Tagliatelle with onion sauce

I'm pretty sure this isn't exactly what Mole had in mind when he taunted the toll-taking rabbits in "Wind in the Willows":"`Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!' he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply."

Clearly, Mole meant it as some sort of insult, but I wouldn't say anything derogatory about this onion sauce.

Tagliatelle with onion sauce

Adapted from “The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces” by Diane Seed, and charmingly illustrated by Robert Budwig

Ingredients

1 pound tagliatelle or other wider noodle

8 ounces butter (one stick)

2 large onions, peeled and thinly sliced

Broth

7 ounces heavy cream

Sprinkle of nutmeg

Grated Parmesan cheese, optional

Chopped fresh rosemary leaves, optional

Method

Heat water to cook pasta. Meanwhile, melt butter in a large skillet. Add onions and cook over medium low heat until very tender. Do not allow to brown. Add enough broth to cover the onions. Cover the pan and cook onions for another 25 minutes. 

Puree onion mixture. Add cream, nutmeg and salt and pepper to taste. Keep warm.

Cook pasta until nearly done. Add to cream mixture and cook a few minutes until pasta is ready. Garnish with Parmesan and rosemary if desired.

Rating: Very nice. Very simple sauce that's pantry friendly. As written, it's probably not diet friendly, but honestly one could just skip the cream and still have a very white, creamy and tasty sauce that's a tad less caloric. I was a bit skeptical about the bit about not letting the onions brown, because I adore caramelized onions and the deep flavor they bring. But it works, and it results in a sort of savory cream. I thought the pinch of rosemary worked well here. Definitely something to add to the playbook.

Yellow split pea soup

 

January in Minnesota is still seasonal: Weeks of subzero temperatures when the house makes cracking sounds of discontent and the planes lumber overhead ominously. That kind of weather calls for thick socks and thick soups. Like wallpaper sludge thick, only tastier and a better color.

This recipe definitely qualifies as thick. It's sturdy enough you can stand up a spoon in it, the kind of savory sludge required for super cold days. This is one of my deep winter regulars, although this time I tried it with a smoked turkey leg instead of a smoked ham hock. That got the smoked turkey leg out of my freezer, where it's been languishing waiting for me to find back the other thick soup recipe I bought it for. 

It can't stand up against the furnace being out for 16+ hours while you huddle under an electric blanket waiting for the service repair guy; few things can. But it can help comfort you as the heat slowly seeps back into the radiators and, finally, into your bones. And hey, it's warmed up enough today to snow!

Yellow split pea, yam and carrot soup

Adapted from “Country Cooking” by Time-Life Books

Ingredients

1 small ham hock, about 1 pound, or a smoked turkey leg

4 cups water

1¼ cups yellow split peas

2 medium carrots, diced (about 1 cup)

1 small yam, peeled and cut into chunks

5 medium green onions, chopped

1 red pepper, diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 bay leaf

Method

In a large saucepan, bring ham hock and water to a boil. Boil for 4 minutes, skimming off the foam bits that rise to the top.

Add split peas, carrots, yam, green onions, red pepper, garlic and bay leaf. (Depending on how super thick you like your soups and how tall your ham hock is, you might want to add a ½ cup more water at this point; I usually do. Return to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered until peas are tender, about 2 to 2½ hours.)

Remove ham hock or turkey leg. Remove any meat from the bone and cut into bite-size pieces. Mash part of the vegetables in the soup pot against the side of the pot to make a creamier soup. Remove bay leaf. Return meat pieces to the pot, heat through and serve.

This soup thickens up even more if it's refrigerated. If you make it in advance you may want to have some broth on hand to thin it a bit. Unless it's -13 outside.

Rating: This is one sturdy, tasty soup. And the red, green and yellow make it much more colorful than wallpaper paste.

Some other sturdy soups to get you through January:

Vegetarian chili

Split pea soup with ham, the name of which sounds similar to the recipe above, but it has a very different flavor profile.

 

Apricot and cardamom scones

 

Well, hello, 2018. It's always better to start off the new year like you mean it, and starting off the year with a new recipe of warm scones can't hurt.

I brewed a pot of Republic of Tea's Cardamom Cinnamon tea which paired perfectly with it. And if I haven't raved about my new tea strainer here before, I really should have. It was a tad spendy for a filter, but it has plenty of room for the leaves to brew without getting bogged down, and a very nice mesh filter so you don't have to learn to read tea leaves in your cup.

