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Three Winter Vegetables (Part I)
This post is part of the Cooking For People Who Don't: Food Security blog carnival.
Here are some of my standard strategies for cooking beets, cabbage, and squash. All three tend to be cheap and plentiful in the winter months. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
carpenter notes, cabbages and squashes can also be huge, especially if you're only cooking for one or two people. Fortunately, they store well, so you can cut a squash or cabbage in half or quarters and use the rest later. (If you're the sort of person who likes to prepare lots of staples at once and then store them, you could also roast cubes of squash and freeze them for later.)
This post involves general notes on dealing with all three vegetables, and two specific recipes for beets (one with squash variation).
My Biases, Other Recipe Inspirations, and Substitutions
I live in the U.S. and use tablespoons, degrees Fahrenheit, etc.
I tend to like my vegetables crunchy, though I'll consume a puree if I made it myself and know what went into it; if you enjoy softer vegetables, you should also look at Eastern European recipes for beets and cabbage, and can probably find all sorts of things to do with squash puree. I don't cook much meat; I suspect there are lots of nice Chinese recipes for cabbage and a bit of pork, but they're not in my standard repertoire.
I don't mind spending lots of time cooking, but I'm never awake enough in the morning to do anything substantive, so I can't tell you how to adapt things for your slow cooker. I am suspicious of canned beans, but you should feel free to ignore my prejudices. In general, I am a bit of a hippie and a fairly experienced cook; I tend to do whatever I feel like doing and correct the next time if I think the results were imperfect, but do please ask for clarification if you are curious about a recipe but want stricter guidelines.
I don't believe in paying for fresh winter tomatoes. I prefer buying whole canned tomatoes and chopping them finely to buying red sauce or pre-diced tomatoes, which tend to be too squishy and too big for me, respectively; if you don't like chopping and do like bigger chunks of tomatoes in your soup, you can substitute the diced version.
I typically prep vegetables as I go along, and I'll write my own recipes in that style, but you should feel free to chop everything at the beginning and keep it ready if you have enough counter space.
Shopping and General Preparation
You can use red cabbage, green cabbage, and Napa cabbage (the kind with the frilly ends) more or less interchangeably in most recipes, as long as you remember that Napa cabbage will cook more quickly.
Most types of winter squash are interchangeable, as are pumpkins; the main difference is in the thickness of the rind. I generally buy butternut squash if I can find it, since the rind is comparatively smooth and easy to remove. Most recipes will tell you to begin by cutting off the stem of a winter squash, cutting it in half, scooping out the seeds and the stringy flesh attached to them, and then (if you're not stuffing the squash) cutting off the rind and chopping the squash into cubes. This process requires a sharp, heavy knife and a fair amount of strength, and can be a bit nervewracking if your knife is less than perfect and you're worried about it slipping. If you're not intensely concerned with the texture of your squash, you can make the whole process a bit easier by turning your oven to 350 degrees or so, putting the squash on a pan, and letting it bake for ten minutes to half an hour. Let it cool and cut it up; the flesh will have softened, and the whole process will be easier. (If you cook the squash for longer periods of time, it will end up soft on the bottom and crunchier on top; you'll want to turn it occasionally and make sure to check the crunchier pieces for doneness in the subsequent recipe.)
Beets occasionally come with the greens attached; you can cut off the greens, combine them with spinach or chard, and cook them another day. Because beets are root vegetables, you'll want to scrub them thoroughly in cool water, and trim off any rough or hairy pieces. There appears to be some sort of grand internet controversy about whether to peel beets; I generally don't bother, but if you find your beets are bitter in spots you may want to try peeling them. It looks like you can peel them fairly easily if you roast them whole first or dip them in boiling water. Red beets will turn the water they're cooked in pink, along with anything else they come in contact with. This also holds for beet greens; I think pasta with chard and beet greens and goat cheese makes a pretty good glossy-magazine Valentine's Day recipe, for this reason. If you've never tried beets before, you should be aware that some people's urine turns pink when they eat beets (I understand this is a genetic thing?), so don't be alarmed if your insides appear to be pink all the way through.
Two Beet Recipes
Beets are good with white, salty cheese. Both of the following recipes follow this principle, but you can obey it more simply by cleaning your beets and cutting them into chunks, putting them in a pan, drizzling olive oil on top, tossing it around with your hands or a spoon, adding salt, pepper, and perhaps some peeled cloves of garlic, and sticking the whole thing in the oven at 400 degrees or so, until the chunks are no longer crunchy. Eat with the white cheese of your choice (I recommend goat cheese, and maybe some walnuts).
