Warm Butternut Squash and Rice Salad with Brussels Sprouts, Apples and Dijon Vinaigrette

I just Googled the name to make sure it is indeed "Brussels" as in the city and not "Brussel" sprouts. Conveniently, there is a www.brussels-sprouts.com, which informed me that "the modern Brussels sprout that we are familiar with was first cultivated in large quantities in Belgium." I like to know these things. Etymology aside, if you love Brussels sprouts like I do you will love them in this dish; if not feel free to leave them out, the butternut squash is the real heavy-lifter here.


I wasn't originally planning on putting this on the blog but it turned out so darn delicious I had to share it with you. I used instant brown rice which I think is truly one of the greatest inventions since sliced bread and just as convenient, making this doable for a weeknight dinner. In the background there is the dressing, a simple apple cider and Dijon vinaigrette which would be equally delicious brushed on grilled pork or grilled chicken.  You could also use cubed sweet potatoes if you don't want to fool with peeling the butternut squash.  I used a McIntosh apple because that's we had but I think this would work better with good ol' Granny Smith, which holds its shape when baked/roasted/grilled/sauteed much better than a McIntosh.  This would also be delicious with toasted walnuts and cranberries for Thanksgiving.  I told you I'm not really into recipes, right? It's your food-have fun with it!

Warm Butternut Squash and Rice Salad with Brussels Sprouts, Apples, and Dijon Vinaigrette

• 1 butternut squash, peeled and cubed
• 1 small apple, cubed
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 cup frozen Brussels sprouts
• Salt and pepper (about 1/2 and 1/4 of a teaspoon, respectively, if you like to measure!)
• 2 cups chicken broth, homemade if you have it and low sodium if you don't.
• 1 cup instant brown rice

For the Dijon Vinaigrette:

• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• Dash of salt and dash of pepper

1. Heat 1-2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium heat until oil shimmers but does not smoke. Add onions and cook for 1-2 minutes, until just starting to turn translucent.  Add butternut squash, stir to combine, and cover the skillet.  Cook for 5-10 minutes, until the squash is just starting to get tender.  Life the cover, stir everything around, add the frozen Brussels sprouts, and cover again. Cook for an additional 5 minutes or so, until the Brussels sprouts are heated through and the squash is almost tender. You don't want to cook anything all the way through because this is a one-pot dish and you'll be cooking the pot right in the pan with the squash, so it will finish cooking along with the rice.
2. Add 2 cups chicken broth to the skillet and bring to a simmer. Add the 1 cup brown rice, cover, and simmer for 10 minutes, until broth is absorbed and rice is cooked through.
3. Meanwhile, prepare the vinaigrette: whisk together all ingredients in a small bowl or small measuring cup. Whisk well to emulsify.
4. As soon as the rice is done cooking, while it is still cooking, add half the vinaigrette and toss. Taste the dressing at this point: my husband prefers things rather plain (*cough*bland*cough*), so I only used half the dressing in the finished dish and added additional dressing at the table. If you can't have too much flavor, like me, you may want to add the other half of the dressing. If not save it in the fridge, it's a great all-purpose vinaigrette.

What about you? Are you a Brussels sprouts lover or hater?Any foods you love that people tend not to like? Brussels sprouts is definitely on my list there, along with Rye bread, sardines, whole-grain mustard, and I'll stop there because I just made myself a nice little sandwich :) What's on your list?

Grocery Shopping Eve Meal: Vegetable Rogan Josh

I wish I had a picture of the fridge in our house growing up to show you. My dad is a very structured man, Lord love him, and our fridge had a shelf for leftovers, a door on the fridge designated for jelly, a designated place for the eggs, lettuce, bacon, etc. to go and on and on. It was a wonderful system and one that virtually eliminates food waste; however, I have yet to meet another person or family that successfully employs a similar system. The rest of our relatively small galley kitchen in my parents' house is beautifully organized as well, even the ubiquitous Tupperware cabinet displaying Tupperware neatly stacked back to front from smallest to largest and no toppling to fear when you open the cabinet door. I'll have to take pictures when I go home for Thanksgiving.

