J. grilled tonight, and when we grill in the summer we almost always throw a mess of vegetables on there along with whatever protein we’re cooking up. Tonight J. grilled zucchini, yellow squash, scallions, and even broccoli. We love the way vegetables taste when prepared this way (they’re drizzled with a little olive oil and tossed with a dash of salt before cooking).

Roni at Green Lite Bite’s recipe for Roasted (Wish They Were Grilled) Cabbage got me thinking about cabbage on the grill, something I’d never tried. Yesterday I quartered two arrowhead cabbages, and spooned Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki over each piece. Then I wrapped them in aluminum foil, and brought them to my parents’ house for my dad to grill. The cabbage steams inside its wrapper, which makes it tender and soft in just 15 minutes or so.

The flavor was great, but next time I’m going to suggest a few minutes on the grill after it is cooked in the foil. Placing the cabbage right on the grill grate would caramelize the sauce and crisp up the edges of the cabbage a little, which would taste even better and certainly be more visually appealing.

We hosted Thanksgiving last night and I think it was a great success. I love the way the holiday table looks set for the meal and decorated with flowers and crafts the boys made! I had two goals for Thanksgiving this year: spend more time with my family while they’re here (less time prepping and cleaning up after), and make a meal that is well-loved and not too experimental. Last year the food was fine, but there was nothing that came out great. Not so this year!

Our biggest experiment was smoking the turkey. While I handled all the raw poultry prep (rinsing, plucking any remaining feathers, and an unsuccessful attempt at turning the wings back under the bird), J. made up the rub and then smoked it on our Weber. It turned out well, very moist and flavorful but not too smokey. Still, I think I would prefer a traditional oven-roasted turkey next year. Plus, there are no slow-baked onions to pick off the top of the turkey while it roasts when it’s smoked! (This is a long-standing tradition in my family!)

I had a large bag of carrots from our farm share, which I made into Roasted Carrots by Pastor Ryan (from The Pioneer Woman Cooks). I roasted them the night before and then reheated them in the oven on Thanksgiving. They were seriously delicious, even though prepping the thyme was a pain in the neck. Mine just didn’t want to slide off its stem. I would definitely make these again, and they’re so easy it’s perfect for a weeknight dinner, too.

This Celeriac and Apple Salad was the surprise hit of the evening — people were taking seconds! I just used celeriac and Granny Smith apples, no nuts. I did buy hazelnut oil for this recipe, though, so now I need to find some additional ways to use it. I like to have a cold vegetable side dish with a holiday meal (I’ve done chilled marinated beets in the past, for instance) — I think it’s a nice contrast to all the starchy, warm foods on the table.

I used Simply Recipe’s Cranberry Sauce as a guideline for making my own. It is so easy to do (fresh cranberries cooked in sugar and water) and you can doctor it up to change the flavor. I added orange zest, which I really liked but make a much less sweet sauce than what you’d get canned. I serve the sliceable canned stuff, too, because my whole family enjoys it. In fact, we had to cut A. off — I was afraid he’d get sick on the sauce.

We made J.’s Favorite Goulash and egg noodles along with the turkey, which I originally wasn’t going to do. I had thought I’d make a heartier vegetarian side dish with gnocchi instead of another meat, but even after we decided to do the goulash I kept this selection on the menu. This is pan-friend gnocchi with garlic and Brussels sprouts, based on my Pan-Fried Gnocchi with Mushrooms & Brussels Sprouts. I omitted the mushrooms because I was including them in my stuffing, and wasn’t sure if everyone liked them. Regardless, this dish was a huge hit! Mostly everyone loves Brussels sprouts (as do I), but pairing them with the gnocchi went over especially well.

I adore stuffing — it is my favorite holiday food, by far. Normally I buy a plain stuffing mix (lightly seasoned bread cubes) and then doctor it up. I’ve added chestnuts, dried fruit, and so on. This year I decided to do wild mushrooms. I reconstituted a package of porcini mushrooms, and chopped them up and reserved some of the soaking liquid. I sauteed a minced onion and lots of fresh shitake and oyster mushrooms, roughly chopped, and added those to the bread cubes with the porcinis, mushroom broth (made by Pacific Natural Foods) and about a cup of the porcini liquid. Oh my goodness, it was divine. Even J., who has never uttered a single word about liking stuffing in all the time I’ve known him (20 years!), thought it was excellent and actually proactively commented on how good it was. If I wasn’t already in heaven from eating it I would have been from the praise.

