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Friday, May 9th, 2008

🦋 Autumn Leaves

You want to know what is a really excellent pasta? Foglio d'Autunno, is what. I bought a bag this evening to go with the dinner I was making for Ellen, and man -- I don't know if I have ever tasted a more pleasant pasta. It's really surprising, since noodles are usually made in regular shapes; these are like little irregular lumps of pasta in different colors. I recommend it.

This recipe was inspired by A White Bear's Cauliflower Pasta Sauce. (For reasons too complicated to explain in this short context, you can log in to AWB's recipe site using as a password, the initial letters of the phrase "Why Must You Be Such A Little Bitch?") I was scanning through the wiki this afternoon looking for a dinner recipe; my eyes kept coming back to that one. Thanks AWB for reminding me of the existence of asiago cheese, which I had somehow forgotten about.

Modified Cauliflower Pasta Sauce

• one red onion
• garlic
• one head of cauliflower
• a bit of spinach
• grated cheese, asiago or romano

Sauté the onion, garlic and cauliflower in olive oil for a good long time, about half an hour. It's ready when the the cauliflower gets tender and pleasant to bite into. At this point you should put pasta into the water that you have been bringing to a boil.

Add a few handfuls of cheese and the spinach leaves to the pan. As the cheese starts to burn, pour some liquid over it and stir well. (AWB used broth, I used white wine.) Turn the heat down to a simmer.

When the noodles are ready, toss everything together in a bowl and serve.

posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

🦋 Summertime Salad

Ellen made this salad for dinner last night, and it was very tasty. She remembered it from a Greek restaurant she ate at when she and Sylvia were in D.C.

Watermelon and mint salad

• Watermelon, cut into bite-size chunks
• Bucheron, cut into small pieces (the restaurant used feta cheese; Ellen used bucheron because it was on hand. I think the goat cheese was great.)
• Scallions, chopped thin
• Kalamata olives, pitted and cut in half
• Fresh mint leaves

Mix everything together in a bowl and serve. The juice from the melon will combine with the cheese to make a fabulous dressing.

posted morning of May 20th, 2008: Respond

Friday, June 6th, 2008

🦋 Salad

Wilted spinach salad is one of my old favorites. Tonight, I figured out how to make it without bacon, since Ellen and I are trying to limit slightly, how much fat we are eating. The figs have a similar flavor profile -- sweet and smoky. The mushrooms give a meaty texture.

Vegetarian Spinach Salad

Serves 2

• about ½ lb. baby spinach leaves, picked, washed, and dried
• a bunch of scallions, washed and chopped
• 5 dried figs, chopped small
  (fresh figs would probably be good too)
• 6 mushroom caps, cut into quarters
• olive oil
• sherry vinegar*
• balsamic vinegar
• grated pecorino romano

Combine spinach, scallions and figs in a salad bowl.
Heat oil in a heavy skillet; when hot, add mushroom caps. Season with salt and pepper and saute a minute or two.
Pour vinegar into pan -- about one part sherry vinegar to two parts balsamic to six parts oil. Quickly remove from heat and pour over salad. Toss salad up into skillet so that it gets warm and wilted.
Top with grated cheese.

This makes a very nice, light dinner served with bread and cheese and red wine.

*(I had some sherry vinegar on hand from when I was making Redfox's Onion Jam recipe -- so I thought I'd use it. It seemed to give a very nice flavor in this dressing, though I can't think of any other salad where it would really be appropriate. It's not an ingredient I'm really familiar with.)

posted evening of June 6th, 2008: Respond

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

🦋 Two recipes: a snack and a meal

Haven't posted any recipes in a while; here are two -- no real connection between them except that I've made both in the last couple days and both have some tangiential relationship to my parents being in town.

Fruit and Nuts

Sylvia and I were playing backgammon this afternoon and needed a snack. Well my parents brought along with them the fruits of the Central Valley, in the form of a big bag of almonds and a big bag of dried fruit from their friend Indira's farm. It's been a while since I had fresh almonds; they are the bomb. Here's one way to prepare them:

• Roast nuts in a skillet over a high flame. Shake the pan every minute or two so they don't burn. You can sprinkle on top a bit of salt, pepper, cinnamon and sugar. The nuts are ready after about 7 minutes, when you start to smell the toasty flavor.
• The pan will be quite hot; turn the flame off, remove the nuts and put some pieces of dried fruit (peaches, apricots, plums) in. Press them down so some bits of the flesh burn onto the pan. Then pour in about ¼ cup or less of water -- little enough that the remaining heat in the pan is enough to boil it. Put the fruit in a bowl and pour the liquid over it.

Chicken Lo Mein

Thursday morning, my parents took Sylvia to Kam Man Foods, the Asian supermarket in East Hanover, to buy ingredients for making dumplings -- they also got a chicken, a bag of lo mein noodles, and some vegetables.

