The Dinner Files

Yeah, I still have walnuts about. Five pounds is a lot of walnuts!

I’ve tried making winter pestos in the past – and I’ve tried them with walnuts. I’ve never been thrilled with the results. I realize not the error of my ways, though. I kept turning to arugula as my green, as my winter “basil.” I kept things a bit more simple and used flat-leaf parsley instead.

Score.

It will be delicious for the coming winter months – and its simplicity can serve as a perfect tonic to the insanity of the Thanksgiving feast you may have enjoyed.

Parsley walnut pesto

Parsley stays nice and green, no there is no need to blanch it.  Toss it with hot pasta or just smear it onto toast. It keeps well in the fridge for a few days and in the freezer for, I’m guessing, several months without trouble. If you plan to freeze it, I’d hold off on adding the cheese until you’re ready to use it.

1 1/2 cups walnuts

2 – 3 cloves garlic

Leaves from 2 bunches flat-leaf parsley

1/2 cup walnut oil

1 – 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice or cider vinegar

1/2 cup freshly grated aged pecorino cheese, plus more for serving

Salt to taste

In a large frying pan over medium high heat, toast walnuts, shaking the pan frequently until walnuts start to smell toasty good and take on a bit of color, 3 to 5 minutes. Take care not to let them darken too much in the pan – they will continue to toast up when you take them off the heat. Transfer to a plate or cutting board and let cool.

In a food processor or blender, pulse garlic until minced – scraping the sides down as needed. Add parsley leaves and pulse until reduced a bit. Add oil and lemon juice and whirl until fairly smooth.

Add walnuts and pulse until as smooth as you like (I prefer to have some chunks of walnut in there). Add cheese and pulse to combine. Taste and add salt as you like.

I never would have come up with this recipe if 1) some lovely walnut folks hadn’t sent me five pounds of fresh walnuts in the mail and 2) I hadn’t just gotten back from Quebec City.

I had walnuts to use and maple on the brain.

Walnut cake

While not health food, there isn’t much refined nonsense in this cake. It is part very moist nut torta and part cake-like date sticky pudding. Top is with whatever you want – ice cream, whipped cream, or, if you serve the cake warm, hard sauce or even maple hard sauce (see below). It would be a lovely change from all that Thanksgiving pie, you know?

1 1/2 cups walnuts

1 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

12 pitted fresh dates

1 egg

3/4 cup pure maple syrup

1/2 cup walnut oil

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325. Spray a 10-inch cake pan (spring form is nice here) with oil, line the bottom with parchment paper, and spray the paper with oil.  You can also rub the pan/paper with oil if you don’t like the spray stuff.

Spread walnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet. Roast in the oven until just starting to color, about 10 minutes but watch them carefully and take them out early rather than risk burning them. Seriously, walnuts will burn while you take a moment to blink your eyes. Let walnuts cool before going to the next step.

In a food processor, pulse the flour, walnuts, baking soda, and salt until walnuts are fairly well pulverized. Transfer to a large bowl.

Pulse dates, egg, maple syrup, walnut oil, vinegar, and vanilla in the food processor until dates are chopped. Whirl until the mixture is puréed. Pour into flour mixture and stir to just combine. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out almost clean – a few bits clinging to it are fine.

Let cake sit at least 10 minutes before you take it out of the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Maple hard sauce

Cream 1/2 cup butter and 1 1/4 cup powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add 1/4 cup maple syrup and 2 – 3 tablespoons whiskey or brandy. The addition of the liquid will make the lovely fluffiness you’ve made fall apart and separate and look a bit nasty. Keep beating it, it will all come together again, more or less. You can leave the maple syrup out for plain hard sauce (add another 1/4 cup sugar), or the whiskey/brandy out for just some maple-tinged yumminess that would also be good on a warm cake or, really, pretty much anything.

First you roast squash, then you mash it in a bowl, then you add salt to taste, then you melt some butter, then you add some warm spices (I used my homemade garam masala), then you pour the spiced butter on the squash, then you sprinkle on some extra fleur de del or other sea salt:

Then you dig in and reveal the layers:

It’s a gentle twist on classic mashed squash. Perhaps even gentle enough for your stick-in-the-mud family that insists on the same Thanksgiving menu every year. Or, perhaps your crew likes to play with the side dishes. In any case, I suggest giving this easy yumminess a whirl.

For a more complete recipe, check out Spiced Butter Squash.

She has been notified, the lucky lady, and the Sunset Cookbook will make its way to her “tiny kitchen” that “is already bursting at the seams.”

I know you’re going to ask: I got the hat in Paris many moons ago and I wear every and all summer long. Someday I would like to take a millinery class and figure out how to make and block a new one (it seems to just be ribbon sewn together in a very particular way). When I do I will make scads of them and sell them here. It really is a fabulous hat. You can form the brim to hang low or rise up to show your pretty face. You can squish it into a suitcase and it emerges happy as can be. It works well for drawings, too.

