brunch for the girls

I can't believe I haven't blogged about this, one of my finest culinary moments of the year to date. Of course, I can hardly claim all the credit, as this was totally a joint effort. Back around Valentine's Day, Laura and hosted a brunch for a bunch of our girlfriends with a bunch of pink, sweet, girly food. In honor of Ms Leslie Knope, who provided the inspiration, I called it Galentine's Day. Don't you just love a cheesy portmanteau?



Now isn't that a picture perfect table? Do you like how I stuffed vases with tissue paper that I've saved rather than buying myself roses? You do? Yeah I thought it was pretty clever too.

And what do you see on that festive little table? A plethora of delicious treats! You can see that I made some chocolate covered strawberries, the Glazer girls brought those festively attired ginger muffins with the heart toothpicks, and Hannah brought a crazy good pound cake seen on the left. I think it had honey in it. The plate in the back is of cookies that DiDomenico brought, and the little green and white bag was full of coconut macaroons from Effie. Laura and I always have such generous guests.



This dish was our main course, a hearty savory breakfast dish to balance out all the sugar and sweetness to come. Eggs baked with onions, bacon, eggs, goat cheese and shredded beets, this was intentionally similar to the baked egg casserole I made for our marathon brunch. I made it with beets instead of squash partially because we always get beets from the food co-op, and they are always the last thing that we end up cooking, but also partially because I thought the pink beets would be appropriately festive.



Aside from the eggs, Laura came up with and prepared most of our menu when she found a great article about hosting a tea in the New York Times. The author's suggestion was to have a nice refined tea party in lieu of partaking in the Super Bowl festivities. Now, I'm all for tea parties and girly things, (although I actually quite dislike tea, the accoutrements are great), but I love me some organized sports as well, so we watched the game and hosted brunch/tea the next weekend.



Laura made these delightful tea sandwiches with an herb caper lemon butter, cucumber and radishes. So elegant.



We teamed up to make whole wheat crumpets with blood orange and meyer lemon marmalade and clotted cream. I bough special heart shaped cookie cutters because I am super adorable.



The "clotted cream" was a delicious and super easy mix of mascarpone and heavy cream, whipped together. Very rich, and very tasty, as were the crumpets, but the sweet and tangy marmalade was easily the best part, in large part because it's one of those things where you're just like "Wow, I can make that myself?!"



Finishing out the meal were these champagne floats with homemade strawberry ice cream. And then we watched Sleepless in Seattle. Does it get any more delightfully girly than that?

ravioli with swiss chard, sugar snap peas and garlic chips/radish salad sandwich

ravioli with chard, sugar snap peas and fried garlic chips

So last Monday night when Nathan left for vacation in Italy, I decided to cook up some Borgatti ravioli. I had had a box in the freezer since I was last up on Arthur Ave the last weekend of April, but I was waiting for a special occasion to break it out. I guess I was feeling like if I couldn't go back to Italy, I could at least eat the best ravioli this side of Atlantic. The time was right. (Appropriately, Nathan actually gets back TODAY, and I am so excited!!!)

As I was leaving work, I stumbled across this recipe for spaghetti with swiss chard, olives and garlic chips. I had seen it before, but it hadn't particularly struck me at the time. However, with a bag full of chard slowly wilting back at home, it suddenly seemed much more appealing. So, when I got home, I dug into a fridge full of vegetables and used that recipe as a jumping off point for my dinner.

Obviously, I switched the pasta from spaghetti to ravioli, but other than that I followed the recipe fairly closely, with one notable exception. I've never really liked olives. Lately, I've been coming around on them somewhat, but I still usually avoid them. I definitely don't keep them in the house, and I didn't go out shopping, so they got axed from the recipe.

