Pumpkin Caramel Profiterole

Let's talk about cream puffs. No, let's talk about squash first. I've eaten winter squash, in one form or another, for the last five days. The only problem with this is that I am currently out of squash.

Too many people go straight for cutting winter squash in half, adding butter, brown sugar and cinnamon and baking. There's nothing wrong with that, but squash can do so much more. In the last week, I have eaten squash in a Mexican-style rice bowl with beans and rice, a South Indian-style coconut and chick pea curry, on flatbread with eggs and tomato jam, in macaroni and cheese, and in cream puffs. And, of course, plain by the spoonful. It is no coincidence that asquash, one of the Algonquin roots from which the English word squash derives, simply means "eaten."

Roasting squash really is the only way to cook it: simmering it leaves it with a stringy texture and can sap out the flavor and copious nutrients. Roasting, on the other hand, enriches a squash's sweetness and creamy texture. I like to roast squash ahead of time, even when I'm not going to use it immediately, often a few at a time. As long as you're going to be at home for an hour, you can roast a squash. It doesn't need much attention while cooking. It keeps in the fridge for two weeks or so (in the unlikely occurrence that it sticks around that long) and provides instant squashy gratification.

To roast any variety of winter squash, turn on the oven to 375°; cut your squash in half and scoop out the seeds. The seeds, of course, can be roasted on their own for a toasty snack. Lay the halved squash cut side down on a lightly oiled sheet pan. Use foil if you don't feel like soaking/scrubbing later. Let it cook until squash is tender to the touch and the skin has started to brown up some. Depending on how large your squash is, this could be anywhere from 35-60 minutes. Set a timer for 30 minutes, poke the squash at its thickest point and decide how long you want to set the next timer for based on your squash-poking assessment.

Don't be too rigid in your squash variety selection, either. You may have a recipe for butternut squash soup or pumpkin pie, but you may find that you like the reverse, or that buttercup makes the best ravioli filling or that you are a fiend for hubbard squash in any form you can get it. A friend living in Germany for the year is finding that the only variety she can get, Hokkaidokürbis (Hokkaido, red kuri or baby red hubbard squash), works really well in places she'd expect to use pumpkin or butternut. A guide to about a dozen popular winter squash varieties is available here.

But enough about that. Let's talk about cream puffs, or profiterole, which is a fancy word which refers to anything creamy stuffed in a pâte à choux shell, usually ice cream or whipped cream (cream puffs typically involve pastry cream). The choux paste shell seems to have fallen out of favor in recent times. This is really a shame; they're a versatile vehicle for flavors sweet and savory. And when you think about it as basically making baked bubbles—which it is—making the shells themselves becomes magic even before you fill them.

Which brings us back to roasted squash. If pumpkin pie season can't come soon enough for you, take note: pumpkin profiterole. Or, whatever kind of roasted winter squash you have profiterole. In fact, unless you're starting with a premade crust, these can be ready faster than a pumpkin pie. Moreover, pâte à choux is not appreciably more fussy than a pie crust (Warning: making pâte à choux can be habit-forming). Also, they look way more impressive, especially when you add a drizzle of caramel. The filling is a mixture of roasted squash, brown sugar and the spices you would add to pumpkin pie, folded with a simple whipped cream. The overall effect is an ethereal few bites of creamy, spiced delight.

Pumpkin Profiterole

The recipe here is more a series of components rather than one recipe. After making the choux paste shells, squash filling and caramel, spoon or pipe the filling into the shells and drizzle caramel over the top. Serve promptly.

Pâte à choux

Adapted from Joy of Cooking
makes about 15 two-inch cream puff shells

• 4 large eggs at room temp.
Dry mix:
• 1 c. AP flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• (optionally add 1 T sugar)
Wet Mix:
• 1 c water/milk
• 1/3 c. butter

Preheat oven to 400°. Sift dry mix together and set aside. Heat wet mix together in a large, heavy saucepan;

when it boils, add dry mix all at once and stir briskly, until it becomes a smooth paste and stops sticking to the sides and bottom of the pan. (see above)

Add eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition (some people like to do this in the food processor). Spoon or pipe the paste onto parchment-lined sheet pans in mounds about 1½" across, leaving room for them to puff up. Bake at 400° for 10 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350° and bake for another 25 minutes, or until quite firm to the touch. Gently stab each with a sharp paring knife to vent it so it cools enough to accept filling without melting it quickly.

Filling

• 1 c. mashed squash (canned will also work)
• ½ c. brown sugar
• ½ tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• ½ tsp. nutmeg
• ½ tsp. ground ginger
• ½ tsp. clove
• ½ c. whipping cream

Whip cream. Blend all other ingredients and then fold into whipped cream.

