In the meantime, I am going to share my favorite pumpkin pie recipe with you. To be perfectly honest, pumpkin pie is not my favorite (by any stretch of the imagination.) But… pumpkins are in season, and I really wanted to do it proper and bake my own sugar pumpkins for the filling. Sugar pumpkins are much smaller than the standard pumpkin-patch halloween jack’o'latern type, and they have a sweeter taste. To bake sugar pumpkins, cut them in half and scoop out all of the seeds and stringy stuff. Then, place them skin-up on a baking sheet and cook in a 350 degree oven for about 1 hour. The pumpkins are done when the tops are squishy and a knife inserted in the middle falls easily through. They should look kinda like this:

Allow them to cool, and then scoop out the soft insides and place in a cuisinart or blender. Process until smooth, and then strain through cheesecloth (if you have it) or in my case, a very fine mesh sieve. Trust me: it may seem like a lot of steps, but it’s easier than you think and the pumpkin tastes WAY better than any type of pumpkin you may find in a can (even the free-range, vegetarian-diet, grassfed, local, organic kinda can.)

The next step is to make the pie crust, and you can find my own custom recipe and instructions here.

For the filling, my favorite recipe is from The Joy Of Cooking. It’s never done me wrong, it’s always classic, and it’s super easy.

Pumpkin Pie

2 cups cooked or canned pumpkin (if you bake your own sugar pumpkins, 2 cups equals roughly 2 pumpkins… depending on the size)
1 1/2 cups undiluted evaporated milk or heavy cream (my advice: always use heavy cream)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinammon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg or allspice
1/8 teaspoon clove
2 slightly beaten eggs

Mix all ingredients until well blended. Pour the mixture into the pie shell. Bake 15 minutes at 425, then reduce heat to 350 and bake about 45 minutes longer or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Serve with sweetened whipped cream.

Mmmmm. Delicious, even for pumpkin pie! And my favorite part is…. the house smells like heaven.

Guest diners in tonight’s adventures: my brother Gaelen and his girlfriend (and one of my best friends) Ms. Christa Susavilla:

Sparkle Duo!

Soooo… obviously this is Cerrithwen (aka Weezy Wiggles whatever you wanna wager.) Christa is a pescatarian, and tonight seemed like the perfect evening to try my hand at the enticing Butternut Squash and Cheddar Bread Pudding recipe I was eyeing in the latest issue of Bon Appetit. Lexi and I made our usual supa’quick Berkeley Bowl West dash. Highlight of our shopping adventure: being treated to samples of a deliciously crisp apple by the produce guy who has come to know and love our uniquely hectic grocery shopping habits. (Yessss… contacts at BB West FTW!)

We came home and I tackled the bread pudding with gusto. And really, when you’re dealing with butternut squash and kinda dull knives, gusto is much needed. Usually I tweak and alter the recipe at least a bit, but this time I pretty much went by the book. The only change I made was to add 1 more egg and an extra 1/2 a cup of half and half at the very end. Some of the reviews on Epicurious had mentioned the bread pudding being dry, so I wanted to make sure that the bready veggie custard was properly moist. I’ve made many a Chocolate Bread Pudding (’twas the most requested dessert of an ex-boyfriend of mine) but I have never made a savory bread pudding and I have to admit I was nervous as I pulled it out of the oven:

Thankfully, my nervousness was ill-founded. The end result was the perfect mixture of rich sweetness, salty cheesy extra-sharp cheddar texture, and the lushness of fresh kale and shallots. Mmmmmm. I’m a savory bread pudding convert.

To top it off, Miss Lexi made an amazing Brussel Sprouts salad with a mustard dressing:

Overall, one of those nights where I find myself blessing the bounty of fresh, local, seasonal veggies. And even more thankful for amazing friends to share the bounty with!

Dancing out on a wave of Pretty Lights….

~C-Weezy

so, as always, i got some inspiration from the interwebs of recipes, but modified shit to all get-out based on whim and what we have in the fridge. here’s the reviews and the recipes.

mac and cheese:
i started out with two ideas from epicurious, one and two. number 1 sort of took the lead in the end, but here’s what i did:

(1) boil roughly 1 pound of shells pasta, til it’s soft but not like wimpy soft.

