Baked Zucchini and Eggplant

This dish saw the light of day a good three weeks ago, on November 6 at a potluck dinner given by my husband's church group. He was out of town, and I ended up not going, but I never let an opportunity to serve eggplant pass me by. I actually can't tell you either how it tasted, or if the people who did eat it enjoyed it. The pan came back a couple of weeks later, and I asked my husband how the potluckers had liked it. He said the host didn't say.

It might be kind of greasy. The recipe says to fry the zucchini and eggplant in a half a cup of peanut oil. Eggplant absorbs oil like a sponge, so you might be looking at a distinctly oily product. However, since I didn't try it myself, I don't know. It was relatively easy to produce, although after I dropped it off and admired the house, I neglected to tell the hosts that it had to be heated up. I arrived back home to find my daughter talking to one of them on the phone. She reported that they took off the aluminum foil and decided that it hadn't been cooked. (It had been cooked, it just needed to be warmed up.)



Baked Zucchini and Eggplant

6 medium size zucchini , thinly sliced
1 medium size eggplant, thinly sliced
1/2 cup peanut oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
3 shallots, finely chopped.
1/4 teaspoon thyme
1 bay leaf
6 tomatoes cored, peeled, and stewed until thickened
3 tablespoons freshy graded Parmesan cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cook the zucchini and eggpant in half the oil until wilted and browned.
3. Cook the shallots in the remaining oil and add the drained zucchini and eggplant.
4 Add the thyme and bayleaf. Turn into a baking dish and bake twenty minutes. Remove from the oven.
Add the thyme and bay leaf . Turn into a baking dish and bake twenty minutes. Remove drom the oven. Increase the oven heat to 400 degrees.
5 Put into another baking dish half the tomatoes, then the zucchini and eggplant mixture. Add the remaining tomatoes and sprinkle with the cheese. Bake ten minutes or until cheese browns. Four to six servings.

Fresh Tomato Risotto

The last dish in the cooking marathon of the dinner party was Fresh Tomato Risotto. Obviously the time to make this is when tomatoes are fresh. In the last weekend of October, tomatoes are not fresh, so I used canned. It worked out fine. Also, you don't have to peel the tomatoes.
It's actually more like Spanish Rice than risotto. One does not have to stand over it, adding liquid and stirring until the cows come home. You just mix everything together, stick it in the oven and bake it. Muy facil.
(That's Spanish for very easy, chicos and chicas.)

Fresh Tomato Risotto

1 cup peeled, chopped tomatoes
3/4 cup uncooked rice
1/2 cup finely chopped onions
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 cups concentrated chicken broth

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Combine the tomatoes, rice, onions, garlic, oregano and salt in a one and one half quart casserole.
3. Heat the broth to boiling and pour over tomato mixture. Cover and bake, stirring occasionally, about 35 minutes, or until rice is cooked.
Makes four servings.

Salade de Champignons

A great many of the New England-Middle States vegetable recipes as yet uncooked are, as I have mentioned before, sort of regional misfits, like clam salad. I can imagine serving, and even eating, clam salad, as part of a summer potluck (where nobody has to be polite and eat it if the very idea appalls) but not at a dinner party where the food ought to in some way go together.
So Salade de Champignons, or mushroom salad for us Anglophones, was one of the few obvious choices. This is easy, and very good. I recommend making it the day before, which gives the dressing a chance to penetrate the mushrooms.
People seemed to like it.
The party was fun. We invited two sets of old friends from our kids' days in elementary school. One of the husbands couldn't come, but his wife did and kept up an entertaining flow of conversation. Unfortunately, either I was distracted by the serving, or I just can't remember stuff very well, but the actual facts eluded me. Her daughter had been a friend of our daughter, so when I related to our daughter that Marcella, her friend, was now living in London, our daughter wanted to know where.
I was able to tell her that Marcella had been living in Bethnal Green, which is in East London, but found it too expensive and moved to some neighborhood without a tube stop.
"Well. where'd she move to?" Daughter inquired impatiently.
"Ummm," I said.
My husband said he thought the neighborhood began with a k. I said I thought it was Stanford Something.
"Stanford Brook?" Daughter, who spent three years in London, asked incredulously. "That has a tube stop. It was right near me."
"You can't remember anything, Mom," she snarled.
Anyway, the food was good, and half way through dinner, I hissed at the husband who was able to come, and we sneaked off for a peek at the World Series, where the Rangers were actually winning Game 3.

Salade de Champignons

1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 pound mushrooms, sliced

1. Place the lemon juice, mustard, salt and pepper in a bowl. With a wire whisk, gradually whisk in the oil. Mixture will become the consistency of mayonnaise.
2. Add the mushrooms, toss and chill.
Makes 3 servings.

Baked Striped Bass

On Saturday, after making the pie, and eating pancakes with the Boy Scouts from Troop 100, I went to the fish store to buy the striped bass. I do not have a lot of experience with cooking fish, so I was startled by the amount of blood and gore involved when one buys a whole fish. Thank God I said yes when the fish man asked me if he should clean it. It looked like Slaughter on Elm Street by the time he was finished.
The recipe called for not only a whole striped bass, but also a pound of shrimp, so there was Slaughter on Elm Street to my bank balance as well. They obligingly bagged up the carcass and the shrimp in ice and handed it to me. I didn't actually get to it until around 6:30 when I took out the shrimp and realized that it had to be peeled.
At that point, Son and his fiance came in, on their way to a Halloween party. I felt like saying, "Hey, pull up a chair and peel some shrimp." I desisted when I saw her in black with a 40s veil and long purple gloves and him in a Justin Beiber wig that made him look like he had a raccoon sitting on his head.
I was still cooking when our friends walked in the door.
This is a good recipe. Some observations. Get the fish boned too. I didn't. A larger fish does not require more stuffing, so don't get a pound and a half of shrimp for a six pound bass. If you can, get the shrimp peeled, or do it when you get home so you don't have to do it at 6:30. Also, make sure the fish is fully cooked.

