Not Derby Pie

This is part of a series on great side dishes for Thanksgiving and year-round. The first of the series can be found here.

To my mind, there are two foods whose flavor profiles are so diverse, they can taste like just about anything. One is cheese, which can taste sweet or salty, buttery or nutty or mild, grassy or spicy or altogether funky, like hot peppers or red wine, pure raw milk or bay leaves. The other? Mushrooms.

The buttons taste bland, but when you get into chanterelles that taste and smell of butter and honey, oyster mushrooms with briny undertones, and morels that sing of smoke and springtime, you’re talking serious flavor diversity. My favorites are honeycap mushrooms, which smell and taste like honey with chocolate undertones. I could literally sit for days with my nose deep in a basket of honeycaps.

The sweet taste of honeycaps comes at a price: $15 a box, to be exact. With few exceptions, I steer clear, making a b-line for the criminis, shiitakes, and maybe some chanterelles. Criminis are pretty plain, shiitakes slightly less so; when I serve these to company, I’m looking to maximize their flavor and increase their shelf life in case there are leftovers. For this, I turn to mushroom conserva. It comes from one of my new favorite cookbooks, Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home.

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This is the first of a series of posts about great sides for Thanksgiving and year-round — stay tuned for more as we approach the big day!

For my money, this is the quintessential side. Flavor-wise, it’s totally in keeping with Thanksgiving tastes. The horseradish helps cut all that sweet, fatty Tday food, and the mustard reinforces for a one-two punch of spice. And at a meal where salad is the wallflower, green beans are more formidable company for that big turkey and the boat full of gravy occupying everyone’s attention.

If that’s not enough to lure you, other benefits include its ease and speed of preparation (it takes 10 minutes flat) and its willingness to hang out for a few days before serving. Really, what more can you ask for?

I make these green beans year round, but they’re especially great on Tday. Go forth and eat.

Green Beans with Horseradish-Mustard Vinaigrette
serves 4 as a side

1 pound green beans
1 tablespoon spicy whole-grain mustard
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish (I make mine by blending horseradish root with vinegar)
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/3 cup olive oil
salt and pepper
1/2 cup sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 350º. Spread almonds in a single layer and toast until golden, about 10 minutes. Watch them carefully so they don’t burn.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Fill a large bowl with ice cubes and water. Working in batches, cook beans in boiling water just until cooked but still crisp, about 2 minutes per batch. Transfer cooked beans to bowl of ice water to “shock” them and stop them from cooking further. Continue cooking and shocking process with remaining batches of beans. Transfer beans to separate bowl and chill. You’ll be serving the beans at room temperature, so chill only enough that they’re no longer hot.

Meanwhile, prepare vinaigrette. Mix horseradish, mustard, red wine vinegar, and lemon juice. Add oil in steady stream while whisking, until all oil has been added and vinaigrette is emulsified.

Transfer green beans to a serving platter. Drizzle vinaigrette over beans, top with toasted almonds, and serve at room temperature.

I know the big T is just under two weeks away, and I get why everyone’s talking cranberry relish and turkey like it’s their job. But we’ve all gotta eat between now and then, and this is one damn good way to get nourished.

Last week, we had the first cold weekend in DC. Now my immune system is starting to feel like the Little Engine that Could. I’m teetering on the brink of a mighty cold, and no amount of OJ or echinacea or (ick) Emergen-C has helped. Not to mention, somehow I didn’t get the email about the free flu shot clinic at work, so I’m totally exposed to the best of winter’s illness smorgasbord. Surely, I’m not alone in my unfortunate predicament. (Right?)

I’m starting to think fighting the cold is overrated. Let’s face it: I’m going to get sick sooner or later. And when I do, I’m going to to curl up on the couch, wrap myself in the sweatshirt-blanket, and tuck into a deep bowl of something warm and comforting. My will to not get sick may also be diminished by the fact that, lastweekend, I made the best chicken and rice I’ve ever had. If I’ve gotta go down, I’d like to do so over a bowl of this stuff.

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That’s right: we’re finally hosting Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll be making dinner for 8 or 9, from soup to nuts. We’re talking appetizers, soup, Turkey, all the sides, sauces, and fix-ins, and of course, pies galore. According to her family tradition, D gets a whole pumpkin pie designated for her. Not one to flout these family customs, I’ll be following suit. One pumpkin pie for D, a couple more for the rest of us. Oh, and pecan, cranberry apple, and maybe something else, too. We’ll see.

For now, here’s my menu. It’s pretty traditional, with some nips and tucks to suit our style (low-key) and our needs (no dairy). Some of you out there must be Tday veterans; I’d love your feedback — what am I missing?

I’ll add recipes and tips as I start the actual cooking, which probably won’t happen until this weekend. Stay tuned, and please, pretty please: if you’re also making Thanksgiving, share your menus in the comments!

