The Feed: October 22, 2014

Tea bags may be convenient, but as Bonnie S. Benwick writes in the article below, there is a better way.

The Feed is my weekly round up of interesting food-related stories from newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites.

Washington Post: "Tea Might Become Your Favorite Hot Beverage, if You Ditch the Little Bags," by Bonnie S. Benwick.
As a typical American, I start my day with a cup of coffee (cup and a half actually, down from the former two). But around the world, tea is the hot drink of choice, especially when brewed with higher-quality loose-leaf tea instead of the easy but less-flavorful bagged variety that are so popular here. Reading Benwick's article inspired me to make my first cup of tea in a long time, and might just get me to pick up some loose-leaf tea at Teaism soon.

Washington Post: "Ten Fruits and Vegetables You're Storing Wrong," by Candy Sagon.
Articles about produce storage have been done before, but it's so easy to forget the rules, so I appreciated this reminder that includes good tips like not storing fruits and vegetables together (gas the fruit gives off will speed decay of the vegetables) and not washing them ahead of time (the moisture promotes bacteria). Sagon goes on to provide specific tips for 10 fruits and vegetables.

Washington Post: "Plate Lab: When Squash and Celery Root Turn into a Dish of 'Noodles'," by Joe Yonan.
Treating spaghetti squash like pasta is a popular trick this time of year, but Yonan writes how D.C. restaurant Thally (a great place I visited earlier this year), is turning butternut squash into its own unique "noodle" dish. Check out the accompanying video.

New York Times: "Washington Has More on Its Plate," by Jennifer Steinhauer.
Should I consider this an olive branch or sorts? An article from the New York Times actually talking up the D.C. restaurant scene? Sure, this year D.C. was named coolest city by Forbes and best city to travel to by Lonely Planet, but when it comes to eating out, D.C. has long had a inferiority complex in comparison to the Big Apple. While I think the latter still wears the national dining crown, there are a lot more jewels in D.C. these days. It's nice to see that publication from up north taking notice.

New York Times: "As American as Tarte Tatin," by Julia Moskin.
Moskin describes French Tarte Tatin as a dessert much simpler to assemble than pie consisting of apples, caramel and crust. Need I say more? Sold!

Wall Street Journal: "Recipes That Take Tahini in New Directions," by Louisa Shafia.
If you're like me, you might have a tub of tahini in the fridge because you bought it to make hummus. Turns out the nutty sesame paste with a texture like super runny peanut butter has lots of other great uses too. Chef Alex Stupak of New York's Empellón Taqueria serves it with eggplant, for example. This article got me thinking, what would it be like in a cookie?

Los Angeles Times: "Soaking Beans? In Most Cases You Don't Need to," by Russ Parsons.
Every recipe I've ever seen that calls for dried beans also calls for soaking them overnight, which means 9 times out of 10 I reach for canned beans instead, since I don't have to think about the pre-planning of a 24-hour bath. Well guess what, Parsons dispels the notion of a required soak, noting that instead you can just cook the beans a little longer until they are tender. Genius! (I actually did this with the Smoky Pinto Beans I made last year).

Eater: "How the Aperol Spritz Became Italy's Favorite Cocktail"
It's Cocktail Week over at Eater, where I've been enjoying in particular the D.C. coverage. This story, from the national site, chronicles how the Aperol Spritz became so popular in Italy.

Mario Batali: "A Kernel, and the Truth," by Jim Webster.
This is just a shout out to Jim Webster (D.C. writer who co-wrote with Mario Batali the new book America--Farm to Table), who, like me, is bemoaning the fact that New Morning Farm's corn season has passed, and it will be many long months before we can enjoy those wonderful, sweet ears again.

Bacon, Brussels Sprouts and Caramelized Onion Frittata

Frittatas are really easy to make. I'm surprised I don't do it more often. It goes something like this: assemble a few key ingredients, like a vegetable or two, a meat and a cheese, then pour egg over them, let set on the bottom, then broil to set on top. And you're done.

Because the actual making of the frittata is so simple, I don't mind putting a little extra effort into getting the ingredients just right. In this case, I roasted Brussels sprouts until they were wonderfully brown, pan-crispsed some really smoky thick bacon slices and caramelized a sweet onion. I even grated a little gruyere, one of my favorite cheeses.

