Recently in Side Dishes Category

I was shocked when I realized there were no local sweet potatoes or yams in the Puget Sound region. After all,  we have an amazing amount of potatoes, and Olsen Farms is my favorite vendor for those. I asked them why we couldn't find local sweet potatoes and they explained that sweet potatoes needed a very long and hot growing season.

So rather than the standard Thanksgiving fare of candied yams, I needed to come up with something else we could candy to at least approximate that signature dish. While our version doesn't use marshmallows, and it does take a little work to get it in the oven, it is well worth the effort and I'd say this was almost as good as candied sweet potatoes and a lot healthier.

Candied Acorn Squash

• 2 medium size acorn squash
• 4-5 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1-2 Tbsp butter
• Cinnamon (optional)

 

Start by cutting off each end of the acorn squash about half an inch to an inch from the tip.

Slice the squash into rings, about 1-2 inches thick.

Grease up a baking sheet or baking dish and preheat the oven to 350.

Bake the squash for 30-40 minutes, depending on the thickness of the slices.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, melt 1-2 Tbsp of butter and stir in 4-5 Tbsp of brown sugar. You can also add just a bit of cinnamon.

When the squash is just about done, turn the heat up on the stove and stir the glaze constantly.

Remove the squash from the oven and baste it with the glaze.

Return the squash to the oven and bake for another 10 minutes.

Serve and enjoy.

Patricia's Notes: This was quite tasty. You don't peel the acorn squash before you serve it, so the presentation is quite dramatic with the yellow flesh and green rind. You can actually eat the rind, though I prefer not to. The flavor was actually very similar to candied sweet potatoes, though the texture was a bit different (expectedly). I will definitely make this again.

Our second Thanksgiving recipe is a rough take on the standard old mashed potatoes. I love mashed potatoes, especially with gravy. Today's recipe makes use of one of those often forsaken winter vegetables. They're really pretty ugly, after all. Also known as the celery root, those leaves are inedible. Just cut off the top and peel.

You can eat celery root raw, or you can puree it, mash it, roast it, or saute it. For today's recipe, I peeled it, cut it into chunks, and boiled it.

Olsen Farms has a wide variety of potatoes, including some vibrant purple ones called Purple Vikings. These potatoes are bright purple/blue on the outside and snow white inside. They make a gorgeous mashed potato, especially when you leave the skins on for some great contrast. 

Potato Celeriac Mashup

• 4-5 Purple Viking potatoes
• 1 large celeriac
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1/4-1/2 cup of milk

 

Peel the celeriac and cut into chunks.

Cut the potatoes into chunks (but don't peel them).

Boil the vegetables until tender.

Use either a potato masher, a mixer, or a food mill to mash the vegetables with the butter and milk.

Serve.

Patricia's Notes: I really enjoyed this. I only used one celeriac, so the mash did taste almost completely like mashed potatoes. But there was a subtle celery flavor underneath it all. Next time, I'll double the celeriac and keep the potatoes the same. The texture was about 90% smooth with just a few chunks. I didn't use very much butter or milk, but this was very smooth. Since I didn't actually make these with a turkey, I didn't have gravy. So I tried to add a few things to bowls of the mash to enhance the flavor. It turns out that Bacon Salt was the perfect addition to this dish.

So we've endured the horrible pumpkin gutting, made a tasty main dish, and now we've got a big mound of pumpkin guts and seeds. We don't like to waste food, and we love seeds, so we decided to try our hand at roasted pumpkin seeds. This was a simple recipe, although a little disturbing, since pumpkin guts were still involved.

When you try to separate out pumpkin seeds from the rest of the innards, your hands get messy. Just embrace the messiness and start pulling out the seeds. You don't need to remove all traces of pumpkin, because you'll wash the seeds a couple of times before you bake them. Just do your best and remove the large bits of guts.

It took me about 20 minutes to get a nice bowl of seeds from the two pie pumpkins.

Once you have that bowl of seeds, wash them carefully in water a couple of times. You can put the seeds in a colander and wash them or use a bowl with a lid on it.

Preheat the oven to 250.

In the bowl, add some olive oil and some seasoned salt. We used Zane and Zack's Alder Smoked Rub.

Spread the seeds on a foil lined baking sheet.

Bake for 60 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes.

Cool and enjoy!

I have a confession to make. Until just very recently, I'd never read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals completely. I started it over a year ago, but it is a long book and I got busy. I knew the gist of it, having read summaries (basically the Cliff Notes version), heard Michael Pollan talk in person, and discussed it with my husband at length. So while I knew I needed to read the whole thing, life just kept getting in the way.

