Baked Butternut Squash Chips

There are obsessions and then there are cooking obsessions. The first kind can land you in counseling (and occasionally behind bars), the second will blow through your kitchen like a tempest, leaving every pot, pan, knife, cutting board, baking sheet and bowl lying in your sink like debris. I developed my first cooking obsession in the seventh grade after taking Wilton Cake Decorating classes with Debbie, the woman I babysat for. I learned how to make buttercream icing and transform it into pretty pansies and roses, shells and, of course, all of my friends’ names. Every time I made I cake I left icing fingerprints—leafy green and daffodil yellow—to dry on the kitchen drawers, the refrigerator handle, the doorknob and even the mailbox. By eighth grade the obsession had started to lose its sweetness, and I started scraping every inch of that pound of powdered sugar and Crisco off of each cake before I ate it.

As a food and wine writer, my cooking obsessions have turned my tiny apartment kitchen into a “test kitchen,” where I work to develop and refine recipes. My most recent obsession has run me through eight butternut squash, two mandolines, and a tiny sliver of my thumb (apparently the blade on the first mandoline wasn’t sharp enough to cut through butternut squash, but it was sharp enough to cut through my finger).

It all started on Thanksgiving when I made butternut squash chips with fried herbs and Parmigiano as one of my appetizers. They came out phenomenal, crisp and sweet with crunchy pieces of earthy rosemary and sage and the salty cheese. With tons of Vitamin A, way more flavor than a potato and the festive, seasonal aspect I knew I hit on a winning snack, but they were a pain in the arse to make without a proper fryer. I spent more than an hour standing over bubbling oil so hot it melted the numbers of my deep fry/candy thermometer, frying 10 chips at a time. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out the perfect way to oven-fry them—a feat that seemed easy enough, but actually posed some challenges.

The recipe I first followed said to slice the squash on the mandoline, soak the slices in ice water for a half hour, dry them and fry them. So I followed the same method for my oven-fried versions. Unfortunately my oven doesn’t really cook evenly (in case anyone at Viking is listening, I’d like a Classic Series Gas Range, please) so some of the chips were like shaved charcoal while others were soggy, sad translucent orange discs. Even when I left them to crisp up the centers remained limp. So after spending a couple of hours online researching baked potato chip recipes I decided to try blanching the squash first. And voila! The chips came out crunchy and sweet and were actually better (and much less greasy) than their predecessors. I had to watch the oven carefully and pull them as the turned golden brown since, unfortunately, blanching them didn’t fix my oven. They’re delicious with the herbs and Parmigiano or just dusted with Malden salt, or you can try spiking them up with some fresh ground cardamom and white pepper for a little spice. And since they’re baked, snackers can feel a little less guilty when the polish off a batch.

Baked Butternut Squash Chips

1 butternut squash, preferably one with a long, narrow neck
spray olive oil
salt
Special tools: mandoline

Mise en place:
Heat oven to 400 degrees
Set up an ice bath
Spray a large baking sheet (or two small wines) with olive oil
Bring a pot of salted water to boil

Cut off the bulb part of the squash and set aside for another use. Peel the skin off of the squash and cut crosswise into 3-inch chunks. Using your mandoline cut the squash, crosswise into 1.3mm slices.

Blanch the squash in the boiling water, about two minutes then transfer it to the ice bath to cool. Dry all of the chips with a towel or paper towel and lay them out on the baking sheet. Spray them with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt or spices.

Set the squash on your oven’s middle rack and bake until golden brown and crispy. Keep and eye on them as some may cook faster than others even though they are sliced evenly.

Season and serve.

Fresh bread, gorgonzola and quince paste

Fall is by far my favorite season and, since the trees here refuse to play dress-up in their crimson, persimmon and gold-colored October wardrobe like a stubborn child refusing to have fun, it’s the one I have to work the most to capture. Autumn comes in from the edges in Southern California. It’s most obvious in the morning—when the light is a little more slanted, illuminating the palm trees and mountains to the east with a pumpkin-tinge—and in the evening, when Orion rises in the sky, the stars on his belt sparkling like Paris Hilton’s bling. It creeps in at the farmers’ markets too, with apples and winter squashes peppering the farmers’ tables along with grapes and figs and dates.

But this year the weather here tells a different story. The summer-like blistering heat marches on like an oppressive regime. So I’m trying to bring the season in from the edges through cooking. Last week I made braised short ribs and slow-cooked chicken. I made sfratti (walnut cookies for the Jewish New Year) and bought a tiny kabocha squash all with the hope that if I ate the foods of fall, somehow I could make it feel more like fall. Mostly it just made my apartment even hotter than it was outside.

