The Happy Mouth Experience

Yes, we still live

2009-04-17T15:00:00.003-05:00

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking. Now that summer is approaching, I imagine there will be many posts coming. I have a bunch of photos on the computer, but haven't dedicated the time to writing about them.
Hopefully that will change soon. Thanks for sticking with us!

Yes, we live

2008-10-18T12:15:00.002-05:00

Man, we are behind on posts! I breezed through a whole bunch that have been sitting in the Draft pile for months now. I promise we'll try to get missing recipes added soon. I started graduate school and Jeremy is in the last two months of writing. Needless to say, we're a bit busy. More soon....

Spaghetti with (fake) meatballs and pan roased broccoli

2008-09-14T21:16:00.001-05:00

Despite years of being a vegetarian, I still crave meat sometimes. It's not the flavor so much as all of the nostalgia I have wrapped up in food. It's also my need for protein, so I appreciate tasty meat substitutes like Nate's Meatless Savory Mushroom Meatballs. They're great in a pinch and add a really nice flavor to spaghetti. It's very important, however, that you brown them first in a little olive oil. It will not only enhance their taste, but keep them from falling apart when you toss them with the pasta.

Roased radishes, red curry soup and watermelon

2008-09-14T21:11:00.003-05:00

When I was in Atlanta, my friend Leah told me about how she tried roasted radishes and that they were fabulous. I was suspect, but threw them into the roasting pan. The radishes lose most of their color and, believe it or not, taste like slightly green cauliflower.

Jeremy made this marvelous Thai red curry soup with lots of vegetables and gluten. The coconut milk lends just enough richness. Hopefully he will post the recipe soon!

Tomato beet salad, sweet corn bisque, spicy corn cake

2008-09-14T21:06:00.004-05:00

During my last ceramics class, I started signing my pots with drawings of rabbits. This one was on the bottom of a summer soup terrine--not sure why he looks so sad.

Jeremy has slowly been shifting to a pro-beet stance. He still prefers the younger roots because they are more tender and taste less dirt-like. Here we grilled them in butter, salt and pepper and tossed them in a salad.
Below is a sweet corn chowder with tofu. The corn cake was a disaster--gooey, soft and unpleasant. I'll spare you the recipe.
3 c whole milk
3 ears fresh corn, cut from the cobs, cobs broken in half and reserved
2 T butter
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, sliced
1 celery stalk, sliced
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
2 c water
2 sprigs thyme
2 springs rosemary (we used sage)
1 bay leaf
pepper
Bring milk and corncobs to a boil in a heavy pot. Remove from heat, cover and let steep while sauteeing vegetables. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium. Add onion and sprinkle with salt. Saute about 5 minutes, but don't let the onion brown. Add corn kernels, carrot, celery and garlic. Cook until soft, about ten minutes. Add water, herbs and milk with corncobs. Bring to a boil. Partially cover and reduce to low, simmering 20 minutes. Remove corncobs, herb sprigs and bay leaf. Puree soup in batches in food processor or blender. Strain into a bowl (very important--it's quite stringy). Season with salt and pepper to taste. You can also garnish with creme fraiche, scallions or additional corn.

Heirloom tomato salad, cibatta and rombi with tomato eggplant sauce

2008-09-14T21:00:00.003-05:00

My new favorite pasta is rombi--a rhombus shaped pasta that resembles baby lasagna noodles. It's great for thicker sauces and has a nice texture. Hooray, carbohydrates!

Mama Trish's produce, and Squeak's okra surprise

2008-09-14T20:56:00.002-05:00

This year we grew eggplant for the first time. (See giant purple globe in the photo.)

They were tasty and not as seedy as other kinds. Definately something we will repeat next year.
One of Jeremy's mom's friends gave her some okra. We don't use it much, but have tried a few dishes this summer. (See other okra related posts.) Here is Squeak, checking it out.

Cheese tortellini with pitty pans, tomatoes and pesto and swiss chard

2008-09-14T20:46:00.002-05:00

Four weeks ago at the farmer's market, I came upon an older guy with a tiny table of tiny vegetables. They were adorable, but I felt sort of bad for him, surrounded by bounty and only selling a few vegetables. I bought his tiny orange tomatoes and brought them home. Little did I know that we'd soon be eating the BEST DAMN TOMATOES EVER!!!!! Oh my god, they were so good--sweet like candy, firm and juicy with a deep, rich tomato taste. The next week we returned, and I gushed about his tomatoes. We bought two quarts, and he dashed us nearly a whole quart more. We ate so many tomatoes that week I had cancer sores. We went back the next week, but he had disappeared. How can I handle tomato harvest without anymore of his orange heavenly droplets? Jeremy searched online for possible tomato varieties--we think they're either sun gold hybrids or sunsugar FT hybrids. Guess what seeds are going on my Christmas list?
Here they play a supporting role with pitty pan squash, frolicking with pesto covered tortellini. This chard grew in Jeremy's mom's garden--we're nearing the end of our backyard splursh.

Pecan plum cake, with cardmon ice cream and ganache heart

2008-09-14T20:43:00.003-05:00

This summer's farmer's market has been a feast of fruits. Sadly, that time is ending. One of the last decent fruits has been the plum. We made this dessert a long time ago, and hopefully Jeremy can find the recipe for both the cake and the ice cream. In the meantime, here's a very easy recipe for chocolate ganache (pictured below on the plate with the cake.)
1/2 c whole milk
2 T butter
1 package chocolate chips like Ghiardelli (the better the chocolate, the better the ganache)
Heat milk and butter in a double broiler over medium low until milk boils. Turn off heat and add chocolate chips. Let sit until chocolate is mostly melted. Stir until smooth.

Chocolate zucchini cake

2008-09-14T20:40:00.002-05:00

I'm a big fan of combining vegetables and cake. Even if they're weird--if it tastes good, I like it. Jeremy thinks it's lame and arbitrary. But I encourage any extra vegetables in my diet. (Not like I don't enough right now...)
Months back I tried a recipe from my mom for saurkraut cake. Because I squeezed out all of the juice, the cabbage had the consistency of coconut.
This recipe is from Clotilde Dusoulier's Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen. It's rich, dense and delicious, even though you can't really taste the zucchini.

Summer minestrone

2008-08-05T20:47:00.002-05:00

I used a combination of this recipe and this one. Sort of. Here's the actual recipe, which was light and summery and satisfying. (Although don't cook too long or the zucchini makes the whole thing bitter.)

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

5 small red potatoes, cubed

5 small carrots, chopped

1 big green zucchini, cubed

2 small yellow squash, halved and chopped

1 1/2 c frozen peas

1 big can low salt whole tomatoes with basil

big handful of beet tops, chopped

1 can cannelini beans, rinsed and drained

a bunch of basil, thyme and oregano (maybe 2 T, 1 t and 1 t)

pepper

2 c leftover zucchini stock from the squash blossom risotto the night before plus

about 2-3 c more water

In the dutch oven, heat 2-3 T olive oil on medium heat and add onions. Saute until soft. Add the garlic and potatoes. Cook 3-4 minutes. Add the carrots and cook another 4-5 minutes. (I added some stock several times in this period to deglaze the pan and keep the potatoes from sticking to the bottom.) Add the liquid (and a bay leaf if you one..we didn't, so I used a bouillion cube) and boil for 5-7 minutes. Add everything else and boil for about 15-20 minutes or until the vegetables are soft.

You might want to add salt....I didn't, and I didn't want to add cream or blend it. I like chunks in my minestrone.

Eat with toasted bread with melted cheese and an extra sprinkle of pepper. Then eat vanilla ice cream with some of Jeremy's cherry sauce for dessert and scream out in ectasy.

Three cheers for food!!!!

Plantain salad and squash blossom risotto

2008-08-05T20:37:00.004-05:00

I love summer salads. You can throw one of these suckers together in less than five minutes, with tons of fresh veggies, some fruit and nuts. As you've guessed by now, one of my compulsions is use-up-that-thing-we-have. I bought two plantains last week at the farmer's market, and here they were, turning black and soggy. Why not throw them in the toaster oven and put them on a salad? Brilliant! (Jeremy didn't think so, but what does he know?)

Okay, he does know some things, because as he predicted, the crystalized ginger chunks were weird on my salad.
Jeremy, my creative and wonderful husband, felt inspired to try squash blossom risotto. I was thrilled after seeing them at the market for two years and being clueless as to what to do with them. A word of caution: after you buy them, they will wrinkle and close, but it's very important to wash them before cooking them. The blossoms will actually open up, so you can rinse away the dirt and bugs hiding inside. After Jeremy started cooking, we discovered we were out of arborio rice. We did have orzo. What the hell.

As it turns out, not only is the orzo a very effective substitute for short grained rice, it reheats much better than traditional risotto. The blossoms we delicious and bright orange! They taste very much like the squash that they were once attached to, but add textural fun. Go look in your gardens or farmers markets, becasue soon they will be gone.

Zucchini Strata and Potates Bravas

2008-08-05T20:31:00.004-05:00

So we had some potatoes to use from the great new potato extravaganza at the markets two weeks ago, and after using them in any number of other dishes, we decided to try out a recipe from the beautifully illustrated Accidental Vegetarian book that we had from the library. It's essentially potatoes roasted in tomatoes and chilies. We were a bit impatient for dinner and Julie was a bit overzealous in her desire to use up all of the tomatoes from the can, so they were bit wet and a bit over done, but still quite tasty, and the concept was sound (dammit!). Maybe we'll make some more for the next picnic we choose to attend.
The potatoes sounded good and all, but not like a full meal in themselves so we decided some form of egg dish would work well with the zucchini proliferating in our fridge. We also had half of a stalish whole wheat baguette that need to be used up or fed to fish, so I decided to try making a strata for the first time.
Oh my god, how did we never try this before? I used this recipe, substituting a mix of sharp cheddar and asiago for the Swiss, added a few beet tops to the zucchini for good measure, and used a mix of fresh oregano and sage for the herbs. The bread became soft and pillowy (in a good way; not like chewing on your pillow at night), the zucchini and cheese complemented each other wonderfully. The whole thing was somewhere between a crustless quiche and a savory bread pudding -- satisfying but also light.

Finally, because what is a good Spanish and Italian(?) meal without a Belgian beer?

Sixth Glass was rich and slightly sweet. A very complex and smooth ale.

Chocolate dinner party

2008-08-05T20:16:00.002-05:00

At Jeremy's part time job, he works with such fun, nice people, some of whom happen to also be vegetarians. We started a veggie potluck, which meets about every other month, and so far it's been a roaring success. Jeremy and I decided to invite just three of the girls, Sheena, Jessica and Katie, to our house for a smaller dinner party. Always ready for a theme, I proposed a few options, including my-favorite-recipe and chocolate. Jeremy scoffed at my chocolate idea, but it quickly became the preferred theme. Chocolate it is!

Sheena volunteered for "salad" before she realized it was a chocolate themed dinner. But, trooper that she is, she found this recipe, which uses white chocolate as the base for the salad dressing.

Like most dinner parties, I take photos of the first course and forget to photograph the rest.

Oh well.

Jeremy made chocolate bread (substituting walnuts for the chocolate chunks), a lightly sweet treat that paired perfectly with the salad.

Jessica made vegetable chili with cocoa. The chocolate flavor was subtle, but nice (especially with extra cilantro.)

We made the main course--bean enchiladas with chocolate mole sauce. The heat was freaking intense....I mean, my god, it had nearly 10 chiles in it...and the chocolate flavor was quite pronouced. Thankfully I'd made guacamole, which strangely had a cooling effect on the enchiladas (no chiles in the guac, just lots of lime). I don't know many people who could actually eat this without passing out from the spiciness, and I needed to take breaks after each bite. Yowza!

Katie made chocolate almond mousse for dessert.

It was actually difficult to find savory chocolate options--if anyone has any suggestions, please send them our way for the next chocolate dinner party.

Dinner with Monique--salad, beet soup and sangria

2008-08-05T20:04:00.005-05:00

Back in the early days, before we lured Monique into our "So You Think You Can Dance" addiction, we had her over for dinner. On this particular evening, an otherwise bleak day for all of us, we had beautiful summer salad, with radishes and stripy beets. My god, aren't they GORGEOUS???

To cheer her up, I gave her a new bee finger puppet, shown here with the shockingly fuschia spicy coconut milk beet soup. The recipe comes from The Accidental Vegetarian, one of our new favorite cookbooks. In the future, I would strain the soup, unless you like strings, but it was light and flavorful. In fact the beets were secondary to the lemongrass and lime leaves.

Here's the recipe:

Take just over a pound of beets, trimmed and cleaned, and place them in a roasting pan. Rub some vegetable oil into their skins, spinkle them with salt and cover the pan with foil. Roast them in a preheated 400 degree oven until the beets are soft, about 40 mins, then allow them to cool. At this point it shoud be possible to skin them easily and with a minimum of finger staining. Cut them into 1-2" pieces and set aside.

Take 2 stalks lemon grass (outer layers peeled and the remaining stalks cut into managable pieces), 2 cloves garlic, 3 red chiles, a 1" piece of peeled ginger, 4 kaffir lime leaves and the juice of one lime and place them in a blender or food processor. Blend them until they form a smoothish paste, adding additional water if necessary to blend. Saute 2-3 shallots and 1 tsp cumin seeds in a little vegetable oil, until the shallots are translucent and the cumin fragrant. Then add half of the above paste and gently cook together for about 5 minutes. Add half of the beets and stir them together for a couple of minutes, then add 2.5 cups vegetable stock. Bring this mixture to a boil, then reduce to simmer for 10 minutes. Then add the remaining beets, paste and one can of coconut milk, and puree in a blender or with a hand blender. Strain the resulting soup to get rid of any remaining lemongrass chunks and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve the brightest fuschia thing you've ever put in front of someone with cilantro, mint leaves, and/or diced cucumber and enjoy.

Sangria is easy to make, and it's a lifesaver in the summer when fruit turns so quickly (at least it does in our oven-of-an-apartment). Our version here is a mixture of blueberries and strawberries, covered with a bottle of cheap white wine (reds good too), a few splashes of liquor (vodka, rum, fruit liquor, Cointreau, whatever) and topped with fizzy water.

Veggie pie and Peach tart

2008-08-05T19:45:00.006-05:00

Crusts! Crusts!
My mother used to make homemade pie crusts all the time. I’ve used her recipe many times, but it leaves something to be desired in terms of flavor. It’s fine, but bland. We’re busy people, and our kitchen is small, so these days I get lazy and prefer to buy store-made crusts. Recently, we discovered that the pie crusts we’ve been buying for the past year contain lard. (Blech.) (Also, see here for more information on store-made crusts.)
Since then we’ve experimented with different recipes. I’d still rather run to the Wedge and buy one, but Jeremy likes to use his elbow grease and make crusts at home. While the ones with cream cheese are tasty, it’s a pain in the ass to make and adds a bunch of extra fat and calories. What works best for us is to use part butter, part shortening, both chilled. Make sure your water is ice cold, and don’t over-mix. Also, I’ve found it’s easiest to roll the dough on a piece of parchment paper/wax paper, or in a pinch, a large plastic bag. Our table is sticky and I end up using a large spatula to remove it from the table, which rips and warps the crust and makes everyone sad.
Jeremy made this version for the veggie pie (just add par boiled or sauteed veggies and about a cup of roue sauce (thinner is best…thick roue just clumps up on the top, which is tasty, but the lower vegetables get lonely.)
Before baking:

After, in all of its golden glory:

This crust (a slightly sweetened version of the above) was made weeks later for a different fruit tart, and then lived in a Ziploc in the refrigerator for far too long. I rolled it out, covered it with some homemade lemon curd (a few tablespoons), sliced fresh peaches and drops/small clumps of ginger preserves. Fold over the edges, sprinkle with some sugar and a little butter and bake for about 25-30 minutes or until the crust starts to brown and the peaches look soft.

Ooooooh, yes......

Curry beans, beet tops and blueberry tart

2008-08-05T19:40:00.003-05:00

As part of the bean present, we finally made curry beans. Eh. It was sort of weird...beans and curry....and it felt like they really needed something to cut the flavor. Not the winning recipe, I'm afraid, but we still love our Rancho Gordo beans!

Jeremy tried yet another crust to make this blueberry tart. They were wet little bastards and ran all over the place, but paired with fresh strawberry martinis, the taste was magnificent.
For the martinis, crush a bunch of strawberries.

Mix about 1 c strawberry juice with 2 shots vodka in a shaker with ice. If you're feeling extra zesty, add a squirt of lime.

