battle 14–day 1–cauliflower

I was pretty concerned about cauliflower week because it was another vegetable I remember disliking pretty vociferously as a child. That dislike grew to utter hatred until eventually I was offended by the mere thought of this colorless, tasteless, virtually nothingness vegetable even occupying the same breathing space as me. At Christmas one time with David’s family someone brought mashed cauliflower, but I thought was mashed potatoes (and we all know how I feel about healthy vegetables masquerading as potatoes), and I was so disappointed when I found out it was cauliflower that it practically ruined Christmas. I mean, really.

But as I tried to recall some of my other experiences with cauliflower as a child, I couldn’t really remember ever having had it. Maybe that one time at…nope, or at…nope. I couldn’t remember a single time I’ve ever eaten cauliflower. Even that time at Christmas David warned me ahead of time so I was just disappointed that it wasn’t mashed potatoes, but I never had to actually eat it. So why did I hate it so much? Then I had a brief flashback to my childhood and remembered a church lady teasing my dad about not liking cauliflower… !!!! So this is really my dad’s fault. It’s my dad who doesn’t like cauliflower. It was my dad who was so vocal about it all my life.

Ah, the sins of our fathers.

Actually, this little revelation gave me some relief, as if being released from my own hatred of cauliflower pre-battle meant I would probably win this one with no problem. I love when I can start the week with this kind of attitude, because it means I will for sure fuck something up.

Sunday afternoon of that week we were out in the yard talking with our friends Naysayer Jon and Supporter Melissa when Melissa mentioned she had some frozen vegetables that included cauliflower, which we could heat up for dinner that night if I came up with the main dish. In a flash of genius I said, “How about country fried steak?”

Not that I have any idea how to make country fried steak. I know we’ve talked before about how my inability to cook is not exclusive to vegetables—that it extends to all my favorite foods, including meat, which is so unfortunate for me—but I’ve largely, obviously, spent this whole project learning about how to cook only vegetables. This is totally valuable (and sort of the whole point of the project), except that I’m not a vegetarian, so knowing how to cook other things is kind of important, too. Country fried steak is right up there with chocolate cake as one of my most favorite foods in the world, so since Melissa was going to make the cauliflower, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a break from learning about vegetables and give myself a little time learning to cook some meat. So, Battle 14—Day 1—Cauliflower, became Battle 14—Day 1—Cauliflower /Cooking Experience (not numbered)—Country Fried Steak.

Several weeks earlier I’d had a great opportunity to watch a master chef prepare country fried steak, so I had a bit of an edge. That’s right, WS Melanie’s mom, a bona fide Southerner raised on a farm, let me hover (she actually let me hover!) in her kitchen while she made Sunday dinner, which included homemade country fried steak and gravy (and some other vegetables I know Melanie will want me to talk about, but it’s against the rules, so I will share a photo of my plate so you can see what I ate, even though it was off schedule).

The most important lesson I took away from my experience in Melanie’s mom’s kitchen was that nobody can do anything as good as she can. The second most important lesson I took away was that I’ll get better with practice. So, I just started from scratch and went from there. And for me, scratch means Google.

The best, easiest, most straightforward recipe I found for country fried steak was Emeril’s on foodnetwork.com. I imagine back in yesteryear when country fried steak was invented, it was probably easy, straightforward and totally no-nonsense, so that’s why I went with this one. Also, despite some of my culinary successes of late (bacon beets), I have had a few massive failures (pumpkin cookies), so I approached country fried steak with no small amount of trepidation, thinking it would be best if I avoided nonsense.

Ingredients

• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 pound round steak, cut into 4 (4-ounce) pieces

(I deliberated at the grocery store for a long time about what cut of meat to buy: a big round steak to cut into four pieces or four smaller pieces….I went with four smaller pieces)

• Salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 egg, beaten
• 3 cups plus 3 tablespoons milk
• 1 1/2 cups plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Country Fried Steak

• Heat the oil in a heavy 9-inch cast iron skillet, to 360 degrees F.
• Using a meat mallet pound out the meat.

(Country fried steak is a really great meal to make if you’re pissed or anxious or if someone has just cut you off in traffic, because pounding meat is a remarkably cathartic exercise in releasing aggression. I highly recommend it. I wasn’t mad that day, but I totally filed that little bit of useful info for use at a later date when one of you assholes naysays my awesome project.)

• Season the steak with salt and pepper.

(A better cook than me would have experimented with seasonings here, but I’m still me and am pretty sure I forgot to do this part.)

• Combine the egg with 3 tablespoons of the milk.
• Put 1 1/2 cups of the flour in a shallow pan and season with salt and pepper.
• Dredge the steaks in the flour, coating each piece evenly and tapping off any excess.

(I smirked at the use of the word ‘dredge’ here.)

• Drip the steak in the egg wash, coating it completely and letting the excess drip off.
• Dredge again in the flour, shaking off any excess.

(I smirked again here. I’m just saying, I don’t think people of yesteryear would have called the batter process “dredging.” So I did think this part of the recipe was a little nonsensical, but that’s fine, Emeril, you have your own restaurant and a toothpaste commercial and I have a blog detailing my ignorance with excruciating specificity, so I say you can call it whatever the shit you want. Dredge away.)

• Fry the steaks in the hot oil, until golden brown on each side, about 3 minutes.
• Remove and drain on paper towels.
• Season with salt and pepper.

(Oh look…another opportunity for me to forget to season the meat.)

Gravy

• Carefully pour off the oil, leaving behind about 1/4 cup of the oil along with the brown bits.
• Over medium heat, add the remaining 3 tablespoons flour and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, whisking constantly.
• Add the remaining 3 cups milk, 1/2 cup at a time, whisking constantly.
• Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium-low.
• Season with salt and plenty of pepper. (I remembered the salt and pepper here! Yay me!)
• Cook for 8 to 10 minutes, whisking constantly. (Ouch.)
• The gravy should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
• If it is too thick, add a little water to thin it.
• Serve the fried steak and gravy with mashed potatoes and green beans. (Or cauliflower.)

