Mashed potato casserole with Fontina and sage

The forecast calls for "shovelable snow" and an unseasonably ridiculous overnight low for Thursday into Friday. There's still a lot of comfort food season ahead before G&T season mercifully arrives.

Mashed-potato casserole with sage and Fontina
From Food and Wine, November 2006

Ingredients
6 tablespoons butter, room temperature, divided
3 pounds baking potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
4 ounces creme fraiche (or sour cream in a pinch)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage leaves (plus more whole leaves for optional garnish)
8 ounces Fontina cheese, grated
1/3 cup plain breadcrumbs
1/3 cup grated Parmesan

Method
Cook potatoes in a large saucepan with enough lightly salted water to cover until potatoes are tender. Drain and mash.

Combine potatoes with 4 tablespoons butter, creme fraiche, parsley and 1 tablespoon chopped sage. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Stir in Fontina.

Preheat oven to 400 if baking immediately. Grease a shallow 2-quart casserole dish. Spread potato mixture evenly in the pan.

Combine remaining 2 tablespoons butter with breadcrumbs and Parmesan. Sprinkle mixture over top. At this point either cover and refrigerate the casserole until ready to bake, or bake for about 30 minutes until golden and crispy on top. I'd say this serves 8-ish.

For the sage leaf garnish that I simply spaced, fry sage leaves in olive oil for about three minutes and array across the top of the baked casserole. I'm sure it would have looked prettier, but I didn't remember it until I was dishing it up, so, next time.

Rating: Hard to go wrong with cheesy souped-up potatoes.

Pumpkin soup with red lentils and ginger

 

Yesterday we woke up to a coating of sky crud, with icy shards hurled in our faces by an unreasonably harsh wind. Today it was 9 degrees when we rolled out of bed. Hence another new soup recipe.

Pumpkin soup with lentils

Adapted from Better Homes and Gardens October 2013

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small onion, cut into thin slices

1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and cut into short slices (you want them small enough to fit on a soup spoon so they’re eater-friendly)

½ cup red lentils

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

1 teaspoon curry powder

1 teaspoon ground cumin

3 cups broth

1 15-ounce can pumpkin puree

Method

In a large Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium high heat. Add onions, pepper and lentils and cook for 2 minutes. Mix in ginger, curry powder, cumin and cook a minute until fragrant. Add broth and pumpkin. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium  low and cook for 30 minutes or until lentils are tender but still have some structure. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serves 4.

Rating: Quite nice really. Especially for the minimal amount of work and elapsed time from start to finish. A reasonable option for which you might well have most of the ingredients on hand, and for when want to have something warm on the table in less than an hour.

Chicken potato herbed hot pot

The calendar says it’s spring, both meteorologically and astronomically. But here in Minnesota, it’s still clearly gastronomical winter. Those store displays of spindly spears of asparagus sourced from Mexico aside, when you wake up to snow in the morning, it’s clearly still time for warming comfort foods.

Plan on starting this dish about 3½ hours ahead of when you plan to eat. It will take about an hour of dawdling preparation since the onions take some time to cook, but you’ll have plenty of time to chop the next layer of ingredients while you go, and then have 2½ hours essentially hands-off. All you need is a green salad to make a lovely meal, finished off with a touch of cheese.

Herbaceous hot pot

From Better Homes & Gardens, September 2004. It's a riff on the lamb-potato hot pot of Lancashire, England. Now idea how authentic it is, but holy cow, look at those views.

Ingredients

2 onions, peeled and thickly sliced

1 large garlic clove, chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 pound mushrooms, sliced

1 tablespoon fresh rosemary leaves

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves

3 large red potatoes, sliced about ¼-inch thick (about 3 cups)

5 to 8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, depending on size

¼ cup dry white wine.

1 tablespoon salted butter

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Heat olive oil in a large skillet. Add onion and garlic and cook over medium low heat until golden. You want them very tender, but not at all crispy, so this is going to take up to a half hour or so. Remove from skillet and set aside.

In same skillet, saute mushrooms until tender. Drain off excess liquid.

In a 4-ish quart Dutch oven (I used a Le Creuset #24), place one-third of the onions in a layer across the bottom. Sprinkle with half the fresh herbs.

Top with one third of the mushrooms. Top with one third of the potatoes. Sprinkle with coarse salt and pepper.