Chard, pecan quiche and strawberry/rhubarb crisp

2008-08-05T19:27:00.003-05:00

Last year, one of Jeremy's mom's friends gave her a 50 pound bag of pecans that had lived in the back of her truck over the winter in Mississippi. They then lived in Trish's closet for a while, until we hauled them out on the porch one night and started shucking them. Miraculously most of them weren't rancid, and after an hour we had a few ziplocs of pecans (and we'd only done half the bag!)
We were having dinner that night and combined the pecans with the chard, arugula and herbs in the quiche we were making. It was damn good--the nutty crunch of the pecans was a tasty addition and one I would recommend.

I'd made the dessert ahead of time (standard crisp recipe) and the rhubarb and berries were so ripe and wet, that they made this messy pool of juice that sloshed all over the back seat of the car. Tasty, but damn sticky.

If you want specific recipes, email us and we'll send you the details.

Jeremy had found a new recipe for the quiche crust and had some left over. My mom used to roll it in a mound and sprinkle it with sugar and bake it. Because I grew up on the Betty Crocker recipe for crusts, it was usually pretty damn bland. What I like to do instead is use whatever fruit is handy (in this case some squishy cherries from the grocery store) and spread it on the rolled out bit of crust. Drop little bits of jam/jelly and a bit of butter on top (or spray the whole thing with a good burst of Pam), sprinkle with sugar and bake until the fruit is soft. My god it was good----so don't throw out that leftover chunk of crust. Make a mini-pie!

Muttar paneer and strawberry tart

2008-07-04T13:42:00.005-05:00

Last night we had our friend, Monique, over for dinner. We made muttar paneer with fresh peas and this strawberry tart from one of the many Martha Stewart magazines given to me by my Aunt Kathy.

Paneer is faster and easier to make than expected, although it's very important to use high quality whole milk. We used non-organic cheap milk and it was a mess. The paneer disintegrated when I tried to fry it and it felt sticky and difficult to deal with.

To make:

Heat a half-gallon of whole milk in a saucepan over medium heat. When it's just coming to a boil (steaming), add 4 T lemon juice (or lime juice, in a pinch) and stir gently. The lemon juice will make the milk curdle, separating the curds from the whey. Remove from heat and pour through a (cheese)cloth-lined mesh strainer over a large bowl. The whey will be a yellowish liquid and can be kept for a few days in the frig to add to soups, rice or to deglaze pans while cooking. The curds will be white and chunky. Wrap the curds in the cheesecloth, place it between two plates and then rest something heavy on top of the plates (a cast iron skillet or a bunch of books will do nicely). Let this sit an hour or so, until the curds have been compressed into a flat, dense slab. Cut the slab of paneer into squares and fry in a skillet with hot oil. Brown on both sides and then move to a paper-towel lined plate to drain. (You can fry right away or keep in the frig until you are ready to fry. You don't even have to fry it, but it keeps it shape better if you do.)

Our paneer kept falling apart and sticking to the pan, so I had a messy pile of overly greasy paneer. Thankfully, muttar paneer is a forgiving dish, and the paneer worked out just fine when added to everything else.

Wisconsin peas and strawberries....95 cents to $1.05 a pound

2008-07-04T13:35:00.006-05:00

It's pea season. Last weekend we drove to a farm near Clintonville, WI to pick peas and strawberries. (See the next post on the berries.) We went a little nuts and bought a whole flat of peas, which were gigantic and sweet, and two flats of berries, which were ripe as hell.

After the 4 hour drive home, we spent three hours processing fruits and vegetables. That night for supper, I made a lettuce salad with strawberries and a side of garlic sauteed beet tops. Jeremy made fresh pea risotto. How is it possible that we can eat so well???

Summer pasta salad

2008-07-04T13:23:00.004-05:00

I dislike mayonaise based pasta dishes, especially in the summer. (Who wants to eat that when it's hot?) I started making this pasta salad back in Atlanta because it's flexible enough to add just about anything, and it's easy to make.
Ingredients:
1 package penne pasta (or whatever kind you like), boiled until al dente and rinsed in cold water
1 head broccoli, broken into smallish stalks
1 head cauliflower, broken into smallish pieces
3-4 carrots, diced
1 onion, diced
garlic, chopped
mushrooms, sliced (if you like)
1 c cherry or plum tomatoes, halved
1 c almonds (or nut of your choice), toasted
1 c dried cherries (or cranberries, or blueberries, or whatever dried fruit you like)
Fresh spinach and/or arugula
Herbs (we use about a tablespoon of oregano, basil and a teaspoon of thyme, but you can also use cilantro and a bit of mint) and salt/pepper
1 to 3 ratio of oil to vinegar/citrus juice (about 1/4 c total...we usually use a mixture of balsamic, regular vinegar and a bit of either lime juice or orange juice with olive oil)

Put a large stock pot on to boil with plain water. Par boil the broccoli until bright green and still crunchy, maybe a minute or two. Rinse with cold water and drain well. Pour into a large bowl. Repeat with cauliflower (might take a minute more than the broccoli). Add the carrots (you can par boil these as well, or leave them raw so they're a little more crunchy) and tomatoes in the bowl (don't boil the tomatoes).
In a skillet with 1-2 T olive oil, saute onions over medium heat until almost carmelized. Add garlic and mushrooms, cooking a few minutes more with a splash of soy sauce. Add to the bowl of veggies. Repeat with spinach and arugula until just wilted. Add to the bowl. Mix well, but gently.
In a separate bowl, mix oil, vinegar and herbs.
If you aren't eating it right away, add 1/3rd of the vinegrette to the pasta salad, stirring to coat and cover with Saran wrap. Keep in frig until ready to use.
Keep vinegrette in the frig too. When ready to eat, add the rest of the vinegrette, the nuts and dried fruit. Stir well and serve.

Spring rolls and orange pecan bundt cake

2008-07-04T13:20:00.004-05:00

I am truly addicted to spring rolls. I could eat them every day if I could, and then I would weigh a thousand pounds and still want more spring rolls.

Unfortunately, it's another food we've ruined for ourselves, because no restaurant's rolls are as good as ours. (Why can't they use a spicy marinade instead of just dry noodles and lettuce??)

Jeremy was gone for the night, so I made myself some, using black rice noodles instead of white. (We've posted on these guys before, so the recipe already lives on this blog.) Don't they look creepy?

I also made orange pecan bundt cake. I messed up the praline topping by using too many nuts and not enough butter/rum, but they make a nice addition along the top.

Rancho Gordo beans

2008-07-04T13:02:00.005-05:00

Jeremy and I are true nerds. In early June, we celebrated our 10th anniversary (of dating, not marriage). What did we get as presents? Jewelry? A travel package to somewhere fun? Fancy dinner out at a restaurant? Nope. Beans.

Months ago, Jeremy bought this issue of Savuer magazine at the Atlanta airport, and we've been loving it ever since. They hailed Rancho Gordo as this fabulous heirloom bean-town, and after reading the descriptions of their merchandise, I knew that we were getting beans this year. They're not cheap at $5 a pound, but damn, they're worth it. I selected four types as a surprise for Jeremy: the borlotti, yellow-eye peas, scarlet runner beans and cranberry beans. Aren't they BEAUTIFUL???????

We used the scarlet runner beans first. The package instructed us to soak them overnight, but we soaked those damn things overnight, boiled them for nearly three hours with beer (the epazote smelled too much like burnt tires for us to ruin the beans), soaked them for two more days and boiled them another two hours. After all this, each bean is as big as your knuckle. The skin was starting to burst open, and the meat didn't have a particularly nice flavor. We made this bean salad:

Initially the salad was just okay, but the longer the beans sat in the frig, they better they tasted.
Next came this soup, a basic pasta fazool, and dear god, it was soooooo good. My only complaint was the pasta, which expanded to gigantic proportions, sucked up all the liquid and eventually disintegrated into the soup.

More beans are soaking today so we can try this recipe for curry beans.

Beans....the perfect anniversary gift!!

Scallion chickpea wraps with tofu and veggies

2008-07-04T12:56:00.001-05:00

This recipe is god knows where...but here's a pretty picture.

Apricot Rhurbarb Crisp

2008-07-04T12:55:00.002-05:00

The above arpicots were on there way to become yet more compote, but I really wanted to tell you about the wonderful dessert that their sibling fruit joined.

This was another occasion where we let the internet provide a recipe to conform to our desires and ingredients. With an abundance of rhubarb and apricots to use up/savor our friends at food network provided this recipe, that with a couple minor subsitutions (apricots and a couple of spare mangos for peaches, and shortening for lard) became one of the most delicious dishes of early summer. It's really closer to a broken pie than a traditional cobbler, but so so tasty, and the lime zest in the dough brlliantly sets off the fruit around it.

The ever-changing Farmer's Market

2008-07-04T12:44:00.004-05:00

It's amazing what a few weeks can do for summer produce. A few weeks back, the most we could get from the local veggies were lettuce, spinach and a few scallions. Everything else was shipped here from somewhere else (although those were some tasty damn apricots.)

A week later we have rhubarb, chard, and the very beginning of peas and strawberries (the berries were $5 a pint, so we didn't buy any....that's why they're not pictured here.)

Now it's almost too hot for spinach, and the lettuce looks all wilty and sad. The asparagus is also finished (these were shipped from Washington), but we've got onions, beets, zuccini, radishes, herbs, more peas, kohlrabi (not shown), berries and tiny baby potatoes.

Every week we go on either Saturday or Sunday morning to buy the weeks' produce. We base our menus on what we can find, and supplement the veggies with a co-op run. After breakfast, one of us washes everything we've purchased in Veggie-Wash and dries them on the table before they move to the frig. It's amazing how much gunk is on the produce...and this is just after the lettuce....

We need to be better about washing the produce that comes from the grocery store...that has even more wax, dirt, fingergerms and god knows what else on it after living in trucks and boxes for weeks.

Rhubarb cobbler, three photos

2008-07-04T12:33:00.004-05:00

One of the very best things about summer is rhubarb. There are 60 types of rhubarb, although the most common is Garden Rhubarb. Indigenous to Asian and coming to America in the 1820's, rhubarb is not only delicious, but a stong laxative. (Hooray, regularity!)

I found this recipe in a newspaper. Growing up, we had rhubarb pie and cake only. Cobblers always seem alluring, but I ultimately find them disappointing because they have too much crust. We were out of AP flour, so I tried substituting whole wheat, and while the resulting topping was no doubt marginally healthier, it was not tasty enough to make it worth it. Not only that, but this particular batch of rhubarb was still it was juicy as hell. A few weeks later, we used this recipe for another cobbler, and found it much tastier.

JUICY!

Heaven.....

A Weekend of Sauces

2008-05-28T14:09:00.003-05:00

Julie went home for Memorial Day weekend while I stayed to write, and I felt compelled (compelled, I tell you!) to make some sauce based on seasonal imported produce, and then Julie return with some seasonal local produce and yet another sauce was born. Here they sit, proudly, on top of ice cream.

Sauce the First: Lemon Curd

Lemons have been showing up plentifully from the resellers at the farmers market, but they don't last long, so they must be put to use quickly. Lemon curd is delicious, and Julie has often said that we should try making some, so try I did! I hunted around and eventually settled on this recipe, that its author describes as foolproof. I'd like to think that I didn't fully put it to the test, but I managed not to fool it up. I added a lot more zest than the recipe calls for, but otherwise left it alone. The result is rich but light in texture, and with a brighter lemon flavor than some of the more yolk intensive versions I've had. The texture is great, but there's a slight hint of egg white flavor to it that bothers me a little bit, so if I made it again, maybe I'd drop one or two of those. It's quite decadent with ice cream or yogurt. I had some this morning on french toast that Julie made and, at her brilliant suggestion sprinkled some toasted walnut pieces over it. So damn good.

Sauce the Second: Aprium Lavender Compote

Apparently aprium season came early this year, because we've had a big bunch of them in the markets lately. I have to say, for eating fresh I find them extremely disappointing: pretty apricot shaped fruit with less flavorful plumlike flavor and somewhat mealy texture inside. The best thing you can say about them is that they're not as intensely tart as many apricots are, but then also blander. Cooked up into sauce, though the texture becomes nice and meaty and the flavor deepens. I very much wanted to try another recipe from Clotilde Dusoulier's book Chocolate and Zucchini, and while Julie is iffy on the whole eating flowers thing she's game to try.

What you do is halve and depit two pound of apricots/apriums (any smallish stone fruit will work). Melt two tablespoons of butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat, then sprinkle two tablespoons of sugar over it and allow it to brown for a few minutes, stirring a couple times to distribute. Place the aprium halves, cut side down around the skillet and allow them to cook undisturbed for about five minutes, until they've given up a good amount of juice. Carefully remove the fruit, leaving as much of the liquid behind as possible. Sprinkle two teaspoons of edible lavender buds (available in co-ops) over the juice and cook the whole thing down over medium-low heat to a think syrup, stirring occasionally. If you're feeling especially lavendery, you can leave the buds in, but I strained them out and returned the syrup to the pan along with the reserved fruit. Combine and heat through. I liked it, especially on pancakes, but Julie was still found flower eating too perfumey, so we made a second batch without lavender.

Sauce the Third: Rhubarb Sauce

Even before Julie brought some gorgeous rhubarb back from Wisconsin and her generous childhood neighbor Lorraine, we managed to piece some together from the farmers market and the plant we put in last year in my mom's garden. Normally all you do is combine chopped rhubarb with sugar to taste and allow it to cook down. This time though, either we accidentally slipped some salt in or perhaps some of the rhubarb was grown in a brackish marsh, either way, the flavor was somewhat off and we added various and sundry things to try and make it good (Julie even wanted to add some rose water before I reminded her that she doesn't like that). Eventually it was Alright, and Julie is gamely continuing to eat it up. Sure is pretty though.

Asparagus Lemon Risotto

2008-05-28T14:07:00.002-05:00

Yeah, it's a lot of green on the plate, but this was actually a very complex and tasty risotto. The lemon, the parmesan, the asparagus and the creaminess of the rice, all played nicely against each other. It was nice to have fresh spinach again, but it was a bit tough and was really just something extra on the plate. Oh well, tastier clorophyll next time.

The original recipe is from here (but that requires some sort of registration, so here's a loose web version), but we've tweaked it ever so slightly, so here's our version.

Asparagus-Lemon Risotto

1 lb asparagus spears
3 T olive oil
salt and pepper
1 medium onion, diced
2 shallots, diced
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 cup Arborio or other short-grained rice
3 cups vegetable broth
1/3 cup grated parmesean
1 t freshly grated lemon zest
1 T fresh lemon juice

Trim the asparagus and divide it between two baking sheets. Leave one third whole and cut the other two thirds into two inch segments. Drizzle one tablespoon of the olive oil over the asparagus and season with salt and pepper. Bake in a 450˚ oven for 10 minutes, tossing a couple of times until crisp-tender.

Bring the stock to a low simmer and keep it there. Heat the remaining two tablespoons of oil over medium heat and add the onion. Saute until the onions are translucent and add the shallots and garlic. Saute one or two minutes more until they soften and add the rice, stirring to coat. Cook stirring for another few minutes until the rice is golden brown. Add the first cup of broth and carefuly stir it into the rice until it is almost entirely absorbed. Work more of the stock in half a cup at a time, stirring, until the rice becomes toothy but soft and the sauce creamy. Stir in the cheese, the lemon juice and zest, then stir in the cut asparagus. Taste for seasoning and add additional salt and pepper as needed. Serve immediately and top with the full asparagus stalks. Tastes like Spring.

Asparagus Corn Chowder

2008-05-28T14:05:00.007-05:00

Local asparagus has arrived! This week it was back up to $4-$7 a pound, but a week ago one of the smaller farmers was offering $3 a pound or two for $5. Who can argue with that? And so the orgy of aspargus dishes began.

This soup is a variation on the Greens potato corn chowder that I've made for years. Back when I was vegan, my dad remarked with wonder that it tasted as rich as a cream based chowder. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but that's part of the beauty -- it's extremely flavorful while being relatively low in fat.

Asparagus Corn Chowder

7 cups vegetable broth

5 ears sweet corn

1/2 lb potatoes (white or yukon gold recommended), cubed

1 T butter

1/2 T olive oil

large yellow onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, diced

1/2 t thyme, chopped

1 t basil, chopped

1/2 lb (approx. ten stalks) asparagus, ends trimmed, cut into 2" pieces

1/4 cup dry white wine

salt and pepper

Shave the corn from the cobs with a large sturdy knife. Set aside 2 cups and put the rest (2-3 cups) in a large soup pot. Use the back of the knife to scrape the remainder of the cornflesh from the cobs into the pot. Add the potatoes, 2cups of the stock, and a bit of salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook until the potatoes begin to break down, 20-25 minutes. Add two additional cups of stock and then blend the soup to a smooth puree.

