Sliced Apples and Satay Sauce

A handy little appetizer that makes the most of fall apples and pantry items.

One apple, cored, halved and then sliced into "chips"
1½ tbsp peanut butter
Soy sauce
Lemon juice
Sugar
Water
Sriracha sauce (optional)

1. Add the peanut butter to a bowl.
2. Add about 2 tsp of soy sauce, 1 of lemon juice, 1 of water, and a pinch of sugar.
3. Using a fork, mash the liquid into the peanut butter. This takes time, and it's tedious.
4. Depending on your texture, continue adding water and soy sauce until you mash into a smooth sauce.
5. Taste and adjust, adding either lemon juice, sugar, Sriracha, or water.
6. Serve as a dipping sauce for sliced apples.

Roast Butternut Squash and Chipotle Soup

Fall is here and winter squash has appeared in the farm markets. Our favorite is a big rural stand that works on the honor system. You select, bag, and weigh your own produce, calculate your total using a pad and golf pencil, and then place your money in a rusty iron box. A sign asks you not to peel the corn before buying it (this is a very stupid thing to do, btw.). If you get a bad ear, take a free one next time.

Butternut squash and sweet potatoes both love chipotles, so here's an easy, tasty soup that goes terrific with cornbread.

Roast Butternut Squash and Chipotle Soup

1 large butternut squash, cored, peeled and diced
1 onion, diced
½ chipotle pepper and extra adobo sauce
Stock (chicken/vegetable)
Parsley for garnish
Olive oil

1. Heat oven to 400. Put butternut squash on a sheet pan and toss with enough olive oil to coat
2. Bake about 20 minutes, flipping occasionally. Do not burn. It's done when it's soft.
3. Fry onions in oil in a large saucepan over medium heat, stirring often for about two minutes or so.
4. Turn down the heat and add a pinch of sugar, continuing to stir until lightly carmelized.
5. Add the roast squash, chipotles and adobo, some salt, and cover with stock and water (about half and half. For a more delicate soup, you could just use water).
6. Cook about 20 minutes.
7. Puree and adjust seasoning (that means to add more salt if it needs it).
8. Serve garnished with parsley. If you're looking to make friends and impress people, you could puree your parsley with sour cream and water, and drizzle their initials on the soup. But a nice hunk of coarsely chopped parsley tastes good too.

Tortilla de Papas (leftover baked potatoes)

Our sister decided to have an extremely quiet wedding this weekend—and invited us to be witnesses. We were surprised when she also requested one of our simplest leftover dishes for the after-ceremony brunch: a humble tortilla de papas (potato frittata).

You can find many recipes for tortillas de papas; ours is based on a simple contrast: we love crispy potatoes but usually dislike browned eggs. Most recipes call for cooking the frittata halfway on the stovetop, and finishing it in the oven. If you do this, the frittata does have a nice puffy texture, but the bottom of the eggs is browned and rubbery, and you lose a lot of the delicate flavors.

Our version is a bit of a high wire act. We make the potatoes like homefries, separate the eggs from the pan like an omelet, and then flip them using a dinner plate. For the brunch, it happily worked and matched excellently with a Moet et Chandon Blanc de Blancs (what doesn't?).

Tortilla de Papas

4 eggs
1 leftover baked potato (you can also microwave one), cut in half and then sliced into 1/3 inch slices.
½ medium onion, sliced thin (optional)
Salt
Chives (or parsley)
Olive oil

1. Heat a good nonstick frying pan (10 inches or less). Add oil, then spread out the potatoes in a single layer.
2. Cook over high heat for several minutes. Try not to move the potatoes at all. That way, they'll brown nicely.
3. Once they are brown flip them over, and sprinkle the onions in. Lower the heat.
4. Allow the onions to wilt, by this point, the potatoes should also be a little brown on the other side.
5. Did we mention not to salt anything. It's very important not to salt for two reasons: salt will make the potatoes less crispy and it will turn the eggs gray.
6. Whip eggs with ¼ cup water until combined.
7. Pull the pan off the stove, toss the potatoes and onion and allow to cool slightly.
8. Add eggs. Reduce heat to low and return pan to burner.
9. Now, shake the pan nearly continually (this will help the eggs separate from the bottom). Meanwhile, scrape and lift the edge of the eggs from a pan with a spatula. Then tilt the pan, allowing liquid egg to swirl around the edge of the pan again, and repeat the scraping and lifting with the spatula.
10. When the eggs are mostly set, add salt. Then, when the eggs are sliding free from the bottom of the pan, you're ready to flip.
11. Take a dinner plate and place it over the frying pan like a cover. Hold it tight and flip the pan over so that the eggs fall on the plate.
12. Now, slide them back into the pan, wet side down.
13. Finish cooking for 2-3 minutes and remove. Garnish with herbs and serve with ketchup or barbecue sauce.

