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Made the celery root gratin again, this time skipping the parsnips and using a bit of cheddar cheese on top instead of parmesan. Hazlenuts and everything else from the original recipe still in place. I defy anyone to think that this looks anything but delicious. It smells divine as well. Clearly we are entering an era of celery root obsession. Also of gratin obsession, I suspect, as I'm feeling that it's time to start making Deborah Madison's superb leek and cabbage gratin again. Unfortunately the market had beautiful leeks but only very sad savoy cabbages, though, so it will have to wait for a bit.
Meanwhile, I bought a young coconut and now have no idea what I'm going to do with it. This goes with my having a weird attraction to messing about not with any kind of actual raw-foods diet but various odds and ends of the recipes that go with it, because they have a certain mud-pie appeal: dump a bunch of stuff into your food processor and whirr it all together like a mad scientist/eight-year-old kid. Then, if you are me, stop about halfway through and cook it. For example, I wound up making a very nice piping hot corn pudding out of something that was originally intended to end its life as mock tortillas full of this and that kind of lovingly maintained raw enzymes or other. Anyway, I think if one were pursuing the Pure Food and Wine aesthetic, one would be supposed to turn the young coconut flesh into noodles or samosa wrappers or something. What I should actually do with it, who knows? Suggestions more than welcome.
Posted by redfox at January 14, 2007 01:33 PM (etcetera) | Comments (4)
Comments
Ooh, I've just discovered celeriac (that's what we call celery root here) gratin as well. I'd never actually had celeriac at all before last week but like you I think it's going to become a bit of a favourite.
The gratin I made was with carrot though (recipe on my blog) so I'll have to try out yours which sounds yum.
Posted by Cal at January 14, 2007 04:40 PMre young coconut: i don't know what one does with a young coconut because whenever i see one i am possessed with a frenzy to drink all the intoxicating water after which point i just scoop the flesh out with a spoon to remind me of all the delicious water i just drank.
anyway the thing about the young ones is that they haven't much meat in them anyway... i guess you could throw the meat into some kaya (coconut egg jam) and see what happens...
Posted by miranda at January 15, 2007 09:36 AMYes, perhaps I should forget about cooking with the coconut and just think of consuming it!
Meg, I have a butternut squash here on my shelf, so your suggestion is quite timely! I only wish I had more gratin dishes, as I love to make these ahead to heat up at suppertime, but that means that the baking dishes are all in demand at once on cooking day. Hmm, perhaps an excuse for buying things is upon me.
And Cal, the carrot + celeriac combination sounds lovely, and I see that you have also conveniently linked to a very appealing celery root soup over at Orangette. Now I just wish that the things were a little cheaper, which seems like it should be only fair given how little they are loved (by people other than ourselves). Your post also reminds me to wish that my local markets had any Jerusalem artichokes.
Posted by redfox at January 15, 2007 11:52 AMall breads | breakfast | dinner reports | drink | eating out | essays | etcetera | lunch | news | recipes | salads | snacks | soups | sweets | tips | travel | vegetables | weekly meals |
Be sure to try her butternut-squash gratin, in the original Greens cookbook. Like most of the recipes in that book, it's unnecessarily fussy ("Before pureeing, deep-fry squash for exactly as long as it takes to clean the gutter on northwest corner of house"), but the results are spectacular. It is now in regular holiday rotation, originally for the vegetarians but now for all the enthusiastic masses.
Posted by meg at January 14, 2007 02:55 PM