Butternut Squash Pie with Cayenne Pepper

First, make a crust. This week, I used the savory tart crust from Pie Everyday and substituted whole wheat pastry flour for the white flour. Here’s the recipe:

Stir a pinch of salt into 11/2 cups flour. Cut in 12 tablespoons of butter. Mix in ice water, a tablespoon at a time, until the dough just holds together. Shape the dough into a flat disk and refrigerate for half an hour while you make the filling. When the dough is chilled, roll it out and put it in a pie pan, add the filling, and bake at 350 until it is done.

The filling: Stick the leftover butter nut squash with cayenne pepper, add two eggs, a cup or so of yogurt, another dash of cayenne, and a little milk in a blender and puree everything together.

Notes: The pie takes about an hour to bake, but it’s better to rely on your senses than the clock when it comes to cooking times. Other types of winter squash would be good too – this would work well with pumpkin or kombucha squash too.

 

 

Roasted Butternut Squash with Cayenne Pepper

First, cut up your butternut squash. If you’re not quite sure how to do this, trot over to my handy tutorial on cutting up very large squashes. You can cut your squash into cubes or slices or whatever suits your fancy. I usually cut them into  something that looks like it escaped from a Jinga tower.

Next, put your squash into a baking pan, add a splash of olive oil and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper, and stir it all together. Bake it at 350 degrees, stirring every 10 or 15 minutes, until you can pierce the squash with a fork. The squash should be done in about an hour – just use your nose, and poke it with a fork once in a while, and you’ll know when it’s ready.

How to Cut Up a Very Large Squash

Winter squash are the armadillos of the plant world. They’re hard, funny looking, and very difficult to cut in to.

If winter squash weren’t so delicious, I wouldn’t give much thought to cutting them open. But they are, and I have. So today, dear readers, I will share what I know with you.

First of all, it helps to have a big, sharp knife. I’ve cut up a squash with a paring knife – in fact, I’ve done it more than once – but I wouldn’t recommend it. They always get stuck in the squash, and then you can’t get them out, and you can’t cut, and it’s very frustrating.

Why I Don’t Write Apology Posts

There is nothing worse, to my mind, than writing a post to apologize for not writing a post. It adds nothing, bores the reader, and displaces useful and interesting content. I would much rather have my reader browse the archives for recipes, trot over to another blog, or switch the Internet off together than to read a post about not writing a post.

Kate Harding has similar thoughts on the subject.

Ricotta Pie

For the crust:

Pour a goodly amount of sliced almonds and dried coconut into a bowl. (If you’re not sure what a “goodly amount” is, start with half a cup of each and see if it looks like enough almonds and coconuts to cover the bottom of a pie pan.)

Remove the zest from one lemon and add it to the almonds and coconut. A zester is nice for this job, but if you don’t have one, use a knife or a carrot peeler.

Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter and stir it into the mix.

Press the almond-coconut mixture into the bottom of a pie pan.

For the filling:

Combine two cups of ricotta cheese, the juice from the lemon you just zested, 1/3 cup of honey, and two beaten eggs.

Pour the filling onto the almond-coconut crust and sprinkle it with a bit of nutmeg.

Bake the pie at 350. The pie is done when you can smell it and when the filling starts to look a little firmer. I don’t remember exactly how long it takes to cook, but if you put the pie in the oven before dinner, it’s usually done by the time you’re ready to eat dessert.

It’s best to let it cool for a bit before you slice it (it’s a bit runny when you first take it out of the oven), but you can eat it straight out of the oven if you like. It’s also good the next day, and it looks very festive with a bit of nice fruit.

I Think There’s a Wild Animal in my House

And Then I Died and Went to Heaven

Cut up half a cantaloupe. Wash a handful of basil leaves, tear them up, and sprinkle them over the cantaloupe. Squeeze half a lime over everything.

How to Make a Most Bodacious Lentil Salad

A most bodacious lentil salad

Put a cup of dried lentils (green, brown, or puy lentils are best – the red lentils will fall apart) and three cups of water in a pot. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat until the lentils are done. This will take about thirty minutes.

Locavore Dinner

Local ingredients: Potatoes, garlic, fava beans, fennel, rainbow carrots, purple cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, and alpine cheese.

Nonlocal ingredients: Butter, salt, and vinegar. And we really could have gotten butter and vinegar at the farmers market.

The technique: Bring a small pot of water to boil. Shell the fava beans. Wash and slice the potatoes, and skin and chop up the garlic. Saute the garlic in butter, then add the potatoes.

Wash and slice all the other veggies while the potatoes cook and the water comes to a boil. Be sure to give the potatoes a stir every now and then so that they don’t burn.

When the water comes to a boil, dump in the fava beans and cook until they’re tender. Fresh fava beans don’t take very long – they cook up just like lima beans. I think 2-3 minutes is probably enough time for them.

Drain the fava beans and add a bit of salt to both the favas and the potatoes. If you’d like to turn your purple cabbage pink, serve it with a little vinegar.

Bon appetit!

Markets, Infrastructure, and Locavores

It really is possible to eat entirely locally, or nearly so, if the right infrastructure is in place. New York has a huge network of farmers markets throughout the city, many of them year-round. There’s one by our apartment, and another by my office, which makes it easy to pick up eggs and vegetables, or whatever else we need from a local source.

Ironically, it’s much easier to eat locally year-round in New York than it was when I lived in rural Michigan, which is prime farm country for all sorts of things. Th local food supply – farmers markets, community supported agriculture, locally produced wine and beer – is plentiful and varied all summer long and into the fall, but things get a lot more sparse in the winter.

It’s not so much that there’s literally nothing local to eat, or that one can’t possibly grow or store local food for the winter. Winter squash, carrots, beets, and apples will keep for a long time, and some of the hardier greens (think kale) will keep going even after it starts to snow.

I think the problem has more to do with a disconnect between farmers and eaters over the winter: most people assume that nothing grows or overwinters in Northwest Lower Michigan, the farmers markets confirm this assumption by shutting down after Halloween, and the farmer-eater connection goes dormant until spring.