Snow Day Spaghetti

Snow Day Spaghetti is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

In Seattle, snow is as rare as rain is common. Possibly more so, seeing as our reputation as a rainy city is partially true and partially a fable told and retold to Californians in an effort to keep them from moving to the area (judging from the traffic--and the fact that I'm married to a former Californian--it hasn't worked as well as we hoped). When we do get snow, the streets are merely wet by evening, icy by midnight, and the snow by the roadside is melted by the next afternoon. We get even less here, sheltered in a narrow band between the backside of a hill and Lake Washington. As a child, I remember it snowing two or three times a year, with at least one snow day thrown in, but the climate has changed since then, and we generally only see one sticking snowfall a year, or two at the most.

Someone should tell all of that to the seven inches that's set up camp in my yard, and the ice packed onto every roadway. It's overstayed its welcome.

Oh, it was a fun guest on Thursday when it all fell in a matter of hours. The whole day took on the feel of a real snow day, complete with powdery snowman snow, another rarity in our region. Our snowballs usually crumble or pack down to nothing but lethal ice. Baker Bee was off work and baking Portuguese sweet bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice (which makes the best toast and French toast I've ever had, especially when topped with my dad's apple butter--we went through a whole jar on two loaves), and a couple of snowed-in friends stopped off in the middle of a walk for rest and a warm drink. I continued reaquainting myself with tools and supplies from pastry school and cake decorating. Opening the tubs that had been gathering dust in the spare bedroom for far too long now was enough like tearing into Christmas presents to infuse the day with a festive spirit. It was the first snow day I've had as an adult that really felt like a snow day.

Yesterday, however, without fresh flakes to revive it, the snow started to take on the appearance of a houseguest who'd lost all of their luggage down to their tolietry kit but insisted they could "get by" until the airline came through and delivered their stuff. It looked cold and tired, and the prospect of the winter storm that's supposed to hit on Sunday made it not seem like quite the miracle it had been the day before. The fun was gone for the most part, but Baker Bee did bake another loaf of bread--a Italian-ish white loaf with some of the new sour we're cultivating in the fridge. It didn't turn out very sour--I didn't really expect it to have much sour to it yet--but it did have a lot of flavor, so Mr. Bee suggested we should make pasta to go with it.

I decided I didn't want anything heavy, like the cheese sauce Baker Bee wanted to make. Olive oil and roasted veggies seemed like the best way to go. I thought about the vegetables we had in the fridge--vegetables that needed attention as soon as possible, since the vegetable barely stew he'd made on Monday had been too good to think of cooking anything else before it was all gone. Crimini mushrooms, mixed bell peppers, broccoli florets, Campari tomatoes. Not my usual combination for pasta, but okay. And then I got out a big casserole dish and started slicing vegetables.

In the pan, I tossed the mushrooms, orange and red bell peppers, and broccoli with olive oil, coarsely-chopped garlic, salt, black pepper, and a mixture of dried oregano, basil, thyme and marjoram, then put it in to roast at 375° for about 45 or 50 minutes total. I stirred the veggies every five to seven minutes, a bit more often than I probably should have but I kept smelling something charring in the oven, like a barbeque, which might have been the mushrooms sticking out on top or (more likely) some of the cornmeal that has escaped off of Baker Bee's pizza stone during the bread-baking spree.

When I opened the door each time, though, a wonderful aroma bathed my face along with the steam, carrying with it the smell of the roasted vegetables reminded me most of the ones I get on my sandwiches at a place called Grinders up north when I go to watch True Blood with a writing friend. (If you live in the area and end up north of Shoreline on Aurora sometime, make sure to stop there for lunch. So, so messy and so, so good. Plus the amibiance inside is a lot cooler than you might guess from the location and the outside of the building.)

The tomatoes went in separately, quartered and lying on their backs, with more olive oil and a good dusting of (vegetarian) bacon salt and regular sea salt. I think they shared the oven with the other vegetables for about the last 15 minutes. When they started looking happy and roasted, I shut off the oven, opened the door a bit and left all the vegetables in there to keep warm while Baker Bee made the whole wheat spaghetti and tossed it with a jar of organic heirloom pasta sauce we got to try. (It was very good, by the way...tasty but thin enough not to compete with the veggies.) Once all was ready, we layered the veggies over the pasta and sprinkled it all with parmesan cheese.

