Meatless Mondays: Pasta with Roasted Butternut Squash and Greens

It seems that almost everything I make these days involves butternut squash or chard. A few weeks ago, it was Roasted Butternut Squash Risotto. Then, it was my favorite chard and onion torta from Deborah Madison. This past week, just to liven things up, I made something with both, the pasta with roasted butternut squash and greens from The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper. I mentioned this pasta the first time I wrote about a recipe from this book (the wonderful soup with fresh greens and alphabets), and I've made it numerous times since then, but somehow, I'm not getting around to writing about it til now.

No matter. Despite our lack of snow in western New England, it remains winter here, and fresh vegetables are not in abundant supply. Still, it's possible to get nice-looking, even local, butternut squash and chard (though this is less likely to be local). This pasta dish is nice because it's delicious, first of all, and relatively quick (more about that in a minute) but mostly because it's a nice change from my usual pasta with a tomato-related sauce.

Lynne Rosetto Kasper said that this dish takes 10 minutes to prep. I think she either has a sous chef or she is deluded. I can't figure out how she can possibly prep this dish in 10 minutes when peeling and chopping (or even just chopping) several pounds of butternut squash is involved, not to mention washing and chopping the chard, not to mention the onions and garlic. Anyway, even with the longer than anticipated prep, this is a relatively speedy dinner to make. (Just make sure you allot more than 10 minutes for it.) Although I usually don't buy pre-peeled or chopped vegetables, I make an exception here. A local store (Atkin's Farm, home of the cider doughnut) sells bags of peeled butternut squash, and when I want to make this pasta, that's what I buy. Then it's just a matter of chopping it, which is much quicker.

The sequence is this. Make sure you pre-heat the oven with the pan in it. (I've forgotten this more than once.) While the pre-heating is going on, you combine all of your chopped vegetables in a bowl:

Then, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, brown sugar and herbs. When the oven is pre-heated and the pan hot enough, spread the vegetables on the hot pan. Make sure you keep an eye on the vegetables while they're cooking, and don't worry if the quantities look enormous. They cook down substantially while in the oven.

You can cook the pasta while the vegetables are in the oven, so everything can be ready to combine as soon as the vegetables are ready. Once they're done, it's just a matter of mixing with the half and half and the cheese and adding more salt and pepper to taste.

One more thing I should note--this full recipe makes a lot of pasta. Really, like a lot. So, good for dinner for 6 people (and some leftover), less good for 1 or 2 people who don't want to be eating this every day for a week. When I made this last, I used a 2 1/2 pound squash, 1 supermarket bunch of chard and about 3/4 pound of pasta. (I didn't fiddle much with the rest of the amounts.) This provided me with one dinner and 2 lunches early in the week and dinner for Alex and me later in the week. We both looked at our empty plates regretfully, and it seemed better to want more than to feel oppressed by the leftovers. No matter the quantity, though, I do highly recommend making this pasta. Soon enough, there will be lovely spring dishes on the menu, so we might as well appreciate an excellent winter dish like this while we can.

Pasta with Roasted Butternut Squash and Greens
Adapted from The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper

5 quarts salted water in a 6-quart pot

Roasted Vegetables:
3 to 3-1/2 pounds butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into bite-sized chunks
1 medium to large onion, cut into 1-inch chunks
2 big handfuls greens; Kasper suggests escarole or curly endive or spring mix, I use chard; all should be washed, dried and torn or chopped into small pieces
1/3 tight-packed cup fresh basil leaves, torn, if available, or 1 tsp. dried
16 large fresh sage leaves, torn, or 1 tbsp. dried
5 large garlic cloves, coarse chopped
1/3 cup good-tasting extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 tight-packed tablespoon brown sugar (light or dark)
Salt and fresh-ground black pepper

Pasta and Finish:
1 pound bow-tie pasta (see above)
1/2 cup half-and-half
1 to 1-1/2 cups (about 6 ounces) shredded Asiago cheese (I've used Manchego, Gruyere and Pecorino Romano, all to good effect)

1. Slip one large or two smaller shallow sheet pans into the oven. Preheat the oven to 450°F. Bring the salted water to a boil.

