Sausage-stuffed sweet onions

I've still got the three Vidalia onions from my first Annie's share and I wanted to do something with them that would be inadvisable to do with the normal sort. There are a few recipe collections on-line mostly filled with the sort of questionable recipes marketing boards put together to use excessive amounts of whatever product they're hawking. This particularly recipe was on the official Vidalia onion website, but it's from an actual restaurant--Elizabeth on 27th in Savannah, Georgia--and has been enjoyed by people not on the payroll.

I did some modification. The original recipe calls for "spicy sausage". Since it's from Georgia, and because the recipe also calls for sage, I figure that's southern-style sausage although I don't think I've ever seen a spicy version. I think you can get bulk southern sausage at my local Fresh Market, but the day I went shopping saw a heavy downpour just as I was getting off work, so the covered parking at Whole Foods beaconed instead. Their sausage-of-the-week was a Hawaiian sausage with pineapple in it which seemed like an interesting choice to stuff onions with. I considered switching out the white cheddar cheese to match, but I couldn't figure out what would work better so I just chose a mild melty variety of white cheddar and used that.

Ingredients:
3 large sweet onions
2 Tablespoons butter, melted
salt and pepper
1/2 pound bulk sausage
1 small yellow pepper, finely diced
a similar amount of yellow squash, finely diced
1 handful Italian parsley, finely chopped
1/2 cup grated or crumbled white cheddar cheese

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Heat 2 cups water to boiling.

1. Peel the sweet onions and slice both ends flat. Scoop out the centers [I found the sharp edge and shallow bowl of my teaspoon measure made it a suitable tool for this task.] trying not to break through the root end. [I succeeded two times out of three, but my third onion was quite flat which made it difficult to deal with.] Reserve the scooped out onion for the stuffing. Place the onions in a baking dish, season with salt and pepper and drizzle with the melted butter. [Pouring the butter into the hollowed out onions and then brushing it up over the sides worked well for me.] Pour the boiling water into the dish until it reaches about halfway up the onions. Cover the dish and bake for 30 minutes until onions are tender.

2. Meanwhile, fairly finely chopped the reserved onion scraps. Heat a medium pan over medium-high heat. Crumble the sausage into the pan and cook until just barely cooked through and, preferably, nicely browned. Remove to a medium bowl. Add a little olive oil to the pan if there isn't much sausage grease. Add half the onion, pepper, squash, and salt and pepper to taste. Turn the heat down to medium low and sweat until everything is softened and the onions are translucent. [Save the rest of the onion scraps for another use. I found that they caramelize quite nicely.] Once it's cooled, crumble the sausage further if there are any large chunks. When the vegetables are ready add to the sausage along with the parsley and most of the cheese. Mix well.

3. Prep your ingredients for the lemon butter sauce:
1/2 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
a similar amount of shallot, minced
2 Tablespoons dry white wine
1/2 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
2 Tablespoons heavy cream
3 Tablespoons unsalted butter, cold and cubed
[You can put everything but the cream and butter right into the small pan you'll be cooking this in.]

4. Remove the onions from the baking dish to a baking sheet. Don't turn off the oven. Stuff the onions with the stuffing, packing gently, until full to overflowing. Add more cheese on top. Return to oven and cook around 5 minutes more to melt the cheese.

5. While the cheese is melting, heat a small pan with the sauce's oil, garlic, shallot, wine, juice and zest over high heat until it comes to a boil. Reduce to 1 Tablespoon (not including the solid bits). Add the cream, reduce to 2 Tablespoons. Turn the heat down to medium and whisk in the butter one or two pieces at a time [OK, I did four, but my pieces were quite small.], waiting until each has melted before adding the next. This won't take much time and the sauce will thicken considerably. Strain into a small bowl.

Remove onions to individual serving dishes and top with the sauce. A little more parsley on top would be nice for the presentation too. I wish I had done that.
In the end, it's sausage and onions. I don't need to tell you that that's a good combination. And I particularly like the play between the pineapple in the sausage and the cheddar. The onion, with it's bite bred out, doesn't really assert itself in the mixture. It's more of an equal partner with the stuffing. The sauce adds richness, but less flavor than I'd hoped for. Overall, not bad; not great. I'd be curious to compare with a version done with the hot sausage the recipe calls for.

As far as the flavor goes, I may as well have sliced up all the ingredients and sautéed them up in a pan. The stuffing is all presentation, albeit, quite a nice one. I've stuffed peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers and every time I expect more than the sum of the ingredients and every time I'm disappointed. Well, I've learned my lesson; My stuffing days are over. If you see me declaring my intent to stuff anything in the future, do please remind me.

