Roasted butternut squash over pecorino grits

Q:

What happens when two Southerners meet and get married in the North, and raise two Yankee children, one of whom ends up going to college in northern California?

A:

Dishes like this one.



ROASTED BUTTERNUT SQUASH OVER PECORINO GRITS

This is one of those meals that came out of the thought process of, "hmm, how can I use all those bits of leftover ingredients already in my kitchen?"

I had a few slices of roasted butternut squash, a small quantity of caramelized red onions, a wedge of pecorino cheese, a container of "quick" grits, a jar of pre-minced garlic, a bottle of homemade balsamic vinaigrette, a plastic boxy-thing of pre-washed salad greens, and a bag of walnuts.

I boiled a little more than 1 cup of water, stirred in 1/4 cup grits and about 1/2 tsp of minced garlic, then covered the saucepan, lowered heat to med-low and cooked (stirring occasionally) for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I shredded a whole bunch of cheese and found my bottle of ground cayenne pepper, and in a separate bowl, tossed a large handful of greens with a small amount of dressing. When the grits were about done, I mixed in the cheese and cayenne, then covered it again and turned the heat to lowest. Meanwhile, I microwaved the squash and onions for about 30 sec, and toasted a small handful of walnuts in a dry cast-iron skillet over high heat.



To assemble, I made a small mound of grits in the middle of the plate, arranged the butternut squash slices on top, then scattered the caramelized red onion over that. Next, I scattered the vinaigrette greens over that and topped with the toasted walnuts. Yum!

So, why do I like grits? Because I come from a Southern family. Why do I like them with cayenne pepper in them? That'll probably be the Baton Rouge side of the family. And the pecorino cheese? That'll be the years in California. And the butternut squash and walnuts? Pretty sure that's the Yankee in me.

Buckwheat Blueberry Bread

Um.  Hi.

Back when I introduced myself, I believe I mentioned being a teacher. Which may explain my complete lack of posts since before September 1. Still, wow, that's embarrassing. I had such grand plans! But I am still trying to keep to the philosophy, if not the posting, so there's hope. And I have a big backlog of photos of projects that didn't get posted back in the summer. Keep peeking in here from time to time, and I'll try to keep putting something up from time to time.

Like today.

So, how've I been doing? Well, I've trained myself to feel full on much smaller portions, to eat more variety and less cheese, to snack less frequently and to eat ice cream and others sweets much less frequently. I've been taking yoga classes weekly since mid-September, and even practicing on my own sometimes. I've been wogging (alternately jogging and walking on a loop around my neighborhood) sporadically and have taken to ice skating weekly on Thursdays. I've given blood successfully, so my iron count must be fine, and my blood pressure is still nice and low. I haven't gotten around to going to a doctor yet, so I don't know any stats about my cholesterol, but I'm optimistic. And I finally called the office of a new doctor just before sitting down to write this, so I should be back on track with regular health care soon. (Okay, I need a dentist, too. I'm hoping the new doctor might have advice about local dentists who get the gluten-free thing.) I don't own a scale and haven't weighed myself, but I'm wearing one size smaller than I was last summer, and am getting comments from friends at work. I'm working really hard not to let my self-image get tied up in my weight, but I do feel better about myself, nonetheless.

A lot of my healthier eating has taken place through variety and portion control, more than through avoiding fats and sugars. I'm saving money by eating less and making my groceries last longer (and buying fewer of them when I shop).

So the recipe I invented today isn't exactly heart-healthy.

BUCKWHEAT BLUEBERRY BREAD

This is a sweet, almost toffee-ish bread with a crisp, chewy outside and soft inside. It's the descendant of my previous experiments with buckwheat-cornmeal pancakes, which I started doing when I had too much cooked buckwheat porridge and couldn't begin to face eating it anymore.



1 cup cornmeal
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp xanthan gum
1 tsp egg replacer
1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup plain nonfat yogurt
1 cup cooked buckwheat porridge
1 1/2 cups frozen blueberries

1. Preheat the oven to 375°F. Grease a 9"x5"x3" loaf pan and dust the bottom and lower sides with cornmeal.
2. In a small bowl, combine the cornmeal, baking soda, baking powder, salt, xanthan gum and egg replacer. Set aside.
3. In a larger bowl, cream the butter with a wooden spoon. Add the brown sugar and cream well to combine. Mix in the egg and vanilla, stirring well until smooth. Add yogurt and mix thoroughly. Add buckwheat porridge, using back of spoon to mash if it has become solid from sitting, and mix until well combined.
4. Sprinkle the dry ingredients over the wet ingredients until the surface is just coated, then mix them in. Repeat until all of dry ingredients have been added to wet, and the batter is uniform.
5. Fold in blueberries until well distributed. Pour batter into pan and use spoon to level top.
6. Bake about 1 hr, 10 min, or until bread is firm and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
7. Cool in pan about 10 minutes (which I didn't - oops!), then run a spatula around the edges of the pan before turning bread out onto a rack to cool completely.

