Going to someone else’s house for Thanksgiving is like voyaging into the unknown.  You never know what strange customs may prevail in this foreign land.  They may serve olives and pickles with dinner (my roommate’s family).  They may serve salad (why?).  They may not make gravy (my cousin’s husband’s family – my entire family stared at him in horror when he admitted this).

I’m actually not all that picky about my Thanksgiving Dinner.  This is mostly because I know that Christmas dinner will be exactly the same as what I would have served for Thanksgiving if I was making it.  So, if I miss my chance at Bacon & Chestnut Stuffing in November, I know that I’ll be eating it in December.  However, Thanksgiving is at our house this year, and I keep feeling like I’ve forgotten some vital Thanksgiving dish, I just can’t remember what it is.

In preparation for Thanksgiving, this past weekend was a tour of all the parking lots I hate the most.  I was at Trader Joes for chestnuts (for the Bacon & Chestnut stuffing), the liquor store for Calvados (for the cranberry sauce), Whole Foods (for the turkey), and my regular grocery store for everything else.  I had a grocery shopping list itemized and divided by store, and I still didn’t manage to remember everything I needed for the week.  This happens every time I throw a party.  No matter how carefully I plan, there are invariably things that I forget (cranberries), things that I thought I had but actually don’t (enough sugar), things that I unexpectedly need (more butter) and I end up back at the grocery store.

So far I have the cranberry sauce made (no quivering cans of cranberry sauce are unmolded at my table), and 15 slices of bread have been cut into cubes and left out to get stale.  Or, at least I hope they’re getting stale, do you know how hard it is to get bread cubes to go stale when it’s raining?  Not that I’m complaining about the rain.  The air here has been so dry lately that my skin is cracking.  This always make me feel like a Victorian heroine – you know, one of the ones who’s quietly dying of consumption in a garret while she sews on cuffs and collars for a penny per shirt by candle light.  I can usually make it to February before I start feeling like I should be coughing delicately into a lace trimmed handkerchief while murmuring, “No, no, don’t worry about me.  I’m sure I’ll be fine soon [cough . . . cough].”  In the event that I ever do find myself dying of consumption (do people still die of consumption?) I’d like to be one of the heroines who languishes palely on a couch in Italy rather than one of the ones who dies alone and in disgrace in a cold room in London while rats scurry along the floor boards.

The rest of Thanksgiving Dinner will get made later today – I figure I don’t need to start cooking until about 11:30, which is another reason I’m convinced I’m forgetting something.  Because I am only doing Thanksgiving for four people, and because I got out of work at 1pm on Wednesday, I had Dinner for anyone who hadn’t already departed elsewhere.  Since some of the people coming to Dinner would be having not one, not two, but three Thanksgivings in the next four days I made the least Thanksgiving-y meal that I could imagine.

Spaghetti & Meatballs
Salad

Spaghetti & Meatballs
(serves 6)

Meatballs:
½ pound ground veal
½ pound ground pork
1 pound ground beef
1 ¼ cups fresh white bread crumbs (about 5 slices, crusts removed)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 teaspoons kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or more to taste
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 extra-large egg, beaten
Vegetable oil
Olive oil

Place the ground meats, bread crumbs, parsley, Parmesan, salt, pepper, onion powder, egg, and 3/4 cup warm water in a bowl. Combine very lightly with a fork. Using your hands, lightly form the mixture into 2-inch meatballs. You will have 15-20 meatballs (I had 30 - but then I think mine were smaller than 2-inches).  If you’re like me and have trouble making sure that your meatballs are of a consistent size, scooping the mixture out in 1/4 cupfuls is a useful way to ensure that they’re all more or less the same size.

Pour equal amounts of vegetable oil and olive oil into a large (12-inch) skillet to a depth of ¼-inch. Heat the oil. Very carefully, in batches, place the meatballs in the oil and brown them well on all sides over medium-low heat, turning carefully with a spatula or a fork. This should take about 10 minutes for each batch. Don’t crowd the meatballs.

Remove the meatballs to a plate covered with paper towels. Discard the oil but don’t clean the pan.

Tomato Sauce
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
1 Tbsp minced garlic
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1 cup good red wine
1 (28 oz) can pureed tomatoes
1 (28 oz) can chopped or diced tomatoes
2 Tbsp chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 Tbsp kosher salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Heat the olive oil in the same pan. Add the onion and sauté over medium heat until translucent, 5 to 10 minutes. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes, and cook for 1 more minute. Add the wine and cook on high heat, scraping up all the brown bits in the pan, until almost all the liquid evaporates, about 3 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes, parsley, salt, and pepper.

Return the meatballs to the sauce, cover, and simmer on the lowest heat for 25 to 30 minutes, until the meatballs are cooked through.

Serve hot on cooked spaghetti and pass the grated Parmesan.

Notes:    I really wanted to be able to do this all in one pan.  I browned my meatballs and sautéed my onions in my cast iron skillet, but when I went to add the tomato puree and diced tomatoes I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and poured all of it into a pot to cook.

I’d never made this particular recipe before, and the amount of oil it calls for you to use to brown the meatballs is a little disconcerting, and I’m not sure it added much to the finished dish.  The meatballs were good, although you really do want to be sure you only mix them very lightly, but I think they’d be just as good browned in about a ¼ of the oil.

