The stunning conclusion to the Chickpeas, Butternut, and Lamb meal series will have to wait a little, because I have to share some timely information about a local gem. If you live in or around Champaign-Urbana, you need to visit Prairie Fruits Farm for their pre-market sales every Saturday (sign up to their mailing list for notifications) from 9A-12P. They started two weeks ago, on March 21, selling their cheese and yogurt, along with local baked goods, produce, eggs, and locally-produced yarn. Not only is there great food, but there are baby goats! You can also see the older ones, and some chickens, but the babies are not to be missed. Just look at them jumping around.

This previous Saturday, they expanded their offerings by adding hot food, prepared by the highly talented chef Alisa DeMarco. They had a few offerings, a frittata, an egg sandwich, and a yogurt parfait. I had one of the frittatas, featuring Blue Moon Farms spring greens, potatoes, Prairie Fruits goat cheese (Moonglo I think?), all set in a frittata made with some of the fresh eggs from Tomahnous Farm. I got some of these eggs the first week, and they were so fresh, with vibrant yolks. It was served with some toast, I’m guessing it was from Stewart Pequinot, the bagel and bread guy in Mahomet (try the egg bagels, they’re great). It was gooey, soft, and deliciously hot on an unseasonably cold Saturday morning. They also had fair trade coffee for sale.

In a splurge, brought on by long months without the farmer’s market, I picked up a little of everything. I got spinach, kale, some potato sourdough bread, some Moonglo cheese and some of the sheep yogurt. They were extremely busy this past weekend, but they still offered tastes of the cheese and yogurt. The yogurt is full-fat, and there is a thick layer of cream at the top. The taste is sour, but it’s mellowed by the sweetness of the milk and the fat content. For the health-conscious out there, keep in mind that despite the higher fat content of sheep’s milk, it also has higher nutritional value. It’s ready to be paired with berries, or flavored any way you like.

I was inspired by the frittata to do something with the spinach and some cheese. I thought a stuffed chicken breast would be a great idea.

Pre-Market Stuffed Chicken

2T olive oil
2-4 cloves garlic, sliced
1 bag Blue Moon spinach (mine was 7 1/2 oz. after picking, washing, and draining)
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 c. pine nuts, toasted

4 chicken breasts
a 2-4 ounce chunk of Moonglo cheese
kitchen twine

To prepare the stuffing:

1. Heat the oil in a saute pan over medium high heat.
2. When hot, add the garlic and stir for 30 seconds
3. Add the spinach, season with salt and pepper. Stir and toss to gently wilt the spinach, only a few minutes.
4. Add the lemon juice, stir.
5. Remove from heat, and add pine nuts to taste (eat the rest).
6. Drain any excess liquid, and allow to cool to room tempurature

To prepare the chicken:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Butterfly the chicken breasts. Here’s a tutorial if you’ve never done it before.
3. Divide the spinach stuffing into 4 portions and put some on each piece of chicken.
4. Take a chunk of the cheese and mold it into a log and place on the spinach.
5. Fold/roll the chicken up, enclosing the stuffing.
6. Tie it up with twine to help it stay together, look nice, and cook evenly. I like using the classic method.
7. Bake for 25-30 minutes.

Not all my spinach fit in my chicken, so I cut squares of the potato sourdough I got, sliced some of the cheese, and made a couple little treats for my wife and me.

Chicken Velouté sauce
I used some on-sale supermarket chicken for this, so there were some bits I had to trim (fat, bone, tendon, etc). I added the trimmings to a pot with

• 1/2 a carrot, chopped
• 1/4 of an onion, chopped
• a clove of garlic
• some parsley stems
• covered with about 3c of water

I simmered that while I was doing other things (about 30-45 minutes) to make a quick broth.

In a small sauce pan, I heated 1 1/2 T butter, tossed in 1 1/2 carrots, diced fine, 1/2 an onion, diced fine, and sauteed them slowly (no browning) for 5 minutes. Then I added about 1 1/2 T flour, stirred it in and cooked to make a very light roux. I tossed in a bay leaf, some parsley, and the broth I made. I cooked that down and then strained it. This was all about using up some of the bits that would have otherwise been thrown away.

I served mine with some quinoa (flavored with onion, garlic, parsley, and lemon) and sauteed asparagus.

I urge you join the Prairie Fruits mailing list to find out the details, and to come to the on-farm sales. It’s a great opportunity to get some great food and meet some cute animals. Maybe you’ll see me there, and maybe you’ll be inspired to come up with your own creations.