CSA week 20 - deep fried stuffed cucumbers

Did you know that pork and cucumbers are a traditional Chinese combination? I didn't, but I did a search for "fried cucumbers" just to see if recipes for such a thing existed and there they were. At first I was going to do a stir fry, but I gotta do something a little more interesting for the blog, so stuffed and deep fried it is. This is another recipe from Thousand Recipes Chinese Cookbook.

Ingredients:
3 dried black mushrooms (I used cloud ears)
1/2 pound lean pork
2 slices fresh ginger
1 scallion
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon sherry or rice wine
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon oil

3 large cucumbers
3 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup water
oil for deep frying
1/2 cup water
1 Tablespoon tomato or soy sauce

0. Soak the mushrooms and chill the pork in the freezer until firm.

1. Process the pork, mushrooms, ginger and scallion in a food processor until nearly smooth. A dozen pulses or so.

2. Blend in soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, salt and oil. Set aside in refrigerator.

3. Peel cucumbers in stripes and cut crosswise in 2-inch sections.

4. Start heating oil for deep frying.

5. Scoop out seeds. [An old fashioned peeler is a good tool for this. I haven't got one, but the tubular protective case for my candy thermometer did the job nicely. Any thoughts on what to do with the leftover cucumber cores?] Stuff cucumbers with filling mixture.

6. Mix cornstarch with 1/4 cup water. Brush mixture over cucumber sections. Resist the temptation to dunk the cucumbers since you'll be using the cornstarch in the sauce and don't want raw pork in it.

7. When oil is just about smoking add cucumber sections a few at a time without crowding the pan. Deep fry a few minutes until pale golden. Drain.

8. Heat 1/2 cup water to a low simmer in a large pan or dutch oven. Carefully add cucumber sections, cover, turn down heat to low and simmer 10 minutes.

9. Remove cucumbers to serving platter. Mix soy or tomato sauce [I didn't want to open a can of tomato sauce for one Tablespoon so I used a teaspoon of tomato paste and a Tablespoon of soy sauce.] with a little of the corn starch mixture [The recipe says to use all of it, but it was far too much for the amount of liquid I had to thicken and I ended up adding another half cup of water to thin it out.] and add to liquid in pan and stir to thicken. Pour over the cucumbers and serve.


Hmm, not the most attractive presentation I've seen. It reminds me of the painting of the Elder Ones in Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials. Just me? The striping is more prominent on the page. Maybe it was the unsettling texture of the over-thickened sauce that put me in a Lovecraftian state of mind.

Appearances aside, it's not bad. The cucumber has the texture and, to some extent the flavor, of cooked green pepper. Soft in places but still with a little firmness to the bite. It's not easy to recognize as cucumber as the flavor isn't strong, but if someone told you, you wouldn't scoff. The pairing with the pork is pretty good but the sauce gets in the way. I shouldn't have used the tomato paste. The sauce is thinly flavored due to the extra water I had to add, but the tomato flavor does come through and I don't think it works well with the cucumber. The combined pork and cucumber juices that gathered on the plate as the pieces rested is pretty tasty and a fair bit better than the prepared sauce to my mind.

I'm curious about the pork and cucumber stir fry recipe I passed up for this. If the two were both sliced thin and tossed together instead of sitting is separate chunks, would I get that blending of flavors throughout? Maybe so. Rather lighter on the oil too. This is good, but next time I've got cucumbers to hand I'm making that instead.

CSA week four - Ham stuffed acorn squash

Nothing particularly innovative here, but I did come up with my own stuffing mix that I think turned out well. Ham, cranberries and sage are a great match for squash.

Ingredients:
1 medium acorn squash
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
3/4 cup ham, finely chopped (I used a simple city-style ham that lacked smoky or sweet additions. I don't see smoked ham working too well in this dish. Honey or maple baked would, but you might want to reduce the sugar.)
5 fresh sage leaves, chopped
1 Tablespoon dried cranberries, soaked for a half hour and roughly chopped
1 Tablespoon light brown sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Cut squash in half top to bottom. Remove gunk. I saved the seeds for baking but that's certainly optional. Place the squash cut side down in a baking dish. Add 1/2 inch water. Cover with foil and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, melt butter in a medium pan on medium heat. When it's stopped frothing add onion and ham and a pinch of salt. You want to sweat the onions, but you don't want the released liquids to evaporate so don't spread them out too much. When the onion is soft mix in the sage and cranberries. In a minute or so, when the pan becomes aromatic, mix in the sugar and allspice. When the sugar has dissolved sprinkle in the bread crumbs and remove the pan from the heat. Mix in the breadcrumbs until all of the liquid in the pan has been absorbed. Set aside.

