Sugar Beets

Apparently sugar beets are a big crop in the Longmont, CO area.  I noticed them loading some trucks full of sugar beets on my way to and from work and my curiosity was piqued.  What was this mysterious vegetable that wasn't sold in supermarkets or farmers markets?  Did it really taste like sugar?  Why was it so huge?  Did it taste like a beet at all?  My obsession with trying new ingredients took over and lets just say that I "obtained" a sugar beet, which is pictured below.  It was about one foot long, but I forgot to weigh it!

 After peeling and cutting, the vegetable looked a lot prettier and less intimidating:

I looked for recipes online and most of them suggested that sugar beets were too bitter to eat plain, but could be turned into a molasses-like syrup by chopping them finely and boiling them in water.  I used the food processor to grate the sugar beet into shoestrings:

 I tasted the beet at this point, and was shocked to find that it was pretty tasty!  Imagine a beet crossed with daikon radish, or something else very crispy, and infused with a strong sugary sweetness.  I think they would actually be pretty nice sprinkled over a savory salad.  I saved a few spoonfuls and nibbled on them as the day went by.  The shredded beets and some water went into a pot and I put them on the stove:

Once things started boiling I simmered the mixture for about 90 minutes, until the vegetables were soft and the liquid was sweet:

Then I filtered out the beet strips and did a second filtration through a coffee filter to remove the last few particles.

After filtering I reduced the clear liquid to a thick syrup, which took around 30 minutes.

This is the syrup that I obtained (I know it is a little scary-looking).  It is in a 1 cup canning jar, so obviously there isn't a lot of it!  The flavor is good though - not really like molasses...closer to the sweet liquor that you get from malted barley when making beer.  Perhaps this will be a good ingredient in some fall-themed cocktails...

I think it would be pretty hard to argue that sugar beets are a more economical source of sugar, given the low price of cane sugar.  But, it was fun to get acquainted with a new vegetable.  Does anyone reading this have recipes for sugar beets or experience eating or cooking with them?

Stuffed Delicata Squash

Fall is here, and so are squash. Carl an I got a delicata squash from the farmer's market the other day. I had heard you could eat the skin (not that you can't in a regular squash, but the delicata skin is supposed to be actually tasty), so we decided to get one and try it. We stuffed it with a wild rice stuffing.

Ingredients
Delicata Squash
For the Stuffing
Wild Rice
Broth or Water
Celery
Carrots
Leeks (or onions, or shallots, or...)
Garlic
Pine Nuts

Assembly Instruction
To assemble, you'll want to cook the wild rice stuffing separately before putting it in the squash. Wild rice takes about an hour to prepare, so plan accordingly.
1. Put olive oil in the bottom of a pot, enough to cover the bottom. Add garlic and leeks, and sautee until the leeks are soft. Add the celery and carrots, and continue stirring until they are soft. Add the rice, stir to coat in olive oil, and then follow the instructions on the wild rice package for how much to use and how much to cook.
2. Once the rice is about half-way done, you can pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees F and start prepping the squash. To do that, cut the squash in half and remove the seeds.
3. About five minutes before the rice is done, stir in the pine nuts. When the rice is done cooking, portion it into the squash. You may have leftovers that don't fit in the squash, that's fine. You can serve it on the side or save it for later.
4. Bake squash for 25-30 minutes. It'll be done when it's easily piercable with a fork or knife.

As I mentioned above, you can eat the peel. Carl didn't like it. I found it pretty bland. It definitely didn't add anything to the dish, for me.

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

 adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home by Nathan Myhrvold

We recently got a pressure cooker and have been finding every excuse to use it.  I was pretty skeptical before we owned one, but they really are amazing.  Our model is an electric model made by InstantPot.  At first we were worried about finding a place to put it, since our kitchen is pretty small, but it turns out that having it away from the stove is great because it frees up a burner on the stove.  This recipe uses the pressure cooker in a few ways and all but one of them are awesome!

Ingredients

• 1/2 gallon chicken stock, preferably homemade (in a pressure cooker, if you have one!)
• 2 precooked chicken breasts, chopped
• 7 or 8 medium carrots, ends removed, then steamed and chopped
• 4 small leeks, white parts only, sliced almost in half and rinsed to remove grit, then steamed and chopped
• 4 ounces cooked fingerling potatoes, cooked
• 1/2 recipe fresh pasta (50:50 all purpose and semolina flours) cut into the shape of your choice, or about 8 to 12 ounces of dried noodles.

A few months ago we rented Nathan Myhrvold's book Modernist Cuisine at Home from the library.  The recipes range from simple to ultra-complicated, but most of them use some kind of non-standard technique or strange gadget to achieve a unique result.  A lot of recipes use a pressure cooker, which is a big reason that we chose to buy ours.

Chickeny Ingredients

The modernist cuisine recipe for chicken stock is great because it creates a full-flavored stock in only 1.5 hours of cooking time.  When I've made stock in the past it simmered on the stove for 4 to 7 hours, so this was a big improvement! The chicken breasts in this recipe are from a grocery store rotisserie chicken.  I don't really understand it, but they are usually cheaper than raw chickens, so we buy them now and then and use the carcass to make stock.

Noodles

Emily's dad gave us a pasta roller for christmas a couple of years ago and believe it or not, we actually use it semi-frequently.  The texture of the noodles is superior to store-bought pasta, and, perhaps equally important in my book: you can make noodles as thick as you want!  We created pretty thick noodles for this soup so that they would have a very chewy texture.  You can make the dough in a food processor, which only takes about 1 minute.  The dough needs to rest for 30 to 60 minutes, and then rolling and cutting it takes about 5 minutes.  So, as long as you aren't in a time crunch, it really doesn't take that much extra "active" time to make homemade pasta.  We are surprised by how easy it is just about every time we made homemade pasta.

Vegetables

We cooked our potatoes by poaching them in a mixture of chicken fat and bacon fat that we had leftover from other recipes.  Our potatoes were quite small - about the size of kalamata olives - so we didn't even need to chop them.  The potatoes are in a jar because we did the poaching inside the pressure cooker, according to a recipe from Modernist Cuisine.  The cooking technique is kind of like using a water bath - the hot steam in the pressure cooker heats the canning jar and the oil is supposed to flavor the potatoes.  I don't think they really ended up with that much extra flavor -  Boiled potatoes would probably be indistinguishable and a lot less work.  The carrots and leeks were steamed for 5 minutes in the pressure cooker, then removed and chopped into bite-size niblets.

Assembly

The stock was brought to a boil on the stove, then the chicken, peas, and noodles were added.  Fresh pasta cooks a lot faster, and ours were done in about 5 minutes.  The hot potatoes, carrots, and leeks were added and it was dinner time.  We got excited to take a picture, but our new camera was out of batteries!  We snapped a couple of photos on our phones, which basically get the point across.  :-)

Joe

A Taste of Fall!

I eat yogurt basically every day for lunch. In the fall, I like to get apple butter from my local farm and mix a bit of it in plain yogurt and eat that. It's a nice way to sweeten the yogurt without having to chop up lots of fruit.