Potatoes Worth Waiting For

Tonight I said goodbye to the last of the fresh vegetables from CSA share. The pound of red potatoes in my crisper could have probably made it a little longer, but it seemed as if the time was finally right to make them. I didn’t want to wait too long and waste them, after all.

My friend Barb had given each of the attendees at our last Cooking Light cooking club event, a Spanish themed dinner, a small bag of saffron to take home. She received it from a friend and had more than she could use.

I had been burning a hole in my proverbial pocket ever since. I had never cooked with saffron, but certainly had tasted it on my trip to Spain. I found a recipe for Saffron Almond Potatoes on the Cooking Light recipe page and printed it out immediately. It called for red potatoes, which seemed like fate.

The potatoes are roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper, in a sauce of water, tomato sauce, and saffron, that is dusted with paprika. As it cooked, it filled the kitchen with a rich smoky aroma that was the perfect antidote for the snow outside.

I had plenty of time to take the scent in as I prepared the crumb topping, which I was quite excited about. First I toasted slivered almonds, then added them with two garlic cloves, some more olive oil and some toasted bread, to the food processor.

When the potatoes were tender I took them out of the oven and topped them with the almond mixture, while they were still steaming. The combination of the garlic and almond together was tasty enough on its own, but with the spicy, tender potatoes it was an especially nice juxtaposition. These were definitely the special potatoes I had been waiting for.

As I ate the potatoes I took stock of the CSA vegetables I still had preserved. I have quite a few tomatoes left and a few packages of pesto, but that's it. Next I counted the months until my first CSA delivery of the next season. Five. Remembering that I slowed down and savored my special potatoes a little bit more.

How Arracache Picadillo Turned into Spicy Potato Picadillo Soup

It has been about a year since I visited Costa Rica. While I was there I visited a banana, sugar cane and coffee plantation. Although we got to try sugar cane fudge and coffee, the highlight of the tour was tasting a local dish, arracache picadillo.

Although we had just a taste the arracache picadillo really stuck with me. I vowed to make it when I returned home, buying a recipe book in the gift shop with the proprietor’s own recipe to make it happen.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve returned to the recipe, again and again. Recreating it wasn’t as easy as I hoped. The first problem was the main ingredient, arracache or arracacha. It wasn’t something an American typically came across in the produce section.

Arracache are a root vegetables native to South America. When our tour guide pulled one out of the ground it looked something like a white carrot, wide at the top and narrow and pointed at the bottom. He explained that it tasted something like a cross between celery and a potato. Later when we ate in the picadillo it tasted distinctive and very good, though I couldn’t say what it tasted like.

Even though the vegetables in my CSA box were varied, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t come across arracacha, so I began searching everywhere else I could think of. I tried Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and the Hispanic grocery stores in Madison.

Language was often a barrier on the Latin grocery story. I held up my recipe book and pointed to arracache in the list and most just squinted before shrugging their shoulders. One woman pointed me to the meat counter.

“Arracache?” I asked tentatively.

She nodded and pointed again to the counter.

“It’s a vegetable,” I said, mad at myself for not knowing such a simple Spanish word.

“No,” she said. “Carne.”

I knew that word, but it didn’t seem right, so I said “gracias” and left.

That was sometime at the end of the summer and the last time I thought about making the arracache picadillo until this weekend. I used of the remaining CSA potatoes last weekend for a tortilla española, and noticed it was growing eyes.

With two bags of potatoes left, I decided I needed to use them soon. One would go for fake arracache picadillo. If arracache tasted something like a celery and a potato, potatoes should be a good substitution.

I started by looking again at the recipe and it hadn’t become any less confusing over the past few months. The problem, besides the missing ingredient, was that the recipe had been written in Spanish and translated into English without someone who knew both languages and the recipe proofing it

As such, it included items such as mincemeat and salami, neither of which seemed right. I assumed mincemeat meant ground beef, but hadn’t seen anything like salami anywhere in Costa Rica. Once in the store, I completely changed course and bought chorizo, mainly because it was an item I had meant to try anyway and seemed like a likely combination of both ingredients.

