I made another loaf of basic hearth bread yesterday. Like last week, I didn't add my usual seed mixture and stuck to straight wheat, baked in a parchment-lined loaf pan. I used an extra 30g of whole wheat flour (90g total) in the sponge and reduced the bread flour correspondingly.
The results are just as good as last time: nice flavor and texture, and the bread is beautifully moist. Another great success. ;-)
We had been talking about making jook for a couple of weeks but somehow never actually did it until Saturday. I used the basic recipe in BittmanWorld, then served it with scallions, sliced BBQ pork, and sliced tea eggs (also from BittmanWorld). Well, sliced tea egg for me - Andrea doesn't care for boiled eggs.
Those tea eggs are wild, it's like boiling eggs in swamp water; swamp water with a complex and tantalizing smell. We got some nice pictures of the eggs that I'll try to figure out how to post if time, motivation, and philosophy (do I really want to start putting up pictures?) permit.
I pretty much followed a Marella Hazan recipe for baked rigatoni here. I used 1 cup of bechamel (made with cream instead of milk because we were out of milk), 2 cups of leftover ragu, a pound of penne rigate, and about 1/2 cup parmesan. I deviated from the recipe a bit by topping the dish with breadcrumbs and olive oil - we like our crusty tops. :-)
It wouldn't have been bad to have more sauce in the dish, but it was just fine like this.
This is a note to myself that I started the preserved lemons, following Paula Wolfert's recipe, today. They'll be done in 30 days.
Last night was more ragu with pasta. This time we ate it with prefab spaghetti - our self-made tagliatelle didn't want to separate when cooking. Big surprise there.
As an accompaniment I made sauteed asparagus with shallots and we had a big green salad.
Yesterday I roasted the Chinese BBQ pork I started on Saturday. We didn't eat this in a meal, but our little test drive indicates that it's damn good. :-) I'll be cooking with some of the pork this week, the rest went in the freezer.
For dinner I made a big batch of ragu (following the Jamie Oliver recipe from the NYT a couple years ago) using the three pound london broil from our cow. This doubled recipe turned out to be too much for my poor pressure cooker, so I had to remove some of the vegetables and a bit of liquid (I simmered these in a separate covered pan) to get things less than 3/4 filled. That still was overly filled, so it took forever to get up to pressure, but in the end the sauce turned out well. In addition to last night's meal, we now have two quarts of sauce in the freezer and a further quart in the fridge for later in the week.
We ate the pasta over home-made tagliatelle. Our food processor is broken, so I couldn't use that to mix the pasta dough. For some reason I used the "break the eggs into a mound of flour" technique instead of being sensible and mixing everything in a bowl. I ought to know better than that. After much cursing, I finally ended up with some properly elastic pasta dough which rolled out nicely. Cutting the dough was no problem, but I was stupidly parsimonious with the flour, so getting the noodles separated turned out to be a massive pain in the ass.
Between the overly full pressure cooker, the stupid dough mixing, and the sticky noodles, I had one of those evenings in the kitchen. Luckily the food all turned out really well... that, in the end, is the most important thing.
I started yesterday (well, really Friday night) with a loaf of bread. I used my usual hearth bread recipe, but I left out the seeds (so it's back to the standard Bread Bible hearth bread recipe with a doubled amount of whole wheat flour). I also baked the loaf in a parchment-lined loaf pan instead of freeform. The result is very, very good. It's moist and has a great flavor and texture. I'm patting myself on the back.
I also started a batch of chinese barbecued pork using a pork sirloin roast and the recipe from BittmanWorld. I'll roast this today and we'll probably eat some tomorrow.
For dinner I made a pot of yellow split pea soup using the recipe in JPT, minus the chicken cracklings, plus a quart of chicken stock for half the water. We ate this enriched with pieces of sausage (farmer-style bratwurst from Dittmers), a green salad, and bread.
Yesterday I picked up a nice mahi-mahi fillet and did a recipe from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (borrowed from the library). I marinated the fish with rosemary, lemon, good olive oil, and bread crumbs, then broiled it. The results were excellent.
To accompany the fish, we had: sauteed asparagus; roasted turnip and rutabaga slices; farfalle with a sauce made from browned onions, butter, white wine, and bread crumbs; and some leftover roast cauliflower from Wednesday night.
This meal was a product of the "hmmm, not much in the fridge other than vegetables and eggs" game. I roasted some asparagus, scallions, and cauliflower (separately of course), then served them with beurre noisette, parmesan, and eggs (a french-style omelette for Andrea, fried eggs for me) .
Given that we were using beurre noisette, dinner was, of course, delicious.
Last night's main course was chicken with asparagus, mushrooms, ginger, and lime from FStoS. I pretty much followed the recipe aside from adding some mirin and sugar to balance the sauce a bit. This is the first of the sauteed and roasted chicken recipes that I've made from FStoS and it turned out very well indeed.
We started with a miso soup (dark miso and yam noodles because the asian place didn't have fresh tofu yet) and accompanied the chicken with japanese rice, pickled radish, and pickled ginger.
deeeelicious.
Inspired by some recent articles in the NYT, Andrea and I have been doing a bit of chocolate tasting lately. We're starting with "plain" dark chocolates in order to establish a good baseline and educate ourselves. I'm going to record these so that we can refer to them later.
Things we've tasted so far, enhanced by my inability to assign names to flavors:
We went up to Russian River on Saturday for the Barrel Tasting weekend, so I didn't have the energy to do anything particularly involved on Saturday night. I still wanted to have something nice, so we picked up a reasonable looking top sirloin steak and I made steak au poivre with that. To replace the missing beef stock (we didn't have that either, of course), I reduced some beef broth and red wine by about 2/3 and used that instead. I also made some mashed potatoes and sauteed arugula rabe.
To go along with the leftover cauliflower from Tuesday, I did chicken roasted under a brick based on the technique in Bittman. I brined the bird all day (1/2 cup salt, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 lemons, 1 gallon water) and then roasted it with garlic, rosemary, and lemon zest. This is a relatively quick chicken technique and the results are very good. Particularly with the leftover yogurt-garlic sauce from the cauliflower.
I also made some asparagus sauteed with shallots. mmm, asparagus and shallots.
Tuesday Night:
Stuffed dates
Baked cauliflower with garlic-yogurt sauce from a recipe in The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen (I borrowed this from the library)
Slow-baked asparagus, also from TSMK.
Brown basmati rice
green salad
The stuffed dates were inspired by our tapas lunch on Saturday. Using deglet dates I picked up at the farmer's market on Sunday, I pitted them, added a piece of spanish chorizo in the middle, wrapped them in bacon, secured them with a toothpick, then baked at 425 until they were brown and crispy. This is EXCELLENT. How can you beat salty/smoky/sweet bacony goodness?
The cauliflower is really good. I may have left the pieces a bit too big, because the egg wasn't so much binding stuff as forming a layer on the bottom of the pan, but the dish was still good.
The asparagus was a disappointment. I had hoped that baking it for a long time at low temp would bring out the sweetness of the asparagus, but it didn't. So there was no great gain in flavor, the texture was less than ideal (I prefer my asparagus to have a bit of tooth left to it), and it took two hours. This recipe is a loser. :-)
On Saturday Andrea and I had lunch at Iberia in Menlo Park. We ordered a bunch of tapas instead of getting "real food" and had a bottle of bubbly with it. We were there for almost 3 hours and had a great time (not just because of the bubbly).
The food ran the gamut from good to excellent and the service was just right. We will be going back.
Looks like I forgot to record Saturday night:
I used the second red snapper fillet to make quick-braised fish with black bean sauce (from BittmanWorld). To go with that we also had some wok-steamed broccoli with oyster sauce.
Yesterday I ended up cooking for all three meals.