• One chicken
• ginger
• garlic
• scallions
• soy sauce
• rice vinegar
• bok choy and/or other green vegetables
• mushrooms (those little white ones with the long stem and round cap are best; I don't remember what they're called.)

1. Remove skin and bones from chicken. This is a pain and takes me a while; basically you just pull the skin off and trim away any gristle, and then cut the meat off of the bones. Save the carcass and skin for making stock. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces.
2. Peel and chop ginger and garlic and scallions.
3. In a wok, heat some oil over a high flame. Add the ginger, garlic and scallions and sauté briefly. Then add the chicken and stir-fry until it's just about done. Put some water up to boil while you are doing this and chop the vegetables.
4. Pour some soy sauce and vinegar over the chicken and add the vegetables. Stir well and cover the wok. While this is steaming cook the noodles -- they take about a minute in boiling water.
5. Drain the noodles and stir them into the wok. Serve.

   posted evening of November 8th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, December 25th, 2008

🦋 Cooking on Christmas

Here is a nice activity for a wintertime holiday which you don't observe, when you feel like staying inside comfortable with your family: Sit in the kitchen listening to/playing music and make stock, then make soup.

Lentil Soup with beef stock

• Inexpensive cut of beef with bones in it.
• Onions, carrots, celery, garlic
• Bay leaves, fennel seed, peppercorns
• Lentils and any vegetables you like -- I am trying Swiss chard here.
• Potatoes and/or rice

If there is a lot of meat on the bones, trim it off and reserve. Roast the bones with some onions, carrots, celery and garlic chopped roughly and some bay leaves, fennel seed and peppercorns. When it is sizzling and starting to brown, put it in a soup pot, fill with water, and bring to a boil. Allow to simmer a half hour to an hour, then strain.

In the bottom of a soup pot, sauté some salted onions and garlic and any meat you reserved from the stock bones. (Bacon might also be a nice addition here.) Add carrots and celery and when it is looking soft, lentils and starch. Sauté briefly and then deglaze with red wine, and add stock. Simmer for an hour or so and season to taste.

posted afternoon of December 25th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, July 4th, 2009

🦋 Cruda

Today I made a raw tomato salsa that came out pretty well. Here is the recipe:

Note: part of the target audience for this is Sylvia, who does not like spicy food, so there is only a little bit of heat in it from the garlic. Add spicy peppers according to taste.

Salsa Cruda

Spices: (all measurements extremely approximate)

• 1 tbsp. fennel seed
• 2 tbsp. cumin seed
• 1½ tsp. rock salt
• 3 cloves garlic

Vegetables:

• 2 large tomatoes
• 1 red onion
• 1 bunch cilantro

Wash vegetables; pluck leaves off of cilantro. Roast fennel and cumin until the seeds start to pop, i.e. about 2 or 3 min. over a high flame. Grind spices in a mortar; add and grind salt, then add the garlic and mash it all together. This is easier if you slice the garlic fairly thin first.

Dice the tomatoes and onion fairly small, and chop the coriander fine. Put all ingredients in a bowl with a pinch of salt, toss together.

This is ready to use right away but improves with an hour or two in the fridge.

posted afternoon of July 4th, 2009: Respond

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

🦋 Blanched

Here is a chicken salad recipe that I came up with today and brought along to a potluck supper, where it was a hit. It is a good use for leftover chicken.

• All or part of a roast chicken, cut into bite-size pieces.
• 1 head fennel, chopped into bite-size pieces
• 2 or 3 carrots diced
• 2 green bell peppers diced
• 1 red onion diced small
• a head of spinach cleaned and picked

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add carrots and fennel. After about a minute add peppers -- immediately drain and rinse with cold water. Combine all ingredients in a salad bowl and toss with whatever dressing you like -- I used balsamic vinaigrette.

posted evening of July 19th, 2009: 1 response

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

🦋 Barbecue and beans

I had some friends over last night for jamming and a cookout. It was a great time; the combination of chicken thighs and franks from Piast is a keeper, a crowd-pleaser. I overstocked meat for the occasion; the kielbasa did not get used at all -- I'm trying to think of some kind of stew I could make with it this evening that will serve me as lunch for the week... Here is a recipe for pork and beans which went very nicely with the cookout (and with my salsa cruda) -- it is adapted loosely from this recipe which ran in the Times magazine a few weeks ago.

Pork and beans

• 1/4 lb. or more slab bacon, diced
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• minced garlic to taste
• flavorings: use your judgement. I used about a tablespoon of cumin, a teaspoon of mustard, a head of cilantro and 3 moderately spicy dried chile peppers*.
• a can of beer -- I used Budweiser, which is cheap and does not have a lot of flavor; a darker beer would probably be good too.
• 4 cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed.