The rest of the ingredients were easy: garlic, onion, bell pepper, coriander, achiote, chicken stock, tomatoes, oil, salt, and pepper. I skipped the coriander because I’m not a big fan. Achiote is a red spice that is typical in Latin American cooking. I was able to get it at one of the Hispanic grocery stores. It looked like chile powder, but didn’t have a spicy flavor, just turned everything a bright red color.

I cut up the potatoes and boiled them until they were just about tender before draining them. I planned to cook them again with the rest of the ingredients and didn’t want them to get too mushy. Meanwhile I sautéed the garlic, pepper and onion until they were tender before adding the chorizo and achiote.

At this point I looked at the remaining ingredients on my countertop. I had a cup of chicken stock and three whole tomatoes that I had taken from my stash in the freezer. In the pan, the chorizo, peppers, garlic and onions looked to be the perfect consistency of picadillo, which is used as filling for tortillas. Adding the stock and tomatoes would make it too runny.

In that moment I realized why it had taken me almost a year to try and reproduce this recipe. I didn’t want to fail and without arracacha I was destined to do so. With this in mind I poured my chorizo mix into a soup pot and added the tomatoes and chicken stock. About a half an hour later I had my own picadillo recipe — spicy potato picadillo soup.

Sometimes cooking is about recreating a recipe. Other times, one dish serves as the beginning of another. Perhaps I’ll have the arracache picadillo again someday, but tonight I’m having an inspiration.

New Year’s Chili

So here we are at day one of 2011. With my lawn making a surprise visit from beneath the snow yesterday, it’s almost possible to believe there are only six months until the next CSA season begins.

Of course it’s a bit of an illusion. From my window it might look like spring, as it felt yesterday at 45-degrees, but one step outside proves that winter is here to stay for a while. Back in the teens today, with a wind chills that feel like subzero, I’m glad I still have some of my CSA stash to welcome in the chilly new year.

With my eye on the last buttercup squash, and wanting to start the new year out with a new recipe, I decided to make chili of a different sort. The resulting black bean and squash chili was hearty enough for the chill outside and also healthy way to get back on track after my gluttonous past few weeks.

I added buttercup squash, black beans, an onion, about four of my frozen oven-dried tomatoes, chicken broth, cumin, and ground chipotle pepper powder to my slow cooker before braving the weather to run some errands. By the time I returned a few hours later I needed something to warm me up. I knew the chili would fit the bill by the scent that welcomed me back in the house.

The ground chipotle pepper powder added the right amount of heat to the dish, making my nose run when I ate it, my measure of a good chile. The squash and onion added a nice sweetness to the dish, which was good since I had eaten so many sweets all December. I wanted something healthy to move into January, but I wasn’t exactly to go cold turkey.

The meal warmed me up and made me feel good without making me feel too guilty. I’d be lucky if all my meals accomplished that in the coming year. Here’s wishing you the same in 2011!

Winter Storm Moussaka

As promised, we had a bit of storm last night. When I returned from a cookie exchange yesterday and the only thing falling from the sky was rain, I had my doubts. But as promised, a few hours later when I looked out the window, the rain had turned to snow.

This was the moment I had been thinking about last summer when, in a bit of a panic, I had begun squirreling away my CSA harvest. At the time I imagined rewarding myself with something hot from the oven after a hard day shoveling the snow away outside.

Lucky for me, I hired someone to do my snow removal, which adds even more joy to the fact that I can enjoy the fresh taste of summer on such a blustery day. With most of the labor of chopping and preparing done this past in July, I had plenty of free time to camp out on the couch and catch up on a few movies and some reading while my frozen moussaka cooked.

I took the frozen casserole out of the freezer yesterday and left it to thaw out in the refrigerator. After its day in waiting I could make out the ingredients, and it looked as if the eggplant had done well in the freezer, as had the meat and tomato mixture beneath.

The only thing left to do was to make the béchamel sauce for the top. I had combined the best of two moussaka recipes when I originally prepared it last summer and pulled them out again today for the cream sauce recipe.

I was missing one key ingredient from the first version (ricotta) and one from the second (eggs). My driveway hadn’t been cleared yet, so I decided to again combine the two recipes, and make due with whatever I had on hand. The final recipe included butter, flour, skim milk, nutmeg and Parmesan cheese, which one of the recipes said could substitute for kefalotyri cheese.