3. Remove the pan from the oven, uncover and flip over the squash. Let cool five minutes. Pack stuffing into the squash, don't jam it in, but get a good bit in there and it's fine if it mounds up a bit. Sprinkle with a few pinches of brown sugar and recover.

4. Bake squash for 15 minutes at 350 degrees, remove foil cover and bake until tender. There's a lot of disagreement on how long this last stage should take and I don't know about you but my squash never seems to finish cooking. I realized this time around that that may be because the top dries out in a way that's not far texturally from undercooked and I can't tell the difference. Try 20 minutes uncovered and see how it goes.

I cut my squash unevenly so the smaller half was overcooked by the time the larger was done. There was probably a good ten minute difference in cooking times so chop carefully in that first step.

The stuffing dried out and got a little crispy on top which was nice. The flavors intensified to a bright salty and sweet that was a bit much on its own but tempered well by the mellow flavor of the squash.

The texture did end up a bit crumbly though so I'm thinking of maybe adding a binder, maybe an egg, next time. But then it would be a big meatball instead of proper stuffing. I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing. Or maybe just packing it in a bit tighter would keep it from drying out so much. You guys have any advice?

CSA week 18 - beef & bulgar stuffed peppers

The last couple times we got peppers in our shares the ones in my box were rather too gnarled for easy stuffing. That's not a real complaint; beautifully shaped, extra large vegetables are the hallmark of factory agriculture and they usually taste of nothing much at all. So it was just luck that my peppers this week had nice big hollows suitable for stuffing. Or maybe they had longer on the vine now that we're at the end of the season? I dunno.

Anyway, I've discussed stuffing before and it comes down to a starch, a binder, finely chopped aromatics and optionally some meat. I happen to have some bulgar wheat that I picked up on a whim and have been wanting to use, so that's my starch set. Before I did my research, my assumption was that I'd find northern European bulgar-and-beef-stuffed cabbage recipes that I could modify to suit, but what I actually found were vegetarian Turkish bulgar-stuffed pepper recipes. I decided on this rather odd recipe from Good Housekeeping that pairs the bulgar wheat with ground beef, spinach, canned tomatoes, feta and dill. I don't know if that's supposed to be any particular cuisine or just a bunch of flavors they liked together.

I was intrigued by the technique of microwaving the peppers for a good long time before stuffing. They didn't say why so I wondered if it was to drive out moisture and it certainly did a little of that, but, in retrospect, I think the main point was to just get the peppers cooked. Everything else is cooked by the time it goes into the oven and the half hour at 350 degrees is just to warm everything through. If I had to do it again, I'd roast the peppers or at least microwave a little less and then char them on the stove.

I used the recipe as a vague guideline and didn't really pay much attention to the amounts. When dividing a recipe by four the ratios don't work out anyway. The biggest difference, I think, was using a couple handfuls of grape tomatoes instead of canned crushed tomatoes. I ended up opening a can of tomato sauce to compensate. That may have been a mistake as the canned sauce flavor ended up contributing to making the whole thing taste kind of generic and pre-prepared. I had hoped the odd combination of flavors would make something distinctively different, but other than some better textures, it could have been your standard Italian stuffed pepper. It wasn't a bad example of an Italian stuffed pepper, mind you, but I was hoping for something a little offbeat. That's what I get for following a recipe. I think now I know enough to improvise and I can do something really interesting the next time I stuff something.

CSA week eight - Moroccan-flavor stuffed pepper

Note please that that's not Moroccan-style; I don't think there's a north African tradition of stuffing peppers. This is one of those let's-try-to-do-something-interesting-with-what-I've-got-in-the-refrigerator type of recipes. What I happened to have is leftover charcoal grilled chicken and onions from a Colombian barbecue restaurant and a bottle of harissa, the Moroccan hot pepper and preserved lemon spice mix. You could grill real shish kabob I suppose but if you're going to do that just cut up the pepper, add it to the skewer and forget this silly recipe. If you're in need of appropriate leftovers I recommend Al Carbon at Coral Way and 23rd. There's a middle eastern market a few blocks east too where you might find some harissa. The particular bottle I've got actually came from a TJ Maxx in Wilmington, Delaware (Thanks Mom!). You can find some real oddities hidden in their food section.

For the most part, the recipe is as straightforward as any stuffed-anything recipe. Get all of the ingredients that need to be cooked cooked, chop everything up small, mix them in with a starch (in this case couscous) and pack it into the vegetable to be stuffed. Of the chopped items in this particular case, I kind of regret the olives. Black olives are a traditional match in Moroccan cuisine with hot peppers and preserved lemon, but I don't think I had the right sort.