Greek-Style Beets
Ingredients:
olive oil
1 onion
3-5 cloves garlic
1-2 tbsp. dry dill, or about a quarter of a bunch of fresh dill, chopped
14 to 28 oz. canned whole tomatoes, with liquid
1/3 cup white wine (you can substitute sherry in a pinch, or omit this)
3-6 beets
salt & pepper
4-8 oz. feta
You will also need either a pot you can put in the oven, or an oven-safe casserole dish.
Chop the onion, mince the garlic, and chop the dill if you're using fresh dill. Heat the olive oil in your pot, add the onion and a small pinch of salt, and fry until the onion starts to soften. Add the garlic and stir it around. Open the can of tomatoes, and the wine if you're using it. Add the dill to the pot, stir it around, and pour in the liquid off the top of the can. Lift out the tomatoes and chop them finely (use about half of a big can for just a few beets, or a whole can if you have lots of beets). Add the tomatoes and the wine to the pot, along with a bit of water to make it look sauce-y (you can run water into the can to pick up some of the clinging tomato bits, if it's empty). Add pepper and another small pinch of salt. Turn the heat down and let the sauce simmer.
Preheat the oven to 375 or 400 (higher temperature means a drier sauce but faster cooking time). Clean the beets and chop them; you can aim for anything between cubes that are 1 inch on a side and cubes that are about a quarter inch on a side. Smaller cubes will cook faster. Taste your sauce, and add more salt and pepper as needed; it should have a fairly intense flavor, but the feta will add a bit more saltiness later. Add the beets to your sauce, and stir to cover. If the sauce looks dry, add a little bit more water or wine. Put the dish in the oven (transfer to a casserole dish first if your pot is not oven-safe). Note the time.
Chop or crumble the feta, wash the knives you used in prep work, and wait about half an hour. Pull the pot out of the oven. If the sauce is looking dry, you can add a splash of water. Scatter the feta on top (be careful! the handle of your pot is now very hot!), and return it to the oven for five or ten minutes. Taste a beet chunk. If it's crunchy, the dish needs to cook longer; continue tasting at ten-minute intervals. When the beets are tender enough for your taste, you're done.
Serve with rice or crusty bread, and a green salad and/or the rest of the wine if you are feeling fancy.
Roasted Beet Soup (Or Winter Squash Soup)
This recipe is based on notes from a conversation with my mother. You can easily reduce the quantities: just use enough broth to cover the vegetables.
The recipe does require special equipment: unless you are very patient and willing to pound roasted vegetables into mush by hand, you'll need a power tool to puree the soup. An immersion blender is probably the easiest power too, since it will let you puree a soup in the pot you cooked it in. You can buy a cheap immersion blender for about $20. I have an immersion blender attachment for my hand mixer that works like the separate-purpose blenders. Just make sure that your blender is completely submerged before you start running it; if you lift the blender partway out of the soup, or have a very shallow soup, you can spray hot soup all over the place and burn yourself.
You can also puree soup in a blender or food processor, but this requires more care, since liquid can seep out of the bottom of your food processor, and hot liquids can melt the rubber parts of your blender.
Ingredients:
About 3 pounds of beets, or beets mixed with carrots and/or parsnips, or about 4 pounds of squash or pumpkin, cleaned and chopped into approximately 1-inch chunks
An onion, chopped
Half a bunch of parsley, or a couple of sticks of celery, chopped (optional)
Chopped leeks (optional)
4-5 cloves garlic, crushed or chopped
1-2 pounds potatoes, diced
About six cups of broth. (You can make your own vegetable or chicken broth, or simmer a handful of dried porcini mushrooms in some water if you are well-off but stressed for time/freezer space, or buy commercial broth. If you buy commercial broth, I recommend buying the low-sodium version or mixing it with water, so you can control the saltiness on your own.)
Butter (or olive oil if you prefer)
Salt & pepper
Goat cheese, creme fraiche, or yogurt to garnish
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Clean the beets and pare the carrots or parsnips, or clean, pare, and dice the squash or pumpkin. Put them in a pan, drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle them with salt, and mix them around. Put them in the oven and roast them for about half an hour or until they taste good when sampled.
Meanwhile, in a big pot, melt a couple of tablespoons of butter (my notes from my mother just say "lots"), or heat a big dollop of olive oil. Fry the onion, leeks, and garlic until softened. Add the potatoes and broth, and cover. Bring them to a boil, then turn the heat down and simmer until the potatoes are falling apart (about 20 minutes). Add the roasted vegetables, and cook for about another ten minutes.
Use your power tool to puree the soup. Add extra water or stock to bring the soup to your desired consistency, and simmer it for a couple of minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If you used squash as the vegetable, you can also add a little bit of grated nutmeg.
