Easter picnic

This being the first big holiday spent away from our families, we wanted to do something special for Easter.  There was no way I could prepare a ham for just the two of us, so we hit upon doing a picnic (or, as I like to call it after our Provence excursion last spring, "le pique-nique").  We figured that it would be a good way to explore the state a little more, but even if the weather turned out to be poor, we could just put our picnic blanket out in our living room!  Our menu consisted of sandwiches on homemade baguettes, avocado salad, orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad, and hot cross buns.

Sandwiches

For the sandwiches, we went with prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and a little drizzle of balsamic, all piled onto homemade baguettes.

• We made the baguettes from the Joy of Cooking recipe; the stand mixer again proved its worth for the mixing and kneading.

Nice crumb!

• We had previously made the mozzarella, though for whatever reason our result was more like a cream cheese spread than regular mozzarella (we have made mozzarella successfully in the past, so it wasn't a first-timers thing).  So we just figured that the cheese could be spread onto the bread before putting all the fillings in.
• The prosciutto came from Venda Ravioli in Providence.  This was our first time going there and it was, I'll admit, a little overwhelming.  It was like a whole emporium for Italian foods; there were even multiple options for prosciutto at the meat counter!  Apparently the "San Daniele" prosciutto was the one to get, but as the guy in front of us requested the San Daniele, we had to 'settle' for prosciutto di Parma so as not to hold up the line.  There were already a LOT of people in line behind us as it was the Saturday before Easter at an Italian market....but I was just really excited to buy prosciutto in the same manner than one might buy some deli turkey for the week's lunches.
• The balsamic also came from Venda Ravioli.  The ingredients list was just one ingredient: 100% cooked must.  So I figured it was the real thing, or at least as close as we can get to the real thing without going bankrupt.  It's sweeter and less overtly acidic than the regular balsamic vinegars.  Well worth it to try!

  

  This is but one reason why I like going to Italian markets.

I made my sandwich with prosciutto, balsamic (sprinkled onto the cut surfaces of the bread), mozzarella, and basil; Dom added sliced red peppers to his.  Both were quite tasty!

That's mine on the left.  Amazingly tasty.

Avocado salad

Just a simple mixed salad of avocados, corn, grape tomatoes, snap peas, and green onions tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette.  We used the regular balsamic vinegar, not the stuff we'd picked up at the Italian market yesterday.  A good mix of colours, textures, and flavours.

Spot all five ingredients.

Orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad

This recipe came from The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays as "orange vanilla fruit salad", though I scaled it down considerably since I didn't want 12 servings.  We used a half pint each of blackberries and blueberries, plus some strawberries and Muscat grapes (they were the same price as the green grapes).  The recipe is pretty flexible as to what fruits to use.

The "orange vanilla" part of the original recipe title comes from the syrup poured over the fruit.  The original recipe called for equal parts sugar and water plus the zest and juice of an orange.  I used less than a quarter cup of sugar, a bit of vanilla, a half cup of water, the juice and zest of one Cara cara navel orange, and the juice and zest of a lime.  I figured that since all the fruits I'd chosen were pretty sweet, the syrup could use some tartness from the lime juice.  There was something between a third and a half cup of syrup after reduction.

Syrup, after reduction.

The result was a very tasty fruit salad; if anything, I would have left the vanilla out.  In fact, I debated for several minutes whether I should even include the vanilla in the first place as the lime-orange syrup already smelled pretty good.  But in the end there were no complaints about the fruit salad!

I usually like fruit salad, but this was really tasty with the zesty syrup.

Hot cross buns

I'll admit it: my only knowledge of hot cross buns before this year came from the first named melody in the music books used by novice instrumentalists, and the incomplete explanation I got about what hot cross buns represent.  I didn't realize until this year that they are an Easter tradition!  And they didn't seem too difficult to make.

I used the Joy of Cooking recipe with inspirations from the version in Nick Malgieri's Bread.  So to the Joy recipe's cinnamon and nutmeg I added lemon zest, cloves, cardamom, and a pinch of ginger, and then instead of currants I threw in dried cherries (being a Michigan native and all).  In place of 1 egg I used 2 egg yolks.  So it was not exactly a traditional hot cross bun, but these were tasty nonetheless.

The icing was confectioner's sugar, water, and a little vanilla.  I had just enough for all 18!

The picnic site

We scoured a very helpful website listing public parks in the state to figure out where to go.  We finally settled on going to the park surrounding Conanicut Battery in Jamestown, which promised to have a nice view of the West Passage of Narragansett Bay.  We ended up having our picnic amid the earthwork fortifications of a Revolutionary War-era gun battery.  Neat!

Upper 50s, sunny, a light breeze, and too early in the season for bugs: could there be any better conditions for a picnic?  I don't think so.

Happy Easter!

Recipes used:

Baguettes: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 601

Fruit salad: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays (2013), p. 108-109

Hot cross buns: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610; with inspiration from Nick Malgieri's Bread (2012), p. 208-209

Writeup background noise: first it was NBCSports's replay of the Chinese Grand Prix, because while the Red Wings were losing, I commandeered the TV; and now it's the soundtrack from Super Mario Galaxy. 

Ragù with rigatoni v2.0

In our last post I had talked about the ragù with rigatoni I'd made with beef instead of lamb.  I recently tried making it again with some of our modifications.  The results were a mixed bag of success: not quite as tasty, but some of the new techniques can be incorporated into the next iteration.

• We stuck with beef, mostly because in this area, it's easier to buy beef than lamb.
• I wanted to try making this with an Italian wine rather than a French wine.  Thanks to Wines and More Rhode Island (right next to Whole Foods!), we got a wine from the Campania region.  I actually ended up liking the French wine better, both on its own and in the dish (but see the caveat in the next point), though I do believe that we need a bigger sample size on this one.  The Italian red we used was a little more dry than the Rhône wine we'd gotten the first time.
• Instead of using the 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1 cup of the juices, I used a 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes.  This was definitely not a solution.  The whole tomatoes are not canned in additional tomato juice; it's just whatever juices come from the tomatoes themselves.  Diced tomatoes, I have learned, are canned with additional juice added, so the ragù was much more acidic than version 1.0.  This made the dish overly tomato-y and combined with the wine we used, it didn't seem quite as complex of a flavour as the first ragù we made.  Most of the spices were drowned out.
• The recipe called for a cup and a half of chicken stock, which I had felt was too much, so for this iteration I reduced it to 1 cup.  Unfortunately, my ill-fated decision to use the diced tomatoes meant that there was still way too much liquid in the pot; I still had to boil the sauce uncovered for about 45 minutes to get it to reduce a bit.
• I greatly reduced the cumin and threw in a pinch of nutmeg along with a bay leaf, but as noted previously, the final dish was mostly a tomato sauce with some beef in it and practically no spices.  Next time I'll keep the proportions I used for this attempt.

So, I suppose this is what learning to cook is all about, right?  Trial and error, modifying the recipe a bit, then refining it some more?  That's what I keep telling myself, at least.

The fantastic thing about cooking with wine?  You can drink while cooking.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

Writeup background noise: Mike and Mike simulcast on ESPN2.