linguine with heirloom tomato, capers, anchovies, and chile/roasted broccoli and garlic with lemon juice and grated cheese

OK, I am officially getting repetitive, but you know what? I am just going to power through and go with it. This is how I cook: with an admittedly nearly bottomless appetite for pasta! And you know what? I don't get tired of it, so hopefully you all can get through one more tomato sauce and spaghetti recipe. Just hang in there, and I'll reward you with a nice broccoli dish. You can do it!

pasta with sun gold tomatoes

Hi guys. Just another little pasta dish for you all. I am nothing if not an inveterate collector of pasta recipes, as you have probably come to realize. This one appealed to me largely due to the name: pasta with sun gold tomatoes. Sun gold! How delicious does that sound? A good adjective will get me every time. For example: farm fresh. Call me a total sucker, but I am probably about 15% more likely to order something if it is described as farm fresh. Embarrassing, but true.

mac and cheese centerfold

So as I've mentioned in the past, Nathan really, really likes my mac and cheese. Honestly, I think he'd be perfectly happy if I made it for him once a week. Of course, between it being supremely unhealthy, particularly labor intensive and fairly expensive, I only make it a couple of times a year, most recently being April 19th, according to the time stamp on the photos.




It was a particularly good batch, rich and gooey, studded with some nice pork sausage. No where that I eat out seems to make mac and cheese quite the way I do, so I always enjoy my homemade rendition.

Of course, my fondness for Sarah-Cascone-brand macaroni and cheese pales in comparison to Nathan's obsession with it. In the interim between my semiannual renditions of the dish, he starts to get reaaaaaally antsy. And sure enough he's been starting to whine about how I never make him mac and cheese, accusing me of taking some sort of sick pleasure from withholding it. Needless to say, he's crazy!




However, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to make some more in the immediate future, so Nathan, and you, will have to make do with these photos for now. I know I can't hope to compare to the hard core food porn of some other blogs, but I think these certainly capture the gooey crunchy melty wonder that is Sarah Cascone's macaroni and cheese. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get to try it some day.

tomates farcies/sausage with arugula

breadcrumb topped baked tomatoes

Happy Thanksgiving, and greetings from Boston!

I know that I am supposed to be writing about squash and turkeys and things, because it's Thanksgiving, but I'm not going to to do that. Sorry. You're probably sick of those things anyway; perhaps even literally. Instead I am going to bring you back to those warmer days of early fall, with late tomatoes, for this recipe that Nathan's mom, Tenli, gave us for baked tomatoes.


our french tomato dinner plate

Nathan's stepmom, Marie, is French, and her very French mother, Jackie, gave this recipe to Tenli, who passed it along to us. It's very easy and a great way to serve a ripe, juicy tomato. Just promise me you won't try to make this with the mealy pink type you're likely to find in the grocery store this time of year. It's just not worth it.

Once you've got your hands on some good tomatoes, say like next July, this is what you're going to do: cut a beefsteak tomato in half, and cover the cut surface with a mix of breadcrumbs, minced garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, moistening the mixture with a drizzle of olive oil. Bake it at 425˚ for about 12 minutes. I put it in the toaster oven, which worked pretty well, but it got a little crispy on top being so close to the heat. With that, you've got yourself a great little side dish!


sausage and wilted arugula

We ate our tomatoes with some ravioli with butter and cheese, chopped up sausage, and arugula that I briefly sauteed in the sausage fat. It was super delicious. Thanks to Tenli for hooking us up with such a brilliantly easy and yummy meal!

Normally, I don't bother trying to write up a recipe, but since Tenli took the trouble of sending this one to us, I'm going to pass it along to you readers directly. Don't get used to it!

Tomates Farcies
serves 2 as a side dish, 4 as a starter

Preheat oven to 425, and put one of the oven racks at the top of the oven.