When Jon and Melissa arrived for dinner I was just finishing the meat pounding process. Wow. I loved that a little too much. Then I made an assembly line of the ingredients for country fried steak and one by one I “dredged” the meat in flour, then coated them with egg and milk, then dredged them in flour again, then dropped them in the super hot oil on the stove. I looked around the room at David, Jon and Melissa, and when no one objected to anything I’d done, I realized, Bam! I was frying some country steak. And then I lost my shit. For real. I was so excited that I was making one of my most all-time favorite meals forever in the whole universe right there in my very own kitchen all by myself that I could hardly contain my excitement. I jumped up and down. And I jumped some more. And I kept jumping and bouncing (which was not unlike my totally fly dance moves some of you may have been fortunate enough to witness in the recent past) until David said, “Wow, you haven’t been this excited about any of your vegetables.” I mean, it was country fried steak, yo.

But then I started making the gravy, which made bouncing difficult since it required standing stationary at the stove and whisking (“constantly”) for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. My excitement over the country fried steak waned considerably as I stood there whisking and my friends moved about the house, doing fun things other than whisking. I was reminded of pumpkin cookies when I was tethered to the kitchen while my friends were engaged in 100 percent awesomeness in places far, far away from the kitchen. Here I was again, shackled to the stove. Ugh. Gravy. Terrible.

Like three years later when the gravy was finally done, we set the dining room table and fixed our plates with the world’s most awesome homemade country fried steak and gravy (second to Melanie’s mom’s). Then I remembered the cauliflower. Damn.

But it was great! Damn you, Dad! (I’m sorry, I’m just kidding, I didn’t mean it.) Cauliflower smothered in cheese is really great. It’s not unlike…broccoli smothered in cheese, which I quite like. What’s the big deal, Dad?

battle 15–day 1–sweet potato

In case any of you actually read this regularly and have noticed posts have become slightly more infrequent in the last few weeks, let me catch you up on what’s happening with Julie v. Veggies right now. You may remember that I had a minor (major) panic attack when summer turned to winter and the vegetables went to shit. That slowed my enthusiasm significantly. Then pumpkin week happened, which picked up my spirits, but then my vacation happened, which put the brakes on the speed I picked up from pumpkin.  In the midst of my vacay exhaustion—and, might I add, the time change, which I hate (seriously, fall, WTF)—I discovered I had one vegetable on the list twice and one week on the list with no vegetable at all.

The project is kicking my ass a little. I’m not saying vegetables are beating me, I’m just saying the project could be a little nicer. Project, back off a little, eh?

So here’s where we are on the schedule now: I’m all caught up on pumpkin and kohlrabi; cauliflower happened next, and even though I have done it I haven’t written about yet; I have a week off (this week); and sweet potato is scheduled for next week to coincide with Thanksgiving. I was going to use this off week to catch up on posts, but instead I started early with sweet potatoes. So I’m going to simultaneously try to catch up and tell you how it’s going with sweet potatoes.

Another thing that happened in the last couple of weeks was David and I got a new housemate. Remember Christa from squash casserole night? Christa has been following the blog very closely and was so worried the project would eventually get the best of me if I kept fucking things up in the kitchen as regularly as I have been, that she thought it was best for everyone if she just moved in to show me how it’s done. And Christa knows how it’s done. Holy good goddamn dinner. The woman can cook.

Monday was supposed to be the first night of my off week, but Christa had brought home some locally grown sweet potatoes, educated me on the difference between conventional and local or organic sweet potatoes (which I totally knew), and started dreaming up all the things we could do with said sweet potatoes. I just watched it all unfold in awe. I was in a bit of a trance and secretly strategizing ways to keep Christa forever, when she whispered (or maybe e-mailed) the words ‘grass-fed brisket.’ I snapped to attention and said fuck my week off, we’re having meat and potatoes, my friends.

The challenge with meat-and-sweet-potato Monday was that one of my many, many, many vegetarian friends was joining us for dinner. I don’t know how, as carnivorous as I am, I have managed to collect so many vegetarians, but I’m sort of swimming in them. And if there’s one thing they’ve taught me it’s that they do require, for nutrition and other purposes, meals more substantial than meat-and-potatoes-minus-the-meat. I racked my brain for things vegetarians eat and asked our dinner companion, Vegetarian Erin, “Um, how about some tofu?” That seriously happened.

But Christa, because she’s amazing, said, “What if we do sweet potato quesadillas?” Obviously.

Then she started pulling things out of drawers and cabinets—utensils I couldn’t identify, spices I’ve never heard of, food I didn’t know we had—waved a magic wand and made the most spectacular, magical meal of sweet potato-y, black bean-y, habanero pepper-y, garlic-y, cheesy quesadillas. And mine had brisket. Wonderful. Heavenly. Too good.

I have to say, even though this project is kicking my ass a little, I have eaten better in the last three months than any other single period in my life. I don’t hate it.

And Christa may or may not forevermore be chained to a chair in my basement. You don’t know.

battle 13–day 2–kohlrabi

Even though I didn’t hate kohlrabi faux fries, they weren’t my favorite either. I figured I couldn’t really make a definitive call on kohlrabi after only one so-so night with it, so I decided to go for round two to see if preparing it in a more kohlrabi-ish fashion would help it act right and find a permanent place in my diet. What to do…what to do…

Fry it, of course.

When I was e-looking for the best way to fry kohlrabi, I found this awesome food blog created by a fellow Georgian, and decided to use her recipe for kohlrabi fritters because she said this: “I justify frying them as healthy because, well, they’re not potatoes.”

