All posts by Kate

Things that are making me happy

Berries in the snow:
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Siamese Dried Porcini:
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The cardinals that live in the trees outside my window:
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Major snow:
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My paperwhite:
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The nutcracker ornament my grandmother sent me–very similar to my favorite ornament growing up, the one I *always* put on the tree:
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Chef Yossi “Lotion de Chef,” an oil-free lotion designed for cooks. I got a package of CY stuff while I was still at [Magazine] last summer. I only opened it when my hands started cracking a couple weeks ago, and it actually is the first hand lotion I haven’t hated–since it’s oil-free, it doesn’t leave your hands slimy.
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Finally, my Valentine’s present, a set of four demitasse cups, creamer and sugar bowl, all in Wedgwood Basalt. One day I will have a wall of silhouettes in a dining room, and in the middle I’ll hang a floating shelf and put the basalt-ware on it–like 3D silhouettes, how meta!
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An apple a day…

I still had half of a ham steak in the freezer, so I pan-fried it for dinner one night last week, and served it with roasted new potatoes and homemade apple sauce. If you’ve never made applesauce, please please give it a try next time you want some: it is SO EASY, especially if you have an immersion blender, that once you’ve tried it you will never crack a jar of Mott’s again. My mom would be the best person to give a serious recipe/instructions for people who want to actually can sauce, but I just make a cheater’s version when I want a little bit to go with pork chops, etc.

Peel and core a few apples–flavorful, not-too-tart ones like Fuji are best, and it’s nice to mix a few types together. For two of us, I used three apples, two Fuji and one Gala, and ended up with a nice bowl of leftovers. Cut up the apples and throw them in a small saucepan with a bit of water–maybe an inch? Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cover; cook the apples until they are quite soft.
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Then pull out your immersion blender and puree the apples. Taste and see if they need sugar–if you’re using Gala, Fuji, etc, you probably won’t. Add cinnamon to taste.
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That’s it! Easy easy easy; the hardest part is peeling the apples. (Cooking the apples with their peels/cores and running the result through a foodmill is the traditional way, and it makes more flavorful sauce. But for a quick weeknight side dish, this way is simpler. Especially since I don’t have a foodmill.)

The next day I ate the leftover applesauce with Nancy’s yogurt, made right in my hometown and only recently available on the East Coast. I wish I had a digital copy of the photos of me on my first birthday, being fed yogurt and applesauce by my aunt Suzanne. My mom says I used to put away the same size bowl of it that my dad did!
Healthy and delicious:
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Easy comfort food

About six months after Ben and I started dating we went very far north/east in Maine for spring break. Apparently we had missed the memo about going somewhere warm… Anyway, I was excited to get to cook, since we lived in a dorm, and I asked Ben what his favorite meal was. He said Beef Stroganoff, so I talked it over with my mom, got a recipe, and when we got to Maine I bought some nice beef, cream, a bunch of good mushrooms, etc., and made a very labor intensive stroganoff. He took a look, a bite, and said, “This is not stroganoff.” Needless to say, I was less than pleased, and I never made it for him again. It turns out he was thinking of Poor Man’s Stroganoff, which is much simpler and made with ground beef, not painstakingly cubed steak. I told him that he could eat it at home on vacations if he liked his mom’s version so much, but six years later I finally gave in and asked Christy for her recipe, which turns out to be so far beyond simple that I’m kicking myself for not making it much earlier. This is comfort food, and not glamorous, but I fed two hungry guys on a cold night, and they were both very happy. This time Ben was pleased as punch! I didn’t include mushrooms because I shopped before getting the recipe, and Ben insisted there aren’t any in it. There are supposed to be, but you chop them up very, very small.

So here you go: Christy’s Poor Man’s Stroganoff

1 lb. ground beef
1 medium onion
1/2 lb. mushrooms
8 oz. sour cream
salt & pepper to taste

Sauté the onion till soft, then add the beef, breaking it up into little sections. Stir occasionally and keep breaking the clumps of beef into smaller sections with the spoon. When completely cooked, drain off the fat, add in the mushrooms and sour cream, and heat thoroughly for a minute or two. Serve over rice or noodles.

The stirring in of the sour cream gave me pause, since it looks totally gross at that point:
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But once I stirred in the cooked egg noodles things straightened out and the sour cream coated the noodles and made a nice sauce:
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I didn’t heat it quite long enough after adding the sour cream, but the guys ate the whole thing–a pound of meat, a pound of noodles.

