Brooklyn Girls Cooking

Bread!

2012-01-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

I have always believed bread to be a fundamental component of human existence, kind of like gravity…and beer. Some years ago, in the course of my foodie-geek reading, I discovered that anthropology bears out this concept: Early human culture developed along with yeast cultures, as our formerly nomad-hunter-gatherer ancestors transitioned toward settling in one spot long enough for those spores to ferment, in order to produce bread…and beer.*

Baking bread is also a wonderfully mellow, good-for-the-soul experience. Although it does take time to let the dough rise, not much of that time is spent working. And what work you do feels therapeutic, or possibly even spiritual: The hippie in me believes that all that kneading transmits positive prana into the dough through your hands, so that the eater receives the good energy you put into it.

There are a lot of complicated bread recipes out there, but there are plenty of simple ones out there as well, and I suggest starting with those and working your way up to more ambitious projects.

The recipe I made recently (results pictured above) was from this old-school book I had called The Cook Book of Breads (pictured at left—though this is actually different from the cover on my edition) that I must have purchased for $1 at a stoop sale or some such. Imagine my surprise, while looking it up to find a photo for this blog entry, to find that used copies fetch $75 and up on Amazon. Um, too bad I broke the binding and got a page greasy…D’OH!

The recipe I made was a simple white sandwich bread, except I swapped in 1/2 cup whole wheat flour to add a little flavor. (While baking is more of an exact science than cooking, it doesn’t mean there’s no room for experimentation—in fact, experimentation is kind of the point of science, duh. If you’re testing out variations to a bread recipe, I would just suggest being cautious and making one incremental change every time you make the recipe; don’t drastically alter a measurement or swap out three different ingredients on your first foray.) The bread—one regular-size loaf and three small ones—came out great, and the method was about as easy-peasy as you could ask from a bread recipe.

* I really wish I could remember for sure what food history book I read this in—both because I recall loving it and would totally recommend it, and because common journalistic decency would require me to credit my source. It may have been A History of the World in 6 Glasses, which I loved and would totally recommend whether or not it's the source of this particular trivia tidbit. If you recall reading this factoid in another book, please tell me in the comments…maybe that’s the one I read.

Double Leftovers Love: Baked Stuffed Potato & “Taco Shells” Pasta

2012-01-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

My two-prong 2012 resolution was to do more cooking at home, and to end up throwing out fewer leftovers by repurposing them for future dinners and/or work lunches. This resolution seemed like a manageable, money-saving one that will yield some good meals and blogging inspiration. Plus, I figured, if the world is going to end this coming December, there’s no point in resolving to exercise, eat healthy, or quit smoking—amirite, gentle reader?

Anyhoo, I have done pretty well thus far—I've brought lunch to work more days than not, and managed to make some creative use of leftovers. The Taco Night I recently blogged about actually occurred twice over the course of a few weeks—once with corn tortillas, once with flour. And following both occasions, I came up with excellent ways to use up the leftover ground beef filling.

Taco Night Reprise #1: Baked Stuffed Potato
After the first Taco Night, there wasn’t more than 1/2 cup of meat left. So the following night, I baked a foil-enshrouded potato in the toaster oven at 425°, with a foil packet of the leftover meat on top of the toaster oven for the last 10 minutes to warm it.

When the potato was done, I opened up the foil, split the potato, topped it with the leftover taco filling, and topped that with shredded jalapeno jack. Then I loosely tented the foil from the meat over it and returned it to the toaster oven at 350° for about 5 minutes to finish heating the chili and melt the cheese.

I dolloped this with sour cream, and accompanied it with a cup of the cream of broccoli soup I had made while the potato was baking. Again, I was working the resolution, with the plan of bringing the remainder of the soup to work for lunch for the next few days. (BTW, gentle reader, I’ve been doing drafts of a cream of broccoli soup recipe for ages, but can’t settle on a formula I truly want to commit to the Interwebs… Never fear, however; I won’t rest until I do!)

Taco Night Reprise #2: Taco Shells
After the second Taco Night in recent memory, there was maybe a cup or more of beef filling left. A few evenings later, I set salted water to boil for pasta and heated the taco meat in a small saucepan with an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce and maybe 1/2 cup chicken stock. I brought the meat mixture to a high simmer, then turned it down to low to let it cook down so the liquid thickened.

Once the water boiled, I made large (not jumbo) pasta shells—get it? Taco shells!!!—and then tossed them in the sauce and garnished them with grated cheddar, for a dish in what I call the Ignorant American Fusion school of cooking: a Mexican-inpired spin on the classic Italian combo of pasta Bolognese with Parmesan. (Well, I don't know if it's actually classic or just what ignorant Americans do. You see how this school of cooking works.)

The Rob and I were both very happy with this dish; the pasta was a nice foil for the spicy sauce, and it was an awfully easy way to recycle! So far, I feel like this resolution is generating a lot of positive reinforcement. So much more fun than exercising, eating healthy, or quitting smoking!

Saturday Night Comfort Food: Ravioli alla Tortorella

2012-01-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

Last night, I invented this dish and named it in honor of the New York Rangers’ coach John Tortorella. There is no particular significance to the ingredients as pertaining to him; I just wanted to pay tribute to the man who has led my secret boyfriend Henrik Lundqvist and his teammates to be NUMBER FREAKING ONE IN THE NHL AND WINNERS OF THE WINTER CLASSIC!!! And whose name just sounds like it should be a pasta. Originally I was actually thinking of inventing a Tortellini alla Tortorella (you know how I love geeky wordplay, gentle reader), but I figured ravioli would work better, because the meat sauce would mingle with the cheese filling once you cut into the ravioli, whereas tortellini are all wound up tight (much like Tortorella).

While heating a large pot of salted water for a package of cheese ravioli (13 count), I sautéed a little over a pound of ground pork in a couple tablespoons of olive oil with a medium chopped onion, a bunch of minced garlic, and a 10-oz. package of cremini (a.k.a. "baby bella") mushrooms sliced and halved. Oh, and coarse salt and pepper of course, and some fresh thyme leaves. I broke up the meat with a wooden spoon as it cooked.

Once the meat was cooked through (it doesn’t really brown, it more like…whites), I added maybe 1/2 cup frozen peas, stirred them in to mix, and transferred the meat mixture to a bowl.

I melted about half a stick of butter in the saucepan where I’d cooked the meat, and sprinkled in/whisked a couple tablespoons of flour, browning over medium heat while whisking for a few minutes to make a roux.

Then I whisked in a healthy splash of chicken stock followed by maybe 2 cups of milk, turned the heat up to high, and brought it just to a boil before lowering to a simmer at medium and throwing in some chopped fresh parsley.

After letting the sauce reduce and thicken for a few minutes while whisking sporadically, I turned the heat down to low and added the pork mixture back into the saucepan along with a piece of Parmesan.

Around this time the pasta water started to boil, so I dropped in the ravioli and cooked them while the sauce continued thickening on low. Once the pasta was cooked, I divided it into bowls, and stirred some more chopped parsley into the sauce before ladling it over the ravioli. There was a good amount of sauce left over; you could probably make this same amount with two packages of ravioli to serve four. Also I could see it working as a lasagna filling if you doubled it, perhaps with some chopped spinach mixed in.

I served it garnished with grated parmesan and more fresh parsley, paired with a bottle of red wine. (Probably a salad would have been good but y’know, that’s just empty calories.) And let me tell you, after a bowl of this heavy dish and a couple glasses of Malbec, even Torts himself would have mellowed out.

This was the most enjoyable invocation of John Tortorella’s name since I got tired of saying it followed by “ella-ella-ella, eh-eh-eh.” I am now inspired to invent a pseudo-Swedish-meatball recipe in honor of my beloved Lundqvist. And in closing, let me just say, LET’S GO RANGERS!!!

Taco Night!

2012-01-05T21:21:00.000-08:00

As countless NYC food carts have proved, there are an infinite ways to make tacos—with a matrix of practically every meat/fish/veggie/legume you can think of, tons of topping combos, and of course, soft vs. hard/corn vs. flour tortilla. I grew up with Taco Night starring the classic American incarnation of ground beef/hard corn shell, but I have no use for the hard shells, which invariably shatter as soon as you take a bite if they haven’t already shattered in the box (plus they’re overpriced and a huge waste of packaging). So, this is my alternate take on the ground beef taco using soft tortillas.

When I made this recently, I heated some bacon fat—but you could use a couple tablespoons of olive oil—to brown 1.5 pounds ground beef over medium-high heat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan (you could use a cast iron skillet or a non-nonstick frying pan; nonstick doesn’t brown the meat properly).

Sprinkle kosher salt, ground cumin, chili powder, and paprika over the meat before using a wooden spoon to break it up so it crumbles as it cooks.

Stir in a diced medium white onion and as much minced garlic as you like. Keep occasionally stirring so the beef doesn’t stick to the pan.

While the meat is cooking, heat a foil-wrapped stack of soft corn or flour tortillas in the oven or toaster oven on, like, 250° or 300°. I like to heat them for five minutes, then separate the stack in the middle and flip it back together so that the ones that were in the center are on the outside and vice versa. That way, they all heat evenly, without the outer ones getting crunchy and unfoldable.

Once the meat is more brown than pink, carefully tilt the pan over the sink to drain the grease without spilling the meat. You don’t want to get all of the liquid out; leave in enough so it’s still moist and flavorful, just not dripping with grease.

Return the meat to the pan. Stir in 1 or 2 minced canned chipotles in adobo (more if you like it HAWT; omit them altogether if someone in the household doesn’t do spicy) and an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce. Reduce heat to medium-low and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has reduced to create a chili-like consistency.

Now all you have to do is plunk the meat on a trivet accompanied by the tortillas and the accouterments of your choice. While the meat is cooking, you can do all the prep work like chopping veggies, grating cheese, and decanting sour cream into a bowl (no plastic tubs on the table, please). Go-to topping options include:

salsas such as cruda, roja, verde, black bean, and miscellaneous
avocado slices, sprinkled with coarse salt and lime juice
shredded lettuce or red cabbage
diced tomatoes
sliced jalapenos, raw, pickled, or roasted
matchstick-sliced radishes
chopped cilantro and red onion
pickled red onion
thin-sliced scallion
cheddar, jalapeno Jack, or cotija cheese
sour cream/crema
myriad varietals of hot sauce

This is a quick weeknight meal and, from what I understand of families, family-friendly. You can make it even quicker by making the meat filling a night or two in advance and reheating it on low in a covered pot while you prep the toppings and heat the tortillas.

And for a party, a cheap and low-maintenance way to entertain is to do a make-your-own taco buffet. Multiply the meat recipe (or repeat it with ground chicken and ground pork), buy a few packages of each type of tortilla, and then set out a lot of topping choices on a buffet in cute bowls and platters. For some reason, people seem to enjoy being made to prepare their own food at parties—go figure.

New Year's Baby (bok choy)!

2011-12-31T14:02:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year Readers!

It's almost a brand new year! I know I never told you about our Thanksgiving fun, brining the turkey. I also realize I haven't said a peep about our Feast of the Seven Fishes at Christmas. Here I've been, dropping the holiday ball, but I promise that I will catch you guys up on everything, it has been mostly delicious!

But here we are, about to ring in the new year, and I have something quick and easy to share. I am hoping to stop by a couple of lovely parties this evening, but I am not sure what the actual food plan is besides snack foods, so I wanted to have something substantial in my stomach before the wine starts to flow, and I had a bag baby bok choy in the fridge. Et Voila! Brown rice and bok choy.

I put the rice on to cook first, as brown rice takes about an hour (50 minutes or so on the stove, at least 10 minutes to sit off the heat). I also took turkey broth out of the freezer and threw it into the microwave to defrost. Then i minced about 12 cloves of garlic, and sliced into thin rounds, about 2 tablespoons of ginger.
I put about a tablespoon of unsalted butter in a large frying pan, as well as pouring in the leftover fat from some andouille sausage that Kitty had browned a couple of days before for her Lamb Shank Stew. It was tasty, and about a teaspoon.

Once the butter and sausage goodness heated up over a medium-high flame, I added the garlic and ginger and let that cook slowly for about 5 minutes. I added about a teaspoon each of mild curry powder and hot paprika, and stirred. This cooked for abother 5 minutes, before I started adding the defrosted broth. I added about a half a cup of the broth, 1/4 of a cup of dry white wine, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and let that cook at a gentle simmer for about 3 minutes. Then added more broth, about 1/4 of a cup at a time every 3-5 minutes, a total of about 2 cups of broth in total, bringing it up to a simmer.
After washing and spinning the 1 lb of baby bok choy dry, I separated the larger bunches from the individual leaves. When the garlic, paprika, broth mixture was ready, I added the larger bunches of the baby bok choy and turned the heat down a little, then flipped them once the side in the broth was a little wilted ~1 minute. After 2 minutes, I added in the individual leaves into the pan and flipped those after about a minute as well.

I turned the heat off, and let both the bok choy and the rice sit for about 10 minutes. And then in a bowl, combined the rice, the bok choy, and broth. The whole meal took about an hour total. It was tasty, flavorful, and really good.
Who's ready to take on 2012?

Happiest of the latest of the newest of all the years ever!
love,
Alyce

Lamb Shank Stew With Tomato and Butter Beans

2011-12-31T11:41:00.000-08:00

It is an all too rare occurrence that my co-blogger and I cook and eat a meal together. But a few days before New Year’s, we found ourselves free of plans. Serendipitously, I had a pot full of lamb shank stew that I had planned to serve over rice, and Alyce was…making rice. It was totally like I was a crocodile and she was that bird that picks food out of its teeth, or something. So, Alyce jumped in her car to come pick me up, I threw my pot into a canvas shopping bag (have lamb, will travel!), and we proceeded to have the best impromptu dinner party ever.

How, gentle reader, did I come to have said pot of stew in my possession? Well, the previous night, I had made tomato soup (recipe to come, sooner or later) and grilled cheese sandwiches (with fancy artisanal bread from Brooklyn Victory Garden and Kraft singles from Met Foods) for myself and The Rob, and prepped this lamb stew for later in the week. See, on weeknights, I like to throw together something quick for that night’s dinner (say, pasta) while simultaneously pre-cooking something that can be reheated another night. Cheap cuts of meat like lamb shank and beef short ribs take a long time to slow-cook but require zero maintenance while doing so, and serving them on the next night or two is actually preferable because (a) the flavors develop that much longer and (b) during overnight refrigeration, a layer of fat congeals at the top of the liquid and can be easily skimmed off before reheating.

So, here’s how to put this dish together. It takes time management (you want it to cook 4 hours on night 1) but very little hands-on time.

Night 1:

Preheat the oven to 275°-300°. (Don’t be a baby; fresh meat cooked at this temperature isn’t going to kill you. That said, Brooklyn Girls Cooking disavows all liability if it does.)

Rub about 3-4 lb. lamb shank with salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, and olive oil and let sit for about 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Brown the meat on all sides (in batches) over medium-high heat in a Dutch oven; using tongs to turn it will make your life much easier.

Remove the meat and add an onion sliced into circles; stir.

Add a 28-oz. can of whole plum tomatoes and their liquid, an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce, and 4 cups beef or chicken stock. (I threw about 1/2 cup of beer in there too; you could use either red or white wine.) Add the zest of 1 lemon; you can grate it directly into the pot.

Turn the heat up to high and bring the mix just to a boil. (You don’t want to be wearing your white silk outfit for this, ’cuz that tomato sauce will spatter like a mofo. Plus, it’s after Labor Day.)

When the tomatoes rise to the surface, stab them through with a kitchen knife. This helps ~~get your aggression out~~ break them up into pieces and incorporate into the sauce.

Lower the heat to medium so you just have a nice modestly bubbling simmer going. Add thyme (ideally fresh, but dried will do in a pinch—actually, use more than a pinch, since dried herbs have less flavor. Hwaaaaaa, see what I did there?!?!).

Return the meat to the pot, cover it with an oven-safe lid, and put it in—wait for it—the oven. Cook for about 4 hours.

Remove the pot from the oven and allow it to cool uncovered for 15 minutes or so before putting it in the fridge overnight.

Night 2

Remove the lid and scrape off the layer of congealed fat, which will likely be stained bright orange from the tomato sauce. (It’s fine if a few beads remain here and there. Don’t freak out about it.)

Use tongs to extract the lamb shanks from the pot, then tear the meat off the bone with your fingers, shredding as needed to flake off maybe 2-inch chunks. Return the meat to the pot (you could save the bones for stock if you like).

Place the pot on a burner turned to medium high, uncovered (you can keep the cover on until the liquid is heated enough to bubble). Add a 15.5-oz. can of butter beans, drained; a sliced yellow or red pepper; and a few generous handfuls of trimmed and halved-lengthwise green beans. Cook until the green beans are softened and the liquid has reduced, maybe 20 or 30 minutes. At Alyce’s suggestion, I whisked 1 TBSP or so of cornstarch into a small bowl of the liquid and then added it back into the pan, to help thicken/reduce the sauce.

Along with the rice, Alyce supplied a lovely romaine salad with celery and carrots—a nice contrast/complement of raw and crunchy to the hearty, rich slow-cooked stew. And because the proportion of lamb I had used was way low (far less than the 3-4 lb. specified above), she also provided a package of Andouille sausage that we sliced lengthwise into 4 pieces and browned on the stove before adding to the pan. This was an excellent addition that I would recommend even if you use enough lamb—chorizo or some sort of fancy chicken sausage would also hit the spot.

We paired this warming winter meal with a likewise glow-inducing Merlot and had a much-needed girl-time catch-up, after not having seen each other over the holiday season. This was a highly serendipitous stewincidence indeed!

Christmas Dinner 2011: Beef Tenderloin and Nostalgia

2011-12-27T21:03:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day, we drove up to my grandmother’s house in Western Massachusetts—where she always cooked Christmas dinner for the whole family when I was growing up—and my mom, the Beez, and I cooked Christmas dinner for the whole family. Though I have fond childhood memories of making E-Z-Bake Oven mini-cakes and baking cookies with my grandmother (I was particularly excited by her pizzelle press), this was the first time I’ve ever actually prepared a meal in her kitchen.

Our mission was to update some family Christmas classics, which include a hodgepodge of Middle Eastern influences (we’re of Assyrian descent—look it up) and 1950s Americana. So, on the appetizer table was pre-cooked shrimp with cocktail sauce straight from the jar, alongside stuffed grape leaves and spinach-feta-phyllo triangles. However, we skipped the canned-peas-with-meatballs-in-tomato sauce that was a vile annual staple of the holiday dinner table, and the Kool-Whip-and-God-knows-what-else-based frozen green pie for dessert. And since Aunty Olga was out of town, there were no Tollhouse cookies for the first time in my memory.

As is customary, we overdid appetizers—but this year we were shockingly conservative on desserts, with only two for seven people (compare with Thanksgiving). For the main course, we eschewed my grandmother’s usual entrée excess (we’re talking a roast turkey, a ham, roast beef, and maybe a lasagna thrown in for good measure) for a single beef tenderloin.

The tenderloin was cooked to perfection (we cut it with butter knives) but a little overwhelmed by the flavor of the smoked paprika I had carelessly overused in the dry rub. Everyone assured me it was good, but I imagine Tom and Padma might have sent me packing for that paprika-palooza.

In any case, here is our Christmas Day menu:

Appetizers

Spinach-feta-phyllo triangles (I really will have to post my grandmother’s awesome recipe for this)
Yahlangees (our word for stuffed grape leaves)
Cocktail shrimp
Stuffed mushrooms with ground veal (we meant to make these and were crestfallen to discover we’d accidentally bought ground veal instead of lamb, but we made it work)
Crostini with white bean-tomato ragout
Tzatziki with pita and crudités

Soup Course

Celery root bisque (this was excellent; I improvised it but I wish I’d taken note of the proportions to post a recipe—I’ll have to try to re-create it for you, gentle readers)

Main Course

Spice-rubbed beef tenderloin (rub with salt, pepper, dried herbs; let sit at room temperature for a couple hours; cook at 350° for 15-20 minutes per pound; let rest 10 minutes) with pan-roasted carrots
Mushroom gravy
Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and garlic
My grandmother’s rice pilaf
Butternut squash bread pudding
Stuffed cabbage
Buttermilk-onion pull-apart rolls

Desserts

Chocolate cake with raspberry filling
Pumpkin bouche

All in all, it was a pretty good spread, and really not too complicated to put together, though we did prep a bunch of stuff (phyllo triangles, grape leaves, cabbage, onion-roll dough, and desserts) a day or two before.

If you’re planning on making a New Year’s Eve dinner, the tenderloin would be an excellent and low-maintenance choice. Just be sure that you apply the dry rub sparingly—and that if you use paprika, it’s of the unsmoked variety.

Happy Holidays to all!

My Favorite Christmas Cookies

2011-12-22T18:51:00.000-08:00

Gentle reader, this recipe isn’t an original, but I keep coming back to it year after year. This holiday season, if you care enough to give your loved ones something homemade (read: can’t afford/are too late to actually buy them presents), this Martha recipe has everything going for it: It combines the classic holiday-treat flavors of chocolate and gingerbread for an unexpected twist while remaining fully in keeping with tradition; and it keeps and travels well for at least a week or two, pretty much without crumbling or breaking.

The one original spin I put on them is to use M&Ms, sometimes the mini red and green ones, in lieu of the chocolate chunks, to make them look more festive. (And I use regular cocoa powder since that’s what I keep in the cupboard.) Oh, and rather than have the actual shreds of fresh ginger in the cookie, which can have an annoyingly fibrous consistency, I grate the ginger into a bowl—maybe a little more than the recipe calls for—and squeeze the liquid out into the butter.

Of course, the whole point of making Christmas cookies is to give them out to people who fall into that holiday gray area between gifts and no gifts. So you might want to double, triple, or even quadruple the recipe to cover all those folks. I would stack 4 or 5 cookies in a festive cellophane bag from the 99¢ store, and tie off the bag with ribbon and a gift tag.

However, you could also leave a plate of these out on Christmas Eve as your offering for Santa Claus—accompanied by anything from a glass of organic soy milk to a White Russian, depending what sort of Brooklyn dweller you are.

Leftovers Love: Chicken Tetrazzini

2011-12-21T20:01:00.000-08:00

What exactly is tetrazzini? In order to use up leftovers, I made a variation on what I thought its main constituent parts to be—turkey or chicken, pasta, cream sauce, peas, and mushrooms—only to look it up after the fact and learn that there is no actual consensus on what exactly it consists of. (Also, that the dish was named after the opera singer at left.) So my variation was as good as any—not to mention being a quick and hearty reworking of leftovers to the tune of $3 in new ingredients.

Backstory: Monday, I made roast chicken, which I had marinated in Brooklyn Lager topped off with some chicken stock, rubbed under the skin with Old Bay and garlic powder, and stuffed with a sliced clementine and a head of garlic for flavor infusion. While the chicken rested, I made pan gravy with the drippings and more chicken stock plus a little of that beer brew. Also, I made frozen peas and Stove Top. (As regular readers may recall, the Rob loves his Stove Top.) This was a very satisfying meal, and also I made a very flavorful stock out of the chicken carcass.

Fast-forward to this evening (is this an action-packed saga or what?!): I purchased a bunch of parsley, an 8-oz. package of mushrooms, and a box of linguine—which frankly I should have already had on hand, but for once I was out of dried pasta.

Once in the kitchen, the first thing I did was to put a covered metal pot of salted water on a burner turned to high, to boil for the pasta. Always start boiling your pasta water before you do anything else, since it tends to take forever. I also preheated the oven to 350°.

The next thing I did was realize I was out of butter. (Gentle reader, clearly I need to stock up on staples.) So, in lieu of that Paula Deen-deified substance, I added a layer of the leftover gravy to a stockpot in which to sauté a small diced onion over medium-low heat.

Once the onion was soft, I added the mushrooms, sliced, plus a splash of white wine and a sprinkle of kosher salt, and continued sautéing, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon.

I stirred maybe 2 cups of milk into the remaining cup-ish of gravy (which was at room temperature), stirred the mix into the stock pot, and turned the heat up to medium-high. I let it simmer with the liquid bubbling, stirring occasionally as it cooked down. (I might have rather used part cream in retrospect.)

Once the sauce thickened a bit, I added the leftover roast chicken that I had stripped off the carcass with my fingers on Monday and hacked up into inch-long-ish chunks, as well as the leftover peas, I’d say ½ to 1 cup though it doesn’t need to be too specific. I reduced the heat down to low and let it continue cooking and stirring.

This was maybe 15 minutes in, total? At this point the water was well boiling, so I added maybe 3/4ths of the box of pasta and cooked per package directions. I tossed the pasta in the sauce and stuck the pot in the oven for maybe 10 minutes, with the lid cracked open. Then I served it with Parmesan cheese for grating; you could also add some grated Parm to the sauce before putting the dish in the oven.

Now, after making this, I got curious about the official definition of tetrazzini, since I had relied purely on my recall of how my mom used to make it when I was a kid—usually with turkey, not chicken. I Googled it and found this one recipe that is pretty similar to what I recall although I can’t remember whether my mom used to bake it with the bread crumbs. (She may not even have baked it.) But some other recipes I found were mushrooms only, not peas—and according to Wikipedia, which again says there is no exact agreed-upon recipe for the dish, one of the main ingredients is almonds. (But the photo accompanying the entry shows peas…and a truly wrong-looking layer of yellow cheese.)

So I would suggest that you just modify the dish as you see fit and/or based on whatever leftovers you have laying around. Cooked broccoli might be good instead of the peas, you could throw some sliced red or yellow peppers in there, and I certainly would like to do the bread-crumb topping next time around. Truth be told, gentle reader, I thought about packing a layer of Stove Top over the dish when I put the pot in the oven…but that seemed truly wrong.

Spicy Lamb-Stuffed Mushrooms

2011-11-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

Gentle reader, I would be the first person to say that Thanksgiving is not the time to experiment with new dishes. Duh, you don’t want something to fail miserably on the biggest food day of the year, when a crowd is depending on you to provide for them. However, a dish that The Beez and I came up with last Thanksgiving was a huge hit that became an instant family classic.

Last year we came up with the idea of a stuffed-mushroom appetizer with a ground-lamb-based filling. In a wacky-sitcom-ish occurrence, unbeknownst to each other, The Beez and I both added hot spice to the mix as it was sautéing on the stove top. So it ended up being reeeally spicy. But everyone loved it and agreed we should make it again, and so we did.

