Just right
This has been an unusual start to fall. My mind should be full of warm thoughts of braising, stirring and roasting – at long last in this chilly weather. But all I can think about is my next bowl of salad.
Funny, isn’t it, how our bodies ask for nourishment? I had a summer of excess, plain and simple. Between vacation, work lunches, dinners out, family barbeques (and frequent stops for ice cream along the way) my mostly plant-based eating was replaced with butter free-flowing through my veins.
And so I keep eating salad. It’s surely not a concerted effort on my part. My head wants to braise leeks and roast sweet potatoes and stir gigantic pots of soup. But when I reach for the kale – with every intent of simmering it gently – it ends up in thin ribbons in the salad bowl. Stewed cranberries are made into a tangy vinaigrette. Apples never find their way into crumbles. My shopping basket teems with frilly heads of lettuce.
Which is how this salad came to be. It’s – I dare say – the perfect mid-fall meal. Sweet orange segments, creamy avocado and thinly sliced macintosh apples get lightly dressed in a salt-and-pepper lime vinaigrette. It’s hearty, refreshing, savoury-sweet and just right for lunch when soup seems depressing.
Mid-fall salad
(lunch for one)
People find the idea of supreming a piece of citrus fruit to be so daunting. Likely this is a reaction to the intimidating French name, because it’s a snap. The key tool is a really sharp knife (I’d say paring knife, but I actually I love my santoku for this job.) The left-over bits and baubles around the supremes can be used for juice, or even eaten as-is.
Ingredients
1/2 soft, ripe avocado, sliced
1 medium orange, supremed
1/2 macintosh apple, thinly sliced
juice of half a lime
sea salt, cracked pepper
Gently combine all ingredients except salt and pepper. Add seasonings a pinch at a time and taste, until desire level of sweet-salty contrast is reached.
Alice
I’m a glossy cookbook kind of gal. Partly because I’m the sort of cook who never follows recipes, and partly because I’m a five-year-old at heart who won’t give up her picture books. I see cookbooks as stories told through pretty photos, better still if said photos are interspersed with thoughtful prose and solid recipes, something Tessa Kiros does so very well.
Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food (2007, Clarkson Potter) was not a cookbook I ever intended to bring home, pictureless and manual-like it is, with only the occasional illustration. But it sat waiting at the library having been placed in queue at some point, probably after I was lured in by its calm buttercup exterior. It waited, wedged on my bookshelf between this and this - each infinitely more exciting with their photos and styling and stories.
On a lark, I picked up Waters one night before bed, winding down with some tea, and flipped haphazardly to the ‘Broth and Soup’ section. To be honest: I didn’t expect much at all. But a couple pages later, Alice had me with her simple instructive chapters and intelligently-crafted recipes. I finished off soups, flipped ahead to ‘Pasta and Polenta’ and ultimately just started from the beginning of her story.
I want to linger some on her recipes. They really are smart. After years of compulsive cookbook reading, I’ve become quite picky about what makes an excellent recipe. From ingredients to method, a good recipe is infused with its author, be it through quirky prose, a friendly tone, or neat precision. A good recipe doesn’t skimp on details, but it doesn’t read like a technical guide. It’s been tested until it’s perfect (seems obvious, but so many cookbooks publish these days with unrefined, half-formed recipes and methods). It tells a story. Waters does an especially wonderful job, helping the reader understand how and why ingredients work together to make good things.
When I spotted two bunches of delicate creamy-orange carrots at the market, Alice’s carrot soup came to mind. I’d long since returned the cookbook to the library, but I didn’t need a recipe: a quick meld of butter, carrots, onion, and salt would do. No homemade stock or fancy pots, just a knife, cutting board and autumn’s best carrots. Thirty minutes of methodical chopping and stirring later, I had a sweet-scented apartment and warm meal fit for a chilly night.
Carrot Soup
(adapted from Alice Waters, makes two dinner-size bowls)
This soup can be pureed to a velvety consistency, but there’s something special and simple about the whole carrot pieces, swimming in broth, sinking like silk under the teeth. The carrots really are the shining star here, so make sure they’re just-picked, with bright green tops and vibrant orange flesh.
Ingredients
4Tbsp unsalted butter
2 cooking onions, thinly sliced
6-8c fresh-as-can-be carrots, thinly sliced (it’s okay to leave the skin on if the carrots are tender and mild – taste one!)
6c vegetable broth (I use Whole Foods’ 365 Organic), warmed
sea or kosher salt to taste
optional mix-ins, to serve: chives, cilantro, Greek yogurt
In a heavy-bottom saucepan over medium-low heat, gently melt the butter. Add the sliced onions and cook until tender and translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the sliced carrots and season liberally with salt. Cook for about 5 minutes then add the vegetable broth. Increase heat to high and boil for a couple minutes, then reduce the heat to medium-low. Simmer for about 30 minutes. The carrots should be meltingly tender. Taste for salt and ladle into warmed bowls. (You may choose to puree the soup at this point for a more refined bowl.)
Serve with a crack of black pepper, or garnish with chives or cilantro or a dollop of Greek yogurt.