I sliced the garlic into thin chips and fried it in hot olive oil until golden brown. I removed the garlic from the pan, and added a diced shallot, which I cooked until soft. Then I added a pint of shelled sugar snap peas, (after almost five days in the fridge, the pods were truly sad looking), and then the chopped leaves of a bunch of chard. (I reserved the stems for use in a dish Nathan likes to call chard surprise, but I'll be saving that for another post.) Meanwhile, I boiled my ravioli in a pot of salted water until it floated. Once the chard was wilted and the pasta drained, I tossed it all together and added back in the garlic chips. Yummy!


ravioli with veggies and open faced salad sandwich

I also had some old Italian bread in the fridge, the end of a head of food co-op lettuce, not to mention that never ending bag of radishes. I toasted the bread with some butter so it would taste less stale, and then just topped it with thinly sliced radish, the red leaf lettuce, kosher salt, fresh cracked pepper and a drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar. It wasn't as extraordinary as my last radish sandwich, but it was quick and easy and helped me use up some of the food I have in the fridge. (If you too have a surfeit of radishes, you can simplify this even further and just eat them sliced with butter, salt and pepper. That's how I finally finished mine off.)


radish and red leaf lettuce salad on Italian bread

So that was that. Dinner without my boy. Inclusion of peas aside, I think he would have liked it. That being said, for those of you keeping track this type of dinner is getting to be bit of a standard in my kitchen. Olive oil, garlic, onion, cooked greens, an extra veggie and some pasta... It's getting a bit formulaic, and I'm wary of falling into a rut. That being said, when there are so many greens to use up, there's only so much you can do with them. If anyone has any especially interesting suggestions, please pass them along!

What I did particularly like about this recipe that made it stand out from the pack was the crispy fried garlic slices. If you too are intrigued by the idea of garlic chips, I also happened upon this post which a couple of other interesting ideas for crunchy fried garnishes. I use a lot of browned garlic in my cooking, but it's generally more finely chopped and serves more as additional flavoring than as stand alone element of a dish. I'm intrigued by exploring this idea of crispy little garnishes and what not. In my first post of the year, I mentioned a dinner that Nathan and I made that included blue steak, creamed spinach and a poached egg with crispy onions. This we did accidentally, but I ended up really liking it. This other blogger's post has got me thinking that there could really be something to this flavorful crispy thing!

gnocchi with pan fried radishes and turnip tops

gnocchi with radishes

So remember when Nathan and I made Jody Adam's disastrous gnocchi in cream sauce? Well, even if you don't, I've had nightmares enough for the both of us. They were soggy, leaden, doughy lumps that sat in our stomachs like cannon balls. An undisputed utter failure.

Well, believe it or not, we had uncooked gnocchi leftover which I actually froze and saved, and I was recently brave enough to defrost them and try again. Nathan told me to just throw them away and not suffer through the awfulness yet again, but I hate to waste food, and I suspected they might be slightly better if I were to pan fry them to a crisp golden brown. (This smitten kitchen posts assures us that after pan frying we will never boil again.)

The verdict? Browning made all the difference! They still weren't super amazing or great, but they were actually quite palatable, and much lighter than the cream laden ones we had cooked the first time around. I'm sure I could improve with practice, but I think the first batch went so badly wrong because we used too much cream and didn't reduce it enough, not because of any fatal flaws in the gnocchi itself. Somewhat of a comfort.

Of course, I had to go and overload the cast iron skillet by about 5 or 6 gnocchi, making it nearly impossible to flip the little dudes without smushing them together. Typical move on my part. Luckily, I still got them all to brown, and if a couple of them joined together to form conjoined twin super gnocchi, it had very little impact on the final flavor.

As for the gnocchi accompaniments, I was inspired by my surplus of radishes and starting-to-yellow turnip tops. I happened across a New York Times article and recipe that sang the praises of cooked radishes, and I was immediately all about it. You can only slice so many of those things and throw them in salads.

I quartered my (surprisingly large) radishes and set them face down in a hot oil pan and just let them brown for about three minutes. After they started to color, I added some finely chopped garlic and stirred it all around for a bit. Then I added the chopped green tops of two bunches of turnips, mixing them around until they all began to wilt. After the tops were cooked through, I added the golden brown gnocchi back into the pan and sprinkled with shredded parmesan. It was all actually pretty good. Cooked radishes are damn tasty, and when it comes to gnocchi, pan frying is definitely an appealing option.


homemade gnocchi: better pan fried

skillet mac and cheese with bacon/fried goat cheese salad

Nathan got really mad at me for this one. He's always suggesting we make mac and cheese, and I'm never in the mood and then he gets cranky and accuses me of cruelly withholding his favorite thing that I cook. And then a couple of weeks ago, I made mac and cheese without him. Oops. When he gets back to the states I'm going to have to welcome him with a big cheesy American style pasta dish to make up for it. Maybe I'll go uber traditional and use elbows. Or maybe I'll make it Italian style and add pepperoni and sundried tomatoes. We shall see.

