holiday blunders

or, "unintentional zucchini casserole"

At our pre-thanksgiving celebration, I attempted to recreate my zucchini au gratin from last year, albeit in larger quantity and with the addition of canned tomatoes on top instead of purely decorative slices of a fresh tomato. 


However, I managed to overdo the milk and garlic, so it never quite obtained that lovely gratin texture.  I wasn't pleased, until later I heard folks asking about "Who made that zucchini casserole?  It's so good."  Then I realized I should just not tell anyone it was supposed to be a gratin.


Moral of the story?  My kitchen mistakes are better than danielle's.  Also, if find out that your holiay meal isn't going as planned, maybe just keep your mouth shut and no one will notice. 


Happy holidays.

rainbow chard gratin

So apparently a gratin is any dish that is delivered to your eaters topped with a brown crust. This definition informs this rainbow chard gratin that I made according to the culinary stylings of Barbara Kafka. (Ed. Note: In retrospect, probably also inspired by this). I'm not going to write out the whole recipe because I ignored most of it and ultimately, ate a tiny ass piece before putting the whole thing in tupperware to be ignored until it went bad.

But I did learn how to be less afraid of chard. All I'd ever done with it before was stuff peppers with it, which was hardly relying on it as a signature flavour. The boiling-for-five-minutes technique was pretty easy, and I'd do it again. I took some okay pictures, but please learn from my example and if you try a similar recipe try not to replace more than half of the ingredients because it'll turn into an EGGY MESS. An EGGY MESS I tell you!

mushroom fritters

So these fritters came about one evening when I'd invited Jeanette for dinner and wanted to make something with mushrooms because mushroom-hating JaBootaay was out of town.  We went through loads of my cook books, nothing was quite right or we didn't have the ingredients until we saw some write-up on corn fritters with a mushroom variation from Bittman's tome.  

 

ingredients

• 16 mushrooms (button mushrooms were on sale, that's what we used)
• 4 spring onions
• liberal handfuls of fresh parsley
  
• 1.5 cups wheat flour
• 1 egg
• 1 cup of milk
• teaspoon of baking soda
• salt and pepper to taste
  

 

So I started by chopping mushrooms and spring onions.  Jeanette made a batter with two cups of wheat flour, some baking soda, an egg and some milk.  The amount of mushrooms should seem a lot in comparison to the batter, maybe a 2:1 ratio.  It all got served together, so we had balls of mushrooms/onion held together by batter.  These balls get dropped into a couple of inches of oil like this:

Using wheat flour meant it was a little harder to tell when the fritters had "browned" but you can still pretty much just tell when they're done.  Basically just have about 4 on the go at a time.  Your yield should be about 20 or so.  I'd encourage you to make them not that big or they won't cook through.  Also, we served them without a dipping sauce, but I would definitely make up either a marinara or a chutney to serve these with.  They had a nice moist center, and a good one-two flavour punch from the batter and then the mushrooms.  We plated with the second zucchini au gratin I made, and overall they were a good pairing.

zucchini au gratin

Zucchini au Gratin

For this meal I've adapted my other gratin potatoes for a lovely green and yellow zucchini/squash dish.  I made it for our pre-thanks meal, and then recreated it a week later when I knew that I'd be able to eat more of it myself.  I'd recommend it whenever you accidentally buy too many zucchini.  (Corgettes-lovers meet zucchini, same difference .... are we all on the same page now?)

ingredients

• 2 zucchini
• 1 summer squash
  
• 1 cup of milk
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• rosemary
• 3 cloves of garlic
• a saffron-esque orange seasoning to taste
• some sharp cheddar cheese
• 1 tomato
• a bit of parmesan cheese
  

So slice the squashes up.  I like the slicer on my cheese grater, but be prepared to guard your knuckles.  I layed the zucchini and summer squash.  To be honest, the second time I made it (like the photo above) I only used one zucchini instead of both, but it was a bad choice because the zucchini shrink a bit as they cook, so the second time around it was a bit less substantial. ....so use both and press them into the casserole dish if you have to.  In the middle of the layers I put in some of the garlic.

When I was done, I mixed up the rest of the garlic with the milk, seasoning and salt/pepper like so:

The seasoning there really is the secret ingredient ... its just that much more satisfying with that yummy orange colour.  Saffron for cheapskates, yo.  Anyway, pour that onto the sliced squash.  It'll all bubble up and be yummy, so don't stress about covering everything perfectly.  Then you want to put the cheese onto the top.  (For the pre-thanks version, I sliced a vine tomato into six slices to garnish and put a good amount of parmesan cheese on top of each slice.)

This is the key bit:  Cover with aluminum foil.  Put in oven at 425 degrees fahrenheit for 20 mins.  Use your timers folks ... when the 20 mins is done, remove the foil.  20 more minutes.  Then cut up the butter and put on the top.  20 more minutes and you're done.