Bone Appetite

Palm Beach Island Pizza

I recently was in Palm Beach for a family occasion, and we had pizza while we were there, but it was what I'd call New Jersey standard fare. Judging my the origins of most of the residents, and the complete lack of what I'd call a native trope in architecture, food, or culture, I suspect New Jersey cuisine is as close to "authentic" as one is going to get for this area. I did fall to thinking: what would constitute a native recipe here? (For all I know there may really be a Palm Beach Island Pizza recipe, but I'm taking the pledge and not googling for one before I post this recipe.) South Florida does have an agreeable mish-mosh of immigrant communities from north and south, and there may be a vestige of internal native Floridian cuisine to be had (grits are still on the menu, including at the Indian breakfast place my sister took us out to), but I couldn't put my finger on a South Floridian cuisine that has yet emerged. Not enough time to gad about, I suspect, to find it. In any event, I did notice both a slightly higher than normal incidence of mango about, and I was bemused to hear of a B&B frequented by family friends called the "Mango Inn", and when I started to make a traditional Hawaiian pizza the other day, I discovered we had no pineapple about the place but I did have a nice supply of mangoes. Hence this experiment, which turned out to be a nice enough result that I thought it worth preserving in our recipe files.

I note parenthetically that I am not usually one for the "sweet" pizza, but this turned out to be a very nice blend and my own exception to the rule of preferring savory or tangy 'za.

Palm Beach Island Pizza

Use a thin crust. I used my habitual 2/3 whole wheat 1/2 white flour recipe, divided in half, pre-baking the crust for 5 minutes.

red pizza sauce (mild, almost no spicing)
mozzarella
thin-slivered fresh basil
diced fresh mango (I'm sure frozen will do fine, mango comes out of the freezer unusually well)
pre-cooked black forest ham, diced into tiny cubes
parmiggiano

put down the sauce, top with the cheese, then the ham. Bake @425 for about 10 minutes. Add the mango, basil slivers, and a thin topping of grated parm; return to the oven until the cheeses just start to brown.

 

Recipe: Rosemary Scallops with Spinach and Brown Rice

We saw a recipe for a simple scallops and spinach, but after deciding it was a bit bland we riffed gently on this combination a bit to come up with the following. It has the advantage of being incredibly quick if you're using frozen spinach and scallops, and has a rich flavor without much at all in the way of spicing.

1 pound frozen scallops (or fresh equivalent)
1 pound frozen chopped spinach (or fresh equivalent
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped and roughly minced
2 tablespoons EVO (or butter)
juice of one lemon
 3 cloves garlic, pressed

Start your brown rice well ahead of time. Start your scallops defrosting if they're not already thawed. The cooktime for the main dish is less than 10 minutes.

The spinach can be cooked in advance and set aside. I simply stir-fried mine in a dry, hot wok over medium heat, then removed to a glass bowl.

Add EVO or butter to the pan and heat gently. My taste-tester preferred EVO; I think a little butter (maybe 50/50?) helps a bit here but if you want to go all healthful on us, by all means just use EVO.

Sauté the scallops and rosemary on medium high heat for about a minute, stirring constantly. Add the lemon juice, and toss and stir constantly until the scallops are almost but not quite done (as ever, don't overcook), 2-4 minutes probably. Add the cooked spinach and pressed garlic, stir to combine thoroughly and heat, 1-2 minutes.

Serve immediately over steaming brown rice. Makes about four medium servings for a "one dish meal".

Apropos of the garlic: it would be wrong to carmelize it by cooking it in the oil before adding to the scallops. By adding it into the end you get the zestiness of the garlic without permeating the whole dish, especially the scallops.

The scallops: either bay or ocean scallops will do here; smaller may be better to get a consistent dish, however.

Variation: try lime juice instead of lemon (I sort of prefer this, but my taste tester insists lemon is better).

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: Cold Green Bean and Leek Salad

I had a bunch of leeks to use up, and I realized that on Sunday -- cooking for five adults and two children -- I had a somewhat thin menu for company, but I also wanted to cook ahead. (The rest of the menu was grilled tritip - which I sadly, hideously overcooked, but that's a story for another day -- sweet potato fries and a simple green salad with vinaigrette.) I looked around on the net, found some green bean and leek and potato salads, and a couple of hot bean and leek dishes, but nothing quite like what I had in mind, so I riffed.

This is what I came up with (sorry, no photo, I forgot!):

1 pound green beans, trimmed and cut into thirds
5 leeks, white parts only, sliced into thin rounds
3 cloves of garlic, pressed
2 tablespoons EVO
2 tablespoons sun dried tomato paste (I would have used sun dried tomatoes, but was out)
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1/2 cup curly parsley, finely chopped

Steam the green beans lightly and then dunk them in cold water. Drain.

In a small skillet, in heated EVO, over medium heat, saute the garlic with the leeks until the leeks are cooked and floppy but not to the point of limpness (3-5 minutes, I'd say). Then mix in the sun dried tomato paste and remove from the heat to a bowl.

