Savory cheesecake

Recently we were given a Ziploc bag stuffed full of fresh bay leaves; another volunteer at an event we were helping with apparently has a tree in his yard.  We use dried bay leaves in sauces and (when we used to make them) stews, but we'd never used fresh before.  I immediately set about finding recipes to use our bay leaves.

From the trove of recipes I've amassed, I found two cheesecake recipes that would use bay leaves: a savory and a sweet.  Both came from a book that translated Ancient Greek and Roman recipes and adapted them for modern kitchens; incidentally and appropriately enough for April 21, these recipes both came from one of the Ancient Rome chapters.  We tried the savory cheesecake first.

The ingredients for the recipe are:

1 lb. feta cheese
4 oz. all purpose flour
1 egg
2-3 bay leaves [I used way more since we have so many.]

I bought feta crumbles as that was cheaper than buying a larger brick than we would have needed.  However, I found that this led to a very dry dough; the dough would have vastly benefited from the extra moisture that the brine would have provided.  I blame Whole Foods for only having two feta choices!  Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the extensive dairy cases at Michigan grocery stores.

We had only 12 ounces of feta (again, I was too cheap to buy more), so we used 3 ounces of flour.  Obviously we still had to use a whole egg, but I hoped that this would partially make up for the complete lack of brine in the feta.

Other than the low moisture, the dough came together fairly easily; it was almost like making a cheese gnocchi dough.  As instructed by the recipe, I put the bay leaves under the cheesecake/cheesedisk before placing it on the baking sheet, then put a heavy-ish Pyrex dish on top to weight everything down.

The cheesecake/cheesedisk was probably 6"-7" in diameter.  The recipe said to score before baking (like making scones), which I guess was helpful when I went to cut slices.  More like a guideline to follow than any physical assistance with getting the pieces apart.

The recipe said to bake for 40-45 minutes, but I baked for something like 35 minutes and thought that too long.  As it was, the outside edge of the cheesedisk was already brown and, as we would discover, rather tough.  For the thin cheesedisk that we made, I'd probably bake for 25-30 minutes.

The bay leaves came out looking basically like the dried bay leaves you can get at the store.

The final product was interesting, to say the least, especially the flavour.  At first bite there was a subtle non-feta taste from the bay leaves; then the full salty feta taste would overwhelm one's taste buds.  The texture of the non-brown sections was nicely smooth when the cheesecake was warm from the oven, but after a couple days in the fridge, it's gotten progressively tougher, and the bay leaf flavour has sort of dissipated.

Complete delicious dinner.  We didn't put salt in the eggs this time, but the cheesecake wedge definitely made up for that.  The rice helped too.

Would I make this again?  Maybe.  It would make a good appetizer, though I'd want to get a higher quality feta that didn't have such a straight-up salty taste.  We have plenty of bay leaves left to use!

The Classical Cookbook (1996); Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger; p. 93-94

Writeup background noise: well, when I drafted the post originally, it was the 2nd period of the Wings-Lightning game.  Thankfully for me, I decided that the 3rd period was a fine time for a nap.

New Year dumplings: A pictorial

I just discovered a neat new cookbook that focuses on dumplings (mostly Chinese and Japanese, but there are a few other flavor profiles in there as well).  We figured we might as well try some of the recipes now while we have easy access to practically any Chinese or Japanese cooking ingredient; plus, each recipe makes more than one meal's worth of dumplings, so we thought it'd be an economical choice as well.  Chinese New Year provided the perfect opportunity to test the book's pork and shrimp dumplings.

We made our dumplings the day before New Year, and got 39 versus the recipe's yield of 45.  Perhaps we put too much filling in each one?  So far we haven't had any problems with broken wrappers or anything.  These are ready to be frozen, then put into a plastic bag to be cooked as needed.  Easy!

These cook pretty quickly with an almost set-it-and-forget-it method.  We are still working out just how long to cook our dumplings though, since we tend to cook fewer at a time than the cookbook author does.  He's usually hosting dumpling parties.  We are lame and thus do not tend to host dumpling parties.

I made a dipping sauce out of hoisin sauce and soy sauce (about a 2:1 ratio), along with a dash of rice wine vinegar.  Kind of a Chinese barbecue sauce of sorts.

The fillings weren't dense, dry, or falling apart.  I might add some cilantro leaves next time for flavor and color contrast, but that's another recipe!

Hey there, dumpling!: 100 recipes for dumplings, buns, noodles, and other Asian treats (2015), p. 41
Writeup background music: Dido, No angel (1999)

Quiche Lorraine

I wanted to make something new for dinner, and since we actually had eggs, butter, and (2%!) milk in our fridge, I decided on a quiche.  We also had some bacon and a LOT of onion, for some reason.  In short, we had almost everything we needed to make a quiche, and I'll take any opportunity to use my mini Cuisinart food processor.

