Category: Food

Here’s a traditional abbey-recipe pie that you can make all winter. A friend gave me some home-grown sweet potatoes, and I resolved to make a pie out of them. I had not made a sweet potato pie in ages, because usually I go for pumpkin pie. But, as I mentioned in an earlier post, proper cooking pumpkins were hard to find this year. But sweet potatoes are easy. Stokes County, North Carolina, is a great producer of sweet potatoes, and the friend who gave me the potatoes knows the good ones — he used to be an agricultural extension agent and helped commercialize our sweet potatoes.

As usual, I study a lot of recipes to get concepts, then I go off in my own direction. I wanted this pie to have a whiff of rum and citrus. Here’s the recipe:

Sweet potato pie

1 1/2 pounds cooked sweet potatoes
1 cup sugar (3/4 may do -- use your judgment)
1/2 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice
2 eggs

1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon rum

Separate the egg yolks and whites. Beat the whites until they are stiff. Add the remaining ingredients and beat like the dickens. Pour the mixture into an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes or until properly done. The pie will rise like a soufflé while baking, then sink as it cools.

It has been years since I’ve had distilled spirits in the house. I actually went to the Walnut Cove ABC store today and bought rum especially for this pie. I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a little rum around for the holidays.

I would not recommend boiling the sweet potatoes. You’ll boil all the flavor out of them and make them soggy. Baking them, then removing the skins after they’ve cooled, is the way to go.

My pie and quiche crusts are always homemade. It’s just 2 cups of unbleached flour, half a cup of olive oil, and enough cold water (just a few tablespoons) to moisten the dough. You know the procedure for pie crusts, right?

This pie is delicious. I’m going to have a second piece now.

It’s casserole season. I wanted to experiment with the casserole’s layered French cousin, the terrine. What I ended up with was a bit too rustic and Irish looking to properly be called a terrine, but it sure was good.

I used a layer of peas, a layer of carrots, a layer of kale, and a layer of breadcrumb dressing similar to holiday dressing. I used grated cheese to hold the carrots together, and some beaten eggs to hold the pea, kale, and breadcrumb mixtures together. I used a lot of celery and onions in the dressing, and a bit of sage.

If you use nice ingredients for your layers, and if you season everything nicely, you can’t go wrong. Casseroles take time, but they make fine leftovers, so all things considered casseroles probably cut down on overall cooking time.

Bread never goes uneaten. Either it’s made into toasted bread crumbs or French toast, or the chickens get it.

Is it just the time of year? For some reason, I had been thinking a lot about hearty dessert breads — things with carrots and pumpkins in it. I saw some carrot cake sitting on the counter in a country restaurant, and it almost overcame my will power. But I resolved then and there to make a healthier version at home.

As usual, I looked at a lot of recipes for ideas and inspiration, then came up with my own recipe. I call these treats cupcakes because “cupcakes” is a nicer word than “muffin,” but in truth they’re probably muffins, because they’re a bit heavy to be called cake. However, add a little cream cheese icing (I did, with a whiff of nutmeg in it) and the difference between a muffin and a cupcake fades.

I also confess that I splurged again on equipping the abbey kitchen. I have never owned a stand mixer, though I have always admired the design of the Kitchenaid mixers. They’re beautiful machines. In the past, I’ve felt that I couldn’t justify the cost of a Kitchenaid mixer (or find the counter space for it). But I finally deceived myself into believing that the purchase was justified. For one, I make pretty much all my own bread. That’s a lot of kneading, and a heavy-duty mixer does a fine job of it. For two, I wanted to be able to make good homemade mayonnaises with home-laid eggs and good olive oil. And a little whipped cream every now and then never killed anybody.

Then I learned that Kitchenaid makes a shredder/slicer attachment, so that sealed the deal. Previously, I have sworn by the Wear-Ever hand-cranked shredder (no longer made, but often available on eBay, where I got mine several years ago). Since the Kitchenaid follows a similar (though motor powered) design, I had high hopes for the Kitchenaid shredder.