Serve the soup hot and add one of the suggested garnishes if you're eating the beet version. The cheese will melt into the hot soup.
Here are some of my standard strategies for cooking beets, cabbage, and squash. All three tend to be cheap and plentiful in the winter months. As
carpenter notes, cabbages and squashes can also be huge, especially if you're only cooking for one or two people. Fortunately, they store well, so you can cut a squash or cabbage in half or quarters and use the rest later. (If you're the sort of person who likes to prepare lots of staples at once and then store them, you could also roast cubes of squash and freeze them for later.)This post involves general notes on dealing with all three vegetables, and two specific recipes for beets (one with squash variation).
My Biases, Other Recipe Inspirations, and Substitutions
I live in the U.S. and use tablespoons, degrees Fahrenheit, etc.
I tend to like my vegetables crunchy, though I'll consume a puree if I made it myself and know what went into it; if you enjoy softer vegetables, you should also look at Eastern European recipes for beets and cabbage, and can probably find all sorts of things to do with squash puree. I don't cook much meat; I suspect there are lots of nice Chinese recipes for cabbage and a bit of pork, but they're not in my standard repertoire.
I don't mind spending lots of time cooking, but I'm never awake enough in the morning to do anything substantive, so I can't tell you how to adapt things for your slow cooker. I am suspicious of canned beans, but you should feel free to ignore my prejudices. In general, I am a bit of a hippie and a fairly experienced cook; I tend to do whatever I feel like doing and correct the next time if I think the results were imperfect, but do please ask for clarification if you are curious about a recipe but want stricter guidelines.
I don't believe in paying for fresh winter tomatoes. I prefer buying whole canned tomatoes and chopping them finely to buying red sauce or pre-diced tomatoes, which tend to be too squishy and too big for me, respectively; if you don't like chopping and do like bigger chunks of tomatoes in your soup, you can substitute the diced version.
I typically prep vegetables as I go along, and I'll write my own recipes in that style, but you should feel free to chop everything at the beginning and keep it ready if you have enough counter space.
Shopping and General Preparation
You can use red cabbage, green cabbage, and Napa cabbage (the kind with the frilly ends) more or less interchangeably in most recipes, as long as you remember that Napa cabbage will cook more quickly.
Most types of winter squash are interchangeable, as are pumpkins; the main difference is in the thickness of the rind. I generally buy butternut squash if I can find it, since the rind is comparatively smooth and easy to remove. Most recipes will tell you to begin by cutting off the stem of a winter squash, cutting it in half, scooping out the seeds and the stringy flesh attached to them, and then (if you're not stuffing the squash) cutting off the rind and chopping the squash into cubes. This process requires a sharp, heavy knife and a fair amount of strength, and can be a bit nervewracking if your knife is less than perfect and you're worried about it slipping. If you're not intensely concerned with the texture of your squash, you can make the whole process a bit easier by turning your oven to 350 degrees or so, putting the squash on a pan, and letting it bake for ten minutes to half an hour. Let it cool and cut it up; the flesh will have softened, and the whole process will be easier. (If you cook the squash for longer periods of time, it will end up soft on the bottom and crunchier on top; you'll want to turn it occasionally and make sure to check the crunchier pieces for doneness in the subsequent recipe.)
Beets occasionally come with the greens attached; you can cut off the greens, combine them with spinach or chard, and cook them another day. Because beets are root vegetables, you'll want to scrub them thoroughly in cool water, and trim off any rough or hairy pieces. There appears to be some sort of grand internet controversy about whether to peel beets; I generally don't bother, but if you find your beets are bitter in spots you may want to try peeling them. It looks like you can peel them fairly easily if you roast them whole first or dip them in boiling water. Red beets will turn the water they're cooked in pink, along with anything else they come in contact with. This also holds for beet greens; I think pasta with chard and beet greens and goat cheese makes a pretty good glossy-magazine Valentine's Day recipe, for this reason. If you've never tried beets before, you should be aware that some people's urine turns pink when they eat beets (I understand this is a genetic thing?), so don't be alarmed if your insides appear to be pink all the way through.
Two Beet Recipes
Beets are good with white, salty cheese. Both of the following recipes follow this principle, but you can obey it more simply by cleaning your beets and cutting them into chunks, putting them in a pan, drizzling olive oil on top, tossing it around with your hands or a spoon, adding salt, pepper, and perhaps some peeled cloves of garlic, and sticking the whole thing in the oven at 400 degrees or so, until the chunks are no longer crunchy. Eat with the white cheese of your choice (I recommend goat cheese, and maybe some walnuts).
