Pasta Salad with Fish

Antonio Carluccio Cooks Pasta
Antonio Carluccio
BBC Books (1999)
ISBN 0563384557

After enjoying some of Carluccio's TV shows years ago, I found this book on sale. It's a companion book to a series I've never seen, and somehow hasn't gotten used much. But I've delved into it a couple of times lately, with good results.

Tonight's dinner was Pasta Salad with Fish, which is a lovely summer main course but could also be a starter or part of a summer buffet. It's very easy to make, and I'm sure you could use any bits of leftover seafood you have around. For the fish bits, the recipe calls for anchovies (I chopped them pretty fine, rather than leaving chunks, since we're not really anchovy fans here), strips of squid, smoked salmon, and small, cooked prawns/shrimp. A sauce is made from olive oil, lemon juice, sald and freshly ground black pepper, fresh chives, and fresh dill. The pasta is cooked, drained and cooled. Everything is tossed together and there it is. Simple and tasty.

A small problem, if this is a problem, with using cascareccia rather than the farfalle or conchiglie suggested, is that the squid strips look an awful lot like the pasta. This doesn't, however, affect the flavor.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Steamed Summer Squash Vinaigrette

Too Many Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, and Other Good Things
Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers
Harper&Row Publishers (1976)
ISBN 0060907657

Too Many Tomatoes is probably one of the first cookbooks I ever bought, a book for using up your garden surplus. The recipes are maybe a bit old-fashioned, US cooking from the 50s and 60s, but still useful. I've used it a lot over the years, and even bought a second copy when we were moving back and forth between houses. My main copy is held together by a fat rubberband. For one reason or another, it's been languishing on its shelf for a while now. With a box of organic courgettes in the fridge, I gave it a look and found this winner or a side dish.

This is about as easy a dish as you can make. Start by slicing your zucchinis thin; because I know that European courgettes are a bit larger than a typical American zucchini, I cut mine lengthwise before slicing. Steam the slices. When they're fork tender, a bit crispy still, drain them and cool them by dunking in ice water or rinsing under lots of cold water. Drain them well and pop them in the fridge till you're ready to serve. Mix up a plain vinaigrette of olive oil, red wine vinegar, a good dash of Dijon mustard (the recipe called for proportionally more mustard than I usually use for a salad vinaigrette), salt, pepper, and maybe a chopped up shallot. Just before serving,  toss the chilled slices with the vinaigrette. Easy to make and much enjoyed by my husband's who's not known as a zucchini fan.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Chicken Salad with Yogurt

Cool & Fresh
Culinary Notebooks series
McRae Publishing Ltd (2011)
ISBN 9788860983312 

This book is brand-new to me, a gift from a friend, who said it's full of tasty salads. It's not available at Amazon (don't they have all books?), so she sent me a copy instead. And, indeed, it seems to be full of lots of appealing dinner salads.

Our weather turned unexpectedly very hot today, and I didn't feel like standing around to make pasta in the sticky heat, so I grabbed this book to see what what could be conjured up from ingredients on hand. On the perpetual use-up-the-oldest-stuff-in-the freezer quest, I defrosted some roast chicken meat rather than skinless, boneless, chicken breast halves. Instead of marinating and grilling the raw meat, I just cut up the cooked meat and let that sit in the marinade (olive oil, lime juice, and S&P). While that's sitting, I whisked up the dressing of mayo, yogurt, more lime juice, and a dab of honey. The recipe called for wedges of iceberg lettuce on the plate, but I used a sack of mixed greens instead. Top the greens with thin strips of lengthwise-cut cucumber and the chicken, then drizzle with the dressing.

All-in-all a nice summery salad, fast and pretty tasty. It's perfect for using up leftovers, although I'm sure freshly grilled chicken would be great. I think I might add a pinch of cayenne or a drop or two of Tabasco to the dressing, just to give it that bit of zing.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays. 

Tandoori Halibut and Alu Dum (Smothered Potatoes)

The Bombay Cafe Neela Paniz Ten Speed Press (1998) ISBN 0898159350
Indian Cookery Dharamijt Singh Penguin (1971) pre-ISBN

It's two-for-the-price-of-on for this dinner.