This mac had five cheeses plus bacon and onions. I didn't deviate much from my previously described method. (If you are looking for more mac ideas, Mark Bittman unsurprisingly has some great ones, or you could make Gordon Ramsay's.) I made a cheesy bechamel sauce with butter, flour, a spash of hot sauce, a dash of worcestershire sauce, some salt and pepper, shredded parmesan and grated romano. I fried a couple of slices of bacon and some sliced onions. I cooked up a pound of orecchiette until tender and then mixed that into the sauce with the bacon and onions. I think I also added some little slices of garlic scape. I layered the pasta mixture with grated cheddar, monteray jack and gouda cheeses, and topped with breadcrumbs and extra of all five cheeses. Then I baked it in Laura's cast iron skillet. When we inevitably part ways as roommates, I will miss that the most. Like, aside from her, obviously.


macaroni and cheese

It was pretty good. Orecchiette is one of my favorite pastas, but I think it might be a little too thick and chewy for macaroni and cheese. I'm afraid that the pasta on top got a bit dried out and tough. Otherwise, it was delicious. Obviously a little smokey bacon and sweet onion take things up a notch,and the bacon and gouda really complimented one another well.


skillet baked mac and cheese

I also tried to pair it with a fried goat cheese salad. This didn't end up working out so well, so the horribly out of focus photo is somewhat appropriate. That isn't to say it wasn't tasty, just that I didn't wind up with the beautiful and neat little crisp golden goat cheese cakes that the recipe's author promised...


fried goat cheese in a lemon mayo dressing

As you can see, the breading burned and kept sticking to the pan, and I had to kind of stick it back onto the cheese... And it looked so good, too! In retrospect, it's probably my fault though. I didn't feel like breaking out the eggs, so I just rolled my freezer-firmed goat cheese rounds in bread crumbs and tried to fry them up in a hot pan of melted butter. I bet the egg would have helped everything stick together better. Obviously goat cheese + butter + bread crumbs still = TASTY, but it was a good deal messier and far less attractive looking than I would have hoped.

What was just a perfect as I imagined it would be was the dressing: olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, homemade mayonnaise, white vinegar and dijon mustard. Salt and pepper to taste. If I had had poppy seeds, I certainly would have added them, but this dressing was delicious even without them. Very bright and fresh, it tasted delicious over food co-op greens and some of my never ending $1 radishes.

farmers' market sandwich creation

sandwich with both parts of the radish

I don't know if you've noticed, but I tend to improvise a lot in the kitchen. That's why you won't find a lot of recipes in my posts, but rather more free form explanations of what I've been up to in the kitchen. This might be frustrating if you're not super comfortable in the kitchen and you are looking for more exact instructions on how to replicate our meals at home, but I do always link to the recipes that were my jumping off point, so hopefully this isn't too much of a problem.

Anyway, my point is that even though I don't worry too much about following a recipe exactly, I almost have one (or two), that I am using as a guide. Therefore, when I come up with a dish entirely on my own, it is kind of thrilling, even if it is only a simple sandwich, like the one I am going to talk about today.

Going on three weeks ago now, back when Nathan and I were still doing our Master Meals series, he suggested I swing by the Union Square Market on Saturday afternoon so we could make Jonathan Waxman's famous chicken on Wednesday. I thought this was a good idea, but by the time I got down there, the chicken vendors were gone, and we never did get around to making more Master Meals.

What I did make was this delicious sandwich, inspired by the bounty of the late spring farmers' market:


fried eggs and goat cheese atop radishes

Thin-as-I-could-slice-'em radishes, creamy salted goat cheese, a runny fried egg and sauteed radish tops atop a crusty roll. All freshly bought down in Union Square and prepared with a minimum of heat and thus ideal for a hot summer day. What was especially great about this light little meal was that it all kind of came together in my head organically, (no pun intended), as I wandered the market.

