Cooking techniques, Food, Recipes

Lydia’s Pasta Salad

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Another weekend, another barbecue. This time some friends from Ben’s first study group came over for burgers in the late afternoon. Sick of cooking potatoes, I made the pasta salad that I first fell in love with at my bridal shower last summer. Ben’s mom’s best friend (and our good friend too!) Lydia makes this supremely simple and delicious pasta salad; we were all begging for instructions after we tried it. Ben called and got the directions on Saturday, and it’s as easy as can be:

Lydia’s Pasta Salad
While your pasta water is boiling, cut up ripe tomatoes and put them in a big bowl with olive oil and salt. (I used cherry and grape tomatoes, about two pints, quartered (they MUST be cut up), with maybe a quarter cup (plus a little) of oil and a bunch of salt.) Let the tomatoes start releasing their juice.
Cut up about a pound of firm mozzarella (though I want to give fresh another shot, I think the flavor would be better even if it did melt all over the place) into small bites and put it in with the tomatoes. [SEE EDIT, below.]

Cook a pound of pasta (Lydia uses penne), drain it, and toss it in with the tomatoes and cheese while it’s still hot.
Add torn up basil and lots of salt and pepper. Keep tasting it; it’s a bit hard to season this enough but you also don’t want to go overboard.

Obviously with a salad this simple, your ingredients need to be top-notch. I used grape/cherry tomatoes because I’ve had better luck finding tasty and sweet ones in the off season. And the cheese I used was so-so. But it’s still really easy and really popular. We went through about 5/6 of this huge bowl!

EDITED 5/21

Per Mom’s question in the comments, I made this again for a dinner party Friday night and used little bocconcini (small balls of fresh mozzarella), cut into quarters. The salad was WAY better–definitely use fresh mozzarella. I cut it small so that if it did melt when I added the pasta I wouldn’t have any enormous blobs of cheese, but it stayed fairly intact. We ate leftovers in the car on the way to Boston on Saturday; this is great picnic food!

City Life, Family, Life in the Big Woods

Distracted by Bikes

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Something I never thought would happen…has happened. I have bikes on the brain, and want to go out riding. You should know that my dad has bike commuted since I was a kid (I remember watching for his bike light out the window when I was 6), and my brother is really into alternative transport and bike building/repair. I, meanwhile, learned to ride when I was 8 or so, had an ok mountain bike out in Oregon, but never rode with much pleasure or regularity.

Ben loves to bike, but has ridden a totally inadequate bike from high school for years (more than 10 years), and we finally decided to get him a new bike, and to look for something for me as well. I had seen the Electra Amsterdam in Blueprint and shown it to Tom, who gave it a seal of approval, to my utter shock. (I expected him to say it was a marketing ploy, designed to suck money away from unsuspecting rubes who….well, it’s usually something along those lines; you should hear him on beginners who ride racing bikes!)

Behold, the object of my lust:
bike
Note the chain guard, wheel cover, lovely blue shade… It is styled after the bikes used for commuting in the Netherlands, and sports a 3-speed internal gear thingy. (Very technical, right?) I also like Electra’s “flat foot” design approach–the pedals are pushed forward a bit, so when you are stopped you can put your feet on the ground.

But when we went to the bike shop they didn’t have Amsterdams, only the cruiser styles, which aren’t what I want. And they started telling me about some other options, and asking if I really wanted a 3-speed or if I’d want to be able to go up bigger hills eventually. I don’t know! Here is the 24-speed they recommended, the Suede DX w by Giant:
bike2
Hmm. More retro-styling than the other Giants I tried, and it has a cute seat, but it doesn’t conjure up images of me biking along looking extremely adorable and European, does it? Reminds me more of a little kid’s bmx bike or something. (…I don’t even know what that means.)

Cooking techniques, Food

Thinking green

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Look at the amazing light that streams through the side of our house (well, the windows on the side–we do have walls) in the late afternoon:

favas

I sat in a pool of that light to shuck my fava beans in preparation for dinner, and was delighted as always by their color and the fuzzy insides of the pods and the sleek little jackets on the beans:

shucked

And after I blanched them (two minutes in salted boiling water, then into a cold bath) and peeled them, they were even brighter:

green

Sadly I didn’t know quite what to do with them. I had the halibut and asparagus, as I said before…I envisioned a scattered shower of the favas over the fish, with the asparagus on the side, but didn’t know how to prepare the beans. I decided to just sauté them with a little olive oil and lemon zest, and see what happened.

