Thai Pumpkin Stir-fry with basil and fried polenta

*Or: “Pumpkin. It ain’t just for pies anymore.”

I was actually looking for an interesting way to use a sugar pumpkin I had included in a decorative arrangement, when…okay let’s just pause right there and address the implied insanity of this first sentence. I was looking to eat a pumpkin I had been using as a decoration for over a month. Why would I do this. This sounds like the culinary equivalent of Scarlet O’Hara making a party dress out of the drapes. Am I that broke? No. (Mom, Dad, I promise I’m really not.)

Reduce, reuse, recycle…

Another possibility is that I have gone completely over into conservation-insanity and become one of those people who washes, dries, and reuses paper towels. Nah. Okay sometimes I reuse tin foil, but that just makes sense. Nor am I one of those people who look at you accusingly in restaurants when you don’t eat the unidentified green garnish that served as a bed for your crab cake and say, “That’s edible, you know. You’re not going to eat it? Fine just give it to me, I’ll take it home in my purse and eat it later so it doesn’t go to waste.” (If that example seemed overly-specific, it’s because it’s practically a word for word transcript of an actual incident.)

Anyway, what actually happened was, I got all inspired by falling leaves and football games, and I made an autumnal centerpiece, and a sugar pumpkin just completed it.

Ratatouille (with sausage)

*Or: “French farmers knock another one out of the park”

Like many people I know, I never had any idea what ratatouille was, other than a nifty word, until that movie by the same name came out. If you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty adorable.

Remy the rat chef in Ratatouille

Incidentally, this image is also a decent approximation of how I look in a kitchen.

In this movie they show an interesting preparation method in which you slice all the components into thin rounds and layer the individual slices to compose a beautifully presented dish. We’re not doing that. For a more traditional method, Julia Child (along with several other beacons of culinary wisdom I consulted) instructs that components should be sautéed separately before layering and doing a final cook in a covered dish. We’re not doing that either. We’re going stovetop skillet, and starting with a recipe from Emeril Lagasse, though there will certainly be modifications. The most glaring of which is probably the meat I’m adding (Inspired by Jeff. He is the only person I know who actually makes this dish on a regular basis. I don’t know what kind of meat he puts in, but we’ll be using Italian sausage. We actually spoke on the phone last night and compared recipes after realizing we had both just made it!)

There is nothing particularly daunting about this dish. Really, it is just stewed vegetables. Apparently it was originally a French farmer’s dish of summer vegetables. Which reminds me of the line at the climax of the rat movie when Remy chooses ratatouille as the dish he will present to the food critic. Collette, another chef voiced by Janeane Garofalo, exclaims with dismay, “But zees ees a peasant’s deesh!” Remy insists however, ultimately giving the critic a transcendent experience and winning the movie.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with humble origins. Coq au vin, arguably one of the most renowned poultry dishes there is, also originated as a peasant dish. So did boeuf bourguignon. Notice that both of those, haute cuisine though they are at this point, really come down to cooking the hell out of a tough piece of meat. But the French understood that using wine for the long cook elevated simple ingredients and produced heavenly results (I’m looking at you, Great Britain. Water is not an effective flavoring agent.) We seem to have strayed a bit from the original topic, but dammit, 18th century French farmers deserve a paragraph or two of recognition. They knew their stuff.

Roasted Delicata Squash

*Or: “Julia Child dropped things all the time in her kitchen too”

I got two of these babies this week. I’ve actually never had one, but they are supposed to be delicious, so I’m okay with it. Here’s what they look like (the spoon is for scale).

Spoon-sized delicata squashes

Now, I am trying to stay away from roasting everything I find in The Box Of Wonders, because I can eat just about anything roasted with salt and pepper and be happy. This whole venture is supposed to be about learning new ways to cook foods I have never encountered before, so I resolved to keep the roasting to a minimum. In this case however, I’m making an exception for two reasons:

1)   I got two of them and I can come up with something more creative for the other one

2)   My neighbors when I lived in Denver, Robin and Vieve, were obsessed with delicate squash. They grew it themselves because the supply at farmers markets was insufficient to meet their daily intake needs. Their go-to preparation method was cutting it into sticks and roasting it.

So, in tribute to Robin and Vieve, let’s roast us up some quash. Here we go.

Pommes de Terre a la Boulangere

*Or: “Getting fancy with roots and tubers”

Okay this title may be a tad ironic. There is nothing fancy about this dish, it just sounds special because it’s in French. I remember I used to have a cookbook that included a recipe along these lines, which is basically wafered potatoes (I may have made that term up) baked in chicken broth with sautéed onions and thyme. All the variations I have seen while in research mode used beef broth though I think chicken broth would taste better (to me anyway), and we are also going to run The Dreaded Rutabaga through my Trusty Roommate Chad’s mandolin and add it to the more traditional potatoes.

Now about that name: Pommes de terre a la boulangere is descriptive of the origin of the dish. “Pomme de terre” is the French word for potato, and “boulangere” means baker. So, “Baker’s Potatoes”. The story I’ve read goes that back (way back) when not everyone had an oven in their homes, wives would throw these items in a baking dish and drop it off at the boulangerie (bakery) on the way to church. The baker would put the dish in the still-warm bread oven to bake, and the wives would pick up the finished product on the way home.

I remember it being described as a “gratin”, and mentioned it to Trusty Roommate Chad, who then asked the valid question, “Isn’t there cheese in a gratin? Is it still a gratin?” I was on his side, to be honest, but we looked it up in and it turns out that the term gratin refers not to an ingredient, but rather a cooking method. And though cheese can and often does figure into a gratin, it is not a necessary component.

Root Vegetable Chips

*Or: “Don’t fry beets. It just isn’t a good idea.”

So in searching for something to do with The Dreaded Rutabaga, I came across this recipe in The Joy of Cooking. Couldn’t be simpler. Slice anything you want to include really thin, then fry the slices in oil. Irma suggests such insanities as carrot chips, but all my carrots are already allocated for salads and snacks, and frankly I don’t like them cooked at all. Even though I am of the opinion that frying makes everything better, carrots may be an exception. I also have several other things I want to try frying, namely a Yukon gold potato, an amusingly long and skinny white sweet potato, a beet, and that danged rutabaga (okay, Gilfeather Turnip).

It turns out I can slice thinner and better with a knife than with a mandolin, so I did it by hand while letting the oil heat up. Irma councils to use 3 inches of oil heated to 375 in a deep fryer or deep heavy pot, but Trusty Roommate Chad isn’t around and I don’t want to be blamed for destroying his fryer and/or the house by doing something catastrophically wrong in the setup stage, so I went with a 3-quart pot, upended a big bottle of canola oil in it, and just turned the heat up to high. This lack of precision may be related to the resulting lack of success. But I’m just guessing here.