Tacos de Calabaza

It's no secret that we love tacos and we love really tasty vegetarian food, so I've been making a lot of vegetarian tacos: rajas con crema, grilled vegetable, spaghetti squash and black bean, and now, butternut squash and poblano pepper.

I thought of these orange and green tacos some weeks ago but I hadn't committed the time to roast butternut squash cubes until yesterday. The idea came from a vegetarian green chile with butternut that I made about the beginning of December. I knew the sweet roasted flavor of the squash would pair tremendously with the mildly spicy earthy flavor of the poblanos. The result was wicked good.

Tacos de Calabaza: Butternut Squash and Poblano

To make the taco filling, I cubed and roasted a butternut, then made a quick sauté of large dice of poblano, diced red onion, sliced green onion, minced garlic, and minced cilantro stems, with just a hint of ground mild Numex chile. I added the squash to the sauté and seasoned it before serving it on corn tortillas with chipotle adobo, cotija cheese, and cilantro leaves. Keeper!

Snowy Day Soup

Two days ago we were going to have turkey-vegetable soup, but being in a bit of a celebratory mood, I changed my mind and decided to make pappardelle con ragù, saving the soup for yesterday. And I'm so glad I did. It started snowing mid-morning and did not let up until after dark. If ever there were a list of days for a bowl of warm and comforting soup, a snowy day would be close to the top of the list.

A Perfect Soup Day

As transplanted easterners, we were delighted to see the snow. Snow here on the valley floor is rare. Sure, the tens and tens of feet of snowpack in the Cascades and in the Coast Range is impressive, but on a year-in-year-out basis, we don't get snow down here at only 150 feet of elevation. In fact, on most days this January, I have been wearing short pants during our daily walks. This mild Mediterranean climate lets us grow figs and olives with near impunity and causes our rosemary to explode into large shrubs. But it causes some of us who grew up with snow to miss the winter season, especially the bright red cardinals silhouetted against the snow.

Turkey Vegetable Soup

Why is soup so comforting? I think it is instinctive in humans to make soup for warmth and comfort. Why else do we turn to soup naturally when we are unwell? I don't think the higher part of our brain is actually involved; it is my private hypothesis that humans have been making soup for eons and at some primal level, know instinctively that it is simultaneously warming, nourishing, comforting, and hydrating, all things we desire when we feel ill or in need of comfort.

Theories aside, I try to make soup frequently in the winter. This winter, my go-to soup is turkey-vegetable. I bought a case of turkey necks from the grocery store just after the holidays when the meat manager was delighted to move them out of his freezer and into my cart.

Making soup is a two-day process. The first day, I roast the turkey necks (and in this case, the detritus from a chicken carcass) to golden brown, then deglaze the roasting pan, and simmer all the roasted meats and bones for a few hours to extract all the goodness. Into the fridge the stockpot goes to set up so that I can remove all the fat from the top the next day.

Then I rewarm everything, pull the meat and bones out, pick all the meat, and add the meat and vegetables back to the stock. The soup cooks for 15-20 minutes just before we want to eat so that the vegetables retain their texture.

This soup contains tomatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, celery, kale, black-eyed peas, stelline pasta, rehydrated porcini mushrooms, and a swirl of pesto at the end.

Pappardelle con Ragù

Our waistlines continue to shrink and I'm at the point where I really want to slow the loss. I was at the grocery store this morning with a plan to make turkey-vegetable soup for dinner, but I felt like we should celebrate a little tonight with a nice meal and a bottle of wine. Nothing was really coming to mind, but when I walked by one of the meat cases, I saw some country-style pork ribs, pork shoulder by any other name, that triggered a memory of ragù, meat sauce.

I thought it would be a wonderful treat on a very cold and rainy (34F and raining is the pits) day to have a warm bowl of pappardelle with meat sauce. And so it was, incredibly delicious, but probably too much quantity and definitely too rich. I made the sauce in a single enameled cast iron cocotte in oven with the whole process taking about 6 hours.

Pappardelle con Ragù

Browning Pork in the Cocotte

Browning the Flip Side

Braised for 2.5 Hours in White Wine and Water

Soffritto Sautéed with Garlic and Basil; Deglazed with White Wine; Meat Added

Tomatoes Added; Ready for Oven

Ragù Ready After Braising for Two Hours

Annie Coloring Outside the Well

Pasta Resting for An Hour

Rolling Out the Dough

Pappardelle Drying Before Cooking

Basic Egg Pasta Dough

Basic egg pasta is simple to make. The following makes plenty for two people.