After winging the preparation last year without writing anything down, we freestyled it again this year, with The Beez suggesting the addition of feta cheese, which proved awesome. The spice balance is up to you, but these definitely work nicely with a little heat. You may end up with some extra filling which you can save (to reheat and eat in a pita or over rice) or just eat with a spoon out of the pan.

Preheat the oven to 400°. (Or you can make the mushroom filling and stuff the mushrooms a day or two in advance, store the shrooms on a baking sheet in the fridge, and throw them straight into a preheated oven whenever you’re ready.)

Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add about 2 T olive oil and swish the pan around by the handle so the oil coats the surface.

Add about 1 lb. ground lamb and 1 small- to medium-size onion, diced, to the skillet. Sprinkle with coarse salt. Break up lamb by stabbing with a wooden spoon.

As it cooks, wash 16 oz. (2 boxes) mushrooms (I prefer cremini, but white are fine) and remove stems. Dice stems and add to lamb sauté; stir to mix.

Add minced garlic to taste (a lot is recommended) along with paprika, cayenne pepper, cumin, and/or chili powder to taste—go easy, and you can always add more. Stir and continue cooking.

Once the lamb looks more brown than gray (this is probably about 10-15 minutes from when you first put it in the pan), turn off the heat, then add to the pan a couple handfuls minced fresh parsley and about 3–4 oz. feta cheese, crumbled. (A handful of pine nuts would be good too.) Stir to mix.

Spoon some lamb mixture into each mushroom top, pressing down the filling with the back of the spoon to pack it. Place the mushroom caps on a foil-lined baking sheet.

Again, you will probably have a lot of filling; I suggest going around filling each mushroom modestly and then doing a second loop to add more based on how much you have left. Yes, this is an extra step, but it will ensure even distribution.

Cook at 400° for about 10-15 minutes or until the shroom caps look wrinkly and give off liquid.

Arrange the mushrooms on a serving platter and, if you desire, garnish them with more minced parsley and/or crumbled feta.

For the second Thanksgiving in a row, everyone raved about these apps, and they have already made it onto the Christmas menu. Take this recipe and make it your own, and don’t be afraid that you’ll make it too spicy.

This Year's Thanksgiving Dessert Table

2011-11-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

Clockwise from top left (pie pan rim touching wine bottle): Pumpkin pie, buttermilk-lemon chess pie, chocolate-pecan-coconut-bourbon tart, pumpkin chocolate squares, chocolate chip cookies*, spiced apple pie, cheesecake with cranberry topping

Note: We had 11 people for Thanksgiving.

* These were provided by Aunty Olga. Brooklyn Girls Cooking is not affiliated with these cookies.

Braise? What braise?

2011-11-20T20:26:00.000-08:00

Hello readers!

Thanksgiving approaches, and I have the family coming into town. OK, I admit, that has nothing to do with this post, but I have a lot of Thanksgiving foods on my mind with the approaching holiday. This weekend I got my half of our CSA share, and man did we have a lot of root vegetables...
by root vegetables I mean turnips, we got a lot of turnips. A lot. With the holiday coming up, I am loathe to over-buy food right now. I know there will be lots of leftovers, and I'm excited to tell you all about our Thanksgiving plans (yes! my family is coming to NY!) but here I was on a Sunday evening, I had some brown rice I had cooked the night before, and I had a plethora of turnips.

I will admit, I do not have the most clear concept of what "braising" is, but I know it has to do with cooking things in liquid, and generally applies to ways to cook meat. slowly. I thought- "hey, they're turnips, i threw these in the slow cooker with some beef stew last week, they are probably best cooked slow!" So. How do I cook them faster? I had no idea, I decided to make something up. I put 2 and a half cups of water in a sauce pan, and added 1 (chicken) bouillon cube. I chopped into small dice whatever old vegetables I had in the fridge. This included about 8 cloves of garlic, 2 small leeks, a half a small onion, and i halved about 8 old cherry tomatoes. (I SAID I grabbed whatever old vegetables were in my fridge!). I put these into the simmering water + bouillon with a shake or two of crushed red pepper, and let it simmer (with a bay leaf!) while i cleaned, peeled, and large-diced the 3 large turnips.

Once I let this hodge podge of... whatever... simmer for a while, i strained it out from the "braising liquid" and then dumped all those turnips right in the liquid. Well readers, remember how I started with 2 and a half cups of water? Yeah, that wasn't enough to adequately cover the turnips, so I looked in my fridge, and miracle of miracles, there was a half a bottle of old white wine in there! ok, it wasn't exactly a "miracle" but it was in there, and I have to tell you, having old white wine in the fridge is like cooking liberation. Not enough liquid in that sauce? Old white wine! not enough liquid in that "i made it up braise"? Old white wine! It's my favorite go-to cooking liquid, and it might as well be yours. I added enough white wine to just bring the cooking liquid up to the turnips, and then I turned the heat up a bit (the wine was cold) and covered the pot.

So I had the turnips cooking in this combo chicken bouillon/veggie/white wine liquid. Yes, I am calling this braising. Is this braising? Can I get a call from the lie judges? And after about 10-15 minutes, once the turnips had started to soften, I added back in the veggies that I had strained out of the liquid. I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I added a little more white wine, and some salt (probably about 1/4 of a teaspoon), and kept it at a simmer. I also realized I had wanted some celery in there to start with, and as I had plenty of celery, and celery doesn't take too long to cook, i thin chopped 2 ribs of celery, and threw that in the pot as well.

At this point, I wanted it to thicken a little, so I just kept it on low heat with the pot cover off.
I put some of the brown rice I had made before in a bowl, and set it on the stove to warm a bit. After a few more minutes, I took a couple of spoonfuls of turnips and liquid, and spooned them over the brown rice. I let it sit for a bit before digging in, so that the liquid could soak into the rice, and when I did dig in? It was really good! It was a nice, hearty, almost stewy, vegetable melange!

I hope everyone is getting excited for Thanksgiving, I know I am! My family is not exactly the biggest fans of turkey, but we are going to do turkey, along with some other dishes, and I wll keep you guys posted. Our turkey tradition involves an olive oil-coated brown paper bag (with no printing on it). Is that weird? I don't know, how do you keep your turkey from drying out?

Yay food-centric holidays!

Thanksgiving Made Easy! (Well, Easier.)

2011-11-20T13:20:00.001-08:00

Last year, as regular readers may recall, my cousin The Beez and I prepared a very Brooklyn Thanksgiving for our family who were kind enough to travel to us. This year, Turkey Day dinner will be at the Massachusetts home of our aunt (a.k.a. the Turkey Ninja) and uncle, and we will be preparing apps and desserts with my mom. I have mixed feelings about not being responsible for the whole feast; on the one hand, it’s a welcome respite from pressure at a time when I’m emerging from an all-consuming work wormhole; on the other, I’m kind of bummed to miss out on preparing the biggest meal of the year.

(On that note, I’m excited for, though slightly envious of, Alyce that her fam will be having Thanksgiving dinner at her BK apartment this year—at least one of the Brooklyn Girls Cooking will be cooking in Brooklyn on this high holy foodie day!!!)

While Thanksgiving dinner is made easier for me this year by the fact that I’m not making it, you, gentle reader, should have the benefit of learning from the meal-planning lessons of the past. Herewith, please find some of BGC’s classic (read: year-old) Thanksgiving how-to posts…because recycling is good for the planet, amirite?!

Bacon-Wrapped Stuffed Pork Chops: So, That Happened.

2011-11-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

I’m baa-aack, did you miss me? Gentle reader, I am just setting foot in the kitchen again after weeks of what I dubbed the Taco Diet, and leave it to me to eat even less nutritiously when cooking at home.

The Rob, as I have mentioned, enjoys very much the Stove Top, and I cannot deny that I see where he is coming from. The other night when I asked if he had any requests, he said he wanted Stove Top, but not chicken. Clearly, that was just silly. But I took this as a challenge and ended up inventing a sort of unholy inside-out pork sandwich, or maybe an inverted version of a KFC Double Down but with pork. If both of those concepts intrigue and excite you, you’ve come to the right post. This meal couldn’t have been simpler to put together and was shamefully satisfying.

I was hoping the Met Food would have a pork loin I could butterfly, stuff with Stove Top, and roll up…but the only ones I found were plastic-sealed logs marinating in some sort of weird “peppercorn” solution, and one processed food per dish is clearly more than enough. So I came up with an insane-tastic idea to bring new meaning to the phrase “double-cut pork chop.” I grabbed a package of four boneless pork chops and a package of thick-cut bacon, thinking the latter would help seal moisture into the lean pork and keep the cutlets from peeling back from the stuffing as they cooked.

First I preheated the stove to 425° and prepared the Stove Top (I prefer chicken flavor, full sodium), and while it was resting on the, wait for it, stove top, I tossed the pork cutlets in a mix of seedy horseradish dijon mustard, maple syrup, minced garlic, kosher salt, and pepper.

I laid out six strips of bacon on a tinfoil-lined rimmed baking sheet and placed two pork chops on top of three strips each, lengthwise.

I spooned Stove Top on top of each chop and patted it down with the palm of my hand, leaving a slight margin around the pork perimeter. Then I covered each with another chop, dolloped the last bit of the marinade onto the surface of the meat, and folded the bacon strips inward so they overlapped in the middle.

I took another two strips of bacon and wrapped one around the center of each chop, perpendicular to the other strips, then tied a knot so they were like a little bacon-wrapped presents, which indeed they were.

These bacon gifts were roasted at 425° for about 30 minutes; around 15 minutes in, I put a big pan of asparagus and chopped shallots in lemon juice on the lower oven shelf to accompany them.

The bacon wrapping held together in all but one spot, so much so that I was even able to, very gently, flip over the pork packets with a spatula and let the bottom bacon crisp up for the last 5 minutes of cooking. (Mmmm, bottom bacon….)

While the meat rested I turned down the oven to 350° and put the remainder of the pot of Stove Top, covered, in the oven to reheat.

Healthy? No. Delicious? Yes. And the bacon wrapper even remained intact as I cut into the giant stack of pork. If the name “pigs in blankets” weren’t already taken by a most excellent appetizer, I’d suggest applying it to this cardiac event. The Rob was most impressed by the taste—and scale—of the “pork sandwich,” but had one note: that it could use gravy. And I cannot deny I saw where he was coming from.

Sarma- aka Stuffed Grape Leaves

2011-11-13T17:19:00.000-08:00

Well readers!

Way back when this summer, my birthday was extra special this year because my Grandma Viola trekked all the way up north from Florida by train so we could celebrate our birthdays together. In honor of this momentous occassion, we had a party with a ton of great food. There was lobster involved, so you know I was happy.

One of the dishes we made was one of my all time favorites- sarma, stuffed grape leaves. If you have never had stuffed grape leaves before, well, i am shaking my head. GO! Find them! Make them! Eat them!

Sarma as I know them are grape leaves stuffed with a rice mixture, rolled up like half-cigars. There are many different recipes for sarma, meat and meatless, sweeter, nuttier, I googled "sarma" and the first recipes listed were all for stuffed cabbage. hmmm. As a child, I had access to all kinds of sarma- we made them at home, people always brought them to family gatherings, they were a staple. I like them all- just the concept of a leaf-wrapped rice nugget is awesome to me!- but am less partial to the meat varieties. Sarma generally cooks for a long time, meat variations can have a tendency to be dry. As sarma is a dish that I ate a lot as a child, much like hummus and babaganoush (and taboule, which I haven't shared with you guys yet, but it's one of my all time favorites) it's a recipe that I feel very at home with, thus, it's not a recipe I have looked up very often. Imagine my surprise, upon looking up "stuffed grape leaves" when I found so many varieties. Ok, maybe I wasn't surprised at the variety of recipes, but I was slightly taken aback to see a recipe for a total of 18 grape leaves- 18? why would you go to the trouble of making the recipe if you are only going to make 18? Part of the joy of sarma is making a big old pot. plenty to go around. 18 just seems like deliberate deprivation, and we don't go for that on Brooklyn Girls Cooking.

So. Sarma, let's go!
Filling

1 cup rice(carolina)
3 cups chopped onion
1 bunch parsley, chopped
1 small can of tomato paste
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 tsp cinammon
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ground clove
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt (to taste)
3/4 cup water (to fill the pot)

Take 3 cups of chopped onion, and sautee it in a large saucepan over high heat in the 3/4 cup of vegetable oil. Once the onion is softened, add the cup of rice and stir until the rice is warm and coated by the oil. Add the bunch of chopped parsley, most of a small can of tomato paste, 1/2 tsp of cinammon, 1/2 tsp of allspice, 1/2 tsp of ground clove, 2 tsp of sugar, 1 tsp of salt. Stir while cooking so that the ingredients are well combined and the rice is coated. Add in the juice of half a lemon while the rice cooks for about 5-10 minutes, until the mixture is hot and the lemon juice is absorped. Remove the rice mixture from the heat and allow it to cool.

While the rice mixture is cooling, take a jar of packed grape leaves, and drain them of the liquid. Usually, I buy grape leaves packed in brine, they need to be washed gently to help separate them and wash away the brine. After washing the leaves, gently go through them, separating them and putting aside any that are "unusable" as wrappers.
Generally, if there are big holes or tears in the leaves, you may not be able to use them to wrap the filling. Sometimes, if the leaf is large enough, you may be able to overlap the torn portion and still use it. Also put aside any leaves that look very large/veiny. These larger, older leaves are a little tougher, and while you can cut out the main vein to cut down on the toughness/stringiness, try to set aside the tougher leaves. These older or torn leaves you should put aside and save for separating the layers of stuffed grape leaves in the pot.

In the bottom of a large pot, place a layer of the larger leaves. On top of the leaf layer, place a layer of ~1/4 inch thick sliced potatoes (not too thin) followed by another layer of leaves over top potatos. Is the rice mixture room temperature? Yes? Well then you're ready to roll! Take about 1 tsp of filling, place it towards the base of the leaf, roll the leaf over the filling, folding the sides in to create a small cigar-shaped nugget of goodness!

You don't want to roll them too tight, as the rice will cook and expand. Place the stuffed leaf in the bottom of the pot. Once you have a full layer of stuffed grape leaves, place a layer of unstuffed leaves flat over the layer in order to start a new layer.

Once you have stuffed all the grape leaves (how many you end up with depends on how much stuffing you put in each leaf, it can vary a lot. In this last batch we had about 3 layers, with about 40 per layer) Fill the pot up with water to the top layer of grape leaves (the rice needs to cook) and top with the leftover tomato paste. Feel free to water the tomato paste down before you add it so that it is more liquidy than paste-y.

Put the top of the pot on, and put it on the stove top over high heat, to bring the liquid to a boil, before turning the heat down to low. (When we made them this summer, we put a plate on top of them to weigh them down a bit) Let it cook until the water is absorped. Don't worry about it overcooking, I think we left the pot on the stove for 2 hours or so. If the liquid has been absorped and the rice isn't cooked, just add more water, and leave the pot cooking for a little longer. Once the water is absorped and you turn off the heat, you can let them sit for an hour to set and finish cooking. Once you unpack the pot, and plate the grape leaves, you will have a delicious layer of tender potatoes at the bottom that have served the purpose of protecting the bottom layer of grape leaves from getting burned, and have, in the meantime, absorped all the flavors, and cooked beautifully.

While this is the recipe we have been making for years, I remember really loving a version that was a little sweeter and had (I think) nuts in it, so I think I'm going to fiddle with this and try some variations. I will keep you all posted!

snow day

2011-10-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

It was a snow day and I was being productive. Seemed like a good time to wash all my dishtowels. How often do you wash them? I get a little lazy sometimes.

Hello Gnocchi!

2011-10-29T19:37:00.000-07:00

Dearest Readers,
if you have ever eaten dinner with me at an Italian restaurant, you know how much I love gnocchi. It's the kind of depth of feeling where if I see it on the menu and don't order it, I feel a little guilty- like I've betrayed the gnocchi. So you can imagine my excitement when, while at cooking school at Tasty Tuscany, I saw that we would be making pumpkin gnocchi. It was divine. It was pumpkin-y and light and melty and delicious.

The pumpkin we used was, as Patricia described it a "Cinderella" pumpkin which, according to All About Pumpkins, is "a unique French heirloom whose correct name is "Rouge vif D'Etampes".
The source of their nickname is that they resemble the pumpkin that Cinderella's fairy godmother transformed into a carriage. This pumpkin is recorded as having been the variety cultivated by the Pilgrims and served at the second Thanksgiving dinner. This is our favorite pumpkin variety. There is something magical about them. Cinderellas make a delightful decorative accent for the fall season, but additionally their flavor is good for any pie or winter squash recipe." The skin of the pumpkin we used in Tuscany was greyish (if I recall correctly), and the pumpkin flesh was very dense and dry. When we cooked it, it did not get stringy or watery at all. I spotted a pumpkin that I thought would work while passing a grocery store, it looked like the right shape, and not so orange as most of the pumpkins out there, so I bought a 2.4 lb section.

Following what we learned at Tasty Tuscany, I cut it into small dice, put it into a large pan with the bottom covered in olive oil, and salted the pumpkin, stirring and cooking until it was soft. In the meantime I put a large pot of water on to boil, and over the top of the pot, placed a large glass baking pan. In the baking pan I put 4 tablespoons of salted butter, 3 tablespoons of olive oil and miced fresh sage leaves (20). I also (separately) grated 1 and 3/4 cups of parmesan cheese, took 1 egg out of the fridge, and measured out 1.75 cups of wheat flour.

Once the diced pumpkin was soft, I put it in a large bowl, and used my trusty Cuisinart immersion blender to puree it until it was smooth, before adding in (with a spatula) the flour, 1 cup of the parmesan cheese, and the egg. The texture of the dough needs to move from stew-y to stickier, to the point where it can stick to a spoon and just start to hold a shape.
If you need to add more flour to get the dough to feel more "congealed" (for lack of a better word) add it tablespoon by tablespoon.It is important to add the flour to the dough while the pumpkin is hot, as it helps the protein/starch in the pumpkin and the flour to combine better and become more elastic. I just made up that protein/starch thing, I am not sure that that's the exact reason why you need to combine the flour and pumpkin while the pumpkin is hot, but Patricia said that the pumpkin (or potato, or whatever you are using in your gnocchi) needs to be hot, and the protein/starch thing sounds like a good explanation, so that's what I am going with. No, I am not great at chemistry, anybody else have an explanation?

So your dough is ready, your water is boiling- put the baking pan with the melted butter and sage that you have stirred up a bit down in front of the pot of boiling water. Take a tablespoon, and scoop up about a half of tablespoon of the dough. Using your finger, sweep the dough off into the boiling water. If you can push it off the spoon diagnoally using the side of your finger, you should be able to get the dough to almost roll off the end of the spoon and into the water in a small dumpling shape.It may take a few to get the feel for it, but once you do, you should be able to plop 10-15 into the water in about 30 seconds. When they float to the top of the water they are about done, I usually let them float for 30 seconds to a minute so they are in the water for 2-3 minutes. The larger they are, the longer you will want them in the water in order to cook all the way through. Fish out the gnocchi with a slotted spoon, and put them into the baking dish. Once they are all in the dish, sprinkle them with some of the remaining 3/4 cup of parmesan cheese and stir them up in the butter/oil/sage mixture. Continue forming and boiling the gnocchi, batch by batch, until you are through with the dough. Also continue to mix in the parmesan cheese and stir them in the sauce in the baking pan.

Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty straightforward, and guess what? You're making gnocchi! Unfortunately, the ones I made with the pumpkin didn't come out as tasty as the ones we made in Tuscany. I know it's shocking that food tastes better in Italy. But I think it had something to do with the texture of the pumpkin- it was a lot wetter than the pumpkin we used in Italy- it was stringier and released liquid, whereas the Tuscan Cinderella was very dense and didn't release much liquid at all (if any). Additionally, in Italy we used Durum Wheat Flour. In the grocery store I found wheat flour. It definitely wasn't the same thing, and the gnocchi tasted more like flour than pumpkin, they were also much less orange, and not as light.

So in debating the success/failure of the US pumpkin gnocchi, my friends who had sampled the gnocchi and I had a gourd discussion about what else we thought could work in the absence of a Tuscan Cinderella. Butternut squash was the best candidate mentioned, and think about it, how many times have you tried to put a knife through a butternut squash and ended up lever-ing your arm back and forth, trying to get some leverage only to go back and get "the big knife"? Imagine my joy when I stopped into my favorite produce place the next day and saw tons and tons of beautiful peeled butternut squash calling my name. It was taunting me in it's naked state- "Alyce, I'm perfect for gnocchi, pick me up now!" Yes people, I think about gnocchi a lot and have imaginary conversations with gourds. don't judge me.

So yeah, I tried it again with butternut squash, and about 1/3 white flour to 2/3 wheat flour. They came out better! I think when I make it again- and you know I'm going to make it again- I would do 1/2 white flour, 1/2 wheat flour. I like the texture of the wheat flour for the gnocchi, but it does have a stronger flavor than the white, and I don't think it would be hurt by a little more dilution. The gnocchi progress is exciting, and I'm looking forward to giving potato gnocchi another shot. I will keep you all posted.

PS- If any Tasty Tuscany attendees have any better notes on the recipe for the sauce, let me know, I don't have any notes on the strategey for combining the butter, olive oil, sage, cheese, so let me know if you think i'm re-creating this the right way.

PPS- Hey! It's our 100th post! Yay!

Straight to you from the Fairway meat counter!

2011-10-21T20:20:00.001-07:00

I'm back!

Hi everyone, it has been a while, and I have been in a whole host of places. The most exciting of which was (wait for it) cooking school in Tuscany. Yes. I went to cooking school. In Tuscany. If that conjures up beautiful images of sunflowers and villas, bread and cheese, olives and grapes and lots and lots of vino for you, well, then the images in your head are almost as nice as the trip was.

My mother and I went to http://www.tastytuscany.com/ and had a wonderful time. I plan to take you guys through all the things I learned, and my first step is having some friends for dinner tomorrow night to recreate some of the dishes we made (practice!). But for now I wanted to share an enlightening conversation I had with the lovely butcher at the Fairway meat counter this evening.

While discussing the plan for cooking the large roast he was wrapping up for me, he told me about the rice he serves as a side dish for said roast.

He said he cooks his white rice with oregano, salt, pepper, and instead of water- Heineken!

I loved this idea, as it sounds like it gives the rice a bit of a bitter kick. He does top off the rice with a little water at the end of cooking, but I like the idea of it as an option for vegetarian rice without using veggie bouillon.

So there's a lot to do! There's tuscan cooking to talk about, stuffed grape leaves to dish on, and I'm excited to try the rice. I am telling you, the Fairway crew behind the counters- meat, cheese, coffee, bakery, are always good for information, tips, and general fun discussion (seriously, what's better than talking about meat and cheese?)

ciao!

Corn-Tomato-Arugula Sauté

2011-09-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

To all of you who have lots of corn and tomatoes from the garden to use up as summer turns to fall…well, screw you! I can’t even have a window box of basil with the amount of exhaust-fume buildup that collects on my windows from the busy Brooklyn avenue they face! But because I am incredibly generous and selfless (pfff), I will provide for you a very easy and yummy recipe that uses up both of those. You could also use up your basil or other herbs with this warm veggie side dish, which could also be served cold or at room temp as a salad.

Ingredients:

2-3 TBSP butter (plus a splash of olive oil to keep it from browning in the pan)
1/2 large red onion, diced
1-2 jalapenos (depending on your heat preference), diced, de-seeded and trimmed of ribs
3 ears’ worth of fresh corn kernels, trimmed from the cob (slice off the tip of the ear, stand it upright on a cutting board holding the handle from the top with your non-dominant hand, and slice downward with a large kitchen knife—or get one of these, which I just saw in Cook’s Illustrated and really want one of)
Halved grape/cherry tomatoes or diced garden tomatoes—you could do like 1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cups, depending on how tomatoey you want it
Kosher or sea salt (to taste)
1 to 2 tsp of paprika, cumin, curry powder, or some combination thereof (or you could go with 1/2 to 1 tsp dried thyme)
4 cloves of garlic or more, minced
1 small-ish bunch arugula or baby arugula, washed and trimmed (you can tear handfuls apart in your hands or leave it intact)
Cilantro to taste—pick a couple handful’s worth of washed leaves and chop up

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan…

Melt butter (+oil) over low heat.
Add red onion and turn up heat to medium-low.
Add jalapenos. Sauté until onion starts to turn translucent, about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon.
Add corn, tomatoes, salt, spices, and garlic. Stir.
Sauté, stirring occasionally, until the corn is bright yellow and has the right give when you chew it—I mean, all you have to do is taste corn to know when it’s done to your liking.
Remove saucepan from heat and give it a minute.
Add arugula and cilantro and stir/toss together. The arugula will get soft and dark green but it should still have a bright, fresh-greens taste, and the cilantro should likewise retain its pop of flavor—this is why you don’t add them while the dish is still cooking.

And that's it—pretty simple, right? Now that autumn is here, enjoy savoring the last gasp of summer-produce goodness!

Ricotta Dip

2011-09-06T21:34:00.000-07:00

Just came up with this quick app that I made ahead for tomorrow night’s dinner, and it’s the easiest thing ever. Spread it over toasted baguette slices (or, even better, flatbread) and it’s kinda like a DIY white pizza. (And this is coming from someone who was never fooled by that “English muffin pizza” nonsense. Seriously, what are we, stupid? That shizz is not pizza.)

Anyhoo, I made this with White Rose supermarket-brand ricotta; the other ingredients give it mad flavor, so don’t stress about getting a fancy expensive ricotta—it’d be like ordering top-shelf tequila in a margarita. (Really? You do that? Oh, honey, nobody is impressed.)

Combine in a bowl or food processor:

1 pint ricotta, softened to room temperature
1 head roasted garlic
2 TBSP extra virgin olive oil
Fresh thyme leaves, sea salt, and ground pepper to taste
Optional: grated lemon rind, chopped basil leaves, or any other aromatics that strike your fancy (rosemary? parsley? chives?)

Give the mix some good jujjing with an immersion blender or a few good pulses in the food processor, until fully combined. Boom.

Serve at room temperature. For accompaniments, use the aforementioned toasted baguette slices, and/or grape tomatoes and sliced raw red peppers for dipping. I think a little cheese knife in a pot would be a nice presentation. You could also use this as a nice spread for a sandwich—say chicken or grilled eggplant on ciabatta. And honestly, given the roasted garlic/olive oil/salt trifecta of pure flavory goodness, I could just eat this stuff spooned straight out of the plastic White Rose container to which I returned the ricotta in its more delicious incarnation for storage in the fridge.

