OK, this could also be called “Pasta with Kale and Sausage” or “Pasta with Kale and Bacon” or “Pasta with Collards and Sausage,” but you get the idea.

This is, seriously, probably one of my favorite dishes ever. Justin and I make it often. You can use fresh or frozen kale or collards, so it’s pretty-much a year-round dish.

For the pasta, we’ve used long and thin (linguini or fettuccini) or short and squat (penne or rotini). I like to use whole wheat pasta, but Justin prefers traditional white pasta. Of course, whole wheat is better for you. Try to buy a more expensive brand of whole grain pasta. I’ve heard the cheaper brands compared to cardboard, and it’s true.

For the bacon or sausage: don’t skimp on quality. In Grand Rapids, it’s pretty easy to get local bacon or sausage at the Fulton Street Farmer’s Market. Cheap grocery store bacon is plumped up with water, so paying more is definitely worth is. You get more meat and flavor. If you’re cutting down on cholesterol-high foods like bacon, don’t ask me if turkey bacon or soy bacon works. I don’t know. I probably will never try it, but if you do, leave a note so that other readers can know if it worked or not.

Pasta with Collard Greens and Bacon

Serves 4-6 (more like 4 if you’re not serving anything else)

10 bacon slices or 1/2 lb. bulk Italian sausage

3/4 C. pine nuts

1/4 shallots, finely chopped, or onions if you don’t have shallots

6 garlic cloves, minced

1 t. dried hot pepper flakes

2 T. olive oil

3 lbs. collard greens, stems and center ribs chopped finely, leaves chopped

1/4 t. salt

2 C. water

1 lb. dried pasta

1 lb. tomatoes, fresh or canned

1 C. Parmigiano-Reggiano shavings, made with a vegetable peeler from a 6-8 oz. wedge

Cook the bacon or sausage in a 5-quart heavy pot over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until crisp (for bacon) or cooked (for sausage), about 5 minutes, then transfer with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain. Pour off all but 3 T. bacon fat from pot. Add pine nuts to pot and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until golden, about 2 minutes. Transfer nuts with slotted spoon to paper towels to drain and season with salt.

Add shallots and collard (or kale) stems to pot and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until softened, about 4 minutes. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and cook, stirring, 1 minute. Add oil and half of collard greens and cook, stirring, until slightly wilted, about 1 minute. Add remaining greens and salt and continue to cook, stirring, until greens are crisp-tender, about 2 minutes more. Add water and cover pot, then simmer greens, stirring occasionally, until just tender, about 15 minutes.

While collard greens are simmering, cook pasta according to the package instructions until al dente.

Drain pasta in a colander. Add drained linguine and tomatoes to pot with greens and cook over moderately high heat, stirring constantly, 1 minute. Season pasta with salt and pepper and serve topped with bacon (or sausage), pine nuts, and cheese shavings.

Don’t tell your cardiologist.

Two weeks ago, the Calvin College student newspaper (Chimes) featured a piece about students, staff, and faculty members who were vegetarians or vegans. I appreciated it, but I kindly disagreed with much of what was said.

For last week’s issue (October 23, 2009), I submitted a rather lengthy letter to the editor that pointed out some of the more nuanced issues in regards to arguements for vegetarianism. It was published as an opinion article entitled “Vegetarianism Complicated.”

One student emailed me after this was written, stating “I thoroughly enjoyed the article you wrote for the Chimes last week. I had felt the same way, although I was considering writing a perhaps…more colorful response. I found your opinion refreshing and yet still done with an inspiring Christian spirit, both audacious and yet humble. It was an absolute pleasure to read.”

Another staff member told Justin that her family had used the article as a starting point for an engaging dinner conversation.

I’ve been considering writing a longer piece than this that more fully fleshes out some of the issues surrounding the seemingly simple choice of becoming vegetarian. What do you think? Is this something people would want to read?

