A Shabbat Feast

This feast, generously subsidized by Birthright, was a wonderful opportunity to make something I normally cannot afford: veal shoulder. This beautiful five pound roast is stuffed with herbs and garlic, rolled in porcini dust, and cooked slowly in my homemade chicken stock, red wine, and tomato paste, with some marrow-filled veal bones tossed in to beef up the sauce.

the herb & garlic stuffing

the bones & the roast

adding liquids

After cooking, you refrigerate the roast overnight, scrape off all the fat, carve the meat and reduce the sauce, sneaking a bite of marrow on toast as you remove the bones. I adapted my recipe from Epicurious's, adjusting things like the balsamic and porcini (I added more).

I served this with a barley and roasted vegetable pilaf-- I roasted the butternut squash and parsnips with balsamic vinegar and fresh thyme, separately so each cube would get creamy on the inside and caramelized on the outside...

combined in one pan for easy cooling

...then tossed them with the cooled cooked barley, reheated the pot, and added lemon zest, toasted almonds and mint.

As an appetizer, I made a salad of arugula, julienned apple & celeriac (celery root) soaked in lemon juice & olive oil, smoked trout, warm goat cheese and spicy-sweet walnuts with a dill-pomegranate (thanks Maia!) cream dressing.

J, of the Green Kitchen next door, made dessert: dried cherries soaked in reduced sour cherry juice, served over Haagen Daaz vanilla ice cream with Chessman cookies.

Apple Banana Breakfast Muffins

This is the only baking post you will ever see on this blog. I do not bake. It just doesn't work for me. There are too many... rules. I can't measure things like flour and baking soda. Most of the recipes on this blog are really approximate measurements, for that matter. Anyway, this recipe came about because I drink a smoothie every day, so I always have bananas on hand, and often two leftover that get too spotty to eat (I think they're too sweet, even for smoothies, when very ripe). I started throwing them into banana bread (my grandma's recipe), but an entire loaf was too intimidating, so I turned them into muffins, and threw in some apples for texture... and then decided to try to make them healthy, and added flax seed meal in varying amounts until I found a balance that still tasted good. Here is the result of many, many batches.

enjoy with earl gray tea with lavender

You'll need (makes 2 trays of muffins):

2 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2c sugar
2 eggs
1/2c applesauce + 1T neutral-flavored oil (canola, grapeseed) OR 1/2c oil
2 large apples, peeled, cored, and diced
1t vanilla
a scant 1/3c buttermilk or yogurt

1 1/2c whole wheat flour
1/4c flax seed meal
1t baking soda
1t salt

Mix wet and dry ingredients separately, then mix them together. Spoon into baking cups (fill only halfway-- 1 heaping tablespoon per muffin). Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown (test doneness by sticking a thin sharp knife in the middle of a muffin. If it comes out dry, they're done).