J.’s aunt Ann (of Ann’s Apple Cake fame) brings the sweet potatoes, so although I didn’t cook them I’d be remiss in not mentioning them here. They are a staple at Thanksgiving, and this year they were better than even J. and I fondly remember them. Perfectly toasted marshmallows, super-creamy sweet potatoes — it is the ultimate holiday food. When else would you top a side dish with marshmallows?

We finished the meal off with my dad’s apple pie (I had a slice this morning — yes, for breakfast — and it was one of his best ever), Ann’s pumpkin pie (a classic), and Kitchen Sink Cookies (with M&Ms only) and chocolate chunk brownies (based on Hershey’s Best Brownies) that I made.

We have some leftovers, but not an insurmountable quantity after giving away some doggie bags of turkey. With food this good, no one minds eating it again.

We had a wonderful holiday, and we got a chance to host a night of Rosh Hashanah for the first time! J. and I love having our families over for the holidays, and I am lucky that he is an eager partner in all the planning and execution. And the clean up — which was not helped by us losing hot water for several hours this morning. (It’s back now, and everything is washed and put away.) I like everything about hosting a holiday: brainstorming a menu, writing a shopping list, doing the shopping, cooking, setting the table, and so on. And the best part of all is having my whole family together, happy and full and celebrating.

I was too busy getting dinner on the table and enjoying my family to photography the dishes while they were hot and first put out. So you’re getting my leftovers!

Top left is the chicken soup GG made. My recipe for Jewish Chicken Soup is based on hers. Below the chicken soup is a Tomato Salad with Honey Vinaigrette (I just omitted the white beans, which I didn’t think would go with the meal).

In the top row, center is a recipe I made up, Slow Cooker Sweet Potato & Fig Tzimmes. Tzimmes is a traditional Jewish slow-cooked stew of sorts, often made with carrots and fruit, sweetened with honey. It’s popular at Rosh Hashanah, when we try to eat sweet foods for a sweet new year! I made a ridiculous amount, but everyone liked it. J. even had it as leftovers. I peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes 6 sweet potatoes (about 5 lbs. or 8 cups once cut up). They went into my slow cooker’s crock, which I’d coated with non-stick spray. Then I poured 2 cups of orange juice, 1 lb. of small figs (remove any stems), 1/2 c. honey, 1 tsp. salt and 1 heaping tsp. cinnamon on top. Cooked on low for 8 hours. After 6 hours, it’s delicious and creamy. Plus your whole house will be perfumed with the honey and cinnamon. Leave it in for the extra two hours, and it changes color to a deeper gold, and the caramel notes are much more pronounced.

Below the tzimmes is J.’s smoked brisket. Incredible. This is the first time he smoked a whole brisket, with the first and second cuts still attached to each other. I am very partial to the fattier second cut, and kept popping little bits of the leftovers today. J. actually put the brisket onto the smoker around 12:30 AM on Saturday morning — you should have seen the two of us on our patio tending to the meat in our pajamas! It finished earlier than we expected, though, so we didn’t actually wind up needing such an early start. We both got a kick of the craziness of that dedication to cooking, though. The results are well worth it. Also, cooking the brisket outside means my oven was free for anything else I needed to bake (Hershey’s Best Brownies and Honey Cookies) and we didn’t heat up the house by having the oven on all day.

The mushrooms & barley at the top right was perhaps the favorite side dish. So easy: prepare pearled barley according to the package directions (I used half veggie stock, half water). Meanwhile, saute 1 medium onion, sliced thin, in olive oil until it is soft and golden. Add in about two pints of sliced baby bella mushrooms, and saute for an additional 7 minutes or so, until they are tender but not soggy. When both the barley and mushrooms/onions are done, stir them together. Salt and pepper to taste. This is fantastic comfort food — warm, creamy, familiar. I’d call it a haimish dish, unpretentious and homey. I think everyone had seconds.

And finally, round challah. We eat round challah on this holiday to symbolize the cyclical nature of life, and the cycle of beginning a new year. We had a raisin challah, too (again, sweet for a sweet year). Not pictured is a lemony smoked chicken, the brownies and cookies I mentioned above, a picture-perfect apple pie my dad made, and a fruit salad from my mom.

Are you full? Even though we ate leftovers for lunch and dinner today, there is still some food left. Dinner tomorrow!