After cooking the sauce into a very thickened state that resembled mayonnaise, I poured it on top of the waiting casserole and topped with some more Parmesan, before heading back to the couch. If I had spent the afternoon shoveling it might have reminded me of the snow outside, but since I hadn’t seen the snow close up yet, I slipped it in the oven without a second thought. As it cooked, it steamed up my windows filling my house with a beautiful warm comforting smell and erasing the winter landscape outside.

When it was done, it looked so pretty that I had a hard time believing I had made it myself. After thanking my July self for thinking ahead I ate up and found it tasted as good as it looked. I was worried the eggplant wouldn’t taste very good or get mushy in the freezer, but it was the right consistency and freezing it had taken some of the pungency away. The eggplant matched well with the cinnamon-tomato meat sauce and will go on my list of eggplant-approved recipes, which require that I can’t taste to much eggplant.

Since it’s only December, I’m glad to say I still have a stockpile waiting for me in the freezer. When I pulled out the moussaka, I found some more pesto, along with a pan of lasagna, some beet burgers and what’s left of the preserved 10 pounds of tomatoes. With winter sure to keep throwing snow at me, all I have to do is make sure I have enough movies and reading materials on hand to enjoy it while my bounty cooks.

Tortilla Española

I’ve never been very good at making omelets. Instead of looking like a fancy folded egg, mine always look more scrambled. After a little experiment this morning I know why. I’ve been stingy on the oil.

After returning from a Thanksgiving trip to Spain and wanting to recreate some of the dishes I had there, I knew the Tortilla Española was the one to start with. Similar to a frittata, not the flour or corn tortillas used in Mexican cooking, it was made of eggs and potatoes, two ingredients I had on hand this snowy morning.

I’ve been hoarding the last few items of my fall CSA deliveries and am down to two bags of potatoes, a few carrots, two onions, a head of garlic, and some Brussels sprouts that need to be eaten pronto. I will be making those later today to help them avoid the fate of the final two beets and one daikon radish that ended up in the compost bin yesterday. Somehow over the course of November they simultaneously dried up on the outside and grown soft inside.

I had three Spanish omelets during my short stay on the Costa del Sol of Spain. Two were identical copies of one another, perfect 6-inch round golden pancakes of egg and potato about an inch and half thick. The third, served as part of a meal of tapas, was about double the thickness of the other two and sliced out of a larger version, like a piece of pie. It was runnier than the other two, and my least favorite, so I set out to reproduce the other smaller version.

I peeled and thinly sliced a large Yukon gold before adding it to a pan that had been heated with some olive oil. In truth, quite a bit of olive oil. I usually try to skimp a bit on oil, using non-stick spray instead, but I wanted to give this my best shot and knew I would need a lot of oil to do it right. My mouth began to water at the sight of the potatoes somehow frying and boiling simultaneously. When they were done I slid them into a colander as the recipe had suggested to drain some of the oil. I set it on a plate with the hope of reusing some of the oil in the next step, but ended up with only a few drops.

I added the potatoes to two beaten eggs and mixed it all together carefully. Meanwhile, I added a bit more oil to the pan and let it cook over medium-high heat. The recipe said this was the most important step, otherwise the eggs would stick and I wouldn’t be able to flip it over – the key step in making a tortilla.

As it was, I probably let the oil get too hot. When I poured the egg mixture into the pan it sizzled on the spot. I waited a full minute before turning the burner down as the recipe stated, again to keep it from sticking, which was probably too long. By the time I turned the heat down to medium, the whole tortilla was nearly cooked and ready to be flipped.

Because I used so much oil, I had no trouble flipping the tortilla out of the pan and onto a plate and sliding it back into the pan to cook through on the other side. Once it was back in the pan it only took a few seconds before it was done. It was much easier than my past attempts at flipping omelets.

In addition to plenty of olive oil, the potatoes seem to make the tortilla easy to work with. Even with an omelet with plenty of filling inside, it rarely takes on as much heft as the potatoes seemed to in my tortilla. And the ratio of egg to filling is much different than a standard omelet. It was more like I was flipping over a stack of potatoes with a few eggs in it, than an egg dish with some filling inside.

