Ok you guys. The main dish here was pork loin braised in milk, adapted from Marcella Hazan by Molly Stevens in All About Braising. It’s the second time I’ve made a version of this recipe (the first was from a different book) and I’m still underwhelmed. No more! So instead of focusing on the pork, lets talk about the side dish, which was also from All About Braising.

Fennel Braised with Thyme & Black Olives.

There. It sounds a little random, doesn’t it? But Stevens recommended it with the pork, and I had some fennel in the fridge and figured I might as well buy more in order to use up what I had (this is logical), so off I went.

Fennel Braised with Thyme & Black Olives
Loosely paraphrased from Molly Stevens

Ingredients:
3 large or 4 medium fennel bulbs (it’s supposed to be about 3 lbs. total; I didn’t have quite that much I don’t think)
3 T olive oil
Coarse salt and black pepper
1/2 cup pitted oil-cured olives (she suggests Nyons or Moroccan)
2 garlic cloves, minced
5-6 anchovy fillets, minced
1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme
1/2 tsp. fennel seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
1/2 tsp. coriander seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
1/3 c. dry white wine or dry white vermouth
3/4 c. chicken stock

(The spices)

(The minced anchovies: DON’T BE SCARED, it really doesn’t taste fishy in the end. Anchovies are your friends, or so my mother always insists. Speaking of scared, after a speared the fillets out of their little jars and examined them, I called Mom in a panic to find out if I had to remove all trillion tiny bones. No, she said: They dissolve. Whew.)

Preheat the oven to 325 and get out a not-too-large casserole or roasting pan.

Cut the ferny fronds off the fennel bulbs, right down to where the bulb starts. (I stuck the tops in a vase of water and they’re still very fluffy and pretty a week and a half later.) Quarter each bulb, leaving the core intact. Removing it means your quarters will slide everywhere and not be nearly as pretty!

Heat 2 T of oil in a big heavy skillet and brown the cut sides of the fennel quarters. Don’t worry that they brown unevenly. Set the quarters cut sides up in your roasting pan, nestling them snugly together. Don’t use too big of a pan. Sprinkle the olives over them.

(Pre-olives)

Put the anchovy, spices, thyme and garlic in a small pan and mush them together into a paste.

Add the wine or vermouth, bring to a boil, reduce by half. This smells amazing. Add the stock and bring to a simmer. Pour over the fennel.

Doesn’t that look smashing? I wanted to eat it right then. Instead:
Cover tightly with foil and braise until the cores are tender when poked with a thin knife, about an hour and 15 minutes. If you saved the fluffy tops you can chop up a couple tablespoons and sprinkle them on top before serving hot or at room temperature. (I forgot to do that.)

Finished and poorly lit, with the pork:

Oh, and before that we had my old standby cauliflower soup (soften a chopped onion in a bit of oil; add in a hacked-up head of cauliflower, cover with stock, simmer 20 minute or so until the cauliflower is soft; puree with an immersion blender until it’s nice and smooth–easiest soup ever):

It was a very neutral-colored meal. Hmm. I loved the fennel–it takes on a texture sort of like bok choy when it’s braised; kind of watery but in a good way. The sharp licorice flavor is WAY tempered. The olives are essential, I was surprised by what a nice strong note they gave each bite. Yum.

After a long, long hiatus, we finally had friends over for dinner on Saturday. (We were out of town all but two weekends from before Christmas until last weekend. It’s been a busy couple months!) Since I was actually going to be home all day on Saturday and the weather was supposed to be disgusting, I went ahead and tried a new Sunday Suppers recipe: the Boeuf à la Niçoise, served with buttered noodles (with spinach). We started with my old favorite Inoteca Salad (romaine and raddichio with red wine vinaigrette, covered by a mound of ricotta salata). Then the beef and noodles, and finally another old favorite, the Sunday Suppers Meyer Lemon and Chocolate Tart (this was a special request from Ben).