J. is still playing around with his new smoker, and since we’re planning on using it to make the brisket for Rosh Hashanah next Saturday night, we decided to do some experimenting today. He also made a couple of chickens, one perched on a beer can with a spicy rub, and the other done with a lemon & pepper rub (with a lemon stuffed in the cavity while it smoked). And a small minute steak. Oh, it’s all so delicious! This was his first time trying to smoke chicken, and the turned out wonderfully — juicy, flavorful, not overly smokey.

My dear friend Sus of Susanna’s Sangria fame demanded asked nicely if she could come up and try some of J.’s cooking, and within a day we had a small bunch of friends ready to come and eat with us. Great company, great food, great weather after several days of rain. It was a perfect afternoon.

On the plate: tomatoes and basil with balsamic vinegar, smoked chicken, minute steak, brisket, Fig and Carrot Salad (thanks, Sus), and Mustard Vinaigrette Potato Salad. And plenty of leftovers for Monday night, too.

J. grilled rib eyes Sunday night (I know, they are missing from this picture — there wasn’t room on the plate!). Thankfully we had family over to help us chip away at our farm share from the past week or so — without much cooking going on this past week, it’s been piling up. I had 10 ears of corn and I just wasn’t ready to start putting stuff up in my freezer yet.

Along with the steaks, I made a beet salad with the CSA beets from this week and last. I boiled them and then slipped off the skins Saturday night, quartering most of them to make bite-sized pieces. Then the day-of I created a dressing with about 1/4 c. orange juice, 1/4 c. red wine vinegar, a teaspoon of ginger (I used ground, from a jar), and a half teaspoon of crushed garlic (about 1 clove). Salt to taste. My in-laws loved this preparation, but to me and J. it was not better than our usual.

We also threw all the corn on the grill, and I had to ask J. if he’d added any sugar to it while it cooked. I couldn’t think of why he’d do that, but it was so incredibly sweet it seemed possible. Of course, he had not. The corn is just really that sweet. Even the boys ate some.

Finally, I made a quick salad out of the red and yellow tomatoes and cucumber from our farm share. I also minced some onion, and then tossed it with a little salt, rice wine vinegar, and olive oil. In retrospect, I think the oil was unnecessary.

Every bite of veggie was happily consumed at this meal, and after Renee took home some yellow tomatoes and a couple of peppers, I had a manageable amount of produce to take me through until Wednesday. Is it silly that it’s such a relief to use up the share? It feels like a bit of a contest each week.

Sarah sent me the idea for these grilled steak fries this week, and I knew immediately that I’d have to use it for our weekend barbecue. It’s so easy: just cut a couple of Idaho potatoes into long wedges — about 6 per potato. Boil them in salted water for 5 or 6 minutes (they should still be quite firm, not floppy), then drain and let cool a bit. Toss them with canola oil and your favorite seasonings (I used Dizzy Dust, which is an all-purpose barbecue rub that we like). Let them sit for a couple of hours in the fridge. When you’re ready to eat, grill them over high heat for 10 minutes or so, turning them once, until they’re nicely charred and cooked all the way through. Delicious! J. was really pleased with the way they turned out. Thanks, Sarah!

A couple of weeks ago, J. tried smoking a brisket on our gas grill for the first time. He’s always been good at grilling in general, but the smoking was a first-time experiment that turned out deliciously. And of course, our minds started turning over all the other wonderful foods we could hit with some smoke. I knew I wanted him to try beef ribs right away. He usually makes them, par-boiled and then grilled, once a summer and they’re delicious. I knew they’d be even better smoked.

For us, the first step in trying out a new meat recipe is usually a convoluted conversation with our kosher butcher, where I ask for something J. read about in totally non-kosher terms, and the butcher tries to figure out which kosher cut of the animal I’m blathering on about. For instance, I asked for a slab of long beef ribs. I preemptively said “long” because I have had extensive conversations with him about long ribs, short ribs, and flanken. Now that I know what terms he wants to hear from me, I can order short ribs without a problem! But the full slab request, well, that threw a wrench into the process. Ultimately, it seems what I wanted was a full square of uncut flanken, and I did indeed get what we needed — a slab of beef ribs. It was about 6.5 lbs. before J. started trimming it (he had to remove the membrane along the back of the ribs himself).

On Friday night, J. rinsed and trimmed the meat, and then coated it with Cow Lick steak rub from Dizzy Pig BBQ. (I’ve got a whole post on these rubs coming… another time.) The ribs were wrapped and put in the fridge overnight. You can soak your hickory chips in water overnight, too, if you’d like.