Store such a refrigerated container for … IDK, a week or two, or until it smells off and starts to separate. Disclaimer: Brooklyn Girls Cooking waives all liability for any instances of food-borne illness that you probably couldn’t even prove was a direct result of what you read in this blog, and also we have no money to pay out in a lawsuit anyway.

Winner, Winner, Cheap and Easy Chicken Dinner

2011-08-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

For my first real foray back into the kitchen since, oh, June, I opted to keep it simple (as in no turning the oven on, and taking under 45 minutes) and cheap. Gentle reader, although I emerged unscathed from the recent stock market dive (after freelancing for 10 years, I didn’t have any retirement investments in the first place—jealous?!), months of lunching on overpriced so-called “paninis” in midtown have taken their toll on my wallet.

So, I went to Met Foods and bought a package of 5 chicken legs (thigh + drumstick) on sale for $1.49/lb., a yam on sale for 99¢/lb., and a handful of green beans…I forget their cost per pound, but the total came to $3.13. Plus, I knew I would have enough chicken left over for a sandwich for lunch, so I stopped at Brooklyn Victory Garden to buy a small baguette—half off, at 75¢, since it was after 8:30pm—and have a cheese sample as an amuse bouche. Kitty keeping it classy!

This whole meal took like 45 minutes from start to finish—of which only the first 10, the last 5, and a couple in between involved prep work. It is kind of a light August spin on hearty autumn-ish fare, but since the chicken cooks in the toaster oven and the yam on the stove, it doesn’t heat up your apartment. (You could of course do it in the oven as well.) Plus, it was a low-maintenance but wholly satisfying and balanced dinner for one that didn’t entail buying excess.

When I got home, I employed maximum time management and prioritizing skills. In this order, I:

Unscrewed a $5.99 bottle of white wine and poured it over a rocks glass full of ice (the more diluted this swill is, the better).
Lined a toaster-oven-sized broiler pan with foil, turning the corners up to make the foil more bowl-like.
Put a couple pats of butter on the foil.
Turned the toaster oven to 400° and put the pan inside until the butter melted.
Tossed the chicken in the foil with the butter and a sprinkling of coarse salt, pepper, and paprika; arranged it on the pan skin side up; flattened the corners of the foil; and returned the pan to the toaster oven.
Set a small pot of salted water to boil; trimmed the yam (peel it if you like, but the skin is nutritious), chopped it into wedges, and tossed it in the pot; covered the pot.
Trimmed the stubby ends off the green beans.
Sliced two pats of butter into a ramekin; chopped a few cloves of garlic, scattered it over the butter, and placed the ramekin on top of the toaster oven.
Removed the lid from the yam pan once the water boiled.
Refilled my wine glass and went to watch TV for like 15 minutes (again, I had been in the kitchen for like 10).
Flipped the chicken with a fork, refilled my wine glass, and went back to watch TV. (I said, it was a small glass and there was a lot of ice in it!)
Once a fork easily went through the softened yam pieces (about 30 minutes from when the water first boiled), removed them with a slotted spoon and put them in a bowl.
Dropped the green beans into what remained of the boiling water, and covered the pan.
Flipped the chicken back to skin side up (peeling back the foil carefully so the skin didn’t tear).
Poured the garlic butter over the yam (don’t worry if the garlic takes on a weird bluish tinge—or just strain it out of the butter if it skeeves you out), shaved on some Parmesan, added coarse salt and pepper, and mashed with a potato masher.
Drained the green beans (after they had cooked for like 2 minutes).
Removed the chicken pan from the T.O., put 3 pieces on a plate, tossed the green beans in the chicken drippings on the foil, and put the sides on the plate.
Refilled my wine glass, took a picture of the completed plate and emailed it to myself, and went back to eat and watch TV. (Tonight was the first time I’ve watched Project Runway in like two seasons, and all I have to say is, if Kim Kardashian says your look is “not costumey,” you might want to consider that.)

This meal is not only cheap and quick to prepare, it’s pretty healthy, especially if you go easy on the butter in the yams and/or skip tossing the beans in the foil. (You could also try this trick with removing the chicken skin, though that adds another 5 minutes to the process.)

Oh yeah, and also, it was delicious. But the best part was: I got dinner plus the main components of lunch for under $4 (not to mention a free amuse bouche). Though this chicken dinner may not have been Charlie Sheen’s idea of winning, I felt pretty triumphant.

My Grandma's DIY Rice Pilaf

2011-08-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

Gentle reader, my grandmother makes the best rice pilaf there is, and that is a fact.

Although Alyce and I have taken sides in the battle of sides, with her being Team Rice and me Team Potatoes, I still have to represent for my grandmother’s rice pilaf recipe. Unlike those expensive boxes containing packets of dried, preservative-laden God-knows-what powder, this is something you can make easily out of regular rice and vermicelli for far less cost per serving, while knowing what’s in it. She has written out the recipe for me, and I am sharing it here.

Now, I always wondered how my grandmother got every grain of rice to be perfectly distinct and delicious…and it turns out the key is a lot of butter. You can certainly use less butter, as I have done for years, while wondering while the rice does not turn out as delicious as my grandmother’s...or you can use her recipe and have your rice turn out as delicious as hers. The choice is yours.

Below is my grandmother’s recipe, exactly as she wrote it down.

2 cups Uncle Ben long-grain rice
1 stick butter or margarine
2 cups vermicelli (break up with hands)
4 cups chicken broth (bouillon cube or powder may be used)
1 TBSP salt

Melt butter and vermicelli and brown for a few minutes. Vermicelli should be golden.

Add rice and salt. Stir for a couple of minutes.

Add broth; stir and simmer until broth is gone and rice is fluffy. (Simmer slowly—takes about 20 minutes.)

Now, mind you, gentle reader, I would always go with butter over margarine and stock over bouillon...but when the recipe is my grandmother’s, I’m just going to put it out there and let you decide. This is a woman whose cooking is synonymous with love, so whatever form in which you prepare this rice, you’re going to rack up karma points just from association with her good energy. And that is a fact.

Smoking Is Addictive: Brisket

2011-07-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

Gentle reader, between the 100-plus-degree temps afflicting Brooklyn this summer and the fact that I have a new new job, my commitment to cooking at home has kind of fallen by the BQE-side. In fact, I have barely set foot in my kitchen in weeks, other than to deposit cold beers in the fridge and then take them out. (Mad props to Alyce for picking up my posting slack and then some!)

However, thanks to our friend Lawyer Mike, I do have some food news to report. You see, it turns out that smoking meat is every bit as addictive as smoking cigarettes or crack, though perhaps slightly less carcinogenic.

You may recall that on Memorial Day weekend, I smoked a pork shoulder at a friend’s place. This experiment gave rise to a weekend-ly smoking ritual: Since then, that friend, Lawyer Mike, has regularly embarked on meat-smoking projects—including ribs, pastrami, pork butt, and brisket—on pretty much every subsequent Saturday this summer (with The Rob's sporadic assistance). While all of these endeavors have yielded results ranging from "pret-tay, pret-tay good" to "nomnomnomnom," Mike's second take on brisket was a serious case of practice makes perfect—OMG, it was fantastic.

Now, I'm not gonna lie: Apart from repeatedly whining "When is it gonna be readyyyyyy?!", my only involvement in this meatsterpiece was slicing it up (which busted open the preexisting chopping callous at the base of my right index finger, causing a blister—does that count as a sports injury? Because I've never had one otherwise...) and subsequently eating it. But I feel that you, gentle reader, should nonetheless reap the benefits of this triumph of smokeration.

Thus, I grilled Lawyer Mike (get it? Because a smoker has a grill, and also he is a lawyer—see what I did there???) on the steps he took to create this unbelievably tasty and tender hunk of meat. (Caveat eater: This will take time, and lots of it.) Here’s what he told me:

How long did it brine?
Well, let's see, I got home around 5. I saw that B61 [Ed’s note: the bar where I met Alyce, The Rob, and Lawyer Mike, although not in that order] was open, but I said let's take care of business first. So I'd say I had it soaking in brine by 6 p.m. Then I took it out around 6:30 a.m the next day.
What was in the brine and rub?
The brine? Well, the brisket was 8 1/2 pounds, so I used about a gallon of water. Heat it up, add 3/4 cup rock salt, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 1 onion sliced and diced, 2 bay leaves crinkled into little bits, a couple scoops of Stumptown coffee [Ed’s note: Stumptown! Ooh, fancy; I guess you think you’re better than me], a handful of peppercorns, about 3/4 cup cider vinegar. Splash on some Worcestershire, maybe 1/4 cup. Don’t forget the garlic...probably 10 cloves sliced and diced.
The rub? Again, a couple scoops of fresh ground coffee, spread around some smoked paprika, ground pepper, rock salt (about 3 Ts of that was hickory-smoked from my last smoke-out), brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, and some New Mexican chili powder.
You put it on at like 7, right?
By the time I put on the smoker, it was about 7:30 in the morning. I took it out of the brine at 6:30 a.m., rinsed it, and then spread the rub on. So it sat for an hour at room temperature with the rub soaking in. Mind you, when I say room temperature, it was fucking 95 degrees in my air-condition-less kitchen, so maybe the slow cooking started right there on the cutting board. I let it sit there until I got the smoker to the temperature I wanted, which was 220–225°.
What time did you put it in the foil? Any other observations you wish to share? Preparation points I’m missing?
I put it fat side up. There it stayed for about 5 hours. Then I flipped it over. I splashed on some brown sugar and cider vinegar every hour or so. After about 3 hours I flipped it back to fat side up and wrapped it with foil. It cooked for another 3 hours. The temperature got stuck at 160 for a couple hours.
Around the 12-hour mark, also known as 7 p.m Saturday, I took it off the smoker. It was only 180 degrees. I was shooting for 190. So I took it out of the foil and threw it on a flaming Weber barbeque. I let it char for 2 minutes each side, hoping to get that internal temperature up a bit. Then I put it in a foil pan, wrapped it in foil, and let it sit for 2 hours.
I made a couple simple sauces out of stuff already in the fridge:
One was mayo, dijon mustard, brown mustard and horseradish.
Two was ketchup, dijon mustard, cider vinegar, and Frank's hot sauce.
Then you expertly cut it up. Put some in a hamburger roll with some sauce. People liked it.

And there you have it, folks. This is a major time commitment, to be sure, but it will feed a small army (or yield a week's worth of sandwiches); said crowd will be impressed and delighted; and more to the point, it will be delicious. Plus, it's exciting to do Just don’t blame us if you get hooked on smoking. All the cool kids are doing it!

Summer Bounty: Easy Squash

2011-07-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

With the small respite from the heat wave, I finally got back into the kitchen. Sometimes it's too hot to turn on the stove. You know what I'm saying.

Last night I was enjoying a lovely dinner with my co-blogger Kitty and the Rob. We were having a chuckle at my recent RAMPSCAPE debacle, discussing brisket injuries and trying to rediscover our enthusiasm for the proposed epic battle "Potato versus Rice" (now dinner is a write-off, right Kitty?) when our friend Hollister popped in to have a glass of wine with us while we were finishing up our meal. While we were chatting, she asked if we could write a post that is "really easy". Now readers, I want to apologize if we haven't been living up to our desired mission- "to make cooking easy fun and delicious", and assure you that most of what we post here, if we've tagged it as "easy" is stuff that you are all perfectly capable of doing.

If you feel uncertain, or don't spend a lot of time in a kitchen, then you just need to get in there and give things a try. Cooking is easy if you feel comfortable doing it, knowing that even if you don't do something *exactly* as described, it will all be ok. For my part, I will try to explain things more clearly and in a more step-wise fashion. If you guys have any questions or requests, please leave them in the comments section, I know both Kitty and I would be more than happy to respond. We LOVE feedback!

And with that, here is a super easy recipe. I got home after dinner, fully weighed down by a big bag of CSA veggies. I didn't know exactly what I had in there, but I've been on a good roll of prepping next days lunch the night before, and I figured there would be something from the CSA that could become Monday's lunch. lo and behold, there was a zucchini and a summer squash, and I even had a zucchini in the fridge from 2 weeks ago that while a little sad, was perfectly usable. I also had onions and garlic in the cupboard. I was all set.

I started by:

Rough-chopping an onion and about 5 cloves of garlic (you do NOT have to use 5 cloves. you can use 1. or 10. whatever you like). By "rough-chop" I basically quartered the onion, cut each quarter in half (so i eigthed it) and then cut those 1/8ths into smaller pieces. I ran a knife through the garlic so it was in small chunks.

I heated about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large frying pan, and when it was hot, I added the onions and garlic, turning the heat down to between medium-high and high, sprinkling with a little salt and pepper.

While the onions and garlic cooked down a bit, I cut the 1 small, 1 large zucchini and 1 small squash into half-rounds. I sliced the squash lengthwise down the middle, and then chopped these into 1/4-1/2 inch width pieces. I also had a small tomato that was starting to go, so i rough-chopped that as well.

After about 5 minutes of cooking the onions and garlic (or whenever you are done chopping the squash) add the squash and tomato to the pan and turn the heat down a little bit.

I added a little crushed red pepper to the pan, as I wanted it to have a little kick, as well as a few shakes of dried basil and oregano. I used a wooden spoon to stir the squash every few minutes.

I then saw a lone can of diced tomatoes on the counter that I had taken out to use in my pasta-sauce that never got added. I let the squash cook for about 4-5 minutes, and then i added the can of diced tomatoes.

I ended up with a nice vegetarian side dish that was done in under 30 minutes, and was really nice to take to work for lunch. This is an easy recipe because the ingredient quantity and cooking timing are very flexible. you don't have to worry about overcooking the onion and garlic, and when you stir the squash every few minutes, you get a good feel for how cooked the squash is (how soft does it feel/look) and can take it off the flame when it's the done-ness at which you prefer your squash. So give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!

Alyce

Massive Errata

2011-07-14T09:51:00.001-07:00

SCAPES!!!
Dear Readers,

I am embarrassed to say that for the past many weeks, the veggie item I thought were RAMPS are actually garlic SCAPES.

I am also pleased that I learned something, and thanks to Sarah Nolan for setting me straight last night when I brought her some pickled... Scapes! It's funny, I am thinking back on all the recipes I looked up for ramps, it might be fun to try them with actual ramps...

Alyce

Pickles! (now with gratuitous garlic scapes)

2011-07-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

Hello and happy high summer!

With high summer comes fresh produce, and when you have a CSA, sometimes you can end up with a lot of something that you don't necessarily have the impetus to cook with.
To that end, something I have gotten a lot of this year (I am sure you are shocked to hear based on this post, and then this post) are garlic scapes. Giving scapes a run for the money in the excess department? Fennel. I was overloaded, I didn't feel like cooking anything major (it's hot, turning on the stove takes effort) so I decided to pickle my excess veggie blues away!

As I am no expert pickler, I took to the trusty google machine to look up recipes for pickling fennel and scapes, and then, for a moment, considered pickling them together. I wasn't sure how that would work- the anise flavor or the fennel and the garlic flavor of the scapes, so I figured I would tackle them one at a time. I started with the fennel, as the recipe I found required the fennel be cooked for a few minutes. Please note that I didn't have: celery seeds, mustard seeds, caraway seeds, a fancy dancy jar with a rubber falange. But I needed a guide, and this seemed like a good place to start. I followed the recipe, using about 1 and a half cups of white vinegar, about 2/3 a cup of sugar, 1/3 of a cup of water and a teaspoon of ground coarse sea salt. I also threw in a little celery salt to make up for not having celery seeds. Once this mixture was boiling, I lowered the heat and added the fennel, letting it cook for almost 5 minutes. I had cut the pieces of fennel a little smaller than planned, so I didn't think it needed the full 5 minutes of cooking.
I did put a sprinkling of "seeds" in the bottom of the jar. About 1/4 to 1/2 tsp each of rosemary, cumin, rainbow pepper and coriander. I used my kitched tons to pack the fennel in the jar and then poured the vinegar mixture over the fennel until it was covered. I did not bother to steam the jar, I just tightened the lid as best I could, and set it on the counter to cool.

I had some of the vinegar liquid left over, so I decided to use that for the scapes. I poured the rest of a bottle of rice wine vinegar into the pot, as well as about 1/3 a cup of sugar, a half teaspoon of salt, and some cayenne and sesame seeds. I cut the ends off the scapes, although in hind site, I would also cut off the bulbous portion of each, as it is more hollow then the rest of the scape stalk. I boiled the vinegar mixture briefly so that the sugar was dissolved and then poured it over the scapes that were in a bowl. As scapes are curly, I ended up using my kitchen scissors to cut them into smaller segments so that they would be more completely immersed in the liquid. Once this cooled, I put them in a jar and poured the liquid over it.

I love the look of pickles, I also love having things in different sized/typed jars. Anyone who has been to my house knows my drinking glasses are in fact empty jars, so it should come as no surprise that I have a fondness for filling them up with things (Is it time for me to start jelly-ing?). A few days later, and I have tried both pickles. The scapes are a bit tough, I like the flavor and even the texture, but thought they had a bit of toughness. The fennel came out great, it was still crunchy, and the combination of the licorice flavor with the vinegar is really tasty.

Hooray for pickles!

Who's Bad? (Scape it up)

2011-07-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

In the face of an excess of garlic scapes (thanks CSA!), as well as a bunch of produce that was calling "cook me now or lose me forever", I decided to cut up a bunch of crap and make something with it.
Literally, that was my approach- I stood in front of my open fridge, grabbed the bag from my CSA pickup Saturday (damn! the broccoli was already yellowing), saw some carrots that had to be weeks old, red peppers that didn't make it onto veggie skewers at the bbq, celery, oldish lettuce, lettuce and tomato pre-cut for bbq burger toppings, and an open package of andouille sausage i didn't use up from shrimp-sausage skewers assembly. I turned to my cupboards for garlic and onions that had been up there for too long, and finally on the counter, one huge and one small tomato, red and about to start severely wrinkling.

Fine, dear reader, accuse me of neglect and wastefulness, but I settled on a goal for the evening- use all of this up, by making a pasta sauce and a salad. I started with the onions, garlic and scapes. In total I would say I minced 5 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced 1.5 large onions, and chopped about 5 scapes. I put that into a large, deep frying pan with hot olive oil, and let that cook on medium-high heat until the onions were starting to soften, adding a little salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper to the pan.

In the meantime i rough-chopped the large tomato and the leftover burger-cut tomato, and once the onion-ramp-garlic mixture had cooked about 10 minutes, (I turned the heat down to medium-low for a bit) I threw in the tomatoes, and added some oregano for good measure. I turned the heat back up on the stove, as I wanted the tomatoes to break down and make the softened onion mixture saucier. While this was cooking, I chopped half the red bell pepper into thin half-length slices, and cut 2 links of andouille sausage (the sausage is pre-cooked, so no raw sausage in this recipe, although if you had uncooked sausage, it would work just fine) into pieces. Once the tomato-onion mixture was cooked down some (about 10 minutes, maybe more if you kept the heat down) I threw in the red bell pepper, sausage, and some white wine (keep it saucy!).

Oh, I forgot to tell you- I put the water on to boil once the onions were in the pan and cooking down. I debated over which type of pasta to use, and went with a linguine, more on that later. While the sauce was simmering (I turned the heat down to low) I cut up the rest of the red bell pepper, the oldish lettuce, carrots, celery, and the other small tomato to make a salad. in the meantime I MAY have thrown some more white wine on the sauce. it's possible. I might have dumped the contents of my wine glass into the pan. you never know. I still had some nice feta in the fridge, so I crumbled that over the salad, added some flax seeds, and then made everyone's favorite simple oil-and-vinegar dressing by grinding salt and pepper over the salad, sprinkling a few pinches of cumin, and then adding about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. salad! done!

The pasta was about done boiling, so I added a few spoonfuls of the pasta water into the sauce and stirred that. Then I drained the pasta, put it in a large bowl and poured my impromptu sauce over top. It was delicious. it had a kick from the crushed red pepper and andouille sausage, but was sweet since I had cooked the onions down so much at a lower heat. It wasn't tomato-y per se, but it had a nice base flavor. At first I wasn't a fan of the linguine as my pasta choice, I thought maybe I would have been better served by a ziti or rotelli, but after just a few minutes, the linguine really soaked up the pasta sauce and it was delicious.

Curried Potato Salad With Zucchini and Chives

2011-07-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

With July 4, one of the high holy grilling days, at hand, Alyce is having a BBQ tomorrow! And so are our friends who had the Memorial Day BBQ for which The Rob and I smoked a pork shoulder. (Turns out that smoking is highly addictive: Since then The Rob has been over there almost every weekend for a smoking adventure such as ribs, brisket, or chicken… and for tomorrow they’re attempting a Pastrami Project.)

Since Alyce’s BBQ starts at 3 pm and our other friends’ at 6 pm, I’m planning to two-time them by bringing the same potato salad. Except I was at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket today and I saw some lovely-looking little zucchinis, so I decided on a whim to get one and shred it into the Alyce-BBQ-bound potato salad, because, why not?

The zucchini was small, and I correctly guessed that it would not really have any seeds to speak of; if you use a larger, seedy one, I would probably scoop the seeds out of it. I used one zucchini, but I would use two next time to make the flavor and texture stand out more.

I proportioned this recipe for about 5 pounds of potatoes, but obvi, you could multiply it as you like.

Drop into a big pot of boiling salted water, on high:

4-5 lbs. Idaho potatoes, peeled and cut into 2"-ish wedges (you could also use red potatoes, unpeeled and quartered)

You’re going to cook these until a fork will easily go through a piece, drain them, and toss them in a large bowl with kosher salt and a couple splashes of olive oil. Then allow the taters to cool to at least room temperature. (You can stick them in the fridge if you like.) But that’s like 20 minutes away; once the potatoes are in the boiling water, start the remaining steps.

Grate coarsely:

1-2 small slender zucchini

Place the zucchini shreds into a fine-mesh metal strainer, set it on top of the potato-water pot, and cover. Steam for a few minutes and remove from pot. You could also drop the zucchini into a separate small pot of boiling water for like 30 seconds, then drain it. Or you could leave it raw if you like; I personally just don’t like raw zucchini.

Finely chop 1 small to medium bunch chives.

In a food processor or blender, combine and blend:

1 1/2 cups plain lowfat yogurt

3/4 cup mayo

2 tsp curry powder

1 tsp paprika

3-5 garlic cloves

1/3 cup cilantro leaves (stems trimmed off)

Once the potatoes and zucchini are cooled, toss them together with the chives and dressing.

I would recommend letting this sit in the fridge for an hour or two, or even overnight, before tasting and adjusting seasonings accordingly. The dressing will seep into the potatoes and all the flavors will combine. At least, that’s the plan!

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Breakfast for 4!

2011-07-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

hello readers, happy july!

In celebration of this great month and this great holiday (holla 4 days off in a row!) I have a bevvy of beautiful ladies hanging out. My sister is in town, her friend Kelly is in town, and Tamah came over to hang. With a morning hangout coming, I was racking my brain over what to put on the table. We couldn't go out to eat, as I had a roof guy coming over to check out the situation up there, and August coming to drop over her keys so i can do some kitty-sitting this weekend, hence the home hang-out time. I didn't have a ton in my fridge, but I did have eggs, I had some greens from my CSA, and I had a couple of tomatos. I was going to start from there.

I cleaned some CSA greens (spinach and swiss chard) and chopped up some onion (about 1/4) and garlic scapes (scapes were CSA as well). I rummaged around in the fridge and saw i had some andouille sausage, so i cut a link of that into small pieces as well. I cut up 1 tomato (although in hind-sight i should have also done the second tomato).

I put about 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a large frying pan, and when the oil was hot, i threw in the onions and scapes. I salted and pepper-ed them lightly, and let them cook down until they were slightly softened. I added the chopped andouille- I should note, this was pre-cooked packaged sausage- if you are using raw sausage, it will need to go in the pan earlier (with the onion) and cook longer. Once the onions and sausage were soft, i added the tomatos, and about 1 minute later, added the greens (it was about 2 handfuls of spinach and swiss chard) along with some crushed red pepper for some kick.

While the greens wilted, I cracked 6 eggs (there were 4 of us for breakfast) into a bowl, and beat them with my awesome hand mixer that I picked up at an estate sale last summer. I like the hand mixer better than a whisk for this, because it beats the eggs nicely and doesn't splatter them everywhere.

Once the greens were wilted, I added the eggs, and salted and peppered the whole kit and caboodle. While the whole pan cooked, I turned the broiler on in the oven, and once the eggs were a bit set, but the top still liquid-y, i put the entire pan in the oven to set the top. I realized I had some left over grated cheese from our pesto dinner the night before, so i sprinkled that on top of the pan. After about 5 minutes the eggs were set, I grabbed a pot holder, grabbed the frying pan, and brought it to the table.

The verdict was "delicious!" It was great to use so much of my CSA bounty, and eggs are a great vehicle.

Happy breakfast everyone!

To brine or not to brine

2011-06-29T18:53:00.000-07:00

Well, it's a question.

I had never thought about brining, until I heard about it from my lovely co-blogger Kitty, and then I was intrigued. I had a barbecue coming up and thought I would give it the old college try. Of course by the old college try, I do NOT mean drinking box wine directly from the box and playing beer pong, but feel free to partake in those activities after the grill is turned off.

I have, recently, developed a fondness for drumsticks. Don't ask me why I didn't like them in my earlier years, I have no explanation for my strange, youthful preference for boring breast meat. Thinking back on my requests, as a kid, for only breast meat, I actually think it can be attributed to my mother's excellent cooking. As a child I had no idea that breast meat could be dry and tasteless until I was much much older- THAT'S how good my mom is. Seriously.
So I had a mess of drumsticks, and I went to look for a recipe. I found this recipe that appealed to me (mostly because it is on a website called "Cooking for Engineers"). You'll notice that this posting is about a brine, but the recipe I am referencing calls it a lime marinade. If you read the very informative recipe, you'll learn, as I did, that "a soaking solution with acid should be referred to as a marinade." The inclusion of the lime juice means this is a marinade. However, in my limited experience, I generally marinate by coating meat in a thick sauce, or letting it sit in a liquid. As this was my first time actually immersing and soaking meat in a salt solution, it was my introduction to brining, so. brine brine brine. because I say so

Put the drumsticks (~8 lbs of them) in a large ziplock bag.
Dissolve 1/4 of a cup of table salt in 4 cups of water. Juice 1.5 limes and add the juice to the salt water. Mince 2 (or more!) cloves of garlic a dried chile pepper (I think the hotter the better- it's just in the brine) and add to the salt water. Pour this lovely, salty, spicy liquid into the ziplock bag with the chicken, and seal the bag, making sure to remove all the air in the bag so that the chicken stays completely submerged the whole time. Leave the chicken in the liquid (BRINE!) for 1-2 hours. I left it in the liquid for almost 2 hours, and it was plenty, so don't let it stay in too long and get too salty.