My 6-year-old daughter and I were in one of the local natural food stores and we were browsing the produce. She spied the butternut squash, and we saw one that was probably 3.5 feet long, it must have weighed at least 7 pounds. She identified it as a butternut and said she wanted to get one. I was hesitant to grab the monster specimen, but I did grab a large one, over 4 pounds. It came home and sat on the counter for a week or two. With something so large, I needed to do something that used a lot of squash with little effort… like soup!

Butternut squash, like its cousins the acorn, pumpkin, or kabocha, is very easy to handle and cook, and their sweetness is usually understated, allowing them to meld with a variety of other flavors. Aside from another favorite dish I usually make with pumpkin, I always bake my squash. It draws out some of the water content and browns the edges of the fruit. Some people say you can bake them whole in a slow oven (too hot and they’d explode), but I always cut them first. It allows for more surface area to season and get browned in the oven.

Butternut Squash, baked

I cut the stem and blossom ends off, cut them into pieces, scraping out the pulp and seeds. I lay them flesh-up on a sheet pan lined with parchment.

If I’m making a sweet dish, I’ll sprinkle them with brown sugar. If it’s savory, I’ll drizzle them with olive oil and give a heavy sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper.

Turn them over, flesh-down (metal conducts heat better than air), and bake at 350 for 1-2 hours, until tender. This will give a light carmelization to the flesh that will complement the flavor of most recipes. You could bake it hotter or longer to bring more carmelization to the party.

Once it’s cooked and tender, let it cool until you can handle it and simply scrape the flesh away from the skins. You could mash this and serve as-is as a simple yet tasty side dish.

We’ll go beyond that, adding some spice, some heat, and a little coconut milk to make a dish that could stand on its own as the star of a meal. I used a recipe that I found a few months ago while looking for other Indian recipes. I made some heavy edits, so if you’re interested in the raw original, please click through to their site.

FXcuisine’s Indian Butternut Squash Soup

3T Butter, ghee, or oil
2T Fresh ginger, diced
1 medium onion, chopped
2-4 cloves garlic, sliced
1-3 green chilies, diced

4# Butternut Squash, baked as above
Pepper
Salt

12-15 fresh curry leaves
1/2 of a 14.5 oz can coconut milk

1. Heat butter or oil over medium heat in a medium pot.
2. Add ginger, onions, garlic, and chilies. Sauté for a few minutes until softened and barely browned.
3. Add the squash, salt, and pepper, and mash to combine. Add water to cover, bring to a simmer, and simmer on low for 10 minutes.
4. At this point, I like to get out my immersion blender and blend it until relatively smooth. You can use a regular blender, or a potato masher. If you want an even smoother texture, strain through a sieve.
5. Return the puree to the pot and add the curry leaves and coconut milk. To fully get the flavor from the curry leaves, I like to simmer the soup for another 10-20 minutes on very low heat.

The curry leaves are not really edible, nor do they blend well. You could pick them out before serving, or count on guests to handle them. I garnished mine with a sliver of jalapeño.

This is a really great example of how a real curried soup should taste. It has deep flavors from the aromatics, and the curry leaves give it a very special flavor. The sweetness of the squash mellows the heat of the chilies. Your typical, yellow, turmeric-laden, grocery store curry powder can’t replicate this.

Curry leaves can be very hard to find. Locally, I’ve found them at Am-Ko, but I’m sure you could find them online. They are not a part of curry powder, which is simply a blend of dry spices, they are an herb to themselves. Their aroma and flavor is hard to describe, and they don’t normally keep long. I’ve found that they stay usable if you freeze them in a zip-top bag. Find them fresh, locally if you can, and try them in all sorts of dishes.

I love Indian food. I can’t get enough of it. One of my favorite things about Indian cuisine is that a lot of it was borne out of poor circumstances. Many dishes evolved in times where there wasn’t refrigeration, thus strong flavors were used to trick the senses. Likewise, a lot of the cuisine is very inexpensive to produce. I love the bold flavors, the colors, the aromas. It may take some time and some work. You may have to go out to stores you haven’t been in before to pick up spices you’ve never used. If your impression of curry relies on a pale yellow curry powder from the supermarket, you’re probably missing out on a world of flavors.