2. In a big bowl, toss together all the ingredients for the roasted vegetables. Be generous with the salt and pepper.

3. Pull out the oven rack holding the sheet pan. Taking care not to burn yourself, turn the squash blend onto the hot sheet pan and spread it out. Bake for 25 minutes, or until the squash is tender, turning the vegetables two or three times during roasting.

4. As the squash becomes tender, drop the pasta into the boiling water and cook it until tender, but with some firmness to the bite. Drain in a colander.

5. Once the squash is tender, turn on the broiler to caramelize it. Watch the vegetables closely, turning the pieces often. Anticipate about 5 minutes under the broiler. You want crusty brown edges on the squash and wilted, almost crisp greens.

6. Scrape everything into a serving bowl. Add the half-and-half, hot pasta, and 1 cup of the cheese. Toss to blend, tasting for salt and pepper. Add more cheese if desired. Serve hot.

Slings and Arrows: A Heartfelt Plug

Slings and Arrows has been on the edge of my consciousness for years. Canadian, yeah, Shakespeare, yeah, funny, yeah, whatever. I always meant to watch it and never got around to it. But late in the fall, I ran into a friend at the library, and we were recommending DVDs to each other. I told her about the 2005 Bleak House (the one with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock), and she reminded me about Slings and Arrows. I'm not sure why this time it clicked, but it did.

And now that I've finished all three all-too-brief seasons, I really can't recommend it more highly. The show ran in Canada from 2003-06 and then was on the Sundance Channel here a few years ago. I suspect it still pops up on cable occasionally. It's set at the fictional New Burbage Theatre Festival and covers three seasons there, during which Shakespeare's three great tragedies are performed: Hamlet in the first season (with a Hollywood action star as Hamlet), MacBeth in the second (with a pompous blowhard as MacBeth) and King Lear in the third (with an aged, ailing and possibly addicted actor as Lear). Meanwhile, the business manager falls under the sway of an American corporate sponsor in the first season, a lunatic PR guy in the second season and a really bad musical in the third. I loved all three seasons, with perhaps a slight preference for the first as my favorite, though the second was maybe the funniest and the third the most moving.

The show is beautifully written and acted, complex, funny and just all around fabulous. The main character is the theater's artistic director, Geoffrey Tennant (played by the cute and wonderful Paul Gross), who had once been a star actor at the theater before having a nervous breakdown in the middle of Hamlet. (He was playing Hamlet and jumped into Ophelia's grave and wouldn't get out.) When the theater's artistic director--and Geoffrey's former mentor and friend--Oliver Welles, is killed ("run over by a pig truck") at the end of the first episode, Geoffrey is asked to take over. Oliver, however, doesn't go away. His ghost, only visible to Geoffrey (and one other key character, later on), plays a major role throughout the series. He and Geoffrey bicker constantly, alarming all who see Geoffrey engaged in what seems to them to be one-sided arguments with the air.

The acting is wonderful all around, from the main characters--Geoffrey; Oliver; Richard Smith-Jones, the clueless business manager; Anna, his able assistant; Ellen, the festival's leading lady and diva--to the minor ones (Nahum, the Nigerian janitor; Frank and Cyril, the two older gay guys who play many of the minor roles; Maria, the ever-harried stage manager). The occasional big name actor shows up (Rachel McAdams in season 1, Sarah Polley in season 3), although I should re-phrase that to mean bigger name in the US, as many members of the cast are very well-known in Canada. But the writing is also wonderful. And even though each season stands on its own, the three seasons work together as a whole. I read somewhere that the show was conceived of as a 3 season show. (Each season contains 6 episodes of 45 minutes; all three seasons, 13.5 hours in all, equal about one regular TV season in the US.) This becomes clear at the end, when there is a real sense of closure. The ending is bittersweet, but the show ends the way it should end, the way it's been set up to end. And throughout the last few episodes, there are moments that hark back both to earlier seasons--Oliver providing for Geoffrey in King Lear what Geoffrey had provided for his leading men in Hamlet and MacBeth--and to earlier moments in that season (the ever present Bolivian musicians' role in the storm scene in King Lear was just fabulous). One thing I should note is that each season takes a bit of time to warm up. You may not be hooked after the first episode or two. But be patient. Once the story is set up, it's hard to stop watching. And the last two episodes of each season are so well done that I felt that I had no choice but to watch them again, immediately.