That’s right, my fellow Georgia blogger friend. They’re not potatoes, they’re kohlrabis.

We invited our friends Tom and Melissa B. over for kohlrabi fritter night. Tom is sort of an inconsistent naysayer, but a naysayer, I would say, of the worst ilk. I think he thinks conquering vegetables is a worthwhile endeavor and he’s even contributed some pretty great recipes to the project (the arugula sandwich was his idea, and it’s one of my favorites now), but he cannot understand why anyone in the world—other than my mom (hi Mom)—would read this blog. He goes on and on about the pointlessness of it all and wonders out loud way too frequently how anyone could possibly be interested in this, even though he’s never even read it. If any of you ever see Tom on the street, kick him in the shins. Melissa B., on the other hand, is a relatively consistent supporter who somehow manages to simultaneously teeter on the verge of naysaying (a fact I mostly overlook because I like her so much more than Tom. What? It’s not like he’s ever going to see this). She offers recipe ideas all the time (she rescued me from collard week with that amazing gratin), has occasionally been known to read the blog (the initiation of which she and her friends encouraged in the first place), and has found me when I was lost in the grocery store (more than once), but she largely detests most of the vegetables on the list and sends me little reminders about how awful each week will be. “Squash! Why did you have to start the project with the worst veggie of all?”

Still, they’re great friends of ours and we’ve shared some really good times over food, so when I know I’ve got something good on the agenda, I get them in on it. And I was pretty sure kohlrabi fritters were going to be good.

If only they were.

Melissa and I sent the boys out back to grill some meat, and she entertained me in the kitchen while I prepared the fritters. I really wanted them to look just like they did in A Hungry Bear’s photos but from the very start I deviated substantially from AHB’s recipe, I’d never fried anything on the stove before, and I’m pretty sure I heard my Fry Daddy beckon to me longingly (Juliiiie, Juuuuuulie), so I started taking bets from myself about how far I would get into making the fritters before I scrapped them and dumped the whole mess into my Fry Daddy. Fry Daddy Julie had a 2 to 1 advantage over Fritter Julie, but… I have a soft spot in my heart for the underdog, so I put my money on Fritter Julie and kept at it with the fritters.

The main problem with the fritter recipe, as you may have noticed, was all the fucking onions. I mean, I think she had like 12 kinds of onions in there. WTF Hungry Bear? In considering a good substitute for the onions I went through my list of things that make vegetables better: meat and cheese. My dinner crew that night disputed that meat and cheese are equal substitutes for onions, but when I threatened to call them out as naysayers they changed their tune. Since we had a bunch of meat on the grill, I went with cheese for the fritters.

I grated the kohlrabi and some cheese, mashed it together, added some salt and garlic pepper, and formed some patties that looked suspiciously like potato pancakes. I pushed that thought out of my mind. I dropped those babies in the oil I’d been heating on the stove and started frying kohlrabi. And it looked great! Meanwhile the conversation around me occasionally turned to how much my kohlrabi fritters looked like potato fritters or potato pancakes. When we talked about whether cheese was the right idea, someone said, well when I make potato pancakes…. And when we talked about what condiment would go best with the kohlrabi fritters, someone said, well I don’t know about kohlrabi, but when I’ve had potato fritters….

Grrr.

In the end, my kohlrabi fritters looked a lot like A Hungry Bear’s kohlrabi fritters, even sans the onions. I removed them from the stove, laid them all pretty like on our plates next to some big hunks of meat, and we dug in. And then we all looked at each other, all four of us thinking the exact same thing. Kohlrabi fritters don’t taste anything like potato pancakes. Stupid kohlrabi.

I tried my best. I smeared a dizzying array of unlikely condiments on my fritter, I added more cheese, I drowned it in salt. But somehow the expectation or hope that it would taste one way made its actual taste that much more displeasing, like when beets didn’t taste like cranberry sauce.

Pretend Vegetable Lover But Really Fellow Vegetable Hater Melissa actually loved it. She kept calling it karabi. “I love karabi!” For the record, she also calls karate karabi, so I’m not sure she knew we were talking about the food, and I’m not sure she knew they weren’t potatoes.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a draw. That was the last of the kohlrabi we had in the house and since it was such a chore to find it in the first place, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put energy into buying more. I mean, I fried it, what were the chances it was going to get better? I know not everyone agrees with Julie’s rules, and that’s fine for you, but since this was Swiss Chard Week No. 1 anyway, I’m just going to give myself a pat on the back for giving kohlrabi—a vegetable no one even gives a shit about anyway—another go and move on.

battle 13–day 1–kohlrabi

I got home Monday night from my super awesome vacation and I was beat from all that relaxing, so I took Tuesday off and started last week’s veggie on Wednesday. I checked the list and discovered it was Swiss chard. I groaned. I already know I’m going to hate Swiss chard because it’s not cheese. I scrolled through the list to see if I could find something more interesting to look forward to. When I reached the end of the list I noticed that Swiss chard appears again in the penultimate (yeah, I said it) week of the project. Huh. This must have been what Nascar Patterson was talking about when he said one of the veggies was on the list twice; funny how I overlooked his comment at the time because I didn’t care (i.e., I couldn’t possibly have made a mistake). So, either I really had my doubts about Swiss chard when I set up the schedule and thought I needed to give myself two tries, or I made a mistake. Obviously it was because I had my doubts.

Then I remembered that I never was able to find kohlrabi during beet-and-kohlrabi week, and even though I was sort of stoked about skipping it altogether, I thought, grrr, maybe this would be a good time to try to find it again. So, Swiss Chard Week No. 1 became Kohlrabi Week Do-over.

