Category: In the Kitchen

So foodnerd has returned from Chicago (to a kitchen full of formerly-green tomatoes now about to expire of ripe redness, yikes), and turns out tallasiandude has been all resourceful about feeding himself in my absence and turned to the foodbloggers for inspiration. Cheers to dave at weber_cam for pasta with raw tomato sauce… and we may do it again tonight, lest the bounty be wasted. Thanks, dave!

Got a big batch of hen of the woods ‘shrooms from the farmer’s market this weekend. Sauteed them with garlic, lots of olive oil & plenty of salt, and a good shot of sherry. Put them over a very small amount of pasta, and at last a decent mushroomy flavor. Whew.

A good thing to do with the last of the red garden tomatoes that are about to rot, and a diced green pepper someone brought over for a salad and no one ate (of course not, because green peppers are gross). It’s an old-skool yankee new england thing — my mom and grandma would make this when I was a kid, and I thought it was the most revolting thing this side of raw green peppers, but somehow in my 30s I figured out that it’s delicious: tangy, sweet, savory. Great with roast meats, on sandwiches, with cheese & crackers. And also great mixed into sweet boston-style baked beans.
6 ripe tomatoes (2.5 lbs, or 2 pint cans)
2 peppers (1 will do)
1 onion
1/2 cup cider vinegar (you may want to use 2/3 cup)
scant 1/2 tbsp salt
1/2 cup sugar (you may want to use 2/3 cup)
Peel the tomatoes if you are industrious, or do what I do and put them in the saucepan in really big chunks and when they’ve cooked a little, fish the chunks out and pull off the skins. Chop the peppers and onion into a fairly fine dice, or to your liking for a condiment. Add them to tomatoes, along with the vinegar, salt & sugar. Let it cook down over a slow heat. Break up the tomatoes as they soften. If you think it needs more vinegar or sugar after it’s cooked down enough to blend flavors, add a bit more so you’re using the 2/3 cup quantity. Keep boiling it down, stirring as needed to prevent burning, until it’s as thick a sauce as you want. Mine cooked slowly for most of the afternoon, and is still a bit loose. If you really get it thick, it’ll be quite sweet, like a tangy jam, or you can leave it looser and it’ll be more vegetal and saucy. I give mine a couple of zaps with the immersion blender to even out the texture a bit, though it’s still chunky. Pour it into a clean jar and keep in the fridge. This recipe makes about 1.5 pints. If you like canning, you can do a batch of 5 pints (7.5 lbs tomato, 1.5 lb peppers, .75 lb onion, 2.5 c vinegar, 1 tbsp salt, 2 c sugar) and put them up the proper way… but as previously stated on this blog, I am lazy, so I skip the canning part and rely on the fridge.

My mom gave me a bunch of concord grapes this weekend, a few red ones from the backyard and a bigger pile of black ones from somewhere in the woods. You can’t eat ’em, because they’re pretty tart and have a very weird texture, kind of like a juicy eyeball inside a tough leather shell. But you can most definitely make jelly out of ’em. We did it last year (with moderate success) and were all fired up to do it this year.
One thing I have learned is that the black concords are WAY better than the red. The reds are good, but the black have that intense ur-grape flavor we know from Welch’s fine products, and they also have the most gorgeous purple color when cooked, while the red ones get kind of drab, as you can see in the picture below. (Watch out — the gorgeous purple stains in a flash, so don’t get any on the counter or porous surfaces.)
I use the jelly recipe in the old (1975) edition of The Joy of Cooking. Annoyingly, the new edition has jettisoned the jam & jelly section entirely, which i find extra-bizarre given the popularity of Martha-type activities these days. Anyway, you crush or slice the fruit and cook it down with a tiny bit of water till it releases juice and gets all soft. The house will be permeated with the most intoxicatingly wonderful grape smell, like walking past a ripe grapevine in the woods, only ten times better. Then you strain it through a cheesecloth, just letting it sit there and drip, resisting the intense urge to squeeze the cloth to get the last precious bits of juice, because if you do, the jelly will be (*gasp* the horror!) cloudy.