Then I found some quince—the yellow-green, lumpy fruit in the apple family with leathery skin like a pomegranate, the astringency of a persimmon when raw and an ethereal, sweet citrus-like flavor when cooked. The fruit has been around for more than 4,000 years in the Mediterranean and Asia, but is just starting to gain popularity here. Only a few farmers grow it, including Mud Creek Ranch in Santa Paula (California), and it’s season is short (late September/early October through December). It tastes delicious poached in vanilla syrup, red wine or honey, or stuffed with spinach—all great symbols of the fall. And because it’s naturally high in pectin, it also lends itself well to jams, jellies and, my favorite, quince paste.

Called membrillo in Spanish, quince paste is customarily served with Manchego cheese, though it contrasts nicely with other salty cheeses like parmigiano or pecorino. Try slathering a pat on fresh bread with gorgonzola, too. Because it keeps well, up to three months in your fridge, it’s easy to make and have ready for unexpected guests, or to serve as a no-fuss appetizer during the rapidly approaching holiday season.

Until I can feel the fall, I’ll be eating quince paste on everything—even if I’m wearing a sundress and the air-conditioning is on all the while.

Quince Paste
adapted from Epicurious

Ingredients
4 medium quinces (about 2 pounds), fully ripe
¼ to ½ cup water
2-3 cups sugar
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Directions
Heat oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a 1-quart terrine.
Clean and dry quinces. Place in a small roasting pan and cover with foil, then bake in the center of the oven until tender. Transfer pan to a rack to cool.

When quinces are cooled enough to handle, peel and core them using a sharp knife.

In a food processor puree quinces with ¼ cup of water until smooth (if mixture is too thick, add a little water at a time, up to another ¼ cup, as needed). Push quince puree through a fine sieve into a liquid cup measure. Note the amount of puree. Transfer to a 3-quart heavy saucepan and add the equivalent amount of sugar and lemon juice.

Cook puree over moderate heat until thickened and begins to pull away from side of pan. If you do not cook the puree long enough it won’t set (though it will still taste good). Pour into terrine and smooth the top with an offset spatula. When paste has reached room temperature, cover with plastic and chill in the refrigerator until set, about 4 hours.

Run knife along sides of terrine and invert onto a platter. Slice and serve. Wrap unused paste in wax paper and then plastic wrap. It should store, refrigerated, up to three months.

Homemade Granola Bars!

Work. It doesn’t go away. If you’re planning a vacation, you have to do more of it, in a shorter period of time, so that you don’t miss any deadlines when you’re gone. When you get back, you have to catch up on all the work you missed while you were away, quickly negating the relaxing vacation you worked so hard for.

Problem is, we’re a culture that puts way more value on hard work than we do on play. We talk about how many jobs we have or how busy we are with work like it’s a badge of honor, like our exhaustion is something to be proud of. We look at people who live to play with disdain, but their easy smiles tell a different story. I’ve lived among them. I’ve been one, albeit a bad one (I always worked at least two jobs), living in Tahoe for years. And I’ve got to tell you there’s a lot of work that goes into a playful life, it’s just tempered with more rewards, more balance.

Fortunately, these days I work in food and wine—a gig that’s inherently geared toward pleasure. But I still have to check myself every now and then, from that impulse to work long hours, to take on too many projects in order to get ahead. Which is why Neal and I are going camping for four days up in the Sierra. Surrounded by the natural pace of things and inhaling fresh mountain air is restorative, balancing, something we should all do more often. Maybe it will even keep me from yelling at the radio for a week or two.

Of course, in preparation for our camping trip I did do a little work. Rather than eating energy bars that cost too much and taste like licking a wet dog slathered in B-vitamins, I made granola bars. One batch is a spicy take on my crunchy granola spiked with black pepper, and the other finished off the delicious Halawy dates I bought a couple of weeks ago at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, spiked with cardamom and packed with toasted pistachios. The blend of honey and brown sugar sweetness, spices and a tiny dose of flax meal make these snacks tasty, relatively healthy and full of energy. If you’re not going camping any time soon, try them as a mid-day snack instead of a candy bar from the vending machine at your office, or in your kid’s lunch box.

Date and Pistachio Granola Bars

2 ½ c Trader Joe’s Multigrain Hot Cereal
¾ c pistachio nutmeats, toasted
1/3 c chopped, pitted fresh dates
¼ tsp fresh cardamom
1 tbsp flax meal
¼ c clover honey
¼ c brown sugar
2 tbsp butter, divided

Heat oven to 300 degrees.

