Recipe: Savory Squash Bread Pudding

One of the many nice things about Smith was that, unlike some colleges you hear about, we really had pretty excellent food and it was served in a pleasant, homey environment. One of my favorite Smith desserts was the coconut bread pudding. Whenever we had it, I'd take a big paper cupful back to my room for later and end up chirring it all within the hour. It was good.

Since then, I've had one or two other delicious bread pudding experiences - Susan brought a pumpkin bread pudding with cream cheese sauce to a dinner party I hosted and Amity had a really good bread pudding with bourbon sauce at her St. Patrick's day bash - but until Thursday I had never tasted a savory bread pudding. My excellent new cookbook "Simply in Season," written by Mennonites and given to me by my Aunt Grace, contains a recipe for savory squash bread pudding, which struck me as an admirable use for the butternut squash I got at the Farmers' Market last week.

The only trouble with this dish is that it's hard to reheat without a microwave. Steaming it for a few minutes seems to work okay - it keeps it fairly moist. However, if you have a microwave you won't have this problem. It also makes the house smell really nice.

Peel and cut into 1/2 inch pieces:
3 cups butternut squash.
Bake at 400 degrees until tender, about 12 minutes. Remove from oven and reduce temperature to 350. (If you are so inclined, it might be a good idea to puree the squash. I did not do this because I didn't feel like dirtying the food processor. It's certainly fine to leave it in chunks, but it might be neat to have it more integrated into the custard.)

In a frying pan, saute:
1 cup onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
with a bit of olive oil until tender. Remove from heat.

Whisk together:
3 large eggs
2 large egg whites
2 cups milk
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
salt
pepper
nutmeg or other spice (I used garam masala, which worked well)
Stir in squash, onion, and garlic.

Pour this mixture over:
9 cups day old bread (I used French bread from Wal-Mart because not even I am going to bake a whole loaf of bread just for bread pudding. Sourdough might also be good.)
Stir gently to combine and let stand 10 minutes.

Sprinkle on top:
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese.
Bake at 350 degrees until custard is set and top is lightly browned, 45 minutes. Serves 4-6.

This would be a nice dish for an autumnal dinner party if you are not inviting anyone with a phobia of plant-based foods or soggy bread. A spinach salad or some bitter greens like kale or broccoli rabe would help to mitigate the heavy breadiness of it all. A fruit or bittersweet chocolate dessert - nothing too heavy and nothing cakey - would make an admirable conclusion to the meal.

Merely some incoherent ravings about food.

Meat! Oh, warm and savory animal tissue! Tonight I cooked meat for the first time all semester; I really shouldn't go shopping when I'm feeling out of it, because the other day I came home with a pound of reduced-price frozen turkey, ground up in a tube. I used it to make Asian Turkey Burgers, which were a very delicious vehicle for ketchup, that most delectable of sauces.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 egg white
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 16 ounces ground turkey
  

In a bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Crumble turkey over mixture and mix just until combined. Shape into four patties. Cook in a nonstick skillet coated with nonstick cooking spray until no longer pink.

Last week I bought some of those new pepper Triscuits and they were gone within 24 hours; K and I simply demolished them. This week they were out - pepper Triscuits are a craze sweeping the nation apparently - so I got fire roasted tomato instead, which were half-off but not quite the taste sensation of the pepper ones.

Another thing that's revolutionized my life in the kitchen lately is Jiffy cornbread mix. I always bake bread on Sundays, but we often run out, and when that happens I supplement our starch supply with biscuits - made from Kroger baking mix - or cornbread, made from scratch using the recipe in the More With Less Cookbook. Now, however, I have tried the Jiffy mix and I will never go back. It's just 37 cents a box, and all it takes is an egg and 1/3 of a cup of milk! You can have warm corn muffins for tea whenever you want! Revelation!

And oh, man, ORANGE JUICE! This is the first time we've had orange juice, all frozen and condensed - brought me back to my childhood. Good stuff! I've been getting a little crazy with the groceries lately - I bought all this name-brand stuff: Triscuits, Honeymaid Graham crackers (they're SO much better than the store-brand though), Minute Maid orange juice, Kraft cheese. I really need to cut back a bit - next week, no fancy stuff! Maybe name-brand raisins, but that's it!

On Friday I did a shift at the soup kitchen and they actually let me do stuff! I got to chop up a million eggplants (and then that night I went home and made eggplant parmesan, yum) and make salads! Eric, the guy in charge, pointed me in the direction of some bags of wilted lettuce and said he didn't like to stifle people's creativity, so just have at. There's a limit to what you can accomplish with wilted iceberg lettuce and carrot sticks, but I had fun. TWO shifts next week because I'm on Spring Break, and I'm totally looking forward to them.

Recipe: Roasted Autumn Vegetable Soup

Last night I made an amazing soup. It was my greatest triumph to date, and so I will share it with you.

Ingredients:
5 carrots, peeled and sliced into pennies
2 leeks, just the white parts, ditto
2 onions, chopped roughly
3 turnips, cut into chunks
2 or 3 potatoes, ditto
Olive oil

About 6 cups chicken or vegetable broth
3 cups tomatoes, peeled & seeded
1 T rosemary
1 T thyme
1 bay leaf
Salt and pepper to taste

Coat the vegetables in olive oil and roast in a 400 degree oven until golden brown - this takes an hour or so. Bring the broth to a boil and add the roasted vegetables, tomatoes, and seasonings. Let cook for awhile longer and then puree the soup in a blender or food processor until fairly smooth. You can mix in a little yogurt or half and half if you like, that’s nice, but it’s really delicious just plain, too.