Michigan is a great place to get dried cherries and I have a great old favorite recipe that uses them: dried cherry scones. Scones are pretty ubiquitous these days, but I remember the late 1980’s or early 1990’s when my mom started making them. They were ethnic, they were English and therefore high-class, and they were really exciting. 

But they’re still pretty exciting. A scone is really biscuit dough with an egg in it and sometimes fancy things (chocolate chips, dried fruit, lavender flowers) added for flavor. They’re great for breakfast and, if you have a little self control, will stick around a few days on the counter without getting too dry. 

Usually when I make this recipe, I substitute 100% whole wheat pastry flour for the cake flour. This makes good scones that aren’t as fluffy as they would otherwise be. You do whatever you’re comfortable with–adding any percentage of whole wheat pastry flour you prefer. Just don’t cut back on the butter. That’s what makes a scone a scone. Eat some soup for lunch and dinner; it will all work out in the end.

Dried Cherry Scones

4 C. sifted flour (all or a combination of cake flour, all purpose flour, or whole wheat pastry flour)

1/2 C. sugar plus more for sprinkling

1 T. baking powder

1 t. salt

1 1/2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2″ pieces

1 C. dried cherries

1 large egg

1 C. whole milk, half-and-half, or heavy cream (Cream makes a better scone, obviously, but I usually use whole milk.)

Preheat oven to 375 with the rack in the middle.

Whisk together the dry ingredients. Scatter butter on top and blend with your fingers or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Mix in dried cherries.

Whisk together the egg and cream in a small bowl then fold into flour mixture until dough just comes together. The dough will be very delicate.

Turn out dough onto a lightly floured surface. With floured hands, press into a 1″ thick rectangle or circle. If you cut a rectangle, use a 3″ biscuit/cookie cutter to cut out circles. I prefer to make a large circle and slice the dough into 8 wedges. The scones will be larger, but this is a lot less work and you don’t have to gather up the fragments and re-cut, which makes the dough more tough.

Sprinkle the top of the scones with sugar, if you wish. Bake scones, rotating baking sheet halfway through, until the tops are golden, 25-35 minutes, depending on the size of the scones. Cool on a rack about 10 minutes before serving.

Eat with a cup of coffee or tea and fresh fruit. Enjoy your food; don’t feel guilty. Just don’t eat scones everyday.

Because of my current state, I have not been cooking as much as usual. However, my dear husband will often step up to the plate and make something and/or order pizza. (He usually makes something.) Soup has definitely been a culinary refuge for the past four weeks; it’s easily digestible and a great way for me to eat more vegetables. 

Last week, Justin tried a new recipe that we both enjoyed. It uses fall vegetables–mostly roots and you can choose what you want to use or have hanging around the house. This may include potatoes, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, parsnips, sweet potatoes, celery root and even kohlrabi (though it’s not a root). These are my favorite types of recipes, the choose-your-own-adventure type.

Root Vegetable Stew with Herbed Dumplings

Stew:

4 t. extra-virgin olive oil, divided

8 oz. Italian sausage, hot or sweet

2 pounds assorted root vegetables, peeled and diced (see list above for ideas)

1 large onion, diced OR 2 leeks, sliced thinly

4 cloves garlic, minced

1 T. chopped fresh sage or rosemary, or 1 t. dried

4 C. chicken broth (You will probably need to add more, or more water, later.)

3 C. chopped dark, leafy greens, such as beet, turnip or kale

Dumplings:

1 1/4 C. whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 C. white flour

1 T. chopped fresh sage or rosemary, or 1 t. dried

1 T. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1 C. milk

Heat 2 t. oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add sausage and cook until brown, breaking up with a spoon, 5-6 minutes. Transfer to a bowl. 

If using parsnips, quarter lengthwise and remove the woody core before dicing. Heat the remaining 2 t. oil in the Dutch oven. Cook onion or leek until tender, about 4 minutes. Add root vegetables and cook 5 minutes. Add garlic and sage or rosemary and cook about 30 seconds, or until fragrant. Add broth and bring to a simmer, stirring often. Cover.