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

2 whole large eggs

2 egg yolks

Mix the flour and salt and form a pile with a well in it. Crack the eggs into the well. Add a drizzle of olive oil if you like. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Beat the eggs in the center of the well and slowly incorporate the flour from the edges of the well until all the flour is incorporated into the dough. Add little dribbles of water if the dough is too stiff. Knead for several minutes until the dough is smooth and evenly colored. Allow the dough to rest, covered, for at least 30 minutes before rolling and cutting.

Chicken Broth with Egg and Spinach

Ann has been asking me to make a chicken broth-based soup with egg in it for a few weeks now, but it has always been pushed aside for something else. I poached a chicken early this week with the express purpose of making broth for this soup and last night was the night for the soup. To the boiling chicken stock, I added one breast that I diced, two big handfuls of spinach leaves, and five beaten eggs. It was just what the doctor ordered yesterday, after a day of working out in the cold.

Chicken Broth with Egg and Spinach

Almost every culture has its version of chicken broth and egg soup, probably because it is so simple to make, so tasty, so easy to digest, and so comforting, something that mom might make for you when you are not feeling up to par. There are not too many dishes like that in the culinary world! Just off hand, I can think of Cantonese egg drop soup, Greek avgolemono, Italian stracciatella, and Bavarian/Tirolean Eierflockensuppe. Ann, being Italian on all sides of her family, was lucky enough to be fed stracciatella with acini di pepe and parmigiano when she wasn't well!

This soup was the third dish that I made from that very versatile poached chicken. A chicken can so easily feed a lot of people for very little cost, if you know how to stretch them. Consider that with this chicken I made chicken pot pies, chicken tacos, and this soup. This chicken is not done yet: I will roast the remaining bones and skin along with some turkey necks that I have in the freezer to make yet another big pot of turkey-vegetable soup this weekend. I'll have to do a post soon on chicken tacos and how to stretch six ounces of chicken with onions and black beans to feed two people very heartily.

Inauguration Day Cocktails and Cheese Puffs

Our heads are still reeling from the rabid mobs swarming and wreaking havoc on the Capitol on the 6th and the fact that our president incited that riot. Ann and I are fed up with such shameful behavior and were so looking forward to the inauguration of a new president yesterday, that we decided to have cocktails and hors d'oeuvres to celebrate what hopefully will be a transition back to more sane behavior in the White House.

Cheese Puffs and Passion for Whiskey Cocktail

Earlier in the week, I had made chicken pot pie and had some leftover pie crust. I knew that I was going to use the pie crust to make an hors d'oeuvre for our little celebration. Then it dawned on me to convert that pie crust to a laminated pastry (puff pastry) with cheddar cheese to bake into cheese puffs to accompany our cocktails.

Cheese Puffs

Although I never went to culinary school, I taught myself everything (and a lot more) that these schools have to teach, including pastry basics. Throughout my chef career, I made a lot of puff pastry (though you can buy it frozen easily in the trade). There's not a whole lot of difference between my pie crust and puff pastry, except that the pie crust is not laminated.

Lamination is the key to puff pastry: folding and refolding it into layers upon layers as you can see in the photo above. Generally, you start with a basic pastry and seal that around a hunk of butter (the process called beurrage). Then you roll the dough out, trifold it, rotate it 90 degrees, roll it out, trifold it again, then let it rest in the refrigerator for 45 minutes to an hour. You do this once or twice more, building layers and layers.

I decided to put a mound of shredded cheddar cheese (rather than butter) in the middle of my pie crust and treat it just like puff pastry. I went through the rolling and folding process three times.

Final Sheet of Puff Pastry, Ready to Cut

I sliced the sheet of pastry down the center and then cut each half into fingers. I put the fingers on a sheet tray, spritzed them with pan spray, sprinkled on sel gris (French gray sea salt), and put them into a hot oven (425F) for 20 minutes.

Passion for Whiskey Cocktail

In addition to being known for a menu of local cuisine that changed nightly, my restaurant was way in the craft cocktail vanguard. I created all the cocktail recipes, using my chef's palate to ensure that they were refreshing and balanced. One huge customer favorite was a drink that I called Passion for Whiskey, basically a passionfruit whiskey sour. It's a great drink and what we had last night.

