On the stove

Hi!

This afternoon, I did the Christmas cookie deliveries on foot. I wore ski goggles, and my snow pants, and I'm pretty sure our friend Bob now thinks I'm crazy, but I have to say, it was wonderful out there.

It was also wonderful to come home and take a hot shower and untangle the icicles from my hair. After I did that, Alex and I made another batch of eggnog involving nine cups of Jim Beam, nine cups of milk, and three dozen eggs. That was pretty great too. Now, I'm sitting on the couch next to our tiny balsam tree, watching the fire roar and drinking a beer.

Pretty soon it will be time for dinner—a bowl of James Peterson's red lentil, coconut milk, and garam masala soup with the addition of some sautéed fennel. I don't always like fennel on its own—it's pretty sweet, and it smells way too much like black licorish to be eaten on its own—but in small doses, and cooked down, I think it's excellent. It goes especially well with the spices in this particular garam masala—saffron and turmeric and nutmeg and cinnamon and cardamom and cloves with a little bit of black pepper mixed in. Also, the recipe says you can choose either yogurt or coconut milk as a thickener, but I used half and half, and I think it was the best of both worlds.

You've probably already started cooking, but in case you haven't, I wanted to let you know. Because between the looming holidays, and the requisite bustling, and the perfect silence of the snow, it's just the kind of easy-healthy-good thing you might want to have on the stove.

RED LENTIL SOUP WITH COCONUT MILK, YOGURT, & GARAM MASALA

There aren't so many local ingredients in this soup, but I'm okay with that in ethnic recipes, so long as the basics are from around here. If you're running low, check out the latest news from Buy Fresh Buy Local Cape Cod—there are still several farm stands going strong.

If you don't have fennel, feel free to play around with other vegetables. The original recipe—which comes from the book Splendid Soups by James Peterson—says that in India this soup is often used as a base for a vegetable stew. I think crushed tomatoes would make a nice addition.

[Update, 8pm: Alex had the idea to serve this as daal rather than a soup, and it was a good one. He cooked up a batch of small potatoes, drained them, smashed them with a fork, and poured the soup over top. Yum!]

1 medium-size onion, diced
1 medium-size fennel bulb, diced (optional)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon fresh or dried thyme
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup red lentils
3 cups water
1/8 teaspoon saffron threads, soaked for 15 minutes in 1 tablespoon warm water
1 cup coconut milk or yogurt, or half and half
salt to taste
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
2 tablespoons butter

Sauté the onion, fennel, garlic, thyme, and turmeric in the olive oil over medium-high heat for 8-10 minutes, or until the onions and fennel are tender. Stir in the lentils and the water, bring to a boil, and cover. Turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes, or until the lentils are tender.

Stir in the saffron with the water it soaked in along with the coconut milk and/or yogurt. Season with salt to taste. Turn the heat up to medium and bring the soup back to a boil.

In the meantime, sauté the remaining spices in the butter until fragrant. Stir this mixture into the hot soup, and serve at once.

The Local Food Report: get this

Get this: If you know where to look, you can find wild morel mushrooms in Wellfleet.

I know. I didn't believe it either, until Richard Bailey took me out foraging the other day. We jumped a guardrail, headed down into a ravine, and there they were—hiding in the leaf litter beneath an old, abandoned apple tree.

Bailey is an amateur mycologist—he learned a lot of what he knows from his wife, who's German—and he says he found his first morel growing near an old apple tree stump in his driveway a few years back. He consulted a guidebook—Mushrooms of Cape Cod and the National Seashore by William Neill and Arleen and Alan Bessette—and discovered that the stump was ideal morel habitat. "Fruiting," the entry read. "Near dead elms, in old apple orchards, burned areas, mixed hardwoods, and sometimes under conifers." Bailey's been finding them every spring since.

Morels are strange looking—the ones we found were about four inches tall, sticking out of the ground at a slight angle, with a short, smooth, cream-colored stem and a golden top that looked sort of like a cross between a brain and a honeycomb. But they're also beautiful. They're delicate, and hollow, and they give off the air of something elusive. Partially, of course, that's because they are: they're one of the most prized wild edible mushrooms in New England. As my friend Eric puts it, they're the kind of mushrooms that can own a dish.

The time to forage for them is now. Bailey says to wait for a warm day following a wet day, around the season when the apple trees are in full blossom, or just after the petals have passed. The book says they're around anytime from April to June, and that they can be found alone, or in clumps. We found six by our tree.