I could go on and on. But really, the thing I most want to say is Watch This. I'm not in theater, I haven't read Shakespeare since college, I don't have any personal reasons for enjoying this. But I loved it. It's probably the best TV I've seen since The Wire, and it's much less stressful. (I had rather disturbing dreams while I was watching The Wire, which is probably why I still haven't watched the last 2 seasons.) For a very brief taste, here's a link to a YouTube clip from the first season, the lovely Geoffrey trying to coach his truly terrible Ophelia. And meanwhile, though I'm sad not to be able to watch it for the first time, I have no doubt that it will hold up to repeated viewings, and even having just finished watching it, I'm already looking forward to the next time.

Meatless Mondays: Potato-Leek Soup, Two Ways

Apologies for the silence and for the day-late Meatless Monday post. (Meatless Tuesday isn't quite as mellifluous.) I've had my head in a (figurative) flowerpot, pretending that our new senator is not a Republican who once posed naked for Cosmo. Well, that and other things, but between the special election and the Supreme Court and my flooded basement, the flowerpot is looking more appealing every day.

Anyway. As promised, now that the new year is well upon us, I am writing about soup for all who are still feeling abstemious and slightly regretful about overloading on fancy food full of sugar and fat over the holidays. Potato leek soup is about as simple as it gets. I tend to make it every fall, especially when it's the end of farmer's market season and I start to feel like "oh no, the season's almost over, I must buy extra vegetables while they're here," and I inevitably end up with lots of leeks and lots of potatoes (since, of course, it's the end of the season and there's not a huge variety.) But that makes this soup equally appropriate for January because even in New England, you can still find decent leeks and potatoes, and that's basically all you need. Plus, there aren't many soups more comforting than potato-leek, and it seems like we could all use some comforting this month.

Recently when I made this, I was all ready to devote some time to the soup and make stock for it, figuring that a soup with so few ingredients in it would need a hearty stock. But Deborah Madison disagreed. In her recipe for Potato-leek soup in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, she specifically says to use water, just water. Well, who am I to question Deborah Madison on the question of stock vs. water? And besides, it saved me some chopping time.

More recently, I decided to branch out and make the variation in Deborah Madison's soup cookbook, Leek and Scallion soup, with potato gnocchi. This one has fewer potatoes in the soup itself but makes up for the lack by the addition of potato gnocchi at the end.

I'm including both recipes because each soup has its own pleasures. The plain potato leek soup is earthy and simple, with the clear flavors of the potatoes and the leeks fully resonant. The second soup is a bit more elegant, with a tang from the wine; with fewer potatoes, the flavor of the leeks and scallions also stands out more sharply. This is a soup you could serve for company, if you needed a simple starter.

Either way, they both encompass the qualities of simplicity, virtue and deliciousness, all fine qualities in soup, of course, and what all of us could use as January staggers to a close.

Creamed Leek and Potato Soup

Adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

3 large or 6 medium leeks, white parts only, finely chopped
1 1/2 pounds potatoes (Yellow Finn, Yukon Gold or boiling recommended), scrubbed well and thinly sliced
1-2 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper
Milk or water to thin the soup, if needed
Light cream or half and half (optional)

Melt butter in a wide soup pot, then add the leeks and potatoes and cook over low heat, covered for 10 minutes.

Add 7 cups water and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and bring to a boil.

Lower the heat and simmer, partially covered, until the potatoes are soft to the point of falling apart, about 35 minutes.

Press a few against the side of the pan to break them up and give the soup body.

If needed, thin the soup with milk and heat through.

Taste for salt, season for pepper and serve.

I like to go the extra step and put the soup through a food mill. (I don't use an immersion blender for this one, as the potatoes get gummy pretty quickly.) Then, if you're feeling a bit decadent (or even if you're not), add 1/4-1/2 cup of cream or half and half. Serve with finely chopped chives and parsley. (Chilled, it's vichyssoise.)

Leek and Scallion Soup, with potato gnocchi
Adapted from Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen

1 Tbsp. unsalted butter
4 cups chopped and rinsed leeks (white part only) (5-6 leeks)
1 celery rib, peeled and chopped
1 russet potato, peeled and finely diced
sea salt/fresh ground pepper
1/2 cup dry white wine
4 cups water

1 pkg. potato gnocchi (found in the frozen food dept.--I found mine at Whole Foods.)

