pesto trapanese

tomato basil pesto

As you may know, pesto is my favorite food. I could eat it all the time, I love it so much. When I see a bunch of basil, my brain is already transforming it into a beautiful batch of pesto sauce. Of course, when I say pesto, I'm talking about the sauce served over pasta. Nathan somehow finds this confusing, and always has to clarify:

"what did you have for dinner?"

"some pesto with salad and a pork chop."

"like, straight up pesto?"

"no! with spaghetti, duh."

Clearly, he is an idiot. In my (admittedly pesto-centric) world, the word pesto is used interchangeably as both the sauce and the pasta dish. Don't try and tell me otherwise. I am equally uninterested in deviating from my family's absolutely perfect pesto recipe. In general, I love trying new foods and different takes on old favorites, but pesto is one big exception to that. I love the creamy, smooth texture of my pesto. Nothing else measures up for me, to the point where I have absolutely no interest in ordering restaurant pesto. Make pesto like an Italian grandmother? No thanks, I'm pretty sure I already make the platonic ideal of pesto, and no amount of old world traditions or America's Test Kitchen tinkering can shake my faith in that belief.

However, my curiosity was piqued when I stumbled across this recipe for pesto trapanese. I hadn't heard of it, but after a little googling, I learned that the pesto that I know and love is not the only type of pesto that those culinary geniuses the Italians came up with. My pesto comes from Genoa, so it is more specifically pesto genovese. Down in Sicily, they make this pesto trapanese that swaps the pine nuts for almonds and adds fresh tomatoes. (There is also apparently a pesto pantesco, which adds capers, dried chili peppers and other herbs to the trapanese variety.)

Since this pesto trapanese is basically an entirely separate sauce, rather than a pale imitation of my favorite dish, I decided to make it. (It didn't hurt that soon after I learned of its existence, the smitten kitchen gave its stamp of approval.)

As with pesto, original flavor, this trapanese pesto is quite easy to make. Toast almonds, blend up almonds, and then add everything else and blend. Everything else being basil, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and grated cheese. Serve over pasta.

The verdict? Eh. Not nearly as good as the real deal. It was way too dry. Also, it was disconcertingly very similar to taste to romesco sauce, which makes sense considering both have large amounts of almonds and tomatoes. (Laura actually asked that was what was on the pasta. She didn't love it either.) I didn't mind it actually, left over and moistened up with a bit of half and half, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement.

Ultimately, this was ok, but the Genovese definitely have the Trapanese beat when it comes to pesto. I am pleased to report that the all basil variety retains the crown, and the rights to be called pesto sans adjectives. As always, when I say pesto, I mean I am inhaling a delicious bowl of pasta with the world's best nutty, garlicy basil sauce.

corn pepper soup/tomato paella

Here's more of what I did with my late summer corn:


corn pepper soup

I made this back in September on a Friday night. Lauren and Hannah came over for dinner and I made this soup. I used homemade chicken stock and lots of corn, pepper and onions. I sauteed the peppers and onions, added the corn and stock and let it all simmer. I blended it all up and topped it off with a hefty sprinkling of cilantro and freshly cracked pepper.

I have to say that while I like both corn and peppers, I had been getting tons and tons of them from the co-op at that point in time. I think I must have been pretty sick of them because I don't really remember that much about this soup. It was sweet and peppery, but at the time it just wasn't the most inspiring flavor combination. Whether I was sick of those particular veggies, I didn't showcase them to their best advantage, or if it just wasn't to my taste, this soup was still relatively tasty and markedly better than the other component of the meal.

I also made Mark Bittman's tomato paella. The way the blogosphere tells it, this summer tomato recipe is just divine. Crispy arborio rice, juicy ripe tomatoes and a rich yellow color from a few precious strands of saffron. All the flair of a fancy seafood paella, minus a great deal of work and expense. Sounds like a story that guarantees a happy ending, no?


Mark Bittman's tomato paella

Well I have a different tale to tell. One of dry, chewy rice, overly herbaceous tomatoes and saffron that was sadly completely undetectable. It didn't taste bad, persay, but either I am way out of step with the online foodie commmunity, or something went really really wrong with this recipe. I totally wanted to love it, but it was a total flop.

Although it was great having Hannah and Lauren over for dinner, I think I owe them a more inspiring dinner!

chocolate coffee oatmeal

chocolate coffee oatmeal

This isn't much of a post, except to say that I recently experimented with making coffee chocolate oatmeal as part of my soft food diet. I cooked the oatmeal on the stove top with hot coffee and milk, stirring in some Hershey's cocoa powder. It was surprisingly disappointing. It got gluey and sticky, and the cocoa powder clumped up a bit. I also think it could have used some added sugar to counteract the bitterness of the coffee.