Bailey's only condition for sharing was that I had to eat mine; I couldn't chicken out. I didn't—I did some research first, on what sort of false morels might be lurking around (read more on that over here and in the book)—but once I was sure, I dug in. I got out a scoop of oat groats from our grain CSA and a bag of shiitakes I bought from Julie Winslow a few weeks back, and simmered them with onions and mushroom broth into a rich, earthy pilaf. I cut the stems from the morels, used a paintbrush to dust them off, and spooned the pilaf inside.


I added a drizzle of melted butter and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan, and that was it. I put them in the oven, and the mushrooms sort of melted into the butter as they warmed up, while the cheese got crisp on top. My two prizes didn't last very long. Alex and I counted to three, took our first bites, and a few minutes later, congratulated ourselves on the fact that we weren't dead. I wish we could have them again, and again.

No luck yet, but I've been scouting old apple trees all week.

STUFFED MORELS

The good thing about this recipe is that if you can't find any morels, it has two parts, and you can at least enjoy the first. Step one is to make an oat groat, shiitake, and mushroom broth pilaf (adapted from Whole Grains Every Day Every Way by Lorna Sass), which any one of you can do once the Orleans Farmers' Market opens this ( ! ) Saturday ( ! ) and Julie Winslow starts selling again.

We got our oat groats from our grain CSA, but you can also buy them New England-grown from Wood Prairie Farm in northern Maine. If you've never had oat groats, you're in for a treat. Shape-wise, they're similar to rice, but they have a sort of silky sweetness that makes them ideal for things like pilaf or risotto. (Also, if you don't have a mushroom broth recipe already, there's a good one over here.)

Of course, if you have part two—the morels—you're in for a treat. They soak up the butter and Parmesan on the outside, and inside, the pilaf adds an earthy richness that makes the whole thing pretty divine. Either way, I think you'll find the pilaf, stuffed or on its own, is a nice side dish. I imagine it would go particularly well with a roasted chicken and a heap of creamed spinach.

2 cups mushroom broth
3 tablespoons butter, divided
1 cup finely chopped onion
1 cup finely chopped celery
1 and 1/4 cups slivered shiitake mushrooms
1 and 1/2 cups dry oat groats, rinsed
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons fresh thyme
2 morel mushrooms, roughly 4-5 inches long
1/2 ounce grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Bring the mushroom broth to a boil, and leave it to simmer, covered, while you work.

Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the onions, celery, and shiitakes and sauté for about 5 minutes, or until the onions are soft and translucent. Pour in the oats and stir until everything is well-mixed. Turn off the heat and pour the boiling mushroom broth over the oats. Add the salt and stir well.

Cover the Dutch oven and put it into the preheated oven. After 35 minutes, taste the oats. If they're tender, remove them from the oven and let them sit for 5 minutes. If not, keep baking (you may need to add a bit of boiling water if the oats are not yet tender but getting dry). They shouldn't need more than another 10-15 minutes at most. Once you pull them out of the oven, let the pilaf rest for five minutes; then stir in the thyme. (Note: do not turn the oven off. You'll need it again in a few minutes.)

Clean the morels of any bugs and dirt (a small paintbrush works well) and cut off their stems. Spoon in pilaf—you may need to use something like the end of a chopstick to pack it down—until the mushrooms are full. (You will have extra pilaf. Quite a bit, in fact; save that for another meal.)

Arrange the stuffed morels in a small baking dish. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan, and drizzle them over the mushrooms. Sprinkle the tops of each morel with grated Parmesan. Bake 10 minutes, or until the mushrooms are soft and the cheese is crisp on top. Eat at once.

The Local Food Report: full strength sea

Did you know that not all Wellfleet oysters are created equal?

This oyster, the wild banana oyster, is the one that shuckers preferred years ago. They were selling oysters by the jar, and this long, thin banana oyster had a whole lot of meat inside. It's from Chipman's Cove and it grows in the mud, just far enough down that it has to stretch to get up and out of it for air, and so it's constantly growing skinny, up. It used to be this biomass banana people picked.

But then, the game changed. Wellfleet made a name for itself—people in the midwest wrote letters cross country about those sweet jars of Wellfleets they found on their supermarket shelves—and the raw bar market sprang up. Tourists and locals wanted their meat served on the half shell, and the deep cupped West Side and the manicured grant oysters with their round, shapely figures jumped in.