1 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 cup finely slivered scallion including an inch or two of the greens

Saute the leeks, potato, and celery with about a tsp. of salt until the leeks have softened.

Add the wine and cook until the wine is almost all gone.

Add the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 20 min.

Add some pepper. Puree a cup of the soup and return to the pot. (Because there was only one potato in this, I risked using the immersion blender and pureed the whole batch, roughly.) If feeling decadent, you can add whole milk or half and half. (I did and did not regret it.)

Meanwhile, cook the gnocchi in salted water, 4-5 minutes. Set aside and keep warm.

Saute the slivered scallion in the butter until just wilted.

Stir the scallions into the soup.

Add a few gnocchi to each bowl when you serve the soup.

Maine Shrimp reminder

Last year, I didn't discover Maine shrimp until March, near the end of the season. I wrote about using them in a Thai-style coconut milk soup.

But the Maine shrimp season actually starts in December or early January, which I suddenly remembered a few days ago as I passed the fish counter at Whole Foods and saw a large heap of plump pink Maine shrimp in front of me. Maine shrimp are cheap ($5/pound at Whole Foods, not on sale, and probably cheaper other places and definitely cheaper if you're in Maine) and tasty and vaguely local, at least if you live in New England. And in January, when there's not much else even vaguely local to be had, that counts for something. (This may be changing. There's now a new winter farmer's market in Northampton every Saturday, and yesterday, there was a special Winter fare market with farmers from all over this area held at a local high school. It was so crowded that people were practically fighting over the carrots, and by the time I got there, halfway through, everything green had already been bought up--I guess there's a pretty serious communal craving for fresh vegetables in the midst of a January freeze!)

Anyway, my inaugural Maine shrimp dish this year was risotto. I loosely followed this risotto recipe, although I made the shrimp stock more like this one posted at the Beyond Salmon blog. We ate it sitting in front of the fire, and it was a fine dinner for a freezing January night--warm and filling and tasty.

And since I now know that Maine shrimp will be around for a few more months, I'm already pondering the possibilities. The Thai soup is definitely on the agenda, but I'm planning to explore some other options as well. I'll report back when I have a winner. In the meantime, stay warm!

Deborah Madison's Lentil Minestrone

The lowly lentil is in the news this week. Yesterday, Mark Bittman devoted his Minimalist column in the NY Times to legumes and beans and has a number of interesting looking recipes. Today, the Atlantic food section offers another paean to the lentil as well as a recipe for "tasty lentils" (that do, in fact, sound pretty tasty). Even before the media attention, I was thinking of lentils anyway because I'm happily eating my way through a large pot of Deborah Madison's lentil minestrone.

I've written before about my general love for Deborah Madison (see here), but I think she's a especially a genius when it comes to soup. Her soup cookbook, Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen, is a standby in my kitchen year round, though it's especially useful in the winter. The lentil minestrone is in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which also has an extensive and helpful section on making soup. Madison's soup recipes may have more steps or be slightly more time consuming than others, but the payoff is in the layers of flavor. The lentil minestrone, for example, is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Its humble ingredients--carrots, celery, onions, tomato paste, lentils--belie how delicious the final concoction is.

It's a perfect dish for January--it's filling and full of things that are good for you. (Lentils! Chard! ) But, it's also delicious. You can eat it happily and maintain your New Year's resolutions at the same time. Like most lentil soups, it gets better with time.

A few notes:

This soup is made even better by the inclusion of a Parmesan rind, added when you add the lentils and the water. (This soup has enough depth that it's fine with water, if you don't have any vegetable stock on hand and don't have the time (or inclination) to make any.)

While Deborah Madison has you cook the greens separately, I usually don't. I rinse the chard and chop it ahead of time, then just add it to the soup while the pasta is cooking. It doesn't stay bright green, admittedly, but when you're eating the soup over several days anyway, the chard will not stay bright green no matter what, so you might as well save a step here.

I do always keep the pasta separate and then add it when re-heating. Otherwise, the pasta will drink up all the liquid, and you'll have soup with rather bloated pieces of pasta and no liquid left.