My roommate and I were down in Miami this past weekend, and I love Boston, I really do, but there’s something to be said for standing on the beach at midnight drinking mojitos in mid-November.  Frankly there’s something to be said for drinking mojitos at midnight no matter what the setting, but the beach was a nice touch.  While I was there it occurred to me, as it does periodically, that high school Spanish might have been more useful to my life than German (although German does have the dubious merit of making Latin seem easier by comparison).

My father is Dutch, and as a result speaks most major European languages with varying degrees of fluency.  I took a lot of high school German and walked away with an ability to watch Charlie’s Angels in German (and Remington Steele, and Hart to Hart and Scarecrow & Mrs. King - German cable aired a lot of ‘70s/early ‘80s detective shows in the afternoon).  I also took French for about 10 years, and while it doesn’t get much of a work out this side of the Atlantic it’s certainly good enough to give someone directions when it becomes apparent that their first language is not English (why there are so many French in Boston is a mystery I have yet to solve).

I pointed the nice, lost, lady in the right direction for Faneuil Hall.  She thanked me, complimented me on my French, and then as proof that no good deed goes unpunished, said I sounded Swiss.  There are no words for how horrified I am by this.  The Swiss sing-song.  They say septante and nonante.

It is not that I don’t understand the appeal of septante and nonante.  Or even that I don’t find them inherently more logical than soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix*.  In 17 years of living in and visiting my parents in French speaking countries quatre-vingt-dix-sept has never once equaled 97 in my head.  It has always equaled 4 x 20 + 17, and usually by the time I’ve done the math on that there’s been an unfortunately long pause in the conversation and someone is looking at me with concern.  However, there are lines that must be drawn, and Rubicons that must not be crossed, and also I’m a snob.  And really, Swiss!  Swiss, I ask you.

This, however, is not my point.  My point is that my father speaks in many tongues, and can ask for directions when we’re lost and translate museum signs in foreign countries.  My mother and I speak in a far fewer tongues, but can read a menu almost everywhere in Europe, Slavic nations excluded.  This is fine because the last time we were in a Slavic speaking country they had the same two things on the menu everywhere we went – chicken & dumplings and goulash.  You’ve never seen people so grateful to cross the border into Germany for the food as we were at the end of 10 days.

I don’t speak anything beyond menu Spanish and I imagine my accent is appalling.  But like most places, I can order dinner and coffee and not be worried about what I’m going to be served.  This is a more useful skill than you’d think.  My father may be able to talk to the taxi driver, but my mother and I know what innards are in Spanish, Italian, German and French.

* I always wondered why 70 and 90 get singled out for such special treatment.  Why is 60 soixante?  Why isn’t it deux-trente, or trois-vingt?  Why isn’t 50, deux-vingt-dix?

Arroz con Pollo
Dark Greens
Salad

Arroz con Pollo (Cuban Chicken with Rice)
(serves 8 )

The recipe came from Gourmet via smittenkitchen.com, and I suspect it’s about as Cuban as I am, which is to say not very.  That being true, it sounded good, and was, in fact, quite tasty.  The rice becomes creamy and almost risotto like.  I think next time I’d skip the chicken drumsticks, and just use chicken breasts and thighs because (a) deskinning chicken legs is a pain in the neck, and (b) they get a little scrawny looking after they’ve been skinned and cooked.

Chicken
3 large garlic cloves
2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp white vinegar
2 tsp dried oregano
4 bone-in chicken breasts (halved crosswise)
4 chicken drumsticks
4 chicken thighs

Mash the garlic to a paste with the salt.  Mix with vinegar and oregano.

Remove the skin and excess fat from the chicken pieces, and then toss with the marinade.  Cover and allow to marinate in the fridge for 1-2 hours.

Note:  I only marinated my chicken for about 40 minutes because more time and we wouldn’t have eaten until 9:00pm.  You can’t leave it to marinate overnight because the vinegar will do strange things to the texture of the chicken if you leave it too long.

Rice
3 oz chorizo, skin discarded
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
3 large garlic cloves, chopped
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp dried oregano
1 ½ Tbsp paprika (spicy if you have it)
1-2 bay leaves
1 ½ tsp salt
1 lb tomatoes, seeded & chopped*
12 oz beer (not dark)
1 ½ cups chicken stock
2 cups white rice

Slice the chorizo lengthwise, and then cut crosswise into ¼” slices.  Cook the chorizo in olive oil in a heavy pot over medium heat until some of the fat is rendered (2-3 minutes).  Add onions, bell pepper, and garlic.  Cook until softened (about 5 minutes).

Add cumin, oregano, paprika, salt and bay leaves.  Cook until fragrant (about 1 minute).

Add chicken and marinade and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently.

Remove the chicken from the pot.  Add tomatoes, beer, stock and rice.  Bring to a boil and then return chicken to the pot with any accumulated juices.  Make sure the rice is submerged, reduce heat to a simmer and then cover with a sheet of parchment paper or wax paper and cover tightly with lid.  Cook, stirring once or twice until the rice is tender (20-30 minutes).

Remove from heat and let stand, covered, about 5 minutes.

* We’re well out of tomato season here, so I used a 28oz can of whole tomatoes, drained, seeded and chopped.

