marathon brunch 2: butternut squash baked eggs/french toast with roasted banana ice cream and toasted pumpkin seeds/bagel and lox

If you've been reading along, you'll recall that least year, Laura and hosted a brunch to celebrate the New York City marathon, which conveniently passes right by our apartment. If you've never experienced the marathon, it is hard to imagine how much fun it is to stand out there on the street, cheering and high fiving the runners as they run a seemingly super-human distance. It is also particularly great to be able to pause and reflect on their amazing accomplishments by eating ridiculous amounts of french toast and eggs.

In other words, let me tell you what I made for our second annual marathon brunch.




That's boozy french toast (as discussed in my second blog post ever), with amaretto, eggs, milk (or cream? doesn't matter really), a little sugar and some cinnamon. I let it soak in the egg mixture and then baked it in the oven. I served it with fresh whipped cream, candied pumpkin seeds and roasted banana ice cream. Oh, and a little maple syrup. Just in case there wasn't enough deliciousness piled up on there. The roasted bananas get really lovely and caramelized, and because the fruit is so naturally sweet, you barely need to add any sugar. (My only thought is that this might be even better if there was an egg custard base, because it wasn't quite as creamy as it could have been. But I am afraid of egg custards because the only time I tried to make one it broke so I'll take a slightly crystallized ice cream over prolonged stove-top trauma.)

Lox

I love lox but I don't like to spend a lot of money. Store- or deli-bought lox often comes at ridiculous prices, with a few pitiful coral slivers weighing in at ten bucks or more. One time I went to the Ess-a-Bagel near where I work and a bagel with cream cheese and lox cost $13. What the Christ? Suckers must think I'm made of money.

One day I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. I had the bright idea that I could probably make my own lox spread on the cheap if I bought a little lox, shredded it somehow, then mixed it with cream cheese and herbs. I never did find a recipe for this, mainly because I got distracted by an amazing discovery. It's incredibly easy and, most importantly, amazingly cost-effective to cure your own lox at home. If you use this method you can get mass quantities of lox while saving about 75% of the cost.

First, buy a big piece of salmon. I got a big fillet in Chinatown, it weighed about a pound or two, I don't really remember. This cost me around ten bucks.

Next, lay out a big piece of saran wrap and place the salmon on it, skin side down. No need to remove the skin, it'll peel off later. Mix one cup of salt and two cups of sugar. I just used the salt and sugar straight up, but at this point you can also place any flavorings that you would like on top of the salmon. Pepper, dill and various spices all would all work.

After that, cover the salmon with the salt and sugar mixture. You want to make sure it is totally covered on all sides (except the skin side that touches the saran wrap). The three cups of salt/sugar that I used might have been a little much. I feel like there was a lot of excess material, but who knows. This is raw fish you're dealing with so you want to play it safe and make sure it gets cured. Also, make sure to remove the pin bones, which are little toothpick-sized bones that can be in the fillet. They're pretty easy to spot and remove just by pressing down on the fillet and grabbing them.

Once you've done that, wrap the whole bundle up tight in several layers of saran wrap. Place it on a dish (in case any fluid leaks) and let it sit out for 6 hours or so. After that, place it in the fridge, still on a dish, and let it sit for another 24-48 hours (I've seen different amounts in different recipes). I think mine was in there for maybe 40 more hours or so.

When it comes out, discard all of the excess salt and rinse off the salmon. At this point you'll be able to peel the skin off really easily in one piece. Throw it out, or maybe you know something you can do with cured salmon skin? I certainly don't. Take a very sharp knife and slice the salmon into thin strips. Cut diagonally, starting on top with the side that wasn't the skin and cutting down and towards the thin end of the fillet.

Mine came out delicious and the whole operation, including the cost of the fish and estimated costs for the salt, sugar, and saran wrap used, set me back maybe thirteen bucks. I got a ton of salmon out of it.

Check out this New York Times article for some other variations on lox.

pizza odyssey

When I was still living in the Bronx, no one wanted to come all the way up north to visit. This was understandable, but perpetually disappointing. However, I have great friends, so there were occasions when they all made the trek to visit Laura and me. Generally, this happened I bribed them with food. My final stint as a Bronx hostess was no exception, as I offered our guests the best of Arthur Avenue's imported and homemade delicacies served up on a pizza.