When cooking for my family, I try to be conscious of choosing healthy options and a wide range of foods. These days, for health and cost reasons, I’m trying to incorporate more vegetarian items into our menu. One popular staple in the house is the chickpea, also known as a garbanzo bean. Of all the lentils and beans available, I think they are one of the “meatiest.” They are available dried and canned, but I find the canned tend to have an off, metallic flavor and tend to break down too easily. Dried chickpeas are great (and much cheaper), but they do take a LONG time to cook. My method is as follows:

For 1c dried chickpeas (yields a little over 2c cooked)

1. Rinse the dried legumes with plenty of cool water, checking for rocks.
2. Put into a bowl and soak them overnight, at least 8 hours, no more than 24.
3. Drain and rinse with cool water.
4. Put in a crock pot, cover with 1.5 inches of water, and cook on low for 8-12 hours.
5. Drain and use in any recipe as you would canned chickpeas, or store in the refrigerator, covered in the cooking liquid, for up to a week.

Chickpeas cooked this way are tender, but firm. At this point, they can be fried, mashed, or cooked in a sauce for another few hours, which is what I’m usually doing anyway. If you want meltingly-soft chickpeas, you can cook them longer, or cook them on the high temperature of your crock pot.

The chickpeas I made tonight are from a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s book, From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail titled “Easy Chickpea Curry”. Since it’s such a flavorful dish, canned chickpeas would be fine, but I really prefer the texture of home-cooked. The “easy” in this recipe comes from a long list of ingredients that just get blended together, no need to carefully chop onions, garlic, ginger, etc. Here’s an abbreviated, annotated version of that recipe:

Easy Chickpea Curry
by Madhur Jaffrey
(serves 4 to 6)

2c drained chickpeas

Curry Paste
2 smallish tomatoes (about 8 ounces), chopped (I used a half-can of diced tomatoes)
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
3 to 6 fresh hot green chilies, chopped
1c cilantro tops, chopped (save some for garnish later)
1T ground coriander
2t ground cumin
1/2t ground turmeric
1/2t cayenne pepper
1 1/4t salt

3T oil
1 medium stick of cinnamon
5 whole cardamom pods
2 bay leaves
1c finely chopped onion
2 medium potatoes (about 9 ounces), peeled and cut into 3/4-inch dice

Put all the Curry Paste ingredients (from the tomatoes to the salt) in a blender with 5-6T water and blend until smooth.

1. Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a wide, lidded, medium pan. When hot, put in the cinnamon, cardamom, and bay leaves.
2. When they start to color, in about 10 seconds, add the onion and potatoes.
3. Stir and fry for about 6 minutes, or until the onion is lightly browned.
4. Add the curry paste and stir for a minute (deglaze the pan, scraping any stuck bits).
5. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook for 6-7 minutes, stirring occasionally.
6. Add 1c of water and the chickpeas
7. Stir and bring to a simmer, cover and cook 20 minutes for canned chickpeas, up to an hour for homemade.

I like to serve this with rice, garnished with a little finely chopped fresh cilantro.

You’ll see the other components of tonight’s meal over the next few posts. If you try the recipes I write about here, let me know how they turn out. If you have any questions about any of the ingredients or techniques I use, leave a comment and I’ll make sure to respond.

Pork products, bacon in particular, are today’s it ingredients. I have a vegetarian aunt-in-law that used to allow bacon into her diet. My brother had a no-pork policy for a time, but even then he allowed the crunchy strips of pork belly onto his plate. I’ve seen references on numerous blogs to bacon ice cream (3M hits on the Google search). The top results are from acclaimed pastry chef, David Lebovitz, who has written a few books on dessert. His recipe is for Candied Bacon Ice Cream, which sounded good, but I didn’t want the overdone sweetness that I expected from the candying.

I wanted to not only achieve the obvious synergy of smoky-salty-sweet-crunchy-smooth that this recipe is destined to exhibit, but I wanted to improve upon my previous ice cream making adventures. In the past, I’ve made ice cream that was over-cooked, I’ve over-churned, I’ve under-churned, I’ve burnt the cream. I also wanted to use some of my new powdery additives to improve upon a classic.

I took a basic ice cream recipe, flavored it with a little vanilla and cinnamon, added some stabilizers, and folded in bacon at the end. Here’s the recipe:

Bacon Ice Cream

2c heavy cream
1c milk
1 cinnamon stick, broken
2 eggs
3/4 c sugar
1.1 g locust bean gum (optional)
0.5 g xanthan gum (optional)
1t vanilla extract
5-7 slices crispy cooked bacon, well-drained and chopped or crumbled into small pieces

In a 2-3 quart pot, heat the cream, milk, and cinnamon over medium heat. Let it come just to a boil, and turn off the heat.

In a bowl, use a whisk to beat the eggs with the sugar until it lightens in color.

