by Anastatia Curley

I’ve had spices on the brain for the past few weeks. Spices in general and apple spice cake in   particular. Spices in particular because I’ve just moved into a new house, and am setting up a new kitchen and looking to get my pantry and spice rack back into trim. (I’ve been subletting for a few months, carrying only my eight-inch chef’s knife and a cast-iron pan with me.  They have served me well, but it’s awfully nice to have a few more utensils.)

Most cooks will tell you that, if you stock your pantry well, you’ll always be able to pull some kind of meal together. I’m going to add my voice to the chorus: even if your “pantry” is a shelf, put a little thought into stocking it. Click on “more” for some handy spice wisdom!

For instance, spices: of course you should always have fresh black peppercorns and kosher salt on hand. It’s nice to have some sea salt, too, for moments when its flaky texture will add something special. (For instance, on a green salad.) Beyond that, what do you need? Of course it depends on how much and how seriously you cook, but even a casual cook should have:

• Red pepper flakes: nice for adding a kick to sautéed greens, tomato sauces, or, well, anything really.
• Cumin: for chile or anything with beans
• Cinnamon: for toast, for baking
• Bay leaves for soup, sauces, and beans

If you’re planning slightly more adventurous cooking, you might want whole cloves (among other things, they are wonderful in black tea with milk), and cardamom pods or ground cardamom, which are great in curries but also in baked goods. I really like both nutmeg and saffron—albeit not together—and so always have them on hand.

Herbs like basil, rosemary, parsley, thyme, or sage I only use fresh. Dried basil or parsley is pointless, and while rosemary and thyme survive the process with some flavor intact, it’s much better to buy a bunch of thyme and freeze it or grow a pot in your kitchen, where it will survive the winter.

I will also just mention that anyone who is really serious about spices should buy a spice grinder and whole spices, and never buy anything ground. If that doesn’t describe you, though, I don’t think it’s a crime to buy ground spices. They are a little more expensive and not as pungent, and you have to use them within a year.

Now that the lecture’s over, let’s move on to apple spice cake, which I have been thinking about ever since the weather got cold and apples appeared in abundance at the farmers’ market. I imagine myself curling up on a grey afternoon with a cup of black tea (with cloves) and a warm slice of spicy apple cake. This weekend I satisfied that craving with this tea bread, which I highly recommend. It’s also good for breakfast, if you’re feeling indulgent.

Apple-Walnut-(and Raisin)-Sour Cream Bread

Adapted from The Complete Tassajara Cookbook

½ cup (1 stick) butter
½ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup AP flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground nutmeg
½ tsp salt
¾ cup sour cream
1 cup peeled and chopped apples
½ cup chopped walnuts
½ cup raisins

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a nine-inch loaf pan.

1. Sauté the apples in butter and cinnamon until they are fragrant and very lightly browned.

2. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, and beat until smooth.

3. In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients. Alternating with the sour cream, gently fold the dry mixture into the butter-egg mixture.  The batter will be thick, but don’t overwork it.

4. Fold in the apples, walnuts, and raisins. Spread the batter into the pan and smooth the top. Bake for about 1 hour, or until the top is brown. Cool the cake for at least 10 minutes before slicing.

Take a break from basting that turkey or calling your relatives to make sure they’re each bringing the right dish tonight: the New York Times published this really cool assortment of interactive maps that shows us what’s cooking around the country this Thanksgiving. The Times tallied search queries for the 50 most-searched recipes on AllRecipes.com and tied them to their states of origin (some tricky I.P. address technology, I imagine).

Are you making sweet potato pie? Cheesecake? Deviled eggs? Do you need a recipe for turkey brine? Green beans? Stuffing? See what people in your state are searching for! Do your tastes match theirs? Find out here!