Place chicken thighs in a layer on top of potatoes. How many you can fit will depend on the size of the pieces and the diameter of your pan. You will only have room to have them on a single layer so wedge in as many as fit. Pour wine over the top. Working in layers, top chicken with remaining onions, then remaining herbs, another sprinkle of salt and pepper, remaining mushrooms, and finish with remaining potatoes. Dot potatoes with butter.

Cover with lid and bake for 2 hours. Then uncover and bake until potatoes are golden brown and starting to crisp up, about 25 to 35 minutes.

Rating: A really excellent Sunday supper. The chicken is very tender, the mushrooms are redolent of rosemary and those onions at the bottom have caramelized in schmaltz. The layering really works its magic in this otherwise simple dish of average ingredients, with the onions dripping down to flavor the chicken, potatoes and mushrooms below, taking herbal notes along. You get two different potato textures: the softer ones below and the crispy ones on top. Definitely be making this again.

I’d say this serves 4 quite generously, since it’s so satisfying. The chicken is falling apart, so you won’t be dishing up an identifiably whole piece of chicken for anyone. I only managed to fit five thighs in a pan much more capacious than called for, but they were on the larger side.

Tagliatelle with mushroom sauce

 

Sometimes (mainly in winter) you want a nice hearty pasta dish. Most of the time that means adding meat, but in this recipe plenty of chunky mushrooms and touch of tomato paste make a substantial, satisfying sauce that still doesn't weigh you, or the noodles, down too much. Dried mushrooms add that earthy depth.

Tagliatelle with mushroom sauce

Adapted from “Italian Kitchen” by Anna Del Conte

Ingredients

1 ounces dried porcini

1 pound mixed fresh mushrooms, sliced

5 tablespoons butter, divided

4 shallots, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

1 tablespoon chopped fresh marjoram

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tablespoons flour

1 cup stock

2/3 cup dry white wine

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

1 pound tagliatelle

Grated Parmesan for garnish

Method

Cover dried porcini with very hot water and let soak for 30 minutes. Remove from liquid and rinse if they are still gritty. Chop and set aside. Strain reserved mushroom soaking liquid through a fine sieve.

Start heating pasta water.

Heat 2½ tablespoons butter over medium heat in a deep skillet. Add shallots and a pinch of salt, and cook until soft. Add garlic and herbs and cook another minute. Add tomato paste and stir in well. Add dried porcini and cook for about 5 minutes. Add fresh mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper, lower the heat and cook for another 5 minutes, adding a bit of reserved mushroom liquid if the mixture becomes dry.

Meanwhile, melt remaining 2 ½ tablespoons of butter in a sauce pan. Whisk in flour and cook for a minute to make a roux. Add broth and cook and stir until well blended. Add the wine, nutmeg and a bit of the reserved mushroom liquid to give it the flavor. Cook over medium low heat for about 15 minutes.

Stir sauce into mushroom mixture and heat through while cooking pasta until almost done. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper as needed. Toss sauce with cooked pasta until al dente. Serve garnished with Parmesan.

Rating: Not bad. The sauce is just the right consistency: not too thick from the flour to be cloying but enough to coat the pasta nicely. Deep mushroom flavors come through.

Slow cooker split pea smoked turkey soup

 

It's still sturdy soup weather, although the grill on the patio has lost its stocking cap of snow, so there's hope.

Slow cooker split pea soup with smoked turkey

A Sunset recipe from myrecipes.com

Ingredients

1 medium onion, chopped

2 large carrots, peeled and sliced ¼-inch thick

2 celery ribs, chopped

1 small smoked turkey leg or ham hock

2 bay leaves

1 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves

½ teaspoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon pepper

1 pound dried split peas (t called for green peas, but I found only yellow peas in by cupboard)

6 cups broth

Chives for garnish

Method

Combine everything but chives in a slow cooker. Cover and cook on low until peas are tender, 7 to 8 hours.

Remove turkey leg and bay leaves. Remove meat from turkey leg, discarding bones and skin. Shred meat and stir meat into soup. Serve soup garnished with chives.

Rating: A reasonably tasty just-us-kids sturdy soup, at least when made with a really nice homemade broth. The texture and color probably don't rise to company-level, but that's not really what this recipe is about. This is a recipe that if you've prechopped your vegetables, you really can throw into the slow cooker in 5 minutes before heading out the door.  The world needs a few recipes like that, or at any rate my world does.