Ricotta tart with tarragon, smoked gouda and roasted mushrooms

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ricotta tart

Mushrooms smell so good when they’re roasting. It really does make your house smell like a holiday. And their nice, meaty, roasty flavor goes so well with smoked gouda! We’d been eating soups and stews and saucy dishes all week, and yesterday I cracked! I made something with a crust! Because I’m crazy! Actually, it’s because I bought some fresh ricotta at Trader Joes earlier in the week, and I was eager to use it. And I bought tarragon earlier in the week, and I was eager to use that as well. I like tarragon with eggy cheesy meals, something about its bright surprising flavor harmonizes well with comforting foods. And this tart is comforting, but also complex and delicious and even elegant. And also fairly easy to make! It has a toasted walnut crust (because walnuts and tarragon play so nicely together) which makes especially good Isaac crackers. All-in-all, a nice winter meal, with potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary, and a crisp arugula salad.

Here’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, by Thelonius Monk.
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Kale, sweet potato & chickpea stew with cumin, paprika & lime

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Kale :& chickpea stew

Kale is not one of those shy and retiring greens that wilts away to nothing at the first sign of attention. I admire that quality. The presence of kale in this dish is probably what makes it a stew rather than a soup. The kale retains its curly, assertive texture to make this thick and hearty. The sweet potato and golden raisins add a touch of sweetness, and the chickpeas – well, you can’t go wrong with chickpeas, can you? The broth of this stew is a lovely mixture of flavors…it’s the broth that transforms humble, potentially stodgy ingredients into something exciting to eat. Smoky paprika, earthy cumin, spicy red pepper, and bright, tart lime. We ate these with pumpkin popovers.

Here’s DJ Food with Stealin Stew

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Pumpkin popovers

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pumpkin popovers

These little popovers are very subtly spiced with cinnamon and cayenne. I wanted them to go well with our kale and chickpea stew (which they did!) but also to be good warmed up in the morning with butter and jam. It’s really sinking in that it’s winter, here, with icy drizzle and everlastingly grey days, and these are a good antidote. They have a nice warm color, a mild sweet flavor, and a lovely light soft texture. They’re also incredibly easy to make! I was reading Mrs Beaton’s cook book, the other day (as one does) and I think these are related to her chapter on “batters.” Which makes them also related to yorkshire pudding, perhaps the most famous of batters! Yorkshire pudding is cooked with a bit of dripping in the bottom of the pan, and these are cooked with butter. I let the butter get burnt, because I like the flavor, but if you don’t, just put the pan in the oven for a minute before you’re ready to cook.

Here’s Tricky’s Pumpkin
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Fennel, white beans, walnuts …

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… tomatoes, olives, capers, white wine, rosemary…
We’ve decided to have a lot of saucy soups and stews this week. Not sure why, it just seems like a good second-week-of-January menu. This particular saucy stewy dish is the kind of meal that is quick and healthy, but that you would make even if it wasn’t, because it tastes so good. Everybody in my family ate it in a slightly different fashion. I had it as a kind of warm salad, over red leaf lettuce and arugula, topped with gorgonzola, which got a little wilty and was really nice with the walnuts and fennel. My littlest son had it with pasta. Which is to say he ate a bowl of pasta and butter. My older son had the white bean … ragu, shall we call it? over gemelli pasta, and my husband had a mixture of pasta and arugula with his ragu. My favorite part of this meal was the walnuts. A nice unexpected crunch, a lovely toasty flavor. This would also be good with rice, or just a nice loaf of crusty bread.

Here’s King Curtis’ wonderful Memphis Soul Stew. I love this kind of song, I really do.
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Pumpkin chocolate chip spiral cookies

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Pumpkin chocolate chip spirals

These cookies are oddly addictive. Well – chocolate and cinnamon – I guess it’s not that odd. But it’s more than that, I tell you! There’s something about the subtly sweet pumpkin cookie part, which shines through the more assertive flavors of cinnamon and chocolate, that makes you want more. That, and, they’re spirals! With gooey cinnamon-y chocolate-y bits that you get to when you peel them apart. What could be more fun to eat than that? I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, I accidentally added too much pumpkin purée, which meant that I had to compensate by adding too much flour, which ultimately produced a very dense cookie. This recipe is adjusted to make a slightly lighter cookie, but it will still have that pumpkin pie-tenderness.
Here’s The Great Pumpkin Waltz performed by the Vince Guaraldi trio.
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Basil & black pepper naan

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Basil and black pepper naan

This recipe isn’t completely authentic – it involves more butter than any I’ve seen in a cookbook – but it is fun to make and good to eat! The basic recipe, as I make it, is similar to a simple pastry dough, with yogurt added at the end instead of ice water. And the whole process is not as icy and distant. You knead the dough for a few minutes, but it’s a very enjoyable dough to knead – soft but not too sticky. I added basil and black pepper, because I like basil with curry spices (we ate it with a cashew butternut squash curry and leftover kofta). The basil smells wonderful while these are cooking! I cooked them on a hot griddle, and then put them under the broiler to puff a bit, and then kept them in a warm oven till I was ready for them. They’re nice toasted the next day, too – they get crispy.

