Happy Solstice!

windswept snow on the open soccer field at Van Cortlandt Park

With holiday-shopping (or in our case holiday-crafting) mayhem on top of a relentless work schedule, it's easy to lose track of the bigger things happening outside ourselves. As I try to speed up and fit more tasks into my day, the world has been telling me to slow down, obey the sun's pattern, sleep a lot, drink vats of hot chocolate, and eat slow-braised root vegetables.  The winter solstice today is the shortest day of the year, and is a welcome reminder to take a deep breath and enjoy the short wintry day we have been given.  As the official start of winter, today is a great day to remember the delightful aspects of the season before the gray snow numbs us to any nearby joy.

The Northeast got slammed with a bunch of snow on Saturday.  This had the unfortunate effect of cancelling the flight Jeff and I were to take Sunday morning to Colorado.  (We're flying out tomorrow instead.)  However, we weren't about to let the FAA take all the fun out of our day.  Rather, we took the subway up to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx decked out in our boots, fleeces and shells to tromp around in the snow.

We summited the two highest peaks in the park, a whopping 320 feet tall, and meandered throughout  the beautiful woodland trails.  While we never felt crowded, we certainly didn't have the park to ourselves.  Dozens of other outdoor enthusiasts were out tobogganing, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing.  They all looked so happy to have their hobbies so accessible.

It's slated to snow again in New York next Wednesday, December 30.  Get some gaiters* to keep snow out of your boots and get outside!

* I have these ones in black.  They're awesome and nicely tailored so you don't look like you have trashbags on your calves.

Remixing Thanksgiving Leftovers

Note of apology:  I wrote this post several weeks ago and then got slammed with holiday mayhem.  If your family is anything like mine though, you'll have plenty of leftovers from a holiday dinner in the near future to remix.

The mighty fridge of leftovers sent me into a decidedly privileged stupor.  Each time I opened the door, I stared blankly at the sheer abundance, struck dumb by the multitude of choices facing me.  On the (late) morning after Thanksgiving, the thought of playing refrigerator-jenga and removing more than one precarious tupperware proved too much for me to handle.  I took out a decent-sized, and more importantly freestanding, container of brussels sprouts with pecans, some parmesan off the door, and the milk carton.  My first meal post-Thanksgiving would be one of penitence: rewarmed cruciferous bulbs and a glass of milk.

In the days after hosting a traditionally overindulgent meal for six, Jeff and I  certainly had our fair share of simply reheated leftovers.  Honestly, I wasn't sure what to do with stuffing or baked mac & cheese besides warm them up.  We also had pie for breakfast and snacks.  If we hadn't snarfed down all the pie in sight, this pumpkin pie parfait from Serious Eats contributor Kerry Saretsky would have been amazing.  Although, as a big fan of pie crust, I probably would opt to toast it separately, crumble and include as a layer in the parfait.

We were been blessed (or cursed, depending on your view) with an incredible amount of simple leftovers from the big binge.  Our friend Alec left us a huge tupperware of extra raw prepped sweet potatoes.  As evidenced by the photo above, we did a mediocre job of tackling the mashed potato mountain, and the six of us essentially ate one turkey breast. The abundance of pre-prepared staples enabled us to be creative in transfiguring our food.

Sweet Potatoes

For the sweet potatoes, we baked the rounds as we reheated a nutritious meal of stuffing and cream gravy.  I replicated the blue cheese sweet potatoes with half of the batch because they were frankly amazing as designed.  I tossed the other half, maybe 2-3 potatoes worth, into the food processor with big glop of sour cream, a chipotle chile pepper*, and a big squeeze of lime juice.  For a real recipe that includes measurements, see this one that I loosely followed. This was made even more incredible by a large amount of gravy.

* [Note: We buy little cans of chiles chipotles en adobado, but usually only need one or two of the roughly seven in there for any given recipe.  After the initial use, I freeze the extra individual chiles with a bit of sauce in an ice cube tray dedicated to freezing food and not ice.  Remove the stems before freezing to avoid wondering later if there are inedible bits in your meal.  After the chiles and sauce freeze, transfer them to a labeled baggie.]

Turkey

Jeff and I got through about half of the remaining turkey meat before I started mixing things up.  I made this tasty turkey curry from Mark Bittman with kale instead of spinach.  If you go this route, add the kale earlier than he calls for the spinach as it's a much tougher plant.  Also, definitely make the suggested little pot of rice to go with it.  I whipped it up after dinner for us to take for our lunches.  With everything pre-prepared, it only took me 20 minutes to cook and pack up.  I highly suggest it.

After eating enough of the leftovers to make room for a big batch of turkey stock, I made jook--a staple of my childhood--using my best friend's recipe, except not exactly because three grocery stores had no green onions.