Caramel Sauce

Recipe adapted from David Lebovitz's Ready for Dessert
Lebovitz's blog, Living the Sweet Life in Paris is always a good read as well.

• ½ c. (1 stick) butter (salted or not, up to you), cut into pieces
• 1 c. sugar
• 1 c. heavy cream
• ¼ tsp. salt, or to taste
Optional:
• ¼ c. bourbon (a little more than a shot)

In a large heavy-bottomed saucepan (deep is important because it will bubble up pretty aggressively after the cream is added), heat the butter and sugar over medium heat. Stir occasionally until the sugar begins to caramelize. When it reaches a dark amber color and smells on the verge of burning, remove from heat and immediately add the cream. Stir until smooth, then stir in salt and bourbon. Letting the sauce cool to at least room temperature gives you a thicker, more caramelly sauce texture, but you can use it before that. Sauce can be stored for up to 2 weeks if refrigerated and a spoonful in a cup of coffee or black tea makes the world a beautiful place.

Garlic & Proust: How to Find Out Who Your Real Friends Are

It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Don't underestimate the importance of messy, imprecise and sometimes smelly personal rituals like garlic spaghetti. It's difficult to get out of the mindset of ritual being the province of traditional religion; after all, it does share a root with the word rite. But if you take it back even farther, it also shares a root with rhythm, which makes at least as much sense: ritual has as much to do with the beat, the repetitive, familiarly measured flow of action.

It's a way of connecting with personal history, enlivening more abstract, nebulous memories with the more immediate, classical five senses. If nothing else, it's vastly more productive and less creepy means of reminiscing than many others. Proust famously wrote about this phenomenon in In Search of Lost Time, describing and then attempting to deconstruct an inexplicable bliss that came out of eating a bite of madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea, finally attaching it to time spent with his aunt as a child.

Imprecise memories don't necessarily require precise remembrance. I first learned about garlic spaghetti from a college friend. Our relationship was largely based around cooking together: we lived in the same vegan co-op, worked at the same (non-vegan) restaurant off campus, and found (sometimes invented) plenty of reasons to be hungry and cook together outside of that. To be quite honest, most of my memories of this friendship are messy and smelly, but they're also distinctly delicious.

Garlic spaghetti was a family favorite of his: thick pasta coated in a buttery Parmesan sauce loaded with raw garlic. It may be vegetarian, but health food, this ain't. It started out innocently enough. We'd peel up 4-5 cloves of garlic for a pound of pasta. It was garlicky, but still fairly accessible. However, we had some sort of ongoing need to out-badass the other, and so every time we made it, the garlic content went up. We made this about once a week. By the time I got to making it for my family back home during Winter Break, it had gotten to a point where we were using at least a full bulb of garlic for the two of us. My family thought I had totally lost it and were ruined on the dish, despite being people who like garlic fairly well.

I made it for the first time in several years the other day. My sister and I had, coincidentally, both been thinking about it. I made the sauce with 5 cloves of garlic for the two of us, staying on the conservative side, but wondering how my own tolerance had slipped from the full-bulb dragon-breath days. I thought it could have used a little more garlic.

If you aren't willing to use at least a clove of garlic per person, don't bother. Remember, though, that garlic breath is only a problem for those who don't have it. The friend from whom I learned this dish insisted it was best served with fake bacon bits, and further insisted that they were preferable to real bacon in this case. I don't know that it holds for me, but Bac-Os (or their generic Head Nut-bought equivalent) were an essential piece of the garlic spaghetti ritual in college, and I would be remiss not to mention them. Here, I've tossed some fresh arugula with the hot pasta, letting it wilt gently into the dish, which is an entirely different but, but still nice, touch.

And fear not the leftover garlic spaghetti! For there do you stumble upon another piece of the ritual: the leftover garlic spaghetti omelette. It pretty much explains itself.

Garlic Spaghetti

vegetarian, optionally gluten-free
serves 3-4, takes 30-40 minutes start to finish

• 1 lb spaghetti (this is the only ingredient with gluten: gluten-free pasta = gluten-free dish)



Sauce

• 4-5 cloves garlic
• 2 Tblsp. butter, room temperature
• 1 egg (if you double the recipe, still use 1 egg; 3 or more times the recipe, increase egg)
• ½ c. good grated Parmesan

• 1-2 Tsp olive oil

Optional accoutrements:
• fresh ground black pepper (I lied, this is obligatory)
• fresh arugula or spinach
• bacon bits, fake or otherwise
• red pepper flakes, if it isn't hot enough for you already (in the badass times, this was a common addition)

Start by putting the pasta water on to boil. Peel the garlic cloves, grate cheese if necessary. Add ingredients to food processor or blender in the order listed, drizzling in the olive oil last, in a thin stream. The sauce will have a thick, fluffy, almost mayonnaise-like consistency. It is also excellent as a spread on bread, and pairs really well with broccoli.