One miscalculation: All the Sunday Suppers recipes are supposed to feed six, and generally with six people there are limited leftovers, if any. We were just four on Saturday and have WAY too much food left over (especially the tart, which gives an easy 8+ slices).

The recipe uses 3 pounds of boneless short ribs instead of the typical chuck roast. After cutting up the strips of meat into nice chunks, they get a rub-down with 1 T pepper, 1 T thyme leaves, zest of 1/2 orange and 6 crushed garlic cloves.

That combination is supposed to hang out overnight, but despite a completely annoying after-work-before-movie shopping trip on Friday night so I’d be able to prep the meat, I completely forgot when we got home, and had to do it in the morning, about six hours before cooking. Oops!

The meat (with the garlic and orange brushed off, to be added back in later) gets thoroughly seared (heat the dutch oven for three minutes; add in a few tablespoons of olive oil, let that heat for another couple minutes before adding a bit of the meat at a time, in batches. This is a smoky process, so open a window…):

And then diced vegetables– 1/2 cup each of carrot and fennel and 1 cup of onion, plus six sprigs of thyme–caramelize a bit in the messy, messy pot, then the reserved garlic and orange zest go in. I include this photo, taken once I’d added in 3/4 cup crushed San Marzano tomatoes and a quarter cup of balsamic vinegar to cook down into a glaze, because cooking isn’t always pretty. There are blackened pots and crappy-looking steps as well as softly-lit final presentations or gleaming raw ingredients!

In go two and a half cups of good red wine, to reduce down, and then four cups of beef stock (bring to a boil), and then the meat. On with some tinfoil (NO PLASTIC WRAP, despite the recipe!) and the lid and into the oven at 325 for three hours.

Part two:
You’re supposed to use San Marzano tomatoes again here, but I couldn’t get whole ones without basil, etc. added in, so I used plain Muir Glen. Cut 8 good canned tomatoes in half and place in a small baking dish (put a couple T of olive oil in the dish first), cut side up. Sprinkle with 1 T thyme, salt and pepper, and put in the oven with the beef for an hour and a half.

At some point while things are roasting, pit 1/2 cup of Niçoise olives (they’re tiny!) by crushing them with the flat of your knife and then picking the pits out:

Also clean 4 oz. of baby spinach and set aside, and get a pot of salted water boiling and then turn it off so it won’t take forever to boil when you need it!

Part three:
When the beef is done, remove it from the oven, uncover it (make sure the beef is meltingly tender, if it’s not back to the oven with you!) and ladle half the juices out into a big pan. Crank the oven to 400 and put the meat back in for 15 minutes.

Bring that water back to a boil and cook 3/4 pound of pappardelle, a little underdone.

Add the olives to the braising juices and then add in the pasta, toss and bring to a low simmer. Add in 6 tablespoons of butter. (I know! You should see the recipe for the lemon tart!), stir in the spinach and 1/4 cup of chopped parsley, and serve, tucking the roasted tomatoes in around the chunks of meat.
Salad:

Dinner:

The short ribs make this so, so tender and delicious. I was really tired and not that hungry by the time we ate, but the flavors here were great and the dish was a very big hit at the table.

Dessert:

This was the first time I got to use Meyer lemons instead of regular–they had loads of gorgeous ones at Whole Foods, so I took advantage.

For the record, Meyer lemon on the left, regular on the right:

My tart pan is randomly 9″ instead of 10″, so I always have lots of extra tart dough. I made little stars to munch on and stick on the tart:

Oh, and for good measure here is the Olive That Ate the World, discovered before dinner:

Why can’t I roast chicken without freaking out? The first time I tried, in December of 2006, was so traumatic that I never did it again. After taking a year to recover, I finally tried again a week or two ago, and once again didn’t have the best of luck, despite a tasty outcome.

I saw Zuni Cafe’s salt-roasted chicken technique on AT’s The Kitchen and thought it looked great and easy. I acquired a small chicken. I gave it a nice salt massage and stuck packets of herbs under the skin, as directed. I may have stuck those packets under the skin on the wrong side of the chicken, I’m still not sure.