"A huge bunch of radishes for a dollar? Those would be great marinated with oil and vinegar, salt and pepper and served on some buttered bread, and I can cook the greens up with some lemon juice. But how can I make this more of a full meal? Eggs for $2.25 a dozen? Oh, a HALF dozen? Expensive, but now I want to make egg sandwiches, so let's just go for it... Oh look! They are closing up for the night so a bag of four rolls is only two bucks! Anything else? There's goat cheese. I love goat cheese. Four ounces for $5. Great!"

This all came together brilliantly. The radish slices gave it crunch, and the buttery bread and runny eggs richness. Nathan made the astute observation that the lemon in the greens mixed with the egg yolk made it taste a bit like hollandaise sauce, and the goat cheese was the perfect creamy, last minute addition. These sandwiches were so good, I'm even going to write up my approximations of a formal recipe so those of you playing along at home can make this yourselves. So, without further ado:

"The Garlicus Maximus" – Whole Radish Sandwiches on Garlic Bread with Goat Cheese and a Fried Egg
makes 2 sandwiches

the green tops from a large bunch of radishes
2-3 medium to large sized radishes
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
kosher salt
freshly ground pepper
½ a lemon, juiced
½ a stick butter at room temperature, plus extra for frying eggs
2 cloves garlic
1½ tbsp goat cheese
2 rolls

1. Wash the radishes, removing the greens and setting them aside. Slice the radishes as thin as you can. (I don't have a mandolin, but I imagine it would be helpful in this situation.)
2. Mix the olive oil and vinegar in a small bowl and add the sliced radishes and a generous amount of salt and pepper. Let marinate while you make the rest of the sandwich.
3. Smash the garlic cloves into a paste. You can use a mortar and pestle to do this, or you can scrape the clove with the side of your paring knife. Mix the garlic into the softened butter.
4. Slice your rolls in half and spread the garlic butter on both sides. Toast in the oven or toaster oven until golden brown.
5. Saute the radish greens until wilted over medium low heat in a frying pan. They should still be wet from when you washed them, which will prevent them from burning in the hot pan, but you can heat up a little oil or butter before you add the greens. Add lemon juice and season with salt and pepper.
6. Fry two eggs and season with salt and pepper.
7. Assemble the sandwiches. Layer the thinly slice radishes on one half of the sandwich, and the lemony greens on the other. Pour a little of the left over vinegar and oil mixture over the sliced radishes. Spread a goat cheese over the radish slices, and top the greens with the eggs. Crack a little black pepper onto the cheese. Fold to close, and enjoy.


soon to be devoured sandwich

PS: If you are, in fact, playing along at home, or even just reading along, drop us a line. I'd love to hear how our recipes turn out back in your kitchen, and it's great to get feedback. Kthxbye.

cooking 2010

Nathan and Jess both independently have suggested I keep note of everything that I cook, so I figured it could be somewhat of a project for the new year.

I didn't cook anything the week after Christmas, but I think I quite made up for it this week.

Nathan recently got me this great book, The Flavor Bible, and I happened to flip open to the monkfish page on Monday. For every ingredient, they have complied a list of other ingredients that accomplished chefs consider to be complementary, as well as brief descriptions of their go-to dishes for that ingredient. Serendipitously, monkfish was described as a great match with cabbage, garlic and potatoes, (all of which I had recently gotten from my CSA food co-op), and bacon, (which I pretty much always have on hand). Since I wasn't sure of what to do from there, I typed in those ingredients into google, and came up with this recipe, which included a couple of other things I had lying around: shallots, red wine, fresh thyme, bay leaves, orange juice, and chicken stock, which I had made and froze myself. All I had to buy was the parsley and monkfish, which cost $10 a pound.

I quartered the shallot and also a small onion and I think a couple of smashed garlic cloves, and sauteed them with the bay leaves, parsley and thyme in some butter and olive oil. I added a cup of wine, some stock, the juice of two small oranges, some salt and pepper and cooked the cabbage in the mixture for 40 minutes. There was a lot of liquid involved, but in the end it all cooked off, leaving a deliciously flavored vegetable behind. I think that the homemade stock really gave it an added richness and depth of flavor, but even without it this cabbage would have been a winner.

