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!