I let it sit overnight in the fridge, and followed all the cooking directions (except, possibly, putting the chicken right-side up to begin with?)… I flipped it one extra time when I decided it was upside down, but that can’t account for it taking 20 extra minutes to cook, can it?

I did a bad job of cutting the poor thing up, but the meat was juicy and flavorful–I will definitely try the salt rub again. I honestly think part of my problem is with the new stove–the oven temperature varies wildly (last night I had it on 325 and it was going from 250 to 350, and I wasn’t opening the door). I will call Viking this week to see if they need to calibrate it or something.

I sauteed broccoli and marinated cherry tomatoes in vinaigrette, and made some israeli couscous (Ben’s favorite) to go with the chicken.

Help me stop being so scared of whole chickens! I’m very tempted to just start buying the rotisserie ones, all nicely cooked for me.

In an attempt to branch out and due to menu planning on the fly at Trader Joe’s while on the phone with my mom, I decided to make chicken quesadillas for dinner one night last week. I bought:
-A packet of small corn tortillas
-A package of chicken tenders
-Grated cheese
-Guacamole (which comes in two clever little sealed packets so you don’t open a whole pound at once)
-A container of “Salsa makings” or something along those lines, containing two shallots, three roma tomatoes, one lime, one jalapeño and a couple cloves of garlic

Once I got home I made salsa using the tomatoes, too much shallot, about two-thirds the juice of the lime, a tiny tiny tiny amount of the jalapeño, and salt (we are both spicy-food wimps and I hate cilantro—not the makings of stellar salsa…). I used the cuisinart stick blender’s mini-prep attachment (which I think I may have later ruined by stupidly tossing the top part (not the stick blender, but the dome that connects the blender to the bowl) in the dishwasher, eek!) to dice up the shallots very, very fine—it worked great.

12 seconds later:

The salsa was only so-so—too much shallot and not enough lime? Also the tomatoes were as blah as you’d expect in February; I don’t know what I was thinking.

I used a bit of the chopped shallot to make a lemon vinaigrette for salad, and put the salsa and salad dressing to the side. Next I made a marinade for the chicken, trying to remember what my mom had told me over the phone. I used the rest of the lime juice, some lemon juice, a bunch of the shallot, a little brown sugar, a couple slices of the jalapeño, and a bit of oil. I cut the chicken tenders into small pieces and marinated them for about 15 minutes (as Mom warned, they will cook in the citrus, like ceviche, if you marinate too long!).

I sautéed the chicken in a nonstick pan—I drained off as much marinade as I could but I didn’t mop the chicken off or anything, and the marinade bubbled up a lot and then caramelized on the chicken, which was tasty.

I set the chicken (a little undercooked so it wouldn’t dry out) to the side and heated up our big griddle. I didn’t get quite the right heat/time balance to make the quesadillas crispy and melty but not tough. I always used to use flour tortillas, which get crunchy but not so hard if you leave them on the heat too long. The corn ones definitely require different timing.

We ate the tortillas with the salad, salsa and guacamole. I’ll try again soon, but I had forgotten that I really don’t love anything but cheese in quesadillas. Maybe I’ll do soft tacos instead?

~~~

BTW, I’m writing this post on the Acela from NYC to Boston. I’m online thanks to a tip from a co-worker—turns out you can get t-mobile to help you set up your computer to use an internet-enabled cellphone (I have a blackberry pearl) as a modem. Amazing!!!! I’m headed home after a wonderful weekend with my dear friend Bridget (who is moving to London next week—good luck, Bridge!). Friday night I got to NY at 9-something and we met at the Spotted Pig, where we only had to wait an hour and devoured the amazing burgers. Next time I don’t think I’ll bother on a weekend—the crowd was dense and not our scene as the night went on—but the burger was amazing and I’ll definitely go again on a weeknight.