While the soup is simmering, melt the butter with the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and saute until translucent and beginning to color. Add the garlic and herbs and cook, stirring occaisionally, until they become fragrant. Add the remaining corn and asparagus and cook until the vegetables become tender. Add the wine, and cook another couple minutes until most of the wine has cooked off.

Add the sauted vegetables to the blended soup. Add additional stock (or milk, or cream), until the soup reached the consistency you like, and cook at a low simmer for another 15-20 minutes to allow the flavors to combine. Add additional salt and pepper to taste. You can top each soup bowl with additional shredded basil or grated hard cheese, as we did here

Julie brought some more asparagus back from the Dorns this weekend, so we can enjoy delicious dinners (and fragrant urine) for a while more.

Portabello Steaks and Minted Almond Quinoa

2008-04-21T20:15:00.002-05:00

As vegetarians, most of our meals are essentially a single dish, possibly with salad on the side, a piece of bread, what have you. Alright, so this isn't really that different, but part of the fun of having a big portabello cap is that it reminds us of the meat-centric meals of our youth; that and, of course, the deliciousness. I think we'd gotten a bit off track with portabellos that last few times that we made them by over marinating them. This is great for grilling, but tends to sog them out when searing them in a pan. This time I only added about a teaspoon of good soy sauce to each while they were cooking (gill side up). They came our rich and meaty; moist without juices running everywhere.

The quinoa dish is essentially a variation on tabbouleh. Julie is excited by quinoa's super food reputation and keen to try new recipes. We made some minor variations to this one from Vegetarian times. I was worried that, on its own, the quinoa might mush out, but the pan roasting seems to have prevented that. In any case, it's a really pleasing and nutty salad.

1 cup quinoa

2 cups water

pinch salt

1/2 cup almonds, toasted and roughly chopped

1/3 cup diced baked tofu (optional)

1/4 cup parsley, finely chopped

2-3 tablespoons mint, finely chopped

3 tablespoons ev olive oil

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Rinse the quinoa and drain thoroughly through a fine mesh strainer (if using boxed quinoa you can probably skip this step). Add to a small sauce pan over medium heat until it dries and then becomes golden and fragrant. Add the water and salt. Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes, until all the water is absorbed. Fluff the quinoa, transfer to a medium large bowl and allow to cool slightly. Add the almonds, tofu (if using), parsley and mint and toss throughly. Whisk together the olive oil and lemon juice and pour it over the top of the quinoa mixture, tossing to distribute thoroughly. Taste for seasoning and add additional salt and pepper as desired. Serve at room temperature.

Amaretto Raisin Swirl Ice Cream

2008-04-21T20:09:00.007-05:00

I'm generally suspicious of recipes produced by the American Stuffnstuff Promotion council. The last one of these that Julie tried was some sort of chocolate sauerkraut cake, conceived by the National Sauerkraut Alliance (or something), that she ~~inflicted on~~ sweetly shared with her colleagues at work. The best thing that could be said about this cake was that some people didn't think it tasted too strongly of sauerkraut. So when she brought home a calendar of recipes from the California Raisin Marketing Board, let's say I was dubious and did a certain amount of reflexive eye-rolling. But I'm here to repent and atone and prostrate myself at the feet of the raisin marketing gods, because they gave us the recipe for some incredibly tasty ice cream. Hopefully, with this ringing endorsement, they will forgive me my earlier skepticism and also forgive me for having been out of raisins and having substituted dried currants (which, it turns out, actually are a kind of raisin and not a currant at all, so they probably won't mind).

The recipe can be found here, and the ice cream is some of the creamiest I've made in a long time, and also one of the easiest to make because it doesn't require you to make a custard. In fact, I was able to make the whole thing in one evening. It's a really incredible combination of fruit, spice and cream. The amaretto doesn't really come across as a distinct flavor, but you can tell that it makes everything richer and deeper.

I promise to be more trusting of my raisin overlords in the future.

Mushroom Stroganoff with Spinach

2008-04-21T20:06:00.002-05:00

This is one of the first dishes that I more or less figured out on my own and knew that I had an actual keeper; not a "well that wasn't too bad, I think I'll keep making that in the hopes that it will get better", but a "wow, that was good and other people say so too!" I even started making it back when I was vegan and using tofu sour cream (a fine product; I recommend it if you're non-dairy). It's almost healthy enough here to be an everyday meal, though we normally save it for a special occasion. We added some yellow pepper, which was fine but superfluous, and some frozen spinach (frozen cause, you know, it f***in' snowed this morning). I didn't mind the spinach, but Julie found it overpowering, so maybe skip it or wait until things actually grow. The basic recipe is very simple and can be easily modified to suit your tastes and inspirations.

In a large skillet, over medium heat, saute one diced onion in a mixture of butter and olive oil until translucent. Add two or three cloves of garlic, diced and cook until they begin to color, then add two to three cups sliced mushrooms. The type of mushrooms is up to you, but more flavorful is better. I would recommend a mix of brown mushrooms. Turn the heat up slightly and add more oil if necessary to allow the mushrooms to brown. Once the mushrooms have seared, add 1 tablespoon soy sauce and cook until absorbed. Add approximately 1/4 cup red wine and reduce slightly, then add 8 oz sour cream and stir until the sauce comes together. Taste the sauce and season with salt and pepper (I would be slightly aggressive with the pepper here). If you are adding spinach, I would do so at this point and just allow it to wilt. Serve over egg noodles or the pasta of your choice.

Bun

2008-04-17T22:40:00.004-05:00

One of my favorite meals EVER is Vietnamese noodle salad, bún or bun (and it's twin sibling: spring rolls). A bed of lettuce is put down, followed by fresh herbs, sweet or crunchy vegetables (carrot, daikon, cucumbers, bean sprouts) and meat, or in our case tofu or gluten. By now we've got the hang of prepping it in record time and can get extra fancy with the toppings.

Bun is often the reason we sit on the couch 30 minutes later, moaning in agony, our stomachs ready to burst because we could not stop eating until the entire plate was clean. I don't care. I love bun.

We use a base of lettuce (any kind, any amount...but we use a plateful), topped with rice vermicelli noodles, a hearty handful of shredded carrot and herbs (usually basil and mint, although I also like cilantro). Then it's a free for all, based on whats in the pantry or fridge--cucumbers, tofu, gluten, scallions, sesame seeds, radishes, daikon, arugula, etc. Here we have baked tofu, carrot, sesame seeds, basil and cilantro. Traditionally it would be dressed with fish sauce, but we used hoisin and a lime vinaigrette.

Ugh, I could eat this every day.......YUM!!!!!

Raspberry Brownies

2008-04-17T22:38:00.003-05:00

Sometimes the internet is a wonderful thing. All you have to do is make a reasonable supposition that something exists and lo and behold it will. The other week I though to myself, "You know what would probably be tasty, raspberry brownies." I then went about proving that such things existed. You do need some pre-existing knowledge to help separate the wheat from the chaff, though. The first recipe I looked at looked promising at first, but on closer inspection looked to be one of those horrible cake-y approached to brownies. (I know that reasonable people can disagree here, but for me brownies are meant to be dense, tender fudgey morsels of head-melting chocolateness. Eating brownies from a box mix means that I am sad and/or will eat whatever's in front of me, despite its strong resemblance to styrofoam topped with chocolate syrup.) So I kept looking, and eventually settled on a combination of this fine recipe and this one. Below is my version.

Over a low flame or in the microwave, melt 8oz (2 sticks) butter and 6oz unsweetened chocolate, then allow to cool slightly. Mix in 2 cups sugar, then beat in four eggs, one at a time. Add a pinch of salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla and 2 tablespoons raspberry liqueur (we used our homemade stuff, Chambord is the most common commercial one), and stir to combine. Sift in 1.5 cups flour and stir until just combined. Fold in 1/2 cup pecans.
Put 3/4 cup raspberry jam in a sauce pan with another tablespoon of the raspberry liqueur and heat until just softened. Pour 2/3 of the brownie batter into a grease 9" x 13" pan. Spread the melted jam gently over the top, then cover with the remaining third of the batter.
Bake at 350° for 20-25 minutes, until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out with maybe some crumbs but no batter (do not over bake you brownies, they will be sad).

Ginger Butternut Squash Lasagna (or when ice cream goes bad and then goes good again)

2008-04-17T22:34:00.006-05:00

They always say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's good when, as I said, you know your way around a recipe well enough to jump in and vary it up. On the other hand this also lets you jump in and realize that the pool was far shallower than you thought that it was, and your ankles are now perhaps sprained and broken.

Half and half was on sale this last week and so was ginger, so I had an idea to make some ginger ice cream. I looked online at a few recipes and thought that I understood the basic principles. Several steeped shredded ginger in milk, then made custard and then added cream. So I figured I would just use the half and half and skip the step of adding cream later. I brought the half and half, sugar and shredded ginger (maybe a bit more ginger than the recipes called for, but I wanted it gingery) together to a simmer. It didn't look quite right, but I decided to turn off the heat and take a look at it after it'd had a chance to steep. As it turned out the acid from the ginger had curdled the half and half (it had also probably come to too much of a boil), but I wasn't sure how much so I left it to strain through a tea towel. As it turned out, it was pretty thoroughly curdled. The whey was nearly clear and I essentially had sweetened gingery ricotta.

What to do, what to do. Ice cream was out. A dessert seemed obvious, but I've never liked ricotta cheesecake and cannoli seemed more trouble than it was worth. Hmm, how about a sweet savory dish? I knew that there were some Italian dishes that used ground up amaretti cookies along with ricotta. Maybe my ginger sweet ricotta could substitute for those. After much googling I came upon this recipe. And so this initially confusing but ultimately delicious dish was born.

It's a fabulous dish for fall or winter. Rich and sweet but very satisfying.

Here's my modified version:
1 onion diced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium(1 1/2 to 2-pound) butternut squash
16 oz gingered sweet ricotta
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3 1/2 cups whole milk
3/4 cup (lightly packed) fresh basil leaves
12 lasagna noodles
1 1/2 cups shredded whole-milk mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup grated parmesan

Saute the onion in the oil over medium low heat, until caramelized. Halve and seed the squash, then bake in a 375˚ oven for 45 minutes, until soft. Scrape the flesh into the bowl of a food processor and add the onion and the gingered ricotta (if you don't happen to have an ice cream mishap, use 16oz whole milk ricotta, 1/2 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon grated ginger). Process until completely smooth.

Boil the lagsagna sheets until al dente. Melt the butter in a sauce pan and sift in the flour. Whisking constantly, bring the roux to blond-brown and then add the milk. Still whisking bring the sauce to a boil and thicken it. Combine in a blender or food processor with the basil, salt and pepper.

Assemble the lasagna: sauce, noodles, filling, cheese, repeat (at the end you should have three layers of filling and four of noodles). After puting the last of the sauce on the top layer of noodles, cover it with foil and bake at 375˚ for 40 minutes. Remove the foil, top with parmesean and bake 15 minutes more. Remove, cool for ten minutes, slice and eat!

Asparagus Mushroom Risotto

2008-04-17T22:30:00.002-05:00

You know that you've made a dish enough times to feel feel comfortable with the basic procedure when you can pick the ingredient variations and just head on in. I think I've finally reached that point with risotto. Not that I don't make mistakes or some aren't better than others, but I basically know what I'm doing.

There was some great looking Mexican asparagus in the grocery stores last week, and we decided that it needed to come home with us. We also had some mushrooms that needed using, and Julie made a strong pitch for using them here. I was dubious, but went along.

I put a pot of stock on to simmer and dropped the woody end of the asparagus in to add to the mix. I browned a diced onion and sliced mushrooms in a mix of butter and olive oil and then added 2/3 cup of arborio rice. Once the rice was glossy I added the first ladle full of stock. The secret to making risotto is adding the stock a little at a time and stirring gently but almost constantly. When rice was just getting toothy, I added the 1/2 inch pieces of asparagus, so that when the rice was finished (you want a starchy sauce, but the rice should still be firm) it would be tender but firm. When it reached this stage, I added a pat of butter and the 1/2 cup parmesan that Julie had shredded for me and stirred them in. It's best right away, so we ate it here with a simple salad.

As for me, I wouldn't combine the strong mushrooms with the subtle asparagus again, but Julie liked it fine. Now we just have to wait for spring and beauty of local asparagus to try it again.

Black Forest Cheesecake for Angie

2008-04-17T22:27:00.002-05:00

For Christmas this year, Angie got a homemade cheesecake each month for four months, in the flavor of her choice. This is the third cake, and I used this recipe, but with substitutions (of course! Do I ever make a recipe without tweaking it?). I used a store-bought chocolate wafer crust and used only 2 packages of cream cheese. Also, instead of the nasty canned cherry pie filling, I used tart cherry jam that we made last year. I also topped it with chopped white and dark chocolate. The cake itself was dense and fudgy, but it definately needed the cherry and chocolate topping to break up the overwhelming flavor. Thumbs up. By far the best of the three cheesecakes I've made for her so far.

Cinnamon Rolls? Yes. Blueberry Rolls? Also Yes!

2008-03-24T16:42:00.009-05:00

There's something about the hearty decadence of breakfast pastries. Breakfast is the one meal where sweets are a standard part of the menu, and yet (pace Bill Cosby) you wouldn't want just to eat a piece of cake for breakfast. So you need something more substantial. Something like candy, but in bread form. As far as pastries are concerned, I'm very happy to let someone else make them for me and pay them for their efforts. It's extremely unlikely that I've ever attempt anything as involved as these in my own home. Cinnamon rolls are about as ambitious as I get in the morning.
The other week I came across this recipe after a link to the site from Bitch Ph.D. No, my rolls wouldn't look as nice as hers, and even if they did, our camera isn't good enough to capture it, but still I could try.
So, Sunday before last, after having made the dough the night before and letting it rise over night, I got up early in the morning to roll out my rolls. I divided the dough in half, freezing half for later rolls, rolled out what was left, slathered it with butter and then cinnamon sugar (the red bits you see below are cinnamon candies that got mixed in with the cinnamon sugar after a recipe I can no longer remember), rolled it up, cut it into eight parts, covered it and went back to bed to let it rise. When the timer went off in the kitchen, I came back out and put it in the oven then crawled back into bed to await the cinnamon rolly goodness.

And there it is. They were tasty and flaky and sweet but not too sweet (per Nabeela's suggestion, I upped the sugar in the dough to 3/4 C). Fresh baked bread and cinnamon is a truly wonderful combination of smells, but I wondered if there wasn't something else that we could try. Then I noticed that the our blueberry jam was especially thick...

So we used butter, sugar, and jam for the filling, and Julie decided to be more aggressive with the icing. And it worked! The jam was thick enough that it didn't run and the blueberry came across as a distinct flavor, rather than just being swallowed up by the sweet. They're enough advance work that I'd save them for special occasions, but I'd definitely make them again.

Potato Vegetable Gratin

2008-03-05T14:27:00.006-06:00

Julie and I were talking about it, and while we both certainly grew up with plenty of potato dishes, au gratin potatoes (not even the Franglaise term, potatoes au gratin) came from one of two places: from a red box that seemed to live indefinitely in the pantry, or, later, in all their orangey congealed glory, in the chafing dish of some slightly exotic buffet. They did not look or taste like this:

Ignore the burnt bits at the side. Those wash right off the pan (it's amazing that way), and the gratin itself was not at all burnt or dry. On the contrary, it was tender and soft and full of rich complex nutty goodness. Sigh...

I've mentioned the gratin thing before. I started making them at the end of last year as a way to use up aging potatoes, and whatever else sounded delicious. Prep for this is actually quite easy, once you get the hang of not bleeding profusely with the mandolin slicer. I use a variation of this recipe. You could use raw portabelo slices, like the recipe say, but you can also substitute whatever you have or is in season. This time I caramelized some onions, sauteed sliced criminis with them and then sprinkled them in between the layers along with some sliced Brussels sprouts.

I know that this is usually thought of as a side dish, but, if you do it up right, a piece of this, a simple salad and maybe a glass of red wine can be an amazingly satisfying meal.

Pudding is the New Ice Cream

2008-02-28T14:58:00.003-06:00

Really, I mean that! This isn't just a snowclone or a marketing concept. It's ice cream; the ice cream I made:

Last week Julie, got a craving for cardamom rice pudding. So she looked at a variety of recipes on line and settled on this one, from the man who Julie used to call my "boyfriend." We didn't have any cream in the house at the time, so I increased the amounts of cow and coconut milk instead. The pudding was delicious, with the sharpness of the cardamom cut against the sweetness of the creamy rice and raisins and the great nutty crunch of the pistachios.