Mashed Potatoes

The mashed potatoes gave us the blankest slate to work with.  I made a few fried potato cakes by molding some taters into patties and throwing a little fry down in a medium-hot buttered pan. The  combination of crisp crust and creamy potato interior gets me every time.  However, the potato cake is a pretty mainstream mashed potato variation.  My stroke of genius came as I thought about another starch-love of mine and wondered what type of bread I should make next.  It hit me: make potato bread, and so I did.

Mashed Potato Bread

Our mashed potatoes are "rustic" or maybe lazy...  We leave the peels on and are of the mind that a few lumps scattered throughout are better than gluey potatoes.  It makes for a more interesting bread.  Don't be worried about having other stuff in your potatoes.  These had all sorts of dairy products, and the bread was great.

• roughly 2 c leftover mashed potatoes
  
• 1/4 c warm water
• 3/4 t yeast (I have a large container of SAF-instant yeast in the freezer)
  
• 1 T olive oil
  
• 1/4 t coarse salt, omit if you have salty mashed potatoes
  
• 1 1/2 c all purpose flour

1. Mix a little bit of less-lumpy potatoes into the water.  Sprinkle the yeast over the water.
   
2. Stir the olive oil and salt into the potatoes, then add the yeasty water and combine thoroughly. With a sturdy fork, work the flour into the potato mixture.  
3. Once combined, knead on a clean surface for 10 minutes.  The dough will become smooth, supple and elastic and less like a lumpy potato.
4. Form into a ball, cover and let rest 30 minutes. 
5. Pat the dough ball into an oblong shape: rectangle or oval, you choose.  Starting with a short end, roll the dough up.  
6. Let rest 40 minutes as you now preheat your oven to 400ºF.
7. Bake for about 30 minutes, spritzing the oven with water in the first few minutes.  The bread should be golden and have a nice crust.
8. As with all things, eat while warm and slathered with butter.
   

Squash Roasting

As fall wound down, Jeff and I got more and more squash from our CSA.  They sat on our dining table staring at me and drowning me in guilt.  I was in a bit of a cooking rut, lacking any creative direction.  As the saying goes, "You can't wait for inspiration to strike. You have to go after it with a club."  Never is this more pertinent than when faced with produce that will decay into a stinky puddle if you wait.  My club of choice for the squash was oven-roasting.

I turned the oven on to 350º, then sliced each of my squash in half--starting with the largest ones, removed their seeds for later snacking, and chucked them onto a foil-covered baking sheet with the cut faces down.  By taking care of the sugar pie pumpkin and acorn squash first I ensured that they had a bit more time in the oven than the smaller, faster-cooking delicata squash.  I left them in there for about an hour (watched The Office and 30 Rock) before smelling the delicious aroma of sweet, vegetal caramelization, a sure sign that they were done.

After an hour in the oven (45 minutes for the little guys), the squash flesh was almost as soft as hummous and smelled divine.  I scooped out the goods, separating the pumpkin for Thanksgiving's pie from the all-purpose squash blend.  I reserved the delicata skins. 

Apparently the skins of delicata squash are thin enough to be edible.  After languishing for a week in the very back of the fridge--the land where foods get inadvertently frozen--they got fried up like potato skins in a hot pan of butter, then dusted with a bit of salt.  When fried to a hearty medium brown, they had a delightful crunch like chips.  Like kale chips, the substance seems to evaporate from the skins and all that is left is an addictively tasty shell.  When just heated through, though, they tasted purely of fresh squash. The state in between--characterized by having less than 50% covered in brown spots--gave less thoroughly enjoyable results.  At that pubescant stage, the delicata skins were neither baby soft, nor hardened into crisps of squashly essence.  Rather, they had a strange fibrousness that Jeff and I found a bit offputting. Conveniently, you can just toss them back in the pan and coax the skins into crunchy chips.

The point of roasting the squash wasn't necessarily to make squash chips.  After I had roasted and processed all of the squash flesh, I immediately had dozens of ideas for dishes to make.  Most of them involved pasta.  So, I whipped up some fresh egg pasta which wassurprisingly easy, and made me want to make pasta all the time.

 I followed the guidelines provided by the amazing people at the Kitchn.

I made one third of a batch since we only had one egg left rather than three...

Flour and salt volcano with egg lava!

More incentive: pasta is much easier to knead than bread.

Why don't I own a rolling pin?

This question continues to baffle

The above preparation is quite nice: fresh egg pasta, roasted squash puree, cheese cloud

I considered making a version of this phenomenal lasagna with the squash puree, brown butter, and maybe some fresh ricotta.  However, the demands of getting a dinner on the table before 10 ruled that out this time.  Good thing I have more squash awaiting the oven!