Dark Leafy Greens

Recipe previously given:    Taking the Easy Way Out

There is a general truth that if you feed them, they will come.

In college they always had problems achieving quorum at Plenary* until they closed all the dining halls that day and only served food at Plenary. This doesn’t necessarily say much about the student investment in the democratic process of student government. It does however say a lot about how to get 1200 college students to turn up for something.

So far the most successful program my roommate has ever run for teens in her library is the one where she brought in cupcakes for them to decorate. College students will show up for food in general. Teenagers will show up for sugar.

I don’t have a problem getting people to come to Dinner. I do have a small problem getting them to turn up on time. However, the universal truth of Dinner is that if you serve it, they will arrive. It’s like magic. As soon as you put food on the table, the door will open and the missing guests will appear. This works so often, that on the rare occasion that it doesn’t work, I’m always surprised.

* Quorum is required to reaffirm of the Student Government Constitution and the Honor Code. You’d think with how central the Honor Code is to life at Bryn Mawr it’d be easier to get people to turn up, but you’d be wrong.

Chicken Fingers
Scalloped Potatoes
Apple Sauce
Broccoli
Salad

Scalloped Potatoes

The Joy of Cooking gives you two cloth bookmarks to place as you will in the book. I use them for the recipes for biscuits and scalloped potatoes. The biscuits make sense. I make them all the time, and no matter how many times I make them I can never remember exactly how much baking power and baking soda I’m supposed to use. I watch people on TV make biscuits with a pinch of this and enough flour and I’m in awe.

The scalloped potatoes make less sense to bookmark since I don’t actually make them all that often. I use the Joy’s recipes for quiche and custard more often than I need the recipe for scalloped potatoes. But somewhere along the line it got bookmarked and it seems like it would be breaking with tradition to change it now.

Recipe previously given: Scalloped Potatoes & Kitchen Toys

Chicken Fingers

Recipe previously given: Corn Pudding & Other Gateway Drugs

Apple Sauce
It’s that time of year again. All the soft fruits are gone from the market, and we’re down to the apples that will have to carry us through to the Spring. It’s early enough in the Fall/Winter months that I haven’t gotten enormously tired of apples yet, and this is the first apple sauce of the Fall.

I read an article in the New York Times the other day about root cellars making a come back. All I can say is that some people clearly have more space than I do, and that equally clearly they don’t have damp cellars. Every house I’ve ever lived in that had a cellar, had a cellar that was damp and I suspect that any fresh food left down there would rot long before the end of winter.

Interesting side note, we once accidentally petrified pears in the bomb shelter (all Swiss houses have a bomb shelter, it’s required by law). Actually, now that I think about it, the bomb shelter would probably be a great place to have a root cellar. Even not sealed against a nuclear winter it’s practically a hermetically sealed environment. The pears certainly didn’t rot, they just desiccated and became stone like, and they were just laying on a tray that got taken down there during some round of lightening cleaning because there were guests coming (I’m assuming that’s how they ended up in the bomb shelter, but I don’t actually remember). It’s probably a more practical thing to do with a bomb shelter than stocking it with canned food and camp beds (also required by law) against the unlikely event that someone decides to bomb Switzerland.

Recipe previously given: Bangers & Mash

Salad
I order my salad (and pea shoots – so yummy) from a local organic farm. I know they’re not growing them outside anymore, so I’m assuming that they’re being grown in a green house somewhere. I know they’re wildly out of season, but it’s a local greenhouse and I’m okay with that. Winter is a long season in the Northeast, and I refuse to live with what the grocery store calls salad for the next six months.

Dear Stop-n-Shop:

It is November 2nd.  That’s two days after Halloween, twenty-four days before Thanksgiving and fifty-one days to Christmas.  In other words, it’s way too early for me to be seeing Christmas ornaments and snowmen peeps on the shelves (anyone else remember when peeps were a seasonal treat?)  The leftover Halloween candy has barely made it to the sale racks, and you’re pushing Christmas knick-knacks already?  Have you forgotten that there’s an entire other holiday in between Halloween and Christmas for which you could be selling tacky and unnecessary kitsch?

Also, wherefore your sudden and mysterious aversion to beans?  What used to be a plentiful variety and stock of beans – red beans, black beans, kidney beans, great northern beans, garbanzo beans – has shrunk to a paltry and elusive collection.  I think I bought the last two cans of black beans in the store.

To say nothing of the butter shortage.  I kind of (but not really) understand having a run on butter around Thanksgiving or Christmas what with all of the baking, but Halloween?  Who runs out of unsalted butter on November 2nd?

Je vous prie, Monsieur/Madame, d’accepter l’expression de mes sentiments les plus exaspérées.*

In other news, I moved Dinner to Tuesday night this week because, let’s face it, everyone I know was going to be glued to their TV all night watching the returns come in anyway.  I figured we could at least watch them all together and provide each other with moral support as we bit our nails and agonized over every single electoral vote.

I would like to say that we as a community have lost our sense of delayed gratification.  We can’t wait for peeps once a year any more, we have to have them for every holiday (and apparently now in flavors, which is just wrong).  On the other hand we finally got to the end of a 22 month electoral campaign so possibly our sense of delayed gratification is fine, we’ve just been saving it for bigger things than when peeps get stocked.

* Why?  Because it sounds so much snider in French.  Here’s hoping I spelled everything right.