Meanwhile, whisk flours, herbs, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl. Add milk and egg and stir until a stiff batter forms.

When the stew reaches a simmer, stir in greens and sausage. Return to a simmer. Drop the dough, about 1 T. at a time, over the stew, making about 18 dumplings. Adjust the heat to maintain a gentle simmer, cover and cook undisturbed until the dumplings are puffed and the vegetables are cooked through. You may want to add more broth or water at this time, as the dumplings will absorb some of the cooking water.

This is delicious, and even good left-over and heated up.

 

I’ve tried several new muffin recipes I found online recently and I wanted to share them with you because they are so dang good. (As a side note, I’ll have you know I picked up the phrase “dang good” from a Calvin College literature professor, so it shows that even the Christian educated elite can use minced oaths freely–or only occasionally, to keep things interesting.) 

This is what happens: I wake up on Saturday mornings imagining a wonderful new type of muffin. So, I search for it online and voila! I do not have to develop a recipe for them because some kind soul already has.

My first new favorite is Zucchini Chocolate Chip Muffins. I only changed a few things on this AllRecipes.com recipe: I add 1 cup of chocolate instead of 1/4 (it’s too skimpy), I substitute whole wheat pastry flour for the all-purpose flour, and I use olive oil instead of vegetable oil. These are so good they could be muffins or cupcakes; if you have frozen shredded zucchini in your freezer from the summer, this is definitely a recipe to try.

My second new favorite is Blueberry Bran Muffins. I woke up this Saturday morning thinking that blueberries and bran would be a perfect marriage, and they were. This recipe is even low fat (which I usually don’t look for.) I made even fewer changes to this recipe: I used all whole wheat pastry flour instead of the white/wheat blend, I used whole milk (It’s all I ever use.), and my applesauce was sweetened. My blueberries were frozen, which worked out fine, but I forgot to dredge them in flour before mixing them into the batter. Dredging blueberries helps them not to sink to the bottom of the muffin. This is a rather sweet muffin, too, so if you cut back on the sugar, they’ll still be good. 

Making homemade muffins is one of the easiest from-scratch baking projects you can do. The trick is not to mix them too much. In other words: be more lazy.

Justin & I made a short film this week. Check it out!

I have a large collection of cookbooks. Some I reference weekly. Others are oddities I pull out for party tricks. Others are pieces of my own personal history.

Last October, when I visited my grandmother for the last time, she told me I could sort through her small cookbook collection and take the ones I was interested in. One of the ones I chose had been a gift to Grandmama from my own mother. It was a cookbook called Encoure! Opera: Organization of People in Ellendale for the Restoration of the Arts. This cookbook had been an early 1990’s fundraiser in Ellendale, North Dakota, to help raise money to restore the town’s opera house. My mother had purchased it while my family lived in Ellendale, a small (population under 1,600 in the 2000 census) town in southern North Dakota.

Compilation cookbooks made for fund-raising are always interesting (if you’re interested in seeing how America cooks) and sometimes distressing (if you’re interested in seeing how America cooks). Many of the recipes in books like this call for assemblage–a can of this soup or vegetable, a jar of Cheeze Wiz, instant pudding, etc. This may be fun and it may be tasty, but I don’t really consider it cooking and it doesn’t usually fit how my household eats.

However, other recipes call for whole foods and require cooking–and there’s a number of well-known contributors: Barbara Bush, Lady Bird Johnson, Phil Jackson, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter (someone obviously hit up the presidents or their wives), Bob Hope, and regional celebrities of that time and generation. (It has been almost 20 years…) I also recognize some community names from my time in North Dakota, and its bittersweet, as some of them, particularly one woman from my family’s church, passed away since then.

I look for ways to adapt assemblage recipes into whole foods recipes, and I did that to one gem from this book this week. Originally from Beryl Ginsbach of the Ellendale Historical Society, I tossed out the canned cream of chicken soup and American Cheese and added milk and cheddar cheese instead.

It’s a delightful, vegetable-y, fall soup.

