duck legs with spinach, carrots and mashed potatoes

So awhile ago Nathan and I went down to the Tompkin's Square Park Farmer's Market on a Sunday to "see what was fresh," as is so popular amongst the food blogging set. We picked up some beautiful duck legs, cute cipollini onions, some fresh spinach and little potatoes and made us some braised duck.

Now, duck is probably my favorite meat, and I know Nathan is pretty fond of it as well. We made an incredibly delicious roast duck for Christmas dinner at my parents' house this year, but this was our first attempt at an every day sort of duck dinner. Back in December, we made a typically complicated recipe from the epic Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. This time around, we once again took a page out of Alice Waters' book, but we were less ambitious and looked to The Art of Simple Food and Chez Panisse Cookbook for our inspiration.

We trimmed the extra skin and fat off the legs, sliced it and fried that up first to render the fat. We tried eating the cracklings with salt and pepper, but they weren't as good as I thought they would be. Kind of burnt I guess. Meanwhile, we let the duck sit after we'd salted and peppered it. After an hour or so, we browned the legs in my big oven proof frying pan, pouring off the fat as it collected.

After the skin of the duck was a nice mahogany brown, we removed it from the pan and set the legs aside for a moment. We tossed a couple of diced food co-op carrots and some chopped celery into the pan and let that cook for awhile. Then we added the duck back in, skin side facing down, a bunch of the peeled cipollinis, and poured in some homemade chicken stock and a little white wine for the braising liquid. I am pretty sure we also added some lemon zest as per Alice's suggestion.

We put the pan in a 425° oven and covered it for a half hour. Then we flipped the duck and turned down the temperature to 325° for an hour to an hour and a half. At some point, and I don't remember when, we dumped off the braising liquid and let the fat rise to the top so we could skim it off. When the legs seemed thoroughly tender, I put the spinach and some parsley in the pan and let that wilt in the juices.

Unfortunately, I found that this dish, while flavorful and delicious, was just too greasy and oily. Even though we skimmed off as much duck fat as we could, it really clung to the whole dish. I was especially disappointed with how greasy the spinach got, even though we just added it the very end. Of course, it was duck with amazing onions and vegetables, so we didn't complain too much. I'm just not sure if braising is the best way to go with such a fatty animal.


not your typical meat and potatoes

More successful were Alice's easy mashed potatoes. We chopped them up into medium sized pieces and boiled them about 15 minutes. After draining them, (reserving some of the water), I put them back in the pot and turned the heat back on to dry them out for a few minutes. That's a trick Aunt Cathy taught me. Then we took them out of the pot and poured in a little milk and potato water, which we also heated. Then we added back the potatoes and some butter and whipped it all together with the electric mixer. Delicious! I ask you: how are mashed potatoes so good?


easy mashed potatoes

top chef: original flavor AKA we're not cooking these unproven shmoes' food

Let me just start out by saying that there is no new recipe today, and if you're not a fan of Top Chef, this post won't be of much interest to you. You also might not want to read ahead if you missed the season premiere and don't want to be spoiled. With that much said...

Nathan and I have decided that we aren't going to do a blog feature for the new season of Top Chef. I liked making our Master Meals, but to be perfectly honest, we often found it difficult to find many recipes from the cheftestants, and I think the small selection left us with some less than fabulous dinners. I definitely think that our overall success rate with the Master Meals was lower than for the regular dinners we make. Moving forward, we're going to cook whatever strikes our collective fancy. If that relates to Top Chef, cool, we'll make a note of it, but we're certainly not going to make a point of it.

We did however, decide to make a little friendly competition of the new season. Based solely on the opening sequences, pre Quickfire, Nathan, Pete and I each placed our bets one cheftestant to win. The loser has to buy dinner, and the cost of the dinner is proportional to how well the winner's chef does compared to how poorly the loser's chef performs.

Initially, we were going to pick immediately after the credits rolled, but they went by in a blur of names and faces, so we decided to let the competitors introduce themselves and that we'd choose right before the first challenge began. I first wanted to go with Angelo based on the opening, because he reminded me of season five's Fabio, the most likable little Italian man. Then he opened his mouth and reminded me instead of that jerk from Flipping Out. Part of me is glad I don't have cable at my apartment because that means I can't get bored and watch the crap that makes up the rest of Bravo's lineup. Anyway, since I very quickly went from thinking Angelo was cute to thinking he was repulsive and cocky, I switched to Kelly from Colorado. This was probably a mistake, because Angelo ended up edging out Kenny for both the Quickfire and Elimination challenge wins. Winning the first challenge almost always guarantees you a spot in the finals. Season three's Tre was controversially axed after a Restaurant Wars redo, but Kevin came in third, Stephan came in second, and Stephanie, Ilan and Harold all took home the title. If I had stuck with Angelo, I probably could have ridden his coattails to a very nice dinner indeed.

