A Hideously Unphotogenic Tamale Pie

For the past 4 months, I’ve been lying to my fiance. After a catering job, I happened to bring home a huge bag full of leftover tortilla casserole for him to — essentially — burrow into and ravage with a honey badger-like rage. Since then, I’ve been making it myself about every month or so… and for some reason, he’s persisted in calling it “tamale pie.” Our conversations tend to go like this every time:

“Hey, I made tortilla casserole.”

“Tamale pie? Yes!!”

“T-O-R-T-I-L-L-A C-A-S-S-E-R-O-L-E.”

“Tamale pie!”

“Yes. OK.”

This week, I decided to try a new tack: making anactual tamale pie. I rolled over in bed, pulled out my handy copy of America’s Test Kitchen’sSlow Cooker Revolution (just $17 on Amazon, kids!), and thumbed through to their Tamale Pie recipe. It called for such pantry stalwarts as instant polenta (what) and Minute tapioca; I called bullshit, and formulated a plan.

A lot of the recipes I found on the web suggested cornbread batter as the topper on the casserole, which seemed a little too dense for me. And also, wouldn’t that just make it a pile of chili with cornbread on top? Isn’t that just a little… stupid? So I went with polenta, but just the regular kind that you have to simmer for a half hour. If I’m gonna slave over my stove, I’m gonna slave, damn it! (But I can’t turn down a perfectly done rotisserie chicken from Holy Land! Or a jar of Rick Bayless’ enchilada sauce. Or some very seasonal canned beans and corn. Oh no sir.)

All in all, I think tamale pie, while more difficult to make than “tamale pie,” is fucking delicious. The only problem I had with the dish was its appearance. Casseroles are just so hideous. Even the fascistically styled dishes on corporate websites look like abominations of Biblical proportions. Well, ain’t no cure for ugly.

Tamale Pie

• 2 C polenta
• 1 T butter
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 C cooked chicken meats / TVP
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• A coquettish dusting of cumin
• 1 16-oz jar of enchilada sauce
• 1 15-oz can of black beans, rinsed
• 1 15-oz can of (possibly creamed) corn
• 1.5 C cheddar cheese, shredded

Preheat the oven to 375˚F. Cook the polenta in 6 cups of water. Once you get it to a boil, lower the heat and stir frequently until creamy and thick. Add salt and butter if that’s your jam. Spread half of it onto a 9″x13″ baking dish.

Saute the onion and garlic in a 2-quart pan. When vegetables become translucent, add chicken and cumin and lower heat. In about a minute, add enchilada sauce. If the mixture seems dry, add a little water. When the chicken starts to break down, add the beans and corn and turn off the heat. Mix well and ladle into the baking dish.

Spread the last half of the polenta on top of the filling. It’ll be chunky and a little hard to handle, but I just broke it up with my hands. No sweat, it’s going to be haggard anyway. Scatter the cheese on top and bake!

Tater Tot Hotdish

Sometimes I just want to tuck myself into bed with a big, cheesy plate of whatever, only reappearing in polite society on trips to the grocery store for marshmallows and booze. The noncommittal early days of winter are definitely that kind of time. Luckily for me and my bear-like tendencies, the Wisconsin Cheese Board dropped off a ton of cheese samples at work and I’ve been slowly working my way through a wedge of Marieke whole-grain mustard gouda this past week. Mmmhmm.

Last weekend, I threw a shard of my pride out the window and decided to party, Lutheran-style, by making a tater tot hotdish! My earlier foray into hotdishery amounted to a vague kind of thing that wasn’t quite the real deal. I mean, we used cream of mushroom soup, which, given the low standards of Minnesotan cuisine, qualified it as a genuine article. But I wanted to go for something iconic this time.

Instead of using cream of mushroom soup (because I am a stuck-up bitch), I whipped together a Mornay sauce with the aforementioned gouda and some Parmesan cheese. It was great, because then I didn’t have to melt cheese on top of the tater tots, which would have made them less crispy than I wanted them to be. I also went a little farther with the food snobbery and used duck fat as the base for the sauce instead of butter. Honk honk.

Tater Tot Hotdish
Serves 1 big fat fatty or 10 people

• 1 bag of tater tots
• 1-3 lbs. of diced assorted root vegetables (i.e. parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, onions…)
• 1 lb. of mushrooms, sliced
• Random herbs (thyme works great, as well as marjoram and rosemary)
• 2 T Duck fat or butter
• 2 T flour
• 1 pint of cream/milk/half and half
• Grated cheese of some kind
• Salt & pepper
• Cayenne pepper

Brown the root vegetables in a heavy-bottomed pan or pot. Once they’re toasty, add the mushrooms and herbs. Put aside.

Make the Mornay sauce by starting a roux with the fat and flour. Scald the dairy in another pan. Once the roux stops tasting like raw flour, stir in the cream or whatever and reduce. Add salt, pepper, cayenne, and cheese to taste.

Spread the cooked vegetables onto a baking dish and pour the sauce over them. Then layer the tater tots on top and throw it all into a 375-degree oven. Once the tots crisp up, you’re done! Easy peasy.

Turnips, Mushroom Bourguignon, Pierogies, and Apple Tart

Or, the Perils of Dating a Food Writer/Cook.

