The Dinner Files

I was craving some chiles rellenos. Then I read this lovely post at Rachel Eats about walnuts, and her walnut pesto looked so yummy that the neurons started firing. Then I remembered that there is a traditional chile rellenos dish that uses a walnut cream sauce. After a bit of research I realized I did not want to make that dish, at least not any vaguely authentic version of it. I don’t much care for peaches in my meat.

So I MacGyvered my own version. They were fabulous and I will never make them again, at least not until someone tells me a trick for skinning walnuts that actually works (um, that baking soda thing? sure, it loosened the skins, but it turned the nuts dark and the skins weren’t all that much easier to deal with). I ended up picking the skin out of all those grooves like a crazy person. My self-diagnosed OCD doesn’t need that kind of aggravation.

Chiles rellenos in walnut cream sauce

1 1/2 cups walnut halves

1 cup cream

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

12 large mild green chiles

1 tablespoon vegetable oil or lard

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 pound ground beef

1/4 cup currants or chopped raisins

1/4 cup pitted black olives, minced

1/2 cup sliced almonds

Pomegranate seeds or chopped red onion for garnish

Put walnuts in a medium bowl and cover with boiling water and let sit a few minutes. Drain. Return walnuts to the bowl and cover with boiling water, again letting it sit for a few minutes. Drain walnuts and spread on a kitchen towel. Settle in with a long radio program or a good chat and pick off the skins from the walnuts.

Put the skinned walnuts in a medium bowl and cover them with the cream. Let soak for a few hours or overnight (chill). Whirl in a blender with milk and 1 teaspoon salt. Set aside.

Roast and peel chiles (if this process is new to you check out this guide). Once cool, make a slit along the side of each chile and pull out and discard the seeds. Set chiles aside.

In a frying pan over medium-high, heat oil or lard and add onion. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and cook, stirring, another minute.

Add beef and cook, stirring and breaking up the meat as you go, until well browned and cooked through. Add currants and olives. Cover, reduce heat to a maintain a simmer and cook about 5 minutes. Drain off any excess fat and stir in almonds. Add salt to taste.

Heat oven to 350. Let stuffing sit until cool enough to handle. Stuff each chile with the beef mixture. Lay chiles in a baking pan, cover loosely with foil, and bake until hot through, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, put walnut cream in a small saucepan and warm over medium low heat.

Serve chiles napped with walnut cream sauce and garnish with pomegranate seeds (traditional and would be amazing, but we had none) or the sad-sack but very tasty purple of the chopped red onion.

You will likely have extra walnut cream sauce. It is delicious spread on toast or tossed with a small bowl of pasta for lunch.

Last night my world fell apart. And thus so too did dinner. Just a bit.

My Very Tall Cousin’s Norwegian girlfriend had been home over Christmas and made lefse from scratch with her stepmother. Lefse, in Norway, is a traditional food and made, she said, really mainly at Christmas time. Most people buy theirs – often from old ladies who make them at home – but her stepmother thought she’d try it and was amazed as how easy (just time consuming) it was. She came back full of will to make lefse – and to teach me how to make it.

So on Sunday she and My Very Tall Cousin showed up, with lefse ingredients in hand. They came upstairs and she unpacked the ingredients on the kitchen counter: flour, milk, butter, and sugar.

Where are the potatoes? I asked.

What potatoes? she responded.

Isn’t lefse a potato bread?

(And here all you Minnesotans will want to hang onto your hats because your minds are about to be blown.)

No, lefse is just plain and you fill it with butter and sugar.

I thought it was a flat potato bread.

No, that’s potato lefse. Just lefse is plain, with butter and sugar.

And, according to Wikipedia, she is right about the food of her country. According to the stack of English-language Scandinavian cookbooks on my shelf, she is on crack. But these books were all written by Americans for Americans. In Minnesota you can buy lefse at plenty of grocery stores. It is always potato lefse. Always. I had literally never heard of lefse being anything else until last night.

Forge ahead. The dough is very cool – just 2 cups scalded milk, 1 stick melted butter, and 2.2 pounds of flour beaten until it holds together in a shiny mass. It’s soft and pliable but holds together and doesn’t stick.

