Little Tiny Potatoes

Over the past few days we have eaten a lot of stuffed pumpkin. The thing about stuffing a pumpkin, even a small one, is that it provides you with about eight meals. So the takeaway is this: make sure you really like stuffed pumpkin before you make it.



On Tuesday, whilst Jen hobnobbed with various celebrities, shoe designers, and celebrity shoe designers, I enjoyed some crostini with goat cheese and the leftover fried sage leaves form the other night.



Tonight I had about fifteen minutes so I "roasted"^* some salmon and served it with boiled potatoes and sliced heirloom tomato. The potatoes were the tiniest I've ever seen and we picked them up this weekend in Katonah, compelled almost exclusively by their miniature size.

^* Okay, I actually just did the salmon in the microwave. Time was of the essence and microwaves have their applications, particularly in the cooking of fish and baked potatoes. Don't look at me like that. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm a good person!

Pumpkin Stuffing (Reprise)

This morning we woke up early for two reasons. Firstly because I had a nightmare about causing a young child to choke on a goji berry but more importantly because we heard about a local farmer's market which we hoped would replace our beloved former farm share.



The market was pretty nice. We got some cider, cider donuts, some bread, and these fantastic brussel sprouts which Jen is brandishing like an Uruk-hai warrior.



By the way, this is about the tenth time we've seen this vehicle downtown. Yes, that's a toilet on the roof. Yes, it claims to be called "The Floatie Mobile." And, yes, there is what appears to be a turd wearing a jaunty sailor's cap on it.



Despite the unappealing vehicles I decided to turn our stuffed pumpkin leftovers into this soup. I sauteed some garlic, onion, and the remaining fennel along with the last bit of acorn squash from the farm share. I added in some of the leftover sausage cornbread stuffing and last week's turkey stock. I toasted the remaining cornbread slices with some goat cheese, toasted the pumpkin seeds with some chili and cumin, and fried up some whole sage leaves for garnish.



As an accompaniment: roasted brussel sprouts with bacon, apple, vidalia onion, and sage.

Now we only need to find room in the freezer to fit the remaining turkey stock. And room in the garbage for the brussel sprout stalk.

Pumpkins in the Rain

Once a year we journey out in the search of apples and pumpkins. Usually we end up paying some astronomical amount of money in the neighborhood of $25 for a single bag of apples just for the joy of being able to labor in the fields ourselves and pick them. Such is the life of the insufferable yuppie.

Since we had approximately three dozen apples from the farm share that I turned into apple sauce last weekend we opted to skip the apples this year and head straight for the pumpkins. It was fortunate that our new suburban life brings us in much closer range to the farms one needs for such activities.



Our first stop took us to Hilltop Hanover Farm. It just so happened that it was their last day of pick your own vegetables. It also happened to be pouring rain and located at the end of a muddy trail. The man at the farm was very nice and gave me a handful of tiny bags and a mud-crusted knife so that we could hack our selected vegetables out of the ground.

We couldn't help but notice that despite the listing on this website which has apparently remained unchanged since 1996 they did not have any pumpkins. This site has been our guide for the past five years and this was the first time it had failed us.

Our second stop wasn't actually a stop but a drive by Amawalk Farm which displayed a sign that read "Closed For The Season."



Our third stop took us to Muscoot Farm which, aside from having a silly name, was an amazing place with donkeys, pigs, chickens, roosters, and a ten-year-old boy who had the ability to talk to animals. They also had a huge pumpkin patch which was surrounded by a fence which was chained up and locked.

There was a barn-like building which claimed to be the area to pay for pumpkins with several loose pumpkins lying around. In desperation we left a $20 bill and took a large pumpkin and a sugar pumpkin for cooking.

After a late lunch at The Blue Dolphin Diner, which had been recommended by a friend and was pretty excellent, we stopped by Sgaglio's Marketplace to pick up some sweet Italian sausage for dinner. Let me just say that this market was pretty amazing. I wish I lived in Katonah to be able to frequent this market and possibly overdose on its rustic charm.

Once home we rung out our close, toweled ourselves dry, and took an hour long nap. After waking from the nap I was pretty sure my pneumonia had fully taken hold. Be that as it may I wasn't going to let that stop me from stuffing the hell out of a pumpkin





First we went through our bounty: from Hilltop Hannover Farms: fennel, chard, leeks, rutabaga, and mizuna. From Muscoot: one cooking pumpkin and one carving pumpkin.

You may recall that last year we made my mother's traditional Stuffed Pumpkin, a dish I am accustomed to eating this time of year.

This year I decided to try something a little different, mostly due to a lack of ground beef at home.





This year I stuffed the pumpkin with a stuffing made from onion, garlic, fennel, chard, sweet Italian sausage, cornbread, and sage. The result was pretty delicious. I felt a little guilty bastardizing my mother's recipe until I tasted the end result.

We'll see how impressed I am with myself after I also eat this stuffed pumpkin for the next six consecutive meals. Wish me luck.

