I'm really thrilled that one of my recipes was selected by food52 to be a finalist in their current contest!  This is my smoked trout pate, which I have shared on the blog before, and it's as easy as can be to make and surprisingly delicious to eat.  I often make this for large gatherings for these reasons.  I like to serve it with thinly sliced baguette, but little packaged toasts and mild crackers are good too.

I'd love if you checked out the contest and voted!!  There are lots of great recipes on the site if you've never been before and many great hors d'oeuvres to choose from!

I'm hoping this link below will take you right to the voting page, but do take a moment to explore.

http://food52.com/contests/349-your-best-hors-d-oeuvre

Vegetarian Chili with a Little Something Extra

The other night I made my usual chili (without the corn), but did my little two pot dance wherein I produce an omnivorous dish and its vegetarian counterpart, side by side, on the same stove, at the same time!  I feel like I should add "with two hands tied behind my back,"  but that would not be true.

I browned some ground chicken thigh meat in a skillet and started my chili in a Dutch oven.  Once I had added everything except the meat (and vinegar, which is almost a garnish, added at the very end), I pulled out a smaller pot and ladled about one-third of the chili into it.  I then put the chicken into the mix in the bigger pot and added a little already cooked and frozen quinoa into Maddy's vegetarian version.  The spirit had moved me earlier in Mom's to buy some frozen butternut squash, an item I have never before purchased, and I added that to the pots proportionally, as well.  I let them simmer a little more just to let the chicken incorporate and the butternut squash thaw and warm.  Too long and the squash would just puree.

I feel certain that this sounds much more complicated than it is!  If you too have a mixed family, give it a whirl.

I made this again with ground turkey and decided that the combination of turkey and butternut squash is a perfect fall nod to Thanksgiving.  This is also the recipe that won in the Greater DC Whole Foods Market cooking contest for best chili.  You can link to the full recipe here!

Thanksgiving Post Mortem or What to Keep for Next Time

How is it possible that we have no photos from Thanksgiving?  No photos of food preparation, no photos of finished dishes, no photos of GORGEOUS dry brined and maple glazed turkey, and no photos of happy friends and family spending time together and feasting semi-healthfully.  Might be in part due the theft of Maddy's camera, but still, we all have iPhones!

I planned a vegetable heavy meal, with every dish vegetarian, except for the turkey.  We did not make any weird, faux turkey vegetarian product.  Maddy never liked turkey, anyway, and doesn't miss it.

This was the menu:

Hors D'oeuvres: cheeses, carrot sticks, olives and Marcona almonds, mini sweet potato latkes with both cranberry-apple and Fuji applesauces in a nod to Thanksgivukkah, smoked salmon canapés on cucumber slices with a (very) small dollop of creme fraiche and a little dill.

Seated dinner for 18: I thought the hors d'oeuvres selection was heavy enough that I opted to skip an appetizer course at the table.  That way we saved one plate which reduced dishwashing and meant we could dig right into the main event.  We had turkey, challah stuffing, green beans roasted with fennel and shallot, butternut squash and parsnip puree, cranberry sauce, roasted brussels sprouts, salad (thank you Karen), and store bought rolls.

For dessert, we had Paula's delicious brownies and sugar cookies, fresh fruit salad (thanks Wendy) and a crumb top apple pie from Jennycakes in Kensington.  The piece de resistance, though, was Maddy's vegan pumpkin pie.  Her crust was ground speculoos cookie with coconut oil and was stunning.

Fall Musings

                                                                                              Photo: Jan Pappalardo  


This has been an unusual fall in many ways.  We've had a few cold days here in the DC area, but not consistently.  Last Saturday morning we woke up in nearby West Virginia to a very brisk 28 degrees.  Nonetheless, we explored Charles Town and shopped at their small, but wonderfully stocked farmer's market, enjoying some warming and free (!) coffee from a local roaster, gathering supplies for an impromptu picnic of cheese, bread, guacamole and chips, and happening upon the most delicious thin green beans of which I bought enough for a dinner during the week as well as some to blanch and individually quick freeze.

