Winter

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.

It happens every Sunday. Clamoring crowds jostle for space around the popular tables at the farmers’ market to check out the hip Meyer lemons, the chic wild arugula, and the sexy red strawberries (yes, we really did have fresh strawberries this past week).

Not so at the cruciferous vegetables table. There lie the Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower (of which only the funky Romanesco variety is getting any attention). These uncomely vegetables patiently wait for someone to come by and check them out. It is a long wait.

This past Sunday the Brussels sprouts were carelessly dumped in a lop-sided pile, causing stray runaway sprouts to keep rolling off the table's edge and onto the concrete. Inspired by Molly’s witty post at Orangette, I thought I would take on a challenge. A makeover for three undatable vegetables: Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli. The make-up? Breadcrumbs.

Now that the holiday feeding frenzy is over (well, sort of) we are left with hunks and wedges of cheese and packages of smoked salmon. I swear my cheese drawer looks like a graveyard of half eaten-half scooped items. But there is no reason to let them go to waste and they are easily re-purposed into something amazing. 

We were lucky enough to have smoked salmon around this holiday season. But don't worry, this recipe would work well with any leftover salmon or fish you have now or throughout the year.

I shredded up some wedges of cheese, about 3-1/2 to 4 cups total. I used Parmesan, Dubliner, Pepper Jack and Monterey Jack and I had about 1-1/4 pounds of leftover smoked salmon.

To make things even easier, I used a can of Progresso Recipe Starters Creamy Three Cheese Cooking Sauce as part of the base for my sauce. Have you tried these yet? They are so great to have in the pantry when you are needing a quick meal.

If you listen to conventional wisdom, you might think roasting is the only way to go when it comes to cooking fingerling potatoes. Now, I am usually the poster-girl for roasting (potatoes or anything else), and I’d like not to be burned at the stake for potato heresy, but I think fingerling potatoes are usually better braised or simmered, or, yes, boiled—any method that involves a little liquid.

I hate to generalize, because there are, in fact, many different varieties of fingerling potatoes. Fingerlings themselves aren’t a variety, but more of a type of potato, defined by their size and shape—small, knobby, and elongated. Their flavor is usually rich and concentrated, but the color of their skin and flesh, as well as their starch content, can vary quite a bit from variety to variety. (Popular varieties include Russian Banana, Purple Peruvian, Ruby Crescent, and French Fingerling.)

The varying starch level is why some fingerlings lean towards being fluffy and dry (like a Russet potato), while others have creamy or waxy flesh (like a Red Bliss potato).  Unless you cook with the same variety a lot, it’s hard to always know exactly what you’re getting at the store (or the farmers’ market) or how it will behave in the dry heat of the oven. While I’ve had bad experiences with Russian Bananas over-drying when roasted, I’ve never had a fingerling that wasn’t perfectly delicious when cooked with a wet-heat method.