Spinach-Cheese Crepes With Bacon

Gentle reader, remember how I told you that I made spinach-cheese sauce … and that I would tell you what I did with it … and that it would involve bacon? Well, let this post go on the record as proof that I do not lie to you.

This crepe main dish is the latest episode in my ongoing quest to negate any and all health benefits involved in eating green vegetables. Yes, I actually took spinach and mushrooms and made them as cholesterolicious as a croque monsieur. Look, I had some bits of Swiss and some other sharp cheese that was getting crusty around the edges, so what else COULD I do? As the French, who invented crepes and cheesy sauces (I think) would say, je ne regrette rien. (That’s French for “sorry, not sorry.”)

I premade the sauce by cooking some bacon on medium until tender, not crispy, in a saucepot, and draining off the grease but leaving the wee brown bits. I then added half a stick of butter and once melted and bubbly, stirred in a chopped half shallot and 4 mushrooms sliced thin, with those slices then halved.

Sarma- aka Stuffed Grape Leaves

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!

Hello Gnocchi!

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.

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

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.

Chicken Potpie

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.

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

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.

Grilled Flatbread

Despite dire hurricane predictions, I went to Provincetown, on the very farthest tip of Cape Cod, with my cousin over Labor Day. The whole weekend turned out gorgeously sunny and cloudless, with the exception of a rainy Friday night…which we made the most of by grilling out on the deck.

Now, since I have no outdoor cooking options at home in Brooklyn, when I am near a grill, I want to use it as many ways as I can. This dinner involved grilled pork loin with marmalade glaze, grilled asparagus, grilled corn on the cob, mashed potatoes with shallots and sour cream (not on the grill—not everything can be on the grill), and grilled flatbread.

I’ve loved making bread on the grill for years, but always consulted a recipe. In the “rainy day” spirit that ultimately anticlimactic Hurricane Earl begat, I decided to wing it by making up my own, all seat-of-pants-like. Gentle reader, it turned out awesome. The process does take a couple hours, although 75% of that time is spent waiting for the dough to rise. (It has to rise twice; I strongly suggest reading through this whole recipe before you start so you can time-manage.)

Hoisin Pork With Scallion Crepes

Sounds fancy, right? But the skills required to make this pseudo-Chinese dish are on a par with those involved in brushing pre-made barbecue sauce on meat and whipping up a batch of pancakes with Bisquick batter. Not that either of those ingredients are involved, mind you--I’m just saying if you can do those, you can make this.

To further assuage any pancake performance anxiety, this recipe is proportioned so that, for two people, you should have either (a) leftover crepes or (b) enough crepes even though you messed a few up and had to throw them out. Accepting that some things will end up in the garbage is a necessary prerequisite to kitchen experimenting. Nothing ventured, nothing eaten!

Start with three or four pork chops: Boneless is easiest since you’ll be slicing them after cooking, but those big, thin bone-in chops that have some darker meat on them would be good for flavor. Marinate them in about a quarter cup of hoisin sauce, which you can find in supermarkets and some bodegas; it keeps forever in the fridge and can be used as an insta-marinade for any meat.

(If you have some, you can add about ½ teaspoon of five-spice powder to your hoisin marinade. Do NOT go all, “Oh, I like really spicy food,” and dump in more, because five-spice powder is not about heat; it’s a pungent mix of stuff like anise and licorice and cinnamon, and if you add too much your meat is going to taste like a sachet from a dresser drawer. Even if you’re into that George Costanza eating-meat-in-bed-is-erotic thing, this will not taste good, trust.)

Chocolate Ice Cream

Some people buy an ice-cream maker on impulse and never use it—as if it were something horrible like a treadmill. As for me, I got an ice-cream maker a few years back and, for a while, used it so often that I wondered whether an A&E crew might show up to stage an intervention. After not using it for at least a year, I busted it out upon finding myself with five egg yolks awaiting a purpose. (Why I had five egg yolks in my fridge is a whole nother story involving a cake and two batches of royal icing, the first of which went wrong. Actually, that’s pretty much the whole story.)

This is a pretty easy recipe for a ridiculously rich chocolate ice cream (though you should know it won’t be ready till the next day). If you don’t have an ice cream maker, just post on your Facebook or something that you want to borrow one. I guarantee one of your friends who just got married will have one they’ve never even taken out of the box.

Chili Cheese Pie

Among the joyful signs that summer has arrived in Brooklyn are the appearance of Mr. Softee trucks, Red Hook taco vendors, and stoop sales. It is a triumph to score a $50 hardcover coffee-table cookbook that was hardly, if ever, even cracked open, for a few bucks.

A few weekends ago at a BK stoop sale, I acquired Alfred Portale’s Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook ($5), plus a vintage original 1984 edition of Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres ($1), both utterly pristine (except for a super-endearing inscription in the Portale, “Merry Christmas '97, Handsome”--which led to a whole discussion speculating about whether one of the guys I bought it from had written it to the other and they were just clearing house, or if the current boyfriend had demanded that the cookbook inscribed by the ex be put out at the stoop sale. Being a romantic, I assumed the former and was crestfallen when someone to whom I was eagerly showing my finds pointed out the possibility of the latter. But I digress).

Flipping through the Martha book, I instantly fixated on a recipe for Corn Cups Filled With Beef Chili, and decided to adapt it into a full-size entree pie.

This recipe can be done in under an hour -- you just add the hot filling to the baked pie crust (which is REALLY EASY TO MAKE, I SWEAR), so you can make your filling as the crust bakes. (Of course I felt the need to top the whole thing with cheese, requiring a few more minutes of oven time, but that’s your call.)

This would be a great meal for a family with kids; it looks like a cross between hamburger, pizza, and pie, and feeds plenty of people with one big dish. It can include a variety of veggies and could be done with ground turkey or chicken, or just beans if your fam is vegetarian.

Chicken Marsala, Sorta

This recipe came about at the suggestion of Rob, who requested "Chicken Marsala over egg noodles.” Though I didn't follow a proper recipe for it, we were both very happy with the resulting dish.

Here's my non-authentic (primarily because I didn't use Marsala wine) version of Chicken Marsala (serves 2, multiply as desired):

Take thinly sliced chicken breast cutlets and slice them in half lengthwise. Put these in a Ziploc bag containing about a half-cup of flour, and a healthy pinch each of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dried basil if you have it.

Experiment: Pork Dumplings

Chinese-style fried pork dumplings have been an idée fixe of mine lately, thanks in part to the unbelievable ($4.75 for eight) ones from Eagle City, my much-beloved (especially when hung over) Chinese-Mexican restaurant on Fulton St. I made my own variation on these dumplings--using purchased square wonton wrappers, I’m not THAT ambitious--and was pretty thrilled with the results. (Read: I ate about 17 in a sitting.) Here's what to do...

Mush together in a big bowl (use your hands, don’t be afraid) about a pound of ground pork or ground chicken (this is a total non-exact-measurements-required recipe) and some chopped garlic, chopped ginger, a little soy or teriyaki sauce, a handful of chopped chives (or chopped scallions), kosher or sea salt, and a scattering of red pepper flakes.