I still think this could be good, but in this iteration, it simply wasn't. Bleaugh.

cucumber and roasted red pepper soup

cucumber soup with roasted red peppers

I will tell you up front that I didn't like this as much as my other cucumber soup. It wasn't bad, but the flavors just didn't meld together as well as the previous soup. This probably had something to do with the fact that the other soup was a tried and true flavor combination, and this soup was just me throwing whatever food co-op veggies I had left in the fridge in the blender and hoping for the best. Sometimes improvisation can be a recipe for success, but in this case it was a rather forgettable endeavor.

Basically, I roasted, peeled and seeded a sweet red pepper, and blended it up with a cucumber, a couple of scallions, peeled seeded tomatoes, a slice of jalapeno, sour cream, plain yogurt, dried cumin and garlic powder. It was fine, but a little strange. I probably should have added a lemon or something, because it was a little dull, aside from the hint of heat from the jalapeno.

Though this was ultimately a forgettable meal, I do want to show you something I am currently so, so happy not to be doing: straining my foods for bits of skins and seeds too large to enter a wired shut jaw.


a laborious task

For four long weeks, this time consuming task went hand and hand with eating. Scraping a spoon back and forth for what seemed like an eternity, coaxing little clumps of pulp and fruit flesh to pass through the fine mesh strainer so I could finally eat. It was by far the most frustrating part of the whole experience and delayed my meals considerably. It's no wonder I didn't have the patience to go back and add lemon juice after such an ordeal!

Right now, I am still on a soft food diet and cannot chew, but straining is thankfully a thing of the past. Hopefully, the coming week will see further improvement and allow me to eat more substantial foodstuffs. Fingers crossed!

hummus

So awhile back when I gave up drinking nasty ensure and was looking for other ways to add protein to my diet, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: make a nice watery hummus for dinner!


soupy hummus

I would start with canned chick peas and add fresh food coop cilantro and a roasted red pepper and garlic. I'd make my own tahini by smashing toasted sesame seeds, season with freshly ground pepper and coarse Kosher salt, and stir in plenty of lemon juice and olive oil. It would be smooth and creamy, and a delicious way to sneak protein into my liquid diet.


canned chick peas and their juices, one sweet roasted red pepper, cilantro, two roasted garlic cloves and toasted sesame seeds mashed into tahini paste seasoned with kosher salt and cracked black pepper

Well, somehow, even though I did just that, mixing it all up with the immersion blender, something about it was all wrong. Maybe it's just that hummus is intended to be a thicker paste spread on crackers. Maybe my mind rebelled against the lack of contrasting crunch and texture. Maybe I used too many chickpeas and not enough of the other ingredients. Maybe it's just that foods become far less appetizing when you're slurping them off a spoon and getting food all over your mouth with every bite. Whatever it was, eating this hummus was a struggle. It was never very appealing to start with, but with each passing bite, it became more and more difficult to convince myself to continue.


this hummus was my foe

Ultimately, I had to toss the leftovers in the trash. I did the best I could, but that hummus kicked my ass and sent me packing.

Unfortunately, this was all too often the case with the food I cooked myself during my time on the liquid diet. It's a real challenge to create meals that remain palatable when strained through your teeth, and while I made progress, I never quite mastered the art. I'm set to have my wires cut and rubber bands put in tommorrow, only two weeks later than planned, and I can't tell you what a relief it will be to be able to open my mouth and brush my tongue and lick my lips and put soft foods on a spoon and eat them without slurping or drinking through a straw. Trust me, it can't come quickly enough.

minestrone

As I've discussed, kale is my least favorite food co-op veggie. I never know what to do with it, and it's always disappointing to get it from the food co-op.

I volunteered for a couple hours during distribution recently, and there were actually several people there lamenting the lack of greens this season. While I was in a different co-op last year, and was not among the members who complained about getting too many greens, I had to admit that I shared their sentiment. When I explained that I never knew what to do with all that kale, one woman suggested cooking it in oil with lots of garlic, adding chicken stock, red pepper flakes, cannellini beans and pasta to make a minestrone soup. When she put it like that, it sounded pretty good!


