Bone Appetite

Recipe: Dora Flood's Bear Flag Restaurant Seafood Pasta, aka Monterey Seafood Puttanesca

Okey dokey, this started out as an innocent pasta puttanesca but I have determined that this had sufficient correspondence with some things we get very nicely locally -- calamari, artichoke hearts, garlic -- that it would qualify as faux Monterey cuisine. (It's even vaguely cioppino-like).

So this recipe is probably prententiously knowable as Monterey Seafood Puttanesca, but in honor of the alleged origins of Puttanescas everywhere and our fabled local color, I decided to name this after the restaurant/restaranteuse in Steinbeck's Cannery Row, who was not actually the proprietor of a restaurant but a, well, purveyor of puttanesca. (I need to be subtle, I don't want this blog blocked by some overzealous piece of filtering safe-internet software.)

Ingredients with instructions are...

6 tablespoons EVO, heated on medium heat (I used a dutch oven to absorb slop spills, a skillet with a cover will do fine)

crush in 4 cloves of garlic, woosh around for a minute

add 1 tablespoon hot pepper flakes, woosh around for a minute

crush in a can of anchovies (6 ounces in this case), woosh around for a minute

add a can of San Marzano tomatoes or 8-10 fresh ones peeled and cored if you have them (OK, OK, I would never actually have the patience to peel them myself, but I think puttanesca's better without the tomato skin) chopped roughly - combine with anchovy-garlic mix and bring it to a strong simmer.

Add one bay leaf.

I added a 1/2 tsp of salt, but given the anchovies were salty this probably wasn't necessary.

After about 15 minutes, fold in:
2 tablespoons of capers,
10 diced black olives, and
a tablespoon of dried basil (or equivalent fresh basil leaves if you can get them, finely minced).

Reduce to a low simmer for five minutes or so. Fish out the bay leaf.

Now add one can of (drained) artichoke hearts (not marinated) and turn the heat up. You can slice up the artichoke hearts a little but if you mash them with a wooden spoon in the pot they should come apart on their own as well.

Add one pound of frozen seafood or fresh equivalent (see note below), preferably calamari or a mixture of calamari, bay scallops, and small shrimp. Bring to high heat and cook until the seafood is done, about five minutes or less (test constantly, the shrimp will pink, calamari will be tender but solid.)

Serve over al dente penne. Makes four healthy-sized portions or eight side pasta portions. Top with parm if you must, but I don't think it's necessary given how rich the broth turns out on this one.

Sorry, no photo once again -- I was concentratin' tonight.

OK, so, the frozen seafood. Most of the "fresh" seafood we get isn't really fresh, it's just unfrozen. If you ask an honest fish monger about a particular fish, they should normally tell you it was 'flash frozen'. It is possible to get fresh fish, of course, that you haven't caught yourself -- meaning fish that has only been on ice, not encased in it -- and boy is that great. But such is not the case with shrimp and scallops around here.

Calamari, on the other hand, you can get here nice and fresh and usually cheap when it's in season. Squidders are practically the only commercial fishing we see out here these days. So if you can get fresh calamari, use it here, and don't overcook it! (On the Cape, I might be tempted to use fresh scallops, but there are so many great ways to use fresh scallops I would think the strong background of puttanesca would not be one of my first choices.)

But, since shopping for said fresh shellfish or what have you requires some premeditation and correct timing, such is not the usual case for most cooks, I would warrant. Not for me, at least. So I resort to one of my stashed bags of frozen seafood.

I try to keep seafood in the freezer as a sort of staple, particularly the shellfish. (Shrimp scampi is incredibly easy to whip up.) It's not that I wouldn't love, say, to have some fresh steamers or mussels, but I'm realistic about the price and their availability. Frozen is underrated in this particular area.

One bag o' seafood available is what Trader Joe's sells as "Seafood Blend", which is what I used tonight. You can use a little or the whole bag at once, and it cooks straight from frozen to the pan. it's great for quick stir frying or sautes - you do have to try carefully not to overcook it -- but I find it almost indistinguishable from similar quality "fresh' fish. Of course, it's often farm-raised or lower quality stuff that goes into such mixes, hence this perception frozen isn't as good, but on the other hand it's affordable and most really good seafood these days is scarce enough as to be expensive.

And, fresh food snob that I am notwithstanding, I have to say one of the things about this dish is you can make the entire thing with food you can stock in the pantry. It's really nice to be able to whip up something semi-fancy on short notice if you have to. (I actually deliberately ignored the very nice fresh cilantro in my hydrator tonight. Shocking, I know.)