On Sunday, when we returned, I quickly started cooking and made the hummus from the cookbook Jerusalem as well as some pumpkin bread, using my basic banana oat bread recipe, substituting pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spice for the banana and cinnamon.  I also added a splash of maple syrup.  I kept the oven going for a while, roasting some eggplant to eat with the hummus.  The warm oven gently reheated the chilly house, and we drank tea and relaxed and I started planning some pureed butternut squash soup that never did materialize.  Or rather, I ran out of steam in the late afternoon and never made the soup.

By mid week, however, thoughts of soup couldn't have been further from my mind as the weather warmed up again to the mid sixties, with an overlay of warm, humid air reminiscent of late spring and not at all evocative of November, even in DC.  Halloween eve, itself, was warm and a little rainy, which I don't remember happening for years.  Earlier that day, I had just noticed the array of colors finally painted across the tree tops while walking in the park.  Yellow, orange, rust, red, and the merlot color of some of the maples.  

As I was leaving the house the next morning in the pouring rain, I noticed that the deluge had washed most of the leaves on the street under Maddy's car and covered the drainage sluice along the curb, stopping up the rain water rushing down the hill, and cascading a wall of water about three feet high over the tail end of her car and onto the sidewalk.  Although I was already late for an appointment, I felt compelled to redirect the flow.  So, in my raincoat with hood on (at least the hood on looks better.  Maddy says that I look like a turtle with the hood hanging down my back), armed with an ancient wooden handled golf club that Teddy bought at the Next to New Sale for $1 and that we inexplicably leave in the umbrella stand by the front door, I went out and scooped and "chipped" the leaves out of the way of the drainage area.  Once I had the water flowing steadily down the street, I then tried to clear beneath the back of the car just a little, until I realized that Maddy was still asleep in bed and was probably not going anywhere in the car for hours.  

Yesterday, we were lucky enough to be invited out to Sycamore Island for some canoeing on the Potomac in the late afternoon, on what we figured might be the last warm day.  It turned a little windy, but the colors and the light as the sun dropped were breathtaking.  Paul and I have a little work to do on rowing in the same boat, but we did pretty well once we got out of the shallow, rocky area.  I did not grow up with canoes, as Paul did, and my more recent, limited experience on the water has been in single person kayaks where there is no need to communicate with anyone else to maneuver.  

And now, as I write this at the new 8 am after changing the clocks, I feel a chill in my toes and nose and I can tell that the weather has changed again.  Maybe tonight I will make that butternut squash soup.   

Pomegranate and Feta Tabbouleh Style Salad

Maddy and I joined the crowd at Sixth and I earlier this week to see Yottam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, authors of the cookbooks Jerusalem and Ottolenghi, and co-owners of the Ottolenghi shops in London.  This was a stop on their book tour sponsored by Politics and Prose.  They've just released the American version of Ottolenghi (which was originally released in the UK), although it was actually their first book and predates even Ottolenghi's own book Plenty, which is a compilation of vegetarian recipes culled from his column for the Guardian newspaper.

I wrote about them here, and included a link to the recipe for their fabulous beet puree from Jerusalem.

And so, continuing on my Middle-Eastern kick, I recently prepared this feta and pomegranate "tabbouleh" salad. I've been making this for several years and pulled it off of a sweet, small-ish blog called What's for Lunch, Dot.  I haven't adapted it as it's great as is, and recommend that you give it a try right now while pomegranates are in the stores.

I seed the pomegranate by breaking it apart in a bowl of water in the sink, and pulling out the seeds or arils from each section into the water.  Once you've emptied the pomegranate of its arils, you'll be left with just the skin and some pith to compost or otherwise dispose of.  The arils themselves will sink to the bottom of the water filled bowl and the stray bits of yellow pith will float so you can discard them.  I  then pick through and get rid of the little white arils keeping only the wine red, plump ones.

Also, to my family's taste, I cut back a little on the parsley and use a milder feta - one that is not too, too strong or salty.   Those marked "Israeli" feta often fit the bill if you'd like to do the same.