red pepper hazelnut salmon

I stumble across recipes everywhere, and I never know what's going to catch my eye and get me to take a second look at one. In this instance, I think that it was probably that this roasted salmon with red pepper hazelnut pesto came from someplace called the Thyme Cafe & Market. I know that's a pretty cutesy name, but I also kind of love it. And then the recipe was an interesting sounding salmon dish with roasted red peppers, which I had in abundance from the food co-op, and toasted hazelnuts, which sounded delicious. I was sold.

As it turns out, this was actually really similar to a couple of things that I made last year: romesco sauce and pesto trapanese. If you'll recall, I actually wasn't too crazy about either of them, but I guess I just wasn't ready to give up on the idea. Somehow, every time I read a recipe with the nuts and red peppers/tomatoes combo, I just can't resist making it.

sunset tomato salad (with mushroom risotto)

I didn't get a great picture of this tomato salad, which Nathan and I made a couple of months ago. I normally make tomato salads with balsamic vinaigrette, basil, garlic and parsley, but when we didn't have garlic in the house, Nathan picked this out of his Sunset cookbook, and it proved to be a great alternative.

Unsurprisingly, considering it comes from a California lifestyle magazine, this tomato salad has a distinct Mexican flair, with spicy polano pepper and zesty lime juice, but make no mistake, this is tomato salad, not salsa. It was fresh and delicious, if slightly spicier than I would have liked.

Also, it was an excellent accompaniment to our famous mushroom risotto.

roasted potato salad with poblano mayo

poblano potato salad with bacon crumbles

Today I drove 4 and a half hours, largely in stop and go traffic on a stick shift. There were serious leg cramps involved, and I am tired and not exactly in the mood to blog about some potato salad I made over a month ago. But here I am, blogging just for you. And National Blog Post Writing Month, obviously.

There is a common thread in much of my writing here on the blog– "I got x vegetable, so I made x." This will start to trail off in the weeks to come, as I only have two more pick ups before the end of the season, but today's entry is another one in that mold.

I had a) potatoes, b) cilantro, c) poblano peppers and d) garlic. The obvious solution to the problem is Rick Bayless's potato salad. The potatoes and garlic are roasted, and then mixed with an olive oil based roasted poblano pepper mayo that you make in the blender. Then you add chopped scallion and cilantro, and plenty of crumbled bacon.

Of course, this was way way too spicy for me because I am a wimp, even though I used far less poblano than the original recipe called for. Also, the mayonnaise totally broke. So much for the foolproof blender method. Personally, I've never failed with a whisk and a slow drip of oil, but this go around with the blender totally confounded me. There was definitely a big puddle of oil on the bottom of my salad. I love Mexican genius Rick Bayless, but I count that as two big problems with this recipe, or at the very least my rendition of it.

Of course, there were a lot of things that were yummy tasty about this dish. Crispy potatoes and bacon, bright green scallions and plenty of roasted garlic. All good things. But the overly spicy peppers and too much slick and oily dressing really killed this potato salad. Don't get me wrong; I still ate it, but I felt like my own parent, bribing myself to eat just three more bites before I could have a cookie.


Rick Bayless's roasted poblano potato salad

Rick Bayless is still the man, but I definitely need to adjust his recipes to better suit my wimpy palate.

green pepper relish/apple crisp

spicy green pepper relish

Happy Friday everyone! I am currently drinking wine at my friend Lauren's apartment after Hill Country Fried Chicken and their awesome biscuits. I don't really want to be writing a blog post right now, but I am supposed to be doing this every day for the month. So yeah, here it goes. Needless to say, I am going to keep this short.


lots of apple crisp

Last month Lauren had a group of us over once again, and this is what I brought: green pepper relish, and apple crisp.