Shopping today meant it was fish night, and to head the meal I picked up The Bombay Cafe, a book that's fairly new to me, although it's been around for a while. It came well-recommended, but somehow has never really caught my fancy.

For one of the sides, I choose a dish from Indian Cookery, which is another quite new-to-me, if secondhand, book, one that I've not used before. It's rather old-fashioned, but probably represents Indian food as prepared in the UK before it became trendy elsewhere.

There was no halibut to be found at the shop, so I used a chunk of cod, cut into two pieces, for the fish. The recipe is simple as can be. The fish is first marinated in a blended mixture of yogurt, fresh ginger, garam masala, ground coriander, cayenne, turmeric, and vegetable oil. (It didn't seem to me that the oil added anything to the flavor or process, so I think I'll leave that out next time.) After 20 minutes or so marinating, the fish is grilled or broiled. That's all there is to it.

The potatoes were prepared in what was to me a new way of doing Indian-style potatoes. They are first boiled until about three-quarters done, then pricked with a fork and rubbed with a paste made of yogurt, turmeric, garam masala, and salt. Bay leaves are cooked in butter (I used ghee), dried chilies added, then a pinch of sugar. Finally the potatoes are stirred in along with minced parsley (I used cilantro, expecting that the parlsley was a 70s substitute for the real thing). The pan is covered, then put in a moderate oven for 25 minutes to finish cooking the potatoes. The yogurt mixture makes a kind of dry crust on the potatoes.

I served these with Spiced Green Beans, a recipe I've made before from Indian Light Cookery (which is a well-used cookbook, so doesn't count here).

We found the whole meal delicious. All bits will likely be made again, and maybe as they're written: as I was clearing up after the meal, I found that I'd gotten out my jar of amchoor, rather than garam masala, so the flavors of the fish and potatoes were not quite as the authors intended—still good, though!

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

365 Ways to Cook Pasta
Marie Simmons
HarperCollins Publishers (1988)
ISBN 0060186631

This is a book that's been around for quite a while. I use it fairly often, but have't made anything new from it recently. It's a plain, rather homely, book that offers quite good cooking. It covers a wide variety of pasta dishes, the recipes are good, and the instructions are clear. It's actually on the shortlist for my Desert Island Cookbooks list as possibly the only pasta cookbook I would bring. (Judging by another of the "365" cookbooks that I have, I think the whole series is surprisingly good.)  When the week's menu plan got thrown into disarray, I picked this up for a look and stopped at the first recipe, Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, whore's spaghetti, supposedly named because it makes a fast snack between clients. Well maybe.

Like many good pasta sauces, you start by softening garlic in olive oil. Then stir in canned tomatoes (I used some purée of deseeded tomatoes that I froze last summer), chopped black olive, capers, dried red pepper, oregano, and coarsely ground black pepper. Simmer that for a while, till the sauce thickens. Then stir in some chopped anchovies (these disappear and add only a complexity to the overall taste, nothing fishy) and some chopped flat-leaf parsley (of which there was none in the kitchen, so I used the curly kind instead). Simmer the sauce a bit longer bit, salt to taste, serve over spaghetti, and enjoy. 

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sunday. 

Stir-Fried Lamb with Garlic and Basil

Ken Hom's Quick Wok: The Fastest Food in the East
Ken Hom
Headline Book Publishing (2001)
ISBN 0747276005

After a couple of months with no activity on my use-my-unused-cookbooks project, I'm back at it again. It's not that I've not been using my cookbooks, I do freqeuently, but it's been the old regulars rather than the unused ones.

This book is a fairly recent acquisition and I haven't really read it. I found this at a charity book sale and thought it might be worth a look. A quick perusal has already led to several stickies, so it looks like it deserves more attention. I have cooked a lot from Ken Hom's Hot Wok and a bit from his Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood; I have an active dislike for his Asian Vegetarian Feast, since this supposedly vegetarian book insists that you use chicken stock, making nonsense of its title. Two out of three, not bad.