Bacon, Brussels Sprouts and Caramelized Onion Frittata

12 oz. Brussels sprouts, ends cut off and sprouts halved (with cuts made through the stem ends so they hold together)
2 tbsp. olive oil
Salt, to taste
8 oz. thick hickory-smoked bacon, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 sweet onion, cut into thin pieces about 1-inch long and 1/4-inch wide
1 tbsp. fresh thyme leaves
7 large eggs
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 cup shredded gruyere cheese

1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Put cut sprouts in a large bowl, drizzle with olive oil and season with a pinch of salt, then spread on a baking sheet, flipping any sprouts over so the cut-side is down. Roast for 35 minutes until golden brown in places. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. This step may be done in advance with the roasted sprouts stored in the fridge.

2. Heat a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until browned and crisp. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and set aside on a paper-towel-lined plate.

3. Heat a large (12-inch) frying pan over medium heat. Add butter. When melted, add the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until golden brown, about 25-30 minutes (add water as necessary to prevent onions from browning too quickly). Stir in the roasted sprouts, bacon and thyme. Use a spatula to spread the ingredients in an even layer in the pan.

4. Preheat oven broiler.

5. Beat the eggs in a medium bowl, seasoned with salt and pepper. Pour eggs evenly around ingredients in the frying pan. Using a spatula, gently lift the ingredients around the edges and in the middle as the egg sets to let the runny eggs run down into the pan (similar to what you'd do with a omelet). When the egg is fairly set on the bottom, sprinkle the gruyere cheese on top, then put the pan in the oven under the broiler. Broil for a few minutes until the cheese is melted and lightly browned and the egg is set on top. Remove from oven, allow to cool slightly, then cut into wedges and serve.

Moroccan-Spiced Meatloaf

A great place to find inspiration for new dishes is from other food bloggers. A couple months ago, I was chatting with Cathy Barrow of Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Kitchen on Twitter, and somehow we got on the subject of meatloaf.

I hadn't made the classic dish for quite some time and was looking for ways to put a new spin on it. Cathy suggested using oatmeal instead of breadcrumbs, which she said should be soaked in milk. That sounded like a great idea. The oats got me thinking about cinnamon and raisins, which made me think about pushing the meatloaf in a Moroccan direction, spice-wise. So in went ground cumin, turmeric and paprika.

This meatloaf turned out with a wonderful, moist texture. The oatmeal really disappeared into the rest of the ingredients, and the spices and raisins gave it a nice spicy-sweetness.

Moroccan-Spiced Meatloaf

3/4 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup whole milk

1 tbsp. olive oil, plus more for spraying the baking dish

1 yellow onion diced

1 carrot, peeled and diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 lb. ground beef or meat loaf mix (I use Whole Foods' mix of ground beef, pork and veal)

1/2 cup golden raisins

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. ground cumin

1 tsp. ground turmeric

1 tsp. sweet Hungarian paprika

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

Pinch of cayenne pepper

1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

2 eggs, beaten

1. Preheat 350 F. 

2. Combine the oats and milk in a small bowl to soak.

3. Heat olive oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and garlic and sauté until softened, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl and allow to cool.

4. Add all of the remaining ingredients to the large bowl with the sautéed vegetables, then add the milk-soaked oats. Using your hands, mix the ingredients until well combined, then transfer to a 9 x 13 baking dish sprayed with olive oil. Shape the mixture into a long loaf and bake for about 1 hour, until an instant-read thermometer reads 165 F. Allow to rest about 5 minutes, then slice until 1-inch slices.

Taking a Week Off: Fall Recipes

Looking for fall recipes? I've got lots here. Pictured is the Fall Grain Pilaf with Sweet Potatoes.

I'm taking a week off from Cook In / Dine Out this week, so there will be no new recipes and no edition of The Feed on Wednesday.

To tide you over until I return on Monday, October 20, here are some great fall recipes.

Squash

Like spaghetti squash? Check out my recipe for Stuffed Spaghetti Squash or, if you want to play up this squash's pasta-like quality, try Spaghetti Squash with Sage and Brown Butter. Butternut squash more your style? Check out this Fall Grain Bowl with Butternut Squash. It's also good in a soup, like Smoky Butternut Squash and Apple Soup. But my favorite way to serve it is in Butternut Squash, Goat Cheese and Sausage Lasagna. Don't forget this classic: Stuffed Acorn Squash.

