Lamb and Red Pepper Ragù with Pasta

Cold weather makes me want to eat hearty meat-filled meals, and recently I was fortunate enough to get a ½ lamb from Old Pine Farm. Here’s a great hearty winter meal that works wonderfully with the strong flavor of locally raised, free range lamb. Lamb pairs well with the taste of peppers. If you are lucky enough to have one of the Locavorious bags of frozen Tantre Farm incredibly sweet and hot Carmen peppers, this recipe is a wonderful use of them, along with the frozen whole Roma tomatoes.

The recipe has been adapted from Cooking Light’s “Abruzzese Lamb and Red Pepper Ragù with Penne.” I’ve never visited the Abruzzo region of Italy, so if you have let me know if it’s true what foodie people say that the rustic Abruzzee cuisine is an undiscovered treasure of Italian cooking. Home of both mountains and extensive coastline, the Abruzzo region is known for hearty mountain recipes, a lot of seafood specialties, and strong flavorful dishes. To make this recipe even more authentically Abruzzese, use chili peppers to increase the spiciness and use an egg pasta, and to make it more Michivore pick up some handmade pasta from Pasta e Pasta from Diane and Debbie at the Farmers Market or some Al Dente Pasta.

Ingredients

1 T olive oil

2 cups finely chopped red onion

12 oz Locavorious frozen red bell pepper slices (or 3 cups bell pepper slices)

4 teaspoons minced garlic cloves

~ 1 lb ground lamb (other ground meats would work just fine too)

1 cup dry red wine

16 oz Locavorious frozen whole tomatoes

1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, divided

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper

4 bay leaves

~ 2 cups chicken broth

~ 8 cups hot cooked penne (about 1 pound uncooked tube-shaped pasta or other short pasta)

1/2 cup (2 ounces) grated fresh Pecorino Romano cheese

Heat oil in a large Dutch oven over medium heat. Add onion and garlic. Cover and cook 6 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add red peppers and cook an additional 6 or so minutes. Remove onion mixture from pan.

Add lamb to pan; cook over medium heat until browned, stirring to crumble. Drain. Return onion mixture and lamb to pan. Add wine; bring to a boil. Cook 10 minutes or until liquid almost evaporates.

Add tomatoes, 3 tablespoons parsley, salt, crushed red pepper, bay leaves, and broth; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer 10 minutes. Discard bay leaves. (Discard tomato skins if desired.) Add pasta and cheese; toss to coat. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon parsley.

Is it peach jam or peach butter?

 

Whatever you would like to call this fruit spread is fine with me, as long as I get to eat a lot of it! This summer we had a minor peach incident in the Locavorious kitchen (hey, who forgot the vitamin C?!) which resulted in yours truly taking home a couple of pecks worth of very ripe peaches from Wolfe Orchard. Having already discovered the joys of jam during strawberry season, I was happy to be “stuck” with lots of juicy, ripe fruit. I made it into what I thought of as peach jam, canned some, and made the rest into large quantities of peach jam dessert bars, yummy, yummy, most of which ended up at Hollerfest, and ate the rest. When I finally had some time to consult the Ball Book of Home Preserving, I discovered that what I thought of as peach jam was really more of a peach butter.

Most of our peaches this year came from Wolfe Orchard in Tipton, Michigan, and a couple bushels came from Karpo Farms across the street. Orchardist Mary Wolfe and her assistant Sue were at the Ann Arbor Farmers market on Wednesdays and Saturdays throughout the season, and they will still be bringing apples and cider to market through December. Mary was very helpful in telling us when the peaches were harvested, which varieties preserve well, and how long we should let them ripen. Peaches are the only Locavorious fruit or vegetable that has something added to it before freezing; every peach half has been dipped in a vitamin C – water bath to minimize browning. Even so, if you thaw peaches before using them, the browning will start again, so just add frozen peaches to recipes straight from the freezer.