I’m really settling into my forties. I forget things like nobody’s business. It used to be a steel trap up there and – poof! ­ – seemingly overnight, if I don’t write it down, it ain’t gonna happen.

I know I should have poured this homemade coffee liqueur into pretty wee glasses and set them on a tray with a pretty cloth on the side and taken a picture. But I forgot to do it – never even added it to my to-do list – and now I’m traveling and away from home while posting this. So please, imagine that instead of the giant jug of dark brown tar above there is a lovely little shot of some small stemmed liqueur glasses with silver rims (I even have them, that’s the real killer – I could have taken the shot, it wasn’t all fantasy!) on a white ceramic tray. Hell, since I don’t have to actually do it, let’s throw some flowers in there too, shall we? Perhaps a teeny plate of broken chocolate pieces would be good. Isn’t that nice?

For years now I’ve made a “cranberry cordial” every holiday season to give as gifts and serve at parties (a bit of the cranberry cordial in a glass makes cheap champagne completely fabulous!). This year I decided to mix it up. Coffee liqueur. I had read about it. I had thought about it. I had a few extra high-quality vanilla beans lying around the house. I got to work.

I scraped the seeds from the vanilla pods, dissolved the espresso into the vodka, added a crazy amount of sugar, sealed the whole thing in a jar, and taped it shut with a note extolling passers-by not to open it until mid October. Then I hid the whole thing in the cupboard over the fridge and promptly forgot all about it.

I was up there last week and found this forgotten labor of love. I unsealed the container and took a whiff. Heavenly. Fragrant, sweet coffee with enough alcohol to let you know it would be fun.

I poured a bit in a glass and took a sip. It tasted like really very good kahlua. Of course it did. It is better than kahlua, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a fundamentally different product. I know a few kahlua applications that I think this finer product would enhance – pouring a shot over homemade ice cream is the first thing that comes to mind. I suppose I could also make the world’s finest white Russian… although who wants to drink white Russians anymore? I had a phase there in college when I drank them almost exclusively, which now seems terribly odd. I had one a few years ago to see if they were still good and they were but only barely and I certainly couldn’t imagine drinking more than one at a go.

Tell me, what would you do with this fine coffee liqueur?

Coffee vanilla bean liqueur

Scary dark, scary sweet, and scary delicious. The curing time – at least a few weeks – is key to the final quality of this liqueur. I tasted it right upon mixing and it utterly lacked the aromatic draw of the final product. Make a batch this weekend to have it well and ready in time for Christmas gifts or entertaining.

3 cups sugar

3/4 cup instant espresso (still dried powder, not made into espresso)

2 vanilla beans

3 cups vodka

Bring sugar and 2 cups water to a boil and stir to dissolve sugar. Add coffee and reduce heat to maintain a steady simmer. Cook, stirring to fully dissolve the espresso, for about 2 minutes. Remove from heat and transfer to a large glass jar or seal-able pitcher and let sit until more or less cool. Meanwhile, split vanilla beans open and se the back of a knife or a small spoon and scoop out the teeny tiny seeds (it seems more like a paste). Add seeds and pods to the coffee syrup. Pour in vodka. Seal and put it away for four to six weeks. Remove and discard vanilla pods.

Serve chilled on its own, in coffee, or over ice cream as a dessert.

The new Sunset Cookbook arrived with a serious thud on my doorstep. All 816 pages of it.

My friend and former boss, Margo True, and all my pals in the food department at Sunset slaved for ages putting this œuvre together. Most of it was pulled from the relatively recent Sunset archive, but I know they developed plenty of new material to fill in holes (bubble teas!), too. The pictures are drool-inducing. The recipes are fresh and simple and modern and lovely. And you can take them to the bank. The recipe testing system at Sunset is intense. Mediocre dishes don’t stand a chance. So-so results will not be borne. It is a cookbook anyone could turn to for basic dishes or new inspiration.

Yet, despite what a great book it is, I am giving my copy away.

As I’ve written before, I have a whole lot of cookbooks. This book is designed to be cooked from, to be turned to for Thanksgiving sides and Monday night suppers. It deserves a home where it will be well used, not sitting here on my shelf making the other books feel puny.

If you’d like to win a copy of the Sunset Cookbook, leave a comment below. I’ll hold the drawing and announce the winner on November 15. If the winner asks nicely I’ll even flag some particular favorites with post-its before shipping it off.

p.s. At the request of a good friend (Young Scallion, I haven’t forgotten!) I’ve started assembling links to my favorites of the Sunset recipes I worked on while on staff. It’s a big, in-process project, but at least I’ve started!