(BTW, this is written from the US Airways (ugh) terminal at LaGuardia, where I am waiting and waiting for delayed and canceled flights back up north. I just ate a shameful fast food dinner, lest you think I’m actually healthy and home-cookish all the time.)
pan

What happened was that they got a little mushy (even after mere seconds) an stopped being quite so green. Oops. I drenched them in lemon juice (more de-greening) and let them sit while I did everything else.

I put some more lemon zest on the halibut, which I had clumsily divided into two servings.

ingred

The asparagus I tossed with lots of oil, salt and pepper, and grilled for about 8 minutes, until it was tender (a little too tender, for the skinny ones! It was a very irregular batch of asparagus) and nicely charred. Mmmm.

aspar

We ate that room temperature, since I was waiting for Ben to get back from a night class, and had everything except the fish ready to go when he got home. I was scared to cook fish, which I’ve never done before. I put some olive oil, salt and pepper on the flesh side of the fish, and started it on the grill with that side down. I cooked it about 5 minutes face down, then put it skin-side down for another…4 or 5 minutes? It was just barely cooked; I should have left it another minute, at least. Still, not horrible for a first try!

dinner

Eaten on the porch by candlelight, it was a very fresh and springy dinner. I need to work on my fish technique, and next time I want to make a fava purée. So green!

Food, Life in the Big Woods

Winter to Summer

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There wasn’t much spring here in New Hampshire this year–it’s gone straight to summer, and right now it is 85 degrees. The good news is that we have nice cool nights, much like back home in Oregon, so the sleeping is still good. The birds, however, are not sleeping well–they were up at 4:30 this morning, and so was I until I found earplugs.

We were in NY last weekend, and then Ben was in Boston, so I haven’t been cooking much. I had a spartan few days, using up whatever we had around, and eating a lot of bread and jam:

jam

Tonight, despite a late start for dinner (9:30), I am going to actually cook, and it will be a Spring Special: Halibut, asparagus and fava beans. I’ll report back with what I decide to do with it all.

Food, Life in the Big Woods

Spanakopita Fest

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Last Thursday we hosted a surprise 30th birthday party for our friend Chris. Preparations involved quite a few weeks of subterfuge by his wife Ann, and we spent several days shopping and cooking before the party, all uner the guise of driving lessons for me. The week before we spent a memorable afternoon making about 90 spanakopita using Chris’s mom’s recipe.

Making a double (triple?) batch meant using a LOT of frozen chopped spinach, which we squeezed out using flour cloth (very chilly):
spinach sink

Into the spinach went a bit of egg, a lot of feta, some ricotta and cottage cheese, green onions, and….I think that’s it? I need to get the recipe from Ann. My hands proved to be the best mixing tools–this is the bowl from the Kitchenaid, for scale.
spinach mixing

The miserable thing was the folding. The phyllo was dry (Ann taught me that you must always blame the phyllo for any problems you have), so it was frustrating buttering each sheet and trying to keep it intact while layering, filling and folding the little triangles. After a few dozen we switched to an eggroll shape, which was somehow less splinter-inducing for the dough.
folders

We popped our trays of triangles and rolls into the freezer, and once they were hard as little rocks I transferred them into ziplocks. Ann made another batch or two at another friends house, as well. The night of the party I baked them at 375 for about 45 minutes, and they were fabulous. The filling had a good bite to it, great texture and flavor, and despite being such a royal pain I had to enjoy the crispy buttery phyllo.

baked

We ended up having decorating with Cinco de Mayo stuff, including a pinata, which Chris beat down to great effect It was all very festive.
decorated

And Ann and I put together quite a spread—and artichoke/spinach dip, the spanakopita, really great homemade hummus (heavy on the garlic and tahini), chips and salsa… Also many, many margaritas and daiquiris. Chris was very surprised and everything went great, but I have to say I prefer 6-8 people coming over for dinner, instead of the 25+ for cocktail madness. With a crowd like that I spend the whole night refilling drinks and bowls, instead of eating anything myself!