Well, I've finally read it and... wow. I cannot even begin to imagine the changes that would come to our food system if everyone in America read this book.

When Michael Pollan is talking about one of the meals he cooked as part of the research for this book, he mentions oven roasting kale. Well, here in the Pacific Northwest, the winter is dominated by fresh kale. Kale, kale, kale. It's all kale. Kale is very good for you. A member of the cabbage family, kale has high levels of vitamins A and C, folic acid, calcium, and iron. We've posted about kale before, and that's been our standard recipe for a year. But now I have a new recipe, all thanks to Michael Pollan!

This recipe can't be easier.

  Take one bunch of kale and chop off the bottom of each stalk. The center of a kale stalk is pretty tough, which is why most kale recipes tell you to separate the leaves from the stalk. For this recipe, cut off the bottom third of each stalk and discard.

Brush both sides of each leaf with a bit of olive oil and place in a single layer on a cookie sheet.

Bake between 375 and 400 for 10-15 minutes, or until slightly crispy.

Season with salt and pepper or some smoked paprika and serve.

The other day, I saw one of my very favorite things at Sea Breeze Farms - fresh ricotta cheese.

 
If you've never had fresh ricotta, you don't know what you're missing. Being Italian, I am very familiar with ricotta. Being third-generation Italian, and having lived in a farmers market and Italian deli-free zone for years, I never tasted truly fresh ricotta until last summer. It is a taste to be savored. Fresh ricotta is firm, creamy, and just a bit sweet. It's not at all watery, not gritty, and above all, not completely tasteless like that "stuff" you find in most grocery stores.

If you find yourself with some fresh ricotta, do yourself a favor and make these tasty fritters. Celery salad might not sound all that appetizing, but this salad was surprisingly refreshing.

Note: If you can't find fresh ricotta, you can make this with the supermarket ricotta. Just take the ricotta out of the fridge in the morning and place it in a paper-towel lined strainer over a bowl. Put the entire assemblage back in the fridge and let it sit all day. This will drain the ricotta and make it a lot less watery.

Celery Salad with Fresh Ricotta Fritters adapted from Tasty
Serves 6

• 1 pound fresh ricotta cheese (from Sea Breeze Farms)
• 2 Tbsp fresh goat cheese (from Port Madison Farms)
• 1/2 cup grated Pecorino cheese
• 1 large egg (from Skagit River Ranch)
• 1/4 cup Emmer or other flour (from Bluebird Grain Farms)
• Salt and Pepper
• Olive Oil (or other oil of your choice)
• 1 1/2 cups bread crumbs (you can even make your own if you have leftover bread)
• 1 small head of celery
• 3 Tbsp oil of choice

 

1. For the fritters, mix the ricotta, goat cheese, and the Pecorino in a bowl. Add the egg, flour, some salt and pepper and mix well.
2. Slice the celery stalks thinly. Chop the inner leaves and mix in a bowl with some olive oil. I've recommended 3 Tbsp, but that's probably a little more than you need. I used an orange flavored olive oil I got on a trip to California, but Hazelnut oil from Holmquist Hazelnuts would also work well.
3. Season the salad with a bit of sea salt.
4. In a skillet, add a thin layer of olive oil over medium to medium high heat.
5. Pour the breadcrumbs on a plate.
6. Form the cheese mixture into fritters and dredge in the breadcrumbs.
7. Cook until each side is golden brown.
8. Place two fritters on each plate and serve with salad.

Patricia's Notes: I've always thought of celery as merely a conveyance for peanut butter. Sure, I put it in chicken stock or soups sometimes, but I never though of actually eating it in a salad. This was excellent. It was a very light summer salad, perfect for a warm day. The celery leaves were incredibly tender and I'll be adding these to my other salads whenever I have celery. The fritters were also amazing. The crunch of the breadcrumbs with the creamy cheese provided a fantastic companion for the salad. The original recipe recommended frying the fritters in a decent amount of oil, but you really don't need much. The less oil you use, the lighter the fritters will taste. However if you use a smaller amount of oil, you might need to add a bit more to the pan after the first batch of fritters.

Some weekends, there are so many wonderful vegetables at the farmers markets that it is easy to buy just a bit too much and end up with a vegetable drawer full of food that you just can't eat. If we've had a busy week and have eaten out a time or two, we'll sometimes even have veggies leftover from our CSA box.

