Kate Flaim (Girl Reporter)

Happy New Year! I sincerely doubt that anyone who is hosting a party tonight still needs menu ideas, but just in case I thought I’d share some of the puff pastry tidbits I made for our holiday cocktail party a couple weeks ago. I am of the opinion that pretty much anything involving puff pastry is automatically tasty, so at our first cocktail party back in Hanover, I made piles of savory “palmier”-style nibbles. What I hadn’t taken into account was the fact that children were attending that party. Small children. Children who took palmiers in each hand, squeezed, and then released the torrent of crumbs onto the floor by the table. Rinse and repeat. By night’s end, the carpet was white with crumbs.

This year no kids were coming! I gave the puff pastry another shot, making three different options using good store-bought all-butter frozen sheets from Whole Foods. Missing from all photographic evidence except the table-views are the leek and sausage squares, which were dead simple. I made the topping the night before and then put bits of it on square of puff pastry and baked them. Savory, easy, and people loved them.

Item two: A vegetarian option, using olivada (black olive spread) and roasted tomatoes. I bought both toppings from the antipasto bar at Whole Foods, because I didn’t want to make myself crazy. Here’s how I assembled them: (Please excuse the grainy photos; something went weird with my camera that day.)

Unroll the thawed puff pastry (follow package instructions), figure out how big you want your hors d’oeuvres, and cut the sheet into strips that make sense.

Spread the olivada (or any other dryish spread of your choice) down the center of each strip, leaving the edges plain, and top with tomato or roasted red pepper bits spaced according to the size of the finished pieces.

Cut between the tomato pieces and place individual bites on a baking sheet (I covered everything in foil for easy clean-up.)

Top with grated cheese (I used parmesan) if you’re into that sort of thing.

Bake according to package directions until golden brown.

I would guess that it took me about 20 minutes to assemble 60+ of these.

The final puff pastry delight, the simplest, the one you’ve made before, and my favorite: Cheese straws. Who doesn’t love a cheese straw? Come on. They are a perfect food. Here’s how you make them, in case you never read a Martha Stewart Entertaining book when you were in middle school. (Ahem. Not that I know anyone who was obsessed with all those little tiny sandwiches and miniature deviled quail eggs and endive straws stuffed with salad.)

Unroll the thawed puff pastry, blah blah blah. Roll it out a bit thinner. Cut it in half. Brush with melted butter. Sprinkle grated cheese (I used cheddar and parmesan) on one half, top with the other half, roll them together.

Cut the sheet into straws and figure out if you want long or short ones. I went for short to maximize the number from the sheet.

Arrange on baking sheet, twisting each straw as you put it down. Brush with butter and top with black pepper if you want.

Bake until golden and delicious and hoard for yourself.

Oh fine, let your guests have them. You nice, sharing person.

Here’s most of the food before people arrived:

(Missing are the bacon-wrapped, parmesan-stuffed dates that I cooked off during the party so they’d be hot. I hated these; too sticky and sweet, but a lot of people gobbled them up. I’ll post the crazy-simple how-to next week. (Impatient? Put parmesan in a date, wrap it in bacon, and bake/broil it until the bacon it cooked.))

Your happy, blurry hostess in a festive apron:

And the glowy living room:

—

I know the last few months have been a bit sparse here at the Girl Reporter. I’ll try to pull myself together in the new year. I hope you all had a safe, happy and delicious holiday season–here’s to 2010! I’m excited about this one.

I could have sworn I wrote this up, but apparently not. Back at the beginning of the winter share distribution I got a truck load of extra-awesome vegetables, including purple potatoes and cauliflower and a stalk of brussels sprouts. I combined all three in a dinner designed purely for my own amusement, because seriously?

How fun are those?

I took some beauty shots before getting down to the cooking:

As cool as the stalk of sprouts is, it does leave you with a slight problem:

Yes, that is the top (huge) sprout next to the one from the bottom of the stalk. Since the sizes were so wildly uneven, I decided to make Greta’s shaved oven-roasted sprouts. The cuisinart makes this WAY easier; use the blade that looks like this and attaches to that stalk thing to keep it at the top of the bowl:

12 seconds later this:

Became this:

I cut the cauliflower into florets to roast (at 400 or 425) alongside the shaved brussels sprouts, and tossed each with oil, salt and pepper.

Meanwhile I boiled the potatoes and tossed them (while hot) with a butter/vinegar/mustard dressing.