I made the green pepper relish because I had poblano peppers from the food co-op. I didn't know they were nearly as spicy as they are. In fact, I thought they were like, green bell peppers. Whoops. So instead of one tiny jalapeno and one much larger bell pepper, I had a one to one ratio of poblano to bell pepper. Whoops. My friend Mike loved the relish, but Lauren and I both found it oppressively spicy. I would have liked it if it maybe had about a quarter of the poblanos in it, which it probably should have if I just followed the recipe as written. Thanks food co-op, for not labeling your peppers.


a delicious fall treat with ice cream

Luckily, the apple crisp Laura and I threw together was way more successful. If I'm being honest, she actually made this on her own, but after she constructed it, I baked it, and I ate it, and I am perfectly qualified to tell you just how good it was: fucking delicious.

The oats, butter, flour and brown sugar topping was perfectly crisp and toasty, coating the spiced apples with tasty deliciousness. With vanilla ice cream, it's a perfect fall dessert. So thanks to Lauren for letting me use her laptop for this post, and for letting me bring this food to her house!

i miss arthur avenue

arugula, prosciutto and parmesean salad

I am really, really glad that I live in Manhattan now. Yes, it may be upper Manhattan, but it's still way more accessible than our old place in the Bronx. People are willing to come over on days of the year that aren't Fordham homecoming or my birthday party, and I love that.

What I do miss is Arthur Ave. The meat, the cheese, the torrone, the wine, the pasta... So much amazing foodstuff. I love it here in Harlem, but I haven't seen so much as a leaf of basil up here, let alone prosciutto di parma. I'm not asking for specialty Italian food, but a nice butcher would be cool.


red pepper and fresh mozzarella bruschetta

So, when I get a chance to go back, I blow two weeks of grocery money in a single afternoon and eat like a pig. I go to Casa Della mozzarella and buy pillowy little bocconcini. They are absolutely perfect and delicious bites just as they are, but I don't always stop there. I also go to Madonia Bakery for their excellent bread, (and peerless canoli), because bocconcini also make absolutely delicious bruschetta with some garlic marinated roasted red peppers, basil, parsley and some wilted greens.


prosciutto close up

Here we have a lovely and simple little salad that I threw together after my last trip to Arthur. I got a quarter pound of prosciutto di parma and a small wedge of parmesean at Teitel Brothers. I made the salad with the paper thin slices of cured meat, some curls of the cheese, a lemony vinaigrette dressing, and then arugula and tomato from the co-op.


four little bruschetta

Man, this was a good dinner. I wish I could get back up there more often. The ingredients on Arthur Avenue are so good and so flavorful that you barely have to do anything to them!

romesco sauce

romesco sauce

My CSA went through a month and a half long stretch where it gave us at least 3 peppers a week, and sometimes as many as 5 or 6. Peppers are good, and we did get a nice variety of them, but it didn't take me long to run out of ideas for cooking peppers:

I really like roasted red peppers, but since I still don't have the courage to try canning (maybe next year!), there's only so many of them I can eat, even with Nathan doing his part. Pepperonata is one of my favorite recipe discoveries of 2010, but I got a little tired of that as well. Of course, peppers are a key ingredient in ratatouille, but I only got eggplant from the co-op once this summer, and the zucchini supply ended surprisingly early. With the bounty of vegetables in my fridge, I wasn't going to buy even more just to use up a pepper or two. Many a time, I resorted to throwing them into a variety of soups, with varying degrees of success. Peppers don't present quite as much of a challenge as say, kale, but I was still struggling to use them all up.

That's why I was excited when I found this recipe for romesco sauce. Red pepper is the star ingredient, but it uses tomatoes too, which the food co-op was also giving us a lot of at the time. (Actually, we were still getting tomatoes as recently as Thursday, but we're shifting to a biweekly pick up schedule, so I'm certain that was the last of them. Which is sad.)

This was really easy to make. I roasted a red pepper over the gas stove, and peeled and seeded it. I pulverized some almonds in the blender, and then added some day-old bread, garlic, a couple of tomatoes, olive oil and salt. It also called for a chili pepper, but I think I used part of a jalapeno pepper. I also substituted balsamic vinegar for the suggested sherry variety. It came together in a flash, to a nice, thick, dip-like consistency.


red pepper romesco

This was definitely very different from my usual fare. Nathan really liked it. Laura and I were a little unsure. There was something about it that I found slightly strange, but not completely off putting. The almonds added a nice nuttiness, but I think that maybe they, combined with the bread, kind of subdued the brightness of the red pepper and tomato too much? I was glad that I tried this and happy to eat it, but I wasn't so won over that I'd make it again.