Breakfast was crepes with ham and gruyere.
Lunch was rice topped with garlic shrimp (with loads of paprika), green onion, and diced tomatoes.
Dinner was a big pot of chili (with ground beef and chorizo), kidney beans, and corn bread.
It was a very happy day. :-)
Yesterday I picked up a couple of skin-on red snapper fillets along with the head and bones from the snapper (since the fish place normally doesn't have skin-on fillets, the guy had to fillet the fish for me, so I figured I might as ask for the rest of the fish too).
I used the bones and head to make a quick stock that I'll have to figure out a use for.
With the fillets, I did a Southeast Asian dish of sauteed fish with chili and tomatoes, from BittmanWorld. As an accompaniment, I made broccoli with crispy ginger using the same approach I used for the asparagus from Wednesday night, though I pre-steamed the broccoli a bit. Of course we also had rice.
Both dishes turned out well. The snapper was nicely fresh and was complemented by the spicy/salty/sweet tomato sauce/relish. The broccoli was pretty much guaranteed to be good because broccoli and browned butter are such a good combination.
We are out of asparagus, so last night to go with the remaining roasted alliums and mashed potatoes I made up a batch of glazed carrots.
We started with mushroom soup and had a green salad with the rest of the food.
We stocked up on alliums at this weekend's farmers market with the intention of doing roasted alliums at some point this week. Last night was the night.
I roasted scallions, leeks, shallots, yellow and red onions, and garlic and topped them with the chive oil suggested in FStoS. As a starch, I made a batch of mashed potatoes with mustard and vermouth (also from FStoS). Ooo boy was that a great combo.
On Tuesday, I saw a recipe in a cookbook from Greens for asparagus sauteed with crispy ginger that sounded really good, so last night I did something similar:
ginger, smallest julienne you can get
butter
thick asparagus, bottom part of the stalks peeled, cut into 2" pieces on the bias
Heat some butter over medium-high heat until it froths. Add the ginger and cook, stirring gently, until the ginger starts to crisp up.
Add the asparagus and a pinch of salt and stir gently. Cook for a couple of minutes, until the asparagus color deepens.
Reduce the heat to medium, cover the pan, and cook until the asparagus is just about done.
Remove the cover, crank the heat to high, and cook until any moisture has been driven off.
Serve immediately.
This is *good*. I've been amazed all week about the sweetness in this asparagus, and this recipe really brings it out. Now I'm really tempted to try the slow-baked asparagus from Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, but since that takes two hours it'll have to wait for a weekend.
Last night we finished off the last of the pork roasted in milk (with rice because the spaetzle were finished on Monday), more sauteed asperagus (with thinly sliced scallions this time), and a green salad.
We started with the mushroom soup from Bourdain, which I enriched with some mixed dried mushrooms. Mmmm, mushroom veloute with sherry.
Friday night we went to Trattoria Buon Gusto in Menlo Park. I had walked past this place a couple of times and thought it looked promising. It wasn't.
Notes:
This week there were a couple stands at the farmers market that had asparagus. It seems freakishly early to me, so I asked one of the farmers. He's in the Salinas valley and said it's pretty normal to be getting asparagus now and that he'll have it through June(!). I guess this is one of the bonuses of going to the year-round market: since Palo Alto's market doesn't open for a while yet, we'd be missing out on weeks of asparagus.
Two added bonuses are that this particular farmer does organic asparagus and brings thick stalks to market. Too many people around here demand grass-like stalks of asparagus.
Andrea and I now have explicit plans to load up on asparagus every week and eat it until we're sick of it.
Last night I did asparagus sauteed with shallots from JPFF to go along with leftover pork braised in milk. All I have to say about that is: yum!
We started the day with overnight waffles, which are always good.
For dinner I used a BittmanWorld recipe and cooked a pork sirloin roast in milk with garlic and rosemary. I served that next to spaeztle (made from a BittmanWorld recipe and formed with the food mill). We started with a tomato-fennel soup from Bourdain.
Notes:
On Saturday we went to a tamale-making party at some friends' house. I made a pot of pinto beans and a "pressure salad" (see below) to bring. mmmm, tamales!
Pressure salad is my newly made up, geeky term for a salad made from vegetables transformed by osmotic and physical pressure:
1 head green cabbage, thinly sliced
4 good-sized carrots, thinly sliced (with the ceramic slicer)
copious salt
Cilantro, optional
Put the cabbage in a large bowl, add a goodly amount of salt (1/4 cup or so), and toss well to make sure it's well coated. Put a plate on top of the cabbage and as much weight as you can on the plate (I used about 30 pounds). Put the carrots in a separate bowl, salt them liberally, toss well, and let them sit.
Every 30 minutes: drain any liquid that's collected around the cabbage, toss it a bit, then replace the weight. Drain the carrots.
Keep this up for at least an hour, preferably two.
Rinse the cabbage and carrots very well and press out as much water as you can by hand. Put them both back in the large bowl and re-apply the weight.
Let things stand for about 15 minutes, then drain again. Repeat once.
Do a final wringing out by hand and then transfer everything into the bowl you'll serve in.
Add the dressing (below) and cilantro and serve.
Cumin-orange dressing
1 cup orange juice
1 Tbs cumin seeds
1/4-1/2 cup neutral oil
~1/4 cup lime juice
1/2 tsp each sweet paprika and chipotle powder
salt, black pepper
Over medium-high heat reduce the OJ to about 1/4 cup. Meanwhile, toast the cumin seeds in a dry pan until they are aromatic, transfer to a bowl.
Add the OJ and an equal amount of oil to the bowl along with a couple Tbs of lime juice and a good pinch of salt.
Whisk together and taste for acid/sweet balance. Add more oil or lime if you need to.
Whisk in the paprika and chipotle, a good grind of pepper, and adjust the salt level. Be careful with the salt because the cabbage and carrots will still be pretty salty.
[Update: I originally forgot to post why exactly someone should want to do all this pressing and waiting. The reason is quite simple: the result of this is a cabbage salad with an absolutely fantastic texture. The cabbage ends up being tender-crisp in a way that you just can't get any other way without waiting a loooong time.]
I wanted soup and spaghetti last night, so soup and spaghetti I made.
We had a bag of already prepped CSA pumpkin in the freezer that I used to make the soup. My idea was to follow the butternut squash soup with chestnuts recipe from FStoS, but the pumpkin wasn't rich enough to stand up to that. So I added some butter, lemon, and curry powder and made a curried pumpkin soup instead. It wasn't great, but it was certainly worth eating.
The pasta and shrimp course was an invention, based on well-established principles:
2 Tbs good olive oil
1/2 cup good bread crumbs
3 shallots, diced
1/4 cup good olive oil
1 good pinch chili flakes
1/2 pound shelled large shrimp
zest of one lemon
1/2 cup dry, fruity white wine (e.g. CA Sauvignon Blanc)
chopped fresh parsley, as garnish
salt and pepper
Toast the breadcrumbs in the 2Tbs of oil until they start to smell toasty. Pour into a bowl.
Wipe out the pan, then add the remaining oil, the shallots, the chili flakes, and a pinch of salt.
Cook over medium heat until the shallots start to soften.
Increase the heat to medium high and add the shrimp. Cook on one side until the shrimp are pink, turn them.
Stir in the wine and lemon zest and let things cook until the wine has mostly evaporated.
Stir in half the breadcrumbs and however much pasta water you need to get the consistency you want (it shouldn't be wet). Adjust seasonings.
Serve over spaghetti, topped with parsley and more breadcrumbs.