Chili
Corn bread
Salad

Hot Cider

Jen’s Father’s Chili

Recipe previously given:  Chili & the Perils of Pottery

I know someone who was planning an election night party where the theme was the food of the liberal elitists.  He was going to serve arugula salad, brie, sushi, and open bottles of chardonnay.  I contemplated this, but made chili instead as much for the sake of practicality as anything else.

Chili is easy to make for a crowd and it holds well if not everyone is sitting down to eat at the same time.  People kept turning up throughout the night as they got done voting, got back from play rehearsals, were finished with seminars . . . . I just kept the pot of chili on the stove over low heat and people could serve themselves as they got there.  Other people brought the dessert and alcohol we felt were going to be necessary to quell our nerves as the results started to be announced.

Cornbread
Recipe previously given: Chili & the Perils of Pottery

Hot Cider
Serves about 8-10 and will make your house smell amazing.

1 gallon of cider
3-4 oranges (depending on size)
8 whole cloves
2-3 (3 inch) Cinnamon sticks
3-4 whole allspice berrie

Pour your cider into a large pot and set over medium heat.

Juice two oranges and add to the cider.  Cut the remaining oranges into sixths and stud with cloves, two per slice (up to 8 cloves, or to taste).  It’s hard to push the clove stem through the orange peel, so I usually poke a hole in the orange peel with my nail or the tip of a knife and insert the clove stem into that opening. Add to the cider.  Add the cinnamon sticks and allspice (if you don’t have whole allspice berries lurking in your cabinet don’t run all over creation to find them, they’re a nice addition but not necessary).

Allow to come up to a simmer, and then lower the heat as far as you can.  The longer it simmers, the better it gets.  It’ll come up to a simmer faster with the lid on, but your house will smell better with the lid off.

If it’s been that kind of a day you can add a splash of rum to your cider, and that’ll make everything seem a little better.

There are certain places that are quintessentially emblematic of a particular region or aesthetic.  It’s like they’ve been designed to fit a stereotype and they’re a little Stepford in how well they succeed in conforming to our expectations.

Gruyere in Switzerland is like that – although in fairness, a lot of Switzerland is a little Stepford.  Gruyere is what happens when Hansel and Gretel escape from the wicked witch and decide to go into urban planning.  There are cobblestone streets lined with neatly whitewashed houses with geraniums in every window box.  There’s a fountain in the middle of the town square, and there are flower arrangements in old wells (geraniums, of course – we knew my mother had lived in Switzerland too long when she started to buy geraniums for outside planters with a complete lack of irony).  In the winter, snow rims the eaves and icicles hang in neatly ordered rows.  Because this is Switzerland I’m sure that the inhabitants are trimming the icicles if they get longer than the regulation limit.

On the upside, when you get raclette in Gruyere you’re presented with a solid pound of cheese under a heat lamp, a stone crock of boiled potatoes and a bowl of pickled onions.  You think to yourself that you and your three lunch companions will never eat that much cheese, and yet somehow 45 minutes later there is only the tiniest sliver of cheese left bubbling under the heat lamp.  When you get raclette in places like Geneva they bring you individual slices of melted cheese to put on your potatoes.  This is probably better for your waist line, but much less fun to eat.  Also, when you order coffee at the end of your meal in Gruyere it comes with a crock of cream that’s so solid that you have to scoop it out with a knife.

Concord (Massachusetts) is the New England version of Gruyere, minus the infusions of heavy cream and geraniums.  Concord is picture postcard perfect New England from the white clapboard church on the town square to the gabled store fronts and the tree lined streets.  Concord looks picturesque no matter when you visit, but never more so than in the Fall when the streets are decorated with sheaves of wheat and groups of pumpkins, the air is crisp and clear, and someone somewhere is selling hot cider and possibly cider donuts.

And it must be said, we’re having a truly spectacular Fall this year.  It got cold fast, which is terrible for my heating bill, but great when it comes to turning the leaves brilliant shades of crimson and orange.  Driving around Concord at any time of year is a little dreamlike, driving around it during the middle of Fall verges on the downright surreal.

It’s enough to make me decorate with miniature pumpkins and tiny cobs of Indian corn.  I’d like to claim I’d never do that because it’s a little Sandra Lee and of the many things I’d like to not be, Sandra Lee is up there with serial killer and talk show host.  Although, to clarify, I’m not doing tablescapes with miniature pumpkins and decorative Indian corn – they’re just discretely piled in the fruit bowl that lives on the dining room table.  Frankly, this is probably bad enough, but they’re cute and I was overcome by the spirit of New England and Fall, or some other form of momentary mental aberration

Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce
Salad

Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce
Having admitted to a nod in the direction of Sandra Lee I feel like I should reassure everyone that all ingredients in tonight’s dinner were real.  Granted I didn’t roast and puree my own pumpkin, but it was just plain canned pumpkin that was used.  No pumpkin pies were eviscerated in the service of dinner.

Recipe previously given:     Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

I had a mildly horrifying realization the other day.  I’m becoming my mother.

No offense to my mother, who is a charming and lovely lady of whom I’m quite fond, but I feel emphatically that I’m too young to turn into her.  Not the least of which because it means I’m that much closer to an unhealthy obsession with the temperature of my freezer.