(2) while that’s happening; a little less than 1/3 of a cup of flour into a pot with after melting about 3 tablespoons of butter into the same pot. stirred. C helped me make this part, apparently it’s called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roux" roux .

(3) after melting and stirring the butter and flour, i added a mix of about 3 cups total of whipping cream and half and half. not what the recipe calls for, but what we had. i’m going to have to drink semi-black coffee tomorrow morning, cuz there wasn’t much half and half left.

(4) the recipe calls for blue cheese and cheddar, but we had about 1 cup of grated cheddar, and i didn’t want to overdo it on the blue cheese, so i did 1 cup of cheddar, roughly 1&1/2 cups of grated parmesan, and some blue cheese (maybe a 2″ by 2″ chunk, that’s a fair amount of blue cheese to add to most things). anyway, i took all that CHEEEEZ (mmmmmm) and stirred it into the butter/flour mixture, after turning the burner beneath it off. i turned it back on to Low towards the end of my stirring, cuz’ it seemed to help melt the cheeses better. but make sure not to burn the cheeses. the LOLCats will be sad. hahaha.

(5) by the time i’d done all this, the pasta was done and draining. so i stirred it into the cheese sauce stuff and then threw it in a le creuset pan thingy, which C tells me is hella chiquey, and put it in the oven for 25.

(6) oh wait! don’t let me forget! i added bread crumbs. i was going to make some bread crumbs from bread, cuz we have bread, but it’s super hippie healthy multi grain stuff that wouldn’t bread crumb well, so C gave me some random breadcrumb stuff that she had. i added a thin layer of bread crumbs and stuck it in the oven.

(7) after about 15 minutes i decided i wanted to add italian seasoning (miscellaneous herbs such as oregano, thyme, rosemary, basil, whatever works in that vein) so i sprinkled some on top.

and then, 25 minutes later, MMMMMM!

for the green beans, i started off of this recipe and pretty much followed the recipe, with shallots that magically appeared in our onion basket, mint from our garden, and green beans from Berkeley Bowl. but for once (this is a rarity in our house) we didn’t have thai chillis, so i substituted red pepper flakes.

and for the sweet potatoes, i started off of this recipe but instead of baking the suckers forever, i boiled the sweet potatoes while prepping the other stuff, about 10min, and when mixing the whole shebang together to go into the oven, i also added some finely chopped proscuitto. having boiled the sweet potatoes, it took about 15 minutes in the oven.

well, that’s tonight at homebase!

i used a french baguette and sliced it diagonally into about 1/2″ thick slices, but it could even have been a little thinner, maybe 1/4″.

next, i sliced some pears thinly, maybe a little less thickly than the bread. i used some amazing pears recommended to me by the produce guy at Berkeley Bowl (the one who said that we move “SOOO FAST”) that i believe were called 20th century apple pears. but i’m sure that any pears would do.

C and i LOOOOVE her cuisinart, and use it constantly, so i threw about a handful of walnuts into the sucker and chopped ‘em finely (thicker than coffee grounds for a french press, but not too much thicker) and then removed them to a bowl.

next into the cuisinart went the topping for the bruschetta. i threw in about a 2″ square of blue cheese, about 3/4 of a stick of butter, about a tablespoon of brown sugar, and drizzled maybe a shot or two of some scotch we happened to have lying around. i’m sure whiskey would work fine too, and spiced rum might even be good… hm… ideas. i blended all of the above until it reached a fairly goopy mess, adding a bit more brown sugar to taste, a few pinches of salt, and a tiny bit more scotch to lube up the whole process.

next: assembly! on a cookie sheet or any kind of oven-suitable pan, place the bread slices. atop that, the pear slices, and atop that, a healthy dollop (rounded tablespoon? depending on the size of your bread. you don’t want too much of the topping to ooze down the sides and burn on the pan) of the blue cheese mixture. a sprinkle of walnuts, and into the oven!

i don’t remember what C had the oven on for the gnocchi she was baking, but it was somewhere around 400 degrees, and i just threw the bruschetta in there with them for about 13 minutes. if i remember correctly, the gnocchi were done at about 8 minutes, and we turned the oven off and let the bruschetta sit in the heat for another 5 or so. just keep an eye and a nose on them, and you should be able to tell when they’re done.