A couple nights later, I fed the same two guys (Ben’s friend’s wife was out of town for a couple weeks, so we had him over a lot) a dressier pasta dish, though based on the same principles. Mark Bittman wrote in the Minimalist column in the Times a couple weeks ago about pasta with gorgonzola sauce, which sounded like an appealing and easy non-meat-based dinner. He added in halved cherry tomatoes and chopped arugula to add flavor, on the theory that both are reliable veggies in the middle of winter. Sound familiar? It’s the same pairing as the base for the parmesan-crusted chicken breasts.

This recipe was super easy and really delicious, once again the guys wolfed it down. It has the advantage of also being extremely pretty to look at.

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Mark Bittman’s Cheesy Pasta
From the NYTimes, 1/24/07

Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup half-and-half, cream or milk
1 cup crumbled Gorgonzola or other good blue cheese
1 pound farfalle or other pasta
2 cups arugula trimmed of very thick stems, washed, dried and chopped
1 cup cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
Freshly grated Parmesan to taste, optional.

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it. In a small saucepan gently warm the half-and-half and Gorgonzola just until cheese melts a bit and mixture becomes thick; chunky is O.K.

2. When water boils, cook pasta until it is just tender but not mushy. Drain and return to pot over low heat.

3. Stir in Gorgonzola sauce along with arugula, tomatoes and a healthy dose of black pepper. Stir to combine, taste and add salt, if necessary, then serve immediately, with grated Parmesan if you like.

Yield: 3 to 6 servings.

Yum, I’ll be making this again soon.

Chicken cutlets for four

Ok, in my past life (as a magazine writer in NYC) I got lots of cool stuff sent to me, since I covered design/lifestyle type issues. One of my favorite things was the pile of pre-publication proofs of books we were always getting, and I brought the best of the food-related ones with me to NH. The only one I’ve really used so far is Christopher Kimball’s The Kitchen Detective, from the editor/founder of Cook’s Illustrated. Right after we moved here I tried his Polenta Pound Cake recipe, and discovered the big flaw to using proofs of cookbooks: They haven’t gotten their final fact-check, and they’re missing stuff like page numbers, certain ingredient quantities, etc. I cooked so rarely in Brooklyn that I never noticed the gaping holes in these books! Anyway, the pound cake tipped me off, since it said to bake at 325, a very low temp for a cake like that, and it took over an hour and a half (instead of under an hour) to finally cook. Oops!

Well, non-baking recipes don’t require the same precision, and the other night I made Kimball’s “Four-Minute Chicken Cutlets” for the second time. Here’s the thing. They don’t cook in four minutes for me, because chicken seems to be my achilles heel, and I can’t get my head wrapped around preparing it. I feel stupid that I can cook pork and beef with no qualms but get all freaked out trying to get chicken ready to go… I had a really terrible time cleaning the boneless breasts and pounding them thin. I definitely didn’t get them super-thin like the recipe requires if you want them to cook in less than four minutes. I ended up on the phone with my mom, up to my elbows in chicken, completely freaking out because the breasts were tearing instead of pounding thin. Turns out I’m an idiot. Instead of slipping them in a ziplock or between saran wrap, I’d put them between PARCHMENT PAPER, meaning they couldn’t scoot around at all while I pounded them, meaning the poor things were shredded. Live and learn. I did salvage them, using my mom’s excellent advice to simply cut the breasts into smaller pieces so I could cook the thick and thin ends separately.

Anyway.

The wonderful thing about this recipe is the coating, which combines shredded parmesan with store-bought superfine breadcrumbs, to great effect. It’s a salty, flavorful, crispy coating, and makes chicken taste really savory and exciting instead of dull. Kimball’s recipe is really long (he does the CI thing and talks about how he tested all the elements of the recipe, etc.) but here’s my very short version:

For four chicken breasts (halves of big ones):
Season with salt and pepper
Dip the chicken breasts in egg white (he says 3 egg whites for this amount, I could have used two)
Dredge in 1/2 cup fine bread crumbs mixed with 3/4 cup grated parmesan
Heat 4 T olive oil until just smoking, cook the chicken 1.5-2 minutes on each side (he says to pound it to 1/4 inch. Mine was at least 1/2 inch and so took longer to cook).