Meanwhile, I had marinaded the fish in olive oil with salt and pepper for about a half an hour. Before we started cooking it Nathan had to bone the thing, because I was not paying attention and didn't ask the fish guy to do it for me. My boyfriend is incredible, so he did this perfectly. So impressive. By the way, if you don't know, monkfish is incredibly hideous. We quickly pan seared it in the cast iron skillet, and then wrapped it in two slices of bacon and threw it in the oven for about 15 minutes. I stuck it under the broiler in the end so that the bacon would get nice and crisp. Amazingly, the fish was moist and delicious, but not undercooked. A triumph.

My recipe suggested preparing mashed potatoes, but I wanted something a little more toothsome. The potatoes I sliced thinly and pan fried with garlic in a little bacon fat, (sorry mom and dad). There were way too many of them in the pan, but I kept shifting them around to get as many as possible crispy. I finished them off in the oven with the lid on, and they were great. The crispy ones were great, but even the ones that weren't got cooked through nicely, and there were tasty garlic nuggets every so often.

Together, this made for an amazing meal. The Flavor Bible wasn't playing around when it suggested combining all these different things. Separately, each component of the meal was delicious, but together, the ingredients really sang. Wow. A symphony of taste!

Wednesday night we went a more traditional route and fried up some crispy onions with a couple of small blue seared shoulder round steaks from Whole Foods. These were pretty much raw in the middle, which was really rich and meaty tasting, but probably not a way I'd chose to eat my steak in the future, especially if it was a normal supermarket steak. As our side dishes, we made up some rice, a roasted red pepper, and creamed spinach with a poached egg. We used frozen spinach upon Nathan's insistence, but I'll grudgingly concede that it wasn't even half bad. The other ingredients were pretty basic, just half and half, flour, onions, garlic, butter and nutmeg. It was easy and delicious. Do not fear egg poaching-- just heat a couple of inches of water until bubbles are forming on the sides and then crack in your eggs for four minutes. Remove carefully with a slotted spoon, (Nathan managed to break my yolk, which was so sad and left me way less runny goodness) and this WILL be perfect.

Thursday I was home alone and made one of my standard issue dinners: panfried pork chops, orrechiette with sauteed mushrooms in a homemade tomato sauce with fresh rosemary, parsley and basil, and some steamed broccoli rabe with garlic and oil which I kind of burned because I am bad at cooking alone. I also overcooked the pork, which was a thinner cut than I am used to having. This dinner was not all that well executed, I'm sorry to say. I think I was missing my boy in the kitchen! However, I will say that the pasta was great with some grated Romano cheese. Still have some of that in the fridge to look forward to!

Saturday, Nathan and I had Bart over for dinner and made lamb chops with a radish salad and a potato leek gratin. We boiled the potatoes in the left over half and half from the creamed spinach, and sauted the leeks with butter and a little bit of bouillon because I didn't have a chance to bring my stock over to his house. We actually forgot to cream the leeks, and just poured the extra half and half over the whole thing, which ended up having an extra layer of potatoes on the bottom. This wound up being a little watery, but delicious.

Thinly sliced radishes with plenty of olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper are tasty enough on their own, but try tossing in some leek tops and the crunchy, slightly bitter leaves. Drizzle on the balsamic, and you have an amazing salad.

The third component of the meal offers this cautionary tale: Never cook with jerk seasoning on the stove top unless you have a super effective fume hood, (I suspect the oven would be better, but not a perfect solution). Nathan and Bart made this crucial mistake with their lamb, and we all paid the price. Our lovely chops had been on the griddle for only a few minutes when the jerk spices started burning, and the fumes became unbearable. It was like pepper spray, and Bart and I beat a quick retreat back to Pete's room to take refuge from the smoke. I could barely breathe and could not stop coughing. Nathan somehow managed to continue manning the stove, although he was forced to undercook the lamb a bit to stop the meat from releasing toxins into the air. That stuff is lethally hot, as my lamb managed to take on a considerable amount of heat just from being cooked in close proximity to their stupid jerk sauce. My lips were on fire. Despite that major hiccup, it was a tasty meal, with plenty of good wine courtesy of Bartosz.

All of these meals were great, (or would have been without hellish jerk seasoning), and were actually gluten free, save for the pasta and creamed spinach, which easily could be if you used the right flour and gluten free nutmeg. And that's my week in the kitchen in review, for posterity's sake!