When pasta is cooked, strain and toss with sauce and fresh greens, if using, until pasta is well-coated and greens are slightly wilted. Serve with black pepper, bac-os, or whatever else appeals to you.

Quick Hits: Chile-Lime Winter Squash/Sweet Potato

It's that time of year where I fall in love with my favorite orange vegetables again - winter squash and sweet potato. Last year, my CSA farm's winter squash crop was drowned by Hurricane Irene. This picture to the right was taken in the squash field. From a kayak. The squash are under about 12 feet of Connecticut River.

They did find their princess in another castle, though, taking in their best sweet potato crop ever from a field a little farther away from the river. In many recipes, this one included, the two are interchangeable. They have very similar nutritional profiles, as well. They're both extremely high in Vitamin A (as are most orange vegetables) and very good sources of Vitamins C, B6, potassium and fiber.

This simple but striking presentation, dressed in sweet, tart and spicy, works equally well for either. Butternut squash is an excellent choice for a dish like this; it's fleshy and its thin skin means it doesn't need to be peeled, just well washed, before being cubed and roasted. Delicata's another good sweet, thin-skinned variety but have a lower flesh-to-seed ratio than butternut. You can eat the rind of any squash, but with many of the thicker-skinned squashes, like buttercup/kabocha, pumpkin or hubbard, you don't want to.

Chile-Lime Squash/Sweet Potato

vegan, gluten/grain-free
done in about 30 minutes, serves 4 as a side

• 1 large butternut squash, cut to bite-sized wedges
or
• 2 medium sweet potatoes, cut into bite-sized pieces

• 2-3 Tblsp. olive oil
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp cinnamon



Dressing:

• 1-2 T honey
• zest & juice of one lime
• ¼-½ tsp. ground chipotle pepper
or
• 1-2 canned chipotles, minced
or
• 1 small red chile, minced
• some fresh cilantro (optional), roughly chopped

Toss squash with olive oil, spread on sheet pan and sprinkle with salt, cumin, cinnamon. Bake at 450°F for about 25 minutes, turning once. Remove from oven and toss with dressing and cilantro

Quick Hits: Herb Garlic Parmesan Potato Wedges

A sure sign of fall: potatoes are back! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew! Perhaps the biggest source of the potato's meteoric rise to culinary ubiquity in Europe has to do with how little need be added to reach being comfort food: little more than heat, salt and maybe butter. You can definitely add more (see last fall's breakdown of Potato Gnocchi with Leek, Kale & Sage Butter), but, as demonstrated by the recent excitement about Waffle-Iron Hashbrowns, the spud requires little help past heat.

Here, cheese and garlic help play up the warm, toasty potato goodness, adding a flavorful crustiness to a simple roasted spud.

Herb Garlic Parmesan Potato Wedges

vegetarian, gluten/grain-free
serves 4-5, about 30 minutes, start to finish

• 3 lbs potatoes (red ones are nice, but not essential)
• 2 T olive oil
• 1 tsp salt

Topping:

• 4-5 cloves garlic, minced
• 6-10 sprigs thyme (or about 3-4 T)
• fresh ground black pepper
• ¼ c. grated parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Cut potatoes into wedges (6-8 per spud) and toss with olive oil. Spread on sheet pan and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake wedges for 10-15 min.

While wedges are roasting, mince garlic and mix with other topping ingredients. Turn potato wedges, sprinkle with topping, and return to oven for about 5 minutes.

Mole Gringo, with only a dozen(ish) ingredients

Reading about traditional moles makes me feel like a total poser, but it also makes me hungry. My students are currently reading What the Moon Saw, a thinly veiled ethnography of a rural village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, for another one of their classes. I snagged it to read one day last week in the name of integrated curriculum and devoured it more or less in one sitting, give or take snacks. Oh, YF books, you go down so smooth. It is also a fairly good coming-of-age story about a teenage girl from the burbs of DC meeting her Mexican grandparents for the first time, finding out her grandmother is a curandera (shamanistic healer), and falling for a local boy who sings revolutionary songs real pretty. Moles, though never mentioned by that name are, along with hot chocolate and corn tortillas, essential to the story. In one of her grandmother's stories, a friend recalls a situation in which she planned on killing herself, but decided to make chicken with chocolate-chile sauce as a final meal and decided life was worth it after all. Mole proved to be her reason to keep living.