Of course this makes me insane, because A) i am impatient, and B) i am greedy, and I hate the idea of wasting that lovely fruit pulp. I had the additional excuse of having only a wisp of cheesecloth left in the house the night I cooked up the fruit, so I decided to try making grape JAM instead of jelly. I scraped the pulp through a fine sieve, getting all the juice & pulp out and leaving just a pasty mess of skin & seeds. Kind of looked like I’d been mistreating a poor defenseless pomegranate.
Then back to the jelly-making procedure: I cooked the goo with a cup of sugar (uh, not enough, but also the only sugar left in the house — i plan ahead good, eh?) until it got thickish, like jam would be if you melted it over heat. This is an improvement over last year, where I couldn’t get that concept through my head and I kept waiting for it to get thicker, and in the end had jelly that was completely solid, like stiff grape jello. (I had to cut it into chunks and mix it into plain yogurt, which was actually really delicious.)
It came out pretty nice, the texture of a thick apple butter. It’s got a bit of a bitterish undertaste, which I suppose is because of all the solids I forced into it. Sigh. Those old timers knew what they were doing, as usual. But it still tastes *good*, with that musky concord grapey goodness, and is certainly less sweet than most preserves, which is quite to my liking. And I’m going to make granita out of that little pool of red grape juice tomorrow.

Have you ever wondered how they get baked potatoes in restaurants to be so deliciously simple, and to have that magically sturdy crust that you can scrape every last starchy morsel out of? I have. And now I know.
I was baking some russets (good ones from the farmer’s market, bonus) and I forgot to really time them, so I was paranoid about raw innards, so I left them in there for like 80 minutes at 400F. I went to poke one & test it, and the skewer was rebuffed — for a second I thought it was raw. But no, just sturdy: when cut open, they were just as fluffy and gorgeous as the ones in a steakhouse. And crust, my god, there is crust. Which is perfect for what I was going to use them for: Baltic Stuffed Potatoes, from what has to be the Funnest Cookbook Ever.
Bake big potatoes as above, cut open in such a way as to leave nice potato cups, scrape out insides. Saute finely diced onion and wild mushroom (dried, fresh, whatever) in butter. Smash a can of smoked sprats (usually available in Russian or Slavic markets, and sometimes regular supermarkets) to smithereens with a fork. Mix all of this together with some chopped dill (or whatever herb, i had no dill so used parsley & thyme), ground pepper, salt, a couple tablespoons fresh lemon juice, and enough sour cream to get the party started right.
You’re supposed to stuff that back into the potato shells and put a little parmesan and bake at 375F till nice & golden, but I couldn’t handle it and just macked it down out of a bowl. I’ll put a picture up later on, though it’s not very photogenic. Yum! Seriously — even if you don’t really like canned fish, you’ll like this: sprats have a nicer flavor than sardines, and that flavor goes *really* well with mushrooms and butter and sour cream and potato. Not kidding. Try it.