Peach jam or butter is a super easy, delicious way to enjoy your Wolfe Orchard peaches this winter. The peach skin, especially the skin of Red Havens and Garnet Beauties, gives the jam a lovely pink blush. (I don’t recommend it, but the peach skins are easily removed if you prefer by running the peach halves under hot water for a couple seconds.) This jam uses less than ½ the amount of sugar found in typical jam recipes, but it seems to be plenty with our perfectly ripened local peaches. Since I still happened to have a lot of extra frozen peaches at home I made a double recipe:

2 lbs frozen peaches

¼ cup water

~ ½ teaspoon grated lemon zest and ~ 3 T fresh lemon juice

1 cup sugar

Put the frozen peaches, water, lemon zest and lemon juice in a medium size saucepan; bring to a boil over medium heat. Break apart the frozen peaches, reduce heat and boil gently for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until peaches are soft and falling apart. For peach butter: cool peaches and transfer to food mill or blender, or use a stick blender and puree to a uniform texture. Return to saucepan and reheat. Skip this pureeing step for jam. Add sugar to the saucepan and stir until dissolved. Bring the mixture to a boil again, stirring, then reduce heat and boil very gently, stirring often, until the mixture thickens. This step always seems to take longer than I expect, but it shouldn’t be much more than another 20 minutes. The jam or butter is done when it holds its shape on a spoon. Another easy test for jammin’ is to spoon a small amount of the jam/butter onto a cold plate – if it holds its shape and doesn’t run, the jam is ready. Cool and refrigerate until ready to enjoy.

(While the jam or butter is still hot you could also preserve it by processing in a water bath canner, but this recipe only makes about 3 pints.)

Now you’ve got lovely peach butter to top toast, biscuits, or scones or to mix into yogurt, cottage cheese or baked goods. I’m going to use this batch for either jam thumbprint cookies or another round of those peach jam bars.

Zucchini soup – Morgan & York’s Pure de Calabacin

This rich and creamy tasting yet completely vegan soup is a great dish to make with frozen summer squash and zucchini.

Morgan & York has been a terrific help to Locavorious by providing us with a convenient and friendly share pick-up spot, so I’d like to start by shouting out a big thank you! As you might imagine, I pop in and out of the store rather frequently dropping off shares, etc. One can’t help but notice their extraordinary wine and cheese selection and eye-popping variety of artisan and local beers. Fortunately for M&Y and unfortunately for my pocketbook I have discovered that it’s also a great place to get a bite to eat. Not only does their deli counter make my favorite sandwiches in town – high quality ingredients on Café Japon baguettes – try the Tasso beet – but they also makes this fabulous zucchini soup. They shared the recipe, which I adapted to fit with the Locavorious frozen summer squash blend. It’s so rich and creamy tasting I was surprised to learn there is no milk or cream in the recipe. According to Simone Jenkins, owner of the store with husband Matt Morgan and friend Tommy York, the key to this soup is to use a high quality, flavorful olive oil. She recommends Koroneiki olive oil.

Quality ingredients and local veggies make this simple, elegant soup quite delicious. Frozen zucchini and summer squash are not amenable to just re-heating and eating because of their high water content. They do, however, retain their wonderful summer flavor when frozen and that flavor shines when cooked into a soup. Even this late in the fall, onions, potatoes, carrots and parsley are all still available at the farmers market, Tantre Farm sent around a note that they will be there on Saturday December 5^th. So with my apologies to the purist locavores, this mostly local soup recipe is worth borrowing 1 or 2 tablespoons of imported olive oil.

Ingredients:

1 ½ – 2 T really good extra virgin first cold pressed olive oil

1 large or 2 small yellow onions, chopped

16 oz frozen Locavorious summer squash

1 or 2 Yukon potatoes (½– ¾ lb), peeled and chopped

2-3 large carrots (I used ~ 6 smaller ones), peeled and chopped

Parsley springs or carrot greens

1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

2 1/3 cups water

Garnishes recommended by Morgan & York: 1/3 lb Jamon Serrano, diced into little cubes, or 1/3 lb Manchego cheese, diced into little cubes.