I used my now-standard pie crust recipe, scaled for a 9" pie plate:

• 1¼ c. flour
• ½ c. butter [cubed and tossed in the freezer for as long as possible]
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3-4 Tbsp. ice water [I tend to use a couple more Tbsp. than recipes call for, but maybe that's just me being a pie crust beginner.]
• ½ tsp. sugar [omitted for the quiche]

The crust came together fairly quickly, and I chilled it for maybe 10 minutes before rolling it out into the pie plate.  This worked better than letting the dough chill for a couple hours, then taking it back out and letting it come up to room temperature for several minutes before rolling.  Most likely a product of the local climate on average being much warmer than most places where American cookbooks are written.

The crust needed to be baked before filling.  I have a handy tool to weight pie crust while baking, which worked very well, but the crust recipe said to bake 20 minutes with weights, then to remove the weights, poke holes in the bottom of the crust, and bake for about 10 minutes longer.  For whatever reason, the crust still puffed up quite a bit during the last 10 minutes of baking, even though I took especial care to actually poke the crust all the way through to the plate.  Next time I have to pre-bake a crust like this I might try baking the entire 30 minutes with the pie weight on.  This might also help bake the crust more thoroughly than the process of baking, then cooling slightly, then baking some more.

Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe calls for 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs.  Perhaps we should have used whole milk instead of 2% that we had, but the custard turned out to be quite soft and I had to bake the quiche for 50 minutes altogether, rather than the "35 to 40 minutes" that the cookbook said.  Even at 40 minutes, the quiche was nowhere near a solid.  Looking at my other recent posts, maybe I should get an oven thermometer to see how accurate our oven is, because there seems to be a theme of "had to bake for way longer than called for" in some of the other writeups.  Perhaps a correct oven temperature would have helped set the custard; or perhaps we should have used an additional egg or two.

Not bad, not great, and sadly not worth several hours' prep time.

The verdict on this one, though, was that I would NOT make a quiche again, or if I did, I would not do my own pie crust.  I spent an entire afternoon in our windowless kitchen making and baking a pie crust, then slicing and cooking onions and bacon, and finally preparing the filling (admittedly the easiest part of it all).  The finished product was not astounding, and the worst part was, it was not even a satisfying dinner: I could have used another slice or two but held off since I knew exactly how much butter and bacon had gone into that quiche.  So, unfortunately, this is probably not going to be a repeat recipe.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 108-109

Vietnamese beef stew

A good thing about having Hawaiian health insurance is the Island Scene magazine that shows up every quarter, bringing a bit of paradise to this windswept corner of New England.  Each issue has two or three ostensibly healthy recipes; one issue from last winter had an intriguing Vietnamese beef stew recipe that we didn't get to try until today.  It turned out to be a fantastic comfort food, perfect no matter if your winter days are 58°F (Hawaii) or 28°F (here).

• The original recipe makes enough for 8, so we cut ours in half.  We still ended up using about a pound and a half of beef tri-tip, 3 star anise, and 2 stalks of lemongrass.
• We had half of a jalapeño in the fridge, so we used that instead of chili peppers.  Because I was the one slicing all of the ingredients, I only used about half of the seeds, but I'd probably just leave all the seeds in next time; it wasn't THAT spicy the way we did it today.
• Next time, I'd add less salt and cut down the amount of fish sauce: the sauce overpowered many of the other flavours.  I'd cut it back to maybe a tablespoon for the half recipe.  Or maybe I should get a better-quality fish sauce that doesn't taste like mostly salt.
• I thought the inclusion of tomato paste was kind of odd, and then when I actually added it in I was convinced it was a poor idea because my pot now resembled something Italian as opposed to something Vietnamese.  But after cooking for an hour, the pot no longer looked like a thin pasta sauce and since the final dish was so tasty, I figured the tomato paste was a worthwhile addition.  Possibly something to reduce a bit for the next time we make the stew so that it doesn't overpower other flavours.
• I have a bunch of candied ginger from some recent baking projects, so instead of buying fresh, I just sliced up some of the candied stuff and reduced the added sugar called for in the recipe. For what it's worth though, it was the kind of candied ginger that is not coated in sugar crystals.
• Homemade bread goes VERY WELL with this.

We had to buy star anise and lemongrass for this, but it was a great excuse to finally try some new spices.

The stew has some great flavour: so much so that I declared that I didn't need anything for dessert this evening, which is something incredibly rare for me to say (usually I'm all "Ice cream?  Macarons?  Pie?  Fruit?  Dried fruit?  Cereal?  Chocolate chips?  All of the above?").  We both agreed that this stew was definitely something to make again, especially since we'll probably have to put up with a couple more New England winters before we can move out to Honolulu. :)

Seriously: so tasty.

Banh mi

Just the other week Caroline had gotten a craving for some Vietnamese sandwiches known as banh mi (there are some diacritics that I have not added - see this Wikipedia article for an introduction).  We were going to go to a Vietnamese bakery/deli last Sunday to satisfy that craving, but sadly discovered the place is not open on Sundays.  So, we checked out some books from the library and tried (and I would say succeeded) on making them ourselves.

