Thanksgiving Duck (part one): Duck Ragù with Garganelli

 

The Sherdos, obstinate contrarians, have on the long Thanksgiving weekend decided to cook and write about cooking a fowl that is not a turkey.

As inveterate readers of cookbooks and cooking magazines, we’ve started to feel rather cranky about the fact that, year after year after year, and seemingly for weeks and months on end, every magazine and newspaper and cooking show devotes itself to turkey, turkey, turkey, along with all the other familiar instances of so-called “holiday cooking.”  After all, how many recipes for roast turkey can one reasonably be expected to read, much less to try? 

(Would you like to know how to roast a turkey?  Take a dressed bird, put it in a hot oven and cook it until it's done.  The rest, as they say, is conversation.  Of course there are also innumerable recipes that involve hotter ovens or cooler ones, recipes for frying, steaming or grilling a turkey, and all kinds of brines, garnishes and other strategies that claim to (and sometime do) produce crisper skin or moister meat.  So by all means, have at it.  But it sometimes seems to us that the sheer profusion of recipes for roasting turkey produces the reverse of its intended effect: that is, it has made the simple act of roasting a bird, which is obviously one of the most basic and ancient of kitchen operations, into a sort of arcane mystery, in which somehow the “best” recipe always remains to be discovered, always mysteriously just out of one’s reach.)

Anyway, at last Saturday’s market, Chowdown Farm had fresh ducks for sale, which inspired us to splurge on two of them, so as to attempt a complicated multiple cooking project spread out over several days of this holiday weekend. 

To be sure, duck is a relatively expensive luxury, for good reasons.  Even laying aside the economies of the factory farm, ducks are simply more expensive to raise than, say, chickens.  Although we’re certainly not experts on the subject, our understanding is that chickens can be raised with little more than a small yard with grass and a coop, whereas ducks need water, a larger area, and special food.  So ducks are not really for daily consumption, but something to be saved for a special occasion.

After getting our two ducks home, we first carefully cut off the legs and the breasts.  We put the two remaining carcasses in a big pot, with a cut up leek, a few onions, carrots, celery sticks and a bouquet garni (some parley, thyme, and bay leaves, tied together with string).  We covered this with water, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat, and simmered it overnight, producing a rich duck stock.  (For more on stock-making, see our post on chicken stock from April 28 2012).  The next day we strained and de-fatted the stock, reserving about ten cups (some for the ragù, the rest for another dish we'll write about in part two of this post); and then reduced the rest into a kind of duck demi glace (a sort of concentrated brown sauce with a paste-like consistency), both of which would be crucial ingredients in the dishes we were planning to make.

First up would be an Italian style duck ragù, which we served with some home-made garganelli pasta.  For this you need the stock but not the demi glace.
 
Our very first post was about this garganelli dressed with spring asparagus.  Fresh pasta takes a bit of work, though a few simple and inexpensive tools — like the dedicated cutter that produces nice even squares of rolled pasta, and a simple wooden dowel and board for shaping the garganelli — do make the task a bit easier.

 

As for Ragù: well, this is one of those notoriously contested terms in cookery that can refer somewhat confusingly to a number of different things.  The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of the word, whose Italian form we’re using here, from the French ragoût, which itself emerges from the French verb ragouster, “to have a taste of, to incite the appetite.”  As a noun, the word usually refers to some kind of highly-seasoned stew of meats, fish or vegetables.  In the seventeenth century, it seems clear that people still heard the word as a kind of compound referring to a dish made “a-gout,” to the taste — or, as it were, a “tasty,” spicy or piquant dish.  For example, in an English translation from 1653 of Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François (1651), a book often cited as the founding text of modern French cuisine, a “ragoust” is defined as “any sauce, or meat prepared with a haut goust, or quicke or sharp taste.”   Susan  Pinkard’s recent A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine observes that, in seventeenth-century France, the words ragoût and fricassee were used more or less interchangeably to mean “dishes cooked in a sauce that incorporated the juices of the principal ingredient, supplemented by other liquids such as bouillon, wine, or cream” (107).  Pinkard also suggests that these dishes developed in the early seventeenth century when the raised stove became common, allowing the cook to maintain a low, even temperature, as various forms of hearth cooking — spit roasting, grilling over the coals, or boiling in a cauldron over open flames — would not. The close watch one keeps over the stovetop ragù was once, then, an innovation.