We grew long beans in the garden this year, because tallasiandude likes them (i do too, but duh). The first few batches I cooked in nonstandard ways, like with chopped walnuts and walnut oil — which were yummy, but not scratching tallasiandude’s itch. So I started cooking them chinese-style, but the first couple of attempts failed: they weren’t the flavors he was looking for. We saw a plateful in a restaurant that looked right, so I used that as the basis, and I’ve finally come up with a recipe that we both like a lot. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I don’t have fresh long beans in my backyard anymore. Oy.
It’s a pretty adaptable recipe, as it turns out, and can handle substitutions & variable quantities pretty well:
Take some chinese long beans, cut into bite size pieces (or you can use regular green beans) and fry them over fairly high heat in a very little bit of oil. When they’ve started to blister and soften, add some ground pork and break it up as it fries. You can also substitute finely diced ham, like I did tonight because I didn’t have any more pork in the freezer. The proportions don’t matter — be guided strictly by your preference or what you happen to have. Sprinkle with black pepper. Once the pork is cooked, sprinkle with about a teaspoon of sugar. Take about half a 3.5 oz packet of pickled turnip/salted spicy radish, or however much you like, cut it into small bits, and add it. (Not sure how to specifically describe this stuff, except that it is the stuff you get in pork & pickled turnip noodle soup. Use whatever salty pickly chinese turnip stuff you like.) Add about a tablespoonful of spicy bean paste, and stir to blend. (There’s a whole other post to be written about spicy bean paste, which I’m sure we’ll get to eventually.) Add about a teaspoon of chinese black vinegar, and stir it around to distribute it before it evaporates. When it’s dry and looking ready, serve it. Add salt if it needs salt (probably will if you used pork, and won’t if you used ham), and chili oil if it needs more spiciness. You definitely want white rice with this, as it’s pretty savory stuff.
This has become my favorite companion dish for Pei Mei’s beef & broccoli, which is very rewarding to cook because it makes tallasiandude so happy. *grin*

Posting really late, but who can resist a picture like this? The last of the magic bacon, on wheat toast with lettuce, mayo, and a late-summer garden tomato. It was brunch on Saturday morning before going rock-climbing. I love early fall. Please note that we were halfway through the sandwiches before we remembered to photograph their lusciousness for posterity. A BLT waits for no man.
And since I am too lazy right now to tweak my MovableType code to handle floated images better when the text is smaller than the image, I am just going to write some more stuff and hope you don’t notice.
Really, you should be distracted by the picture anyway.

I woke up a couple of days ago dreaming about how to make banana rum raisin ice cream. Like, not just how yummy it would be, but actual steps and ways to make it work. Not at all sure what triggered it, other than the ripening banana on the counter, but I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so I just made it. I didn’t feel like buying cream so I went online for an icemilk recipe to check proportions, and adapted it for my purposes. Here’s what I did:



2 cups 1% milk
1 tbsp cornstarch
3/8 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 ripe banana, smushed
cup of raisins
Gosling’s spiced rum to cover raisins
Put raisins & rum in a bowl to soak. I microwaved mine 30 seconds to speed the process.
Put the egg yolks in a small bowl & beat lightly.
Whisk sugar & cornstarch together in a pan, then whisk in milk. Bring to boil over medium heat, stirring frequently, and boil 1 minute, stirring constantly. Slowly, slowly drizzle about a third of the hot milk into the eggs, whisking or stirring. Stir the tempered eggs into the rest of the milk.
Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes or until slightly thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon. Pull off the heat. I almost always wait just a second too long, and my custard splits — if this happens, do not panic. Just do what spleen does and whisk the living crap out of it off heat until it smooths out — it’ll be fine in the icecream. Pour the excess rum off the raisins into the custard & stir to blend. Cool then chill about an hour till it’s cold. Stir in the smushed banana.
Run custard through ice cream maker, adding raisins toward the end when it’s firmed up a little. This will thin it down, because of the extra rum going in, but it’ll firm right back up. Put into plastic tub & freeze.
I guess you could consider this a very late, totally non-official participant in IMBB8, since it has booze in it. *grin*
It came out really well — it could be creamier, of course, but for 1% butterfat, whaddaya want? It’s smooth and scoopable, it tastes faintly of banana and stronger of rum, and it has juicy raisins all through it, and because it’s not heavy cream I can eat way more of it, which is nice for a change. (foodnerd is attempting the nearly impossible: growing smaller without giving up cheese or bacon or pasta. It’s all about kickboxing and DDR, really.) I’ll make it again, for sure, and i might put 2 bananas in next time for a stronger flavor… and for company I might use whole milk. It really is quite luxurious and rich even in the 1% version, because of the custard and the rum. Mmmmmmmm…..

