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These crisp fall like days are calling for comfort food and autumnal dishes. Now that Storkbite is staying up later and later, it’s hard to muster the energy to be creative and well fed. I decided to “take the day off” yesterday and stay home to knit and make apple pie. Storkbite’s Grandma came last month with a load of apples from the organic farm in Indiana and I still had apples in cold storage that needed to be processed. Is it a Midwestern thing to melt cheddar cheese over a slice of warm apple pie? If you haven’t tried it, you should do so.
Goat Cheese Lasagna
I was uncertain how this would turn out; however, I must say that I knocked it out of the park. Not only was it easy and created in shifts, it was comforting on a chilly evening.
I used Barilla flat lasagna noodles. Layered lasagna noodles with bechamel (1/4 cup butter melted with 1/4 cup flour, add 2 1/4 cups milk and bring to a boil, simmer until thickened), cooked ground turkey, sauteed yellow and red peppers and goat cheese. There was no particular order to the layering, it was kind of a mess actually. Once the dish was full, I added the remaining bechamel and some shredded parmesan cheese. I baked it for about 20 minutes until golden brown at 375. It was so warm, melted and delicious. I’m having left-overs for lunch now!
Apple Pie
Lattice top apple pie is a fall treat. This one got souped up with dried bing cherries, golden raisins and pecans. Simply make a pie crust (look below if you actually want to do that!) and then add your mixture of cored quartered apples, raisins, cherries and nuts together with 2 tbs. of flour, 1 tsp of cinnamon and the juice of 1 lemon. Turn it all together and fill your pie shell. Weave a pretty lattice, paint it with butter, dust it with sugar and bake it for about an hour at 350 until golden brown.
Serve to husband / boyfriend / partner in the evening a la mode for unexpected results.
Pie Dough
This is the secret family recipe:
- 2 cups flour
- 2/3 c. frozen lard
- Pinch of salt
- 6 - 10 tbs of ice water
Combine flour and lard in a large bowl with forks or a pastry cutter until it forms pea size bits. Add salt. Add ice water a bit at a time and combine until it forms a ball. This takes time and you must be careful not to over do it or it becomes tough. Be gentle and go slow. Lots of love makes a better pie crust. Don’t even try to substitute butter or shortening. It’s not the family recipe if you don’t use lard.
What to do with lox, buckle and scallops? See below. We had a busy week, but some of the highlights were bagel and lox salad which I made up out of desperation one night after a hard day of Storkbite wrangling. The pièce de résistance of the week was the ceviche, which I made with fresh scallops and calamari from our local fisher at the farmer’s market. In addition to the ceviche, I made a fresh blueberry buckle with the leftover ingredients from this morning’s buttermilk blueberry pancakes. It’s basically the reincarnation of breakfast for dessert.
Bagel and Lox Salad
This was another variation of breakfast for dinner. It was chopped red onion and capers added to a regular plain old vinaigrette dressing over greens. Then on top, toasted bagel pieces, smoked salmon, and crumbled hard boiled egg.
This was a very quick meal which I threw together in minutes while singing to Storkbite in her high chair. Papa ran in from work, ate his salad and promptly left for a meeting. Yep, that’s what our week was like. Good thing we splurged on scallops for our Saturday night feast.
Ceviche
OK, so this was so damn good. Storkbite’s papa told me that he felt like he was sitting on a beach in Mexico. I took that as a compliment. The best part about this is that I had all the ingredients except the scallops and cherry tomatoes which were purchased steps from our front door at the farmer’s market. I had never made ceviche before and I think I’ve only eaten it once. This was a 100% intuitive recipe that actually worked out! I used about 1 lb. of very fresh scallops, 3 calamari, a hand full of tomatoes, 1 avocado, 5 limes, 1 orange, 1 small white onion, 1/2 a small zucchini, 1 long skinny light green pepper, 1 handful of rough chopped cilantro, salt, pepper and olive oil. I just chopped everything really nicely and mixed in together in a bowl. I let all the flavors marry together in the refrigerator for the afternoon and then we took the entire bowl to the park to watch Twelfth Night. The ceviche, a loaf of semolina bread, a bottle of wine and comedic Shakespeare made for an excellent Saturday evening. Wow - I can’t get over hot summery and delicious a bowl of fresh ceviche is - YUM!