The word seems to have been imported into English almost immediately.  The English poet William Davenant, in The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House (1656), a sort of loose opera commonly cited as the first new dramatic performance in London after the closing of the theaters during the English revolution in 1642, describes the bounty of a banquet as including

Your Pottages, Carbonnades, Grillades, Ragouts ... and Entremets.

As recently as 1925, in P.G. Woodhouse’s Carry On Jeeves, Bertie Wooster refers memorably to his aunt’s cook Anatole (whom other rich people are always sneakily trying to hire away from her) as “A most amazing Johnnie who dishes a wicked ragoût.”

The Italian ragù, however, is a slow-cooked stew of mixed meats and flavorings used to dress pasta.  Two of the most famous, of course, are the ragù Bolognese from Emilia-Romagna, that simmers veal, pork and beef in a rich sauce with just a hint of tomato and thickened with milk or cream; and the ragù Napoletano, which mixes chopped meat with lots of tomato — and thus seems to be the ancestor of old-fashioned American “spaghetti sauce.”  In The Splendid Table, Lynne Rossetto Kasper observes that a French ragoût is always a dish eaten on its own (in fact, many French cookbooks use the word as a synonym for "stew"), whereas the Italian ragù is always a sauce for pasta.  Kasper records that the Italian cookbook author Christofaro di Messisbugo served ragù-like dishes at the court of Ferrara in the 16th century, dishes which she believes had much in common with Middle Eastern cuisine, incorporating exotic spices such as rosewater, saffron, cinnamon,  ginger — and of course sugar.  They would almost certainly have tasted sweet to a modern taste.  The modern Italian ragù, she believes, was in effect re-imported into Italy from France in the 18th century, when aristocratic Italians became obsessed with all things French.

Our duck ragù is based on a recipe from Mario Batali, whose description of it as a dish “raised to mythic status” when combined with homemade garganelli captured our imaginations.  Garganelli, a shaped pasta like homemade penne or ziti, comes from the Italian word for a chicken’s gullet (and is thus a linguistic cousin of the English word “gargle”).   

The ragu is actually quite easy to prepare: basically, you just brown your duck legs, then sauté a mixture of chopped aromatic vegetables, and then add tomatoes, wine and stock.  The duck legs are then braised slowly in this sauce.  Finally, the cooked meat is shredded and returned to the sauce, whereupon it's ready to be finished with your pasta.  The original recipe called for chicken stock, but  using duck stock amps up the flavor and distinctiveness of the dish.  And, perhaps needless to add, the ragù is also great with any kind of store-bought pasta — you might try it with the lovely fresh parpadelle from Pasta Dave at the market.   

Duck Ragù with Garganelli

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 4 duck legs, visible fat removed, patted dry
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 rib of celery, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 4 fresh sage leaves
• 2 cups red wine
• 1 cup duck stock (or substitute chicken)
• 6 oz tomato paste (or substitute about 2 cups of chopped fresh or canned tomatoes)
• Garganelli made from about 1 pound of pasta dough (or substitute about 2/3 lb of storebought penne or ziti)
• Parmesan cheese for grating

Season the duck legs with salt and pepper.  
In a dutch oven, pot, or large saucepan, brown the duck legs for 10 minutes, and remove to a plate.
Add the chopped vegetables, and cook over low to medium heat until soft.
Add the wine, stock, and tomato paste, stir, bring to a boil.
Return the duck legs to the pot, turn down the heat, and simmer, partially covered, for at least one 1 hour or until the legs are well cooked. 
Remove the duck legs, allow to cool slightly, then shred the meat and return it to the pot.
Simmer uncovered another 30 minutes or until the sauce is thick. 

Cook the garganelli until just barely tender, and add to the pan with the sauce.
Toss over high heat for two minutes, adding a splash of pasta-cooking liquid if necessary.
Remove from heat, spoon into bowls, and top with grated parmesan and additional pepper.

