For the past couple of summers we’ve been members of a local CSA, and this summer we’re back to trying our hand at growing vegetables in pots in our backyard as well. (We’ve learned that we can basically grow herbs, cherry tomatoes and — especially — chili peppers. Oh so many chili peppers.)

This week we got some corn on the cob and a bunch of tomatoes, plus a head of fresh garlic, from the CSA (amongst a bazillion other things… August is when the CSA boxes really start to get heavy). And our backyard banana peppers and jalapeños are nearing their peak as well. This morning I wanted to make myself a breakfast burrito, as I often do, but I got sidetracked turning all of the above into a roasted corn salsa. I was totally winging it, but the results turned out pretty tasty, so I decided I should write up the recipe. Here goes!

Ingredients

1 cob fresh sweet corn
8 small or 4 large tomatoes
3 fresh banana peppers
1 fresh jalapeño
2 cloves garlic
a few slices of onion
fresh cilantro (optional)
salt and pepper
vegetable oil

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400ºF (convection if possible).
2. Shuck and rinse the corn, leave on cob. Slice the tomatoes in half, and remove the hard stem area if needed. Leave the chili peppers and garlic whole.
3. Rub the corn with some oil, then salt and pepper as desired.
4. Place the corn, half of the tomato halves (cut side up), the chili peppers, garlic and onion on parchment paper on a baking sheet and place in oven.
5. Check the progress every few minutes; rotate the corn and peppers as needed. Note that some things may take longer to roast than others. As each item appears to be “done” (starting to char), remove from the oven and place on a plate to cool. (I found the banana peppers were ready really fast; the corn took the longest.)
6. Once cooled, cut off and discard the stems of the banana peppers and jalapeños. Peel the skin off if it is loose. (In my case, the jalapeño needed to be peeled but the banana peppers did not.) Slice each in half. Remove the seeds/pulp from the banana peppers, and from the jalapeños if you don’t want the salsa very spicy. (My jalapeño had already turned bright red and I left all of the seeds in — the salsa is very hot. At least by Minnesota Scandinavian standards.)
7. Finely dice all of the chili peppers and place them in a mason jar or medium-sized bowl. (Be sure to wash your hands well after handling the jalapeños!)
8. Finely chop the onion and add it to the jar.
9. Without peeling, squeeze the roasted garlic bulbs into the jar. The insides should have a mashed potato-like consistency and come out fairly easily. Be sure none of the papery skin gets into the jar!
10. Cut the corn off the cob and add to the jar.
11. Place the roasted tomato halves, along with the remaining uncooked tomato halves, into a food processor and process just until broken up. Pour into the jar. (Depending on the size of your tomatoes, you may have too much, or possibly too little. For me, 8 small tomatoes was just perfect. If your jar isn’t mostly filled, purée another fresh tomato or two, as needed.)
12. If you are using cilantro, wash and dry it, finely chop (removing tough stems), and add to the jar.
13. Lid it, then shake vigorously to mix all ingredients. Taste and add more salt and pepper if desired. (I didn’t need to.)

This salsa tasted pretty good right away, but it will get better after it’s been in the fridge for a few hours. I should also note that I didn’t use cilantro, because we didn’t have any on hand. The salsa doesn’t really need it, but if you have it, I would use it.

Do you want to read a long, drawn-out blog post intro to this recipe before I actually get down to the details? Of course you do!

But I don’t really care to write it. Suffice to say, the first time I ever had biscuits and gravy was at a restaurant somewhere on vacation with my parents when I was about 11 or 12. I loved biscuits and I loved gravy, so I assumed it would be awesome. But I’d never had (or even imagined the existence of) sausage gravy, and since I was at the age where — with food at least — surprise equals disgust, I hated it.

Over time I learned to like biscuits and gravy. But over time I also became a vegetarian. What to do? How about make my own vegetarian version? Of course!

The first thing you need to know is that I am not much of a baker, and my biscuit recipe is almost exactly the biscuit recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, so I suggest before you do anything else, you head over to your favorite bookseller and buy it.

The next thing you need to know is that I am all about making sauces, gravies, béchamels, what-have-you. I have always found that recipes gloss over the trick of it, which is really not hard at all, but if you don’t know it, they turn into a lumpy disaster. So I’ll get to that in time.

First let’s make some biscuits.

Not Exactly Mark Bittman’s Buttermilk Biscuits

This makes somewhere between 10 and 15 biscuits, depending on how thin you roll it out and how careful you are about not wasting any dough.

Ingredients

2 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp baking powder*
1 tsp baking soda
5 tbsp butter
1 c buttermilk

* Mark Bittman says 3 tsp, but since 3 tsp equals 1 tbsp, I don’t know why he does that, other than that baking is a science and maybe saying 3 tsp instead of 1 tbsp will make you be more precise in your measurements. Also make sure you pay attention to the difference between baking powder (which contains baking soda) and baking soda (which does not contain baking powder).