The West Sides grow on sugar sand bottoms, places where there's deep water and rough sediment and every time the tide turns any sharp, thin edges get chipped off. A grant owner creates this same look by pulling their oysters out, knocking off the beaks and coaxing them into wide, deep shells.

The funny thing is, they all taste the same. The flavor of an oyster is determined by the water, and in Wellfleet, we are full strength sea salt. Most people, myself included, would take our raw thirty-three parts per million over a southern oyster—those flat-tasting warm water creatures from Virginia and Florida—any day, whatever the shape.

If you get those deep-cupped West Sides or a nice, wide grant shell, though, you almost have to try Oysters Rockefeller. The greens and the herbs and the sherry and the cheese—they just fit. The wide, deep cup holds the juice and the meat and the flavor all at once, and if you're any good at shucking, they take hardly a quarter hour to make. They're elegant and dressy and just sophisticated enough, and the way they feel on your tongue is like pure luxury slipping down.

We ate six last night—six West Sides Rockefeller with two glasses of white wine and my grandmother's tiny silver oyster forks. While we sat the radio signal went silent and the dark crept up the windows, and we decided instead of turning on the lights to simply tuck in, leave the dishes, and go to bed. I can't say if it was the oysters or the quiet or the wine, but it all felt very extravagant.

Wherever you live, and whatever sorts of oysters you have (please don't tell me, please don't, that you have none at all), I highly recommend you pick up a bag this afternoon. Look for the ones with the deep cups, the tall sides, the wide, holding shells, and make sure you have a shucking knife. Crack them open over a bowl, and save the juice, then sauté up your best spring greens with some sherry and herbs. Turn on the broiler and just as the air begins to chill, arrange the meats in their shells with a frock of green and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan or pecorino on top. Pull them out just as the cheese begins to sizzle and brown, and eat them as the sun goes down.

OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER

This recipe is somewhat adapted from one a very talented former Mac's Shack chef passed along, but mostly, it is made up. The chef's recipe had an incredibly daunting number of steps and soaks and sautés—the sort of undertakings that would be okay for a whole night of service at a nice restaurant, but absolutely ridiculous for a half dozen oysters at home—so I took a rough inventory his ingredients and technique and reinvented it on my own. The result was delicious, simple, and so long as your oyster shucking technique does not involve a garden glove, a layer of dish towels, and a lot of fear, also very fast.

6 oysters
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 shallot, thinly sliced
2 ounces spinach, chopped into small pieces
2 ounces Swiss chard, chopped into small pieces
salt to taste
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped dill
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
2 tablespoons sherry
1/2 tablespoon butter
2 ounces grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese

Shuck the oysters, reserving the liquid and meats in a small bowl. Scrub the bottom shells clean and set them aside; throw the tops in the compost.

Heat up the olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Add the shallot and sauté for about 30 seconds, or until it just starts to brown. Throw in the spinach and Swiss chard, and sauté, stirring vigorously, for about a minute. Add the herbs and continue sautéing for another minute or two, or until the greens are completely wilted.

Pour the sherry around the edges of the pan to deglaze; it should sizzle and almost instantly disappear. Pour in the oyster liquid, taking care not to let any oysters slip in. Stir in the butter and continue cooking for another minute, or until the oyster liquid is reduced by half, all the alcohol in the sherry has cooked off, and the butter is absorbed. Turn off the heat and set the greens aside.

Preheat your oven broiler and arrange the six bottom oyster shells on a baking sheet. Place an oyster meat in each one. Divide the sautéed greens evenly between the six shells, gently layering a spoonful on top of each of the oysters. Top the greens with the grated cheese, and broil the oysters for 2 minutes, or until the cheese turns golden brown. Devour at once.

Holding all the hurry

There is no point in trying to pretend. As of today, it is officially six days until we hand over our house keys, pack up the car, and drive to Maine to get ready for the wedding. Things are starting to get just the teensiest bit crazy around here.

This weekend, for instance, Friday I spent 45 minutes on the phone with my mother's very dear friend, going over all the final details for the flowers before finishing up my last column and arriving at the restaurant seven minutes late. Saturday a friend's mom and I did the practice hair run (big! and curly!) and I walked around doing the recycling at work like some sort of Jessica Simpson shake-those-curls-loose barbie doll, and Sunday Alex and I got the yard all squared away for freezing temperatures. It's been feeling sort of like a perpetual Christmas Eve, a long, drawn-out one, where for weeks and weeks on end you hurry around waiting for the big day, slowly ticking off the time in your head.


