Recipe Thursday: Roasted Roots with Figs, Goat Cheese, & Almonds

This is such a great dish. It’s low-maintenance, super sexy, and can work as a side if you wish or has everything you need as a main course. It’s seasonal and substitutable with some things other than roots (like cauliflower or butternut/cup/acorn squash), and generally I don’t prefer Red Beets (they bleed too much) or Sweet Potato (too soft). We’ve also changed the nuts (pecans, hazelnuts) to seeds (pepitas or pine nuts) or even chick peas to add a great protein addition. Sometimes we do without the cheese and add preserved lemons or ginger instead. And the figs can be changed up to dried apricots or dried plums, even fresh apple wedges or chunks (Bon Appetit tells me that Jonagold, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp, Braeburn, Winesap hold up well in baking) – or even a mix of fruits. We generally cook it in a 9×13 stoneware baker but a sheetpan could work well, too (keep in mind a metal surface will generate a crisper caramelization rather than moist, personal preference). If you are feeling that you need even a little more heartiness, cooked farro/bulgur/wheat berries are a good match for the earthiness of this dish. As a side, it is a nice accompaniment to a whole roasted chicken or pork tenderloin. Which reminds me, I don’t nearly have enough roots yet.

Roasted Roots with Figs, Goat Cheese, & Almonds

  • A mess of roots: Carrots of any color, Golden Beets, Parsnips, Rutabaga, Turnips, scrubbed and chopped into 2″ chunks
  • 1 Large Red Onion (or a handful of Shallots, Pearl Onions, or a Vidalia), chopped
  • 3-5 Medium Whole Garlic Cloves (if only big, chop in half), peeled
  • 1 cup of Dried Figs, halved
  • 1/2 cup whole Almonds (whether roasted, toasted, or raw – your preference, keep in mind, the oven will toast them up a little more)
  • a few sprigs of Fresh Sage (or Rosemary or Thyme)
  • Olive Oil
  • Sea Salt & Fresh Ground Black Pepper, to taste
  • 4-6 oz Goat Cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put all veg/fruit/nuts in your baking pan, toss with Olive Oil, Sea Salt, & Black Pepper. Bury the herb sprigs in the mix. Bake until hardest veg are tender and browning nicely (35-45 min). Remove from heat, give a good stir, and dollop (who doesn’t love that word) Goat Cheese across the top. Serve with hearty cooked grain and/or roasted meat, if desired. Stands great on its own, too.

Happy Fall!

Tuesday Happenings

A couple years ago now we decided to charcuterie a pig liver, wrapping it in linen, tying it, and hanging it from a hook in our ‘dining room’. We were ecstatic to have hanging meat. We ended up being too nervous to try it after we left it for a ridiculous amount of time (somehow we forgot about it) and chucked it, though if I knew then what I know now – I would still try it even if it were still there. With that said, Josh is enamored with the little River Cottage book on Curing & Smoking, I expect our dream of hanging meats will be renewed.

What else is going on around here? It’s Tuesday so there are piles of bread, trays of bagels, jars of ricotta and pesto waiting to go out for delivery. It’s Pretzel Braed week – a sweet and savory braided bread with your name all over it. The chickens have started laying (gorgeous little eggs with deep colored yolks) and the rooster is being re-homed (today). There is apple jelly, apple butter, applesauce, and apple chips waiting to be finished and cider (whew!). And something delightfully sweet and special coming your whey (yes, I did that). A Fall apple Kimchi is bubbling away. I’m fantasizing about pumpkin butter and cranberry sauce, too (y’know, when I get a handle on this half of my chapter I have to write for this semester). And warmy teas are coming your way – the apothecary has been building all Summer and Fall (thank you Justin for the burdock root!) – rosehip, calendula, red clover, raspberry leaf, lemon basil, juniper berry, bee balm, yarrow, goldenrod, cleavers, lavender, thyme, mullein – it’s a good store this year.