Tonight's dinner certainly lived up the to "quick" promise. Thin slices of lamb sit for 20 minutes in a marinade of light soy sauce, shaoxing wine, sesame oil, and cornstarch. Then they're fried in the wok (a skillet would work fine, of course), and fried some more after a lot of sliced garlic is added, and fried just a bit longer after adding some basil and cilantro leaves. All very quickly done and on the table so fast, I forgot to take a picture till I was halfway through eating. And very tasty it was.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sunday. 

Anne's Anodyne Liniment Cake

The Book Lover's Cookbook
Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen
Ballantine Books (2003)
ISBN 0345465008

This was probably the last cookbook I bought before we left the Netherlands. I found it at a local bookstore and it said it needed to come home with me. I resisted at first but finally went back to buy it. As a result, it moved with us and didn't end up in storage for six months. It's a lovely book; each quote from a book is followed by a recipe related to that book. I've used it at least once, but for the last couple of years, it's been sitting on the shelf unattended.

I haven't made a proper dessert in the last days, so tonight I thought I'd try Anne's Anodyne Liniment Cake from Anne of the Green Gables. (That's a book I've never actually read, but heard recently on the BBC iPlayer.) The woman who provided the recipe for the cookbook is the granddaughter of the author.

As I frequently do, I did all the cake mixing in my cuisinart and baked it in my 9"x13" pan, rather than two 9" round cakepans. But something wasn't quite right. The cake rose very high on the outside edges, mostly along the long edges, rather than the short ones. After a very short cooling it came away from the sides of the pan.

For an icing, I used the Creamy Butter Frosting recipe that's printed with the cake recipe. Definitely wouldn't do this bit again. Much too sweet and I added only about 2/3 of the sugar required. A nice cream cheese icing, not too sweet, as we prefer, would be better. Or maybe a chocolate icing to contrast with the vanilla cake. This time, since the whole cake looked a bit sad, we thought we'd top it off with some hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles, for those whose Dutch is rusty).

The cake actually tasted pretty good, but the texture was more like a thick, fluffy pancake. I'm not sure what caused the strange rising and texture , but wonder about the amount of baking powder. One tablespoon was called for, where I'd expect no more than 1-1/2 teaspoons (a half tablespoon). It also seemed to me that there wasn't enough batter for two 9" pans. If there were less leavening, I think the cake might work fine in a 9" square pan. I'll try this again in a few weeks.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sunday.

White Lasagna with Roasted Vegetables

The Roasted Vegetable
Andrea Chesman
Harvard Common Press (2002)
ISBN 1558321691

This book has been hanging around the shelves quite a while, and has always put me off a bit because it has no information or recipes using the brassica family. My experience is that broccoli, cauliflower, and relations roast up especially well, so it's odd not to find them here.

This is my second outing with this book, and a very successful one. We both really liked this lasagna. It's a pretty standard white lasagna, with roast veggies as the filling: red bell peppers, eggplant, fennel, leek. In the end, I thought some mushrooms would have been an nice addition; DH thought that some black olives would have been nice.

While the veggies roast, you make up a panful of a garlic-scented bechamel sauce, adding a goodly slog of white wine and some chopped fennel leaves at the end.

To fill the pan, you start with a bit of the sauce. Then, three times, you layer 1/4 of the lasagna noodles, 1/2 cup sauce, 1/3 of the roasted veggies, and 1/2 cups Parmesan. Top it all off by a final layer of noodles, the rest of the sauce, and another 1/2 cup of Parmesan. Bake covered at 350F for 30 minutes, then for another 10-15 minutes uncovered. (My lasagna took a bit longer uncovered to get a nice bit of browning.) Let it stand for 5 minutes before serving.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Tagliatelle with Chicken Livers

Antonio Carluccio Cooks Pasta
Antonio Carluccio
BBC Books (1999)
ISBN 0563384557

Carluccio's chocolate pasta not being my favorite pasta ever, I thought I'd give this book another try with my monthly fresh pasta. This recipe called for fresh tagliatelle, so I made that in the early afternoon, then prepared the sauce for dinner.