A few slices of grilled steak for protein and voila!

The leftovers were excellent for lunch the next day, and in daylight the colors were even crazier:

[FYI, purple potatoes and cauliflower taste essentially the same as normal potatoes and cauliflower, but they look purple. So: Worth it.]
—

I’m scrambling to pack for a lengthy round of holiday visits. Looking forward to NYC and to the usual cooking orgy back home in Oregon. I hope everyone has a lovely holiday season!

Do you ever have a moment of insanity where you think, “I should make ___, but I think I will change the formula in these 6 ways and also not look at any recipes,” and then when you do exactly that you’re shocked when the results are less than perfect? Yeah, me too. Last night, for instance. Here’s how this went:

1. While reading last month’s Real Simple, notice a 1-line “recipe” suggesting a pasta dish with shredded brussels sprouts sautéed in butter and combined with fettucine and bacon.

2. Remember the stalk of brussels sprouts aging in the fridge; think you can probably make things more interesting than just combining the pasta with the sprouts and bacon.

3. Carbonara!

4. Don’t look up a recipe from carbonara, except to see that one online says “beaten eggs” and one in a cookbook says “egg yolks.” Do not read any of the rest of either recipe. Just start cooking, even though the one other time you made carbonara (following a recipe to the letter) you got it wrong and the eggs scrambled.

5. Proceed smugly, shredding the sprouts, cutting bacon into lardons and frying them, cooking the sprouts, separating eggs, cooking spaghetti.

6. Frantically call husband into kitchen to grate parmesan as the pasta finishes cooking; combine sprouts/bacon with pasta; assume the pasta is cooling down too much, dump eggs into pasta in a panic.

7. Pasta and pan are still too hot. Eggs sort of scramble.

8. Fling pot holder on the floor, while cursing.

9. Rip off apron and fling it against a cupboard, while cursing.

10. Storm out of the kitchen in a cursing, flinging fit.

11. Return to kitchen and mumble profanities while seasoning the pasta, meanwhile breaking it into smaller and smaller strands while husband silently pours large glasses of wine.

12. Eat giant mounded bowl of pasta (plus seconds), which looks horrible but tastes pretty damn good. Say a silent thanks for candlelight. Drink wine.

Lessons learned:

– For the LOVE, make sure the pasta is hot enough but not too hot when mixing in the egg.

– Keep in mind that things can only go so badly when the ingredients involved are: Bacon, brussels sprouts, parmesan, garlic, pasta.

—-

I’m in a panic about cocktail party for 40 tomorrow night. It is sleeting and I need to grocery shop but I feel like I don’t have a very solid menu. Wish me luck, please! And if you’re feeling upset by that sad pasta up, let me offer you the following condolence prize:

I visited Bridge in NYC this weekend, and we celebrated her boyfriend Matt’s birthday at the unbelievably awesome Fette Sau (“fat pig”) in Williamsburg. Witness the glory of the Tray Of Meat:

9:29 p.m.

9:55 p.m.

We also drank cider and beer out of half-gallon jugs:

It was a good weekend for food. We ate at Perbacco and had mince-meat-stuffed deep-fried cerignola olives (!!) (Bridge saw them on the menu and just looked at me, all “wow, they know your soft underbelly…”), and we visited my favorite bodega tacqueria on 10th Avenue. We spent an afternoon in my beloved old neighborhood, saw great apartments, and spent a lovely time with friends. Good times and at least a five-pound weight gain, I’m guessing.

….Hi.

Yes, it’s been more than two weeks since I checked in. There’s no real reason for it, just a lack of motivation and a general feeling of “blah.” I have about 10 different things I should get posted, which is of course a little overwhelming (I’m trying to get to the photos for this post and I’m already on page 8 of my Flickr without getting close. Agh).

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Ben and I were on our own this year, so we took a drive up to York Beach, ME and ate at Lydia Shire’s Blue Sky, which was fantastic. Between the dinner I ate and my mom’s continued proselytizing, I am convinced of the wisdom of cooking the turkey legs and breast separately: I had lovely slices of the white meat, accompanied by a ridiculously delicious “ragout” of shredded dark meat warmed up in gravy. Yup, that is the way to go.