The End of an Era

With distance and time a factor we have had to leave our farm share behind. There are a few weeks left of our farm share but we are left a little too remote to pick it up. This week would have brought us fennel (or broccoli), leeks, potatoes, carrots, celeriac, onions, lettuce, kale and chard. Unfortunately, I know this thanks to Farmer Ted's weekly email and not because it is currently sitting in my fridge.

There is a farmer's market in town that we will likely visit this weekend in hopes of making up for vegetables lost. Incidentally, if you live in the vicinity of the George Washington Bridge and want some free vegetables for the next few weeks, contact me for details.



One of the last hurrahs for the farm share was this absurdity. It was just the remaining broccoli with some cheese ravioli and simple tomato sauce. A lack of creativity blended perfectly with a freezer full of quick fix meals that I'd stocked up on last week prior to a few late nights at work and Jen contracting the flu.

While Jen had the flu I didn't make much aside form chicken soup, a large pot of turkey stock and about two gallons of apple sauce from the last three weeks of farm apples we've received. I would have posted pictures but strangely the turkey stock and apple sauce look pretty similar. So similar, in fact, that Jen almost ate a spoonful of turkey stock the other night before I intercepted her. I fear that had I not interrupted her action she may have been put off both stock and apple sauce for a very long time.



Tuesday night was the first real dinner in a while. I roasted a red snapper stuffed with lemon wedges, parsley, and capers along with my traditional oven fries. I also made a mixed greens salad with grape tomatoes and goat cheese.



Tonight was another low-inspiration, high convenience meal. I baked this mustard-panko chicken breast along with wedges of acorn squash from the farm which I tossed with olive oil, sea salt, cayenne, and cumin. As an accompaniment I made a rerun of Tuesday's salad with a baked potato.

This weekend may bring a trip to the farmer's market to make up for the vegetables we have been missing. There may have also been enough time that has passed so that we might be able to go out to dinner again after our initial move in to the new place.

Oh, just imagine the wild adventures we will have this weekend with no one dying from the flu, no out of state weddings, and gas. It's going to be a wild time.

Vegetables That Roast and Simmer

I've lived in range of a grill for ten days now and I still haven't used it. I have not had reliable grill access for over five years so I thought I'd be taking more advantage of this. Unfortunately I haven't had a great deal of free time to be cooking these days. Last night was no different. Getting home late it was all I could do to turn on the oven, chop up some vegetables, and throw them in to roast while I showered and caught up on some other miscellaneous work.

I have become quite fond of roasting in the recent years. Now that we live in an apartment with ventilation and roasting does not mean triple degree room temperatures even in the dead of winter, roasting has gained a bit more luster under these circumstances.

Whilst the roasting occurred, I threw together a quick salad.



This salad isn't exactly a typical depiction of our Thanksgiving leftovers, however, we are running out of leftovers to utilize. I threw this together with the mimolette, red grapes, green grapes, black grapes, and some sweet Connecticut grape tomatoes.



The main course was assorted roasted farm vegetables: shallot, hot wax pepper, onion, celery, celery greens, acorn squash, and a little leftover butternut from Thanksgiving. I sauteed them with a little olive oil (no garlic to be found) and sprinkled lightly with a touch of cinnamon and cardamom.

Normally I think baked chicken is kind of lame. I guess there's really no way to really define baked chicken. They taught me at culinary school that baking only happens to something that is made from a dough or batter. In my mind I guess baked chicken is chicken that is placed into the oven cold with no searing. Before last night I'd never used this technique. Of course the term technique is used to cover up for my incredible laziness and lack of preparation time.

In the past I have always seared and finished in the oven. Last night I tossed in salt, pepper, and roughly chopped parsley from the farm.

The result was pretty good. The parsley from this week's farm pick up has been exceptional. A couple of years ago I would have laughed at the thought of exceptional parsley. It's kind of like exceptional water.



Tonight I used the leftover roasted vegetables from last night to make this salad along with the red leaf, arugula, and Connecticut sweet grape tomatoes.



On Tuesday I was fortunate enough to get my hands on some burrata. The only disadvantage to having something as delicious as burrata is t nohat one feels guitly even combining it with something as neutral as a water cracker. Burrata may be best enjoyed accompanied by only a spoon.



I used to work at a job where one of my responsibilities was to make 5 gallons of two to three different varieties of soup a day from leftover items we had lying around. In that time I became fairly adept at coming up with soups as I went along. Tonight I relived my roots by making a soup from some assorted farm leftovers including carrots, onion, celery, butternut squash, and the rind from a piece of Parmigiano.

The result was actually not that great. I think, perhaps, I may have gone a little heavy on the celery greens as the soup seemed to taste predominantly of celery.



For dessert we ate a wedding favor from last weekend's wedding. It was Jen's all time favorite thing in the world, a chocolate/caramel apple. This particular apple was from Dipalicious in Rhode Island.

We still have a giant bag of candy from the wedding and a fridge and freezer full of leftover desserts from Canadian Thanksgiving.

So pretty much it's the best thing ever.