Preparation:

Put oil in a small soup pot on medium heat. Sweat down the chopped onions until they are uniformly soft and translucent. Add everything to the pot – chopped potatoes, carrots, parsley, salt, water and frozen squash. There is no need to thaw the squash first! Put a lid on the pot, turn heat to high and bring it to a boil. Once boiling, break up the frozen squash, stir, replace lid and turn heat down to medium low. With the lid on, let everything simmer ~ 45 minutes or until everything is fully cooked and soft. Remove pot from heat and let cool ~ 1 hour.

Blend to a fully consistent creamy texture with a stick blender (or transfer cooled soup to a blender to puree it.) Add a little water if it’s too thick for your liking. When ready to eat, gently heat the soup back up to ~ 140 degrees, stirring a bit. Garnish with either little diced ham or cheese cubes. If you don’t have Manchego, tiny cubes or shavings of parmesan work too.

A Garden Variety Beet-Veggie Soup….aka Borscht

Beet-cabbage-vegetable soup…also known as borscht. For years whenever I’d say how much I like beets, folks would then ask, “So, you make borscht?” And for years I would have to fess up that not only did I not make it, I’d never even tasted it. Borscht is a soup that I thought one needed a secret family recipe from your mama’s bubbie’s bubbie from deep in the Russian or Baltic or Ukrainian or, at the very least, Eastern European heartland. No such luck in our family. I vaguely remember my maternal Bubbie tossing together canned pickled beets and sourcream and sitting down to eat that scarily vibrant pink concoction after everyone else had left the table. Now that I think about it, that’s always when Bubbie ate, so maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the borscht. In any case, I assumed that neon pink stuff from a can was not of any interest.

Flash forward to this past summer when the garden and the farm share were yielding beets, beets, root veggies, beets and cabbage and more beets. While hungry and “complaining” about the bounty after playing ultimate one evening, a young guy (i.e. a guy younger than me) commenced eye-rolling, “Come one, just make borscht, it’s so easy. Even on a weeknight.” HUH? What did he say? He rattled off a generic recipe formula….”My wife and I love it in the summer; we just cook down some cabbage and onions, carrots or whatever else is around, add some water and beets; plop on some sourcream when the veggies are soft. It’s delicious hot, warm or cold.” WHAT? My head was spinning with challenges to my long held assumptions:

1. Borscht is not just for Bubbies.
2. Using canned beets is not required.
3. Some long kept secret family recipe is not required.
4. Some young, punky ultimate-playing guy can make this unusual old world soup.
5. Same guy can whip it up on a weeknight in spite of having 2 young tots.
6. It’s delicious. Really? OK, well I had to give it a try.

So now I am here to testify – borscht is delicious! You cook down some cabbage and onions slowly, almost caramelizing them; you add root veggies full of natural sugars. What’s not to like? OK, maybe this soup needs a better sounding name, however, even the ever skeptical chef Jeff was won over. Our summer’s bounty was transformed into various batches of borscht (or let’s call it veggie-beet soup), the leftovers now safely snuggled into the freezer for winter consumption. But don’t think of borscht as just a summer-time cold soup. Most of these ingredients are still available at the farmers market through the fall, and it’s a hearty, healthy vegetarian soup great served hot in this cold weather. I prefer it hot. Borscht is also a perfect use of frozen whole or stewed tomatoes too, putting back in a touch of that fresh summer flavor.

Instead of relying on Bubbie’s secret recipe I use Debra Madison’s the “The Ultimate Root Soup: Borscht” from Local Flavors as my guiding light. This soup is very amenable to substitutions – no leeks? Use extra white onion. No turnips? Use parsnips. Want a vegan version? Skip the sour cream. And on a weeknight…use canned broth. Full disclosure – I typically use canned broth, but for the Slow Food Huron Valley Harvest Cook-off a couple weeks ago, I made the stock from scratch. It was the soup/appetizer winner, so maybe I should call this particular version Blue Ribbon Borscht. Hard-core Ann Arbivores & Michivores will love this soup too, as you can source everything but the pepper and bay leaves from our local food shed. For this version all the vegetables except the celery came from Tantre Farm.

