Scraping the bottom of the barrel

As I've mentioned before, I am pretty much done with winter food. I can't wait for spring. Visions of glowing strawberries and roasted asparagus with a touch of lemon and some goat cheese tempt my palate. But I must be patient. There's no local food right now. And I've got leftover root vegetables and squashes hanging around in my veggie basket and frozen fruits (mostly peach slices) from last summer at the back of the freezer. It's time to clean all of that out and make way for the fresh food that's soon to come.

Today's task was to get rid of the three celebration squash that I bought oh so many months ago from the good people at Glascock's Produce, back when I thought I should store away as much produce as I could and was feeling adventurous about trying unfamiliar squash varieties. (I love winter squash, but a long winter makes root vegetables and squashes boring, although I have no doubt I will be excited about them again come fall.) The celebration squash were pretty beasties back when I bought them: variegated orange and yellow, smooth skin. Now out of the basket, they seemed a little dusty and felt as though they had lost a lot of weight. (I guess the moisture was pulled out of them.) So I cut them open to see how they looked, and they seemed fine. No black spots, no sliminess, no bad odors. Probably OK to eat. There wasn't a lot of meat on them anymore, but I decided they would make  good cups for a stuffed squash dish. So I cleaned the seeds out of the six halves, sliced a small bit off the bottom so they wouldn't roll around in the pan, and placed them in a baking dish I had rubbed with some olive oil. Finally, I drizzled a little maple syrup into the cups because maple syrup works magic on squash.

Then, I had to decide what I could stuff them with. I happened to have some ground chicken. Maybe I could make a chicken-apple sausage to stuff the squash? No, no, no, these squashes didn't have enough meat to make a meal. We need some carbohydrates. So I looked in the veggie basket and found a decent-looking sweet potato, a bruised apple, and some slightly wrinkly red-skinned potatoes. Got it: Hash!

Now, before I go on, let me say that I am not a fan of bad food, or, to be honest, even particularly tolerant of it. I've known people to dump the contents of their crispers into a pot with some water or a couple of cans of commercial broth and call it soup. This is appalling to me. And, as a lover of soups, it's offensive. Would you also call the contents of your garbage disposal soup? Well, I suppose that's one thing you could call it. What I wanted to do was to transform ingredients that were past their prime into something yummy.

So I'd decided to make a hash. I finely diced a yellow-skinned onion about the size of my fist (this turned out to be a good dish for practicing your knife skills) and added it to about two tablespoons of hot olive oil bathing in my wonderful iron skillet. (Anyone who has ever gotten a good season on an iron skillet must love their skillets the way that I do. Or perhaps not. OK, I'll be over here.)

I slow-cooked the onions until they caramelized into golden-brown bits that crusted the pan, which gave me time to dice the sweet potato, two potatoes, and the apple into about a quarter-inch dice. When I was done, the ground chicken went into the pan until it was slightly browned and mostly cooked through. Next the diced potatoes and apple went into the pan, just long enough to brown a little. I added about a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of dried sage, and a generous pinch of white pepper. Then I threw in a handful of chopped almonds to get a little crunch.

The next steps were to fill the squash cups with the hash, top them with some fresh bread crumbs and a dab of butter, and pop them into a 375-degree oven for an hour. Because I had lots of hash left in the skillet, I popped it into the oven with the squash cups for about 20 minutes to finish cooking the potatoes and have some leftovers ready for tomorrow's lunch. (Just heat it up and fry an egg sunny side up to put on top. Yum. I love a good runny yolk on hash.)

I need to work on my food-styling skills.

This was my experiment. The verdict? The flavor was great. The sweetness of the apple and the sweet potato mellowed with the onions, the squash, and the chicken into a warm and savory mixture. However, the crumbs were a bit burnt, the squash a bit stringy, and the chicken a bit on the dry side. These flaws were not enough to kill the dish, but flaws they were. And yet, it tasted great, and I had managed to use several old vegetables and fruits that have been languishing for a while. A few more meals like this, and all the vegetables and fruits from last season will be gone, and there will be plenty of space for the fresh fruits and vegetables we will soon see in the markets. (And I don't have to feel guilty about wasting good food.)

If you want to try this "recipe," the steps are described above. Here are the general quantities used:

• 1 lb of ground chicken (ground beef or pork with a slightly higher fat content would be a bit less dry; however, make it's not too fatty or the stuffing could get greasy)
• 3 celebration squash, halved, seeded (if you use acorn squash instead, you may want to pre-bake it for at least 40 minutes before stuffing it because it's such a meaty, slow-cooking squash)
• 1 large onion, diced finely
• 1 sweet potato, diced (about a quarter inch)
• 2 medium potatoes, diced (about a quarter inch)
• 1 apple, cored, peeled, and diced (about a quarter inch)
• about half a cup of chopped nuts (I used almonds because that's what I had, but most nuts would taste good here)
• about half a cup of fresh breadcrumbs
• some dabs of butter 
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sage
• a generous pinch of white pepper

I am so over winter food!

