All Stuffed Everything: Mushrooms and Winter Squash with Kale Apple Sausage Stuffing

It's time for the things that you reach for when you want something hot and filling and savory, and if you're like me, you have ALL THIS SQUASH. For the rest? Clear out your fridge! The key elements here are the greens (which are chewy and slightly bitter), the apples (which are soft and sweet), the meat/cheese/mushrooms (which are substantial and savory), and the starch, which adds bulk. With those parameters, play around with whatever you've got!

Ingredients: 

• 4-5 small squash or 1-2 large squash. Any kind with a large cavity will do - acorn, delicata, dumpling, or even pumpkin, why not?
• 2 leeks or 2 onions, or one of each.
• 1 bunch kale
• 2 large apples or 3 small ones
• 1 package whole button mushrooms
• 1 cup dried fruit. I used raisins.
• 2 stale sandwich rolls or 1 cup dried-up takeout rice
• 1 egg
• about 3 tbsp worth of savory cheese. Almost any kind will work. Blue is nice.
• optional: 2 sausages

Directions:

Cut your squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Save them - you'll use them in a different recipe.

Cook your squash. If you really really want to, you can roast them, but it's much less trouble and time to simply turn them cut side down in a microwave safe dish and cook it on high for five minutes. Prod it with a fork and see if it needs more time. It probably will. They're done when you can sink a fork into the flesh without much resistance.

While that's going on, core and chop the apples. Chop the tough upper leaves off the leek, and mince the rest up nice and fine. Put a little fat in a skillet and start frying the apples and leeks together.

Next step you can do in the same skillet if you want, but I decided to keep the two separate so I could have some vegetarian stuffed squash in the mix. Henceforth the meat skillet will be Skillet 2, and the apple skillet Skillet 1.

For Skillet 2, pull out the stems of the mushrooms and mince them. Mince the second leek or onion. Begin frying the sausage in Skillet 2, breaking it up as it cooks. Add the mushrooms and onions and cook them all until the onions are caramelized.

 Chop your kale finely and add it to Skillet 1. Add the dried fruit. Cook until the kale is wilted; you may need to add a splash of water to the skillet to help it along.

I have some old stale sandwich rolls in the freezer that had no conceivable use other than as bread crumbs. If you have something similar, crumble one roll into each skillet. You can use basically any starch for this. I've used uninspiring takeout rice. You could use couscous or quinoa. Either way, about half a cup per skillet.

Add an egg and about a tablespoon and a half of savory cheese to each skillet. You're using the cheese for flavor, not for bulk, so the stronger the better. Stir it all together and shut off the heat.

Pack your mixtures into the mushroom caps and the squash halves, and put them in a 350 oven for about half an hour. Check on the mushrooms after 10 minutes. The squash may need more time, depending on how well you nuked them beforehand.

These will keep very nicely in the fridge and make a great ready-made meal during the week, when you can't be bothered to come up with something else. Stick one of these beside a cup of soup, and you are good for Fall. 

Roasted Tomato, Red Pepper, and Chard Soup

I am very proud of this soup. Less so of my photos.

I have a chard problem. I considered it the archetype of disgusting vegetation as a child, and despite my later conversion to the Church of the Bitter Greens, I still find myself occasionally at a loss for what to do with it. When it's young, I just pop it into the salad along with everything else, but when it's older, it commands the attention and should probably be cooked. Mostly I saute it with sausages, but that takes meat, and I don't have enough meat to keep up with the sheer volume of chard that my garden is producing.

Hence, this soup. This soup will change your life. (Perhaps not as thoroughly as the Life-Changing Cabbage Soup, but I still give it a 73% chance of life-changing). It's incredible: the sweetness of the grilled peppers, the startling savoriness of the grilled tomatoes, are given this beautiful, flavorful depth by the bitterness of the chard. I'm eating a bowl of it right now.

The first time I made this soup, it was entirely with garden produce. The peppers are ending now, so I had to supplement them with store-bought ones, but it's a great end-of-summer dish, especially since the grilling adds extra flavor. It's good cold or hot, and like most soups, is even better the next day. 