Then came the extensive rolling –

The rolling actually takes both time and a fair amount of effort because you want it paper-thin. Really, what you want is to get it read-through thin –

Getting each lefse this thin is, as you might imagine, a total pain in the ass. The best combination for this feat was the much-used (and thus constantly well-oiled and seasoned) cutting board and the rolling pin with actual handles. Rolling on the almost-never-used-for-direct-food-contact side of the kitchen cart with the handle-less French-y style rolling pin was not so much fun. In a way, it’s easy to roll out. It has the consistency of playdough and doesn’t stick much, but it has a tendency to bunch up and fold onto itself if you’re not paying attention or you’re using the above-mentioned poor combination of location and pin. We all took turns, and drank beer or wine (or, in Ernest’s case, a rare treat of ginger ale), and made a good time of it as we rolled, cooked the lefse on a pancake griddle instead of an authentic lefse grill, and – and I believe this is quite different than with potato lefse – layered the lefses ain between damp kitchen towels to soften them. Once properly pliant, they were spread with a butter-sugar mixture, folded, and stacked – ready to freeze as you see at the top of this post.

Then it was time for dinner. I had defrosted a top sirloin roast from my meat CSA, salted and peppered it and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Then I just roasted it at 450 until a meat thermometer read 135, let it rest so the temp would go up to 145, sliced it and served with butter braised cabbage and celery salad. And no potato lefse.

The problem was that none of the three thermometers in my kitchen drawers were registering any temperatures at all – but I didn’t realize that for awhile, what with all the lefse rolling business at hand. The meat all got cooked to medium well, which was a shame. Luckily, I had made a horseradish whipped cream (whip some heavy cream until it thickens and soft peaks form, stir in freshly grated horseradish and salt to taste). It was delicious. Beyond delicious, actually. And, as My Very Tall Cousin pointed out, it was like putting Cool Whip on meat. In a good way.

After letting the cream melt like butter onto the steak, and enjoying the horseradish tang on the deeply savory and seasoned meat, we headed back to the kitchen, for more spreading and folding and to eat our fill of lefse. Or, as my dashing husband dubbed it, “sugar bread.”

Like any good San Franciscan, I know how to layer. I’ve lived here so long that I’ve become constitutionally incapable of leaving the house without a sweater, which, when I’m here is a good practice. When I’m in, say, Minnesota in August, however, it seems a wee bit pathological. As I type this I’m wearing a long-underwear-grade insulated silk camisole, a t-shirt, a wool/silk lighter weight sweater, and a big cozy cardigan along with wool tights layered with socks under a skirt that itself is multi-layered.

For Christmas a good friend sent me Terrine, by Stéphane Reynaud. In general the cookbooks are no longer such great gifts for me. I have a lot of them and they are part of “work.” As much as I like my work, it still occupies the work part of my brain and not so much the “fun gift” part. I’d like fewer cookbooks, in fact. I’m constantly culling the collection, trying to keep it manageable and in some small way useful. But friends write them and I’m happy to get those, and then publishers send them to me all the time for one reason or another, and the stacks re-form despite my best efforts. So when I opened the present and saw a cookbook I was, at best, underwhelmed. I mean, really, how many patés is a girl ever going to make? Especially with a dashing husband who is quasi-vegetarian?

Then I started paging through it. Oh. My. God. This book is beautiful and inspiring and makes me want to layer everything. Everything. Fish, vegetables, cheese, meats, sweets – everything.

So when friends were in town for the weekend and I had a good excuse to cook too much food, I layered like a crazy person. A terrine starter, then pizza because an all-terrine meal would be weird and my pizza is so good, and then the chestnut meringue “terrine” pictured above.

Of course, the chestnut meringue is not really a terrine. It’s just a layered dessert. It is also the best dessert I’ve ever made. I used the recipe in Terrine as a jumping off point, but cut down on the sugar in the meringues, added vanilla to the whipped cream to great effect, and fixed the messed up not-tested metric-to-American measurements.

Chestnut meringue “terrine”

I’m a lucky girl whose neighborhood market carries this delicious vanilla-ed Clement Faugier chestnut spread. That link will let you buy some if you are not quite so lucky.

4 egg whites

tiny pinch of salt

1 cup powdered sugar

1 cup heavy cream

1/2 vanilla bean, slit lengthwise

1/4 cup granulated sugar

About 1 cup chestnut spread

Preheat oven to 200. Prepare two or three large baking sheets by lining them with either silpats or parchment paper.