Then I thought, I haven't made ice cream in a little while, and most ice cream uses a custard base, so maybe this stuff would work. Armed with something closer to the correct ingredients (I basically doubled the liquid part, using one cup of rice with two cups milk, one cup coconut milk, one cup cream. 1/2 cup sugar, one full teaspoon ground cardamom, and about 1/2 cup each golden raisins and pistachios) I tried to make my vision a reality. And, what do you know, it worked! Julie still finds the rice in the ice cream confusing and it tends to freeze harder than I'd like it to, necessitating long warm up times for serving. I tried soaking the golden raisins in a little rum, but I think that I should have done that longer and use more. Hmm, future pudding based ice cream strategies to ponder.

The cardamom rice pudding ice cream is served here with a decent but forgettable chocolate hazelnut cake. I think I overburdened the cake by adding twice the amount of hazelnuts (I had some booze soaked one left over from liqueur making) and it ended up too dense and dry. I think I need to work on my bundt cake mojo.

Blood Orange and Hazelnut Salad and Dolmas

2008-02-24T12:05:00.005-06:00

This is another one of those meals that was midway between an everyday fridge cleaner and a what-the-hell-are-we-doing-cooking-like-this-when-we-don't-have-company-coming meal.

Tis the season of bountiful citrus, and the co-op lately has been running specials on these gorgeous looking blood oranges. We first started buying blood oranges at the Dekalb Farmer's Market, and I only realized recently, after reading everyone's favorite food book from last year that their flesh has a flavor in between oranges and raspberries. Our standard salad recipe lately has been: lettuce (usually green or red leaf), possibly sliced carrots, some form of nut (thanks to Trader Joe's our freezer is generally stocked with an an assortment), and, at least for Julie, some form of citrus. These blood oranges seemed to call out quietly, but insistently, for hazelnuts, so we toasted some, rubbed the skins off and sprinkled them over the top. After sectioning the blood oranges, I made a quick vinaigrette with some zest and the juice of the remaining fruit. Such a nice combination textures and of bitter, sweet and sour flavors.

I don't remember the first time I made dolmas. My parents' time living in Chicago meant that they were well acquainted with the deliciousness of Greek food long before we could afford to go to the few Greek restaurants in the Twin Cities, and I know that they made dolmades once or twice in my childhood. It was probably sometime after becoming a vegetarian in high school that my mom and I first made their vegetarian, middle eastern cousins, dolmas, for some holiday gathering.
Julie and I made dolmas for a pot luck dinner that we hosted recently with folks from the History Center, and they were a big hit (or as much as anything can be when you're trying a little bit of everything from seven or eight tasty dishes). However, the big jar of grape leaves from Bill's costs about the same as the small jar of grape leaves, and so it seems wasteful not to buy the big jar and then wasteful not to make more within a couple of weeks so that the remaining grape leave don't get forgotten in the fridge and eventually turn moldy, like they did the last time. Anyway, once you get the hang of rolling them, it's really not that much work, and we put them in the oven to cook while we went to the gym for an hour. We used this recipe, without the green onions, and we baked them in the oven uncovered at 375 for an hour (This gives a chance for the dolmas to cook to tenderness and most of the water to steam away, so they're not soggy). Serve with some form of tzatziki or yogurt sauce. Wonderful lemony, pine nutty, oniony, ricey goodness.

Pea, Onion and Broccoli Soup, with Chard

2008-02-22T20:38:00.010-06:00

Split pea soup was one of my Dad's favorite dishes, but something I never learned to like. It always just tasted of dust and salt and, I don't know, sadness?, to me. Every so often, Julie will ask me if split pea soup sounds good, and I say, no, it will never sound good. If you want to make it, I will eat it, but I will never be excited about it.

And so it came about the other week that we had an abundance of broccoli and notions of making it into a soup. Julie was in charge of finding the recipe, and, after disqualifying the countless milky and bland cream of broccoli soups she found, she looked inside the modestly titled The Best Ever Vegetarian Cookbook, which she had purchased on clearance a couple months back after falling for its many lovely and helpful pictures (Julie being a visually oriented cookbook shopper). There, she found a recipe for Pea, Leek and Broccoli soup, which sounded tasty enough, since the peas would be (frozen) fresh, rather than dried and split. Leeks, however, are expensive at the moment, and we didn't have any in the house, so I decided to substitute onions and to up the flavor component by caramelizing them. I made it for our friend Monique along with a quick saute of chard, and Julie enjoyed the leftovers the next day.

It was amazing. The sweetness of the peas really complemented the deeper green flavors of the broccoli and the sweet richness of the onions brought it all together. You could grate a sharp cheese over the top of this, or just enjoy it with some toasted bread. I may make it again in a couple of days. Here's the adapted recipe.

Dice one large onion and saute in a dutch oven or sturdy soup pot with two tablespoons olive oil and one tablespoon butter over medium-low heat until soft and brown, about fifteen minutes (part way through, you may want to deglaze with some wine and add three or four cloves of garlic, sliced). Add one quart vegetable stock and two medium potatoes, diced. Bring up to a boil, stirring to work in any caramelized bits. Cover and simmer about ten minutes. Add half a pound of fresh broccoli, cut into one to two inch pieces, and one and a half cups frozen peas. Cover and simmer ten minutes more, stirring occasionally. Blend the soup to your desired consistency. (I used a hand blender, so it still had some texture to it, which we enjoy. For smoother puree, work in batches with a blender.) Season with salt and pepper and garnish to your heart's content.

Healing Thai Soup

2008-02-04T10:23:00.000-06:00

So Julie's been dealing with a cold for the past week and I've had my tonsils kicking at me as well, so we decided that it was time for some healing and nourishing soup. So Julie stopped by Shuang Hur and picked up lemon grass, galangal and kafir lime leaf. I made some vegetable stock from the vegetable odds and ends that we keep in the freezer for just such occaisions. To make the soup from there: take about two quarts of vegetable stock and simmer it with six lime leaves, three lemon grass stalks (peeled and chopped into sections) and one three inch knob of galangal sliced into 1/8th inch coins for an hour. Add a couple of dried shitake to rehydrate in the stock for the last fifteen minutes.

After an hour remove the aromatics and discard (set the mushrooms aside until they're cool enough to handle, remove the stem, slice and return to the pot). Add vegetables of your choosing, spacing them out through the cooking process so that they finish at roughly the same time. We added first carrots and sweet potatoes, followed by onions, thai red chilis, garlic, sliced mushrooms and swiss chard, then chopped gluten and coconut milk to thicken and enrich the stock (we've made this before as a dinner party main dish, and added two full cans of coconut milk and a couple of tablespoons of red curry paste; this time we were feeling more basic, so only added about half a can of coconut milk). When the soup was in the bowls, we sprinkled on cilantro, sliced green onion and toasted cashews.

Ahhh, the healing powers of soup.

Birthday Dinner, Grand Cafe

2008-01-26T09:15:00.000-06:00

So yesterday was my 35th birthday (I know! Weird, huh?) and to celebrate Julie, my mom and I went out to Grand Cafe on Grand and 38th, here in Minneapolis. In warmer weather it would be walking distance from our house, but the idea of combining walking with such a wonderfully decadent meal seems positively bulimic.

My mom and I had been there this summer, and had an absolutely fabulous meal, elements of which I later tried to recreate, with mixed results. I won't be attempting such a feat with last night's meal, not because it wasn't great, but because it's elements were either beyond me or more decadent than I can usually bring myself to cook at home.

Before discussing the individual dishes, let me give our overall impressions. This place is fabulous. The space is really nice combination of fancy and unpretentious: small neighborhood restaurant setting (in that converted-retail-space-of-some-kind way), with white table cloths and silver (the bill arrives rolled in a silver egg cup). The food is French-American with an emphasis on seasonal and local ingredients. I know. It sounds like I just described nearly every newish restaurant, but these folks do it up right. By contrast, last year at this time we went to Corner Table and found it decidedly underwhelming, at least from a vegetarian perspective, because their winter seasonal offerings just weren't all that flavorful. Grand Cafe is by no means a vegetarian place, but is insanely vegetarian friendly. How friendly? The soup of the day was prepared with vegetable stock. It's one of those small touches that most restaurants can't be bothered with even when, as in this case, it just makes more sense with the dish. The service was friendly and wonderful: attentive without being intrusive and gracious in answering all of our questions. The wine list is nice and has a number of good reasonably priced bottles for us less wealthy folks (we shared a bottle of a nice Côtes du Rhone). We got a number of dishes (the soup, a salad, the one veg entree, two starters, and a de-fished special) and shared around, which was an advantage both because it gave each of us the chance to try a number of different dishes and because a number of dishes had such intense flavors that they would have become overwhelming if that were the whole of your meal (this is how I always feel about a dish like szechuan eggplant -- I love it when it is part of number of dishes being passed around a table, but don't enjoy eating an entire plate of it). Finally, everything was delicious, but evidently butter is also a seasonal food (I remember our summer meal as being lighter), so by the end of the meal we did start to feel slightly bloated from all the richness. OK, onto the food.

The soup of the day was a sweet potato and apple base with gruyere folded in and bay leaf oil. The soup was really nicely seasonal, both in it's ingredients (winter seasonal produce up here on the tundra presumably being things that keep well in cellars) and in the feeling that it gave: warm with a hint a crispness in the background. The gruyere was fine, but didn't add a lot, and the bay oil was disorienting, but a really interesting way (I felt the same way about the chili oil that floated atop our delicious cantaloupe soup this summer). We also shared the warm beet salad: circles of sweet red beets that sandwich Stickney's goat's milk cheese (so creamy and good) which are served with caramelized pears and greens tossed with toasted walnuts and a really rich vinaigrette (our one complaint was that the greens -- mostly frisée -- were overly salted).

The two starters that we shared as entrees were the leek and mushroom gratin and the potato gnocchi. The gratin was rich and wonderful, really well balanced with the toasted baguette. The gnocchi were among the best I've every had -- light, soft inside, slight crispy outside and flavorful, and I don't think I've ever had celery taste better than in the celery and onion confit that it and the wild mushrooms (black trumpet? I'm not sure) were tossed with. I could have eaten the gnocchi with a salad as my meal and been incredibly happy.

The crispy polenta cakes entree was Julie's favorite, and something of a revelation for her, as she's been generally suspicious of polenta up til now. The polenta cakes were creamy and savory inside, and the sweet-sour sherry and golden raisin sauce nicely complemented the accompanying roasted carrots and onions (I don't think I've ever thought of pearl onions as a flavor element before, but they were really fab here). Our final dish was the vegetable elements of the steelhead trout special (my mom sweetly decided to fore go meat in order to facilitate veggie sharing with us): dill risotto with chickpea puree and roasted brussels sprouts. The brussels sprouts were perfectly prepared and like a much more butter intensive version of what we prepare at home, and the chickpea puree was a nice accent, but the risotto was something of a revelation. It had the full flavor of fresh green dill, so that the first taste hits you in this incredibly herbal clean way, and later bite reveal other aspects of the dill flavor. I can only believe that this would be amazing with the trout. As it was, it was really nice to have a couple of bites of this and savor the tasty and surprising combination of flavors, then go eat something else for a while, and then return to be struck by the flavors anew.

For dessert we shared gingerbread bread pudding with white chocolate cream and sour cherries. It was good, in keeping with the warm, rich clean flavors of the evening, but not fabulous. We would not get it again, but happy for a sweet end to a sweet evening.

I'll be excited to back to the Grand Cafe during the summer months. It's a wonderful place, but the combination of richness and price mean this is a twice a year sort of place.

Peanut butter balls*

2008-01-20T09:41:00.000-06:00

My family has few traditions, which always baffled me growing up. We're sturdy German stock, and you'd figure we'd claim something from our heritage to recreate every year. Nope. No beer, no sausage, no Black Forest cake, no pretzels, not even German potato salad. Likewise, my family didn't bind days with food (no Friday pizza nights at my house.) One of the only constants was a handful of holiday treats we would make every single year. Some have come and gone as my mom discovered new recipes and our tastes changed, but the only one to remain is Peanut Butter Balls. Without fail, we'd make two batches of peanut butter balls every single Christmas, as did my aunt and Grandma (although theirs tasted different.) It's a super sweet concoction and despite the few ingredients involved, I soon noticed subtle differences between our peanut butter balls and others. My Grandma's were smaller, and she used a different coating chocolate (plus she used wax, which is pretty common with the recipe but fills me with horror.) My aunt's version was closer to my grandmothers, but she only used creamy peanut butter and melted chocolate chips. Ours were bigger and more irregularly shaped, with crunchy peanut butter and NO WAX. Over the years, however, I've become so accustomed to rolling these cookies that I can usually make a whole batch of them nearly the same size. That's what three decades of rolling can do, I guess.

Peanut butter balls were an addiction, and despite our love of them, they were only made in December. The only time I strayed from this concept was when we were moving from Atlanta. I made a batch for our goodbye party. Folks loved them (although they were gooier in the heat), but I felt like I was being sacrilegious making them five months too early. (I'm still fascinated by these delicious or holiday foods that are never made outside of Christmas or Thanksgiving. Who says you can't have green bean casserole in February or pumpkin pie in June?)

Peanut butter balls conjure up the idea of family, of delicious comfort foods, of holiday get-togethers. I love them. Even now, when Jeremy and I make entirely new cookies and candies each year, I still make peanut butter balls.

Here's the original recipe (with comments and revisions later)

2 c. crushed graham cracker crumbs

2 c. powdered sugar

2 c. peanut butter (creamy or crunchy)

1/4 c. melted margerine or butter

A large block of confectioner's chocolate or chocolate of your choice

Mix the first four ingredients in a bowl. It will be messy, but it's easier to mix with your hands. When thoroughly mixed, roll into 1 - 1 1/2 inch balls and stack in a separate container. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours, or until the balls are more solid and easier to handle. Melt chocolate over low heat or a double broiler (some use the microwave, which is okay too). Jeremy prefers to add a small handful of finely chopped chocolate at this point to temper the chocolate and make it set better, but you don't have to. Dip balls in chocolate until coated, and using two forks, try to drain as much excess chocolate as possible. Place on cookie sheets covered in wax paper and refrigerate until the chocolate is set. Transfer to a tupperware container and keep in a cool place.

Growing up, we always used the Skippy-esque processed peanut butter and chunks of milk chocolate. It's too sweet for me these days, so these are my suggestions. This morning I'm wondering if you could cut the powdered sugar by 1/2 c. I now use organic no-salt, no-added sugar creamy peanut butter from the co-op (I tried using the jarred oil-on-top peanut butter once, and it was too dry to combine with the other ingredients.) For true decadence or for those with peanut allergies, you could use almond butter instead. We buy large blocks of 70% cacao dark chocolate from Trader Joe's, which produces a much richer, less sweeter coating. (Although my sister, a milk chocolate eater, doesn't like our version. But we do.)

They're easy and yummy and my favorite food tradition.

*My friend is hosting an online food blog theme party about food that is closely linked to memory, so this is my contribution. Here's her blog: The Skinny Gourmet

Cannellini, Couscous and Pomegranate Salad

2008-01-18T10:58:00.000-06:00

We've had some really tasty meals these last couple of weeks that we simply haven't managed to photograph, including a potato gratin with sliced mushrooms and brussel sprouts that was a perfect winter fridge cleaner and a very satisfying treat.

This one we did manage to capture, though. Pomegranates are still relatively cheap and plentiful, and this is one of those dishes where they really shine. We tried it once before with my mom, and it turned out decently, but, with some modifications, this time was even better. The sesame flavored eggplant, the couscous and the cannellinis (we threw in some tofu too, which was also fine) combined for a rich nutty goodness, against which the pomegranate pods and the chopped herbs really popped.

As a side note, I recently tried a new technique for harvesting pomegranate seeds that works really well (or at least much better than our old peeling-like-an-orange method). Run a serrated knife horizontally around the pomegranate, about halfway between the stem and flower ends, being careful not to cut too deeply. When you pull these two halves apart, the seed clusters should be nicely exposed and easy to separate from the membrane and pith. Voilà!

The recipe called for pomegranate vinegar, but we couldn't find such a thing and instead found pomegranate molasses, this thick, rich, sour-sweet syrup, at Bill's, the Greek store down the street.

The origins of the recipe are now lost (xeroxed page from something, we thank you), but here it is in our slightly modified form.