Chicken livers are not my favorite food, but the DH loves them, so I try to indulge him occasionally. But I have to say, even I liked the results. What's more, this has to be one of the cheapest dinners I've ever made. The chicken livers cost less than one euro. Pasta, how much does less than 1-1/2 cups flour and two eggs cost? The rest of the ingredients are pantry staples of minimal cost.

For two, start by finely slicing a small onion and sautéing gently in oil until softened. While that's cooking, sliver 150g of chicken livers. Add them to the onion, along with 2 bay leaves, and sauté gently over low heat for 6 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While the liver cooks, prepare one little bowl with 1-1/2 tablespoons of sherry (I used 2 tablespoons, since a lot evaporates and I was cutting back the recipe) and a grind of nutmeg, and another with 1 tablespoon of tomato purée and 1 tablespoon chicken stock (or water).

Drop the fresh pasta into boiling water, then stir the sherry/nutmeg into the livers and let simmer for a minute or so. Then stir in the tomato purée and stock; maybe you'll need some extra stock or water to give a nice consistency. Taste and add salt and pepper as you like. Remove the bay leaves and serve over the drained pasta, topped with lots of freshly grated Parmesan.

The fresh tagliatelle was delicious with this, but I don't see why a dried pasta wouldn't be perfectly good. And why not a shaped pasta like gemelli/cascareccia or butterflies?

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Nutty Eggplant and Potato Curry

The Spice of Vegetarian Cooking
Martha Rose Shulman
Healing Arts Press (1986)
ISBN 0892813997

Martha Rose Shulman is one of my favorite vegetarian cookbook authors. A friend introduced me with the gift of The Vegetarian Feast. Then I got Fast Vegetarian Feasts, which is certainly on the shortlist for my desert island cookbook list. Mediterranean Light, along with the beautiful little books Main-Dish Salads and Main-Dish Soups, are also on that list. The other two Main-Dish books, Grains and Tarts and Gratins are well thumbed but not as well used as the other two. I got this book expecting to like it a lot—vegetarian and spicy, "ethnic recipes from India, China, Mexico, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe"—these are things that are usually very popular round our house. But I've never found a recipe here that really appealed.

Having a bit of an Indian itch, I turned to this book for a curry dish. But I can't say we were very pleased with it. There's a similar sort of recipe, Neela's Eggplant and Potato, in Madhur Jaffrey's old World of the Easy Vegetarian Cooking that is lightyear's better.

Nutty Eggplant and Potato Curry begins by roasting an eggplant and steaming some diced potatoes while the eggplant roasts. Then you sauté some onion, garlic, and ginger in butter. After a few minutes, stir in some curry powder. (Of course, no matter how good your curry powder is, this is a clue that the recipe is going to be short on real flavor.) Continue sautéing for a good long time, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes total.

Now stir in the potato, the eggplant (removed from skin and chopped), some raisins, and some peanuts (Shulman also suggests almonds or sunflower seeds, but I think cashews should have be better still) and cook another 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste, take off the heat , and stir in a cup of buttermilk or plain yogurt.

I'll give this book at least one more try, but I have a suspicion it might be one that ends up on the recycle stack when my cookbook shelf space becomes critical.

This is another post linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays. I'm having fun with my using-unused-cookbooks challenge!

Winter Squash and Leek Soup

Verdura: Vegtables Italian Style
Viana La Place
William Morrow (1991)
ISBN 0688087647

Our recent frigid weather has brought on a spate of soups, this one being the second from this book. The extreme weather is over, but momentum keeps those soups a-rolling in.

This one was very tasty, but we thought it didn't seem like a dinner soup somehow. Maybe because it was puréed to smoothness. The leftovers will appear in mugs with our lunchtime sandwiches, no doubt.