I usually just use dried thyme with the bay leaves, and I don't always include the parsley branches (though I do include the chopped parsley).

I don't have any mushroom soy sauce in the house so have never added it to this soup. While I think adding regular soy sauce would be fine, I sometimes put in a dash of red wine vinegar instead, which adds a nice flavor.

If you leave your bowl on the table too long, watch out, as it might attract the attention of an otherwise carnivorous creature who might stick a tongue out for a tentative taste . . . (In this photo, I think Chaya is actually coming back for more--he already knew he liked it, as the previous night he'd licked my bowl clean, a privilege usually reserved for cereal, yogurt and ice cream. The cat is definitely on to something!)

Lentil Minestrone
Adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Add the cooked pasta and greens just before serving so that they retain their color and texture. And, don't forget the Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus extra virgin to finish
2 cups onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste (The Italian tomato paste in a tube is perfect here.)
1/4 cup chopped parsley
4 garlic cloves, chopped
3 carrots, diced
1 cup diced celery or celery root
1 cup French green lentils, rinsed
Aromatics: 2 bay leaves, 8 parsley branches, 6 thyme sprigs
1 piece Parmesan rind (optional)
9 cups water or vegetable stock
Mushroom soy sauce to taste
Salt and pepper to taste
1 bunch greens—mustard, broccoli rabe, chard, or spinach (I almost always use chard.)
2 cups cooked small pasta (I usually use shells or pipette)
Thin shavings of Parmesan

Instructions
Heat the oil in a wide soup pot with the onion. Saute over high heat, stirring frequently, until lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Add the tomato paste, parsley, celery, garlic, vegetables, and 2 teaspoons salt and cook 3 minutes more.

Add the lentils, aromatics, Parmesan rind (if using) and water and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, partially covered, for 30 minutes. Taste for salt and season with pepper. If it needs more depth, add mushroom soy sauce to taste, starting with 1 tablespoon. (The soup may seem bland at this point, but the flavors will come together when the soup is finished.) Remove the aromatics.

Boil the greens in salted water until they're tender and bright green, then chop them coarsely. (Or, add the chopped greens to the soup while the pasta is cooking.)

Just before serving, add the greens and the pasta to the soup and heat through. Serve with extra virgin olive oil drizzled into each bowl, a generous grind of pepper, and the Parmesan.

Year-End Book Roundup

Back in May, I posted about my favorite books of the first 5 months of 2009. (You can find that list here: Sunday Book Recommendations, though I'll include a cheat sheet for those too lazy to click the link):

The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver (serious novel)
Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (short stories)
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken (memoir)
The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman (light novel)

I still stand by those four books, but now that my reading year is just about over, I wanted to add a few more. They don't exactly fit into the same categories as the first four--it turns out that Jhumpa Lahiri's book of short stories was the only one I read this year. (That seems wrong, somehow, but so be it.) I'd also like to note that this is purposely not a Best Books list. (The fact of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi turning up on so many year-end Best lists shows how subjective the whole thing is.) These were just the books I enjoyed the most, whatever their category.

Memoir: What I Thought I Knew, by Alice Eve Cohen. This actually is an interesting companion to Elizabeth McCracken's memoir. But while McCracken's is the story of a child lost, Cohen's is the story of a child found. At 44, after being told she's infertile and in menopause, Cohen discovers that she's 6 months pregnant. Her story of her ambivalence about her high-risk pregnancy--and the daughter it produced--is brief but deftly told and moving.


Epistolary Novel: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Okay, admittedly this is the only epistolary novel I've read in recent years. But still, I wasn't sure how to categorize it otherwise. This book was a bestseller and has been written about a gazillion times. For that reason, I avoided it. Until I didn't, and I ended up really enjoying it. Despite the twee title, the book itself isn't twee. In her first and only novel, Mary Ann Shaffer manages to write about a serious topic--the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II--with a very light touch. (Shaffer, sadly, got sick while she was writing the book and died before it was published. Her niece, Annie Barrows, a writer herself, finished it for her.) As letters fly back and forth between the main character, a journalist named Juliet, and her newfound friends on Guernsey, it's hard not to be taken in by their growing friendship. This year's lesson in, "occasionally good books do end up being bestsellers."