I was still licking my wounds from the various pumpkin fiascos (…I might have left out the part about abandoning the cookies while the last batch was still in the oven…), so I sent David to the farmers’ market in search of kohlrabi. Really, folks, I know better by now.

And. He. Found. It.

I can’t tell you how excited I was, after weeks of this saga, that he fucking found it. And I’m using “found” in the strictest sense of the word—like discovered treasure—because it was neither in the area where it should have been stocked, nor was it spelled right, nor did anyone who works there know what it was (either in English or YDFM language), nor did the cashiers know what to charge him for it. David texted me with minute-by-minute updates and questions. “Are you sure it’s K-O-H-L-R-A-B-I?” I paused. Of course I’m not sure. It’s a vegetable I never knew existed before three months ago. “I’m positive.”

Now that we had kohlrabi in our possession I had to figure out what to do with it. Kohlrabi, which Google says is German for cabbage turnip, is a member of the turnip family but it is most closely related to cabbage and cauliflower. It is usually light green, but the ones I got were purple, which brought back bad beet memories. Ugh. Beets. I was relieved when I cut into them and found a white, starchy center, not unlike a potato.

I decided to roast kohlrabi the first night. I peeled them and then cut off the “woody” exterior (I basically peeled them twice). Then I sliced them into French fry-like strips, tossed them in olive oil and placed them on a cookie sheet. I roasted them for about half an hour, stirring and flipping them every few minutes in the last 10 minutes. Then I added cheese and baked them for about five more minutes. They came out looking like cheesy fries.

Here’s the thing about food that resembles other food but isn’t. It’s disappointing. Kohlrabi has a white, starchy center like a potato, but it isn’t a potato. I cut it into French fry-like strips and they came out looking like cheesy fry goodness, but they weren’t French fries. We took a bite and it tasted….not at all like the food it resembled. It tasted like kohlrabi cut into strips and roasted with cheese on it.

I mean, it wasn’t terrible. It was totally fine. I’m just not down with food that pretends to be something it’s not. Be kohlrabi, kohlrabi. I think potatoes have the market cornered on fries.

battle 12–day 3–pumpkin

Pumpkin week ended with a mini-vacation to Southern California where we planned to get our ghoul on for Halloween. We and 13 of our friends rented a totally shabby 5,000-square-foot shack on a golf course, put in many long hours of hard labor by the pool during the day, and suffered through some really boring live music at night. It was a tough gig. To relieve us of this misery, my initial plan was to bake and bring everyone pumpkin treats—pumpkin crisp and pumpkin cookies—but some last-minute packing emergencies (i.e., I didn’t start packing until the last minute) derailed that plan, so instead I took some breaks from the laborious tasks of sleeping late and lounging in the hot tub to bake the crisp and cookies in the shack’s grossly oversized kitchen.

WS Melanie gave me the recipes for both pumpkin treats, although I think at least one originated with Supporter Jenn, and before that I think they might have come from a Phish chat board (who knew people used these boards for talking about more than which version of what song they saw at what show what year under what circumstances and whether it rained?), but they were both super easy and–for my vegetarian friends, which are, I think, like, all of you–totally meatless.

This was the first time I’d cooked anything in a kitchen other than my own, which was a challenge. I thought about this earlier in the week when Lauren was making lasagna in our kitchen, because she mostly didn’t seem fazed by the fact that she was in someone else’s kitchen making this extremely complicated recipe, but when I looked around I realized it was probably because she’d brought her kitchen with her, all her own pots, pans and utensils. I mean, she even brought her own casserole dish. Pfft. I have a casserole dis… nope. I absolutely do not own the size of casserole dish Lauren used for pumpkin lasagna. Oh, snap.

Of course, before I got lost in that gigantic kitchen, I got lost in the grocery store, which I thought was totally reasonable since I was practically in a foreign country. PROJECT 29 to 30 Steph, who had already done her new thing for the day, turned her attention to helping me find evaporated milk. No shit, it took us 20 minutes and walking up and down the same four aisles 12 times before she finally found it on the coffee aisle. For real? When I bought evaporated milk a few days earlier in Atlanta (before the packing emergency), I found it on the baking aisle, so I thought it couldn’t possibly just be my grocery store ignorance that had us wandering the store for so many minutes. To soothe my ego about this recurring issue, I did some investigating on getting lost in the grocery store and found this awesome piece about placement of grocery stock. Suddenly I felt a lot less bad about all the times I’ve been lost at the farmers’ market. From now on whenever I can’t find something I’m just going to blame it on the stock boys. Assholes.

Back at the house I fumbled around the imposing kitchen looking for all the baking accoutrements I would need for my first pumpkin treat: pumpkin crisp. Despite its impressive demeanor, the kitchen of our casa de fancy pants was seriously lacking in cooking and baking supplies. I imagine the people who live in these kinds of houses don’t do much cooking. They have people for that. Fortunately for me, I can barely tell one kitchen item from another, so using a broiler pan as a cookie sheet seemed completely acceptable to me. Our only obstacle, which threatened to be relatively major, was that no one could figure out how to work the can opener. Actually, we weren’t even sure the object we were using was a can opener or a cork screw; when we finally determined it was probably the former it became even more frustrating when it turned out to be nothing more than a can-opener-or-corkscrew-shaped paperweight, since accessing the contents of the can was kind of crucial for assembling the pumpkin treats.  You know. Pumpkin.

Several people had gathered in the kitchen at this point—either because they were shocked I was actually awake before noon (Sarah F), or this was the first time they had actually seen me cook (Sarah F), or because actual real breakfast food was happening on the stove (everyone else)—and it was someone among this group who finally noticed that an electric can opener had been sitting on the counter the whole time, laughing at us as we each took turns fighting with the can opener/corkscrew paperweight. Whatever.