Recipe: 17-Rind Parmigiano Reggiano Soup

I had noticed a couple of references here and there in the last year about using the rind leftover when you've scraped what you can off a hunk of parmigiano. You throw the thing into, say, a minestrone and it gets a nice little nutty extra flavor in the soup.

 So I've been thinking about doing this for a while, and saving the rinds on our parmigiano for the day when I, say, made a minestrone. To the tune of, maybe 15 or 17 rinds in a plastic bag in the back of the fridge. 

Today, I had soup on the menu, and was also in the process of trying to clear some room out of the fridge. I saw the rind bag. Now, if one cheese rind makes a nice mellow rounding out to the flavor - in the words of Travis W. Redfish, anything worth doing is worth overdoing.Why not make a soup with all the rinds?

So, this is what I came up with:

~6 cups of chicken broth (home made in this case, so a little rich)
~15 (plus or minus, i forgot to count) parmigiano reggiano rinds
2 leeks, sliced into thin rounds
4 turnips, diced into 1/8" cubes
3 thin celery stalks, chopped, with stalks chopped roughly and reserved
3 medium carrots, quartered and chopped
1 cup white beans (cannellini)
1 cup barley
salt and pepper to taste
water (eventually about 10 cups)

So, I made a cheese broth by simmering the cheese rinds in the chicken broth for about an hour. I stirred every now and then, sort of poking the rinds to get the cheese off into the broth. I removed the rinds, although in retrospect I should've strained the lot. One of the artifacts of having some cheese floating around is at the end of the soup simmering, I had some interesting coagulated curdballs in the final product. They weren't untasty, and had an interesting texture, but they looked weird and I suspect would not appeal to some diners. 

(Flensed rinds to the left, after being simmered out in the broth...appetizing, eh?)

While the broth was simmering, I did all the chopping, and sauteed the leeks in a little EVO. When the broth was done and the rinds out, I threw in the veggies and beans and barley and six cups of water. I let it simmer for about two hours in two stints (had to take the boys out to do something in the middle), adding four more cups of water and just a little pepper and salt to taste.

I thought about throwing some turnip greens in at the end, which I think would've been an excellent idea, but decided I wanted to save them for something else later in the week.

The result was quite interesting -- a very rich broth, cheesy but with a flavor a bit different from eating the cheese. (We doubled up on wine at dinner to cut the cholesterol.)

I served it with a tomato and bell pepper salad, which was a nice acidic balance, and bread and cheese, which may have been a bit much on the cheesy side of things, with some fresh avocado slices on the side.

To Dive and Lie in Lasagne

For some reason when I was doing the meal plan, I was seized with a desire to cook lasagne. We never have lasagne, or almost never, and when we do we usually have this really nice goat cheese and pesto recipe. Son No. 1 loves pesto. We had goat cheese. But the yen told me to make "regular" lasagne. The yen knows what the yen wants.

We have a family recipe for "standard" lasagne called Lasagne Nita (from the mother of a friend of my mom's). It involves making the sauce from scratch, but its most irregular departure from standard is the cheese mixture. Instead of just ricotta, one takes a half cup of ricotta, a half cup of cottage cheese, 8 ounces of cream cheese, and a quarter cup of sour cream. There's no egg in this version; you just mix together the cheeses and chop a quarter of a green pepper very finely into the cheese mixture.

I was in an experimental mood, so I poked around for other lasagne recipes. I decided on a mish-mosh of the Good Housekeeping recipe (which does call for eggs, two) with some flourishes from Bittman and using the ricotta-heavy (no cottage cheese) version of Lasagne Nita that we usually make. I used a jarred sauce (enhanced with tomato paste with a cup of sangiovese, onions, and red bell peppers) and a half pound of hamburger in the hope of making Son No. 1 interested in eating it.

The problem I usually have with lasagne is in the construction phase, with the noodles. You either lay them lengthwise and get good fit but no overlap with standard noodle sizes in the 9 x 13 baking pan, or crosswise (as I usually do) and have good overlap but have the edges stick up the sides. I do this and them trim off the excess of the top layer (fed them to Son No. 2, since he's not old enough for real lasagna pieces just yet) so there's a noodle layer all around the sides. The problem is, with oiled and slippery lasagna noodles, I always have a hard time getting them to stand up just so on the edges and there's an awkward rearrangement.

This riff came out well enough, although it was still slightly runny after 45 minutes in the oven. I find lasagne that's been in the fridge sets nicely and forms better serving pieces after being reheated then fresh out of the often lasagne does. Given enough time, perhaps next time I make it, I'll just let it cool off, put it in the fridge, then cut and heat up individual pieces to serve.