Ingredients:

2 russet and 2 purple potatoes, peeled

4 carrots, peeled

5 large garlic cloves, chopped

1 large red onion

2 small white onions, one diced and one quartered

1 bunch baby turnips, scrubbed and trimmed

½ large green cabbage (equates to about 4 cups when shredded)

2 T butter

Salt and pepper

3 bay leaves

1 ¼ lbs of beets, peeled

1 package Locavorious frozen stewed tomatoes, or frozen whole tomatoes

1 T sugar

8 cups vegetable stock (recipe below), water, or some combination

6-10 sprigs parsley, half chopped, half whole

1 T red wine vinegar

½ cup sour cream

1 T horseradish

1 celery stalk

½ kohlrabi, chopped

2 Shiitake mushrooms

 

Preparation

1. Vegetable stock: Wash/scrub the soup vegetables.  Place peels from the carrots, beets, and two potatoes in a pot with three of the garlic cloves, two bay leaves, two teaspoons of salt, celery, kohlrabi, some parsley sprigs, the quartered white onion, and the Shiitake mushrooms.  Other combinations of vegetable trimmings will work too.  Cover with 10 cups of water; bring to a boil, then simmer while you prep the vegetables, ~ 45 minutes.

        2.     Chop these vegetables: onions, carrots, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, and the rest of the garlic.

3.     Melt butter in a large soup pot.  Add onions, carrots, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, and garlic.  Toss with 1 T of salt, cover and cook over medium heat until the vegetables have wilted, ~ 25 minutes.

4.     Meanwhile, dice the beets.  Defrost the frozen stewed tomatoes enough to get them out of the container. If using frozen whole tomatoes, no need to defrost.

5.     When the onions, cabbage, etc. are soft, add the beets, frozen tomatoes and 1 bay leaf.  Keep the heat on medium and gently break up the tomatoes.  Strain the stock and add it to the soup plus enough water to equal about 6 cups.  Once the soup is boiling again, reduce heat to a simmer and cook an additional 25-30 minutes or just until the beets are tender.

6.     Add salt and pepper to taste.  Remove from heat and stir in 1 T vinegar.  Sprinkle chopped parsley on top. Can also use chopped fresh dill.

7.     Combine the sour cream and horseradish.  Serve soup hot, warm or cold with a spoonful of the sour cream-horseradish on top.

Try this at home – preserving fall crops

Brrr…..in case there was any doubt the weather confirms – autumn is really here! Hope you are all still enjoying the Michigan harvest. At the Locavorious kitchen we are still enjoying preserving fall’s bounty! What? What’s that you say? Is there still Michigan farm fresh food around to preserve? Yes, there is, and yes you can do this at home! Now is still a great time to buy fresh veggies in season and put some up for winter.

Here are some of the vegetables that are still available at the Ann Arbor Farmers market that freeze well: spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, squash, pumpkin, green beans, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and even a few tomatoes for sauce.

Greens like kale, collards and swiss chard are simply awesome right now and will be available well into next month from the local farms. To freeze them for use in hearty winter meals – wash the leaves, remove the thick woody stems, and chop. An easy way to quickly chop them is to roll a handful of leaves loosely together and then cut strips. Green vegetables need to be blanched before freezing – either in boiling water or steaming. I recommend steaming for 3 minutes and then quenching the kale in a bowl of ice water. Drain, pack and freeze. At Locavorious we pack kale and swiss chard into 16 oz heavy weight deli-type containers, but you can use any sort of freezer bag, freezer-ready jar or plastic container. It’s now recipe-ready for you in your freezer.

This week we preserved a blend of 3 types of kale from Frog Holler Organic Farm – curly, Red Russian, and Lacinato (also known as cavolo nero, black kale or dinosaur kale). This winter one could add such a lovely organic kale medley to stews, or make braised greens or southern style greens (cooked in a pot forever with a ham hock or chunk of smoked meat.) Kale pairs well with strong flavors like smoked meats, tamari, hot peppers, garlic, peanuts, and sweet peppers. Last week I made Debra Madison’s White Beans with Black Kale and Savoy Cabbage recipe with our kale medley, and it was just the thing for cool autumn evening.

