Bone Appetite

Christmas Eve Pizza!

Catching up after the fact on neglected holiday postings...

We don't have a particular Christmas Eve tradition in the house, so each year we just pick something different to do. If there's company, of course, a fancy meal is in order of some sort, but otherwise anything that's celebratory sounds like a good idea. This year, I asked the eldest what he wanted, and he answered "Pizza!" which was pretty predictable even if he doesn't actually eat much pizza when we do have pizza. We try to make a vegetarian pizza for the younger and Mrs. Claus, so I frequently make two small to medium pizzas on pizza nights. This time, however, I decided the seasonal design would lend itself well to a half-veggie, half-pepperoni! (That's artichoke, pepper, red bell pepper and cherry tomato on the upper half.)  

Retro Meal Plan (featuring Indian Red Lamb Stew)

Hey, where's the meal plan for last week? my loyal readers (both of them) may be asking. Well, in case you haven't noticed, it's the silly season, aka the month leading up to Christmas, and we had "outside" events affecting dinner four of the seven nights. I had a meal plan, and it was tested and twisted much of the week.

For 12/7-12/13, to keep in the archival spirit of these pages, however, here is our retro meal plan:

Monday - Pasta night with salad. I was occupied with something and dished this one over to my sous chef, so I can't rightly remember what went on here.

Tuesday - a big mess of gyoza, egg-fried rice. I was insane to try this on a weeknight. It took portions of much of the afternoon to get the dumpling stuffing ready -- lots of chopping -- and even though I used store-bought wonton wrappers (NOT the same thing as specialized dumpling dough, fwiw) -- and of course I was only able to get a couple dozen dumplings made (more than enough for the dinner, of course) of both meat- and vegetarian fillings, freezing the rest. I also froze a dozen pre-made. The good news is I've got the makings of about five dozen gyoza in the freezer now, waiting for a night when we need a little comfort food and don't have all the time in the world. As fun as this is, family tradition and all, etc. etc., I can't help but thinking we're actually better off buying Trader Joe's dumplings in bulk sometime instead, though.

Wednesday -- a school fundraiser pizza night out, which ended up in taking the pizza out as my eldest had an unexpected onset of some kind of social anxiety. We will perhaps post about this another day, but it was very odd, as he normally loves restaurants and adores pizza no matter how good or how bad.

Thursday -- we "grazed" with some simple foods from home, some snacks purchased out, and treats from the Christmas at the Adobes in Monterey. The kids' nutritional balance was definitely off this week --- a meal consisting of at least 50% cookie content is not containable inside the food pyramid.

Friday -- potluck -- more grazing.

Saturday - we had another school event during the day, so I ended up making Mac and cheese (with roasted brussel sprouts, yum). I had planned on doing latkes but ran out of time.

Sunday -- I had one feast on the menu this week and it got bumped to Sunday, and it took a while. I made Indian Red Stew with lamb, ala Madhur Jaffrey, with Samosas ala Mark Bittman. The stew (pictured) was superb -- I have not had a single recipe from this cookbook turn out badly. I am cursed with the duality of absolutely adoring spicy food, particularly Indian cuisine, and having quite the stomach for it --- but not the digestive system. I suffer greatly when the spicing is overdone, and my tongue thinks if it's overdone by that standard it's underdone. That said, I have been able to cook using Jaffrey's recipes without modifying the spice content much and come out with digestible and wonderful dishes -- only the kids won't eat them right now (they even rejected the samosas, deep-fried and all, as too spicy.) So we don't make much Indian these days. But I do have to give props to my sister for giving me Jaffrey's Indian Cooking some years ago, which was just the delicious reference cookbook I needed.

While I spent more time than I probably should've cooking on Sunday, it was deeply satisfying, and I also used up one of the on-sale legs of lamb I bought some time back and threw in the freezer. The lamb, slow-cooked, was utterly deliciously tender. And there were enough leftover that both my spouse and I could have it for lunch the following day. Yum!!

I did do one moderately whacky thing with the stew: I used a big turnip for part of the volume (I only used about a pound and a half of usable lamb, the recipe called for two). Turnips are not unheard of in Indian cuisine, at least as Jaffrey creates it, but they weren't in this recipe. I thought they were outstanding in the dish, adding a certain something potatoes occasionally lack in the deep sauces of much of Indian cooking.

The Applesauce Runway

This is an airport, with an airplane taking off. The things you can do with cinnamon and raisins.

2009 Beaujolais Nouveau

Woot! The Dubouef Villages Nouveau was just being unpacked in the store when I got there this morning.