Boil up some chunks of peeled and diced winter squash in water just to cover. While that's cooking, sauté some sliced leeks and a chopped celery stalk. When the veggies are soft, add a pinch of ground cloves, 1 cup of milk, and 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then add salt and pepper. Cook for 10 minutes, then add the cooked squash with its cooking water and simmer 15 minutes more. Put it through a food mill, or purée in a food processor, or get out that staff mixer and give it a good buzz. Stir in a bitter butter and some grated Parmesan. Serve. Tasty stuff; looking forward to the leftovers.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

White Bread and Whole Wheat Bread

Bread Machine Cookbook
Better Homes and Garden (2001)
ISBN 0696213168

Here is a book that I bought by a mistake. I collected a good ABM recipe on a mailing list and liked it enough that I thought I'd get the book where it originally appeared. That's what this was supposed to be, but it wasn't. (It was Betty Crocker I meant to get, not Better Homes and Gardens.) The book itself is quite attractive; it has hardboard covers with a ring binding inside, so it lays flat and is easy to use. But I've never really found a recipe that said Make Me Now.

We were pretty well snowed in last week, making it difficult to get out to shop. One morning I missed the mobile boulanger who delivers bread — I met him while I was out walking Pogo, but had no change in my pockets, argh! — and we were pretty well out of bread, so I had the idea to make some whole wheat bread for our next day's breakfast.

Working on my project to try unused cookbooks, I picked up this book, found a promising whole wheat bread, and started assembling it. At one point I laid a measuring spoon down on the opposite page, and then started following that recipe. (I often use a measuring spoon to track ingredients in a printed recipe.) Result: white bread instead of whole wheat. Luckily the recipes are quite similar except for the flour and I could easily correct the difference.

That night, I set the ABM up in the living room, since the kitchen gets quite cold at night and I know that makes the machine unhappy. In the morning, we woke to the wonderful smell of baking bread.

ABM bread is not especially cool, but it's awfully handy when time and bread are short. And this was not at all a bad plain white bread. I might even make it again. But not before I make the bread I originally intended to make.

Having been diverted from the path towards a whole wheat bread, I went back a week later to try that. I made this bread using the Whole Wheat Rapid setting on my machine, so I'd be sure to have it out and cooling before bedtime.

This is not a 100% whole wheat bread, but half and half with regular flour. It's probably one of the best plain whole wheat breads I've made with the machine. It slices easily and tastes good. Another keeper. Looks like this book is rescued from the Recycle stack.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Lentil Soup with Red Squash and Fennel

Verdura: Vegtables Italian Style
Viana La Place
William Morrow (1991)

ISBN 0688087647

This is another book I saw recommended somewhere, although I don't remember where. It looked like it might be interesting, Italian and vegetables both being Good Things, so I found a cheap second-hand copy. But it sits there on the shelf with other veggie books and I never seem to find anything suitable when I'm looking in that area.

If it the weather forecast is right, we'll have been 2 weeks sub-0C when it finally warms up. Soup weather indeed. There are butternut squash in the cupboard still to be used, the bounty of a neighbor's garden. Lentils are a staple. A slippery trip to the grocery turned up a fennel bulb. And here I found a soup to pull them all together. It was a surprisingly good combination.

Maybe this isn't really a weeknight soup, since it take a good hour to cook, but it's a leisurely thing to put together. Chop an onion and sauté it. While that's going, chop the fennel. When the onion is soft, stir in the fennel. While that's going, measure the lentils, fennel seeds, salt, and water. After the fennel has cooked for five minutes, stir in the lentils and seeds, add the water, and bring to a boil. Let it simmer partly covered for 30 minutes while you peel and chop a chunk of squash. Stir in the squash and cook another 20 minutes until the lentils and squash are done. Grind in some black pepper and serve. A bit of time, but an easy, unrushed assembly. With very tasty results.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Fusilli with Cabbage and Tomato

Pasta Harvest
Janet Fletcher
Chronicle Books (1995)
ISBN 0811805670

After the encouraging results with the first recipe I made from this book, I decided the book would be good company for our little trip to Amsterdam. Good company, and I used more than one package of stickies marking promising recipes.

For my second outing with Pasta Harvest, I chose a recipe using cabbage, a really winter vegetable, and we were quite pleased with the results. This isn't a weeknight recipe since there's a lot of chopping, sautéing, and simmering time involved. But it's very tasty indeed, and I expect it would keep for a few days in the fridge, if you wanted to make it up on the weekend.

