I’m so ready to heat things up in the kitchen, but opportunity hasn’t been knocking. It’s been too warm to start the soups, stews and roasts of chilly weather cooking. So, following on the heels of the preserved lemons and chicken stock, I’m continuing the theme of getting some basics ready for nippy nights. This time, it’s harissa, a condiment sometimes used in North Africa cuisine. In it’s basic form, it’s made with peppers, garlic, olive oil and a few spices.

If you read the LA Times, you will have seen that Amy Scattergood did a recent article on harissa. She suggests chipotles in her mix, call me a purist, but I completely disagree, this is not the place for their smoky flavor. Her recipe and many others call for caraway, but that flavor doesn’t remind me of the harissa in the couscous restaurants in Paris I used to go to with my friends when I was a poor student in Paris, so I leave it out. I also find that too much raw garlic is too strong (and I’m not one to skimp on the garlic), so I only use two cloves. Trust me on this one.

The word harissa in Arabic means to crush, and it’s traditionally made in a mortar and pestle, but you can use a food processor. Harissa is used in all sorts of ways in North African cuisine. It’s a must when making "un grand couscous," a meal of couscous grains topped with a stew of vegetables and meats. The stew itself is full of flavor, but the harissa adds a tangy garlicky heat that this dish really needs. Plus, it’s useful that the heat is added by each person at the table; it makes it easier to feed kids and adults the same thing and you also don’t have to worry about the guest who doesn’t like spicy food. You can serve this along with a chicken breast, with some grilled lamb, put a dollop of it in some soup or lentils, put it on potatoes or eat it like in the Maghreb spread on a piece of bread. Or just do like me and make it ahead of time and wait to steam up the kitchen another day. I’ll put up the couscous recipe sometime between now and the first big frost.

harissa

• 6 oz. dried chiles (guajillo or ancho or a mix), stemmed and seeded
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and quartered
• 1 t salt
• 1 T coriander
• 1 T cumin
• 2 t cayenne pepper (start with this amount and add more if you like it really hot)
• 2 T extra virgin olive oil, plus more for storage
• juice of one lemon

Put chiles in bowl and cover with hot water. Let sit for 1 hour until softened; drain. Place all ingredients into a food processor and pulse until smooth. Add a little water if necessary to form a smooth paste. Transfer harissa to a jar and add just enough olive oil to cover. Refrigerate until ready to use. Makes about 1 cup.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of ceres & bacchus. Looking back to last October, I’m reminded of something Edward Said wrote, “Beginning is making or producing difference.” I started this site as an outlet for my culinary obsession and because my husband wanted to become a web designer (watch out everybody, because now he wants to increase his skill set to include video and podcasts). We both had the feeling that we could make something different within this genre, but I hadn’t realized all of the ways in which it would make a difference in my life. There’s the cliché idea that in writing a blog, one participates in a global virtual community. Sounds sappy, but it’s oh-so-true. I’ve had contact with people all over the world, I’ve found inspiration gastronomical and otherwise and I’ve even received foodie packages in the mail. The site has also allowed me to have contact with friends and family that I wouldn’t have had otherwise (hi grandma!). I’ve challenged myself with tasks I hadn’t realized would be part and parcel of this venture: choosing recipes that people will love and that are different from what everyone else is making; writing instructions that are clear and concise and that make it so people can actually reproduce the recipes; making a coherent narrative that will keep all of you interested in coming back here; and of course, the monster that plagues us all, the photography, because let’s face it, everybody wants the food porn. The one thing that writing here on an almost bi-weekly basis has done for me that I hadn’t foreseen is that it’s made me a better writer in my academic work. The more I write, the more I write. That’s a tautology, for sure, but it holds. If you’ve been with me for the last twelve months, you’ll have noticed that I’ve had an eventful year, full of changes both exciting and daunting and we’ve had some great food and great parties. The next year will bring more challenges and certainly more good food. And I’m signing up for another twelve months of this; I’ll already be making dinner, might as well share it with you all. Let’s hope I won’t have too many disasters.