Take two large tomatoes in season (beefsteak or a large heirloom variety are both delicious!) Cut in half and place cut side up on a baking sheet covered in foil.
Combine:
3TBS bread crumbs
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 TBS parsley
Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Distribute crumb/garlic/parsley mixture evenly between the tomato halves, then drizzle each one with +/- 1 TBS olive oil

Bake in top of oven for around 12-15 minutes.

Very tasty!

ricotta stuffed tomatoes

Believe it or not, my jaw was actually wired shut two months ago today! I am pleased to report that the injury is no longer dictating my diet. Last night, Nathan and I went out for some Righteous Urban BBQ and I tore into some St. Louis style ribs with a vengeance. It felt awesome! It had been far too long since I'd done any serious meat eating.

I'd like to say that today's entry is written in that same spirit, but I'm afraid I don't have a bloody, carnivorous feast to present to you today. Instead, I have more of my soft food backlog and ripe and juicy local tomatoes. Yay food co-op!


tomatoes bursting with ricotta cheese

I mad these for Nathan and I a few weeks ago and served them with EVEN MORE tomatoes. Surprisingly, Boyfriend was singing the praises of our vegetarian meal, a true testament to the deliciousity of a farm fresh tomato cooked with some well chosen accompaniments. These were sliced in half, seeded, and drained on paper towels before I seasoned them and stuffed them with a mixture of fresh basil, dried oregano, grated romano and ricotta cheese. Topped with breadcrumbs and a drizzle of olive oil, they baked at 400˚ for about a half an hour.

They were delicious, but I wish I had used a better brand of ricotta instead of cheaping out on whatever crap they had on sale at Fine Fare. Also, I think I forgot to add minced garlic to the filling! Absolutely shocking, I know. Someone should slap me upside the head for neglecting my favorite ingredient of all time. I so was busy trying to get a nice dinner ready by the time Nathan arrived at my apartment, (just wait til I write about the awesome dessert), I must have just skipped it in a rush. I promise to do my best to live up to the Garlicus Maximus name in the future!

I found this recipe here. Amusingly, the author there had found the recipe on a different blog, which had also taken it from a third blog, which attributed the recipe to someone called Pastor John. Oh the interwebs. Basically, it's your turn to make a blog entry about this dish, adding one further degree of separation. Won't that be fun?

spinach pancakes and "fried" chicken wings

chicken wings and spinach pancakes

My friend Becky came over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, and we made my mom's toaster oven chicken wings and some Mark Bittman pancakes by way of some food blog. We rounded things off with a little salad with grape tomatoes and my fast-becoming-standard red wine vinegar dressing. You should really give this a shot— According to Mario Batali, "a great salad dressing has great olive oil and an inexpensive red-wine vinegar."

Anyway. The pancakes were the most labor intensive part of the meal, which was pretty damn easy overall. We trimmed and washed ten ounces of spinach, and briefly sauteed it with a little garlic and oil. Then we squeezed out the water, chopped the spinach up, and mixed it into the pancake batter. This consisted of one and a half cups buttermilk, two beaten eggs and 2 tablespoons melted butter, which we mixed together and then stirred into the dry ingredients: 2 cups flour, a tablespoon of sugar, half a teaspoon each of baking soda and salt, and a dash of nutmeg. Finally, we added the spinach.

We fried the pancakes up with butter over medium high heat until crisp and golden on both sides. A good rule of thumb for flipping pancakes is to wait until the surface is full of little bubbles. Becky handled our pancakes, and did a bang up job. They were great. We served them with sour cream mixed with lemon zest and some shredded parmesan. Dee-licious.

Before we started cooking the pancakes we prepared our chicken wings and stuck them in the toaster oven. I grew up eating these chicken wings, and they are so good. Crispy and moist with a delicious breading... as a kid, this seemed like perfection, and even now I think its pretty wonderful, especially since they're so easy. Obviously, these are baked, but as a kid I always assumed they were fried, and I don't think I stopped thinking of them as such until a few years ago. They are that damn good.

