki is a hot pot traditionally made with beef and vegetables, but I just did without the beef. We had carrots, mushrooms, tofu, scallions, konyaku, enoki mushrooms, and spinach in a sweetened soy sauce-based broth. It wasn't exactly like my host mother in Japan made, but that's the great thing about sukiyaki: you can make it however you like!

breakfast of champions

We stopped at Mitsuwa, a very large Japanese grocery in Chicago, on our way home from Thanksgiving break. It seemed like every Japanese person traveling through Chicago was there as well. Most of the clerks and about 95% of the shoppers were Japanese. I even got to speak a little Japanese with a few people. For a minute or two I felt like I was back in Japan!

The upshot of going to the grocery is that we came home with a few of my favorite Japanese food items, and I have been eating them bit by bit of the last couple of weeks. This one here is natto, a fermented soy bean product that many people describe as having the consistency of snot. Appetizing, right? But I love it on rice with nori (seaweed) for breakfast, and it is very high in calcium and other vitamins.

winter pie

Sam says that my all of my posts should be accompanied by a photo because they look better in his RSS reader that way. So here's a photo of my vegetarian shepherd's pie.

We (well, mostly Sam) are attempting to perfect all of our go-to recipes and gather them together. My contributions are usually baked goods, and this shepherd's pie is sort of a cross-over. I am very proud of this recipe and the tweaks I've made to personalize it. My secret is a bottom crust made with lots of dill, and a hearty vegetarian gravy made with nutritional yeast to slather on top.

And maybe next time I'll have a photo of our new house to post here. New house!

bountiful

Our summer CSA ended last week, and I was sad. But then we signed up for the winter CSA, and I was happy again!

We got our first boxes last night, and it was more than I was expecting. How about 20 lbs of butternut, delicata, and sugar dumpling squash? I walked home with a backpack full entirely of butternut squash.

We also got several pounds of potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, and shallots. Then there were the stalks of brussels sprouts with the sprouts still attached, leafy greens, broccoli, and leeks.

I feel like I need a root cellar to keep all my bounty for the winter.

blank canvas

Sam scolded me for not taking a picture of his beautiful dinner this evening. It was very colorful.

Red leaf lettuce. Orange carrots in a yellow sunchoke chowder. Green leaf lettuce. Purple cabbage. White feta cheese and black olives on the salad. Brown beer brats with yellow mustard. There was no blue food.

The juice from the purple cabbage ran over to the remainder of my yellow mustard and created a pink splotch. In the end, my plate looked like a melting watercolor painting.

sweeties

A couple weeks ago, we were just outside of Milwaukee for a tournament. On Friday night we walked across the street from our hotel to get dinner at the restaurant there. I don't remember the name, but it had a very hunting-themed decor.

As I was looking through the list of sides, I saw "loaded sweet potato," which I assumed to be like a loaded baked potato, only with a sweet potato. This is something I love, so I ordered it.

I wish I had a picture of what arrived at my table. It was a bowl filled with mashed sweet potatoes, and those potatoes were swimming in a mixture of butter, cinnamon, and caramel. On top were marshmallows and walnuts.

Now, I normally love my sweet foods, and I did try my best to enjoy the gooey treat in front of me, but the caramel and marshmallows eventually did me in.

I think I'll have my sweet potatoes plain for awhile, thank you.

chile rellenos ala sam

Somehow between tournaments, work, practices, and trying to deal with preserving as much food from the garden and the CSA that we can, Sam managed to squeeze in cooking a good chile rellenos tonight.

Chile rellenos are, in general, poblano peppers stuffed with queso and fried. Sam has tried several times to make this dish, but the peppers have a tendency to fall apart. This time they held together pretty well, and the little bit of membrane he left in the pepper gave it just the right amount of kick. The homemade tomato sauce topping was the perfect complement.

The side dish was a simple combination of kale and beet greens added to fennel and bacon pieces cooked in the bacon's own juices. The fennel gave the greens a great flavor in place of the apple cider vinegar we usually use.

sam's home cooking: pasta aglio e olio

Pasta aglio e olio

⅙ cup olive oil
4 medium cloves garlic, minced
⅛ teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)
Salt
½ pound spaghetti*
⅛ cup fresh parsley, chopped (optional)
⅛ cup fresh oregano, chopped (optional)
Black pepper (optional)
Parmesan (optional)

Bring 4 quarts water to a boil in a large pot. Prep garlic.