Last night we had dinner with our delightful friends S & D, who were very patient with me as I undertook three separate courses for dinner. Everything was yummy (more on that in a minute), but I have learned that even when you are totally prepared, with sauces made ahead and a simple menu, and with a carefully-thought-out action plan, it still takes way too long to cook & plate up 3 whole courses while your guests are kicking around the dinner table waiting. Next time I will just do two: soup and main, rather than breaking up the main into meat+veg, then pasta. And family style at that — plating is a drag when done at home. Oh well.
Anyway: we started with baguette, crostini crackers & cheeses — a tomme (inspired by the photos on The Daily Bread, and they right – it’s yummy!), a nevat (swoon), a spenwood (from Neal’s Yard, a dreamy hardish cheese with a good balance of milkiness and tang) and a caciotta al tartufo, which is a pretty boring semisoft cheese made utterly lovely by little flecks of black truffle. And also homemade dilly carrot pickles.
Then gazpacho andaluz, which was a bit spicier on the tongue than I anticipated. I think there was a bit too much garlic, or the garlic was too strong; it was not as creamy and delicate as what I had in Spain. Lovely, though, and we all liked it just fine. And it makes a nice change from the chunky bright red style so common here in the US (for which the Moosewood Cookbook’s recipe is by far the best).
Then seared scallops and steamed green beans with lemon-chive mayonnaise sauce. Trader Joe’s frozen scallops are just terrific and very cheap, though I do recommend getting the largest size you can for nicer presentation. Lemon-chive mayonnaise is great stuff — I’m definitely making it again, to go on fish, chicken, green vegetables, probably pasta too.
And then (sigh) pasta with wild mushrooms & sherry, from the current issue of Saveur (October 2004). I first made this with chanterelles & oyster mushrooms, at littlelee’s house, and it was very tasty but seemed to lack oomph. I attributed this to the fact that $7 worth of chanterelles wasn’t very many damn mushrooms, and so there wasn’t enough to fill out the pasta. This new batch was made with a huge pile of shiitakes, button mushrooms and oyster mushrooms, plus more liquid in the sauce, plus more parmesan cheese, and it STILL didn’t have enough flavor. Argh! I suspect I didn’t salt the dish enough, and I also suspect that I still had too much pasta for the amount of shrooms. Maybe I overcooked the mushrooms; I don’t know. I ate some cold, sprinkled with salt, for lunch, and this seemed a great improvement; the mushroom flavor came through much more when right out of the fridge. What I might do next time (because I love mushrooms & sherry so much, there *will* be a next time despite the frustrations) is cut back the pasta and also add another ingredient, like meat or seafood, or some nuts, or a stronger herb. And I’ll salt up those shroomies right next time, too.
Last but never least, cantaloupe sorbet for dessert; three cheers for the ice cream maker!

A happy confluence of leftovers and farmer’s market goodies spawned this tasty dish (healthy too, shh).
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, diced
1 poblano pepper, seeds & ribs removed, diced
2 small summer squash/zucchini, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
dried oregano (1/2 tsp?)
ground cumin (1 tsp?)
chili powder (1/2 tsp?)
stewed tomatoes or can of diced/crushed tomatoes
2 grilled chicken thighs, diced
kernels scraped from 2 ears leftover corn
salt & pepper
Heat the olive oil over med-high heat and add the onions. Saute till starting to soften, then add the poblano and squash and continue sauteing. The high heat will add a bit of nice brown crust to some of the vegetables, so keep stirring so they don’t burn rather than brown. When they’re nice and soft, sprinkle a bit of salt on the veg, add the spices, and stir to distribute. Then add the garlic and saute for 30-60 seconds. Add the tomatoes to keep things from burning (the oil will have been absorbed by now). Lower the heat to low and simmer 5 minutes, or as long as it takes to fully soften the vegetables. Add the corn and chicken just long enough to heat through and blend flavors (about 5 minutes), or longer to reduce any extra liquid you don’t want. Adjust seasonings & add pepper to your taste.
Serve over white rice, sprinkled with cheese, cotija if available.