Two pie? Aye!

A potluck at a friend's apartment and a gift sent from Florida provided an excellent opportunity for not one, but two desserts.

The goat cheese cheesecake is something I've been wanting to make for a long time. In its original incarnation, it involved a peach and thyme filling, but peach season has given way to apple season while I was trying to find an opportunity to make it. I also wanted to sweeten this with honey, but I wanted to go by the original recipe first until I had a better idea of what the viscosity would be. This was rather runny as-is, so if it had been sweetened with honey instead of sugar, I'm sure the baking time would have had to be significantly increased. But oh, boy, would that have been delicious.

Turning from autumn to summer, we have a key lime meringue pie, thanks to the parents of a dear friend from high school. They sent us a wedding gift of miniature ceramic pie plates, key limes, condensed milk, and a recipe for key lime meringue pie. How could I resist?

Apple nutmeg goat cheesecake for those without a springform pan, adapted from Food and Wine
Double the recipe (except for the goat cheese; the original called for 11 oz) if you have a springform pan.

1 prebaked crust of your choice in a pie pan (I used graham cracker, but I bet a flaky, buttery pastry crust would be amazing)
6 oz goat cheese, the good stuff
3 eggs, separated
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon juice plus 1/4 tsp lemon juice
1/4 to 1/2 tsp lemon zest
1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar (or honey, if you're brave)
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1 large, tart baking apple, of the sort that mostly breaks down when cooked
nutmeg
2 tsp butter

Peel the apple and slice it thinly. Melt the butter in a pan and add the apple, a pinch of salt, nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp lemon juice. Cook over medium-low heat until a chunky paste is formed. Set aside to cool, and set the oven to preheat at 350 F. Beat the goat cheese with the egg yolks, vanilla, lemon juice and zest, and sugar until it's very smooth. Stir in the flour until just incorporated. With clean beaters, beat the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. Stir a third of the egg whites into the goat cheese mixture, then gently fold in the rest. Pour about half the filling into the pie crust. Layer the apple paste on top as evenly as you can, and pour the rest of the filling on top. Bake for 15 to 25 minutes (I know, it's a big span of time, but my oven is weird and should not be trusted), until the filling is set and a knife inserted into the middle of the cheesecake comes out clean but moist. Cool to at least room temperature before serving sprinkled with nutmeg.

Man, Janeway really *does* pose like Robin Hood...

My BLS/IV venipuncture course ended well over an hour early tonight, without incident save a little pain inflicted on a classmate (sorry, Brent) who volunteered his arm, so I had plenty of time to bake these carnival squash:

But first I filled them with a mixture of rice cooked with mirepoix, spinach, saffron, cinnamon, and a little pepper, then stirred with some yogurt. For dessert: toasted squash seeds with cinnamon sugar. When you toast them in your cast-iron skillet, they spin around so quickly they blur, or do the Mexican jumping bean thing.

And now to a very thrilling, Manhattanite Friday night of weight-lifting, multiple episodes of Star Trek: Voyager* (or maybe an episode of Torn Apart, the web series accompaniment to The Walking Dead that is providing yet another piece of evidence that no character in any form of media who is named Hannah is a person you want to empathize with***), and lots of sleep.

*Nobody is ever going to convince me that this is not an awesome Star Trek incarnation. I've already seen every episode at least twice**, but Andy had never seen a single one, so of course we're planning to gradually rewatch it together.
**Wipe that pitying look off your face, young whippersnapper!
***A Widow for One Year? Hannah's a backstabbing slattern. House? Hannah's a whiny adolescent. Hannah Montana? Don't even. Veronica Mars? Hannah's a doormat, just as she is in Harry Potter. There's a Hannah in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but that movie is deeply creepy and basically justifies abducting women and coercing them into marrying you by saying, "Look, they'll fall in love with you eventually!"

Licking my wounds

That exam was predictably not good (for everyone, not just me, which I guess is a good thing?). I needed salve. I needed comfort. I needed the food equivalent of this:

This is eggplant ziti with a goat cheese mint bechamel sauce. 