Pour multigrain cereal onto a baking sheet and top with tablespoon of butter. Toast cereal for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally for even browning. Remove and pour into a large bowl. Toast pistachio nutmeats for about 7 minutes or until lightly browned.

When the nuts are toasted, add those to the bowl with the multigrain cereal, chopped dates, ground cardamom and flax meal and stir together.

In a small saucepan heat honey, a tablespoon of butter and brown sugar over medium-low heat, stirring until the sugar melts completely.

Pour the sugar mixture over the grain and nut mixture, stirring to coat completely. Pour granola bar batter into a greased baking dish and let cool. Use a larger baking dish for thinner, crunchier granola bars, a smaller one for thicker, chewier ones.

To make the black pepper spiked granola bars, use 2 cups of Trader Joe’s Anti OXidant Nut and Berry Mix and 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper instead of the cardamom, dates and pistachios above.

Heirloom Tomato Tart

Tomato season has officially begun and I’m a woman obsessed. All of the delicious, funky-looking heirloom varieties scattered across the tables at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market last Sunday tempted me like Tribbles. They were so fresh. They smelled so good intoxicating. And then I tried one, the juice dripping from my chin and between my fingers. Before I knew it, my bag was overflowing with Cherokee Purples, Golden Jubilees, Brandywines, Marvel Stripes and Black Crimsons from Tutii Frutti Farms, all bumping up against each other in the hot August sun.

The trouble with Tribbles, if you’ve seen the Star Trek episode, is that they multiply at breakneck speed. Initially there was one, but suddenly there are so many Tribbles that Kirk and Uhura can’t figure out what to do with them all. While my tomatoes didn’t exactly reproduce in my bag or on my countertop, I’ve ended up with way more than I’d planned to use and a freshness meter counting down like a time bomb.

Overripe tomatoes are as bad as, if not worse than, under-ripe ones. They are like being forced to eat raw slugs. Fortunately, cooked tomatoes, if done right, can mask the texture of a softening tomato, concentrating the sugars and elevating the tomato-y flavor to something quite decadent. (It’s why Nancy Silverton’s Mozza Caprese, with oven-dried tomatoes, is always so delicious.) Unfortunately, it can’t do anything for an unripe tomato. Nothing can.

Combine the flavor explosion of these heat-improved tomatoes with flakey, buttery puff pastry and you have a recipe for…Well, you have the recipe for an easy-to-make tomato tart! (You can use this same recipe for the bounty of figs showing up at farmers’ markets, too.)

Heirloom Tomato Tart

1 Sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
2 Medium-sized heirloom tomatoes
1 egg, beaten
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Place puff pastry sheet on a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with egg and bake for 15 minutes or until lightly-golden.

While the puff pastry is baking, cut off the tops of the tomatoes, seed and slice. You can slice them into rounds or half moons, depending on the shape of the tomato.

Remove the puff pastry from the oven and let cool, but keep oven on. When cool, arrange tomatoes on the pastry, drizzle with olive and sprinkle with salt and fresh-ground black pepper. Place back in the oven for five minutes to heat the tomatoes. Drizzle again with olive oil and finish with fleur de sel. Serves four.

Homemade Cucumber Sorbet

I invented the root beer float when I was five or six years old. I was at a birthday party at the Ground Round, staring into my glass of soda, contemplating how to make my plain vanilla ice cream taste better. And then it dawned on me. And I dumped the ice cream in the cup, watched the fizz build and then started to suck down the creamy soda through my straw. My friends watched on in awe.At least that’s how I remember it. Of course, I wasn’t the one who invented the root beer float. And I was eating vanilla ice cream because I was allergic to chocolate and drinking root beer because I was allergic to cola. These were the stories I told myself to make my food interesting, particularly when my food was different than everybody else’s. And apparently it worked. I love root beer floats like I invented them.

Ice cream, and I use the term loosely to include sherbet, sorbet and gelato, winds through our memories like ribbons of chocolate fudge. Chasing the ice cream truck. Sitting at a soda fountain. Or at the Bubbling Brook on a hot summer night. It reminds you of your first summer or after school job, of birthday parties and parents and grandparents and friends. Ice cream is a conjurer. Memories of discovery, like the root beer float, are echoed in the sound of a straw slurping at the bottom of a glass.

For something so cold, so fleeting, it’s amazing how ice cream can create feelings that are so warm and so long-lived. And while I love going out for ice cream (check out my post on the best ice cream shops in L.A. on Serious Eats) there’s something sublime about making it at home, too. That’s why once the weather turned warm I ran out and bought the ice cream maker attachment to my Kitchen Aid mixer.