The one interesting thing here is a trick I came across while looking up what to do with the harissa. In some recipes, instead of just dumping it into the dish, it's mixed into a beaten egg which is cooked into an omelet which keeps the sauce nicely sequestered. Modern molecular gastronomy does something similar using various chemicals to trap sauces in sheets or caviar-esque balls. Today I had the heat a little too high, screwed up the omelet, and ended up making goopy mess I was hoping to avoid after mixing it into the couscous but I've done it successfully in the past and it was pretty neat. If eggs didn't go with the dish you're making (as they do here), you could use just an egg white and control the sauce without adding any extraneous flavor. It's an idea to keep in reserve anyway.

So, I mixed everything into the couscous, packed it into the pepper, sprayed it with olive oil, sprinkled on some salt, and baked it at 350 for 25 minutes. If I had a gas grill I might have charred the pepper for some extra flavor, but this is Miami so I'm more likely to have a charcoal barbecue handy.

The end result looks about the same as it did when it went into the oven but the pepper is nicely tender but not collapsing (one benefit of not dousing it in sauce and then over-cooking as many Italian stuffed pepper recipes call for). Other than the olives, I think everything worked well together. Still and all, I'll probably just chop the pepper up and char it in a pan next time.

CSA week five - stuffed tomatoes

I was happy to discover that my guess was right; these tomatoes are quite well suited to stuffing. A firm sturdy structure held up well to cooking and there was plenty of room for the stuffing inside.

I did a pretty traditional Italian version for my first try. I cooked up a bit of sweet Italian sausage with onions and peppers, added some greens (spinach would be a little more standard, but the fresh braising blend was a much better choice than the frozen spinach I've got on hand. The frozen vegetables would have released a lot of juice and I wanted to keep the mix pretty dry. Once the greens were wilted I added fresh bread crumbs to soak up all the liquid in the pan. Finally, I mixed in a Romano cheese herb blend to add some more flavor and bind the stuffing together. (and salt and pepper to taste, of course)

I had hollowed the tomato making sure to get all the seed and liquid bits out and then rubbed a bit of salt around the inside for seasoning and to draw out a bit more liquid. I let the tomato rest in a bowl upside down so any juice released could drain out. I wasn't sure whether to pack the stuffing in tightly or loosely, but I had made far too much so tightly it was going to be. In retrospect there's nothing in there that was going to expand so there was no need to leave room. A bit of mozzarella on top and into a 325 degree oven for 15 minutes.

The results were, well, a cooked tomato with sausage, onions, peppers a bit of greens and some cheese. Not a watery mess, but nothing spectacular emerged either. A bit of broiling might have browned the tomato a bit and added a little more flavor. Oh, I also sprayed a bit of olive oil on the outside of the tomato and tossed on a bit of salt. It didn't make much difference in flavor (although it managed to make the presentation even more hideous. I mean, just look at that picture!), but if the tomato had started to cook down, I think it would have helped.

While I was putting this together, it occurred to me that tomatoes, onions and peppers have worked their way into most world cuisines so you could easily adjust the recipe to suit your mood. Use an appropriately spiced ground or chopped meat and rice or couscous or whatever local starch fits and there you go. If we keep getting these tomatoes, I think I'm going to trying out a few more variations.

My first inspiration along these lines was a breakfast stuffed tomato. I used the same onions and peppers although chopped a bit more finely this time along with some breakfast sausage. I seasoned this with what I consider a tragically ignored flavor combination: maple syrup and Tabasco sauce. I had hoped the reduced syrup would act as a binder, but I think the water in the hot sauce (actually another vinegar-based hot pepper sauce Cholula that adds some spices for a more well-rounded flavor) kept that from happening. So I threw in some of the colby jack cheese that I had shredded for a topping.

Once that was packed into the tomato, I cracked an egg on top, added the cheese and into the oven it went. Since the first tomato was pretty much just warmed through, I turned the heat up to 350 degrees this time. After 15 minutes the tomato was cooked, but the egg wasn't. I checked on baked eggs in my old Betty Crocker and 15 minutes at 350 is supposed to do the trick; I think the cheese over top insulated the egg from the heat. So I pushed the cheese aside and put the tomato back in for another five minutes. Here's the results. Not pretty, but it was tasty. Was it as tasty as everything grilled separately? Not really as it missed out the browning and all the flavors and textures it brings with it. But it was less of a mess, probably a little lower fat and an interesting presentation (if done correctly. I think my results ended up more "interesting" than interesting). That's the whole point of stuffing a tomato in the first place, but I don't know if it's worth what it loses in flavor.

I'll have to give a bit of thought on how to improve the results; I suspect broiling is going to be involved. Or possibly breading and deep frying. If you've got any ideas I'd like to hear them.

There's also the issue of the waste of all that tomato innards that were scooped out. I probably should have cooked a stuffed pepper at the same time and just moved the tomato bits over.