Last October, the initial post was for a simple roast chicken recipe. I’ve been making roast chicken for years, because it’s economical and delicious. Now that fall is upon us, I’m pulling that recipe back out and I’ll start putting it on the menu again every couple of weeks. When I make a chicken, I take the bones and make stock, use the leftover chicken for sandwiches, salads, stir fries, enchiladas, risotto, or whatever other thing I can think up to put variety on the table. The first recipe I ever wrote down and shared with my family was for this chicken and what to do with the leftovers. My dad now calls it “the recipe for one three dollar roast chicken that feeds you and your family for five days.” We do like chicken, but the other reason I make it I can no longer bring myself to buy chicken broth, the stuff I make from the chicken bones is just so much better, and I especially like broth made from a chicken that has been roasted, it’s darker in color and richer in flavor. If you’re thinking you don’t have space in your freezer for that, let me tell you that you’re better off having a freezer full of homemade fat free chicken broth than a freezer full of just about anything else, so eat up those Lean Cuisines and Stouffer’s Pizzas and make room for some of this. If space is truly an issue, just reduce the stock by half and add some water when you’re ready to use it. This recipe is really easy, just throw everything in a pot the day after you’ve roasted a chicken and wait for it to turn into liquid gold. I always cool it in the fridge and wait a day so that I can skim all the fat from the top, but you can leave some in if you want some schmaltz in your soup. You’ll also note that I don’t call for salt here, it’s best to wait and see what you’re going to do with it before you decide how much salt it will need. In any case, this might not be the most original recipe out there, but I know that some of you haven’t ever made this before and some of you have forgotten just how good it is. Make this, you won’t regret it.

chicken stock

• bones from one roast chicken
• one onion, cut in half (I don’t peel it, you don’t have to either)
• two medium carrots, broken into several pieces (ditto)
• one celery stalk, broken into several pieces
• 1 bouquet garni: two stalks parsley, a few sprigs of thyme and a bay leaf tied together with twine
• 10 black peppercorns

Put all ingredients together in your largest stock pot, fill pot with water and put on stove on high heat. Once it comes to a boil, turn heat to low, cover and let simmer for about three hours. Skim if a lot of foam appears on the surface (the best way to avoid the foam and thus avoid the skimming is to keep it at a bare simmer with no boiling bubbles at all).

I can finally start getting into the idea of fall, because you see I found my sweaters. They were in a box in the garage of our new house and I was refusing to believe that fall was coming, refusing to think it was going to ever be cold outside, refusing to cook for fall. Now that I’ve got my apparel in order, I’m ready to appreciate the changing colors of the leaves and ready to heat things up a little in the kitchen.

This weekend, my parents and my sister came to visit. We didn’t spend a lot of time cooking anything elaborate; tapas for friends on Friday night and a big family dinner on Saturday. I didn’t even cook dessert; we just bought Magic Brownies and Pecan Blondies from Zingerman’s - no need to find the perfect brownie recipe, people, just order these. The big news of the weekend is that my muscle bound sister slung a bunch of boxes around and my mother unwrapped all the kitchenware and organized my cupboards; my father helped, too (thanks y’all!). This is a good thing, because I was having a block about getting started, especially since we moved from a very large kitchen into a much smaller one. Where to put everything? Thanks to mom, I didn’t have to make any decisions and she put everything away in the perfect place - of course she did, she’s my mom, right? This reminds me of the last time I was at her house for lunch and she was making sandwiches. She said, "How do you like your sandwich?" and I just stared at her for a couple of seconds and finally said, "I like it how you make it, you’re my mom."

Now that the family has christened the house and the kitchen is organized, I can get down to the business of making plans for cold weather cooking. I decided to start by replenishing my supply of preserved lemons. I realize I’ve given you this recipe before as an addendum to something else, but I don’t think you’ll mind me repeating it. I found these wonderful tiny lemons at Trader Joe’s, but any lemons will do and when Meyer lemon season rolls around, try using those. These take about three weeks of marinating before they’re ready. I’m still looking for the tagine and the couscoussier, but I know by the time I find them, it’s going to be good and chilly outside. I’ll put a pot of d’jej m’chermel on the stove, slip on my favorite sweater, and curl up on the couch with a book and a glass of wine until it’s ready.

preserved lemons

• 4-6 lemons, preferably organic, scrubbed
• 1/2 cup sea salt
• 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• Enough boiling water to fill your jar
• A sterilized jar, with a tight fitting lid, large enough to hold the fruit (to sterilize, boil in water or run it through the dishwasher right before using)

Take each lemon in your hand and make vertical slits from the blossom end to the tip without cutting all the way through the fruit. Place the lemons, salt and lemon juice in the jar. Add enough boiling water to come to the top of the lemons. Put the lid on the jar. Place the jar in the refrigerator for at least a week before using the lemons. When you want to use a lemon, use a clean utensil to fish one out, not your hands. Will keep in the refrigerator for six months to a year.

