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

BBQ-Style Stuffed Peppers

A few years ago, I made a dish of onions stuffed with a ground beef mixture from Joyce Goldstein's Cucina Ebraica. It was quite delicious, and I'd resolved to make it again (in fact, in my cooking notebook I'd written down a variant which I have yet to make, but perhaps will appear here one day), but sadly that resolution was lost between the pages of numerous cookbooks I've acquired since.

Fast forward to last week. I had ten people coming for dinner and only a package of ground beef in the freezer. I thought to myself, "how can I make one pound of ground beef stretch for ten people?" My first thought was to fall back to my reliable sweet & sour meatloaf. But then in the back of my mind I recalled the deliciousness of those stuffed onions, and thought of another iconic form of stuffed produce: stuffed peppers.

As it happened, I recently had some stuffed peppers at Abigael's - but they were stuffed with barbecued brisket. I liked the idea of barbecued beef inside the pepper - instead of the classic tomato sauce-drenched dish. But my one complaint about that dish was that the brisket felt a little dry. I knew I had to get the barbecue flavor and ensure a moist, juicy texture to the meat.

The key to that was to cook the meat almost like a stew, with plenty of liquid in a heavy-lidded pot which retains heat well. I created my own savory-sweet barbecue sauce to be cooked in with the beef, and when combined with soft basmati rice, the mixture retained moisture and flavor excellently. Most stuffed pepper recipes call for pouring tomato sauce on top. I debated this for a while but Faigy advised that doing so would drown out the flavor of the meat and the pepper too much.

The rice and meat mixture can be made ahead of time. Just stash them in the fridge for up to a day or two. Reheat the meat in a dutch oven (add a little extra water or broth if it seems dry), then add the rice and warm together (the rice should absorb the remainder of the liquid).

Also, you can make this dish pareve/vegetarian/vegan by using a good ground beef substitute (we like Trader Joe's Beef-less Beef) and vegetable broth.

Red and green peppers will lend different flavors - experiment with both!

Hearty Wild Rice Soup

Reading through the latest issue of Cooks Illustrated, a recipe called "Wild Rice and Mushroom Soup" caught my eye. It looks hearty, healthy, and perfect for winter. However, I knew I'd have to do quite a bit of tweaking to make it kosher because it uses chicken stock and heavy cream.

I decided to use the chicken stock because it seemed that the meaty flavor would be too good to pass up with the wild rice and mushrooms. I also further highlighted this aspect by incorporating many vegetables that boosted the umami flavor, such as carrots, sweet potatoes, and sun-dried tomatoes.

Instead of the cream, I used vanilla almond milk because I liked the idea of having a sweet nuttiness in the soup. I also added a lot more vegetables because I love a very chunky soup and they add nice color and flavor. I also made a bunch of other tweaks, changes, and adjustments just based on my own preferences and what I had on-hand. 

So in fact, I would bet this soup tastes quite different than the original, but it was delicious all the same. There are some great tricks in here from the original recipe, including the use of baking soda to speed up the cooking time of the rice and cornstarch to thicken the soup. 

This soup is unctuous and has a sweet and earthy flavor with an almost velvety texture. It has a nice blend of creamy thickness and chunky heartiness. It's perfect on a chilly or rainy day.