Still, it beats another generic red pepper infused soup, right?


mystery soup

I'm going through my Flickr account and I swear to god I don't even know what this one is made of– it might not even have peppers in it. But the good news is, if I don't remember it, I don't have to blog it, right? One more dish to check off the list!

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!

mozzarella en carrozza with sundried tomato jam

No pictures today, I'm afraid, but I'd like to tell you about the first real meal Nathan and I made after they snipped my wires and replaced them with rubber bands. It took me about twice as long as usual to smash up everything and carefully swallow it, but for what was essentially a grilled cheese sandwich, this mozzarella in carrozza was pretty soft and easy on my wounded jaw.

It was also a really nice night in general. Nathan's roommate, Pete, moved out in September, but we all ate this meal together before he moved downtown. It was also a special night because Pete recently started dating our very good friend Jess. This was a long overdue development. It's too bad that Jess and I can't hang out while visiting our respective boyfriends, but I'm of course very happy for them regardless of where Pete is living.

I've had mozzarella in carrozza before, but it wasn't quite like this. Here, the fresh mozzarella was sandwiched between two slices of bread and dipped in a mix of egg and milk, and then fried in butter. Basically, it was a hybrid grilled cheese french toast. When I had this on Arthur Ave at Marios, the bread must have been much much thinner, because I really thought it was just breaded and fried. This was also delicious, but much more sandwichy. I think the key was that the bread soaked up so much of the egg and milk that it kind of melded together with the cheese. If our bread had been thinner, it would have been an even more cohesive dish, and more like what I remembered.

The accompanying jam was what really excited me about this dish. Sundried tomatoes, roasted red peppers with strawberry jam, a little sugar, red wine vinegar and salt, it seemed easy enough. I liked it well enough, but we probably could have drained less of the olive oil off the peppers and tomatoes. It was definitely too dry, and not nearly jammy enough. Maybe my solid food cooking skills were still rusty? I'd consider making this again, but I wouldn't exactly jump at the chance. It was definitely tasty and hit the spot after a month of slurping purees through my teeth, but it didn't quite come together.

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.

soup revisited

As you probably know by now, having your jaw wired shut jaw really limits your dining options. Milkshakes and smoothies get pretty tiring after awhile, which is why it's good to switch it up with some nice savory soups. Today I'd like to talk about two different soups that I've made in the past couple of weeks. I've actually covered both tomato soup and broccoli soup before in the earliest days of this blog, but in both cases I did some things differently this time around.


a roasting pan of tomatoes

For the tomato soup, I put some of my beautiful food co-op tomatoes to good use by rubbing them with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasting them on a baking sheet in the oven at 375° for 45 minutes. I also roasted a handful of garlic cloves, two sweet Italian peppers and almost all of a jalapeno, which was cut open and deseeded.


tomatoes and peppers from the food co-op, and garlic

I neglected to photograph everything after it's stay in the oven, but rest assured that everything was deliciously shriveled and blackened. If I wasn't reduced to only the smoothest of purees, I might have been tempted to stop at that. Roasted tomatoes are a beautiful thing. However, under the circumstances, soup was my only option, so I plowed ahead without even so much as tasting one of my roasted beauties.

While the tomatoes were roasting, I started the soup on the stove top, sauteing onions in some hot olive oil with salt and pepper. Then I added a can of whole tomatoes, and let that cook. Then I added a couple of cups of homemade chicken stock, which has been a big part of my liquid diet and will be covered separately eventually.