(Image courtesy of SeriousEats)

One of the best dishes I have ever had was pumpkin ravioli from Cucina di Pesce, in New York City’s East Village. The pasta was the perfect thickness. It was elastic without being rubbery and ideally sized to wrap around the medallion of harvest-fresh pumpkin filling, whose abundance made it as hearty as cheese ravioli. The sauce was good, I think; something that traditionally complements pumpkin ravioli, like a light cream-based sauce. I actually don’t quite remember what it was, but it was only because my teeth, tongue, and mind chewed the ravioli together, focusing on its texture and the bright, sweet flavor of its pumpkin innards. The pretty cream (at least I’m quite sure it was a cream sauce) was a bit like the bride and groom on top of a wedding cake: necessary decoration with an undeniable contextual presence, but ultimately not part of the food party on my plate.

Two weekends ago, my residential college held its annual Harvest Festival, replete with delicious fall foods: apple cider, chai tea, pumpkin pie, apple pie, kettle corn, and caramel apples. My heart raced at the sight of twenty or thirty pumpkins in the dining hall, my mouth started watering, and my mind wandered back to that plate of pumpkin ravioli, that moment of tasty bliss I enjoyed at a dinner with seven of my closest friends. And that’s when I knew. I could have that ravioli again. I could recreate it, and invite my friends over for dinner, and have the best deja vu ever. I planned the ingredients for the filling. I scoured the internet for tips on how to make the best ravioli shells. After a brief shopping trip, I was ready. How did it go? Read more after the jump!

I turned my “spunky” Pandora station up on high, pulled the recipe up for pasta dough on my computer, and set to work. I grabbed a sheet pan, since my college kitchen is a little want for table space, and dumped my measured mound of flour onto it. Then, as advised by several sources and videos that claimed the authentic way to make pasta dough was to make a volcano out of the pasta mound and crack the eggs right into the center of it, beat the eggs with extra virgin olive oil and salt, and then slowly incorporate the sides of the flour mound into it, I did precisely that. But unlike the chef whose nice, slow, expert gestures of swirling the eggy center caught and incorporated pockets of flour into the liquid mixture at a gradual pace, I grew impatient. And when you’re not an expert at something, or even when you are an expert at a recipe, impatience is your enemy. It leads to rash decisions. After I had swirled about half the flour into it, I thought that I could just start incorporating larger amounts of it faster, and I accidentally broke one side of the volcano of flour so that the thick, liquid egg and flour mixture began to flow out of the broken dam. Welcome to Franken-pasta disaster number one.

Covered in flecks of flour and a good deal of amateur chef’s despair, I almost gave up. But, I had friends who I promised I would feed, and a stupid sense of resolve that tends to take over whenever I’m faced with a difficult situation. And so I attempted to sweet-talk my gestating pasta-mound, “No, stop that, come back! Please? Okay, I’ll rebuild the flour wall, as long as you just stop running…okay, that’s not working, how about I just throw all of the flour into the center and mix you together, that ok?” Of course, talking to it resulted in nothing more than a verbalization of plan B. I threw it all in, and began to think of it as just any other dough. Once I managed to gather it into a ball, my kneader’s intuition kicked in, and I stretched and rolled it like nobody’s business. I set it aside and let it rest before I attempted to conquer the next big step.

It’s no secret that rolling out ravioli dough is part talent, part Italian grandmother’s expertise. Most chefs and home cooks today who make pasta use a handy dandy pasta maker or cranker. You crank the dough through a press, adjust the lever of the contraption to a thinner setting, and pass it through again and again, until it’s thin enough that you can almost see through it.

Yep. thin enough that you can almost see through it, because once it hits the boiling water, it’ll thicken. Unarmed with a pasta making machine, unschooled in the art of making pasta, and completely untalented in bicep department, I was the unarmed greenhorn, too stubborn to give in to making ravioli with wonton wrappers because I had neither the right equipment nor any experience at all.

And so, I did the only thing I could. I borrowed a rolling pin, sucked in my breath, spread some flour out onto the table and exhaled. Then, the rolling pin, driven by the brute force of my puny arms, met with the dough. I rolled and rolled; the pin rotated endlessly like tires on a cross-country drive. I felt like I’d finished a workout and a half by the time the dough was thin enough. But it was worth it. Labor and effort really are evident in good food. At least, that’s what my friends said when they scarfed down the ravioli. I thought they tasted pretty good for a first try as well.