Remove the chicken from the bag and rinse it thoroughly. Toss the chicken in a bowl with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, the juice of 1/2 of a lime, and your choice of spices. I used 1 tablespoon of paprika, 1 teaspoon of cumin, 1 teaspoon of coriander, and 1 teaspoon of garlic powder. The options are endless, use whatever you like.

Grill the drumsticks, turning every 5-7 minutes, for about 15 minutes, or until the meat reaches 175 degrees. I do NOT have a meat thermometer, but I plan to get one soon, and I will let you know how it goes- you know using a real indicator of "done-ness" rather than the half-assed timing and squeezing with grill tongs that I favor (haven't poisoned anyone yet).

These are, without a doubt, the best drumsticks I have ever made. The recipe is simple, and the results are juicy and delicious.

So come on, it's 4th of July weekend, get your brine-y grill on people!

alyce

Lemony Chicken and a Series of Mildly Unfortunate Events

2011-06-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

Despite this post’s title, tonight’s meal was a triumph, for I was able to bang it out in near-record time: under half an hour (suck it, Rachael Ray). AND everything was done at once! (Ironically, the meal then had to sit and wait, but we’ll get to that.) Oh, and it was light and healthy fare...well, with the exception of the Rice-a-Roni.

Okay, here’s what happened: The Rob called and said he would be stopping home for dinner, before going back to work for a night project, in about an hour. Prompted for a request, he suggested chicken with lemon sauce, broccoli, and—wait for it—Rice-a-Roni. (I’m not gonna lie: I love the so-called chicken flavor. Don’t judge me, gentle reader.) So, I headed to the Met Foods for groceries.

Mildly unfortunate event #1: The guy in front of me in the checkout line, upon reading his receipt, realized he had been overcharged for turnip greens—$2.99 a pound instead of 99 cents—which led to a heated exchange with the cashier and a protracted process of re-scanning and refunding that included the cashier’s extended disappearance into the produce aisle. As a result, when The Rob called to say he was on his way home, I had just gotten home myself. But I kicked it into high gear.

I pounded 1.5 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast flat, trimmed off the fat, and sliced them into small-ish cutlets, yielding 3 pieces per breast.

I tossed the chicken in a mix of olive oil and chopped garlic, a sprinkling of dried herbs (basil and what have you), kosher salt, and the grated zest of a lemon.

I began preparing the Rice-a-Roni according to package directions.

While the ’Roni browned, I chopped the heads of 3 broccoli stalks into florets. (I’ll use the stems, along with leftover florets, for a cream of broccoli soup.) I placed this in a basket steamer like this inside a saucepan with a layer of water, and covered the pan.

Once the rice had been simmering for about 5 minutes (meaning it would be ready in about 10 minutes), I turned the heat under the broccoli to high. You want the broccoli to cook until it is bright green and fork-tender.

Then I added my chicken pieces to a preheated George Foreman grill—I know, tacky, but it’s fast, and I actually think the G.Fo is good for keeping boneless chicken breasts from drying out.

Tempering
To keep milk, yogurt or egg from curdling when added to a hot liquid or sauce, put it in a small heatproof bowl and gradually whisk in a few tablespoons of the hot liquid in a slow stream. Then you can safely whisk the contents of the bowl into the pot cooking on the stovetop.

In a small saucepan on low, I melted a big pat of butter and sautéd some more chopped garlic, then added white wine (maybe 1/2 cup?), 3 packets of Grey Poupon mustard (maybe 3 TBSP?), and kosher salt. I brought it to a boil, let it simmer on low for maybe 10 minutes, and added dried herbs and about 1/4 to 1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt (tempered—see sidebar). A few minutes before serving, I added some chopped fresh parsley.

Unfortunate event #2: So, as I said, everything was done cooking—at the same time, no less—but then it turned out The Rob was held up. Erego, I had to keep the food warm for like 5 or 10 extra minutes...and in that time the chicken (which was sitting in the unplugged but still hot G.Fo) got a little dried out after all, and the broccoli a little too wilted.

Still! It was pretty delicious and pretty healthy, and the sauce (which I also applied liberally to the broccoli) supplied the needed moisture to the chicken. And as planned, there’s leftover chicken to slice up for sandwiches and/or salad, and leftover broccoli for the aforementioned cream of broccoli (I think I’ll also try adding the leftover lemon sauce, to give the broth a nice tang). Of course, I plan on blogging about said soup soon...failing any show-stopping unfortunate events.

You Can Make It Yourself! Fruit-on-the-Bottom Yogurt

2011-06-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

I always resent those sanctimonious “Your Money” articles that local papers periodically run, telling you that you could save ever so much bank if you would just, say, make your coffee at home every morning. As if forgoing that $1.50 large with half-and-half at the bodega is really going to solve all your budgetary woes? Listen, all New Yorkers are pretty much financially screwed to varying degrees—so let us have a little indulgence like a damn cup of deli coffee on the way to work without feeling guilty about it!

That said, there are some really overpriced food items 9-to-5-ers get suckered into buying o’er on the dreaded isle o’ Manhattan, that I do believe you’re better off prepping and schlepping. Case in point: those stupid yogurt cups with fruit and granola that cost, like, $3.50 in the refrigerator cases of your fancier midtown delis. How hard is it to buy a quart of yogurt, a pint or two of berries, and a box of granola for the week, and combine into individual servings in Tupperware the night before work?

And if, like me, you enjoy taking a fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cup as your morning repast, you’re looking at probably upwards of $1 a pop…not to mention whatever additives, preservatives, and sweeteners. If you make a batch of fruit sauce at home and buy a quart of yogurt at the supermarket, you’ll have a few days’ worth of healthy morning or afternoon snacks for less money (and not much time), and you’ll know what you’re eating.

This is a great way to use blueberries that are a little past the peak of ripeness. Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and sliced peaches would all work in lieu of or in addition to blueberries. But if you have really fresh fruit straight from the farmstand, you might just want to enjoy it raw with the yogurt and a drizzle of maple syrup or agave nectar.

Rinse a pint of blueberries and dump it into a small to medium saucepan.
Add water and/or red wine to the pan until the berries are just covered.
Add a pinch of salt (sounds counterintuitive, but salt brings out sweetness).
Optionally, add a stick of cinnamon, a swath of lemon rind, or a dried bay leaf.
Turn the burner on to high, bring the mix to a boil, and then lower heat to medium-low and let it simmer. The berries will expand and absorb the liquid.
When the liquid has cooked down about halfway (use the color stain on the side of the pot—temporary!—as your guide), add 2 TBSP sweetener: I’ve been into agave nectar lately, but you could do maple syrup or, in a pinch, brown or white sugar.
Lower the heat and let the fruit mix cook down a bit more. Taste and add more sweetener if needed. You want it to be somewhat viscous/syrupy, but remember that when it cools it will become more so, and you don’t want it to get too sticky and jelly-like. Take it off the heat and let it rest for a few, then test it on a wooden spoon for a fruit-on-the-bottom-y thickness of consistency. Return to heat and cook more if needed.
After achieving your desired consistency and allowing the sauce to cool, layer it with plain or vanilla yogurt (personally, I think vanilla yogurt is disgusting, but that’s all on you) and, if desired, granola or lightly toasted nuts—either in parfait dishes to be pretty for a brunch or in a Tupperware container to bring to work. Oh, I bet this would be good to pack in kids’ school lunches, assuming you used all water and no wine.

Alternately, you could serve it slightly warm drizzled over vanilla ice cream, pound cake or shortcake. Or fill a muffin tin with batter, then add a dollop of fruit sauce to the top of each muffin cup, for souped-up blueberry muffins.

Other ideas on how this sauce could be used, or what other fruits might work in it? Leave them in the comments, please!

Purple Chipotle Slaw

2011-06-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

So, this is the slaw I served atop pulled smoked pork shoulder on soft corn tortillas this past Memorial Day weekend; I’ve also done it with braised pork shoulder. But as a stand-alone, this would be a welcome side dish at any cookout or picnic, and it’s a good way to feed a crowd—red cabbage is cheap! Plus it takes very little time to throw together.

I recommend making this the night before so that the flavors set up and the cabbage softens into the dressing. The cabbage I used in the recipe below was a little under 2 1/2 pounds; tweak the dressing proportions if yours is significantly bigger or smaller.

Puree in a large bowl with an immersion blender, or in a food processor or blender:

Once you open a can of chipotles in adobo, the remaining ones will keep, refrigerated, for months; just transfer them from the (rust-prone) can into a glass jar with a lid. I pretty much always have a jar on the side door of my fridge along with mayo, mustard, Tabasco, et al.

2 chipotles in adobo sauce, seeds removed

3 cloves garlic

1 cup sour cream

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 TBSP agave nectar, maple syrup, or honey

2 tsp kosher salt

Toss this dressing with:

1 head red cabbage, diced or shredded

2-3 scallions, sliced, or 1 medium red onion, diced

1-2 TBSP minced cilantro or fresh parsley leaves (optional)

Taste and add more mayo, sweetener, and/or salt as needed.

Again, I suggest refrigerating the slaw overnight in a sealed container. But if you make it the day of a cookout, it will still be good—if anything, letting it sit out in the sun on a picnic table for a couple hours will probably have a positive effect in terms of softening the cabbage. (Disclaimer: If you leave this slaw out in the sun and get sick, Brooklyn Girls Cooking and its affiliates disavow all liability.) Happy summer, everyone!

Smoking Is Good for You: Smoked Pork Shoulder, Part 2

2011-05-31T19:44:00.000-07:00

Gentle reader, as you may already have surmised from the fact that you’re reading this post, the smoked pork shoulder was a success! Mind you, much of the credit must go to The Rob, who got up at 7 AM to go set up the smoker in our friends’ backyard, and spent the next several hours peering at the temperature gauge, twiddling the vents, and replenishing the water. Since I am constitutionally incapable of getting up before the crack of noon on a Sunday, I really appreciate him shouldering this huge responsibility. Get it? See what I did there? SHOULDERing! BWAAAAHAAahhahaaaaahaaa...

Ahem. Anyhoo. I arrived at my friends’ BBQ around 6 PM to man the smoker for the last few hours, before pulling the meat and serving it on soft corn tortillas with a chipotle slaw. So here’s a little post-pork analysis of the lessons I learned.

While the meat was delicious, after about 12 hours of it cooking, I still ended up having to use a knife to slice the inner meat off the bone, although the outer part was more shreddable. Ideally, you should be able to shred apart strands of meat with your fingers or two forks, so it actually could have cooked even longer.

The internal temperature of the meat got to about 180°, though based on what I gleaned from the Google machine, it should have been about 190°-200°. To clarify: It was well past the point of doneness vis-a-vis food safety; it’s just that the texture wasn’t quite falling-off-the-bone, finger-shreddin’ good. Safe to eat doesn’t necessarily mean good to eat, so don’t rely solely on such guidelines.

The meat also could have rested longer, about 45 minutes according to this very helpful article ... but it was after 9 PM and I could not in good conscience keep the crowd of BBQ guests waiting that much longer. (Really, we might have done well to smoke the thing the day before and then reheat it in foil on the grill, or on low in the oven. I believe that letting people go hungry is a social crime on par with not letting the passengers exit the train before you get on, or murder.)

Fun fact: It turns out that opening the smoker’s vents increases, rather than decreases, the temperature inside. Since this was counterintuitive to me, I panicked early on when the temp climbed to 300° before getting this memo. You want the smoker to remain at around 225° to 250° ... and if you prefer eating dinner before midnight, I’d recommend the high end of that spectrum.

I left the outer layer of fat and skin on, thinking it would keep the meat from drying out, but in retrospect I wonder if it would have cooked through faster and been more shreddable had I removed it.

Pulling smoked pork causes your hands to absorb the indelible smell of, wait for it, smoked pork. If you are disturbed by the prospect of spending the rest of the night sniffing your fingers compulsively like Mary Katherine Gallagher (I know, it’s not a good look, but gentle reader, they smelled just like bacon!), you might want to wear plastic gloves.

I need a better camera. Seriously, look at that photo up top! I’ve seen more professional-looking graphics on MySpace pages!

All that said, the meat was well-received and I was pleased. Again, a big shoutout to The Rob for all his time and energy—oh, and he had also caught some striped bass the day before, and we threw that on the grill, so he was pretty much a cookout supahstah.

Stay tuned for the recipe for Purple Chipotle Slaw, which is great served with the pork or as a picnic/BBQ side dish. (And if you missed it, here's Part 1 of the porkapalooza post.

Smoking Is Good for You: Smoked Pork Shoulder, Part 1

2011-05-28T14:14:00.000-07:00

Ah, Memorial Day weekend. A time for honoring America’s war heroes, and for cooking large quantities of meat. Alyce got a jump on the official start of grill season with a fab rooftop cookout Thursday, and today, I am marinating a pork shoulder to be smoked for a backyard gathering tomorrow evening. And by “marinating,” I mean I am sitting outside with my laptop drinking a beer while the pork sits in the fridge inside.

A pork shoulder is a great cookout option: The meat is cheap (about $1.50 a pound), it requires very little hands-on time, and a whole one will feed a crowd. (The one I bought was about 7 pounds.) The reason it’s cheap, however, is that it is a very tough cut that takes a long time to cook. You want to cook it at an extremely slow temperature so that the meat breaks down and all the fat gets nicely rendered into it; when it’s finished cooking, you should be able to pull strands of meat apart with your fingers. Again, you don’t really have to tend to it at all while it’s cooking, you just have to plan to get it cooking several hours before serving. One good way to cook a pork shoulder is by braising it in the oven at, like, 250° to 300°. And another is to put it in a smoker.

In preparation for tomorrow, I purchased the meat (which resembles the photo above but is not the same pig) and, in a 2-gallon plastic freezer bag, tossed a spice rub consisting of about 2 TBSP each of garlic powder, paprika, cumin, and kosher salt. To be honest, gentle reader, I really didn’t measure the amounts at all, but I suggest blending them with a few shakes of the (sealed) bag, adding the meat to the bag, rubbing in the seasoning thoroughly, and then shaking out any excess rub into the sink.

Next, I dumped maybe 1/4 cup olive oil (again, I really didn’t measure, I just dumped) into the bag, sealed it, and flipped it around a few times to get the meat fully coated. Fatty as pork is, the surface can get dried out when the meat spends so many hours in the smoker.

I then put the bag into a large bowl, to catch any leaks, and stuck it in the fridge. And now ... we wait.

Last July 4 (another one of the high holy days of grilling season), I tried my hand at smoking a pork shoulder for the first time. It came out pretty good, but I think ideally I would have cooked it a little longer, and also added water to the smoker every hour or two to minimize drying out the meat. (The olive oil is also a new feature in PS 2.0.) I can't remember how long it cooked last year, but this year I actually bothered to look up pork shoulder cooking times, and gathered it should spend about 1.5 hours per pound at 225°.

So, if all goes according to plan tomorrow, the pork shoulder will spend almost 10 1/2 hours in the smoker in my friends' yard (the logistics of which is frankly making me a little nervous). It will then be served on corn tortillas with a red cabbage and sour cream slaw. A head of red cabbage, like the pork shoulder, is cheap and will feed a crowd once shredded.

And now, I'm off to transport said shoulder to the site of the smoker. If anyone tries to snatch my purse on the subway, they'll be in for a surprise! Tune in for part 2 to find out how things turned out—or if you return tomorrow and this post has been deleted, you’ll know they went horribly awry.

Spaghetti With Zucchini and Roasted Tomatoes

2011-05-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

Gentle reader, at every Brooklyn street fair, it seems I end up disappointing myself. I gravitate toward the first greasy street foods in sight, then end up too full to try things I encounter later. (Hint: Avoid the mozzarepas—they expand in your stomach and ruin you for the rest of the day in one shot.) However, this past Sunday, at the Fifth Avenue Street Fair, I had the opposite problem: not getting enough street food. Oh, the irony!

See, after much cautious passing-up of various pulled-pork purveyors, I threw in my lot with a brisket slider from Benchmark. (Yummy, if messy. Note to self: Put Wet-Naps in purse before next street fair.) But by then it was getting pretty late, and it started to rain, and all the vendors started packing up, so I was unable to follow up with a chicken taco, much less funnel cake for dessert. And let me just say—at the risk of sounding melodramatic, which I would never, ever, ever do—that for a moment I hoped those people carrying signs about the End of Days coming next Saturday were right. Because seriously, what kind of a God would want to rain on His children’s funnel-cake parade?!

After I finished shaking my fists at the heavens, I proceeded to the after-party, chez the Beez (what, you don’t have after-parties for street fairs? Laaame), where I proceeded to overcompensate by eating pizza (you never saw a group of people tear into a pizza like that straight off a street-fair fried-food crawl) … at which point someone brought over a triple-crème cheese and crackers … and then I may have stopped for a couple of fried chicken drumsticks at Yafa Deli on the way home. What? Don’t judge me! I did a lot of walking at that fair!

Anyhoo. My point being: For the past couple of days, I’ve felt the need to eat relatively healthy, vegetable-driven meals that are neither deep-fried or on a stick. Hence I came up with this simple pasta, with a low ratio of noodles to veggies.

(Yes, that’s where I was going all this time. I’ll pause for you to overcome your indignation.)

So, yeah! This is a no-brainer-easy, vegetarian alternative to your average pasta with preservative-laden jar red sauce. Ingredients total around $5—and might be even cheaper come summer’s end, if you have a garden overflowing with tomatoes and zucchini. Personally, I don’t have a vegetable garden, so if you do, gentle reader, the polite thing would probably be to share some of your extra produce with me. I did share this recipe with you, after all, so it’s really the least you could do.

The below recipe serves two. Feel free to vary and multiply the proportions—as is usually the case here at BGC.

Ingredients:

2 tomatoes
1 small/medium yellow onion
1 small zucchini (a.k.a. green summer squash)
Minced garlic and herbs (basil and/or oregano, fresh or dried) to taste, or 1-2 TBSP pesto (I’ll allow store-bought, sigh)
Kosher salt and pepper to taste
A splash of red or white wine
8–10 oz. spaghetti or pasta of your choice (or more, depending on your desired sauce-to-pasta ratio)
Parmesan for garnishing, if desired (although, like, why would you ever not…ohhh, you’re vegan, aren’t you? I see how it is.)

Start by boiling a big pot of salted water, with the lid on. This is practically always the very first step you take when preparing pasta.

Now, in an oven or toaster oven at 400°, roast the tomatoes. In case you’ve forgotten how to prep them, I’ll remind you: Score the top and bottom with X’s, toss in olive oil on a foil-covered rimmed metal sheet pan, and sprinkle with salt. You want these to cook about 15 minutes, until the skin starts to wrinkle and pull back so it’s easily peelable.

In a medium saucepan, melt 2 TBSP butter with 1 TBSP olive oil on medium heat.

Dice and add the onion. Toss it in the buttery goodness.

Slice the zucchini lengthwise, repeat, then chop crosswise into quarter-circles about ½ inch thick. When the onion is soft, add the zucchini to the pan with a sprinkling of salt. Stir.

Cook, stirring every few minutes, until soft and slightly golden brown—at which point your tomatoes should be about ready. Add the splash of wine, and stir.

Let the tomatoes cool a bit before peeling and roughly dicing them. (Feel free to make dad jokes about fondling hot tomatoes.) I recommend using a ridged cutting board, so the liquid collects in the moat and you can just tilt the contents of the board, juices and all, into the pan.

Add the pesto or garlic and herbs, stir, and turn the heat down to low. (You might try also adding some capers, roughly chopped purple or black olives, prosciutto, or even anchovies if you’re into that sort of thing.)

Cook the pasta to package directions, occasionally stirring the sauce. You don’t want all the sauce liquid to cook down, so if it’s getting close, either turn off the heat and cover the pan until the pasta is done, or add a splash or two more wine.

Toss the pasta in the sauce, grate some Parmesan onto it, and you’re good. Enjoy!

(Seriously, though, I’m not kidding about that vegetable garden thing. Can you hook me up?)

Celery Root and Apple Soup

2011-05-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

Hello and happy May Day!

Yes, it's May and I know what you are thinking- soup? Celery root soup? Come on Alyce, winter's over, where's the grill? It's almost cinco de Mayo, how about some fajitas?
I know, trust me I know, but the other day I was in the grocery store, saw a big ole celery root and had to pick it up. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do with it. Wasn't in a gratin-y mood, and wanted to do something a little more substantial than a salad, so I looked online and found a recipe for soup with celery root and apple that piqued my interest, seemed really simple, and so I got to work.

I melted the 1/2 stick of butter in a large, heavy pot. This is (except for the food processor) a 1-pot meal, so make sure the pot is large enough. I added about 4 cups of peeled cubed celery root to the pot, along with about 4 cups of cubed, peeled granny smith apples and 2 onions (medium sized) chopped medium. I also mixed in some curry powder (about a tablespoon), and some salt and pepper. Cook these over medium heat, stirring frequently for about 15 minutes until they are a bit translucent, don't overcook them or brown them. Add 4 cups of chicken broth (reserve a cup or so of broth) to the celery root and apples and bring it to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low and cover the pot, stirring occasionally for about 25 minutes until the celery and apples are soft.

Remove the pot from the heat and you can let it cool a bit, and then puree the broth in a blender or food processor until smooth, adding in the reserved broth in portions as needed to achieve the consistency you want in your soup. I didn't add too much as I do tend to like my soup with a bit more texture. Return the soup to the pot and season as needed with additional salt and pepper to taste.

Wipe down the blender or food processor, add 1/2 cup of chopped chives and 1/2 cup of grapeseed oil (I used safflower oil, and it was fine) and puree. Dish the soup out into bowls and drizzle with the chive oil.

The recipe on line also called for cooking and crumbling pancetta to top the soup with, and it sounds like a lovely addition, but I didn't happen to have the pancetta on hand, and I enjoyed the soup without it.

spring!

2011-04-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

When I get the baby asparagus
And see all the green
I feel the spring!
Now it's the trees' turn

(happy "it's not tax day on April 15th for the first time since i can remember")

Quiche vs Tart: Part Quiche

2011-04-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

Hello my friends, Are you as excited for part 2 of this tart-quiche saga? I know I am. As you may have previously read, I made a tart, in an effort to learn the tart/quiche process. I also decided to make a quiche, in an effort to try a different recipe and see what worked for my preferences.

I turned to Epicurious.com where I had pulled a recipe called "Broccoli Cheddar Garlic Quiche". If you've read here before, you know that they had me at "Garlic". This recipe called for a home made crust, and my freezer was fresh out of pie crust, so i made the dough for the quiche while the tart baked. I promise to talk about my positive dough experience soon.

Once again, in assessing the ingredient list:
10 ounces of broccoli florets
2 large garlic cloves
6 large eggs
1 1/2 cups of half and half
1/4 tsp of grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp of cayenne
2 cups of coarsely grated extra-sharp cheddar
1/4 cup of grated parmigiano-reggiano

I had to make a few adjustments. Upping the broccoli and cheddar amounts? right on. I also added less half and half, (closer to 1 1/4 cups) fewer eggs (5 instead of 6) and (shocking, i know) I doubled the garlic. The recipe calls for mincing and mashing the garlic. I did this by chopping it very fine, and then drawing the flat of the knife over the garlic to crush it into more of a paste.

In a large bowl, I beat the eggs with the garlic, half and half, nutmeg, cayenne and salt. I Poured this into the pie shell, added the broccoli, and sprinkle the cheese over top. I also added the remainder of the caramelized onions in with the broccoli as well as over the top.

Bake this for ~45 minutes at 375 degrees. Let it cool for at least 20 minutes before cutting into your quiche. And the results were?
Better than the tart. The flavor was much deeper, i know this is just a matter of the additional (and simple) spices, and I think the next time I make this, I will do a combo of the two recipes (with my additional touches, the caramelized onions were very tasty).

The quiche recipe called for cooking the broccoli before baking the quiche. I didn't think this was necessary. 45 minutes at 375 degrees definitely cooks the broccoli, and i prefer my veggies to have a little texture. I think next time I would also use whole milk instead of half and half- I think with the additional cheese, the recipe won't lose anything using whole milk instead of half and half.

Sunchoke Puree

2011-04-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

Today, with the temperature finally cracking 60 degrees, I visited the greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza for the first time since last year. Along with trying samples of three kinds of sausage (hot pork Italian sausage, duck salami, and turkey sausage), I got a couple of delicacies. I splurged on a leg of duck confit for $6 (after forbearing at the supermarket earlier this week, I gave in rationalizing that this one was straight from a real farm), and I bought a little over a pound of sunchokes, also for $6.

Sunchokes, which are really called Jerusalem artichokes but were evidently rebranded, as it were, for marketing purposes, have a subtly rich taste that I can only describe by saying it’s kind of like if you somehow infused a potato with the flavor of an artichoke. Texture-wise, they’re also much like potatoes, albeit less starchy, and can be cooked as potatoes are. The one thing that’s annoying about them: They are knobby like ginger roots, and therefore a pain to clean and peel. But once you take the time to prep them, this mashed-potato-style dish is very easy to make.

Again, start with about a pound of sunchokes; this serves 2 as a side dish.

Wash the chokes thoroughly and peel off the skin. You may have to slice off some of the smaller bumps to get a clean peel. But it’s not a big deal if you leave a few scraps in the nooks and crannies. I ended up cutting off some of the larger knobs and peeling them individually, then slicing the larger pieces in half so they would cook evenly with the smaller ones.

Put the peeled sunchokes in a pot of salted boiling water and cook, partially covered, until you can easily put a fork through them: about an hour.

While the sunchokes cook, roast some garlic: Slice the top off a bulb, drizzle with olive oil, and wrap in tinfoil. Cook at 250° in a toaster oven until the cloves are soft and can be gently squeezed out of the skin.

When the sunchokes are cooked, put them in a bowl with 2 TBSP butter, a sprinkling of salt and fresh ground pepper, and about 6 cloves of roasted garlic. Use a potato masher to smush it all together.

Add about 1/3 cup milk and puree with an immersion blender or in a blender or food processor until smooth-ish.

Taste and add more salt and pepper if desired.

This can be served immediately or transferred to an oven-proof dish and reheated, uncovered, at 350°-ish.