Let me elaborate.  My grandmother wouldn’t let you put things in the freezer unless it had made ice because, “it wouldn’t be cold enough”.  My mother – proving that’s genetic and doesn’t skip generations – won’t keep ice packs in the freezer because, “it makes it too cold.”  I’m a little afraid to ask my aunt her opinions on the temperature of the freezer.

So far I have yet to get really invested in the temperature of my freezer, and I am not quite as far gone as my mother is when it comes to shopping.  She actually goes to five or six different places to get the exact products that she wants.  She has time to do this because she’s retired, and also a lot pickier than I am, although clearly I’m getting pickier.

I get my dry goods – cat food, fizzy water, cereal – from my local Stop-n-Shop.  I have my dairy products, fruits and vegetables, and the world’s best fresh pasta delivered weekly by the nice folks at In Season*.  As an aside, I have to say that milk in glass bottles does not get old.  If I still need something I’ll stop by the farmer’s market mid week, or as was the case this week I’ll go down to Whole Foods for a special cut of meat.

I want to know when I became the kind of person who shops in three different places to get her groceries, and gets a little twitchy at the idea of milk from the grocery store, and eggs whose provenance I can’t trace to a specific flock of hens.  And does this mean that I can no longer feel superior to the earthy crunchy people who shop at Whole Foods?   Or, do I have to accept that I am a little earthy crunchy, but at least I’m supporting local farmers while I do it?

* Really, the nicest people run this business.  I’d forgotten what it was like to deal with businesses run by actual people instead of corporations.  People who will accommodate the fact that you have to leave for work by 7:30 and will therefore make sure that your groceries are there before you leave for work.  People who will rescue you when you build a grocery list and then forget to actually order it, by stopping by your house later in the week with what was on your list that they have in stock.  It’s such a nice change from dealing with a large corporation where the only way to get something done is to be the biggest pain in the ass that you can be – comment not at all inspired to my recent dealings with AT&T (no relation at all).  If this sounds like a shill for In Season, well I like having my milk and eggs delivered to me and I’d like to see them stick around.

Braised Lamb in Pomegranate Sauce
Couscous Bread
Broccoli
Salad

Braised Lamb in Pomegranate Sauce
(serves 8-10 – I used a 3.75lb shoulder and served 6)

In answer to everyone who has raised their eyebrows at me this week in amusement: Yes, I’m having a little pomegranate renaissance.  I like pomegranates.  They’re fun to look at, and they taste a little like grape juice but without the cloying flavor.  Pictures and words don’t do justice to just how good this smells while it’s cooking.  Wine, pomegranate juice and lamb are possibly my new favorite flavor combination.

I trekked down to Whole Foods for my lamb this time, cursing the parking lot the entire way (because whatever else I may say, the real reason I hate going to Whole Foods is because the parking lot is a nightmare), and dithered for a good 15 minutes while the man behind the counter patiently and helpfully enabled my indecision.  I was going to get the Icelandic lamb and do my bit to help out their economy, but they didn’t have the cut I wanted, so the lamb’s from New Zealand instead.  This lamb smelled exactly like lamb should, and reassured me that I had done the right thing in tossing the lamb stew the other week.

1/4 cup olive oil
1 pound lamb neck bones
1 7- to 7 ½ -pound lamb shoulder, boned (bones reserved), well trimmed, rolled, tied
All purpose flour

2 medium onions, chopped
10 large garlic cloves
2 cups chicken stock or canned broth
1 cup dry red wine
1 cup unsweetened pomegranate juice
2 Tbsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp firmly packed golden brown sugar
1 tablespoon dried oregano, crumbled
1 tsp ground cinnamon
¾ tsp ground allspice

1 ½ Tbsp butter
1 ½ Tbsp all purpose flour

Position rack in lowest third of oven and preheat to 325°F. Heat oil in heavy large pot or Dutch oven over high heat. Add all lamb bones and cook until brown, turning often, about 15 minutes (I failed at finding just lamb bones and used a lamb shank, as recommended by the butcher, instead). Transfer bones to plate. Season lamb with salt and pepper and dredge thoroughly in flour. Add to pot and cook until brown on all sides, about 10 minutes. Transfer lamb to plate with bones.

Note: I lack both a Dutch oven or a stew pot that’s oven safe, so I did my searing and sautéing in a large cast iron skillet and then transferred everything to a medium sized baking dish and covered it tightly with foil.

Add onions and garlic to pot and cook until onions are just golden, scraping up browned bits, about 5 minutes. Return lamb to pot. Arrange bones around lamb. Stir in stock and next 7 ingredients. Bring liquid to boil. Baste top of lamb. Cover; bake until lamb is tender when pierced with long sharp knife, turning once, about 2 hours 15 minutes. Cool; cover and chill overnight.

Note: I cooked mine to 155 which is about halfway between rare (140) and medium rare (160-170).

Preheat oven to 325°F. Remove fat from surface of lamb and cooking liquid. Transfer lamb to platter. Remove string from lamb. Cut into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Arrange in shallow baking dish.

Note: So much fat.  Words can’t quite describe how much fat.  It was a little gross, but at least I was removing most of it from the finished dish.  Suffice it to say, you don’t want to skip this step.