(NOTE: This dish should easily serve at least four, but the precise amount of pasta you use is negotiable.  If you're serving only two people, you can freeze half the ragù for later.  Your goal is to have plenty of sauce to coat the pasta well, but not so much that the pasta is swimming in sauce.) 


Make this dish any old day and we promise your loved ones will be humming the old tune from Disney’s Mary Poppins:  “every day’s a holiday with you.”

First crab and "South End of the Market" Cottage Pie

This morning at the market, we overheard someone say it was a "much restricted" market because of the weather.  While it is true that it was drizzling and cold, it is also true that the market was bursting with treasures.  We got what are likely to be the last organic grapes from Mt. Moriah farms, as well as the first crab of the season from Mission Fish.

We also nabbed two ducks from Chowdown Farms.  We're planning a duck ragu as one of our uses for those ducks and we'll write about that later.  We love crab in salads (see one of our first posts about our version of Crab Louis) and that's what we'll do with this first crab of the season, combining it with beautiful lettuce mixes available from several different farms and the last-gasp tomatoes from Towani farms.  If we weren't currently obsessed with making our own fresh pasta, we'd pick up some from Pasta Dave at the market--a welcome addition to our vendors--and serve it with melted butter and as much of the crab as our budget and picking patience would allow.

If you need a meal this week that isn't too demanding and will please different palates, we'd like to recommend a Sweet Potato Cottage pie that we think of as "South End of the Market" Cottage Pie because its three chief ingredients can be purchased at the South End:  raisins and sweet potatoes from Schletewitz Farms/The Fruit Factory and ground beef from Yolo Land & Cattle. 

The recipe originally came from Fine Cooking magazine and is available here:  http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/sweet-potato-cottage-pie.aspx.  Predictably, we made a few changes.  These lower the fat content of the potato topping and spice up the filling.

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For the topping
2 large sweet potatoes (about 2 lb. total)
1/2 cup Greek Yogurt
3/4 oz. (1/4 cup) finely grated Cheese
Kosher salt and
Freshly ground black pepper 

For the filling
2 medium celery stalks, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 3/4 cup)
1 large carrot, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 3/4 cup)  
1 medium onion, finely chopped (about 1-1/2 cups) 
Kosher salt 
3 medium cloves garlic, minced 
2 tsp. cumin seeds toasted and then ground
2 tsp. chopped fresh oregano or 1/2 tsp. dried oregano 
1 tsp. ancho chile powder or other pure chile powder 
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon 
1 lb. ground beef  from Yolo Cattle
1 14-oz. can whole peeled tomatoes
1 chipotle chile from a can, chopped
1/2 cup coarsely chopped green olives  (we use those from the Davis Co-op olive bar)
1/3 cup coarsely chopped raisins from the Farmers Market (they really are better), perhaps chopped so that they distribute evenly

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Prepare the toppping

Position a rack in the center of the oven and heat the oven to 425°F. Line a heavy-duty rimmed baking sheet with foil.

Prick the sweet potatoes all over. Roast until very tender, about 45 minutes to an hour.  You can do this well in advance, perhaps when you've got the oven on for another meal, and then just store the roasted potatoes in the refrigerator until you are ready to make the cottage pie.

When cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh into a medium mixing bowl. Add the yogurt, generous salt, and 1/2 tsp. pepper and beat with an electric hand mixer on low speed until smooth and creamy, about 1 minute. Set aside. (It also works to mash the potatoes with a hand masher.)

Prepare the filing

Heat the oil in a 12-inch sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the celery, carrot, onion, and 1 tsp. salt. Reduce the heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are soft, fragrant, and starting to turn golden, 10 to 15 minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, oregano, chile powder, and cinnamon and cook for 30 seconds. Add the beef, season with 1 tsp. salt (original recipe recommends 2), and cook until no longer pink, about 5 minutes. While the original recipe recommends tilting the pan to spoon off most of the fat, the grass-fed ground beef from Yolo Land & Cattle is really lean so you don't need to do this. 

Pour the tomatoes and their juice into a small bowl and crush them with your hands or a fork. Mix in the chopped chipotle.  Add the tomatoes to the meat and cook, uncovered, until thick, 10 to 12 minutes. Add the olives and raisins and cook for another minute; season to taste with salt. 