Serve on a bed of arugula with sliced tomatoes over it, and some basil over the tomatoes if you want. I used cherry tomatoes, cut in half and dressed in sherry vinegar and olive oil/ salt/pepper, which added a nice juicy layer. (Cherry tomatoes tend to be pretty tasty even in the middle of winter.)

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I over-roasted my new potatoes while trying to get all the chicken cooked…ah, well.

Before the chicken we had my third version of the cauliflower soup, this time made with Broccoflower! It’s a cross between broccoli and cauliflower (….obviously), and is an amazing shade of bright spring green, not quite captured by my photo:
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I was hoping the soup would also end up bright green, but since the inside of the broccoflower is white, the soup was very pale green. I left the cheese out this time, and just sprinkled a little on top, which made it really light and nice, a perfect first course.
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For dessert I made the Gateau Piège from Chocolate and Zucchini. Due to a slight clerical error in the original version of the recipe (it’s been fixed now) I underbaked it by quite a lot, so the middle was much denser and flatter than it should have been. I loved the flavor though, and it was super easy–I want to try it again this week, maybe with lemon this time.

Overall a very uplifting mid-winter meal, with lots of fresh flavors. I’ll try all of it again, hopefully with fewer bumps but a similarly tasty end product.

French Onion (Bacon) Soup

I had a craving for French Onion Soup a couple weeks ago, and when I bumped into Anthony Bourdain’s recipe on Chow.com I figured I’d try it. Hmm. I will try it again but cut down on the bacon–it completely overpowered the onions and beef stock; the soup was far too smoky for me. After two disapointments with bacon in soup in one week, I think I’ll stick to eating it any other way I can think of instead.

A few pics:
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BTW, I used my Oxo mandoline to cut up all trillion onions (even for a half batch it was a lot!) and it made nice thin slices but I was very frustrated by the design of the grippy hand thing and how much onion you can cut on the mandoline. Hard to explain but annoying. I think solid things that won’t go to pieces will work better? But why not just use the slice blade on my cuisinart for things that won’t go to mush? I haven’t yet got the hang of having actual kitchen tools aside from my 8″ knife.

Huzzah for short ribs

Two fridays ago we had our friends Chris and Greta to dinner, and since Greta is a fabulous cook who worked in a great NYC restaurant before moving to NH, I wanted to try something new and really cook a great meal. I got my very own copy of Sunday Suppers at Lucques for Christmas, and decided to try Suzanne Goin’s short ribs recipe, and serve it with her parsnip-potato puree. To start I made another cauliflower soup, this time a recipe from Bon Appetit (I got a subscription for Christmas) with much more stuff in it. For dessert I tried my hand at another BA recipe, a caramel pudding tart in almond shortbread crust. That was topped with candied almonds and whipped cream. I basically cooked for a day and a half straight, but luckily everything came out very well.

Thursday night I rubbed the short ribs in salt, pepper and herbs, as directed, and tucked them into the fridge to rest. I made the shortbread dough and put it in the tart pan, then froze that overnight. Friday morning I baked off the crust and candied the almonds, and after lunch I made the pudding and put the tart in the fridge to chill.
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Then I pulled out the short ribs to warm up, broiled some pearl onions that would later be served with the ribs, and browned the ribs (I made 6, but couldn’t brown them all at once):

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I made a mirepoix, cooked down red wine, port and balsamic vinegar, squeezed all the ribs in, and then….oh, then. Goin’s instructions say to cover the braising pot tightly with PLASTIC WRAP, then with tinfoil. She very carefully says not to worry, that it’ll be fine in the oven. I was dubious, to say the least, but this is the woman responsible for the pork burgers that are so complicated but come out so perfectly, so I trusted her. I put the pot in the oven and ignored it for over three hours.

Meanwhile I cleaned two huge bunches of red chard (there wasn’t any swiss in stock at the Coop, and I found the bright fuschia veins charming):

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Then I made the parsnip puree, a relative nightmare since my Williams-Sonoma ricer likes to spray everything back out of the hopper, instead of through the screen. Awful. I and most of the kitchen was covered in hot potato and parsnip. This wasn’t helped by the fact that parsnips have lots of fibers, which clogged the ricer up terribly. I persevered, relieved that no one was home to hear me cursing or see me with parsnip on my nose, and the puree was very creamy and tasty, though not very different from straight potato. Finally, after Ben got home and was sent on an emergency chicken stock quest to the Coop, I made the soup.