First, season some breadcrumbs. I generally buy a canister of plain ones at the grocery store and jazz them up with some garlic powder, black pepper, grated romano cheese, dried basil, oregano and parsley. I like to keep a container of these in the fridge for making scrambled eggs or breading pork chops, chicken cutlets or eggplant. They really do come in handy.

Once your breadcrumbs are ready, spread some out on a sheet of wax paper. Then you want to coat your wings with a little bit of mayo and then roll them in the breadcrumbs. This bit is a little gross, because your hands wind up covered in raw chicken, mayo and breadcrumbs, but once you're through it, you're basically done. Pop those wings into the toaster oven on a little tray, and cook them at 350° for about 50 minutes. So easy!

After enjoying our delicious supper, Becky and I also made ourselves a strawberry shortcake for dessert. I'm not sure if it was because we slightly undercooked it or if the recipe was just a dud, but the cake had a slightly unpleasant doughiness to it, or something. I suspect it may have been our fault as over eager cake eaters, but ultimately, it was not that good. Becky is supposed to guest blog the recipe, so stay tuned for that. Until then, I leave you with this parting shot of the two of us with our just desserts.


strawberry shortcake cream on top, tell me the name of your sweet heart

Fried Chickpeas with Chorizo and Spinach

This is another recipe from Mark Bittman, the dean of people who mean well but don't want to spend a million years in the kitchen getting all messy and irritable as they slave over some complex hogwarsh. I made it one night after seeing it on the Times' website.

Ingredients:
- 2 cups canned chickpeas (no need to get fancy, I just got one of those big Goya cans)
- 4 oz. diced chorizo (Goya to the rescue again. Just get a whole one and cut it up.)
- half pound spinach
- bread crumbs

The original recipe also called for sherry, but I'm not the sort of moneybags who keeps a well-stocked bar filled with all sorts of exotic liqueurs. I have a minibar area in my bedroom but it currently consists of a bottle of red, a bottle of rum, a chocolate bunny, and some cookies. In the freezer there be gin and vodka, but no sherry. Sorry haters. Anyway, I just used red wine vinegar instead and so should you.

First, put like 3 tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a pan, and heat it up. Put all of the chickpeas in there (after draining their fluid from the can) and salt/pepper them. Bring the heat down to medium-low and let the chickpeas cook for ten minutes or so until they start to turn brown. Then add the chorizo, and let it cook for another 5 minutes, maybe a bit more, until the chickpeas start to crisp up on the outsides and they start to get some nice chorizo flavor on them.

Remove all of that stuff from the pan and then cook the spinach in the oils that remain. At this point you can add a quarter cup of sherry, or if you're awesome like me, red wine vinegar. Add some salt and pepper too, naturally. When the spinach is nice and soft, pretty much cooked, put the chickpeas and chorizo back in and toss everything together for a bit.

To finish it off, put breadcrumbs on top of the whole thing and put it all in the broiler for a little bit, just to brown the breadcrumbs and give the dish a nice crust. Then eat.


chickpeas, chorizo and spinach with a nice crispy top

I really enjoyed this dish - it was great and it easily cost less than ten bucks. The chickpeas had a great texture, nice and soft but just crispy enough on the outside. The chorizo was luscious. The spinach provided a nice clean backdrop, keeping the dish from getting bogged down in starch and meat. Best of all, it only took like 20 minutes to make.

everyone loves macaroni and cheese

macaroni and cheese stuffed artichokes with goat cheese bechamel sauce and lemon zested breadcrumb topping

The one thing that I cook that I'd really say is a crowd pleaser is macaroni and cheese. Two years ago, Laura and I were hosting a joint birthday party in our on campus apartment, and I decided that some really good mac and cheese would be the perfect party food. Macaroni and cheese is one of those foods that can be really really great when it's done right, but I find that it's often too dry, too creamy, or too processed tasting for me to enjoy it. In my opinion, a good version of the dish has a nice cheesy bechamel sauce holding it together, but also plenty of melty gooey cheese layered into it, and a crispy top.