Cooking techniques, Food, Life in the Big Woods

Barbecuing

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For the second night feeding the boys, we grilled burgers and sausage and ate outside. We invited Chris and Ann over to talk marketing with the college kids, and then Brian and Liz came over to play catch and we asked them to stay, too. All 8 of us squeezed around the table on the porch, which gave it a fun party feeling. It was a little chilly to be eating outside but I don’t think any of us noticed, in part because Ann, who is always cold, was sitting by the open window to the kitchen, where I accidentally left the oven on at 480 degrees long after taking the potatoes out…

Liz mixed up some more wonder concoctions in the freezer–a sort of strawberry margarita improvisation–and the guys drank a lot of beer. We grilled 14 1/4 pound hamburgers and 10 sausages and every single one was eaten. I also made a huge salad and some oven fries, and Ann brought a delicious cake from King Arthur.

The oven fries were an experiment, and worked out remarkably well. I usually parboil potatoes that I’m trying to make crispy in the oven, and the few times I’ve skipped that I’ve regretted it (see the chicken dinner back in December where the potatoes took an extra 45 minutes to cook). But I forged ahead, cut 8 big bakers into wedges, rubbed them around in oil, salt and pepper, then baked them at 450 (later cranking it to 480) for about….45 minutes?

wedges

When I pulled them out to test them a lot of the wedges were sticking; they hadn’t crisped up enough to release from the pans. That was when I cranked the heat up. Basically just keep baking them until they release from the pan without too much trouble! I dusted them with some truffle salt (another product sample from my magazine days) before serving.

fries

Dinner—the best shot I could get in the midst of the utter chaos (fun chaos) at the table:

burger

dinner

Cooking techniques, Family, Food, Recipes

Six+ lb. lasagna: A photo tutorial

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Ben’s “little” brother (6’6″) and one of his friends came to visit this weekend, and since I knew I would be feeding two young guys who can eat impressively large quantities at a sitting, I planned big, food-wise. For dinner when they got up here Friday night I made a meat lasagna, using the Cook’s Illustrated recipe I cooked once last fall. The ingredients total more than six pounds, so I figured it would do the trick.

ingred

Hearty Meat Lasagna – New Best Recipes (Cook’s Illustrated)
(As adapted by Kate’s Mom)

Notes from Mom: “This is a production but easy to do. It is important to get the mix of meats. I get it fresh ground at Long’s and ask Mike to make the pork fatty because veal and beef are lean.

Unless I am doing it for a party and need the whole recipe, I assemble it in three tin foil square pans and freeze the other two.”

Method

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Tomato-Meat Sauce

1 T olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped fine
6 medium cloves garlic, minced
1 lb. meat loaf mix or .33 lb each ground beef chuck, ground veal, & ground pork
.5 t. salt
.5 t. black pepper
.25 C heavy cream
1 (28 oz) can pureed tomatoes
1 (28 oz) can diced tomatoes, drained

sauce

2. Sauce: Heat oil in a large, heavy-bottomed Dutch oven over medium heat until shimmering, but not smoking, about 2 minutes.
a. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened but not brown, about 2 minutes.
b. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute.
c. Increase heat to medium-high and add the ground meats, salt, and pepper; cook, breaking the meat into small pieces until the meat loses its raw color but has not browned, about 4 minutes.

sauce2

d. Add the cream and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid evaporates and only the fat remains, about 4 minutes.
e. Add the pureed and drained diced tomatoes, and bring to a simmer; reduce the heat to low and simmer slowly until the flavors are blended, about 3 minutes – and only 3 minutes; set the sauce aside. (Note from Kate: You’re leaving the sauce wet, not cooking it down, because you need enough liquid to cook the no-boil noodles.)

sauce3

Ricotta, Mozzarella & Pasta Layers
15 oz whole-milk ricotta, 1.75 C
2.5 oz Parmesan cheese, freshly grated, 1.25 C (divided)
(optional per Beth: .5 t. red pepper flakes & .25 t. nutmeg)
.5 C fresh basil, chopped
1 large egg, lightly beaten
.5 t. salt
.5 t. black pepper

ingred2

12 no-boil lasagna noodles
1 lb whole-milk mozzarella, shredded, 4 C

ready

3. Layers:
a. Mix ricotta, 1 C of the Parmesan, basil, egg, salt, and pepper (and optional red pepper flakes and nutmeg) in a medium bowl with a fork until well combined and creamy; set aside.