This was very tasty. I had intended to add some lemon juice as well, but I forgot to do so. The wine (Mauritson's Sauvignon Blanc) was citrusy and acidic enough that this was no problem at all. :-)
We've been eating osso bucco, risotto, and potato gratin and I haven't been doing much cooking aside from quickie side dishes like roasted cauliflower and sauteed greens and glazed carrots. Glazed carrots combined with sauteed arugula rabe turned out to be a very nice combination. :-)
After a long hiatus, I made a loaf of bread yesterday. Something went a bit screwy with the dough, which took forever to wake up (slow yeast?), but the final loaf came out looking great.
I used a different seed mixture this time: 90 gm millet, 50 gm flax, 60 gm sesame; we'll see how that turned out when I cut into the bread.
When you reach into the fridge to pull out the applebutter for your morning toast, be sure that you actually get the jar of applebutter. If you get the jar of spicy miso paste (which is about the same color and texture) instead, it's going to be a very rude surprise.
Andrea, compassionate sort that she is, helped by trying to conceal her laughter.
I more or less followed the procedure from our last gratin, but I added the diced ham to the milk/cream mixture while it was heating (to soften the ham a bit and distribute the salt a bit more evenly), and skipped the breadcrumbs this time. I was a bit more systematic about quantity this time too: I used 1.5 lbs of potato and 2 cups liquid (1 each of cream and milk); this is a good ratio.
The ham idea worked nicely, the breadcrumbs should not be skipped.
To accompany the gratin, I sauteed some diced zucchini with some arugula rabe (!) that we found at the farmers market this week. We also had the ubiquitous green salad.
Yesterday was a high stock-demand day, so I made 5-6 quarts of chicken stock in the afternoon.
Last night I made osso bucco using the shanks from our cow. I followed the recipe in BittmanWorld pretty much without modification (using chicken stock).
To accompany the beef I made risotto al limone (also from BittmanWorld). I haven't had risotto with lemon before, it's a really nice combination. We also had some steamed broccoli.
I really liked the beef, but I think the risotto kind of stole the show. Holy crap is that good.
Some notes:
To go with the leftover rillettes on Thursday night, I roasted some cauliflower and made a batch of pan-glazed carrots.
Note to future self: I added some tomato paste (leftover from the pork and beans) to the remaining vegetable soup. That's good stuff.
This was a rare mid-week dessert for us, but we both had sweets cravings. I used the standard salty butterscotch pudding recipe, but baked it in a standard gratin dish (too many ramekins were filled with rillettes).
Comments:
Cati loaned me her copy of Charcuterie so that I could flip through it and drool at all the wonderful things. Looking through the book provided the push that I needed to make a batch of rillettes (I'd been thinking of doing this since reading the recipe in Bourdain).
I made a fraction of the full quantity using about 3/4 of a pound of pork shoulder left over from this weekend's baked beans. Of course there was no way I was going to make veal stock during the week, so I made some chicken stock instead. Otherwise I basically followed the recipe.
The results are excellent. Since this recipe isn't actually that much work (it's more a matter of time), I will almost definitely be doing this again in the not to distant future.
To accompany our rillettes we had broccolini sauteed with garlic and chili flakes, vegetable soup, quick-pickled daikon, cornichons, toasted bread, and a green salad.
I made a bunch of chicken stock Monday night in order to be able to try making rillettes (we're trying these tonight, so more on them tomorrow). To use the huge amount of stock I had left over from this process as well as some of the older vegetables from the fridge, last night I made quick veggie soup. The veggies I used were: japanese leeks, red onion, enoki mushrooms, shredded zucchini, shredded yellow turnip, and shredded carrot. I also through in a bit of minced country ham (for flavor), some lemon zest, and orzo.
We topped this with fresh parsley and parmesan and ate it with bread and big green salad. yum.
Last night I made some Gingery Ground Chicken (from Washoku) which we had donburi-style with leftover braised hijiki, fiery daikon peel, some flash-sauteed radish greens (seasoned with rice vinegar, soy, and mirin), and pickled ginger. We also broiled the last of the block of tofu with miso sauces and ate that on the side.
The chicken is a great 10-15 minute weekday recipe to serve on rice.
Unrelated to the above: I also made a big pot of chicken stock; that's for tonight/tomorrow.
Two years ago I made pork and beans on Superbowl Sunday based on a Bittman recipe in the NYT (it's behind the paywall now, the article is from Jan 28, 2004). Since then I've made the recipe, with modifications, a couple of times. Even without New England in the game, it still seemed appropriate yesterday.
2 cups great northern beans, sorted, washed, and soaked overnight
1.5 lbs pork shoulder butt, extra fat trimmed, 1" dice
1/2 lb slab bacon, cut into lardons
2 medium yellow onions, medium dice
6 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 Tbs molasses
2 Tbs tomato paste
2 Tbs dijon mustard
1 Tbs brown sugar
2 cups chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Render the bacon in a large oven-safe pot over medium heat until it's nicely browned. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and reserve. Brown the pork butt in the bacon fat. Use a bit of salt and some pepper to season the meat while browning, but be careful with the salt (it interferes with the beans cooking). When the pork is browned, remove from the pot and reserve. If there's more than a Tbs or so of fat in left in pan, remove the extra now.
Add the onions and garlic and use them to deglaze the pan; cook until they are soft. If the pan isn't fully deglazed, add a bit of stock and finish that. Then add the rest of the ingredients, including a couple of good grinds of pepper, and get everything well mixed. Add back the pork and bacon. Add as much water as is required to get everything covered.
Cover the pot and put it in the oven. After an hour, remove the lid and give the beans a stir.
Cook, stirring every half hour or so, until the beans are tender. This will take about another 2 hours. If the liquid level starts to get too low during the cooking, add a bit more water (not too much though, unless you want soupy beans).
Remove the pot from the oven and adjust seasonings; it'll need salt.
Last week I got a copy of Elizabeth Andoh's Washoku: Recipes From The Japanese Home Kitchen in order to learn more about making (and eating) Japanese food. Yesterday Cati took me to a good Japanese supermarket down in Mountain View so I could stock up on staples. And then yesterday afternoon and evening I cooked. And cooked. And cooked. :-)
Things that I made, with brief comments:
Andrea suggested a hearty soup for dinner last night, and we still have loads of country ham, so I made a big pot of split pea soup with ham. I used a hybrid of a recipe in Bittman and one in JPT by adding a good tsp or so of herbs de provence to the soup as it cooked. For some reason herbs de provence and peas are tightly linked in my head; they just go together.
Bittman suggests leaving the carrots in fairly large pieces, but he is wrong about that. The carrots in split pea soup want to be diced to about 1/4" (or maybe a bit smaller).
I also made a pan of cornbread using the standard recipe, zucchini sauteed in a bit of butter, and a green salad. It was a very nice, very green meal. :-)
I have no point here, I just feel like saying "Bittman/Pepin chimera".
We still had a bunch of braised beef and sauce leftover from Saturday, so in order to have at least a bit of variety, last night I converted it into a topping for baked potatoes.
To make the topping I browned half a pound of quartered mushrooms in olive oil then added the remaining sauce, some frozen peas, and the rest of the braised beef (diced). After simmering for 10 minutes, this was ready to go.
To bake the potatoes, I used the technique from JPFF (four minutes on high in microwave, turn over, another four minutes on high, 12-15 minutes in a 450 degree oven), which works very very well.
The remaining sour cream/horseradish/dill sauce complemented this quite nicely, as did the green salad we had on the side.
For dinner I did braised beef, bratkartoffeln, steamed broccoli, and a green salad. The theme for the first two entries on this list was: "take standard recipes and follow McGee's suggestions to refine them."