Mysteries: The Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries by Louise Penny

Louise Penny's mysteries were one of my great discoveries a few years back. Usually with mystery series, by the time I discover them, the series is well established, and I have to go way back and start at the beginning. I found Louise Penny's first novel, Still Life, on the new fiction shelf at the library, some time after it had first been published but before the next book was out. That's given me the opportunity to follow Louise Penny's burgeoning mystery writing career with great pleasure. It's not just that Penny seems to be a lovely person; she's also a good writer. In Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, she's created a detective of depth and charm, and in Three Pines, the rural Quebec village where most of the books are set, she's created a place I'd like to move to immediately except for the rather unsettling frequency of murders that happen there. Penny's characters are quirky and flawed and compelling, and the mysteries solid.

I haven't liked all five of them equally, but I very much enjoyed both that came out this year, A Rule Against Murder and The Brutal Telling, with the latter especially strong. I'm delighted that Louise Penny seems to have garnered both critical and commercial acclaim for her work, and I'm looking forward to more of the lovely Gamache and more of that idyllic but murder-ridden village, Three Pines.

Novel both light and serious: This is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper. Although I had read and enjoyed one of Tropper's earlier novels, it hadn't prepared me for how much pleasure I would get from Tropper's latest. This was a book that had me snorting inappropriately in various public places as I read it--the library, the waiting room at the garage--but had a serious undertone that serves as ballast for the levity. The novel's narrator, Judd Foxman, is recently separated from his wife--who, he learns in a particularly unfortunate way, has been sleeping with his boss for months--when he finds out that his ill father has died and that the father's last wish (despite being an atheist) was for his whole family to sit shiva for him for the full 7 days. The Foxman family is exquisitely dysfunctional, and their forced togetherness is a perfect set up for the novel. There are too many good parts to name; just read it.

Best Audio Book I haven't finished listening to yet: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley. Okay, so that's not really much of a category, but I wanted to make sure I wrote about this one, even though I'm only about halfway through it. Bradley is a 70 year old Canadian who'd never been to England until after he'd written this novel, yet his narrator is 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, who lives at Buckshaw, a stately house in the British countryside. Flavia is precocious, in love with chemistry, a bane to her older sisters and determined to solve the mystery of how a dead man (with the villainly name of Horace Bonepenny) ends up in their cucumber patch. She's a wonderful narrator, and I loved his story (in an interview) about how he was actually writing a different book when "Flavia walked onto the page . . . and simply hijacked the story." Wisely, Bradley stopped writing the other book and gave Flavia her due. The narrator of the audio book, Jayne Entwhistle, has a quirky and interesting (though occasionally annoying) voice that seems just perfect for Flavia and all her eccentricities. This is the first of a series, and it's one I'm looking forward to.

So, that's my list for the year, a year that featured a rather significant amount of re-reading of beloved childhood books (which I think jacked up my overall number of books read, which still came in under 100, including audio books--a bit of a disappointment). But it will soon be a new year, and my reading slate will be clean again. I look forward to whatever literary discoveries 2010 has for all of us. Happy New Year!

Celebration Chocolate Cream Pie

It must be said that in this household, at least, December hasn't been a particularly celebratory month. The 5K on December 5 may have been the high point. A few days after that, I trekked down to Baystate hospital and had a PICC line put into my left arm--it's a very thin tube that's threaded through a vein in my upper arm up to my chest. Through this, I've been able to give myself the IV antibiotics I was prescribed for Lyme, once it was apparent that the oral antibiotics wouldn't be enough. The 45 minutes or so that it takes to do the infusion is fine--it's the other 23 hours and 15 minutes every day that I've had the tube in my arm that I mind. It's been 2 1/2 weeks now, and I no longer spend my waking hours thinking, "oh my god, there's a thing in my arm." But I am still frustrated by the limitations--I'm not supposed to lift anything heavier than 5 pounds with my left arm or do any repetitive motion, which makes exercising a challenge. (So, basically, I haven't run since the 5K.) Plus, I can't get the dressing wet, so I have to shower wearing a plastic sleeve. I do realize that there are people who live with PICC lines for much longer than 3 weeks, and really, I admire their fortitude. Mostly what it's showed me is that I'm a very bad patient. It turns out that I'm not, actually, particularly stoic.