I was expecting a lot less from this pasta than it delivered, possibly because I don't normally roast the vegetables that I put in with pasta--it's far too easy to boil some broccoli in the same water as the pasta and call it slightly healthy. But the texture of the vegetables and the pasta were just right. The "tooth-feel" of the mushrooms in particular was exactly what I was looking for, which was a roasted equivalent of the perfectly cooked mushrooms in Baker Bee's vegetable barely stuff earlier in the week. The flavors were the sort that get better as you eat. I thought I was getting full and set my plate aside, but soon I was craving the pasta again and took it back in hand. All in all, a warm, flavorful dish that took me immediately back to my cozy snow day feeling from the day before.

Cranberry Meringue Tart

Cranberry Meringue Tart is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

Ever since I first saw the picture of the cute little Mini Cranberry Meringue Pies in Martha Stewart Living a couple years ago, I've wanted to make them. Their photo showed one sliced down the middle, exposing the jewel-like filling and the lightness of the meringue to full effect. I never got around to it, but this year I decided to try all new recipes for Thanksgiving, and this went to the top of my list.

I made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes like forgetting the egg in the citrus pate sucree (I put it to the left of the food processor and the rest of my mise en place to the right) and experimenting with a store-bought carton of egg whites for the meringue when I didn't have time to make a second batch. However, even without that egg, the pate sucree was possibly the best tart crust I've ever made, and several people complimented it. It uses both lemon and orange zest, a flavor combination that I used in my wedding cake years ago that really seemed to punch up the flavor.

But there was no blessing in disguise in regards to the meringue, unless I count the reminder that things never go well when I try to cut corners. At least this time it was in the spirit of experimentation and not just out of laziness, as usual. I used the Trader Joe's 100% egg whites, and I knew that they weren't going to be ideal when I saw how cloudy they were, but I went ahead and made the meringue. The foam ended up looking, well, very insipid and watery, not the airy dollop of heaven that I wanted to recreate from the magazine. By the time I was done, there was no time left, so the mediocre meringue went on the tart and I did my best to torch it, even though it didn't want to brown properly.

Despite all of that, I don't think I've ever had a dessert disappear so quickly at a big family event or gotten quite so many compliments and questions. I kept being surprised that people liked it, because I wasn't entirely pleased with the mouth feel of the cranberry filling, as pretty as it was. It had that gross texture that comes from too much cornstarch, so next time I make this I'll either decrease the cornstarch or experiment with some of the alternate thickners my husband has been playing with in his attempts at molecular gastronomy, now that we have a kitchen that we can actually cook in again. The xanthan gum marshmallows he made last week were a huge success, so I'm reading up on hydrocolloides now, too.

As I said above, I picked out a number of new holiday recipes to try this year. When I ate meat, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays, and I've been trying to recreate that experience in a vegetarian way for eight years now, with varying amounts of success. This year, though, inspired by the new kitchen, I decided to try to find some new flavors to turn into new traditions, rather than continue to try to recreate the omnivore's version of the holiday. Pretty much all of them (other than a new twist on the savory seitan and mushroom dish I've come up with to stand in for turkey) came from Martha Stewart--I rarely turn to her during the rest of the year, but the recipes in the holiday issues of the magazine are always really appealing to me, so much so that I keep them in their own binder on my cookbook shelf.

Cauliflower Gratin with Endive was delicious--cheesy without being greasy at all, and the Israeli couscous scattered in the bottom of the pan absorbed the sauce but held its shape in a texturally interesting way.

Stuffing was always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, so it took a lot strength to turn my back on the plain old crouton, celery and sage type stuff we always had. The Cornbread, Wild Mushroom and Pecan Stuffing I settled on was so good I just wanted to hold it on my tongue and not swallow it, or even chew it.

We used maitake, hedgehog and oyster mushrooms--I'd never cooked with hedgehog mushrooms, and they were extremely tasty!--so it wasn't inexpensive. Otherwise, I would've made another pan straight away and wolfed it down at home. I have plans to try it with less expensive mushrooms soon. The pecans were a revelation. I've often put walnuts into savory cooking, but I think this was my first time using pecans that way, and they complemented the mushrooms very well.

It seems like we made another new dish, but I can't think of what it was, other than the seitan stuff, where the newness of it lay mostly in my husband's interpretation of how to cook it based on my instructions I yelled from the shower. That and he tried a trick for quickly browning onions by adding baking soda to them that he read about somewhere online. It worked. But it also made the onions completely dissolve...which had the effect of coating the seitan in the onion pulp and frying it onto it. Not what we were going for, but I think I'll do it again next time we make it.