and enjoy! the combination of flavors may sound bizarre, but the end result was unbeliiiieeevably good.

over and out, til next time!

chicken pot pie with fall veggies (including turnips, leeks, carrots, and shallots) and dates stuffed with parmesan wrapped in proscuitto. mmmmmmmm!

as i open this blog, we are sitting down to dinner, so first, the feast! and next, the review / tips / recipes.

regarding the dates:

i actually first tried this dish with my boyfriend jonah on one of our first “dates” at Cesar’s on Piedmont Ave. we tried a similar dish, dates wrapped in bacon, and i discovered that i liked dates, both the sweet food and the sweet activity.

so, since C and i have been getting excited about seasonal cooking, when i noted that dates are in season, i decided to pick up a pack and try it out. dates are way cheaper than i thought, we found a huge pack for $5 at Berkeley Bowl where we do most of our shopping. the proscuitto too, i once thought a splurge, but you can get a huge pack (1lb) at Berkeley Bowl for a totally reasonable price ($6ish). proscuitto is great for wrapping around things. i like it wrapped around asparagus with balsamic vinegar and parmesan dusted atop, and i love it with dates!

the actual recipe is easy:

take dates. cut a slit down the center to remove the pit, replace the pit with a comparable slice of cheese (i used parmesan, but just about any cheese would probably be as good). wrap in proscuitto (bacon would also do, but with bacon, you want the slices to be as thin as possible… proscuitto is already thin so it’s a no-brainer) about 2 layers, and stick a toothpick in it, if you have toothpicks. if not, balance the wrapped date so that the proscuitto doesn’t come undone. if your oven is preheated to around 400 degrees, just throw them in for 8-10 minutes. i actually just threw these in the hot oven after C had pulled out the pot pie– about 13 minutes, and the proscuitto had gotten lightly crispy, and the cheese had melted inside. i recommend just trying one to see if they’re done. (i’m a huge advocate of eating while cooking!)

On to the Chicken Pot Pie (and yes, the switching between users may get confusing but this is Cerrithwen aka C-Wigz Weezy Wiggles.) So, I woke up this morning in Santa Cruz to a foggy characteristic Fall day and my first thought was “I want to cook!” I mulled over my options for a while, but Chicken Pot Pie kept infiltrating my thoughts and I finally decided to give in to my craving. I used my handy Epicurious iPhone app to search for recipes and finally settled on Chicken and Fall Vegetable Pot Pie.

Once back in Oakland, I tackled my project with gusto! The recipe called for two fairly unfamiliar vegetables, at least as far as my cooking repertoire goes. Turnips and leeks, both of which are in season but I have somehow managed to ignore in lieu of the trendier sweet potato and cranberry type fiasco. Determined to expand my cooking lexicon, I happily started chopping veggies:

The recipe called for baking the pie in a Le Creuset type oval baking dish with an herbed pie crust on top, but I decided to modify things by using a deep dish pie pan and my traditional pie crust recipe. I know a lot of people are super intimidated by pie crust, but it’s actually quite easy and I’m going to share my personal pie crust recipe with you. The following is for one crust. Double the recipe if you’re making a pie with a top & bottom layer.

Cerrithwen’s Tried & True Pie Crust:

5 Tablespoons Chilled Butter
1 Cup of Unbleached Pastry Flour
1 teaspoon salt
~1/4 cup cold water

-Slice butter into 1 inch pieces. Add flour and combine in a cuisinart (if you have one.) If not, I prefer to use clean hands to work the butter and flour into the proper consistency. It should resemble very coursely ground flour… make sure there are no big chunks of butter. Adding the water is the tricky part. I’ve made pie crust so often that I instinctively know when enough water has been added, but it takes some time to get to this point. Start small by only adding about half of what is called for & then stir with a fork. The dough is ready when it clings together but is still discernibly flaky. Roll the dough into a ball and prepare a clean, well floured surface. Roll the dough until it’s reached the proper size for the pie pan you are using. The next step is to take your rolling pin and gently wrap about half of the dough around it. Put your pie pan underneath and quickly transfer the dough to the pan.