Pumpkin Ravioli with Browned Butter Ginger Sauce (Serves 4-6)

Pasta Dough

3 cups of flour

3 large eggs

½ tsp. salt

1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

Pumpkin Filling

1 ¼ cups of roasted pumpkin puree (or 1 15 oz. can of pumpkin puree)

½ teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

1 tablespoon chopped ginger

½ tablespoon chopped garlic

¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

¼ cup ricotta cheese

1 egg

Browned Butter Ginger Sauce

1 tbsp. sliced ginger

4 tbsp. butter

1. Mix flour and salt together. Make a well in the center of the pasta and crack the eggs into the center. This is pasta, old school.
2. Beat the eggs in the center and gradually fold in the flour with your hands.
3. When the dough starts to come together, knead it for approx 8-12 minutes until it forms smooth ball. Let it rest for 30 minutes to an hour.
4. While the dough is resting, combine the ingredients for the pumpkin filling together in a bowl.
5. Pasta maker (or rolling pin time). Roll out the dough, preferably into a large rectangle until it is thin enough that you can see your fingers through it. Lightly flour it as you’re rolling it out to keep it from sticking.
6. Beat the egg to make an egg wash that will help the pasta stick to itself.
7. Take a teaspoon and lay down the filling on one half of the pasta sheet in an array. Brush the egg wash in the spaces on that half of the pasta and fold the top over. Push the dough down between the pumpkin hills to ensure that the pasta is sticking.
8. Take a pizza cutter or a cup or ravioli cutter and cut the ravioli into squares (or other shapes).
9. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add the ravioli about 7-10 at a time. Fresh pasta should only take about 3-4 minutes to cook. Set aside finished ravioli in a strainer.
10. Brown the butter in a saucepan and add the sliced ginger. When the ginger browns, turn the heat off and coat the ravioli in the browned butter. Serve.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about oatmeal for my Natural Nibbles column. I talked about my obsession with oatmeal, how often I find myself thinking about it or thinking about eating it; I even wrote one of my final semester papers on it. I wrote about how I find comfort in each warm, gooey bite, and how the heat and creaminess from the oatmeal spread from my stomach to my blue limbs that would scream for warmth if they weren’t so lifeless and lazy from the cold.

What I didn’t stress last time is that oatmeal is a kitchen chameleon. It can be anything you want it to be. Oatmeal is like one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, which have been on my mind lately, as I’m going through the senior job search and thinking about what I want to do, where I want to live, what stores I want in my neighborhood, whether or not my future land”person” will let me grow vegetables on or around my apartment building, what it will mean if I eat mashed potatoes for dinner, etc. You know what I mean. Oatmeal is so basic that it can become the dream of whimsy.

You can start with a can of whole rolled oats and end up with plain oatmeal. You could be in a chocolate frenzy and end up with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. You could have a craving for crunchy, buttery, honeyed granola. You could rice for oatmeal and eat it with your stir-fry. You might start out with cinnamon and sugar on hand and realize that what you actually want is maple oatmeal with bacon mixed into it. Mmmm that last one sounds good. For those of you who, like me, are in a “festive fall” mood, your tastebuds might crave apples and cinnamon, or, tired of the traditional flavor, might decide to branch out the tiniest of bits and make this pumpkin spice oatmeal.

The bright orange hue of the oatmeal is so reminiscent of the changing colors on the leaves and, of course, pumpkin flesh. Note: no pumpkins were cruelly harmed during the making of this oatmeal. While one of the most pleasing aspects of this oatmeal comes from its sheer aesthetic beauty, the best part of this recipe is that it tastes just like pumpkin pie. And you’ll still fit into your jeans after you eat it. Recipe after the jump.

Recipe (serves four-6)

1 1/2 cups of pumpkin mashed or pureed (one can of pumpkin would work here too)

2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup light brown sugar

3 cups of water

1 cup of plain soymilk

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

toasted walnuts and raisins (optional)

1. In a pot, bring water to a boil. Add oats and milk and bring to a boil, stirring frequently.

2. Once mixture has come to a boil, add pumpkin and spices. Lower heat to medium and let the oatmeal cook until your desired consistency.