Crops from the brassica genus freeze really well too – especially cauliflower, broccoli, and Romanesco , that funky fractal-Christmas tree-like vegetable you know you want to try. For these veggies, wash, chop or break into florets, and blanch in steam for 5 minutes. Alternatively, you can blanch in boiling water for 2 – 3 minutes before cooling in the ice water bath.

This year Locavorious put up some brilliant orange cauliflower as well as the traditional white. All of our cauliflower came from Wilczewski’s in Howell. Kurt and Karen Wilczewski grow the biggest and the most colorful cauliflower I’ve ever seen. Kurt says he cannot taste the difference between the colors, but he’s heard people say orange cauliflower has a more “buttery” flavor. In the kitchen we thought the orange had more of a buttery smell after blanching, but I too thought they tasted the same – both delicious. Frozen cauliflower works well in casseroles, soups and curries, and pairs well with many flavors – cheeses, garlic, curry, ginger, soy sauce, lemon, and butter, just to name a few. If someone has a good recipe for Aloo Gobi, please share it!

For more information on how to preserve food at home via freezing, check out the National Center for Home Food Preservation website – http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/freeze.html, or some of my favorite books: Preserving the Harvest, So Easy to Preserve or Preserving Summer’s Bounty.

Some pix: Tantre Farm’s market table on Wednesday, October 14.

Swiss chard, lacinato and curly kale waiting for you at Tantre’s table.

A lovely organic kale medley from Frog Holler Organic Farm about to get blanched.

Karen Wilczewski and her big, colorful cauliflower at the Ann Arbor Market.

Dawn, a strong member of the Locavorious kitchen crew, lifts a Wilczewski cauliflower.

Announcing the Long Winter Kitchen

Brrr here arrives autumn.  When I picked up produce from Tantre Farm’s market stand on Wednesday, Richard Andres just smiled and quoted Percy Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being

Fortunately the rock stars in our Locavorious kitchen crew have preserved an amazing amount of food this year…so not only are we enjoying the wild west wind of autumn….we are ready for winter!   And speaking of the long winter in front of us…..I wanted to share with everyone yet another great local food business designed around helping people eat locally in these coming cold winter months. 

An all new prepared meals winter CSA called the Long Winter Kitchen has launched in Ann Arbor. The Long Winter Kitchen is a four month CSA that prepares your meals from virtually all local ingredients, primarily local produce preserved by us in the Locavorious community freezer and local meat from Old Pine Farm.   Talk about high quality ingredients!   

Each month The Long Winter Kitchen chefs (including Mary Wessel Walker of Community Farm Kitchen fame) will transform humanely raised organic beef, chicken, pork, eggs and bison from Old Pine Farm and local produce harvested at peak flavor and preserved by Locavorious, into healthy and hearty winter meals.  The menus they’ve planned include dishes such as pork roast stuffed with apples and cranberries, Beef Wellington, chicken chili and a special quiche of the month.   Whole shares are $1200 for the four months.  This equates to less than $10 per person, per meal for delicious, local home-style food. For information please contact Mary Wessel Walker @ 734-395-7782 or email info@communityfarmkitchen.com

Go Blueberries!

For the past couple weeks, whenever I’m at the market, it’s hard to resist the urge to dance around yelling, “The blueberries are here! The blueberries are here!” They are more than just here, they are perfect right now. I love fresh picked Michigan blueberries. The smell alone differentiates our Michigan farmers’ blueberries from those poor, plastic-clam-shelled, shipped, chilled, blue Florida or Jersey marbles at the grocery stores. So – go – quick – to the farmers market or to a u-pick. Enjoy as many as you can….and then, of course, freeze some! Rinse, pick off stems and leaves, spread out on a cookie sheet and stick it in your freezer. The next morning, bag those berries up really quickly, and back into the freezer they go. Ready when you need them 6 months from now.

