Deborah Madison

Deborah Madison, who helped start the Greens restaurant and now writes cookbooks in Santa Fe, has become our cookbook author of the month as I focus on shopping at the farmer's markets. We actually had three meatless meals last week, relying primarily on her Local Flavors.

The pasta with golden fennel was easy. Trim, quarter and (vertically) slice the fennel, saute it in butter and oil,  then add salt, toss with the juice of 1 lemon, add a cup of water and braise, adding water by the 1/2 c. until fennel is tender. Boil and drain the pasta (we used fettucine), stir it in the fennel and added a mix of minced garlic, chopped fennel greens and lemon zest. Ours came out very lemony because I used a big lemon, but it makes a nice refreshing meal.

The superstar of the week was the celery root and wild rice chowder. Boil 1/2 c. wild rice separately. Trim and peel celery root and chop into bite-size pieces. Saute in butter with the chopped white parts of 2 leeks, a diced celery rib, a thinly sliced russet potato, 1/4 c. chopped parsley, a bay leaf, a thyme sprig. Add 2 c. vegetable or chicken stock and simmer for 20 min., then add 2 c. half-and-half or milk (guess which one I used), and cook until tender. Purree 1 c. of soup and stir it back in. Serve in bowl with a mound of wild rice topped with chopped parsley and a drizzle of truffle oil. Heavenly.

We also used the endives baked with Gorgonzola from her earlier cookbook, The Savory Way, to accompany a festive steak dinner, and a recipe for winter squash and quinoa soup from Rebecca Wood's The Splendid Grain (just OK, there are better butternut squash soup recipes).