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch chard
• 2-3 red peppers
• A lot of tomatoes (look, how much will depend on what size your tomatoes are - let's say enough tomatoes to give you about 3 cups worth?)
• One onion
• Handful of basil
• 1 quart chicken stock

Directions

Rinse your tomatoes and peppers and grill them on high heat. The peppers will turn black. Don't worry, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Turn them so they're blackened on all sidesSome of the tomatoes will burst their skins. If that happens, go ahead and scoop it up - grill it any further and it might disintegrate. 

They should look about like this

Gather up your grilled vegetables and let them cool on a baking sheet. You'll want to use all the delicious juices they're giving off, so be sure to use something with sides.

Chop your onion and put it in a soup pot. Saute it in olive oil until it starts to soften. 

Wash your chard well, chop it finely, and add it to the onion. Saute it until the stems are soft and the greens are limp.

Finely chopped chard

Once your grilled tomatoes and peppers are cool, slip their skins off. This is most important - and easiest - for the peppers. If the tomato skins aren't already falling off, don't worry about them. But do take off the skins, the stems, and the seeds, from the red peppers. 

Put all your grilled vegetables into the soup pot. Rinse the juices from the pan into the soup pot. Add a quart of chicken stock. Or whatever stock you've got on hand. You do have stock on hand, right? I mean, you can get by without it, but your next project should really be stocking up on stock.

Simmer simmer simmer simmer.

Add caption

Once everything is looking well simmered (20 mins - 1 hour, soup is flexible) pull it off the stove and let it cool.

Once it is cool enough not to break your blender, pour it in the blender and puree it.

That's it! Enjoy!

Collard Fish Tacos

The collard greens have been growing great in the garden, but in the middle of summer, I find I'm not as much in the mood for the cooked greens dishes that they're often used for. Luckily a fresh collard leaf is sturdy, crunchy, mild, and tasty, making it a great vehicle for little wraps. Here's a new favorite:

Ingredients
Cooked white fish (I just steamed this one until it turned flaky)
Green Salsa (In my case, tomatillos from the garden blended with lime, cilantro, and a little garlic)
Thin-sliced cucumbers
Thin-sliced radishes
Guacamole (mashed avocados with cilantro and lime, or your favorite style)
Shredded Cabbage Salad (shredded cabbage dressed with white vinegar, olive oil, salt, caraway seeds, and paprika)
Fresh collard leaves (broccoli leaves will also work fine for this if you have broccoli growing in your garden)

This is a dish that's much more fun to make with a mandoline.

Heap up the ingredients on the collard leaf, taking care not to overload it. Here I thought about adding a pickle to the mix.

Fold up the collard leaf like a taco or a burrito. It will be quite small, almost bite-sized.

I decided that the pickle competed with the green salsa rather than complementing it, and replaced it with a drizzle of sriracha, which was the right decision.

You can assemble a whole plateful of these and store them in the fridge; the collard leaf won't get soggy. And then you can use all your chopped-up vegetable ingredients in salads. Great summertime meal for a lazy person.

Tomatoes for the Winter: Canning Time!

Now we are getting into my very favorite part of summer, the part where every time you look out at the tomato vines you see them all shiny with red globes, like a midsummer Christmas tree. Now the tomatoes are finally producing enough that I can actually get some into the house before I eat them all straight off the vine.

This is the time of year when you remember that tomatoes are more than just a component. They're these marvels of sweet and sour and savory; they taste like concentrated sunlight. So now's the time to can all you can, so that you can open a jar in the middle of winter and remind yourself that life is worth living.

This is going to be a project. Block off a whole night for this. You're also going to need some specialized equipment. It's not hard to find, but you will have to find it, so this is not an impulse project.

You'll need a lot of tomatoes to make this worthwhile. In previous years, I lived near a market that would do a $15-for-25lb box of seconds; 25lbs was about as much as I could handle at one time and that stocked me up for the whole season. I also had a larger canning setup. This year, I'd say I canned about 10-15 lbs of tomatoes and I used up all but one of the jars I have. Get good tomatoes. I don't mean beautiful round red ones, I mean peak of summer field-ripened ones, big fleshy heirloom varieties, the kind you can't find in supermarkets. If you grow them, great! If not, you can actually get them pretty cheap because - and this is key - you can get the ugly, split, misshapen ones. You'll be paying close attention to them and chopping them up anyway, so removing any bad spots won't add extra work, and no one cares how ugly a tomato is once it's been cooked down into sauce.