Mini apricot and cardamom scones

Adapted from “Joy the Baker Over Easy” by Joy Wilson, which looks to be a book well worth exploring further.

Ingredients

3 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon ground cardamom

1½ cups heavy cream, plus more for brushing

1 teaspoon vanilla

¾ cup snipped dried apricots

Method

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.

Whisk dry ingredients in a large bowl. Combine cream with vanilla and mix into dry ingredients with a sturdy spoon. Stir in apricots. I had to use my hands to bring the dough together by kneading it in the bowl.

On lightly floured board, knead dough together briefly and pat out to a ¾-inch thick rectangle. I wound up with something 8-ish by 10-ish inches. Cut in half lengthwise and then cut each long strip in half again lengthwise. Then cut crosswise in thirds, resulting in 12 squares. Cut each square in half diagonally and you’ll wind up with 24 cute little triangles. (Alternately, the original recipe called for cutting out little circles, but then you end up with tedious leftover bits and rerolling and all that.)

Brush lightly with more cream and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 10-14 minutes depending on your oven. I got them out at 11 minutes and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to let them go much longer as they were nicely set and turning golden.

Serve warm, with butter if desired. (Our room temperature butter barely spreads these days.)

Rating: Fine, although they could use just a little something more. I love cardamom, so I don’t want to overwhelm it with something that detracts from it but this recipes isn’t quite there yet. Maybe a 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon? Maybe it just needs more cardamom. Worth repeating and exploring anyway. They make nicely risen scones with a good texture, and they're a fast fix, especially if you measure the dry ingredients and chop the apricots the day before. And bonus: I only baked off half the recipe and stored the other triangles in the freezer waiting to thaw, brush, sprinkle and bake another day. So 2018 can just keep on getting better.

 

Year of the appetizer, and appetizers of the year

Looking back over the course of the year that was, 2017 was clearly the year of the appetizer at our house.

This was partly by design. The Drink & Nosh feature was a strategic way to encourage me to broaden my appetizer repertoire beyond the tried and oh so true favorites. While it's certainly gratifying to have your guests recognize your offerings and say, "Oh, I love that one" on sight, it was a sign to someone like me that it was time to up my game a bit.

So small wonder then that as I look back at my favorite new recipes in the past year, four of them were appetizers. For simplicity that's simply wonderful, it was hard to beat the garlic and brie toasts we rushed to make at home after having them at our friend's house.

And any recipe that contains roasted squash, roasted garlic and goat cheese over crostini really has no choice but to be good, and this recipe didn't disappoint.

The roasted garlic saffron toasts were amazing even before being gilded with bacon. I plan to try those again garnished with caramelized onions to see if I can make them more Bernie-friendly.

Which brings me to my hands-down favorite, the caramelized onion rosemary dip. Really, an onion dip is my favorite? Yes, because it's somehow like the crack version of the standard store-bought onion dip, which usually does yeoman's duty at any game-day buffet, always readily devoured but never commented on. This version won't suffer that fate. I'm thinking about trying it with a touch of goat cheese, but really, maybe I should just stop while I'm way ahead.

Since there was the Drink portion of the blog gimmick, it's also not surprising that I discovered more cocktails that I really like. I'm not a huge hard liquor drinker, so it was useful (but possibly dangerous) to find some options well worth repeating.

The pear martini was the very best of the lot; it's hard to go wrong with anything containing St. Germaine. And speaking of elderflower flavors, discovering FeverTree's Elderflower tonic water was a quite nice addition to a standard gin and tonic. And speaking of gin and tonics, my close second favorite drink this year was a grapefruit tarragon variation that was so good. As was every gin and tonic we had on our friends' fabulous porch. Thanks, Sonja and Bernie; we really owe you several porch nights when we get ours rebuilt. Rounding out the drinks tray winners was the potentially odd, but surprisingly tasty rhubarb martini.

But I guess there's more to life than appetizers and booze. The winner in the category of Worth Getting Up For: the oh-so-lovely rhubarb scones. Heavenly way to start any Sunday morning.

When it came to lunch, bizarrely, the curried chickpea salad sandwiches were this omnivore's favorite. They are a winner both for flavor and a wonderfully pantry-friendly meal.

In the category of Best Use for a Slow Cooker, and all-around good supper: Corsican chicken with sun-dried tomatoes. 

To make it an even top 10 list, I'll pick the chicken Veronique with grape shallot cream sauce.