Assemble and bake the pie

Transfer the beef mixture to a 9x9-inch baking dish. Spread the sweet potatoes over the top in an even layer. Bake until bubbling around edges, about 30 minutes. Top with some grated cheese. Bake another about 15 minutes until the cheese has melted.  (Fine Cooking recommends broiling this at the end but we get distracted and come to grief so we omit that step.) Let cool at least 10 minutes before serving. 

We have assembled the pie a day or two in advance and then heated it up with success later.  That makes it perfect as a dish to have on hand before those hungry houseguests arrive.

Fresh ginger cake and fairytales of one kind and another

The delicately pretty, thin-skinned, fresh ginger from Towani Organic Farm at the market this fall has inspired us to make a ginger cake and to reflect on some of gingerbread’s appearances in history and literature.

Ginger was one of the spices that inspired the spice trade between the Roman Empire and China in the second century.  It later became a staple of Medieval European food, which was much more highly spiced than it would later become. By the early fifteenth century in England, it arrived regularly on boats from the Mediterranean and by the sixteenth, it appeared routinely in cook books and medical guides.  Often in powdered or candied form, since it is relatively perishable, ginger flavored savory and sweet dishes, and provided various medicinal benefits, including “comforting the heart,” aiding the digestion, cleansing and warming the body, countering inflammation, and heightening desire.  

 



When Sir Toby Belch, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, famously calls out the "puritan" Malvolio —

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

— and the Clown chimes in:

Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' th' mouth too! 

—he seems to be referring to the use of ginger to heat up the bodily passions Malvolio censures.  

By the sixteenth century, ginger was a crucial ingredient in what had become a cherished food, ginger bread or cake. Many historical accounts of gingerbread on the internet repeat the story that Queen Elizabeth I presented guests with gingerbread likenesses of themselves.  This even appears as the assertion that Queen Elizabeth “invented” the gingerbread man.  Unfortunately, we haven't been able to find the source for such a story, as proves to be the case with many of the juiciest and most beloved anecdotes about Elizabeth. What we can assert with confidence is that, while Elizabeth was a Renaissance woman with great erudition and many talents, a baker she was not.   Now, there is certainly widespread evidence that early modern cooks shaped marzipan, sugar, and various doughs into representations of flora and fauna, ships and buildings, and, indeed, people.  So it is at least possible that Elizabeth sometimes asked her cooks to make portraits of expected visitors out of gingerbread.  It is appealing to imagine the queen greeting a diplomat, suitor, or courtier with a tiny edible version of himself.  “Sweets to the sweet,” she might have said, “but keep in mind that I could bite your head off.”

Whether or not the sweet-toothed queen shaped the history of gingerbread, the drama that is often considered one of the delicacies of her reign makes frequent mention of gingerbread.  The playwright and poet Ben Jonson, famous for his appetite, among other things, dreamed up a gingerbread gag for a character in one play, and in another, depicted a gingerbread seller at a fair, with her basket full of “gingerbread progeny” and a young man who buys her out, seduced by the pleasures of the fair including his “gingerbread-wife.”

In fairy tales, gingerbread also has a special status if one that is, again, hard to track down.  In the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel,” a story all about hunger, the mother (only later revised into the stepmother, to the chagrin of stepmothers since) proposes that the solution to the family’s poverty and starvation is to leave the two children in the woods.  There, they come upon a witch’s house, “built entirely from bread with a roof made of cake.” While the German might specify that this is “ginger bread or cake” that detail is not in most English versions of the tale. Nonetheless, many illustrations depict the witch’s house as the prototype for the lovely but inedible gingerbread houses that are now a standard part of Christmas decorations.  Underpinning the assumption that the witch’s house is gingerbread is the assumption that gingerbread is the treat most mouth-watering and irresistible to starving, abandoned children, the food of childhood dreams.

So formidable queens and witches haunt this recipe for ginger cake, adapted from the one in David Lebovitz's wonderful book, Ready for Dessert.  While we love recipes that combine ginger in various forms (fresh, dried, and candied), we chose this one to showcase the young ginger turning up at the market, ginger that has not even yet produced thick skin and tough fibers.  The recipe is available elsewhere on the internet but we will repeat it here for convenience.

