What Did You Eat?

WHB: Butternut Squash Gratin With Persillade And Lamb Shanks

Recently my friend Nancy gave me a beautiful butternut squash, grown on a local organic farm.  Butternut squash, which is a fruit, is one of the power foods, full of fiber, vitamins, and beta-carotene.  But, all too often these good qualities are smothered in recipes calling for cream, butter and sugar.  This simple recipe contains the squash, garlic, parsley, a bit of flour, and olive oil.  It cooks slowly, forming a crispy crust, with juicy cubes of squash underneath.  Besides being healthy, this recipe lets the squash flavor shine through.  My husband and I both found it quite delicious. 

Served along side the squash were fork tender lamb shanks, made from Kevin's excellent recipe at Seriously Good.   

Linguine With Zucchini, Capers, Lemon, Pine Nuts, And Herbs

Ruth at Once Upon A Feast had a great idea--Presto Pasta Night. And I'm very glad she had this idea. I realized that I haven't fixed pasta in over a month. How did that happen?  Very odd, as we usually eat pasta at least once a week.  So, thank you very much Ruth, you got me back on the pasta track.  I'm sure there will be many others making lovely pasta recipes and you'll find their efforts in the Roundup at Ruth's site this Friday.

It's been cold and wet here, not cheerful at all. One thing that brightened my mood was this simple little centerpiece of speckled baby Iris bulbs.  I love these early spring flowers and have larger Iris plants in my yard, but they are weeks away from flowering. This little centerpiece is on a small breakfast table and it makes me smile each morning as I eat my oatmeal.  I offer it for Janelle's Centerpiece Of The Month at Talk Of Tomatoes which ends tomorrow for February!  There will be better and more artful centerpieces than mine there for your consideration.

The Iris on the left whispered to me this morning, "Spring is coming!" 

Note To Self: Use Cinnamon Carefully

I haven't said much about my two weeks eating vegan.   Except for a few things that drove me crazy, such as soy milk in my coffee and the absence of fish, it wasn't a bad experiment.   Oh yes, I also missed parmesan cheese on my pasta. Those seem like little things, but my discontent with them grew larger and larger each day.  I never could solve the Coffee Issue and daydreamed about sardines and tuna with increasing frequency as each day passed.  I came away from my two weeks of eating vegan with some good experiences. But, my first non-vegan meal of red snapper curry from a local restaurant, (Sophie's Thai Kitchen for all you Davisites), was heaven and underscored what I missed during that period.  I think it's best to go vegan gradually.

For some reason, I became obsessed with chickpeas during those two weeks.  I cooked huge pots of them, to have on hand for one particular recipe, a Deborah Madison tomato and chickpea pilaf. I craved it.  The recipe can be found in an article I wrote about eating vegan in Fit Fare.   Yesterday, I decided to make an entirely different type of chickpea recipe.  I had a lot of cooked chickpeas in the fridge that I needed to use or they would wind up in the garbage.  The resulting meal was spiced with cumin, coriander seed, turmeric, and heaps of garlic. It also called for cinnamon. Now here's some handy advice, mainly for myself. If the recipe calls for a large amount of cinnamon, keep in mind the quality of the cinnamon you use. In my case, it was Penzey's Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon, the best and strongest cinnamon you can buy.   I should have used much less than the recipe called for. Much less.  The dish didn't shout "cinnamon", it bellowed it. 

Sixty-Five Calories Per Serving

Easter is this weekend and that means gift baskets full of baked goods for my friends. I baked a lot of muffins and little cakes this week.  And there are still cookies and other high calorie foods to make.  Of course, I had to sample them when they came out of the oven.  Quality control, you know?   So, I appreciate having meals right now that are low in calories.  I saw a recipe for Yellow Squash Soup with Cumin and Salsa in The San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook that the authors swore was one of the most refreshing soups around, and has only 65 calories per serving.  Sounded good to me.   The soup was extremely easy to make and tasted very good, but it wasn't the most refreshing soup I've ever eaten.  Not even close.  But, it has only sixty-five calories..........

Spaghetti With Zucchini And Saffron

It doesn't happen very often, but there are times when I question the whole cooking thing. This happens when I'm very stressed or tired and that was the situation on Monday.  A dinner of shredded wheat seemed fine with me. But, then I thought of my new spices and herbs from Penzeys.  That revived my spirits a bit. But, I knew that any recipe I made had to be fast. Really fast.  Not one of those recipes labeled fast, but actually requiring fifteen minutes or more of chopping or shredding. Or stripping watercress leaves off their stems.    None of that.  And I wanted to use my new saffron.  The result was this fast (I swear) recipe of Spaghetti With Zucchini And Saffron.

Book club: sugar cookies and stuffed baby squash

Monday night I hosted my book club discussion of Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's and other short stories.  It's been years since I read Breakfast At Tiffany's and In Cold Blood.  I enjoyed reading those books immensely, but the passage of time had blurred my memory of his work.  So it was a pleasure to read his short stories and rediscover the way Capote tells a story. 

As the book club meeting was the night before Valentine's Day, I incorporated that into the food I served.  In particular, I made my first dipped sugar cookies. I know that's old hat to most people, but I've never been one to decorate my cookies beyond sprinkling some finishing sugar over them.  Armed with my Martha Stewart recipe for sugar cookies and my new Wilton decorating kit, I entered the fray.