My wife made baklava the other day to bring in to a potluck at her office.  I’ve had so many soggy, over-sweetened, stale pieces of baklava that I wasn’t so sure of it at first.  One bite later I was a convert.  It was light, flaky, and had just enough sweetness.  The triple-threat combination of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts really elevated it.  Go get some phyllo dough and make this (she used Alton Brown’s recipe).

If you’re coming here from Chambanamoms (welcome!), where I am an occasional contributor, you’ve already seen my take on a vegetarian main dish for St. Patrick’s Day.  If not, go read about that Guinness tofu stew, and learn about my opinion on “authentic” St. Patty’s Day food.

As I touch on there, the food that grocery stores shove down our throats is pre-packaged corned (cured) beef brisket with limp cabbage.  It doesn’t have to be a bad dish, but I haven’t seen it prepared well yet.  Besides that, I’ve been trying (as Chambanamoms editor, Amy, has) to incorporate more meatless meals into our diet.  It can often be cheaper, much healthier, and if you’ve read books about how food is produced in this country (like Michael Pollan’s excellent In Defense of Food) you know that it may be a much more responsible dining option.

I had most of the ingredients for this meal already at home, but if my math is right, I can pick up everything for this meal at the coop, getting all organic produce (and supporting a local business), and still have a complete dinner for four for less than the cost of a bad piece of corned brisket at the grocery store.  And I’d still have to buy more stuff for the sides.

Even if the weather here is warming up, nothing says comforting like a stew.  It’s too bad that most stews cook so long that everything can end up tasting the same.  This meal came together while thinking about making something that was quick and easy, yet packed with lots of flavor (something many vegetarian meals lack).

You can read about how we introduced a lot of flavor into the stew, with umami flavor bombs like soy sauce.  Root vegetables are easier though, since you can just throw them in the oven.  Parsnips are one of my new favorite vegetables, and one that most people overlook.  They look like carrots, but are usually a pale yellowish color on the outside.  You can peel them and treat them just like carrots, but they are a little starchier, which lends well to roasting.

Roasted Parsnips

side/garnish for 4

• 8 parsnips, carrot-sized, a little less than 1 pound
• olive oil, to coat
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 2 T flour

1. Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Peel the parsnips and cut on the bias into 1/4 to 1/2-inch slices.
3. In a bowl, toss parsnips with olive oil, salt, and pepper, until they are all coated.
4. Add flour, and toss to give each slice a good dusting of flour.
5. Spread out on a (foil-lined for easier cleanup) sheet pan, and roast for about 30 minutes, or until they soften and the edges start to brown.

We all know that potatoes and cabbage are very traditional Irish staple ingredients.  There is an old dish that is typically served around Halloween, according to Wikipedia, called colcannon.  It really boils down to mashed potatoes with cabbage (or kale).  Most recipes I’ve seen have you boil the cabbage.  This is a travesty.  Boiling cabbage tends to make it soggy and limp, devoid of flavor.  Worse yet, most recipes suggest overcooking it, which makes it stink and taste bad from the sulfur compounds it contains.

Here we use just a little water with a little oil, steam until it’s soft, then saute it to add some flavor.  I like to leave my cabbage with just a little crunch, but if you like it softer, go ahead and cook it longer.  One great kitchen gadget in use here is a potato ricer, which looks a bit like a giant garlic press.  After you cook your potatoes, cut them in half, put them skin-up in the ricer and press down.  The peel is left behind like magic.

Colcannon

serves 4

• 2-3 pounds of potatoes, scrubbed
• 1/4 – 1/2 head of cabbage, thinly shredded
• 2 T oil
• 6 T butter
• 1 c milk
• salt, pepper, to taste

1. Boil/steam the potatoes until cooked through, about 20-30 minutes depending on the size of your potatoes.  Drain and allow to cool slightly
2. Add the cabbage, the oil, and 1/2 cup of water to the pot, cover and steam over medium-high heat until cabbage begins to darken and soften, about 5-10 minutes.
3. Remove the lid, allow the water to evaporate, then sautee the cabbage with the existing oil until it is as soft and browned as you like, about 5-10 minutes.
4. Lower the heat to low and add the milk and butter.
5. Pass the potatoes through a ricer or food mill, or mash by hand (which would require you to peel them first).
6. Add potatoes into the pot with the cabbage and stir to combine.
7. Taste and adjust texture with more milk and/or butter, and season with salt and pepper.

Potatoes are the perfect foil for stews, as they absorb a little of the liquid and add more heft to the plate.  Plus, well, I just love mashed potatoes!