3. Add toasted walnuts and raisins, if you like.

Two summers ago when I was in Budapest, I had a craving for peanut butter. Budapest, however, had very little in the ways of peanut butter; it’s simply not a popular food there. My friends and I were the only people in the whole neighborhood who ever bought those mini-jars of incredibly sweet paste-like peanut stuff. We bought them with gusto. Peanut butter was, at times, the closest we ever came to home. It’s a childhood food. I think in the 50s and 60s people used to joke that Americans were corn and beef-fed. I mean, we still are, but I think there’s also enormous truth in the assumption that all who aren’t allergic are also peanut-butter fed. I loved sitting with my friends by the huge windows of our apartment, hanging out with a spoon in one hand and my peanut butter jar in the other.

But now I wish I could take it all back. I wish I could take back the entire year of peanut butter sandwiches I ate after that summer. In fact, I wish I could take back all the typical grocery store peanut butter I’ve ever eaten. I think it amounts to like twenty-five jars or something. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when I think about all the hydrogenated vegetable oils (fake food) and all the unnecessary sugar that was added to every jar of grocery store peanut butter I spread on Wonder Bread, I want to vomit. Of course, neither I nor my parents knew any better when I was growing up–the organic and natural foods movement was a thing of hippies past, Trader Joes was too expensive, and Asian people never ate peanut butter anyway.

Last semester, I really started paying attention to the ingredients in my foods. It’s hard to be disciplined, to give up foods that you love and have eaten your entire life. I’m still working on it and while I want to be that person who eats only natural foods and never gives in to processed snacks, I fail. I fail a lot. I eat cereal too much for my own good, for example. And so with the foods that I know are my go-tos, I’ve tried to seek out organically grown foods or foods that have natural ingredients in them. What do I mean by natural? I mean ingredients that aren’t the product of human food engineering/ingenuity. Like hydrogenated fats. Margarine is probably the most famous of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil family, proven over recent years to be even worse than its evil fat twin, Butter. Partially hydrogenated essentially means that oils that are liquids at room temperature are chemically altered to become solid at room temperature–your body breaks it down differently than it would fats that come in their natural form.

Of course, with peanut butter, there are some aesthetic things that makers have tried to deal with by adding other ingredients. With regular peanut butters, they usually add hydrogenated oils to make it smoother and solid at room temperature, and sugar to give it that slight sweetness. Organic or natural peanut butters are mostly made of just the nuts, either roasted or plain, unsalted or salted, and are usually unsweetened. Because peanut butter made of just peanuts tends to separate (the oil rises to the top), customers or people have griped about having to stir their peanut butter, and so companies conscious of the ills of trans-fat that come from hydrogenated oils have taken to adding palm oil, which is solid at room temperature. I have to say though, that peanut butter with palm oil tastes awful–the palm oil really envelops and overwhelms the flavor of the peanuts. And for those of you who love peanut butter, you know that overwhelming the flavor of peanuts is a really hard and unfortunate thing to do. So I will stick to yummy peanut butter that I might have to stir every once in a while–I eat it so much anyway that it’s just worth it.

In this week’s food news, I happened upon this great link from our friends at A Hamburger Today about Burgerville, a chain in Washington and Oregon that emphasizes using local ingredients in its foods and operates on a sustainable business model. Burgerville is printing the nutritional information of its customer’s orders on their receipts (at left)! I guess it’s time for us to know exactly what it is we’re paying for. Fast food might be quick and tasty, but it comes at a price. What do you make of Burgerville’s offer? Is this TMI?

The Food Issue of The New York Times Magazine has been all the buzz in the food world this month. Some of you might remember last year’s Food Issue in which Michael Pollan entreated the White House to come up with a healthier, more sustainable food policy. In this year’s issue, Mark Bittman writes about making online grocery shopping more efficient and more specific, to help encourage Americans to return to their kitchens and make meals together, a la the slow food mantra.

People often say that the challenge for the slow food movement and for the locally grown, sustainable, organic market is price. Well, several California food banks are doing their best to change the perception that farmer’s markets and fresh, locally grown produce are an elitist practice by trading canned goods for fresh produce and making “farm to table” available to more Americans.