creamed

b. Smear the bottom of a 13 x 9” baking dish with .25 C of the meat sauce.
(Note: Here’s Mom’s adaptation, and a brilliant one it is. Instead of trying to dab the ricotta onto noodles in the pan, lifting them up and displacing them with your spoon, she lays them out like playing cards and uses a spatula to spread the mixture on.)
c. Lay out 9 of the noodles and smear equally with the ricotta mixture.

cards

d. Place 3 of the coated noodles in the dish to create the first layer.

noodles

e. Sprinkle the layer with 1 C mozzarella.
f. Spoon 1.5 C meat sauce evenly over cheese.

layer

g. Repeat layering of coated noodles, mozzarella, and sauce over the noodles two more times.
h. Place the remaining three noodles on top of the sauce, spread with remaining sauce, sprinkle with the remaining 1 C mozzarella, then with the remaining .25 C Parmesan.

lasagna
side

i. Lightly spray a large sheet of foil with nonstick cooking spray and cover the lasagna.
j. Bake 15 minutes; remove foil.
k. Return lasagna to oven and bake until the cheese is spotty brown and the sauce is bubbling, about 25 minutes longer.
l. Cool the lasagna about 10 minutes; cut into pieces and serve.

lasagan cooked

Let me tell you, this is a delicious lasagna. Each boy had two of those huge pieces that night; Ben and I each had half a piece and split the other piece for lunch the next day. See the pretty layers in the cold slice:

crossection

I served it with salad and a loaf of store-bought garlic bread. That is a classic combo for a reason!

Food, Life in the Big Woods

Grilled chicken with eggplant

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I am trying to avoid falling back on pasta for non-company dinners, so last night I tried a recipe from Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, a chinese-inspired eggplant/shallot/ginger mixture to serve with chicken.

ingred

The shallots get browned for a while, then in goes the eggplant until it’s nice and browned and soft. A bunch of minced ginger goes in towards the end, and I served it over rice with grilled chicken.

eggpl

The eggplant was pleasantly bitter with the sweet shallots, which were really delicious. Another time I might just cook a ton of shallots this way–they were slightly caramelized and a really nice side dish.

dish

We ate out on the porch even though it was a bit chilly. Frogs have woken up in a stream a block or two away, which reminded me of eating on my parents’ deck in Oregon. Spring must really be here!

I tried Bittman’s rice recipe from that book and it didn’t work nearly as well as his method in How to Cook Everything. This way made wet rice, blech.

City Life, Design/Living, The Apartment

Why we buy old

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Scrappy Girl asked today about buying real/knock-off vintage furniture, and it got me thinking about why we love old things. Ben and I are true suckers for old music, houses, furniture…You name it. Our wedding song was “I’m Old Fashioned.” The (big) band played only standards—the music Ben also plays on the piano. So of course when we started apartment hunting we focused on things built before 1940, and especially before 1920. The apartment we ended up with was built around the turn of the 20th century, and it shows. The layout is long and narrow, with the kitchen and maid’s room (my study!) at the back. The exterior doorknobs are brass, with beading details around each one. The inside knobs are either brass of painted wood, depending on where they’re located. The double crown molding ends in picture rails around every room, so I can hang art with picture hooks instead of making holes in the wall, if I want (the inspector was impressed that I knew what they were). And then there is that pantry that I already posted pics of… All those details are what make a house feel special to us, and we feel really lucky that we found something that is nearly perfectly intact.

At the home inspection on Tuesday, I took a closer look at the fireplace, which I was already in love with:

fp

That is….not a great photo. But the gorgeous mantel aside, the fireplace is surrounded with narrow green subway tiles, and a border of white ones. Tuesday I actually leaned into look at the interior, and here is what I found:

fp inside

Ooooh. I think it’s a cast iron liner? I cannot wait to see it with a fire lit!