I prepared this alongside my second attempt at curry-rubbed lamb ribs, served this time with a mushroom-curry sour cream, plus garlicky sautéed red chard. Oh, and the first course was a salad consisting of the duck confit leg, chopped, over baby arugula with dried cherries and red onion, in a balsamic vinaigrette.

OH MY GOD it was all so good. And considering the lamb was $4 and the red wine was $8.99, the $12 total for duck confit and sunchokes really didn’t seem like such a bad deal for a special Saturday night dinner for two, compared to a restaurant that would have easily run us close to $100 for similar fare (including the wine markup).

Although I conceived of the meal as a let’s-have-a-special-dinner-with-no-particular-occasion thing, it turns out we did have something to celebrate: The Rangers made the playoffs!!! All around, a pretty great Saturday night.

Cassoulet, Brooklyn-Style

2011-04-04T20:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was perusing the meat aisle of my local Met Foods trying to come up with a dinner idea that wasn’t just a straight-up meat-vegetable-starch plate, when I suddenly came upon packages of confit duck legs. While a nuanced discussion of gentrification in Brooklyn neighborhoods is outside the scope of this post, I will just say that the presence of duck confit there was about as surprising as discovering that the G train was running normally on a weekend.

At $6 a leg, I realized, I could not afford the confit. However, the idea of using it in a cassoulet had already taken shape in my mind, and I decided to try my own spin on that one-pot meal using turkey drumsticks, which were packaged at the Met for about $2 for two.

As usual with my cooking, this makes no pretense to be faithful to the classic dish, in this case a French-countryside-y bean stew with a mélange of rich meats. I looked up cassoulet in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking when I got home, and her rendition is a five-page, three-day affair for 10-12 people involving “pork loin, shoulder of mutton or lamb, and sausage,” with suggested variants such as duck, goose, confit goose, veal shank, and partridge—all compiled under the unassuming recipe title “Cassoulet: French baked beans.” (Sorry to get all “Kitty and Julia” on you, but she is the authority on French cuisine.)

Along with the turkey drumsticks, my cheapo version uses the packaged horseshoe-shaped supermarket kielbasa, plus two Goya cans of butter beans—large white beans whose starch gives the sauce an almost creamy texture. It does take upwards of two hours, so you may want to prepare it on a Sunday; this is one of those dishes that might be even better reheated. The below proportions would easily serve four for dinner, but I made it for two with plans for leftovers.

First, turn your oven to 350°.

Sprinkle two turkey drumsticks with salt and pepper, coat them lightly in oil, and cook in the oven in a foil-covered pan (I find they nest nicely in a loaf pan like you’d use for banana bread) for 1 to 1 ½ hours, or until you can stick a fork in and the meat comes easily off the bone. (If your market doesn’t sell turkey drumsticks separate from the whole bird, I’d try chicken thighs or whole legs—or, of course, partridge.)

While the turkey cooks: Heat a splash of vegetable oil over medium flame in a stockpot or heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add 1 lb. kielbasa, sliced into inch-ish-thick medallions. Cook, tossing to turn periodically, until the cut surfaces are brown-spotted, about 5-10 minutes; then remove from pan and drain on paper towels (or brown paper bags, as my mom does).

Drain off about half the oil from the pan and add a pat of butter. After it melts, add the white and light green parts of a large leek, sliced into thin circles (remember to submerge in water to wash; I usually do so after slicing, to get any dirt hidden between layers). Sprinkle about 1 tsp kosher salt, stir, and sauté, covered but uncovering to stir periodically, until leeks are soft.

Add a few cloves of minced garlic (well, I used 6) and stir. Add 8 oz. mushrooms, sliced; a bay leaf; and a few sprigs’ worth of fresh thyme leaves. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Stir in 2 15.5-oz. cans large white beans or the equivalent, rinsed.

Now add 1 quart chicken stock (it may be a little ridiculous to note that you could substitute vegetable stock considering this recipe contains two kinds of meat, but hey, I’ve been known to order a turkey burger with bacon) and about ½ bottle beer. Gentle reader, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what to do with the other half.

Turn the heat up to high and bring the liquid to a boil; then turn the heat down to low, and stir in the kielbasa and an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce. I also stirred in about 5 or 6 fronds’ worth of roughly shredded kale leaves once I realized I had them on hand, and I must say they were a nice touch, but they’re optional.

Cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about an hour and a half. You want the liquid to reduce down so it’s more like a thick sauce than a broth—think stew, not soup.

Whenever the turkey is done, use two forks or, once it cools, your fingers to shred it into pieces, discarding the skin. Don’t worry about making the pieces uniform—some will be more like chunks, some shreds—but do be careful to remove all those sharp spiky things. Stir the turkey meat into the pot (it doesn’t really matter how much cooking time remains for the stock-pot stuff when you add it).

Although it would by no means give Julia Child a run for her mutton, I was quite pleased by how this dish turned out. The flavors came together really nicely in a rich base that was, as I said, made thick and almost creamy by the starchy white beans. Typically this hearty fare would be more of a winter thing, but at this point we’ve given up hope of ever achieving actual spring weather, amirite?

I served this garnished with fresh thyme leaves, alongside a green salad, plus a crusty baguette from the new specialty store around the corner that charges $15 a pound for cheese (again, let’s not get into the whole gentrification thing). Oh, and a bottle of red wine—at $6.99, only slightly more expensive than one duck confit leg.

Quiche vs. Tart: Part Tart

2011-04-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

Dearest Readers,

Hello! How have you all been? I hope everyone had a lovely winter! Personally, I took a bit of a hiatus, enjoying some time in the Maldives. It was rather boring, as I’m sure you can imagine: Get up in the morning, have some fresh fruit, put on a bathing suit, lounge in the sun, read the paper, take a nap, go shopping, pick a place for dinner, go for a late night swim, and then get plenty of sleep in order to start fresh again the next day. I know it sounds tiresome, but what can you do when you live a life of leisure. Oh wait. I actually haven’t won the lotto yet. A girl can dream though, right?

I too have been struggling through this seemingly endless winter, and there was a time in early January when I had been suffering a fair amount of food malaise. I sunk into a bit of a food funk- not cooking anything fun, going through the motions at the grocery store, turning to my freezer for Ling Ling's potstickers in my time of need. The situation was verging on dire.

I took a trip to Fairway in the midst of a bad head cold which only perpetuated my food doldrums- I decided to partake in some prepared foods. As I don't usually spend much time in the prepared food section, I am always impressed by the selection. I was, that cold winter evening, sniffling into my crumpled tissue, totally taken in by a small broccoli-cheddar tart. It looked delicious, like the perfect little treat to take to work the next day for lunch, so I bought it. Dear readers, it was, simply put, really disappointing. While I'm not sure that anything could have lived up to my expectations, it fell short on texture and taste, and suddenly, this slight let down of a mid-week office lunch sparked some inspiration in my lazy food bones. I would make a broccoli cheddar tart! I would make a tart and it would be good! Wait when was the last time I made a tiche (tart/quiche)?

So I went online, found some recipes, and was initially a bit confused- what's the difference between a tart and a quiche? Let me answer that for you- Nothing. Seriously, I know that a tart can be sweet or savory, while a quiche is savory, and there is some talk about the difference in ratio of eggs to liquid, but really? I liked Kitty's explanation best- When that whole "Real men eat quiche" fad started, the backlash probably drove the "tart" designation. You know. Quiche is scary.

The recipes I found online were varied, some were easy, "beat some eggs, throw in some grated cheddar and broccoli, pour it in a pie shell and bake". Some were more complicated. I decided that (since I am a relative novice at tiche making) I would try a couple of recipes and see what worked. First I found a very simple recipe and then went to epicurious.com for a more intricate "quiche" recipe. I decided that I would follow both recipes exactly so that I could give a good break down of what I think works versus what I would change, or combine between the two recipes. I tried to follow the recipes exactly, really I did. It just didn't happen that way.

The first recipe I used was from the Cooking Village site online. I hadn't used a recipe from that site before, but it was such a simple take, I wanted something basic and straightforward: Broccoli Cheddar Tart

The recipe calls for little "tartlets", instead I was excited to use a pie shell I had in the freezer. No I won't tell you how long it had been in my freezer.

Other than the shell, the recipe called for 3 eggs, 1 cup of half and half, 1/4 cup of chopped green onions, 1/4 cup of shredded cheddar cheese, and 1 1/2 cup of chopped broccoli florets. I didn't have any green onions, just regular old yellow onions, so I decided to caramelize a couple of onions. I also thought that 1 cup of half and half was too much, and 1/4 cup of shredded cheese was too little, so I used less half and half (about 3/4 of a cup) and more shredded cheddar (closer to a full cup, I shredded it finely so it would blend). I also added about 2 cups of broccoli instead of 1.5.

So, with onions caramelized, i beat the eggs, added the half and half, the cheese, the broccoli and the onions, and mixed it all up so that everything was nicely coated. I poured it into the pie shell, and cooked it for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. As the 30 minute cooking designation was for the smaller tartlets, so i ended up turning the heat up to 370 and cooking it for an additional 15 minutes.

The results were... kind of bland. I loved how easy the recipe was, but it was lacking any umph. In an effort to ratchet up the finished product, I sprinkled left over cheese from "Quiche vs. Tart: Part Quiche":Tell me that topping with shredded cheese doesn't always make everything better.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Bland-ness prevailed. But tune in for the second part of this battle for Part Quiche, coming soon, and hear my suggestions for future "Tiche" making!

Curry-Rubbed Lamb Ribs

2011-03-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

Two years ago this time, gentle reader, you could not get through a restaurant review in a New York–based publication without encountering the R-word: “recession.” And we're still feeling the culinary repercussions of that market meltdown.

See, back in the '09, with the economy a bigger hot mess than a school-cafeteria Sloppy Joe, the sanctimonious contingent of the Brooklyn restaurant scene (think seasonal/local/sustainable/blah-blah-blah) eagerly embraced the frugal, down-home aesthetic of “upscale comfort food”—often, a euphemism for “We buy cheap cuts of meat and cook them for a long-ass time, and for that we will charge you in the vicinity of $20 for a small but beautifully plated portion of some obscure, newly acceptable part of the animal.”

The economy has theoretically picked up, but this credo of Brooklyn restaurant cooking remains rampant. And while I love rich, slow-cooked, meat-based dining—and respect the bargain-hunter impetus behind it—I resent the massive markup. So I was excited when I saw a 4-pound breast of lamb ribs—a cut I had tried only twice, each time at trendy Brooklyn restaurants that shall remain nameless, since I genuinely enjoyed and do not want to badmouth them—for $4 at a market on Washington Ave.

Lifelong lover of lamb though I am, I was utterly unfamiliar with preparation methods for this cut, and hence worried about my ability to cook down the significant layer of fat without drying out the meat. But for $4, I decided to go for it. I'd say this should serve one or two people.

As soon as I got home, I googled “lamb ribs” and took a quick survey of the first few recipes that came up. This is a common strategy of mine: to glance over three or four recipes and glean the basic methods involved, pick and choose the elements that appeal to me, and then just wing it. But this time, I was skeptical of the recipes I saw, which mainly advised roasting the meat at 400° for a couple hours, as one would a far pricier rack of lamb. I figured with the tougher, fattier cut, you really want that low-slow cook to tenderize the meat and render down the fat, so it gets to the falling-off-the-bone point without drying out.

I ended up rubbing the ribs with a dry rub that was heavy on curry powder and letting it sit in the fridge in a Ziploc overnight (you could do anywhere from a few hours to a few nights). Then I wrapped it in aluminum foil, put that in a roasting pan (you do not want the unmitigated foil packet dripping lamb fat down into your oven), and cooked it at 250° for like 4 or 5 hours, the night before I intended to serve it.

The next night, I brought the rack to room temp and reheated it, unfoiled, at 400° for about 15-20 minutes, to get a nice little crisp on the fat. (Also in the oven was a heart-shaped panko-crusted potato-onion gratin that had gone in about 45 minutes before. What? I like making heart-shaped gratins. Shut up.)

The lamb came out gnaw-every-scrap-off-the-bone-and-lick-the-grease-off-your-fingers good. The dry rub nicely complemented the rich meat. Next time, though, I would probably do a simple dipping sauce of yogurt or sour cream flavored with turmeric or curry powder and paprika, plus maybe some chopped fresh thyme or chives.

To round out the meal, I served sautéed mushrooms, as well as steamed green beans tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, and ricotta cheese. Oh, and the gratin, which was pretty dayyyumn good, if I do say so myself.

If you’ve roasted lamb ribs or cooked them another way, please leave a comment—I will definitely be experimenting with this cut again soon, while it's in season. (Okay, fine, gentle reader, I do actually believe in cooking seasonally when possible. People need to just chill out and shut up about it, is all!)

Kale, Yeah!

2011-03-21T22:03:00.000-07:00

This morning, I saw a commercial that may well earn a spot in the Annoying NY1 Ad Hall of Fame alongside Pillow Pets and the Sarah MacLachlan abused-animals-wondering-what-they-did-wrong ones. In it, a woman says something like, “Don’t you wish vegetables didn’t taste so vegetable-y?”

Whaaaaaaat?

Of course, my mind immediately went to Alyce’s “Veggie Rage” post expressing, well, rage at those who would make us feel vegetables are something to be endured rather than enjoyed. (I believe the ad went on to tout some product that made a mix of fruit and vegetable juices taste solely like fruit, but even if I did recall its name I certainly wouldn’t plug it.)

Now, I like a big hunk of meat as much as the next guy—and by "next guy" I mean Homer Simpson marveling at the “wonderful, magical animal” that makes pork, bacon, and ham. But I also appreciate the flavor and texture of veggies in their own right, not when disguised as meat or fruit or what have you. If I’m going to make vegetables, they’re damn well going to taste vegetable-y.

In that spirit, here’s a recipe for kale—much like Brussels sprouts, a super-nutritious green that is often unfairly maligned because people don’t know the simple ways to cut its bitterness and bring out its intense flavor ... which turns out to be a surprisingly great complement to a rich meat-driven dish.

The proportions of this recipe are easily multiplied. Tonight I was cooking for myself; I used half a bunch of kale, which as it turned out could have been two generous servings. Note: A bunch of raw kale looks like it could feed an army, but cooks down to a fraction of its size, so resist the urge to use far less than a recipe calls for.

After thoroughly rinsing the kale, remove the stems; they are edible, but much thicker than the leaves, and this imbalance will mess up your cooking time. The stems come off very easily: Just encircle each one between your thumb and forefinger, then pull the stem down through that circle so the fronds separate from it. This will make sense when you do it, trust.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan, over medium heat.

Toss in a small, or 1/2 large, onion, sliced thin. (The pieces needn’t be uniform size.) Stir to coat with oil.

When the onion starts to get soft and translucent, chop a handful of kale leaves—again, don’t worry about size uniformity—then toss in, sprinkle with coarse kosher or sea salt, and stir to coat. Repeat these steps, with the exception of the salting, until (duh) you have used up all the kale.

Once the kale softens a little, add some coarsely chopped garlic. I like a lot, like six cloves; garlic is one important way to bring out the flavor of bitter greens. I add it at this stage rather than with the onions so that there’s no fear of it burning, which will definitely bring out the greens’ bitterness in a highly unpleasant way.

Unless you’re a spicy-phobe, add a sprinkle of dried crushed red pepper flakes.

Add 1/2 cup chicken or vegetable stock and turn up the heat to high. This is the crucial step in cutting the greens’ bitterness, which gets absorbed into the liquid as the greens are infused with the stock’s savory flavor. Water will do in a pinch.

Once the liquid is bubbling vigorously, turn the burner down to medium-low and cook, stirring every few minutes, until the kale is tender to your liking; I’d say about 15 minutes. If all the liquid cooks off and the greens are still too tough, keep adding stock, or water, and cooking until they’re good to go.

Stirring in half a can of white beans, drained, about 5 minutes in would make this a protein-ful veggie main, which you could serve with some grated Parmesan over rice or pasta. I served my kale over a baked sweet potato, though you can’t really tell from the photo above.

Full disclosure: You also can’t tell from the photo that right after I took it, I slapped a reheated leftover boneless pork chop on top of the kale. Gentle reader, I didn’t want the true vegetarians out there to be turned off by the picture…but I apologize if you have read this far and now feel betrayed. I just have a thing for the “magical animal,” okay?

So there you have it: a healthy, cheap vegetarian dish ... that happens to pair perfectly with a hunk of pork. I’m just saying. Hey, it still tastes vegetable-y.

Pork Loin On the Go

2011-03-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

Gentle reader, I recently got a real job. Yes, after years of freelancing, I took a staff position, which has brought such magical developments as visits from the money fairy (a.k.a. direct deposit) and the prospect of finally getting my teeth cleaned.

Another plus: I can pick up groceries in the neighborhood where I work, which was not an option at my previous gig in Times Square—an area so devoid of grocery stores, I frequently saw people in line at the Duane Reade with baskets full of staples like milk and cereal. Kind of depressing that in the greatest food city in the world, people are grocery-shopping at a chain pharmacy.

Anyhoo. I have spoken before of how my matrilineal heritage of old-fashioned home cooking involves the use of condiment packets. So last Friday, I took it into my head to marinate a pork loin using ingredients found in my office kitchen, while I enjoyed happy hour with a friend.

(Mind you, if you're not into eating dinner late, you might want to save this recipe for a weekend, since it does take a while. You could also marinate the pork the night before and refrigerate it overnight, but it will still need time to come to room temperature and to roast.)

Here’s how it went down:

I bought a 2.5-lb. boneless pork loin—the wide kind, not the log shape—for about $5 at the grocery store. At one of the tables in the front of the store where people are supposed to eat prepared food, I transferred the pork loin to a Tupperware container (washed out from the lunch I’d brought) and tossed it in a whisked-together marinade consisting of:

2 Dijon mustard packets

2 soy sauce packets

1 hot sauce packet

1/4 cup honey

I flipped the pork loin in the marinade with a plastic fork, then sealed the container and swaddled it inside plastic bags. I’m pretty sure anyone passing by who saw me through the windows doing all this in my grubby North Face hoodie thought I was completely insane, but oh well.

Then I was on my way to meet my friend for happy hour, during which time the meat marinated and also came to room temperature, which is important for even cooking. If you cook a big roast straight out of the fridge, the outside will be burnt by the time the inside gets cooked enough. So you see, there’s a method to my madness!

Once home in Brooklyn, I turned the oven to 450° and put the pork in a Le Creuset (ceramic) pan with a little water on the bottom, so the marinade wouldn’t get burned onto it—sugar-like ingredients such as honey will easily turn a marinade or sauce into a nearly unscrubbable black char on the surface of your crockery.

After 10 minutes, I flipped the meat and brushed it with Dijon mustard; after another 10 minutes, I flipped and brushed again and turned the heat down to 325°. I cooked it for maybe another hour, flipping once or twice. It could have been a little less done, though, so use a meat thermometer if you have one.

Let the meat rest, under tented aluminum foil, for at least 10 minutes before slicing it.

This could easily serve four or five as a main course—it was just two of us, but there are many leftover possibilities (I ended up making some delicious Cuban-ish pressed sandwiches). I served it with asparagus and garlic mashed potatoes, plus a mustard cream gravy, but you could do whatever.

Super Bowl Munchie: Red Bean Dip

2011-01-31T20:03:00.000-08:00

No, I didn't make this, nor are we affiliated with those who did. It's just awesome. Insane ultimate Super Bowl dip recipe by Holy Taco; get the how-to here.

My co-blogger Alyce and I are most definitely kindred spirits. But since we human beings are all unique, just like everybody else, even the B-est FFs are bound to have certain points of divergence on tastes. Ours, in a word? Football.

See, Alyce believes the point of football is to enjoy the thrill of the game (I assume, anyway ... I never asked, because I get bored as soon as the F-word is uttered). She totally represents for the knowledgeable, engaged, passionate-to-the-point-of-cuckoo female fans (this article seriously pissed her off), and I admire her for it.

However, I have a very different take on the point of football. For me, gentle reader, it means enduring a long winter of Sunday afternoons of endless, tedious Spandex-clad scrums (how the Jets game the other week trumped Mariska’s Birthday Marathon of SVU in The Rob’s priority system is beyond me) in order to reach the second greatest eating day of the year, after Thanksgiving: the Super Bowl.

Ahhh, the ’Merickan glory that is the classic Super Bowl spread: Pigs in blankets. Buffalo wings. Kielbasa. Nachos. Pizza. Spinach-artichoke dip. Seven-layer dip. Sundry other dips. Requisite accompanying chips. And beer...so, so much beer. The $25,000 Pyramid category here could just as easily be “Things That Make Kitty Happy.”

Anyhoo. This particular bean dip is super-easy, and makes a large quantity on the cheap (it's easily multiplied for a crowd). And it's actually relatively non-fat-laden, at least as far as Super Bowl foods (or, again, things that make Kitty happy) go.

Sauté 1 diced onion in 1 TBSP olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat, until translucent. (Optional: Add a dried bay leaf or two.)

Add a drained, rinsed 29-oz. can of red beans (pink or black would also work), 2-3 smashed garlic cloves, 1 chipotle in adobo sauce, and 1 cup beer or chicken stock (or 1/2 cup each).

Turn up heat to high and bring liquid to a boil. Lower heat back down to medium and simmer uncovered, stirring every few minutes, until most of the liquid is gone but it’s a bit soupy still, about 15 minutes.

Turn off burner; add coarse salt to taste and pinches of any other spices you desire (e.g., cumin, paprika, cinnamon, chili powder).

Remove the bay leaf and, if your fellow Bowl-ers are wusses about spicy food, the chipotle.

Using an immersion blender or in a food processor, puree the bean mixture.

Stir in 1 cup sour cream. (You can skip this if you’re super-fat-conscious, though even I know that is not the point of the Super Bowl.)

Give the blender or processor a couple more pulses to blend. If necessary, add a little more sour cream, or water, to achieve the desired texture, and pulse again. Taste and adjust seasoning as you like, or don’t.

Serving Options

You can simply serve this at room temperature—optionally garnished with chopped cilantro or chives—alongside baby carrots, tortilla chips, bagel chips, Triscuits, or, if you’re feeling ambitious, triangles of flatbread.

Or spread it in an ovenproof dish, cover with shredded Monterey Jack or white cheddar, and (optionally) crumbled bacon or diced chorizo; and/or diced or pickled jalapenos. Bake at 400° until the cheese is melty and bubbly and starting to brown. Serve hot with any of the abovementioned accoutrements.

And of course, you can use this bean dip as one of the layers in seven-layer dip, a classic Super Bowl ritual. Other layers might include (but are not limited to): guacamole; salsa cruda; salsa verde; pulled pork, beef chili, or shredded chicken; shredded Cheddar or Jack; seasoned corn; or straight-up shredded iceberg lettuce.

When football season has—mercifully—concluded, you can add the bean mix to burritos and quesadillas; or, go easy on the sour cream and keep it a little chunky, and serve it as a side with chicken and rice.

Enjoy the Super Bowl, and remember: Your team may not cover the spread, but as long as you eat and drink your own weight, you come out a winner.

Roasted Bok Choi

2011-01-30T21:28:00.000-08:00

This recipe, like so many great dishes throughout history, had its genesis in one crystal-clear beacon of inspiration: Some food was about to go bad.

In this case, that food was a head of bok choi, which I bought last week and failed to use. I wanted to try roasting it, because the oven tends to be more forgiving to vegetables that have passed their prime, much like dim lighting with humans.

I figured it would go great with the pork dumplings I made a big batch of and froze a few weeks ago. You can plop these right from the freezer into a steamer over boiling water, and they cook in about 10 minutes, so they are awesome to have handy.

Bok choi has stems that are much thicker, and thus take longer to cook, than its green ends. So I debated whether to add everything to the pan at once, or start with the stems and add the greens later. I Googled “roasted bok choi,” but every recipe that came up was for baby bok choi, which have far slenderer stems (hence the name, duh), so I wasn’t sure whether the directions would apply.

Being hungry and impatient, I opted to wing it. I decided I would cook everything together but keep the greens under the stems so they would retain their moisture.

Having preheated the oven to 450°, I mixed in a square baking dish (brownie-pan-size):

A splash of soy sauce

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 TSP Dijon mustard (you could use other kinds or skip it)

A splash of chicken stock (optional)

A splash of hot sauce (and by “splash” I mean “packet from the Chinese restaurant,” but you can source your ingredients however you like—or just leave this out for wussier palates)

3 chopped garlic cloves

(Some minced ginger would’ve been a good addition, but I didn’t have any.)

A pinch of coarse salt (be sparing, because soy sauce is so salty)

1 TBSP olive oil

Note: When I say “splash,” I’m usually all for erring on the generous side. But since bok choi has a high water content, it really absorbed all these flavors—the lemon juice in particular—so I’d be conservative with seasonings here to retain some of the crisp flavor of the vegetable.

I chopped a bunch of bok choi in half lengthwise, then chopped through the base so the bottom halves/white stems came apart.

I tossed the bok choi in the liquid mix, then arranged the greens on the bottom of the pan with the white parts on top, curved (outer) side up to tent moisture and steam the greens.

I cooked this for maybe 30 minutes, and as I said, it had a TON of flavor. The roasting gave the bok choi a rich and complex taste, and the warming, filling quality you want from a winter dish—a rare overlap with light and healthy.

This green was indeed great with the dumplings, but would go equally well with grilled steak or salmon. And cold leftovers would make a nice salad with toasted walnuts and thin-sliced red onion, plus maybe sliced steak or flaked salmon if you made it with one of those mains and have leftovers.

This concludes our token healthy vegetable recipe. Coming up: We resume our regularly scheduled Winter Carbopalooza!

Mac and Cheese: Thinking Outside the Kraft Box

2011-01-24T17:30:00.000-08:00

In case you have not noticed, gentle reader, my recipes have been on the hearty and rich side lately. That is because right now in Brooklyn, it is about 7 degrees out. Which kind of sucks in a largely car-free culture where you have to walk everywhere. So you can understand why I would be drawn to seriously belly-filling fare these days. I'm calling it Carbopalooza 2011.

This naturally brings us to mac and cheese, another ’Merickan classic. There are almost infinite variations of this dish you can whip up ... though The Rob would far rather have a box of Kraft—old-school powdered cheese-style—than any other incarnation, so, I'm ashamed to say, the neon-orange stuff does sometimes make an appearance on our plates.