Like many Italian recipes, it starts with slowly sautéing minced onions, carrots, and celery until they are very soft, 15 minutes or more. Then lots of minced garlic is stirred in, followed by pepper flakes, strained tomatoes, chicken stock (which happened to be simmering away on the back burner prior to being strained and frozen), and oregano. (Fresh oregano? In February? You jest! It was dried Mexican oregano for me.) This mixture simmers for about 15 minutes. Then a big pile of finely shredded cabbage is stirred in and simmered again for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the pasta and drain, saving some of the water in case the sauce needs thinning (it did). Toss the pasta with the sauce, some chopped parsley (I forgot), and some freshly grated Parmesan. Dish it up and serve with more Parmesan. Yum.

Aside: Pasta recipes frequently call for draining the pasta, then tossing it with the sauce in a large, warm bowl. Does anybody actually do this? The pot where the pasta cooked qualifies for large and warm, that's two out of three. The clean-up crew appreciates not having an extra dish to wash. I always serve pasta directly onto our plates (less messy at the table), so a serving bowl is superfluous.

This recipe calls for either fusilli or spaghetti as the pasta-of-choice. Spaghetti didn't seem right to me, and I didn't have enough fusilli (and didn't want to open another package). Having used gemelli/cascareccia a couple of times lately, I opted for my current second favorite pasta, one I haven't discovered a name for, a mini version of curly-edged lasagna noodles.

We've had two hits from this book now. Thinking that it will sit on the shelf with vegetable cookbooks, since this is one I'll want to pick up when I've found something good at the market.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Five-Alarm Lentil Soup

The Sriracha Cookbook
Randy Clemens
Ten Speed Press (2011)
ISBN 1607740036

For our first day back from a week's vacation, I planned a nice vegetarian soup for dinner, which turned out to be a good thing, since the weather has turned frigid. I collected the recipe from a recipe list, but noticed that it's actually from The Sriracha Cookbook, a not-too-old book that I started reading and then put away, I think because company was coming and I wanted to tidy up my stacks of books. On the basis of this soup, I think I need to resume my perusal.

This is an easy soup to assemble. You start by sautéing chopped red onions and carrots in a bit of olive oil. Then you stir in a pile of minced garlic, some smoked paprika, ground cumin, bay leaves, tomato paste, and 3/4 cup of Sriracha—all good tastes. When it smells nice, you stir in a can of stewed tomatoes (I used deseeded "sauce" from the freezer). Then add a pound of red lentils and 2 liters of vegetable stock (I cheated and used the stuff from a cube since there wasn't enough in the freezer.) Simmer till the lentils are soft, salt and pepper to taste, toss the bay leaves, and serve. Yum!

Yes, I could have wiped the edge of the bowl before taking the picture, but we were hungry!

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Gemelli with Mushrooms and Tomato

Pasta Harvest
Janet Fletcher
Chronicle Books (1995)
ISBN 0811805670

This book has been hanging around for a while, and I can't remember what provoked me to buy it. I have another book by Fletcher, but don't recall that I've used it much either, and I don't remember which I got first. The premise of this book is promising, pasta dishes using veggies fresh from your garden. But for some reason it's stayed out of the day-to-day loop of cookbooks that are in active use. I'm thinking now that's situation needs to be remedied. (There is a problem with this book: does it get shelved with pasta books or does it get shelved with vegetable books? Hard call. These sections don't sit next to each other either.)

In the headnote for this recipe, Fletcher mentions that there are two kinds of gemelli available, those with an S-shaped profile and those that look like two spaghetti strands twisted together. This is the first time I've seen anyone else remark on this difference, which has always bothered me. Two shapes with one name. DeCecco's cascareccia, which is S-shapped gemelli by another name, has become one of my favorite pasta shapes since I discovered it. It really holds a sauce well. I don't think the double-stranded version works quite as well.