I am so bored with food right now. When you eat seasonally, transitioning between seasons is always hard, but this time of year is particularly dreary. You are tired of eating frozen berries and mealy apples, but you know you need to clear out the freezer for all the good new stuff that will come. A few wrinkly sweet potatoes and rock-hard squash (what were those called again, celebration squash?) loiter at the bottom of the veggie basket, up to no good with some wayward onion skins. Most sellers at the winter farmer's market in Leesburg seem tired or bored, waiting for the release of spring and summer, oh sweet explosive gorgeous summer. When Mike says he was hoping to see some vegetables, one seller calls out, "No, won't be any vegetables until the end of the month." Haven't seen the carrot guy with his sweet little jewel-bright roots in weeks. The eggs are gorgeous with their perky, deep orange yolks and becoming increasingly abundant, but I feel as though my capacity to come up with things to do with them is waning along with the variety of foods available to me. I look around at the market, I see cupcakes, goat milk soap, honey, and lots of meats--all good stuff--but somehow much has lost its luster.

So what then? I guess I need to kick it in gear, get inspired, get  creative--try things that I might never try otherwise. Dig out the stuff from the back of the freezer and come up with a way to make it interesting (and good, of course). Try something I haven't done before. I've been toying with the idea of making noodles or pasta for a long time. Maybe now would be a good time for that. Maybe I need to learn to make a different bread (I make most of the bread we eat; when we first tried to eat locally and without a lot of industrial ingredients, we discovered quickly that most commercial bread is chock full of weirdness). I tried making sourdough once and failed sadly (tough stuff--should have used it for insulation or in place of concrete barriers), and I've been meaning to try again with another recipe, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

What I have tried to do recently is to institute Meatless Mondays and to start eating more fish. What both of these attempts have taught me is that I know less about some kinds of food and cooking than I thought. Creating vegetarian meals is hard because they frequently lack a centerpiece; it all seems like sides. They are often complex, too. I started my Meatless Monday career with a great pizza, but it was a fussier recipe than I typically do on a weeknight. (I will be using the pizza dough recipe again, however.)

And, despite my Nordic heritage, I am not much of a fish eater or cook. So far I have made one fish recipe that I like (the recipe is at the end of this post), which is a traditional Swedish dish that, believe it or not, I used to eat in grade school and like (unlike fish balls--gag--or blood pudding--gag even worse). In Swedish it's called mandelfisk, which translates into almond fish, and it's just a nice yummy, breaded fish with nuts (and lots of butter). I like to eat it with boiled Yukon Gold potatoes (or any other nice, buttery yellow-skinned potato) with some melted butter and parsley and some grated carrots, perhaps with a squeeze of lemon or a dash of vinegar. Simple, clean tastes that bring up memories of better times as a kid in Sweden. Like when I spent a week on my aunt and uncle's boat in the Stockholm archipelago, eating a fresh fish stew with butter melting into rings in it ("leaden circles dissolved in the air"), giggling with my cousin while rosy, hot-faced, and sweetly tired from a long day in the sun and wind.

Mandelfisk
4 small files of white-fleshed, flaky fish (I use Chesapeake rockfish, because it's the one fish that I know I can get locally; it's a little strong, but still very tasty)
4 Tbsp butter
1 cup breadcrumbs (fresh preferably, which are really easy to make if you have a food processor: just throw some chunks of fresh bread in and whir it up until it's fine)
1/2 cup flaked almonds (or if you've got whole almonds, you can just chop them, which I discovered in a pinch)
a bunch of fresh parsley, chopped (if you have it); if not, use a Tbsp dried
1 clove garlic, chopped or crushed

1. Heat your oven to 400 degrees (Fahrenheit)
2. Butter a baking dish
3. Rinse your fish files in cold water, pat dry with paper towels, salt and pepper to taste
4. Place your fish files in the buttered baking dish
5. Meanwhile, in a pan over medium heat, melt the butter
6. Add garlic, parsley, breadcrumbs, and almonds; mix everything into a kind of crumble and take it off the heat
7. Pack the breadcrumb mixture evenly onto the top of your fish files
8. Put the fish in the oven and let it bake for about 20 minutes, or until the fish is flaky and the breadcrumb mixture is golden brown