Cannellini, Couscous and Pomegranate Salad

Prepare either one cup of dried -- soak overnight, boil for 30-45 minutes, until tender -- or one 16 oz can prepared cannellini beans --rinse thoroughly. (The type of bean is pretty important here, so substitute at your own risk. Personally, I'd substitute chickpeas before I'd use navy beans or such.)

Dice two cups Chinese or Japanese eggplants. Heat 1T sesame oil in a non-stick skillet until just under smoke and add the eggplant (and tofu if you feel like it). Saute, stirring, five minute or until tender. Add 2T sesame seeds and stir until they start to brown. Add 1T minced shallot and 2T minced garlic and stir one more minute before removing from heat and setting aside.

Bring 2C water to a boil and stir in 12oz couscous. Return to a boil, cover, and turn off the heat to allow the water to absorb (5-10 minutes). While the water is absorbing prepare a vinaigrette of 2T white wine or apple cider vinegar combined with 1.5T pomegranate molasses with 3T olive oil whisked in.

Fluff the finished couscous with a fork and turn into a large bowl. With two spoons, toss in the eggplant mixture, 1/2C chopped cilantro (and scallions and/or parsley) and the seeds of one pomegranate. Drizzle the vinaigrette over the top, add salt and pepper to taste, toss to combine and serve at room temperature. Works as a side or main dish.

Guess what everyone got for Xmas this year...

2007-12-27T18:56:00.000-06:00

Why, selections from the jam wagon-train, that's what!

Snowman cakes

2007-12-27T18:54:00.000-06:00

Making snowman cakes takes a lot of concentration. Mom and I decorated them on Xmas eve.

It was a basic box cake mix, but they were damn cute. I covered one in coconut...he had an unfortunate face and the pretzels turned soggy as hell, but it tasted good.

Cookie and candies aplenty!

2007-12-26T11:21:00.000-06:00

So for the second year running we made an assortment of cookies and candies for people, in addition to the jams and occasional bottles of liqueuer we foist upon indulgent friends and relatives, in our Homemade Xmas Parade™. This gives us the excuse to try a bunch of new recipes and people seem to enjoy it.

So here, for the record is this year's Cookie Album (double ™ed).

Pinstripes (almond poppy- seed, cherry and chocolate)

Chocolate crinkles

Russian tea cakes

Chocolate thumbprints

Dark chocolate coveredpeanut butter balls

Chocolate gingerbread with white chocolate drizzle

Bourbon balls

Amaretto truffles

Brandy balls

Lemon cranberry sandwiches

Coconut macaroons

Dark chocolate rum truffles

Chocolate caramels

Smorbakelser (Swedish cardamom cookies)

Pie Ball

2007-11-28T12:39:00.000-06:00

For Thanksgiving this year, Jeremy and I went to his mom's house to help with Thanksgiving dinner. Each time it's a careful negotiation between the meat eaters (everyone but us) and the vegetarians (us). At his mom's, we normally have lasagna (meat and veggie), a few sides, and dessert.
We recently bought a used copy of The Essence of Chocolate by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg. After drooling over its pages for months now, we finally settled on the Chocolate Pecan Pie for our Thanksgiving contribution.
I woke up early Thanksgiving morning to work on the crust, which needed to sit in the frig for three hours. At Jeremy's mom's we made the filling and baked the pie. As Jeremy removed it, the pie slipped off the cookie sheet and smashed on the floor. He ran out of the kitchen in horror, while I tried to scoop the napalm hot chunks off the floor, trying to pick out any kibble or dog hair. (I was trying to meet that five-second rule of removing dropped food from the floor.) I salvaged as much as I can and, knowing we couldnt serve it to anyone else, we started another version. The former pie sat in the bowl, and we munched on it during the day.
Since there was no time for the original crust, I used the Betty Crocker recipe with a few additions, and Jeremy remade the filling. It turned out well--rich and chocolately (god I love that cookbook), and everyone raved about its flavor.
At the end of the night, I separated the pie in the bowl into 2 sections of saran wrap--one for Jeremy's mom and one for us. Because of the corn syrup, I could squish the remnants into a dense ball, crust intermingling with chocolate and pecans.
The next day, I cut off a slice. When I bit into the pieball, I nearly fell over. It was soooooo good!!! Better than the regular pie! The way that all of the tastes mixed together, the way that the corn syrup had become almost like caramel. My god, pie ball was like heaven on a plate. I'm convinced we should do this every time we make a pecan-based pie. We should collapse it onto a cookie sheet and squish it into a ball.

Crust:
4 T unsalted butter at room temperature
3 oz. cream cheese at room temperature
pinch of salt
1 t cinnamon
2 T sugar
1/2 cu flour
Filling:
1 1/2 c toasted pecans, whole or chopped
4 oz. 70% bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
2 T unsalted butter
5 oz. 70% bittersweet chocolate, coarsley chopped
1/4 c packed brown sugar
1 c light corn syrup
3 large eggs at room temperature
1 t pure vanilla extract
In a stand mixer with a paddle, cream butter and cream cheese. Add salt, cinnamon and sugar and beat until uniform in color. Add flour and mix just until combined.
Turn the dough out and shape into a 6 inch disk on plastic wrap. Cover and refrigerate until chilled, about 2 hours.
On a lightly floured surface, roll dough into 12 inch circle and place in a 9 inch pie pan. Trim edges and refrigerate 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 1 hour and place rack on the lowest shelf.
Place pie plate on a baking sheet (we found this more trouble than it was worth--a deep dish will not overflow). Sprinkle the pecans and 4 oz. chocolate over the bottom of the piecrust.
In a medium saucepan, melt the butter and 5 oz chocolate over low heat. When smooth, remove from heat and stir in brown sugar, corn syrup, eggs and vanilla. Pour over pecans and chocolate.
Bake 45 to 50 minutes (ours took a bit longer) or until golden brown and the center of the pie is set. Cool completely before cutting.

Black sesame ice cream

2007-11-28T12:26:00.000-06:00

While in NYC, we fell in love with this ice cream shop in Chinatown. One of their regular flavors was black sesame ice cream. It was truly a revelation, possessing both a nutty sweetness and a lingering toasty almost smokiness. So delicious and haunting...we went back there the following night, only to find that they were sold out of it. Jeremy's mission: to find a recipe that we could make at home.

This version is pretty good, but it's slightly grainy in texture and not quite as good as the original. We'll get there yet!

Recipe to be found here.

Don't be concerned by the "glucose" business. I decided that just meant corn syrup. Use your taste and judgement with the egg yolks. It all depends on how custardy you want the final ice cream.

This is how I eat when Jeremy's not here

2007-11-28T12:22:00.000-06:00

Yes, those are frozen eggrolls and yes, that's a giant plate of brussel sprouts, but they're delicious!
We found this simple recipe for brussel sprouts (another vegetable that needs a good marketing campaign. People--they don't have to be frozen, nasty, bitter things! They're nutty and delicious!)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Scatter about 2 T butter around a 9 x 13 pan. Trim root end off fresh brussel sprouts (not frozen!) and discard any dark or wilty outer leaves. If sprouts are large, cut in half lengthwise. Create a single layer of sprouts on the pan and sprinkle with pepper and a little bit of salt. Place in the oven and stir every 10 minutes for about 40-45 minutes, or until sprouts are tender all the way through. The combination of the nutty sprouts with the butter and salt....oh my god. We must have eaten our body weight in brussel sprouts this year---and I've never eaten them before this summer!!

From meals past...

2007-11-28T12:10:00.000-06:00

I am a proud user-upper. Especially in the summer, when our frig was bursting with veggies, I felt compelled to find recipes to use up as much as possible. I periodically clean out the pantry too, and find aging lentils or rice that need to be used up, too.

Just as fall was starting to turn crisp, and the last of the heirloom tomatoes were in full bloom, we made this meal: Moroccan Lentil Soup, from our well-worn Fields of Greens cookbook.

It was really tasty, but what really strikes me is how freaking gorgeous those tomatoes were. I'm writing this post in late November, when the Heirloom have long since died, and it makes me nostalgic for tasty, sweet tomatoes. Sigh...

Moroccan Lentil Soup:

Sort and rinse one cup of lentils and bring them to boil in your soup pot with six cups cold water. Reduce to a simmer and cook about 20 minutes, until tender.

While the simmering is happening heat olive oil in a medium saute pan and add a diced medium onion, 1/2 tsp salt and a pinch or two chile powder (we used a combination of cayenne and ancho). Cook until soft, then add one carrot and one red bell pepper, diced, one tsp cumin and 1/2 tsp corriander (toasted and ground) and 1/4 tsp tumeric. Cook five minutes and then stir in four cloves chopped garlic and one Tbsp grated ginger. Cook a couple more minutes and then stir in 1/2 pound tomatoes (canned or fresh, peeled and seeded or not), and add the whole thing to the tender lentils. Cover and cook for thirty minutes and then as salt to taste.

You can top this with cilantro or, as we did, with minted yogurt.

Jerusalem Artichoke Salad w/ Mint and Lime Vinagrette

2007-11-17T14:57:00.000-06:00

You know, I've seen Jerusalem artichokes a bunch of times, but I never had any idea what to do with them. In fact, I would stare at them and wonder, "What the hell would I do with THAT?" They look a bit like ginger root, with less fingery things growing off the sides.

Also called the sunchoke or sunroot, Jerusalem artichokes are a type of sunflower. Used to create fructose in processed foods, Jerusalem artichokes are also edible just the way they are. Eaten raw, they taste a bit like potatoes or rutabegas. We've also seen recipes for them roasted, where they are supposed to be like a nuttier turnip, but have yet to try those.

Jeremy checked out Vegetable Harvest by Patricia Wells from the library, and she included a recipe for Jerusalm artichokes. The salad was delicious--the crispness of the Jerusalem artichokes went well with the lettuce, and the vinaigrette had just enough tang.

Minted Jerusalem Artichoke Salad with [Field Lettuces]

Peel 1/2 pound Jerusalem artichokes and slice them thinly with (the beloved) mandolin slicer or a sharp knife.

As you slice them, add them to your prepared dressing: one Tbsp lime juice (half a lime), whisked together with 1/2 tsp sea salt (less kosher or table salt) and 1/4 cup ev olive oil, then combined with about 40 mint leaves minced. Toss to combine and marinate ten minutes.

Remove the marinated jerusalem artichoke slices with a slotted spoon and lay them out in a circle around the outside of your two plates. Then take your prepared lettuce (the recipe called for mache, so you could use that, watercress or baby spinach if you wanted, but we used the last field lettuces of the season) and toss them with the remaining dressing. Mound the greens on top on the slice circles and, viola.

The finished salad!

Winter Is Here, in Its Death of All Growing Things Form

2007-11-17T11:23:00.000-06:00

So we stopped by the Farmer's Market this morning and our fears were confirmed: it's over. When we went last week, we pretty much knew it was the last hurrah. This week they were down to one aisle of produce, with at least three big tables of that was the wholesale grocery-store type produce. Sigh. And the egg people were gone, so no eggs for us and the cartons we brought went unreturned. We didn't need that much this week, anyway, but we did manage to pick up two pints of brussel sprouts (woohoo! a post on those to follow shortly), some apple cider for Angie's art sale, and some baby spinach.

2007-11-06T18:41:00.000-06:00

The next day in NYC was a whirlwind. Me and the Subway were good buddies now. I successfully navigated all of my trains and visited every single place on my list like a pro. After my morning bagel and egg, I hopped to the Staten Island Ferry to see the lovely Statue of Liberty. All my life, whenever I've dreamed of NYC, I pictured the Statue of Liberty. Seeing her in real life made me want to cry and hug strangers and sing the "Star Spangled Banner." Seriously. It made my month. Sadly, I'm an idiot, and my morning brain did not comprehend that I had actually traveled across the river instead of just circling around, and I was indeed on Staten Island. Thirty minutes later, I caught the ferry back to Manhattan. From there I walked to the WTC site (a giant, weirdly-vibed muddy hole in the ground which also made me want to cry, but for different reasons), to El Laboratorio del Gelato.
After devouring dark chocolate, green tea and Black Mission fig gelato ($5), I bounced over to Rockefeller Center (so tiny!), and then back to the hotel to see a friend's presentation.
That night for dinner, Jeremy and I returned to China Town for veggie dim sum. For years I have always wanted to eat dim sum, but most of the choices are meaty and mysterious. In my pre-trip internet searching, I found the highly rated Vegetarian Dim Sum House.
We sampled three dumplings ($12), then raced back over to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. (Priorities, people!)

I love this place! Their menu is divided into two main sections: regular flavors and exotic flavors. Regular flavors include almond cookie, avocado, black sesame, coconut, durian, green tea, lychee, mango, red bean, taro, Zen butter and wasabi. Exotic flavors include banana, cherry pistachio, cherry vanilla, chocolate, chocolate chip, coffee, mint chip, oreo cookie, pumpkin pie, strawberry and vanilla. We decided to be boring and chose the "regular" flavors of green tea (very good), Zen butter (so so delicious) and black sesame (one of the most delicious, haunting, rich flavors I have ever encountered.)

We ended the evening at Cinema Classics, home of Rififi, my new favorite place in NYC. On Saturday night we enjoyed wacky comedians and a free 60's funk dance night (where the DJs handed us free CDs.) Plus they have the cheapest beer we found in NYC. ($5 a glass and $5 cover for the show.)
Sunday we sadly left the lovely conference hotel and trekked across town (damn subway repairs) to a hostel on 101st Street. Overtaken by hunger, we paused in a Turkish place about a block away. At first I thought we might have to leave because the main eating area reeked so strongly of musty basement and 100% bleach that I thought my head was going to explode. We shifted to the bar, right by the open doors. Ten minutes later someone took our order (a gingerale, a Turkish coffee and hummus.) Ten minutes later we got our drinks. Thirty minutes later we got our hummus. Thirty minutes later we got the check ($20). Ugh. I'm just not a patient person, especially in restaurants. I don't think I'll ever be one of those souls who spends four hours at dinner, just hanging out and talking, oblivious to the time. Sorry. I want a greeting and drink order within five minutes of my arrival, I want food that shows up in less than 45 minutes and I don't ever want to have to hunt down the server for my bill.
That night, after walking for hours in Central Park, we returned to our familiar stomping grounds (Chinatown) for Tofu House 86 (or something like that) for a really decent meal ($18). We again ate delicious ice cream ($5), followed by strange and colorful desserts from Chinatown's many bakeries ($0.80 to $1.25 each). The treats, though cheap and beautiful, are always disappointing to me. However, I'll keep getting suckered in with their day-glo colors, coconut shavings and creamy frostings. Total creatures of habit, we also returned to Rififi. We paid our $5 cover to see the Sweet and Nasty Burlesque, a super silly and highly entertaining burlesque show. I purchased a $1 lottery ticket and thanks to the real winner (the boyfriend of one of the burlesque hosts), I won a giant bag of gifts (including a book, shot glasses, a coupon to the burlesque and a Peaches cd.) Whoooo hoooo, I love Rififi!!!
Monday morning arrived, and we ate breakfast at a Greek diner two blocks from the hostel. I felt grumpy from an uncomfortable bed and snoring dorm-mates, so we packed up, took the train to the New Jersey airport and headed home. All in all, I had a fabulous time. NYC ain't cheap, and even being frugal as hell, we still burned through the money. Four days is perfect, especially being centrally located like we were near Times Square. I already have a long list of things I missed, things I want to see again, and new restaurants to explore.
Weeks later, reflecting on the trip, I'm struck by one thing in particular. First of all, we are not "regulars." We've lived in the Twin Cities for ages, and I can only name a handful of places that we've eaten at more than four times in our lives. I love trying new things and it's very hard for me to choose a familiar place over an exciting place we haven't tried before. I think because of the sheer volume of NYC, we kept returning to things we liked.
I highly recommend NYC as a long-weekend vacation spot. New York City is awesome!!!

Start spreading the news! Part 1

2007-10-23T22:48:00.000-05:00

Oh, New York, I love you. The food! The food! We ate our way through the Big Apple and with few exceptions (one soggy by-the-slice pizza and the occasional treat that was good but not great) we had marvelous food meal after meal.

Most days started with a quick and cheap bagel with a fried egg ($2.50) from the street vendor kitty-corner from the hotel. After the third day he recognized me and we chatted like I was a regular.

When we first got in, Jeremy and I grabbed a quick slice (spinach for Jeremy, brocolli and tomato for me) from Famiglia's ($3-4 a slice), then hopped over to the Majestic Deli for a Greek honey cookie and a cannoli ($5 for both) plus an espresso ($2). Now, the thing I didn't know about the section of NYC where we stayed (53rd and 7th Ave.) was that every three blocks we found a bakery. No lie. I've never seen so many freaking bakeries in my life. HEAVEN! And this cookie--so tender and sweet, paired with perfect ricotta and chocolate chips in the cannoli... Ugh! To die for!