I don't know where you all stand on the creamy vs. cheesy macaroni spectrum but this New York Times article provides some interesting commentary. Despite the current fashion for creamier versions, some purists actually consider what they call "macaroni and cheese sauce," to be an entirely different and entirely inferior dish. To a certain point, I agree. I find overly creamy mac and cheeses can actually trigger my gag reflex. And don't even get my started on the abomination that is Kraft— I may have tried it once, buy my brain has clearly surpressed that terrible memory. However, that is not to say that a cream base is not an essential part of the dish. Without enough of one, the cheese can congeal into an equally unappealing block of oily pasta.

Luckily for my dinner guests, and for you, I've found a recipe that successfully balances the two elements to form the perfect celebration of cheese and carbs: Emeril Lagasse's Macaroni with Four Cheeses

Emeril starts off by making a bechamel sauce from half a stick of butter, four tablespoons flour, two cups of half and half, 4 ounces grated parmesan, a dash of hot sauce, salt and pepper. He pours this over a pound of buttered elbow macaroni mixed with some minced garlic, and then layers the pasta into a buttered baking dish with a pound and a half of cheddar, fontina, gruyere and parmesan cheeses. On top of the final layer of cheese, he adds seasoned breadcrumbs, and then he lets the oven work its magic for 45 minutes or so. This mac and cheese is irresistably good, and whenever I make it everyone always raves about it.

Over the past two years, I've made this recipe many times, including for my and Matt's graduation party, where we totally overestimated and made enough bechamel sauce for ten pounds of pasta—what normally took took 4 to 5 minutes to thicken became a 45 minute affair! After following the recipe very carefully the first couple of times, I've been able to play around quite a bit: using varying the types of cheese included based on what's around and what I can afford, adding sweet or hot sausages, and even baking the pasta into hollowed out artichokes. (As you might now guess, this was the only mac of which I took decent photos. This recipe was our guide, but we ignored large chunks of it.)

My only rules when it comes to the dish is that some of the cheese has to be mixed into the sauce, and that there needs to be lots of it shredded and layered inside to make for gooey cheesy strings when you dig into it. I've used parmesan, romano, goat cheese or even cheddar in the sauce, using more or less of it depending on how much I have, although more is always better. The shredded cheese is usually cheddar with the fontina and gruyere only if I can afford them, although I recently used mozzarella to great effect. I really like to make this with the traditional elbows, but I am not into the skinnier straight macaroni, as it's too reminiscent of Kraft crap. I've also had success using the little shells, or conchigliette, which Laura particularly liked, and to a lesser degree the corkscrew cavatappi. I think my favorite though, is radiatori, because the cheese really clings to its many little ridges.

I actually made a wonderful gluten free version of the dish for Matt just last month with his special penne. It was probably not the best noodle for this dish, but that didn't diminish his enjoyment of the dish. I used Bob's Red Mill gluten-free flour to make the one batch of bechamel, which I divided between Matt's pasta and everyone else's, and no one was the wiser.

Macaroni and cheese is such a classic dish, and everyone loves it. As much as I recommend the Emeril version, there is no one definitive version of this dish, and I encourage you to play around. Throw in some bacon and crispy onions, or use mustard powder or dijon to kick up the flavor a bit. Lots of people like to add roasted tomatoes, and I personally think artichoke hearts or roasted peppers would be lovely with the right cheeses. Despite the Italian ban on mixing seafood and cheese, lobster or shrimp macs are hugely popular. Nutmeg and worcestershire sauce are other common flavoring agents. Personally, I'm wary of eggs, evaporated milk, cream cheese or cottage cheese, but I do think there's plenty of other ways to change it up. If you're looking for more ideas, the Chowhound message board is a great place to start. There is so much to experiment with, I don't see how anyone could ever be satisfied with a box and a packet of powered "cheese mix"!