The word mole comes from a Nahuatl word, molli, which simply means "sauce," though it lines up interestingly with the direct-from-Latin Spanish verb moler, "to grind," an essential process in making mole. Nahuatl, a group of

languages from across southern Mexico, is the source for a surprising number of English words: chocolate, avocado, guacamole, tamale, chili, coyote, and tomato are all of Nahuatl origin, filtered through Spanish. Seeing as the term of origin is as broad as it is, it's unsurprising that there are a wide variety of moles across southern Mexico. They vary in complexity and focus, but have a few things in common: all begin with a variety of chiles, and from there are built out of spices and ingredients that make it sweet, like dried fruit; sour, like tomato or tomatillo; and thick, like nuts, seeds and starch. Oaxaca, where the book takes place, is known in some circles as the "Land of Seven Moles" but it's much broader than that - think of the seven moles a little like the five classic French mother sauces. They're more like guidelines. The most complex of these moles have nearly 40 different ingredients and can take days to make, so it's easy to see where folks might be overwhelmed by the idea of making it on their own for anything short of something very special, and miss out on the joys still available from a simplified mole.

Chocolate Magic Cookies (gluten & dairy-free)

One of my early jobs in education was as a paraprofessional in an intensive special needs program. A number of the students with autism were on the gluten- and dairy-free Autism Diet, which purportedly ameliorated some of the regressive behaviors associated with the Autism Spectrum. I had—and continue to have—reservations about the effectiveness of this approach, but I'm neither an autism specialist nor a nutritionist, so it's not really up to me, and I don't think it's going to exacerbate the issue. However, I had one co-worker who insisted on calling it

the "fun-free" diet in a way that I found aggravating. The "fun-free" description seemed to riff on the infuriating, pervasive illusion that if something is good for you, there's no way it will taste good and its equally problematic corollary that if food tastes good, then there's no way it's good for you.

Similarly, there's this illusion about teachers that they can either be nice or demanding, and that only one of these qualities is effective. I remember reading one article which contrasted "the kind of teacher who brings in brownies" with "the kind of teacher that demands results." Seriously, who comes up with this festering load of flapdoodle? I bet it's the same people that think tasty and healthy are mutually exclusive. This isn't to say that there aren't teachers who mistake being liked for being respected, and end up foregoing academic rigor for fear of not being liked, but let me tell you this: brownies—or any other kind of food—have nothing to do with it. On the other side of it, there are also teachers who mistake being disliked for being respected, and brownies have nothing to do with that either.

Any time you share food with someone, it's an acknowledgement of your shared humanity. Even if it's just passing around a tin of Altoids, as a couple teachers I've had were fond of doing, you are demonstrating a simple need and enjoyment that you have in common. Beyond demonstrating that you're not a robot who sleeps standing up in the broom closet, you are breaking down the perceived otherness that keeps students from becoming invested in a subject. Even in a fairly concrete, objective topic like math, a student's ability to invest themselves in a topic, to work hard and internalize it is linked to their sense of being seen as a person. So yes, I am one of those teachers who brings edible treats in for my students on occasion. I am also one of those teachers who demands a lot of hard work. I see no conflict between these.

This year, I have several students with dietary restrictions, so most of my go-to treats leave someone out. Enter these mouthwatering, crackly-topped, fudgy cookies, which happen, by my old co-worker's definition, to be totally "fun-free." No dairy, no gluten, no flour at all in fact. No need: the sugar, cocoa and egg whites around which they're built contain none of those things.

My sister's been making this one where she works, and scrawled down the recipe for me. As long as I leave the nuts out, this addresses all of the dietary restrictions I face at school, without any weird ingredient replacements. Even better, it is an incredibly simple recipe. A little Googling tracks this recipe back to one by François Payard in Gourmet's April 2002 issue, as digitized by Molly Wizenburg at Orangette, though I'm not sure where specifically my sister got hold of it. Wizenburg calls them "Featherweight Cookies"; a very similar recipe circulates as "Chocolate Puddle Cookies." I'm going with "Magic Cookies" because they are pretty damn magical. Besides, who needs "fun" when you have magic?