That being said, I did better than Nathan at the very least. Kelly's dish garnered compliments from the judges during the show, and Gail Simmons called it "another standout, even if she was not the strongest in her group," on her blog. Pete's pick, 51 year old culinary instructor Lynne, skated through without much notice, but Boyfriend's horse, John of the scary dreadlocks, struggled the whole episode through. I knew he was in trouble the moment he pulled something out of the freezer in Whole Foods and announced he had never used it before. Frozen, pre-made AND you've never used it before? Three strikes you're out, John. On top of that, he foolishly attempted a dessert, the usual kiss of Top Chef death. Needless to say, he went home, even over fake Kate Hudson's grainy chicken liver mousse. Sorry Nathan... now where do you want to take us to dinner?

grilled lamb chops with gorgonzola butter/salad with dried cranberries and candied walnuts

My mom and I prepared this dinner a couple of weeks ago in honor of my dad's birthday. The recipe came together rather serendipitously after we shopped for the ingredients. My dad had asked for lamb, so that was all we had to go on initially. We picked some beautiful little chops at King Kullen, and talked out the rest of the meal on our way through the store. We decided on baked potatoes and a nice red leaf lettuce salad with dried cranberries and walnuts. On our way past the cheese section, I also decided to pick up some gorgonzola, which dad loves. So do I, for that matter.

Anyway, upon our return home, we decided to look online for tips on grilling the lamb. I figured I'd just find a simple marinade or something, but I found so much more when I quickly turned up this recipe for grilled lamb chops with gorgonzola butter. Since we had just bought the cheese, everything else just fell into place. Don't you just love that?


gorgonzola buttered lamb chops and potatoes

We did marinate the lamb for an hour or two with some olive oil, minced shallots and garlic, and salt and pepper. The recipe also called for rosemary, which definitely would have been nice, but my mom has some strange aversion to it so we left that out.

That was the boring part. The fun part was sauteing shallots and garlic in butter, and beating them together with a stick of butter, gorgonzola cheese, minced parsley, a healthy amount of cracked black pepper and a little olive oil and lemon juice. After this was one gooey mass, I rolled it into a log, covered it in plastic wrap, and stuck it in the freezer to firm up before dinner.

My dad took over grilling duties, and cooked the lamb to perfection. Each chop was topped with a healthy schmear of the gorgonzola mixture, which melted like, well, butter. It was both delicate and decadent. We also slathered it on our baked potatoes. Delicious, but definitely too rich for regular consumption. It was without a doubt a birthday type of meal.

Like the lamb, the salad was easy and delicious. I tore up some red leaf lettuce, crumbled up some of the gorgonzola, and tossed in a hefty handful of craisins. The only even slightly tricky part was preparing the walnuts, which I decided, in a fit of inspiration, to candy. According to the recipe I used, all you have to do is heat some sugar in a saucepan, add walnuts as it melts, and stir to coat the nuts in sugar. It worked nicely, but I was fairly stingy in the amount of sugar I used since I didn't want a whole lot of extra melty sugar and nothing to use it on. I probably could have done with a spoonful more and been better for it. I think we just used a balsamic vinegrette as a dressing, but regardless this salad was fantastic. So light and fresh and fruity!


a fabulous salad with pungent cheese, crunchy nuts and delicious fruit!

It was all in all a very nice dinner, although it was lucky Nathan was not around for it. First of all, he is crazy and thinks neither fruit nor nuts have any place in salads. Also, we had just enough chops for the four of us, and there weren't any more at the store. Boyfriend would have had to settle for a cheaper, inferior cut of lamb, haha.

master meals, week 8: tony mantuono's crespelle with ricotta and marinara

crespelle with ricotta and marinara sauce

So, Top Chef Masters ended its season last week, with Ethiopean born Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson narrowly edging out Rick Moonen and Susur Lee. If you've been reading along, you may be thinking "hmm... this Master Meals series thingie didn't feature two of those three finalists." You'd be right, and I'm afraid that's not going to change. We kind of fell off the bandwagon the final two weeks of the season, partly because Marcus and Susur's food is a bit removed from our culinary comfort zones, and partially because I had a Yelp event with free food one Wednesday and that killed our momentum. So, we skipped cooking entirely the second to last week, and then last Wednesday we made chicken marsala instead of a master meal (we'll eventually get around to blogging about that too, I'm sure).