I am firmly in the other 99% of society, however, which opens the fridge with one hand and thrusts a newly filled Tupperware on that second shelf on the left that seems a convenient landing place for everything.

Full disclosure: I just got up and took a picture of my fridge. Semi-organized--Pickles are a vegetable, right?

 I am also in that 99% of folks that find themselves with 3 stalks of celery and a quarter of a squash at the end of the week and I'll be darned if I'm going to throw away any food, at least not without giving a valiant effort. I view expiration dates as a trick of the food industry to trick us into throwing away our food and get more money out of us at the grocery store. Not really, but I do pay very little attention to expiration dates and instead tend to wait until there's mold somewhere to admit that any particular food item cannot, in fact, be eaten. Marriage has been good for me in that sense; my husband does not share my iron stomach and views expiration dates as fact, which has caused some bouts of secretiveness thus far. Vegetables, however, bear no expiration date, and that is how I arrived at my Saturday night dinner: Veggie Rogan Josh, or sauteed veggies with bottled Rogan Josh sauce stirred in for flavor. This is what happens when you are starving at 9 pm the day before you go grocery shopping.

I'm generally a bit of a whiz when it comes to making something out of nothing from the random bits of leftovers in the fridge. That night, though, I was merely determined to not let the bits of veggies I'd been accumulating rot in the fridge and I have a hard time thinking straight when I'm really hungry so I can pretty much forget being brilliantly creative.

This is the most appetizing picture I have of Saturday night's dinner, cooked at 9 pm with a glass of wine as an appetizer. That would be one leek, cleaned and chopped in the pan, half a cabbage, half a bag of (expired) shredded carrots, and one quarter of a red pepper. After a little more fishing in the fridge I pulled out a container whose top had an interesting bulge going on, indicating some carbon dioxide action or something going on in there. I really have no idea why I'm being so honest. I poured off the broth, which seemed to be where the fermentation was occuring, rinsed the chickpeas and tried one. It had a little bit of tang to it, just a hint, and I figured there must be some traditional dish out there in which fermented chickpeas play a role, so in they went.

The finished product was much greater than the sum of its parts and oddly satisfying, although they say hunger is the best condiment.

That would be a dollop of sweet chutney on top and a little tangy Greek yogurt hiding underneath. Sweet+Spicy+Tangy=Deliciousness. Side note: if you're interested in making this, that particular sauce I bought is quite spicy in a slow lovely after burn kind of way but I love it.  Word of warning to the spice averse.

The next day I was not quite as hungry and a little more creative so I seared some tofu in a cast iron skillet, cooked up some brown rice, and stirred all that together with the leftover vegetable mix and a little more sauce. Now that was delicious.

Now my morbid curiosity begs the question: do you organize your fridge or shove everything in there willy-nilly? What is your standby grocery shopping eve dinner?


Grocery Shopping Eve Vegetable Rogan Josh

• Lots of veggies, in my case: 1/2 a cabbage, coarsely chopped; 1 leek, trimmed and chopped, 1/2 bag of shredded carrots, 1/2 bell pepper. Potatoes or sweet potatoes would have been a welcome starchy complement in this mix (if you use potatoes I would parcook them in the microwave for a couple of minutes because they take so much longer to cook in the skillet than the rest of the vegetables).
• Indian Simmer Sauce: I used Spicy Tomato and Ginger or Kashmiri Rogan Josh, but any of the prepared Indian sauces would do nicely, especially with some rice.
• A protein: I added chickpeas because that's what I had but the next day it was delicious with some seared tofu. This mix would also go nicely with chicken or of course lamb, but if you have lamb in your Saturday night leftovers repertoire I'm jealous.

1. Heat 1-2 teaspoons of oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Saute your veggies (in the particular mix I used the cabbage takes the longest to cook so I put that in first and let it wilt a bit. If I had used onions those would have gone in first). I added mine to the skillet in the order listed.
2. Let your veggies cook to your desired doneness. I wanted my cabbage with a bit of chew since the rest of the dish was fairly insubstantial so I cut it in large chunks and let it cook until just tender.
3. Add your sauce and heat until heated through.
4. Serve over rice or with naan if you have it, or wine and your Hulu show of choice if you don't. 