The attachment—just a work bowl you stick in the freezer and a dasher—helps keep making homemade ice cream simple. Want to make vanilla ice cream? For a rich, custard-based vanilla all you need is milk, cream, sugar, eggs and a vanilla bean. Prefer chocolate chip, or, as the Italians call it, stracciatella? Melt some bittersweet chocolate and pour it into your ice cream just before it’s done mixing. And once you get a hang of it, everything from the farmers’ market to the liquor cabinet can become inspiration for your ice cream maker.

My most recent experiment is based on the refreshing Gordon’s Cup, a gin-based cocktail I had last week at Osteria Mozza. Made using gin, lime juice, vanilla-infused simple syrup and crisp summer cucumbers, the drink was like sipping garden sunshine. So I stocked up on Persian cucumbers at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market on Sunday and created this elegant sorbet. Perfect after a long day’s work, on a lazy Saturday afternoon or as a palate cleanser during a long Sunday supper, this fresh cucumber sorbet is a must-try while these snappy gourds are in season.

Cucumber Sorbet

2 lbs Persian cucumbers, peeled and chopped
2 tbsp fresh-squeezed lime juice
2/3 c sugar
2/3 c water
½ vanilla bean

Puree cucumbers and lime juice in a blender or food processor and set aside.

Heat water and sugar in a saucepan on the stove, stirring until the sugar completely dissolves. Steep the vanilla bean in the simple syrup for 10 minutes (you can use a bean you’ve already split and used to impart flavor, or clean and dry this bean when you’re done to reuse).

Mix cucumber puree and simple syrup together. Push the mixture through a sieve, to get out any seeds; the batter will be slightly pulpy, but mostly liquid. Put vanilla bean back in mixture to steep. Cover and refrigerate for at least 5 hours, preferably overnight. Freeze according to your ice cream maker’s instructions.

Leah’s Crunchy Granola

The East Coaster in me hates the crunchy granola hippie part of me. It’s true. She thinks that the combination of rolled oats, dried fruit and nuts kissed with honey is silly. And weak. The East Coaster in me thinks I should eat egg on a roll. With Bacon. Every day. And I don’t blame her. By most accounts, a fresh Kaiser roll with fried egg, butter and bacon, dusted with salt and pepper, is a very satisfying way to start the day. It can be easily eaten on-the-go, out of a brown paper bag, and goes great with a light and sweet cup of coffee. But I’ve lived in California too long. I enjoy my leisure too much. In the warm California sun I’ve learned to sit quietly and listen as my teeth grind each cluster, sounding like rocks rolling in a polisher. I like granola out of hand on a hike in the winter green mountains of Los Angeles and served with tangy Greek yogurt and a drizzle of local honey at the breakfast table.But it hasn’t always been that simple. Food has always defined me–the urban intellectual battling the laid-back, outdoorsy mountain girl competing for dominance over my brain and stomach.When my family first moved to California I was acutely aware the food was, well, different. You’ve heard the New Yorkers’ lament: the bagels suck, the pizza is bad and the Kosher deli is virtually non-existent. Every trip back east was planned around what I wanted to eat, my best friend Trish carting me around from pizzeria to pizzeria to find fresh Italian ices, to eat greasy Chinese, to pop garlic knots slathered in mozzarella cheese and marinara. I stuffed boxes of Devil Dogs in my luggage for my mom, packed the overhead compartments with onion bialy and pumpernickel bagels for my dad and once even brought a cheese pizza wrapped in foil through airport security for my brother.But then, after nearly 15 years on the West Coast, I moved back to New York. While living in Manhattan I craved Mission-style burritos and authentic refried beans, but was consistently disappointed with the Mexican food. The salsa tasted like marinara and the tortillas were rarely fresh. Avocadoes were limited to Haas, and were always on the verge of rotting after their long journey east. In a place where, with a little work, you can seemingly find everything your heart desires I missed things that hadn’t traveled far to my table: eggs from the chickens I saw running around when I lived in Petaluma or strawberries, just-picked, purchased at a roadside farm stand off the freeway in Ventura, near my folks.When I first lived on the West Coast I took for granted the mid-winter sunshine, the access to the mountains, the beach and the desert and the food. Back in New York I paid attention to the food, but too often forgot to appreciate the rainbow of fall leaves, or the subway or the Met, instead missing being able to hike or cross-country ski with little planning. In retrospect, I realize that it’s easy to get stuck in a psychological and gastronomic bi-coastal battle when you’re busy looking back.These days I live in Southern California, a place, to be quite honest, that I never thought I’d come back to. And I love it. A couple of weeks ago, while the East Coast was getting pummeled by winter storms and my friends in Lake Tahoe were making turns through five feet of fresh Sierra snow, I was walking to the farmer’s market on Third and Fairfax in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. Yesterday, when I felt like I was coming down with a cold, I walked into my backyard to pick lemons off the tree for honey ginger lemon tea. And this morning, Neal and I drove 20 minutes to the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market where I picked up a fresh, young pasture-raised chicken that came from a farm in Fillmore, just an hour from here. And live equidistant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and hiking in Runyon Canyon. What’s left to miss?Which brings me back to granola. I’ve been obsessed with granola lately, maybe as a sign that I’m finally comfortable is my own skin, and no store-bought clusters have been able to satisfy me. Bulk or pre-packaged granola is often dry, stale and flavorless or expensive. It’s either really high in fat or tastes like cardboard. With every granola I’ve tried I’ve thought—much like jewelry after I’d learned to make it—I can do that better.And so I set out to make granola myself. I was surprised to find that something so simple wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought. My first batch burned, leaving the grains over-caramelized and tasting like charcoal. My second batch had the right flavor, lightly sweet, nutty and tart, but the oats didn’t bind together and I was left with dust to sprinkle over my yogurt. Inspired, my friend Brooke of Foodwoolf tried the granola recipe from Orangette, which was also slightly overdone and too loose. I was getting close to giving up when I remember the beautiful golden clusters when I made Ben’s Apple Crisp. The trick, I realized, was kneading in cold butter and piling the cereal together to cool. On Thursday night, armed with a new baking sheet from Surfas, a Silpat baking mat, multi-grain hot cereal from Trader Joe’s (a blend of rye, oats, wheat and barley) and TJ’s Anti-OXidant Nut & Berry Mix, which includes walnuts, almonds, cashews, dried cranberries, raisins, blueberries and raspberries, I finally nailed it: Granola that tastes like home.