There was a box of mushrooms lurking in the fridge wanting to be used and lots of tomato sauce from last year's harvest waiting in the freezer, so this looked like the perfect recipe to be tried soon. You start by sautéing pancetta, rosemary, and lots of garlic in some olive oil. When the pancetta is getting crisp, add strained canned tomatoes. (Many of the recipes in this book have you straining canned tomatoes to get the seeds out. Since my DH seems to be allergic to the seeds, I removed the seeds before I froze up lots of tomato sauce this summer.)

In another skillet sauté mushrooms seasoned with salt and pepper until all the liquid has evaporated. Then add the tomato sauce, or vice versa, and stir in some chopped parsley.

Cook the pasta, add the sauce, stir in some grated Parmesan, and thin with a bit of pasta water if needed. Serve sprinkled with more Parmesan. Enjoy!

Any kind of mushroom could be used with this. Shiitakes, some kind of wild mushroom, or a mix of cultivated and wild, all would be good. Lardons or bacon could be used for the pancetta, which does add a nice depth to the sauce flavors. I made the full recipe and froze half the sauce to use for a quick dinner sometime.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

From-Scratch Buckwheat Noodles

The Grains Cookbook
Bert Greene
Workman Publishing Company (1988)
ISBN 0894806122

The Leftover Queen's Buckwheat Noodles with Mushrooms and Sour Cream was on the menu for tonight. The recipe calls for soba noodles and I hadn't been able to find them at the grocery store for the last several weeks, so I decided to make the buckwheat noodles myself. (Buckwheat flour is readily available, being used to make crêpes throughout the lenten season.) I searched through many of my books that might have a recipe for these, and settled on the recipe for From-Scratch Buckwheat Noodles from Bert Greene's The Grains Cookbook. This is a book I've had a while, and enjoy browsing, but have used only once so far.

Since I was serving only two of us, I made a half recipe of the noodles. Elsewhere, I read that buckwheat noodles are typically three parts buckwheat flour to one part white flour, so I used that ratio in my cut-back recipe (3/4 cup buckwheat flour and 1/4 cup tipo 00 flour), rather than half buckwheat flour that Greene prescribes.

As Greene suggests, I mixed the dough in the food processor, although I really don't see the problem with mixing by hand. When I started making pasta myself, I did use the processor for the mixing, but I've stopped as I've gotten more experience. There are so many bits of the processor to be washed, whereas if you mix by hand, there's just a big bowl and maybe a fork to get things started. Either way you're going to get doughy hands.

Also, using the processor, I've never had the dough come together in a ball all by itself as Greene and others report. I usually have to dump it out and make a ball. If I then put it back in the processor, it stays together and cleans the sides as it should.

Using my cut-back recipe, I should have needed no more than 1-1/2 tablespoons of water. I added about twice that, and it could have used a bit more.

Nevertheless, the noodles were very tasty and I'd definitely do this again when the earthy kind of taste that buckwheat adds is appropriate.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays. This is my second Cookbook Sundays post for this week, one that not really planned, since it came from needing to make a substitute in a planned meal.

Curried Roasted Squash Soup

The Roasted Vegetable
Andrea Chesman
Harvard Common Press (2002)
ISBN 1558321691

This book was a gift from a friend way back when roasted veggies started to become trendy. It's the place I store all the roasted vegetable articles I save. I pick it up occasionally when I have a glut of some veg needing to be used, but never seem to find anything that catches my eye. Strangely, Chesman completely ignores cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc., which is amazing to me since this family really takes well to roasting.

I'm also working through a sack of butternut squash, overflow from a friend's garden, so Curried Roasted Squash Soup here looked like a good bet. Butternut squash is really not my favorite—heresy, I know. Especially in a soup, I don't like the texture and I don't like the sweet taste. That said, this really wasn't a bad soup at all. And it's really simple to make using a staff mixer rather than a blender.

You start by roasting the squash. I did this earlier in the day, since we were out for the afternoon. The roasting could even be done the night before, I expect, then the soup would be quite quick to finish off.