minestrone soup

I did pretty much exactly what she told me to. I used kale and beet tops, (which made it turn pink) as my greens, and threw in some carrot rounds as well. Nathan told me that minestrone is supposed to have tomatoes in it, so I tossed in some leftover tomato sauce. Then after it had been simmering for awhile, we tasted it. Nathan was worried that the chicken broth was too bland, so I told him to add some more red pepper flakes. He did NOT stop dumping them in when I said and thus the soup was far too hot, but STILL managed to be a little bland. Not terrible, but not that great. Next time I'll use a legit recipe, or maybe just add some onions. Also, I used canned beans and Nathan convinced me not to rinse off the bean gunk. That was probably a mistake. I think the beans tasted a little funky, especially on the reheat, and I've never had that problem with canned beans that I've rinsed.


spicy minestrone topped with grated romano cheese

glazed Gourmet potatoes and a terrible disappointment

When Gourmet Magazine folded last year, it was almost as if a little part of me died. Growing up, I think I thought Gourmet was just another picture book. My Aunt Cathy had a subscription, and I used to make her read me recipes like they were stories when I came to visit. I still can't believe that it's no longer in existence. A damn shame. Anyway, the good thing is that plenty of the magazine's recipes are available online, from one source or another. Today, I'd like to talk about a wonderful potato recipe that I made last week.


olive oil glazed potatoes with fresh parsley

The original recipe was entitled Fingerling Potatoes with Chives and Parsley, but I didn't have fingerlings, so I just used some regular ones at it worked out fine. (Actually the bag says "Golden Potatoes," if you really want to know.) I just had to slice them into long cross sections.

These potatoes literally couldn't be easier. You simply peel them, place them in the skillet and cover them with water, a couple tablespoons of olive oil and some salt and pepper. Then, you bring it to a boil, and then cover and simmer for ten minutes stirring occasionally. At that point, you take off the lid and let it cook for five more minutes, so that the olive oil sort of glazes over the potatoes. Add freshly chopped herbs, like basil and parsley, and eat immediately. I only had parsley on hand when I made it.


simple and delicious

It was delicious. Absolutely delicious. I will definitely be making this again. Normally I'll just make a baked potato if I'm having them for dinner, but this is so much faster and just plain old better. Good old Gourmet. Still coming through with amazing, fantastic food, even after being cruelly shut down.

I was lucky that those delicious potatoes turned out to be so delicious, because I majorly screwed up the main component of that meal, which was supposed to be a delightfully sweet and summery corn chowder. I was really excited about it too. I had gotten corn from the food co-op, and it was just the sweetest most delicious corn I had even tasted. I cut all the kernels off the cob and set them aside while I made a stock to base the soup on, and let me tell you, I couldn't stop nibbling. It was like candy.

I opened up The Flavor Bible to the corn entry, and in addition to learning that corn goes nicely from everything from crab to maple syrup, I was excited by the suggestions of a chef from Oregon named Vitaly Paley. He had two ideas that really spoke to me, which I will quote:

"We used the husks, which produce a juice, to make a stock for the soup... We made a stock using the corn hucks cooked with a little onion, water, and salt, and let it cook for about 45 minutes. What came out was the most amazing sweet broth. We added the corn, pureed it, and served it chilled. It was so sweet and full of corn flavor you would have sorn there were cream and sugar in it. We now make a corn husk broth to add to a corn, chanterelle, and Dungeness carb risotto with a touch of pesto. Basil pesto and corn really speaks to me. It is a wonderful combination."

You always hear that the best way to make a really sweet and delicious soup infused with bright corn flavor is to boil the cobs first, so I figured I would use the husks as well. I was convinced that this was going to be the most delicious, most flavorful, most corn-like corn soup ever. Liquid gold, if you will. I also was going to add porcini mushrooms and swirl in some of my homemade pesto. I was really excited.

What went wrong? I got the proportion of husk/cob stock to actual kernels completely wrong. Wayyyy too much water and not nearly enough corn. It was totally diluted. I tried adding some cream to thicken it up, but that didn't do much to help. It didn't taste bad, but it was just so bland compared to the glorious soup I envisioned, and the sugary sweet and farm fresh corn I had to work with. When I told Nathan, he employed one of his favorite phrases: casting your pearls before swine. It was a damn shame.

asian style tat soi and zucchini stir fry

food co-op stir fry

This dish was really simple, so it was sad that I screwed it up. I started off by trying to recreate a baked zucchini dish my dad and I invented last summer. I had sliced zucchini and summer squash sitting in the fridge, so I simply rubbed them with brown sugar and sesame oil laid them flat on a tray and baked them in the toaster oven. Looking back, I think my dad and I also used butter and salt and pepper. These want a significant amount brown sugar, and I think I skimped on it.