Remove bones and discard. Strain pan juices, pressing hard on solids to extract as much liquid as possible.  Bring pan juices to a boil.  Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add 1 ½ tablespoons flour and stir until mixture begins to brown, about 2 minutes. Whisk in hot pan juices and boil until sauce is reduced to 2 cups (about 15 minutes). Season with salt and pepper.  Pour over lamb. Cover with foil and bake in a 350 oven until lamb is heated through, about 35-40 minutes.

Arrange lamb on platter.  Garnish with pomegranate seeds and chopped mint (optional, but recommended).  Serve extra sauce on the side.

Note: The easiest way to seed a pomegranate is in a bowl of water.  If you do it underwater if you burst any of the seeds it doesn’t stain your counter or your clothes, and the pith will float while the seeds sink, so it’s easy to separate the two when you’re done.  Having seeded two pomegranates in two weeks I have come to a new appreciation for Proserpine’s ability to extract and eat just four seeds, all I can think is that either goddesses are more adept at seeding pomegranates than I am, or that she had red juice all over her robes when Hades had his triumphant moment which is just adding insult to injury.

Couscous Bread
I was going to make couscous to soak up the gravy, but then I was gifted with about 7 loaves of bread on Tuesday night, and even I can’t eat that much bread before it goes stale and/or moldy.  So, we had bread to mop up the sauce instead of couscous.  Then because I still had ridiculous amounts of bread left I sent people home with mixed bags of bread and we still have bread left for us.  It was a lot of bread.  Excellent bread though.

This is the story of the lamb stew that wasn’t.

It starts with losing two members of Dinner for the foreseeable future – one to an internship at L’Espalier, and the other to rehearsals for a play.  On the one hand, those are obviously good things and we’re pleased for them.  On the other hand, we won’t get to see them as much and that’s sad.  And, on a third hand, they are coincidentally the two people at Dinner who don’t like lamb which means that while they’re off not coming to Dinner I can serve lamb to my heart’s content.

With this in mind I took myself off to the grocery store two weekends ago to buy the fixings for lamb stew.  In the back of my mind I more or less assumed that this would require, at some point, a trek down to Whole Foods for lamb and figs.  But lo, there were figs at my local grocery store.  And more mysteriously, there was a broad selection of cuts of lamb.  If my life had a sound track this is the point when the ominous music of ‘don’t go down that staircase to the dark cellar’ would have started playing.  However, as my life is sadly lacking in an omniscient soundtrack I went ahead and bought the lamb.

When I opened the package of lamb I sniffed at it a little dubiously.  But, it’s been a while since I’ve made lamb, and lamb does smell gamier than most other meats I cook.  I checked the sell by date on the package, and I sniffed again and finally decided that it was fine.

The problem is, once a seed of doubt about whether meat is still good has been planted, it’s hard to convince yourself that it is fine regardless of the actual quality of the meat.  I kept going back and sniffing the meat, and sniffing my hands.  And one time it would smell fine, and I’d be reassured, and the next time it would smell distinctly off and I’d be dubious all over again.  Unfortunately I didn’t come to a definitive conclusion about the lamb until after I’d made the stew and tasted it.  I finally decided that it just tasted odd and I was better off not risking it.

Then I got sick – unrelated to the lamb stew that may or may not have been bad – and didn’t have Dinner last week anyway.  I went into this past weekend cheerfully assured that I didn’t have to think about what I was going to make for Dinner this week because I already knew – lamb stew.  Then Sunday morning I was flipping channels and caught about 90 seconds of “Throwdown with Bobby Flay” and saw someone making biscuits and realized with horror that it had been months* since I last made biscuits and immediately had to rearrange my Dinner menu to rectify this.

Buttermilk Biscuits (with ham)
Curried Chicken Salad
Beet Carpaccio
Hard Boiled Eggs
Salad

* 4 months, I checked, and then I checked again because this seemed just so unlikely.

Biscuits

Recipe previously given:    Farewell to Summer

Curried Chicken Salad
I happened to have pomegranate seeds on hand this week because there were pomegranates at the grocery store last week and they’re fun to eat, if a little time consuming to break down.  They were a really nice addition to the salad.  They’ve got a great sweet-tart crunch and burst of flavor.  I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to find them the next time I make chicken salad, but if I have them around I’ll definitely use them.  Also, they’re terribly pretty on top of the salad.

Recipe previously given:    Farewell to Summer

Beet Carpaccio
(serves 4-6)
I am bound and determined to come to a greater love of beets.  They’re just so pretty, and I want to like them and I figure if I make them often enough eventually I’ll just cave and start really enjoying them.  Apparently my newspapers agree with me because in the last month the Boston Globe, the New York Times and the CS Monitor have all run articles on the best foods you’re not eating and featured beets.

The Beet Carpaccio recipe from the Boston Globe certainly looked aesthetically pleasing in the picture, and it’s terribly seasonal with the beets and the apples.  Plus, any excuse to use my mandoline.  I substituted some local goat cheese for the feta because I happened to have some on hand that needed to be used, and can you really go wrong with goat cheese?

Dressing
1 tsp mustard
Juice of 1 lemon
6 Tbsp olive oil
Salt/pepper

Whisk together.
Carpaccio
4 medium beets
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 apple
3 oz goat cheese (or feta), crumbled
1 Tbsp mint, chopped
2 Tbsp pistachio nuts, roughly chopped*
Pomegranate seeds (very optional)

Toss the beets with the olive oil and salt, wrap in a foil packet and roast in a 375 oven for 45-50 minutes, or until tender.  Allow them to cool slightly and then peel.  Allow them to cool completely (or refrigerate over night).