Greek-Style Beets
Ingredients:
olive oil
1 onion
3-5 cloves garlic
1-2 tbsp. dry dill, or about a quarter of a bunch of fresh dill, chopped
14 to 28 oz. canned whole tomatoes, with liquid
1/3 cup white wine (you can substitute sherry in a pinch, or omit this)
3-6 beets
salt & pepper
4-8 oz. feta
You will also need either a pot you can put in the oven, or an oven-safe casserole dish.
Chop the onion, mince the garlic, and chop the dill if you're using fresh dill. Heat the olive oil in your pot, add the onion and a small pinch of salt, and fry until the onion starts to soften. Add the garlic and stir it around. Open the can of tomatoes, and the wine if you're using it. Add the dill to the pot, stir it around, and pour in the liquid off the top of the can. Lift out the tomatoes and chop them finely (use about half of a big can for just a few beets, or a whole can if you have lots of beets). Add the tomatoes and the wine to the pot, along with a bit of water to make it look sauce-y (you can run water into the can to pick up some of the clinging tomato bits, if it's empty). Add pepper and another small pinch of salt. Turn the heat down and let the sauce simmer.
Preheat the oven to 375 or 400 (higher temperature means a drier sauce but faster cooking time). Clean the beets and chop them; you can aim for anything between cubes that are 1 inch on a side and cubes that are about a quarter inch on a side. Smaller cubes will cook faster. Taste your sauce, and add more salt and pepper as needed; it should have a fairly intense flavor, but the feta will add a bit more saltiness later. Add the beets to your sauce, and stir to cover. If the sauce looks dry, add a little bit more water or wine. Put the dish in the oven (transfer to a casserole dish first if your pot is not oven-safe). Note the time.
Chop or crumble the feta, wash the knives you used in prep work, and wait about half an hour. Pull the pot out of the oven. If the sauce is looking dry, you can add a splash of water. Scatter the feta on top (be careful! the handle of your pot is now very hot!), and return it to the oven for five or ten minutes. Taste a beet chunk. If it's crunchy, the dish needs to cook longer; continue tasting at ten-minute intervals. When the beets are tender enough for your taste, you're done.
Serve with rice or crusty bread, and a green salad and/or the rest of the wine if you are feeling fancy.
Roasted Beet Soup (Or Winter Squash Soup)
This recipe is based on notes from a conversation with my mother. You can easily reduce the quantities: just use enough broth to cover the vegetables.
The recipe does require special equipment: unless you are very patient and willing to pound roasted vegetables into mush by hand, you'll need a power tool to puree the soup. An immersion blender is probably the easiest power too, since it will let you puree a soup in the pot you cooked it in. You can buy a cheap immersion blender for about $20. I have an immersion blender attachment for my hand mixer that works like the separate-purpose blenders. Just make sure that your blender is completely submerged before you start running it; if you lift the blender partway out of the soup, or have a very shallow soup, you can spray hot soup all over the place and burn yourself.
You can also puree soup in a blender or food processor, but this requires more care, since liquid can seep out of the bottom of your food processor, and hot liquids can melt the rubber parts of your blender.
Ingredients:
About 3 pounds of beets, or beets mixed with carrots and/or parsnips, or about 4 pounds of squash or pumpkin, cleaned and chopped into approximately 1-inch chunks
An onion, chopped
Half a bunch of parsley, or a couple of sticks of celery, chopped (optional)
Chopped leeks (optional)
4-5 cloves garlic, crushed or chopped
1-2 pounds potatoes, diced
About six cups of broth. (You can make your own vegetable or chicken broth, or simmer a handful of dried porcini mushrooms in some water if you are well-off but stressed for time/freezer space, or buy commercial broth. If you buy commercial broth, I recommend buying the low-sodium version or mixing it with water, so you can control the saltiness on your own.)
Butter (or olive oil if you prefer)
Salt & pepper
Goat cheese, creme fraiche, or yogurt to garnish
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Clean the beets and pare the carrots or parsnips, or clean, pare, and dice the squash or pumpkin. Put them in a pan, drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle them with salt, and mix them around. Put them in the oven and roast them for about half an hour or until they taste good when sampled.
Meanwhile, in a big pot, melt a couple of tablespoons of butter (my notes from my mother just say "lots"), or heat a big dollop of olive oil. Fry the onion, leeks, and garlic until softened. Add the potatoes and broth, and cover. Bring them to a boil, then turn the heat down and simmer until the potatoes are falling apart (about 20 minutes). Add the roasted vegetables, and cook for about another ten minutes.
Use your power tool to puree the soup. Add extra water or stock to bring the soup to your desired consistency, and simmer it for a couple of minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. If you used squash as the vegetable, you can also add a little bit of grated nutmeg.
Serve the soup hot and add one of the suggested garnishes if you're eating the beet version. The cheese will melt into the hot soup.