A chicken pot pie is a labor of love, and an intensive process with many steps. But at last she was done, and our dinner was complete:

hey all! lexi here. the C-weez and i are in the middle of our thursday night dinner, and its getting good enough that we’ve gotta share it with you!

first off, we bought a TON of groceries today! our cupboard was lookin’ pretty bare, so we stocked up on tons of seasonal essentials, and a few fun and ambitious new additions to our kitchen.

now, we’re in our usual cooking woodshed, a bottle of wine in and flying. a guy at Berkeley Bowl tonight said to me, “You two, you’re always moving SO FAST. Everytime you’re in here, you move SO FAST.” it was really cute. but that’s how we roll! creative tornadoes, leaving destruction in our wake. mostly just lots of dishes and a few broken wine glasses, but you never know what the night holds when we’re in the kitchen.

anyway, on to the food.

C is making sweet potato gnocchi with fried sage and shaved chestnuts right now. she’s using a Gourmet recipe (click on the words for the link) but throwing her own special touch in, as always.

i just finished with a blue cheese pear and scotch walnut bruschetta appetizer, cuz we were so starving after our marathon grocery shopping trip. i got some ideas from allrecipes.com which is my favorite website to go for to generate ideas when i’m planning a dish. you can search by ingredients (Uh, I’ve got, like, a loaf of bread, some garlic, and a cucumber. What do I do?”) or browse in various ways, and the site isn’t toooooo gourmet, so you can get the fundamentals of some new stuff fairly easily without having to hit specialty food stores or break the bank.

anyway.here’s what i did with the blue cheese pear and scotch walnut bruschetta. it’s grub. we’ve killed almost the whole batch already, and i’m only in here on my computer typing this blog cuz i’m trying very hard not to eat the rest.

C is also going to introduce me to BRUSSEL SPROUTS tonight. i’ve never had them, and they get a super awful rep, but she tells me that roasting them is the way to go. (i’ll let you know what the verdict is.)

UPDATE from the C-Weez:

…or more accurately at this point in time, the C-Wiggles. I’ve had more than a few glasses of wine, and I’m positively stuffed to the brim with gnocchi goodness. Speaking of which, my first adventure into the land of homemade gnocchi was a smashing success. I happen to be an obnoxiously proud Italian. To the point where I remind people OVER and OVER of my illustrious Italian heritage until they roll their eyes and tell me “Yes, you told me that… 500 times.” So, I got to thinking. How can I sincerely call myself an Italian if I’ve never made homemade gnocchi? Tonight was my chance to prove my Italian-ness. And I did the best I could. The recipe called for a ricer, and I didn’t have one and really didn’t feel like blowing $30 at Sur la Table. So I went to Urban Ore and managed to find an attachment to my cuisinart that mildly resembled a ricer, and at the price of .75 cents it was kind of an obvious win. It made the potatoes and sweet potatoes a bit mushier than I would have liked, but it did the trick… for the most part. After folding in the egg, nutmeg, cheese, and flour, the dough was the perfect texture and form and easily shaped into 6 equal parts for the gnocchi cutting. In my enthusiasm, I cut the gnocchi a bit big. But the end result was positively delicious:

INGREDIENTS:

• lime juice
• olive oil
• garlic (a few cloves, depending on how deep your garlic love goes, preferably chopped finely or squished or otherwise not in whole clove mode)
• ginger (fresh is better, chopped finely or grated or squished up; but dried ginger will also work if you don’t have fresh)
• Thai chilis, if you have them. they are really good, and if you like to cook Asian-influenced foods, I highly recommend starting to keep them around your kitchen. *

STEP 1:

combine roughly the same amount of lime juice and olive oil (to taste– do the stick-your-finger-innit thing and see what you think) and roughly the same amount of garlic and ginger. add chopped Thai chilis *.

STEP 2:

stick the stuff to be marinaded in the marinade and go have a drink and a cigarette.*

*optional

STEP 1: MARINATE (OPTIONAL)

i often like to marinate the fish / chicken for a while first, especially if it was frozen. an easy marinate that i often do for stuff like this is roughly equal parts lime juice and olive oil, with ginger and garlic if you have them (powdered will work as well as fresh for this sort of thing) and with something spicy like chopped Thai chilis or chili powder if you have it.  you don’t need to add too much of the spicy to the marinate, because the blackening part of the recipe is full of spice. make enough marinate to cover the fish / chicken in a covered bowl or sealed plastic bag, and marinate in the ‘fridge for between 45 minutes and 3 hours.

