anchovy and spinach pasta with tomato

spaghetti, spinach and tomato in anchovy sauce

This was easy and delicious: angel hair pasta, tossed with spinach and tomatoes that had been sauteed in olive oil that I loaded up with garlic and lots and lots of anchovies. The spinach cooks quickly in the pan, and the tomatoes only break down the tiniest amount. In this dish, they aren't a sauce but a vegetable, just briefly cooked over high heat. The spaghetti is coated in savory olive oil, and the tomatoes are only one more component of the dish, rather than its defining element.


not fishy

In general, I love pasta, and the simple combo of garlic, oil and anchovy makes a surprisingly rich and delicious sauce. I know it may seem unexpected but, as long as you don't use too too many anchovies that you use, this is surprisingly unfishy. Those little buggers just melt way into the hot oil. I used probably close to ten anchovies, but the garlic and spinach were still the predominant flavors somehow. When you cook the anchovy, it dissolves into the oil, leaving behind a nice savory umami flavor, but little of the pungent fishiness that so many people take issue with. Adding the tomatoes and spinach makes for a nice hearty dish with plenty of veggies. Sprinkle with a hefty amount of grated cheese and some fresh black pepper, and you are totally good to go.

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!

baked kale chips

hey it's baked kale chips

This is another one of those things that I probably shouldn't even both blogging about because it's been so extensively covered by other food writers, most of whom are way better at this than I am. (This is normally where I would give you a series of links demonstrating just how saturated the blogosphere is with this recipe, except that a: I almost typed blogoshop, which sounds like a vaguely terrifying place, and b: I sliced open my left pinky cutting brussel sprouts off the stalk tonight so I am typing with only nine fingers.)

Well pinky be damed, I am still going to tell you about these kale chips anyway. I can hear Nathan complaining already, but I have my reasons. Firstly, I don't really think my "audience" is reading any other food blogs, so I expect this will still be new to all five of you who are here. Secondly, I'm not writing this blog to get a deal writing a cookbook of my original recipes. I'm writing this blog to keep a personal record of what I'm cooking. What worked, what didn't, what I loved, where I got all my recipes... In other words, it's not about you, dear reader, it's about me.

But seriously, even without these reasons, and even if this wasn't pretty tasty, I'd probably have blogged about this just because it looked so cool. My baked kale chips, lightly oiled and salted, were not only an excellently crispy snack. They were like a lovely plate of fallen autumn leaves!

As for this recipe, the amount of attention it's gotten is somewhat ridiculous. My theory about the popularity of baked kale chips is that they've taken off because everyone is joining a CSA these days. Food co-ops tend to give out a lot of kale, which is not exactly the world's tastiest veggie. Baked kale chips are crispy and salty, which everyone loves, and they don't really taste like kale anymore. Hardly a revelation, for sure, but still a marked improvement on some more steamed or stir-fired kale.

Plus, check out how cool these look! Like fall on a plate. With Thanksgiving around the corner and piles of freshly fallen leaves on the street, it's hard not to get a smile from eating something that looks so seasonal.


a cookie tray of baked kale leaves

Believe it or not, these peeled right off the baking sheet, and stayed pretty much in one piece. If you really must know, I followed this recipe from the Smitten Kitchen. Happy kale chipping!

balsamic orange beets with goat cheese and walnuts

beets cooked in orange juice and balsamic vinegar

So as I've mentioned, I'm not too crazy about beets. I don't dislike them, but I get very bored of them after a few bites. Beets are kind of a chore. But I promised I'd try them with goat cheese, so that is just what I did. I know that adding pine nuts is another popular choice, but there was apparently some shortage in China and those little buggers cost $20 a pound, so I used walnuts instead. Way more affordable.

I also took a peek in The Flavor Bible, which suggested pairing beets with oranges. I had some orange juice in the fridge, so I peeled my beets, chopped up an onion, and then boiled the beets in a mixture of oj and balsamic vinegar.


beet salad with goat cheese

Served over arugula with goat cheese and toasted walnuts, these orange infused beets were pretty much as good and they were going to get. That being said, I still wasn't too thrilled with those beets. It was good, but I guess beets just aren't my thing, because I didn't really want to finish them.

Unfortunately, I'm going to keep getting beets as long as I'm in the food co-op, so I guess I'll just have to keep looking for a beet that I love.

bread salad: the good and the bad

I really only started cooking after I had my own kitchen and couldn't rely on my parents or the caf to feed me. I knew my way around the kitchen from helping out my parents, but until the summer after my junior year, it wasn't a place that I chose to spend much time in. That June, I found myself cooking for ten on a service trip to New Orleans, when no one else seemed comfortable stepping up to the plate. With very limited resources and absolutely no recipes, I somehow managed to make something that everyone ate without complaint. I wouldn't call that dinner a triumph, but I would say that it kindled something deep inside me. Bolstered by that success, I began to feel drawn to the kitchen.

After my trip to New Orleans, I went to Europe for two months. Obviously, food was a big part of that trip, and I didn't have to prepare most of it. Traveling with friends through Britain, Spain and France, there was always another restaurant, another sandwich shop, another gelato shop. When we finally got to Italy, Mike, Marianne and I stayed in a small apartment with a tiny little stove in Cinque Terra. One night we bought pasta and lots of fresh veggies in the town of Riomaggiore, and I cooked dinner. It was just a simple pasta dish, but I got a real thrill out of making something tasty from quality ingredients.