Multigrain Chocolate Stout Banana Bread

Simplicity is not my strong point, at least when it comes to food. In life I am perfectly content to wear the same long waisted t-shirt and comfy flats high school through college, no problem. When it comes to my eating habits, however, I am infamous for 1) eating every meal out of a bowl 2) putting more ingredients than really necessary in said bowls. For instance, my morning oatmeal bowl often consists of oatmeal (3 parts steel cut to 1 part old-fashioned--try it, the texture is unlike any other) topped with sliced banana, nuts or peanut butter, yogurt, and granola. If you do 1/2 servings of each component you end up with one well-rounded bowl of lovely texture and temperature contrasts, the key to memorable dishes.

Which brings us to today's creation. It all started with a bottle of opened stout in the fridge. I opened it the other night for dessert and apparently misread my cravings because it was too heavy for me that late at night. I think I had a glass of wine instead. I'm all about freedom of choice. But back to the beer--flat, opened beer in the fridge screams "beer bread" to me. Did y'all make beer bread in college? We made a lot of it. Want to know why? Here's the recipe, pay attention now: measure 3 cups of self rising flour and 1/2 cup of sugar into a bowl (or directly into a greased baking pan, if you really want to go dorm-style). Stir in 1 12-ounce bottle or can of beer. Bake at 350 for 1 hour. Really, that's it. Sometime we would get creative and do garlic parmesan or cinnamon sugar toppings, but in general that's it. It has a texture like the middle of a good biscuits-and-gravy biscuit: dense and bready, perfect for slathering with butter and honey. Bringing back memories.

So today's beer bread started with that basic premise. The chocolate stout in the title refers not to "chocolate stout" as in Young's Double Chocolate or similar, but rather to chocolate, as in a fantastic high-fat natural cocoa powder I got from Penzey's this weekend, and stout, the beer on the same end of the spectrum as porters. Chocolate stout beer bread? I could tell this bread was headed somewhere delicious. There was also quite an old banana sitting in the fridge that I'd been meaning to mush up in a bowl of oatmeal for a few mornings now. I realize not everyone is a fan of the banana + chocolate combination, but I certainly am and a banana always adds some welcome moisture if you're a fan of the flavor. Oatmeal! That's a good idea too.  Then a hint of cinnamon for a welcome backbone of warmth and a star is born.

I truly wish you were here to share this with me. This honestly turned out so much better than I thought it would, the darkness of the stout and coffee brought out wonderfully by the cocoa and the cinnamon. It made for a deeply satisfying snack with a little fig-orange-ginger jam on top and a mug of coffee on the side. I told you simplicity is not my strong point. Oh and also? This loaf just happens to be vegan. Snuck that one in on you, huh? That's right, no eggs, milk, or butter to be found, just good ol' beer, coffee and chocolate. If you like barely sweet and highly flavorful baked goods, this loaf's for you. 

Multigrain Chocolate Stout Banana Bread

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan.

1.  Measure out 1 cup any stout beer (such as Guinness) and 1/2 cup strong black coffee into a measuring cup.  Add 1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats and let stand at room temperature while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

2. Measure 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (you could certainly use all-purpose; whole wheat behaves much the same way most of the time, it would work fine in this recipe), 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1/3 cup natural cocoa, 1/4 cup cocoa, 1 tablespoon baking soda, 1 tsp. salt and 1 tsp. cinnamon into a medium mixing bowl and mix well with a fork or wire whisk to combine.

3. In a separate bowl, mash one ripe banana using a fork or pastry blender. Whisk in 3 tablespoons vegetable oil.

4. Add the measuring cup of beer + coffee + oatmeal to the banana and stir to combine. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir just to combine.

5. Pour your batter into the prepared loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 45-60 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the very center comes out with one or two moist crumbs attached. This is a very dense bread and so will not be actually wet and batter-like in the center. If you're baking in a metal baking dish, the bread will probably take closer to 45 minutes and if you are baking in a glass Pyrex dish or similar it will probably take closer to 60 minutes.

6. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool for at least 15 minutes (slicing into it hot will ultimately dry out the loaf!). Slather with your condiment of choice and enjoy with an afternoon cup of coffee. Or, of course, another beer.