Our extended Summer is coming to a close this week (today at 70 degrees, next Tuesday back to 40), which leaves us just a smidge of room to get those windflower corms in the ground in the back orchard, and the handful of alliums and croci bulbs. Duende and I almost had Josh convinced to get us ducks but since we haven’t painted the chicken coop yet or taken care of the strawberry beds, he was less convinced we should add more to our plate at this time. Maybe we can work on him again in the Spring – ha! Though he is dreaming of bees, and I of pumpkins (and floors). D has been making little picnic tables with dishes and providing seedy food for the birds and chipmunks – adorable.

Enjoy yourself – it’s later than you think.

Monday’s Muse

Inkamisana

BY CECILIA VICUÑA

Stairs & rites
not for the foot

The building
thinks

Angular rock

Green skyscraper

Black ziggurat

Miniature
of time

Made
into altar

Invention
of the night

Sprouting
at dawn

Carved rock
praying
as it buds

Seeking the seed
to sprout!

Saliva
in torrents

Cooling waterfall

You redeem your field

Salt head

Stream
of lights

Double reflection

Stone
& water

The same
sprouting

Recipe Thursday: RBH Tortilla Sopa

I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for the cliche; a turn in the weather sounds like stew time to me. Lovey hearty soups and stews – I’m dreaming about Luscious Butternut Squash soup (Recipe within a recipe: Saute 6 cups chopped leeks until soft in a deep pot, add pre-roasted peeled garlic cloves from a whole bulb, 4 cups peeled/cubed butternut squash, 2 cups of water, 2 cups of chicken broth, 2 Tbsp chopped fresh sage, S&P to taste, bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer 10 min or until squash is tender. Blend or mash until desired thickness – be careful, it’s hot! Add 1/2 cup heavy cream, 1/2 & 1/2 or coconut milk, cook until thick. Serve sprinkled with toasted pepitas, croutons, and/or fried sage leaves), and my red bean chili (the secret is pumpkin and chocolate), creamy gourmet mushroom and wild rice soup – and of course, with fresh sourdough bread for us.

I have another yummy recipe somewhere for this soup but this is the one I can find (and since I’m going to make it today…) – I have the remnants of a roast chicken, a half a bag of tortilla chips, and a lone avocado. This recipe was meant to happen. My mom used to make a version with fideo noodles, sazon, and 3 or 4 kinds of meat – it was divine. This Tortilla Sopa’s highlights are the Hatch Green Chilis (accept no substitute, Hatch, NM works hard, as does the rest of the area – during the chili roasting season, the air is a heavenly smoky magic. Unfortunately way over here in Maine we can only get them in tiny cans instead of buying a giant bag to be roasted in the grocery store parking lot. They don’t always add a lot of heat, ergo the extra boost of Ancho or any other spicy pepper powder you might have), and the touch of Lime juice at the end. I can substitute many things but honestly, if I don’t have those 2 things, I don’t make this soup. The soup is ladled over the chips, the cheese added generously on top and stirred in, the Avocado fanned out, and a little Cilantro as garnish. You can make it as hearty as you like by adding more chips or cheese. Lovely and delicious.

RBH Tortilla Sopa
Serves 8

  • 3 Tbs olive oil
  • 1 cup diced Onion
  • 4 cloves minced Garlic
  • 4 diced Plum Tomatoes (or a 15oz can)
  • 3-4 Hatch Green Chili (or 3-4 4oz cans, depending on heat preference)
  • 4 cups Chicken or Veg Broth (you can whip some up fresh if picking a pre-cooked chicken; just add the ‘picked’ carcass to water, boil until desired richness)
  • 2 cups shredded pre-cooked Chicken (or cook up 2 Chicken Breasts/shred)
  • 2 tsp Mexican Oregano
  • Salt & Pepper, to taste
  • 2 tsp Chili powder (add extra 1-2 tsp Ancho Chili if heat is desired)
  • 1/2 cup diced Cilantro leaves (I put mine in a cup & use scissors to ‘chop’)
  • 2 Limes (or 1/4 cup Lime juice)
  • Tortilla Chips
  • 2 cups shredded Monterey Jack Cheese
  • 2-4 sliced Avocado

Saute Onion in a Large pot over medium-low heat until golden, add Garlic and cook another minute. Then add Tomatoes, Green Chili, and Broth. Bring to a simmer, then add Chicken and spices, cook 15-20 minutes to meld flavors. Add Salt & Pepper (and chili) to taste, stir in Cilantro (serving some for garnish, if you like). Squeeze 1 Lime or add 2 Tbsp Lime Juice, to taste, into soup (I then generally serve with more Lime wedges for personal additional Lime).