Once my pan of tomatoes had cooled off a bit, I set aside one of the sweet peppers and two garlic cloves for hummus, but added the other red pepper and all the tomatoes to the soup. I discarded the jalapeno, because I could tell just from smelling everything that a good bit of its heat had run off into the pan juices. This proved to be a wise move, as the soup was almost spicier than I could handle as it was. I can't even imagine the damage that any jalapeno solids would have done, if the juices alone were that potent. Unfortunately, the red pepper kind of got lost amid all the juicy tomatoes and the heat of the jalapeno. If I made a tomato soup with peppers again, I'd probably use almost as many peppers as tomatoes.


tomato and red pepper soup with fresh basil

To finish things off, I added a large handful of basil leaves and then went to town with the immersion blender. Because I didn't peel or seed my tomatoes, I had to strain this soup in order to drink it. This is often the case, and it's definitely a pain. However, this soup was good enough that I didn't resent my time spent straining.


a spicy soup

The second soup was a broccoli and swiss chard soup, and it was very easy. Just some garlic and onions cooked in butter, and then chicken stock with broccoli and chopped chard. Once everything was nice and soft, I blended it all up and put it through a strainer. I also added some grated romano cheese. I lost a great deal of the broccoli when I strained the soup, and what was left separated from the broth, which actually turned green from the chard stems. It was definitely not the world's prettiest soup, so I didn't take any pictures.

Interestingly, I eventually doctored up both soups with some cream, albeit for very different reasons. As I mentioned before, the tomato soup, while tasty, was just a little too spicy for my liking. Some heavy cream smoothed things out quite nicely. The broccoli soup suffered from a very different problem. It tasted like bad health food or something. It was just "green" tasting, with no richness or other flavor. Some grated cheddar and half and half made a HUGE improvement. The soup that I'd been struggling to stomach was suddenly tasty! Dairy really does make all the difference.

ratatouille

I love the movie Ratatouille. When it first came out, I hadn't ever eaten the title dish, but I've since made it two times, with this dinner being my third. Last summer, Nathan smartly suggested I made it to use up some of my summer food co-op vegetables. Despite having seen the movie, I didn't even know much about the ingredient list, but it ended up matching up quite perfectly with a mid-summer's CSA share. Peppers, zucchini, yellow summer squash, eggplant, tomato, onions, tomatoes, garlic, basil, parsley... All farm fresh and organic from the farm. With ingredients that good, you can't miss.


ratatouille, fresh from the farm

The second time, I made ratatouille for a cooking class I was teaching for my roommate Laura, who runs a Saturday club program for girls in middle school. It was still tasty, but not nearly as good with winter grocery store vegetables. This is a meal that really sings in the summer, when everything is at the peak of ripeness. I'm not one to strictly adhere to seasonal eating, but in some cases there is just no arguing against it.

My last food co-op share before I broke my jaw, I had to marvel over just how closely the vegetables we were given matched the ratatouille ingredient list. The only things it was lacking was parsley, which I had already gotten at the grocery store, and tomatoes, which I picked up at Harlem's new Mt. Morris Park Farmers' Market, a scant 13 blocks from my house. Armed with my first local tomatoes of the summer, I was ready to go. Almost.

Even though I'd made the dish twice fairly recently, I found myself without a recipe, and unable to find the one that had served me so well last year. From what I could remember, my recipe was fairly straightforward. The vegetables were all cooked together in the same pot, added one at a time. When I tried to find a recipe, most involved cooking each component separately, and for salting, draining and pressing the zucchini and eggplant. This was more work than I cared to do, and more than was actually unnecessary, if my last year's ratatouille wasn't just a wonderful fluke.

I wound up perusing a Chowhound thread on the subject, and while I didn't find a recipe exactly like the one I was looking for, I did read through enough of them to feel comfortable trying to recreate the one pot method I had found last summer, although I did decide alter it slightly by cooking the tomatoes separately.

I started with the onions, sauteing them in olive oil with salt and pepper. I also threw in some of the beautiful herbs of provence that Nathan's mom Tenli gave me for Christmas for a real French feeling. In a second pot I sauteed some garlic in olive oil, and then added one and half large chopped tomatoes. I let this sauce simmer while I took care of the rest of the veggies in pot number one.

I let the onions cook for awhile, and then I added in succession one green pepper, one yellow squash and zucchini and one medium eggplant, each cut into small chunks. I cooked each vegetable for five minutes or so before adding the next one. I added the eggplant last because I was worried about it soaking up too much of the oil. (That's why so many of the other recipes suggested salting and pressing it.) I'm happy to report that it worked out just fine. Once the eggplant had softened, I added the tomato sauce and a decent amount of chopped basil and parsley.