Temper the eggs with some of the hot cream: take a ladle of the hot cream and pour into the egg/sugar mixture, whisking constantly until fully incorporated. Repeat with a few more ladles of the hot cream. This reduces the chance of your eggs curdling into scrambled eggs.

Add the rest of the hot cream to the eggs and beat to fully incorporate, then return all of it to the pot.

At this point, I decided I really wanted to use some stabilizers. It’s not that I’ve had stability issues with previous ice creams I’ve made, but I do feel like they could be, well, better. Many products that you consume have some sort of stabilizer or emulsifier, they are just there to improve food quality. You don’t need them, but I wanted to see if they made a difference. I decided upon using locust bean gum and xanthan gum. They generally are measured out as a percentage of the total mass, and I was adding about .04% and .1% of LBG and Xanthan gum, respectively. I found this on some food manufacturing site as the middle of the range for ice cream stabilization. If I come across it again, I’ll edit the link in here.

The stabilizers, if using, should be added to the custard mixture with an immersion blender.

Turn the heat on to medium-low. Stir it as it heats. You want to heat it to about 170 degrees. Other clues that you’re done: the custard will coat the back of a spoon (nape), the bubbles will disappear. The heat cooks the eggs, which thickens the custard. It also allows the gums to fully hydrate so that they can do their thing.

At this point, you should remove it from the heat, cool it down and refrigerate for at least 4 hours to let the flavors develop. I didn’t, because I was impatient, and it still tasted great.

Freeze in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions and fold in bacon bits. I use this Cuisinart model.

Put into some sort of container to harden in the freezer.

Serve with a crisp bacon garnish if you like that sort of thing. You should end up with something like this:

I expected it to be pretty good, but not this good. The bacon gives a crunch, the cinnamon and vanilla base are just flavorful enough to set a nice background for the bacon, which is the star of this creation. I’m not sure if the stabilizers made a difference or not, if you try it without, let me know how it goes. I used some bacon that was otherwise languishing in the freezer (Hormel Black Label if you must know). When I make it again, I think I’d use a thicker and/or more flavorful bacon. Other ideas: a bourbon & brown sugar swirl, maple syrup flavor in the base. I have another pound of bacon in the freezer… maybe a follow-up is in order?

I’ve been thinking about this new “molecular gastronomy” concept for a while, and have wanted to take a taste of what it can teach me about food. So many times you see very complicated or very expensive preparations that were beyond my resources. I saw a post on Michael Laiskonis’s blog, Workbook, that convinced me I could at least try something that I’ve seen many chefs do.

The basic idea that I got caught up on was creating little balls of something that tasted good. In this case, the subject is orange juice. Chef Laiskonis’s version seemed so simple, yet so effective. I like orange juice, I could get the necessary ingredients. I’ll give it a try. An image of his little pearls, atop a star anise-infused milk chocolate cream bon bon, is shown above. I would recommend reading his post about the bon bons, titled Star Power, to learn more about the other flavor pairings he made.

The pearls are created when you have a viscous liquid dropped into cold oil. The viscosity in this case is created by agar agar and locust bean gum. Agar agar is derived from seaweed. It’s similar to gelatin, but has a few differences. First, it needs to be heated much hotter to dissolve into liquids, but once thickened, it can withstand heat (gelatin melts). It can also be grainy, instead of silky smooth like gelatin. Locust bean gum (from carob seeds) is also used for thickening and gelling.

I halved the recipe from the original Workbook formula. After lots of measuring and mixing, I had a slightly thick liquid in front of me that I needed to drop into some cold oil. I couldn’t find a syringe, so I scavenged around and found in my daughter’s science kit a pipette (similar to the plastic ones seen on Wikipedia). I tried to widen the opening, but it still made very small drops.

Things were looking pretty good at this point. Once I had a bunch of those little beads at the bottom, I drained and rinsed them. Then I had a spoonful of them to try.

They looked a lot like the original. I was still a little skeptical about what they would taste and feel like. I tried some, and they tasted of pure orange juice, and the texture was soft, but each pearl was well-defined. It’s something that I think could be put to good use elsewhere, but not much more than a bite or two.

I continued with making more little droplets. The pipette I had was just too small to proceed at a good pace, the mixture was already setting and I had only done a few spoonfuls.

I poured the rest of the orange goo into a small dish, covered it, and set it in the fridge. This morning, I unwrapped and plated myself an orange juice breakfast gelée. It was just as delicious, soft but had a slightly coarse texture. Not as appetizing as a soft, smooth gelatin version would be.