Crush Tortilla Chips into bowls, ladle soup over chips, 1/8-1/4 cup shredded Jack cheese over top. Lay Avocado slices over the island of cheese, add Cilantro for garnish and serve!

Duendesday

{life with a curious and crazy 10 yr old}

The sass is strong with this one. She’s as imaginative and funny as she is sassy and forthright. I wouldn’t change a thing. She’s very independent – in her desires and her expressions of them, she knows who she is already and she’s not afraid to show it. I admire her every day. She is aware that she is a magickal faerie and a witch and that both things are possible at once.

For Samhain Duende was happy to get a purple velvet cape with hood (why don’t I have a picture of her in it, she loves it!) and her November book is a new comic venture called Snapdragon by Kat Leyh (we’ve been buying monthly books to help our home library grow) which is perfect for my little witch. The glorious moon was full and portentous, reviving our energies and exciting our creativity. I wish we were better at celebrating the mid-seasons with specificity – we always make sure to spend the time together directly, make a special dinner, clean, decorate, and sometimes read appropriate things – for Samhain we pay respect to our ancestors and loved ones who have passed by remembering them or telling stories by the fire – but it’s a very casual observance and one that is usually generated modestly. Sometimes I wish we made clear overtures to the celebration day and purpose; evoked the elements directly, had a specific place to honor nature, and had at least banners if not other decorations designating each festivity (I have a banner for D’s birthday, the Equinox’s, and the Scotch party but I never got around to making one for Solstice’s or mid-season’s). We have a giant blue spider and web somewhere we used to try and hang up for Samhain but to be honest, we’re really lackadaisical about specificity – there is always nature bits everywhere, we see the seasons change outside and then inside just as a regular occurrence. We go for seasonal walks to celebrate the changes but we don’t make a thing about it – we just do it. We build fires all the time, whenever we’re together, so there aren’t too many of these types of things that we do with a separate sacredness – our whole lives are relatively sacred and already in tune.

But then again, she spent the day dressing up as her extra witchy self (witch dress, cape, black pointy hat) and I cared for some dry herbs and medicines while Josh racked hard cider. I did make a ‘faerie food cake’ (angel food cake but we don’t have angels in our lives, just faerie folk) with whey caramel and thawed strawberries, we had that lovely monkfish dish (see previous post) and we loved each other, as we do. What more could I want?

Homestead Happenings

There is always an urgency when the first snow flurries make an appearance – many times they signal the change and then aren’t seen again for months. Josh and I are both familiar with it snowing on our birthdays in October and April, mid season bookends. So, it is no surprise to wake up and see a soft coating of the white stuff, the green grass still poking through, the leaves over their splendor now, seed heads offering up the last nutrition to the congregating Black-Capped Chickadee, Blue Jays, Tufted Titmouse, Nuthatches, Cardinals, Crows, etc. Our sweet chickens have started laying eggs (adorable little faerie eggs with deep orange yolks), maybe in payment for all the treats we give them (oats, our own grown strawberry popcorn – so tiny compared to regular, flax/sunflower seeds, etc). When they follow me around I feel like Snow White.