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 450ºF.
2. In a large mixing bowl, combine the first 4 ingredients and stir together well.
3. Cut the butter into small pieces — I actually hack away at it with kitchen scissors; you could also grate it with a box grater if it’s cold enough.
4. Add the butter pieces into the dry ingredients, and then using your fingers, smoosh the butter together with the flour until there aren’t any big chunks of butter left. (Make the recipe a few times and you’ll probably figure out your own preferred way to do this.)
5. Stir the buttermilk into the bowl 1/4 cup at a time, and continue stirring until the dough starts to come together. If your experience is like mine, it never totally does. Just avoid working it too much.
6. Scoop the dough out onto a floured surface and knead a few times, just until it comes together. Again, don’t overwork it.
7. Dust a rolling pin with flour, and roll the dough out to about 1/2 inch thick.
8. If you have a biscuit cutter or a circular cookie cutter, awesome. Otherwise, an overturned juice glass supposedly works. You might want to rub some flour around the inside lip of the glass to keep the dough from sticking. Press the cutter/glass down straight through the dough quickly to make circles. Don’t twist.
9. Hopefully your dough is dry enough not to stick to the cutter/glass and even more importantly to the counter. Assuming that’s the case, you can transfer the circles of dough to a nonstick baking sheet. Give about an inch between biscuits. They do expand while baking, but not a huge amount.
10. If you have leftover dough, smoosh it back together, roll it out again, and cut out a few more biscuits! Then be sure to take the remaining scraps this time, mash them into a grotesque monster biscuit, and put that on the tray too!
11. Bake for 7 to 9 minutes. (My oven takes 9.) Just look for the kind of golden brown color on top that you like to see.
12. Remove the biscuits from the oven and cool slightly on a cooling rack before serving.

Here are the biscuits I made this morning (minus a couple Sara snagged before I could take a picture). Can you tell which ones I cut out first?

While the biscuits are in the oven, you can get started on the gravy.

Scott’s Vegetarian Sausage Gravy

Ingredients

3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
1/4 c buttermilk
3/4 c vegetable broth
1 c milk
2 vegetarian breakfast sausage patties (e.g. Morningstar Farms)
fresh ground black pepper
salt to taste

Preparation

1. Combine the liquid ingredients in a 2-cup measuring cup. (Should be 2 cups total.)
2. Place butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat.
3. While butter is melting, microwave the sausage patties 20-25 seconds, flip, then 20-25 seconds more.
4. Add the sausage patties to the saucepan and break into small pieces with a wooden spoon.
5. Add the flour and stir well for about 1 minute.
6. Here’s the secret to good, smooth gravy/sauce/bechamel: Add the liquid a small amount at a time. By “small amount” I mean about 1/4 cup. Stir until all of the liquid is absorbed and the mixture is a consistent texture, then continue adding liquid 1/4 cup at a time until the overall mixture is more “liquid” than “paste,” then pour in all of the rest of the liquid and stir well.
7. Turn the heat up to high and stir constantly until it comes to a boil. Reduce heat to medium.
8. Continue stirring constantly, making sure to loosen up anything that’s starting to stick to the bottom of the saucepan.
9. Stir in a generous amount of black pepper (fresh ground if you have it). Good sausage gravy has a lot of black pepper in it. I generally use at least 1/2 tbsp to 1 tbsp.
10. Continue stirring and simmering until the gravy reaches your desired thickness. Taste and season with salt as needed.

That’s it! Put 2-3 biscuits in a bowl or on a plate, ladle the gravy over and enjoy!

(Another day, another blog post with a vegetarian recipe! Again, I’m not turning this into a food blog, but this is just something I’ve been meaning to write up for a while, and I made it last night so the timing is right.)

I was going to just put “meat” in quotes in the title, but (a) I was thinking about SEO (yes, I’ve become that person) and (b) I realized that, for this recipe, “balls” really needs to be in quotes just as much as “meat”. You’ll see why when you cook them. Let’s just say neither “meatmuffins” nor “meatpucks” really works, for obvious reasons. I seem to keep mistyping the word as “metaballs” which I actually think is quite appropriate. But, you know… SEO.

Also just a word of caution… this is definitely not vegan, and it’s not particularly “healthy”. But it’s a bit of that “hygge” everyone’s after these days (even though that’s Danish).

I’ve been eating vegetarian/pescatarian for the last 5 1/2 years, but I’ve been a Minnesotan of mixed Scandinavian descent my entire life. So, yes… I’ve been quite familiar with Swedish meatballs for a long time. Well before Minnesota finally got an IKEA store in the mid-2000s.

In fact, I’ve made the meat variety of Swedish meatballs so many times that I still have the recipe memorized, even though I haven’t tasted them since 2013. Granted, my kids are not vegetarians, so I still have to occasionally make the traditional version for them. But last year I finally cracked the code on a vegetarian version. For a while I’d just use general-purpose frozen vegetarian “meatballs” and cook them in a vaguely Swedish cream sauce. I even used “GRÖNSAKSBULLAR” from IKEA. (Why does IKEA do everything in all-caps? It’s awfully shouty for mild-mannered Swedes.) They’re not bad… but they’re not right for this dish, either.