Baked Striped Bass

1 four-pound striped bass
1/4 cup diced salt pork or butter
2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
1 pound shrimp, shelled, deveined and roughly chopped
1/2 cup fine soft bread crumbs
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1/4 teaspoon thyme
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice

1. Clean the fish, but leave the head on. (The fish store didn't. If you dislike your dinner looking at you, take it off.)
2. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
3. Cook the salt pork, if used, in a skillet until the bits are crisp. Remove salt pork bits and reserve. Add the shallots to the drippings and cook until tender but not browned.
4. Add the mushrooms and shrimp and cook quickly until shrimp turn pink and mushrooms wilt, about five minutes. Add the breadcrumbs, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper and reserved pork bits. Stuff the fish with the mixture and secure with skewers or sew to close. (I didn't sew or skewer, and there was a lot of stuffing left over. I just left it in the pan.)
5. Place the fish in a greased baking dish. Brush with the melted butter, season with salt and pepper and sprinkle the lemon juice over all.
6. Bake about thirty-five minutes, or until fish flakes easily.
Makes four servings.

Squash-Apple Pie

This is a picture of two halves of an acorn squash, being steamed in my patented handy-dandy steaming method. I put a metal colander upside down in my stew pot, add two inches of water, and put the squash on top. Cover, turn on the gas, and let things boil for 10 to 15 minutes until you can stick a fork through the squash. Once you have your cooked squash, you are ready to proceed to the pie. I made this pie at the beginning of a marathon day of cooking for a dinner party. I polished off four recipes and was still cooking at 7:15 when the guests came.

Since I bought the pie crust, and steamed the squash the night before, the pie was the easiest part. It went into the oven in less than 15 minutes and I moved on to cleaning the kitchen floor. The recipe does not specify what kind of squash you can use. Pumpkin would work as well as acorn squash, and probably you could use Hubbard squash as well. What you get has the signature taste of pumpkin pie, although it has different ingredients.

Squash-Apple Pie

1 cup cooked, mashed and sieved squash

1 cup thick, tart applesauce (I used unsweetened applesauce.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup light brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ginger

1/2 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

4 eggs, lightly beaten

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

1 unbaked ten-inch pie shell with stand-up edge

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. Place the squash (which, by the way, you can just mash with a fork. Don't worry about sieving it.) and applesauce in a bowl. Stir in the salt, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, mace and cloves.

3. Combine the eggs and cream and add to the squash mixture. Pour into the pie shell. Bake twenty minutes. Reduce oven heat to 350 degrees and bake twenty to twenty five minutes longer. (a knife inserted into filling should come out clean. Cool and chill

Makes eight servings.

Tomato Sauce

Here is a picture of the completed ravioli with the tomato sauce over it. I was actually too frazzled by the time I got around to making the tomato sauce to remember to take a picture of the process. It is not easy to cook and photograph at the same time, since one has to stop and wipe one's hands, (and one's brow) each time the camera is used.

There is nothing special about making the tomato sauce. If you want to undertake this whole project, I would suggest making the tomato sauce ahead of time. We did not.

Tomato Sauce

1/4 cup olive oil

1 large onion finely chopped

1 clove garlic, finely chopped (If you like more, and who doesn't, go for it.)

1 two-pound-thirteen ounce can Italian plum tomatoes

1 six ounce can tomato paste

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 bay leaf

1 teaspoon basil

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Sautee the onion and garlic in the oil until tender but not browned.

2. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, salt, pepper, bay leaf, and basil. Bring to a boil and simmer for twenty minutes.

3. Add the thyme and oregano and let simmer five minutes longer.

Makes about one quart, or plenty for all the ravioli you can churn out.

Pasta

The pasta went relatively easily because my husband took over. We hadn't made our own pasta for years, but when we had, back before we had kids, he did it. And he did it again, Tuesday night. This recipe uses the "make a well in the flour and break the eggs into the well" method.
Well, what we both have to say about the well method is, forget it. Olvidate, as they say in Spanish.
Use a food processor, and very little water. Put in a tablespoon at a time, and as soon as you can get it to hold together, stop. My husband says, think pie crust dough. And, if you are making the full recipe, make it in two batches. Luckily, I did that, because I ruined the first batch with too much water.
Here follows not Hewlett's recipe, but ours, adapted for a food processor. This is a picture of my husband rolling the dough through the pasta machine.

Pasta

6 cups flour

1 tablespoon salt

6 eggs

1. Place half the flour, salt and eggs into a food processor. Buzz the mixture until everything is mixed together. At this stage, it's kind of like oatmeal. Then add water a tablespoon at a time. As soon as the dough holds together, stop. If the dough is sticky, it will gum up the pasta machine, and you will have to throw the dough away.

2. Repeat for the second half of the ingrediants, if you need that much.

3. Pass one-sixth of the dough through the pasta machine at its widest setting several times, folding the dough in thirds as it lengthens for successive rollings. This is kind of like kneading the dough. Set the machine at number two or three for the final rolling to make the ravioli dough.

Makes enough for six dozen ravioli.