Chestnut Squash

Gropius planted a French heirloom squash variety in the garden this summer and we cooked our first meal with it earlier this week.  It's called potimarron--a contraction of "pumpkin" and "chestnut" in French.  I can't say that I detected a strong chestnut flavor, but it was tasty nonetheless!



We've also been harvesting the volunteer butternut squash that came up in our compost--so far we have 3-4 squashes! Not bad considering our initial investment of $0.

To let the flavor of the squash shine through, we decided to make a squash risotto.

Everything's better with chocolate.

A meeting with one of my senior colleagues over my tenure file ran late yesterday afternoon, so I didn't get to Merryhill in time to get Lulu to her dance class.  I felt really guilty, even though I was rationalizing it to myself in the car on the drive from campus (one missed dance class versus an unemployed mother is kind of a no-brainer).

So, when I picked her up and she said she wanted pink ice cream, I thought perhaps I could make her day with a strawberry shake at McDonald's on the way home.  When we walked in though, Lulu wanted a chocolate chip cookie once she saw them on display by the cash register.  So I bought a cookie for her and a mango-pineapple fruit smoothie for me...which also became Lulu's.

She wanted to "sit at the table, Mama!"  So, I let her pick which table and we had a nice mother-daughter moment before heading home.

My personal favorite of the bunch.
Mickey D's really needs this for an ad campaign, don't you think?

Broccoli Rabe Pizza

We had some broccoli rabe in the fridge from earlier in the week and decided that we'd make pizza with it. I found a recipe from Sunset magazine that used dough and toppings from Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco.  If you haven't eaten at Pizzeria Delfina, my friend, you are MISSING OUT!  It's delicious!

Here are a few photos of the end result:

The bacon wasn't in the original recipe, but it sounded tasty and we had some.

Besides, who can resist bacon??  Not us!

Random cheeses and bacon scones

I woke up this morning with the taste of these on my tongue.  My good friends in Fargo, Andy and Miriam, had sent me some cheddar cheese and bacon scones from Zingerman's (in Ann Arbor) for my birthday last year and the taste has haunted me since.

So, I decided to try to bake my own.  I did find this recipe on the King Arthur website and blog and used it as my base recipe.  I used their basic proportions, substituted my Cuisinart for the zip-loc bag method, and added in fresh thyme and Dijon whole-grain mustard along with the bacon and cheese.  I didn't have cheddar cheese, so I decided to use up the random scraps of cheese from our cheese drawer in the fridge.  I think there's a little cheddar in there, but probably a bit of Wensleydale and Emmentaler, too.  I did cut back on the bacon (we didn't have a pound of it lying around) in part because Lulu kept eating from my mise en place.  Clearly, I need to work with my sous chef!

A short 22 minutes later, this is what came out of the oven:

Combine the scone with a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice and you've got a delicious start to a Sunday morning!

Adventures in Spätzle.

We have been experimenting with spätzle recipes around here lately.  My main motivation was to figure out how to subtly work more vegetables into Lulu's diet without a fight (did I mention that she's now three?).  So, I figured that spätzle would be an easy way to do so.

First up was Spinatspätzle (spinach spätzle).  Quickly blanching spinach and then pureeing it in the blender with the water was the only extra step to spätzle and, man, was it tasty!  You couldn't taste the spinach at all (for better or worse), but you could certainly see the color!

told you it was GREEN!!!

wienerschnitzel, carrots, and spinach spätzle

Tonight, it was beet spätzle. We had an extra roasted beet rolling around our freezer (from what I don't know), so I decided to puree it the same way I did the spinach and see what happened.  Lulu was supervising my cooking--quite a challenge to deal with sticky spätzle dough, boiling water, and a curious toddler all at the same time!

 You can definitely taste the beet, but it's a very subtle flavor. I think these would be delicious with poppy seeds!

the chef with her creation

look at that gorgeous color!

I can imagine a really kitschy Christmas side dish with beet and spinach spätzle--red and green.  What do you think?

Bittman's Beer Bread

I made Mark Bittman's beer bread recipe last weekend and it was delicious. It was so easy, I even baked two batches! I used Spaten Optimator, fyi.

We had it for dinner with some brats and wurst. Yum!

Pretzel Brot

Inspired by these, I thought I'd try making my own.  I had wanted to tackle this project this past weekend, but our kitchen was otherwise um, occupied.

So, I spent the day working at home (in part to avoid students trying to add into my classes) and was able to weave in this baking project into my research work.

I'm not especially pleased with the Laugenbrezel recipe that I used--the dough was very, very sticky.  I think next time I try these, I will use my regular pretzel recipe from Martha Stewart's cookbook instead.  I had light Jarlsberg cheese, smoked turkey breast, and diced orange bell pepper for the inside.  (Lulu is fascinated with the orange bell peppers for some reason, so I bought the smallest, lightest one I could find last time I was at the store, even though we didn't need one)

The first one I tried definitely looked um, mangled.

You can see the orange bell pepper sticking out on the top there

But, I started to get the hang of it by the end.

Not too shabby--held together during boiling with no leakage

I made six stuffed pretzel rolls and plan on bringing them with me to school for lunch next week.

various levels of success

I boiled them in baking soda-ed gently boiling water prior to those photos--that's why the one sort of split in two. I had to be really careful, too, like I was cooking knödel/dumplings.

But, twenty minutes in a 450F oven, and they all looked very tasty!

fresh from the oven!

And I'm quite pleased with the later ones I did--they look just like the commercial stuff I ate last week:

Look at that beauty!

but they certainly tasted a LOT better!

Next time, I think rather than dicing the bell pepper, I might leave it in slices. Ditto for the cheese. And I think a thin schmear of mustard would bring it all together in a nice way.

Will definitely have to experiment with these again!