The previous owner of our house must have loved green. The porch was covered in grass green astroturf, the porch itself is painted a hunter sort of green. The bottom half of the house is painted Necco wafer green as is the whole garage, including the doors. I don’t have anything against this color; in fact it’s a good fashion choice for the golf set, but for a house? I think the neighbors agree. When I met them, the first thing they asked was whether or not we’re going to paint it. You should see the inside I told them. It came with mint green carpeting, green linoleum and kelly green blinds. I’m going to banish green from making an appearance in our décor, but not on our table.

Salsa verde, or green sauce, is a standard Mexican cooked sauce. You can eat it with chips like any salsa, but it’s also excellent when used in tacos, on enchiladas, with grilled pork or chicken or as a topping for chalupas, which is today’s recipe. The main ingredients are green: tomatillos, jalepeños, cilantro and lime, with some onions and garlic thrown in for flavor. Have you heard that myth that there is some sort of gene that makes about 40% of the population hate cilantro? I’m not buying that one, because that would mean that 40% percent of Mexicans and Thai hate it too and that’s just not possible. If you grow up with the taste, you love it, if you encounter it for the first time later in life, you might say yuck it tastes like soap, or you might love it. My virtual friend Luisa, aka The Wednesday Chef, recently had a cilantro epiphany and is jumping on the Mexican food bandwagon. She is looking for more Mexican recipes and also said she’d like to see more pictures of the house. And that’s about as close as I can get today to tying these two unrelated paragraphs together, aside from the green part, of course.

chalupas de pollo con salsa verde (chicken chalupas with green sauce)
adapted from epicurious.com

For the salsa verde

• 1 lb fresh tomatillos, husks discarded and tomatillos rinsed and quartered
• 1-3 jalapeños, coarsely chopped (use just one for a milder sauce, up to 3 for more heat)
• 1/2 cup chopped white onion
• 3 garlic cloves, quartered
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro
• 2 T vegetable oil

For the chalupas

• 1 to 2 T vegetable oil
• 12 small corn tortillas
• 1 cup shredded cooked chicken (from 1 chicken breast half)
• 1/4 cup sour cream mixed with the juice of one lime (put this in a squeeze bottle if you have one)
• 1/3 cup finely chopped white onion
• 1/3 cup finely crumbled queso fresco (Mexican fresh cheese)
• 1/3 cup finely chopped cilantro
• For serving: 1 lime cut into wedges

Put all of the salsa verde ingredients except the oil in a blender and purée until smooth. Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat. Carefully add purée (the oil might splatter). Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 8-10 minutes. This mixture can be made ahead of time and keeps well in the freezer.

Heat 1 T vegetable oil in a skillet until hot but not smoking. Cook tortillas three at a time turning every minute or so until they are crisp on both sides. Add more oil as needed. To serve: top each tortilla with a little chicken, some onion, cheese, salsa verde and some of the sour cream mixture, then top with a sprinkling of cilantro (but only if you like it) and put a wedge of lime on each plate. Serves 3-4 people (or two really hungry ones).

I wish you could have come over for dinner last night. It was the first real meal in our new house and it was so good I would have loved to feed it to everybody I know and all of the rest of you. We’ve bought a 1913 Dutch colonial style house that needs extensive renovations. The kitchen is a disaster both functionally and aesthetically. It has a mishmash of poorly made cupboards from the 1940s and the 1980s with green 1970s linoleum that could be cool except it doesn’t go with the turquoise formica or with anything else in the room. Before we’ll be able to fix its myriad problems, we first need a new roof, a new furnace, new bathrooms and repairs to the leaky basement. And the purple trim in the living room and dining room? We’ll cover that up with a fresh coat of white semi-gloss sooner rather than later.

