I just LOVE Valentine’s day! What better time to show your sweetie how much you care about them! I spent most of the day decorating the apartment with pink and red crepe paper and singing along to my favorite love songs, but I also took time to make dinner. Earlier in the week I planned to use some small heart-shaped cake pans that we never use to make cupcakes, but as usually happens with my plans to make sweets when the time came around I just didn’t have the heart. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the pans:

Butternut squash kibbeh, from Ana Sortun’s Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, is highly moldable for all your holiday novelty-dish needs. It’s also a great way to use butternut squash in the winter that is (Minneapolis restauranteurs take note) NOT butternut squash ravioli/pasta. For those not familiar, kibbeh is a Levantine/Middle Eastern dish of bulghur wheat mixed with meat (usually lamb) that is eaten raw, baked, or fried. I think it is best fried, but I have never eaten it raw. For this version, butternut squash takes the place of lamb as the principle binder of the bulghur. And while you can’t see it in the picture, this heart is stuffed with spiced feta. I am not a big fan of butternut squash because I think it is too sweet and too smooth-textured, but here the cracked wheat helps with both of those issues by giving the mixture a more grainy texture and diluting the sweetness of the squash.

Here’s the recipe:

Stuffed Butternut Squash Kibbeh

Kibbeh:

• 3# Squash
• 4 T beurre noisette
• 1 onion
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1/4 c olive oil
• 2 t paprika
• 1 t Middle Eastern five spice
• 1 1/2 c bulghur or cracked wheat

Filling:

• 1/2# Feta
• 1/2 t Middle Eastern five spice
• 1/2 t sumac (or more – the more sumac the better!)
• 1/2 t Aleppo pepper
• 2 T chopped parsley

Roast the squash until it’s soft, then puree it in the food processor until it is smooth and creamy. Season liberally with salt and pepper. Cook the onion and pepper in olive oil until softened and starting to brown, then stir in the paprika and five spice. Cook for a minute. Add the squash puree and warm through. Stir in the bulghur, cover, and turn off the heat. Let sit 15 minutes while the bulghur softens up.

For the filling, mix the (crumbled) feta with all the other ingredients.

To assemble, pack the kibbeh mixture into your desired vessel (for example, a heart-shaped cake pan). Hollow out an indentation and fill it with the feta mixture, then cover with more kibbeh as needed. Bake in 375° oven for 15 minutes. Turn kibbeh out on to a plate (I hope you remembered to grease those vessels, because I sure didn’t remind you!). Garnish with a bit of the feta mixture and maybe some chopped parsley.

We had this with muhammara (it’s red like hearts GET IT?) and pita. Not bad for a Valentine’s day.

Since I make pizza regularly, I am always trying to come up with new ideas for toppings to keep things interesting. I also have been trying to buy food that is local and in season. Those two concepts intersected recently to result in: the beetza.

Beets are not, strictly speaking, in season since everything here is dead, but these beets were local and probably have been stored away somewhere since the fall—as seasonal as I’m going to get in January in Minnesota. To accompany the beets, I thought I’d aim for the classic combination with basil and goat cheese. I bought basil but since I already had feta so I decided to use that in place of goat cheese (I defy you to find a difference between sheep and goats). Almost all the beets I’ve ever eaten have been roasted, but I figured with 9 minutes in a 500 degree oven thin matchsticks of raw beets would be fine. As it turned out, the beets were still pretty crunchy, which I didn’t mind, but some probably would. This was a good pizza, although the beet flavor wasn’t especially strong. The color of the beet juice bleeding out from the beet pieces made it very visually striking; it was probably worth it just to see that.

I also made a couple of other pizzas which were somewhat less exciting. Here’s a marinara pie with capers and rosemary added:

And a pizza with mushrooms and brie (on a side note, I’m pretty sick of brie): 

I did not get the crust on these pizzas as dark as I usually do and I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Same oven, same maximum heat, same crust (Peter Reinhart’s napoletana dough from American Pie). It was only the next day when I remembered that I had my pizza stone set up on a rack in the lowest position, rather than on the floor of the oven. Putting it on the floor gets the stone a lot hotter since the gas burns just below the floor. In fact, it gets too hot for bread, burning the crust before the inside is cooked, which is why the stone was on a rack in the first place. But for pizza, you want everything as hot as it can get, so I have to remember to move the stone. Those 2″ make a big difference!

