Mad Housewife Wine News

Ode to Orange – Pumpkin Ravioli with Sage Butter

I watched as a middle-aged man was introduced to a five-year old child.  He looked trapped, as if confronted by an IRS auditor, unsure if he should turn and run, or act friendly.  After the introductions, he tried—in the hopelessly lost way adults do—to engage the child in conversation.  He asked the three standard questions:  How old are you?  What do you want to be when you grow up?  What is your favorite color?

    As adults introductions are much the same.  The first question—How old are you? — immediately springs to mind (particularly if cosmetic surgery appears to be involved) but is never asked.  The second—What do you do?—is always, with mind-numbing regularity, asked.  But I’ve never been to a cocktail party where someone has asked me my favorite color.  Why have we dropped the question that might actually tell us something about how the person sees the world, what they love, what they find beautiful?  In our busy oh-so-important adult lives, does color no longer matter? 

    Color does matter.  Color is taste for the eyes.

    This time of year, my soul longs for orange—for the changing foliage of New Hampshire’s forested hills, blazing red and orange.  Country roads paved with fallen maple leaves.  Trails covered in damp pine needles.  Roadside stands lost between mountains of pumpkins and gourds.  Or a single orange leaf floating down a bubbling creek.

    Here in on the Gulf Coast, fall brings an equally spectacular orange—the migrations of millions of Monarch butterflies, which feast on our goldenrod and saltbush before catching thermal winds across the gulf waters to Mexico.  Our trees, too, turn orange, as thousands of butterflies rest on branches, slowly flapping their wings, drying them in the sun.  On warm November afternoons, as you drive by the salt marshes, clouds of orange butterflies flutter merrily across the road.

    It is magical, out of a Disney cartoon.

    There is a wonderful word synesthesia used mostly in poetry criticism which means a sensation produced in one sense that evokes another, such as hearing a sound that makes you visualize a  certain color.  Or a color that fills you with sensual longing.

    Orange makes me smell burning leaves on a chilly morning.  Orange makes me hear the crackling of bonfires on the beach.  Orange makes me taste all the glorious orange foods of fall—pumpkin, winter squash, cantaloupe, carrots, mangos, persimmon, sweet potatoes.  Something is deeply stratifying about orange food, from the glass of orange juice in the morning, to cantaloupe and yogurt for lunch, to a slice of pecan-crusted pumpkin pie for dinner.

    Open your culinary heart to color.  Maybe you don’t have time for that watercolor class you want to take, but you can paint with your dinner menus.  A few spears of bright green broccoli, dried apricots in a salad, a slice of tomato on a white fillet of fish. Be mindful of color when you serve food.  Choose a plate color that highlights your supper. 

    Color is all about feeling and beauty, about bringing pleasure and delight.  And about showing off!  Look at me!  I am delicious!

    So at your next holiday party, after you discover the occupation of your new acquaintance, and after your silent soliloquy “to Botox or not to Botox, that is the question,” take a sip from your glass of garnet-red Mad Housewife Merlot and ask about her favorite color.  What’s yours? 

 

Pumpkin Ravioli with Sage Butter

 

Homemade ravioli always impresses, and this recipe is a wonderful treat for Thanksgiving.  It’s a lot easier than pie crust, and it freezes well.  Get yourself a ravioli mold (kind of looks like an ice cube tray), and wow your friends.  Their eyes are guaranteed to light up with pleasure.  Serve with Mad Housewife Chardonnay.

 

Filling:

2 cups fresh pumpkin or red-skinned sweet potatoes (canned pumpkin also works)

1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

4 amaretti (Italian almond cookies-pecan shortbread cookies also work)

1/3 cup apple or pear mostarda (optional, see note below)

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

2 tablespoons fresh parsley

pinch of salt and black pepper

 

Pasta:

2 cups flour

3 large eggs

1 tablespoon milk

 

Sauce:

2 tablespoons butter

¼ cup chopped sage (or dried sage)

fresh parsley or thyme for garnish

¼ cup shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese for garnish

 

1. Start with the filling.  Either roast pumpkin (cut into chunks) or skinned sweet potato in 400 degree oven for 40 minutes, or microwave for 8 minutes.  Cool, peel, and mash. 

2. Pulverize amaretti by hand or in a food processor.  Add pumpkin, mostarda, lemon juice, and mix until smooth.  Scrape into a bowl and stir in ½ cup cheese, parsley, nutmeg, salt and pepper.  Set aside.

3. Make pasta.  In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour and pinch salt.  Mound flour, create a well in center, and add eggs and milk.  Using fork, slowly mix together, then knead in bowl until dough forms complete mass.  Transfer dough to floured surface and knead 8 minutes until dough is smooth.  Wrap dough in plastic and let rest for 30 minutes.

4. Roll dough into thin, five-inch wide sheets, about 1/16 inch thick, or run through pasta maker.  Flour one side and lay on ravioli mold.  Spoon filling into ravioli dents (do not be tempted to be generous—1/2 teaspoon will do).  Use your finger to run cold water around edges of each ravioli (to make glue).  Cover with second sheet of dough, and cut ravioli into separate dumplings by rolling the rolling pin over the mold.