Here's my tomato haul. This is mostly from the garden, supplemented with the yellow ones from a friend's garden and some seconds from the farmers' market. There wasn't a developed seconds market, but I went up to a likely-looking stand, told them I was making sauce, and asked if I could buy a bagful of ugly and dented ones. I went around gathering up the ugliest of the tomatoes, and he gave them to me half off. Thanks, Farmers' Market Guy!

You'll also need a basic canning setup. If you have a pressure cooker, great! I have never used one and am frankly kind of scared of them! I use the boiling water method, which demands, at minimum, a giant pot, mason jars with lids and screw bands, a rack to hold the jars in the pot, and a jar lifter. These aren't too hard to find, even where the hipsters have driven the canning market up. If you can't find mason jars, check the hardware store. If you're lucky, you'll find some overly-ambitious home canner divesting herself of her whole setup on Craigslist! And once you have the equipment, you're set: the only thing you'll need to re-up on are the lids.

I'm following the guidelines from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. I really can't add anything to their excellent, readable "Principles of Home Canning", but they've done a really superior job on making their site navigable and approachable for someone who comes in thinking not "I want to learn all about canning!" but "How do I get these tomatoes in jars?" Their directions are clear and specific, and include links to further information at just those stages in the process where you might start wondering "Wait, why am I doing this?"

I'm making three kinds of tomato product here: whole peeled tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, and tomato sauce. The first two just speak for themselves - well, rather, for the tomatoes they're made from - but the last one I'm really quite proud of.

Tomato Sauce Ingredients

• 10lbs sauce tomatoes, cleaned and roughly chopped
• 1 8 oz can tomato paste
• 2 med onions, finely chopped
• 6-8 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp dried thyme
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 1 tbsp dried basil
• salt to taste
• large handful fresh basil

Tomato Canning Extravaganza Instructions

Fill your largest pot with water and start sterilizing your jars. You don't actually have to do this, according to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, since your food is going to be processed for more than 10 minutes in boiling water. I do it anyway, to make sure the jars are clean and pre-heated so they won't crack when I add the hot tomatoes and sauce. While you're sterilizing the jars (10 minutes in boiling water), make your sauce.

Pour a generous amount of olive oil into the bottom of a large heavy pot. Crush the garlic into it and saute on medium-high heat until golden. Add the onions and saute until soft. Add the tomato paste - you don't actually need this, but I find that unless you are prepared to simmer your sauce literally overnight, you'll want the sauce to be a little thicker than simple fresh tomatoes will provide. Stir that around, and then start adding your fresh tomatoes.

You'll have so many fresh tomatoes it's basically pointless to have them all chopped beforehand. Just keep chopping them and throwing them in. A note here about your seconds: obviously you're cutting off the scars and the cores, but also make sure you don't use any part of the flesh that's softer than its surrounding bits. 

Go ahead and add the dried spices. If you've got some wine, you can add a splash of that too. Once you've added all the tomatoes, turn the heat down and let the sauce simmer indefinitely. Throw in the fresh basil at the end.

Finished sterilizing your jars? Great! Time to acidify them. Botulinum toxin needs a low-acid environment to grow, and although tomatoes are an acid food, some kinds may have pH values above 4.6, so lemon juice should be added to the jars regardless. Sounds complicated, is in fact as simple as adding one tbsp of lemon juice to each pint jar. Well, that was anticlimactic.

Let the sauce simmer while you prepare your whole peeled tomatoes. This is how I dealt with the abundance of cherry tomatoes; use your structurally sound tomatoes for this. Put them in a basket or strainer and dip them into boiling water (hey, you have a pot of boiling water right there on the stove!) for 30-60 seconds, then rush them over to the sink and run cold water on them. Pop them out of their skins - they should have already split from and into the jars. Fill the jars to half an inch from the top - "headspace".  Once you've peeled all the tomatoes you want to, boil some water - not the water you were soaking the skins in - and pour in the jars to just cover the peeled tomatoes. Tap the sides or stir the contents with a knife to get the air bubbles out.

Clean the jar rims with a damp paper towel; you don't want any tomato bits interfering with the seal. Put the lids on the jars and screw them on with the rings. You don't need any kind of extreme tightening, just firm. The seal is going to happen between the jar and the lid; the ring just keeps everything in place while that happens.

Load your jars into the boiling water bath. This is where a jar lifter is absolutely essential. (If you have a rack that can be lifted out and loaded, that's different.) Normally I disapprove of kitchen gadgets that have only one function, but when that one function is "safely transferring slippery glass things into and out of boiling water", then sign me up.