I hope you find yourself trying some new meatless meals this year.  You may save some money, you may get a little bit healthier, and you’ll be eating with a little less impact on the environment.

I mentioned in my previous post reviewing Xoco that I really wanted to have the torta ahogada.  Since I’m in Chicago quite infrequently, I had to take matters into my own hands.

First I made some crusty bread.  This is a pretty standard Ratio (5:3) bread, formed into a baguette shape, baked with steam until very crusty.

The centerpiece of the sandwich are the delicious little meats, carnitas, made from a big hunk of pork shoulder.  I used the simpler-than-you’d-expect “Slow Roasted Pork Carnitas” recipe from Rick Bayless himself.  You get tender shreds (or chunks if you prefer) of pork with crunchy surfaces, and all that without the mess of stove-top frying.

I also made some black beans, a blended chipotle salsa, and some pickled onions.  Slice the bread, top with meat and all the fixings, then slide it all into the oven to melt the cheese a bit.  Here it is pre-bake.

So, I wasn’t 100% accurate, but the spirit was there.  My bread was a little too crusty, but the components come together in a symphony of rich, sweet, salty, tart, spicy Mexican flavor.  The pickled onions are vital to balancing the richness of the carnitas, so you should make plenty.  I usually go with a really simple preparation and wish I made twice as much.

Pickled Onions

These things are great on sandwiches, tacos, toss them in salads or eat with a fork–anywhere you want that acidic zing.  Keep them refrigerated and they will stay nice and crunchy.  I like to use cider vinegar, but feel free to use whatever you like or is most appropriate for your dish.  I like them to be crunchy and bold, still offering the heat of the onion.  If you’d like to tame them a little, combine all ingredients and cook anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the texture you’d like.

• 1 medium onion, sliced thinly
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/4 c vinegar (cider vinegar, or whatever you like)
• sugar, to taste (optional)

1. Sprinkle sliced onions with salt, and toss to distribute.
2. Add vinegar and toss to coat the onions.
3. Allow to sit 10-30 minutes, tossing occasionally.
4. Taste and add sugar to balance the vinegar, if desired.

In blog business, the winner (chosen by random draw) of the contest was Stuart, who writes the excellent food blog kitchenhacker.net.  A couple disks of Mexican chocolate (and a little something extra) from Taza Chocolate will be its way to him very soon.  He used to live in the Champaign-Urbana area, and I was fortunate enough to meet him a few times.  When he was in his last-minute moving preparations, he offered me some of his frozen stash that he just couldn’t take with him.  It’s still in my freezer, but it will be featured soon.

Taza is supporting the efforts to aid people devastated by the earthquake in Haiti by donating half of each retail sale on their website through January 22nd.  You can read more about the organization they are donating to in their blog post.  Go buy some chocolate and help a good cause.  I get nothing for telling you this, but there are plenty of people whose lives will be changed.

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Fall and winter are a great time to make warm side dishes with big roasty flavors.  Sweet potatoes (previously seen in pie form) are a delicious reason to fire up the oven.  I contributed a recipe for garlic sage roasted sweet potatoes to local mom parent-focused site, chambanamoms.com, for Thanksgiving.  This is a simple-to-prepare side dish that is sure to satisfy.  Make it for a holiday meal when you’re tired of mashed potatoes (as if that ever happens), or any weeknight meal that needs a little seasonal pick-me-up.

Find the recipe over on ChambanaMoms.com.  I made this with butternut squash just a couple days ago and it was delicious.  Just cut them up into cubes, since the squash takes a little longer to cook than most sweet potatoes.

As you may have seen, I’m trying out a gallery plugin to put together a bunch of photos on this post.  If you like it (or don’t), please let me know.

Reminder: if you haven’t already entered the giveaway for some tasty Taza chocolate, go read up on the details and enter!

First, to update from previous posts. The chef’s knife that I won has been working out fantastically.  The edge is sharp, and the weight of the knife has been a welcome addition to all my cutting.  It certainly came in handy over the gustatory celebration known as Thanksgiving.

I had a great seasonal recipe published on a local site, featuring more delicious sweet potatoes.  I’ll leave it as a tease now, but I’ll be posting a copy (with links to the original post) very soon.  This is one to bookmark and share with your friends for the holidays and any time you find great sweet potatoes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, chocolate has been taking over my life.  First it was getting involved with Dan Schreiber.  At some point I started noticing a small, artisan, bean-to-bar chocolate maker out of Somerville, MA–Taza Chocolate.  They’re on Twitter (@tazachocolate), and apparently if you’re in the area, they offer tours of their facility and have a Chococycle that they pedal to local markets and events.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of great chocolate makers out there.  One way that Taza distinguishes themselves is by putting their values in the forefront of what they do.  Their chocolate is not merely fair trade, but Direct Trade.  They work directly with the people who grow their vital raw material–theobroma cacao.  Not only do they pay them more generously than fair trade standards require, but they work with them to ensure they are using organic, sustainable growing practices.  So far, all their chocolate (other than a recent limited release) has used chocolate from a single coop in the Dominican Republic.  In addition to holding their suppliers to high standards, they work for sustainability and eco-friendliness in their own operations, reusing, recycling, and composting wherever possible.  They even work with a local organization to help keep their community green.