So what do we do in situations like this? We make a special risotto that is so forgiving, it will take just about any vegetable we can throw at it.

 

Clean Out the Fridge Fall Vegetable Risotto

Serves 4

• 1 pound fava beans
• 4 carrots
• 3 small to medium beets
• 2 shallots
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 2 turnips
• 2-3 cups Emmer (or white rice)
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 6 cups chicken broth
• 3-4 Tbsp butter
• 1/2 pound peas
• 1/4 cup shredded Asiago cheese

1. Prep all of the vegetables by doing the following:
   • Mince the garlic and shallots.
   • Cube the beets.
   • Dice or slice the carrots.
   • Boil the fava beans, shell, and peel the skin off the shelled beans.
   • Cube the turnips.
   • Shell or slice the peas (shell sugar snaps, slice snow peas into 3-4 pieces each).
   • Pan roast the beets and turnips.
2. Melt 1-2 Tbsp of butter in a large sauce pot over medium heat.
3. In a smaller pot, gently warm the chicken broth and water together over medium-low heat.
4. Add the garlic and the shallots and stir frequently for 3-5 minutes, until the shallots are translucent.
5. Stir in the Emmer (or rice) and stir to coat well with the butter.
6. Add the wine to deglaze the pan.
7. Once the wine has evaporated, start adding the chicken broth and water, a ladle at a time.
8. Check the mixture frequently, at least every 5-7 minutes.
9. As the liquid evaporates, add another ladel full.
10. Keep adding liquid in small batches, only when most of the previous ladle has cooked off.
11. When you're down to the last one or two ladles of chicken broth, add the peas.
12. When all of the chicken broth has cooked off, turn off the heat and stir in the fava beans, beets and turnips, pea shoots, and Asiago cheese. Mix well and serve.

Patricia's Notes: You can add just about any fall vegetable to this dish. If you have leftover corn on the cob, just scrape the kernels off and add them to the risotto. Bell or hot peppers would be excellent, diced and pan roasted. If you don't have chicken broth, you can use vegetable broth or even water, though if you use water, add some salt as well. I loved the fava beans in this recipe, though I'm not sure they are worth all the effort. Not only do you need to boil the whole beans, but then you must shell them. Unfortunately, you're not yet done as you need to remove a protective sheath from each bean as well.

Tip 1: Precook any root vegetables, peppers, or beans.
Tip 2: Making risotto with Emmer takes about 50 minutes. White rice reduces the cooking time to 20 minutes.

Today's recipe is one of the simplest and most versitile you'll find. Hasselback potatoes have a beautiful presentation and will be the talk of any dinner party, yet take mere minutes to prepare. We first noticed this recipe on Orangette, and if you haven't yet visited Molly's blog, I urge you to do so. She is an amazing writer and you can feel her love of food in every post.

I prefer to get my potatoes from Olsen's. Located at the majority of Seattle's farmers markets, Olsen's sells a wide variety of gourmet potatoes. I will often pick up a mixed bag of red, white, and purple or blue potatoes and make roasted potatoes on the grill, or use only blue potatoes for a dramatic side dish of mashed potatoes.

For this dish, however, all you'll need are a couple of decent sized potatoes. Any type will work. I love Yukon Gold's in this recipe, but Russets work just as well.

Hasselback Potatoes

Serves 4

• 4 large potatoes (any type)
• Any of the following ingredients or combination of ingredients:
  • Garlic
  • Butter
  • Rosemary sprigs
  • Hot peppers
  • Bacon
• Olive oil
• Sea salt

1. Scrub your potatoes and grab a wooden spoon and a sharp knife.
2. Place a potato in the the bowl of a wooden spoon, much like you'd carry it if you were running a "hot potato" race.
3. Make 6-10 slits in the potato. Cut about 3/4 of the way through the potato. If your potato is well proportioned to your spoon, you'll cut straight down until your knife hits the sides of the spoon, thus not cutting all the way through the potato. Alternatively, thread a metal skewer through the potato about 3/4 of the way down and cut until your knife hits the metal.
4. Slice the garlic cloves, the butter, the hot peppers, or the bacon. Cut the rosemary sprigs into half inch pieces.
5. Carefully insert any of the above ingredients into the slices of the potato.
6. Preheat your oven to 400.
7. Place the potatoes, cut side up, on a baking sheet rubbed with a bit of olive oil.
8. Sprinkle with sea salt and drizzle with more olive oil.
9. Bake for 50 minutes, or until potatoes have reached desired tenderness. The potato will fan out as it bakes, creating a dramatic presentation.