David Lebovitz’s Fresh Ginger Cake

4 ounces fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
1 cup mild molasses
1 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 cup water
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 eggs, at room temperature

1. Preheat over to 350°F. Put rack in the center of the oven. Butter a 9 inch springform or 9 x 2-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with a circle of baking parchment.
2. Using a food processor or knife chop the ginger very fine.  You could also use a microplane to grate it.  We used the processor. 
3. In a large bowl, mix together the molasses, sugar, and oil.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper.
5. Bring the water to the boil in a saucepan, stir in the baking soda, and then mix the hot water into the molasses mixture. Stir in the ginger.
6. Sift the dry ingredients over the batter, then whisk to combine.
7. Add the eggs, and continue whisking until thoroughly blended.
8. Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for about 1 hour, until the top of the cake springs back lightly when pressed or a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  (Check after 50 minutes.  You don’t want to overbake it.)
10. Cool the cake completely. Run a knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan.  Invert it onto a plate, remove the parchment, and then reinvert it onto a serving plate.

We served this with unsweetened whipped cream and a sauce we canned this summer made from Good Humus Royal Blenheim apricots (basically a very loose jam). The cake has a very strong, pure ginger taste and is, indeed, "hot in the mouth."   We like to think that Queen Elizabeth would approve--and Malvolio would not.

Brutti ma buoni: Comice pears and almond cookies

 

This week we celebrate an ugly duckling dessert and more generally the way that many of the best tasting things at the market are blemished or misshapen.  We all know that many fruits and vegetables have been bred for sturdiness, shelf life, and looks.  The heirloom tomatoes or apples we are so excited to find at the market often announce themselves by their thin skins, cracked or seamed surfaces, bumps and bruises.  For the heirloom seeker, what was once a consumer turnoff becomes the attraction.  “Ah, that’s a fruit that has not been bred for looks,” we think, reaching for it.  And more often than not, the heirloom delivers with its depth and complexity of flavor.  The ugly duckling reveals itself to be a swan.

Among our favorite such fruits at the market are the comice pears from Ratzlaff farms.  They don’t last long.  When they first arrive, they are rough-skinned and lumpy and reasonably tasty—especially if left out on the counter for as much as a week.  Each outing at the market they look a bit worse and taste a bit better.  By now, they are mottled, plump, dripping with juice and bursting with flavor.  Their skins manage to be both susceptible to nicks and bruises and gritty and a bit bitter.  If we are feeling ambitious and persnickety, we peel the pears, letting the juice drip over the salad or yogurt they are about to grace.  But we gobble them up with their skins as well, enjoying the contrast of silky and resistant, sweet and slightly bitter.

While the pears don’t need any embellishment, the Italian almond cookies called Brutti ma Buoni, or “uglies but goods” make the perfect partner.  Pears and cookies share an appearance that belies their deliciousness (although we wouldn't really call either ugly), complementary flavors, and local availability.  We draw our recipe from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  Long ago we started toasting the almonds that went into the cookies, although Marcella does not.  One of our mothers, a great baker and exacting teacher, insists that nuts used in baking (and most other cooking) should always be toasted first to deepen their flavor.  She is even known to ask suspiciously “did you toast these nuts?” and, trust us, you never want the answer to be “no.”  But for the market shopper it is possible to pump up the flavor of these cookies and appease dear Mama without any extra effort.  How seldom that is the case.  The trick is to use the deeply flavored Cabral Family farms dry roasted almonds.  With their skins on and their interiors roasted a dark brown, these almonds magnify the flavor and improve the appearance and texture of the cookies.  The result—a cookie with no flour or gluten and no dairy—is a wonderful keeper and a crowd pleaser.  In a further tribute to Mom, we keep them in a tin box, as she did and as did her mother and aunts before her.  She hated to part with a tin box, stockpiled the sturdy ones, and inspired her descendants to covet and hoard tin boxes as well.  If you want to keep cookies crisp, the tin box has no rival. 