Vegetable Cheese Soup, compliments of North Dakota

In a large Dutch oven, saute in 1 T. butter or bacon fat, 1 chopped leek (onion may be substituted), 1 diced green pepper, 3 stalks celery, and 2-3 carrots. (Vegetables should measure about 1 C. each).

Add 1 quart chicken or vegetable broth.

Add 2 diced potatoes. (About 2 medium potatoes, preferably red-skinned. Peel them if you wish.)

Add 1 bay leaf.

Cook for 20 minutes, or until tender.

Add 1/2 lb. chopped broccoli, 1/2 lb. chopped cauliflower, and 3 C. whole milk. (If you must use skim, which I really don’t recommend, add a bit of cream to thicken it out.) Heat, but do not boil or the milk will curdle. Add 1/2 lb. cubed cheddar cheese and heat. Salt and pepper to taste. The amount of salt you use will depend on the state of the stock and your own preference.

Enjoy! This soup is delicious the next day, too.

I’m not much one for baking in the summer. If the air conditioning is on, it seems counterintuitive. If the air conditioning is off, it’s unlikely I want to heat up the house.

But then fall comes, and fall is my favorite season of the year. I hope that, because I like the season fall, I’ll also appreciate the autumn of my own life, but that won’t be for a number of years yet.

Anyway, this past night was the first frost of the season, and we woke this morning to a rather cold house. So, I made muffins for breakfast. This is unusual, especially for a weekday, but they’re pretty easy and you can shower etc. while they’re baking.

This recipe is adapted from an out-of-print book called Greene on Greens & Grains by Bert Greene that was originally published as two books–Greene on Greens (1984) and The Grains Cookbook (1988). What I like about this book–besides the recipes and stories Greene tells–is how it’s organized. In the Greens section, chapters are alphabetically organized by vegetable from artichokes to zucchini including fennel, kohlrabi, parsnips, string beans, sweet potatoes, and everything in between. The Grains section is organized similarly, featuring grains from barley to triticale and including millet, semolina, quinoa and other grains you’re probably more familiar with.

These are delicious bran muffins. One of the reasons I particularly like them is that they don’t call for bran cereal, like most bran muffin recipes do. Instead, they use raw bran, which is pretty cheap by volume and it stores well (unlike bran’s cousin germ.) You can purchase wheat bran at Harvest Health in West Michigan, or Bob’s Red Mill packages it and sells it in grocery stores throughout the country.

Applesauce Bran Muffins

Wet ingredients:

1/3 C. firmly packed light brown sugar

1/4 C. melted butter

2/3 C. applesauce–homemade or storebought

2 eggs

1/3 C. milk

Dry ingredients:

1 C. whole wheat pastry flour

1 C. unprocessed wheat bran

1 T. baking powder

1/4 t. salt

1/4 t. ground cinnamon

1/8 t. ground ginger

1/4 C. raisins

1/4 C. chopped walnuts

Preheat the oven to 350. If you haven’t yet melted the butter, stick it in a bowl and pop it in the oven to melt while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. Lightly grease a 12 cup muffin tin.

Mix the dry ingredients (except the raisins and walnuts) together in a small bowl.

In a medium bowl, lightly beat the eggs. Add the rest of the wet ingredients, including the butter once it’s melted. Pour the dry ingredients, raisins, and walnuts into the wet ingredients and mix lightly. Do not overmix or the batter will be tough.

Divide the batter into the muffin tins. Bake for 25 minutes or so until golden and firm.

These don’t need jelly or honey, just a good cup of coffee.

One of my favorite foods, during fall and winter at least, is soup. I go through phases with soups and my current phase is chuncky meat and vegetable soups.

But there’s a problem with most soups: they take too long to make if you work during the day. The solution? Pretty simple–use a crock pot.

Yesterday, starting Sunday night, actually, I made a lovely beef stew. I made it up, so feel free to variate as you will. But if you follow what I wrote, you should have a nice beef stew that’s even better the next day.

