This was a "let's clean out the fridge" pasta sauce.
I used finely diced chopped ham, julienned chard greens, minced onion and shallot, slowly cooked in olive oil. Just before serving I added creme fraiche, white wine, and some fresh tarragon. Very nice, very nice indeed.
We ate the sauce over linguine and had a green salad.
Last night somehow ended up being Marcella Hazan night. I did tuna with sweet and sour onions and some baked radicchio. As a side I made mashed potatoes with goat cheese (not a Hazan thing).
We also had a green salad.
Comments:
I actually made this yesterday in order to have some time for the prep work.
The selection of vegetables was celery root, kohlrabi, carrots, leeks, wirsing, and garlic. I used a bit of turkey stock and some smoked ham for flavor.
And quite nice it was too! But then, when you start with this:
how could it not end well?
As a side I caramelized some halved brussel sprouts along with lardons (leftover salted pork belly, not smoked bacon).
Wine: Guigal 2003 Cotes du Rhone
Our original plan for yesterday was to have make a nice beef roast with red wine a la Marcella Hazan.
Then I saw a stand with fresh sauerkraut (mmm, oxymoron) at the market. I, of course, had to buy some of that. There's no way to have sauerkraut without including some sort of smoked pork product, so at the Coop I picked up a smoked ham (from three beautiful choices of types of smoked ham... I was in pig heaven).
Then I saw saucisson Vaudoise on sale, and that seemed like it would also go really well with sauerkraut. So I grabbed one. Andrea tried to suggest that I should get the sausage or the ham and not both, but I wasn't having any of that. I did allow common sense to intervene a little bit and switched plans to make choucroute garni instead of the pot roast. So I refrained from buying the beef roast; that dish will have to wait (not too long though!).
At that point I felt quite righteous about my restraint, so I also picked up a piece of salted pork belly.
For the choucroute iteself, I followed the basic recipe from Bourdain, though I used a Swiss chasselas (from Yvornne) instead of riesling. I cooked the saucisson Vaudoise in one piece on top of the sauerkraut, ham, and pork belly.
Served with some fresh parsley, boiled potatoes, and grainy mustard, I hardly need to say how good this was.
As a completely superfluous vegetable side I also did a gratin from some leftover chard stalks (recipe from Hazan).
There was a green salad.
The wine was a Pouilly-Fuisse from Georges DuBoeuf. It should have been an Alsatian Riesling, but since I had already tainted the choucroute with a foreign wine, I felt safe continuing the wrongness. It's a nice wine. :-)
This was a meal planned with the intent that it be fast to prepare.
For a protein, I seasoned some beef Saftplätzli (minute steaks) well and pan fried them.
To accompany I made a pasta sauce by sauteing some minced shallots in olive oil and then adding halved cherry tomatoes and cooking until they started to soften.
We ate this sauce over some nice linguine.
Before serving I sprinkled the pasta with parmesan and then sprinkled chives and olive oil over everything. I added lemon slices for the steak.
of course we also had a green salad
Good good good (and total prep time was less than 30 minutes).
Wine: Cantine Sasso 2001 Aglianico del Vulture, DOC Minorco; This was the second night we had this bottle open and it was even better than the first night. Good stuff this.
I found a nice-looking piece of veal shoulder on sale, so last night I cooked that up.
Veal shoulder, cut into 1cm thick steaks
salt, freshly ground pepper, cumin, and coriander
1 onion, chopped medium fine
4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
2 Tbs sherry vinegar
1 cup stock (I used turkey stock)
clarified butter (or oil)
chives for garnish
Season the veal pieces well, then brown both sides in the fat.
Add the garlic and onion and sautee another few minutes until they start to soften.
Add the sherry vinegar and stir until it mostly cooks off.
Add the stock, then cover and simmer until the veal is tender.
Remove the veal and reduce the sauce a bit; thicken with starch if you're interested.
Serve immediately, garnished with chives.
We ate this with some sauteed chard, buttered hartweizen, and a green salad.
I really ought to get back to finding interesting recipes in cookbooks and trying them, but somehow that doesn't end up happening during the week any more.
Last night I did a Thai curry where I braised chicken leg quarters (skinned and browned) in a sauce made from green curry paste, shallots, coconut milk, keffir lime leaves, and lemon grass. Just before serving I added some sugar and fresh lime juice. We garnished with cilantro and ate this with rice.
Fantastic.
The wine was an Alsatian Riesling (Domaine Blanck, 2004) that was a bit too grapefruity for my riesling tastes but quite nice when considered on its own.
We were visiting Andreas this weekend and did the mandatory cooking evening. We made a batch of a relative of chicken with coriander as well as a South Indian inspired green beans and tomato dish.
A rare dessert for us. We had an entire (small) loaf of bread leftover from turkey day that was, needless to say, too stale to eat. I couldn't bring myself to throw it out, so I decided to improv a bread pudding.
To the cubed bread I added cream, milk, melted butter, honey, an egg, diced pear, some raisins, a splash of rum, and a bit of cinnamon. I mixed everything well and baked it covered at around 175 for 1-1.5 hours.
The result wasn't spectacular (not enough liquid), but it was downright edible.
The potato croquettes represent the last of the leftover mashed potatoes from turkey day. I added finely chopped leek, egg, sweet paprika, pimenton, salt and black pepper and then sauteed them in clarified butter. Very nice and light.
For a protein, I cut pieces of Schüfeli about 1cm thick, coated them with black pepper and freshly ground coriander (no salt! they're salty enough), then fried them in clarified butter until nicely browned on the outside. Quite good!
