coraa

Thank you to everyone who provided me with parsnip cooking suggestions! Last night I made a lovely soup of caramelized onions, apples, and parsnips, plus sage, cinnamon, coriander, white wine, water, and a bit of cream. It came out quite well, although a bit sweet; next time I'll add some lemon juice to balance it out.

An experiment, in the hopes of using up the stuff in the crisper in a timely fashion.

( Cut to spare the flist )

Food porn time!

I spent, oh... let's see: out of the past six weeks, I've been away from home for about four weeks. So I didn't do a lot of cooking and shopping in between, because it didn't seem worthwhile to buy a lot of food in order to watch it go bad while I was away.

Also, the last time the boy and I were at the liquor store was in preparation for the 2008 election night party, so it'd been a while.

So yesterday, we went to the liquor store. I now have enough kahlua and Irish cream to make legions of froofy coffee drinks, which is good, because we probably won't make it back to the liquor store until another year passes. ;)

And today, we went to the farmer's market! I am particularly pleased with the spoils of that quest.

In terms of meat, we got a chicken (which will be roasted for dinner), plus chicken feet and necks for stock; sweet Italian sausage (for a potato, sausage and onion fry-up sometime next week); and a keta salmon fillet, which I may glaze and grill or I may sous vide.

Veg was, of course, the largest haul: purple kale and curly green kale (one of which will be turned onto udon soup with kale); brussels sprouts (for warm shredded sprout salad); a mixed bag of root vegetables for braising or roasting (looks like a mix of carrots, potatoes, turnips, beets, and rutabagas); a huge bag of carrots; and a small bag of assorted mixed potatoes. Also, a bag each of dried chanterelle and lobster mushrooms, which I will combine with the fresh crimini mushrooms I have on hand to make a mushroom risotto.

We also got dried field peas (which I'm thinking of using in peas and rice, or possibly in soup); dried cranberry beans (definitely for beans and rice); and fresh wheat flour, by which I mean milled just last week. The wheat flour will be used to try to make a classic baguette, and I'm also using it to reboot my sourdough starter, which got a bit grim-looking after a few months of neglect.

Finally, a few treats: a gallon of Honeycrisp cider, a box of very gingery molasses-ginger caramels, a small round of camembert-style cheese.

Dinner tonight: roast chicken and vegetables, with an apple salad on the side. Tomorrow: vegetable-chicken soup with the leftover chicken, and fresh baguette. I'm also going to experiment with planning out a week's worth of meals, so we'll see how that goes.

Mmm. Now to clean the kitchen so I have room to put this all away....

Lamb chops sous vide, browned in butter, are a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

I love caramelized onions—onions that have been well-cooked, so the sulfurous harshness of raw onions is completely gone, replaced by a complex sweetness and a deep onion flavor and a hint of richness. But they're not easy to make. For a long time, I could only make caramelized onions in one of two ways: either cooking on very high heat and needing to stir them a lot (and still having them scorch half the time -- and scorched onions are not so tasty), or cooking on low heat, with no risk of burning but also an incredibly long, multi-hour cook time, and sometimes with the onion never quite cooking through anyway, so bits of it wind up not quite the right silky caramelized-onion texture.

Fortunately, Cooks Illustrated came to the rescue with an onion caramelizing method that has worked, faultlessly, every time, and without taking too long.

( Easy Caramelized Onions )

What to do with caramelized onions? All kinds of things. They're good on sandwiches and burgers, or as the base for soups, or to make sauces both thicker and more complex; they taste wonderful mixed into pilafs or risottos, or on pasta, or alongside meat dishes. They can add a rich, unctuous flavor to dishes without adding very much fat. I use them all over the place—now that I know how to reliably make them.

Parsnips with lemon-butter, warm German potato salad, and salmon mi-cuit. With pictures.

Also, a dose of personal nostalgia. ;)

( food neep beneath the cut )

(It's been feeling really weird to write these -- I've been so pleased with the sous vide, which makes me excited and I want to share it, but the only way I can really do that is to talk about how well the food has come out, which basically means squeeing about my own dishes. Which feels awkwardly self-congratulatory! But the sous vide supreme really is pretty darn awesome, and a lot of the amazing things -- like the super-juiciness of the meat dishes, and the way the flavors meld -- are more it than me.)

(More on sous vide, including an Interesting Link, and Science.)

( Cut to spare those who are bored by this )

Eggs, today.

( Cut to spare those who don't care. )

So I decided to go with the beets with balsamic and brown sugar, and the lamb.

( Details of how I cooked it all )

Three culinary lessons of the day:

* You can make good pesto out of practically any combination of nuts, greenery and cheese, plus olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. (Okay, I probably wouldn't recommend, e.g., pistachios, beet greens and chipotle cheddar, but nevertheless.) This one? Pecans, parsley, soft cheese from the farmer's market. Mmm. (It's going over pre-prepared butternut squash ravioli.)

* Golden beets are a godsend. They may not have quite as assertively beet-y a taste as regular red beets, but they also don't make me look like I just survived a knife fight.

* Beets and apples roasting in the oven smell awesome.