I never actually posted any of the cooking experiments from my visit home in late October, and I think one of them might come in handy if you’re looking for a satisfying but light dinner for these post-Turkey days. We ate at The Butcher Shop in the South End with new friends before my trip, and I shamelessly hogged a shared salad appetizer, a frisee salad with bacon dressing, shaved egg and fingerling potatoes. A few days later in Oregon, I decided to recreate it for the family, and we got it mostly right, though not quite perfect. It’s a nice riff on the traditional french bistro salad (frisee and lardons with a poached egg). This is easier to share, since there aren’t whole eggs, and would also be great without the potatoes, or as a simple lunch.

First things first, we baked a few strips of good, thick bacon, then cut it up into small little bits and saved a bit of the fat to make the dressing (like a warm spinach salad).

(I cut the bacon fat with a bit of grapeseed oil, which is nice and neutral. I never did get the dressing quite right; I forgot to add mustard and it never came together the way I wanted.)

Next up: Potatoes. Mom got gorgeous fingerlings, which I halved, boiled until nearly cooked, then tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasted until they colored but didn’t crisp up.

Finally, the egg. In retrospect, I’m an ass. I could have passed it through a food mill or pushed it through a sieve. But I was jetlagged, sick and stupid, and didn’t get there. Mom thought her egg slicer could produce a very fine dice, so we gave it a try:

Um, fail. Even if I rotated it 90 degrees for a second slice….no. My solution? The box grater!

(Tom was entertained by taking action shots while I struggled)

It was hard to get through more than half of the egg before it fell apart in my hand, but the results were perfect:

Nice and fluffy.

Assembly time. I dressed the frisee, tossed it with the bacon, and then topped it with the egg.

Tossed the potatoes with the rest of the dressing, and layered those on top:

We also had steak, beets, beans, and peppers:

And wine and candles.

Still to come: A four-hour pasta recipe from the lovely Suzanne Goin, lots of non-food pictures, thrifting adventures with Tom, fun with purple vegetables, etc.

Yesterday I picked up my first winter share from Stone Soup–two bags full of treats:

Let’s zoom in a bit, since that is a LOT of stuff.

Let’s see, I’m pretty sure it is:
-1 enormous white cabbage
-8 oz. salad greens
-2 rutabagas
-2 heads garlic
-1 head *purple* cauliflower (there were white, cheddar, and romanesco varieties, too!)
-1 stalk of brussels sprouts, OMG I am in love
-2 delicata squashes
-1.5 lbs. daikon radish
-2 bulbs celeriac, yippee!
-2 lbs. onions
-1 bunch of gorgeous little white turnips, with greens
-2 lbs. sweet potatoes
-1 bunch cavolo nero

So exciting. Let’s zoom in even closer on some of my favorites.

I know I’ve said it before, but vegetables just amaze me.

I am alone for a couple nights, so I indulged in a super-simple dinner, even though I knew I should be eating up those perishable greens and saving the sturdy root vegetables for later in the winter.

Dinner for One: Mashed rutabaga and toast

Peel and cut up the rutabaga (preferably not an enormous one):

Boil in salted water until nice and tender.

Mash with butter, salt and pepper. (I have recommended it in the past, but it’s worth repeating: I love my Oxo potato masher, with the handle on top. It’s easy to get enough pressure behind it, and the way it’s designed lets you mash things right in the pot and get to the corners, etc.) Devour with buttery sourdough toast.

I considered frying an egg, but decided to skip it and make popcorn for dessert, instead. I ate the whole bowl while watching CSI reruns and feeling less sorry for myself than I usually do when I am on my own for a few days!

BTW, just in case you’re interested, here’s a slide show of the vegetables from the summer share, from June through October, plus the winter share. If you’re in the Boston area and you’re interested in a great CSA, get on Stone Soup’s mailing list now so you can try to get in on the 2010 action!

Re. the Flickr problem on Monday, from my mom’s computer in Oregon when I’m not logged in I can choose “copy image address” but it copies a blank fake address. Awesome. Using Gretchen’s workaround (which requires going into the “all sizes” view once logged in), here are some things:

Bittersweet branches for fall:

You guys, Ben gave me the plague. Not cool. I’ve been deathly ill since late last week, and first thing tomorrow morning I’m headed to Oregon to celebrate my mom’s birthday. We have some good cooking planned for while I’m home, and hopefully once I’m back we’ll get back into a more normal eating-at-home schedule. It’s been sparse around here lately.