Heat oil, garlic, and red pepper flakes in a small pan over medium-low heat. Stir frequently until garlic turns golden but not brown, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

Add salt and pasta to boiling water. Cook until pasta is al dente. Drain pasta, reserving ⅛ cup cooking liquid. Return pasta to pot. Add garlic mixture, cooling liquid, parsley, oregano, and black pepper. Toss well to coat pasta and mix seasonings.

Serve immediately. May be topped with grated parmesan.

Roasted red potatoes

2 pounds red potatoes, halved into ¾-inch pieces
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt & pepper
Optional seasonings: dill, paprika, rosemary

Preheat oven to 425. Prep potatoes.

Toss potatoes and oil in covered bowl. Season generously with salt, pepper, and optional seasonings of your choice. Toss again.

Arrange potato halves cut side down in a single layer in a roasting pan. Cover aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes.

Remove foil and roast until potatoes touching pan are crusty golden brown, about 15 minutes.

Remove pan from oven and turn potatoes, taking care to protect the crusts. Return pan to oven and roast until most of the potato is crusty golden brown, 5-10 minutes.

Transfer to serving dish without ripping crusts. Serve hot or warm.

sam's home cooking: radicchio risotto

Background: Radicchio Risotto

Olive oil
1 ounce pancetta*
½ pound radicchio, coarsely chopped
Salt and black pepper
½ cup onion, chopped
¾ cup Arborio rice
⅓ cup white wine
2½ cups vegetable broth, warmed
1 tablespoon butter
⅛ cup parmesan cheese

Heat medium skillet over medium heat and add a small amount of olive oil and the pancetta. Cook until pancetta releases its fat and begins to crisp, about 4 minutes. Add radicchio with salt and pepper to taste. Stir to coat radicchio with fat and cook until wilted, about 7 minutes.

Heat a medium pot over medium heat and add a small amount of olive oil and the onion. Sauté until soft, about 8 minutes. Add rice and stir occasionally until the rice kernels turn translucent. Add wine and stir until it evaporates. Add the broth to rice in ½ cup increments for 10 minutes, stirring regularly to keep maintain a lazy bubble. Adjust heat as necessary.

Add radicchio and continue cooking for another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Risotto should be somewhat soupy and not too stiff. Adjust seasonings to taste.

Remove from heat and add butter and parmesan. Cover and let sit for 2 minutes. Serve immediately.

*substitutions: May use bacon instead of pancetta, but consider adding spices such as fennel seed, nutmeg, garlic powder, salt, white pepper, and others.

Foreground: Smoked Apple Sage Field Roast

Crumbled Field Roast sauteed with broccoli and crimini mushrooms in the bacon grease leftover from the risotto.

sam's home cooking: baby turnips

The summer CSA is here and the heat has gone, which means Sam can spend lots of time in the kitchen turning fresh vegetables into tasty meals. The next few days will be a testament to his excellent cooking.

Roasted baby turnips

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1½ teaspoons whole-grain mustard
1 scallion, minced
1½ tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper
24 baby turnips stems trimmed to 2 inches

Preheat the oven to 425°. In a bowl, whisk the vinegar with the mustard, scallion, parsley and 1/4 cup of the olive oil. Season the vinaigrette with salt and pepper.

Heat a rimmed baking sheet in the oven. Cut the turnips in half through the stems; quarter them if large. In a large bowl, toss the turnips with the remaining 1/4 cup of oil and season with salt and pepper. Spread the turnips on the preheated baking sheet and roast for about 18 minutes, until tender. Transfer the turnips to a platter and let cool.

*Saute the turnip greens in olive oil with a little salt and pepper for a light bed on which to place the baby turnips.

four-alarm foul-up

Two or three times a year, my choir has a day-long rehearsal with a potluck lunch. Last time, a tenor brought what I thought was a very tasty Indian curry. I asked him for the recipe, and tonight I tried it out.

When I had this curry at the potluck, it had just the right amount of spice; the first bite woke you up, but everything mellowed out by the third or fourth spoonful. Tonight's version almost killed us.

Sam enjoys spicy food, but even he had trouble with this one. He went through a decent amount of rice and nan to finish his serving. I used a ridiculous amount of sour cream to cut the heat.

What went wrong? We think we'd like to blame the cayenne pepper. The recipe says 1 tsp, but Sam says you should think twice before ever using more than 1/4 tsp in an average-sized dish. I didn't know, and if the tenor cooked it this way, why was his not ridiculously spicy?