Chocolate Magic Cookies

gluten-free, dairy-free, nuts optional
25 minutes, start to finish, makes about 32 three-inch cookies


Dry Mix:

• 3 cups (12 oz) confectioner's sugar
• ¾ c. cocoa powder
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 2 c. mix-ins (toasted nuts, chocolate chips, cacao nibs, etc)



Wet mix

• 4 large egg whites (~1/2 cup), preferably at room temperature
• 1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°. Mix dry ingredients together until well blended. Separate eggs and add vanilla. Add egg and vanilla to dry mix and stir until well-blended. Scoop about a tablespoon at a time onto parchment-lined sheet pans with plenty of room to spread (which they will start to do immediately) and bake for 12-15 minutes, or until cookies are puffed up and cracked on top. It possibly goes without saying that to keep these gluten and dairy free, your mix-ins must also be, and that label reading is up to you (especially on chocolate chips!). You also may not care. I actually wonder how salted pretzel bits would work in here.

The Co-op's Korean Spinach

I'm pretty sure that the reason I would happily down this entire bowl of spinach has more to do with it being tasty than about it tasting like good memories, but it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.

This is a great spinach dish for people who think they don't like spinach: it has a mild, savory flavor that enchants all kinds of palates. It's also, starting with frozen spinach and adding very little, highly nutritious and cheap as chaff.

Spicy Tomato Peach Jam: Convergent Evolution?

One of my favorite writers, magical realist godfather Jorge Luis Borges, has a short story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (in Spanish; in English), which describes the efforts of a writer to rewrite the classic Don Quixote. Menard wishes not simply to reinterpret the story in his own words, but to cause himself to produce Cervantes' exact text, even if only a few pages thereof. He rejects his initial approach, "[to] know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes," as too simple, and decides instead, "to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard." For additional absurdity, the story is presented as an obituary of sorts for Menard, who never actually existed.

I was put in mind of this yesterday when I spontaneously recreated a recipe I had merely skimmed during initial research for a tomato jam I decided to make after coming home from the farm with an entire flat of tomatoes. Given, this is a much less onerous task than recreating Quixote; there's a reason you can't copyright a list of ingredients. And, in truth, a list of ingredients is not a recipe.

Russian Eggplant "Caviar"

I recently lost my main Russian grocery hookup when the last of my stepmother's family pulled up roots from their largely Russian Northeast Philly neighborhood. Our shared background in Russian Studies has been a major bonding point for us. I first met her shortly before I started studying Russian towards the end of high school and she was a big part of my reassuring my parents that it was perfectly fine to send me off to Central Asian parts of the former USSR back in 2002, based on her own experiences in the USSR in the late 70s/early 80s (my parents have never leaned towards being overprotectively alarmist, but anywhere ending in -stan raised a high eyebrow that close to 9/11 and the beginning of US involvement in Afghanistan). A couple times a year, she'd call to say, "Hey, I'm going to visit my mom for a few days. You want anything from Bell's?" (referring Bell's Market, the go-to Russian store in Philly). We'd go on for a few minutes about all the different kinds of frozen dumplings, smoked fish, cold salads and baked goods available there, which inevitably turned into reminiscences of particular meals and dishes from our travels. Every culture has its notable culinary adventures, but Russian culture in particular seems to keep the kitchen table at its heart. I'm reminded of a toast in honor of the kitchen table from Dennis Danvers's novel, The Watch:

"The Kitchen Table...is the site of all that's best in Man—his sociability, his intellect, his good humor, and his generosity—not a monument to death but a celebration of living, not the theft of life but its sharing, not the jingoistic cant that generally passes for history but here and now, together in solidarity, this very moment! I give you: The Kitchen Table!"

This toast is delivered by none less than Peter Kropotkin, or at least a fictional, time-traveling version of him, though I could imagine a similar proclamation coming from the man himself.

In any event, one of the Russian specialties that we always lingered over was баклажанная икра (bak⋅la⋅zhan'na⋅ya i⋅kra'), which literally translates as, "eggplant caviar." For all that it's called "caviar," baklazhannaya ikra is a totally vegan "salad" (Russian salads rarely involve leaves) made of eggplant, tomato, pepper, onion and carrot slow-cooked together to savory perfection and seasoned with the only two herbs that really matter in Russian cuisine, dill and parsley

Quick Hits: Lentil, Herb & Feta Stuffed Tomatoes

The months of drooling, rhapsodic fantasies about perfectly-ripened field tomatoes have finally given way to a flood of them. It's not an overabundance; that would imply too much. The simple joy of slicing a tomato, sprinkling it with salt and maybe drizzling a little olive oil over it hasn't gotten old yet, but there's so much more to do with tomatoes before you even get to cooking them. I tossed together this fresh-stuffed tomato using some left over odds and ends recently and was so excited about it that I had to recreate it and write it down to share.

The dish is built around a protein-rich lentil and grain stuffing, simply flavored with a healthy handful of fresh herbs, a little feta, and the guts of the scooped-out tomato. It may look like a salad, but it eats like a meal.