We also had a green salad (it's been a while).
Wine: Dynamite 2003 Cab
Er, I suppose it's more appealing to call this "mixed winter vegetable soup" or something.
We had a bunch of bit of vegetable in the fridge and a big pot of turkey stock, so Saturday I made a big pot of soup. Contents included turnips, carrots, leek, wirsing, dried green beans, and leftover bits of turkey. For herbs I used parsley, bay, and thyme.
The dried green beans (Dorbohnen) are interesting things. they start out looking like little shards of plastic, but rehydrate into a decent approximation to a cooked bean. I'm going to have to play with these some more.
Neither of us could stand the thought of more leftovers, so last night I did something different.
I've been intending to make stuck-pot rice (from a Bittman article) with a potato crust since last week, but our stove problems last Friday stopped it from happening and then turkeyday intervened. Last night's version tasted quite good, but the potato crust didn't get browned and crispy, so it was missing something. Memo to myself: the burner needs to be set higher than 1.5
For the green beans, I cooked a diced onion in some olive oil until it started to soften, then threw in the washed beans and some cubed (1cm or so) Schüfeli (this is a cured and smoked pork shoulder) , covered it, and cooked over medium-low heat until the beans were done (about 30 min). I then uncovered the pot, cranked the heat up a bit and cooked off the collected liquid. Very nice indeed.
We had a salad with this.
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Andrea and I managed to convince some friends and coworkers to come over for Turkeyday on Sunday, so I was able to do a reasonably full production (stove problems aside, but that's a different story).
Things we made:
Again, Saturday was mostly spent prepping for Thanksgiving on Sunday, so dinner was mostly a matter of "wow, look at all these veggies we need to get out of the fridge!" We had bratkartoffeln, brussels sprouts sauteed with bacon, and some salsify.
The brussels sprouts dish (brown some lardons, toss in some halved brussels sprouts, saute covered over medium heat until nicely browned and fully cooked) was really good. It's hard to believe that I used to not like these things.
Salsify (Schwarzwurzel in German) was completely new to me; I picked some up because it's in all the shops and I wanted to give it a try. It is weird stuff. First of all it was unbelievable dirty. I soaked it and changed the water and scrubbed it and changed the water and soaked and scrubbed it and changed the water and it was still dirty when I peeled it. Secondly it releases some kind of sticky sap when peeled that is rather difficult to get rid of. I'm pretty sure the sap turns red when exposed to air, but it may have just picked up something else. Once the prep work was done, I cut the roots into bite-sized pieces and boiled them in salted acidulated water (per a suggestion from Bittman) until they started to get a bit tender. I drained the pieces and tossed them with some butter before serving. The roots didn't have much flavor (beyond butter and salt), but the texture was quite good. I wonder if a slower cooking/sauteeing would help with the flavor.
We're in the middle of Thanksgiving prep (Sunday is Turkeyday for us), so I didn't want to make anything too involved last night. I ended up doing a Gary Danko (by way of Mark Bittman) recipe for baked chicken with a mustard and herbed bread crumb crust. I also roasted some romanesco on the side.
The chicken recipe is quite good, though I think it would benefit from a longer cooking time in a lower oven. It's using chicken thighs and legs, which I think are better when they're long cooked, but the bread crumbs would burn at 400. So maybe 45 minutes at 350 or 375 would be better.
The roasted romanesco was really good. I don't know if this particular head was extra flavorful or if it's just magically compatible with roasting, but it was *good*.
The wine was a sparkler from Alsace: Baron de Schiélé Crémant d'Alsace. This was, I think, our first crémant d'Alsace, so I have no points of comparison, but this was a nice middle point between the lightness of a prosecco and what Andrea describes as the oiliness of champagne.
To go with the leftover meatloaf (mmm, leftover meatloaf) last night I did some sauteed broccoli and a salad made from roasted yellow turnips and sauteed carrots, tossed with sherry vinegar and olive oil.
Very nice
It looks like it's been a while since I made this. It doesn't seem that long, maybe google's indexing of blogs isn't all that good. ;-)
I took the basic recipe from BittmanWorld and didn't really muck around with it other than to reduce the sauce a bit at the end (after removing the meat and veggies), thicken it with potato starch, and then add a slug of wine just before serving. That last bit of wine really makes a nice difference in the dish. For the beef I used "siedfleisch", which looked a lot like brisket to me (not that I'm an expert in identifying cuts of meat, but it did look like brisket). Whatever cut it may be, it's perfect for stewing. This was definitely happy-making food. Too bad we don't have that many leftovers!
As a side I made oven-roasted potatoes. We also had bread and a green salad.
Andrea's parents are visiting this weekend, and I wanted to make something "American" for them last night, so meatloaf it was.
For the meatloaf I used 1 kg of mixed pork and beef, about 2oog of bacon (finely chopped), onion, garlic, 2 eggs, salt, black pepper, sweet paprika, and enough bread crumbs to make things not too wet. Before baking, I topped it with a thin layer of ketchup (of course!). It took 20 minutes longer to cook than I thought it would, but this was still a very nice meatloaf. I'm really looking forward to the sandwiches!
As a side I braised some belgian endive in vegetable boullion (after browning the cut side). This was good, but I think I used too much liquid... it'd be better to use a minimal amount (pan-steamed instead of braised or something).
We ate the meatloaf and endive with a big green salad and some good bread.
An aside: it occured to me that meatloaf is pretty much the same as pate de compagne.