Make sure your boiling water setup is correct - water over the tops of the jars - and then boil for the time directed. In this case, 40 minutes. While that's bubbling away, make your crushed tomatoes. This is so simple it's a bit ridiculous, and it's what I did with the nicest sauce tomatoes. Simply cut them into quarters (or eighths, depending on how big they are), drop them in a pot, and heat them up while pressing them down slightly. Cook them 5-10 minutes. They'll give off enough liquid to pack them in.

Load up your crushed tomato jars and your sauce jars. This would be where a wide-mouthed funnel would help, if you had one. If not, just use a ladle and be precise. As before, wipe the rims of the jars before placing the lids on them.

Time's up? Take the peeled tomatoes out of the boiling water bath (JAR LIFTERS JAR LIFTERS JAR LIFTERS) and put them on a wire rack to cool. You'll hear them go plunk-plunk-plunk as they cool and the lids invert, creating the seal. Put the sauce jars in the boiling water bath. Check the water level, and go watch an episode of something while they boil for the recommended amount of time. 

Whoa. Look at that. Have a drink. 

Dill Fridge Pickles and Basil Fridge Pickles

I actually got a chance to do some cooking with my co-blogger last week! The garden had a whole mess of cucumbers - literally more than I could carry - and we thought it would be good to do some pickling. Now, there is a whole art of fermentation and canning and etcetera etcetera, but come on, it's summer. If you're not eating the pickles fast enough that plain refrigerator pickles will serve just fine, you're doing it wrong.

(Briefly: you can ferment cucumbers - or most things, really - in a jar with some salt and water and after a while you will have something sour. You can also can pickles with boiling water and then they can sit on shelves for quite a while. OR you can put some vinegar and salt on some cucumbers and seasonings, stick it in the fridge, and call it a day. Thought so.)

Dill Fridge Pickles (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 whole mess of cucumbers (I'd say I used about eight? It'll really vary depending on how big your cucumbers are. Don't sweat it. Just keep filling up jars until you run out of cucumbers)
• Fistful of dill
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 4 tbsp kosher salt (the type of salt actually matters here, since the iodine in table salt can turn pickles dark. I mean, you can still eat them, but they may look odd)

Basil Fridge Pickles (adapted from Food52)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 whole mess of cucumbers
• Fistful of basil, sliced thin
• 2 cups apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup mirin or rice vinegar
• 4 tbsp kosher salt
• 1/2 cup sugar

Instructions

Chop up your cucumbers into rounds, nice and thin. Start filling up jars. You don't have to use Mason jars for this, although Mason jars are very useful containers. If, for instance, you've been saving salsa jars, they'll work just fine. Fill them up near the top, but leave about 1/2 inch of space. 

Add the herb (basil or dill) to the jars. You want to have enough of it in there to see, but not so much that you can't see the cucumbers. One head, or two large sprigs, of dill should be enough; two to three large leaves of basil.

Mix up the brine - that's the vinegar, salt, and sugar if using it. Shake until all is thoroughly blended, then start pouring it over the cucumbers. Fill up each jar a bit more than halfway with the brine. There'll be cucumbers sticking out of it. That's okay! The salt will start drawing out the cucumber liquid soon enough, and by tomorrow you'll see that the brine will cover the cucumbers.

Close your jars. Shake them well. Stick them in the fridge. You'll be able to see them turn to pickles - they'll turn from dark green to olive green. Eat them up, yum. They'll keep for about three weeks.

Zucchini Blossoms

Fried zucchini blossoms are a favorite in my family. My mom used to grow zucchini plants just for the blossoms. (Also, if you pick all the the blossoms and baby zucchini off of your zucchini plants every day, that is a great way to have a zucchini the size of a small toddler appear overnight. Giant zucchini are gross. They starchy and flavorless and pretty unsalvageable.)

I have no idea where to suggest you buy zucchini blossoms. Apparently they sometimes show up at farmers' markets.

But zucchini blossoms are easy. Cover in egg and flour and sauté in butter. There is a theme to my cooking; sauté in butter with parmesan cheese for easy delicious food.