Luckily, in the midst of all the chaos, cabbage season decided to show up. There is no vegetable like cabbage to keep you grounded, I think, and savoy cabbage works some particular magic. There's something about the way it ruffles—the way it's all composure and elegance on the outside, even though everything is tightly wound and scrunched up underneath. We've been braising it, recently, cooking it down with butter and onions and thyme and sherry until it collapses into a soft, tender heap, and it's been just the thing. We're sort of the same way by the end of the day, actually, come to think of it, Alex and the cabbage and I, all wilting just a little bit into our dinner plates.

Slowly, though, with the help of a bit of pork and herb butter and a hunk of bread, by the end of the meal, we perk back up. The cabbage lulls us into a soft, contented sort of haze, and we sit on the couch making lists about packing and to-do's and thank-you notes and RSVPs. It's nothing fancy or exciting, but I think the braised cabbage has been keeping us sane.

I'll be back on Thursday to tell you about a very special someone and how he taught me to fillet fish, but after that, I won't be around for a while. We'll be in Maine for a week, and then in Boston for a few hours, and then, if I pinch myself hard enough, in Paris for three days and Italy for two (!) whole (!) weeks. We'll be back November 28th, and I promise to be here on Monday, November 30th, with a whole new set of stories to tell.

Until then, I hope you'll enjoy this cabbage. It is very good, I promise, at holding all the hurry at bay.

BRAISED SAVOY CABBAGE WITH ONIONS AND THYME

I probably shouldn't admit this, but until the other day, I wasn't entirely clear on what the word braising really meant. I understood the results, and I was a big fan, but I wasn't quite sure how to get there. I went on sort of a braising kick reading online until I at least had a vague grasp on the term, but I'm hoping, one of these days, to pick up this book and learn a whole lot more. I have a feeling, based on the cabbage, that braising is my kind of thing.

3 tablespoons butter
2 onions, diced
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 medium size head savoy cabbage, core removed and chopped into thin ribbons
1 cup chicken stock, preferably homemade
1 cup whole milk
1 tablespoon sherry
salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter over medium high heat in a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot. Throw in the onions and let them sweat for 10 minutes or so, stirring frequently so they don't burn. Midway through add the thyme, and once the onions are soft and translucent, add the cabbage. Continue sauteing while stirring constantly. When the cabbage and onions have lost their moisture and are very dry, after about five minutes, pour in the chicken stock.

Continue stirring constantly, mixing the onions and cabbage with the stock, until the stock has been reduced by at least half. (There should be only a little bit of visible juice mixed in with the cabbage at the bottom of the pot, more of a glaze than a broth.) Add the milk and the sherry, and reduce the liquid by half again. When the milk and chicken stock form a nice, thick glaze, season the cabbage with salt and pepper to taste, and you're ready to eat.

We had this alongside a thick pork chop with a little bit of blue cheese herb butter on top and a slice of bread—it is the perfect vegetable accompaniment to that sort of hearty meat cut. A rib-eye would be good too—anything with heft and a good amount of fat. If you don't eat meat, though, it doesn't matter too much. I ate the cabbage the next day for lunch with just the herb butter and a hunk of toasted bread, and it was just as good.

A bit backward

What is it they say? In like a lion, out like a lamb? This March is a bit backward, it seems.

I began the weekend with the best of cooking intentions, but when Saturday and then Sunday dawned warm and sunny, they simply didn't make the cut. Other things did, like dog walking and lettuce planting and beach visits and an afternoon of wine and spinach puffs on a lovely Sandwich porch. Even car vacuuming and house cleaning snuck in there.

But spending all day in the kitchen when March was offering 60 degrees seemed like a terrible waste. I don't have any regrets.

I did manage, once Sunday wound down, to muster the energy for a simple carrot soup. The fridge was empty, after all; I'd eaten through a quart of my mother's homemade minestrone, nearly a cup of sour cream, and far more banana bread than ought to be legal. I had to make something, and carrot soup seemed the easiest thing.

There was a pot of homemade chicken broth on hand, boiled down from the carcass of a bird we ate last week. I had several pounds of carrots still kicking around in the hydrator from goodness knows when, and lots of storage onions tucked away in the basement closet. All that was left was a few sprigs of thyme, and they sat happily potted in the greenhouse outside.


I cried an awful lot during the onion slicing, either because I knew the cold weather was to return today or because storing onions all winter somehow gives them a terrible ability to sting. I don't know which, but it was sort of cathartic in the end.