From Cinque Terra, we went to Pisa and to Rome, and then we went our separate ways– Marianne back to New York, Mike to Albania, and I to Florence. There, I had an apartment with five other American girls for a month. It was a fifth floor walkup, but there were three bedrooms, a tiny living room, a rooftop balcony with a view of the Duomo (*sigh*), and a pretty nice kitchen. Obviously, I ate out a great deal in Florence, but I also went shopping at the San Lorenzo Market and started making myself dinner.

I probably only cooked three or four times while I was in that apartment, but it was always kind of fun and exciting, even if the results weren't that spectacular. I remember making a great pasta dish with onions and cannellini beans, and calling up my Nona to get her recipe for pasta in ricotta cheese sauce. Again, nothing super fancy, but I got quite a sense of accomplishment from throwing those dishes together without a recipe.

Of course, after a while I felt like making something more traditionally Florentine. I don't remember where, but I did find a recipe for a bread salad called panzanella that Italian peasants made with their stale bread. I had lots of stale bread, and it seemed easy, so I decided to whip up a batch of panzanella.


soggy panzenella

Unfortunately, it was soggy and bland, and a total disappointment. I figured I must have done something very wrong. I was a novice cook, and I didn't think it was possible that I could be so unimpressed with traditional Italian food. I love me some peasant food, so this mushy mess just couldn't be right– could it?

Well last month I gave panzanella another shot, and let me tell you the result was exactly the same. Totally bland, even loaded up with basil, garlic, roasted red pepper, tomatoes and sauteed spinach. The bread, though toasted absorbed all the moisture from the veggies, turning the salad into a cold, wet, unappetizing pile of sludge.

Basically, I don't know why this dish hasn't been put out to pasture. Panzanella is just not good. Luckily, I have an alternative for you that is way better.


it's not panzanella– it's way better

Though this dish has a lot of the same ingredients as panzanella, it manages to avoid getting soggy and gross. I cubed the day old bread, but instead of toasting it, I melted some butter in a cast iron skillet, and then tossed in the bread. I let it sit until it got really crispy, and almost burned. Then I stirred all the bread around, letting it soak up all that butter goodness. Almost saturated with butter, the bread stayed crispy on the outside, even when I mixed it with sauteed arugula and pan fried tomatoes. I threw all that on a plate and topped it with some goat cheese, plenty of cracked black pepper and a fried egg.


toasty buttery bread with goat cheese, pan-fried tomatoes and wilted arugula

Now that's what I call a delicious bread salad.

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!

lemon buttered green beans with toasted almonds

really good green beans

I must apologize for the rather boring blog posts this weekend. I've been a little overwhelmed with all the posting this month, and I guess I'm in need of a second wind. Hopefully that will come with the start of a new week.

Anyway, today I've got these green beans for you. I'll be the first to admit that green beans aren't my favorite vegetable, but made like this they make a great side dish. All you need is a little butter, lemon, salt, pepper and slivered almonds, and you can make the lowly string bean sing.


green beans with almonds

We got a lot of green beans from the food co-op this summer, and this was my go-to preparation. Simply toast the almonds briefly until golden brown, making sure not to let them burn. Then the green beans are cooked in melted butter over low heat, sprinkled with lemon juice and tossed with the nuts. It may not seem like much, but it's really quite good.

tomato mayo sandwich

tomato and mayo on toast

So it's difficult to top a really ripe and juicy tomato. They are just so delicious and it's a shame that those mealy pink monstrosities are all that's available for so much of the year. Believe it or not, I just finished my last batch of awesome local tomatoes yesterday. I made a tomato basil tart, which I will be covering soon, but first I would like to throw up a quick post about a simpler way to enjoy a really wonderful tomato: sliced thickly, between two slices of toast slathered with mayo.

This may not sound like much, but there actually have been odes written to this sandwich. It doesn't get much easier than that, and the straightforward ingredients really shine in such a barebones presentation. For best results, you should really try making your own mayonnaise. It's thicker and more flavorful than the store-bought variety, and actually not way too painful or time-consuming to make.

Sometimes you just want something basic for lunch, and this quite fits the bill. I feel like there was some children's literature character who used to eat tomato sandwiches, and I think that the childhood Sarah thought that was gross, but as an adult I totally appreciate a shining tomato and some crisp bread adorned only with mayo.

pesto trapanese

tomato basil pesto

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

"what did you have for dinner?"

"some pesto with salad and a pork chop."

"like, straight up pesto?"

"no! with spaghetti, duh."

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

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

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

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

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

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

corn, bacon and green bean hash

corn and green bean stir fry

This is a little something I like to call "omg what am I going to do with all these vegetables I better just throw them in the frying pan with some bacon and that should taste pretty good right?" And believe it or not, it did.

There's not really too much to say about this one. I just chopped up everything real small and cooked it in my small frying pan. Sweet yellow corn, green beans, onion, basil, grated romano cheese, plenty of cracked black pepper and some toasted walnuts. It all came together is a sweet, salty mix of deliciousness. And that was all she wrote.