Brutti ma Buoni or Piedmontese Almond Cookies

11 ounces of Cabral Family farms dry roasted almonds (Marcella calls for skinned, blanched almonds)

1 cup plus 3 tablespoons granulated sugar

4 egg whites (we use ones we’ve frozen from all that pasta making this summer)

Salt

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract (we must boast that we use an extract we made out of vanilla beans bought for a song at Vanilla, Saffron imports in San Francisco and soaked for months in vodka)

Butter for smearing the cookie sheets

Marcella says this makes 55-60 cookies but for us it’s more like 30.

1)   Preheat the oven to 300 degrees

2)   In a food processor, pulverize the almonds with the sugar or chop them very fine and combine with the sugar, or smash almonds and sugar in a mortar and pestle

3)   Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks.  This is very easily done in a standing mixer but can be done with a hand beater as well.

4)   Fold the beaten egg whites into the almond and sugar mixture and add the vanilla extract.

5)   Smear two baking sheets with butter.  Scoop up about 1 tablespoon of the batter for each cookie.  This is a great time to use a small cookie scoop if you have one.  Otherwise you need to use two spoons, one to scoop up the batter and the other to push it off onto the pan.  Keep the mounds of batter at least 1 inch apart as these cookies spread out.  As Marcella explains, “don’t worry if they seem shapeless:  Their Italian name means ugly, but good; they are expected to be very irregular.”

6)   Bake on the middle racks of the oven for about 30 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through.  Spread them out on a cooling rack.  When they are completely cooled, store them in a tin biscuit box. 

Marcella expressly recommends the tin box, but we were way ahead of her. 

Kitchen alchemy: Fall vegetable panade

Even a touch of coolness in the air tempts us to undertake more time-consuming and heat-producing kitchen tasks and to whip up comforting dishes that make use of fall produce.  As a consequence, we decided to make some chicken stock and a panade—a bread and stock concoction resembling stuffing or a custard-less savory bread pudding.  We’ve written in another post about “bountiful stock,” especially a stock made from stew hens when they’re available at the market.  The stock we just made might more properly be called “scarcity stock,” as we make it entirely from things that might otherwise be thrown away.  Like edible compost, this stock is a very satisfying form of alchemy, gold made out of garbage.

Over the last few months, we had been stashing the carcasses of all the Chowdown Farm chickens we roasted in the freezer.  They all went into the stockpot, along with a parmesan rind or two (also archived in the freezer), and some tired carrots and celery from the back of the fridge, an onion cut in half, a crushed clove of garlic or two, and, to strike a different note, some fresh rosemary, thyme branches, and bay leaves from the garden.  After bringing it to a boil and skimming it, we simmered it on low heat for a day.  We then chilled it, skimmed off the fat, and stored it in the freezer in small containers.  Chilling it makes it much easier to handle this wonderfully flavorful stock, which turns gelatinous. 

Because we were working with a backlog of chicken carcasses, we produced more stock than we really had room to store in the freezer.  So we were faced with the happy challenge of choosing a dish that would use some up.  We first learned about panade from Judy Rodgers’ splendid Zuni Café Cookbook.  We often make one of her panade recipes at Thanksgiving in place of stuffing.  The panade we made drew on what we learned from Rodgers and combined it with a panade recipe from the Tartine Cookbook, which uses milk in place of the stock.  Naturally, we were all about the chicken stock.   But you can also use vegetable stock or milk in this recipe. 

This simple dish showcases vegetables that are at their best right now at the market:  kale (or another dark, leafy green), cauliflower, butternut squash, and leeks.    

It also uses a hearty bread.  We prefer whole wheat levain, either from Village Bakery at the market or Acme breads at the Co-op.  For cheese, we list fontina and we used the Fontina Vera Aosta from the Co-op.  You can use anything that will melt and that has a flavor punch. 
 

We finished the panade with some grated cheese.  For this, we adapted a trick we learned at the Findlay Market in Cincinnati years ago.  The woman ahead of us in line at a cheesemonger requested “cheese ends.”  When we asked her what she would do with them—in an instance of the snooping, asking, learning, and teaching that make it such a pleasure to shop in a local market—she said she used them in her macaroni and cheese.  She went home with a very motley assortment of bits and pieces of various cheeses and an expression that conveyed her eager expectation of the mac and cheese they would produce.  And we went home with a commitment to mixing it up when it comes to cheese.  So for this panade, in the spirit of using things up rather than throwing them away, we put every stray bit of hard cheese we had in the cheese bin into a food processor and sprinkled it on top in the last phase of cooking.  It was delicious and the unintelligible identity and untraceable origins of the cheese topping just made it more so.