We used The Banh Mi Handbook as our basis.  In the book is a recipe for the mini baguettes these sandwiches are named for, as well as recipes for the fillings.  Our sandwiches had marinated chicken, pickled carrots, cucumber, cilantro, and (on mine) jalapeno rings.  Here are descriptions of the things we made.

Bread:
The recipe goes on for a couple of pages in the book, but only because the author is very descriptive and includes nice pictures on how to form the rolls.  The dough is pretty simple - flour, water, yeast, salt, and a small amount of butter.  The recipe called for extra wheat gluten to be added, but we did not have that, nor was I ready to buy some at the store.  It did mention that if you used King Arthur brand flour, you wouldn't need as much additional gluten.  So, I picked up a small bag of the King Arthur flour for these rolls, and kneaded the dough a few minutes longer than called for.

The forming went very well following the instructions in the book, though I will admit that the three that Caroline formed (the recipe made six rolls) looked much better than mine.

The recipe called for the steam method of filling a pan with water while preheating the oven, but we just spritzed some water on the rolls before baking.  Twenty-two minutes of baking later, we had these:

A finished roll ready to be filled with tasty stuff!

The result, in two and a half to three hours of work: some light and delicious bread for sandwiches.

Pickled Carrots:
Pickled vegetables are standard for banh mi, so we chose carrots.  The book called for a combination of carrots and daikon, but we didn't have the daikon readily available, so carrots alone it was.  It was a simple process that I did while the dough was rising. First I added some salt and sugar to the carrot sticks that were about 3 inches long and 1/4 inch wide.  A couple minutes of working the salt and sugar in and the carrots were getting floppy.  At this point I diverged from the book.  It said to rinse the vegetables and then put them in a water, vinegar, and sugar (1/3 cup) solution.  I thought that sounded sweet, so I left the salt and sugar in the original bowl and put the rinse carrots back in with the vinegar and water.  I was later told that I should probably have gone with the sweeter route.  Ooops...

Chicken:
For the chicken, I did not look at a recipe.  We had some chicken breast tenders, and I made a marinade of soy sauce, hoisin sauce, minced garlic, and a small amount of oyster sauce.  The chicken marinated in that for about 4-5 hours in the refrigerator.  Then, just simple pan frying - we don't have a grill yet... :(

Pan seared marinated chicken - turned out extremely well for guessing on the marinade.

The end result:

Caroline's sandwich.

My sandwich. I took out some of the jalapeno seeds so that they didn't overpower the other filling ingredients.

These sandwiches were delicious and flavorful.  The bread was light enough that with the overstuffing you see above it just deformed around the filling and nothing fell out.  The crust was also strong enough that the hinge didn't give out.  Definitely make again!

Stuffies

Since it appears that we will be living in Rhode Island for at least the next couple of years, I figured that we should make the best of it, and my philosophy is that there is no better way to get to know a place than by its food.  Accordingly, we decided to make "stuffies", or what the rest of the country would call "stuffed clams".  At least around here, these are typically made with the largish quahog clams, which we found at our local supermarket for the ludicrously low price of $0.99/pound.  I suppose much of the weight is taken up by the shell, and then the end user has to do all the prep work, but that's still a ridiculously low price for any kind of fresh (and live!) food.

The clams

We checked various recipes to figure out the best method of preparing the clams; in the end we put about an inch and a half of water into our pot, brought it to a boil, put our 4 clams in, and turned the heat down.  In theory, the water would have only simmered after putting the clams in, but we must not have turned the heat down enough, and the water started boiling again.  According to some recipes this is one way to make clams tough; in the future, we'd want to be a little more vigilant and a little more patient!   But all of the clams popped open when done, just as the recipes said they would.  So far, so good.

When the clams were done, they would pop open rather more violently than I would expect, enough that I didn't want to use the tongs to get the first clam out lest the next one decide it was done at that exact moment and splash boiling water onto my hand.

It was Dom's job to chop up the clams while I rinsed off the shells. Here's his take on it.

Chopping the clams turned out to be pretty easy.  If I had wanted to, I could have just chopped them all haphazardly and things would have been fine.  However, I noticed while I was chopping that the centers of the clams were a different consistency and a bit gritty.  (From later reading of Joy of Cooking, we determined that this part must be the stomach.)  I removed this part of the clam starting on the second one, and by the fourth, and last, I had devised the following strategy - and I apologize if it sounds gory.  If I was to slice the clam horizontally to open its stomach wide, and spill out the contents by scraping (actually not to hard to do).  This way, there should be no grit left, and all you should have is meat.  We don't want a repeat of the bit of grit that found its way into one of Caroline's clams.  I will have to report back on the strategy after take 2.

