Autumn vegetable and chicken curry stew, served in kabocha squash bowls

Here's a fine fusion dish for a cold autumn day. Find small, round, blemish-free kabocha squash, one per person. Carve off the tops as if you were carving jack-o-lanterns, and remove and discard the seeds. Save the tops (if they are particularly thick, cut off a bit of the flesh for cooking into the stew; sprinkle the inside flesh of the tops with a little apple cider vinegar if you're worried about letting them sit out for a while). Rub some salt into the flesh inside the squashes, wrap the outsides of the squashes with foil, and back upwards of an hour in a medium-temperature oven. You want the flesh to be tender, but the sides to retain their integrity, so check regularly with a fork.

Meanwhile, prepare the stew. Begin by sauteing onions in olive oil with some salt, a bit of ground allspice, and plenty of curry powder. Then add a few sour green apples, chopped up, and some peppers, and any other fall veggies you might happen to have (e.g. the extra squash from the top of the jack-o-lanterns). After sauteing a bit, add some vegetable or chicken stock, or, better, some blended squash soup (we found some in the freezer). (If you have lots of extra winter squash, you can make this soup before making the stew: onions, squash, broth, a little salt, cooked until tender and then pureed.) Bring the stew to a boil, and then stir in some pieces of chicken, to poach. Once the chicken has cooked, taste the stew and adjust the seasoning.

When the flesh of the kabochas is starting to get tender, remove the "bowls" from the oven and fill with the stew while still very hot. The heat from the stew will help cook the insides of the squash even more. Replace the tops and serve.

The point is to eat the soup, and also eat the bowls mixed into the soup from the inside out. We had been intending this for our Hallowe'en dinner, but ended up pushing it to All Saints' Day instead. This stew can go with almost any wine, depending on how cold it is outside.

Wheat berry with red sauce

Pan-fried snapper, sauteed peppers, and Israeli couscous pilaf

Ratatouille lasagna

We love the flavor combination of ratatouille: tomatoes, eggplant, summer squash, supplemented with onions, garlic, peppers, and herbs. But the vegetable mix is never satisfying as a dinner: you eat and eat and eat and never fill up. Much better is a lasagna, layering the vegetables between cheese and pasta. So we decided the have the best of both worlds.

We began by slicing and lightly salting the vegetables (eggplant, onions, bell peppers, zucchini) and spread them in single layers in pans to roast uncovered in the oven. Meanwhile, we made a pasta dough with one part white flour to two parts semolina, a little salt, a couple eggs, and enough water to hold it together but not so much as to make the dough tacky. We rolled the dough through the hand-cranked pasta maker and let it dry on a rack. Then we put together our cheese mixture: minced garlic, grated mozzarella, grated romano, fresh thyme, grated black pepper, and ricotta. Finally, we diced some tomatoes, saving the juive, and mixed in some diced onion and chopped basil and a little salt.

Ingredients prepared, we started layering the lasagna. Begin by putting a splash of oil and just a little of the tomato juice at the bottom of the pan, and then a layer of noodles. Then some of the tomato mixture, a layer of zucchini, and a layer of cheese, with some of the roasted onions and peppers dotted through. On top of all this, another layer of pasta, then tomatoes, eggplants, cheese, and continuing in this way until the casserole is assembled. End with noodles and a thick layer of cheese, decorated with some roasted onions and peppers.

Cover the casserole with a tent of foil, and bake about half an hour. Then remove the foil and cut it into strips to wrap just around the edges of the pan, so that any noodles showing don't crisp too much in the oven, and bake another half hour. Let the casserole cool about ten minutes before slicing and serving.

Cold corn soup with popcorn and salsa

We had a strange but tasty lunch at Eugene City Bakery, and decided that we just had to make it at home.


Begin by sauteing one large onion and two yellow bell peppers, coarsely chopped, in some olive oil until tender. In the saute, include also some salt (to help the onions tenderize) and ancho chili powder. Cut the corn off of three or four ears and add to the pot, along with just enough water to cover. Bring to a boil.


With an immersion blender, puree the veggies. Also mix in one four-cup tub of non-fat plain yogurt.




Do not reheat the soup: the idea is to have it cold. Do, however, add a lot more spices — your tongue is less sensitive when the food it is tasting is cold, and you probably have spiced the soup for hot. In addition to a bit more salt and ancho, blend in a some curry and tarragon (both of which go wonderfully with cream).



Pop a pot of popcorn, and flavor the popcorn with salt and paprika. Also make a fresh salsa of tomatoes, onions, and garlic. Serve the soup cold with popcorn and salsa mixed in at the table.



As odd as the pairing might sound, this dinner was one of our best.

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.

Pizza with shrimp, sweet peppers, and tapenade

Polenta gnocchi with leeks and peppers

Bring to a boil one cup water with two cups red wine and a small handful of salt. Then remove from heat, whisk in one cup corn meal, cover, and let the polenta cook for at least twenty minutes.

When the polenta has cooked, mix in an egg. Pour a small pile of semolina flour onto the counter, flour your hands, and roll the polenta into small gnocchi, rolling each gnocco in the semolina flour.