Fall vegetable panade

For the panade, you need a heavy, ovenproof pot (about 5-quart size), preferably with a lid.

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 leeks, white parts only, chopped

About 6 cups chicken stock (you can also use vegetable stock or milk)

Salt

About 3/4 a loaf of day-old country bread, in big cubes

1 small butternut squash (about 1 pound), peeled, seeded and cut into cubes

1 bunch black kale or Swiss chard, center stems removed

1 small head cauliflower (about 1½ pounds), trimmed and cut into florets

½ pound fontina cheese, thinly sliced or cubed

A little hard cheese to grate on top?

1)    Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Melt 2 tablespoons of the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the leeks and sauté until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the stock and perhaps salt it lightly if it’s homemade and you haven’t added a lot of salt.  If you are using store bought stock, don’t salt!  Bring to a boil and then remove from the heat.

2)  Lightly and quickly saute the kale or chard in a bit more oil, just to soften it.

3)    Cover the bottom of the casserole with cubes of bread. Arrange the squash cubes in an even layer on top of the bread and pour in 2 cups of the stock. Put in a layer of some of the fontina cheese.  Then put in another layer of bread cubes.  Top with the kale and the rest of the soft cheese. Arrange the cauliflower florets over the kale. Press down on the ingredients to compress them. 

4) Pour the remaining stock over the top of the whole casserole, but stop adding it when the level is about even with the top layer of cauliflower.  You want the cauliflower to stick its head above the soupy sea. Cover the pot with a lid or aluminum foil. Bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and sprinkle the top with the grated cheese. Return to the oven uncovered and bake until the liquid is absorbed and reduced and the cheese has melted and browned, 30 to 40 minutes. This is delicious when it is wet and almost like a bread soup, but it is even better if you bake it long enough to dry it out so that it holds together.  Serve immediately or let cool and refrigerate for up to 3 days. Leftovers reheat well either in the casserole or in individual slices on a baking sheet. This is one of those dishes that, like love, just might get better the second time around, in this case because it develops wonderfully crispy edges.  This is also a good choice if you need something you can make in advance.

Pasta with Zucchini in the Style of Campania

Zucchini is the first vegetable either of us remembers really liking as children.  Yet precisely because it can seem so unobjectionable and homely, zucchini often doesn’t get much respect.  Notorious for its superabundance when in season, its very bounty can make it seem burdensome.  When we lived in Ohio, a neighbor would sometimes leave a paper bag of huge zucchini at the door, ring the bell, and then nip away.  We inevitably suspected that the stealth was a strategy to prevent us from refusing the gift.  There is a suburban legend that the reason one should always lock car doors in summer, even (or especially) in small, relatively crime-free towns (like Davis), is because otherwise someone will leave a bag of zucchini on the seat. 

Of course, people try so hard to offer their too too-abundant squash not just because they have so much of it, but also because, after all, it's just too good to waste.  More than once, a trip to Italy taught us to see zucchini anew and to try different takes on that summer staple, zucchini pasta.  

Some years ago we had a dish at a little restaurant in Montalcino, in Tuscany, of butterfly pasta, cooked squash, garlic, basil, and a generous amount of pecorino fresco, a soft, fresh sheep’s milk cheese from Tuscany that is available at the Davis Co-op.  The more widely-known pecorino romano is an aged version of a similar cheese.  With this dish, we learned about something that we’ve come to refer to as “the restaurant pause.”  In the restaurant in Italy, we could see the pasta being finished in the pan with the cooked vegetables and herbs.  It was then plated, and small pieces of the cheese (which is too soft to grate) were sprinkled on top.  We could see the chef putting the plate on a shelf just outside the kitchen for the waiter to pick up.  In the tiny, busy and hot restaurant, with one waiter striving his best to serve every table, the plate of pasta waited for perhaps two minutes or so on that shelf; and when it arrived at the table the cheese had melted perfectly on top.  It’s not a liquid cheese sauce, but a sort of lovely light lattice of melted cheese on top of the cooked butterflies.  In most recipes, of course, one is told to serve pasta “immediately,” but this recipe makes a positive virtue out of the inevitable (small) delay between cooking a dish and getting it in front of your guest.