In a small skillet, brown the pine nuts over high heat, moving constantly. (You can do this first if you want to use the same skillet for the leeks, but do this is in a DRY skillet, no oil or anything.) Don't burn the poor things.

Combine the beans, leeks, pine nuts, and parsley, and toss until everything is mixed and thoroughly coated. Chill in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.

I got about five medium-sized portions out of this recipe; to make it into a main dish for four, I'd double the ingredients.

The flavor of the leeks comes through nicely without overwhelming the beans, and there's a rich taste joining the flavors together from the garlic and nuts and sun dried tomatoes; the parsley adds a fresh accent to the combination. A fairly successful experiment.

Hungarian Peppers, Onions, and Chard

I'm not tagging this one as a recipe because I'm not 100% sure about it, but my taste tester said it was excellent, so I'll record this for future reference.

I had two odd sets of ingredients from the vegetable box to work with this week: cipollini onions and hungarian peppers, plus some really fantastic chard I hadn't worked in elsewhere.

Cipollinis are a little odd to work with -- they have indented tops, and they're squat, so it's hard to get the paper skin off, especially at the stem. They cut into little rounds nicely but don't chop particularly well. They're very sweet, at least the ones I get from our CSA. I have a hard time sizing them for quantity.

Hungarian peppers are devilishly weird. I've never seen them in the stores. Sometimes they're hot, sometimes they're sweet, often they're a little of each, which is strange. But I've found the ones from our CSA are very unpredictable.

So here's what I did. I cut the onions (3) into roundelets, and softened them in a little oil. I then put in two T of balsamic to coat them, and added the peppers (5) cut into thin strips against the grain (I basically cut them into rounds, except I had to slit them on the side to get the seeds out), and sauteed for about ten minutes. Just a tiny touch of salt and pepper. Then I added the chard, heated the chard up in the pot (dutch oven) until everything was coated, covered and turned off the heat completely, letting it sit for about 10 minutes while the chard cooked in the steam and heat of the enclosed pot.

The result was a sweet and mellow dish, with the occasional tiny pop of heat from the peppers, but mostly mellowed into the chard. I think the chard, which was tasty to begin with, was rather helped out, although it may have been an odd use of peppers-and-onions. So I should probably call this "Chard with Peppers and Onions" and not "Peppers and Onions with Chard"....

I served this with unseasoned Himalayan red rice on the side (see previous post) and with small fish pieces batter-baked. It wasn't the combination I would have normally come up with but I had problems getting a tasty fish (I had originally planned on a cilantro sauce) so went with a frozen cod (although admittedly the kids love the fish that way.)

Recipe: Spinach Barley Casserole

I like the cookbook One-Dish Vegetarian by Maria Robbins, but I have a running objection to the relative blandness of many of the recipes. It's not vegan, that's for sure (cheese everywhere) and the author confesses she's not actually a vegetarian, but I'll leave the consideration of these points to my V-friends to ponder. That said, I've had decent luck using recipes in this book as a departure point.

In the particular section I was reading last week, I was taken with her praise of barley. And it's true, barley is underrated - it holds its own in such mixes a lot better than rice, it cooks up more easily than brown rice or a lot of beans, and it holds a coat. It's possible to overcook it and get a glutinous mass, but it's relatively hard in my experience. So I thought: let's do something with barley this week.

I started this recipe based on her "Barley with Spinach and Peas" on p. 114, a recipe I've made before and said, yeah, OK, but something's missing. This time I made it into a casserole: I monkeyed with the ingredient quantities, added mushrooms, omitted the salt, doubled the parmiggiano, and added an egg and some milk as a holding agent. Verdict: excellent. Here's the modified version of the recipe:

EVO to coat the bottom of a dutch oven
1 largish onion, diced finely
2 very large carrots or moral equivalent, diced (note I used yellow carrots tonight, see photo above)
6 small celery ribs (or, maybe, 2 huge ones), diced finely
4 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups pearl barley
16 ounces of frozen chopped spinach, thawed, or equivalent fresh blanched (maybe a pound and a half?); Mika thinks chard would be an acceptable substitute here, but I'm not so sure
1 cup frozen peas (fresh if you can get them would be excellent here, they'd have to be steamed and immersed in cold water before adding in the step below)
1 pound crimini mushrooms, stemmed, and sliced in half and then in rounds
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 cup grated parmiggiano

Get out the Dutch oven, heat it a bit, add the EVO, let it heat, and then add over medium heat the onion, carrots, and celery. Woosh around for about five minutes, until everything is just a bit soft.

Add the vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Add the barley, reduce heat to a hard simmer for 5 minutes, then reduce to a light simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Stir once or twice while simmering.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Stir in the peas and spinach, cover, and cook on low for another 10 minutes, until the liquid is almost all gone -- just a bit on the bottom. During this stage, saute the mushrooms separately in a tablespoon of butter until they're cooked but still firm. Set aside. Then beat the egg with the milk in a separate bowl.

Mix in the mushrooms, then the egg-milk mixture, the second tablespoon of butter, and then the cheese. Put the dutch oven, covered, into the oven and cook for 15 minutes. Remove the cover and cook 5-10 more minutes. The casserole will be bubbly, not crusty, but the bubbling should be quite thick.