My taste tester and I pronounce it EXCELLENT this year, not at all acidic, nice smooth buttery taste with a dry finish, just the way we like it. Let's just hope the case lasts us through Thanksgiving.

 

   

Now with the wine goggles on...

Remedial Lemon Slicing

Here's this week's kitchen konundrum (tm): if you need to squeeze half a lemon, and want to use the other half for lemon slices, what's the best way to cut the lemon?

I believe this is an insoluble problem, like Fermat's last theorem. The best way to cut lemon slices is to cut along the axis of the stem (parallel to the nubbinses on either side), and the best way to cut a lemon to juice it is transaxially, so the tissue between the segments doesn't interfere with the juicing.

If you cut it as illustrated on the right, you will get lots of juice in your face and not on your fish. But if you do it the other way and try to juice the half you need for juice, you end up having more difficulty getting the juice out and end up with more pulp to filter.

That said, I think the correct answer is the latter (NOT the way it is illustrated above) -- cut for the slices and deal with the juicing.

I thereby open the floor to discussion. More important issues of our day to come!!!

I wonder if this is the sort of thing they discuss at culinary school?

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.

Recipe: Medley of Cold Squash Salad Recipes

No, the title is not a typo.

I had originally planned on doing a green salad tonight, but because I didn't use the summer squash last night, and I made focaccia for the main course tonight, my thoughts turned to cold squash salad. I was originally thinking a little EVO, lime juice, tarragon, maybe a little salt and pepper, over steamed and doused squash, chill in the fridge, pop it out when dinner's ready.

But, this thing called the Internet, it lets you check your thinking against the wisdom of the masses. When I had typed the appropriate search terms into the Google, this is the recipe that I found.

Now, as I'm sure we're all well aware by now, anything you find on the Intertubes must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Recipes would seem to be particularly risky with respect to attribution and provenance; there's hardly a real original recipe in the world, I would think, except insofar as we're all riffing on one another. (Maybe the Soylent Green Cookbook will be an original. GMOs, anyone? The GMO Cookbook! Now that's an idea waiting for an author!)

So, I looked at this particular recipe and I thought, why not? I've actually got an avocado unspoken for unhand and ripe, and yes, I have...cream cheese? Hmmm. What's up with that? And...green chiles? And olives are not listed in the ingredient list, but they are in the directions.

And that cream cheese -- a 3 ounce package? I've never seen cream cheese in 3-ounce packages. Cut into 3/4" cubes? 3 ounces of cream cheese would make, well, about four such cubes. And while I confess that I frequently pop cheese to be grated or cut into the freezer for ten minutes to harden it up and make the cutting process easier, trust me, this does not work with cream cheese. Who cuts cream cheese into cubes, and gets cubes when they're done? (Our cream cheese comes in a circular tub, making cutting it all the more problematic.) And...you figure out how much 3 ounces of cream cheese is. I guessed, using the pizza-cutting part of my brain.

All this makes me a little suspicious. That perhaps this recipe was modified, either by the website editor, the contributor, or wherever. Because, well, if olives were in the original recipe, but not the green chiles, and the cream cheese were feta, this would make a pretty decent Greek salad, particularly if part or all of the squash were cucumbers.

I cast no aspersions on Helen Rodriguez or InMamasKitchen.com here -- that's what we all do when we innovate or try to be creative with recipes. You take an existing idea, you monkey with it, it's either a success or it isn't and you can claim it as your own or orphan it. A little careful editing and kitchen-testing would help, though.

In my case, I couldn't make it quite as instructed. I substituted a shallot for the scallions, I skipped the green chiles and used olives (5, to be precise, because that seemed like the right number), I added a quarter of a roasted red pepper diced up, and I just tried not to smoosh the cream cheese entirely (I would've used feta had I any on hand).

This was not bad -- but I think it would've been better with the feta, and a bit more lemon juice. Mika says she likes it very much, complex flavors without anything really dominating and a nice mix of textures.

Now, would that be enough for an original recipe?

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.

Veggie Black Bean Burritos

Menu: veggie black bean burritos, chunky guacamole, corn chips.

Ah, Sunday dinner. Usually the one day a week I follow the traditions of my New England forbearers and trot out a slab of red meat of some sort. However, with the holiday weekend and the extra activities and the
change of mealplan yesterday precipitated by the hot dog eating and the lasagne yen, I promoted burrito night.