Ultimately, I was a bit worried that it would wind up bland, so I loaded up on freshly cracked pepper and added some dried oregano. I let that cook for maybe five minutes more, and then took it off the heat. When my mom tried it a few days later, she commented that there was too much oregano, so I may have been a bit over zealous there. Personally, I thought it was deliciously fresh and herbaceous; a perfect celebration of summer!


rustic ratatouille

Unlike the dish Remy the rat makes in the movie, my ratatouille is not particularly beautiful or elegant. It's a simple, rustic dish. Though it's not much to look at, it more than makes up for its humble appearance with its bold taste. If you're looking for something a bit more visually impressive, you can actually make the dish as seen in the movie, a fancier variation of ratatouille called confit byaldi. The official recipe comes from renowned chef Thomas Keller. Julia Child also makes a fancier layered version. For me, easier was better, what with the heat we were experiencing for most of July, but I'd definitely love to try a more high end version of the dish some day. Regardless of appearance, I'm sure it's hard to make a ratatouille that's anything but delicious, especially this time of year. It's just the thing to make with your summer vegetables!

Master Sneals Week MCMXXIV: Rick "Bayless" Moonen's Bluefish with Dijonaise Sauce

Broiled Blue Fish Dijonnaise

Don't be fooled by the unappetizing picture, what appears to be a mound of gray and yellow goop is actually a delicious piece of fish! We got this recipe from this guy Rick Moonen. He is one of the contestants on Top Chief: Masters of the Universe and he looks a lot like last season's winner, Rick Bayless. He has an elaborate, yet surprisingly successful, combover. It's probably the best combover I've ever seen. The guy must shellac his hair with about 2 pounds of crude oil each morning to get it to work. He's also into sustainable fish and stuff. I actually found this recipe on some sort of eco-fish website, which has a bunch of other good meal ideas too.

You will need:
- Some small, portion-sized fillets of fish, or just one big fillet that you can cut up later. The original recipe said mackerel in the title, but then the actual text said bluefish, so who knows. We used one big bluefish.
- 1/4 cup mayo
- 2 tbsp. dijon
- some thyme and oregano, probably any herbs would do, whatever you like
- salt and pepper

This was incredibly easy. The only remotely difficult part was getting the pin bones out of the fish. Why don't fishmongers do that for you? I bet they have some tool that could do it really quickly with no effort. I thought this was America.

Start by putting a griddle under the broiler. I got a big griddle at Good Will a few years ago for like a dollar. It's probably worth more than that in scrap, and it is such a great cooking tool. I also got a little toy hippo at the same time. I've still got the hippo, too; it was really a bang-up day at the Good Will.

While the griddle is heating up, mix together the mayo and mustard and herbs. Season the fish with salt and pepper, then slather the top of the fish with the sauce mixture. Once the griddle is hot, put the fish on there, skin side down, for about 3 or 4 minutes. When the sauce on top has started to brown and bubble, you're done. That's all there is to it.


fish on the griddle

We served it with rice and peperonata. We tried Rick Moonen's peperonata recipe, which, while still good, is a step down from the one we used last time. It's pretty much the same as a standard peperonata, except it adds anchovies (wasted, no impact on the flavor at all, save them for something where they can make a difference) and tomato (no flavor impact, just made the dish more watery). He also did not call for red wine vinegar in the recipe, but I made a game-time decision and threw some in.

Overall, this meal was awesome and required very little time or effort. It even made good leftovers. It seems like fish is usually really easy to cook, all you do is kind of throw some sauces on a fillet and then cook it on high for a little bit. Or maybe that's just amateur hour stuff? Who knows. I like it.


blue fish and peperonata

maiale in agrodolce e peperonata

This gorgeous recipe comes from Saveur's April issue, which featured an absolutely inspiring spread on Roman food. Nathan's co-worker turned him on to it, and he insisted we make the cover recipe, and even though it was fantastic we've put off blogging it for quite awhile now.


the classic Roman porkchop

Impressive, no? Well, ours didn't look nearly as picture perfect, but it was still a damn tasty meal. The ones in the photo have been frenched, which looks fancy, but really just means you're cutting off all that tender meat along the bone, which is one of the two best tasting parts of the chop. Therefore, we didn't have any regrets about sacrificing Saveur's dramatic presentation for the sake of MORE MEAT.