The difference between the two shredders is a wash, really. The Kitchenaid shredder cones are slightly larger, and the Kitchenaid is probably safer because of its feed system, but the Kitchenaid blades aren’t as sharp as the Wear-Ever blades, and when making slaw with the Kitchenaid the cabbage is a little bruised and crushed (not necessarily a bad thing). Then again, it may take me some time to figure out the best way to cut cabbage in chunks and feed it to the shredder. Carrots, however, shred beautifully. The Kitchenaid shredder attachment (sold separately) comes with four slicer/shredder cones. I’ve tried only two of them so far.

Here’s my recipe for cupcakes with shredded carrots, apples, and coconut.

Heavy but reasonably healthy cupcakes

1 1/2 cups grated carrot
1 apple, peeled and grated
1/2 cup dry, unsweetened, store-bought shredded coconut

1 cup stone ground whole wheat OR sprouted whole wheat flour
1/2 cup unbleached flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 eggs
1/2 cup oil (I used olive oil)
2 tablespoons milk (if needed)

Sift the flour and combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Set it aside.

Whip the egg whites until they’re stiff but not dry. Add the other ingredients including the egg yolks except for the milk and dry ingredients and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients to the mixture in portions, mixing as you add. The batter should be pretty thick, but if it’s too thick, add the milk.

Put the batter into a cupcake pan (I used paper liners). Makes about 10 cupcakes.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until the cupcakes pass the toothpick test (about 205 degrees F internal temperature).

I feel guilty and acquisitive and materialistic for spending money again on the abbey kitchen, but I do like fine machines. And I would like for the abbey kitchen — a serious and well used kitchen — to be able to do everything that a commercial kitchen can do, though in a smaller way.

My old way of making slaw, and still a fine machine

A different — and not necessarily better — way of making slaw

Cabbage shredded with the Kitchenaid shredder

The pumpkin above is a proper “pink pumpkin” for cooking.

I have never used canned pumpkin and never will. It has never made sense to me to open a can for something that’s so easy and fun to work with. However, it’s getting more and more difficult to find cooking pumpkins. Increasingly in the fall, the pumpkin market is flooded with the bright-orange, ugly shaped, so-called Halloween pumpkins.

A friend who works for the county’s agricultural service had posted a photo on Facebook of a bunch of Halloween pumpkins. That seemed like a good opportunity to ask a knowledgeable person why old-fashioned cooking pumpkins have gotten so much harder to find. He posted this, which perhaps was copy/pasted from elsewhere. I apologize for not knowing the original source:

“The bright orange non-edible pumpkin is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1960’s Massachusetts farmer John Howden wanted to breed a pumpkin that was easy to carve (Jack-O-Lantern). The criterion — thick stem (lasts longer), shallow ribs, and thin flesh relative to its size (easier carving) — resulted in the Howden variety pumpkin. The Howden totally dominates the Jack-O-Lantern market today. The public desire for other decorative pumpkins led to the proliferation of bright orange pumpkins that dominate roadside markets, grocery, and big box stores.”

So there you have it. I needed a cookable pumpkin for a pie this week, and I finally found one at one of our local treasures, Priddy’s General Store.

If I had a field (and I don’t), I’d love to grow pumpkins. They need more space, though, than I can provide.

And here’s a bit of pumpkin trivia. While writing Oratorio in Ursa Major, I wanted to light an outdoor festival as it might have been lit in 48 B.C. Knowing that jack-o-lanterns come to us from Europe and that pumpkins didn’t, I wondered how all that worked. The research was clear enough — the early Europeans used turnips for lanterns the same way we now use pumpkins. Once pumpkins became available, pumpkins ruled.

Above, rolling out the crust after the pumpkin flesh had been cooked in the steam oven. Pumpkins produce a lot of juice when they’re cooked, and the pumpkin flesh needs to be well drained before making a pie. I always save the pumpkin juice for soup stock.

A field of the wrong kind of pumpkins, near Bell Spur, Virginia

I apologize for bragging, but after considerable practice, I’m ready to claim that I’m now as confident with sourdough artisan breads as I long have been with traditional yeast breads. The keys are the right guidebooks (chiefly The Breadmaker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart), a steam oven (the Cuisinart CSO-300), a few simple tools like a baker’s stone, a peel, and a razor-blade lame for slashing the tops, and lots of patience.