Slice the beets very thin – I did mine 1/16” on a mandoline – and arrange in overlapping concentric circles on a plate.  If you’re using a mandoline – and honestly I wouldn’t really want to try this without one– put something underneath it like a piece of tin foil, or saran wrap so that you don’t stain your counters.  Staining your fingers is pretty much inevitable (although I suppose you could wear rubber gloves, but this seems like overkill), but beet stains will wash off your skin a lot faster than they will off your counters.

Slice the apple very thin (again, a mandoline is great for this), toss with a little lemon juice to stop them from discoloring, and arrange on top of the beets.  If you slice the apples after the beets they will be tinged slightly pink in interesting patterns, which looks kind of cool.

Drizzle some of the dressing over the carpaccio and top with crumbled cheese, mint and chopped pistachios.  I also added some pomegranate seeds because I happened to have them on hand, but I wouldn’t go wildly out my way to find them.

The original recipe calls for you to mound salad on top of the beets/fruit at this point which to me just obscures the pretty patterns you’ve made, so I served the salad separately.

The original recipe also calls for grapefruit as well as the apple.  I think this is (a) just too many ingredients, and (b) you can’t section the grapefruit as thinly as you do the apple and the beets and it looks odd (or at least I think it looks odd), and (c) I’m the only person in my house who likes grapefruit.

* Interesting note about pistachios, they’re not actually a nut, they’re a seed.  Obviously if you’re serving someone with a nut allergy you should check with them before feeding them pistachios, but you have decent odds that they’ll be able to eat them.

Dinner was cancelled last night due to me being sick earlier in the week, and while feeling better on Wednesday I was still decidedly unenthusiastic about food.

I’ve been feeling disenchanted with the Food Network lately. It seems like every time I turn it on there’s a food travel documentary or the secret history of something or other airing. Admittedly I find the fact that carbonation is the secret ingredient in slurpees fascinating, but it’s not really what I’m flipping to the Food Network to watch. They have a roster of new shows and they all feel like they’re trying too hard. None of the new hosts really look at ease behind the camera, and none of them are endearing enough that I want to watch them anyway. This is a problem since they’re also not cooking any food that I’m interested in watching them make*.

I still like watching Ace of Cakes, and I enjoyed Feasting on Waves (because I do love me some social history, and the social history of food is just icing on the cake), but those aren’t really cooking shows and the line up of actual cooking shows just don’t hold my interest any more. I’m sure that Barefoot Contessa is still airing but it’s never on when I’m flipping channels, and frankly there’s only so much appalled interest that I can work up for watching Sandra Lee massacre food. And, when exactly did Paula Deen become a caricature? I ran across her new show the other day and I swear she looks like a drag queen. A classy drag queen granted, but I’m guessing that drag queen of any stripe isn’t really the image she’s trying to project.

At the moment I’m getting my cooking tv fix from America’s Test Kitchen. I finally gave in and set a series recording for it on my DVR, because who’s watching TV at 3:00pm on a Sunday? However, America’s Test Kitchen while entertaining and occasionally inspiring enough to get me to run off and bake enormous chocolate chip cookies, isn’t really enough to satisfy my need for food tv.

I’m not sure if my current disenchantment with the Food Network is a sign of growth on my part, a failing on the part of the Food Network, or just an overdose and I’ll be excited to watch it again in another few months. In the meantime I’m left with nothing to watch on Sunday mornings while I eat my breakfast and commune with my coffee. I suppose I could talk to my roommate, or read, but that seems terribly radical.

* It’s not as if I watch the Food Network for menu planning purposes. I make maybe 1% of the recipes I see in any given year. I watch so that I can learn how to rescue seized chocolate, and to get vicarious thrills from the amount of butter Ina Garten cavalierly tosses into her recipes.

Macaroni & Cheese
Roasted Chicken
Broccoli

Macaroni & Cheese
I’ve been refreshing the front page of the New York Times approximately every 10 minutes for the past week and been horrified every time. I’m consoling myself with cheese and starch.

Recipe previously given: Macaroni & Cheese

Roasted Chicken
I cheated. I didn’t feel like roasting a whole chicken and then having to dismember carve it, so I roasted bone-in chicken breasts instead and then sliced them off the bone to serve. I’m not entirely sure that this was actually easier, but it seemed like it would be on Sunday when I was at the grocery store.

I minced garlic, lemon zest and fresh thyme together and left them marinating in olive oil over night. I slathered the chicken breasts with the flavored olive oil and then roasted them with some quartered onions and lemons (the lemons that I’d zested for the marinade).

I served the sliced chicken with some of the roasted lemons – and then saved the rest for a roasted lemon vinaigrette that I’m going to make tonight.

Note: If you’re going to bake two things at once, like say macaroni & cheese and chicken, you need to up the temperature of your oven. Both macaroni & cheese and roasted chicken need a 350-375 oven to cook, but if you’re doing them together you need to bump the temperature up to 400-425 to get them to cook properly.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to soup.  There are the people who think that soup is the perfect food, and is an end in and of itself.  And, there are the people who think soup is lovely, but get to the bottom of the bowl and want to know where the rest of dinner is.