Most of the bulbs are in (ha! still some leftover alliums/croci/windflower corms) and time is running out for that sort of thing. Time to mulch over the strawberries, the garlic bed, the fruit trees, and give up on the rest of the garden plans. We have a known little hiccup coming in the late Fall where we will have to take a couple of weeks off any big projekts, and baking/delivery which will serve my dissertation well and our collective health (no little thing), but not much else. So, the urgency is to push to get a lot of goodies set aside now – like whey caramel, apple butter, hand pies, a sweet and spicy Fall kimchi, new and exciting pastas, and more preserved lemons (speaking of – I made a piccata the other night with some monkfish my mother was kind enough to pick up at Portland’s Harbor Fish Market for me; preserved lemons, parsley, and caper sauce over fregola – so simple and sexy).

We really should use our upcoming ‘Indian Summer’ to paint the chicken coop, maybe add another little pop-door for their convenience and shelter, get the Sugar Shack ready for February, rake out the garden beds and sow Fall seeds (Poppies, Echinacea, Bachelor’s Buttons, Milkweed, Rudbeckia, Gaillardia, Flax, Foxglove, Dianthus, Delphiniums, and even Calendula, and Daisy) as all do well with natural stratification (dormancy), cage all the baby fruit trees, and paint the inside of the house, too – while we can leave all the windows/doors open (though we use No VOC and Milk paint, there are still chemicals in it and drying time is reduced by airflow). One last good clean out and Fall cleaning before the nights start staying below 30 degrees and we’re in and cozy for the long Winter weather (which we need both of us – this place is crazy town!).

Oh, the urgencies – and on this day when there is a political urgency of hope (and hopefully some practicality), and with the compounding existential urgency – we, at Rock Bottom, wish you moments of deep breathing, gratitude, and a sense that all of our urgencies are worth living.

Monday’s Muse

The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man? Reason answers, “there cannot be.” There is no room for absolute truth upon any subject whatsoever, in a world as finite and conditioned as man is himself. But there are relative truths, and we have to make the best we can of them. ~ Madame Helena Blavatsky

Recipe Thursday: ‘Fast Food’

To be honest, lately we are looking at quick meals. Of course, our quick meals are probably pretty slow for many folks because we just don’t have fast easy ways to make things happen around here. Our systems aren’t set up for it. We don’t buy food that turns into anything interesting fast. And if you are like me and avoiding the grocery store, it’s all about planning and availability. But with all that is going on sometimes we realize at the end of the day that we have forgotten to consider dinner. What do we do about that around here?

Maybe the fastest sort of thing we could come up with is Rock Bottom Lentils or pre-cooked Cannellini beans heated up with garlic and kale served with a crusty baguette (if we have any of those things, which means we must’ve made the bread at some point recently – see? fast is a loose concept around here). I guess we might consider something with few steps fast – like a sheet tray of cauliflower, locally made sausage, garlic, and delicata slices (we call that Fall or Winter Broil, the Summer version usually has something like cherry tomatoes/zucchini/onions/chunks of cod or shrimp/etc, drizzled with olive oil and roasted high) or even sometimes just store bought spaghetti, sauce, and homemade meatballs (gasp – yes, it happens, happily!) or we whip up a Pasta Carbonara (Cook 1# pasta per directions/save a little pasta water, whisk 2 egg yolks and 1/2c of heavy cream in a small bowl, if we have time and inclination we might fry 1/2# bacon chopped small or saltpork lardons with garlic/drain fat – add pasta to bacon pan with bacon/garlic and/or stir in yolk/cream mix to pasta with pasta water – toss 1 minute over low heat – remove from heat, toss in 1c fresh parmesan and pinch nutmeg/S&P to taste, with extra Parmesan if needed – sometimes we add broccoli or cauliflower or shrimp or scallops to the boiling pasta and continue on the same).

Our pizza night isn’t too complicated, we usually have frozen pizza doughs that Josh has made previously and if we remember to pull them out to thaw (and have ‘pizza ingredients’), we’re in business. Duende lately prefers just a red sauce, maybe black olives, maybe pepperoni or salami if we have it, and cheese and we generally make a white pizza for the ‘adults’ with ricotta (because we seem to always have some homemade in the fridge) and whatever else we seasonally have (I think last week was spinach, the last of the fresh tomatoes from the CSA, and a bit of ham). But we have a system for that – Josh has baking stones and a peel, we use one of my brother’s amazing cutting boards to serve on, we have a rhythm down for game night – pizza done.