For now, I'm going to talk about this awesome dish by Tony Mantuono, Obama's favorite chef. Crespelle are really fun to make, like little crepes, only not quite as thin and therefore less delicate and difficult to perfect. The batter was particularly easy to prepare. Simply combine the wet ingredients (two eggs and three quarters cup milk) with the dry (three quarters cup flour and a half teaspoon salt), and then stir in a tablespoon of melted butter. Aside from the instructions to cover the crespelle batter and let it sit in the fridge for an hour, this recipe was really quick to prepare as well.

I fried the crespelle for three minutes each in a frying pan rubbed with an olive oil soaked paper towel. I wound up with only six of them, because I didn't have a quarter cup with which to measure the batter. They are like thin pancakes. Then Nathan and I spread each crespelle with a mix of ricotta, parmesan, parsley and cracked black peppper and folded them into quarters. Nate had made up some tasty tomato sauce, so we spread half of that in the bottom of our baking pan, and put the crespelles on top. Another layer of sauce, some parsley and extra grated cheese, and we simply popped the pan into the oven for 25 minutes.


oven baked crespelle

Nathan will disagree with me but I think this dish blows a simple lasagna, (which will also be making a blog appearance one of these days), out of the water. It's like an easy manicotti. So good!


getting ready to plate

my csa!

Today I am so excited. Would you like to know why? It's because I picked up my new CSA for the first time, and this is what I got:


the season's first food co-op share

This is a ridiculous haul for the first pick up of the season, and I actually left behind a beautiful head of romaine lettuce because there were just too many greens! I am just blown away by this spread. Zucchini, summer squash, Boston lettuce, mixed lettuce, a cousin of bok choi, parsley, cilantro, turnips, spinach, mixed lettuce, that big woody kind of kale or whatever, a carton of sugar snap peas.... It's ridiculous. Take another look:


squash, turnips, tatsoi (fake bok choi), and that awful kale

This is my second year in a CSA, or community sponsored agriculture. I go to the food co-op pick up site once a week and pick up that week's share of locally grown organic vegetables and fruit. This year I'm in the Central Harlem CSA at 135th and Adam Clayton Powell. I know it's still early, but I have a good feeling that it's going to be better than the old Norwood CSA Laura and I were in last year. I checked back and our first share there consisted of 4 garlic scapes, 6 scallions, .75 lb mixed braising greens, 6 turnips, 6 of the tiniest radishes I've ever seen and 3 bok choi. Now, the women who were running the distribution tonight were the first to say that this was an unheard of bounty for the the second week of June, but that doesn't make me any less impressed with this new CSA.

Compared to Norwood's, the produce was impeccably clean and large. I thought that food co-ops meant runty veggies covered with dirt. I mean, that's not a problem, but apparently, if you shell out a bit more cash, you'll get prettier produce. The veggie share at Norwood was only $315, but down in Manhattan the lowest available price was $410, and members are encouraged to pay $540 or $625 if they can afford it. I wasn't pleased about the price hike at first, but the location is way more convenient, and now that I've seen the produce, I'm diggin' it.

I don't know what I'll be cooking with my new bounty, but I happen to have tomorrow off so I'm definitely going to spend some time in the kitchen. I am so excited for this season!

ghetto black bean soup

black bean soup with cumin crema

I made this a couple of Thursdays ago while I was watching an evening's worth of NBC comedies. I was kind of cranky because I think some plan for the night had fallen through, leaving me with nothing to do and nothing in the house to make for dinner. As I sat there vegging out and gradually growing hungrier and hungrier, I decided it was time to do something with some of those black beans from the food co-op that I had sitting in the pantry. I threw a large handful of them in a pot with some water without much thought, and eventually wound up with the soup pictured above.

This tasted quite tasty considering I was pretty much winging it. I have no idea how long I cooked this for, as I kind of started without realizing what I was doing. I improvised a lot. I didn't have any ham or peppers, like my mother would have used, or any chilies, red onion or lime, like this recipe suggested. However, beans are of themselves pretty rich and hearty, so I guess that the bulk of the flavor is already there, and all the add ins are less essential.