Recipe: Very thinly slice and abundantly salt 1 large or 2 medium eggplant, and let it sit for an hour or so to draw out some of the moisture. Meanwhile, make 2 1/2 to 3 cups bechamel sauce. Just as it's finishing, stir in about 8 ounces of goat cheese and whisk over low heat until it's smooth. Toss in 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint (and some parsley, if you want), 1 pound al dente ziti, and salt and pepper as needed. Preheat the oven to 350. Pat the eggplant slices dry, then alternate monolayers of salted and peppered eggplant with layers of sauced ziti in a greased baking pan. Top with breadcrumbs and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the eggplant is tender. Unlike me, you should let it sit for a few minutes after it comes out of the oven so the slices of ziti hold together.

If you fry it, they will come

There's this Steelers bar/restaurant on 41st called Public House that is becoming Andy's de facto Place to Watch Football Games until he finds one either closer to Washington Square or closer to the medical center. But even if a Steelers-friendly locale opened up across the street from his lab, I'm thinking he might stick with this one, because he has recently discovered the all-holy fried mozzarella stack: two slices of fried mozzarella between which is a slice of tomato, accompanied by pesto and marinara sauces. Fortunately, I refuse to be outdone by a sports bar.

These are fried rounds of goat cheese accompanied by homemade Concord grape jam and pesto. Please ignore the fact that the pesto sort of looks like baby poo on a plate and focus on the fact that alongside it is fried cheese, which is actually food of the gods.

I also made focaccia with Concord grapes and sunflower seeds, and the omnipresent kale chips, of course!

Andy: "If I buy you ten pints of grapes and some meth,
how many of these can you make per week?"

And then ate the rest of the grapes. They're $3 per overflowing pint at the farmers market. Next week, I will be purchasing one of several varieties of white grape, because they looked amazing and because I bet they'd go well with a wide selection of awesome semi-soft cheeses.

This leads into why I made a rather elaborate--though surprisingly un-time-consuming--dinner instead of studying for an exam for which I'm extraordinarily, terrifyingly, unprecedentedly unprepared: I did not trust myself around those grapes. By Monday afternoon, when my exam was over, I would have picked and nibbled until there were none left. Other omnipresent theme: self-control? Not my thing.

Spittin' kitchen

Dammit, Deb. You had to go and post on your food site--Smitten Kitchen, only one of the most trafficked of them all--a recipe for the exact idea I had on my own: apple and honey challah.

Andy can attest that I've been plotting this for a week now. Sure, she's apparently been incubating this idea for nearly a year, but somehow I still feel vaguely usurped. By the professional. Totally. Yeah..



I just filled the braid with apple slices and speckled the top with more, then brushed the whole shebang with an egg white and honey glaze. Also, check out this impending storm!

To appropriate by destruction

Sometimes I get an idea and inexplicably glom onto it like a hedgehog with a raspberry.

Like yesterday's lentil soup with caramelized onions, dates, porcini broth, and turmeric, over wild rice and arugula pilaf. I've had a note on my desktop for three weeks about this idea, not that it's particularly revolutionary. It just stuck.

Or tonight's pasta salad based on this recipe, minus the pomegranate seeds (I thought those were in season by now, but couldn't find them anywhere), plus a little cinnamon and cayenne.

Or opening a French restaurant for existentialists-in-denial called Mauvais Foie. It's going to happen one day, just you wait.

Lentil soup with dates and caramelized onions
2 onions
2 cups lentils
1/3 cup chopped dates
2 cloves garlic, chopped
turmeric, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste
1 bay leaf
1 oz dried porcini mushrooms

Caramelize the onions at the bottom of a soup pot. Add the garlic and saute until it's toasted, but not burnt. Add the lentils, dates, porcini, and bay leaf, and add water or broth to cover by about two inches. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the lentils are cooked. Pick out the porcini insofar as is possible (I suppose you could wrap them up bouquet garni-style, but that's too fancy for me). Using an immersion blender, puree the soup until most, but not all, of the lentils have been liquefied. Add more water/broth or boil off liquid according to how thick you like the soup. Add turmeric, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste after adjusting the viscosity (sorry, bad term) of the soup.

Tea and Thorazine

Before I start the usual culinary blather, here, in honor of the fact that I'm currently digging myself out of a massive academic hole*, here's my Fun Diagnosis to Make o' the Week: syringomelia! And here's the current Number One Thing I Never Want to Experience: mixed mania! Well, either that or this.