I have a real serious problem right now. Our CSA has delivered, over the past two weeks, an incredibly luscious array of cayenne, poblano, serrano, and habanero peppers. I can't cook regular meals with them because then neither kid will eat what I cook. And rather unfairly, I will opine, because I love spicy stuff so much, particularly with fresh peppers, capsicum products do not agree with my digestive tract in my tender middle age.

However, when I saw those peppers it was suggestive. We also had some nice, small red onions and San Marzano tomatoes in the veggie box this week. I had a leftover red pepper that needed eating, or rather, 3/4 of one. Tada, veggie burritos on the meal plan.

I got somewhat suspect Chilean avocados at the store, 4 for $4, which suggested guacamole, on top, alongside, under, or just in the general ambient vicinity of the burrito. Thence the corn ships (unsalted).

I can never find large enough tortillas in the style I like at Whole Foods, and it hardly seems worth a separate trip just for tortillas, so I use the 'taco' size traditional home size tortillas. These are more kid-friendly, anyway; one is just about the right portion for Duncan. 

I forgot to put cilantro on the list (woe to both my usual burritos and the guacamole). Egads. I love cilantro, what was I thinking? We've tried to grow it but have had problems with it taking the last two seasons; the year before that it bolted. Topic for another day, I digress.

Here's how this one went.

Half tablespoon of olive oil in the pan, finely diced red onions into the oil. These were smallish onions, so it was probably the equivalent of a half a large red onion. A pinch of tumeric, about a quarter tsp of cumin, 1/8 tsp cayenne, a pinch of salt. In goes, in 1/8" dice, the red pepper. Swoosh around for a bit. Add in about half a brick of (extra firm) tofu, cut into 1/8" cubes. Woosh until coated. The tofu turns a nice orange-yellow eventually, more yellowish at this stage.

Why bother with the tofu, you may ask, when with the corn and black beans below we will have complimentary proteins already? I like the extra bite and variation in texture, and it sort of fills the burrito a little more nicely in lieu of the traditional meat fillers.

In go about eight of the San Marzanos, seeded and diced, and the juice of an elderly lime. Woosh. Let this mellow while I started the guacamole, then add a can of black beans (drained and rinsed) and a cup of frozen corn, bring to a quick simmer and turn down to low for about 10 minutes while the rest of the dinner gets itself ready.

 

For the guacamole, I used two of the weird Chilean avocados, one of which was slightly underripe. I used my favorite kitchen tool - my fingers - to mush up this one (hey, we're family, I wash), for a slightly chunky blend. I used to be a fanatic about smoothing out my guacamole but I've mellowed (or gotten lazier) about this in recent years. Oops, I used up the red onions - diced a shallot instead. Three cloves of garlic, juice of an even more elderly lime, a pinch of salt, 1/8 tsp cayenne, woosh woosh. Then I diced up two cored and seeded San Marzanos for the Christmas chunky feel. I am not usually a fan of tomato in my guacamole but the fresh tomatoes were calling to me, and as long as they don't take over the dominant flavor of the guacamole I think they're fine.

Here's my burrito tip. I put a small amount of olive oil, just a dab really, at the bottom of a glass baking dish. I put two rounded tablespoons of burrito filling in the middle of the tortilla, right there in the dish, two grates of jack cheese inside, then fold the thing up and flip it upside down so the seam is on the bottom. Repeat, then grate a layer of jack. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes or so. I find baking the burritos the hardest part of the whole affair, and the most gratifying when done correctly: just on the edge of crispiness, but still pliable, so the burrito holds together and the flavor of the tortilla is brought out. I find the oil on the bottom of the pan does just an ever so slight job of frying the bottom, not even frying so much as mild crisping up, and it keeps the burrito from sticking.

I have no idea if this is "authentic" or not and I don't care. Some burritos you get out in the world, including at real down home Mexican places, seem like heavy ordinance wrapped up in a canvas tarp -- a big frisbee-sized tortilla whose only role is to enclose a vast amount of meat and refried beans. It's an insult unto the noble toritlla, in my humble opinion, to be demoted to the level of mere wrap, like so much fish and chip paper.

What I gave the kids: Iz got the black bean burrito mix, cooled down, with some cheese and guacamole, frozen beans, and a whole tortilla. Dunc got a burrito, which he emptied of the contents and ate with just the melted cheese - sort of a limp quesadilla.  

(Pictured: Izzy's dish, no burrito, but the burrito filling and an empty tortilla with a little side of cheese giving him a simulation of the Burrito Experience. In the little tray on the upper left is the guacamole.)