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Eh. As you can see, it’s got much more going on than the last version. It starts with bacon, and then celery and onion, and then the cauliflower and stock and a chunk of pecorino cheese. It was finished with “truffle oil” (we ended up returning it, it smelled/tasted like plain stale olive oil; obviously past the use by date) and shaved pecorino. It didn’t have as nice of a color, since the browned bacon and fat made everything browner. And the bacon was a little overpowering. I prefer the simpler version by quite a lot.

Just before Chris and Greta got to the house I pulled out the short ribs to see how they were doing. Well, surprise, surprise. The plastic wrap was visible fused to the outside of my Le Creuset, but inside: Nothing. It had vanished, obviously melted into the ribs. My stomach dropped into the basement, and I yelled for Ben to help me fish out the sheets of plastic wrap we could find. I was pretty freaked out–we didn’t find much, and I didn’t know what to do. In the end I admitted what had happened to Greta, and we just…served it. No one choked or got sick, so all’s well that ends well? I guess. Anyway, NO PLASTIC WRAP in the OVEN. After letting the ribs rest while we all got drinks, etc., I cranked up the oven to brown the ribs while the braising liquid reduced a bit.

I served the soup, which was good but not fantastic:

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Then cooked the chard with the pearl onion, heated up the puree and put it in a serving bowl, heated up plates and plated everything:

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I have to say the ribs were fantastic. The chard and onions provided great contrast, the sauce from the braising liquid was incredibly rich and flavorful, and the meat was meltingly tender and very, very delicious. It was a huge production, but at least I’d picked the right people to cook it for–Greta said short ribs are their favorite meat. (When I discussed the menu with my mom she was hesitant about the ribs because they’re so prehistoric-looking and fatty, until I told her where Greta had worked, and she said “oh, it’s perfect!”) The puree was a nice counterpoint too, as was a horseradish crème fraîche that Goin recommends serving with the meat.

It was a long time before we were able to face dessert, but that was a hit too. It was too sweet for me but the guys especially loved it. (Ugh, WAY too sweet for me.)
A messy photo:

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It was actually really fun to go all-out on a menu, and I am in love with the Lucques cookbook, though the plastic wrap thing threw me. Soon we will be trying Grilled Pork Confit! Liz has 2 quarts of duck fat coming our direction!

Quick cauliflower soup for two

I have been on a big available-in-winter vegetable kick lately, craving things like brussels sprouts, broccoli, parsnips, etc. I love, love love cauliflower, and brought home a big head of it last weekend to make soup out of. The recipe came from the Williams-Sonoma Soups cookbook, which I received as a wedding gift together with the soup bowls I completely forgot to pull out the other night (oops!), but I simplified it a little since it called for spices I didn’t have on hand. Very quick and easy though:
Sauté a thinly sliced onion in olive oil for a couple minutes, until it starts to brown, add a few cloves of minced garlic, sauté those for a minute, add in a head of cauliflower (cut into florets, leave in any stem that is tender (peel it)) and 4 cups of stock, bring to a simmer and cook 15 minutes or so until the cauliflower is tender. Puree in a blender or with an immersion blender. Stir in one cup of sharp cheddar cheese; season to taste.

Yum. I love how cauliflower, once it’s pureed on its own or in soup, could almost pass for potatoes but it has a little bit of a more intriguing flavor to it. You couldn’t really taste the cheese, but it added substance and depth to the soup, and thickened it a little. We ate huge bowls for dinner with a few slices of toasted sourdough to dunk in it, and then wolfed the leftovers yesterday. No photos, because this was very white-on-white; not much to see. I would make it for a dinner party first course (it’s really quite elegant), garnished with a little something to make it stand out. I also have another recipe, similar but without cheddar and with pecorino curls and some truffle oil on top, that is much dressier.

Next up: Experiments with parsnips and turnips, both of which are languishing in the veggie drawer right now.