So for the braised beef I used a crossrib roast from our cow and a recipe from How to Cook Meat, but I used McGee's suggestion of putting the browned meat + veggies + cold stock in a cold oven and heating it at 200 for two hours to do an initial heating, then raising the temp to 250 until fork tender,then letting the meat cool a bit in the sauce. I think this works better when the meat is completely immersed in liquid, which wasn't achievable with any of my pots without using an insane amount of liquid (I need to remember that I can do this type of braise in one of the ceramic bowls... those are narrow and deep enough to work). Ah well, it still turned out great and the color of the meat certainly was a lot better. I also did my usual "homogenize the sauce with the stick blender" trick, because I really like that. The combination of the sauce + the beef + the dill-horseradish-sour cream sauce is excellent.
For the potatoes, I followed McGee's suggestion of starting the potatoes in cold unsalted water and very slowly bringing it to a boil. With Yukon gold potatoes, this gives an amazing texture that stands up really well in the browning phase of making bratkartoffeln.
That McGee is a real smarty-pants. :-)
I followed the recipe in Bittman for the batter and we filled them with country ham and aged gouda, goat cheese and chives, and as a sweet closer, apple butter.
I'm going to have to remember how easy it is to make crepes, because they are awfully nice.
Andrea requested pasta last night (we'd been doing rice all week), so pasta we made. We had spags with mushroom sauce, italian sausage, steamed broccoli with "lemogrette", and a big green salad.
For the sauce I used 4 or 5 cloves of sliced garlic, a diced onion, some finely diced country ham, canned tomatoes, mixed dried mushrooms (from TJ's), red wine, crushed chili pepper, rosemary, and marjoram. I followed the standard prep approach and let things simmer for a good hour.
We ate the sauce over spags, topped with a good hit of parsley, freshly grated parmesan, and a drizzle of truffle oil (to complement the mushrooms). We had the sausage (pan fried) on the side.
The lemogrette (my new word for a vinaigrette made with lemon juice instead of vinegar) for the broccoli consisted of a small clove of garlic made into a paste with salt and allowed to stand for 5 minutes or so to mellow, good olive oil, and meyer lemon juice. This emulsified quite easily and went really well with the broccoli and a grind of black pepper.
I had a fish craving yesterday, so I went to the fish market at lunchtime. Next to the stuff they always have (halibut, snapper, salmon, ling cod), there were a few sablefish fillets. I haven't cooked sablefish before, and I'm not sure that I've eaten it, but there was a voice in the back of my head telling me that I wanted to buy those fillets. Sometimes I ignore that voice, but those fillets weren't just intriguing - they looked really good.
So I get home with my sablefish and google for a bit to find out what the internet thinks I should do with it and I find out that sablefish is also called black cod. That starts to pull up associations from the back brain: black cod... Nobu... miso! (Apropos nothing: "black cod, nobu, miso, plum!" may be my new mantra for the next couple days.)
Sure enough, pretty much every recipe I can find for sablefish/black cod calls for miso. There's a recipe in BittmanWorld for black cod marinated in miso and mirin and then broiled that looks as comparable to all the others I found (except for the Nobu recipe at epicurious: that one calls for 2 to 3 days of marinating and I wasn't going to wait that long). I followed the recipe pretty much exactly (45 minutes of salting, 2 hours marinating time) except for quantity. I'll gush more later, but this dish is absolutely amazing.
As a starter we had cucumber soup with nori and tofu (also from BittmanWorld), using fresh tofu from the local Asian market. I hadn't tried the fresh tofu before either - it's really nice stuff. This soup would have been better with dashi, but I wasn't going to do that much work last night, so I just used chicken stock. It was still very good.
To go along with the fish I made sweet rice and a quick pickle with yellow turnips from the farmers market, rice vinegar, and mirin.
So, the fish. It was good. It was good enough to inspire me to write way more than I usually do. :-) The texture of the fish was almost like good scallops (the flakes of fish, not the whole fillets) and the combination of flavors (rich fish, sweet-salty-umami from the marinade/glaze) was magic. The one thing I'll change next time I do this recipe (and I will do it again) is that I'll garnish with pickled ginger. Bittman suggests grated fresh ginger that's been soaked in water and that was just too harsh for me. The turnip pickles went really well, but a bit of ginger would have been nice as well.
To add some zing to the rice I made to go with the last (or almost the last) of the goshtaba and the never-ending dal (continuing lentils?), I made a batch of turnip thuvaiyal following the "Choko Chutney/Chow Chow Thuvaiyal" recipe in Dakshin. The base recipe ended up being really tasty, but it got even better when I added a bit of lemon juice to brighten things up.
I'm pretty sure that we're going to be making thuvaiyals a lot more often. :-)
Keeping the parathas thicker (by not rolling them out so far) definitely is better.
They still ended up a bit dense/tough, but that's something I can try to address next time I make the dough (more water?).
Last week Andrea requested Indian food, so last night I made a few things from BittmanWorld: Goshtaba (lamb meatballs cooked in milk and yogurt), Haaq (spinach cooked with hing), Dal, and Paratha.
Some individual notes:
For lunch yesterday we had smoked salmon plates with chevre, capers, lemon, baguette, and a cucumber-onion-watermelon radish-lemon thyme quick pickle I made.
I started some turnip/watermelon radish pickles with an Indian note (toasted black mustard seeds, cumin seed, dried red chili, and curry leaves; a bit of sesame oil; cider and white balsamic vinegars). I made this one up, so we'll see how it turns out.
Given that it's "winter", and we have that lovely country ham, it was pretty much mandatory that we have a nice potato-ham gratin. I'm not one to argue with mandatory gratins, so that's what I made last night.
yukon gold potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (I used 4-5 cups of potato sliced with my ceramic slicer)
1/2 large red onion, thinly sliced (again, with the ceramic slicer)
1/2 cup country ham, sliced thin and then chopped
3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup milk
2 Tbs butter + extra for greasing the pan
1 Tbs sweet paprika
white pepper
cheese
breadcrumbs
Preheat the oven to 375 and butter a 9" square baking dish.
Heat the cream, milk, butter, paprika, and a couple good grinds of white pepper until they are just starting to boil (watch that it doesn't boil over).
Start building layers of potatoes in the dish, spooning small amounts of cream mixture over each layer.
After you've built a couple of layers, add the ham in one layer with some onions, spoon cream over it.
When the potatoes are finished, add another layer of onions and the rest of the cream mixture. If the liquid doesn't come to just below the top layer of potatoes, add more milk until it does.
Top the dish with half the cheese and mix the other half with some breadcrumbs. Top the cheese layer with that mixture.
Put the dish on a baking sheet (in case it bubbles over) and bake for 30-40 minutes, until the top is brown and the potatoes are cooked (you can check with a fork). If the top starts to get too brown, cover it loosely with foil.
We ate this fantastic beast with the leftover fennel from the other night and a green salad.
To go along with the leftover pork and cauliflower from Monday, I baked a fennel bulb (with beef stock and cheese) following a recipe in Bittman. I had made this before (pre-food blog), and we really liked it. This time the recipe just didn't work at all. I don't know if the fennel wasn't great or if I overcooked it or what, but the stock didn't get absorbed and we just had a soupy mess in the gratin dish.
It didn't taste bad, but it wasn't what either Andrea or I had been looking forward to.
The original JPFF recipe for this uses chicken breasts (poached in water/butter) as the protein. I was in more of a pork mood when we went shopping on Sunday, so I subbed for the chicken.
I used standard boneless thick pork loin chops, but I cut them through the middle and pounded them out a bit to get "cutlets", then brined them for an hour or so. Rather than poaching the cutlets (which seems like a bad idea), I sauteed them lightly in a bit of butter.
This was a really nice and speedy (aside from the brining) meal, but the plate could have used some color on it; next time I'll have to do a vegetable side or something.
Yesterday Andrea and I were wandering around in the Mission District and I noticed several country hams hanging in the window of a meat market (The Fresh Meat Store). So I bought a Virginia country ham from a Chinese market in a primarily Mexican neighborhood in a Californian city; how very 21st century. :-)
I'm very excited.