Moving on to a topic I'll probably address annually: Anyone who has spent more than five minutes around me between the months of September and May knows that I hate the cold. I go all Raynaud's**, and it's impossible to wear sandals, and my hair freezes in the morning as I walk home from bikram. First-world problems are hard.

But one thing that is delightful about the months between, at least, September and November is squash. And apples. And hot spiced drinks. And more apples. Since last week's surprisingly diminutive Lower East Side Apple Festival taught me more about mastiha*** than on everyone's favorite all-American fruit, I'm sticking with squash for today:

Butternut squash fries with paprika and ketchup!

I should really learn how to light pictures at this point.

These go with a toasted fontina, mixed wild mushroom, and arugula sandwich on flaxseed whole wheat bread. I'd like to try the bread with some rye flour in addition to the whole wheat, and with some ground flaxseed or flax oil. The seeds themselves need to be ground up (by teeth or by mortar and pestle) before any real nutritional benefit can be had from them, and there's no way enough chewing of this bread is going to happen for that to be possible. Recipe to follow.

Roasting mushrooms "en papillote" (okay, or "en foil")
with rosemary.

One of the batards...

...sliced open to reveal the seeds inside.

I broiled the fontina on top...

...and added arugula while the cheese and mushrooms were
hot so that it would wilt somewhat.

And, of course, an apple for dessert, finished off with coffee containing my newly homemade pumpkin spice syrup for Andy and black tea with the same stuff for me. Again, recipe to follow.

This may look like a normal coffee,
but it has a secret superpower of
Absolute Deliciousness.

I apparently cannot succeed at filtering things, both because my attempts to use a coffeemaker and then a paper towel failed utterly and because I refuse to pay for cheesecloth, but the syrup was fine despite the fact that the spice granules had to remain in it.

Before resuming my panicked studying (ohgodneurologyohgodpsychiatryohgodohgod), a food-related (and unusually political, for me) addendum about someone who actually scares me: I met a patient once whose child had recently received a new kidney because of E. coli food poisoning. Just saying.

Flaxseed bread
N.b.: I'd replace about a third of the bread flour with rye and retain the whole wheat flour, I think. You could also use sunflower seeds, linseed, or even wheat berries in this as well.

400 g bread flour
100 g whole wheat flour
2 tsp salt
150 g flax seeds
1 tbsp honey
2 1/4 tsp yeast (a.k.a. one packet)
300 g warm water

Mix the flours, honey, and water, and let the mixture sit for 10 to 15 minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients and knead until the dough is very smooth and homogenous; it should be tacky, but not too wet, and consequently it won't appear too elastic. Let rise for an hour to an hour and a half in an oil-coated bowl. Punch down the dough and divide it in half. Let rest for 20 minutes under oiled plastic wrap. Shape the dough according to this video (or however you want, really, the bread doesn't care). Let rise for an hour or until the loaves are doubled in size. Meanwhile, preheat an oven with a baking stone and another heatproof pan in it to 425 F. Brush the loaves with water, score them, and put them on the baking stone; also throw some water into the other preheated pan to fill the oven with steam and help develop a nice, crunchy crust. Bake 40 to 45 minutes, rotating the bread halfway through to brown it evenly, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped on their undersides.

Pumpkin spice syrup
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 tablespoons pumpkin (I use canned; it makes life easier)
teeny tiny pinch of salt
teeny tiny pinch of black pepper
1 tablespoon cinnamon (or three to four cinnamon sticks)
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves

Heat the water and sugar together over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved and the solution is nearly clear. Add all the other ingredients and cook at medium-low to medium heat for 6 to 8 minutes. If you're not me, you'll be able to successfully strain this so that you get a clear, amber-colored syrup. Allow to cool and store, refrigerated, until use.

*I've always hated this expression. You don't dig yourself out of a hole. You dig yourself into a hole. What's especially confusing is that both expressions are apparently widely used.
**These pictures exemplify the dramaticest of the dramatic Raynaud's. It's not nearly that bad in most people, no worries.
***This substance is fascinating. It's only grown on Chios, and it's like a cross between the smell of a pine tree and the taste of buckwheat honey. Idea: mastiha semifreddo, or possibly mastiha taffy, or orange-scented mastiha caramels. I'll keep you posted.