Simple cooking from Amy Chaplin’s At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen

Below are a few dishes I’ve made recently out of Amy Chaplin’s At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen. I was making the curry powder shown below while Winter Storm Juno raged outside, so I’ve included a photo of the snowy view outside my kitchen window as well. I’m especially in love with this curry, in part because I finally bought a spice grinder and have so much fun grinding spices now. I can say goodbye to the days spent grinding away with my mortar and pestle!

Quick pickled cabbage (recipe #12) and simple marinated beans (recipe #13) – served with forbidden black rice and parsley

lemony marinated lentils (recipe #14) – served over wilted kale and avocado

curry powder (recipe #15)

Winter Storm Juno

curry powder and harissa

Spicy carrot soup with homemade curry powder and coconut milk (recipe #16)

the last suppers

I start my journey back to Connecticut tomorrow morning. Here is a quick report on my last two suppers in Wisconsin. All of these dishes are from Amy Chaplin’s At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen. Below is a wondrous roasted vegetable cannellini bean stew with wheat berries and kale.
This past evening we made a simple corn soup . . .

         . . followed by this gorgeous dill roasted tomato tart with pine nut crust.

These dishes, then, mark 11 completed recipes from this new cookbook. I’m off to finish some packing, but I’ll see you on the other side!

Two beef stews from Hispaniola

I have learned quite a bit, at least in an introductory sense, about stewing beef over the last couple of days. These recipes are taken from two books featuring the food of Hispaniola, one from the Dominican Republic (Arturo Feliz-Camilo’s Mama Pura’s Recipes) and one from Haiti (Mona Cassion Menager’s Fine Haitian Cuisine). This first is a Dominican-style stewed beef, served with rice and stewed red kidney beans. Since we don’t have a pressure cooker, we had to make up quite a bit of this along the way. We were quite pleased with the results. Seriously, stewed beef and stewed beans are an awesome combination.

Pictured below is Menager’s Haitian stewed beef with Creole sauce. This recipe was a bit easier to follow, since she suggests stewing the meat on the stove. The reduced sauce was incredible with plenty of spicy heat.

butternut squash lasagna with whole-wheat noodles and sage tofu “ricotta”

This butternut squash lasagna represents our seventh meal from Amy Chaplin’s At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen. We definitely enjoyed the various parts of this dish — butternut squash, the tofu flavored with sage, vinegar, and plenty of garlic — but we, admittedly, could have executed it a bit better. Everything went smoothly, even the layering process, but we simply did not have enough butternut squash. The final dish, then, didn’t have enough sauciness to accompany the noodles. This was entirely our own fault and not the fault of Chaplin’s book. If we make this again, we think cloves, nutmeg, and extra red pepper flakes would be great additions — and, of course, the requisite amount of squash.

Three Soups + 1

I have three additional recipes to report from Amy Chaplin’s At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen. The first (meal #4, courtesy of Chaplin) is this bean “bourguignon” with a cauliflower and potato mash. Chaplin calls for celery root instead of the cauliflower, but we couldn’t find any. Cauliflower, in any case, works wonderfully. We very much enjoyed this the night we made it, but we thought it was especially good reheated the next day.

Meal #5: Simple red lentil soup with spinach. This really is a simple but lovely everyday soup that I must make regularly.

Meal #6: French lentil soup with kale and butternut squash. Again, we had to make a quick substitute for this dish—in this case, the kale for rainbow chard. But it still worked very well and tasted lovely. The most exciting thing, for us, about this meal is that the kombu Chaplin uses so often finally arrived in the mail today – so we were able to cook with this seaweed for the first time. It really does add a lovely fragrance to the stock.

And we’re not forgetting about our other love, Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Jerusalem. Pictured below are some fish cakes (made with pollock) in a tomato sauce.

As I finish up this quick post, Chaplin’s butternut squash lasagna with whole-wheat noodles and sage tofu “ricotta” is nearly finished baking in the oven. Update coming!