Speaking of making fresh foods more available to more Americans and encouraging more Americans to make healthier food choices by picking minimally processed foods with real nutritional value, President Obama has proclaimed every second week in October “National School Lunch Week” to raise awareness about and improve the quality of school lunches. Progress?

Lastly, fall is upon us. New Haven has not made any effort to hide the coming cold and the change of seasons–here’s a fantastically delicious pumpkin pie recipe from Sweet Corner.

To all our loyal readers: we are taking a break from posting for the summer. We’ll be back when the school year starts again, so look for us then– in the mean time, enjoy your summers!

By Lee West

Most processed foods like to tell you what they don’t have:  “low fat,” “low carbs,” or (the worst) “low calorie.” Few foods, however, tell you what they do have. Here’s an idea: instead of selling foods that are not bad for you, what if people sold foods that were good for you?

News is, we’re getting closer. Apparently someone told Madison Avenue that Americans are starting to care more about what they’re putting into their bodies. The response hasn’t been to change the product, but how it’s presented: according to a recent article in the Washington Post, food marketers are starting to advertise food for having recognizable, and relatively few, ingredients. “White corn, vegetable oil and salt,” says an ad for Tostitos. “Three ingredients is good.”

My question is, good for who? The general message of these ads (and there are others, for potato chips and Fritos, ice cream and Snapple) seems to be that simple ingredients equals healthy ingredients. That’s not always true – think about sugar, or something like animal fat.

That’s what rubs me about these ads: they take a complex problem – what’s the healthiest way to eat? – and oversimplify it with a simple equation of their product to the good thing. This particular campaign doesn’t bug me so much, because I think the claim (that natural ingredients are better for you) is by and large true, despite the lack of nuance. But I worry about what’s to come. The Post article suggests what may be the next generation for food marketing:

Up next for food manufacturers’ marketing plans: going local. The concept is the current darling of sustainable-food advocates and environmentalists because food sourced or processed locally tends to be fresher and have a lower carbon footprint. Frito-Lay’s Gonzalez noted that the company has 32 plants around the country and that, for example, Tostitos sold in Washington area stores were produced 70 miles away in Aberdeen, Md. The company is working on new messages to connect their products to local communities.

As with natural ingredients, this seems like a good thing. People should care if their food is sourced locally, and have the information to decide accordingly. But as with natural ingredients, and with the promotion of USDA Certified Organic food in the past, local food is not necessarily the best food – for your health or for the environment. “Local” as a label, like “organic” and “natural,” can be a helpful heuristic. But no marketing ploy, however well-attuned to the changing desires of more sustainably-minded consumers, should be allowed to serve as a stand-in for truly healthy and sustainable food.

When I first read The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan’s book on the co-evolution of humans and plants, it did not immediately strike me as a stage play. The main characters are, after all, potatoes, tulips, marijuana and apples. This is not stopping the Arts Research Center at UC Berkely, which is adapting it into a full-fledged theatrical production with director Alex Harvey and composer John Gromada.

They’ve put out an open casting call for 2 women and three men who can sing, dance and act. “We need a group prepared to fearlessly embrace the  disparate styles of the piece,” reads the flyer, “Ensemble members will play a wide variety of roles, from kitschy frontier festival re-enactors to authentic 1806 Northern Territory immigrant settlers (Disneyworld to Deadwood). Roles run the gamut from contemporary Connecticut gardeners to a mythological Dionysian chorus of the Bakkai. ”

 Art beyond the endless parade of narrative nonfiction has yet to be truly incorporated into the sutainable food movement, so while totally weird, I’m excited to see just what this production might turn out to be like. Read the flyer after the jump.

By Snigdha Sur

The following is an excerpt from yaleasterix, a blog for incoming students. See the whole post here.

This is Luda. He will matter in this post later. Pay attention.

This past Friday, it was sunshine-y and warm in New Haven. It was the perfect weather for a quick stop at the Cupcake Truck, where I grabbed a red velvet topped with marshmallow and white chocolate cream cheese icing. I then took a leisurely stroll up Prospect Ave (better known as Science Hill) and turned right on Edwards. I had finally found, and found myself at, the Yale Farm, part of the Yale Sustainable Food Project.