The whole endeavor—melting butter, sauteing onions, carrots, and thyme, throwing in broth and a pinch of salt—only took about a half an hour, from start to bowl. It's not a demanding soup; you can empty the dishwasher, wash the knives and pots, and generally have most of the cleanup done by the time you're ready to eat.

Late on Sunday afternoon, that's a very good thing.

CARROT SOUP

adapted from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

I always turn to Waters' when I want a meal that is easy to make, requires only a few good ingredients, and will be simple yet elegant all at once. This soup is no exception, and beyond adding a bit more thyme, I really didn't change much.

4 tablespoons salted butter
2 onions, cut in half and then sliced thin
3-4 sprigs thyme
roughly 6 cups carrots, peeled and sliced into thin rounds
salt to taste
6 cups chicken broth

Melt the butter in a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot. Add the onions and thyme once it is hot, and sauté for about 10 minutes over medium-low heat, or until the onions are translucent and soft. Add the carrots and season with salt to taste.

Continue to cook the vegetables together for another 10 minutes or so (Waters points out that cooking the carrots with the onions is important to build flavor, so don't skip ahead to the broth). Once they are fairly soft, add chicken broth and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and leave the soup to simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the carrots are cooked to your liking. Serve hot with a good rustic bread and maybe a dollop of sour cream.

Chicken roast

The bones are all that's left of the bird we roasted Saturday evening. It was my first chicken; my first attempt at transforming the cold, clammy flesh into something worthy of a warming fall celebration.

Our guests were bringing vegetables and dessert, and I'd kicked my roast-hungry sous chef out from the walls of the tiny kitchen, determined at last to learn this bird.

I'd picked it up in Dartmouth that morning—at Paskamansett Farms—packed it gently into a large white cooler to rest alongside two sister birds.

With the freezer already well stocked—there was a pig from the same farm, smoked into bacon and packed into sausage, a good supply of grass fed beef from a Foxboro farm, and assorted bundles of lamb from a Barnstable shepherder already in—the chicken and her sisters would round out the winter.

Confronting her in the sink, I rinsed and washed her body cavity with cold water, checking for an organ here or there and finally laying her down. I chopped onion and apple, carrot and butter, and threw a handful of breadcrumbs and cranberries into a bowl. With a spoonful of poultry rub and a good bit of salt and pepper, her stuffing was made.

With a few cloves of sliced garlic and a few sprigs of thyme in hand, I turned back to the bird. Slowly, carefully, I felt my way beneath her skin and began to spread the seasonings against her fat. The garlic rested heavy on her thighs and breast, and I rubbed her well with salt and pepper.

The oven heated up, and I began to stuff. I packed her full until finally her skin just stretched to conceal the bread, fruit, and fat, and sewed her up. I felt the heat begin to rise from the oven, and worked quickly to give her one last gift. Chopping quickly, I filled her pan with turnip, onion, and brilliant orange butternut squash.

It made for a magnificent send off—this ferry of herbs and color—wending its way towards the oven barrow. On the plate, it was equally splendid. Meat and root fell together, fruit crunched tart, and a savory gravy of herbs and fat filled out the meal. She didn't last long.

But today, meat gone and bones light, she's back to the soup pot for the final journey.

ROAST CHICKEN

Make stuffing. Chop and combine in a bowl: 1 good sized carrot, 1 firm apple, and 1/2 large white onion. Add 1 and 1/2 cups torn bread, 1 stick butter, cut up, and 1 cup cranberries. Season with poultry rub and salt and pepper to taste; set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Pick and have handy several sprigs thyme. In a finger bowl, mix together 2 tablespoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper. Peel 1 head of garlic and cut each clove into thin slices. Rinse whole chicken inside and out in cold water; put in roasting pan or dutch oven with 4 tablespoons olive oil drizzled over bottom. Gently work fingers between bird's skin and flesh, and push in garlic and thyme, spreading evenly over thighs and breast. Pack bird with stuffing; stake or sew shut with twine.

Peel and chop 2 cups butternut squash, 2 cups turnip, 1/2 onion, and 1 apple. Throw around chicken in pan. Cover with tinfoil or put dutch oven lid on, and put in to bake for about 1 hour, or until skin is crisp and bird cooked through. Put stuffing and root vegetables into serving pans; baste bird with juices and let rest 15 minutes before serving. Save bones and meat scraps for soup.