The filling

From our research, we determined that the stuffie is one of those kinds of foods where no two recipes are the same.  Even something like oven temperature is pretty variable; apparently you can bake stuffies at anywhere from 300°-425° and they'd still be good.  But the biggest differences are in the stuffing mixture; the most basic just use minced clams and breadcrumbs, while the more elaborate concoctions use celery, peppers, various herbs, and even bacon or chouriço.  We ended up using the clams, the rest of our panko breadcrumbs (about 2 Tbsp.), some Italian breadcrumbs (about 1 Tbsp.), an egg, and some sautéed celery, onions, and garlic.  I didn't want to cover up the taste of the clams, which I figured was a big part of the reason we wanted to make stuffies in the first place.

Stuffing mix, pre-mixing.

These got baked at 350° (mostly because the oven was still set to 350° after baking a loaf of bread) for about 13 minutes, after which I sprinkled a bit of pecorino cheese on top of 2 of the clams and popped them all back into the oven for another 4 minutes.  The stuffies were plenty hot and cooked through.

Stuffies before going into the oven.

Verdict

This was literally the first time either of us had eaten a stuffed clam.  We thought they were pretty tasty but that the actual clams were kind of tough; next time we'll know how to cook AND prepare the clams!  The stuffing was flavorful but the other ingredients didn't detract from the clams, and I don't feel the need to toss any other meats into the stuffing.  If we happen to have any fresh herbs around next time we make stuffies, I might throw some of those in, but otherwise, these tasted fine as they were.  Overall, we think this was a resounding success for first-timers like us!

A stuffie with pecorino in the front, one without in the back, and a slice of homemade bread.  Tasty!

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.

Lamb ragù with rigatoni (var. beef)

In an effort to diversify our recipe repertoire, I purchased The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (after having tested some recipes from the library's copy, of course).  We've had success with a few of its recipes, but then I started to notice that we were only making those few dishes.  So we decided to make something different: lamb ragù with rigatoni.

We quickly discovered that the Foxborough Trader Joe's (right next to Gillette Stadium!!) doesn't carry ground lamb, so we bought beef instead, and rather hilariously, we didn't even buy ground beef (personal preference).  I realize this may have changed the final product rather a lot.*  But they had everything else we needed, including a bottle of inexpensive but quality red wine.  Massachusetts grocery stores >> Rhode Island grocery stores.

This turned out to be a very tasty red; it was a lot smoother than many other reds (which I prefer).  Trader Joe's FTW!

From a cursory read-through of the recipe, I knew that this one would take rather a while: definitely a weekend meal despite the cookbook author claiming that it could be done on a weeknight ("It cooks in 45 minutes!" for me means "You will be chopping things for 30 minutes, THEN cooking for 45 minutes!").  But even so, we started chopping things around 5:30 and didn't eat until just past 7.  Didn't budget the time well on that one.

Once we got the stove going, the sauce looked great.  Beef, onions, celery, carrots: deglazed with some red wine, this was starting to look more like a French beef stew than an Italian pasta sauce (though I have since learned that this is the traditional method for preparing a ragù alla bolognese).

I'd added the wine a few minutes prior to taking the photo; it was already tasty at this point.

Then the recipe told us to add 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1/2 cup of the juices, then a cup and a half of chicken stock, followed by a covered simmer for 45 minutes.  This made the sauce look more like a soup, so I left the pot uncovered for the 45 minutes.  This thickened the sauce, but I would still reduce the amount of chicken stock to 1 cup at most and simmer with the lid on.

The ragù just after adding the tomatoes, juice, and broth.  Soup, or sauce for pasta?

The ragù after trying to get it to reduce.

The finished product was incredibly tasty even though we hadn't followed the original recipe to the letter.  It was not overly tomato-y; there were enough other flavors like rosemary, bay leaf, thyme, and cumin that no single flavour dominated the dish, and the carrots added just a bit of sweetness.  If anything, I would swap out the cumin (the cookbook author loves that cumin) for a pinch of nutmeg instead, but that is just my personal preference.

This is definitely something we would make again, but only on weekends unless I can improve my knife skills** enough to make this on a weeknight.  I'd like to see what it would taste like with the original main ingredient, but this beef variation was excellent.

A recipe to keep!  We made this with rigatoni bought from Trader Joe's.  It's somehow thicker than the Barilla or Mueller's rigatoni and stood up well to the chunky sauce.

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

*This is, in fact, reminiscent of a recent experience at a local Szechwan restaurant.  Our party wanted to order "Chinese broccoli with chicken".  Our waiter kindly let us know, though, that the restaurant didn't have any Chinese broccoli that evening; moreover, because of a printing error, it wasn't broccoli in the dish, it was cauliflower; and then it wasn't chicken, but pork.  Cauliflower with pork?  Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Chinese broccoli with chicken!

**I have almost, almost resisted the urge to use the word "sharpen" in relation to improving my knife skills.

Hawaiian shrimp curry

Shortly before we left Ann Arbor, we discovered Indian food (it just took us a little while), thanks to the wonderful Cardamom Restaurant that opened in April near our old apartment.  Emboldened by this 'new' discovery, Dom immediately declared that we had to try making a curry.  It took us a couple of months and a change of residence to make that happen, but we finally tried a shrimp curry recipe.  It's from a cookbook written by a mother and daughter originally from Hawaii, but who had started a Hawaiian cafe in Ann Arbor a number of years ago.  As far as I can tell the cafe is no longer in business, since I would have found it by now if it were.