5. You can store fresh ravioli for several days (or freeze).  When you are ready to make dinner, cook ravioli in gently boiling water for about 4-5 minutes (or 15 minutes if frozen).  While water boils, brown butter, and add the sage.

6. Using slotted spoon, gently transfer ravioli to warm serving plate.  Top with melted sage butter, shaved cheese, black pepper, and more herbs.

 

Notes:  1. Ravioli or tortelli di zucca (pumpkin) is popular throughout Italy.  In Matova cooks add apple or pear mostarda to the pumpkin, which is a spiced jam with chunks of fruit.  I’ve used minced meat (chopped fine) with a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, and gotten a similar mix of sweet and spicy.  Other spiced jams, such as onion jam, would also work.  It adds a lot.

      2.  When making the pasta, do not be discouraged if the dough is too sticky.  Knead in more flour, let it rest, and try again.  Be sure to use plenty of flour when rolling out the dough, and dust the dough before you put it on the mold.  Otherwise, you’ll never get it out.  If you make a mess of it like I did the first time, gather all the bit and pieces together, roll into a ball, knead, let it rest, and try again.  

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Feeding the Wolf – Tortelloni Soup with Zucchini

“When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it.” 

    So writes M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992), the first great female gastronome of the twentieth century, who introduced American readers to the marvels of French cooking years before Julia ever chopped an onion at Le Cordon Bleu.  M.F.K. Fisher was one of the great culinary writers of all time not for her recipes, but for the way she uses food as metaphor.  For M.F.K. Fisher, the mindful preparation and eating of food was an art, a philosophy, a way of making sense of the world.  Her essays are wise, moving, and funny. 

    M.F.K. Fisher was in essence the mother of food blogging.  Thousands of Mad Housewives now share their sensual and humorous experiences with food, their recipes, their passions.  And why not?  Food sustains life, and writing about food is writing about all that sustains life.

    In her 1942 book, “How to Cook a Wolf,” M.F.K. Fisher gives practical advice on how to provide a nutritious meal when there is little in the pantry.  But it is so much more.  She talks about how loving care needs to be taken with food, especially when times are tough.  How every part of a vegetable or meat is to be cherished, the juices from steamed vegetables used as the base for another dish.  How one appreciates a baked apple for dessert when there is nothing else, how succulent it is, how many flavors one can find in it.  Be intimate with your food, she tells us, chop it, grate it, clean it.  Enjoy the process of cooking, enjoy the fruits of your labor. 

    I also have been reading a memoir by a woman who was part of the French Resistance during World War II.  The rebels plan their dinners as carefully as their espionage—after blowing up a bridge, they meet at a favorite restaurant for paté, a Bresse capon, goat cheese, and a bottle of Beaujolais.  They are French, after all.  I think of Anne Frank and her family cloistered in an attic, joyous at receiving a crate of strawberries.  When the war was at its worst, food was a refuge of relaxation and equilibrium.  Sharing food with strangers was a way of thumbing their nose at hardship.

    When you have little food, you experience it intensely. 

    And now?  When unemployment approaches 11 percent, how does one keep the wolf from the door?  One way is to always have a well stocked pantry.  Here are ten inexpensive ingredients every pantry should have.  Just add a few other staples (milk, olive oil, cheese) and you can always come up with something wonderful for dinner.

1. Many varieties of dried pasta
2. Jars of different pasta sauces, including frozen basil pesto
3. Bags of frozen vegetables
4. Frozen ground meat or meatballs
5. A bag of potatoes 
6. Frozen chicken breasts
7. Grains—brown rice, millet, barley, couscous
8. Frozen shrimp and scallops
9. Chicken stock—cans, or home prepared and frozen
10. Bags of fresh salad and spinach

Keep a few bottles of Mad Housewife wine on hand, and every night you will feast!

    When all else fails, make soup.  Soup is the simplest, yet most satisfying of all meals with an infinite number of variations.  In the fall and winter, you can make a large pot of soup and serve it for lunch or dinner throughout the week.  Nutritious, warm, delicious.  Served with good bread, cheese, and a bottle of Mad Housewife, nothing is more perfect.

    When you buy chicken breasts, don’t buy those naked anemic deboned breasts—buy it still on the bones.  It is less expensive, tastes better, and makes several meals.  At home, debone the breasts, throw away the skin and fat, freeze the breasts (in serving sizes—e.g., two if you normally cook for two), and toss the bones in a pot of water, with salt, chopped onion, celery, and herbs.  Boil for a half hour.  Remove the bones, let cool, take off remaining chicken, and throw it back into the pot. 

    What you now have is priceless.  A stock that will make any dish taste gourmet.  Or make the basis for a succulent soup.  Freeze for later, or start your soup now.  The wolf will thank you with a smile.  

 

Tortelloni Soup with Zucchini  

 

While traveling through Tuscany as a young woman I discovered two simple and lovely soups: one made with zucchini in broth, the other with tortelloni in broth.  I put them together.  Perfect for a light dinner, or an elegant first course. And it only takes minutes to make. 

