For October 29

Dinner:

Corn, Bean and Pumpkin Stew, from Deborah Madison, The Greens Cookbook

Arugula with Pecorino Romano and Roasted Walnuts

Corn-Cheese Muffins
both from Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone

During the Practice Period, we have Thursday night Sangha dinners at ZCLA. I signed up to cook this week, and based on tonight's prep and cooking, I was obviously completely crazy at the time I did this - or was I just crazy in putting together this "simple" menu? All of the recipes are from Deborah Madison, who is wonderful, and whose cookbooks are my standard references. On the other hand, while she has a cookbook that is designed for simple and quick cooking, none of these recipes are from that book! Anyway, two of these are among our very favorite recipes. The Corn, Bean and Pumpkin Stew is an annual Thanksgiving weekend recipe that I make. It is a wonderful, low fat, high fiber stew brimming with good stuff - corn hand cut off the cob, pinto beans, chunks of sugar pie pumpkin cut and cooked, a home made spice melange...yum. I am making some cheese-corn muffins to go with it, which is a new recipe. And the arugula salad is a specialty of Andrew's - a really good salad with grated romano and roasted walnuts. The vinaigrette uses walnut oil, diced shallots, sherry vinegar and a little dijon mustard. Wonderful!

This was a labor intensive prep and cooking tonight, and it would not have been possible without Andrew being here to help. He is usually not at home now on Wednesday nights, but this week he was, and I am very lucky for that!

Now, on to the desserts....

Chocolate Cupcakes, from Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts via the New York Times food blogs

Oatmeal Applesauce Cookies, from Martha Stewart's Cookies

There is quite a difference between these two desserts this week. The cookies are very homey - you could almost call them homely. They are big, irregular, none too pretty. But they are very flavorful! They have very little fat in them - not much butter at all, with most of the moisture coming instead from the applesauce. This is an organic applesauce from a small producer. The recipe calls for the cookies to be iced, but that just wasn't happening this week. And I think we'll all survive.

The chocolate cupcakes are quite straightforward: chocolate cake, with a chocolate ganache for icing. The ganache is nice, because it has a lot of chocolate intensity, but is quite thin and doesn't pack a huge, overwhelming sugar wallop like you get on many cupcakes these days where an inch of buttercream frosting can leave you with a horrible sugar high. The recipe is from an old, 1970s classic cookbook, but was recently resurrected in a blog post at the New York Times web site.

Well, it's after 12:40 a.m., so time to sign off. Ciao!

For October 24

Vermont Maple Cookies, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

This week, ZCLA was engaged in the annual autumn sesshin or meditation retreat. So there were no cookies on Thursday night. However, on Saturday night we had a ceremony in the Zendo called Honsaku Gyocha, for which I made these cookies. The sesshin marks the end of a year of training for the Head Trainee at the Center. For the final six months of her training period, she works on a koan, and on the final day of the retreat she presents the koan, gives a talk on it, and then challenges those present to test her understanding in a ritual called Dharma Combat. Very dramatic and beautiful. That all occurred on Sunday morning, but on Saturday night, the night before, we have Honsaku Gyocha, which is a ceremony where the koan is presented, the abbot gives a few remarks, and then everyone has tea and a cookie. I was asked to make the cookies. In the end, since I was doing the sesshin, it proved a bit of a challenge time-wise, but Andrew jumped in and helped immeasurably by making the cookie dough on Friday afternoon. I baked the cookies late Friday night, was back in the Zendo at 6 a.m. Saturday morning, and iced them later on Saturday. Because the kitchen was full of people prepping for the lunch and dinner for the retreat participants, I iced in the library. The cookies and icing had a very intense maple flavor, and it lingered on long afterwards!

Anyway, this is a wonderful autumn cookie. It incarnates maple. There is a large amount of maple sugar and maple flavor in the cookie itself, and then they are iced with an icing that involves both maple syrup and maple flavor (and, of course, cream). Quite sweet, but wonderful. The cookies have a slightly crisp exterior, but a soft, almost cakey interior. The icing is not necessary, but really reinforces the maple flavor - these are a cookie where the flavors in the cooked cookie are significantly toned down from the uncooked dough, so the maple icing has a real function. Without the icing, they reminded me of a kind of maple snickerdoodle. King Arthur Flour is located in Vermont, and they know how to make a maple cookie! Kudos!

For October 15

Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts

Maple Walnut Bars, from The King Arthur Flour Baking Company

The chocolate chip cookies are a repeat. This is a nice recipe - very straightforward. This particular recipe calls for the dough to refrigerate for several hours before baking. From what I have been reading, this is now considered a better thing with many cookie recipes because it allows the fat from the butter to fully absorb with the flour. I hand cut the chocolate rather than use chips. I also used a natural brown sugar, which is much more rich and intense than the normal brown sugar, which is really just white sugar that has had molasses added back into it. The recipe calls for baking them a bit longer (apparently Wolfgang Puck likes his cookies crisp) but I shortened it because I prefer a softer, chewier cookie.

The second recipe is another nod to autumn. On the King Arthur Flour web site these are called maple walnut brownies, but that seemed such a misnomer I have changed it. More like blondies, since there is no chocolate to be found in the recipe. These have both maple syrup and maple flavoring in them, but when I baked them the maple flavor was a bit muted. Isn't it interesting how there can be these transformations between how it tastes as a dough versus as a cookie? Anyway, I then amped up the maple in the glaze, so I think that there will be no mistaking the maple aspect as a finished cookie.

It rained here in Los Angeles today - hurrah!

For October 8

Autumn has finally arrived in Los Angeles, hurrah!

This week's cookies:

Applesauce Spice Bars, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours
Cornmeal Thyme Cookies, from Martha Stewart's Cookies.

Both of these are repeats, but not for a while. The applesauce bars are an autumnal nod - they have lots of applesauce, raisins, chopped apples, pecans and spices, and are topped with a light brown sugar glaze. If you ate these anytime other than in the fall, your brain would have so much cognitive dissonance you would either go into shock or have an enlightenment experience. I'm afraid to see which it would be.

People have really enjoyed the cornmeal thyme cookies. They are a very interesting cookie, because they are quite simple and the flavors of the cornmeal, thyme and currants come through strongly. (There is not even any vanilla in them.) I am a bit ambivalent about them myself, because I often find the coarse cornmeal somewhat irritating. This time, I used 1/2 of the amount of cornmeal and then used corn flour - a very finely ground cornmeal - for the other half. This gives a more delicate consistency to the cookies, but they retain their flavor. Anyway, we'll see....

Roshi just emailed to say that I would have competition from her home grown watermelon. Harrumph. My applesauce bars sneer at her watermelon - respectfully, and bowing, of course, but sneer just the same.

As for the movie last week (benefit screening of Where The Wild Things Are), wow.

LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!!!!!

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