Macaroni and cheese and mushrooms and broccoli in a cast iron skillet

Some food from the weekend

I'm not going to regale you with recipes for every Thanksgiving dish — everything was delicious, and almost everything is a favorite standard — but I thought it best to at least check in with a quick rundown of the weekend. On Wednesday we made pizza for the family (four cookie-sheet-sized pizzas, two with tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella and two with pears, walnuts, blue cheese, and mozzarella). Tomorrow night's plan is for stew with chickpeas, clams, and sausage. Tonight we had skate, very yummy baked fifteen to twenty minutes in a buttered pan at 400°, and then topped with browned butter and capers. We served the skate with brown rice and chard: bring a few inches of water to a boil in a large pot, and add a good handful of baking soda, and then stir in two bunches rainbow chard, cut into one-inch-thick ribbons; peel a couple cloves of garlic, mince them, and then add a large handful of salt to the garlic in a small pile on a cutting board and work the salt into the garlic with a knife until you have a nice paste; after about two minutes, drain the greens in a colander, dry them off a bit in a clean dish towel, and toss the greens with the garlic in a serving bowl.

On Friday, as we do every year, we made soup. My brother invited a friend from school to join us for the Thanksgiving weekend, and said friend is quite strictly vegetarian, so in addition to our usually turkey soup, we also made a vegan option. (The friend left today, hence the meaty dinners tonight and tomorrow.) Coarsely chop four onions, half a dozen celery sticks, and about as many carrots, and divide them roughly evenly between two pots. Add a few bay leaves, a few peppercorns, and a large handful of salt to each pot. In the larger pot, also add the saved turkey neck and giblets as well as the bones (break them up if you can with a cleaver to let the marrow out), but discard the skin and use the fat for some other project. Save any savable meat, of course. Cover the contents of each pot with water (but not more than enough to cover), place the lids on, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook about an hour.

Dice another three onions. Place two of them in a large pot and one in a medium pot, and saute in a splash of olive oil with some salt. Also add diced carrot and celery to each to make two mirepoix. To the smaller pot, add three quarter pound sliced crimini mushrooms. Once the mushrooms start to release their liquid, add between half and a third of a cup of pearled barley to the smaller pot, and between half a cup and two thirds to the larger pot. Stir the barley in to coat, and then place a colander or sieve over the smaller part and pour in the finished vegetable broth, rescuing the cooked veggies to give to the backyard chickens (it was raining all weekend — that soup was from October). Then move the colander to the larger pot and pour in the turkey broth.

Bring both soups to a boil. After about ten minutes, add frozen edamame to each pot. Bring back to a boil, cook another ten minutes, and stir in a fair amount of saved turkey meat into the turkey-broth (non-mushroom) soup. Adjust the salt and serve with good bread and good wine.

Broiled teriyaki chicken with a stir fry of portobello mushrooms, red onion, and bok choi

Stuffed delicata

Wash, remove the tips from, halve, and scoop out the seeds from two delicata squash. Rub some salt inside the squash, place the squash halves face-down in an oiled glass pan, and bake ten to minutes. Meanwhile, in a food processor combine onion, apples, walnuts, mushrooms, and a little salt and oil, until coarsely chopped. (If the onion is particularly piquant or the mushrooms a little touch, saute them first.) Remove the squash from the oven, turn upright, and stuff with the onion-and-walnut mixture. Sprinkle grated cheese on top, and return to the oven for half an hour.

Camping: farfalle with red sauce

For our last night camping, we made pasta. For the sauce, we sauteed onions and garlic, added bell peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes, and topped it off with herbs we had brought from our garden at home. We served the dinner with the Pinot Noir from Territorial, a Willamette Valley vineyard.

Portobello burgers with grilled sweet potato fries

The very best sweet potato fries we've made were these, on the grill. Slice sweet potatoes for large fries, toss with olive oil, salt, paprika, and cumin, and grill. Then grill portobello mushrooms, which you have sprinkled with olive oil in which you have mashed rosemary. Add sliced jack or cheddar cheese, and serve on home-made whole-wheat buns. Assemble the burgers with sliced red onion, home-grown tomato, and home-made bread-and-butter pickles.

Scallops; campanelle with onions and morels

Bring water to a boil for pasta.

Begin by coarsely chopping a large white onion, and sauteing in copious amounts of browned butter. Add washed whole morel mushrooms, your favorite spices (salt, papper, thyme, taragon). Once onions are soft, remove most of the sauce to the serving bowl for the pasta.

Salt the boiling water and add the pasta, and, as always for perfect pasta, set the timer for two minutes less than the package instructions.

Brown some more butter in the same pan, and, when it is hot, sear the outsides of some large bay scallops. Be sure to buy them dry-packed — most scallops are "wet", which means they are packed in a soapy-tasting liquid to keep them plump longer.

Plate the scallops. Drain the pasta.

If necessary, brown even more butter, and return the onions to the pan. Add cream and white wine, and reduce briefly, making some sort of stroganoff. Toss with the pasta. Finally, deglaze the pan with white wine, and pour the jus over the scallops. Enjoy!

Three dinners: Asparagus pizza; Pasta primavera; Broiled salmon with red wine reduction

Prawns and mushrooms sauteed with onions and garlic

Mushroom tortellini

S came over, and the three of us made tortellini. The pasta dough was a part-whole-wheat, and the filling was mostly cremini mushrooms, with some grana padano and garden thyme.

Between shaping the tortellini and eating it, the three of us went on a walk in Tilden Park with our friend JB. The slideshow:

Homemade whole-wheat linguini with morels and cream

Cream of mushroom soup

Campanelle with canned tomatoes, leeks, and mushrooms

Stir fry of prawns, mushrooms, and chard; wheat berry

Two pizzas: mushroom and tomato; asparagus

Mushroom barley soup

Begin with a mire poix of carrots, celery, leeks or spring onions, dried bay leaf, and a little ground black pepper, and saute it at the bottom of your soup pot in olive oil and salt until the vegetables soften. Add a bit of minced garlic and a cup of dry pearled barley, and stir to coat the barley in the hot oil. Add halved crimini mushrooms, one large jar of home-canned tomatoes, with their juices, and, if you like, some cooked kidney beans or white beans. Add lots of water — the barley will expand as it cooks — and salt liberally. Bring to a boil and simmer at least an hour. Before serving (or after, if you forget) add a dash of red wine vinegar.