Mexican Polenta Pizza with Tomatillo Salsa (gluten-free)

Hello everyone! Rosh Hashana is upon us, and so I thought I would post...something entirely unrelated to apples, honey or brisket! But tonight's recipe is in part motivated by the upcoming holiday. Specifically, we got a really great haul from our CSA this week and we have been scrambling (figuratively and literally as well, we made scrambled eggs this weekend with some of it) to use up the delicious produce we get from Windflower Farm - with the abbreviated week, we needed to make sure we cooked up some good stuff before heading to family for the holiday.

Among our haul: tomatoes, bell peppers, chili peppers, arugula, red onions and tomatillos. The last one being, I think, the most interesting of the bunch. I've heard professional TV chefs like Bobby Flay talk about how amazing tomatillos are, and I've heard of them used in lots of Mexican dishes. I've seen them in the supermarket too, but I've always been a little afraid to buy them, being unsure what they taste like or how to use them. So naturally when we got them in our CSA it was my job to use them up.

The trouble with tomatillos is: no one else really seems to know how to use them either! That's an exaggeration of course, but in my research it seemed like all people really used tomatillos for sauces - the most popular being salsa verde, along with some other tasty-sounding sauces for enchiladas, or as mix-ins for guacamole. I recently even saw a tomatillo ketchup from Saveur recently. But in all these recipes the tomatillos were just playing second fiddle as a condiment. I nearly gave up and planned on just buying some avocadoes and dicing them into guacamole...

When I asked Faigy what proteins we had on hand, she mentioned chicken. I figured I'd be stuffed with chicken for the next three days over the holiday, so I wanted to go for something else. The only other things she mentioned we had were pasta and polenta. Hmm...polenta sounds good, but we always have it sliced into rounds, how could I come up with a new presentation...?

A few more minutes mulling it over and it hit me! Being a sauce didn't mean the tomatillo couldn't play a starring role. What if I just treated it like a tomato and made a sauce out of it for pizza? But the better answer was to let the tomato inspire it, but not treat it like one.

I went back to the tomatillo salsa idea. I could bake a pizza "crust" from polenta, spread a tomatillo salsa doctored up as a pizza sauce on it, sprinkle cheese and bake! The result was a recipe with a number of different variations to fit all sorts of different tastes and requirements.

Some notes: I tried the salsa raw and cooked. The raw had much more of a spicy kick, but way more vibrant flavor and a beautiful color. If you're looking for something punchy with a great bright green color, keep the salsa raw before spreading onto the crust (you may need to strain it a bit). On the other had, the cooked version has a much deeper, more caramelized flavor, with a taste that vaguely resembles a tomato but not quite.

This can also be made vegan by using vegan cheese (or omitting it entirely). It is also entirely gluten-free naturally!

Finally: if you want a quick version: skip the tomatillo sauce entirely and just use regular tomato sauce. The polenta crust is way healthier than dough (350 calories for the whole thing) and it takes 5 minutes active time to prep.

Mexican Polenta Pizza with Tomatillo Salsa and fresh CSA veggie salad

Creamy Cheesy Grits

Faigy and I just got back from our two week trip to Southeast Asia. And in honor of that we've decided to bring you...the furthest thing from Asian cuisine we could think of! Well, not really. But I did make this for breakfast to give us a taste of being back home.

Because of the 12-hour time difference, we are extremely jetlagged, to the point that we were up and about at 4am. Faigy managed to get back to sleep but I was up for quite a while more, so I decided I would surprise her with breakfast in bed. The problem with that, I realized, is that before leaving we had completely emptied our fridge. This left us with no eggs, which are quite a staple of breakfast foods. I was originally thinking of making an omelette or pancakes but that obviously wasn't possible. So I did a quick search to get some ideas for egg-less breakfast ideas.

The first thing that I saw was oatmeal, which we had. I went to grab it from above our fridge and saw behind it that we also had a container of quick-cooking grits, which also doesn't require eggs. My first inclination was to make a sweet version with some jams we had in the fridge, but a recipe on the side of the box gave me the idea to do a more savory version.

I applied a few technique tricks to amp up the flavor of the grits (since they can tend to be bland) including browning the butter and toasting the grits; these steps can be skipped if you're in a hurry though. The box calls for water for cooking the grits but I used milk (yes, it was still good after 3 weeks! Ah, the joys of ultra-pasteurization) for added creaminess, and some garlic and paprika for enhanced flavor and color. I topped the cooked grits with additional cheese and wheat germ (we had some in the fridge; if you don't, it's not a big deal) and broiled it.

Since I took the savory route, I complemented it with some jam on toast to fill in the sweetness. Here's what it looked like (on our new serving tray from Vietnam).

Breakfast in bed

Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce

Have you ever wanted a bowl of pasta but were quite tired of the same old tomato or marinara sauce on pasta? Or if you're a little more old school and keep it clean with just garlic and olive oil, haven't you wished you could bring a new, fresh flavor into your bowl of pasta? I felt exactly that way last week, and I wanted a new sauce quickly (in about the time it took the pasta to cook).

I had a can of pumpkin around, and if you've been reading this blog from the beginning you might have gotten the hint that I am a culinary sucker for pumpkin. It's really just so versatile in how you can use it in so many dishes, either as a star or as part of the supporting cast. Faigy and I (if you haven't noticed, my wife and I are co-bloggers now; I lucked out with someone just as (if not more so) culinarily talented and inclined as myself) have been toying with the idea of making pumpkin gnocchi for quite some time now. Unfortunately it was a rather lazy Sunday so that wasn't happening. But we could do the next best thing - have pasta with some sort of pumpkin sauce.

I wanted to really highlight the savory notes of pumpkin this time, which stands in contrast to a lot of other pumpkin recipes I'm a fan of. I decided to use dairy as the platform upon which to build these flavors - first and foremost starting with frying (not just sautéeing) onions in butter. Some milk thins out the thicker canned pumpkin and gives the sauce some creaminess, but what really steps up the flavor is fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. It's sometimes hard to find blocks of Parmesan kosher, so in a pinch the bottled pre-grated Miller's stuff will do, but it's hard to beat the fresh stuff. The cheese brings out some of the nuttiness dormant in the butter and pumpkin, and is enhanced if you add the toasted crushed walnuts.

The last really crucial thing to this recipe is the finishing touch: extra virgin olive oil. Now, I am often one to just skip garnishes and like accoutrements to recipes I see; you are free to do so with the others in this recipe, but I warn you, DO NOT SKIP THIS. The fruitiness of the olive oil adds a really powerful contrasting accent to the savory sauce we've built up and teases out some of the fruitiness the pumpkin is hiding. Since it's raw, definitely use the extra virgin stuff (we just used generic Fairway brand and it was fantastic).

You can in fact make this entire recipe pareve/dairy-free (as indicated) but be aware that if at all possible, you should re-make it in its dairy form another time to compare and contrast.

A fresh autumn take on pasta sauce