Things moved at lightning speed after that. Ingredients mixed. Mixture in oven. Pumpkin crisp baked, removed and summarily devoured. Because the crisp was so easy to make after those first few hiccups, it made me think about how easy my life will be once I know where every single thing is in the grocery store and once I have every single kitchen item at my disposal forever until eternity. I can cut prep time on everything down to like 30 seconds. This was such a great daydream. Until I made the fucking cookies. Goddamn fucking pumpkin cookies.

I took a break between the crisp and the cookies. A long break. I consumed a few adult beverages. And sat by the pool a little. And lounged in the hot tub a bit. And took a nap. By the time I got around to the cookies, I was A) overconfident and B) drunk. The thing about cookies is you have to have sustained interest in tending to them in fits and starts: one batch in and one batch out, remove some to cool, put more on the cookie sheet, another batch in, another batch out. Blah, blah, blah. But there’s always a weird time period of five or seven minutes in between with nothing to do; it’s just short enough that you can’t really start a new chore or project, but just long enough to be bored to tears standing in the kitchen by yourself. Cookies really aren’t for me. I read over the recipe again while the first batch was in the oven, trying to entertain myself at my little pity party in the kitchen. It was then that I discovered the flaw in cooking while overconfident and under the influence (CWOUI): things such as, like, measurements get blurry but you don’t care. I might have accidentally added twice the amount of pumpkin the recipe called for. Oops.

To fix this I just started adding shit to the remaining batter. To be fair, this little revelation made my pity party a lot more interesting. A little more flour here, a dash more of whatever else was in the recipe there, and voila….fuck, more batter. More cookies. More time standing here by myself. I really hate baking cookies.

Pumpkin crisp, in. Pumpkin cookies, out.

**********************************

Pumpkin Crisp

Prep: 15 min.; Bake: 1 hr., 5 min.; Stand: 10 min.

1  (15-ounce) can pumpkin
1  cup evaporated milk
1  cup sugar
1  teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2  teaspoon ground cinnamon
1  (18.25-ounce) package butter-flavored yellow cake mix (I used Betty Crocker Super Moist Butter Recipe Yellow Cake Mix, per the original recipe’s suggestion)
1  cup chopped pecans (I skipped the pecans, which WS Melanie said is the “crisp” part, but eh, it was still delicious)
1  cup butter, melted
Whipped cream (optional) (I didn’t do this optional part, but I’m sure it would have been great)
Ground nutmeg (optional) (I don’t think I did this either, I don’t like nutmeg)

Stir together first 5 ingredients. Pour into a lightly greased 13- x 9-inch baking dish. Sprinkle cake mix evenly over pumpkin mixture; sprinkle evenly with pecans. Drizzle butter evenly over pecans.  Bake at 350° for 1 hour to 1 hour and 5 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from oven, and let stand 10 minutes before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature with whipped cream, if desired. Sprinkle with nutmeg, if desired.

battle 12–day 2 1/2–pumpkin (lasagna recipe)

Hi friends. I’m still here. And even though pumpkin week totally revived me from my winter vegetable funk, I promptly went on vacation to sunny southern Cali and left half my brain there. Whenever it decides to rejoin me, I’ll post more updates about the cooking I did out there and what I’ve done since I’ve been home (I found kohlrabi!).

In the meantime, I’ve had a lot of friendly and insistent reminders to post the pumpkin lasagna recipe. It was one of the best meals of the whole project so I encourage everyone to do it while pumpkins are still in season (the cooking ones, not the smashing ones). Many thanks again to BFF Lauren for this gem.

Northern Italian Pumpkin Lasagna, from “Pumpkin, A Super Food for All 12 Months of the Year”

1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, thinly sliced (Lauren skipped the onion for me)
2 lbs/4 cups fresh pumpkin, seeds and fibers removed, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp oregano
1 tsp salt
Freshly ground black pepper
½ lb bulk sweet Italian chicken sausage (Lauren will have to verify what she used; I think it was special)
1 large clove garlic, minced

12 oven-ready/no-boil lasagna noodles* (Lauren boiled whole-wheat noodles)

Béchamel sauce:
5 tbsp butter
6 tbsp unbleached, all-purpose flour
5 c nonfat milk
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp white pepper
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
3 c grated part-skim mozzarella
1 ½ c freshly grated parmesan

*Using no-cook noodles cuts out one step; however, if using regular noodles, cook and drain them and reduce the amount of sauce: use 4 tbsp butter, 5 tbsp flour, 4 c milk.

1. Heat the butter and oil in a large sauté pan or skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for five minutes, or until wilted. (I say skip the onion. Yuck.)
2. Stir in the pumpkin and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with the oregano, the salt, and a few grinds of pepper. Add the sausage and cook until it loses its color, about 5 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook for 1 minute longer. Set aside.
3. Meanwhile, make the sauce. Melt the butter in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour. Cook for 1 minute, until bubbly. Whisk in the milk and cook, stirring, until mixture thickens and bubbles, about 5 minutes. Add the salt, pepper and nutmeg, and set aside.
4. Combine the two cheeses in a medium bowl.
5. Heat the oven to 375.
6. To assemble the lasagna, spray a 9-by-13-by-2-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Ladle ¾ cup of sauce on the bottom of the pan and top with 3 noodles, placed crosswise.
7. Pour another ¾ cup of sauce over the noodles, then 1/3 of the pumpkin filling. Sprinkle 1 cup of the cheese mixture over the filling. Repeat the layers of sauce, noodles, filling, and cheese twice. Top this with the remaining noodles, pour over the remaining sauce, and sprinkle with the remaining cheese. The lasagna should look soupy.
8. Spray a sheet of aluminum foil with nonstick spray and cover the top of the pan, with the oiled side facing down. Bake for 45 minutes, uncover, and bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until lightly browned and bubbly. Let sit for 15 minutes before cutting and serving.