There’s a certain chunky texture that proper Swedish meatballs need, and the processed smoothness of frozen “meatballs” — plus the lack of the correct spices — just won’t cut it. So I turned to another processed frozen meat substitute… “crumbles”.

Yes, the secret to my vegetarian Swedish “meatballs”, if I’m being precise about it, is MorningStar Farms® Grillers® Crumbles™. (I copy-pasted that from their website to make sure I got all of the trademarks right.)

That, and a muffin tin.

This mixture isn’t as firm as one with ground beef, so you can’t shape balls by hand. That’s where the muffin tin comes in, as well as the slightly odd shape of the final product. We’ll be baking these instead of browning them in a skillet as with traditional Swedish meatballs.

This recipe also involves one of my favorite skills I have acquired as a cook: making a good sauce. Whether it’s gravy, béchamel, or whatever you want to call it, the principle is the same: 4 tbsp fat, 4 tbsp flour, 4 c flavorful liquid. Cook the fat and flour together for a minute, then gradually add the liquid, stirring constantly to absorb completely and keep the consistency smooth. Once you “get it”, it’s simple and awesome. But I rarely see it described correctly.

OK, enough Minnesota small talk. Let’s get cooking!

Vegetarian Swedish “Meatballs”

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Ingredients

For “Meatballs” (a.k.a. Metaballs)

1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 small(-ish) onion, very finely chopped; reserve 1-2 tbsp for cream sauce
1 12-oz pkg MorningStar Farms® Grillers® Crumbles™ or similar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
3 slices stale(-ish) bread, processed to fine crumbs
1 tsp (or so) freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

For Cream Sauce:

2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp vegetable oil
4 tbsp flour
3 c vegetable broth
1/2 c milk and 1/2 c cream
(or just 1 c milk if you’re pretending this is healthy)
pinch of nutmeg
pinch of allspice
2 tbsp ketchup
(or 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce if ketchup sounds too weird to you)
salt and pepper to taste
minced fresh dill or dried dill weed for garnish

Preparation

Stuff you’ll need to have ready before you start:

• a large (12-inch), high sided skillet
• a 12-cup muffin tin, greased and floured
• a large mixing bowl

1. Preheat oven to 375ºF.
2. In large skillet, melt 1/2 tbsp butter with 1/2 tbsp oil over medium heat. Add the onions (except reserve), and cook about 3 minutes until softened. Stir in entire package of crumbles, cover and set to medium-low for 3-5 minutes. You’re just trying to thaw the crumbles, not cook them! Check periodically and break up big pieces as they thaw. Remove from heat as soon as crumbles are soft.
3. Meanwhile, in a large mixing bowl, stir breadcrumbs into beaten eggs with nutmeg, allspice, salt and pepper. When the crumbles and onions are ready, add them and stir to combine thoroughly. Leave any remaining bits in the skillet as long as they’re not burned… they’ll flavor the sauce.
4. Prepare your muffin tin by spraying with cooking spray and then dusting with flour. Shake out excess flour into the sink.
5. Using a large spoon, scoop the mixture equally into the 12 cups of the muffin tin. Use the back of the spoon to smooth the mixture into rounded mounds inside the cups, but don’t press them too firmly. You just want them to stay together.
6. Place the filled muffin tin on the center rack in the preheated oven and bake for 20 minutes. Remove muffin tin from oven and let cool.
   

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   While the muffins are baking, you can start on the cream sauce or work on anything else you need to prepare, like potatoes or vegetables. The meatballs can rest on the counter for a while if needed.

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7. In the same skillet you used for the onion/crumble mixture, you’ll start on the cream sauce. Add your reserved onions, 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp oil and heat over medium-high heat. When the butter has melted and onions are translucent (or slightly browned on the edges, depending on your taste preference), add the flour and pinches of nutmeg and allspice, and whisk gently until completely absorbed and smooth, about 1 minute.
8. Turn the heat to high and gradually add the broth to the saucepan, about 2-3 tbsp at a time. Constantly whisk the mixture gently (to avoid splashing), making sure the liquid has completely absorbed before adding more. As you do this the mixture will transform in appearance from grainy clumps, to pastry dough, to mashed potatoes, and finally a creamy smoothness.
9. When all of the broth has been added, whisk in the milk and cream. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low and simmer. Stir frequently to avoid sticking or burning on the bottom of the pan. Adjust heat if needed to keep a gentle simmer.
10. After sauce has thickened slightly, add ketchup (or Worcestershire sauce) and whisk to mix thoroughly.
11. Gently remove baked “meatballs” from muffin tin — you should be able to twist them slightly with your hand to loosen them from the cups — making sure not to break them apart. Add them into the simmering cream sauce and continue to simmer, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes or until sauce has reached desired thickness. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve 2 to 3 “meatballs” per person with mashed potatoes and a generous amount of cream sauce sprinkled with dill, along with vegetables and lingonberry or cranberry sauce.