Basically, what happened was that I had the beans boiling away, and I kept adding more water, and then after awhile I added a cup or two of my homemade stock. Then I sauteed up some yellow onion with salt and pepper and a healthy sprinkling of cumin, and tossed that in the pot as well. I cooked this all on a really high boil because I was hungry and didn't want to wait a million years for dinner. In lieu of the ham, I diced a slice and a half of bacon, (a terrible brand to boot), and threw it in the frying pan. Once it had crisped up I added it into the soup with the pan drippings. I checked the beans every once in a while, and when I decided they were soft enough/I was too hungry to wait any longer, I went to town with the immersion blender. If you cook this the proper amount of time, blenders are unnecessary, but I was already taking a lot of liberties with the dish, so I decided to expedite my dinner.

The one ingredient I strangely did have was cumin seeds, which I toasted in a frying pan, ground up as best I could with my muddler, and mixed into some sour cream. This "crema" is a Bobby Flay recipe, and it probably would have been delicious had my sour cream not somehow frozen in the back of the fridge. In case you were wondering, it does not defrost well. At all. However, you could tell this was good.

All in all, the soup came out way better than I could have reasonably expected. I would have topped it with a little fresh cilantro, but I didn't have any. I needed something green for the photograph though... Spinach. I tore up some spinach. Like I said, ghetto black bean soup. Good, but ghetto. Will definitely have to try making this again properly, because it's one of my favorite soups, and mom has a GREAT recipe for it.

master meals, week 7: jonathan waxman's steak tartare and potatoes with melted raclette

waxman's tartare and potatoes

We've fallen a bit behind on our Master Meals series. We made this quite awhile ago, after loading and reloading the google book copy of A Great American Cook until we found a Jonathan Waxman recipe that we both liked. Nathan is crazy about steak tartare, and I was willing to give it a shot.

As it required no cooking, the tartare was pretty easy to make. It did, however require a whole lot of chopping. First, the meat, which I sliced into ⅛ inch strips and attempted to dice. Then we quartered a lime and chopped up half a red onion, a couple of shallots, 4 cloves of garlic, a jalapeno chile, a serrano chile, a tomato and a half cup of parsley. Like I said, a lot of chopping. Then we mixed the meat with salt, pepper, a few shakes of tabasco sauce and the juice of a lemon. The other ingredients we piled on a plate, and added them in as we saw fit at the table.


tartare mix-ins

Somehow, this didn't quite come together. It wasn't bad, but I didn't enjoy it all that much either. I think that the steak wasn't chopped small enough. I did the best I could with a knife, but I think having it coarsely ground would have worked better. Nathan also thinks we should have mixed in some egg yolk. That probably would have been good. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is evident in the picture below. You can see that the pile of onions and shallots and such was almost as big as the pile of meat, and I didn't even do the full three recommended shallots. It was pretty much all we could taste after we mixed it all together, and I kept on tasting it all night through to the next day's lunch. Decidedly unpleasant.


a salad, tartare and all the fixins

The potatoes, on the other hand, were great. We boiled them for 20 minutes, and then sliced them real thin. After tossing them olive oil and salt and pepper, we crisped them under the broiler with half a pound of shredded raclette cheese and cooked until it got nice and bubbly, which only took two or three minutes. Raclette tastes pretty nasty cold, but it melts into total deliciousness. I would definitely make potatoes like this again, and I'd love to find another raclette recipe.


raclette roasted potatoes

photos of pasta with anchovy sauce, wilted radicchio and an olive oil fried egg

Remember when we blogged about Nancy Silverton's pasta with anchovy sauce, wilted radicchio and an olive oil fried egg? No? Well take a look back, because we made it again and now there are pictures!

creamy polenta with sausage and parmesan

There's the pasta. It was awesome. And here is me eating it, even though I always get annoyed when Nathan photographs me during dinner. It's never flattering, and this is no exception.

I didn't realize what a lovely (read: unfortunate) view into the bathroom there is from my dinner table.