Holy complicated. I’m so glad Lauren made this for me. Truly, it was worth every ounce of her effort.

battle 12–days 1 & 2–pumpkin

All I have to say is, thank god for pumpkin week. And all BFF Lauren had to say was, it was a good idea in theory…

Pfft. I thought scheduling pumpkins for Halloween week was a great idea since the stores and churches and schools and farms would be bursting with fresh patches of big, orange squashies. Then again, the only pumpkin item on my agenda that actually called for fresh pumpkin was the lasagna Lauren has been planning since the project started, so it wasn’t likely I would be dallying in any pumpkin patches and if there were gonna be any consequences of my bright idea (which there obviously were), I probably wouldn’t have to bear them.

Monday was still gloomy and gray so I spent most of that day thinking and planning (i.e., moaning and groaning) rather than shopping and cooking. While I was thinking, planning, moaning and groaning, I decided I should incorporate into pumpkin week the three most culturally prominent pumpkin foods: pumpkin pie, pumpkin seeds and Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte. Then I laughed. Like I’m going to make a pie. But I can probably manage seeds and a latte, and two outta three ain’t bad (thank you, Meatloaf).

At happy hour on Monday with Erin and Amber at the Spanish-Venezuelan-Cuban fusion Mezcalito’s in Oakhurst, I actually discovered a salad with pumpkin seeds (I mean, it’s not like I was digging for gold, it was just right there on the menu). So I added grilled steak to that bitch and knocked Day 1 out of the park. To be fair, they were just seeds and I couldn’t even really see them, so I’m not positive the kitchen remembered to put them on my salad, but it was a good try.

I was most looking forward to pumpkin lasagna on Day 2, though, which I really intended to be my inaugural pumpkin meal. BFF Lauren has been talking about pumpkins and pumpkin lasagna for weeks now, ever since she discovered a cookbook with nothing but pumpkin recipes (an entire book), because apparently pumpkin is not just a vegetable (and even that may be debatable), it’s a super food. I don’t know what a super food is, but it sounds important. Each time Lauren has made pumpkin lasagna she tells Facebook, and everyone there seems to agree it sounds delicious. So. Bring on the deliciousness.

Except for that one part about the consequences of my bright ideas…

OK, but for real, if you were planning this project, wouldn’t you have put pumpkin during Halloween week? It’s just fucking clever.

So the thing about pumpkins is they come in various sizes, most of which are appropriate for cooking, except at Halloween when their only sizes are big, bigger and monstrosities, which are really only appropriate for carving and smashing. Obviously I wouldn’t know this because when would I ever have had occasion to cook with a pumpkin before? And frankly, I didn’t know stores sold pumpkin at any time of the year other than Halloween. So actually, I thought I was doing pumpkin week a favor by situating it at the end of October. You’re welcome, pumpkin week.

But, eh, sorry, Lauren.

So Lauren, who had planned her day around pre-prepping the rather laborious pumpkin lasagna construction, wound up a bit perplexed by the scarcity of the cooking pumpkins amongst all the carving pumpkins. She got a carving pumpkin anyway and called me to let me know the situation and that it might be a little longer before she got to my house, like I had any fucking clue what she was talking about.

Meanwhile, back at my place, I served a pumpkin seed appetizer (it was just pumpkin seeds in a fancy bowl) to David and my sister, Bethany; played loud music; and showed off my best dance moves while they ignored me and talked about esoteric bullshit. Whatever, yo. It’s pumpkin week.

Lauren called again to say the larger pumpkin wasn’t working, so her wife, Melissa, had taken pity on her and had gone out and found some smaller ones. She was prepped and ready to go, so she and her pumpkin lasagna parts were officially on their way.

Pumpkin lasagna has a lot of parts. I’ve discovered that most of the recipes of this project that have been really worth it have had a lot of parts. And pumpkin lasagna… so fucking worth it.

We spent the next hour doing what has come to be my favorite part of this project: spending time in the kitchen with friends and family around warmth and yummy smells. The buttery, orange pumpkin sautéing on the stove and the creamy white béchamel simmering in Lauren’s bright red pot were the perfect antidote to my winter vegetable blues. Suddenly I was transformed into a cozy snow bunny, dreaming of hot chocolate and roasting marshmallows by an open fire on chilly nights, bundled in sweaters and hats and scarves, mmmmmmmmm. I love pumpkin week!

Lauren carefully layered all the parts—whole wheat noodles, sautéed pumpkin and chicken sausage, béchamel, and mozzarella and parmesan cheese—in a casserole dish and popped that prettiness in the oven. When it came out all pretty and golden 45 minutes later we ooh’d and ah’d. It was beautiful. A fucking masterpiece. Lauren was not surprised.

“I make pretty shit.”

And I win shit. We’re such a good team.

battle 11–day 1–bok choy

Is it just me or are fall and winter vegetables a hundred percent more boring than summer vegetables? Also, is it weird that I have an opinion about that? I think it is.

So last Monday was my sixth wedding anniversary—happy anniversary to us!—and my clever husband took me to my favorite restaurant, Watershed (which I classify differently from my all-time most favorite eating establishment in the whole wide world forever to infinity because one is a restaurant and one is a “joint,” although we did eat at my all-time most favorite eating establishment in the whole wide world forever to infinity one year for our anniversary and it was lovely). Watershed, of course, has the world’s best vegetable plate. Sometimes. Like, in-the-summer sometimes. On Monday Watershed’s vegetable plate had field peas, green beans, collard greens (the disgusting kind), fried okra (OK, well that was delicious), and, horror of horrors, roasted tomatoes. I say why mess with a good thing when tomatoes are perfect, perfect, perfect right off the vine. I mean, perfect. I sat there depressed while the dark, gloominess of autumn and its boring vegetables chilled my bones. Roasted tomatoes. Ugh.