The thing about soup, I’m discovering, is that you can just cook vegetables and puree them with some broth and then you have soup! Nothing could be easier! This recipe is a little time-consuming because of the chopping and the endless roasting, but actual work time is pretty low, and it’s super-delicious.

Better Homes and Gardens

After nearly three months in the Hoosier state, I have finally bought a couch. It folds out into a bed, even, so if you want to come visit me, you will no longer have to sleep on the floor.

Doesn't it look homey, with the lamp and the plant and the Chagall? It's rather intimidating to own something so large and heavy, but I already have a bed, so in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. I can never move now. Not that I'd be able to find something so well-located again, anyway.

I've been sick for going on two weeks, which meant no homemade bread this past week. On Sunday, my breadmaking day, I was too sick to even contemplate mixing, let alone kneading. I have, however, been having a lot of fun with soups. I tried Laurie Colwin's curried broccoli soup, which was pretty good and fairly easy to make, plus a ridiculously easy sweet potato soup: Bake some sweet potatoes until soft. Let cool a little and then peel, then put them in the food processor with a quantity of chicken or vegetable broth. Season with red pepper, cloves, and ginger. Very soothing.

As soon as my cough goes away and I can eat delicious dairy products again, I'm going to make some roasted autumn vegetable soup using one of the recipes I got last week at the Farmers' Market. The recipe sounds rather unhealthy so I'm going to make some alterations. I'll see how it goes.

Happy Hour at the Irish Lion last night with a bunch of people from the department. The Lion is not an ideal venue for this sort of thing because one sits at long tables and I invariably end up with a bunch of non-talkers. I rallied as best I could and brought out one of my favorite conversation starters: what was the first album you ever bought by yourself? (Mine was Jagged Little Pill, by Alanis Morisette, I think.) (Confidential to CLA: note carefully the "by yourself" part.) This was a very musical crowd and so that was quite effective.

Tonight I've got mountains of epistemology to go through. Maybe I will do it while sitting on my couch.

Recipe: Persimmon Rice Pudding

Ingredients:
1 pint fresh persimmons
2/3 cup Arborio rice
3 1/2 cups milk (I used half skim, half whole)
1/4 cup honey
2 T sugar
1/4 t salt
zest of 1 blood orange

Procedure:
Gently rinse the persimmons and remove the stems. With a spatula, press the persimmons through a sieve to separate the pulp, seeds, and skins from the relatively tiny amount of usable persimmon glop. You can suck on the seeds but apart from that I doubt they have any real use. You won't end up with a lot of glop, but you don't need that much.

In a large saucepan, combine rice, milk, honey, salt, zest, and sugar. Bring to a simmer, stirring frequently, then reduce heat to lowest setting and leave it, stirring from time to time
until the pudding is quite thick and the rice is soft. This will take ages. You can read philosophy while this is happening, or talk to your sister on the telephone, or bang your head on the table and think about the awkward email you got from the Werewolf this morning, about how sorry he is you're afraid to go in your office and how he'll try to make you feel more welcome from now on. Feel terrible about making the Werewolf feel guilty. Contemplate skipping town.

Oh, right, the pudding! Ah, it's looking nice and thick now, time to take it off the heat and stir in the persimmon goop. Serve warm and awkward.

Pumpkin Soup (based on K's family recipe)

Ingredients:
1/2 medium-sized pumpkin, peeled and chopped into roughly 2-inch chunks
vegetable broth to cover
2 handfuls brown lentils
1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1/2 red pepper, chopped roughly
1 teaspoon cumin
salt (to taste)

Procedure:
In a large stockpot or saucepan, bring pumpkin and vegetable broth to a boil. Add lentils, cumin, and half of the onion and cook until pumpkin is tender. Put in blender or food processor and moosh up. In a small saucepan, sautee remaining onion, garlic, and red peppers until onion is translucent. Add to pureed pumpkin mixture and add broth or water to bring to desired consistency.

Serve hot with a generous tablespoonful of your homemade yogurt, which is not going to waste, especially if you add some to the cornbread you can serve on the side.

The result is not very pretty but it is savory and filling, with a nice creamy, smoky flavor.

Carrot Soup

Perfect for a gray, rainy day like today.

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound carrots, peeled and sliced into pennies
half an onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3-4 cups vegetable or chicken broth
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, chopped
1 teaspoon garam masala

plain yogurt

Method:
In a large skillet or frying pan, sautee onions, garlic, and carrots in vegetable oil until the onions are translucent. Add 1 3/4 cups broth, ginger, and garam masala and let simmer, covered, until carrots are quite soft - about half an hour. (This might be a good time to read Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism or, if you prefer, the New York Times.)

When the carrots are soft, pour it all into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Return to saucepan and add as much broth as you like to thin it to the desired consistency - more like soup and less like baby food.

To serve, add a dollop of plain yogurt - the nice sour, creamy note brings it together and brings out the gingerbready flavor of the garam masala. (We happened to have some lying around so I threw it in as a lark, and it worked quite nicely. Nutmeg or cloves would also work, if you have any.)