To start, we seasoned our chops and drizzled them with olive oil. The recipe called for letting them sit like this for half an hour, but I can't recall if we listened or not. Basically, I'm sure resting the chops with the salt makes then more tender (that's almost like brining, right?), but the agrodolce glaze you're about to make is so good that it probably doesn't matter. Also unnecessary? A grill. We cooked our chops on Nathan's griddle, which has grill ridges on one side, but a regular skillet or pan would be fine.

For the sauce, we reduced ⅓ cup balsamic vinegar and 2 tablespoons of honey in a small pot. You want the sauce to get nice and syrupy, but don't let it get too thick. If it's getting to the point where it's so viscous that you're scraping, not stirring, you've reduced too much. This happened to us, but we just added more balsamic and it loosened back up. To finish the sauce, melt in a half a stick of butter and the leaves from one sprig of rosemary.

We then cooked the chops on medium high heat, basting with the sauce and turning them over every so often. They should be done after 12 to 14 minutes. The recipe instructs letting them rest for five minutes before serving, but these smell so good that it'd be understandable if you cracked before that.

As you might have expected, these are awesome. The balsamic honey glaze is more sweet than sour, but the rosemary really gives it a depth of flavor. It was my first agrodolce, and it won me over instantaneously. Cooking down the balsamic really mellows it out, and the sauce tastes wonderful with the pork; (I love pork so much and I love finding new ways to cook it).

Saveur's suggested serving these beauties with peperonata, which turned out so good that it rivaled the main dish. The onions and peppers become sweet and delicious, and the red wine vinegar finishes it off with a nice tang. So good, and so simple.

Simply chop up 4 assorted red, yellow and orange bell pepper, 4 cloves of garlic, half and onion, and cook them in a pot with a little hot olive oil. Add a quarter cup water and some salt and pepper, and just let them cook for about an hour, stirring every so often. Stir in 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar at the end, and you're done. Perfection!


hearty Roman fare

jambalaya

jambalaya and salad

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty good cook, but I'll be the first to admit that my range does not extend much beyond Italian food, American food, and maybe some basic French stuff. However, with the Saints playing in the Superbowl earlier this month, I got inspired to make some jambalaya, which is definitely outside my culinary comfort zone. My mom hates sausage and peppers, but selflessly agreed to my dinner plans, and cooked everything with me.

I found two recipes that we used, but I wasn't quite happy with the result. Sometimes AllRecipes can come through with something great, but I think the tendency there is for recipes that are overly simplified for the home cook. With such short cuts, it is difficult to develop any real depth of flavor. Unfortunately, in this instance, we took a cue from the AllRecipes jambalaya that we probably shouldn't have, and served our jambalaya over rice, rather than cooking the rice with chicken stock and all the other ingredients, as the second recipe had instructed. There wasn't much to taste other than the smoky and spicy andouille sausage, green peppers and tomatoes. If I made this again, I would definitely cook the rice in with all the other ingredients, as I suspect that would impart the whole dish with a richness and depth of flavor that it sadly lacked.

I wish I knew more about Creole and Cajun cuisine, as I felt completely out of my element trying to make a New Orleans classic. We used chicken and shrimp in addition to the sausage, and stuck to the so-called Holy Trinity of green peppers, onions and celery. Basically, we cooked it all up with tomato paste and canned tomatoes... It was fairly tasty, but I wasn't satisfied. I would definitely try this again and try to infuse the rice with the flavors of the dish, rather than mixing it in after it has been cooked. As it was, it just didn't seem like real jambalaya, even to my inexperienced palate. However, I did happily eat the leftovers while watching the Saints win!