Food, Recipes, Travel

Argentina Travelogue: Mendoza, part two

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(Yet another long delay. I’ll try to wrap this up in the next week.)

The evening after our wine tasting day we simply could not face walking into town for dinner at a restaurant. That morning, we had asked Maria Gracia, the owner (and matriarch), if we could have dinner at the hotel. It turns out they had stopped having asados since no one ever asked for them, but we were invited to join the family for dinner at the main house.

fish

The contractor who is working on the guest houses had gone fishing at the reservoir that morning and caught the trout (right Dad?) that we ate. Maria Gracia served mashed avocados (with lemon, salt and pepper) and bread to start, then we had an eggplant parmesan prepared by Maria Gracia’s mother, Rosa (with heavily rolled R, followed by a dramatic pause and: “di Napoli”). That was delicious—the eggplant was more bitter than I’m used to eating in the US, but the dish was served room temperature and all the flavors had mingled nicely. The eggplant wasn’t fried, just sliced and layered with tomatoes and cheese, then baked.

The trout had been cleaned and then stuffed with grated carrots, fresh oregano and tomatoes and baked. It was a good combination, especially with the incredibly delicate fish. I had a bit of trouble with the de-boning (I got one side off perfectly, then spent the rest of the night picking bones from the other side out of my mouth), proof that I have got to practice eating whole fish more often.

Maria Gracia’s birthday was earlier that week, and friends who own a bakery had given her three fancy Alfajors, which are the national cookie of Argentina, from what I could tell. They’re more like cakes, with two dry cookie layers filled with dulce de leche and then frosted with chocolate or meringue. We cut each one up into little pieces so everyone could try each flavor. (The cat tried to grab one, but we rescued it. The cake, not the cat.)

At the table were Ben and I, Maria Gracia and her husband Alberto, their son Gabriel, and Rosa. We sampled several wines from the vineyard where Gabriel works (he is in college studying viticulture), Alta Vista. The rosé was a nice end to the meal. We ate and talked for about three hours, in Spanish, English, French and a little Italian. Alberto is a scientist and Maria Gracia was an art history professor, and the conversation covered lots of ground. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip, tied with our experience hanging out in the Andes with Gustavo.

…..Gustavo. The next day, Gustavo picked us up, this time in casual wear. We drove up into the Andes, a couple hours west of where we were staying (the foothills are within half an hour; we were driving nearly to Chile). We took a two-kilometer hike from the highway past the ranger station and up to a lake that has a great view of Mount Aconcagua, the highest point in the Americas. By far the best part was when we got to the viewing area and Gustavo opened up the box he’d been lugging up the path. Out came a bottle of wine and two glasses, along with some crackers to snack on.

Gustavo polishes up the glasses:
gustavo

What an incredible interlude, slightly light-headed from the altitude and the wine and the sun, gazing at the mountain. Gustavo took this photo of us, with me looking incredibly Lushy–it makes me think of the Valley of the Dolls or something, with the sweater and glasses and glass of wine, so inappropriate in that setting:

lush

Sigh. I’m not very outdoorsy. I got a fierce sunburn that day.

The mountain, through the perfect looking glass:
glass

Aw, it’s not even as remotely food related as all the wine talk, but here’s a picture of us with Gustavo, who is an incredible guy and tons of fun:

trio

For lunch we kept driving west, up to a hostel/restaurant/shop built up over the highway:
lodge
Gustavo told us it was simple food, the type of thing most people eat at home. Sure enough, there was a buffet of stewed beans and meats, rice, rice and beans, and rice and lentils, as well as a salad bar. I had a delicious chicken milanese, salad, mashed potatoes, rice, rice and lentils and salad. (With a side of carbs, please!)
lunch

I asked Gustavo how to cook the rice so it’s as flavorful as mine was. Here’s his recipe:
-Put corn oil in the pan, heat it up, and add rice. Cook for 10 minutes.
-Cover with water and add a bouillon cube. [I guess I could sub in chicken stock for those two.]
-Cook, uncovered, until almost done. Remove from heat and cover until dried out.

That night we were exhausted again, so we ended up walking to the corner store and assembling a rather make-shift picnic, ham sandwiches and chips and cookies:
picnic

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