Anyway, as soon as dinner was over, Sam ran out to get ice cream. We're hoping some dairy in the tummy will protect our stomach linings as we digest this evening.

black curry experiment

In the four hundred years or so since Japan opened its ports to the West, the Japanese have been adapting Western food to their taste. One of my favorite examples of this is Japanese curry. It's a sweet, creamy version of its southeastern neighbors' dishes, and it goes great with katsu, a crisp, breaded pork tenderloin.

Japan is the land of easy-made food, so of course, most people buy roux bricks to make their curry at home. That's what I'd always done until No Recipes, one of my favorite food blogs, decided he'd come up with a from-scratch curry recipe. I was excited. Then, he decided he'd try something different and make a black curry. With chocolate in it. Oh, yes.

So I gave the black curry a go. I had to make a few of the ingredients to go in this dish, mayu and tonkatsu sauce, and this took a lot of time. But it was fun to be spending an entire afternoon cooking a good and creative meal. I even made an approximation of katsu by breading seitan with panko, Japanese bread crumbs.

Overall, the curry was a great meeting point of the sweetness of Japanese curry with the spices (cardamom, anise) of farther east and the inventiveness (chocolate) of the crazy U.S. Sam says the flavors didn't blend well; he thinks you could taste each one individually. But I thought it came out rather well. The seitan katsu was a little bland, and next time I'll marinate the seitan in something to give it a little more flavor before breading it.

deep-fried deliciousness

I like it when Sam's on vacation because one of his favorite things to do when he has time is cook good food. He'll plan and make several new or tried-and-true recipes, and I'll be his sous chef.

For Christmas Day, we had a classic meal. Sam heated up the oven for a Tofurky roast with mashed potatoes, yams, carrots, squash, gravy, and rolls. (We find that the Tofurky roast is moister than the Quorn turkey roast, although we love Quorn otherwise.)

Today, we leaned toward fair food. Sam prepared Tofurky Italian Sausage topped with bell peppers, onions, banana peppers, and tomatoes. I made some beer batter and fried up some cheese curds and mushrooms. Really, if you are as fairly proficient at home deep-frying as we are (we regularly make tempura, falafal, and taco shells), frying up your own cheese curds is easy and much cheaper than at a restaurant. And if you have some flat homebrew sitting around that needs another purpose, this is a great use!

Here's the recipe, if you ever find yourself in the presence of some fresh cheese curds.

Deep-fried Cheese Curds

Deep-fry oil
1 egg, beaten
1 cup flour
1 tsp sugar
1 cup beer or milk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 package cheese curds

Heat deep-fry oil in a medium pot.

Mix together remaining ingredients except cheese curds. Batter should err on the runny side, so add more beer/milk if necessary.

Roll cheese curds lightly in flour. (Cheese curds should be at room temperature so as to sweat a little bit. This will encourage the flour to stick to the curds.)

Drop a small amount of batter into oil. If batter pops up immediately, oil is hot enough. Dip curds in batter and drain off the excess. Deep-fry curds in batches for one to two minutes, or until batter is golden brown.

Remove the curds to a plate with a paper towel to absorb the excess oil. In order to keep the first batches of curds warm while making the others, put the plate in a warm oven between batches.

Enjoy the tasty goodness of fried cheese curds with or without dipping in ranch dressing.

the end of the month

*Breakfast: Yogurt with raisins and almonds; bagel with black sesame spread

Black sesame spread is one of those tasty Japanese foods that I can't find in any market over here. If I have a friend going to Japan/visiting here from Japan, I always ask them to bring me black sesame spread. It's like peanut butter, really, but made of black sesame and sweetened just a bit. It is wonderful on toast.

*Lunch: Leftover red beans and rice with lots of cheese

*Dinner: Fake beer brats, sauerkraut, and roasted root vegetables (beets and turnips)

I like most of the Tofurkey brand fake meat products, but I like their brats/sausages the best. I especially love the Spicy Italian Sausage. The beer brats go very well with this very German of meals we have occasionally, though. And as much as I hated sauerkraut growing up, I love it now.

oy vey

It was a hectic morning. There was no time for breakfast.

*Lunch: Pasta primavera from the Co-op

*Dinner: Beans and Rice

Another one of my all-time favorites of Sam's cooking is his Red Beans and Rice. Again, it involves Worchestershire sauce (maybe this is the key). Since Japan, rice has become a sort of comfort food for me. In addition, chili with lots of kidney beans was one of my favorite meals. Red Beans and Rice brings together the two of these textures and flavors into a great rainy-day meal. And today was definitely a rainy day.