Godly Treats

A few weeks ago I found myself walking through Hamden, and I passed a bakery called Godly Treats. As I am tolerant of all religions that provide me food, I went in, where a very nice woman greeted me and told me I could have a free taste of anything I wanted. I went home with a bean pie ("Have you ever had one before?" they asked me) and the belief that the place was run by the Nation of Islam. Nope! It's run by the United Nation of Islam, a group "which is a separate and non related entity than the similar sounding 'Nation of Islam.'" I can't make too much fun of them because their bean pie was really good. It was like a pumpkin pie made with mashed up navy beans instead of pumpkin. In fact, I'm sure I could have passed it off as pumpkin pie. If I'm ever in Kansas City, I'll go to their restaurant, Your Diner, "A Place For Us To Develop Ideas And Enjoy Wholesome And Delicious Food In An Environment Of Righteousness."

Yes, this is a weird organization.

Honey and Caraway

It's not often that I taste something while it's cooking and it's bad. It's not that I have some extraordinary skill; it's just hard to cook good ingredients and make them bad. It was worrisome, then, to taste cabbage in the process of cooking and have it be as bad as it was. (It was actually a lot like the cabbage I cooked in Hungary, which Joel tried and wisely refused to eat.)

Since I don't usually write about my failures, you've probably guessed that it was good in the end. And yes, after I added more salt, honey, and mustard, it was delicious. So don't be discouraged if it's a bland, watery mess when you first taste it. Honey fills in most of the gaps, and mustard fills in the rest. This makes 4-6 servings and takes about an hour.

• 1 medium head red cabbage
• 1 onion
• 1 tbs. caraway seeds
• 1 lemon
• 3-4 tbs. honey
• mustard to taste (1-2 tbs., I think)
• butter or oil or both
• salt, pepper

Dice the onion and fry over medium-low heat in the butter or oil with some salt in a big pot. As it cooks, cut up the cabbage. When it's soft, after five minutes or so, add the caraway seeds and stir. After another minute, add the cabbage, some salt, and a little bit of water (less than 1/4 cup), and cover the pot. Stir occasionally, and add more water as necessary if the pot dries out. When the cabbage has started to soften, add the juice from the lemon. Add the honey a little bit at a time and stop when the balance is right. (My measurements are all approximate--next time I'll try to make them more exact.) Cook until the cabbage is soft, which takes a long time. When it's ready, add the mustard and taste. You'll probably want to add a bit more honey, since the sweetness goes nicely with the mustard. Mix in some pepper and serve.

Squash Ravioli

I would have blogged about this much sooner, but I was still too emotional about it to risk it. I didn't want to ruin a perfect thing by talking about it. But I've come to accept that I have nowhere to go but down, and now I can talk about the squash ravioli that were the pinnacle of my culinary existence. Yes, they were good. Oh, and Giovanna did all the work in making them. I just, umm, supervised. Many thanks to Mark Bittman. This serves four and takes forever.

The filling:

• 1 medium-sized butternut squash
• 2 eggs
• nutmeg (a lot)
• salt, pepper
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Cut the squash into inch-thick slices, remove the seeds, and cut off the peel. Put a bit of olive oil on a baking pan and put the slices on this, and put a bit of olive oil on top. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the squash. Bake until soft (30-45 minutes) in a 400 degree oven. Put the slices in a bowl and mash. When the squash has cooled a bit, mix in all the other ingredients. Taste and adjust seasoning.

The dough:

• 2 1/2 cups flour, about
• 1 tsp. salt
• 4 eggs

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl and crack an egg in. Beat the egg and mix it up, and repeat with the other eggs. The mixture should seem much too dry, but pick it up and knead it a bit. If it's still too dry, add water a tiny bit at a time, but it shouldn't need it. Roll the dough out as thin as you can into a giant strip---this will take a while---and cut it in half. Put the filling onto the first half in little mounds, spaced properly apart. (How far apart? One ravioli-distance, I guess.) Brush or drizzle water in the spaces between the filling; this will make the dough stick. Take the top sheet, put it on top, and press it against the bottom sheet where it comes together (i.e., press between the mounds of filling). Cut out individual ravioli. Do all of this on a lightly floured surface to keep things from sticking, and don't pile ravioli on top of each other. (You could probably get away with it if you dust flour on, but why go to that trouble?) Pour them into a big pot of boiling, salted water and cook till done (six minutes, maybe), giving it a gentle stir every now and then. While you're doing that, make the sauce:

• olive oil
• fresh sage, minced
• garlic (I didn't use this, but I think it would be good)
• salt

Heat the olive oil on medium-low. Add the sage, garlic, and a little bit of salt. Don't burn the sage.