This was a great first effort, though of course there is room for improvement.  Our notes:

• We did not take the time to make shrimp shell broth as the recipe called for.  Not only did we not have any shrimp shells, having opted for the convenience of the peeled and deveined shrimp, but we used the suggested substitute of chicken broth.  No doubt the dish would have been even better with the shrimp broth, or even chicken stock we'd made ourselves.
• Our curry did not thicken much.  At first I thought it may have been a mistake with the amount of fat originally in the pan; we had started with probably a tablespoon of olive oil, when the recipe called for 2 tablespoons of butter.  (I hastily added about a tablespoon of butter upon realizing that I was making a sauce.)  Thanks to a chat with my mom I now realize that there may not have been enough flour in the recipe for the amount of liquid.  2 tablespoons of flour for 2 cups of chicken broth + half a can of coconut milk....or, maybe I'm just not good at making a white sauce.
• Slightly put off by negative press regarding the health of coconut-derived foods that aren't coconut water, I had opted for the 'lite' coconut milk, but I probably more than made up for that with the addition of some half and half into the curry.
• The addition of a bit of salt at the end (not called for in the recipe) did measures for the flavour.
• The Simply Organic curry powder was fine for beginners like us: pretty mild and very slightly spicy.  Next time we buy a jar of curry powder, we should try to get something a little more adventurous.
• Sort of a cookbook pet peeve of mine: when ingredients are not listed in the order they are used in the recipe.  This wreaks havoc with my organisation of ingredients prior to cooking.

The final result was extremely tasty, and we will definitely see what other kinds of curries we can make.

Shirley Tong Parola and Lisa Parola Gaynier, Remembering Diamond Head, Remembering Hawaii (1999), p. 209
Writeup background music: Jack Johnson, From Here to Now to You (2013)

Unrelated to food, but related to the writeup background music.  We saw Jack Johnson (not that Jack Johnson) at the Life Is Good Festival on the 22nd.  He played "Sweet Caroline" probably because the festival was held outside Boston, but it was like an early birthday present for me!

Creamy Chicken and Dumplings

On day recently as I was cleaning out the mixing bowl from making pizza dough, I mixed some water with the excess flour and decided to try the raw dough that formed.  I enjoyed it so much that I decided to make a dumpling dish without looking at a recipe.  Chicken was the easiest thing to add, and it quickly became a creamy chicken and dumpling thing.  I started by cooking the chicken with some chicken broth.  Then, I added some dumplings made from the following dough  (inspired by pizza dough):

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• olive oil (I didn't measure)
• ~ 1/3 cup of water - I just added water until I had the dough consistency I wanted

Once the dumplings started cooking, Caroline added some cream and sour cream we had in the fridge to complete the dish.

Result:  a pretty tasty dish, though the dumplings were quite dense.  Next time, I might think about making them with milk, or possibly smaller.  I don't know - I still have to think about how to make them less dense.  This is something I'll probably try again, but I won't subject Caroline to my experiments without trying them first myself.

Dumplings just added.

Cooking along with cream added.

Bowl o' food!

Irish Stew

This is a hearty stew for the coldest of winter days on the Emerald Isle (or in the Mitten).  This is another recipe from our favorite Joy of Cooking (pp. 496).  This is a lamb stew, and we were able to pick up some lamb chops at our local Kroger to throw in.  The result was very tasty.

Notes:

• Quantity - the recipe called for 3 pounds of stew lamb.  As Kroger did not have stew lamb, we picked up a couple of packages (~ 2 lbs total) of some bone-in lamb chops, which seemed to work quite well.  We didn't really scale back the amount of vegetables, but that can't hurt, right?
• Liquid - the recipe said to use either chicken stock, dark stout, or water.  We opted for about half-and-half chicken stock and stout (Murphy's Stout - 'twas a bit less expensive than Guinness but still tasty - just not if you ask Caroline ;-) ).  This seemed to work out well, and helped it taste close to the Irish Stew at Conor O'Neill's (on Main St. in AA).
• Thickening potatoes - we sliced up some potatoes that were supposed to disintegrate and thicken the stew, but this didn't work.  In discussing why it didn't work, we came up with the theory.  The time we've had potatoes thicken a stew we cooked it on the stove - this recipe had us cook the stew for an hour and a half in a Dutch oven in the oven.  Perhaps the stew needs to cook harder for this to work, or else you have to slice the potatoes really thin.

Pictures!

Before going in the oven.

Ready for consumption (the carrots are added after an hour in the oven).

Verdict - a very tasty dish that makes good left overs and should be made to warm body and soul!

Braised chicken with nuts and dates

Whenever Caroline reads a book about some type of food, she usually wants to make something with it. So recently, she read this book about dates, and thus wanted to buy some at the store. A couple of days later, we weren't sure of what to make, and then remembered that we had chicken and we had dates, so we had a recipe to try.