This from-scratch baked version, with three cheeses, prosciutto, and peas (yet another spin on my go-to pasta formula), seems pretty fancy but is simple to throw together with ingredients you can get at your supermarket’s deli counter. I made it for a recent dinner with my friend Tom, a good Italian boy who is naturally a fan of the non-box-based cheesy pasta. (I apologize if that was Italian stereotyping and our advertisers pull out like with Jersey Shore. Not that we have any advertisers, but we might someday, and I don't want to have to go back and edit.)

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Boil a pot of salted water, into which will go a 16-oz. package of bow-tie-shaped pasta, or farfalle. You could also use small shells, orecchiette, or fusilli, and myriad other pastas as well.

While the water boils, make the cheese sauce:

Chop 1/4 lb. prosciutto into 1/2-inch-ish chunks. (Ask for the prosciutto at the deli counter in the form of one hockey-puck-size slab, not thin-sliced. And don’t pronounce the final “o”.)

Grate (or slice into strips, if deli-sliced) 1/4 lb. each provolone cheese and garlic cheddar (or one of these could be Gruyere, Jack, regular cheddar...). Shred 1/4 cup Parmesan (or Romano, or Asiago).

Melt 2 TBSP butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add a handful of flour and mix with a whisk. Cook this roux until golden brown.

Whisk in a generous splash of chicken stock, white wine, or sherry, followed by 1 1/2 cups milk.

Whisk in the cheeses.

Add a pinch of salt. Optional: Add a pinch of fresh-grated or powdered nutmeg, which is great in a creamy sauce.

Add the prosciutto and a handful of frozen peas. (Mushrooms or broccoli would be good too.)

When the pasta is cooked, toss it in the sauce and transfer to a baking dish.

Sprinkle the top of the pasta with panko bread crumbs—optionally, seasoned with pinches of salt, dried basil or oregano, and garlic powder.

Bake until the top is golden brown and bubbly, about 1/2 hour.

I served this with a balsamic-vinaigrette-dressed salad and a bottle of red wine. Snow was falling outside that night (for a change) and it was an excellent cozy meal.

Thanks to Tom for taking the photos, in case you couldn’t tell from the fact that they are much better than my usual ones.

Chicken Potpie

2011-01-23T12:43:00.000-08:00

Chicken potpie occupies a unique place in the ’Merickan culinary pantheon, in that it is a classic retro-Americana "leftovers dish" yet does not evoke any of the shudders or gag reflexes such dishes are wont to elicit. Compare, for example, tuna casserole—just the name has served as a punch line for decades of family sitcoms, the premise of the joke being that hidden under those canned dried "onions" is everything that was about to go bad in the fridge. Even meatloaf, which has recently acquired new panache in this recessionary era of "upscale comfort food" (more on this at a later date, in my upcoming post about meatloaf) inspires a wide range of visceral reactions in people, many of which are extremely negative.

But chicken potpie grosses out nobody (except perhaps carb-phobic Atkins devotees, but we all know they lead miserable and bitter lives anyway). It is hearty, it is buttery, and it makes efficient and cheap use of leftovers, supplemented by staples you probably already have in your kitchen. Often, I roast a chicken for just myself and The Rob, with an eye toward making potpie out of the leftovers. With the plump roaster I got on sale recently for 99 cents a pound, I was not only able to do that, but make a couple sandwiches' worth of curried chicken salad—oh, and of course, I made stock from the chicken carcass.

Usually, when I make chicken potpie, I put the filling in a gratin pan and lay a crust over just the top of the dish (as opposed to having a bottom crust lining the pan). It's not like this is exactly a "light" dish any way you prepare it, but I find that you don’t really need all that extra crust.

The pie dough I make is based on a recipe from an old Martha Stewart cookbook aptly called Favorite Comfort Food. It is not necessary for me to look up the recipe in the index, since I just open the book and the crusty, broken-spined pages literally pop out at me. This is how you know a recipe is good. I have made tweaks to the dough recipe (primarily, using less butter), so here's my own adaptation:

DOUGH

Cut 6 oz. butter (3/4 of a stick) into 1/2-inch-ish squares and stash it in the freezer.

Separate an egg. Lightly beat the yolk into a small bowl or cup containing 3 TBSP cold water, and stash the cup/bowl in the freezer.

Save the egg white in another bowl, in the fridge.

Combine 1 cup flour, 1/2 tsp. salt, and about 1 TBSP dried herbs (try thyme, rosemary, and/or tarragon) in the bowl of your food processor. If you don't have a food processor, get one. Seriously? It's 2011, here.

Add the butter to the food processor, and hit "pulse" 5 or 6 times. Pie crust recipes always tell you that the mixture should look like "coarse crumbs," but I find this to be an unhelpful description. Basically you want the butter to disappear into the dry ingredients, with kind of a lumpy texture to the mix.

Get your yolk/water mix out of the freezer, press the "on" (not "pulse") button, and pour the liquid down the spout into the processor. Press the "off" button as soon as you see the dough start to come away from the sides of the processor, i.e., start to form a ball.

Sprinkle a sheet of wax or parchment paper or plastic wrap with flour and turn out the dough ball onto the paper. Sprinkle a little more flour on top of the dough, and fold in the wax paper so the dough is covered. Flatten it into a rough disc and store it in the freezer 30 minutes, or in the fridge for 1 hour (you can leave it in the fridge overnight if you like).

FILLING

While your dough is chilling, make the filling:

Dice one large or two small russet potatoes and sauté in a large pot in a couple tablespoons melted butter over medium heat. (You can skip this step and just dice up leftover roast potatoes if you have them, which is what I did this time, having roasted wedges in the pan with the chicken.)

Once the potatoes are slightly translucent, add one large diced carrot to the pan, and stir.

Add about 6 sliced mushrooms, stir, and cook until they and the carrots have softened. (The veggies will continue cooking in the oven, so they don't need to cook through all the way.)

Shred or chunk…mmm, about a pound of cooked chicken? (It's hard to quantify a leftovers dish exactly. If you have more chicken on hand, add more when you have your filling assembled in the dish.) Add to the pot.

Add a handful of frozen peas to the pot.

Optional: Add diced ham, or crumbled cooked bacon.

Stir the filling together and dump it into your gratin dish or roasting dish. Flatten the surface with the back of a spoon or spatula.

Return the pot to the heat and melt another couple tablespoons butter. Add a handful of flour and mix it with the whisk to make a roux.

When the roux is bubbly and beige, whisk in about 1/2 cup chicken stock, followed by 2 cups milk. Simmer (don't let the milk boil) until it is a thick consistency, somewhere between cream and gravy.

Pour the liquid over the filling. Shimmy the pan back and forth so it sinks in. Let this sit at room temperature.

ROLLING DOUGH/ASSEMBLY

Preheat your oven to 375°, and get your dough out of the freezer.

You want the dough to be firm enough to roll out without smearing and breaking, but not so rock-hard that you can't roll it out far enough. If it's too hard, whack it with your rolling pin a couple of times and/or let it sit at room temperature for a few minutes.

Roll out the dough on a wax-paper-lined baking sheet to maybe 1/4 inch thick, making sure the surface is a little larger than your pan. For ventilation, poke fork holes throughout, or use a cookie cutter or paring knife to make a design.

Chill the dough in the fridge for 15 minutes before draping it carefully over the filling. Use kitchen shears, a pizza cutter, or a paring knife, to trim any dough that hangs more than an inch over the pan edge. If desired, trim scraps into shapes for your design, and press them gently onto the dough.

Using your fingertips, press that extra inch of overhanging dough into the sides of the pan, folding it back on itself to make a crust edge. Press this with a fork to get the classic pie-crust ridges.

Now remember that egg white you saved? Whisk about 1 TBSP milk (or water) into it and use a pastry brush to "paint" the surface of your dough. This will help it get glossy as it bakes and ultimately achieve that shade of golden brown that signifies doneness and deliciousness.

BAKING

Put the pan in the oven; I recommend resting it on a foil-lined baking sheet, to catch any filling that bubbles up and drips out.

Bake for 45-ish minutes, or until you see that telltale golden brown color. And let the pan rest on a trivet for maybe 10 minutes—so the filling won't be too hot or too liquidy. This will give you plenty of time to take pictures of your design before you devour it!

Saturday Night Comfort Food: Baked Chicken With Mushrooms

2011-01-08T21:54:00.001-08:00

Saturday night is my favorite night of the week to stay in. All the douchebags are out and about, crowding up restaurants and bars. It's the one night I can actually find an available washing machine in my apartment building’s laundry room. And because I have the day off work, I can leisurely grocery-shop (the Met Foods is rarely crowded on Saturday) and cook dinner.

This evening, I was kind of feeling a mid-twentieth-century housewife vibe (okay, fine, when am I not?). I was also feeling extremely lazy. So I decided to make this update on those classic grosstastic suburban-mom dishes that involve dumping a can of cream of mushroom soup on some chicken and sticking it in the oven. I figured it would be low-maintenance and hearty. And it was.

However. Gentle reader, what you are about to read may shock you. You see, tonight I defied every principle of Brooklyn foodie-ism to prepare a meal that involved—yes—prepackaged, additive-addled food products. Luckily, if your body is a temple of loca-eco-susta-whateverability, you can easily skip said ingredients.

First, preheat the oven to 400°.

I sliced an 8-ounce package of mushrooms and 1 large shallot (or you could use 2 small, duh), then scattered them around the bottom of a roasting pan. You could actually double these proportions if you really like mushrooms; they cook down a lot.

I sprinkled the mushroom mix with about 2 tsp total of mixed coarse salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dried herbs (experiment with oregano, thyme, basil, sage, and/or tarragon). You can use more or less, to your taste.

I added 6 chicken thighs, skin side up, and sprinkled another 2 tsp-ish of the spice mix on top.

I added maybe 1/2 cup chicken stock to the pan (use 1 cup if you doubled the mushrooms and shallots), then slathered the chicken skin with some gravy I had left over in the fridge, because that’s how I roll. If you don’t have gravy, you could use about 1/2 cup sour cream.... Or, hell, you could use a can of cream of mushroom soup.

And yeah ... ummm ... I miiiight have added a schmear of Lay’s brand onion dip. (Which I only have on hand because The Rob eats it! No, seriously! Okay, fine, I like it too! Don’t judge me.) But you could obviously skip this. Anyway. Moving on.

Bake this dish for about 45 minutes, or until the chicken is nice and crispy and brown on top. You can drain the liquid from the pan and make gravy if you like. (I did.)

Adding to the prefab-food shame, I served this with (frozen White Rose brand) peas tossed in garlic butter with chives and—gasp!—Rice-a-Roni, chicken flavor.

Yes, I know you're scandalized. ("How can she call herself a food blogger?") And you could of course serve the veggies and rice or whole grain of your choice; this would also be good with egg noodles. But look, once in a while we all need a little bit of good old-fashioned American artificiality in our lives!

Coffee-Beer-Braised Short Ribs

2010-12-31T08:31:00.000-08:00

Gentle reader, read this recipe quickly, as it might soon be illegal. Since NYC has banned sales of Four Loko, that can of pure vile that equates to the alcohol of three beers and the caffeine of three cups of coffee, there could be trouble if the authorities get wind of this short-rib braise consisting of near-equal parts—you guessed it—beer and coffee.

Short ribs are a wonderfully rich and flavorful cut of beef; they’re inexpensive, though there is a fair amount of bone and fat going on in the cut, so I recommend buying a bit more weightwise per person than you would of a steak-type cut of beef. This is a great comforting winter dish to feed (and impress) a crowd, for waaay less money than a tenderloin or rack of what-have-you.

Although short ribs do need to be slow-cooked for a long time, they need no maintenance while they’re in the oven. I recommend cooking them a night or two in advance (I often multitask by browning and braising the ribs while I whip up a quick meal for that night). Another advantage of advance cooking is that once you put the dish in the fridge, the fat from the short ribs forms a solid layer on top of the liquid, which you can then skim off before reheating and serving.

Preheat the oven to 300°.

Sprinkle short ribs with salt and pepper and brown them over medium-high heat in batches, starting fatty side down and turning with tongs, in an oven-proof pot, lined with about 1 TBSP vegetable oil.

Once all sides of the beef are brown, remove them to a plate with the tongs.

Turn the burner heat up to high and add to the pot:

2 cups brewed coffee (cold and stale is fine)

1 bottle beer (preferably a brown beer like Guinness or Brooklyn Brown)

2 cups beef stock

2 canned chipotles in adobo (store the rest in a tight-lidded glass jar in the fridge)

1 cinnamon stick

Several cloves garlic, smashed

1/4 cup molasses or packed brown sugar

Salt and pepper

(These proportions are for about 3 pounds of short ribs; I would use more liquid for more meat, but not necessarily increase the seasoning unless you’re making LOTS more.)

When this comes to a boil, turn off the burner and add the meat back to the pan; if the liquid doesn’t cover the meat, add water or more stock until it does.

Cover the pot with an oven-proof lid (or wrap tinfoil tightly over the top) and put it in the oven. (You could doubtless do this dish in a slow cooker as well; however, not having the counter space for one, I am unable to advise you as to cooking time/procedure. Please weigh in with a comment if you have a hunch.)

Cook for a few hours, or until the meat comes right off the bone when you stick a fork into it. If in doubt, err on the side of cooking longer. Again, you can chill overnight, or just lift the meat out and serve.

This is great served over soft polenta in a wide, shallow bowl, or try it with mashed potatoes, egg noodles, or parsnip puree. You could reduce and thicken some of the remaining liquid with flour to make gravy to pour over the meat, or just lightly sauce it with the liquid (you don’t want it to be all soupy).

Happy New Year, everyone!

Saturday night comfort food: Lentil Soup

2010-12-21T08:06:00.000-08:00

Hello Holiday Hobgoblins

It was another Saturday night, and while I was feeling a bit better than the week before, I think I am in the midst of some winter doldrums. I won't lie, I'm very much looking forward to the completion of today, December 21st- I always feel better when the shortest day of the year is behind us. It may be imperceptible at first, but at least you know in your head, that the days are starting to get longer again. In the meantime, of course, I am doing what I can (and I hope you are as well) to stave off the winter downs... a lot of my weapons are food.

So bring out the weapons! I took some time on Saturday (curled up in a nice blanket) to page through the latest Bon Appetit. There were lots of lovely recipes for Christmas day- lamb, ham, spam. No, just kidding about spam. I'm a sucker for a rhyme. There was ALSO a recipe for a lentil soup. Being a sucker for a soup, a legume, and a new recipe, it won't surprise you to hear that I was completely taken in- What's better than hot lentil soup on a cold Saturday night? ok ok, a lot of things. but bear with me, this is a food blog.

I took a look at this recipe, and realized I had just about everything I needed for it in the kitchen, except for the "special" french lentils. It was Saturday. I decided to brave Fairway. I found the special lentils. I was good to go.

You can find the Bon Apetit recipe here: Lentil Soup Recipe!

Here's the fun I had with it!

I chopped a large onion, and tried to (more) finely chop a carrot. In retrospect, I didn't chop the carrot enough. I sometimes have trouble with the line between the fine chop and the mince, it's something I am working on. I heated a tablespoon of olive oil in a medium soup pot, and added the onion and carrot. About a 2 minutes into the onion and carrot cooking, I added a rib of celery that I had also chopped (I admit, I don't generally feel that a soup is complete if it doesn't have celery). A couple of minutes later, once the onions were transluscent, I added 3 cloves of chopped garlic. Once these aromatics are nice and soft (5 or so more minutes) add a couple of tablespoons of curry powder (at least 2, more if you feel like it) and once it's all nicely mixed together, add a cup of the French green lentils (Aren't they pretty? I found them in the bulk section of the organic section of Fairway) and 2 cups of water. Add some salt and pepper, turn the heat up to bring it up to a boil, then turn the flame down to medium and let the pot simmer until the lentils are tender, it should be about 30 minutes.

While the lentils are simmering, take, drain and rinse a can of chickpeas. Add them, two tablespoons of lemon, a crushed clove of garlic (instead of chopped), and 2 tablespoons of olive oil to a food processor to create a kind of "chick pea puree". I have to admit, I found this a little distracting. I was all- hummus? am I making a version of hummus? I ended up adding about another teaspoon of lemon juice in order to loosen the "chick pea puree" up a bit. Please keep in mind that I am trying a new recipe here, so I proceeded with a bit of caution, hence the added skepticism around "chick pea puree".

Once the lentils were tender, I added the "chick pea puree" and 2 tablespoons of butter to the lentils. It needed to be stirred to ensure everything was mixed together. I added a little more curry powder as well as some more salt and pepper, and a little water to loosen the soup up a bit. It was ready! I chopped a bit of a scallion for garnish, and sat down to eat. It was seriously delicious. I was nervous trying a new recipe, but it's such a straightforward recipe, AND when they give you the "while this is cooking" tip to put together the chick pea puree, you really do have time to execute other parts of the recipe. I really hate it when a recipe gives you like 5 minutes to prep a major part of the recipe. just one of my pet peeves.

So another Saturday night and i've got a good dinner (i admit it, in my head I'm singing the Cat Stevens song).

happy cooking!

alyce

ps- Got word from my mother, that the bacala has been purchased and is soaking. Seriously, DATES fans- bacala is a lovely fish, and you don't have to worry about it going bad, you just have to soak it (for a while, maybe a week)!

Saturday night comfort food: Aglia e Olio

2010-12-14T07:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

I was feeling kind of down. In truth, I was feeling really down. I was kind of at a variety of loose ends, unsure of what to do to cheer myself up. Luckily, I live right near the Red Hook Fairway, and decided to treat myself. I headed over, and decided I would impulse grocery shop. I put only things that really appealed to me in my grocery basket. Here's what I ended up with (in the order I picked it up):

* a pomegranate
* a bag of clementines
* a bunch of parsley
* baby spinach
* celery (see: bloody mary)
* head of garlic
* sweet onion
* fresh salsa
* good bleu cheese (see how i emphasized the "good" by spelling it "bleu"?)
* spicy V8 (see: bloody mary)
* barilla thin spaghetti
* tortilla chips

I had decided that I would indulge on snacks (chips and salsa, bleu cheese and crackers) while making myself my most favorite, most comforting dish ever: Aglia e Olio. If you're new here- guess what, I love garlic. I also love the simplicity of aglia e olio. pasta, garlic, parsley, olive oil, red pepper flakes, topped with parmesan. there is nothing better. I was going to feel better. I won't lie, I have eaten my feelings before, I figured I would try to make it a productive exercise for myself and you, dear readers, by chronicling a simple, straightforward, immensely appealing recipe.

The only two things that take time in putting this together, are preparing the garlic and the parsley. I opened a bottle of wine, I turned on "The Lady from Shanghai", cleaned parsley, and peeled garlic. I will admit I was sitting on the couch not in the kitchen. I will also admit I was eating chips and salsa in the meantime, so yes I was finally feeling a little better.

After getting a nice dose of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, i decided to get off the couch and start mincing. Before I got my knife out, I put water on to boil. Always good to get that water boiling. I took the full head of garlic that I had peeled, and just started rough chopping, continuing until i got down to a nice mince. The same mincing can be done with the 3-5 tablespoons of parsley.

I heated 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil over a low heat, and added 3/4ths of the minced garlic plus a few grinds of the salt grinder. Cooking most of the garlic slowly and over low heat with a little salt does a nice job of keeping the garlic sweet and mellow. Reserving a bit of the garlic to go in at the end will add the kick you want.

Hopefully by now, your water is boiling and you added your pasta (I went with thin spaghetti). The garlic is cooking slowly (~10 minutes or so, let it get to a nice light brown), your parsley is minced, you have a lemon and some red pepper flakes ready to go. Sit down, have some wine, you have a couple of minutes. Just make sure that as you close in on the end of the pasta cooking time, you reserve some of the pasta water- a half a cup is plenty. Once you've reached ~10 minutes on the garlic, the pasta should also be about done, you can drain it, and either put it back in the pot (with a little olive oil so it doesn't stick) or into a large serving bowl. Once your pasta is cooked. You can add the rest of the garlic, some more olive oil, the parsley, red pepper flakes, lemon juice, and ~1/4 cup of the reserved pasta water to the pan with the garlic. (Sometimes I add less pasta water, if I feel like adding more lemon juice) Keep in mind you are aiming for a looser sauce- adding the pasta liquid helps the olive oil, garlic and parsley become a more fluid sauce. Pour over your pasta. Add some grated parmesan. Enjoy.

I did, and I felt better (I'm sure it had nothing to do with that bottle of wine).

xo
Alyce

Thanksgiving 101: Using Up Leftovers

2010-11-30T13:25:00.000-08:00

What’s up with people saying “We have so many leftovers!” like it’s a bad thing? If you still have remains of Thanksgiving Day in your fridge, and you're sick of sandwiches, here are a few ideas on reducing, reusing, and recycling that food.

Most of your meal should still be edible five days out...but as always, gentle reader, we disclaim any liabilities for food-borne illness. (And yes, fine, maybe you could have used these tips a few days ago, but it took a while to recover from this meal's ensuing food coma, mmmkay?) If you're out of Turkey Day remnants, keep these tips in mind for future occasions when you've cooked too much.

Turkey

Turkey pot pie: Shred or chunk turkey; combine it in a gratin pan/baking dish with creamed onions, a handful of frozen peas and/or corn, and a few sliced mushrooms. Cover with a sheet of puff pastry, poke a few air holes with a fork, and bake at 350° until the pastry is golden brown and puffed.

Turkey tetrazzini: A great old-school pasta dish that is easily tweaked to be leftovers-friendly. Heat some cream-sauced green beans and mushrooms from your green bean casserole in a saucepan with shredded turkey; toss with pasta.

Curried turkey salad: Do this. But with turkey.

Stock: The turkey carcass you’re left with is ideal for making stock. You can freeze the stock in plastic pint and/or quart containers from Chinese take-out, sour cream containers, or what have you, and it will keep long enough to be used in your next Thanksgiving dinner, so it’s all, like, circle of life, or something.

Cranberry Sauce

Cranberry sauce or relish can be folded into quick breads, cakes (e.g., banana bread, lemon pound cake), or muffins. You can freeze the cranberries in Tupperware for a couple weeks if you’d like to make said quick breads to give away as Chrismukkah presents. (More on this soon.)

Spinach/Artichoke Dip

A little leftover spinach/artichoke dip would be great folded into an omelet. If you have a good amount of it (though that seems highly unlikely), you could chop it into chunks and distribute it across a pie crust or sliced potatoes, then pour an egg mixture over it to make a quiche or a frittata, respectively. Choosing to include cooked bacon would be excellent.

Mashed Potatoes

Potato Croquettes: Mix mashed potatoes with some grated Parmesan and a lightly beaten raw egg. Roll ice-cream-scoop-sized balls of the potato mix in panko bread crumbs. Chill balls on a baking sheet in the fridge, then fry in butter.

Shepherd's Pie: Leftover mashed potatoes are ideal for a shepherd's pie topping; use browned ground lamb or beef, or do a variation with leftover turkey.

Brussels Sprouts

Pasta: Toss roasted sprouts with pasta, cooked bacon, and grated Parmesan.

Pies/Desserts

Do what the Beez did and throw a dessert party for your friends. Make them bring wine and/or champagne. Slice up the desserts so they don't look picked-over. Who says holiday entertaining has to be expensive?

And with that, BGC's Thanksgiving 101 series is complete, and Chrismukkah draws nigh! Time to move on to visions of ~~sugarplums~~ beef tenderloin and potato pancakes. And cookies—lots and lots of cookies! Stay tuned....

Brooklyn Thanksgiving 2010: A Menu Recap

2010-11-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

So, Thanksgiving came and went, and we did pretty damn good, if I say so myself.

Other than a minor mutual meltdown when The Beez and I mistakenly thought we had ordered a “maple-crusted” turkey (The Rob, who was nice enough to pick it up, remarked that we were one of only two orders placed at the Brooklyn Fairway for a Maple Crest turkey, and a game of Telephone ensued), we managed to execute our entire menu sans agita. Thanks to our OCD planning of the grocery shopping and menu, there were no last-minute freakouts (though we may not have been smiling quite as widely as the ladies pictured above right, gentle reader).

We decided to do a dry brine on the turkey due to refrigerator-space constraints, and while I would still use the wet-brine method for smaller cuts of meat, I think this will be our go-to method for Thanksgiving turkeys henceforth; it turned out incredibly flavorful and moist, and we didn’t have to deal with the logistics of chilling a 20-lb. turkey in a massive vessel of liquid.

Here’s the menu we ended up with (to serve 12):

Brooklyn Thanksgiving 2010

~Appetizers~
Beet, Cheddar and Apple Tart
Deviled Eggs with Curry Filling
Pumpkin-Mascarpone Phyllo Cups
Hot Spinach-Artichoke Dip
Bacon-Wrapped Dates
Lamb Stuffed Mushrooms

~Soup~
Curried Heirloom “Musque de Provence” Squash

~Main~
Dry-brined Maple Crest Turkey
Brussels Sprouts with Shallots
Muffin-pan Potato Gratins
Green Bean Casserole with Fried Shallots
Cauliflower with Herbed Breadcrumbs
Creamed Onions
Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Paprika-Spiced Pecans
Pull-apart Onion Rolls
Cornbread Stuffing
Ritz Cracker Stuffing
Stove Top Stuffing
Variety of Cranberry Garnishes

~Dessert~
Maple Cheesecake with Roasted Pears
Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie
Pumpkin Pie
Apple Pie
Fruit Crumble
Olga Cookies

Full disclosure: My mom made the cranberry sauces (well, other than the canned one) and the pumpkin and chocolate pecan pies—the latter, I must say, was a total knockout. And the "Olga cookies," a.k.a. your garden-variety back-of-the-package chocolate-chip cookies, were brought by Aunty Olga, as they have been brought to every family holiday since the dawn of time...or, at least, of Aunty Olga, who is actually our great-aunt. Basically, you would need NASA to do the math on the number of Tollhouse morsels that have met their end in her oven.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T07:32:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving y'all!

(just channeling a little paula dean. I know you can't see me, but I promise, I'm holding a stick of butter)

So today's the big day, and of course, I mean big football day. But seriously, my lovely co-blogger has been doing a wonderful job of providing fantastic thanksgiving day tips for preparing the big meal (thanks Kitty!), and as I type this, I am sitting in my parents living room, the (relatively small) 13 lb bird, is sewn up, in its olive oil coated brown paper bag in the oven.

This olive oil coated bag ends up speeding up the cooking time by about 25% and does a great job of keeping the bird from drying out. Keep in mind that you need to find a paper bag without any ink/supermarket logos/any decorations at all. Think plain, brown, paper. You don't want ink leaching into your bird. Of course, this method limits the basting aspect, and also means you can't see the turkey as it cooks, but that's the beauty of the bag. It keeps all the good stuff in!