As always, some of our favorite meals were random acts of something on a Popine pizza crust, like this one with sun-dried tomato sauce.  Because as much as I clearly like trying something new, old favorites see us through the year. Thanks, Popine, for feeding us for another year, and thanks again, Amy, for sharing her 11 years ago.

So as we cherish the best of the last year, we look ahead and wish that the best is yet to come. Happy New Year.

In search of the elusive ginger cream recipe

Each Christmas I make a ridiculous quantity of cookies. It's never as many as I hoped to have made, or bought the ingredients for, but it's sufficiently ridiculous.

Along with several repeat options, I tried three new recipes this year. The chocolate toffee cookies, while not exceptionally looky, bear repeating. They were a finalist in this year's Taste cookie contest, and were clearly the people's choice winner in the tasting in the lobby. They call for salt on top, and I tried using Himalayan pink salt to make them more festive, but it's hard to retain that pink color after it's finely grated. At any rate, it merited a spot in the 10-cookie lineup.

I also tried the Cranberry Ecstasy Bar recipe from the Taste section, because it looked suitably festive and sounded really good with crystallized ginger, dried cranberries and white chocolate. They were fine-ish, but not really worth the effort, so I'll move on.

And I'll have to move on in my quest to find a ginger cream recipe that's like the one my grandmother made. Our mother didn't keep Grandma's recipe, and my sister and I regret that. We both remember it somewhat fondly, although naturally after all these years we remember it some what differently, which makes it that much less likely I'll find a recipe to match. She remembers a sandwich cookie filled with a coconut filling. I remember a very light ginger colored cookie with white frosting on top. Who knows, perhaps she made both.

I started with the ginger cream recipe from the Pillsbury cookbook, figuring Grandma would likely have used one of the Big Four major cookbooks. It's not bad, with cloves, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, and I tried to make it dressier for the holiday by sprinkling crystallized ginger and gold sanding sugar on top. But it's clearly not the recipe. I've seen several recipes online, which also don't look likely to match my memory. Perhaps in a church cookbook ...

If 10 cookies seems ridiculous, it's nothing on this gingerbread replica of the Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

Caramelized onion rosemary dip and tahini cilantro dip

 

To some recipes, the only logical response is: Where have you been all my life? 

I made a big vat of caramelized onions the other day to use up the fall supply on the orchard rack in the basement before they start to sprout in January. One of the outcomes was deciding to try making onion dip. This is so not the same thing you buy prepared at the grocery store in plastic tubs. This goes into the to-die-for category.

Caramelize your onions however you prefer. I prefer to let time do the work, so I load up a large slow cooker with thinly sliced onions, top it with a chopped up stick of salted butter and sprinkle in 3 tablespoons of dry white wine. Let cook for 12 hours on low and you wind up with gloriously tasty golden brown goodness. Caramelized onions freeze fairly well, and having these in your back pocket is like cheating.

 

Caramelized onion rosemary dip

Adapted from epicurious.com and several other random bits of inspiration.

Ingredients

3 onions, thinly sliced, then caramelized in butter and white wine

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

½ cup mayonnaise

½ cup sour cream

½ teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon (or more or less to taste) of finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Combine cream cheese, mayonnaise, sour cream, garlic powder and Worcestershire sauce in a food processor until smooth. Transfer to a bowl.

Chop caramelized onions into desired size; you want them small enough that they will easily fit on a cracker but not so fine that they disappear. 

Stir onions and rosemary into dip. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

This makes a fair amount, but it disappears more quickly than your average dip, so plan accordingly.

Rating: This is a highly addictive, dangerous substance.

Tahini cilantro dip

Adapted from “Classic Party Fare” by Martha Rose Shulman.

Ingredients

1 cup plain yogurt

½ cup tahini

Juice of 2 limes

3 to 4 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

¾ cup cilantro leaves

Method

Combine yogurt, tahini, lime juice, garlic, cumin and cayenne in a food processor. Puree until smooth.

Chop cilantro leaves. Add to yogurt mixture and combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Rating: Nice. Not overwhelmingly garlicky or cilantro-y, just bright flavors. It’s a perfectly respectable dip, although it gets overshadowed when placed on the same table with caramelized onion dip. Certainly a viable option for when you're looking around to make a dip that you have the ingredients for. 

Both of these are valid choices for the many holiday gatherings we wind up attending or hosting. 

If you need more holiday gift inspiration for cooks, check out the Harry Potter house-themed spatulas. I'm sure Gryffindor is the most popular, but luckily for me and my blue kitchen, I always test as Ravenclaw through and through.