Last week we had three dinner parties, and MAN, was I tired by the end. The first was a super-traditional ham dinner for a few friends on Easter. We even ate in the late afternoon; it was very retro—so much so that I was even inspired to wear one of my 50s dresses, complete with rick-rack trim. I wasn’t clear on how many people were coming, so I ended up with MUCH too big of a ham; it was more than 9 pounds and in the end we had four meat eaters! I now have a freezer full of ham. (There are worse fates, I guess.) To go with it I made my mom’s broccoli puree, which is the one item we nearly always eat on holidays, and which I’d never made before, and Julia Child’s Scalloped Potato recipe from the cookbook that goes with her early television shows. I baked Parker House rolls and cupcakes, too.

We were in Boston on Saturday and got home (with groceries) around 10, and we were going to church in the morning so I knew I had to do some prep that night. I made the broccoli purée and put it in the fridge, all ready to go. It took a while to clean all the broccoli, then I cooked it and it took a longer while to puree because I didn’t follow the instructions. I had too much to do all at once in the cuisinart, so I was trying to purée some, remove it, purée the rest, then continue with the recipe. Hmm, it turns out you really need to add the crème fraîche for the recipe to work. The cuisinart can’t get the broccoli smooth enough unless you add it before puréeing—it needs the wetter texture to get the job done. Oh well, lesson learned, but I wish I hadn’t learned it at 11 o’clock at night, while madly spooning hot broccoli in and out of the cuisinart. I think Ben was a little scared. This is a fabulous (and EASY if you follow the directions) recipe, though, and a really nice fancy side dish.

Note holes from repeated pokes with a thermometer to see if it was hot yet:

My mom apparently got the recipe from the Silver Palate cookbook, but I will always think of it as Mom’s Broccoli Puree:

Broccoli Purée with Crème Fraîche – Silver Palate

Note from Kate’s mom: I often adapt this recipe to the amount of broccoli I have on hand and adjust other ingredients accordingly; i.e.; I often reduce the amount of crème fraiche.

4 big stalks broccoli (3 lbs), trimmed and chopped, including stems
1 Cup crème fraîche
4 T sour cream
2/3 Cup freshly grated parmesan
1?2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1?2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Salt to taste
2 T sweet butter

1. Bring 4 quarts of water to a boil; salt.
2. Chop broccoli, leaving several flowerets whole to decorate top of dish. Drop broccoli into boiling water.
3. Cook just until tender, about 8 minutes, but test earlier.
4. Transfer broccoli, reserving flowerets, to a food processor. Add crème fraîche and puree thoroughly.
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
6. Scrape puree into a large bowl. Stir in sour cream, parmesan, nutmeg, pepper and salt to taste. Mix well.
7. Mound in ovenproof serving dish, dot with butter and bake in preheated oven for 35 minutes or until puree is steaming hot.
8. Garnish with reserved flowerets and serve immediately.

Note from Kate: Since I made this ahead it was very cold when it went into the oven, instead of being lukewarm from the cooked broccoli. As a result it took forever to get hot; good to keep in mind for next time.

The scalloped potatoes were much simpler than I expected, though you definitely want to use a mandolin to slice them super-thin. It would have taken forever to do with a knife, and I doubt I could have gotten them thin enough. I ignored Julia’s instructions to use a flameproof gratin pan, since I have no such thing. Instead I heated the milk (whole milk with a crushed garlic clove or two, plus salt and pepper) on the stove and poured it over a few layers at a time of the potatoes. I am paranoid about undercooking this sort of thing, having eaten some very crunchy scalloped potatoes in my day, so I peeled back the top layer and pulled out a sample from inside once or twice to check that everything was cooked enough. The finished dish was subtly garlicky and very refined. It held together well and I didn’t miss cheese or cream.

The ham was from Vermont and was pre-cooked, so I just had to heat it in the oven. It was good but not great… It sure looked impressive though! Here’s the whole spread:

The Parker House rolls were a fiasco. I gambled that the bulk yeast I have is instant, and….it’s not. The rolls were very small. Heh. I also made my first ever batch of cupcakes, yellow cake with confectioner’s sugar frosting, and though they spread out on top of the pan, once I trimmed the errant tops to size and frosted them (sloppily) they looked ok. They tasted quite good, too!

I told Ben while I was hacking the crispy overhanging edges off the cupcakes that I feel like I have two cooking/entertaining fairy godmothers, one on each shoulder. In one ear Martha was telling me to bake another batch; in the other Julia was saying to just add more frosting and cover the cut edges. Obviously I listened to Julia.

Oh man, this involves a LOT of cauliflower. We were going to a potluck at the home of one of Ben’s professors, and the guest list looked like there would be 16 people there. I was to bring a “cooked vegetable,” so I bought four heads of cauliflower (8 pounds in all) and made Cauliflower with Lemon-Mustard Butter from epicurious.com.

This involved a much longer period spent slicing cauliflower than I expected. Cauliflower doesn’t want to be sliced, it wants to be florets. Slicing means you get some nice cross-sections and a LOT of crumbs. Oh well. I ended up doing four half sheet pans (regular cookie sheet size) and four quarter sheets, rotating them all in and out of the oven. Maybe more, it got a little hairy there at the end, and I was in some sort of Cauli-Trance.

You bake the slices (and crumbs) for about 15 minutes, then baste them with the sauce—a lot of butter, lemon juice and mustard, with some zest for good measure) and bake for another 10 minute. I’m a sucker for roasted cauliflower, so I’m not the best judge because I’m not picky, but Ben kept eating the finished batches off the serving tray, so I’m pretty sure it’s a hit for people who don’t LOVE cauliflower, as well. It’s very tangy and buttery, and the leftovers (only 12 people ended up being at the party) have been tasty straight out of the fridge.

The other day for lunch I used up the tail end of a bag of pasta, cooking it absorption-style, and at the end I threw in a bunch of the leftover cauliflower and heated it through. That was great: The sauce melted and coated the pasta and the textures were a good match. Yum.

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.

A favorite cookbook in my family is The (sadly out-of-print) Classic Pasta Cookbook by Marcella Hazan’s son Giuliano. It looks sort of like a kid’s book (it is published by the Eyewitness Books people, I think), with photos illustrating each recipe, but the recipes are really good and quite sophisticated and traditional.

My version of the ingredients:

I finally received my very own copy of the book recently, but hadn’t used it yet, and I broke it in for a casual dinner last week by making the simplest thing in the book: a tomato and butter sauce, which I served over store-bought fresh ravioli. Very easy, very comforting, and quite pretty–the (large amount of) butter gives this a softer flavor and color than marinara-style tomato sauces.

-2 14 oz tins of whole peeled tomatoes with their juice, coarsely chopped [I use one -28 oz can of the muir glen chopped ones]
-3.5 oz butter
-1 medium onion, peeled and cut in half
-salt
-4 T freshly grated parmesan cheese
Put all ingredients except the cheese in a saucepan and simmer over a low heat until tomatoes have reduced and separated from the butter: 20-40 minutes depending on the size of the pan.
Remove from the heat and set aside, discarding the onion halves.
Toss the pasta in the hot sauce with the cheese.

(Gah, all my evening photos are so blurry—the lighting in the kitchen is terrible! I’m sorry.)

The best part, though, was the leftover sauce. The next day I suddenly felt inspired to use the sauce in my lunch, and I put it over fried eggs on sourdough toast. I could write a whole post about how much I love fried eggs on toast, and eggs in almost any form, but this was especially good. The soft flavor of the tomato sauce was perfect with the egg but did add a nice fresh taste, and made the whole thing seem more lunchy.

It was pretty, too.