Julienne leeks, sweet peppers, and garlic, and sauté in olive oil, adding a little salt. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, drop in the gnocchi, and cook until they float, about five to ten minutes. Remove the gnocchi from the water with a slotted spoon, toss with the vegetable sauce, and serve with red wine and pecorino cheese.

The last hurrah of summer

Our vegetable box last week surprised us: it was the final Tuesday of October, and yet the box came full of corn, green beans, sweet peppers, and basil (well, cilantro, actually, but we asked to trade). Our bean vines are still heavy with fruit, so we added some fresh shelled white beans, grabbed some thyme from the garden, and made a wonderful succotash.

Shell white beans and simmer at least ten minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, sauté diced white onion in lots of butter. When onion is translucent, add minced garlic, fresh thyme leaves, and fresh corn cut off the cob. Cook a few minutes while you dice sweet red peppers and add it in; also add in green beans, cut into one-inch pieces. Finally, mix in the drained white beans and some fresh basil leaves. Serve with a well-chilled white or rosé.

Entrée salad

Begin with the aioli: one egg yolk; a small spoonful of water; many gloves garlic, mortar-and-pestled with salt; one can anchovies, washed, shells and bones removed, and mortar-and-pestled; a few spoonfuls capers, rinsed and minced; a cup and a half olive oil.

The rest of the salad: romaine lettuce; peas from Catalan (a fall harvest!); nicoise olives; cooked salad shrimp; sweet red peppers, sliced; onions, sliced; the last harvest of cherry tomatoes.

Toss everything together in a large salad bowl, and serve with fresh sour baguette and with a chilled rosé.

Three meals

A commenter asked about our normal meal time frame: How long do we cook? How long do we eat? Are we always carefully "slow"?

To the last question, yes: we make almost everything from scratch, using fresh local ingredients as much as possible. (Some exceptions: when there are not tomatoes, we eat canned tomatoes, but we can those ourselves. "Asian" ingredients, like soy sauce and coconut milk, we do not try to source locally. Milk is local, but most of our cheese is imported. And so on.) To the second question, our meals are just about exactly an hour of eating. In particular, we usually put on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me to listen to while we eat, and we finish the salad (we always end with a salad) just as they're finishing the show.

But as to how long cooking takes? Here are three recent case studies.


Thursday's dinner was very fast to cook — start-to-finish twenty minutes. Fill a large pot half-way with water, bring to a boil, and add some salt. Meanwhile, scrub two pounds of mussels and set aside. Wash and chop a medium head of of broccoli, and begin steaming in a colander set in the top of the pot. In a large fry pan, melt butter and olive oil and sauté a few cloves of garlic, chopped. When the broccoli has turned bright green, transfer it to the sauté pan, pour a pound of dried rigatoni into the boiling water, and set the timer to ten minutes. Begin sautéing the broccoli, adding salt and more oils as needed. After three minutes, move the cleaned mussels to the colander and steam six minutes. When the timer has one minute left, transfer the mussels to a bowl, and set on the table — also finish setting the table and open a bottle of wine. Rinse the colander, drain the pasta when the timer goes off, and mix with the broccoli in a large serving bowl. Serve with a brick of pecorino romano and a peeler for shaving over the pasta.








For comparison, consider Wednesday's dinner of ratatouille and carrot cake. B made the carrot cake in the afternoon; the ratatouille is from Chez Panisse Vegetables, and is described as "serves 8" (the two of us ate half of that recipe as an entre, and had the other half cold for lunch the next day). Mise en place is essential for a long meal like this. The ratatouille is easy, but it's a lot of chopping: make into half-inch cubes equal amounts of eggplant (one larger), onion, tomato, peppers, and summer squash; begin with the eggplant and salt it liberally, so that it can drain in the colander while you prepare the other veggies. Also mince ten cloves garlic and prepare a bouquet garni (the recipe said just basil; we used a mix of garden herbs). Then dry the eggplant, and sauté until golden in the bottom of a large pot, remove and set aside. Sauté the onions until transclucent, add the garlic and peppers, a few minutes later the squash and bouquet garni, and a few minutes later the tomatoes. Bring to a boil, cook ten minutes, add the eggplant, cook another twenty, let cool a little, and serve. Plan about an hour if you're doing all the chopping yourself, and more time to make the dessert, etc. (Ratatouille is delicious, but not entirely satisfying as the only course.)







The final meal this week was about forty minutes of cook time. With a peeler, make very thin slices of potato (two medium taters is probably enough), and lay out overlapping on a piece of wax paper. Salt and rub with a little oil, then place on the potatoes a large fillet of rock fish. Liberally add salt, pepper, and herbs (we used thyme, fennel tops, and rosemary), and then wrap the fish in the potato skin, using the wax paper to help roll the fish. Wrap in parchment (or wax paper, but it doesn't work as well), and bake in a preheated oven 20 minutes. Meanwhile, slice thin two small yellow onions, sauté with salt and olive oil until translucent, add a few cloves minced garlic, and then the stems and then the greens of a bunch of silver chard.