Here’s K’naan’s ABCs. Because it’s a brilliant song, and because my son just got his first headphones, and it’s the sweetest thing in the world to hear him sing along to this song.
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Roasted butternut and black bean kofta

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butternut squash black bean kofta

I feel like I’ve been seeing meatballs everywhere lately. All the internets and newspapers and magazines are brimming over with them. Is this a “food trend” that we have before us? Perhaps, subconsciously, that’s where I got the idea for these. We obviously need a vegetarian version! I’m fascinated that different cultures seem to have their own take on the notion of little balls of meat and grains and veg and spices. My son’s favorite dish to order from an Indian restaurant is malai kofta, which is one variation on the idea. Decades ago, I saw pumpkin kibbeh listed on a menu at a Lebanese restaurant. I’ve been intrigued by the idea for years! This is sort of my imagining of a vegetarian meatball/kibbeh/kofta. It combines roasted butternut squash, smashed black beans, bulgar, bread crumbs, a bit of cheese and an egg. These are seasoned with oregano, basil, sage, smoked paprika, allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon. Flavorful little bundles! I thought about frying them on top of the stove, but in the end I coated them in olive oil and then baked them in a hot oven instead. They still came out quite crispy, but soft in the middle. I made a spicy chipotle tamarind sauce to go with them, and we ate them with lettuce, tomatoes, avocado and warm pita bread. Plus oven roasted rosemary french fries. But I have different plans for them tonight! I’m having trouble concentrating on this! My little son is home (not very) sick from school, and I’m getting a tutorial on the shades of difference between his two Luke Skywalker toys!

Here’s Josh White’s One Meatball.
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mushroom walnut dumplings

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mushroom walnut dumplings

Inside: Roasted mushrooms, walnuts, parsley and cheese. Outside: a biscuit-like crust made with whole wheat flour, toasted oats, rosemary, black pepper and buttermilk. I called these dumplings because of their shape, but it might be more accurate to call them stuffed biscuits. They’re not soft and flaky, like anything made with paté brisée. They’re a little heartier-tasting, so they’re nice with soup or something saucy. Or even a sauce! Like the herbed walnut sauce, perhaps. Each bite has subtle flavors of baked rosemary and black pepper, and you can pick them up and eat them with your hands! Always a bonus.

Here’s Big Joe Williams with King Biscuit Stomp
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Syllabub cookies

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Syllabub cookies

Every Christmas we have a special drink/dessert called syllabub. It’s from an old recipe – hundreds of years old! As with most old recipes, there are many variations, but at its simplest, syllabub combines cream and spirits. Our version combines sweetened red wine with whipped cream mixed with orange & lemon zest and juice and sherry.

These little butter cookies are based on this premise. The cookies themselves are made with orange & lemon curd and a little sherry. They’re iced with a red wine glaze. Their taste is unusual, but very good! A nice cookie to have in the afternoon with a glass of sherry, or after dinner with red wine. I should admit that when I made the curd, it didn’t quite solidify. I’m such a coward about cooking things with egg yolks in them on top of the stove. So I panicked and took it off the heat too early. But it didn’t matter! It worked in the cookies anyway. In fact, this is a good recipe to use for any sort of failed citrus curd experiment you might encounter.

Here’s Clash City Rockers, because they sing about oranges and lemons, of course!
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Puréed spinach with potatoes

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Spinach & potatoes

Puréed spinach is a tricky thing. On the one hand, it can conjure pictures of creamed spinach from a can, featured in remarkably unflattering photos in 50s magazines. On the other, it can be a flavorful and comforting dish, prettily bright green and good for you, too. I’ve always loved saag aloo, the Indian combination of spinach and potatoes, in which the texture is pleasing, not drably mushy. This is inspired by that dish. It’s flavored with basil, rosemary and smoked paprika – some of my favorite flavors, and all really lovely with the spinach. The spinach is quickly boiled, and then pureed and returned to the heat, but not cooked to sogginess. It emerges bright green, and still in possession of the full force of its delightful spinachiness. The cornmeal makes this substantial without being stodgy, like a tiny touch of polenta. And the potatoes – boiled simply in their skins – are surprisingly good. You can actually taste them, they’re not just a starchy background element. We ate this with some curried white beans and my ootoes, or yeasted semolina pancakes. Simple and satisfying.

Here’s Belle and Sebastian’s Simple Things
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