After it was done, I patiently waited a few minutes to let it set before taking my first bite. It looked like a pretty close copy of the tortillas I had eaten in Spain, and tasted pretty close too. The only difference was that mine was a little more well done and had a higher concentration of olive oil. I’ll definitely make it again, using less oil and watching the heat. I also have some new tricks for standard omelets. Next time I’ll splurge and use some extra olive oil to make it easier to work with. But I just may stick to tortillas from now on.

To Each His (or Her) Own Thanksgiving

This month’s issue of Real Simple features a number of essays on memories around Thanksgiving. As I read them on the elliptical machine this morning I was struck by how different each memory. There are a million different nuances to celebrating this “traditional” holiday.

It seemed like the perfect read this morning because I had eaten my own Thanksgiving meal last night and needed to burn off a few extra calories. As we do every year, my cooking group holds our own Thanksgiving dinner in weeks leading up to the holiday. It gives us a chance to try out the recipes we may later make for our families or to bring a dish that might not be accepted at our home feast.

For my contribution I made Buttercup Squash and Apple Bake. I had been saving the buttercup squash I received in one of my fall CSA boxes. These squash, which look like something like miniature green-striped pumpkins, were new to me. I love squash and was excited to try out a new variety to my usual acorn, butternut and spaghetti.

Because our dinner was planned for after work on a Monday, I planned to make them in the slow cooker, doing all my prep on Sunday night. As I chopped the buttercup open I noticed the cavity inside was smaller than an acorn squash and the meat itself was more similar in consistency to a sweet potato. I worked up quite a sweat paring the thick green peel off with my butcher knife and was lucky I didn’t lose a finger in the process. By the time I was done my hands were stained yellow, I assume from all the healthy vitamins inside.

The recipe was simple, calling for two apples, butter, brown sugar and mace, besides two squash. I didn’t have mace, so I used nutmeg instead, which seemed to be a worthy substitute. After a day of cooking on low, everything had blended into a perfect side dish that I felt was worthy of serving to others.

As for the rest of the meal, everything else was perfect too. We had turkey breast, wild rice stuffing, cauliflower gratin, mashed potatoes, spicy Moroccan chickpeas, sweet potato rolls, and chocolate walnut torte.

It may not have been a traditional meal, but like every group that gets together to share a version of this feast, we created a flavor all our own. And, as with any good Thanksgiving dinner, it was just as tasty when I ate the leftovers today.

Bree’s Soup, My Tomatoes

As I mentioned in a previous post, Learning to Be Flexible, my cooking club has been meeting for 10 years now. The general idea of our group is that meet monthly around a specific theme, each bringing a dish to share. That’s 120 get-togethers and a whole lot of recipes over the past decade. A few recipes have made more than one appearance, and many have made my list of go-to choices.

Bree’s Lentil-Tomato Soup is one of those. To someone like me who tends to eat a mostly a vegetarian diet (my recent over-consumption of bacon notwithstanding) lentils are an important food. They are a main ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food, which happens to be my favorite, and are super-healthy. I even learned from Wikipedia that lentils are the third highest source of protein after soybeans and hemp. They are also high in fiber, folate, vitamin B1, and iron.

All are really good reasons to love lentils, but that’s not why I keep returning to Bree’s Lentil-Tomato Soup. It actually tastes really good. It also is very easy to make, and because lentils are inexpensive, it’s very economical. And, since I usually have lentils in my pantry I can make it whenever I get the urge.

I got the urge this week and in just a few minutes I was mixing the ingredients together in my slow cooker. When I got to the tomatoes in the recipe I reached for my freezer handle instead of the pantry door. The moment I had been waiting for was finally here. It was time to dip into my stash of oven dried tomatoes (10 Pounds of Tomatoes).

It felt so satisfying to drop those tomatoes in with the rest of the ingredients and not just because it was easier than opening up a can. It felt good to know that I had planned ahead for this moment and that the tomatoes had been nurtured under the same sun I had enjoyed this summer.

And the taste? I could tell the difference. It may have been the same recipe I’d been served by others and made myself many times before, but this time the tomatoes made the recipe.