Fine, it wasn’t that bad, but I’ve had some really shitty vegetables three weeks in a row—beets, collards and now bok choy—and it’s hard to keep up the enthusiasm when the hits keep coming. Seriously, beets? Gross. Thank god for pumpkin next week; that should be a gimme.

I recovered from my trauma over the end of the summer vegetable plate at Watershed and got back to business with bok choy on Tuesday. Many thanks to Elwood for finding me a recipe with ham hocks and bok choy; many curses at the farmer’s market for giving me ham hocks that look like lumps of pig butt. My Biggest Supporter Melissa R. and Infinite Naysayer Jon offered to do a stir fry with their wok, since that’s all anyone seems to make with bok choy, but they weren’t available until Thursday so I had to come up with something else for the next two days. Google and I spent a lot of time together Tuesday looking for creative ways to eat bok choy, and here’s what we came up with: stir fry. I did find one Web site that said I could deep fry it and I about fell out of my chair I was so excited, but  when I got further into the recipe it said the method for deep frying bok choy is to just fry it longer in a stir fry. Booo.

I was getting kind of cranky and about to give up altogether (we were within two hairs of my first defeat…and by forfeit, no less) when David reminded me that we have a wok-like contraption (like, how would I know this?) and then said that he would be happy to make dinner while I sat on the sofa and sulked. So my first almost-defeat turned into David’s first battle for the blog. Way to take one for the team, DP.

I was really only able to sulk for a minute or two before getting bored with my self pity (I didn’t have an audience, so it wasn’t really worth the effort); I went into the kitchen to see if there was anything I could do to help. There wasn’t. So I hovered. While David cooked I thought about all the things I’d learned on Google that day that I’d forgotten to tell him, like about separating the greens from the stalks and cooking the stalks first, but I didn’t want to nitpick, and since neither of us would have known the difference between well-prepared bok choy and chewy, overcooked bok choy I just kept my trap shut and smiled my I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile.

When he was done, David took extra care to lay out his stir fry so I could take pretty pictures, but then discovered what I struggled with early on in this project: veggie sides do not a meal make, and meals take planning, so…. We had turkey sandwiches and bok choy stir fry. Yum.

The bok choy was eh. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it, but if I encounter it again I’m pretty confident I can eat it without complaint. Mostly I think I wasn’t keen on its pairing with a turkey sandwich, but I really appreciated not having to cook while I was in my post-summer-vegetable funk, so I’m calling it won and moving on to pumpkins, which I think will get me into the fall spirit in a really yummy way.

battle 10–day 1 and only, after party–collards

First of all, I’d like to just go over the rules of Julie v. Veggies again. Maybe some of you are new to this project or maybe some of you are steadfast naysayers and have some unreasonable reason to think I can’t win everything all the time, which I can, so we’re just going to go over this again, slowly.

1. First and foremost, I make up the rules and I can do whatever I want.
2. Generally, the week should go like this: I eat a vegetable and if I don’t like it, then I keep trying until I come up with something palatable; this is pretty standard since I can’t usually stomach, ugh, new vegetables, ack, right away. However, on the random weeks I win early and can add a new vegetable to my diet Monday or Tuesday, then I have the rest of the week to do whatever I want. I can write about what assholes you naysayers are, heap lavish praise on you supporters for being my favorite people in the whole world, or daydream about having tea and crumpets with the Queen of England. I can also keep on eating that vegetable, because if you’ll recall from three milliseconds ago, I’ve already added it to my diet permanently, but if for some reason I don’t love the next dish I make with it, that doesn’t mean I suddenly lose; it doesn’t negate my earlier win. That’s like saying just because I don’t like onions on my hamburgers I don’t like hamburgers. Complete nonsense.
3. Let me just take this opportunity to reiterate that I make up the rules and I can do whatever the fuck I want.

Now that we’re clear, we can revisit collard week for a second. Briefly. IhadregularolecollardsonSundayandtheyweresohorribleIwantedtogougemyeyeballsoutalittlebit. Next up, bok choy.

OK, fine. Since I cleared collard greens with such success on Collard Saturday, I figured, hey, they’re a part of my diet now, why not just give standard greens a little try, what could it hurt? JVV Newcomer Mark suggested trying the greens at my all-time most favorite eating establishment in the whole wide world forever to infinity, Daddy D’z BBQ Joint, which I took under advisement, and then went to the Midway Pub instead to watch the Steelers win some shit. I actually didn’t really plan to eat the greens at Midway, I was really only going to eat greens on Sunday if we went to my all-time most favorite eating establishment in the whole wide world forever to infinity, because chances were they would do them right at a barbeque joint, but the glutton for punishment in me took over and before I could stop myself I had ordered them and they were in front of me and I was trying to decide if I should have a pretend fainting spell or just fucking eat them. I was very, very close to pretend fainting.

Worried Supporter Melanie (looking particularly worried) assured me the only way those awful things were going down was by dousing them in hot and pepper sauce. Meanwhile, Supporter Jenn stuck to a “if you have to drown them in sauce, what’s the point, screw em” mantra, which I’ve been saying all along about all the vegetables, thank you very much. Still, I added both hot and pepper sauce with many, many shakes. Lots of sauce. Lots.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Terrible. Horrible.  No good. Very bad. Gag.

So Melanie said, “Give em here.” Then she lifted one lonely green out of the heap, held it to the light and inspected it very closely….for bacon. The bacon was its only savior! Now they’re really going to be awful. She ate them. Then her eyes started to water. Too much pepper sauce. “My mouth is on fire.”

Traditional collards, out. Collard gratin, in. I still fucking win.

battle 10–day 1 and only–collards

When I realized late Friday how much effort I was going to have to put into preparing collards, Collard Friday very quickly turned into Collard Saturday. I was still committed to my one-day battle and I wanted to do it right, so I planned to spend all Saturday afternoon in the kitchen with collards. Mmmmm.