While these were the toaster, I chopped up some tat soi, leaves and stalks both, and sauteed them in hot vegetable oil with minced garlic and ginger. Since I had already used the sesame oil and ginger, I started to feel like my veggies were asian inspired, and decided to add some soy sauce. Usually, I only use soy to make fried rice, which can absorb a lot of soy flavor. The tat soi was overwhelmed by what I thought was a small glug of soy, and the dish became overpoweringly salty. To try and spread the soy around, I threw the zucchini and squash into the pan. Not only did this not particularly help, it also meant that I completely lost the brown sugar and sesame flavors. It was sad. Not terrible tasting, but disappointing nevertheless.


zucchini and tat soi with soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger

You might expect that I paired these veggies with some sticky rice, and if I had planned ahead, that's probably what I would have done. However, this wasn't so much a planned ahead dish as much as a "oh shit, these zucchini and summer squash slices have been sitting around since Sunday! and I need to use that tat soi!," so I ate it with leftover mac and cheese. The two made relatively strange bedfellows, but I was eating by myself and I wasn't too bothered by it.

It was my first time eating tat soi, and I liked it. I just wish I hadn't killed it with so much soy sauce. If the food co-op gives us more I may try this simple blanched and sauteed version. I also plan on trying my sesame brown sugar zucchini again, since it didn't work out so well this time. I think I just lost sight of the goal. Oops.

master meals, week 4: jody adams' gnocchi with mushroom fricassee

I have not been looking forward to writing this entry. Jody Adams may have broken our losing streak by becoming the first featured Master Meals chef to make it to the Champions round, but Nathan and I were less successful back in his kitchen. This was easily the worst thing we've cooked all year, including our blue cheese sauce disaster.

The recipe was for homemade gnocchi with mushroom fricassee, and it looked straightforward enough. Sure, I'd heard that making gnocchi can be pretty tricky, but I had done my research and I thought I had a pretty solid grasp of the process.


our gnocchi

Unfortunately, a theoretical understanding of making gnocchi will only take you so far, and we fell more than a little short in the execution. Instead of light, fluffy potato-y pillows, our gnocchi were dense, doughy bricks. It was quite a disappointment. I think that making good gnocchi is probably one of those things that you have to just develop over time, because I couldn't tell you what went wrong. My only thoughts are that I may have over kneaded the dough, and that it would have been lighter had I added more flour. The Jody Adams recipe used about twice as much potato as compared to flour than the other two recipes I was using as a reference.

Anyway, I won't pretend to give you any gnocchi tips, as I could use some good ones myself. I will, however, tell you a bit more about the mushroom fricassee, which was quite delicious and was the only reason I was able to stomach as much of the gnocchi as I did. We sliced and browned a whole pound of button and portabello mushrooms in some butter. We had to do this in two batches so as to not crowd the mushrooms, (a Julia Child tip). Then we removed them from the pan and sauteed up a shallot and a clove of garlic with more butter until soft. Then we tossed the mushrooms back in with a half a cup of marsala wine and let that reduce to a nice glaze. The recipe also called for fresh thyme, but we did without.

On its own, this mushroom fricassee would have been great. Adams poured reduced heavy cream over her gnocchi and spread the mushrooms, chopped tomatoes and parmesan cheese on top to bake. We used canned chopped tomatoes, which actually worked fine-- it was the gnocchi that were the real problem. They were just a leaden mess, and soaking in all the cream probably didn't help any either. Sprinkled with parsley, though, they actually looked pretty good. As we sadly learned, however, appearances can be deceiving.


not bad looking gnocchi

master meals, week 1: jimmy bradley's orzo lentil salad

So today's post introduces our first weekly feature on Garlicus Maximus: a dinner featuring a recipe from one of that week's Top Chef Masters competitors. I'm calling it Master Meals. (I'm sorry if that's unspeakably corny, but I kinda like it.)


Nathan's Top Chief pose

I've been a fan of Top Chef since its second season, and it actually was a big influence on me as I began cooking more and more. The Masters spin off is arguably better than the original, as the chefs are way less bitchy and competitive. Much of that stems from the fact that they are established and successful chefs, and are playing for charity, rather than to jump start their careers with nationwide exposure and prize money. There also seems to be a great camaraderie between all these culinary giants, and it is great to see how much they all respect and admire each other's different cuisines. The challenge of our Master Meals will be to find recipes from these great chefs that can be easily prepared by the home chef, aka Nathan and me. Needless to say, I don't expect we'll be making anything of molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne's, but I hope we can find some cool things to cook.

