The Dinner Files

My Uncle Denny may be best known both here and in my mind for his superlative smoked salmon, a fish he catches, cleans, and smokes himself. It is actually smoked, not cold-cured or salt-cured, but set in a smoke house filled with smoke from a hot fire, a process known as hot smoked to some, kippered to others, or, simply, smoked. Instead of transforming the salmon  into the silken slabs of gravlax, the smokes dried the fish a bit, highlighting the oils which remain free-flowing in even the coldest of waters and that make salmon so delicious, and makes it easy to flake into salty bites.

Yet it is from him that I first learned a) pumpkin pie need not come from a can, and b) you need not confine yourself to pumpkin when making what he calls “gourd pie.” It takes no discernible effort for me to picture him in the kitchen of their old house – the one with a giant hand-cranked coffee grinder built into the kitchen wall, with baskets and pan hanging over the counters, and a wood-burning stove in the living room – manning the blender on a Thanksgiving morning, whipping up a half dozen of his gourd pies to bring to the Thanksgiving potluck and soccer game while my cousin, who is now finishing up law school, pulled at my hand hoping I’d read the stack of picture books he’d assembled to him.

So when Denny and my Aunt Nancy as well as my parents were in town the weekend before my dad’s birthday, we had a little dinner to celebrate. I took extreme advantage of my guests and made a range of pies to fill in my Thanksgiving offerings over at Local Foods. Pumpkin pie, chile pumpkin pie (seriously, that bit of ground dried chile is awesome in pumpkin pie!), and a bourbon pecan pie (made with maple syrup) were all on offer. Following my fine uncle’s example, the pumpkin pies were made with freshly roasted winter squash, with something labelled a “red kabocha” at the market. It looked suspiciously like a red kuri pumpkin to me. Check out that gorgeous color.

Whether you roast your own squash to make your own pie or not, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving and hope you spend it with people who make you laugh and who slowly but surely, without too much fuss and without distracting from the animated conversation already in the works, pay you the ultimate compliment and finish all the pie.

(Still menu planning? Find a gaggle of my Thanksgiving desserts recipes over at Local Foods.)

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.

Did you have a happy Thanksgiving? Was the turkey moist? The pie flaky? The relatives well behaved?

We did not have the best Thanksgiving ever. That was last year. Last year I came down with pneumonia (pneumonia!) the weekend before Thanksgiving, causing us to cancel the festivities. My friend from high school who was scheduled to come for the weekend came anyway, figuring on keeping me company and/or helping with Ernie while I recuperated. The thing is, a few days into the anibiotics and steroids I was feeling much better. Not well enough to host Thanksgiving, but well enough to enjoy the company of my dashing husband and omnivorous son and the world’s best houseguest. I wasn’t up for cooking on Thanksgiving, so we got take out from our favorite Pakistani restaurant. The whole day was so fun and mellow that we declared it The Best Thanksgiving Ever. It was a fine example of extremely low expectations leading to great happiness.

But, as the saying goes, you can’t go home again. Since none of us care about turkey (well, my dashing husband adores it but, as previously mentioned, he is “trying” to be a vegetarian so torturing him with a turkey carcass to pick at for a few days seemed cruel). We were all tempted to just order the Pakistani food again, but my dashing husband inquired if there was some other way to celebrate Thanksgiving.

So I thought. And thought. I considered the time I would put into a traditional menu. I thought of what else I could make. What else I wanted to make. What I’d rather make. And then it came to me: manti.

Manti are teeny tiny Turkish dumplings filled with itsy bitsy morsels of lamb, baked, covered with broth and baked some more. They are then drizzled (or drenched, your choice) with garlicky yogurt, brown butter, some chopped mint, and a sprinkle of ground chile. They are crazy delicious and an unbelievable amount of work. So I spent a few hours on Wednesday afternoon mixing the filling, kneading and rolling out the dough, and folding the tiny things closed before arranging them in a pan. I made them based on a recipe from Saveur, which got it from Nevin Halici’s Turkish Cookbook. 

I started by making chicken stock. Since I make it in giant batches in a canning kettle, I removed the 4 cups I would need for the dumplings and simmered that with a stick of cinnamon and a dozen whole peppercorns for 30 minutes.

Next step was making the dough, essentially a basic pasta dough of 1 2/3 cups flour, 1 tsp. salt, 2 eggs, and 1/4 cup water. Mix this until it forms a dough, then knead it, using extra flour as necessary (between the humid San Francisco November weather and the simmering broth turning my kitchen into a light steam room, I used a fair amount), until when you pinch a bit of it it feels like your earlobe, 5 to 10 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest at least 30 minutes and up to an hour.

While that rests, mix the filling. Just a half pound of ground lamb, a finely chopped small onion, about 2 Tbsp. minced flat-leaf parsley, 3/4 tsp. kosher salt, and 3/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper. Since that probably won’t take a full half hour, you can also generously butter a large baking pan (at least 10.5 x 12 or two smaller pans; you may want to have a smaller pan ready for extra just in case). 

Divide the dough into four pieces, roll one piece into as much of a square as you can manage about 1/8-inch thick. Cut into 1-inch squares, removing any uneven edges. Top each square with about 1/8 tsp. of the lamb mixture. Yes, these amounts are insanely tiny. Any yet these are the amounts, trust me.

Pick up a lamb-topped square and fold two opposite corners towards the center and pinch them to seal them together. Pull the other two corners up to the center and seal them. These corners need be sealed in the center top, but the sides do not need to be completely sealed. Place the sealed dumpling in the buttered baking pan (they need to be in a single layer, but you can have them in there pretty tight just not squished) and repeat with remaining dumplings. Then repeat with remaining dough. At some point you will feel like you are losing your mind. Make sure you have the radio on or perhaps a good friend on speaker phone. Or just get all zen-like and enjoy the mindless, repetative task at hand.

When they are all done and in the pan you can cover and chill for up to a day (as I did), or just go ahead with the recipe. Heat the oven to 400. Bake manti until golden, about 30 minutes. Bring the 4 cups broth to a boil and pour into pan, cover pan with foil, and continue baking until most of the liquid is absorbed, about 25 minutes.

While they are baking, mince or seriously smash up 3 cloves of garlic and mix it with 1 cup thick or strained yogurt and salt that to taste. Melt about 4 Tbsp. butter and cook until it starts to brown. Chop about 1/4 cup of fresh mint leaves. 

Divide dumplings between 4 to 6 shallow bowls, top each serving with yogurt, brown butter, mint, and some ground chile. Tradition/authenticity calls for urfa chile flakes. I found a mixture of ground arbol and ground ancho and a bit of ground sumac was pretty tasty. Just some red chile flakes would work just dandy, too. 

For dessert we had this beautiful baklava. I’m not going to give you the recipe, though, because I wasn’t so thrilled with it. The word I’m looking for just may be “disppointed.” It sure was pretty though:

In short, we had a Turkish dinner instead of a Turkey dinner.