I grew up in a family that belongs to the first school of thought.  Except for the unfortunate black bean soup my mother made when I was in high school that was promptly dubbed river sludge soup, I’ve pretty much never met a soup I didn’t like.  My mother admittedly did not think it was the best soup she’d ever had, but didn’t think it was quite as bad as my father and I made it out to be.

Dinner divides fairly evenly into both camps, although I think it tends a little more towards the “and the rest of dinner is where?” side of the debate which is one of the reasons why I don’t make soup for Dinner all that often.  Other reasons include the fact that soup for a large group is not as easy as it sounds, and that I don’t have a soup tureen (the fact that I have nowhere to store a soup tureen is irrelevant to this discussion).  But, Dinner this week was on the small side, and it was a birthday request.

I’m grabbing onto the very tail end of Summer with both hands and refusing to admit that we really are segueing into Fall, all evidence to the contrary.  For one more week I’m pretending it’s Summer and I used the last of the summer corn to make soup.  The recipe is actually called Summer Corn Soup, but I think it’s a decent transition from Summer into Fall.  It’s got the delicate summery flavor of corn contrasted with the salty kick of bacon that make you think of winter stews and kicking through piles of fallen leaves.  Even my roommate who firmly belongs in the second camp when it comes to soup, and usually greets soup for dinner with an expression of ‘hmmmm’ volunteered an, “amazing” followed up with an, “so good” when it came to this soup.

That being said, this is not a main course soup, and if you want to treat it as such you need to supplement your dinner with a number of other things.  The original recipe says it serves 6.  I think it’d be skimpy for 6 even as a starter.  As written I think you could serve 4 for a starter, and 2-3 as a main course if you had other things to go with it.  I made a generous 2.5x the recipe and served 6 with the additions of quiche, bread & cheese, salad and dessert.

The original recipe calls for you to strain the soup after you puree it.  I don’t understand this at all.  Firstly, I think it would taste like flavored milk if you strained it, and I’m not all that fond of milk to begin with, much less slightly salty corn flavored milk.  Secondly, the texture you get from pureeing the corn and vegetables gives it a nice body.  It’s still a very light soup, but not straining it gives it some presence.  Also, it’s a lot less work.

Corn Soup
Quiche
Salad
Cheese & Bread
Olives

Peach Pie

Corn Soup
(recipe says serves 6, I remain dubious)

Soup
3 cups whole milk
3 ears of fresh corn,
2 tablespoons butter
1 large onion, chopped
1 large carrot, peeled, thinly sliced
1 celery stalk, thinly sliced
1 garlic clove, pressed
2 cups water
2 large fresh thyme sprigs
2 fresh rosemary sprigs
1 bay leaf

Cut the kernels from the ears of corn and reserve.  Break the cobs in half and place in a heavy pot with the milk.  Bring the milk and corn cobs just to a simmer and then remove from the heat, cover and allow to steep while you sauté the vegetables.

Melt butter in large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion; sprinkle with salt and sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes (do not let onion brown). Add corn kernels, carrot, celery, and garlic; cook until vegetables are soft, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes. Add the vegetables to the corn cob/milk mixture.  Add 2 cups water, herb sprigs, bay leaf.  Increase heat and bring to boil. Cover partially, reduce heat to low, and simmer 20 minutes to blend flavors.

Discard corncobs, herb sprigs, and bay leaf. Cool soup slightly. Working in batches, puree soup in blender until very smooth.  Season soup to taste with salt and white pepper.  You can make this a day ahead and chill.  Bring to a simmer before serving.

Garnish
¾-1 ear corn per person
2 slices bacon per person

Cut the kernels from the corn and place about ¾-1 ear’s worth in the bottom of each bowl.

Dice the bacon and then sauté until crispy.  Drain briefly.

Ladle the soup over the kernels in the bowls.  Garnish with bacon.

Quiche

Recipe previously given:  The Perils of Scurvy

Peach Pie
One summer when I was in high school my mother came home with a flat of peaches.  My father and I stared at her bemused and asked what on earth we were going to do with 42 peaches.

The answer?  Make a lot of peach pie.  We took our favorite apple pie recipe from the Joy of Cooking and changed some of the spices and used a little more corn starch, and voila!  Peach Pie.

8 ripe peaches, peeled and sliced
3 (scant) Tbsp corn starch
¾  cup sugar (white, or brown, or mixed)
¼ tsp ginger
¼ tsp All spice
¼ tsp nutmeg
2 Tbsp butter, cut into bits
2 Tbsp heavy cream
½ tsp vanilla
2 pie crusts

Combine the peaches, corn starch, sugar and spices in a bowl.  Mix to coat the peaches and allow to sit for 5 minutes to macerate.  Turn into a pie shell.  Dot with butter and drizzle with cream and vanilla.  Cover with another pie crust.  Cut some decorative holes in the upper pie crust to allow steam to escape.  Bake at 450 for 10 minutes.  Lower the temperature to 350 and bake for another 40 minutes.  Allow to cool for 45 minutes to 1 hour (cooling it lets the filling gel, if you cut into the pie right out the oven the filling will still be liquid and run all over your plate).

I like to serve it with freshly whipped cream, but technically that’s not absolutely necessary.