For this breakfast I started with the chilaquiles recipe in BittmanWorld, but I made a couple of changes:
We still had half a bag of brussels sprouts that I wanted to make last night. Rather than just whip up another batch of Bittman's simmered brussels sprouts, I decided to do a variation:
1/2 pound fresh brussels sprouts
olive oil
1/4 cup good bread crumbs
juice of one lemon
chopped parsley
salt and pepper
Trim the ends off the brussels sprouts, then cook them in boiling salted water for about 7 minutes - until they start to get tender. Transfer to a bowl of ice water.
Cut the sprouts in half down the middle (through the stem, not crosswise).
Heat a couple Tbs of olive oil in a heavy pan over medium-high heat until it starts to shimmer, then add the sprouts, cut-side down.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper and let cook without stirring until the cut side of the sprouts gets nice and brown, 3-5 minutes.
Reduce the heat to low, and stir in the bread crumbs and lemon juice. Cook until the lemon juice is evaporated and the crumbs start to brown.
Adjust seasonings and serve topped with parsley.
We used some cod from the freezer (good old TJ's frozen seafood) to make a dish with cod, chickpeas, onions, and sherry from BittmanWorld. To go along with this I also made a batch of yellow rice (saffron rice), also from BittmanWorld. And, of course, we had a green salad.
I enjoyed both dishes a lot, but I remain a bit skeptical about saffron. It certainly adds a beautiful color and a distinct flavor to food, I'm just not 100% certain that I *like* that flavor. It seems to be slowly growing on me though, so maybe it'll be like white pepper (which I used to think was questionable, but now is great).
I also think that the fish recipe would benefit from having the garlic go in a bit earlier (Bittman recommends adding it in the last minute or two of cooking). I like that heavy garlic punch as much as the next guy, but in this case I think it began to overwhelm the more subtle flavor of the sherry on the chickpeas. Next time I make this I'll probably add the majority of the garlic with the onions (early in the process) and save a smaller amount to add at the end.
While I'm picking on the cod recipe: I wasn't overly pleased with the way the coating on the fish turned out. Bittman's instructions have you dredge the fish in flour, brown one side in the pan, then put the fish, browned side up, in a 300 degree oven to finish cooking. This leads to a nice top coating on the fish, but the bottom side is a bit slimy since it never has a chance to crisp up. This is probably inevitable unless you either brown both sides of the fish and put it in the oven on a rack or only dredge one side of the fish.
To go along with the leftovers from last night's pasta gratin, I made a batch of simmered brussels sprouts from Bittman. And to think that I used to not like brussels sprouts.
We had a goodly amount of braised beef left over from Sunday's ravioli, so last night I used that to make a pasta gratin. I made the sauce by sauteeing diced onion and garlic slices, adding canned tomatoes, some coarsely chopped dandelion greens, and the leftover beef, and seasoning with a bit of crushed red pepper. I used penne as the pasta and topped the gratin with a mixture of grated gouda, bread crumbs, and a drizzle of good olive oil.
The result was excellent. Pre-mixing the grated cheese with the breadcrumbs leads to a nice topping with distinct crunchy pieces of cheese. mmmm, crunchy topping.
To go with the gratin, I sauteed some (briefly steamed) broccoli in butter and mixed in a bit of dijon mustard and martini. We also had the requisite green salad.
We had friends over last night and did an Italian theme. We had ravioli filled with wine-braised beef (from our cow), spinach sauteed with mushrooms, some bread, a big green salad, and oranges with cream cheese (from JPFF, but using grated orange zest whipped into the cream cheese and a splash of brandy in the sauce) for dessert. The ravioli and spinach were inventions.
To make the ravioli:
Brown 1 pound of seasoned stew meat in olive oil. Deglaze the pan with half a medium onion, diced small. Add back the beef, four cloves minced garlic, 1-2 tsp minced fresh rosemary, and enough red wine (I used Nerello del Bastardo) to cover the beef. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce the heat, and simmer until the meat starts to get tender (1.5-2 hours). Add some stock if the liquid starts to get too low. Remove the lid and let it keep simmering until most of the liquid is gone and the beef is really tender (like you can mash it to threads with a spoon). Adjust seasonings and allow the beef to cool.
Make fresh pasta using only semolina flour (this was trickier than using AP or bread flour, but I think it was really worth it) and roll it out to the second to last notch, then form the ravioli. Cover them with a towel and let them sit until ready to serve. Cook the ravioli in salted water for 5-10 minutes (I didn't time this, I ended up eyeballing it).
For a sauce I made a batch of Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce with butter.
I served the ravioli atop a bed of sauce, drizzled with a bit of olive oil and sprinkled with a mixture of grated lemon zest and minced parsley.
For the spinach:
Finely dice 3 strips of good bacon and let them render over medium heat (don't brown the bacon). Add a good cup of quartered cremini mushrooms and continue to cook until they've given up their moisture. Add a pound of baby spinach that's been washed and then wilted in the microwave. Mix well, adjust seasonings, and serve.
This was a very nice meal.
I actually made this on Saturday and then let it sit until Sunday to "allow the moisture to redistribute" (an instruction from the recipe I'm skeptical about, but eh).
The base recipe was from The Bread Bible and, since it's for baking, I pretty much stuck to it. The only variation was to use diced prunes instead of raisins. We didn't have any raisins in the house and I like prunes, so it was either substitute or go to the store; and there's no question at all there.
I think the bread turned out really well. I'll have to try it with raisins sometimes, but the prunes are awfully good.
On Wednesday I developed a craving for chipotle, specifically chipotle with shrimp. I'm not sure where that came from, but it was easy enough to satisfy: there's a good chipotle shrimp recipe in BittmanWorld. My only mod to the recipe was to use a couple canned tomatoes (+ juice) instead of fresh tomatoes since at this time of year fresh tomatoes aren't worth eating. Bittman leaves the chipotle quantity open, I used half a small can of chipotles. The resulting sauce is hot, but not deathly hot.
Since something like chipotle shrimp craves rice, but we've been eating a lot of rice already this week, I jazzed it up by making coconut rice. There's a recipe for Red Beans and Rice (West Indies style) in Jay Solomon's Taste of the Tropics that I based from. I didn't muck around with the red beans recipe, but I wanted strongly coconutty rice, so this is what I did there:
1 cup long-grain rice
2 cups coconut milk
1/2 cup finely diced onion
4 small cloves garlic, minced
fresh thyme
crushed allspice, ground cumin
salt and black pepper
Combine all the ingredients in a heavy pan, cover, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer until the rice is mostly tender, about 15 minutes. Check it occasionally to make sure stuff isn't sticking to the bottom of the pan. Turn off the heat and let the rice rest for 5-10 minutes.
Jay suggests mixing the beans into the rice, I did not do this.
We had these two delights with a green salad and were very happy with the results.
The past few days have been full of leftovers... from leftover chicken soup to pot roast from the freezer (from the Italian dinner party back in May).
Hopefully tonight I'll have energy (stupid jet lag) to do something new.
Yesterday we picked up a whole chicken and I made a big pot of chicken stock from everything but the breast, which I poached in the finished stock. I shredded off the meat from the thighs, legs, and breast to make soup (dinner) and a chicken salad (waiting to be made) and strained the stock for soup.
For dinner I used a Mexican chicken and rice soup recipe from BittmanWorld and made up a big batch of sauteed vegetables (rutabaga, potato, carrot, parsnip, onion, garlic) with toasted cumin and coriander to accompany it.
Both the soup and vegetables were really good. Andrea's comment on the soup was dead on: "it's hearty, but still really fresh."
Luckily we have tons of leftovers. :-)
We're back in the US.