Whip egg whites until frothy. Add the pinch of salt, beat until they hold stiff peaks (you should be able to lift the beater or whisk out of the egg whites, turn it upside down, and the peak of egg white that clings to the beater or whisk should hold its position). Sift the powdered sugar onto the egg whites and use a flexible rubber or silicone spatula to gently fold the sugar into the egg whites. Deflate the egg whites as little as possible.

You can get fancy and use a pastry bag to pipe out the meringue onto the baking sheets, but that seems messy and silly to me (they get covered with whipped cream later anyway). I diviied out the mixture into three piles on the baking sheets and then used a spatula to form circles, each about 8 inches across. Bake 2 hours without opening the door or bothering them in anyway. Turn off the oven and let them cool in the cooling-off oven (this seems to help keeps the meringues from cracking as they cool.

Meanwhile, you can prepare the cream. Put the cream, vanilla bean, and granulated sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stir to dissolve the sugar into the cream. Take off the heat and let cool to room temperature. Use a small spoon to scrape the vanilla bean flesh into the cream and discard the pod. Transfer cream to a medium bowl, cover, and chill until ready to use.

When ready to serve, whip cream until soft peaks form so you can dollop and spread it easily. Remove meringues from baking sheets. Place one meringue on a serving plate, spread with one-third of the chestnut spread and layer on one-third of the whipped cream. Repeat with all three layers. Bring to the table and accept your oohs and ahhs. Then destroy your creation by cutting it into slices. I found this serves 6 just right. You could stretch it to 8 but people might feel like they didn’t quite get enough. You could divide it among 4 for sugar hogs, no problem.

More adventurous, finicky bakers could always make smaller meringue rounds to create individual servings, which would undoubtedly be much prettier.

If you’re invited to my house for dinner anytime soon, consider yourself warned: come prepared for layers.

I’ve got the blue pumpkins blues. See the pretty blue pumpkin? See how it almost glows in the dull light of my kitchen? Now, I know that the inside of blue pumpkins isn’t also blue. I know the inside of blue pumpkins is just as bright orange and non-blue as any other pumpkin, but the naive child inside me is always a wee bit disappointed when I cut in and see no blue, no deep purple, no shimmery gray. Take heart, though, I cheer up almost immediately because that orange has a magical power all its own.

So I cut the top off the blue pumpkin, much as one would for a jack o’lantern, had my weird let down at the sight of orange winter squash flesh, scooped out the fat pumpkin seeds (again, as for a jack o’lantern), put about 6 oz. of fresh shiitakes (trimmed and halved) inside, sprinkled them with 1/2 oz. porcini that I’d soaked in hot water for 15 minutes and then chopped up, added a pinch of salt and some generous grinds of black pepper, and then drizzled on about a 1/3 of a cup of cream.

That all got popped in a 375 oven until the squash was tender and everything was bubbling and yummy looking, which took about an hour. It all seems a bit soupy because the mushrooms have let off their liquid into the cream:

It is quite tasty just like that, no doubt. But, if you can control yourself and not eat it while it sits (covered with foil to keep it warm) for 20 or 30 minutes, the cream and mushroom liquid gets all soaked up by the squash and the mushrooms and something magical happens:

You get this creamy, sweet, floury, earthy, savory delight. I liked mine with a poached egg and a bit of spinach salad. A great shared side dish – with everyone scooping their share from the baked gourd at the table – for Thanksgiving, no doubt. Also, in a smaller, individual, acorn squash (or similar sized) halves? I’m thinking that is a pretty sweet vegetarian main dish for the annual feast.

Let’s face it: cream is a magical thing. We don’t eat much of it at our house because, well, we’re coastal elites concerned about our health and fitness and cream is “bad.” But, of course, cream isn’t bad at all. Too much cream is a bad idea, but a bit of cream used strategically here and there is a wonderful, satisfying, smile-making thing. It is, after all, creamy and has the power to make other things creamy. What is creamy? Creamy is smooth and mouth-coating. Creamy – with the fat necessarily associated with it – literally highlights other flavors by very effectively “carrying” them around your mouth.

Last night I used the last half-cup of cream that was sitting in the fridge from the creamy turnip soup a few posts down, whisked a bit of coarse-grain mustard into it, and poured it over a potato and cabbage casserole/gratin thing I was whipping up and created something fabulous. It was so much more than the sum of its parts. I credit the cream.