I wanted to post a few pictures of life Chez Flaim over the past week or two, but Flickr is suddenly not allowing me to “copy image location.” FAbulous. Hopefully I can figure that out soon…

A non-food post, but I have to share a few photos with you… Last weekend we joined Ben’s aunt/uncle/cousins/mom/brother/etc. on Cape Cod for the weekend, breathing in big lung-fulls of cool air and leaving just into time for the Nor’Easter on Sunday. I spent a very happy two hours bundled up on Saturday, tramping up and down the beach and gathering up the fantastic hunks of granite and quartz that had washed up in the recent storms.

I’ve never outgrown my beachcombing urge, and any time I’m on the Ocean I spend as much time as possible staring at the sand, looking for treasures. Every few minutes I stand up straight and gaze out at the ocean, get all dwarfed-feeling thinking about the vastness of it all, and then turn back to the stones and shell shards at my feet.

I have a project in mind, which prompted me to haul an embarrassing heap of big stones back with me. I left the many huge “dinosaur eggs” of granite behind, since I don’t have a yard in which to build a nest. More to come! (And more photos here, if you’re so inclined.)

Meat cuts like pork butt always call my name at the butcher counter because they are so darn cheap and so easy to prepare. Last week I had apples and pork on the brain, and it was also getting really chilly all of a sudden, so I hauled out (and scrubbed off) the slow cooker and got to work.

(A bum bottle, sadly. Worked fine as cooking liquid but wasn’t drinkable. Boo!)

I took the elastic waistband off the pork and trimmed off the bigger chunks of fat–this is a really fatty cut, so I also had to skim off fat from the cooking liquid at the end.

I patted the pork dry and seasoned it with salt and pepper, then seared it well on all sides and put it in the pot.

Along for the ride were a couple red and yellow onions.

I used a couple glugs of chicken broth and some of the cider for my liquid, and set the slow cooker on low for 7 hours. After six or so I came back and added in my apples, cut in quarters and cored.

At dinner time I pulled out the meat and apples and onions and drained the liquid into a gravy strainer to separate out some of the fat. I sort of messed up, mangling the cooked apples in with the onions, so instead of just mushing up the apples as sauce (which would have been great) I mixed the two together. That was fine but definitely diluted the apple flavor. I added a little cider vinegar to sharpen it up, and more salt and pepper.

I tried to get the extra fat off the meat, then I put it back in the pot with the liquid and pulled it apart with a couple forks.

We had the apple/onion sauce and chard on the side.

Three pounds of pork yielded a mountain of meat, and I have to admit it was sort of bland. I need to dissect how Chipotle makes their carnitas so flavorful. Ben took leftovers for two lunches, and we made flatbread pizzas with some more. I froze the rest for future use. For the flatbreads I drained the liquid off the meat and crisped it up in a pan, then topped garlic naan with the meat and some shredded cheese.

Once they were baked I put a little arugula salad on top.

—

I’m going to try cooking chicken legs–another extra-economical cut–tonight. Wish me luck! As long-time readers know, I loathe cooking chicken.

Ben and I had a long conversation a couple weeks ago, while we were in the car driving back to Cambridge from New Hampshire. We were talking about goals and dreams and we somehow got on the topic of the blog and what I want to do, career-wise, and eventually I found myself going on and on about why I care about food. As I spoke I started to make some connections to my childhood and the way we live now, and I thought it might be useful to lay those things out. Warning, this is long. Long long.

Dinner as bonding time
This isn’t rocket science. There have been tons of studies that link eating dinner as a family to better test scores, behavior, success in life, etc. I’m sure all of that is true, but the root is bonding time, I think.

When I was a kid, we ate dinner at the table every night. Sure, there were exceptions (my parents had a work event, one of us had a play or something at school), but 95% of weeknights we sat down at the table. As my mom finished dinner, Dad would turn off NPR and turn on Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis, light the candles, turn off the overhead lights, and we would set the table with cloth napkins. Everyone was expected to participate in the conversation (which was a major drag when I was 13 or 14), and we stayed at the table until everyone was finished eating. After the main course we’d have salad and wipe our plates with a bit of bread.

When I got married, my mom gave me napkin rings with our initials, along with cloth napkins, as a wedding gift. I don’t know why lighting the candles and using real napkins makes a difference to me, but it does. Maybe it’s that there is a distinct moment when it is truly Dinner Time. Sometimes we are eating a really simple salad and some bread with cheese toasted on it, but we sit across from each other at the table and we talk about our days and it is a really important part of our lives. We both feel off-kilter when we go a week or two without regular meals together at home.