Transition
The air is brisk. Pumpkins start to arrive on grocery shelves and in market stalls. I pull tweed and sweaters from storage, at last. Everything is to love about fall. It’s dismal and rainy, yes – and the hours of sunshine through chilled air are few at best. But maybe it’s the student in me that sees autumn as a fresh slate, purging summer heat to make way for snow and new memories.
I’ve been thinking about transition a lot lately. Seasons encapsulate transition, I think. As much as I get dreamy-eyed about year-long sunshine or living somewhere more temperate, I need the seasons, so reliably ephemeral: summers marked by icy watermelon, fall’s cider, cocoa and chestnuts with the snow, and spring’s first asparagus.
Each season with its new bounty, some small cause for joy.
Come fall, I’m smitten for squash. It’s such a comforting, warming food and I love its versatility. Sweet or savoury, in a soup, roasted, stirred into oatmeal – it’s comforting and tastes like the season. And there’s something pleasantly humble about squashes: knobbly and imperfect, economical, best prepared simply.
When we recently gathered to celebrate my dear friend and a soon-to-be bride, I knew I’d bring something squash-filled along. And with Thanksgiving next weekend, pumpkin is everywhere. Tiny roasting ones, even tinier ones to display, and whole shelves lined with the pureed kind in cans … some tucked into my cart to share.
A botched streetcar ride, torrential downpour, subway interchange and short walk later, my pumpkin spice pastries arrived to the party miraculously intact, if a few minutes late. Imagine pumpkin pie rolled into a neat bundle of phyllo pastry: slightly spiced, crinkly under tooth, just sweet from brown sugar.
A dessert, I’d say, fit for transition.
Pumpkin spice pastries
(makes 10 large pieces)
A note on phyllo
Phyllo is one of those falsely intimidating doughs. But it’s actually very simple to work with. A few tips for using it successfully:
1) Cover it well with a damp dish towel as you work. This keeps it pliant and prevents cracking.
2) It’s forgiving! My Yia-Yia taught me how easy it is to patch pieces together and just keep folding. Once it’s baked, no one is the wiser that dough surgery was performed.
3) Brush the pastry with enough fat, be it butter or a neutral oil. This keeps it supple and flaky as it bakes.
A note on canned pumpkin
Don’t feel you have to laboriously roast, peel and puree pumpkin for a good filling. Pumpkins are sometimes unreliable with bitter flesh. Canned is usually good quality (I like E.D. Smith or Whole Foods’ 365 house brand). Look for 100% pureed pumpkin, and not varieties that have been mixed with other squash, and don’t mistake pure pumpkin for pre-sweetened pie filling.
Ingredients
2c pureed pumpkin
3/4c brown sugar
<2tsp pumpkin pie spice (mine is a combination of ground clove, ginger cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice)
1/4tsp fine sea salt
2 eggs, beaten
10 pieces phyllo pastry
1/4c melted butter (salted is okay)
additional cinnamon and brown sugar to sprinkle
1 cookie sheet, parchment paper, pastry brush
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
In a bowl, combine pumpkin, brown sugar, spices and salt. Gently incorporate the eggs. Cover and chill in fridge while you prepare your workstation for folding.
Melt the butter over low heat. Ensure your work-surface is very clean. Remove the phyllo from its packaging and unfold, covering with a damp dish towel. In a line, set the butter, pastry brush, cinnamon and a small bowl of brown sugar.
Remove the pumpkin mixture from the fridge. It will seem runny, but not to worry – it will set up nicely to a custard-like consistency once baked.
Brush one sheet of phyllo with butter and sprinkle lightly with cinnamon and brown sugar. Fold the sheet in half lengthwise. Dollop about 2Tbsp of filling at the bottom centre. Fold in the sides lengthwise and loosely roll the package upward until you have a cylinder, as you would with a cabbage roll or stuffed grape leaf. Place the pastry on cookie sheet. Repeat for remaining sheets of phyllo.
Before baking, brush pastries with butter and sprinkle with more cinnamon. Bake in a preheated oven for approx. 20-25 minutes, or until the pastry is puffed and golden. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Pickled
I love pickles. Pickled anything, really (okay, maybe not pickled eggs).
The word pickle immediately brings to my mind the fat and nubby cucumber model. And well enough. The familiar pickle is everywhere, so silent and unassuming alongside a stage-stealer. Heaped on burgers, speared next to a smoked-meat sandwich, alongside curries or as part of a relish tray. (Does anyone else say that? Relish tray? Or is it just my grandma?)
With due respect to the humble cucumber-pickle, so delicious and crisp and briny: there is so much more.
Lots of things are made that much lovelier pickled. Sweet peppers and capers and giardiniera, that blend of cauliflower, celery, pepper, carrot and onion ubiquitous at Italian weddings. Pickles are delicious and heady, with a potent waft and they pucker the cheeks. But not-so-usual pickle candidates, like spindly spring carrots and crunchy red grapes, become positively addictive with a vinegar varnish, scented with toasted cumin or coriander or peppercorns.
