Scottish Cow

August Vegetable Pie

Alternative titles considered, but ultimately rejected, for this post:

1)  Roasted Vegetable Tart

2)  Pile of Healthy Stuff, Surrounded by Cheese and Butter-Ridden Crust

3) The Pie That Shall Not Be Named

We’re left with “August Vegetable Pie,” which in all honesty doesn’t really sound so hot, but here were are.  It’s August after all, and we’ve finally got some fantastic eggplant and tomatoes, and although the zucchini is heading on its way out, our kitchen table was overwhelmed with a pile of those three (lazy centerpiece?) - so that’s what went into the pie.

I’m not quite sure whether to call this a pie or a tart, but I suppose it doesn’t matter so much.  It requires a single batch of your standard pie/tart dough.  Any all-purpose and especially any baking cookbook will undoubtedly have a recipe for it, if you don’t have a favorite already. If you’re feeling fancy, Google (or even better, use Food Blog Search) for “Pate Brisee.”  Lazy?  Check out one of these recipes.  I usually use something similar, all butter, with an egg, nice and flaky and easy.

The inspiration for this came from a tart my mom used to make that consisted of a pie crust, a layer of mustard, tomatoes, basil and cheese.  That just wasn’t going to plow through our pile of veggies though.

The zucchini and eggplant got sliced, tossed with oil/salt/pepper, and roasted in the oven (at 350) on a rack on a cookie sheet until they were soft and starting to brown.  The tomatoes got the same treatment, but after they had been lightly salted and pressed in paper towels.  A lot of work, yes, but have you had a vegetable tart that was overrun with liquid before?   Sogged out crust and watery filling?  Yeah, me too.  Those suck.

So all the vegetables get cooked ahead and layered into the pie crust.  As extra water-insurance, I tried baking the crust for about 10-15 minutes before putting the veggies in, with a layer of grated parmesan sprinked in.  I would have pre baked it anyway, but the cheese seemed like a good idea as well.  It didn’t work out so well – normally when blind (pre) baking the shell, we’d put some foil in it, and fill it with old beans to keep the crust in place.  Well, I couldn’t do that with the cheese in there, and just to prove a point, the crust completely collapsed.  Not sure how I’d approach it next time, but pulling it out a little early, smushing the dough back up the walls and letting it finish the pre-bake worked out all right.

After it’s baked, the veggies get layered in.  I didn’t want to clobber it with garlic, which is my usual M.O., but we had some pesto left over, so a thin layer of that ended up in the middle, and it worked well.

First, the layer by layer photos and then an outline of the overall plan..  I do believe just about any vegetable would be great, so go for it.

 

- Make pie crust, refrigerate at least 1 hour, maybe overnight (let warm up for 15 minutes if you do that)

- Roll out crust, get into pie dish and bake with or without cheese and/or weights (you’re on your own here) for 10-15 minutes until it starts to firm up and get a little golden

- While that’s baking, slice and prep veggies.

- While pie crust is cooling, roast veggies.

- Layer everything in.  This one was as follows:

1) Parmesan (baked in)
2) Eggplant
3) Pesto
4) Zucchini, sprinkled with a little more parm
5) Tomato, little more parm
6) Big pile of shredded basil
7) Melting cheese – fontina.

Back into the oven until is bubbly and you can no longer withstand the urge to burn your tongue on the cheesy, stewy tomatoes.

Molly (quickly becoming master of the well timed one liner) decides to make a statement between bites of this very meal: 

“I’m done with veggies.”  She says, with a little nod of her head to confirm it. 

“Just candy from now on.” 

And continues eating her vegetable candy pie.

Back to Work & Some Peanut Dressing Love

We're back from a lovely week away, visiting my parents and getting to see most of my mom's side of the family (sorry Renny & Eva), including Anya, who has been hiding away in Beijing for months on end.  She's a little over a year old, and absolutely adorable.  It was infinitely neat seeing her and Abby interact a little, and again as much sad to think they won't see each other again for quite a while.

We remembered our Grandmother in our stories and our thoughts and had a huge dinner of peking duck and champagne in her honor.   In fact, we spent most of the week eating and drinking great things.  Which is nothing new - visiting my folks and eating with my family is a food-wise reminder that there's nothing better or easier than taking simple, great ingredients and not screwing with them too much.

The one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the quantity and the quality of the local cheeses around Northampton.  Combine this with the three incredible bakeries in town (bread focused bakeries, no less) and you're pretty much set.  Look at these guys - my favorite, the white rinded one in the middle, is a goat's milk cheese they get at their local farmer's market.  Come on.

It makes me want to quit my job, get some land and some goats, and start supplying Western New York with something even half that good.

Just so this post isn't completely made up of fromage-related daydreaming, here's a quick recipe - Noodle and Veggie Wraps with Peanut Dressing. 

