Apple leek and butternut squash gratin with Luzon Red

This was a dish that both gave us the chance to use some seasonal vegetables and our fancy mandolin slicer. One of the best things about getting legally married is that people will buy you all the wonderful kitchen tools that seemed too frivolous or occasional-use for you to buy for yourself before, and the mandoline was one of those. OK, I still manage to cut myself on it from time to time, but for making clean even slices its amazing.

So the dish requires a certain amount of prep, but it was actually very easy to assemble. The use of apples in a savory dish was a little disorienting, but ultimately tasty, very Celebration of Fall. We decided that next time we would do some caramelized onions along with the leeks, and possibly add another layer of squash. It's a very good side dish, but a little thin for a main dish on its own.

The Luzon we'd had once before when my dad's old friend Kevin and Bette brought it to our house for dinner. It's a really nice rich but light bodied Spanish red, somewhere between zinfandel and pinot noir in flavor. This picture really doesn't do justice to the gorgeous color of the wine: a dark, almost purple burgundy. Perfect for this sort of autumnal meal.

Black bean and sweet corn chili

The problem with the abundance of summer produce, is that you have to use it up quickly and thoroughly. Each week at the farmers' market there are things that are gorgeous and ripe that we pass by because we already have enough produce and can't figure out how we'd use it before it spoils. Also, each week there are things that we (ok, I) take home because I can't resist them, even though they're not part of a recipe that we've (ok, mostly Julie) selected. So, by way of compromise, we try and come up with dishes for the week that will use up some of the crazy amount of produce that we have before it goes bad.

So, in the interest of using up some of our many heirloom tomatoes from the garden at my Mom's house, the sweet corn in our freezer (we weren't eating that fast enough either), the first of the red bell peppers and habeneros we picked up that week, and in the general interests of deliciousness, we decided to make black bean and corn chili with cornbread.

It's a really basic dish. The spicing, in addition to the things I've mentioned and the standard onions and garlic, was mostly cumin with a little coriander seed and some ancho powder. The flavor was really good, even if the corn was almost overpoweringly sweet (making it almost candy like) and the skins of the beans turned tough for some reason.

Still a simple and hearty meal.

Peaches and Their Offspring

Remember when we got all those peaches from Colorado? They were sweet and delicious and dripping with peachy goodness. The problem with such seasonal bounty is that it goes quickly and once it's gone you can't do anything but mourn its loss, but if you try and draw things out too much you be left with rotten produce, and that makes no one happy. So...



















We had to find ways of preserving that seasonal peachy goodness, and, much as you might suspect, in addition to trying a couple of new desserts, we went with our old stand-bys: liqueur and tasty preserves.
























After a month of steeping, I strained, filtered and bottled the liqueur. It smells lovely and tastes promising. This left me with the question of what to do with the booze-soaked fruit (We couldn't possible just throw it away! That's precious fruit and even more precious alcohol!), and I went with the ever popular option of boozyfruit bundt cake.

The peaches don't come through super strongly in the cake above, but the taste was quite good. We're eating it here with a side of rose petal ice cream. My mom got a beautiful and productive rose bush this year and I was looking for a culinary use for rose petals. I modified the recipe slightly by cutting the number of egg yolks to two and adding one tsp of rose water and a couple drops of red food coloring. Julie hated the ice cream, saying that it tasted like eating perfume, and quickly pushed it off onto my plate. I quite liked it, though it was really too sweet. I'd cut the sugar to at least 2/3 of a cup (1/2 cup is standard for ice cream recipes this size). You have to embrace the idea of flowers for dessert, though, for it to work.

Miso soup

Miso is a wonder ingredient. I'm sure that it has health benefits of some kind (back when I was vegan I remember there being some notion that if you ate it by the spoonful there was a chance that it would help to stave off vitamin B-12 deficiancy). The real wonder of it, though, is that a couple of tablespoons of it can transform a normal tasty-but-watery vegetable soup into a rich savory experience. That it can do this without resorting to some sort of cream based trickery (and certainly without flesh/bone derived collagens) and thus being pretty much fat free, just makes it that much more impressive. I suspect this power is part of its awesome umaminess, or special powers of rich/savoryness. Yes, OK, it is high in sodium. What do you want? Complete virtue and complete pleasure?

Anyway, it's the perfect sort of meal for when you're feeling a bit under the weather (as both Julie and I were last week) and need something both calming and sustaining -- like chicken soup for the global cuisine vegetarian. Miso paste comes in a variety of different preparations, differentiated by color (white, red, and apparently black, though I don't think we get that last one in this country, and, less traditionally, yellow or brown) and sometimes by the grains that they are prepared from in combination with the soy beans, such as barley or rye. We used a mellow brown rice miso paste here. Just add two tablespoons miso to two quarts liquid (we used half water and half vegetable stock) and add three or four dried shiitakes. Bring the stock to a boil and then continue to simmer, stirring occaisionally as the miso is incoporated into the liquid. When the shiitakes are fully hydrated, remove them from the soup, cool them briefly in the freezer, remove any attached woody bits of stem and then slice them about 1/8" thick before returning them to the soup. Prepare your vegetables as you see fit, browning those that need browning first and adding others directly to the soup (here we browned the mushrooms, zucchini and eggplant, and added onion, green onion, garlic, chili, carrot, edamame and tofu directly). And thus, hooray! Delicious and nourishing soup!