Anyway, you guys should make this. You will love it!

fancy carbonara

A traditional carbonara is made with spaghetti, eggs, pecorino romano cheese, guanciale and cracked black pepper. Of course, you are probably used to a carbonara with bacon or pancetta, since guanciale, or cured pork cheek, is hard to find outside of Italy, except at specialty stores. You also might expect to find some garlic or parsley or maybe even onions thrown in there, and you're probably used to a carbonara sauce thickened with cream or half and half. You might not even think twice about using parmesan in lieu of romano (although having recently attempted such a substitution for the first time, I urge you not to). Although your conception of carbonara might deviate from the original dish first served in Rome, you'd expect most people to agree that both feature the same flavors and textures, and that such variations or adaptations are true to the spirit, if not the letter of the culinary law.

I'd be right there with you, had I not recently discovered that there is a small but vocal community of carbonara purists out there, trolling the web in order to find and attack the authors of so-called "bastardized" carbonara recipes. Edward Schneider of The New York Times became one such victim when he blogged about his attempt to recreate at home the carbonara dish he had been served by Joël Robuchon at his restaurant in Monte Carlo.

This carbonara uses small bite-sized pasta such as acini di pepe, although we settled for orzo. The pasta is served with crispy strips of bacon, cracked black pepper and a rich creamy sauce of caramelized shallots, parmesan cheese and heavy cream. Schneider suggests slow cooking an egg for 45 minutes at 145 degrees and cracking one into each serving, but when we tried to fudge this, we wound up with hardboiled eggs. So we had egg salad for the next day's lunch and just put a raw egg into each bowl of hot pasta and then stirred it all together and ate our soupy carbonara with a spoon.


orzo carbonara

As amazing as that dish sounds, folks immediately went to town in the comments, belittling Schneider for calling such a dish a carbonara, and going so far as to demand a correction from the Times and less sloppy and careless global reporting. It was all pretty ridiculous. (Bonus points if you can pick out Boyfriend's inflammatory comment aimed at putting uppity carbonara purists in their rightful place.)

Robuchon is a masterful French chef. He was actually voted the chef of the CENTURY, so he's got nothing to prove, and I'm sure he's well aware of the "true" recipe for carbonara. That being said, the chef of the century is not going to serve the traditional carbonara as perfected by Roman peasants. He's going to take that tried and true recipe and play around with it, tweaking the ingredients and methods in order to create something new and high end that both pays homage to and is evocative of the original dish. Great chefs don't replicate, they create.

Now, I am sure that "real" carbonara is fucking fantastic. I'd love to make it some day. Perhaps I'll see the error of my ways and never again add cream or garlic or parsley or bacon. However, I'm pretty sure I'm always going to think the carbonara I grew up with is delicious— because it is, bastardization or not! And so was Schneider/Robuchon's!

Basically, the way I feel is that if someone thinks that carbonara has cream in it, that doesn't make them an idiot and that doesn't even make them wrong. Their understanding of the dish is simply filtered through an American lens. For better or for worse, cream and bacon have become part of the dish's identity, and people can and should call pasta with bacon and a cream/egg/cheese sauce carbonara. That's cultural evolution for you.

Our enjoyment of food is deeply tied to memory and nostalgia, so I can understand being attached to a particular recipe. For instance, I doubt you'd be able to convince me there's a better way to make pesto. However, I'm hardly about to attack someone if they have a different idea about how to prepare it. What is the kitchen, if not a place to experiment with taste and smell and flavor? And as Schneider points out, the flavors of carbonara "seem to lend themselves to being taken apart and put back together again." Why not change things up up a bit?

Recipes aren't written in stone, and each person is going to have their own tastes and opinions. It's subjective. In any dish there is always room for change, and dare I say it, maybe even for improvement? To be too attached to any one recipe is just close-minded and irrational. Don't let your culinary creativity be stifled, and don't worry if stodgy purists think you're calling your dish the wrong thing! Cook and eat what you love, whatever you call it.

If, by any chance, you'd like to read more about the real carbonara, one particularly obnoxious fellow has written a minor epic detailing the reasons why you must never, under any circumstances, deviate from the tried and true Roman original. There's also this less pompous and self important piece on traditional carbonara technique and an accompanying recipe from Saveur, although it uses parmesan rather than romano. I'm fascinated by the thought of a silkily creamy sauce made only from eggs and cheese, so don't be surprised if I blog a more traditional version of this dish sometime soon.

Finally, let me just say that however you may change, adapt or "bastardize" any of the meals we describe here on garlicus maximus, I wish you the best of luck in your kitchen. May all that you eat be delicious!

spinach pancakes and "fried" chicken wings

chicken wings and spinach pancakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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