When you're ready to make the soup, sauté some curry powder, minced ginger, cumin seeds, and red pepper flakes. When these are smelling really nice, add a lot of minced garlic. When the garlic softens, in a minute or two, add chicken or vegetable broth and the flesh of the roasted squash. Use your staff mixer to purée the squash (or do this in your regular blender in two or more batches). Stir in coconut milk and a goodly slog of lime juice, and heat until hot. Adjust salt and pepper to taste. The recipe calls for chopped cilantro to be stirred in just before serving. That's out of season right now, but I think it would be a nice addition.

My squash was a bit small (2#9oz vs the 3-4# asked in the recipe), but I used all the ingredients for flavor. Also, I probably doubled the amount of broth to make a thinner consistency. Result: a nice soup for a cold evening.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.

Clafoutis aux Carottes

Mes petites recettes magiques au curcuma
Pascale de Lomas
Leduc (year?)
ISBN 2848994495

This little book was a bit of an impulse buy. There's a whole series of Mes Petites Recettes Magiques books available at the grocery store, but I managed to limit myself to just this one that stars turmeric. It was a fun read, stretching mon pauvre français, and I used quite a few stickies on such a small book. Previously I tried a vinaigrette (lemon, oil, S&P, turmeric, and a pinch of sugar). This time I opted for something a little more substantial.

A clafoutis is usually known as a dessert with fresh fruit (classically cherries, but most any fruit that's not too soggy can be used) cooked in kind of a pancake batter. This version, with carrots, can be served as a side dish or as a dish on its own, accompanied by a salad.

The recipes in this book are limited to one per page, so that means the instructions are sometimes less thorough that you might like. Given that you're already comfortable in the kitchen (and all French people are, aren't they?), this really isn't a problem. More annoying is that the ingredients are not given in the order used, but in an apparently random order. This is an annoying problem I see frequently in both French and Dutch recipes.

The carrot clafoutis uses oignons primeurs, which are young onions, looking like green onions with a bulb. Those weren't in the shop, so I used shallots instead, minced, then sautéed in olive oil and drained on a paper towel. Eggs are beaten and milk added, little by little, until it's all well mixed. Then salt, pepper, turmeric, basil, and piment d'Esplette are added. Flour is sprinkled in, then grated carrots and the onions are stirred in. The mixture is put into a buttered dish and baked for 35 minutes. Well, for me it took longer than that, but I often find that eggy-custardy things take longer than stated. My oven's at the right temperature, but it was still at least 45 minutes till this was done through. You can see where I poked it quite a bit in the middle to encourage it to finish cooking.

Having served this clafoutis as a side dish, I think it would be better by itself, either in small wedges as a starter or bigger wedges as a main, accompanied by a nice salad.

This recipe suggest using turnips or parsnips in place of the carrots, but these would make for a pretty monotone dish, while the orange bits make it quite pretty.

This post is linked to next week's Cookbook Sundays. (I'm at the late end of this week and Sue's in New Zealand, so I'm taken advantage of that to leap ahead here.)

Carl Goh's Zucchini Bread

Beard on Bread
James Beard
Knopf (1973)
ISBN 0394473450

Now, Beard on Bread is a book I've had a very long time. It was possibly the first book on bread that I bought, over well thirty years ago. I was surprised to see that I've actually made a recipe from it, a loaf of Basic White Bread, but my notes are undated, so that only means it was a long while ago. Thumbing through the book recently, I came upon this zucchini bread, and since I've got lots of shredded zucchini in the freezer needing to be used. I thought this would make a nice snack.

Like most quick breads this was easy to assemble—that's the point of quick breads, isn't it? I set the oven to heating, then broke up a cupful of walnuts. Beat the eggs then added the sugar (sucre de canne instead of white sugar, and only 3/4 of what was asked), oil, zucchini, and vanilla. Stirred together the dry ingredients and added those. Finally added the walnuts and into the pans for an hour in the oven. Result, a very nice zucchini bread. Ed especially liked that the crust was a bit crispier that other such breads I've made. Maybe this is because the fat is vegetable oil rather than butter. I don't really have a "standard" zucchini bread, but this is one that will get added into the group I use.

This post is linked to this week's Cookbook Sundays.