For us, the peanut butter-based dressing has definitely reached the status of a comfort food.  It's easy, it's always good, we always have the ingredients and we have some happy memories associated with it.  It's like a friend that's always there.  A delicious, edible friend, made of items in the pantry.

Our first experience with it was at Mary Chung's, a Chinese place in Central Square, in Cambridge, MA.  We had the Dun Dun Noodles a LOT when we lived out there.  Simple dish:  noodles, bean sprouts and thinly-sliced cold chicken, with a thin, spicy peanutty dressing.  I mean spicy.  There would practically be tears rolling down your face, and you'd be begging Mary for more.

This one is significantly less spicy (hence, kid-friendly), but there's nothing stopping you from taking it wherever it is you'd like it to go.  The dressing is simple and I never measure it, so:

- A couple of heaping spoons of peanut butter (make it chunky) into a bowl.  Add a little hot water, and whisk it up.

- Add a good pour of soy sauce and stir it up - it should taste good already.  Add more water or soy sauce if it's too thick or not salty enough.

- At this point, I add other things depending on what we have and where the dressing is going - almost always some a lime juice or rice vinegar.  For the heat - chili flakes or sriracha is all you need, and add as much as you need.  Sometimes, minced garlic or scallions, cilantro, brown sugar or honey.  Often, I'll have to go back and add some more peanut butter to balance it back out.  Again, hot water is great to thin it out and not change the flavor much.

If you haven't already finished eating the dressing with a spoon...or your fingers, you can make the wrap.  It had some boiled and cooled udon noodles, shredded lettuce, shredded carrots, and slivered radishes all piled up in a steamed flour tortilla (#1 use for our microwave).  Spoon in some dressing, wrap it up, and you're set.

I'm out on the front porch right now and the bugs are attacking the laptop screen, so it's time to go.  Speaking of quitting my job above, I've already done that once this month, and my new one starts tomorrow.  Like the first day of school, all over again.  Need to go make sure my pencils are sharp.

One last treat from the week away.  Older than me:

Love That Dirty Water

We're shipping up to Boston for the weekend, but first, here's a quick recipe from this week's CSA share.  It was inspired by a piece on ricotta in the Times a couple weeks back.  A chef was talking about the great simplicity of a bowl of ricotta and some crostinis.  Man.  I don't know why we've never tried that.  We love ricotta.  We love grilled bread.  We put little blobs of ricotta on grilled pizza all the time.

So here's the plan for this one:

Rapini - rinsed it off, discarded the very bottoms of the stalks, chopped the rest, stalk and all.  Over medium heat - oil, garlic, salt and mild red pepper flakes.  After the garlic cooks for 30 seconds, stir in the rapini, and cook till tender, lowering the heat if necessary.

Ricotta - whipped some up in a bowl with salt, pepper, a bunch of microplaned lemon zest and a nice dose of olive oil.

Bread - thick slices of chewy sourdough, spray with cooking spray and grill on both sides till crispy.

Spread the ricotta on the bread, pile the rapini on top, and crunch away.

Can't wait to land in Boston.  It's high on the list of all time favorite places.  We won't have much time for relaxing and eating, but that's OK.  Wedding festivities for a good friend are always something to look forward to.  We'll leave the airport, through the tunnel, speed past the city on Storrow Drive alongside that dirty water.  Past the bridges, the crew teams, the softball fields, and the brownstones in Back Bay.  We'll make way for ducklings, drive past the old apartment in Watertown, wondering for a second who's in it now.  Somewhere along the way, we'll talk about the Sox and super burritos from Anna's, and before we know it, we'll be on another plane back home.

I wonder what the garden will look like 3 days from now...

A Tale of Two Sandwiches

We love sandwiches. Thankfully, there are no gluten allergies or carbophobics in our family. We usually have a few different types of bread around, and lately at least one of them is usually homemade. If you've got the bread part covered, a good sandwich can't be far away.

I have no qualms about publicly admitting my love for peanut butter and jelly (except I'd rather have jam or preserves). I like chunky, we usually have smooth, but that isn't enough to keep me away. I will even lay claim to having invented (at least in my sphere of influence) the renown Peanut Butter and Jelly on Waffles. Yes, substitute toasted waffles for bread for a transcendental experience.

Yeah, maybe transcendental is taking it a tad past reality, and for health reasons, let's just agree not to eat those too often.

Here are two of our favorites. The first, pictured above, is made from one of our most common leftovers, and the second from two "pantry" ingredients we almost always have on hand.