Thanksgiving Menu

note: some of these recipes are NDP standbys. Several come from the wonderful community of cooks on Food52, and I imagine these are just a few of the Tday-friendly recipes on that site. I’ll add links as I settle on recipes for the other dishes, so again — stay tuned.
Aperitif: Sour Cherry Liqueur
Oven-Roasted Olives
Pickles, Pickles, Pickles
Tomato Soup with chive coulis OR curried carrot soup (haven’t decided yet)
Turkey with citrus and thyme, probably adapting this recipe
Stuffed squash with quinoa, pears, and cranberries
Green beans with horseradish-mustard vinaigrette
Brussels sprouts
Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s challah stuffing (vegetarian)
Forgotten sweet potatoes with maple syrup, adapting this recipe
Cranberry sauce or chutney (if you have a great recipe, send it over!)
Onion confit
Butternut butter
Gingerbread
Pumpkin Pie
Pecan Tartlets
Apple Cranberry Pie, or adapted from this recipe

A couple weeks ago, my friend Jeremy told you using the last of the summer bumper crop to make oven-roasted tomatoes. Like the diligent readers you are, several of you went and made your own oven-roasted tomatoes. But then you emailed me later that week asking what to do with the oven-roasted tomatoes you had made. Recognizing that my first-impulse answer, “what can’t you do with them?!” wasn’t exactly so helpful, I started a list of ways to use these plump little suckers. Toss a couple on pizza; pile them in a heap on baked feta and serve with pita chips; add to roasted broccoli and drizzle vinaigrette over the whole mess; and so forth.

One suggestion I neglected to share, of course, was to toss them with pasta. Ironically, that’s my most frequent use for them. I toss them with spaghetti and finish with parmesan, I add them to baked dishes like ziti and lasagna, and — as you’ll see — I mix them with some rigatoni and coat it all with pesto. In this combination, the tomatoes brighten the pesto-coated pasta, punctuating with sweetness and acid. Once you’ve got the tomatoes, the dish takes about 25 minutes to make, though the results would suggest otherwise. An added plus: this doubles as weekday lunch. What more could you ask for?

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Yesterday, I got three emails from three friends, all with the same CSA. “I got quinces in my CSA: what should I make?” “My CSA gave us quince this week. They smell great but what do I do?”

Of the emails I get from readers, most of them begin, “what can I make with…?”

I’m introducing a new feature today. “How to Use” will share five(ish) creative uses for an ingredient. No accident, this feature was born of your many curious emails: “I got quince in my CSA – what can I do with it?” “there’s 8/9 of a bottle of molasses in my cupboard – how can I use it up?” or my favorite and possibly most-often received, “the grocery store shelves have beets and kale, beets and kale, and nothing else. Please make my dinner menu!” Well, friends, starting today, I’ll be building an archive of good recipes by ingredient. When you’ve got 6 green tomatoes and you don’t know how to use ’em up, “How to Use” will be your new friend and cooking companion. And for those of you with most of a bunch of chives sitting in the fridge door, well, today’s your lucky day.

Chives are, in my opinion, the most underrated herb. Basil pops up in everything from pasta to ice cream, and thyme is as popular in beef stew and chicken soup as it is atop ricotta crostini. But chives sit unnoticed, and it’s quite a shame. Chives are a member of the onion family, but unlike regular onions, they’re fresh-tasting and quite mild. Raw onions go great with heady flavors like lox, but chives won’t overpower even milder bagel toppings, like cream cheese. They have the effect of making whatever they join taste somehow fresher, lighter, greener. In experimenting, I haven’t found a dish that doesn’t benefit from a sprinkling of chives. Here, then, are five good uses for the lovely herb.

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…and just like that, I’m a married lady. Craziness.

It’s hard to believe an event that took nearly a year to plan could come and go in the span of a few hours. Before the wedding, as we were making dinner or reading the New Yorker or watching Tina Fey be awesome on 30Rock, D and I would turn to each other and ask, “can we just be married already?” We were serious. Marriage was what this was all about for us, and we wanted to just be there already. That’s why the night of the wedding, after all the guests had left and we had taken every last bobby pin out of our hair, we were about as happy as two people can get. You see, not only did we have the most wonderful, joyous, hilarious, fun, exhausting day of our lives, but we were finally married. Everything felt so right.

We’ve spent the past couple weeks checking our our friends’ awesome pictures on facebook and absentmindedly playing with our wedding rings, all the while trying to adjust back to reality. I’m just starting to get back in the kitchen, but I’ve got a few recipes up my sleeve from before the big day that I’m excited to share.

Today’s cookies came about when I craved a proper mojito but didn’t have quite enough rum. I went digging on the interwebs, and found a recipe from the lovely Deb of Smitten Kitchen fame to save the day. Deb had gone to Mexico, and when she got back, she invented “margarita cookies” to take the edge off having to leave. It was the perfect solution: Mojito cookies!

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