One of the best discoveries I’ve made in the last year is sprouted whole wheat flour. It has turned out to be much easier to work with than whole wheat flours. And sprouted flour almost certainly is even healthier, with a lower glycemic index and easier digestibility. When getting a start with sourdough artisan breads and pursuing your practice, I think that one is pretty much obliged to work with unbleached bread flour. But once you’ve got that down pat, you can move on to more challenging flours such as sprouted whole wheat.

Sprouted whole wheat flour loves being fed to your sourdough starter. However, you need to give it a little more time. Another of my discoveries (no surprise to sourdough professionals) is that sourdough bread doughs love the refrigerator. Invariably, when I split a batch of dough in half and bake part of it today and part of it a day or two later, the bread made later is better. Not only does the later bread taste better, but it’s easier to get a better crumb with coarse holes, and more oven spring. Just be sure to take it out of the refrigerator in plenty of time to get the dough up to room temperature.

It’s getting to the point that yeast breads don’t even seem like real bread anymore. Sourdough bread makes toast that is greatly superior. And while a yeast bread will be moldy on the third day, I have never seen a sourdough bread go to mold. You can toast it for days. I’m sure that it’s the lactic acid that preserves it.

The loaf in the photo above sprawled flat (as usual) when I put laid it on the baking stone in the hot oven. But by the time it was done, it had sprung straight up to almost twice as high, and the top burst open nicely.

That’s fall greens in the photo below, with egg salad from home-laid eggs.

Pumpkin soup

I go into Winston-Salem regularly to get groceries at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but I usually get the heck out of town as quickly as possible, because I miss the peace and quiet of my hermitage in the foothills. But today I was in downtown Winston-Salem, I was hungry, the weather was beautiful, and I figured that it was high time I treated myself to a proper lunch.

None of the restaurants downtown appealed to me very much. They seemed far too trendy and aimed at a younger set. However, just west of downtown is a lovely old restaurant named Bernadin’s. I used to go there frequently years ago, before I moved to California. At the time, it was called Zeveley House. It is more or less French, and it’s as nice a white-tablecloth bistro as I know of.

I tend to be stingy, but I called a moratorium on stingy today. I ordered the grilled salmon without asking the price. I was almost shocked when the check came. The salmon, which included a salad and potatoes and vegetables, was $13. I was expecting anything from $14 to $19. The soup, which came with bread and butter, was $6.

No doubt I still think like a San Francisco person if I’m in a bistro, and I know that good food can’t be cheap. But this seemed shockingly reasonable to me. Country restaurants or the places that I called “fried fish houses” will sell you grilled salmon for the same amount or more, and you’re not likely to be pleased with what they set in front of you. But the cooks at Bernadin’s obviously are well trained, and lunch was delicious.

I will definitely do it again. I sat outside in their patio, by the way, and I was the only person there. I don’t feel the slightest stigma having lunch, or even dinner, alone in nice restaurants.

The salad that came with the salmon

Grilled salmon, one of the day’s specials

When I was a young’un growing up in the country, people had apple trees and actually bothered to pick them up and use them. That meant that, when apples were in season, you might get them at every meal. Everybody’s favorite is apple pie, but that takes time. I don’t know about you, but for me eating apples raw (except maybe in Waldorf salad) takes some discipline.

But the easiest way to make apples that even young’uns will eat is to fry them. The word “fry” makes it sound more unhealthy than it really is. It just means cooking the sliced apples in a skillet, in butter, with some cinnamon and maybe a wee bit of sugar. The fried apples are then served like a vegetable along with supper. I don’t know of anybody who thought of fried apples as a dessert item.

Fried apples can be worked into any meal. Here the fried apples are a topping for sprouted wheat pancakes with toasted walnuts, maple syrup, and blackberry preserves.

Speaking of maple syrup, Trader Joe’s has it at a reasonable price, imported from Quebec. Don’t hesitate to buy Grade B maple syrup. I like it better than Grade A syrup because Grade B has a sassier, more rustic maple syrup flavor.

All during the night, a steady rain blew in from an Atlantic storm. The high temperature forecast for today is 62. This is sprouted wheat pancakes with maple syrup and blackberry preserves. I wish I could say that I made the preserves, but a friend gave them to me.