So I met this guy, we hit it off, and I’m basically crushin’ on him really hard. To be honest, the whole dating thing is really difficult for me. I’m terrible at selling myself, especially if I like the person I’ve met. In order to mask my acute insecurities and myriad personal inadequacies, I decided to seal the deal by making him dinner. Thank god for gourmet food goggles.

The first course was a simple plate of raw Hakurei turnips sprinkled with some fennel-citrus salt. Hakureis are really sweet (for turnips, anyway) and are just perfect as a snacking vegetable. If I had a mandoline, I would have sliced them thin and served them like sashimi, but I don’t have one. And also, it’s not the ’00s anymore.

I served Smitten Kitchen‘s vegetarian mushroom bourguignon as the main course. I was kind of a cheapo and used organic white button mushrooms instead of portobellos or criminis, but it didn’t make a big difference. Since I got a cute little bag of chervil in my CSA share this week, I chopped up a bit of it and sprinkled it on top.

The pierogies are filled with a mixture of dino kale, Yukon Gold potatoes, caramelized onions, and more Hakurei turnips. Mushroom bourguignon is a nice departure from the traditional pierogi accompaniments of sour cream or applesauce, too. All I ever want is savory, savory, savory anyway. My date, who pretty much wiped his plate clean, seemed to agree. <3

Lastly, I served up Jacques Pepin’s apple tart for dessert. The crust, a pate brisée, turned out so flaky and crispy that one could probably eat the whole thing without silverware. The dessert was kind of a butter explosion, but it just tasted so good! Especially with fresh CSA apples. I’m not sure what variety they were, but they worked really well in this dish. (Sorry, I’m useless.)

Birthday Dinner at Piccolo

For my birthday this year, my wonderful friends Ali and John took me out to a restaurant that I had been admiring from afar for pretty much its entire existence: Piccolo! I first encountered Chef Doug Flicker’s food at February’s Gastro Non Grata event, wherein he sent out an amazing pork meatball that totally threw everyone into a feeding frenzy.

But I had actually heard of him a lot earlier, from Jon Radle, a chef with whom I was interning in the winter of 2010. He said that Flicker was one of the best chefs out there, and that everyone could learn a lot from him. So I was just hysterical with anticipation when I finally sat down at Piccolo yesterday.

Eggplant Parmesan

Eggplant slices dipped in egg, flour, and herbed panko bread crumbs. After I fried them up, I plated them with some angel hair pasta and cabernet tomato sauce. I don’t get to cook at home as often as I used to, so when I do I trend toward more complicated things to make up for it.

Butternut Squash & Rosemary Pizza

I love marinara + cheese pizza as much as the next urban food blogger, but somehow I keep wanting more than that. (And yes, I did make a run-of-the-mill mozzarella and anchovy pizza the next time.) Inspired by my recent liberation of a butternut squash from an outdoors window display, I dug into Vegetarian Planet and made the pizza you see above, which was actually inspired by Didi Emmons’ encounter with a similar pizza at Chez Panisse.

Though my experiences with farming introduced me to many worthy winter squash varieties, butternut is still one of my favorites. Its size and versatility are pretty big advantages in a small kitchen — does anyone really like hacking away at 50 lb. Hubbards, as good as they are? Relatedly, my roommate absolutely hates squash, and the last time she was forced to eat it she cried. What a life I hope you don’t cry when you eat this, dear reader.

Butternut Squash and Rosemary Pizza

• Pizza dough, enough for 2 or 3 personal pizzas
• 2 shallots, sliced horizontally
• 1 medium butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into ¼” slices
• 1 tsp dried rosemary
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Parmesan or Asiago cheese, shredded

Saute the shallots with olive oil over medium high heat to brown them. Add the squash and rosemary and cook until the squash becomes tender, stirring frequently.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and roll out the dough into rounds. Assemble the topping on top of the dough and bake for about 10 minutes. Once the pizzas are done, sprinkle with cheese (or don’t) and drizzle some olive oil on top.

Dinner at Grand Cafe in Minneapolis

I don’t know if I’ve dropped this bomb yet, but I’m two weeks in on a stage at the Grand Cafe, which is a bistro in south Minneapolis. What that means is that I’m working on a volunteer basis in order to learn how to work in a restaurant kitchen. It’s been a really positive experience so far, and I’m glad to have this opportunity. In exchange for my labor, John, the chef de cuisine, invited me to have dinner at the cafe for free!

What can I say? The meal I had last night blew me away. As each course came out, I immediately noticed little things that I had played a part in: the shredded duck, julienned pickled peppers, little leaves of frisée. It was a great feeling. I’ve never been so proud. The supreme icing on the cake was a last round of vodka shots in the Grand kitchen with the chefs. Bliss.

I didn’t take pictures, but here’s my recollection of what we had (I scribbled these down last night when I was drunk so NO GUARANTEES):

ocean trout tartare w/ truffle oil on a house-made cracker
seared scallops on a squash puree
spicy shrimp w/ pickled peppers and cheesy grits (paired with Pabst Blue Ribbon!!!)
blue cheese tart and duck confit salad
ahi tuna w/ leeks/escarole/bacon and potato puree
duck breast w/ potato gnocchi
pumpkin creme brulee