After a long day of conferencing, Jeremy, our friend Jon and I scoped out the dinner scene. Not cheap, but we eventually settled on Kyma, a Greek restaurant on 8th Avenue. Jeremy and I split the spanakopita, skordalia and baba ganoush appetizers, (about $8 each) while Jon ordered moussaka ($18). Jon's mom is Greek, and he thought it was nearly as good as hers. We liked eveything we had, although we probably could have knocked it down to two appetizers instead of all three. Full and sleepy, we mustered the energy for a few beers ($6.50 each) at The Snug before crashing into bed.

The next day I was on my own. I pretended I lived in NYC and deluded myself that I would instantly figure out the subway. Sadly, no. While getting lost a zillion times and eventually finding Judy Chicago's brilliant Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Art Museum, I also found some great grub. While the sky was raining to beat hell, I found refuge in Healthy Nibbles. Despite the unfortunate name, their veggie burger ($5) tasted great. Yes, that's an entire edamame in there!

I continued in the rain to Chinatown, my favorite place in all of New York. The lights, the restaurants, the wondrousness of it all. Love it! I shopped for a few cute bowls, sucked down a passion fruit bubble tea ($3), and made mental notes of where to take Jeremy when we returned the next night for dinner.

Friday night Jeremy, myself, Alicia and Andrea (two friends from Atlanta) walked to Bayleaf, the most affordable Indian place I could find near our hotel. Yum! Veggie samosas, palak dal, tandoori panner tikka, rice and mint paratha ($63 for all, including a giant $10 Taj Mahal beer, tax and tip).....so delicious. No photos of the food, but here's one of us:

Full as hell, Jeremy and I walked through Times Square and took in the brightly light consumer extravagance of it all. We even stopped at the three-story M & M store to soak in the weird.

I'll finish the story tomorrow....until then, Viva New York!!

Apple leek and butternut squash gratin with Luzon Red

2007-09-22T23:25:00.000-05:00

This was a dish that both gave us the chance to use some seasonal vegetables and our fancy mandolin slicer. One of the best things about getting legally married is that people will buy you all the wonderful kitchen tools that seemed too frivolous or occasional-use for you to buy for yourself before, and the mandoline was one of those. OK, I still manage to cut myself on it from time to time, but for making clean even slices its amazing.

So the dish requires a certain amount of prep, but it was actually very easy to assemble. The use of apples in a savory dish was a little disorienting, but ultimately tasty, very Celebration of Fall. We decided that next time we would do some caramelized onions along with the leeks, and possibly add another layer of squash. It's a very good side dish, but a little thin for a main dish on its own.

The Luzon we'd had once before when my dad's old friend Kevin and Bette brought it to our house for dinner. It's a really nice rich but light bodied Spanish red, somewhere between zinfandel and pinot noir in flavor. This picture really doesn't do justice to the gorgeous color of the wine: a dark, almost purple burgundy. Perfect for this sort of autumnal meal.

Black bean and sweet corn chili

2007-09-22T19:06:00.000-05:00

The problem with the abundance of summer produce, is that you have to use it up quickly and thoroughly. Each week at the farmers' market there are things that are gorgeous and ripe that we pass by because we already have enough produce and can't figure out how we'd use it before it spoils. Also, each week there are things that we (ok, I) take home because I can't resist them, even though they're not part of a recipe that we've (ok, mostly Julie) selected. So, by way of compromise, we try and come up with dishes for the week that will use up some of the crazy amount of produce that we have before it goes bad.

So, in the interest of using up some of our many heirloom tomatoes from the garden at my Mom's house, the sweet corn in our freezer (we weren't eating that fast enough either), the first of the red bell peppers and habeneros we picked up that week, and in the general interests of deliciousness, we decided to make black bean and corn chili with cornbread.

It's a really basic dish. The spicing, in addition to the things I've mentioned and the standard onions and garlic, was mostly cumin with a little coriander seed and some ancho powder. The flavor was really good, even if the corn was almost overpoweringly sweet (making it almost candy like) and the skins of the beans turned tough for some reason.

Still a simple and hearty meal.

Peaches and Their Offspring

2007-09-12T18:55:00.000-05:00

Remember when we got all those peaches from Colorado? They were sweet and delicious and dripping with peachy goodness. The problem with such seasonal bounty is that it goes quickly and once it's gone you can't do anything but mourn its loss, but if you try and draw things out too much you be left with rotten produce, and that makes no one happy. So...

We had to find ways of preserving that seasonal peachy goodness, and, much as you might suspect, in addition to trying a couple of new desserts, we went with our old stand-bys: liqueur and tasty preserves.

After a month of steeping, I strained, filtered and bottled the liqueur. It smells lovely and tastes promising. This left me with the question of what to do with the booze-soaked fruit (We couldn't possible just throw it away! That's precious fruit and even more precious alcohol!), and I went with the ever popular option of boozyfruit bundt cake.

The peaches don't come through super strongly in the cake above, but the taste was quite good. We're eating it here with a side of rose petal ice cream. My mom got a beautiful and productive rose bush this year and I was looking for a culinary use for rose petals. I modified the recipe slightly by cutting the number of egg yolks to two and adding one tsp of rose water and a couple drops of red food coloring. Julie hated the ice cream, saying that it tasted like eating perfume, and quickly pushed it off onto my plate. I quite liked it, though it was really too sweet. I'd cut the sugar to at least 2/3 of a cup (1/2 cup is standard for ice cream recipes this size). You have to embrace the idea of flowers for dessert, though, for it to work.

Miso soup

2007-09-11T23:03:00.000-05:00

Miso is a wonder ingredient. I'm sure that it has health benefits of some kind (back when I was vegan I remember there being some notion that if you ate it by the spoonful there was a chance that it would help to stave off vitamin B-12 deficiancy). The real wonder of it, though, is that a couple of tablespoons of it can transform a normal tasty-but-watery vegetable soup into a rich savory experience. That it can do this without resorting to some sort of cream based trickery (and certainly without flesh/bone derived collagens) and thus being pretty much fat free, just makes it that much more impressive. I suspect this power is part of its awesome umaminess, or special powers of rich/savoryness. Yes, OK, it is high in sodium. What do you want? Complete virtue and complete pleasure?

Anyway, it's the perfect sort of meal for when you're feeling a bit under the weather (as both Julie and I were last week) and need something both calming and sustaining -- like chicken soup for the global cuisine vegetarian. Miso paste comes in a variety of different preparations, differentiated by color (white, red, and apparently black, though I don't think we get that last one in this country, and, less traditionally, yellow or brown) and sometimes by the grains that they are prepared from in combination with the soy beans, such as barley or rye. We used a mellow brown rice miso paste here. Just add two tablespoons miso to two quarts liquid (we used half water and half vegetable stock) and add three or four dried shiitakes. Bring the stock to a boil and then continue to simmer, stirring occaisionally as the miso is incoporated into the liquid. When the shiitakes are fully hydrated, remove them from the soup, cool them briefly in the freezer, remove any attached woody bits of stem and then slice them about 1/8" thick before returning them to the soup. Prepare your vegetables as you see fit, browning those that need browning first and adding others directly to the soup (here we browned the mushrooms, zucchini and eggplant, and added onion, green onion, garlic, chili, carrot, edamame and tofu directly). And thus, hooray! Delicious and nourishing soup!

Tragic accidents and unfortunate substitutions

2007-08-27T19:23:00.000-05:00

[Julie]
Alas! What horrors have begotten this pizza stone?
It had been a night of unsettling appliance noises...dripping refrigerator, huffing gas stove, when we heard a strange cracking noise. "What was that?" I didn't see anything broken or out of place until I opened the oven to check on the pizza. What the hell?! The pizza stone, without any known cracks or chips, snapped in half while baking at 400 degrees. We've used this stone bunches of times before. Has anyone heard of this happening? I'm trying to track down a local Pampered Chef rep here in the cities, but if anyone knows one in either WI or MN, please let me know. Aren't these things supposed to have a lifetime warranty??

[Jeremy]
So it turn out PChef goods, whether inherited from ex-roommates or bought outright, have only a three year warranty. Which means we'll have to stick with the more efficient baking stone that we got as a wedding present and find some other way to bake extra fourth of the pizza. As with the rest of this home-made business, it's hard to go back to the disappointing finish you get from a regular baking sheet after you experience the happy crisp of a baking stone. Sigh

Tonight's pizza was disappointing on three counts even before you got to the cracking of the stone: first, the TJ pasta sauce we used (being out of Muir Glen pizza sauce) was decidedly bland; second, the faux-meatballs Julie requested in the interests of apparent protein were squishy and not nice in this context; third, the roasted garlic-jack cheese that we bought on impulse while camping and thought we might use up here tasted almost exactly like roasted garlic flavored plastic. Sigh, again. As usual the crust was tasty though.

Wheat Pizza Crust

I arrived at this recipe by combining and adapting the pizza dough recipes from Field of Greens and Alton Brown to produce a soft, light and chewy part-whole wheat crust. We also use our stand mixer for this one, so if you don't have one just substitute the phrase "stand there and stir/knead it yourself" for "let the mixer run for a while."

1.5 tsp active dry yeast
.75 C (filtered) water and or (soy) milk
1.5 T olive oil
.5 tsp salt (we use sea salt)
1 tsp sugar
.5 C whole wheat flour
1.5 C (unbleached) all-purpose flour

Heat the water/milk for 45 seconds in the microwave or until warm on the stove top and add the yeast. Once the yeast has proofed (shown you that it has life in it, ie gotten bubbly, usually 2-3 minutes; you can skip this step if you trust your yeast) add the whole thing to your work bowl along with the oil, salt and sugar. Add the whole wheat flour and mix until well Incorporated. Add the first half cup of AP flour and allow to mix for five minutes or so (this helps the flour to develop gluten and get good and stretchy), then add the second half cup of AP flour and work this in (in each case you'll want to start the mixer on low so as not to send the flour flying and switch to medium). At this point you might want to switch to your dough hook or knead on the table top. How much of the last half cup of flour you'll need to use will depend on your flour and what the weather's like that day (seriously), so add it a bit at a time while you're working the dough as needed. What you want is to be able to take a piece of the dough and stretch it out with your fingers so that you can see sun light through it without it pulling apart, so keep kneading until you get that.
Roll the dough into a ball and place it in a bowl with a little oil. Roll the dough in the oil to coat, cover with a towel and allow to rise on the counter about three hours.
Turn the out onto a work surface (you don't need to punch it down, it will deflate on its own) and divide it as you see fit. We usually divide into four pieces, which will each produce a nine inch pizza. Stretch the dough into friendly rounds (thumbs are better than a rolling pin here) and place on your baking stone/sheet to be covered by sauce, toppings and cheese. Bake in a 425 oven until bubbly and as brown as you like (12-15 mins).
Takes some time but is very worth it.

Orange Marmelade

2007-08-27T18:49:00.000-05:00

Our friends Tae and Dan are leaving for Korea right about now (Dan's on a post-doc and Tae found a pretty sweet job there), so, having missed their wedding reception (being out of town), we met them and our friend Piper for drinks at the Muddy Pig, a fabulous place for Belgian ales and conversation. Anyway, since they were in the same, we're-leaving-the-country-so-we-have-to-get-rid-of-everything-we're-not-bringing-with scramble (that we ourselves still remember quite vividly from almost five years ago now) they brought along a trunk's full of produce, beer and wine to give us. Now, normal people (and I mean that in an admiring kind of way), would, in response to being given a bag of oranges as part of this bounty, say to themselves, "Wow, oranges. Let's eat some of those." or possibly "Wow, oranges. I guess we could juice these." or even "Wow, oranges. Let's use the zest in some recipes and then eat the fruit, or whatever." But we had been talking about making marmalade in the general "We should maybe try that sometime" kind of way for some time now, and if we were actually going to do it, well this was as good a time as any.

We used the zest including version of this recipe, more or less, and, yes, it is as messy and labor intensive as it looks. Oranges don't zest as easily as lemons or limes do, but we knew that it is in fact the pith (the spongey white part) not the zest (the colorful peel part) that causes bitternes, so we knew that we wanted to include the zest. Luckily our friend peeler monkey was there to help and made the job go by much faster. Two or three hours later we had produced this fine jam, that we have since pronounced tasty on pancakes, scones and toast.

Dinner with Monique

2007-08-23T19:23:00.000-05:00

You know how there are people you've been friends with forever, and you don't see each other enough, and that's dumb and unfortunate, but it's somehow OK, because when you do see eachother it's all happy and good (or not always happy, because life isn't always happy, but, you know, good anyway)? Yes, well, Monique is just such a friend. And because Julie knows that both Monique and I like cheese, she will purchase a variety of kinds for us to try, and even melt some on toast so that she can try some herself, even though her non-melted cheese block remains firmly in place. The two mold-ripened soft cheeses were the stand outs, though there names have now been lost to time and memory.

First wine

Second wine

The chenin blanc was wnoderful: fruity and crisp and tart-sweet and went great with the cheeses and the salad you see in the background. The tempranillo rose (it wasn't labeled as such, but it was lighter bodied than any of the tempranillos I've had in the past) was light and tart, though this was moderated by the dinner course:

This was essentially a kind of crustless artichoke quiche, but it was not so nice. Julie and I talked some about how we could have fixed this dish, and sort of circled back to the shoulder-shrugging "a different recipe" answer. However, the magic power of even bland artichokes will sweeten up any wine, which in this case worked out quite nicely.

This one's for you, Erin

2007-08-04T19:33:00.000-05:00

Our friends Erin and Terry are moving back to Ghana next month, and I've been thinking about them a lot lately.
Things really changed for me during my time in Africa. Before then, I was a fast and dirty cook--choosing the easiest, quickest option 90% of the time. I also still ate fish and poultry, and relied on them to make rapid but tasteless suppers for myself.
In Ghana, I couldn't find a job. (There were slim pickings, and I was on a tourist VISA rather than a working one.) Instead I spent hours and hours, wandering around Accra, going to the markets, and cooking elaborate meals. I just never had the time to dedicate to cooking before. I mean, honestly, who has five hours to shop for and prepare supper?
We felt fortunate because Accra, the capital, had several grocery stores that catered to the tourists and ex-pats. Therefore we could get such staples as cookies, crackers, candy, baking supplies (sometimes) and a few other goodies. We lucked out and found a local Chinese restaurant that sometimes made homemade soy milk and tofu. The Lebanese population ensured good olives, some cheeses and pita. And thanks to the bounty of Ghana, we filled up on tomatoes, chiles, avocadoes, pineapple, oranges and mangoes.
However, there were huge sections of our usual pantry and frig that did not exist during our stay in Ghana.
Due to the lack of some ingredients, I learned to make chocolate chip cookies using vegetable oil, chapati flour and either Cadbury or the local chocolate. We used up our fuel tanks baking brownies from scratch. I overworked my arms shelling individual chickpeas and then mashing them forever in a large morter and pestle for super garlicky hummus. I made my first version of veggie burgers with rice, mashed beans and spices. I even made homemade onion rings once. (Too time consuming and messy.)
In honor of Erin and Terry, and because they may feel inspired to use these recipes in a month or two, here are my two favorite recipes from our time in Ghana: key lime pie and tortillas.
Key Lime Pie
1 1/4 c tea cracker crumbs, or sugared graham crackers, or the closest you can find in Koala
4-5 T butter
1/4 c sugar
3-4 egg yolks
lime zest off 5-9 limes, depending if you can find the key limes or the giant green/yellow ones (make sure to wash them in soap or a bit of bleach first before you zest them)
1 397 can Bonnet Blue concentrated milk with sugar (about 9000 cedis at Koala), or you may have to use 2-3 of the tiny little cans
2/3 c lime juice (about 5 big limes or 10-15 key limes)
Mix the first three ingredients as crust. Bake 5-10 minutes at 3-3 1/2 (that's about 350 degrees), depending on your stove capabilities and amount of gas in the tank. (Basically you just want the beginning of brownness.)
Meanwhile, beat egg and zest (you will need a whisk of some kind) for 5-7 minutes or until it feels like your arm is going to fall off. You can stop when it's fluffy. Add sweetened condensed milk and beat 3-5 more minutes. Add lime juice just until mixed.
Pour into crust and bake 10-25 minutes at 3 1/2-4, depending on your stove and how hard you like your pie. I like a firmer pie, so I will bake it until the top starts to get slightly brown.
Koala sometimes has whipped cream in the refrigerated section, although you don't necessarily need a topping on the pie. (Vanilla FanIce will also work too.)