Patricia's Notes: You can really do just about anything with this recipe. I typically have alternated garlic and butter, or garlic, butter, and rosemary within the potato slices. Just about any flavored ingredient that you can think of that would survive the oven cooking can be used. If it can go on a potato skin, it can go in these potatoes, with the exception of cheese. If you do want to top the potatoes with cheese, bake them for about 40 minutes and then add some grated cheese on top during the last 10 minutes of cooking.

This is one of my go-to recipes. It's easy, requires almost no tending once it goes into the oven, and every time I make it, I cannot believe there are really only 3 ingredients. The magic of the recipe comes in the first two steps and in the use of a well seasoned cast iron pan.

But I don't have a well seasoned cast iron pan? Can I still make this recipe?

Of course you can. Though I suspect it will end up being simply a good recipe instead of a great one. If you are not using a well seasoned cast iron pan, you'll probably want to throw in a few seasonings here and there.

Ingredients

4-5 Tbsp butter

3-5 Yukon Gold potatoes (medium size)

Sea salt

 

Directions

Thinly slice the potatoes. 

Melt a tablespoon of the butter in a cast iron pan and melt the rest of the butter in a small saucepan. Turn off the heat to the cast iron pan.

Sprinkle the buttered cast iron pan with sea salt and spread a layer of potatoes in the pan.

Drizzle the layer of potatoes with a little butter, and add another layer. Sprinkle with sea salt.

Repeat the butter, potato, and sea salt layers until you're out of potatoes.

Cover the top of the pan with foil, and press down firmly to flatten the potato layers.

Slide the pan into the oven and bake at 450 for 20 minutes.

Remove the foil and bake for another 20 minutes.

Serve.

 

If you're able, the best way to serve this dish is to invert the entire cast iron pan onto a serving dish. This makes a beautiful presentation with the crispy potatoes on top. However, if you can't, just cut the dish like you were serving a slice of pie.

For variations on the dish, try adding garlic, Bacon Salt, paprika, or cayenne. 

When you write about food on a regular basis, sometimes you just get tired of trying new recipes. We were wandering the University District Farmers Market this morning, and while everything for sale looked fantastic, nothing in particular was calling to either of us for dinner. We picked up a few staples, such as Italian sausage, stew beef, cheese, and hot peppers. Then we smelled it. Fire roasted peppers! Last summer, Billy's had fire roasted peppers for half of the summer. This is the first time we've seen them this year though.

We immediately picked up a pound and headed off to lunch with still nary an idea of what to make for dinner.

Lunch provided the perfect inspiration. We ordered some soup that came with large, soft, breadsticks. Aha! We can cut those up and make bruschetta!

Fast forward about six hours and you find the husband slaving over the Big Green Egg. He grilled the hot Italian sausage (from Skagit River Ranch of course) and I got to work in the kitchen slicing and dicing.

Twenty minutes later we had bruschetta!

Now, onto the recipe.

Sausage and Roasted Pepper Bruschetta

• 2 links hot Italian sausage
• 2 large roasted hot peppers
• 2 Roma tomatoes
• Provolone cheese
• Baguette or large breadsticks for slicing

 

Grill the Italian sausage until done.

Slice the baguette or breadsticks and place on a cookie sheet.

Thinly slice the tomato, chop the pepper, and grate the Provolone cheese.

Once the sausage has cooled slightly, cut it into thin rounds.

Layer the sausage, tomato, and pepper on the cut bread.

Bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

Switch the oven to broil and top with Provolone cheese. Broil until the cheese is bubbly and serve.

Even when I professed to hate vegetables, I would still always eat beans. Wax beans, string beans, green beans... they were all good to me. My parents would cook them until practically mushy and then serve them with some butter and salt. What's not to love? Salt, fat, and some mild veggie flavor.

Since then, however, I've broadened my horizons when it comes to beans. Oh I still love them with butter and salt, but I've found a new love for them when cooked with something spicy. 

This was a rather simple recipe that I sort-of found, sort-of improvised. Hopefully you enjoy it as much as we did.

• 1 pound wax beans
• 4 shallots
• Lard or olive oil
• 2 cayenne or other hot fresh peppers

 

Peel and slice the shallots. In a fry pan with some lard or some olive oil, fry the shallots until almost crispy.

Meanwhile, trim the wax beans and cut in half if they're large. Steam them until tender.

Cut the tops off the peppers and add them to the shallots. Cook for another few minutes and then add to the wax beans. Serve with a little salt and pepper.