Squash Mush

If I had a fancy restaurant, this would be called squash puree. Instead, it's mush. I've made this twice now. Both times, it had pretty good flavor. Its texture was very nice the first time, smooth and airy. On my second try, it was watery and gross. I think the difference was in the amount of parsnips and water in the mush (more parsnips and less water in the good one). Also, don't use too much carrot. I had two big ones left and figured I could use them up in this, but they really dominate the flavor.

• 1 medium or large butternut squash
• 3-4 parsnips
• 1/2 of a carrot (or none)
• 1-2 onions
• 4 cloves garlic
• rosemary, salt, pepper
• butter, olive oil, or some combination
• 1 tbs. maple syrup (or a different amount, but it's worth including)

Chop the onion finely and cook with oil or butter in a large pot over medium-low heat. Add salt. Chop the parsnips, carrots, and garlic and add them. Add rosemary (maybe a tsp. of dried rosemary?). Peel and chop the squash and add it to the pot. Mix everything and add a bit less than 1/4 cup of water. Cover the pot and keep the water simmering (you'll probably have to turn up the flame a bit). Stir every few minutes and keep cooking until the squash is soft. Add more water if you have to, but you probably won't, even if it looks like it needs it. When the squash is soft, mash everything with a potato masher (or a blender or mill). Add the tablespoon of maple syrup and salt and pepper to taste.

Cranberry Muffins

These are my mother's muffins with some additions. The recipe makes twelve muffins and takes almost no time.

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup cornmeal
• slightly less than 1 tbs. baking powder
• pinch of salt
• between 1/8 and 1/4 cup of sugar
• cranberries (about 4 oz.)
• 1-2 tbs. maple syrup
• zest of 1 clementine (or of an orange, I suppose)
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1 and 1/4 cups milk

Mix the dry ingredients (flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, baking powder). Add the egg and beat it. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix as little as possible while combining everything. Put the batter into a buttered muffin tin and put that into a 415 degree oven for 21-22 minutes.

This recipe is imprecise, but I really do cook it at 415 degrees, and it really is done after 21 or 22 minutes. Use the lower sugar amounts if you want muffins to eat with jam, and the higher ones if you want to eat them plain.

Káposztaleves olasz galuskával

Yesterday, I applied to Yale's Directed Independent Language Study program. Since I'll be learning Hungarian again, I now have an excuse to write titles that nobody can understand.

I had chicken stock and bok choy that I needed to use up. They, along with my pangs of reminiscence for Hungary, led to this soup, which involves weird Hungarian/Italian dumplings that were good but still need some work.

• 6 cups of stock/water
• 1 onion
• 2 carrot
• 5 little bok choy heads (maybe 1/2 pound in all)
• 1/2 cup flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• parsley (not too much)
• Parmesan cheese
• nutmeg
• salt, pepper, olive oil

Chop the onions, carrots, and cabbage. Cook them with the olive oil over medium-low heat in a big pot, and add a little bit of salt and pepper to them. While you're doing this, bring the stock to a boil. When the vegetables are soft (about 20 minutes), pour the stock over them. After this simmers for 5-10 minutes, start making the galuska by mixing 1/4 cup of flour with a lot of Parmesan (details at the end for this), salt, nutmeg, and pepper (lots of pepper). Add the parsley, minced very finely. Add two eggs and beat them a bit. Then add the 1/4 cup milk and about a tablespoon of water, and mix as little as possible while still mixing everything up. Then, add more flour until the dough is quite thick--it should still be liquid, but about as thick as a liquid can be. Before you add this to the soup, turn the heat up so that it stays at a boil when you do. Put the batter into your soup by pressing it through a galuska tray, which all good cooks keep around (well, in Hungary they did--you could push it through the back of a grater, or just spoon it into the soup in chunks). Cook this for about four minutes and then remove the pot from the heat. Add more pepper to the soup, and more salt if it needs it.

This soup was hard to screw up, since my chicken stock was good enough that I could have just heated it up and called it soup. The vegetables were nice, but I couldn't taste the Parmesan in the galuska at all. Part of the problem is that my Parmesan is not from Parma and is not very strong (or very good). I think I used about 1/3 of a cup, and next time I'll double that. I could taste the nutmeg and pepper, though, and they were good (though completely non-Hungarian).

Clementine Question

How long is the clementine season? Specifically, how long will the supermarket have crates of them?