But the good news is that I'm down to my last few days of medicine. December 31 is day 21, and I am looking forward to starting 2010 IV free. (I was very disappointed when I realized that I would have to break my trend of starting new decades in India--in 1989, I spent New Year's Eve in Delhi (at the Delhi branch of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, of all places), and in 1999, I was in lovely, lovely Goa. This year's New Year's highlight is going to be showering without any plastic on me, but so be it.)

But enough about PICC lines and Lyme and crankiness. This post is supposed to be about pie. Next week, perhaps, I'll post some nice healthy soup recipes, figuring that everyone will be feeling abstemious after the excess of the holidays. But before you become abstemious, I'd recommend making this pie. A last hurrah of excess, if you will.

Before I got involved with Alex, I had never given much thought to chocolate cream pie. But for reasons I'm still not sure about, it began appearing on holiday menus a few years ago. A couple of times, I assisted in the pie making. And this year, I took it on myself, twice, for Thanksgiving and Christmas both. The main virtues of this particular pie are that it's easy to make and delicious to eat. But even better, it must be made in advance, which is a fine quality in a pie during holidays when oven time is at a premium. (And even then, the crust only needs to bake for 15 minutes, and that's it.) Basically, you make a pie crust, you make a thick chocolate pudding, and then you combine them. Voila.

A couple of notes. The original recipe calls for chocolate wafers for the crust. It's good that way, but it's equally good with ginger cookies. I've discovered that Trader Joe's Triple Ginger Snaps make a fine crust.

I melt the chocolate the same way I now melt butter if at all possible--I put it in a stainless steel mixing bowl and stick it in the oven when it's pre-heating. Once, recently, this didn't work--the chocolate never really melted for reasons I never figured out--but usually it works just fine. Just make sure the chocolate is broken up into little pieces ahead of time.



The one tricky moment occurs when you're making the custard. You stir and stir and stir, and all of a sudden it thickens up, and then you have to take the custard off the stove immediately lest the eggs cook too much. (It's slightly nervewracking but not nearly as nervewracking as my first experience with a candy thermometer, making caramel for the caramel corn Molly recently wrote about in Orangette.) After that, you swirl it through a strainer to get any lumps and bumps out, then mix it with the chocolate. Then you chill it in the bowl for a few hours and then in the pie crust, overnight, if you like.




The pie is rich and silky and decadent and especially good with whipped cream. And while the regal Lino (also known as Rigolini), pictured at the top, could resist the luscious piece of pie placed right next to him so temptingly, it's unlikely that Loofa, his fatter, fluffier sister, could do the same. And nor, for that matter, could I.

Chocolate Cream Pie
Adapted from Gourmet, February 2004

Yield: Makes 8 to 10 servings
Active Time: 45 min
Total Time: 8 hr (includes cooling and chilling)

For crust
1 1/3 cups chocolate wafer crumbs (from about 26 cookies such as Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers) (Can substitute ginger cookies as well)
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup sugar

For filling
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 large egg yolks
3 cups whole milk
5 oz fine-quality bittersweet chocolate (not unsweetened), melted
2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla

For topping
3/4 cup chilled heavy cream
1 tablespoon sugar

Make crust:

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F.

Stir together crumbs, butter, and sugar and press on bottom and up side of a 9-inch pie plate (1-quart capacity). Bake until crisp, about 15 minutes, and cool on a rack.

Make filling:

Whisk together sugar, cornstarch, salt, and yolks in a 3-quart heavy saucepan until combined well, then add milk in a stream, whisking. Bring to a boil over moderate heat, whisking, then reduce heat and simmer, whisking, 1 minute (filling will be thick).

Force filling through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, then whisk in chocolates, butter, and vanilla. Cover surface of filling with a buttered round of wax paper and cool completely, about 2 hours.

Spoon filling into crust and chill pie, loosely covered, at least 6 hours.

Make topping:

Just before serving, beat cream with sugar in a bowl using an electric mixer until it just holds stiff peaks, then spoon on top of pie.

Cooks' note:
Pie (without topping) can be chilled up to 1 day.