Their process is very manual, using vintage machinery that they put a lot of love into.  At the end of the line, the chocolate is wrapped by hand.  Their bars are sealed with a label that has a number corresponding to the batch of chocolate your bar is from.  On Taza’s website, you can put in this number and see all the details of where everything in the bar came from, when it was made, even the signature of the cacao grower the beans came from.  Click the image on the right of one of the bars I had to see all the details for batch #218.

When you unwrap one of these bars, you’re greeted by a shiny bar of dark chocolate.  Each section snaps loudly as you make your way through the bar.  The chocolate has texture, character, owing to the hand-hewn stone grinders they use at Taza.  Pressing it to the roof of your mouth, it slowly melts and the flavors of this 80% dark chocolate unfold with delicious notes of fermented flavors, a surprising brightness (acidity?) and unexpected tropical fruit flavors, like banana.  Before having real artisan-made chocolate, I never experienced chocolate like this.

Their other primary product is Mexican Chocolate, sold in adorable disks pressed with the company name and hand-wrapped in pairs.  They are all 55% cacao, since they are intended for making drinking chocolate, though they are tasty on their own.  For these decadent disks, they offer several flavors on top of their cacao puro, including classic flavors like vanilla, cinnamon, and guajillo chile.  They also offer, for the slightly more adventurous, a yerba maté infused chocolate.  If you’ve enjoyed the bitter South American beverage before, it’s a really neat combination.

Now, I mentioned drinking chocolate, not hot chocolate.  The recommended recipe is one disk to 6-8 ounces of milk, or water if you want to be traditional.  This elixir is intense.  If you love chocolate, this will change your life.  If you snack on the dark stuff every once in a while, and you think it might be too much, share it with a friend.

One of the typical ways that people all over the world enjoy this decadent beverage–from cafes and street carts in Spain and Mexico, to chocolate mexicano advocates like Rick Bayless in his Chicago restaurant, Xoco–is with churros.  I remember having churros in my high school cafeteria, but if you’ve never had them they are essentially fluted tubes of fried dough.  They are often dusted with sugar, maybe cinnamon, and if you’re going over the top, like Bayless does, rolled with finely ground cacao nibs.  Warm churros, with their crunchy exterior and (usually) softer, interior, are delicious on their own, but this classic combination is a winner.  The way the fluted edges hold just enough chocolate to soften them ever-so-slightly is a testament to why this is a lasting match.

As long as you’re not afraid of piping dough into hot frying oil, churros are easy to make.  Most recipes I’ve found make a dough that is too hard to pipe out of anything I have–most churros are extruded from large metal churreros, not plastic piping bags that most of us have access to.  The traditional dough is similar to pâte à choux (you know, the stuff eclairs & cream puffs are made from) without eggs  or butter.  Boil oil, sugar, and water, then turn off the heat, dump in flour and stir, stir, stir.  Bayless’ recipe is available from StarChefs.com (and probably elsewhere).  Since it was way too thick to pipe with my jury-rigged zip-top-bag-with-the-corner-cut (I do screw on a star tip), I added a couple eggs, which softened up the dough enough to allow for precise piping.  Pipe it into hot oil (watch out for splashing), and cook until lightly browned.  Watch the oil temperature though.  If it’s too high, the insides won’t cook enough, and I’ve heard that if it’s too low, they will explode as the outsides will set before the moisture inside has a chance to escape.

If you’re having visions of drinking delicious hot stone-ground chocolate, explore Taza’s online store or ask around at local stores.  In the C-U area, I found some of the Mexican chocolate disks at Art Mart in Urbana.  I’ll be hosting a give-away of some Mexican chocolate disks (and maybe an additional surprise), but it won’t end until after the New Year (expect details in the next week), so if you want some before the holidays, go ahead and order some.

Disclosure: Taza sent me some free samples of their products (see below), with no request or expectation of a review, positive or negative.  I have since bought my own chocolate from them, beyond what they sent, which is why I have some to give away. I like the chocolate and believe in their mission and their quality, which is why I’m spreading the love.