But we are not afraid to just have grilled cheese on sourdough with roasted broccolini either (like last Tues) or what I like to call ‘baked to sh@*t chicken‘ – where whole legs or a variety pack of chicken parts are baked on a sheet tray with a drizzle of olive oil/salt & pepper (chicken can do no wrong in my book, it’s forgiving and easy to just bake), and a side salad (we whip up a quick vinaigrette for dressing or even just eat sliced cucumbers and wedged tomatoes), if we are feeling particularly hungry we’ll throw a tray of potato slices in as ‘fries’. Or Taco night if we have enough ‘fixins’ – I’m paranoid about my grain goods (NGMO, clean and responsible source, no additives) so I was happy to find quinoa based taco shells that were delicious. We’ve still yet to find things like hot dog/hamburger buns that aren’t questionable so we get creative with those things (Josh toys with different recipes sometimes but so far they have been time consuming and not ‘quite right’) – we use our pizza dough to wrap around hot dogs (it’s awesome), or Josh makes a great ciabatta that we use for burgers, but that’s if I’ve been able to get nitrate-free hot dogs anywhere.

We’re amazingly not really Stir-Fry people, once in a while but it’s an affair – it’s rarely as quick as it should be because there are all kinds of veggies to prepare and ingredients to pull out. Same with my Indian food dishes – they may cook up simply but the preparation is more than quick or fast might do for us. Last night we took advantage of our own bounty and cooked up some frozen homemade beet gnocchi and slathered it in our pesto but we were lucky we had them. I’m not opposed to breakfast for dinner but we rarely have it. I’ve heard another amazing local blogger (with many children; anyone with more than one children can definitely do whatever they can) offering up popcorn for dinner, we’ve tried that once or twice (since our lovely kid is already more of a ‘small meals’ kind of gal, I can cater her snacks to fulfill her dietary needs). I have to say, ‘popcorn’ for dinner sounds about right tonite.

Keep it simple, keep it sane.

Happenings on Tuesday

When it rains, it pours around here – (quite literally, there was a drought all Summer and now we’re sopping wet around here, no days to put out the laundry, we’re running out of towels!), we offer up a lovely pasta week and shazamo! Everyone wants some. Who knew? How amazing. So we worked our little fingers off making glorious seasonal gnocchi (golden beet/sage and sweet potato, red beet/thyme and potato, ricotta and parmesan), and then we also got a banner bagel order (of course, some of that was due to order form confusion which caused a series of problems down the line – if your bagels are a little funky this week it’s because they are handmade and variety is dependent on many factors – like too many bagels to proof at once). Whew! We might start offering goods twice a week.

But even though the 40lbs of pasta making was crazy making, I’m already dreaming of new flavors for next month’s pasta offering (maybe butternut squash and spinach tagliatelle, ricotta and lemon farfalle?). We’re also thinking of a holiday cookie week – rosehip shortbread, blueberry Linzers, apple white chocolate oatmeal? Ideas are flying. Next week is a specialty bread week: Sourdough Parmesan loaves – oh, so yummy. Josh has been developing this over the last month or so and it is delicious (as well as the soft sourdough rye he’s been working on, keep your eyes peeled for that one!).

Meanwhile, we got a whole pig (and Josh got a smoker for his birthday – let’s hope the two come together for some intriguing treats!), the Rosehip wine is bubbling away, cheese dreams are still developing, the garden is all but put to bed (though all the bulbs need to go in tomorrow! eeek!), and space for a new pumpkin patch is being prepared. The chickens are not laying eggs quite yet (soon) but we did find that the marvelous little chicken that we saved from the meatbird harvest (it was our ‘exotic’/extra chick that they throw in, seemed a different breed – colorful, small, sweet) is a rooster that we now need to rehome. I’m a little sad – that chicken was becoming quite the pet for me.

The next week will have many changes – politically, astrologically, seasonally; may you adapt smoothly and sanely.