I figure it's unlikely that I'm going to get around to detailed postings about the cooking on this trip, so I'll summarize:
In Germany for the holidays.
I'll try to do some updates, but it's going to be super slow until the new year.
We had a friend over for dinner last night and I wanted to do something nice, but it had to be makeable in not much more than an hour. Aside from the soaking time for the cabbage, this meal fits that description:
App: Dungeness crabmeat mixed with a bit of lemon juice, black pepper, and sesame oil; served with thinly sliced scallions and diced mango with butter lettuce leaves to roll it up.
Salad: Shredded green cabbage and diced carrots; dressed with lime, lemongrass, ginger, toasted cumin and coriander seeds, sesame oil, canola oil. I soaked the cabbage in brine for a few hours first to soften it up. This could have used some 'tro, but we somehow didn't have any in the house.
Main course: Halibut steaks browned in the pan, then braised in a fish-sauce caramel with minced lemon grass, scallions, garlic, and loads of black pepper. Served with sticky rice.
This all came off rather well. :-)
This was just the standard Sambar recipe from Dakshin, made with the last of the drumstick that we had in the freezer. What an odd vegetable that is. :-)
As always with recipes from that book, it was very good and left our house very aromatic.
We've been eating leftover braised chicken and some cauliflower we picked up at the farmer's market and the roasted.
The problem with organic cauliflower is that it's frequently full of bugs. Sure, they're organic bugs, but it's still kind of gross. The trick I've come up with for cleaning cauliflower is this: cut it into pieces, drop the pieces into hot (like from the tap) salted water. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes, then rinse and brush the pieces. This seemed to work pretty well.
On a whim, we got a few hachiya persimmons at the farmers market yesterday. I've only had them less than perfectly ripe (and thus deadly astringent) before, so this was a bit of a leap of faith for me. Boy was I rewarded. These things are like aromatic fruit pudding barely constrained by the skin. mmmm
I'm tempted to take the remaining one and toss it in the freezer for an hour or so to see if we end up with persimmon granita; but then I guess you'd lose the beautiful melty quality. hmmm.
Last week's Minimalist column had this recipe for browned and braised whole chicken surrounded by root vegetables and a light cream sauce. That was totally irresistible sounding, so last night it was braised chicken all around. :-)
I followed the recipe pretty closely, though I couldn't resist a couple minor modifications:
2 Tbs butter
1 small (3 pound) chicken, trimmed
2 onions, sliced
2 large carrots (I used French carrots), 1/2" dice
1 large parsnip, 1/2" dice
8 whole cloves of garlic, peeled
2 large yukon gold potatoes, peeled, 3/4-1" dice
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup cream (I actually use 1/2 heavy cream, 1/2 milk)
1 bay leaf
1 sprig each thyme and lemon thyme
fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste
Brown the chicken, breast-side down in the butter in a pan large enough to hold everything with a lid on it (my 12" everyday pan worked fine), sprinkling with salt and pepper. Flip the chicken and brown the other side, season it as you go.
Remove the chicken from the pan, pour out some of the fat, and add the onions, carrots, parsnips, and garlic. Cook until the onions start to take on some color, about 10 minutes. Add the potatoes and mix well. Add the liquids and herbs (I included a bit of parsley as well), bring to a boil, lower the heat to get a simmer, cover and simmer until the chicken is done, 45 minutes or so.
Remove the chicken and vegetables, raise the heat and reduce the sauce a bit. Thicken with potato starch if you want, and adjust seasonings.
I actually forgot the garlic last night, but the dish was still awfully good.
We ate this with rice, lima beans, and a green salad.
We had a big lunch of leftover hobo pack, so dinner was more moderate: Westlake Fish Soup (from BittmanWorld, using tilapia as the fish) and a big green salad.
The soup was excellent: it's amazing the depth of flavor you can get from browned shallots, soy sauce, and some ground pepper (black and white).
The hobo packs were the sausage-and-potato kind from JPFF. We made this once before with an inappropriate sausage substitution. This time, using just mild italian sausage and polish-style sausage from Draegers, the results were much more satisfying.
To go along with the meat and potatoes, I steamed the broccoli stems we had leftover from the puree a couple nights ago and then sauteed them with some good olive oil and a splash of vermouth. I didn't really taste the vermouth, but the sauteed brccoli sure was good. :-)
To accompany came baguette and green salad.
This started with the broccoli, which I picked up at the farmers market on Sunday. Pasta was a natural thing to have with it, particularly since there were still some sweet peppers left from our last CSA box. I added meatballs because there was a small amount of ground turkey in the freezer. So pretty much this is a "emptying the fridge" meal.
For the meatballs I mixed about 1/2 pound ground turkey with 2 cloves minced garlic, 2 thinly sliced scallions, sweet and smoked paprikas, and salt and pepper. I made the meatballs small (1" in diameter), and browned them in olive oil before adding them to the sauce at the last minute.
The sauce was a standard improv tomato sauce: onion, browned garlic, sweet peppers, red wine, tomatoes. Simple and good.
The broccoli recipe is from JPFF and I've made it before. This time I did use less broccoli, as I should. :-)
Sunday night we had kalbi jim (Korean braised short ribs, using ribs from our cow) and kimchi, both from recipes in BittmanWorld. I didn't plan particularly well, so I had to make a couple of substitutions when I made the marinade for the ribs on Saturday (an extra shallot for the scallions, a mixture of white wine and xiaoxing wine for the sake).
The kimchi, which we made with a mixture of napa cabbage and daikon radish, turned out great. The ribs were also very tasty, but somehow seemed "unfocused" in their flavor (to the extent that makes sense). This probably is because of the substitutions; the only thing for it is to try the recipe again and do it right. Soon! :-)
Karen and Jamshid hosted the big event and I helped cook. Stuff I made:
I had a porkchop craving yesterday, so I made this "devilled porkchops" recipe from BittmanWorld. The only realy variation I did was to let the chops sit for a while after covering them with the mustard. We ate them on a bed of frisee (we got a nice head of frisee at last week's farmers markte), topped with a pan sauce.
For the potatoes, I diced them large (1" dice, or thereabouts), put them in cold water and brought it to a gently boil over medium heat. The idea was to end up with potatoes that were barely cooked (even a bit raw in the middle) and not all beat up so that they held together in the pan frying. This worked. :-)
We had lima beans as a side because I wanted to show Andrea what lima beans are.
This was good food.
We needed to use up some remaining CSA vegetables, so last night I improv'ed a pasta sauce:
eggplant, 1 cm dice, about 2 cups (salted, rinsed, and drained if necessary)
orange peppers, small dice, about 1 cup
1/2 large red onion, small dice
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 anchovy
olive oil
chicken stock
salt, red pepper flakes, black pepper
1 Tbs butter
finely chopped parsley to top
Heat a couple Tbs olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat and add the anchovy. Cook, stirring, until the anchovy breaks down. Add the garlic and cook for about a minute. Add the onion and half the pepper. Cook, stirring frequently, for another couple minutes until things start to soften. Add the eggplant and a pinch of red pepper and cook for another couple minutes. Add a bit of stock (1/4 cup or so), cover and let simmer until the eggplant is soft. Add more stock if necessary to keep it from getting dry. Add the remaining pepper and cook for another couple minutes. Stir in the butter and adjust seasonings.
If needed, thin with some pasta water before serving. Top with the parsley.
This sauce, served atop penne, made a nice dinner with a green salad on the side.
I originally was going to make the black-eyed peas and have the collards on the side, but I decided to just go for the whole beans-and-greens thing. That was a good idea:
1 cup dried black-eyed peas
water
1/2 red onion, medium dice
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2-4 oz smoked ham, cubed (I used the butts from a Niman Ranch "black forest ham", and that was good...)