You want indirect heat when you’re smoking, so on a gas grill the food should go on one side (which you don’t turn on) and the wood chips go on the other side where there is direct heat. Here’s a broad overview of the smoking technique (and remember we’re still learning ourselves): Turn one side of the grill on high, and put the wet chips in a heat-proof dish on that side. Close the grill and keep it going on high until the chips start smoking. Then turn the heat down until you get to about 225° F — that’s your optimal smoking temperature. Once you’ve hit 225, you can put the meat on grill. Remember, it goes on the side where your chips aren’t. You want to keep an eye on both the smoke and heat throughout the day, keeping the heat as constant as possible and replacing the chips as needed when the smoke gets low. J. estimates he checked the temp and added hickory chips almost every half hour.

These ribs smoked for 9 hours. Really. They probably didn’t need quite that long, but they had that beautiful, dusky pink hue of smoked beef, and a fantastic, spicy crust. Overall they were really succulent and filling. The tip of the ribs (the thinnest part) was a bit dried out, so J. said he’d wrap it in foil earlier in the cooking process to protect it next time.

We served the ribs with Broccoli Rabe & Potato Salad and Sesame Radish Salad. And now my rib craving is satisfied until next summer.

Borscht-making is J.’s job, and this is his grandpa’s recipe. I have a copy of an email Poppy sent me in 2002, passing this recipe on to us. I love that we have this email from him preserved as part of our cooking and family history.

The problem with making borscht is that it can be very, very messy. We were lucky this time — nothing dropped, splattered, or otherwise altered our very white kitchen from its natural state. We also use the recipe just as a guide: we wanted to use up all the beets from our farm share, which was probably about double what the recipe called for (I had two almost melon-sized beets from a couple of weeks ago, plus this week’s share). With that quantity of beets, three fresh lemons provided the right amount of zing.

We served this soup tonight with pumpernickel bread my parents brought from Rockland Bakery, plus boiled potatoes from our farm share and plenty of sour cream. It was delicious, as always. We’re freezing the rest to serve at our Hanukkah party later this month.

Poppy’s Borscht
Attributed to Mama Grossinger of the Borscht Belt

10 large beets, peeled and grated
2½ quarts water
1 onion, minced
2½ tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 c. lemon juice
2 eggs

boiled potatoes and sour cream (optional, to serve with it)

Combine the beets, water, onion, and salt in a large pot. Bring to a boil and cook, uncovered, over low heat for about an hour. Using an immersion blender, puree beet mixture until almost smooth. Add sugar and lemon juice. Cook an additional 10 minutes and adjust seasoning.

Beat eggs in a small bowl, and temper with the hot borscht to prevent curdling. Then add egg mixture to the pot of borscht, stirring constantly. Turn off heat and allow soup to cool. Chill thoroughly before serving (overnight is best).

Serve with cold, boiled potatoes and sour cream.

This is a post I started over the summer, when we were receiving lots of cilantro from our farm share.

J. and I both make guacamole similarly, which is unusual for us — we tend to each have our own way of doing things, and we also have our own areas of specialty (he wouldn’t bake; I don’t grill — could we fall into more stereotypical gender roles?).

Every time we receive a big bunch of cilantro from our CSA, I can’t help but think: guac! Of course, I’ve found plenty of other dishes to make with cilantro: Spicy Sauteed Chickpeas, Beef & Cilantro, Corn, Avocado, & Tomato Salad, Vegetable Jalfrezi, and Tandoori Tofu are just a few. Still, guacamole remains my favorite. This is how we make it.

Guacamole

3 Haas avocados, peeled, pitted and cubed
1 small onion, minced (about 2 Tbsp.)
handful fresh cilantro, minced (about 2 Tbsp.)
2 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced
1 lime, juiced
1-2 jalapenos, seeded and minced
kosher salt to taste

Lightly toss all ingredients in a bowl, leaving the guacamole as chunky as you like (we don’t break up the avocado much at all). Serve immediately, or bring to room temperature after refrigerating if you must make it ahead.

J. grilled steaks tonight, and as good as they were (always are), the side dishes were what we all talked about. We had homemade pickles (the cucumbers, garlic, and onion were from my CSA), CSA potatoes (Allyson, another Roxbury Farm member, gave me the heads up that they would be pink inside, just like the skins), grilled CSA sweet corn, and Basil Green Beans with Tomatoes (so yummy I made it again — basil, tomatoes, and green beans from my CSA).

I won’t lie: I was almost as excited to use up so much produce in a single meal as I was thrilled that everyone found it all delicious.