Frozen Macaroni & Cheese dinners for those busy nights

Just ask anyone who's ever lived with me - macaroni & cheese is my go-to, default meal. When I was little and would hardly eat anything? Macaroni & cheese was one of my favorite foods. (As was broccoli. True story.)

Until I had to stop eating gluten, Annie's shells and cheddar was approximately my favorite thing on the planet. Their GF version doesn't thrill me as much, although I do like it. I find that DeBoles rice pasta and cheese dinner is much closer to the flavor of the original Annie's (for some reason, Annie's uses a different cheese in their GF dinner than in their original).

Just last night, I decided I needed to cook up that box of DeBoles that had been sitting in my pantry. Remember that broccoli-love I mentioned? Mmm, they taste great together.



But what I really loved when I was a kid was the Stouffer's frozen macaroni & cheese entrée, and since the start of my gluten-free diet, I've been a fan of Amy's rice macaroni & cheese. The problem is, a frozen entrée sells for upwards of $3 at my local Shaw's, and also it's not the best nutritional choice out there.

So, a week or two back, I pulled out my Gluten Free Gourmet Cooks Comfort Foods, and did a little calculating. If a 9"x13" casserole makes 8 servings, what size stoneware dish do I need for an individual serving? Then, I went online and bought eight 16-oz ramekins with fitted rubber lids, and got ready to cook.

Let me take this moment to send my thoughts to the family of Bette Hagman, The Gluten-Free Gourmet herself, who passed away recently. She has given us all a great deal, and will truly be missed. Although I didn't follow her recipe exactly in this case, and haven't technically baked any of it yet, this one is


I mostly followed Bette's recipe for macaroni & cheese casserole, with two ingredient changes: in place of the butter, I used olive oil; and for the cheddar cheese, I used Cabot 75% reduced fat cheddar. I tasted the sauce, and trust me, nothing's missing.



I combined the cooked macaroni with the sauce back in the boiling pot (after rinsing pot and macaroni well with cold water), stirred them together, then spooned the mixture into the ramekins. I covered each with its lid, then stacked them in the freezer. Stoneware can go from freezer to microwave or oven to dishwasher (if I had one), so it's perfect for homemade frozen dinners. Looking forward to quickly grabbing one of these on a busy night when I want something yummy and don't have time to cook it!

Fresh corn and zucchini salad alla Al Forno

A few weeks ago, my parents were darling enough to take me out to dinner with them at Al Forno, one of the truly finest restaurants in Providence. One of the dishes I enjoyed there was a salad made from fresh, local corn and zucchini. Having come home from the farmers' market this week with the same two vegetables, I decided to try my hand at duplicating it:



To make this salad:
1. The secret to the pretty curls of zucchini? A vegetable peeler. I started with a smallish zucchini, maybe 8" or 10" long, and used the peeler to skin off the very outside and one more layer, going over the same "stripe" of the zucchini. I discarded those first two passes, then kept going, making more and more pieces. I had about enough by the time I hit the seeds. Then I curled and arranged the slices of zucchini in my salad bowl.
2. Shuck 1/2 cob of fresh corn (I pulled the leaves down only halfway, and broke the cob in half with my hands, then wrapped the remaining part back up). Using a sharp knife, slice the kernels off, then sprinkle them over the zucchini curls. I ended up pulling a few of the zucchini pieces back up so they showed through the corn, for a more balanced appearance.
3. Drizzle with good olive oil.
4. Using that vegetable peeler again, make curls of parmesan or pecorino cheese (anything sufficiently hard and salty will do). I barely had any left, so I didn't get as pretty, big shavings as the original had had.

Done! Yum!

To serve leftover pizza

Catching up on some meals I'd meant to post:

When my sister visiting a couple of weeks ago, we were both too tired to think about cooking at home, so we went to one of my favorite restaurants: Twist on Angell, in the Wayland Square area of Providence's East Side. I love Twist for its funky atmosphere, extremely friendly and helpful waitstaff, and most especially for its gluten-free menu that includes pizza and beer. Hooray!

A small pizza would be no challenge for my pre-possible-eating appetite, but as I'm trying to get by on less food, I forced myself to stop at half-done and take the rest home. (I did have the crème brulée. It was delicious, and I'm not sorry.)

With a salad for a centerpiece, the four remaining squares of pizza made lovely accompaniments for two further meals. For this one, I mixed some torn-up fresh spinach and romaine lettuce and topped them with a handful of blueberries (all of the above being from the local farmers' market), almonds and I think a drizzle of apple cider vinegar.