Notes:

• The recipe called for ground walnuts, but we didn't use any. Still seemed to taste just fine.
• The recipe also called for crushed coriander seeds. As we didn't have any of these, we just threw a bit of cilantro in. This tasted just fine to us, so no need to use a plant's seeds when you have it's leaves! (Not actually going to claim this as a general rule...)
• This was a pretty easy recipe - didn't take long to make and didn't require much prep work.

Verdict: Would definitely make again. This is a very tasty dish that is also easy. Bonus!

It may look a little monochromatic, but it was certainly tasty. -CPYP

Dates: A global history, p. 118 (Nawal Nasrallah; 2011; London: Reaktion Books)

Genoese Minestrone

Since it's been getting cooler, we figured it would be a great time to try making soup.  A quick survey of what ingredients we had versus ingredients called for in various recipes convinced us to try a minestrone recipe.  This turned out great and we had leftovers - enough to enjoy, but not so much that we didn't like the soup anymore.  Pernfect.

From World Kitchen - Italy

Notes:

• This does take some time to make - there is a lot of prep work involve in cutting up vegetables to go in the soup.  However, some effort was reduced by buying pre-cubed prosciutto (instead of pancetta) from Kroger.  Overall, this was an afternoon project.
• Instead of borlotti beans, we added some red kidney beans that were still around from making red beans and rice a little while back.  We also used some Italian cut green beans instead of runner beans (might actually be the same thing).
• Deletions: cabbage (we didn't want to buy one to just use 1/8-1/4), pesto, and Parmeasan cheese.  The pesto and cheese are meant to be added when served, and so were not viewed as necessary.
• The recipe said to just peel the potatoes and add them in whole, but we used cubed unpeeled redskin potatoes.  This seemed to work out just fine, and it goes along with our tendency to only peel potatoes when necessary (which is rare).
• We used some Barilla mini penne that we had instead of ditalini, but it seemed just fine.  The pasta will get softer and mushier for the leftovers, but it will still be very good!

Cooking the onions, prosciutto, sage, and parsley; already smelling great.

Then you cook the vegetables a bit before adding the chicken broth.

Delicious finished soup, ready to be consumed.

Verdict:  Would definitely make again.  The end result is definitely worth the prep work.

World Kitchen - Italy (2010), p. 24-25

Chicken paprikash

This experiment came about from three factors:

1. We had a container of sour cream in the fridge that I didn't know what to do with.
2. We always want to broaden our culinary horizons.
3. Captain Sisko cooked chicken paprikash on a recent episode of Deep Space Nine that we watched ("Family Business"--of course, Sisko was still a Commander at the time...).

Joy of Cooking gave us a relatively easy recipe to go on, and we even had a good supply of sweet paprika to use.  This turned out to be incredibly tasty and not too spicy.  We would definitely make this again, which is typically my criterion for deeming whether or not a recipe is a keeper.

Our notes:

• This was a straightforward recipe, but not one for a hot day; though we used only one skillet, that particular burner on the stove was on for the entire cooking time and I had to be standing there for most of that time.  Fortunately we managed to keep the smoke detector from going off (it's gone off from us boiling pasta in the past).
• We used chicken tenders rather than the "3 1/2 to 4 1/2 pounds of chicken parts" called for in the recipe.  This definitely cut down on the prep work and cooking time, and they didn't dry out in the cooking or anything.
• In the interest of using the sour cream as quickly as possible, I probably put in more than was called for; would definitely cut back next time.
• There was, not surprisingly, a large quantity of paprika in this: 1/4 cup for the full recipe, and 2 Tbsp. for a half.  It gave the dish just enough spice to prevent us from finishing our plates in a hurry--always a good thing.
• We served this over rice, but it would probably work just as well with spätzle, egg noodles, potatoes, or other dumplings.

Flavourful!

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 431-432

Round and round pasta

We saw this pasta recipe on an episode of Giada at Home and it looked like a good springtime meal.  It turned out to be an interesting mashup of flavours and included our new favourite summer produce: zucchini and summer squash.  It also gave us an excuse to buy mascarpone.

Our notes:

• This recipe took a lot of time to prepare: cooking, cooling, and slicing sausages; slicing shallots; slicing carrots; slicing zucchini and summer squash; slicing tomatoes; mixing the dressing.  The given prep time of 10 minutes seems a bit on the optimistic side, though I suppose once everything is chopped the actual cooking doesn't take too long.
• I had cooked the sausage long before Dom got home so that it would have enough time to cool.  This saved time later, but it's my opinion that this recipe is not for those who work full time.  Maybe on weekends or something but definitely not for a weekday.
• Because we had only decided to make this earlier that day, the sausages were still frozen.  I cooked them on low heat in a covered skillet with about 1/2" of water, and kept checking on them for 15-20 minutes.  Worked great.
• Even with "medium" zucchini, 1/2" slices seemed rather hefty.  Though it would destroy the aesthetic of having all round items in the dish, I'd probably cut each piece of zucchini in half or quarters to get bite-sized pieces.  Either that or buy tiny zucchini.  (Side note: the photograph at the recipe's webpage has zucchini slices about the same size around as the pasta, and not as thick.  This was NOT reflected in the recipe's numbers.)
• I would use more than a 1/4 cup of orange juice for the cooked zucchini.  This barely covered the bottom of the pan and there wasn't a whole lot left after the "cook until the juice thickens" step.  Yes, I know it doesn't say "reduce" so I kept vigilant watch over it.
• The recipe calls for rotelle (wagon wheels), but I bought ditalini as our local Kroger doesn't have rotelle.  I always forget just how much volume a pound of ditalini takes up versus a pound of a larger pasta, and mixing together all of the ingredients was a bit dicey even in the pasta serving bowl that we have.  Guess we should just get penne next time if we don't have time to hunt down rotelle--the sauce-to-pasta ratio would probably be a little better with larger pasta.
• Perhaps I didn't allow enough time for the mascarpone to come to room temperature, but there was no way that stuff was going to be whisked, much less "poured" over the finished pasta.  However, the 'dressing', as it were, of mascarpone, lemon juice, and salt, was really quite delicious (once I worked it into the pasta) and provided a nice salty-and-sour contrast to the hint of orange juice that the zucchini had been cooked in.  We actually cut down the amount of salt in the dressing to about 1/2 teaspoon as a full teaspoon seemed excessive.
• Speaking of mascarpone, hearing someone say it "mars-ca-pone", in the same way that people pronounce my name as "Carolyn", sort of irritates me.  (It's closer to "mas-car-pone-eh", and my name is not "Carolyn" in the same sense that it isn't "Marie" or "Jordan".)  Since I've learned over the years that no one likes a know-it-all and since this really isn't a big deal in any case, I usually just brush it off and ignore the momentary and slight rise in blood pressure.  So to save myself a little hypertension, whenever someone pronounces it "mars-ca-pone", I'll just pretend that they're referring to that rum-running Capone family of Mars.  They've got an in with Starfleet, you know.

So all in all, this was a relatively labour-intensive dinner and it's not a good hot-weather dish only in that it requires three different uses of the stove.  However, it was very tasty and the end result was a not-too-heavy springtime dinner that we'll probably end up making again sometime--it'd be a great make-ahead dish as the flavours get better with a little time.

Avocados and pasta: a winning combination

Tagine

Inspired by a friend who lived in Morocco during her stint with the Peace Corps, I've wanted to try tagine ever since she mentioned it in her own blog.  I found at stovetop version at Allrecipes which looked easy enough and would only require us to buy a few things we wouldn't have bought normally.  I really don't know if this particular recipe is authentic in any way, but it afforded us the opportunity to try something new.

This was an interesting flavour combination and I was a little hesitant at first, but by the time the title sequence came up for the episode of Deep Space Nine* we were watching, I was a big fan.  I'd make it again so long as we purchase a vegetable peeler before trying to peel a butternut squash (see our notes).  Also, that will not be my job.

Our notes:

• Butternut squash is tough.  This was the first time I'd purchased one myself and probably will be the last that I try to peel with a knife.  I'm not a fan of risking severe injury in the name of food.
• Coriander is cilantro--didn't know that one.  We didn't miss it in the stew, but it would have been nice to know at the time.
• We added dried cherries for a bit of sweetness, and also because we didn't have any other dried fruit like apricots.  This added another layer to a dish already containing an amalgam of flavours.
• Store-brand vegetable broth works just fine, which is nice because the Kroger down the street doesn't have any other brand of vegetable broth for some reason.

Our stovetop, hard-anodized, Calphalon version of a tagine (pot).
Also known as the "3-quart covered saute pan".

Served over rice because that's the staple grain for us.

*We're halfway through Season 3, and I am so excited to watch the series all the way through with Dom since it's one of my all-time favourite television shows.

Homemade tortillas

After seeing this recipe at AnnArbor.com, we decided to make our own tortillas.  We ended up using the Joy of Cooking recipe due to logistics.  In any event, this was a resounding success.

Our notes:

• These were absurdly easy to make.  Five ingredients total: flour, baking powder, salt, vegetable shortening (or, in our parlance, "olive oil"), and water.
• The two recipes differed only in the amounts of baking powder and shortening.  Joy of Cooking called for less baking powder but far more shortening: 2 tsp. shortening vs. 1/4 cup (!).  The tortillas we made tasted heavily of olive oil--not a bad thing but next time I think we should try the recipe that uses less oil and see if that makes a difference in the texture.
• We used our handy griddle rather than a skillet.  This worked fabulously.
• Our tortillas came out a bit thicker and denser than store-bought ones, and they seemed to be less pliant (i.e. they would tend to crack if you tried to roll everything into a burrito).  Perhaps we should have used more baking powder?  Or less oil?
• The original recipe I had seen called for vegetable oil, and we used olive oil instead.  As a result our tortillas had a stronger taste than if we had followed the recipe more closely, but the substitution did not seem to affect the cooking time at all.