  

I ate this with toast for breakfast, and I had a hummingbird as a companion. If you have the possibility of having a hummingbird breakfast companion, I recommend it. I have learned this week that they chirp at each other, and perch on things. I had always assumed they were like sharks and were always moving. (I know this doesn't make sense. But it is what it is.)

Fried Zucchini Blossoms

Zucchini Blossoms

Baby zucchini

1 egg

handful of flour

grated parmesan cheese

pat of butter

Scramble the egg in one bowl and put the flour in another. Add parmesan cheese and salt to both.

Coat each thing in egg and flour. Sauté. If doing baby zucchini a well as blossoms, do the zucchini first, as it needs to cook the longest.

Fennel-Zucchini Frittata

My mom has an extensive vegetable garden. Well, extensive by my standards anyway. When I went to visit her, we went out and picked fennel and zucchini.

 

Frittatas are easy. Chop up vegetables and sauté them in a pat of butter or dash of oil until they are soft. The only trick is what kind of pan to use; cast iron is traditional, but I am intimidated by cast iron. (I have no idea how you clean it. Something about no soap and then also rubbing oil on it. You see my problem.) You need to use something that is oven safe. This one was made in a Caphalon All Clad pan, all metal, no teflon, no wood, so, oven safe.

*

Depending on the vegetables, this step might not even be necessary. But you don't want to bite into raw zucchini, that would be gross. So cook them until they are edible. Then mix in with scrambled eggs. This is the step where you add cheese. We used feta that she had in her cupboard, which was also produced locally.

Put a little more oil or butter in the bottom of the pan to keep the egg mixture from sticking. Most of your butter or oil has been absorbed by the vegetables or is already in the eggs. Pour the eggy mixture back over the vegetables.

Cook on the stove for a while until it looks like most of the egg is cooked but the top is still a little runny. Put it in the oven and bake until it's golden.

Zucchini Fennel Frittata

1 large bulb of fennel

3 small zuchhini

5 eggs

4 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup (approximately) feta or other cheese

handful of pine nuts

Preheat oven to 350.

Chop up the vegetables. I sliced everything super thin. Sauté until soft with pine nuts. While the vegetables are cooking, scramble the eggs. Pour the vegetable mixture into the eggs, stirring constantly. Add cheese, continuing to stir. Melt more butter in the pan, pour egg and vegetables back in the pan. Cook until set.

Put in oven, and bake until golden.

Transfer to a plate to serve. Be very careful, the handle of this pan is going to be very hot. It was in the oven. It might fall apart, but really, who cares? It's delicious.

*Look, I figured out how to put animated gifs in posts! Sorry if they are boring. Once the novelty wears off, there will be less animations.

Garden Breakfast: Kale & Squash Blossom Omelette

So in one of my garden boxes, I just let whatever was in the compost sprout. That turned out to be squash, squash, tomatoes, squash, tomatillos, squash, squash, and squash. Though most of the squash are winter ones (I think?) they are still producing a huge amount of the fragile, tasty delicacies that are squash blossoms. Squash blossoms are a great reward of having a garden - they're expensive to buy and not of the best quality, since they start to wilt as soon as you've picked them. Grow your own, and eat like people pay to in restaurants.

I wake up, I'm hungry, I go out to the garden and pick the stuff that needs picking. Good heavens, that's a lot of greens. Stay tuned for greens recipes.


Ingredients

• 5-6 eggs
• 2 cups squash blossoms (if you don't press them down)
• a good handful of kale or other green
• a shallot or small onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• some kind of sharp cheese; I used cotija, I've also had good results with goat cheese. Feta would work nicely.
• Whatever else you get from the garden that day. I used broccoli. You could use tomatoes. Really it is hard to go wrong.

Instructions
Mince the garlic and the shallot. Fry in oil or butter until transparent.

Add the squash blossoms. Fry on medium heat until wilted and soft.

Push the vegetables out of the pan and crack the eggs into it. (Or you could mix them eggs up beforehand; I like the contrast of yolk and white that you get if you break the yolks after they've started to cook. You'll want to make sure the pan is not too hot.

Once the eggs have turned opaque but have not yet finished cooking, lay the cooked vegetables down in a line on one side of the eggs.

Wash the kale or greens and lay a layer of leaves over the top of the squash blossoms. Let the heat soften them a little bit, then put on your last layer of vegetables - here, broccoli. Sprinkle on some sharp cheese.

Gently fold over the top of the omelette and let it cook until set. Serve with hot sauce.