Tortilla de Papas with Sausage and Cheese.

To create this, simply add crumbled cooked sausage one minute after the onion. When the onions are nearly cooked, add grated cheddar or other semisoft cheese and allow it to melt around the potatoes before adding the egg.

Teriyaki Chicken Wraps with Miso Dressing

When it comes to food, the three most important things are decidedly not location, location, location. Our favorite local Japanese restaurant sits in a depressing strip mall between a Latin-fusion dive (rapidly going out of business) and a More Than Just Nuts store.

Our favorite things about it are the fresh scallop sashimi and the miso salad dressing. The owner regards these two as, respectively, the most and least impressive things on his menu. And so, we left the beautiful scallop alone and flat out stole the salad dressing recipe. Here, we applied it to a wrap with a simple teriyaki chicken.

Miso Salad Dressing

1 tsp red miso
2 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tsp mirin
1 tsp brown sugar
Water

1. Whisk the first four ingredients together.
2. Taste, adjust, then add water to thin to desired consistency.


Teriyaki Chicken

(By the way, this is likely not the best teriyaki you'll ever have—so if you've got your own recipe, go for it.)

Two chicken breast halves (or boneless thighs), cut into 1 inch strips
¼ cup soy sauce
¼ cup mirin
2 tbsp Dry Sack (or saki, if you have it)
1 tbsp brown sugar, unpacked
2 tsp ginger, slivered
Water

1. Combine the soy sauce, mirin, saki, sugar, and ginger. Mix, then marinate chicken for 30-45 minutes.
2. Drain chicken, reserve marinade.
3. Grill chicken
4. Once done, heat a saucepan. Add chicken, reserved marinade and about 2tbsp water.
5. Reduce until a tasty glaze forms and remove.


To make wrap

1 recipe of PJ Hamel/King Arthur flour gorditas (or any flatbread)
1 recipe miso dressing
1 recipe chicken
Baby spinach
Scallions, slivered.

1. Lightly dress spinach with dressing.
2. Assemble how you like and add more dressing on top.

Pasta with Celery Sauce

Throughout pregnancy, she had only two cravings. One was celery. The other was French fries topped with canned gravy and American cheese. No comment.

Back to the celery. It's really out of favor among the food elite. A few years ago, an article appeared in Ars Culinaire or one of those high-end food magazines, opining that over the years celery must have become more bitter. It explained this by saying that more and more chefs were using less and less of it, even for the classic French mirapoix. We'll leave that discussion to the experts.

Of course, celery flavor is not going out of style. Celery root has made such a lightning ascent that celeriac salad is now on the menu of every Food Network star. (Why is the Food Network the only place outside of the porn industry where everyone is a star? We must stop digressing.)

So let's embrace it. This celery pasta is cheap, dead simple like all good Italian food, and, if you've got good, minty basil to go along with it, really tasty.

Pasta with Celery Sauce
1 large can tomatoes
2 stalks celery plus some celery heart, cut in very large pieces (you're going to remove them)
1 medium onion, quartered
Basil
Salt
2 tbsp butter
3tbsp cream cheese
Parmesan (lots)
Pasta

1. Place tomatoes, celery, 1 tsp salt, and onion in a pot.
2. Simmer for 40 minutes, adding H20 as necessary.
3. Allow to cool. Pull out the celery and onions and squeeze them over the pot to get out all the juice.
4. Add butter and bring back to a simmer.
5. Add cream cheese and stir until it dissolves
6. Add grated parmesan slowly while stirring until it tastes great. (a good handful or so)
7. Cook pasta, toss with sauce and basil to taste.