This summer we were in Campania, the region in the middle of Italy whose capital is Naples, where the local specialty is often claimed to be spaghetti with zucchini.  We certainly ate it constantly when we were there.  Usually it’s just squash cooked in olive oil and tossed with spaghetti and grated pecorino romano.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but neither is it particularly memorable.  In one tiny restaurant near Positano, however, the pasta was dressed in a rich green sauce with flecks of brown.  As we ate, we speculated that they had added cooked bacon or ham, or perhaps a glug of sweet cream, to pureed squash.  But when we asked our waiter (part of the family that ran the restaurant), he wagged his finger and said “no, no” and then explained what they did as best he could.  Only when getting home and reading around a bit did we also learn that one of the secrets of this recipe is a variety of squash known as romanesco, which by a happy chance was turning up at Fiddler’s Green at the Davis Farmers Market just as we were experimenting with this dish.  The flesh of this variety has a creamy texture that is part of the secret of this dish — along with, truth be told, a rather generous amount of butter.

Romanesco Squash from Fiddler's Green Farm

Anyway, the recipe below is our best shot at synthesizing what our friendly waiter told us in Campania and a few other recipes seen elsewhere. In this version, we juiced it up a little further by adding some basil and chopped zucchini flowers, since the latter happened to be available.  The basil doesn’t do much, so feel free to omit it, but it does amp up the green color somewhat.  We’ve also included a method for plating the spaghetti that we noticed everyone doing in Italy.  

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Spaghetti with Romanesco Zucchini in the Style of Campania

5-6 medium romanesco zucchini squash, scrubbed, trimmed and sliced medium thinly

Olive oil for frying

1 lb dried spaghetti

5 tbs butter

about one cup of grated parmesan cheese

¼ cup basil leaves, sliced into thin ribbons (a chiffonade)

1 basket of zucchini flowers, trimmed and sliced thinly (optional)

Fry the zucchini slices in olive oil at medium heat until soft and beginning to brown a little.  It will take at least two rounds of frying.  (We’ve found that zucchini tends to get bitter if you get it really brown.  What you’re aiming for here are pieces that are soft, spotted with brown, but retaining some of their green color and just beginning to fall apart.  Remove from pan to a plate and reserve).

 

All the rest of the dish gets done when you finish it, which, unfortunately, has to be right when you want to serve it.

To finish and serve

Bring a large kettle of generously salted water to boil.  Drop in your spaghetti, and stir vigorously until it is boiling again.

Put the butter in a separate pan big enough to fit the whole dish.

When the spaghetti has cooked about half of its time (check your package of spaghetti, but usually around 4-5 minutes), take one cup of the pasta water and add it to the pan with the butter and turn the heat to high.

When the butter-water mixture comes to a boil, add the reserved zucchini.

Now, still at high heat, stir the zucchini mixture vigorously, allowing the pieces to fall apart, until you have a kind of rough puree.  It should take a good two minutes or so.  When it starts to look the way you want it, turn the heat down or off; but this is a game of inches, measured against your pasta in the kettle. 

When the spaghetti is still a little underdone, drain it (reserve another cup of pasta water just in case), and add it to the pan with the zucchini.  Stir vigorously as the pasta absorbs some of the liquid.

Add 1 cup of grated parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. Continue to fold the pasta into the sauce until it has the right consistency.  If it looks watery, cook a little longer to dry it out; if it seems dry, add a little more pasta water.

(Just before calling it done, gently fold in the basil and the chopped flowers, if using.)

Take a large fork, and gather a goodly bit of the spaghetti, turning it into a spiral in a large ladle.  Put one generous spiral of pasta on each plate. 

 

To be really honest, this dish seems to us to have so successfully distilled the earthy taste of the squash that, as the old saying goes, a little goes a long way.  But this is an absolutely wonderful pasta served in small amounts as part of a three-course Italian dinner, following some kind of light antipasti and preceding a meat course, perhaps one of Bledsoe’s wonderful thick pork chops.