Moving on now to a positive development, I’ve got a new stove, but it’s really an old stove and of course there’s a story behind it. About a year ago a childhood friend contacted me to see if I wanted her Magic Chef, a gorgeous old monster with red bakelite handles (Thanks Jane!). I didn’t know it when I accepted her offer that I was going to need this puppy. Our new house came without a functioning stove. Whatever did I do with the Magic Chef in the last year? I told you a little about my best friend, Nancy, right? Well she really is a solid gold friend. She picked up the stove for me, took it to her warehouse, had it shrink-wrapped and kept it for me for the last year. The big adventure of last week was borrowing my brother’s old pick up and driving to her store to get the stove, getting it home, in the house, hooked up and working. All of these were major efforts, of course, not the least of which was extracting myself from conversation with Nancy’s wonderfully talkative father; he heads up the hardware store that is Nancy’s family business. You remember that part, right? My best friend’s family has a hardware store. Isn’t that awesome? She held on to my stove for the last year, she brought us a new Weber grill on the first day we were in our house, she took care of my shower issues and I’m sure she’ll be bringing me a hose, or some other equally useful household item, the next time she comes over (right Nancita?). Erik says he can’t imagine me having a better best friend except for maybe if her family business were a brewery.

Let’s get back to the food. Maybe you want to know what that first supper was last night? It’s something I’ve been making all summer whenever we’ve wanted a very quick, very satisfying meal. It doesn’t take a lot of cooking, but it’s not just a summer weather dish. Around here we call it simply milanesas, the Spanish term, because it’s something we ate a lot when we were in Spain doing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. In French it’s escalopes à la milanaise and in Italian, cotoletta ala milanese. Traditionally made with veal, these can also be made with pork. In German, this is good old wiener schnitzel. So the German speakers think it’s from Vienna, while the rest of Europe says it’s from Milan. In fact, it’s not known if this dish comes from Renaissance Italy, originating in Milan of course, or if Austrian general Josef Graf Von Radetzky invented it in the nineteenth century, though he is said to have been the first one to write the recipe out. I’m sort of a purist when it comes to this and I don’t serve it with anything other than a little lettuce and tomato with the pan juices and lemon drizzled on top, though in Spain you’ll find it served with French fries and in France I’ve had it with cheese covered macaroni, the cutlets laying on the cheesy pasta and pan juices poured on top; I might make it like that this winter sometime.

We’ve finished pulling out most of the mint green 80s carpeting. Does anyone want to come over for a redo of this meal and help pull staples out of the wood floors? We could also use some help dragging the drop ceiling out of the basement and shoving it into the purple dumpster in our driveway.

cotoletas milanesas (breaded and pan fried veal or pork cutlets)

• 4 thin cut boneless pork chops, trimmed of fat
• or 4 veal cutlets
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 egg
• 1 T water
• 1 cup plain bread crumbs
• 3 T butter or vegetable oil
• 1 small head of Boston lettuce, washed, dried and torn into bite size pieces
• 4 plum tomatoes, cut into wedges
• 1 lemon, quartered
• salt, freshly ground black pepper

Using a meat mallet (or the bottom of a heavy skillet or an empty wine bottle, etc.) pound each cutlet to about 1/8 of an inch thick. Put flour on a plate and season with salt and pepper. Place egg in a shallow bowl, whisk in water and add a pinch of salt. Place bread crumbs in a plate and season with salt and pepper. Heat butter or oil in a skillet over medium heat. Dip each cutlet in flour, then egg and then bread crumbs, patting the breadcrumbs on thickly and place each cutlet in the skillet. Turn after 2-3 minutes when the underside is golden brown. Remove from skillet when the other side is also golden brown. To serve: divide lettuce and tomato among 4 plates, arrange one cutlet on each plate, divide the pan juices among the four plates and finish by squeezing a lemon wedge over each one. Add more salt and pepper as desired. Serves 4.

Options: you can make these with chicken or turkey or even a thin slice of tofu. If you are watching your calories, substitute cooking spray for the butter or oil.