Tortillas
3 c flour (chapati, all-purpose or a mixture of the two)
1/2 t salt
1/4-1/3 c oil (you can use shortening--4-6 T, but good luck finding it)
about 1 c warmish water

Mix flour, salt and oil. Slowly add the water, a little at a time, until the dough is soft but not sticky (sort of like making a homemade pie crust). Knead the dough for a few minutes on a floured surface. Break the dough into 12 small balls. You can put these in the frig if you want to, or just let them set for about 10 minutes. Roll out each ball as thin as you can, and cook on a heated skillet or frying pan. Cook a few minutes on either side, or until slightly brown. Continue with all 12 tortillas, and keep in a bag in the frig. They will harden slightly by the next day, so you will need to reheat them for a few seconds before eating.
(Great with that kick ass mango salsa, fresh guacamole or pico de gallo.)

Whole Foods hummus and 2006 Beaujolais Villages

2007-08-04T19:22:00.001-05:00

You know, it's hot. And when it's hot, sometimes I don't feel like cooking. Jeremy worked all day, and I spent the afternoon sewing and shopping and putzing. So this is what we had for dinner:

Heirloom tomatoes with herbs and olive oil, mixed olives, pita, two types of feta for Jeremy, homemade vinegar pickles and Whole Foods hummus.
I don't normally shop at Whole Foods (called Whole Paycheck in Atlanta), due to a combination of the prices and the clientele. But it was not far from where I had to pick up Jeremy and I was lazy. WOW! What a pleasant surprise! The roasted garlic hummus ($2.49) is a close but less-lemony version of our own hummus, with nice texture and good garlic flavor. Hooray!
Their olives leave something to be desired, especially for $9.99 a pound. (Why must they de-pit all of them and then post a giant sign that says, "Caution! Some of our lives contain pits." WTF?)

I also bought some Beaujoais, which was on sale for about $8 at South Lyndale Liquors. Jeremy scolded me a bit, because the last time we had this kind of wine was during our stay in Ghana. The Beaujolais was always expensive (more than $10 a bottle at any of the Ghanaian grocery stores) and every time we had a chance to try it (usually at someone else's house, because we're cheapskates!), it was horribly disappointing.
My theory: Constant 100% humidity and temperatures over 92 degrees can fuck up wine.
This bottle was tasty. Slightly fruity aftertaste, pleasant and light, and it went really well with the high-acid supper of tomatoes and olives and sour pickles. Great for summer and good if you can find it for under $10.)

2004 Rosso Piceno Saladini Pilastri

2007-08-04T19:18:00.000-05:00

This wine was light, tasty and satisfying. I apologize for not knowing where it came from (I suspect it was one from Atlanta), but should you find it, it's well worth the money. (I'm sure we didnt pay more than $9.99 for it.)

Ginger Peach Upside Down Cake

2007-08-04T19:13:00.000-05:00

We made this Ginger Peach Upside Down Cake.

Things to note:

I doubled the crystalized ginger and found it still wasn't enough for me. We also ran out of white flour, so used 1 1/2 c all purpose flour and 3/4 c whole wheat flour. It was okay, but I wouldnt use any more than that because it gives it a slightly grainy texture.

Plus, the peach juice/sauce sogs out the cake pretty fast, so you've either got to serve this at a big party where it will be eaten quickly, or store it in the frig and know that in a day or two, the top will be a bit sloppy.

I've never made anything upside-down-cakey before, and found that it wasn't that complicated. The only hiccup was that our 10 inch skillet was wider than any serving tray we had, so we improvised with the one big plate we owned.

Holy shit, we've got peaches

2007-08-04T19:10:00.000-05:00

Well, we HAD peaches anyway. BF Angie gets peaches from a client's sister who lives in Colorado. $32 per box. We got 40 lovely peaches (except one that was totally rotten) and my goodness, they were FABULOUS. They ripened instantly in our sauna apartment, so the processing moved pretty fast. One batch jam, two Ziplocs in the freezer, one batch peach liqueur and about three a day for each of us. Plus a cake. (See next post.)
SUMMER FRUIT MAKES ME HAPPY!!!!!

Beets are beautiful

2007-08-04T19:06:00.000-05:00

Jesus, I love beets. Aren't these gorgeous!? Pictured here is a fast, fast dinner. Salad, new potatoes tossed with some simply fresh pesto sauce, and beets boiled until soft.
Jeremy is just starting to like beets. He can't get past the earthy/dirty flavor. I was one of those weird kids who loved beets. (Although I was a dirt eater, too.) Yellow ones are more mild, and you can eliminate some of the dirt flavor by peeling them before you boil them. I've heard you can boil them in wine or stock or tea as well, but I've never tried that. I'd love comments from anyone who has...

Pure di fave con cicoria

2007-08-04T18:54:00.000-05:00

That's Chicory with mashed cannellini beans to me and you (although we used navy beans).

From Gusto Italiano
1 c cooked beans
1 clove garlic
2 T olive oil
2 t herbs (we used sage and tarragon)
1 T lemon juice
Mash together or put in food processor until well blended.
You can use chicory, but we couldnt find chicory, so we used dandelion greens and beet tops. (They were too bitter.)
If you are using a harder green, par boil it for a few minutes until softened. Arrange on a plate, with a scoop of bean mix on top. Pour olive oil on top.

It's okay...but a lot of chewing, especially with tougher, bitter greens.

Veggie alfredo and Hogue

2007-08-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

Veggies alfredo can be pretty fast. Saute onions and garlic, add mushrooms and zucchini, then set aside. Boil water for the pasta, and before you add it, par boil the broccoli and cauliflower for a few minutes to soften. Mix with the other veggies. In a skillet, add butter (a few tablespoons), 1/3rd of a cup of grated parmesian and 1 c cream. Cook until combined---feel free to throw some more garlic in here, too. Toss over the veggies and eat.
As always, Hogue is great. Tart, crisp, delicious, especially with white sauces and vegetables in the summer.

Homemade liqueur (woohoo...eventually)

2007-07-25T14:31:00.000-05:00

We are an apartment of projects. We don't own a house, so we can't try and construct furniture in our workshop or dedicate a room to that floor loom I've wanted to have magically appear since that fiber arts class in college or construct an entire second story to our house (Julie's sister Stacy and her husband Chris are in the midst of doing this right now). So, instead, Julie makes felt dolls and I write my dissertation and we both pick out recipes to try. Mostly these recipes are the sort that we eat in one night or, if it's a dessert, hopefully over at least a couple days. Others, like jam, are about putting something away for later, and for creating resonably priced presents, so that we can be seen as cheap but thoughtful come gift-giving times.

Two years ago, inspired by a friend's efforts at homemade limoncello, we decided to give it a try ourselves. This led to further experimentation with other variations on the citrus zest front (first orange, then lemon-lime, then orange-grapfruit) all of which were tasty in their way. Then last year, after a summer of picking fruit for jam and left with more cherries than we knew waht to do with, I started looking up other liqueur recipes online and took out some books from the library. We produced a fabulous cherry liqueur, then some quite tasty apple jack, then some good smooth blueberry liqueur, and finally the amazing toasted walnut and honey liqueur you see above. I made a triple batch using half and half vodka and brandy, added a stick of cinnamon and a whole clove for the initial steeping period and used a local honey from the farmers' market for part of the sweetener. After just three months of steeping and aging it's smooth and delicious with complex nut and honey flavors, as well as little bits of spice that slip in.

The ingredients aren't cheap, though they're propotionally much less expensive than buying such liqueurs commercially, and you'll need to buy both aging and bottling containers, but the biggest thing required for making these liqueurs is patience. Most will be ready to drink in two months, but some, like the cherry deserve more like six and all of them will become smoother if they're put down for a while. The strawberry liqueur pictured above was just separated from its fruit (which went into a delicious but boozy bundt cake) and will need to age for at least another month in order to loose that harsh liquor taste and have the fruit come to the front (it smells great though, so I have high hopes.

Below are the three liqueurs we have steeping right now: raspberry, yellow cherry, and a big batch of sour cherry. The raspberry should be ready to strain in a couple weeks and will need to age for about a month after that. The cherries will hopefully be ready for gifts around Christmas.

Cherry picking in Door County, WI

2007-07-23T20:31:00.000-05:00

Holy buckets! My parents and I had a great time picking cherries in Wisconsin. It was outrageous--cherries like bunches of grapes that would just fall into your hands. We must have eaten a million cherries---I actually had a stomachache when we left the orchard. Eight giant pails later (about 11 ice cream buckets worth), we pitted and cleaned and processed. My folks froze all of theirs. Jeremy and I made three batches of liqueur, three batches of jam, a crazy boozy strawberry/cherry/chocolate bundt cake and froze two quarts.

Maybe next year I'll have a chest freezer and I can get double the cherries!!!
YUM!!

Biggest cilantro EVER!!!!

2007-07-07T13:54:00.000-05:00

Other winning recipes, losing ones too

2007-07-07T13:38:00.000-05:00

The good ones:
Fresh mint ice cream
Whole wheat blueberry muffins
Zucchini bread (from my mom's cookbook)

The so-so (won't try again) ones:
Blueberry lemon pancakes (from the Ladies' Home Journal, Sept. 2002...can't find the recipe online)

The bad ones:
Spring pea tarts (Cold pastry, cold peas, cold cheese--nauseating)

Boiled new potatoes, stuffed mushrooms and Macon Village Chardonnay

2007-07-07T13:35:00.000-05:00

Stuffed mushrooms used to be holiday fare in this house, until one day I looked up and we were making it some random weeknight, with no recipe, in under 30 minutes. If anyone tells you that stuffed mushrooms are complicated, kick them because they dont know what they are talking about.
Start with mushrooms (I find that mini-portabellos work much better than white mushrooms). Break off the stems and mince. Mince one onion and two cloves garlic. Sautee with olive oil until soft. Throw in some fresh herbs (sage, parsley, basil, tarragon all work just fine..maybe 1 T). Remove from heat. Put a piece of bread in the food processor until finely crumbed. (Is that a word?) Mix it all together with some salt and pepper and about 1/4 c finely grated parmesian cheese. Using spoons or your hands, fill up the mushrooms with as much stuffing as possible. Place mushrooms on a cookie sheet in a preheated 350-375 degree oven. Bake about 15 minutes or until tops are golden brown and mushrooms are tender (but not mushy.) These suckers are best hot (with salad and new potatoes in rosemary butter in this photo), but they also make great party food (hot or cold.) Plus, they retain their shape well to reheat the next day for lunch.
I don't remember where we bought the Macon Village Chardonnay....I'm thinking Trader Joes...which means that we paid less than $5. Again, much like most cheap wine we drink in this house, it's not going to blow your socks off, but it's decent and satisfying with dinner.
Not too dry, not too fruity, not too oaky. This chardonnay leaned more toward the buttery edge of the spectrum (without being buttery) with a fuller body.

Tomato avocado salad and Picpoul de Pinet

2007-07-07T13:34:00.001-05:00

I know this looks totally crapola, but I swear to you it was sooooo good.
A bed of lettuce covered in a mixture of chopped tomatoes, fresh avocadoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, lime juice and salt.
The wine was also tasty. The Picpoul was this delicious, crisp, tart treat. Good with dinner, good the next day, and the next. Very good bargain for under $10 and fabulous on a hot summer day.

Strawberry jam and hot pepper jelly

2007-07-07T13:32:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't noticed, it's jam season. Damn! I love jam.
Last month I tried this recipe for Double Hot Pepper Jelly. I have complaints. Most recipes call for sweet peppers, which I tried to avoid, but in hindsight, I would totally use bell peppers instead of all of the damn sugar.
I doubled the amount of chiles, but it still wasnt enough...there were just a sprinkling of chilies among this vast sea of sugar.
Plus, the recipe called for two pouches of pectin. Huge mistake! The jelly morphed into this hard ectoplasm, instead of delicious, slightly soft jelly.
It's not bad, especially on egg sandwiches and I've heard that it's good when eaten the Minnesotan way (crackers covered in cream cheese with hot pepper jelly dropped on top....makes me want to cry and puke at the same time when I think about it.)
Next time = more peppers, less sugar, less pectin.

Cilantro chutney

2007-07-07T13:30:00.000-05:00

Green chutney (from the City Pages, about four years ago)
1 large handful cilantro leaves (or two, or three)
1 handful fresh mint leaves, stemmed
1/2 inch fresh ginger root
1 or 2 cloves garlic
1 medium tomato (although you can skip this in a pinch)
1 or 2 chiles (Thai preferably)
salt to taste, and about 1/3 c water
Start by rinsing the leaves and putting them in the salad spinner, one of the greatest inventions of all time. Roughly chop everything and throw into a food processor or blender. It will look really full, and you may need to add a few tablespoons of water to get it going.
Blend the hell out of it until it is green and smooth and beautiful. Add salt. (Add about 1/2 teaspoon at a time, tasting it as you go. The saltiness will increase over time, so less is better.)
The recipe says you can store in the frig in an airtight container for up to two days, but I've found that if you skip the tomato entirely, you can keep a tub of this stuff in the frig for a good month or two.
Great on frozen samosas, spread on pita, eaten with Indian food, added to stirfrys, or scrambled eggs or salads.

Farmer's Markets last week June/first week July

2007-07-07T13:20:00.000-05:00

Banana Cornmeal Pancakes

2007-07-07T13:05:00.000-05:00

These Banana Cornmeal Pancakes were damn good. The batter puffs up like crazy, nearly doubling as it rests.
But the pancakes are delicious and not too heavy.

(Good with ginger preserves, strawberry jam or maple syrup.)

Wild rice, grilled mushrooms and Spatburgunder

2007-07-04T13:37:00.000-05:00

Really more of a fall or winter dish, we sometimes make Wild Rice with Shitakes & Toasted Almonds when we're feeling picnic-y. We substitute veggie broth for the chicken broth, cut down on the scallions and add fresh oregano, sage and wilted spinach. Great with asparagus and grilled portabello mushrooms. (Marinate in a ziploc with 3 T soy sauce, minced garlic, 1-2 T balsamic vinegar, 1 chili and black pepper. Throw in a frying pan with olive oil on medium high heat, until the mushrooms are tender and start to release their juices.)

The Spatburgunder (sort of like a Rose') was nice, light and fruity. Not too sweet, not too dry. Perfect for summer. Highly recommended.

Szechuan green beans and spring rolls

2007-07-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

One of my absolute favorite meals is this dish. In fact we've made it three times in the past month and now that I look at this photo, I want to make it again.

I mean, my god, look at this spring roll. It's BEAUTIFUL!!!

We first starting making spring rolls when we lived in Atlanta. I was working at Noodle, and it looked pretty easy. They used a different version--with just lettuce, steamed shrimp, basil and noodles--no marinade.

One of the best features of Atlanta is Buford Highway, this diverse stretch of road combining Asian, Hispanic and other ethic stores, restaurants, and other businesses. Many a Saturday we enjoyed Buford Highway, particulary the big Farmer's Market (not really a Farmer's Market) near 285, this great tea shop that has since closed down and Morninglory, a Korean stationary store.
Anyway, due to the plethora of Asian grocery stores and recipes online, we gave it a try. Daunting and nervewracking the first time, but not so complicated. The most time consuming part is the rolling of them, and once you find some reliable rice paper wrappers that dont break in your hands, you're good to to.
Boil water in a pot and add the thinnest rice vermicelli you can find. It cooks fast (2-3 minutes) so be sure to check it regularly. Drain, rinse with cold water and drain again. Set aside.
In a large bowl, combine shredded lettuce (I like really bitter stuff like mesclun mix or arugula), shredded carrots, mint, basil, cilantro, and the noodles. In a small bowl, mix two minced cloves of garlic, 2 chopped chilis, 2-3 T of rice vinegar, 1 t sugar, the juice of 1/2 a lime and a splash of soy sauce. Pour over noodle mixture and toss well with your hands. Set aside.
In another small bowl, mix 1 minced clove of garlic, 2 chopped chilis, 1/4 c hoisin sauce, 1-3 T rice vinegar, the juice of the other half of the lime. Top with roasted peanuts. This is your dipping sauce.
Cut the ends off the green beans and cut on half. Chop 3-4 cloves garlic and 1-3 chilis. (You can substitute dried chili flakes). Heat sesame or olive oil in a wok on high for a minute or two, then add beans. Toss frequently, adding a sprinkle of salt. After 3-4 minutes, add the garlic and chilis and cook a few minutes more, until the beans are to your liking.
If you're like us, you will inhale this meal, making loud, orgasmic grunting noises and smiling at the nice burn on your lips.

