Baked pasta with golden cauliflower and sage

The print headline on Rick Nelson's article on the Taste page in this morning's Sunday paper was "How Great Is Ina?" Having just made this Ina Garten recipe for summer last night, I'd say pretty great.

Ina Garten has always had my vote for food celebrity whose house you'd most like to be invited to for a weekend visit. She makes tasty food, and unlike my longtime inspiration, Martha Stewart, she always seems very relaxed.

 

This dish takes advantage of the golden cauliflower I bought at the last regular farmers market of the year. (Thanks, Julie!) Yesterday we wished our farmer/vendor friends a good winter, congratulated them on making it to the finish line of another season, and thanked them for the many, many good meals we had courtesy of their efforts. Every meal I cook with farmers market produce brings a face to mind as I cook. Next year's market is going to be displaced due to construction, but we'll track them down somehow. (And once again we wonder why the heck can't we have market plazas like Europe?)

The dish also plays on the current love of cauliflower, although not in its trendy usage as a lower carb stand-in, since here it's paired with pasta.

 

Crusty baked shells and cauliflower

Adapted from “Cooking for Jeffrey” by Ina Garten as published in Food and Wine November 2016. If you can find golden cauliflower, it adds color to the dish and helps break up that white on white effect.

Ingredients

¾ pound medium pasta shells

7 tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 large head cauliflower, cut into small florets

3 tablespoons chopped fresh sage leaves

2 tablespoons capers, drained

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

2 cups grated Fontina cheese

1 cup fresh ricotta

½ cup panko bread crumbs

6 tablespoons grated Pecorino cheese

2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley leaves

Method

Cook pasta in boiling salted water just until barely tender. You’ll be baking this later, so don’t overcook it. Drain into a large bowl.

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add half of the cauliflower in a single layer across the bottom of the pan; you want all the cauliflower to make contact with the pan so you can brown it, which takes about 5 to 6 minutes, stirring occasionally. Pour contents of pan on top of the pasta in the bowl, scrapping out any little bits.

Add another 3 tablespoons of oil to the pan and repeat browning. Transfer cauliflower to the bowl but retain some oil in the pan. Add sage, capers, garlic, lemon zest and red pepper flakes and saute about 1 minute to flavor the oil. Pour mixture into the bowl with pasta and cauliflower. Stir in salt, pepper, and grated Fontina.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 10- by 13-inch baking pan with olive oil. Put half of pasta mixture in pan to form the bottom layer. Top with ricotta, and then spread remaining pasta mixture on top.

In a small bowl, mix panko, Pecorino, parsley and 1 tablespoon olive oil. Sprinkle mixture over the top of pasta in the pan. Bake for 35 to 30 minutes or until browned and crusty.

Rating: Ina's husband Jeffrey really is a lucky guy. I might add just a touch more garlic next time because I’m that way, but it’s a perfectly fine dish as is. She notes that you can assemble the dish the day before for make-ahead purposes. Like on a long weekend with guests.

Carrot soup with thyme and fennel seed

 

I have limited space for growing vegetables, so I usually use it for items I can't get at the farmers market, like heirloom varieties, or things of which want a constant fresh supply, like herbs, tomatoes and lettuce. 

This year I devoted a little precious space to growing Parisian carrots. They're little orange globes, perfect for my comparatively shallow raised beds, and something you don't usually see in most stores or markets. 

All fine and good, except the part where, ahem, I did a fairly random job of thinning the seedlings. So some of them turned out to be the correct size (about the size of a large radish), but some of the ones I harvested at frost were teensy orange orbs packed in too tightly on top of each other to get much size. Those went into the stock pot, but their larger counterparts went into this soup, still my favorite among carrot soup recipes.

Now I just have to cook my way through the mound of carrot tops.

Carrot soup with thyme and fennel

From Bon Appetit, March 1999

 

Ingredients

¼  cup butter

4 medium carrots, chopped small

¾ cup chopped onion

¾ cup chopped leeks, white and green parts only (about 2 small)

2 garlic cloves, chopped

½ teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

¼ teaspoon fennel seeds

5 cups broth

Salt

¼ teaspoon ground white pepper

Method

Melt butter in a large saucepan over medium low heat. Add carrots, onions, leeks, garlic, thyme and fennel, stirring to coat. Cover and cook until onion is translucent, stirring as needed.

Add broth and partially cover. Simmer until carrots are very tender, about 45 minutes. Cool slightly and then puree in batches. (For this soup you’ll be happier with the texture if you actually haul out the food processor instead of the stick blender, unless you’ve got a professional model.) Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Rating: Just lovely. Nicely balanced, with very subtle fennel flavor. It's mellow, smooth and tastes, well, warm, if warm was a flavor. The perfect fall soup.

Potato tomato gratin

 

We reach a sad point all too soon in Minnesota's short growing season, where the only tomatoes at the farmers market post-frost are best roasted. This dish makes good use of these tomatoes we bought at last week's market, where we saw snow flakes icing the mounds of purple kale. 

The regular Saturday markets are nearly over; this coming weekend is the last one for our usual farmers market. It's a bittersweet day where we thank the few remaining hardy souls for all the good food they've given us, wish them a good, relaxing winter, but also are secretly relieved that there will be no more produce to strain the bounds of our refrigerator, waiting to be turned into soups and sauces in the freezer.

This weekend we wrestled a new freezer into our basement to replace the one that took a dive last winter, to our deep chagrin. This one is a small upright, which is slightly less efficient use of overall freezer capacity because of the shelves, but makes the food so much more accessible and less of an Antarctic archeological dig to find the soup you're pretty sure was in there, maybe, still. 