Saturday morning I went to the farmer’s market. And I might have gone by myself. But before you naysay anything about broken promises and whatnot, I actually found every single thing on my list.

So, have you ever seen a collard before? Or a bunch of collards? And if someone said to you, “three to four bunches of collards,” would you know how much that is? I walked up to the collard bin at the farmer’s market and I was the only person standing there for a minute (thinking to myself, of course I’m the only person buying collards because they’re goddamn disgusting). Before me were the biggest, hugest leafy green leafy things I’ve ever seen. Huge. Gigantic. Big. Bigger than me, big. Big. Several big stalky stems were bound together, which didn’t make sense to me, so I thought, I’ll just take those apart and take what I want. And you know I really only wanted one. But something about how I had to very laboriously separate the one stalky bit from its stalky bit friends wasn’t altogether intuitive, plus my recipe called for “three to four bunches of collards,” so then I started to really study the stalks and stems and binding of the stalks and stems. Were the big stalk-like things that narrowed down into many, many stems a bunch? Or were the eight or nine of those things bound together considered a bunch? If that was the case, could I possibly need 30 pounds of collards? I was beginning to feel like it was a mistake to come by myself this time, not because I couldn’t find what I was looking for, but because I wouldn’t be able to carry what I found.

As I stood there deliberating over how many collards to get, several more people finally came up and started putting bunches in their baskets. So I just watched them. The lady next to me turned to a plastic bag dispenser behind us; apparently collards are so big they get their own supersized bag. I watched as she pulled one off and then picked through the collards until she found a set (still not sure on the bunch business at this point) she liked (also not sure what her criteria was) and dropped it in her McBag. I followed suit. I got a big bag, picked through the collards, inspected them for nothing at all, chose one that looked like all the other ones, dropped it in my basket, and moved on to the rest of my list. A slight panic about Collard Saturday began to set in, but I suppressed the urge to let it take over. I mean, collards are so big and so green. And also so big. But you know, I can totally do this.

The next place I went in the farmer’s market was the meat counter for some ham hocks. I’ve never bought ham hocks before, not because I have anything against them, but mostly because I’ve only really ever heard of them being used to make vegetables taste better, and well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I don’t eat many vegetables. So I said to Mr. Meat Guy, two ham hocks, please. I had no idea what to expect, and actually, Elwood’s recipe called for smoked ham hocks and I was kind of hoping that’s what I’d get. Instead Mr. Meat Guy gave me two raw pieces of pork that looked like every other piece of raw pork I’ve ever seen. This was not an exciting experience. Nothing to see here, people.

It got a lot more exciting when I got home and realized hoping for smoked meat and not getting it meant I was going to have to smoke it myself. Of course, I didn’t actually realize that until I had a pot of simmering chicken broth on the stove to which I was about to add some really, super raw ham hocks. Yum.

I paused, and I thought for a second. I looked at the raw ham in my hands and thought, wait a minute, these ham hocks aren’t smoked! And then I envisioned myself firing up my smoker and spending the next six years smoking those hocks and the four years after that simmering collards, and blah, no thanks. I was pretty sure I was going to hate them to begin with, there was no way I was putting all that effort into something that fucking disgusting. (I mean, come on, Elwood, even you weren’t sure these were going to be good….I know we have faith in meat and beer, and I do, I totally do, but….you should have seen those fugly collards.)

Plan B. I was trying to knock these out in one day; obviously there was a Plan B.

Plan B was Alton Brown’s mustard green gratin, but with collards instead of mustard greens. I loved this idea, especially because it was a totally different way to prepare collards, it had my most favorite food word of all time—gratin—and it didn’t have meat in it. OK, I didn’t love that part, but we were going to Melandy’s to watch the Cocks get their asses handed to them Saturday night, and since WS Melanie is a vegetarian it was better for this battle to be won sans meat.

Once I read over the collard green gratin recipe a hundred times and did some Googling on how to clean and prepare collards, I determined to finally settle the bunch question for myself. I decided one of the big stalky bits with a ‘bunch’ of little stems is a bunch, because this is reasonable, and if a usual recipe calls for three or four or five or six bunches and they were grouped together that way at the farmer’s market, then the individual pieces are probably a bunch. Deductive reasoning is what that is, right there. Also, I got a little dizzy when I thought about having to work with much more than three or four of those stalky bits, so I got comfortable with my answer and didn’t verify with Google because if there was an answer other than the one I came up with, I didn’t want to know. Finally soothed about this daylong mystery, I started cutting off the stalks and stems and washing the dirt (and possibly bugs, according to Google) off the leafy greens. OK, now, collards are huge and scary and they’re super time-consuming, especially for the relatively small yield you get in the end, but I found the methodical, repetitive cutting and cleaning to get them ready really relaxing. I don’t think preparing them in the future will wind up being the best use of my time, but I enjoyed the one experience I’ve had with them so far.

I finished cleaning and cutting the greens and added them to the garlic and mushrooms I was sautéing in a roasting pan on the stove. This was the first time I’ve used a roasting pan on the stove and the only one I had was way, way bigger than what the recipe called for; really, do people have multiple sizes of roasting pans? I went with it, though, and I think I did it right. Then I added the greens to the cheese mixture I’d already prepared and popped that bad boy in the oven.

Collard green gratin is great. It tasted like spinach, actually, which is one vegetable I tolerate extremely well. And when I took it to Melandy’s everyone agreed this is a perfectly acceptable way to win; I don’t have to like the other kind. And I probably won’t, so, one-day battle with collards won. Done.

I do still have those ham hocks, though, so if anyone has any idea how to marry ham hocks and bok choy, I’m all ears.