The Dinner Files

Two things conspired to make me feel oh-so-nostalgic this past week. First, my best friend from high school called from Minneapolis to tell me that my brother was in the local paper. This did not surprise me. He is not regularly in the paper or anything, but he has the kind of job that one can imagine he might end up in the paper every now and again. No, she said. Third-grade Dave.

Our third grade teacher was looking for former students and the Star Tribune ran a story about her search that included (in the print edition only) a picture of my little brother – young enough so he still had his angelic blond curls (in the way of younger brothers he drove me crazy, sure, but he looked like an angel doing it) – and his best grade school buddy with our universally adored third grade teacher.

Of course this made me think of our neighborhood school and its mostly excellent teachers and walking on our own without adult supervision to and from school about half a mile everyday (well, the moms walked us on the first day of kindergarten, but after that they figured we had enough sense – and neighborhood kids  – to find our way back again). And yes, sometimes this walking took place through truly tremendous amounts of snow (check the snow records for the 70s – those snow levels were high!). And, as my neighbor friend pointed out when we reunited this summer, we had to go over a hill so it really was uphill both ways.

Then this weekend my little family of three snuggled into bed and watched Charlie Brown Christmas and I was back at St. Joan of Arc church in South Minneapolis during Christmas Eve mass or in our living room watching the same cartoon with my brother or walking home from a friend’s house in the dark of a December late afternoon looking into our neighbors’ windows to see their trees. In my mind’s eye, of course, there is a picturesque dusting of snow falling and it is so quiet that the snow crunches loudly beneath my snowboot-clad feet.

People not from there don’t tend to understand how a person can miss snow and cold, but this time of year – as the fog and drizzle of rain more or less set in here in San Francisco – I do. I have no doubt trying to bundle a kid up for months on end would make me nuts, and I’m happy to skip the endless rounds of cold and flu that circulate in the heated indoor air. I certainly don’t miss the toxic gray slush that forms in the streets or that dreary tail-end of the never-ending winter known as March and even April in Minnesota. But I do miss the way the sharp cold air can reach down into your lungs to check to see if you’re really breathing and mostly I crave the peaceful calm that descends on a household when everyone is home and safe and the snow starts coming down.

Charlie Brown Christmas captures so much of this. The kids skating endlessly, catching snow on their tongues, walking here and there as independent as can be – all really speaks to my own childhood (Charles Schultz was, after all, from St. Paul). And when Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas, that sounds about right, too. I was raised Catholic, but a 70s-style progressive Catholic. My mom wasn’t so into the whole “sin” thing and I remember a very intense debriefing after a Sunday school teacher had gone on and on about hell. Sure, Jesus was the son of god, that was always around and about, but what was played up to me was that he had some good ideas about how to be loving and kind to other people. Christmas was about “peace on earth and goodwill towards man,” just as Linus explains, it wasn’t a birthday party.

I’m going to spend the next few weeks creating a little peace on earth and goodwill towards man in my own world. I’ll be spending time with family and friends and seeing that my son enjoys that wonder of wonders – winter break when you’re seven – as much as possible. Then I’m taking off for a week without work or family on this thing called a vacation. I’m thinking that is going to be a fairly awesome way to usher in 2011.

See you back here in January. Check over at Local Foods this week, though – I’ll be posting the Christmas cookie recipes I worked on Sunday with the help of Very Cheery Cousin Katie. It was a bone-tiring day in the kitchen. That may be, however because we cooked up a few New Years cocktails, too.

Walnut buckwheat tea cakes

Swedish tea cakes were my favorite Christmas cookie (other than the rosettes my grandpa used to fry up) as a kid. Then I learned they were also Russian tea cakes and Mexican wedding cookies and Snowballs – everyone, it seems, would like to claim these as their own. I made these with walnuts, but pecans or hazelnuts (roasted and peeled), work, too. I used buckwheat flour because it has such a sandy texture when you bake with it, which is exactly what you want in these cookies. Plus, it gives the interior a cool dark color that contrasts so nicely with the snowy white powdered sugar on the outside. Use regular flour instead, if you like.

1 1/4 cup walnuts

3/4 cup butter

1 1/3 cups powdered sugar (confectioner’s sugar), divided

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 cup all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 300. Pulse walnuts in a food processor until finely minced. Transfer to a large bowl. Put butter and 1/3 cup of the powdered sugar in the food processor and whirl, stopping and scraping down as necessary, until butter and sugar are combined. Add vanilla and salt and whirl to combine. Add flours and pulse to combine. Turn the dough into the bowl with the walnuts and stir (or knead with your hands) to combine thoroughly.