Blueberries are very popular in our house – fresh and frozen. One small, cute person who lives with us will eat a whole pint before we leave the market. Said small person also eats them frozen right out of the freezer bag, but she has to plead with Chef Jeff to give some up. He monitors the frozen berry inventory fastidiously to be sure the supply allows year-round blueberry pancakes. Chef Jeff’s blueberry pancake recipe works equally well with fresh and frozen berries.

This time of the year, though, blueberries are not just for breakfast. When the carnivorous mood strikes – try some local ground meat with, yes, blueberries! I found this recipe for Blueberry Burgers on Kate’s irreverent blog 4obsessions. Blueburgers work well with either fresh or frozen berries – so save some of the frozen ones and freak out your football fanatics this fall.

Now I must admit that as an occasional meat eater I didn’t appreciate what all the fuss was about grass-fed, free-range beef….until I tasted some burgers prepared with ground beef from Old Pine Farm. All I can say is – TASTE! That is what the fuss is about. As Kate points out, though, lean grass-fed beef can dry out during cooking, so this blueberry addition boosts the juiciness. My guess is this recipe would work well with ground buffalo, too.

 

For a dinner prepared earlier this spring we used some ground beef from TMZ Farm; the blueburgers were topped with a sauté of Michigan Mushrooms and spring onion from Goetz Farm. And that’s a side of roasted Locavorious cauliflower grown by the Wilczewskis and a salad of greens from Brines Farm.

 

 

Corn and goat cheese quesadillas

Frozen corn meets spring onions for a delicious dish. I loved these things! The ingredients are simple, local and the prep is fast. What is not to like?

1 bag Locavorious frozen corn kernels, lightly thawed

~ 5 oz goat cheese

tortillas (4 large wheat or 8 small corn)

~ ½ cup chopped green onions

Tomatillo salsa or salsa verde

Cooking spray

 

Heat a large nonstick skillet over med-high heat. (Next, I had to thaw the corn kernels for about 30 seconds in the microwave to get them loosened up.) Add corn to the hot skillet and sauté for 2 or 3 minutes, or just until the corn is starting to brown and stick to the pan. Transfer the corn to a bowl, and add the goat cheese, stirring until blended. (At this point, I quickly rinsed the skillet and got it back on the stove to warm up again.)

Divide the corn mixture evenly among 2 large (or 4 small) tortillas, and spread it out. Sprinkle the corn with green onions, then drizzle with the tomatillo salsa; I probably used about 1-2 tablespoons per tortilla. Top with the remaining tortillas.

Get that skillet hot again over med-high. Spray with cooking spray. Cook quesadillas about 1-2 minutes per side. For the next round, you might have to wipe out the skillet with a paper towel & re-spray with cooking spray. Cut quesadillas into wedges and serve with more salsa. I also tossed on a little chopped cilantro.

How local can you go with this recipe?? The Locavorious corn mostly came from Gardening Angel Organic farm (near Hartland). How about some tortillas from the Ann Arbor Tortilla Company, made right in town, with The City Goat cheese from Zingerman’s Creamery? The spring onions are in at the farmers market! Who made a good tomatillo salsa and put it up for their pantry? (OK, not me….but this summer…I’ll put it on the list.) Otherwise check out these Michigan made salsas – Garden Fresh Gourmet, Little Diablo, American Spoon (actually has a tomatillo salsa), Chuck & Dave’s, and Cherry Republic.

Michigan Lady Food Bloggers – Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Or some semblance thereof.  A loose group of food-loving, Michigan lady cooks and bloggers got together this weekend for a themed luncheon – cook something from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French cooking Volume 1…. or just cook something from a French cookbook, or something remotely French sounding…or head down to the creamery and buy some really stinky cheese. In all cases, the food was yummy!

Now, as a local foodie, the proposal to cook French at first made me feel slightly dizzy. But I got over it. Seasonal and local vegetables are often highlighted by French chefs. And I was very pleased to note Julia Child’s lengthy discussion in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol 1 of the proper way to blanch green beans and cauliflower for maximum flavor (lots of boiling water, not too long, plunge into cold water.) As your typical busy-working-mom-still-trying-to-cook-at-home person, French cooking also sounded like it would be way too time consuming. But I got over it.