Sauté bacon, onion, garlic and spices until onion begins to caramelize. Deglaze with beer. Add beans, bring to a boil while stirring; cover and reduce heat to a simmer. You can let it simmer for a few hours prior to serving; occasionally you should give it a stir scraping the bottom, and adding more beer if it looks too dry.

* Here is how to used dried chiles in case you do not know: Boil some water and turn the flame off. Cut the tops off of the chiles and throw them into the pot to soak for a minute or so. Take them out, cut them open the long way, spread them out on a board, and scrape the red paste off the inside using a butter knife or similar. You can keep or discard the seeds according to how much heat you are looking for. Mash this red paste up with your garlic or spices.

posted morning of August 16th, 2009: Respond

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

🦋 Stovetop

I made a vegetarian sauté last night that reminded me of how good vegetables can taste by themselves -- no meat, no seasoning besides a little salt, just vegetables and a little olive oil and wine. Here is the recipe (to serve 1 -- I was eating alone last night -- increase as necessary):

Stovetop Autumn

• one smallish yellow onion, diced
• two cloves garlic, minced
• ¼ apple, diced
• 1/8 head of red cabbage, sliced thin

Combine all ingredients in sauté pan and cook for about 15 min. stirring occasionally, until cabbage is tender and onion is starting to burn. Deglaze with a few ounces of red wine, stir scraping the bottom of the pan, and allow the liquid to boil away completely. Serve with bread and apples and red wine.

You don't cut everything up and then sauté it all at once -- the timing is best if you cut up each ingredient after adding the previous one to the pan. So everything has been cooking for a few minutes by the time the cabbage goes in. The thinner you slice the cabbage, the better it will taste.

Last night I dreamed about cooking -- I was making a stewed chicken and rice dish and bizarrely using my espresso pot to cook it in. It came out beautifully -- the grains of rice were soft and puffed up so they looked like orzo -- and they overflowed the pot like popcorn, spilling out onto the stovetop, which was already covered in some kind of red sauce that I had been cooking before that. It looked really tasty and lots of people were there hungry and wanting to be served...

As long as I am thinking about recipes, here are a couple of links: The NY Times Magazine reprints a recipe for Worcestershire sauce originally published in 1876 (although it contains the direction "refrigerate", which surprises me -- were refrigerators standard kitchen appliances in 19th Century NYC?*), and an updated version from Boston chef Barbara Lynch. The updated version is made with Vietnamese fish paste so does not require any fermentation time, it's ready to serve right away; the old recipe takes a month to mature. Worcestershire sauce traces its ancestry to the Malay condiment kecap, as does Ketchup; at The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky looks at the history of this condiment. And here is an old piece by Malcolm Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum.

* Wikipædia reports that "At the start of the 20th century, about half of households in the United States relied on melting ice (in an icebox) to keep food cold, while the remaining half had no cooled storage at all, possibly excepting a 'root cellar'." So I'm thinking "refrigerate" is a modern edit of an 1876 recipe.

posted morning of October 17th, 2009: 2 responses
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Sunday, December 20th, 2009

🦋 Signing off (and soup!)

Off for the winter break -- I'll be visiting the Painter of Blue in a far warmer clime than my own, for a week. So no blog activity for a few days -- I'm trying to stay off the computer while down there and work on writing a piece about Museum of Innocence and Snow. I haven't been particularly active on weekdays anyway for a while, so there won't be that much difference; but this gives me an opportunity to share a soup recipe that I cooked for Ellen and myself tonight.

We've been in a pattern lately of cooking a large pot of soup on the weekends and then keeping it in the fridge for a couple of days and warming up leftovers for lunches and dinners... Clearly that is no good today, when we're going away. So here is a soup that serves two people without being too little or too much -- I'm pretty happy about having reckoned the quantities accurately. It is a lovely cold-weather soup, and vegetarian if you do not use chicken stock; adapted pretty freely from a larger recipe in Barbara Kafka's Soup: a Way of Life.

Pasta Fajul for 2

• 1 small yellow onion diced
• 2 ribs celery diced
• ½ cup canned tomato purée
• 1 tsp. tomato paste
• 1 can white beans, drained and rinsed
• 2 c. vegetable or chicken stock
• 2 small carrots, cut into chunks
• a handful of pasta -- penne or ziti is good, or whatever you like.
• ¼ c. parsley chopped fine
• 2 cloves garlic chopped fine

In a medium skillet, sauté onion and celery for a few minutes with a sprinkle of salt. Add tomatoes and tomato paste; cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 15 min.

In a saucepan, bring stock, beans, carrots and tomato mixture to a slow boil. Mix in pasta and cook until noodles are soft, about 10 minutes. You need to stir it every minute or two, so the bottom does not scorch. Add parsley and garlic, cook a minute longer and serve.

See you after Christmas! I am planning out my reading list post for the end of 2009.

posted evening of December 20th, 2009: 3 responses

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