Leah’s Crunchy Granola5 tbsp cold, unsalted, butter cut into pats3 cups TJ’s Multi-grain cereal or oatmeal2 tbsp honey¼ cup brown sugar6 oz. TJ’s Anti-OXidant Nut & Berry MixPreheat oven to 325 degrees. In a large bowl combine cereal, honey and brown sugar. Slowly and gently knead in butter to form clumps of cereal, being careful not to crush the grains. Pour onto baking sheet and cook until light brown, occasionally stirring and piling granola toward the center. (If the cereal spreads as the butter melts, it’s more likely to burn and you won’t get big granola clusters.) Once desired color is reached, take out and let cool. Break up clusters and stir in nuts and berries. 

Eat your granola by the handful, but save some for the next day’s breakfast (and your favorite East Coaster).

Homemade Kettle Corn

I blame my boyfriend. I hadn’t watched a full baseball game in years before we met, but since the Sox have been on our TV every day since April, it’s been hard not to get into it. Now it’s game three in baseball’s American League Championships and I’ve moved past biting my nails and am on to my fingers. We religiously checked the score while at a friend’s wedding in Ohio Saturday night, sneaking out to get an inning-by-inning summary from a fellow Sox fan watching in San Francisco, then nearly got our butts kicked at the bar after the wedding as the game went into extra innings. Tonight’s entire game has been as grueling the Saturday’s tenth and eleventh (the Sox are currently down by two in the seventh and the series is tied 1-1). If I don’t get something crunchy and sweet soon, typing may become impossible.

Kettle corn!

Inspired by fellow blogger Nicole at Pinchmysalt.com I first made kettle corn about a month ago and have since become addicted to the homemade version of this timeless treat. Salty, sweet and crunchy, it is unbelievably satisfying and surprisingly easy. Best of all, the sound of popping corn drowns out the sound of the cheering Cleveland fans.

Kettle Corn

1 cup organic popcorn kernels
¾ cup dark brown sugar
2 tbsp olive oil, butter or clarified butter
salt

In a large heavy-bottomed pot heat oil or butter. Add three kernels to pot and cover. When all three kernels have popped add remaining kernels and sugar. Shake the pot vigorously and often, removing it from the heat occasionally to keep the sugar from burning, listening to the popping corn ricochet of the lid. When the popping slows, turn off the heat and continue shaking until the popping stops. Pour the sugarcoated corn into a serving dish and sprinkle with fleur de sel. Curl up on the couch in front of the game and crunch enthusiastically.

This great snack isn’t just perfect for soothing sports nerves, but for a Halloween treat as well. Little cellophane candy bags and some orange and black ribbons make a great cupcake or candy alternative for your kids to bring to school.

Okay, it’s the bottom of the eighth and I’ve got smokin’ hot corn to soothe my nerves, at least until hockey season starts.