1 bunch collard greens chopped (This was whatever size bunch we got from our CSA box, I think it was probably 1/2 pound)
neutral oil
extra chicken stock
salt and pepper
Pick through and rinse the black-eyed peas, then transfer them to a pot with a lid. Add water to cover by about 1/2 inch. Bring to a boil covered, then turn off the heat and let the beans soak for 4-6 hours.
Add the onion, garlic, and ham and bring to a gentle boil, covered. Add more water (or stock) if needed.
When the beans start to get tender, flash fry the greens in the oil and then add to the beans along with however much stock you need to make sure everything is covered.
Continue to simmer until the beans and greens are tender (about 20-30 minutes).
Adjust seasonings and serve.
Notes:
Last night we had a very colorful, very random mix of primarily vegetables on our plates:
This was an idea Andrea and I had for a food gift for Christmas. I hadn't done apple butter before, so this was an adventure/learning experience. For proportions and basic technique I used the recipe in The Joy of Cooking.
The first time I tested this (much smaller quantity), I used a sweet apple and was not real pleased with how the apple butter turned out (it also didn't help that I added the optional lemon zest and had the inspiration of adding a bit of molasses: those two overpowered everything else and you couldn't taste apple at all). This time we picked out a mixture of granny smith and mutsu apples; I think the tartness of the apples really improves the apple butter.
Start with a goodly quantity of apples (about 5 pounds). Wash them, quarter them, and remove the cores and stems. Then throw them in a large pot with enough water to cover the bottom by about 1/4 inch, cover the pot, and let it simmer (low heat) until the apples get soft - an hour or more. Run the apples through a food mill (fine mesh) into a second, ovensafe, pot. Measure the pulp.
Add the spices: for about 5 cups of pulp, I added 2 cups of sugar, 4 cinnamon sticks, 6 cloves, and 6 allspice berries (crushed with the side of a knife).
Put the pot, uncovered, in a 275 degree oven for a good, long time, maybe 4 hours, maybe longer. Take it out every once in a while and give it a stir. (Theoretically, you can do this step in a crockpot too, but we don't have a crockpot.)
The apple butter is done when it seems appropriately thick and the color has changed to a nice caramel brown.
We then canned the apple butter in 8 oz jars (20 minutes in the canner).
We ended up with 6 jars, which isn't enough, so we'll be doing this again next weekend. :-)
Last night we made a couple Chinese dishes from BittmanWorld: "shrimp with cabbage and black beans" and "chinese greens with oyster sauce" (though instead of greens we used broccolini from the farmers market). Both turned out nicely, though the shrimp would have benefited from a bit of cornstarch to thicken the sauce.
For dinner last night I adapted the "Garlic Soup" recipe from JPT to use up some alliums we had lying around. The primary stars in this very assertive soup are the leeks [CSA] and garlic:
4 leeks, including part of the green, sliced
8 cloves garlic, chopped
6 cloves braised garlic
1 large yellow onion, medium dice
1 pound starchy potatoes, peeled, medium dice
2 Tbs butter
4 Tbs olive oil from braising garlic
1 quart chicken stock
2 cups milk
2 cups water
Salt and white pepper
heavy cream, optional
Add the butter and oil to a soup pot over medium-high heat until the butter foams. Add the leeks, sprinkle with salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until they start to soften, 3-4 minutes. Add the onion and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion softens and starts to take on a bit of color, about 10 minutes. Add the potato and cook, stirring frequently, for a couple of minutes.
Add the stock, milk, water, and some white pepper (maybe 1/2 tsp) and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and let simmer until the potato pieces are cooked, 15-20 minutes.
Remove from the heat and homogenize thoroughly.
Return the (low) heat, taste for seasonings, and add a bit of heavy cream if the soup tastes too thin.
Serve with grind of black pepper and, optionally, some chives (we didn't have chives last night or I would have done this).
To accompany the soup, we had also had some good bread and a "Deconstructed Salad":
- Green leaf lettuce [CSA], ripped into bite-size pieces, dressed with salt, good olive oil, balsamico
- Threaded watermelon radish [CSA], lightly salted
- Threaded cucumber, lightly salted
- Roasted pumpkin chunks [CSA], dressed with salt, black pepper, good olive oil, fresh parsley [CSA], and a small amount of rice vinegar.
(Threaded = sliced using either a peeler or the ceramic slicer, then cut cross-wise into threads)
Each of the veggies was in a distinct pile on the plate, which made a nice arrangement.
We had escarole from the CSA box, and this Bittman column from back in October was still in the back of my head, so last night we had soup:
1/4 cup olive oil
4 strips bacon, cut into small strips (lardons)
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
2 dried cayenne peppers, sliced
1 good-sized head of escarole, cut into chunks
1 20 oz jar of white (cannellini) beans, drained
3 cups chicken stock
salt and pepper
good olive oil for drizzling
Big croutons and parmesan cheese for serving.
Brown the bacon pieces in a pot over medium heat in the olive oil, then remove them from the pot. Add half of the garlic and all of the cayenne and saute for a minute or so. Add the escarole and a pinch of salt and saute for another minute or so, until it's coated with oil. Add the stock and beans, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for about 10 minutes, until the escarole is tender. Add back the bacon and the reserved garlic, let cook another minute or so.
Serve drizzled with the oil and topped with croutons and parmesan.
This was just excellent. Something (escarole and/or beans) leached a bunch of starch into the stock, making it nice and thick (mmm, unctuous), and the mild bitterness of the escarole plays off really well against the creaminess of the white beans. To complete dinner we had a green salad from the CSA box.
This is the place that took over the old "Late for the Train" spot a while ago.
I went to Mike's for lunch today and was not even remotely impressed. They're borderline white tablecloth in terms of atmosphere, but the service was sloooooow and the food was both overpriced and dull.
I had fish and chips ($10.95) which was a few pieces of nicely breaded red snapper piled on some tired romaine lettuce and about 8 steak fries. The fish had a nice crust, but to call it flavorless is to give it far too much credit; this stuff seemed to destroy the flavor of the things around it on the plate. The fries were warm (not hot) and mushy inside.
Maybe they were having a bad day, but I won't find out, because I won't be going back.
I guess I miss Late for the Train.
In order to finish off the last of the sherry-braised beef from Sunday, last night I threw it into a pot with a jar of tomatoes, let it simmer for a bit, then served it over spaghetti with lemon zest, minced parsley, and a bit of grated manchego. It was spicy, Spanish-influenced, spag bol! We somehow didn't have much in the house in the way of vegetables, so to accompany that we had some glazed baby carrots.
This idea came about because I really wanted to make beef rendang yesterday but that wouldn't fit into the Spanish theme of the rest of the food. So I decided to improvise something like rendang but with Spanish flavors. This is what I came up with.
2 lb beef chuck roast, cut into 1-2 inch cubes/rectangles
2 heaping tsp smoked paprika
2 heaping tsp sweet paprika
2 heaping tsp ground cumin
1 cup dry sherry
salt and black pepper
olive oil
Combine the beef with the spices, 3/4 cup of sherry, and a healthy hit of salt and pepper. Let stand for a couple hours.
Heat some olive oil in a heavy skillet (not nonstick) over medium heat.
Add the beef chunks, letting excess marinade drip back into the bowl, and brown well. Do this in stages so that the pan doesn't get too crowded. Watch the heat level so the spices don't burn.
When the beef pieces are nicely browned, transfer them to a nonstick pan with a lid that will hold them in a single layer.
Deglaze the skillet with the remaining 1/4 cup of sherry, then pour this over the beef chunks in the other pan. Pour the marinade left in the bowl over the beef.
Cover the pan and simmer over low heat for 2-3 hours, until the liquid is absorbed and the beef is fork tender. If the pan is dry before the beef is done, add a bit of stock.