So. That's the only Thanksgiving day tip you guys are going to get from me. In truth, Thanksgiving isn't my favorite food holiday. I know, I know, it's blasphemous, but in my house, we do the traditional Italian 7-course fish dinner every Christmas eve, and it is, without a doubt, my most favorite food day of the year. Leading up to Christmas, I will keep you all posted on what we've got planned, and help with the DATES craze that has taken Brooklyn by storm!

As for Thanksgiving, my mom tells the story of how when she was growing up, my grandmother, who isn't much of a cook, always made the turkey. My grandfather, who was much of a cook, always made a lasagna. So I like to say that my "meh" attitude towards turkey is genetic, however, I would be lying if I didn't say that it might also be connected to an event I now call "Turkey Gate 2005". In brief, it was 2005, we had cooked a lovely meal- Turkey, stuffing, cranberry, onions, yams, broccoli, all the fixin's, we sat down to eat early in the afternoon, all was good. Except with me. There was clearly something wrong with me, and after a torturous night of... unpleasantness (I don't think I can ever apologize enough to my sister, with whom I share a room while I am home) at 2 am I went to bathroom, and it all came up. Undigested. I was very ill.

For years following Turkey Gate 2005, we had an array of poultry on Thanksgiving- Duck, Cornish Game Hens, take your pick. Now we're back to turkey, and it is going to be a wonderful meal, with friends, family, good food, football (go pats!) and of course, my favorite, wine!

So happy Thanksgiving to you all, I hope everyone is having a wonderful day!

Alyce

Thanksgiving 101: Turkey! (And Pan Gravy)

2010-11-23T13:50:00.000-08:00

Before we begin, could we all take a moment to be thankful for the fact that I did not title this post "Talkin' Turkey" or something equally cheesy? You're welcome! Now, since we don't have much time before T-Day, let's get right to the point: how to ensure the bird is prepared properly and deliciously.

Now, there is no one exact right way to cook a turkey, although there are certainly right and wrong things to do with each method. I’m personally a proponent of going the classic roasting route, but if you want to do your bird deep-fried (I’ve sampled such a bird and found it surprisingly non-greasy)—or whatever other trendy method you’ve read about—go for it. I would just suggest doing a trial run if you’re trying a brand-new technique; a holiday meal where everyone is gathered is not the best time to experiment.

First, figure out how much turkey you need. For a smaller group, you might want to consider doing just a bone-in turkey breast, which still has an ooh-and-aah-inducing effect presented on a platter. For a larger group, consider buying an extra package of drumsticks in addition to the whole bird, so nobody has to fight over them. (Apologies if you could have put this advice to use sooner, gentle reader; planning my own feast and, oh yeah, working for a living have been sucking up precious blogging time!)

I am a fan of brining the turkey, though this is not necessary. A lobster pot or even a brand-new plastic garbage barrel are good vessels to contain the bird and the liquid, which tend to be heavy. You can brine the bird overnight; if refrigerator space is an issue and you live somewhere the temperature drops below 30° at night, you can keep the container on your porch. (This year, we're doing a dry brine since The Beez's fridge isn't big enough, and it's supposed to be like 50° in Brooklyn. Thanks a LOT, global warming!)

There are plenty of websites where you can determine the cooking time for your weight of bird, but keep in mind brining could make it cook faster, and every oven is different, so keep an eye on it. Remember that it will continue to cook through while it's resting.

Let the turkey rest at room temperature for maybe an hour before you put it in the oven. This should be fine food-safety-wise; however, BGC is not responsible for readers who contract salmonella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh, or any other food-borne illnesses, for that matter. If you're stuffing the cavity, the stuffing should also be at room temperature.

Before putting it in the oven, sprinkle the turkey skin and the inside of the cavity with salt (unless you brined it) and pepper, and rub the skin with butter or oil. (Alyce's mom soaks a paper bag in oil and puts the turkey inside to keep it moist.)

Above: Two recent Thanksgivings past. Note my predilection for wearing patterns that are as stain-concealing as possible.

I also sometimes put chopped herbs (e.g., sage, thyme, rosemary) between the skin and the breasts, or whole sage leaves as pictured above right; to do this, carefully sever the center membrane with a paring knife or kitchen shears. Then slide your hand between the skin and meat to loosen the skin, and stuff in the herbs, spreading them as far back as you can reach. (Do not get skeeved out! You can wash your hands in a minute, for God's sake.)

If you're making pan gravy, put the neck and giblets in the roasting pan to add to the flavor. You could also contribute to gravy flavah by putting a couple carrots and/or leeks or sliced onions under the turkey; you won't actually eat these, they'll get strained out and discarded once the bird's done. (Pan gravy instructions below.)

Baste, baste, baste! This will keep the turkey moist and also afford you opportunities to check on the cooking process. But I wouldn't open the oven door more than once every 20 minutes, or the heat will get lost and the cooking process will take longer.

If the legs start to get crispy and brown before the main carcass, tent them with aluminum foil. Likewise, if the exposed part of the stuffing gets too crispy, cover it with foil.

The bird should rest for about 15-20 minutes after cooking (check one of those websites for exact times).

During this time you can make the pan gravy: Pour out all but a couple tablespoons of the drippings from the pan into a gravy separator, and discard the entrails, carrots, etc. Heat the roasting pan over a burner. Sprinkle it with about 1/4 cup flour and scrape the bottom of the pan to release the yummy bits. When the flour mix is medium brown, add your pan drippings (if you don't have a gravy separator, pour off the grease on top), plus chicken stock as needed, whisking to mix. Bring it to a boil, then let it simmer to the desired thickness, and strain out any solids before bringing it to the table in a gravy boat.

I suggest bringing the whole roasted turkey to the table on a platter; allowing guests to ooh and aah and take pictures on their phones; then returning it to the kitchen where it can be dismembered out of sight. Think of it like an actress at a premiere doing red-carpet photos and then immediately being whisked off by handlers to the VIP area. (The metaphor kind of breaks down when you get to the part of bringing the carved-up turkey back to the table, but we won't worry about that.)

Carving the turkey can be intimidating, but there is usually one guest who enjoys doing it, so ask for volunteers. (In our family, we have an aunt who brings her own electric carver to dinner and wears the top to my mom's old karate uniform in lieu of an apron; I call her the Turkey Ninja.) Rather than making slices lengthwise off the breast, you can remove the entire breast from the bird and then slice it crosswise.

Now it is time to eat! Give thanks that you can finally sit down and enjoy the meal. Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!

Thanksgiving 101: Timing Is Everything

2010-11-17T14:34:00.000-08:00

Timing is a challenge in any kind of cooking—and especially when it comes to a meal as ambitious and symbolically significant as Thanksgiving.

Much as I love the fact that my cousin and I have taken over making our extended family's T-Day dinner, there are always some performance-anxiety jitters about getting everything on the table on time. In fact, in the week or so leading up to the big meal, I invariably have an annually recurring nightmare that we are supposed to serve dinner at 4:00 but it's 3:30 and the turkey has not gone into the oven yet. (Seriously, it's a really specific dream—even my subconscious is anal-retentive.)

To keep you from getting Butterball-related butterflies in your stomach, here are some tips on Thanksgiving-dinner time management.

First, as soon as you get your groceries, check them against your shopping list to make sure nothing is missing. Better to send someone out to the store right away than to discover on T-Day a missing ingredient that derails a dish.

The cardinal rule: Anything that can be made in advance, should be. This means almost everything except turkey, gravy, and mashed potatoes, and possibly green vegetables (but seriously, who eats green vegetables on Thanksgiving? Unless they are from a can, mixed with cream of mushroom soup, topped with Funyuns, and baked in a casserole dish—in which case they can be made in advance).

Make a timeline of when to prepare various dishes (sometimes in stages—e.g., you can make crust for pumpkin pie one night, filling the next). Be sure to compare this against your menu so nothing slips through the cracks.

For the timeline, make a list of tasks under Tuesday and Wednesday (yes, it's an epic process, this) in no particular order. Then for Thursday, include times, working backward from when you want to serve the main meal. For instance, if your dinner is at, let's say, 4 PM and guests are arriving at 2:30 PM, you'd be like: "2:15 PM: Reheat hot appetizers" and "3:45 PM: Let turkey rest; make gravy." (Or: "3:58 PM: Open can of gravy and heat." I won't judge…well, okay, maybe just a little.)

Don’t freak out if you have scheduled your Thursday to-dos and find yourself running behind! Just be sure to have plenty of wine on hand (or Dora the Explorer DVDs for the little ones) so people don't mind if they have to wait a little longer for dinner.

It's also a good idea to identify a relative or two whom you can conscript as a sous-chef as needed—one who will (a) be helpful, (b) not try to call the shots, and (c) be unfazed by you barking orders and running around like a crazy person with bits of stuffing in your hair.

Conversely, DO NOT under any circumstances let that toxic, passive-aggressive douchebag [insert name of relative fitting this description] into the kitchen, as s/he will undermine you and discombobulate you, throwing you off your timing rhythm. And food thrown in frustration across the kitchen cannot be unthrown.

Last but most important: ~~You're there to spend quality time with your family, and the food is not the most important thing, so don't stress too much about making everything perfect.~~ Ha-ha, yeah, right. AS IF the food is not the most important thing. Anyway, don't overcook the turkey. Thanksgiving will be ruined.

Thanksgiving 101: Meal Planning

2010-11-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

Planning the Thanksgiving menu is exciting and daunting at the same time. You don't want to serve so many dishes that preparing and heating them becomes unmanageable—but nothing would be worse than not having enough to eat on the most gluttonous day of the year. I use a chart to get a handle on the menu and keep all relevant recipes handy. Not only is this chart illustrated below for you, gentle reader, but it has been populated with links to many BGC recipes that might be welcome on your Thanksgiving table!

Our Thanksgiving meal is usually a mix of tried-and-true family favorites, and new recipes culled from cookbooks, magazines, and the Interwebs. I recommend that you compile a list of dishes for each course (appetizers; soup, pasta, and/or salad course if you do that; turkey, sides, and accoutrements; and desserts) and then add/whittle down to what seems appropriate for your size group. Try to think about what can be made in advance and reheated, and what others will be bringing—and bear in mind the limits of burner and oven space.

Below (after the jump) is a sample menu. You could add more fields to your chart -- e.g., how much to multiply a recipe by; how many days in advance a dish can be prepared; a "Vegetarian?" checkbox to gauge whether meat-averse guests will have enough options; and so on. If a recipe is not online, you might want to note the cookbook/magazine issue date it comes from, and the page number, in the Recipe field.

THANKSGIVING MENU
Course	Dish	Recipe
Appetizer	Hummus	http://tiny.cc/xj584
Appetizer	Babaghanoush	http://tiny.cc/jv9c1
Appetizer	Pan-grilled Flatbread	http://tiny.cc/d10u8
Appetizer	Potato Pancakes	http://tiny.cc/t970g
Appetizer	Spicy Squash Seeds	http://tiny.cc/ifmuh
Soup	Curried Butternut Squash Bisque	http://tiny.cc/0ezuv
Main	Brined Roast Turkey	Brine recipe
Accoutrement	Mushroom Gravy	http://tiny.cc/eqplw
Accoutrement	Canned cranberry sauce w/lines	n/a
Accoutrement	Canned cranberry sauce w/ no lines	n/a
Side	Stuffing, cornbread *	TBD
Side	Stuffing, saltine *	Mom will make
Side	Stuffing, Stove Top *	Back of the box
Side	Roasted Brussels Sprouts	http://tiny.cc/dwsmv
Side	Roasted Potatoes	http://tiny.cc/qunxj
Side	Roasted Fennel	http://tiny.cc/ifmuh
Dessert	Pumpkin pie	TBD
Dessert	Pecan pie	TBD
Dessert	Sweet potato cake	TBD
Dessert	Chocolate chip cookies	Aunty Olga will bring

(We'll fill in the TBD fields with links to cookbook recipes and/or new BGC posts.)

* One final note: Please be accepting of the fact that you may need to make several kinds of stuffing, especially if you are hosting a blended/extended family, as stuffing is an emotionally and culturally charged thing. For instance, along with the cornbread stuffing I like, we serve a saltine-based stuffing for my stepfather and (gulp) a package of Stove Top for The Rob. Yes, it goes against everything I stand for to prepare a prepackaged mix on the foodiest day of the year... but hey, it's his family tradition, so who are we to judge?

Thanksgiving 101: Grocery-Shopping Template & Tips

2010-11-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

For the past few years, my cousin The Beez and I have more or less hijacked the planning and preparing of our extended family’s Thanksgiving dinner. And while hosting Turkey Day (or Tofurkey Day, if your relatives are hippies) for a crowd is many people’s worst nightmare, we get totally geeked out about it, to the point of making multiple spreadsheets for planning purposes. (Oh, you snicker now, but if you skip our advice and end up running out to 7-Eleven at 4pm on Thanksgiving Day for canned cranberry sauce, who will be laughing?)

This year, rather than schlepping on the Bolt bus on the most nightmarish travel day of the year, we are having T-Day right here in Brooklyn, chez The Beez. The prospect of not leaving the mother of boroughs is a massive relief to both of us. And I would like to pass that stress savings along to you, gentle reader; hence Thanksgiving 101, the BGC guide to Thanksgiving planning!

Herewith, the first installment of we-haven't-decided-how-many-yet in our Thanksgiving 101 series: how to gather all the groceries you need without running around town like a turkey with its head cut off. (See what I did there?)

Back to those spreadsheets: A key one is the grocery list, organized into columns by food category so that you're not running back and forth from aisle to aisle. If there are certain items you expect that you will only be able to get at a specialty store, keep these separate at the bottom, so they don't slip through the cracks when you're crossing stuff off at your local Try-N-Save.

Here is a partially filled-in sample of the list (and I do mean partially—for our family meal, this baby usually stretches to, like, 30 rows). You can download the template here. Obvi, you could add or delete your own categories.

REGULAR GROCERIES
Produce	Meat	Dairy	Dry/Canned Goods	Baking	Misc. & Non-Food
Onions (5 lb)	Turkey (20 lb)	Heavy cream	Canned cranberry sauce	Brown sugar	Frozen spinach (2x8oz pkg)
Leeks (4)	Italian sausage (1 lb.)	Eggs (2 doz.)	Chick peas (2 cans)	Semisweet chocolate	Phyllo dough
Butternut squash (2 lb.)		Parmesan cheese (1 lb.)	Pecans (8 oz.)	Cornmeal	Aluminum sheet pans
Brussels sprouts (2 lb.)		Buttermilk	Pumpkin puree (4 cans)	Yeast	Wooden toothpicks



SPECIALTY ITEMS
Morels	Prosciutto	Creme fraiche	Jarred chestnuts		Beef demiglace
	Ground lamb	Mascarpone cheese	Dried cherries		Xanax

A few other shopping tips:

Make your list by going through each recipe on your menu. You can update quantities of ingredients that dishes have in common as you go (think eggs, butter, etc.)

Check your pantry and see what needs to be restocked. You might think you have enough flour, but for Thanksgiving, you probably don’t.

When bagging at the grocery store, try to keep all your refrigerated items together. It will make it easier to just put those bags away first when you get home. (I always bag all my groceries by category so I can organize them more easily in the fridge/freezer/cupboards, but you may not be that OCD.)

Above all, be flexible, and willing to adjust your menu. There is always going to be one ingredient you can’t find in stock, and rather than make yourself insane going to three stores, just accept that you will either tweak the dish, 86 it from the menu, or replace it with something simple (e.g. mashed sweet potatoes) that doesn’t require more than a couple of ingredients.

More Thanksgiving 101 posts to come, including menu-planning tips and ideas, and prep countdown timeline! Meanwhile, you can practice the shopping-by-category method for your regular grocery trips. Tell me that doesn’t save time.

Note: Special thanks to Debzita for helping me remember the name of the supermarket on The Simpsons.

sunday night meal- yep, chicken

2010-10-31T19:51:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Earlier this month, I was sick for over a week, which is very much out of the ordinary. I get sick every once in a while, but don't normally feel under the weather for more than a few days at a time. I eat a lot of garlic, take vitamins, have a balanced diet, etc. etc, which makes me surprised when it happens, but every once in a while a cold just takes me out. And I got taken out. One of the side effects was a loss of appetite. Don't get me wrong. i was eating. I knew I needed to eat, but I didn't have any cravings, I didn't feel hungry. I wasn't having any "oooooh, where's my sushi at" moments. Normally I crave. I think about what I want to eat, I work to make it happen.

It was a tough couple of weeks.

Thankfully, I got my appetite back last night! And in honor of that, I wanted to make a nice sunday dinner that would help set me up for lunch for the rest of the week. I didn't have the energy to do a full Fairway shopping, and I had a fair amount of stuff in my fridge that was fair game, so I went to the market with a small basket, and picked up a few things. They were having a sale on chicken breast, $1.99/lb, so i got 5 large boneless skinless chicken breasts for less than 11 dollars. I felt flush. I picked up a few other things I needed for the week and went home.

I had a long day of football ahead of me, so I did a few prepatory things in the kitchen- washing some veggies, emptying the sink of dishes, and then i went about my day.

When I got home after a nice Patriots win (go pats!), I had less than a half an hour before game 4 of the world series, and the Steelers-Saints game started. I knew it was unlikely that I would have everything completed by 8 PM, when the games were slated to start, but I wanted to give it a try.

My plan was for rice, broccoli and chicken. My rice and broccoli routine are pretty straightforward (steam the broccoli, brown rice cooked slow), but I don't often do anything but grill boneless skinless chicken breasts, and I didn't want to stand over it in a pan. my mind was on baking so i could go watch my games.

So I went to my favorite cook book, America's Test Kitchen. It is a great cook book that is in 3-ring binder format, so you can remove just a page for ease of recipe-reference on the counter. I looked at the Poultry section to see what they said about baking chicken. It looked like 450 degrees for 50 minutes (give or take 10) was the baseline consensus. That was for skin-on bone-in chicken, my chicken was no-skin, no-bones, but I started from there.

I preheated the oven to 420, took a small square glass baking dish, and sliced up a half of an onion and 1 potato into small pieces to line the bottom of the pan. I grated some ginger and crushed a clove of garlic into a small bowl with ~1 tbsp of unsalted butter, and microwaved that to melt the butter. I rinsed 2 of the chicken breasts, patted them dry, and salted and peppered them before placing them in the small baking dish. Once in the dish, I took the microwaved mixture of butter, ginger and garlic, and spooned it over the two chicken breasts. I would normally use my silicone basting brush, but it managed to disappear, so instead, I used a spoon to spread the mixture evenly over the chicken, patting it with the back of the spoon to make sure that the entire exposed surface of the chicken had at least been brushed with butter. I put the pan into the oven, with some foil loosely over the top of it (since there wasn't any skin of the chicken to protect it).

My plan was to check on it in ~30 minutes or so- maybe take the foil off at 35-40 minutes. It was 8:30. In an hour I had managed to get the rice, broccoli and chicken on the stove, and I sat down to watch some mid-season sunday night football, world series baseball, and write up this post. 15 minutes into the 30 minutes I was giving everything, I realized that I had some crushed tomatoes in the fridge, leftover from a recipe I made last week. I am Italian. I feel you can add crushed tomatoes to anything. so I pulled the chicken out of the oven, and poured the crushed tomatoes around the edge of the dish. I figured, this would cook into the potatos, and keep the chicken from getting too dry. In addition to believing whole-heartedly that crushed tomatoes can be added to anything, I also hate wasting things. you get my drift.

After 30 minutes in the oven I turned the temperature up to 435, and spooned some of the now-tomato sauce over top of the chicken. After another 15 minutes or so, I turned the stove off and let it sit. From start to finish, I think the chicken took an hour and 5 minutes, with ~50 of those minutes spent sitting in the oven. There aren't any magical tips here, or a recipe for making the most to-die-for chicken you'll ever eat, (or any awesome ways to use condiments!) but for the amount of effort I was willing to put in, I got a Sunday night dinner, as well as a 3 lunches for the week, and that really made my night.

happy cooking!
Alyce

Honey-Mustard Roast Chicken

2010-10-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

This recipe, and with it one of my fundamental tenets of thrifty cooking, had its genesis in a memorable meal my mom made when I was young. Not having much in the fridge, she ran out to the car and grabbed some of the plastic-encased condiments that were always stashed in the glove compartment. These proved to be honey-mustard packets from Chicken McNuggets, which were then still novel and advertised by the short-lived Birdie character (so I must have been about seven or eight…I mean, a fetus. Did I say seven or eight? Because I meant a fetus).

Anyhoo. Said packets were used to glaze roast chicken drumsticks, and Honey-Mustard Roast Chicken, a future staple of my cooking repertoire, was born…as was my belief that good recipes can come from small packets—and leftovers—so you should never throw out your take-out condiments.

Start with a package of chicken drumsticks (about 8) or whole (thigh + drumstick) legs (about 4). You can leave the skin on or try this trick for removing the skin while retaining some of its flavor/fat in the finished dish.

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Line a shallow roasting pan or metal baking sheet (don’t use a pristine one, it’s gonna get greasy up in here) with tinfoil. (If you're a total ecorexic and feel like spending four hours of your time scrubbing the pan is worth it to avoid that foil spending eternity in a landfill, feel free to skip the foil. I reduce, reuse, and recycle six ways till Sunday, but my laziness trumps my greeniness once in a while.)

Place a pat of butter in the pan, and put it in the oven for a few minutes, just until the butter melts. Tilt the pan to spread the butter around.

Sprinkle the chicken on both sides with coarse salt, ground pepper, and about a tablespoon of paprika (or use a spice rub of your liking).

Place the chicken in the pan, top side (i.e., the one that would be facing out were it still attached to the chicken) facing down. If you removed the skin, make sure the pan's bottom is well coated with butter and/or chicken fat; if not, add a bit more.

In a small bowl, mix a tablespoon of curry powder with about 1/4 cup honey and 1/4 cup Dijon or stone-ground mustard. (Alternatively, use fast-food honey-mustard packets from your glove compartment.)

After roasting the chicken 10-15 minutes, use a fork or tongs to flip the pieces. Be careful not to rip apart the chicken so it sticks to the foil; you can slide a spatula under it if necessary for easy release.

Tip: I cannot recommend strongly enough using a silicone basting brush to baste—they are heat-proof and about a bajillion times easier to clean than old-school hair-bristle brushes, so you never have to worry about contaminating your melted chocolate with raw chicken, or getting stray brush hairs in your food.

Brush the now-on-top side of the chicken with some of your honey-mustard mix.

Return the pan to the oven. After another 10 minutes or so, flip the chicken again and baste this side with honey-mustard as well. After another 10 minutes, flip and baste again.

In total, these should cook about 30-45 minutes, with the thigh-on legs likely on the longer end of the spectrum than the drumsticks. You want them to get nicely roasty-browny-crispy.

Along with being easy and cheap, this is a very flexible dish; you can experiment with different spices (cumin, coriander) and/or substitutions like agave syrup for the honey. Any leftovers will be yummy cold, or you can shred the meat into a chicken salad. Try it and I'm guessing it'll become a staple of your weeknight-family-meal repertoire. Birdie the Early Bird may be long lost to the annals of Gen-X pop culture nostalgia, but the legacy of those fateful sauce packets lives on.

Branzini- what's that?

2010-10-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

Greetings all,

Apologies for my extended absence. There has been an addition to my family (new nephew!) and then i got sick. really sick. so all the soupiness that BGC has been focusing on has been even more helpful in my time of ill.

My mom was in town over the weekend, taking a little tour of the NY, NJ, Philly area to see some family members (who knew October was such a family-oriented month?) and in her Fairway run to pick up the additional ingredients we needed to make a soup for sick ol me, she couldn't resist the fish counter- they had fresh whole branzini (aka mediterranean sea bass).

So they filleted them up for her, and she brought them home. By the end of the day, our soup making and general lazing about had both exhausted us and filled our tummies, and the branzini fillets remained in the fridge untouched. I promised her that I would cook them up today, while i stayed home and continued my recovery, and I figured it was worth documenting for the fantastic cause of Operation DATES (Developing A Taste for Eating Seafood).

As you can see from the photo, these fillets of branzini are thin and delicate. These types of delicate fish fillets are perfect for sauteeing, as they cook quickly, and don't require too much fussing. Main point is that they don't have to be intimidating if you aren't too used to cooking fish. Per my mom's wise instructions, i patted the fillets dry, and put together some flour with salt, pepper, and a little cayenne. I lightly dredged the fillets, and heated a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a frying pan until it shimmered. I laid the (very thin) fillets in the pan, skinless-side down, and let them cook about 4 minutes per side.

I read that when sauteeing, always lay the nicest looking side down first, as the first side down gets the nicest, even-est brown. I am not sure if this is true or not, but I figure since one side had skin, and one didn't, i would try laying the skinless-side down. This worked fine, but next time, I might try skin-side down first, just to see how it goes.

Once the fillets were done, I set them aside on a plate with a paper towel to wick out any residual vegetable oil, and "tented" them. This involves taking a piece of foil and placing it over the cooked food in a tent style, so that the foil is folded, and the center crease is above the food. the foil doesn't need to touch the food, nor does it need to be folded under the plate. This serves the purpose of keeping the food warm, without trapping in the heat to further cook the fish with steam.

To the pan in which the fish was cooked, I added 2 minced garlic cloves, a half cup of canned crushed tomatos (I had a large can of crushed tomatos open from a slow-cooker meal I prepared earlier, and wanted to use them) as well as a plum tomato, chopped medium, a tablespoon of capers, some chopped olives, salt (but just a pinch, as the capers and olives add a nice salty flavor), pepper, and crushed red pepper. I let this cook for a few minutes, and then added about a half cup of white wine in order to make it a little saucier, also because wine+sauce=yum. I cooked it for a few minutes longer to allow the sauce to thicken, and then added some minced cilantro.

I like to taste as I go, it helps me to not only cook the dish I am making more to my taste, but also to get a feel for how the dish changes as I add things. This helps me to better gauge how i want to make dishes in the future.

Once the sauce was finished, I took a fillet, peeled off the skin (it came off very easily), and put a nice helping of sauce over the fish. I know, the plate looks a little empty, and needed a side of salad or rice, but I'm sick, so give me a break.

The end results of the Branzini, Operation DATES, experiment was a nice, delicate fish with a strong, almost briny sauce. It had a little kick from the cayenne in the coating, and the crushed red pepper in the sauce, and I always like a little kick.