 

Potato tomato gratin

Adapted from a Beth Dooley recipe in the Star Tribune Taste section.  Post-market season, some decent-looking hot house tomatoes would do; just make sure you get ones that look juicy, since that's key to this dish.

Ingredients

¼ cup olive oil, divided

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

Lemon zest, optional 

1½ pounds fresh potatoes, thinly sliced

1 pound tomatoes, sliced into ¼-inch rounds

Kosher salt and ground pepper

½ tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, divided

3 ounces soft goat cheese

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 13-inch baking dish with some of the oil.

Put remaining oil in a small saucepan with chopped garlic and lemon zest and heat oil just until fragrant. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place potato and tomato slices in overlapping layers in the prepared baking dish, sprinkling with salt, pepper and thyme and drizzling with some of the garlic-infused olive oil as you build the layers. Reserve some of the oil and thyme leaves for a final garnish later on.

Cover with foil and bake for 40 minutes until potatoes are softened. Remove foil and dot with cheese. Drizzle with remaining olive oil and sprinkle on remaining thyme and some more pepper. Bake for 15 minutes until cheese is melting and starting to pick up a tinge of color.

Rating: The first time I made this, I made the recipe as written, and it was just fine, so if garlic isn't your thing, leave it out and it's still a nice enough dish. The second time, I added the garlic and heated the oil, and that made it into a quite lovely, repeatable dish. Both times I used lemon thyme, since I've got a pot on hand, now settled into the basement for what part of the winter it will survive. The lemon was a really nice touch, so if you're just using regular thyme leaves, I might consider adding some lemon zest to the oil at the beginning.

Pumpkin pie coffee cake

Pumpkin spice gets a bad rap when misapplied to all manner of foods in the name of selling us products in October. But one place where it really has its place is the place it started: in baked goods. 

This cake marries two good things (pumpkin pie filling and a streusel sour cream coffee cake) quite successfully.

If you mix up the dry ingredients, pumpkin filling and streusel, and set the butter out in a bowl the night before, you can get this into and out of the oven in 77 minutes. So it actually can work as a take-to-work morning treat. (Happy birthday, Cindy.)

Sour cream pumpkin coffee cake

From Jennifer Maloney's Seasons & Suppers blog, a source of many things I've pinned to my comfort food board.

Ingredients

Streusel

1 cup light brown sugar, packed

2 teaspoons cinnamon

⅓ cup butter, cut into cold pieces

1 cup chopped pecans

Filling

1 ¾ cup pumpkin puree (1 15-ounce can)

⅓ cup granulated sugar

1 egg, slightly beaten

½ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ginger

Pinch of salt

Cake batter

½ cup butter at room temperature

¾ cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 eggs

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup sour cream

Glaze

½ cup powdered sugar, sifted

1 to 2 tablespoons milk

¼ teaspoon vanilla

Method

Preheat oven to 325. Grease a 9-by-13 cake pan.

For streusel, mix together 1  cup brown sugar and 2 teaspoons cinnamon in a medium bowl. Cut in the ⅓ cup cold butter with a pastry blender or two forks. Stir in chopped pecans. Refrigerate until ready to use.

For pumpkin filling, mix pumpkin, ⅓ cup granulated sugar, 1 egg, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and pinch of salt in a medium bowl until combined. (Can be mixed up and stored, covered in the refrigerator, overnight.)

For batter, in a medium bowl whisk together the flour, baking soda and powder and ¼ teaspoon salt.  In a large bowl, beat ½ cup butter and ¾ cup granulated sugar until light and fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Mix in vanilla. Add eggs one a time, beating after each addition. Add dry ingredients, alternating with sour cream and mix to combine.

Spoon half the cake batter into the prepared baking pan. Sprinkle half the streusel mixture on top. Cover with all the pumpkin filling. Then spread the rest of the cake batter over the top. (Start with small spoonfuls because it’s hard to spread big globs of batter over the tacky pumpkin mixture.) Sprinkle remaining streusel mixture on top.

Bake for 45 to 55 minutes or until set and golden. Cool slightly in pan before icing.

For glaze, mix powdered sugar, ¼ teaspoon vanilla and milk (or half and half) as needed to make a thin glaze. Drizzle over cake.

Note: if you want the glaze to be quite noticeable, you’ll want to spread it on a completely cooled cake. I didn’t go that route, because for me warm coffee cakes in the morning outweigh immaculately decorated coffee cakes. This cake is quite moist, so if you’re not going to be able to eat all of it in a day, I’d refrigerate or freeze it. The filling is essentially pumpkin pie, and you wouldn’t leave that out at room temperature for multiple days.

Rating: Not super sweet, with nice subtle autumn flavors, what pumpkin spice was meant to be. I was afraid this might turn out to be a big mush, but I really think this works. And it makes me ponder what other fillings I might try inside this batter combo. Almond-apple filling perhaps?

Pepperonata

 

Pickling a mix of colorful peppers is one of my favorite ways to preserve them, but this recipe is a lot faster, and very tasty. Use this as a topping for bruschetta or grilled meat or fish. Depending on your mix of peppers, this can be hot or mild.

Pepperonata

From Cooking Light June 2013.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 pounds sweet and hot peppers, cut into strips

6 shallots, peeled and thickly sliced

½ teaspoon kosher salt

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

Method

Heat oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add peppers, shallots and salt. Cook 3 minutes and reduce temperature to medium low. Cover and cook for 20 minutes.

Uncover and add vinegar, sugar and thyme. Cook over medium heat for another 15 minutes until peppers are very soft and sauce thickens a bit on the peppers, stirring occasionally. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Rating: Tangy sweet. Very useful condiment.