This stuff was *good*. Using meat from our cow probably helped, but I'm sure "normal" beef probably would also have been excellent.
This was an improvisation that came about because we had loads of extra peppers from the farmers market and we were roasting pimentos anyway. I used several different varieties of smaller peppers (red, green, yellow, orange, none of them bell peppers), roasted them in the broiler, and then peeled them by hand (not using water). This doesn't taste any better than it would if you just dressed the peppers with the vinaigrette, but it sure does look nice. :-)
To make the timbale:
3/4 cup roasted pepper strips
salt, pepper
lemon
parsley leaves
Mix the pepper strips with some salt, pepper, and a squirt of lemon.
Oil the inside of a 6 oz ramekin, line it with plastic wrap. and oil the inside of the wrap with good olive oil.
Arrange some parsley leaves nicely on the bottom of the lined ramekin.
Pack in the pepper strips and fold the plastic wrap over the top.
Put the ramekin in the fridge with a weight on top of it for an hour or so.
Gently demold the timbale onto a plate, remove the plastic wrap, surround it with vinaigrette, serve.
Garlic vinaigrette (quantities here are very approximate):
1 Tbs lemon juice
2-3 Tbs braising oil from making braised garlic
1 anchovy fillet
2 Tbs water
1 tsp balsamico
1 Tbs parsley leaves
salt and pepper
Combine the lemon juice, anchovy, parsley, and oil in a minichop with some pepper. Blend well to form an emulsion. Add the water. Blend well. Add the balsamico and blend well. Adjust seasonings.
This emulsion seemed pretty stable last night.
Yesterday friends came over and I made a series of "small plate" things:
I did home fries for breakfast on Saturday and there a couple things I should take note of:
This was the second way of the "Southeast Asian chicken two ways" from BittmanWorld. I used bone-in chicken thighs and added some minced lemongrass to the spice mixture.
I also flash fried some collard greens [CSA] with spring onions and a bit of rice vinegar.
We accompanied these two delights with sticky rice and a green salad. I do love that caramel/fish sauce component of Vietnamese food, oh yes I do.
We've been building up to needing to make a batch of sauteed vegetables for a while -- to help empty some of the CSA stuff out of the fridge. Last night was the night.
Approximate quantities: 4 strips bacon, 1 leek, 1 delicata squash, 4 "french" carrots, 1 1/2 turnips (one yellow, 1/2 red-top; this ends up being about 2 cups diced turnip), 2 cups diced eggplant, 1 bay leaf, 1 sprig marjoram (dried), 2 Tbs chopped frozen basil.
I served the vegetables drizzled with good olive oil and with a spoon of parsley/garlic (overly strong parsley/garlic... whoa).
To go with the vegetables, I sauteed the last of the chateaubriand (used in the pho). I salted and peppered the steak liberally, sauteed it in about a Tbs of butter until all sides were nicely browned, then transferred to the 300 degree toaster oven. To make a sauce I deglazed with a chopped shallot and about 1/2 cup of red wine, reduced the wine heavily, added about a cup of chopped oyster mushrooms, cooked until they were soft, added a bit more wine and another dab of butter.
We also had a green salad. Everything was most excellent, though the vegetables could have used a bit of potato to tame those turnips.
TAME THOSE TURNIPS!
I couldn't just do nothing last night, so I made a batch of cookies. :-)
I made a half batch of "The World's Best Cookies" from San Francisco a la Carte (get the recipe using Amazon's amazing "Search Inside the Book" feature).
Though they have a goofy name, these are really nice cookies: they keep a long time, have a good variety of flavors, and aren't overly sweet. Needless to say, I don't do the "sprinkle the finished cookies with sugar" thing.
The downside of all that cooking on the weekend is that we end up with so many leftovers that there's no cooking during the week.
Damn tasty leftovers though.
Last night I made two things from BittmanWorld -- pork stuffed with prunes and apricots, and braised red cabbage [CSA] with apples [CSA]-- as well as a batch of mashed potatoes with turnips.
For the two Bittman things I pretty much followed the recipes in the book, aside from using a "ribeye" roast of pork. For the potatoes I used a 2:1 ratio of yukon gold potatoes [CSA] to turnip; I cooked the turnips by dicing and roasting them to prevent them from getting soggy.
We were both very happy with the food.
When I flipped through BittmanWorld the first time and saw a pho recipe, there wasn't much doubt that I'd have to give it a try. Since it's definitely a weekend prep, and Andrea was very enthusiastic, we made this yesterday.
I pretty much followed the recipe, though I used "beef knuckles" from Draegers (some piece of leg bone with a substantial chunk of meat still attached) instead of plain bones and chateaubriand instead of sirloin.
This recipe is really simple, it's just time consuming and is certainly a form of torture as the whole house fills with the smell of star anise, cloves, and ginger. But the results are certainly worth it: Pho is just soooo good.
Comments:
Last week I found out about the publication of Mark Bittman's new Best Recipes in the World. It's a stupid name -- it reminds me too much of the America's Test Kitchen titles -- but how could I possible resist a new Bittman book? Particularly one with loads of recipes from places other than France, Italy, and the US? The answer to that is pretty easy: I couldn't.
After paging through most of the book, I'm very happy with it.
I'm sure to be using this book frequently, so it's getting a new abbreviation: BittmanWorld. Now I just have to go through my box of index cards and throw out all those Minimalist recipes that are in there. :-)
It seems that beurre blanc, or whatever it is that I make when I try to make beurre blanc, isn't half so fragile as I believed.
I made a batch on Sunday night and it's been sitting, covered, at room temp since then. When we've wanted to use it, we just throw it in the microwave for 15-20 seconds and then whisk it a bit. The sauce comes right back together and tastes fine. I'm sure that I would notice some difference if I were a super taster, but I'm not, so I don't.
This is just fabulous for Andrea and I: we both like beurre blanc a lot, but it's a bit too much of a hassle to make for a single dish. Plus making only two servings is pretty much impossible. So being able to make a half recipe from Techniques and eat it over the course of a couple meals is most excellent.
I fried up a couple of "tenderized round steaks" from our cow last night for dinner. To go along with them I made a quick sauce from: chopped parsley [CSA], chopped garlic, lemon zest, lemon juice, olive oil, a teeny bit of balsamico, toasted cumin seeds, sweet paprika, salt, and pepper.
As sides we had some roasted golden beet (from Wednesday), steamed broccoli [CSA] with beurre blanc (from Sunday), and a green salad[CSA].
For dessert we made an apple galette using the leftover (frozen) crust from Saturday's quiche.
Comments:
Last night we made some progress on using up stuff from two CSA boxes (last week and this week). I improvised a soup from leeks, delicata squash, carrots, onions, garlic, and chicken stock. I also roasted some golden beets and we had a green salad with some julienned watermelon radish.
The soup was fabulous. Surprisingly, the beets didn't taste too much like dirt, so Andrea and I both liked them; I guess maybe we only really dislike red beets.
Last night I did a Thai red curry with shrimp, eggplant, and fresh shitake mushrooms. We were going to make a red cabbage salad, but we forgot. doh! Luckily there was plenty of delicious curry.
At Sunday's farmers market we picked up some nice looking artichokes and chantarelles. That pretty much set last night's menu: Steamed Artichokes with Beurre Blanc and Sauteed Chantarelles on Polenta.
I kept the chantarelle prep simple: I just sauteed the sliced mushrooms in olive oil with a bit of fresh thyme, some salt, and a small splash of balsamico. I drizzled the final dish with some black truffle oil and a sprinkle of chopped parsley before serving.
We also had a salad with mixed greens from our CSA box and some arugula from the farmers market.
For dessert I made a raspberry gratin (from JPFF).