1 1/2 ounces bourbon

3/4 ounce St. Germain

3/4 ounce lemon juice

3/4 ounce passionfruit syrup

4 dashes old fashioned bitters

Swirl all ingredients in a shaker full of ice. Strain into a coupe or martini glass. Serve up with a wild cherry for garnish.

Chicken Pot Pie

My wife is a little crazy and I love her for it. This week when I had poached a chicken, she nonchalantly and quite apropos of nothing (that I could ascertain; who knows what was buzzing around in her infinitely circular brain?) asked me to make a chicken pot pie, saying that she would really like that a lot. Why not? Anything for her.

So I poach all the vegetables, make the gravy, make the crust, bake the pies, and get them to the table. Just before we dig in, she says, "I've never had pot pie before." All the while, I assume that she has asked me to make her a pot pie because she had eaten one and found it delicious enough to want again.

Don't you think that she would have said to me, "I've never had a pot pie before and really want to try one! Would you make me a chicken pot pie?" Nut!

Chicken Pot Pie

Pie Vegetables

You can use any vegetables that you want for your pies. I had planned to use celery, leeks, carrots, and green beans. When I got home from the store, I found that someone (not naming names) had roasted all the green beans that I was going to use in the pies. So I substituted some broccoli florets.

I brought some salted water to a boil and gave each of the vegetables a quick parboil. I cooked each vegetable in sequence until it was crisp-soft and put it in ice water to stop the cooking. Meanwhile, I picked a bit of chicken off a carcass that I had poached the day before.

Pies Ready for Topping

I brought the chicken stock that I had made the day before to a roiling boil and thickened it with a corn starch slurry. I poured the thick gravy over the vegetables and chicken, then seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper, and a mound of freshly chopped parsley.

In retrospect, I should have used a beurre manié (flour and butter mix) to thicken the gravy. I was trying to back off the calories by using corn starch, but the gravy broke down in the oven later, something that flour will not do. Even an old chef learns the hard way (to be fair to myself, in my restaurant career, I did not get any experience in low-fat, low-calorie cooking!).

Pies Ready for Oven

We don't have any special dishes for pot pie and I thought that it would be nice to make individual ones, so I repurposed a couple of cereal bowls. I topped each with pie crust (recipe below), trimmed the crust, crimped it into the rim of the bowls with the tines of a fork, slit the crusts for steam vents, and brushed the tops with egg wash. 

The pies want to be in a hot oven (425F) until the top crusts brown nicely. I want to say that these took 35-40 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock like a hawk.

Pie Crust Recipe

This is my tried and true all-butter super flaky pie crust. I would love to say that I learned it from my mother or her mother, inveterate pie bakers both, but that wouldn't be the truth. They were diehard Southerners and it was Crisco for their pie crust or nothing. I gave up on trans fats and hydrogenated shortening a very, very long time ago in favor of butter or (rarely) lard.

The following recipe will make a generous single pie crust (with generally enough left over to make a lattice top), depending on what size pie plate you are making. I measure my baking ingredients by weight in grams. If you do not have a scale, get one. It will be the single best thing you can do to improve your baking.

150 grams all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

140 grams cold butter, in small cubes

ice water as needed

Spin the flour and salt in the food processor for a second to mix it. Add the cold butter cubes and pulse. Pulse until the butter resembles really small peas in size. Add a couple tablespoons of water and pulse. Add water in dribbles and pulse in between. When the dough just starts to come together, bring it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it in film and refrigerate for an hour to cool it off. After this rest, it will be ready to use.

Fish and Black Bean Tostadas

Fish and Black Bean Tostadas

We eat a lot of tacos suaves at our house. Sometimes we are looking for a little different texture, so I have been making tostadas recently. The latest batch is fish and black bean, the black beans helping to stretch the expensive fish and also to bulk the dish so that we consume fewer tortillas. We might only eat 3 or 4 tostadas, but if we're just having tacos, we're probably going to eat 5 or 6.

This dish has three components: the tostadas, the beans, and the fish. If you need a refresher on making tostadas, you can find it here. The black beans are flavored with a soffritto of (scraps from the refrigerator) red onion, shallot, green onion, cilantro stems, garlic, and mild ground Numex chile. The fish (Pacific rockfish) is baked on a sheet tray after being sprinkled with a mix of mild ground Numex chile, ground cumin, granulated garlic, salt, and aromatic Mexican oregano.

For us, tostadas are a great change of pace. And these fish and black bean ones were so delicious that they'll probably become something of a regular replacement for fish tacos.