Lasagna and brownies

2007-07-04T13:30:00.000-05:00

Ah, lasagna. Seemingly so complicated but really so easy. How I love thee.
Saute chopped onions over medium heat until almost clear, then add chopped garlic (maybe one onion and about 4-8 cloves of garlic). Add 2-3 cups of chopped mushrooms. Feel free to add a splash of wine or balsamic vinegar.
Empty the pan and saute spinach in olive oil until dark green and wilted. You can also saute sliced zuccini, eggplant, or whatever veggies you like.
Put veggies in bowls, along with ricotta cheese, shreded mozzerella cheese, fresh basil and boiled lasagna noodles. Splash tomato sauce down on a 9 x 13 pan, and start with a layer of noodles. Add more sauce, then 1/3rd of the veggies, 1/3 rd of the ricotta and a few good handfuls of cheese. Add more noodles, and repeat. Add more noodles and repeat. Top with noodles, a tiny bit of sauce and the rest of the cheese, along with some parmesian. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes to an hour, or more if you have made this ahead of time and refrigerated it. When a knife inserted in the middle is hot, it's ready. Let sit for 5 minutes before cutting.
What goes really well with lasagna?
Brownies!
This is a recipe from Nink, who was a student of Jeremy's mom's housemate's back in Chicago in the 1970's. We like it because it's rich and dense and tasty.
1 c butter or margerine
2 c sugar (I usually cut this by 1/2 c)
4 oz unsweetened chocolate (although I recently made this with bittersweet chocolate by mistake. It was very sweet, but not the horrible disaster I thought it would be)
4 eggs
2 t vanilla
1 c flour
1/2 to 1 c nuts (pecans or walnuts)
Preheat oven to 325. Melt butter and chocolate over low/medium heat, stirring constantly. Add sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, making sure you stir the hell out of it each time so the eggs are combined completely. Add vanilla, then flour. Fold in the nuts. Pour into a sprayed 8 x 8 pan and bake 25-30 minutes, or when an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Rhubarb scones

2007-07-04T13:28:00.000-05:00

Aren't these beautiful?

We the previously posted scone recipe but added pecans and rhubarb (coated in sugar). It got a bit sloppy from the juice, and was challenging to fold it all in, but damn, these were tasty.

Piper's salad recipe thing

2007-07-04T13:25:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know it looks disgusting, but this salad tasted so damn good.
The base is lettuce and shredded carrots, with garlic, green onions, tomatoes, mock duck, mint stir fried in chilis, vinager, sugar and a little bit of sweet chili sauce.
(For a fast topping for salads or rice, you can also cube tofu and throw in a wok with minced garlic and a few good dollops of sweet chili sauce. It cooks up nicely.)

Farmer's Market bounty

2007-07-04T12:56:00.000-05:00

This beautiful photo displays the farmer's market selections from early June. The strawberries were the first local ones of the season, and they were so sweet they tasted like jam. Great tomatoes too.

When cleaning the cherries, I found not one, but EIGHT siamese twin cherry bunches. Isn't that strange? (Especially considering I've never seen even one before then...)

Wafernusse and Don Juan Tempranillo

2007-07-04T12:54:00.000-05:00

There are some folks out there who hate Aldi's. (ALbrecht DIscount, a discount supermarket chain from Germany.) They think that if you're paying 25 cents for canned goods, there's got to be something wrong with it. Now I know that most Aldi's seem to crop up in the less than wealthy parts of town, and that the produce is usually pathetic and sad looking (even though it's dirt cheap), but within the aisles of Aldi's you can find several treasures.
First up are these fine Chocolate Wafernusse. Delicious crispy wafers with hazelnut and chocolate layers. So, so good.
They have excellent prices on pure vanilla, brown sugar and marachino cherries, as well as comparable prices on flour, sugar and other baked goods.
Like Trader Joe's, owned by Aldi's, they have cheap nuts, dried fruits and cereals.
When I went last week, the fruit looked great and man, what a deal! $2.99 for a whole seedless watermelon, 50 cents for a cantelope, cheap cherries and strawberries (neither of which we needed) and Mama Tia's frozen cheese pizza for $1.99 (which actually became my new preferred pizza, as long as you add sauteed veggies on top.)
Speaking of Trader Joe's, I believe we purchased Don Juan tempranillo from there for $3.99. It tastes just like a tempranillo--sort of dry, a little acidic. Not bad, especially for that price. Not a superstar, but come on, it's less than $4!

Pizza, Blue Bunny ice cream and Rex Shiraz

2007-07-04T12:49:00.002-05:00

We love pizza, and even though we'll eat frozen pizza when we're lazy, we prefer to make our own. Jeremy uses a great recipe for a whole wheat pizza crust and we include whatever veggies are in the frig.
The usual suspects: sauteed onions, garlic, mushrooms and spinach, sometimes asparagus, sometimes artichokes and olives, sometimes hot peppers. YUM.

I'm a sucker for cheap ice cream. When looking for no sugar added versions after my dad found out about the diabetes, I found Blue Bunny's vanilla, a tasty, non-chemically alternative to "real" ice cream. The Bourdeaux Cherry Chocolate was also good, with giant chunks of cherries and chocolate. (Not diabetic friendly, I'm afraid.)

With dinner we drank some Rex Goliath Shiraz. As I said before when reviewing the Chardonnay, I like Rex and have never been
disappointed by their wines. They are cheap (usually $7 or 8),

last a good while and go with just about anything.
Hooray for cheap tasty wine!

Vegetarianism's little secret

2007-07-04T12:49:00.001-05:00

I don't remember farting much growing up. Seriously. I was born into a good, hard-working, German family, with lots of meat and potatoes and milk. (I don't remember being constipated either, but I should have been with all of that starch and dairy...but I digress.)
Since becoming a vegetarian, however, I seem to produce enough gas to fuel the world. It's ridiculous. No one told me. It appears that flatulence is a common complaint among vegetarians and vegans.
Here's a good explanation from www.thestraightdope.com:
"The problem is the body's inability to fully digest the complex carbohydrates so abundant in the vegetarian diet and the consequent excessive production of gases such as hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane.
Vegetarian nutritionists claim this phenomenon abates once the intestinal flora adapt to the new menu. However, I suspect high gas production is inherent in any diet consisting predominantly of plant products. Cows and sheep, for example, are marvelously adapted to all-veggie fare, yet they generate such prodigious quantities of methane-laden flatulence that some authorities regard them as major contributors to the greenhouse effect and thus to global warming.
A matter avoided studiously in most discussions of this subject, and to which I now must delicately turn, is odor. While it seems inarguable that a vegetarian diet eventuates in increased flatulence, the gases produced in greatest volume--the aforementioned hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane--are odorless. The noxious fragrance of which you complain is produced by minute amounts of other digestive by-products, typically containing sulfur, such as hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol, and dimethyl sulfide.
I pass no judgments, observing only that foul smells are likely to be associated with particular high-sulfur foods rather than with a vegetarian diet in general. I have it on solid authority, for instance, that if you pack in the garlic you will stink like a son of a bitch. Broccoli and cauliflower are also notable in this regard. Willpower and muscle control won't save you--if you don't shed the noisome molecules in the form of flatus, they'll be absorbed into your bloodstream and later waft from your breath or pores."
I thought I would try an over-the-counter gas reducing pill. After taking the first pill (which worked quite well), I read the list of ingredients. Besides including gelatin (made from bones, teeth and other animal bits), it contains "cod, flounder and redfish."
WTF???!! Why do I need fish to stop gas? Needless to say, Jeremy won't touch the stuff, and I'll only use it if I'm desperate (going out with friends after eating black bean soup, or something.)
I don't regret being a vegetarian, but damn, I sure hate the gas.
If anyone knows of a vegan remedy (other than fennel, which doesn't do squat for me), let me know.

Dinner club for May--Our house, our menu

2007-06-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

We meet with two other friend couples every other month for Dinner Club. Whoever hosts chooses the menu and assigns dishes for others to bring. Usually the hosts make the main dish and the dessert. This time around we chose tofu something, tart thing, salad and dessert.

The evening started out unfortunately, when I accidentally dropped a glass of water and it shattered/splashed all over Jay. Thankfully he wasn't impaled or hurt, but I felt embarrased for the rest of the night.

The tofu starter had mixed reviews. Jeremy loved it, while I thought it was weird. We both liked the salad (very refreshing) and veggie tart, although the cheese didn't melt on the top--it just formed this line of cheese-ness. (Not a problem for anyone except Julie...I have cheese texture issues.)

No photos of dessert--lemon poof cake, which was gooey and sad. The crust was an inch thick and chewy and not pleasant. (Julie's memory here is vastly exagerating the unfortunatenes of the lemon tart. The crust, while thicker and denser than it should have been, was a scant quarter inch, and while the filling was overly meranguey the flavor was good. -- Jeremy)

Thankfully, the drinks won the spotlight. Boulevard Wheat beer--great for summer---light, flavorful and perfect with a lemon wedge. Framboise Lambic raspberry beer--almost wine-like in its crisp fruity-ness. Fabulous!

Both the Bogle Chardonnay and the Penfolds Cabernet tasted great.
Both Bogle and Penfolds are wonderful wines for the price---under $9 a bottle, so dependable and full-flavored. I've never had a Bogle wine that I didn't like. Our friend, Monique, brought over Penfolds a few years ago and ever since then its one of the wines I choose to bring to other people's houses, just because I know it's going to be good.

Mushroom pasta and Rex Goliath Chardonnay

2007-06-26T20:21:00.000-05:00

We eat a lot of pasta in this house. It's fast and easy, and usually serves a good way to use up vegetables on the brink of going bendy or brown. In this version, we used whole wheat linguini with sauteed onion (1 chopped), garlic (4-6 cloves, chopped), mushrooms (about 1-2 cups chopped), asparagus (one bunch broken into one inch pieces) and grated cheese.
Salad is greens with pinenuts and our homemade dressing. (Mix 1-3 T mustard, 1 minced clove of garlic, a 3 to 1 ratio of any type of vinegar or acidic fruit juice to olive oil. Shake well and store in the frig.)

Rex Goliath is another solid wine. It's cheap (usually less than $7 a bottle), decent in either the reds or the whites and doesn't seem to go bad if you keep it for a while. (I had a white for at least three years and it still tasted fine.) Again, it's not a show stopper, but it's a great bargain. Plus there's a rooster on the label! I love chickens! (By the way, I'm one of those hopeless schmucks who base 45% of my wine decision making on the label design. Fifty percent is the price and the other 5% is any suggestions by the store or magazines. I love graphics and a good label can make me buy even the crappiest wine. At least once. And then I learn.....until the next time.)

Organic Rice Divine Chocolate PB Fudge ice cream

2007-06-26T20:18:00.000-05:00

I'm lactose intolerant, but addicted to ice cream. I like to fool myself into thinking that I can eat as much ice cream as I want and not feel like shit 10 minutes later. The Wedge was having a sale on Good Karma rice ice cream so I decided to try it. Chocolate is especially difficult in fake ice creams. Without the milkfat and with the common use of carob instead of chocolate, the texture is usually dry and weird. In this version, the peanut butter taste was nice, but again the texture was sort of dry and grainy. Just not real ice cream. My vote: Spend the extra buck and get the real stuff...just take a Lactaid first.

Orzo with ragout and Fat Bastard Shiraz

2007-06-26T20:09:00.000-05:00

Wow, we are sooooooo behind on posts. Past suppers have become hazy. But I'm diligent, and I want to be up to date.

We made this for supper a few weeks back:

In case you've never had orzo, it's like a combination of pasta and rice--very firm and dense. We made a stew of onion, garlic, tomatoes, eggplant and feta cheese. The salad is mixed greens, fresh grapefruit, slivered almonds and olives.

Yum!

I really like Fat Bastard. I've never been disappointed by either the reds or whites. I like dependable wines, good choices for dinner parties and eating at home. The shiraz is full and nice. Not exceptional, but solid and a good value for the price.

Wheaty streusel muffins

2007-06-26T20:07:00.000-05:00

I've since lost the recipe for this one, mostly because the muffins were dry, and the streusel was hard and unpleasant, and we basically never wanted to eat them ever again. But here's a photo.

Country Rhubarb Cobbler

2007-05-21T19:39:00.000-05:00

This was the first time we've ever made a cobbler, or, I think, even had one fresh out of the oven. Great use for the first rhubarb of the season.

From The Appleton Post Crescent:

Country Rhubarb Cobbler

1 pound fresh rhubarb, trimmed, cut into 1/2 inch pieces to yield 3 cups

1 cup brown sugar, packed

2 cups cake flour or 2 cups all purpose (non-bleached, please) flour minus 1/4 c sifted flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup plus 2 T sugar (divided)

1 stick (1/2 c) cold butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes

1/3 cup whole milk (we used soy milk)

2 large eggs (1 separated)

ice cream

In a large bowl, combine rhubarb with brown sugar. Set aside. In another bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and 1/2 c sugar. Cut in butter with pastry blender until mixture forms coarse crumbs. In a small bowl or glass measure, whisk together milk, whole egg and separated egg yolk. Form a well in the dry ingrediants and pour in milk mixture. Stir together until it forms a soft, sticky dough.

Butter a 10 inch glass or ceramic pie plate or 2 1/2 quart baking dish. Transfer half of dough onto bottom and spread with rubber spatula halfway up sides of prepared pan. Spoon rhubarb mixture over dough, drop remaining half of dough with tablespoon or small scoop evenly over rhubarb.

Lightly beat egg white. Brush top of dough with egg white and sprinkle with remaining 2 T sugar. Bake in 400 degree oven for 35 minutes, or until top is golden and rhubarb is tender. Cool for 30 minutes (while you run to the gas station to buy some vanilla ice cream...wait, is that just us?)

Scoop into giant bowls, top with ice cream, making moaning and ectastic noises as you eat rhubarb cobbler in front of the television and praise the universe for such wondeful creations as rhubarb, butter, ice cream and sugar. The recipe says it makes 6-8 servings, or 4-6 in this house.

Asparagus Pesto Lasagna and Hogue Cab Merlot

2007-05-21T19:18:00.000-05:00

God, I love salad. And more than salad, I love this fabulous garlic artisan bread from the Wedge Co-op. Isn't that so lovely? Can you see that ENTIRE CLOVE OF ROASTED GARLIC? God, I'm just peeing my pants right now. And it was so tasty, lightly toasted with butter.
Augh! Yes!!

And then came the wines.

First, I must begin with a disclaimer.
Columbia Crest is a really decent wine for the money. I have never had a bad bottle, even that $3.99 sale Riesling in Atlanta once. (You'd think, it's only four dollars, it's got to be crap, but no, it's good.) This particular bottle, from 2002, had lived in my friends, Kim and Paul's, basement for the year we lived in Ghana, and then lived in our wine rack in Atlanta for the next year or so, and lived up here in Minneapolis for another few years. Is it any wonder that the cork was funky and the whole bottle tasted like my parent's old basement?
No. I do not blame you, dear Columbia Crest. We are still good friends. You can come over for dinner anytime. I hold no grudge.

We dumped the whole thing down the sink, (Goodbye, old friend!) and tried again with this dependable sweetheart, Hogue Cabernet Merlot. I used to drink a lot of merlot (you know, before the whole Sideways shaming), but then it started to give me headaches from the tannins. But this guy, he was friendly. Full, fruity body with lots of spice. Dry on the tongue but not like a desert.

Perfect with this extravaganza, Asparagus Pesto Lasagna.

Is it a holiday? What? No? It's a Monday? And we're cooking this like we're having some secret dinner party and it's just us? Life is so fucking good sometimes. Fresh spring asparagus rocks my world, and this lasagna tastes richer than it normally is. It feels like we were dripping in butter or fat, but it's not actually that bad. Perfect as gravy for the previously mentioned garlic bread. (I know it's good when Jeremy's eyes roll back into his head after a bite, and when we are so full that we want to weep, but keep eating more because it's so tasty.)

My only problem is that whenever I eat lasagna (or pizza) without tomato sauce, it feels like something big is missing. I like pesto as much as the next gal, but I like my tomato sauce too. I would tweak the recipe...by adding at least 4 or 5 cups of wilted fresh spinach, 1-2 cups mushrooms and possibly some freshly diced tomatoes, and maybe a pinch of oregano.

Pumpkin Pecan Muffins

2007-05-21T19:15:00.001-05:00

I needed to use up the leftover pumpkin after making Vicki's scones last week, so we made these pumpkin pecan muffins. (I can't find the recipe right now....)

They were moist and delicious, and didn't get all hard and stale like most muffins do.

Muffins rock!