Eating together means you are checking in every night, without the distraction of TV to let you get off the hook and avoid talking. It means eye contact and a glass of wine (or water!) and a respite from the blackberry. It’s not really about the food, but:

Food as social fodder
At some point I started thinking about food more seriously, and I chalk that up to my family, too. When I was in elementary school my mom started teaching cooking classes, as well as getting more and more serious about food herself. By the time I was in high school we were regulars at the farmers market and she had an in with a wholesale gourmet purveyor in Portland. Food had become the common language in my family, and we talked about it all the time.

Ben first visited us in Oregon the summer after we started dating, and at a certain point that week he turned to me and said “Um, do you guys ever stop talking about food?” No. If we’re not discussing what’s for dinner (say, because we’re currently eating dinner), we may be talking about things we plan to eat tomorrow, or things we ate recently that we want to replicate, or what’s due soon at the farmer’s market. Months before a trip to Eugene, my mom starts making a list of things we need to cook while I’m home. We’re a little obsessed.

The result is that I think about food all the time, sort of the way a sports fan thinks about his team of choice. I’m not into the whole “foodie” (gah) restaurant scorecard/chef-tracking thing, but I get really giddy about asparagus season.

What I don’t like is snobbishness and the idea that food needs to be fancy to be good. Food needs to be good to be good. Sure, I focus on trying to keep what I cook local and seasonal, but I won’t lie, we were at a small country fair this weekend and I found it crucially important to sample both the “giant donut” and the fried dough. And some cotton candy. (The giant donut won, and it was indeed the size of my face.) Which brings me to my last point (and about time, too):

Food should be fun and delicious, not scary
I was pleased that the movie version of Julie and Julia highlighted my favorite Julia Child advice, “be fearless.” (My other favorites, paraphrased: never apologize (this trips me up), always mix with your hands, and cover mistakes with whipped cream.) Cooking and eating should be fun, enriching experiences, not stressful ones. When we got married I had never cooked dinner regularly. Living in NYC with roommates and crappy kitchens meant that if I made anything at home, it was probably a fried egg or some Trader Joe’s dumplings. And yet I plunged into cooking that first year in Hanover, choosing Sunday Suppers at Lucques as my cookbook of choice and throwing one, maybe two dinner parties each week. Of course I overshot sometimes, and got stressed out trying to time the meals right, and I freaked out that time the plastic wrap melted into the short ribs, but it never occurred to me that I should start with simpler things, because for me the challenge made it fun.

Maybe it’s because I grew up sitting on the desk in the kitchen while my mom cooked dinner–I certainly didn’t cook much at home, aside from helping her with tedious tasks and going on occasional baking kicks. I did know how to do a lot of basic things, but let me tell you, my knife skills were pretty shoddy. The first time I made those triple pork burgers they took forever, and I swore it wasn’t worth the trouble. Funny; the most recent time I made them the prep took about 1/4 the time. Practice does, indeed, make something closer to perfect. (Though Ben and my mom swear that if I keep practicing one day I’ll be good at slicing bread, and so far that is a blatant lie. Stupid wonky slices.)

What I want to get across is that cooking doesn’t need to be intimidating. The worst that can happen is that you burn the hell out of something, or, um, explode the pyrex, or flood the kitchen with pizza dough. Kitchens are made to be cleaned up. You can always eat a scrambled egg or order takeout if things go truly awry.

I write about food because food makes me happy, and I want it to make other people happy, too.

In the interest of service journalism, How to enjoy food, my humble guide:
Geek out about the colors and shapes of vegetables and food. Use white plates, or vintage ones that make you happy. Try a complicated recipe when it won’t freak you out if it doesn’t work. When in doubt, make a braised stew. Buy dessert unless you really feel up to it. Eat fried dough at every fair you encounter. Eat more noodles. Use salt and butter and olive oil and sugar: In my experience, you’ll be ok if you’re also avoiding processed foods and eating lots of delicious vegetables and not eating pounds of any one thing. Visit farms. Visit farmer’s markets. Save up for one really astonishing meal every so often. Light the candles and sit down at the table for dinner. Brussels sprouts. Cabbage. Carrot salad. Beets. Garlic. Also wine. And, in the summer, gin.

—-

And now I’m going to go make a dutch baby for dinner, because who doesn’t love an oven pancake?