Apples

I recently did a whole week on apple recipes, including Apple-Potato Soup with Chicken-Apple Sausage, Triple Smoky Apple-Blue Cheese Crostini, Roasted Stuffed Caramel Apples. Previously, I've shared recipes for Grown Up Applesauce,

Salad

Speaking of squash and apples, the both show up in this Fall Kale Salad along with pecans and dried cranberries. Barely cooked squash is the star in this Shaved Delicata Squash Salad. And if you still have figs, I definitely recommend the Beet, Fig and Prosciutto Salad or Watercress and Fig Autumn Salad.

Cocktails

Colder weather always puts me in the mood for the woods, which I tried to capture with the Scent of the Woods cocktail made with eu de vie of Douglas Fir. Bourbon lovers should definitely check out the St. Germain Cocktail, which nice balances the caramel notes of bourbon with floral St. Germain. For apple lovers, there's the Honey Bourbon Apple Cider and How Do You Like Dem Apples, which features three apple ingredients. Pumpkin may be overplayed this year, but I still love these Pumpkin Cocktails.

Cocktail: Scent of the Woods

I love drinks with smoky, woodsy flavors. Rosemary is a good vehicle for this, since the spiky herb is redolent of pine. This drink honors a different evergreen tree: the great Douglas Fir. While you will find a lot of pine trees in the drier central part of Oregon east of the Cascades, in the wetter west part of the state, fir trees rule, particularly Douglas Fir, which is the state tree. We had them in my front and back yards growing up. They smell wonderful.

The Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Oregon makes a variety of eaux de vie (that's the plural of "eu de vie"), a type of clear brandy typically infused with fruit, although as Clear Creek has shown, it can be infused with other flavors too. The distillery's founder, Steve McCarthy, worked 10 years to perfect the Eu de Vie of Douglas Fir used in this drink. It adds a nice subtle note of fir.

I considered mixing this cocktail with whiskey, although most of the recipes I found online that used this brandy mixed it with gin. So I compromised with barrel-aged gin, a sort of whiskey-like gin that's brown and aged but not as assertive as whiskey. The St. Germain gives the drink a nice touch of citrus and floral.

Cocktail: Scent of the Woods

2 oz. Few barrel-aged gin
3/4 oz. St. Germain elderflower liqueur
1/2 oz. Clear Creek Eu de Vie of Douglas Fir
Lemon twist

Combine the gin, elderflower liqueur and Eu de Vie of Douglas Fir in a cocktail mixing glass. Fill the glass with ice and stir until chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe and garnish with a lemon twist.

Stuffed Spaghetti Squash

My coworker, who graciously contributed the large round zucchini I roasted and stuffed recently, also gave me a spaghetti squash. I cooked this vegetable last year and served it stringy, playing up its spaghetti-like quality. This year, since I had such luck stuffing the other squash, I decided to give that a try here too.

I went with a different flavor profile, a classic Italian mix of sausage, onion, bell pepper and tomato sauce with mozzarella. As I've found with these types of dishes, it works better to roast the squash and cook the stuffing separately, bringing the two together in the end just to heat them through and melt the cheese.

Stuffed Spaghetti Squash
Adapted in part from a Bon Appétit recipe

1 spaghetti squash, halved and seeded
Vegetable oil (for brushing the squash if roasting, not needed if cooking in the microwave)
3/4 lb. mild Italian chicken sausage, casings removed
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 yellow onion, diced
1 green bell pepper, cored, seeded and diced
Salt, to taste
Pinch of red chili pepper flakes
1 tbsp. fresh thyme leaves
1/2 tbsp. fresh chopped sage
1/2 freshly grated nutmeg
1 1/2 cups tomato sauce (see recipe below)
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 400 F.

2. Cook the squash: Cut the squash in half the long way (i.e. from the stem end to the base). Brush a baking dish with vegetable oil. Place the squash halves in the baking dish, cut-sides down. Roast in the for 50 minutes until the cut edges are lightly browned and the squash is softened. Allow to cool a bit. (Alternatively, you can use this method to cook the squash in the microwave, and it will be done in half the time).

3. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Brown the sausage, remove it from the pan and place it in a large bowl. Add olive oil, then, when hot, add the onion and bell pepper. Season with salt and a pinch of red chili pepper flakes, then add the thyme and sage. Sauté until the vegetables are softened, about 10 minutes. Remove from pan and add to the bowl with the sausage. Add the nutmeg and marinara sauce and stir to combine.

4. Place the cooked squash halves in a baking dish, cut-side up. Fill the hollow cavity with sausage-tomato filling, mounding the filling. Top with mozzarella cheese. Bake in the oven until heated through and the cheese is melted and lightly browned, about 20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Tomato sauce

1 tbsp. olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
14 oz. canned chopped tomatoes
2 tsp. dried oregano
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1. Heat olive oil in a medium saucepan. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, a couple minutes. Add the tomatoes, oregano, salt and pepper and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 5-6 minutes.

Related:

Giant Stuffed Zucchini

Spaghetti Squash with Sage and Brown Butter

The Feed: October 8, 2014

Grain bowls may sound boring, but with a little thought, they make a colorful, delicious dinner, like this Fall Grain Bowl with Butternut Squash.

The Feed is my weekly round up of interesting food-related stories from newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites.

Washington Post: "Lessons from Farmers: What I Learned about Cooking — and about Respect," by Jim Webster.

Webster, co-author (with Mario Batali) of the new book American: Farm to Table, discusses how some of the best cooking lessons he learned while working on the book came from farmers, not the chefs, reflecting on what he learned about respecting the seasonality of ingredients, the value of pigs that are humanely raised (and then slaughtered) and getting to eat some amazing squash tacos. I was pleased to see his story included Jim Crawford of New Morning Farm, from whom I buy vegetables (almost) every Saturday morning during summer and fall, and even into winter. 

Washington Post: "Mark Bittman’s ‘How to Cook Everything Fast,’ Reviewed," by Tim Carman.
You can count me among the many fans of Bittman's How to Cook Everything series of cookbooks (which also come in handy iPhone versions). His latest book emphasizes cooking fast, an important skill for a busy cook with less than hour to get dinner on the table. For example, Carman writes about how Bittman encourages cooks to prep while they cook, which is something I do all the time.

Washington Post: "Weeknight Vegetarian: A New Technique for Defusing Those Soy-Sauce Sodium Bombs," by Joe Yonan.
Yonan shares a very simple trick that could be revelatory for those with high blood pressure who enjoy Asian dishes: substitute Chinese black vinegar for the soy sauce. Genius.

New York Times: "Grain Bowls: How to Make Your Own," by Melissa Clark.
Grain bowls...sounds a bit boring, doesn't it? Yet, I've made some pretty great ones and you can too argues Clark in this piece about had far they've come in recent years. The "burrito bowl" at Chipotlé, the fast-casual empire's best-selling dish, is after all, a grain bowl.

New York Times: "Restaurant Cocktails That Aim Too High," by Pete Wells.
There's a cocktail crisis in New York. Not in the nifty craft cocktail bars, which continue to churn out amazing drinks (just got my copy of Death & Co.'s new book yesterday), but in the restaurants, where the demand for original cocktail lists is apparently outstripping the supply of talented bartenders to make sure they taste good.

Vox: "The Problem with Home-Cooked Meals," by Sarah Kliff.
As a food blogger, I clearly have no problem with home-cooked meals. So Kliff's article caught my eye--I wanted to see what possible objections she could raise. What she found, based on others' research, is that for many lower- and middle-income households, home-cooking is a tiring, stressful experience, but they do it anyway, since they can't afford not to. So the issue isn't really about home-cooking as it is about achieving "ideal" home cooking, that is meals made with organic, non-processed ingredients--healthy, but time-consuming and often expensive. It's a great reminder about the myriad of factors that influence our food choices.

The Guardian: "Quinoa, Chia Seeds and Kale: Superfoods or Supermarketing?" by Sarah Shearman.
Salmon, kale and blueberries have gotten a lot mileage out of being labeled "superfoods," but so have a lot of other foods, sometimes dubiously. Shearman takes a look at "superfoods" as a story of successful marketing and not always good science.

Get in My Mouf: "Pumpkin Sage Empanadas," by Evan Shaw.
I'm thinking of going more international with my Thanksgiving recipes this year. These delicious-looking pumpkin-sage empanadas are exactly the kind of thing I'd like to have gracing my table.