STEP 2: MAKING THE SPICE MIX

to blacken something is basically to coat it with spices and sear it quickly on high heat.  the spices you use can vary based on what you happen to have and what you’re cooking. i recommend roughly equal parts of some or all of the following:

salt, garlic salt, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper, cayenne pepper (THIS IS THE BEST! USE IT IF YOU HAVE IT! one of my favorite spices for soooo many things), basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme,  or pretty much any other dried herb, curry powder, chili powder, and so forth.

mix together in a large-ish bowl in ample amount. (i don’t usually measure stuff like this i just kind of throw it together) once you’ve got it all pretty mixed together, stick your finger in it and see how it tastes. if it tastes too much like one ingredient, add other stuff until it tastes more balanced. (this is my common-sense cooking style. not so much into measurements if i can avoid them.)

STEP 3: BLACKEN

heat cooking oil* in a frying pan on fairly high for a few minutes, until it gets a little crackly. if it starts smoking before you put anything in it, turn it down a bit.

while heating the oil, remove fish/chicken from the marinate and get rid of the marinate. maybe pat the fish/chicken dry a bit, but not too much, because the juicyness of the marinate is going to help the spices stick. plop your fish/chicken into your spice mix bowl, coating it on all sides with the spices.

now place fish/chicken into the frying pan with the hot oil. the object of the game is to cook it hot and fast. how long exactly will vary depending on what you’re cooking and how hot your stove is, but a good ballpark guess is 2 minutes each side. fish/chicken should be blackened and crispy on the outside, and still soft and tender on the inside.

STEP 4: EAT

i like blackened fish/chicken with something a little sweet, so i usually do sweet potatoes (i like mine mashed with butter, brown sugar, and cayenne pepper, but you kind of can’t go wrong with sweet potatoes) and / or throw some kind of fruity jam or chutney over it. i’ve found that mango or pineapple salsa work great for this, as does orange marmalade** or cranberry or mango chutney, or… pretty much whatever you might have lying around that is sweetish and fruity. try raspberry jam. try whatever, but try a little bite of the fish/chicken with a little bit of the sauce first, so you don’t ruin your masterpiece while experimenting.

i also love this kind of dish with coconut milk cilantro rice. i’ll be putting up a recipe for that soon, and this bold will turn into a link.***

hope you enjoyed! let me know what you think.

*note– do NOT waste expensive olive oil for cooking stuff in. olive oil is great for sauces and other things because it TASTES so much better than vegetable oil, canola oil, whatever. but if you’re just frying up some fish or cooking some veggies, olive oil is a waste, and i’ve been told by fairly credible sources that it actually doesn’t cook properly either.

**at some point in this blog i will make a list of all the unlikely and wonderful things that orange marmalade is good for. i had some in my fridge one time for god knows what reason, and started experimenting, and found some seriously great uses for it.

*** all the bolded stuff in this recipe/rant/article are things that will eventually become links.

our blog is getting off to a slow start, as both of us work the full time and keep life pretty packed. but here are a few pictures of cerrithwen’s latest pie to whet your interest. more to come soon!

contents of the pie: black/blue/raspberry

latticework, pre-bake

the completed pie. mmm!

it’s cerrithwen and lexi, at your service. those of you who know us know that we’ve been talking about starting a food blog for a while now, and finally, here we are! we’re hoping you’re as excited as we are!

a word about our moniker. we’ve melded two great words into one in an attempt to signify what we’re up to. the first word, “piquant”, is defined by wiktionary.org as:

1) Engaging; charming.

2) Favorably stimulating to the palate; pleasantly spicy; stimulating.

the second great word that we fused is “vigilante”, defined by the same source as:

1) One who takes the law into one’s own hands.

by this we mean to say, we’re taking food, wine, beverages, beats, and general lifestyle fun into our own hands, in a “piquant” way. get it? (we just pulled this out on the fly, so, if you’re not quite grokking it yet, well, neither are we!)

this much is for sure, however. we love good food, good (cheap) wine, good music, and good company, and we’re ready to share them all with you! as our blog develops around us and our busy schedules, be sure to let us know what you’d like more of, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

until next time,

cerrithwen and lexi.

muah!