Blueberry Buckle
This dessert started when I ran out of our apartment at 8 AM in my PJs to the farmer’s market to get some blueberries. I woke up wanting buttermilk blueberry pancakes real bad. Instead of making tons of pancakes to save for the week, I dumped the remainder of my homemade batter into a baking dish, threw in a layer of fresh blueberries and topped it with the crumble (or buckle) part of this dessert. It’s simply 3 tbs. butter mixed up with 1/4 c. flour, 1/4 c. brown sugar, 2 tbs. white sugar, pinch of salt and a big fist full of almonds. Mix that up until it’s crumbly and put it all over the top. I baked this for 30 mins. at 350 and it looked nice and brown. I don’t think you can really go wrong with having blueberry buttermilk pancakes twice in one day. I don’t think Storkbite will mind.
It’s Thursday and that means that we get our box of organic CSA vegetables and the challenge to use them all before the next box begins. Tonight we received more rhubarb than I knew what to do with. I decided to process it immediately and give the rest to our neighbor who is an excellent baker so I could see what she comes up with. I first thought I would make a pie, but Storkbite was being rather unpredictable and I didn’t think she could handle momma making both filling and pastry crust. I settled on a crumble. I have never used a receipe for a crumble so it’s always an experiment. Since rhubarb can be quite tough, I sautéed it in a couple tablespoons of butter until it got this nice creamy texture.
I removed the rhubarb from heat and added slices from four apples and a handful of cut strawberries. I stirred the fruit to combine. I added a couple tablespoons of white sugar and flour to this mixture and combined with fruit.
To make the crust, simply add a half stick of cold butter (in chunks) and approximately a quarter cup of each: brown sugar, white sugar and flour. I then added a handful of walnut segments to this crumble crust and sprinkled it on top of the fruit.
I baked this at 350 for about 30 - 40 minutes. I’m not sure because I forgot this in the oven while performing Storkbite’s bedtime ritual. When I came back into the kitchen I was overwhelmed by the sweet smell of rhubarb and apples. We ate this while it was still warm drizzled with fresh cream.
Dinner was take-out tonight, but dessert was delicious and homemade.
It’s a challenge to try and use the entire CSA box every week. It’s only the second week, the boxes are still small and I’m already slightly overwhelmed. The weather is unseasonably hot here in NYC and I want to stay away from my kitchen as much as possible. Last night was Friday and I wanted to make something special, but what to do with mushrooms, arugula and strawberries?
On hot nights a sandwich is really the way to go. While Storkbite sat in her bouncy seat in the middle of the kitchen, I cleaned the mushrooms and coated them in a garlic, olive oil and white balsamic vinegar marinade. Then Storkbite started to loose it, and Papa was running behind schedule so I had to abandon our dinner preparations and restart the process later.
During bath time I was able to get myself back to those mushrooms and grill them on a very hot stove top grill pan. It didn’t take long until I was called away again so I turned off the stove and let the mushrooms carry-over cook on the grill.
Finally we got Storkbite in bed and we were free to open the bottle of Rose I was saving for the weekend. I sliced a loaf of bread, layered it with the grilled baby bellas, arugula, orange and yellow tomatoes and smeared on some goat cheese. With a nest of argulua leaves on the side covered in lemon, olive oil and slivered Parmesan cheese it hit the spot on a hot night.
I really like to make an event out of Friday nights and make a special dessert. Sometimes it’s nothing fancy - just a scoop of ice cream. However, this week our CSA came with these sweet little strawberries which were the first of the year’s crop. I almost ate the whole box when I got them on Thursday, but instead I came up with the idea of making a pavlova after seeing the meringues at the bakery earlier that morning. I had seen a picture of this extravagant dessert in a magazine not long ago and decided that I will never have the patience to make it. What I didn’t realize at the time is that the meringues are available at bakeries and all I have to do it whip cream and cut strawberries! Any berry can be used and it’s simple, delicious and a real crowd pleaser.
Meringue for Pavlova - $1 each
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