Resting the dough before cooking.

Once again, the griddle came through for us.

Stack o' tortillas.

yum.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 608

Slow cooker Cuban braised beef and peppers

Real Simple lived up to its name with a very easy slow cooker recipe that did not require much prep work (my kind of recipe).  The result was several hours of amazing aromas wafting through the apartment followed by a very tasty dinner.

Our notes:

• We generally cut the recipe in half since there are only two of us; we only used half an onion, one red pepper, and one 14-oz. can of tomatoes.  However, we probably used more than half of the amount of flank steak called for.
• We had an abundance of canned stewed tomatoes in the apartment, so we used those rather than diced tomatoes.  Breaking up the tomatoes a bit before cooking rendered them indistinguishable from the diced variety.
• Cumin was not used.  We don't keep cumin around and I usually don't like buying an ingredient that will probably be used only once.
• Cooking time: 4 hours on high and then intermittently on low and warm (our slow cooker switches to warm when the timer ends; when I remembered to I turned it back to low to cook it a little longer)
• We also did not use fresh cilantro.  While I find cilantro delicious, we figured that the dish would be all right without it (and it was).
• Avocado was a fantastic accompaniment, but then there are very few things that I would not say that about.

Due to extenuating circumstances, we had a small amount of leftovers even a week later, but these were still edible and, more importantly, quite tasty.  Next time I would probably make a full recipe in order to have a better amount of delicious leftovers.

A lot of flavour for not a lot of prep work.  My kind of recipe.

Pasta all'amatriciana...all'americana

In a quest to try new pasta recipes I found one for pasta all'amatriciana, typically a tomato-based sauce with pancetta and pecorino cheese.  While grocery shopping yesterday, we decided to make this for dinner and consequently we had to substitute for items not commonly found at Meijer stores since we didn't want to have to make another stop on the way home.  Thus we called it: pasta all'amatriciana...all'americana.  It was still quite delicious but probably not anything like traditional.

Our notes:

• Meijer does not carry pancetta which is hardly a surprise.  Thus we used both Canadian bacon and regular bacon as a substitute (though if it had been up to me, I would have skipped the Canadian bacon and only used regular bacon...).
• Meijer also does not have bucatini pasta (again, not a surprise).  Linguine worked fine.
• The recipe called for a can of plum tomatoes which would then be run through a food mill.  Not owning a food mill, we opted for a can of crushed tomatoes.  Our dish looked much like the photo from the recipe's original site so this was probably all right.
• The addition of a very small quantity of baking soda (<1/8 tsp.) near the end of cooking reduces the acid in the sauce nicely without much affecting the overall taste.
• Red pepper flakes are not as inexpensive as you might think given that every single pizza joint has a jar of them on every table.
• We used closer to 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes; even I think I could have put in a few more to make it a bit spicier.
• A bit of black pepper made a fine addition to the sauce.
• BelGioioso Romano cheese was perfectly serviceable.

Verdict: a recipe to try again, though with a little more planning next time around in order to get the traditional ingredients.  What we made was delicious already but presumably with the actual ingredients called for it would be even better.

An American interpretation.

Chicken pot pie

We've made it before, usually using the version on the back of the Bisquick box, but we wanted to try the Joy of Cooking version.  It ended up taking much longer than we'd thought to put everything together and we discovered Joy of Cooking's interesting method for information organization, but we ended up with a pretty delicious meal.

Our notes:

• There was the recipe for chicken pot pie, but the first step was to make creamed chicken.  The first step of the creamed chicken recipe was to make poached chicken which was itself its own recipe.  Only too late did we see that there was a "quick creamed chicken" recipe that used cream of chicken soup rather than making a sauce out of flour and butter.  Oops.  There went several minutes, but the results were worth it.
• The recipe called for a lot of flour relative to the amount of butter, but despite my misgivings it did not seem to be a problem.
• The actual chicken pot pie recipe called for us to cook the carrots, onions, and celery before throwing it into the baking dish with the chicken.  It was later than our usual dinner time, and we didn't want to have to wash another pan, so we didn't bother to precook anything.  I thought this added some nice texture to the chicken pot pie.  I view homogenous textures as the epitome of boring food.
• BUT, the poached chicken recipe told us to poach the chicken with onions and celery; instead of discarding these as the pot pie recipe called for, we just threw them in with everything else.  A good idea as they added some flavour and texture.
• The pot pie recipe did not call for any spices except for some chopped parsley.  Dried parsley did just as well.
• We made a half recipe, which included making a half recipe for the top crust.  Would make somewhat more than a half recipe of batter next time as there didn't seem to be enough.
• The top crust turned out more like drop biscuits--better than a solid crust over the entire thing.
• Cooking time: 18 minutes in an 8"x8" glass baking dish

No photo as we were both too excited to finally eat after all of the prep work, but definitely a recipe to make again as there were also no leftovers.


Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 103