Squash Butter and Maple Toffee Naan

Sometimes you get this grand plan for dinner, the type of dinner that warrants a lovely dessert to follow. But you get so caught up in making the dinner that dessert becomes irrelevant until you're done making the dinner and you're left thinking, "Shit. Now what?" We were lucky to come up with this one from extra bread dough and stuff in the freezer. I recommend many pumpkin pies in the fall, but save some purée for something like this.

Squash Butter and Maple Toffee Naan
The first step is to make the naan dough. I had great results with Food Network's recipe. As with any yeast bread, mix the dough an hour or a few ahead of time to allow it to rise. Skip the fennel and other seeds since you want a plain bread dough for this. And if you happen to not have yogurt, as I didn't, don't fret. I substituted around 5 T of heavy cream for the yogurt portion, but I get the feeling water or milk will work equally well.

Also, I used a whole packet of yeast and only let it rise once since I'm not keeping around a partially-used packet and I can never time bread right.

Squash Butter
~2 C puréed squash***
~3 T honey
1 broken cinnamon stick
0.5 tsp ground allspice
0.5 tsp ground black pepper
0.5 tsp nutmeg

Combine in a saucepan and allow to reduce over the lowest heat, stirring consistently, until the mixture thickens and you can smell the spices. Then turn the heat off. Nice and easy.

***If you've never prepared your own squash purée before, DO IT. It's truly flavorful, fresh and bright, MANY times better than the canned stuff. Pick a day when you don't have that much to do so it doesn't suck washing the food processor and cutting into these hulking fruits. Round up some Butternuts, Long Island Cheese Pumpkins, Blue Hubbards, or other roasting squash, cut (or saw, if necessary) them into chunks, and roast at 350 F until the flesh separates from the skin easily with a fork. Purée the flesh in the food processor until smooth, then fill into Ziploc bags and freeze until you're ready to use it!

And for cooking, never use those orange jack-o-lantern pumpkins which are Connecticut Field Pumpkins. The flesh is stringy and super bland, they're only for decoration.

Putting It Together
1. Put your oven up to 450 F.
2. Grease a cookie sheet
3. Grab a big handful of dough, stretch out into a long strip, and spread on a liberal amount of squash butter.  
4. Twist the buttered strip over itself, so it encases the filling. Don't stress over this, think 'rustic' and just go with it.
5. Repeat until you use up the dough and squash butter. Save the saucepan for the toffee!
6. Bake for about a half hour, until the bread is toasty and golden brown.

Maple Toffee
In the same saucepan you cooked the squash butter in, combine:
~3 T butter
~3 T sugar
~3 T maple syrup
and cook over low heat until it combines, bubbles, and looks all lovely.

And when the naan is done, drizzle the toffee on top and have a nice time eating it.

 

Tomato Pie

I love tomatoes.

I. Love. Tomatoes.

ILOVETOMATOES!

Since they can be such a pain in the ass to grow, this time of the year, where I can go out every morning and bring in pounds of these most-pleasing fruits, provides some of my most joyful moments.

Just cutting up and eating tomatoes is my favorite way to do it, but this comes in as a close second. Tomatoes meet pie in a luscious symphony. For me, baking works great in the summer; my window AC's are so ineffective at cooling my kitchen that I have no trouble saying, "Fuck it, let's crank it up!" But even if you've got central air, this pie'll make it well worth turning on the oven.

Pâte Brisée
First you gotta make the crust. You can buy one, but they're not as good, centswise they're many times more expensive, and it's not hard to make your own. Some sources claim it's hard, some say to freeze your flour and your butter and to put ice in the water, but there's no need. As long as the butter doesn't melt, you're golden.

1.25 C flour
1 stick of butter
1 tsp. salt
1 T chopped herbs if you have them
~.25 C cold water

Put the flour, salt, and herbs in a bowl. Cut the butter into cubes, and dump into the flour. Then I use my hands to massage the butter into the flour. You're looking for the texture of clumpy sand, an even mixture of buttery flour grains. Don't massage it enough for the butter to melt, just enough to get the mixture combined.

Work in a little cold water until the mixture comes together a bit. At this point you're looking for it to be, still, more crumbly than smooth. Then dump it in your pie plate and punch it out into place. And that's what I do, punch and press, so as to not waste wax paper and to not have a rolling pin to wash. When it's nice and crust shaped, pop it in the fridge until you're ready to bake.

The Filling
It's a few steps to get the tomatoes and other elements prepped, but well worth it. Don't sweat exact measurements. Here's what you'll need:

Enough tomatoes to fit your pie plate
1 medium onion
5 cloves garlic
olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper
a few T chopped basil, if you have it
2-3 T cornstarch

1. Put on a pot of water to boil so you can blanch the tomatoes, and turn your oven up to 350 F.

2. While the water heats, dice your onion and garlic. Put some olive oil in a small pan, and once it's hot sauté the onions 'til translucent. Then add the garlic, 1-2 tsp. salt, and lots of fresh ground pepper. In a few minutes deglaze the pan with 2-or-so T of balsamic vinegar, and while that reduces chop your basil. Turn off the heat, stir in the basil, and transfer this mixture to a bowl (and hang onto that pan 'cause you'll be able to whip up a quick, delicious barbeque sauce in it).

3. By now your water may be boiling, so a few at a time boil your tomatoes for a minute and then immerse in a bowl of cold water. This will allow you to remove the skins, which you should do next. Cut out the spot where the stem meets the fruit of each tom, and then into a separate bowl squish out the seeded juicy sections of each tomato. If you don't remove the juice, your pie will likely be a lamentable, soupy mess. Reserve this juice to make that barbeque sauce I mentioned. And break the tomato flesh into large chunks and add to the onion mixture.

4. Sprinkle on 2-3 T of cornstarch. For a 9" pie plate, you won't want to use any additional lest the pie set too firmly.

 5. Mix it up until the cornstarch is evenly distributed, then evenly distribute the filling in your crust!

6. And bake for 35 minutes at 350 F. As the pie is getting done you'll begin to smell the butteriness of the crust, and the cornstarch will no longer be evidently white.

7. Pull out your pie and have a grand old time eating it.

Quick Tomato Barbeque Sauce

It's exciting to find new ways to use ingredients, particularly those parts which would otherwise go straight in the compost. So when I knew I wanted to make a tomato pie, and that I'd have to remove the watery parts, I wanted to come up with a way to use those watery parts. This reduction sauce made a lot of sense since I already had a pan out from making the pie filling. Just poured the juice back in, turned up the heat and I was ready to go!

Quick Tomato Barbeque Sauce

1-2 C Tomato juice
~1 T honey
~2 T apple cider vinegar
3-4 crushed hot peppers
salt

Very simply combine all ingredients in a pan and put the heat on high. Let it boil and reduce until the sauce is caramelly and thick. At that point taste it, adjust the flavor if you'd like, and if you end up adding more liquid let it reduce back down again. Once it's the texture of barbeque sauce, take it off the heat and store it in the fridge.

Here it is on a really good burger I made the other day.

 Tangy, sweet, and spicy, as good as any other barbeque sauce, and one more thing you can make yourself instead of buying it in a bottle!