Crockpot Beef Stew

2 beef soup bones (They’ll have some meat on them; don’t despair!)

4-5 carrots, cut into rounds

1 large red-skinned potato, peeled if you wish (I don’t wish.) and diced

2 C. chopped green cabbage

2 C. chopped green beans

3 stalks celery, chopped

2 t. dried marjoram

2 T. beef soup base (I use Better Than Bouillon Beef Base which may not be for true purists, but it really improves the flavour of the soup.)

2 bay leaves

salt & freshly ground black pepper

Parmesan cheese, optional

1) The night before you wish to serve the soup, place the beef soup bones (frozen is fine) into a 2-3 quart crockpot. Cover with water. Set on low and cook overnight.

2) The next morning, add the rest of the ingredients. Add water, if needed, to fill the pot. Cook while you are at work.

3) Before you serve the soup, remove the soup bones. Take the meat off the bones and add it back to the soup. Discard the bones, or give them to an animal if you think it’s safe. (I am not held liable if it’s not safe.) Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve the soup topped with Parmesan cheese and give yourself a pat on the back for being so industrious.

One of my uncles and I regularly joke around about tofu. “Come visit,” I’ll say. “I promise not to serve you any tofu.”

“Well, I’ll promise not to eat it if you do!” he says.

So this time, I didn’t serve tofu. I made beet and carrot burgers and he asked for the recipe.

One of the problems with some vegetarian diets, I think, is the meat substitutes. Meat substitutes are like a tin fiddle or skim milk. They’re sad versions of the real thing. I don’t like meat substitutes, I like meat. I also like vegetables, which is why these burgers are so good. They don’t pretend to be what they’re not.

This recipe is from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables, which was my new addition to the cookbook collection this season. Farmer John Peterson runs Angelic Organics, a CSA outside of Chicago. When I got this cookbook, I began to read some of the essays and wonder if my sister and brother-in-law are members of Angelic Organics, since they’d often talk about their “box.” (Produce is delivered in a box to members of this CSA, unlike other CSAs where one may have to pick up the produce and bag/box oneself.)

“What’s the name of your CSA?” I chatted to Gillian.

“Angelic Organics,” she replied.

“Have you heard of Farmer John’s Cookbook? It’s by the farmer of your CSA!” I informed her.

“Yes, we got that when we joined,” she told me.

This is their second season as members; boy, am I slow on the uptake.

Even if you don’t like beets, you may like this recipe. Even if you don’t like conventional veggie burgers, you may like this recipe. Give it a try.

Baked Beet & Carrot Burgers

1/2 C. sesame seeds

1 C. sunflower seeds

2 C. grated, peeled beets (1-2 medium beets)

2 C. grated carrots (about 4 carrots)

1/2 C. minced onion

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 C. cooked brown rice

1 C. grated cheddar cheese

1/2 C. oil

1/2 C. finely chopped fresh parsley

3 T. flour

2. T. soy sauce or tamari

1 clove garlic, minced or pressed

1/8-1/4 t. cayenne pepper (or more, if you like)

Preheat the oven to 350. Lightly coat a baking sheet with butter.

Place a small, heavy skillet (preferably iron) over medium heat. Add the sesame seeds and stir them on the dry skillet until lightly browned and fragrant, 3-5 minutes, watching closely to avoid burning them. Immediately remove from heat and transfer seeds to a dish to cool.

Toast the sunflower seeds in the same way you toasted the sesame seeds.

Combine the beets, carrots and onion in a large bowl. Stir in the toasted sunflower and sesame seeds, eggs, rice, cheddar cheese, oil, flour, parsley, soy sauce and garlic. (You may want to use your hands.) Add cayenne and mix until combined.

Using your hands, shape the mixture into 12 patties and arrange them in rows on the baking sheet.

Bake until the patties are brown around the edge, probably 30 minutes, depending upon how finely or coarsely you grated the vegetables. Turn them if they’re large and thick. Serve alone or on buns with hamburger fixings. (Mustard is good!)