Nathan's delicious meatsa trio

As I alluded to in an earlier entry, our old oven was a totally crazy inferno, to the point where Laura was afraid to light it. The first time I baked a cake, I was shocked to discover that it was cooked through in less than half the prescribed time. It was absolutely impossible to tell what temperature the oven was set to, and I would have to try and gauge by opening the broiler to see the size of the flame. Needless to say, this was a considerable culinary challenge when it came to most foods. However, when it came to pizza, I had long suspected that the high temperatures would only work in my favor.

creamy taleggio cheese with porcini and cremini mushrooms make the night's best pizza

Professional pizza ovens exceed 1000 degrees as a matter of course, so home cooks have difficulty replicating their results. Many bloggers have tried and failed, but they didn't have my oven. I cranked it up to full heat and left it on until my entire apartment was swelteringly hot-- no small achievement considering the jerks downstairs hadn't turned on the heat all month. Anyway, my mom gave me grandma's old oven thermometer, and the needle went past the maximum temperature of 500 degrees and back past 250 degrees before something inside it burst and covered the interior with chalky dust. Also, I got nice rubber coated pot holders for Christmas, and they actually started melting. This pizza party was intense, and probably the closest I'll ever get to making pizza parlor pies at home.

prosciutto di parma, pepperoni, polly-o and sausage

I was pretty proud of how well the whole thing came off. I made my own dough, my own sauce, and used fresh herbs and the finest toppings that Arthur Avenue had to offer. However, that is not to say that things went off without a hitch: my first pizza was actually a total mess. Jess lent me her pizza stone, so I put that in the oven to get properly hot. If you're properly equipped you use a wooden peel to transfer the pizza onto the stone. I was not properly equipped, so I thought maybe I could just drop the pizza in there on a sheet of wax paper. I tried this, and as you probably will have guessed, it immediately began to burn and melt. We awkwardly attempted to transfer the first pizza to a sheet of aluminum foil and tried again. The final product, with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella from Casa and fresh basil and parsley, was delicious, but more closely resembled a ghetto disaster of a calzone than a proper pizza.

the first attempt: a delicious mess

However, we used the foil technique for all the rest of the pizzas with wonderful success. I ended up making five pizzas that night and seven overall. (I baked up the rest of the dough with some olive oil, herbs and a little grated cheese to make pizza flatbreads to bring to Jess and Marc's birthday). In addition to the deformed plain pie, there was pepperoni one, and several specialty pies: a porcini cremini mushroom taleggio pizza with fresh basil, a lox pizza with a sour cream, dill, shallot sauce and Nathan's home cured salmon, and my boy's prosciutto di parma, sausage, pepperoni stuffed crust send up to the meatsa trio, ingredients purchased at Arthur Ave's amazing Calabria Pork Store.


Nathan's homemade lox with fresh parsley and a dill sour cream shallot topping

The next day I also made two pizzas including a three meat pizza with Polly-O cheese (ran out of the fresh stuff!) and fresh basil and parsley for lunch. They were allllllll awesome, and so easy to make! I've recently recreated the mushroom pie as a crostini, so you can expect an elaboration in a later post, as well more on the homemade tomato sauce. Also, hopefully Nathan will also share his lox with you. For now though, I'll leave you with everything you need to know to make your very own pizza dough.


the risen dough

This recipe makes two 10 or 12 inch pizzas, depending on how successfully you stretch the dough! Bake as soon as you've topped your pizza, and at the highest possible temperature, as it will cook faster and keep the dough from getting soggy and your pizza from being a floppy mess.

Carefully stir one packet of yeast into a cup of warm water with one tablespoon or either sugar or honey. I used sugar, because I forgot my honey at my apartment and I made the dough at Nathan's because boyfriend has a bad-ass Kitchen Aid, but lots of recipes seem to prefer honey. While the yeast is getting nice and frothy, (let it sit for about 5 minutes), mix three cups of flour with two or three tablespoons of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt. Slowly add the yeast and water, mixing until they form a dough. This is easier when you have a mixer, but definitely doable by hand. After it comes together, knead the dough on a floured surface for a few minutes and then form it into a ball. Drizzle olive oil into a bowl to coat it, and set the dough in it to rise, making sure to cover with a towel or plastic wrap. The dough should double after an hour or two, after which you want to knead it again. At that point, you can let it rise again, or you can get down to the business of making pizza, giving each pizza crust a nice dusting of cornmeal on the bottom to make it less sticky. I let my dough rise again for hours and hours, and that was fine. I even refrigerated some of it over night and kneaded it and let it rise again before I finally baked it. You can also freeze your dough, but I think you have to do that before it rises. I was totally expecting to fall flat on my face with my first attempt at pizza dough, but it was surprisingly easy. Try it!

more pizza dough than you could possibly ever need