Winter

If you don’t think salad is a hearty enough meal for the dead of winter, this one will certainly change your mind… With a warm duck breast sliced atop a flavor packed mix of greens, vegetables, nuts and cheese, it’s a dish that’s rich and satisfying but also pretty skinny.

I only recently stumbled upon this fabulous combination of flavors at The Waterfront Restaurant in our favorite home away from home, Camden, Maine. It was Christmastime and there was a fresh blanket of snow on the ground…but the sun was bright, the sky a vivid blue and the outside temperature was an almost balmy 34 degrees. Somehow, I didn’t feel like a cold seafood salad but didn’t really want a hot chowder either.

I ended up ordering this dish instead and, by the time lunch was finished–and everyone at the table had sampled my plate–we all decided that this warm salad would be perfect any time of year.

I came home from the market the other day and I had bags of acorn squash, butternut squash, parsnips and obviously the sweet potatoes and yams you see here.

When Fall hits, I immediately go into squash and root vegetable mode.  It's hard not to.  But there is something about yams and sweet potatoes that float my boat.  I wonder what it is...oh yeah, it's a potato...my kryptonite. 

So I wanted to roast these potatoes, which I could happily eat plain, but the family would want a dipping sauce.  I wanted smoke, I wanted sweet and I wanted tang. So I started playing around and came up with something we loved.  It had such a good flavor.  We had some the next day and it was even better. The flavors had melded together.

This is going to be a staple dish through the Fall.

I love soups and stews. I truly do. This soup is a derivative of fresh, previously fresh, and local flavors that all meld together in a literal melting pot of culinary delight.

Sausage from M&T Meats in Hawkinsville mixed with Conecuh Sausage from Evergreen, Alabama add a layer of savory, smoky flavor as well as depth to this soup. Stewed tomatoes, put up from last summer, and black beans all swirl around in a big ol’ pot with cumin, cayenne, and a Vidalia roux.

Rouxs rule! A roux, or a cooked mixture of fat and flour, is the flavor foundation for this soup. A roux is the classical thickener for the French mother sauces, yet a Cajun roux is a bit different from its classical cousin. The roux for this soup is more so of a Cajun roux, though not totally authentic…a Cajun roux takes a long time to properly make – this one not so much. I also did not use flour since I used onion powder and cumin, thus making up the starch portion of the roux’s makeup. Typically a one to one ratio fat to starch is called for in a roux…this combo works just fine!

Sounds funny, right? “Winter fruit”. It’s a sorry state of affairs, especially in California where we can get so many splendid things almost all year round AND believe it or not, we DO have winter.

The Farmers Market web sites list what’s in season and during winter the list looks like it’s trying too hard.  With un-enticing things like Gogi and Ground Cherry (what the…?) it looks like a parent making excuses for their untalented child. When I clicked on the Fruit icon at LocalHarvest.com it showed an array of exciting things like apricots and melons, only to find out that they were hocking the seeds to grow them with for ‘sweet goodness grown at home.’  Jesus!

The one fruit that gets to shine during winter is the apple.  I love apples. I’m so glad the growers of Delicious got it together and stopped growing that mush bomb. Red Delicious has returned to the apple of my childhood. Hard as a rock, crisp, juicy and sweet.