Check out this recipe from Fast Food My Way by Jacques Pepin – Chicken Bouillabaisse – served with a spicy rouille. Other than lemon, olive oil & saffron, this dish can be made from many local Michigan ingredients, and it came together in pretty quickly and had wonderful flavor.

Bouillabaisse ingredients:

1 T good olive oil
1 T coarsely chopped garlic
½ teas saffron threads
1 teas grated lemon zest
¼ teas salt
½ teas freshly ground black pepper
¼ teas fennel seeds
¼ teas herbes de Provence
½ cup coarsely chopped onion
¼ cup coarsely chopped celery
¼ cup coarsely chopped carrot
4 chicken thighs or about 1 ¾ lbs chicken parts, skin and fat removed
About 1 cup or ½ a can diced tomatoes – or 1 package Locavorious frozen tomatoes
½ cup dry white wine
¾ cup water
5 red or Yukon gold potatoes, about ¾ lb, halved or quartered
1 ~ 10 oz piece of kielbasa sausage, cut into 4 pieces
1 T chopped fresh tarragon, chives or parsley
2 teas Pernod or Ricard (optional)

Mix the olive oil, garlic, saffron, lemon zest, salt, pepper, fennel seeds, herbes de Provence, onion, celery and carrot in a large bowl. Add the chicken and turn to coat. Cover and refrigerate until you are ready to cook. (I actually let the chicken marinate overnight.)

Transfer the contents of the bowl to a stainless steel pot and add the tomatoes, wine, water and potatoes. Cover, bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low and boil gently for 25 minutes. (If using the frozen tomatoes, after 15 minutes, gently break them apart with a spoon; you can also if desired fish out the tomato skins.) Add the sausage and cook for 5 minutes longer. If adding Pernod, stir it in now with the fresh herbs.

For the rouille: Remove ½ of a cooked potato and ¼ cup liquid from the pot and place in a food processor with 2 large garlic cloves, 1/8 teas cayenne pepper and ¼ teas paprika. Process for about 10 seconds. Add 1 large egg yolk. Then with the processor running, slowly pour in ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil and process for a few seconds, or until incorporated. Taste for salt and add a dash if needed.

Serve the bouillabaisse in warmed soup plates with a spoonful of the rouille drizzled on top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And for a truly sensational meal, invite a bunch of Michigan Lady Food Bloggers over and have each bring a dish!

Blueberry Matzah Brei

Chef Jeff is one of those guys that can eat matzah brei (aka fried matzah) year round.  Chef Jeff is one of those guys that not only eat matzah brei year round but also really loves it.  I am not one of those guys.  Once a year at Passover is quite enough for me.  However, when the master of blueberry pancakes invented this sweet Passover breakfast treat, matzah brei lovers from all over (the family) heaped praises upon his head….so here it is.  Fortunately, even though spring is upon us, we’ve still got frozen Dexter Blueberry Farm berries galore. This makes one large breakfast serving for a fried matzah lover.

Put ~ 1 qt of water on to boil. Beat 3 eggs, 1/4 teas salt and a pinch of pepper together in a medium size bowl and set aside.  Break 3 pieces of matzah into a large colander.  Chef Jeff says break each piece into 16ths. Slowly pour the boiling water over the matzah in the colander; let drain just a little. Transfer the wet matzah into the egg bowl and let it sit ~ 15 minutes while you go take a shower or shave or something.

Melt ~ 1 T of butter in a medium sized non-stick skillet over medium heat. Put the matzah-egg mixture into the skillet. Sprinkle the top with 1/4 – 1/2 cup of frozen blueberries.  Cook without disturbing until the bottom of the matzah brei gets golden brown; about 8 minutes. Now it’s time to flip it over. Easiest way is to use a spatula to break the matzah brei into quarters and flip each piece separately. Now you can break up the matzah brei into smaller pieces or leave it in large pancake-like sections. Cook another couple minutes.

Serve hot with maple syrup, or jam or even honey.