The season actually started last week, but I had a job interview so Nathan and I were not able to prepare our first Master Meal until Sunday night. While finding the time to cook was tricky, selecting a cheftestant was easy. My parents took us to the Red Cat for my birthday last month, and we were just blown away by the Jimmy Bradley's food and the restaurant as a whole. I especially loved that everything I read about Bradley's approach to cooking and dining echoed what we had experienced at the Red Cat. A "purveyor of straightforward, occasionally irreverent, food, and contagious conviviality, all of it wrapped up in an attitude-free package"? Yep, that was our meal in a nutshell. Not to mention the incredibly solicitous and helpful staff! As Bradley said himself in this (otherwise somewhat boring) interview, "All of my restaurants are chef-driven. Everything starts from the kitchen. My places aren’t about what’s fabulous, exclusive, and snooty. Customer service is a top priority, too. I concentrate on anticipating guest needs and recovering when we fail — we need to know what you need before you need it, and when we do make a mistake, we should be able to make up for it easily." I can say from first hand experience he's made that vision a reality.

For our Jimmy Bradley Master Meal, I found this recipe for Lentil and Orzo Salad. It seemed easy but tasty, with tomatoes, cucumbers, toasted almonds and fresh herbs. I basically picked it because I was intrigued by the french lentils, which Nathan's stepsister Helen had recently blogged about with great enthusiasm. I didn't know where I'd get them, but I happened to take Matt to the Chelsea Market on Friday, where recent addition the nut box was serendipitously selling them for only $2.50 a bag. Because the dish called for mint leaves, it seemed natural to pair it with lamb chops, which we rubbed with mustard, parsley, garlic, salt and pepper before pan frying. I also decided that I needed to try my hand at mojitos, my favorite cocktail, the result of which was incredibly exciting and satisfying and summery. We rounded out the meal with some cumin roasted carrots, which I'll be covering in depth on another post.


lamb chop, orzo, and a sprig of mint

As much as I would have liked our inaugural Master Meal to be an unqualified success, the recipe wasn't all that exciting. I wouldn't call it a dud, necessarily, but it was a little bland and forgettable. Nathan and I both felt that the lentils seemed out of place in a pasta salad, like they were a very conscious attempt to add protein to a vegetarian dish. The toasted almonds were a nice touch, but there were so few of them that they were easily overlooked. It also probably didn't help that the out of season tomatoes were flavorless pink mush. I also would have added way way more basil, and maybe some red peppers or a crumbly cheese or something. As Nathan pointed out, it's easy to make a good orzo salad, and we could easily improve on this one, perhaps even at the Whole Foods salad bar. I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't recommend this recipe.


orzo and french lentil salad

Unfortunately for Bradley, his time on Top Chef Master's went much the same way. While his seared lamb carpaccio salad was beloved by the judges, they found his partner, Gorvind Armstrong, had a prepared a rather dry and boring lamb chop. Sadly, the team finished in third place. I had been rooting for Bradley to move on to the Champions round, but I'm looking forward to seeing more of winners, Tony Mantuano and Susan Feniger. Meanwhile, for a Bradley fix I can just head back to the Red Cat, or try swinging by the Harrison. As for the rest of the French lentils, maybe I'll try Helen's sausage recipe before the weather gets much warmer.

Tonight's episode looks like it is featuring some heavy hitters, and I'm looking forward to it. After work, Nathan and I are meeting at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods to shop, and then we'll head up to his place to cook, eat, and "watch what happens." We've already selected our second Master Meal, and I'm excited to say we'll be preparing a dish by the one and only David Burke! Stay tuned to find out what it is!

A Cautionary Tale

We were making some steak, or something like that, I don't really remember. I thought it might be pretty cool to make a blue cheese sauce with it, so I went on the internet and searched for a recipe. The first recipe I found suggested that all you really had to do was put equal parts butter and blue cheese in a pan, turn up the heat, and let the ingredients do their thing. Bitchin', I thought, how easy!

Unfortunately, this was not the case. It quickly became apparent that the blue cheese wasn't melting right, instead separating into the oil and the solids. The butter just kind of added to the oilyness of the pot. It became a sort of yellowish-grayish-blueish miasma of crap.

We tried adding flour to solidify it, but this did not help. The flour absorbed some, but far from all, of the greasy soup. It ended up as a fluffy mess instead of an oily one, looking sort of like the bastard son of the worst matzoball in the world and some grayish goop. Believe it or not, it didn't taste half bad - it retained some of the blue cheese flavor despite this abuse - but it was absolutely unappetizing to look at, and it did not qualify as blue cheese sauce.

We ended up draining away some of the oil, shredding up the floury puffs, and mixing it into some spinach and mushrooms that we had made. It was okay.

So, let this be a lesson. I'm sure there are a lot of great recipes for blue cheese sauce out there. Mixing blue cheese and butter, then trying to salvage it with flour, is not one of them. Maybe you can find one - I sure couldn't.