So get out there and cook some fish! other fishes that would work this way are fillet of sole, flounder, tilapia, the list goes on. When you stop at the fish counter in the grocery store, look for thin fillets, and don't be afraid to ask the person behind the counter, they are very knowledgable and usually happy to help!

Roast Panko-Mustard-Crusted Lamb With Rosemary Potatoes

2010-10-22T22:49:00.000-07:00

My friend Jacqueline recently returned from a trip to Portland, Oregon, where she visited our Brooklyn-expat friends J.J. and NeNe and their new bay-bay. Baby is really cute, super happy for them, yadda yadda yadda…point being, Jackie brought me back some rosemary from their backyard and some nice seedy mustard from Kruger’s Farm Market, and I wanted to do justice to these lovely ingredients. And what goes with rosemary and mustard like lamb? Duh.

For two, I got two round-bone lamb chops, about .60-.65 lb. each. This preparation would also be great with a rack of lamb for a dinner party, but I would recommend Googling the cooking time for its weight, and searing all sides of the meat in a pan before you do the mustard schmear/crumbing.

On a cutting board, pile 5 or 6 cloves of garlic, the needles from one stick of fresh rosemary, and a sprinkling of coarse kosher or sea salt (about 1 tsp). Chop this until it is very fine.

Tip: To remove sprigs of rosemary quickly from the stick, hold the top of the stick between the thumb and forefinger of one hand; directly below that, encircle it tightly between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand. Pull the stick up with the first hand and the leaves should all fall off.

Halve 4 new (a.k.a. red) potatoes and then quarter the halves. Toss the potato wedges in a couple tablespoons olive oil, half the garlic-rosemary mixture, and salt and pepper to taste. Arrange them on a foil-lined roasting pan, ideally with the skin side down to prevent them sticking. Put the pan in the oven.

Dredge the lamb chops (both sides) in a mix of 1 TBSP olive oil, 1 TBSP soy sauce, 1 tsp. ground black pepper, and 1 TBSP Dijon or grainy mustard.

Add the remaining half of the garlic-rosemary mix to another couple tablespoons of mustard, and schmear this mixture on the top half of each lamb chop. (If you were doing this with a rack of lamb, you’d want to schmear the fatty side, and again, you might want to sear the meat on all sides in a pan on the stovetop, then let it cool slightly, before this step.)

Sprinkle panko bread crumbs over each chop until the surface is completely covered. Press down gently with your palm to ensure the crumbs stick to the mustard mix, which should act as a kind of glue binding the crumbs to the meat.

After they’ve been cooking for 15 minutes, toss the potatoes, push them to the sides of the pan, and add the lamb chops to the pan (you may want to slide a spatula under them so all the panko doesn’t fall off).

Return the pan to the oven. After 15 minutes, turn down the heat to 375° and toss the potatoes again. Cook about 15 more minutes, tossing the potatoes once or twice more. (So, your lamb cooks about 30 minutes total, the potatoes 45. They should be crispy outside and squishy inside, and the panko should be nicely browned.)

That’s it! I served this with steamed green beans, a cucumber-and-feta salad, and a ~~nice~~ $4.95 bottle of Merlot-Malbec blend. I also had some leftover mushroom gravy that I heated up, but The Rob said the meat was so good it didn’t need gravy—which, regular readers may recall, is unprecedented; hence I deemed the dish blog-worthy. Gentle reader, please do try it (BTW, this cut of lamb was like $5.99 a pound) and let me know if you concur!

Mushroom Gravy

2010-10-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

The expression “It’s just gravy” suggests that gravy is something optional, a gratuitous bonus above and beyond the essentials … the proverbial icing on the cake. Gentle reader, this is not the case in our household, for The Rob regards gravy as effectively being a food group. He considers it as essential an accompaniment to a steak, a pork chop, or a piece of chicken as a green and a carb, and I can’t say I blame him. (Come to think of it, a cake without icing is pretty incomplete as well, but that’s a post for another day.)

These proportions will serve two people with a couple of steaks or chops or a chicken, but can be easily multiplied. I served it with grilled pork chops in a soy/mustard-based marinade; green beans with shallots, bacon, and garlic; and mashed potatoes, which are also, to The Rob, incomplete without gravy.)

Melt a couple tablespoons of butter over low heat in a small saucepan.

Add a minced shallot or half a minced onion, stir, and sauté on medium-low until the shallot is soft and translucent.

Add about 4 oz. mushrooms, sliced. (I like to use cremini mushrooms, sometimes billed as “Baby Bellas,” because they have a lot more flavor than supermarket white mushrooms, for usually about 50¢ more per 8-oz. package.) Sprinkle with kosher or sea salt and stir. Cook, stirring often, till the mushrooms are soft.

Gradually sprinkle a couple tablespoons of flour into the pan, mixing it into the sauté with a fork or whisk.

Now turn up the heat and gradually add a couple cups of stock, mixing in with a fork or whisk. Beef stock will probably work best for beef or pork, chicken or vegetable stock for poultry. (As always, I recommend using a no-salt or at least low-salt stock if you buy a commercial one, so you can control the amount of salt—or, better yet, use a stock you made yourself.) If you want it to be more like a mushroom sauté than a gravy, add less liquid.

Optionally, you can add a dried bay leaf or the leaves from a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme.

Let the liquid boil, then turn it down to medium/medium-low and whisk. It should settle into being bubbly but not boiling. Cook for about 10 minutes, whisking occasionally; the liquid should thicken into the consistency of, well, gravy. If it cooks down too much too fast, add more stock or some water. If your meat’s not yet done, you can keep whisking in liquid and cooking it down while you wait for it (or just turn off the burner, and reheat it when the meat is done).

After your meat rests, you can pour the juices from the plate where it rested into the gravy. And/or you can finish with a splash of wine or sherry—red wine will work better with beef stock, white with chicken or vegetable stock; sherry will cover all the bases. You could also stir in a splash of heavy cream at this point to turn this into a cream gravy.

Now, your entrée is truly complete! And everything else is just…well, you know. (See what I did there?)

Technique: Substituting Whole-Wheat Flour in Baked Goods (Without Making Them Suck)

2010-10-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Tweaking recipes to make food healthier is a noble endeavor, but all too often it is achieved at the expense of taste and texture. Case in point: substituting whole-wheat flour for all-purpose in baked goods. Whole-wheat flour has more nutrients such as fiber, because in white flour, those nutrients have been refined out. But those same qualities are what can make baking with whole-wheat flour result in leaden, tasteless, dense, gluey-yet-crumbly lumps that would function better as doorstops than as treats.

However, hot on the heels of my life-changing sandwich-packing innovation (okay, fine, let's say lukewarm on the heels—look, I've been busy), I have another technical kitchen breakthrough to share: how to use whole-wheat flour in baked goods without making them too dense or gluten-y.

You can try this technique for less-sweet baked goods like bread and flatbread; semisweet ones like muffins, biscuits or banana bread; and even—more cautiously—on sweet baked goods like cookies, doughnuts, and cakes, which are harder to incorporate whole-wheat flour into, because their texture is intended to be lighter and crumbier.

First and most importantly, don't try to substitute whole-wheat for ALL of the white flour in your recipe, unless you think that muffin-shaped doorstops would make lovely holiday gifts for acquaintances you secretly dislike. You want to swap out just a percentage of the flour. I would suggest starting with a quarter, and if the recipe turns out successfully, you could work your way up to a third, then maybe even a half, on subsequent attempts.

But here's the real trick: Balance out the whole-wheat flour with the equivalent amount of cake flour, which is finer than all-purpose flour, and has very little gluten (which is what can make whole-wheat baked goods gluey). So, for example, if your recipe calls for a cup of all-purpose flour, you would use 1/4 cup whole-wheat flour, 1/4 cup cake flour, and 1/2 cup all-purpose flour.

Note: It's not necessary that the wheat flour constitute EXACTLY 25 percent of the total flour, just that it be balanced by the cake flour and not too heavy in the overall context of the recipe. In other words, if your recipe calls for an amount of flour that isn't easily divisible, don't knock yourself out doing math; just accept having a slightly higher percentage of all-purpose.

Say, for example, your recipe calls for 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour (which the cookie recipe on a 12-oz. package of Tollhouse semi-sweet chocolate chips might, although it's not like I know it by heart or anything). I would do 1/2 cup whole-wheat flour, 1/2 cup cake flour, and 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour, rather than agonizing over how to divide up the extra 1/4 cup. (For the record, that would be 2 TBSP all-purpose, 1 TBSP wheat, and 1 TBSP cake flour, so you see why it's just not worth it.)

If you want to understand more about how various types of flours differ…well, Google it or something. What do I look like, Alton Brown? I told you I was busy. This concludes today's lesson.

Pack a Non-Soggy Sandwich for Lunch At Last!

2010-10-06T13:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I had the very cool opportunity to attend a reception for Popular Mechanics’ annual Breakthrough Awards, which featured demonstrations of these amazing scientific innovations. And clearly, upon my return home, I was inspired by that spirit of innovation. Except, instead of thinking of ways to benefit human beings’ quality of life via genetics or engineering or green energy, I opted to do so by improving the quality of their sandwiches.

Although I doubt this particular innovation will make next year’s awards list, I am nevertheless pretty excited to have developed a method that solves a major and persistent problem in our fast-paced modern workaday society: how to pack a sandwich for work or school the night before, without the bread ending up soggy and bloated like a body that Benson and Stabler just dragged out of the East River. In fact, my new technique ensures that—brace yourself—the bread remains completely impervious to moisture absorption the next day. Suspend your disbelief, gentle reader, for it is true! Behold, the future of sandwiches is here now!

I like to use a bulkie roll for this, but you can use regular sandwich bread, or whatever.

Lightly toast the bread or, for a roll, slice it in half like a hamburger bun and toast the bottoms of the halves. (I learned this tip from a Tom Colicchio article: When the inside of the bread is toasted but the outside isn’t, it is resistant to mushiness and does not cut the roof of your mouth.)

Once the toasted bun has cooled, take a leaf of Boston lettuce, which is the rounded kind used to make lettuce cups—see where I’m going with this?—and place on top of the bottom half. Schmear your mayonnaise and/or other condiments on this.

Layer on your meat/main filling (deli turkey, bacon, tuna salad, roast eggplant, what have you), followed by veggies (e.g., roasted peppers, or tomatoes or cucumbers—I recommend removing the seeds to be extra cautious; you can either use a corer on your cucumber or squeeze a cut half of your tomato before slicing).

Either blanket this mixture with cheese slices, or if you don't have cheese (what is wrong with you?), reserve some of your meat/filling to layer on top.

Fold in the edges of the Boston lettuce leaf. Cover this with another leaf, dome side up, and then tuck the edges of that leaf underneath the bottom one. Repeat that step with another lettuce leaf going crosswise. Put the top of the roll/other slice of bread on top and ever so gently press down.

Now you have a sandwich containing a little tamale-like package that will keep all the moisture in your ingredients sealed and safe from your bread! Plus it helps keep your filling from spilling out! You can even safely cut the sandwich in half, though I recommend wrapping it in wax paper first and slicing it with a big bread knife, like they do at delis.

The filling of the "Eureka!" sandwich prepared in this engineering experiment consisted of shredded leftover honey-mustard roast chicken (which I’ll post the recipe for soon), jalapeño Jack cheese, cucumbers, a touch of mustard, and mayo. I packed this sandwich for The Rob's lunch (I had leftover kale, white bean and kielbasa soup, which I’ll post the recipe for soon), and he attested today that, indeed, there was no moisture leakage into the bread ... confirming that I have indeed achieved a transformative scientific breakthrough in sandwich preparation. Popular Mechanics, are you listening?

Curried Butternut Squash Bisque

2010-09-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

Summer in New York City has a kind of charmed quality, and come every autumn, I mourn the passing of another magical season of sun, strappy dresses, and (cold, gray, polluted) surf. But there are a few things making their annual debut in September that console me for the loss of summer: squashes, soups, the new season of 30 Rock, pies, and—ever since The Rob entered my life—New York Rangers hockey. This post concerns the first two, though future ones may touch upon the fourth…and possibly even the fifth, since God knows Alyce uses every excuse she can to gratuitously mention the Celtics. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

But I digress. On a recent evening, the aforementioned The Rob’s dinner suggestion was squash soup, which struck me as a perfect choice to put a positive spin on the fact that the temperature had just dropped 20 degrees from the day before. (Obviously, we have soup on the brain lately at BGC.)

The ingredients for a big quantity of this bisque are really cheap; it freezes very well (you’ll want to wait to add cream until defrosting the soup). I like to use chicken stock, but you can make this recipe vegetarian with vegetable stock.

Start with—wait for it—a butternut squash. (The one I used for this recipe was on the medium side, say 1 pound; one great thing about soup is, you can easily adjust the proportions of liquid and seasonings in relation to your main ingredient[s]).

Prep the squash by following this post's instructions and then chop it into approximately one-inch-ish cubes. You're going to puree it all later, so you don't have to worry about your pieces being symmetrical or any of that aesthetic stuff.

Melt a few tablespoons butter with a small splash of olive or vegetable oil (to prevent the butter from burning) in a heavy saucepan over medium heat.

Add the chopped squash.

Add a diced white onion.

Add 1 Tbsp. yellow curry powder, 1 tsp. coarse kosher salt, 1 tsp. paprika, 1 tsp. cumin, a dried bay leaf, 4 minced garlic cloves, and an approximately inch-long piece of ginger root, peeled and minced. (All these measurements can be tweaked to suit your taste; just go easy with the salt.) Stir with a wooden spoon to blend.

Cook for about 5-10 minutes, until the squash is slightly softened and the onions are translucent, stirring every few minutes. Keeping the pot half-covered (the lid on the side of the pot) will make this go faster, but do leave some ventilation.

Turn the heat up to high and pour in a splash of white wine, chicken or vegetable stock, water, sherry, or white wine. (Gentle reader, I used beer.) It should immediately get bubbly and sizzly. Scrape the bottom of the pan to loosen whatever brown stuff is stuck to it. This is called deglazing and really adds to the depth of flavor of your soup.

Pour in 2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock and 2 cups of water (unsalted or low-salt is highly recommended; if you have full-salt stock, you might want to do 2½ cups of water to 1½ cups stock). With the burner still on high, bring the liquid to a boil.

As soon as it boils, stir it, turn the burner down to medium, and partially cover the pan. Let it simmer, stirring occasionally, until the squash is soft enough to be easily smushed against the side of the pan with your wooden spoon. (Add a little more water if it looks like too much liquid has cooked off). Turn off the burner.

Remove the bay leaf from the pot and discard.

Now puree the mix until it's smooth. An immersion blender works best here since you don't have to deal with pouring the hot soup into a blender or food processor and then transferring it back to the pot; if you don't have one, let the soup cool off a few minutes. If necessary, transfer the soup back to the pot.

Stir in about half a cup of heavy cream (you can skip this and add a little more water if you desire, but come on). Note: If you plan to freeze the soup, wait to add the cream until after you defrost it. (You could also ladle out some for freezing, and add proportionately less cream to the remainder that you're planning on serving immediately.)

Turn the burner heat on low and reheat the soup. Before serving, taste it to see if it needs any more seasoning, or if the consistency is too thick or too thin. If it's too thick, you can add a little more water; too thin, let it cook down (uncovered) for a few more minutes.

Here are some suggestions for garnishes for the soup:

Croutons (pictured)
Toasted squash seeds (here's how to make them)
Crumbled bacon (you can fry the bacon in the pan, then cook the squash in the leftover grease plus some butter)
Chopped chives
Chopped scallions
Frizzled shallots
Fried sage leaves
Fresh thyme leaves
Diced red pepper
Dried red pepper flakes
Shaved Parmesan cheese
A slab of Brie or St. Andre cheese (this would work great in addition to chives or fresh herbs)
Chopped toasted pecans
Matchstick-sliced Granny Smith apple
Matchstick-sliced jicama
Roasted garlic cloves
Mexican crema or creme fraîche (also good with chives)

Please leave your own suggestions in the comments!

Hey! Don't Throw That Away! Part 2: Potato Leek Soup

2010-09-19T07:46:00.001-07:00

Hey all,

If you had a chance to read my last post about chicken stock, you know it was the start to a fun weekend of cooking.

So it was the end of the week, and I had all this lovely chicken stock. We were coming up on labor day weekend, and holiday weekends in New York tend to be a great time when enough people leave that it seems like the city is empty. This empty city led to a text from a friend, asking if i was in town, and if so, i could go and pick up their CSA http://www.localharvest.org/csa/. I happily agreed, not being a member of a CSA myself, to partake in fresh veggies. So on Saturday morning I headed down the block and picked up: 4 carrots, a bunch of beets, 2 leeks, a bunch of kale, 4 heads of garlic, a bunch of yellow wax beans, 4 ears of corn, and two onions.

It was such a wonderful experience, to get to the park and take the allotted veggies from the containers full of freshly harvested, organically farmed beautiful vegetables. When i got home I assessed the bounty and decided (among other things) to make a potato leek soup.

I had a couple of potatoes in the cupboard, two fresh leeks, plenty of chicken broth, and fresh parsley growing on my roof. So I cut away the roots and the dark green parts of the leeks, slice the leeks, lengthwise, down the middle, and immersed them in water to clean them. Leeks can get very gritty, and because their layers are so tightly packed, I have found that the only way to adequately clean them is to take them apart with the one slice down the middle, and then soak them well, changing the water a couple of times as needed.

I got onto epicurious, as I recalled them having a very straightforward recipe that I have used as a starting point for this soup in the past: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Potato-and-Leek-Soup-11599
Aside from the leeks, potatoes, chicken broth and parsley I already knew I had, I also had the unsalted butter the recipe called for, as well as garlic and cayenne powder, that weren't listed in the recipe, but that I used.

Once the leeks are clean, chop them into small-medium sized pieces, they do not need to be too small or too uniform.

Mince 3-4 cloves of garlic

Cook the leeks and garlic in 1 tablespoon of butter with salt and pepper and a couple of dashes of cayenne for about 10 minutes, covered, over moderately low heat, until the leeks are nice and soft. I used to be a culprit of cooking everything over too high a flame. Then when I started cooking on my current stove, where I have different sized burners and had more control, I learned to use the burners and flame levels differently, and have had a lot more success.

Once the leek-garlic mixture is softened but not brown, add 2 and a half cups of chicken broth and the diced potatoes (The recipe I have linked above calls for 1 1/2 cups of water and a cup of broth, and peeled potatoes- but- I had lovely (unsalted) homemade chicken broth that I was excited to use, and I didn't think the potatoes I had on hand needed peeling... so I didn't peel them)

Cover, turn the heat up a bit (depending on the size of your burner) so that your soup comes to a simmer, and let it cook for about 20 minutes, until the potatoes are soft.

Pour ~1 cup of your soup into a food processor or blender, and puree. Return the puree into the pot, and stir it into the soup, along with 2 tablespoons of minced parsley.

The soup will need salt (and pepper) if you used unsalted butter and unsalted broth, so add it to taste, and sit down with your bowl of soup.

This is the beauty of fresh ingredients and a simple recipe, you can tweak it to your tastes- I added garlic (i know you're shocked) and cayenne, and used more broth than called for. However, you could very easily add cream in place of some of the additional broth if that's your preference. So enjoy the start of soup season, and get cooking!

Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans

2010-09-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

I once attended this awesome lecture class at the Natural Gourmet cooking school, taught by Annemarie Colbin, whom I admire very much for proving that it’s possible to believe in holistic health and nutrition without being pretentious or preachy. To wit: At one point she said something like, “I just know there’s something medicinal about bacon. I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s just so delicious, there has to be!”

That quip came to my mind while making Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans (above left), since if you operate with the assumption that bacon is indeed somehow medicinal, this would be, like, the healthiest dish ever. You could, of course, omit the bacon and just use olive oil to sauté your veggies, but bacon is a great complement to bitter greens and really just brings all these flavors together.

(Also, you could use kale instead of chard, though I might discard the stems and use solely the leaves, and also cook it about 10 minutes longer. But I love red chard [above right], because it cooks into such a pretty pink color.)

Cut up 3 or 4 pieces of bacon, preferably thick-cut, into Listerine-breath-strip-sized pieces, and cook over medium heat in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan until just cooked through (you don’t want crispy for this, even if that’s your breakfast preference).

While your bacon is cooking, chop off the stems of 1 washed bunch of red chard. Trim off the bottoms and discard, then chop the stems into roughly half-inch pieces. Stack the chard leaves and chop them roughly into strips, perpendicular to the stem line, then run your knife through in the other direction a few times.

Once it’s done, remove bacon from the pan and drain on paper towels. Being very careful, pour out most of the liquid bacon fat into an empty tin can, or down your sink with the hot water running. Leave the last tablespoon or so, with the yummy brown flecks, in the pan.

Return the pan to the burner and add 1 TBSP or so of olive oil.

Add the chopped chard stems, sprinkle with kosher salt, and stir with a wooden spoon. Splash a bit more olive oil in if the chard doesn’t look coated.

Dice half a red onion and stir it in.

Dice 3 or 4 garlic cloves and stir them in.

After stirring occasionally for 5 minutes or so (the chard should be starting to soften), stir in about 1 TBSP balsamic vinegar. Follow with about ½ cup of chicken or vegetable stock and turn up the heat to high. When it gets bubbly-boily, turn it back down to medium.

Stir in the chopped chard leaves and another sprinkle of salt. They are going to cook down a lot, like all greens.

Stir in half a can of cannellini beans, drained. (Drain the liquid from the can directly into a Tupperware container, then add the other half-can of beans and refrigerate or freeze.)

Return the bacon to the pan. Keep stirring every couple of minutes until the greens are wilted, i.e. not too chewy and tough. Serve with a slotted spoon so any leftover liquid doesn’t spread all over your plate.

This recipe could serve three or four as a side dish; for two, we ended up with leftovers. I served it as an accompaniment to roasted lamb chops and potatoes (above right); you could instead toss it with spaghetti and Parmesan, which would give you a pretty healthy and cheap one-dish meal for two, with protein from the beans, vitamins from the greens… and, of course, the mysteriously salutary qualities of bacon.

Hey! Don't Throw That Away! Part 1: Chicken Stock

2010-09-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
I had such a great weekend of cooking, that I wanted to share some of it with you. To tell you about it, i have to go back about two weeks, on a Sunday afternoon when i decided to roast a chicken in order to have some food options for the coming week (which just happened to be my first week of work at a new job!). This decision to roast a chicken, combined with a few other happenings, led me to a fun cascade of cooking decisions.

First, and it's pretty exciting, so it bears repeating- I got a new job! When i spend my days in the office, I try to pack a lunch as frequently as possible. This preference is a combination of my dissatisfaction at the lunch choices available to me on a regular basis, and my cheapness. I don't always manage to pack, and I definitely enjoy a dose of Chipotle every once in a while, but this particular week being my first week, I enjoyed chicken for lunch in a few different forms. When all that was left was a carcass, it was the end of the week, and I decided to make some chicken stock.

If you haven't made it before, it's very easy to make, and about a hundred times better than bouillon cubes (but trust me, I use bouillon cubes all the time). Take a chicken carcass, a couple of carrots, an onion, ribs of celery, garlic cloves and bay leaves. Take a look at the photo above. See that there's chicken skin in the pot? Don't do that! Take as much of the chicken skin off the carcass as you can before you put it in the water. You don't want fatty stock, and while you can definitely skim off the fat later, it is easier to not have it in there from the start.

Chop the vegetables roughly, and throw them all in a pot together with enough water so that everything is bobbing around the pot. It's good to get some other flavorings in there as well, some whole peppercorns, parsley, thyme, whatever you have on hand, dried or fresh. For fresh parsley and thyme, throw in the whole lot, stems and all, it will only add to the flavor.

Bring the whole kit and kaboodle to a boil, then turn it down and simmer it, covered, for a couple of hours.

Strain the broth, (you can discard the vegetables and spices), return the liquid to the pot and simmer on low heat with the cover off until the liquid is reduced by a cup or two. See the white spots on top of the liquid and the white layer around the edge of the bowl? That's the fat from the chicken skin that I shouldn't have put into the pot- There's nothing wrong with this, and I skimmed the fat from the surface, but you can avoid this very easily by not putting the skin in there in the first place.

You'll be left with a good 4-6 cups of stock that you can use for all types of recipes. One of the beauties of having (and freezing) homemade chicken stock on hand in the fall is that it makes fall soups. So it was the end of the week, and suddenly I had all this lovely chicken stock... ~~Stay tuned for~~ "Hey! Don't throw that away! Part 2" ~~coming soon!~~ -- Potato-Leek Soup -- is here!

How-to: Cutting Butternut Squash / Toasting Squash Seeds

2010-09-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

Fall—a.k.a. squash season—is just about here! A recipe for curried butternut squash bisque is forthcoming on BGC…but for now, I thought I'd get everyone in the squash spirit with a quick how-to on cutting butternut squash, which can be daunting since it's so dense. As you may have learned from experience, randomly hacking away with a kitchen knife is likely to result in a frustrating "Sword in the Stone"-type moment.

(Plus, below is a bonus how-to on toasting seasoned squash seeds, which make a great healthy munchie or a sophisticated garnish—throwing the raw seeds out is such a waste!)

Cutting Butternut Squash:

Peel the squash lengthwise with a vegetable peeler. You may need to go around the underside of the base in circular motions once or twice.
Chop off the stem and the knobby part of the base.
Cut the squash crosswise right above where it starts to get bulbous—so you end up with one round piece and one cylindrical-ish piece.
Cut the top (cylindrical-ish) piece in half lengthwise.
Cut the bottom (bulbous) piece in half lengthwise.
Scoop out the squash seeds with the tip of the vegetable peeler or a spoon. (Set aside the seeds in a bowl to make the spicy seeds below.)
Scrape the inside of the squash cavity to remove the stringy threads from the sides (it needn't be totally pristine.)

Now, you can slice your squash into wedges for roasting, cubes for soup or baby food, or whatever other shape your recipe calls for—and you won't have a sore shoulder from trying to slice through it whole.

Toasting Seasoned Squash Seeds:

Using your fingers, remove as much of the stringy pulp stuck to the seeds as you can.
Toss the seeds in salt, garlic powder, paprika, and a splash of olive oil.
Bake the seeds in a single layer on a baking sheet at 400° for about 5 minutes or until they're crunchy. (Check them compulsively—left unattended, they burn in no time!)
You can garnish a soup or salad with these or just munch them straight from a bowl as you would spiced nuts.

Happy squashing!