My Dad's chicken salad. It's the best. Everyone agrees and you will too. It has two special ingredients that take it well beyond your typical minced-up-chicken-with-too-much-mayo mess: toasted pecans and lavender. Our family is blessed with pecans falling from trees in my grandmother's backyard in sunny Texas. Each year, after the collecting, shelling, picking through and bagging, we end up with a few bags in our freezer and they never last as long as we'd like. The lavender was an accident. My dad thought he was adding tarragon from the garden, which has similarly shaped leaves, and to be fair, there wasn't a big lavender colored flower on the top of it yet. What a mistake it was. It plays so well with the rest of the ingredients, and it seems like you can't add enough. If it's fresh, great, if not, we have enough dried to last the rest of the year, and it tastes just as good.

The second recipe is from the first meal I had in Amsterdam. Goat cheese and honey. Overwhelmed with jet lag and the awe of a first trip to Europe, we travelled via tiny boat from my cousin's apartment to a cafe somewhere in the city for lunch. It was this sandwich and a cold beer. The goat cheese was served warm in a crock, and you got to assemble your own sandwich on a crusty roll. This is pictured on a ciabatta roll (not homemade), toasted well, and assembled quickly so the cheese can melt and the honey can run. The acidity of the goat cheese and the sweetness of the honey are a match made in oh-man-i'm-dribbling-honey-all-over-my-sweater heaven.

The recipes:

Dad's Chicken Salad Sandwich

Mix in a big bowl:

Leftover chicken (grilled, roasted, poached or cooked by divine intervention)
Finely chopped onions/scallions
Diced sweet red pepper
Diced jalapeno/poblano or pinch of dried chili flakes/powder (optional, if you want some heat)
Several pinches of chopped fresh, or dried lavender
Nice handful of toasted (toaster oven is great for this), chopped pecans
Small pinches of salt/pepper

Mix everything together and start adding mayonnaise slowly, mixing it in well. You really only need enough to bind everything together.

 

Goat Cheese and Honey Sandwich, as if you needed a recipe

Put a bunch of both on crusty, warm bread:

Honey (we like acacia honey, which seems both mild and richly flavored at once)
Soft goat cheese

Eat quickly, without sharing.

Welsh Rabbit

Lest there be some concern that we've fed Bugs or the oversized guy that drops off our Easter baskets to Molly for dinner, fear not. If you've never heard of welsh rabbit before, it's not really rabbit.

I do like rabbit, but don't cook it often (hmmm...can you see lightbulb over my head?). This dish, another one that's been propelled forward through the years as a childhood memory, is wonderful for 2 reasons. First, its name is totally misleading - funny now, even better when you're a kid. Second, it's major ingredients are bacon, cheese, beer and bread.

Bacon.

Cheese.

Beer.

Bread.

Yeah, I'll admit there are some tomatoes in there too (think of them as a cheese delivery system). The dish is like a big, melty, beery BLT, without any of that pesky rabbit food getting in the way (ha...rabbit food)*.

For my childhood version, I distinctly remember getting to stir up the cheese into the double broiler until it turned into a big sloppy mess, add the mustard, the beer (it was Heineken), take a sip of the beer, add some milk and keep stirring and stirring and tasting with a cheesy index finger. Cooking as a kid, the idea of anything beer related is exciting - like you're getting away with something you shouldn't be.

The following recipe stays pretty faithful to what I remember. There are recipes out there that start off with a roux, but that seems unnecessary. I like the sauce a little liquidy, so when you pour it over the other stuff it manages to find all the voids and overwhelm them with cheese. It's still thick enough to stick around and not run away when you assemble a bite on your fork.

I've also upgraded my memory and replaced the pale, minature slices of Pepperidge Farm sandwich bread that were common in our kitchen back then with toasted chunks from a big, crusty boule.

The cheese is probably the most important ingredient, so get a good sharp one. For the beer, I think that Newcastle Brown Ale is about the best all purpose cooking beer there is.

Welsh Rabbit

10 oz sharp cheddar cheese
1 TB butter
3/4 C of beer/milk combined - pick your own ratio, more or less for soupier or thicker sauce
1 egg
Worcestershire sauce (squirt)
Dry mustard (pinch)
Salt/pepper (pinches)
Cayenne/Hot sauce (pinch/squirt)

Bacon, cooked and crumbled
Grape tomatoes, halved or quartered
1 LB loaf of crusty bread, cut in 1" cubes

Shred the cheese and add the butter, salt and mustard/cayenne to taste (a big pinch of each usually). Melt in a double boiler (or bowl set over boiling water) until the cheese has turned into a melted blob. Mix the beer/milk, egg and a few dashes of the worcestershire sauce together until the egg is beaten and add to the cheese. Stir it well until most of the lumps are gone - this will never be a truly smooth sauce.

As the sauce is finishing up, spread the bread cubes out on a baking sheet and put under the broiler until toasted.

To assemble - put a handful of the toasted bread in a bowl, sprinkle on tomatoes and bacon, and spoon the cheese sauce over the top. Add some more bacon on top if desired...and really, it should be desired

-----------------------------------
* I swear, we're having kale salad for dinner tonight to make up for it.