 

6 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)

2 scallions, chopped (or ½ onion)

9 ounce package of fresh tortelloni (sausage, cheese, or prosciutto)

2 smallish zucchini, sliced in rounds

1 tablespoon basil pesto (optional)

½ cup fresh parsley

¼ cup shaved Parmigiano Reggiano cheese

dash of fresh lemon juice

black pepper

 

1.   Sauté the scallions in EVVO until soft.  Add stock and boil.  Add tortelloni.  Cook per instructions on package.

2.   When pasta is almost cooked, add zucchini and cook for 1 minute.  Add basil pesto.

3.   Serve into bowls.  Add dash of lemon juice and pepper.  Sprinkle on Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and parsley.  Serve with Mad Housewife Chardonnay and crusty bread.

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Simply Elegant- Salmon in Basil Broth

My mother was in love with Jackie Kennedy. She was convinced that Jackie was not only the world’s most excellent hostess, but also its most accomplished chef, despite Jackie’s admission that she could not cook…at all. The widely publicized menus for the White House dinners no doubt gave Mom this impression.  She was in awe. Jackie’s grace and glamour were quite extraordinary to most muddling housewives of the sixties, many of whom, like my mom, were raised during the depression. Four course meals with fancy French names were a real stretch.

    In many ways, Jackie was ahead of her time. She aimed for simplicity, comfort, and unpretentious glamour. She tried to select foods that were in season. She streamlined menus to four courses, where as previous White House dinners ran to five and six. (During the Grant administration, meals had as many as twenty-nine courses.) The four courses consisted of either a fish or soup course first, then the main dish, salad and dessert. She always wanted dinner time to be special, a respite for Jack. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, she planned an Italian Bistro lunch to distract the family.

    Inspired by Jackie, Mom spent several weeks reading her first edition copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Then she set it on the shelf above the stove and never opened it again. She went back to her “special treats” of cherry Jell-O salads with marshmallows, tuna casseroles, canned pumpkin (again with marshmallows), fish sticks, and spam “crowned” with pineapple (no marshmallows, thank goodness).

    Jackie’s exquisite luncheon menus remained part of my mother’s fantasy life. Yes, she would have loved to have an elegant place setting, a timbale with béchamel sauce served on vermeil china, gilt-edged place cards, a centerpiece of wildflowers, but “Who has time?” she said.

    But my mother retained one element of Jackie’s elegant dinner table.     

    Candlelight.

    Every dinner of my childhood was lit by candlelight. My father was a pastor, and after the Sunday service he brought home the half-burned altar candles.  My mother said she used the candles because it had the effect of quieting her rambunctious children. But I think it was more than that. In candlelight, she could let her imagination go—she was Jackie Kennedy, entertaining foreign ambassadors, eating exquisite dishes while Pablo Casals played cello in the background.

    For me as a child candlelight at dinner was a revelation.  It was the first time I realized that daily rituals such as eating could be beautiful, poetic, magical. I realized that slowing down, taking time to see, to observe, to taste, allowed one to feel the texture of life.  In the crepuscular light, food, no matter how humble, became more significant and tasted better. It made me think about food. It made me grateful for food. 

    “Who has time?” my mother asked.  “Who can afford not to make time?” I ask. 

    It isn’t so hard, Mother. You even showed me. Elegance and simplicity are compatible. All it takes is a little imagination, a little love. 

    Make dinner time special. Pour your Mad Housewife Chardonnay into the fancy wine glasses. Turn on the music. Light the candles.

    Elegance is a state of mind. You too can be Jackie Kennedy. 

 

Salmon in Basil Broth

 

This easy recipe looks so elegant—the lovely green broth contrasts with the pink fish and spicy shrimp.  The trick here is to microwave the fish.  Fast, simple, elegant. 

 

(serves two)

1 tablespoon butter

6 scallions

1 celery stalk

1 clove garlic

1 bunch basil

2 cups chicken stock

½ cup Mad Housewife Chardonnay

2 salmon fillets (grouper, halibut, or Chilean sea bass also work well)

6 medium shrimp, peeled and deveined

½ teaspoon tandoori powder or other spicy seasoning  

1 lime

salt and pepper

 

1. Place shrimp in small glass bowl and toss with tandoori powder and juice of lime.

2. Melt butter in medium sauce pan and briefly cook chopped scallions, celery, and garlic.  Add chicken stock and simmer for 3 minutes.  Let cool.

3. Pour solids and a little of the stock in a blender, add basil, and puree.  Return to sauce pan.  Add white wine.  Simmer for a few minutes.  Add salt and pepper.

4. While sauce is simmering, place fish in glass dish with salt.  Splash with white wine.  Cover and microwave for three minutes or until almost done.

5. Cover shrimp and microwave for one minute.

6. Place one piece of fish in each bowl, and pour broth around the fish.  Place shrimp down the center of each piece of fish.  Grind black pepper over the top, and garnish with parsley.

 

Serve with Mad Housewife Chardonnay.  Enjoy!

 

 

 

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