Roll dough into bite-size (or two-bite-size) balls and place on a baking sheet about an inch apart. Bake until set, about 10 minutes. Let cool a few minutes and gently roll each cookie in the remaining powdered sugar. Set on a rack and let cool completely. Then gently toss each cookie in the powdered sugar a second time. It’s like painting a room – two thin coats are infinitely better than one thick one, which gets gloppy and doesn’t cover as well:

One thing about being a grown-up: it can be tricky to make new friends. Sure, I meet people that seem like I’d like to be friends with them, but finding the time to become friends is tough. Then there is staying in touch with old friends. People you’d love to talk to everyday. People who make you smile and feel good about the world and the way you go through it. People you truly love but to whom you only speak or see occasionally because everyone has not just jobs but careers and not just families but small children. Some days I feel very forlorn that so many people I love live far away and in any case we’re all so busy as evidenced by how infrequently I see dear friends who live within an hour (hey, even a five minute walk is too much to navigate much of the time!) of my house; on better days I feel extraordinarily lucky that I have so many people to miss.

On top of all this is the difficulty of finding couples with whom one can, if one is in a couple, be friends with as couples. My dashing husband and I definitely have an ample shared section of the Venn diagram of people we like. And yet… so many factors have to come together for it all to work.  The least of which may be the extent to which couples come in the very oddest combinations sometimes.

So when on Sunday night we had dinner at a couple friends’ house and were served scrumptious roast chicken and mushroom risotto and all the adults had a bit more wine than perhaps they should have while the children entertained themselves in other parts of the house, I was very happy I had spent the afternoon baking them a pie. It is a sad cliché, but it is true (and the reason why I have never ever wanted to work in or run a restaurant) that when I cook for you I am saying “I love you,” or at the very least I am saying “I think you are a lovely/funny/interesting person, I hope you enjoy this pie.”

Wait a second, you ask, back up. Why would it take all afternoon to bake a pie? Well, I didn’t get started until 2 because my son and I had spent the earlier part of the day with my Very Tall Cousin Sam being thwarted at every turn: it rained at the flea market and instead of leaving with a coffee table and a dining table and nightstands and a few chairs and a desk and vintage Christmas ornaments and “toys” we left with a coffee table and not one single other thing except a now-broken once-favorite umbrella, the Pixar show at the Oakland Museum was sold out, the tofu place wasn’t open.

So around 2 I donned my apron and started in on the walnut pie I had in my mind’s eye. The first walnut-laced crust was a disaster. It melted into a puddle of an overly buttery cake-like-but-not-delicious thing in the middle of the pie pan.

So I made a regular crust and what was essentially my world-famous pecan pie with walnuts and maple syrup in lieu of pecans and corn syrup. It wasn’t the pie I imagined but it was, by all accounts, fabulous. Best crust I have ever made. Ultra-flaky. I finally tried that trick where you use vodka instead of water. There simply isn’t as much water in 2 tablespoons of vodka as there is in 2 tablespoons of water, so there is less water to develop the gluten in the flour and take away from the flaky-tender potential inherent in flour and butter. The dough, however, is tender and delicate too, so it requires a kind hand when rolling out and getting into the pie pan.

May I suggest bringing it to people who make you smile?

Walnut pie

This is basically my pecan pie recipe. I love pecan pie but find most of them cloying. The bitterness of the walnuts tame the already not-too-sweet nature of this particular version. Plus I used maple syrup in place of the corn syrup, but I think we’ve established that I’m a bit maple-crazy these days.

2 1/2 cup walnuts

1 9-inch pie crust (buy one or make one – I used this pie crust recipe but left out the sugar and used vodka instead of water)

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup packed brown sugar (dark or light, either works)

1/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons whiskey of whatever sort – including bourbon – you prefer (optional but very tasty)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Lay walnuts on a baking sheet and bake until toasted, 5 to 10 minutes. Watch them very carefully. Walnuts go from toasted to burnt in a snap and this is a lot of walnuts. Let them cool. (Alternatively, you can toast them in a large frying pan over medium-high heat watching constantly and stirring frequently for 5 to 10 minutes.)

Roll crust and place it in a pie pan. Oil or butter the shiny side of a piece of foil and place it, oiled side down, on the pie crust. Fill with pie weights or dry beans. Bake 15 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and bake another 5 minutes. Let cool a bit.

While pie crust bakes, melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add the syrup, sugar, cream, and salt. Stir until the sugar completely dissolves. Take off the heat and let cool to at least a warm room temperature. Stir in cooled off walnuts. Pour into partially-baked pie crust, place pie pan on a baking sheet (to save your oven in case it bubbles over), and bake until the entire filling is bubbling vigorously – and that includes the very middle of the pie, about 40 minutes. Let cool until set (see above) before serving.

Be warned that this pie has some body to it. It’s basically caramel-coated nuts in a crust. It is not for the weak of jaw or the newly crowned teeth. If you want that gooey, soft style nut pie there are many recipe out there that use a lot more cream and a fair amount of corn syrup and even eggs. Those are not the nut pies for me. This one is good on its own and sheer perfection with whipped or ice cream.

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.

My weakness for a crunchy endive salad is, in my mind, legendary. My love of endive in general is well documented – I once put together a cracker jack food trivia team with the sole goal of winning a 6-pound box of endive for myself. All the other prizes – coffee and wine and gift certificates galore – I let the others divvy up as they saw fit. But the box of endive: that was all mine.

And then I made an Endive Walnut Salad, and it was good.

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.