Usually, pickling amounts to a protracted kitchen experience, what with the cooking, sterilizing, jarring, sealing and cooling. Last week, armed with a gorgeous handful of ruby beets, I wanted pickles. Usually, I’d follow the model I ate often growing up in a Greek home – boiled and salted, packed with an inappropriate amount of garlic and white vinegar and left to sit until silken and delicious. But that night I wanted quick and simple pickles that wouldn’t leave my house reeking of boiled vinegar, ones that felt a little more like summer.
Which led to this raw number. Thinly sliced and covered just-so with toasty spices and a splosh of good red wine vinegar, they were ready in a snap. After a week in the fridge, these beets are all about contrast. At once crisp and pliant, warm from the ginger and allspice but cool on the tongue, sweet but punchy. Restrain long enough not to eat the whole jar in a go, standing at the sink, and they’re delicious in salads, alongside cooked fish, piled in sandwiches and atop croutons lightly smeared with some tart chevre.
This simple combination of vegetable + vinegar + spice + salt can be replicated for any sturdy, thinly sliced vegetable – carrots, green beans, cauliflower, onions. And I don’t know about you, but I need my pickle fix before late-summer’s bounty gives way to frost.
Raw pickled beets
(Makes two 500mL jars)
Ingredients
3 large beets
4Tbsp red wine vinegar
2 cloves
few allspice balls
large clove garlic
small knob ginger, about 1/2Tbsp (optional, for subtle heat)
1/2Tbsp kosher or sea salt
sage leaves, or other fresh herb (optional)
In a food processor, blend garlic, ginger and salt into a fine paste. Incorporate vinegar. Slice beets very thinly across (see photo) and pack into jars with cloves and allspice. Spoon pickling liquid overtop. Put on some summer tunes, and shake the heck out of those jars. (This tenderizes the vegetables and speeds up the pickling process.) Refrigerate. To keep the brine distributed, dance and shake whenever you feel compelled, preferably often.
These can be eaten straight-away, but are best after they rest for at least a few days, optimally a week. They keep for a couple weeks sealed tightly in the fridge.
Peach-ricotta pizza
Peaches. Amongst summer fruits, their season is one of the most fleeting. In and out of the market, it seems, within weeks. So, when I can, I snatch them up. Which is how, at the weekly Sick Kids’ Market, I came to acquire a 3L basket containing 19 beautiful cling-stone specimens.
Peaches are the worst offender on the dirty dozen list of fruits and vegetables for pesticide exposure. And it’s near-impossible to find organically grown peaches locally. That said, I’d rather buy delicious Ontario Peaches than organic mealy ones imported from half-way across the world. It’s helpful to ask questions. Most farmers will be honest as to whether they spray their crops and what kinds of pesticides they use. Many small local farms just aren’t certified for reasons of economy and scale, but use near-organic practices. These peaches weren’t organic, but they were grown locally and un-sprayed. That’s good enough for me.
Now: for a family, 19 peaches is small change: they’re eaten up within a few days. One gal can only eat so many peaches out of hand, though, and I knew exactly how I wanted to use some of these – in a peach-ricotta pizza. Sweet from the peaches, salty and creamy from the ricotta, with a chewy crust and lively cilantro topping, it was a perfect summer meal.
Peach-ricotta pizza with cilantro salsa verde
(makes one small rectangular pizza)
Ingredients
2 ripe peaches, thinly sliced
1/4c ricotta cheese
1 ball (approx. 300g) pizza dough*
olive oil to coat
coarse or sea salt & black pepper to taste
*you can make pizza dough from scratch, but on weeknights for simplicity and lack of mess, I pick up a ball from my local pizza place. It’s a couple dollars and makes the whole process much simpler.
Preheat your oven to its hottest setting: most home ovens max out at 550 degrees F. A pizza stone isn’t required, but if you have one, you’ll want to heat it as well. If you’re using a sheet pan, grease it lightly with olive oil.
Stretch the dough out to fit the pan. I make a rectangular pie about 10 inches long and 6 across. It doesn’t have to be perfect – dough is forgiving – keep stretching until the thickness is roughly even. Let the dough rest while you prep your other ingredients.
Stone the peaches and slice them thinly across lengthwise. Arrange them on the pizza dough and scoop blobs of ricotta over the peaches. Sprinkle liberally with salt and ground pepper (if desired).
Pop into the oven and bake for approximately 12 minutes, until the crust is golden and puffy. Slice and serve.
Cilantro salsa verde
(makes one 500mL jar)
This is totally optional – the pizza is great without it – but it really makes the pie summery, as the grassy notes contrast with the sweet peaches. And this is really a bastardized version of a proper salsa verde, just so the purists don’t come after me.
Ingredients
1 small bunch cilantro
3 Tbsp cold water
1/2tsp sea salt
3Tbsp of your best olive oil
In a blender or food processor, pulse the cilantro, salt and water until you have a sauce (the water is there to get the whole lot moving, use less if you can). Pour into a sterile jar and gently mix in the olive oil. Keep in the fridge for up to a week. Unused quantities can be frozen in an ice cube tray and defrosted as needed.
Other delicious uses: as a bread dip, sauce for white fish of all types, salad dressing, alongside mellow cheeses, stirred into mashed avocado … and pretty much anywhere else you would use cilantro.
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