Now, place the reheated pizza (which had sundried tomatoes, a mixture of smoked and shredded mozzarella, slivers of fresh basil and a drizzle of balsamic reduction) alongside, and serve with a glass of red wine, because hey, yum.



Even Charcoal was looking for a taste!

Summer Peach Bread Pudding

I apologize for the long silence! Many thanks to new commenters theresa and sea for their compliments, and of course to hilary for her constant support. :-) This is a post I wrote a long time ago, when I actually was making this dish, but didn't get around to finishing until now because I was too lazy to upload the photos. Ah, the last days of summer.

Speaking of which, I do intend to keep posting once I'm back to the teaching grind (in, ergh, a few days), but please understand that it will be much less frequent than my intial flurry of posts. I'll try to be reasonably regular with adding things here, though.

On to the food!



Peaches are in season, and the ones from my neighborhood farmers' market are sweet, juicy and scrumptious. I honestly believe that the best thing to do with ripe, in-season fruit is to eat it raw, all by itself. Yum! It also inspires me to try new recipes - and occasionally to improvise, which I've done here.

I had most of a loaf of GF bread in my freezer, of a type that I don't particularly like for toast or sandwiches. This is what gave me the idea of making a bread pudding. I honestly don't know exactly how much I had, so I'm guessing it was about ten slices. If you try this yourself, you may find you need more or less to complete two layers in the dish. I would recommend the softest/airiest bread you can find, and giving it a good, long soak before baking (longer than the 30 minutes I did). My experience was that the peaches and bread all floated up to the top when I poured in the custard, and the bread stayed very dense and chewy, rather than incorporating the custard, which forced me to bake this far longer than the recipe indicates. It was still very tasty, but should definitely be considered a 'work-in-progress.'

Some of the proportions in this recipe were based on the Apricot Bread Pudding recipe in Rebecca Reilly's Gluten-Free Baking. Although it will go without saying on the slighest glance at the ingredients list, this dish falls securely under the heading of 'treat.'

SUMMER PEACH BREAD PUDDING

about 10 slices gluten-free bread, thawed and crusts trimmed off
1/4 cup butter, melted
2 ripe peaches, pitted and skinned
cinnamon, nutmeg and powdered ginger
6 Tbs dark brown sugar, divided
5 eggs
1 Tbs or more vanilla
1 1/4 c. heavy cream
1 1/2 c. skim milk
[2 3/4 c. half-and-half can be substituted for the above two ingredients]

In a 6-cup Pyrex dish, make a single layer of bread by cutting slices to fit like a jigsaw puzzle. Drizzle with half of the butter. Slice one of the peaches into very thin slices, placing it to cover the bread layer completely. Sprinkle liberally with cinnamon, slightly with nutmeg and moderately with ginger. Sprinkle 1 Tbs brown sugar over that. Repeat all of the above steps to create a second layer each of bread, peaches, spices and sugar.

Heat cream and milk in a saucepan over low heat, until very hot but not yet scalded. Meanwhile, beat eggs with a whisk in a medium-sized, heat-proof bowl, then whisk in remaining 4 Tbs brown sugar along with vanilla (I slipped at this point and added at least 2 Tbs worth; luckily, I like vanilla). Whisk in hot cream, gradually, then strain mixture over bread and peaches. (Top layer of peaches may float to the surface.) Allow to stand 30 min.



Preheat oven to 300°F. Place a roasting pan (or other pan large enough to allow your baking dish to sit in it) in the oven, place pudding inside it, and fill the roasting pan with boiling water halfway up the sides of the pudding dish. Cover dish with buttered parchment paper (or foil). Bake for 20 to 30 minutes.



Remove the pudding from the hot water bath (careful - water is very hot and can burn you). Serve warm, or try room-temperature or cold, as you prefer. I found this to be too rich to be enjoyable with any sort of accompaniment (e.g., ice cream), but that may change if the bread is soft enough to get a more classic bread pudding texture than I did on this try.

Blueberry Scones

My second recipe from Rebecca Reilly's Gluten-Free Baking has been as successful as the first! With my sister staying over and a basket of farmers'-market blueberries in the fridge, I decided to take a shot at making scones. One of the nice things about getting used to baking GF from scratch is that I've started to find that I have all the ingredients already at my house, usually with not more than one or two exceptions. In this case, I didn't have any heavy cream, but I needed some for a frosting recipe that I plan to try later this week, so I didn't mind going out to grab some. (If I'd known I'd need some for this recipe, and that my local Shaw's also only sells cream in pints [not half-pints], I would have ordered some from Munroe for this week's delivery. Ah, well.)

These were really easy to make, and came out very well. My sister, who can eat gluten, told me she thought they were tasty enough to serve to gluten eaters outside the family ... and even to Mom!