This was great as-is, and also was served nicely with a little Louisiana-style red hot sauce.

Now THAT's a Cooking Show

I am not a huge watcher of fiction TV, but I confess I've become a fan of The Sopranos in syndication (during its original run, I saw three episodes -- all on free HBO weekends...) I see it as an absurdist comedy; as much as it has been hailed as this deep commentary on American life, I think it makes more sense viewed as an R-rated sitcom (although on A&E they blur out a lot of bits, to be sure).

Anyway, I recently watched the episode where Tony kills Ralph Cifaretto, in Ralph's kitchen. One of the really prominent things about this series is how much food plays a role. I'm sure this was part of the whole deep-psychology-Dr. Melfi pseudo-therapy strain of the show, since food is a really deeply-ingrained part of our psyche and also a very important part of most ethnic and family cultures. I haven't kept score but everybody seems to be eating and drinking and otherwise consuming in most episodes.

So, just before Tony and Ralph get into the fight that ends up with Ralph dead on his kitchen floor, Ralph offers to make Tony some eggs. Ralph, in the middle of the discussion about their dead race horse Pie O' My (another food reference!), claims the secret to eggs is adding sour cream. He's making these eggs as the fatal fight finally erupts.

It just shows you what a food loon I am that this is what I remember best from this scene. (Have you ever made the tomato sauce just the way they did in the gone-to-ground sequence in Godfather? I have! I also own a copy of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, which is a topic for another day.)

So - sour cream - in eggs? I'd never heard of such a thing. On top of eggs, sure! In the egg mixture? How does that work?

Now, most omelet recipes call for milk or cream, about a tablespoon per egg or less, well-beaten in. I've always assumed this was to rearrange the protein strings in the egg, using the egg as a binding agent, especially since the more you beat this mixture smoothly the more consistent an omelet comes out. Sour cream, though, I wondered about: since, by definition, it has more curds than cream or milk, wouldn't that make the egg mixture cook up lumpy? If, as Ralph is suggesting, in scrambled eggs, does that make the texture better, or the flavor tangier, or both?

I consulted the usually-reliable Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking) and was interested to learn he doesn't even mention dairy in his discussion of omelets. He has the following definitions: "Scrambled eggs are omelets made from yolks and whites mixed together, and are therefore a good fate for fragile, runny lower-quality eggs." I'm with him there -- I just don't cook scrambled eggs at all, we get the best jumbo eggs we can get and when I cook eggs qua eggs, 9 times out of ten it's a simple omelet with milk and I let the bottom set (no scrambling). McGee, of course, advocates low heat and patience for scrambled eggs, which is the exact opposite of what I learned about scrambled eggs from my grandmother and mom: for them, this was a very quick way of getting a mass of eggs on the table in the morning. Crack the egg into a hot pan and whisk for a minute and you're done. For omelets McGee says, "If good scrambled eggs demand patience, a good omelet takes panache -- a two- or three-egg omelet cooks in less than a minute. Escoffier described the omelet as scrambled eggs held together in a coagulated envelope, a skin of egg heated past the moist tender stage to the dry and tough, so it has the strength to contain and shape the rest." I'm with this definition, for sure, and that container aspect of it is another reason this is the default egg preparation in our house -- for one thing, you can cut the omelet up into discrete kid-friendly bites, plus the cold egg can be stored and snacked on later (try doing that with scrambled eggs -- yuck.) And, I think an omelet's safer -- well-cooked, there's nothing runny about it so no salmonella risk. But I can't cook an omelet in one minute, at least not with the kitchen stuff we have. I have a very good medium-sized omelet pan that does one and two-egg omelets nicely and can be made to cook a three-egg omelet, with or without fillings. But it's not cast iron, nor do I apparently have sufficient gas power to get the pan hot enough. So my omelets usually take three minutes.

Which gets us back to Ralph Cifaretto's eggs. I've experimentally tried adding sour cream twice recently, largely because we had sour cream leftover from the lasagne of a few weeks ago, and I don't do a lot of cooking with sour cream, so it's still on hand. Once with a scramble, the second time beaten into an omelet.

With the scramble, it just didn't mix in with the eggs very well -- I got a thin mixture of undercooked egg-cream mix and some odd-looking egg curdles. Not very appetizing to me. I will say the dog loved it, though.

This morning I tried sour cream beaten into an omelet mixture, and it came out better. The mixture was very 'heavy' in the pan, and the omelet took about a minute or so longer to really cook through. It did not puff up a lot, a la Julia Childs' great omelets (my hero!) although if I'd stuffed it and then cooked it longer it seems like it would make a very good envelope for fillings, as it were, since it was heartier when being flipped over.

I'm not sure I'm going to repeat this experiment, but I will ask my readers herein if they have any experience with using sour creams as an egg mixture. (McGee has a long section on egg-liquid mixtures of various sorts, but mostly as custards and creams. It's completely essential reading, since as with any complicated egg usage - meringues and so forth -- a little underlying theory is very very useful in guiding tricky practice. But not for omelets.)

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.