Farmer Boy dinner for two

As kids my brother and I both read the Little House series until our copies fell apart, and recently I picked up a used copy of Farmer Boy at a library sale and we both reread it. FB was always my favorite because instead of detailing the brutal struggle of pioneer life, it talks about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband Almanzo’s childhood, on a prosperous horse farm in upstate New York (WAY upstate, by the Canadian border). A lot of time is devoted to talking about the amazing food that Almanzo’s mother and sisters prepared to keep everyone fueled up for dawn-to-dusk manual labor, and I always loved the detailed meal descriptions. Breakfasts on the Wilder farm involved ham steaks, pancakes, pie, cheese, etc.—huge piles of food. At one point Almanzo and his brother Royal talk about what they like best to eat, and Almanzo says his favorite is Fried Apples ‘n Onions. Tom and I were discussing that after we reread the book last fall, and when I brought home a ham steak to fry for dinner the other day, I also picked up a few granny smith apples and figured I’d give it a try.

There are lots of Apples ‘n Onions recipes on the internet (there appears to be a Little House cookbook, which I should investigate), and Bittman also has a recipe in “How to Cook Everything”—I read them all and then kept it simple. I sliced two onions very thin, and then peeled and cut up two apples. I used a tablespoon or two of butter, sautéed the onions until they were starting to brown, then added in the apples and cooked until they were starting to soften (I could have cooked them a little longer).

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I also baked baking powder biscuits, then pan-fried the ham steak and plated up a nice big Farmer Boy breakfast for dinner.

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Very satisfying, and I want to play with the apples and onions a bit more. I could have cut the onions a little thicker and put the apples in earlier so they could soften more while the onions browned. Some recipes also recommend adding a tiny bit of brown sugar, which would have been a nice addition.

Absorption Pasta (!) for two

Another inspiration from Chocolate and Zucchini, this time for a pasta technique that I’m now in love with. This is a way of cooking pasta that is closer to making risotto than typical throw-it-in-boiling-water pasta. You sauté garlic or onion in olive oil (just a little bit), add in your cut pasta, rattle it around very noisily for a minute or two to get it really coated in the oil and a little toasty, then add hot stock to cover it and simmer it for about 10 minutes. You might need a little more stock, but it doesn’t take that much—I cooked about 2/3 of a bag of pasta and used a little over 2 cups of broth, and shouldn’t have added in the last bit. Partway through cooking I added in broccoli, and at the end I stirred in sausage that I’d cooked in the pan before starting. Because of the extra broth the pasta was a tiny bit overcooked, but still delicious and very appealing-looking:
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Looks rather restauranty, no? Because the pasta is sucking in all that flavorful broth, instead of tossing around in hot water, it is coated in a glossy jacket of starch rather than being washed fairly clean. That let the small pieces of broccoli and sausage cling to the pasta and gave it a very substantial feel, compared to when I’ve tossed veggies with boiled pasta. I will use this technique going forward for any pasta that I am dressing with something besides a tomato sauce, etc. It’s great for making a simple, quick dinner that feels a bit dressier. As Clotilde said in her blog entry, not having to boil water (boring) is another major plus!

ETA: I was just flipping through my Mark Bittman “The Minimalist Cooks Dinner,” and he has an absorption pasta recipe, simply called “Pasta, Risotto Style.” I must have flipped past it a million times… I will try his method next time; he recommends tossing the pasta for up to 5 minutes before adding broth, until it really starts to brown, and then adding the broth a little bit at a time and cooking uncovered.

December catch-up: Christmas Eve

We were on Long Island for Christmas, and I volunteered to cook Christmas Eve dinner for the four of us: Ben, his mom and brother John, and me. Ben’s mom can’t eat gluten, so risotto seemed like a natural fit, especially since we were having a big ham on Christmas and a meat-heavy meal wasn’t required.

I made a double batch of mushroom and sausage risotto, since B’s brother eats as only a 6’5″ 20 year old can. It nearly outgrew the pot by the end, but I eked by.
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For salad I dressed mesclun with a sherry-vinegar vinaigrette, then topped it with slices from a beautiful Oregon Comice pear, and walnuts that I’d sort of candied with some brown sugar. Here you see my normal-sized salad next to John’s big one:
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I was very brave and made a flan for dessert, complete with caramel. Sadly the vanilla extract had gone a little funny, so it had a strange alcoholic overtone, but it looked great—I couldn’t believe it came out of the pan in one piece. I cooked down a bag of frozen organic cherries with a little amaretto for a sauce.
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