You may recall my mentioning a desire to post these pictures here. This stuff is good. It’s so good I wrote them a letter about it (I used to write companies a lot when I was 8. Then they sent me free stuff. So far no free gelato by mail.). The “Lisbon Lemon” is still the favorite after trying “Roman Raspberry” (below) and “Malaysian Mango.” Here’s a link to their website. Don’t try to order it online—it costs about a billion dollars to ship. Instead, come visit. We’ll pick up a pint for dessert.

Talenti Gelato e Sorbetto :: Available at Kowalski’s Markets :: Open 24-hours

Ever since I noticed it opening in the old My-T-Fine (great name for a tea shop, why did it close?) on my way to work, I have wanted to try Cafe Agri. I think I was mostly drawn in by their logo and their slogan “from field to fork”. At the time I was under the sway of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (I still am, but it was fresh) and excited by the idea of another restaurant based on local and seasonal food close to my home. 

Reviewing the menu that was posted a couple of weeks later gave me pause. The food did appear to be local, but what was all this tempeh nonsense? As it turns out, Agri focuses not only on local and sustainable food, but also on vegetarians and vegans. Fair enough, but not the kind of place that calls my name. Still, I was intrigued and, after a few months, decided it was time to give it a try.

On entering the place, we couldn’t help but be impressed by the decor, particularly the many interesting light fixtures. Martha could probably say more about this but she’s not here so hah.  Anyway, Agri gets high marks for atmosphere.

They also have a very good selection of interesting wine and beer, mostly organic. You might miss this while trying to decipher their inexplicably centered drink menu, but there really are a lot of good, reasonably-priced choices. We both went beer.

And then there was the menu itself. Reviewing the six entrees, I began to despair. There was plenty offered to make the vegetarian, vegan or celiac sufferer happy: very limited meat (one entree with trout), tempeh and tofu aplenty, and as little gluten as possible. But, since I am none of those things, I wondered what exactly I wanted to order and pay $16 for. Butternut squash ravioli? Now where have I seen that before? Tempeh terrine? With pork or goose liver? Penne Primavera? In inverno? In the end we decided to just have a couple of appetizers and head for greener (well, less green) pastures. So keep in mind that this is in no way a fair review.

We ordered two dishes: the yam crisps with fresh guacamole, described as “baked—not fried!” which I assume was meant to be a recommendation rather than an apology, and the falafel (also baked) with cucumber salad and yogurt dill sauce.

The yam crisps themselves were good. Besides having beautifully curled edges, they were, in fact, crisp with a pleasant, not overwhelming sweetness. The guacamole, on the other hand, could not be described as good. It was severely underseasoned, resembling those awful supermarket guacamoles made with sour cream or mayonnaise. I suspect, had the lighting been bighter, its color would have been closer to brown than green, but I have no way of proving this. I also wondered from which farm in Minnesota they had obtained the fresh avocados, especially in winter. 

As for the falafel, I should never have expected to like it in the first place since it was billed as “Baked Falafel” and I don’t like baked falafel. This certainly was baked falafel, in all its sandy-textured mediocrity. It was topped by a tasteless tomato slice (did I mention it’s winter?) and yogurt sauce, which deserves neither praise nor blame. The cucumber salad was really a quick pickle of thick-cut, seeded cucumber slices and onion. Serving pickles with falafel makes good sense since pickles are very popular in the Middle East, but this was a sweet pickle rather than a sour-hot pickle as you might expect with Middle Eastern cuisine. Inauthenticity is of course not a fault per se, but I didn’t think the sweet pickles really did anything for the falafel. In any case I would have preferred fresh cucumber.

And that was all we tried. Hardly enough to base a review upon, even in these troubled economic times. But I think our reaction to the menu points to a problem with Agri and other restaurants like it. Local, organic and sustainable food are all good things. We really need more restaurants to make such food a priority; indeed, it should be the default. For that future to happen, however, food that is local, organic and sustainable has to appeal to the public: it should be relatively inexpensive (which should happen anyway because of reduced fertilizer, equipment, and transportation costs) but more importantly it should be delicious. Instead of seeing these things when he goes to a restaurant like Agri, average, closed-minded John Q. Public just has his presuppositions about this kind of food confirmed: bean curd compressed to various textures and shapes prepared in thin sauces by ascetic health nuts. Not for me. Organic and sustainable does not have to mean soybeans, and maybe it shouldn’t at all. Of course, Agri might not even want these customers. They may have intended to primarily serve vegans and vegetarians (god knows they could use a few more places) and not to be the ambassador of local/organic/seasonable/sustainable that I had made them in my mind. If Agri’s content to preach to the choir, that’s fine, but I won’t be in the pews.