Anchovies

I've never eaten anchovies before. In fact, I don't honestly know the difference between an anchovy and a sardine. But Ed went and edumacated himself because he wanted to make this pasta sauce with anchovies in it that he'd seen on Molto Mario. Or something like that. I was a little suspicious, but, in the end it turned out well enough. I don't exactly know what went into this, just that he put together all the things and cooked it for a while, and then the fish sort of disintegrates into nothingness, just a little bit of salty fish flavor, which doesn't sound all that appealing but it actually tasted delicious.

I think there was plenty of basil, onion, garlic, a can of tomatoes, a couple fresh tomatoes, white wine, the anchovies - I hear the important thing is to first soak them in milk, to draw out some of the saltiness. Ed did this. Sorry this isn't much of a recipe, but there are plenty of "tomato sauce with anchovies" recipes out there if you use the google. I'm just here saying you should try it. I wanted to try this with tunafish, but got told that wouldn't taste good. I think hes probably right about that.

Squash soup

Its squash soup season again! My favorite time of year. This was a particularly good soup, if I can say so myself, although it was a bit on the thick side. Which is fixable, but I'm lazy some days. This gets a good Ed-rating, he liked it too. Its especially good with some fresh bread to dip into it... just a suggestion...

Squash soup

~4C chicken stock
1 parmesan rind
1 bay leaf
half a cinnamon stick
1 clove
1 onion
4 cloves garlic
1 small apple (or half a regular sized one)
1 butternut squash
2 tbs olive oil

Chop the onion in half, use half in the soup and caramelize the other half for putting on top. Heat some olive oil in a pot, sweat the onion, add the garlic, its all going to get blended so nothing needs to get too finely chopped. Add the chicken stock, bay leaf, parmesan rind, clove, and cinnamon. You can skip all the spices if you want, but it won't be as good. Peel and chop the squash and add it to the pot. You could roast it first, Ed suggested that, but it was an extra step I didn't want to do. Peel and chop the apple. Boil everything until the squash is super soft. Take out the parmesan rind, cinnamon, clove, and bay leaf (have fun finding them...). Using a stick blender, or a big blender, and blend it all up. Serve with some caramelized onions on top.

Eggless chocolate chip cookies

Yesterday was Ed's birthday. We didn't have any eggs or milk, so I couldn't make him a cake, so he asked for chocolate chip cookies. And then I remembered I didn't have any eggs. I browsed around for a chocolate chip cookie recipe without eggs, but the only ones I thought had a chance were ones that replaced eggs with some sort of strange vegan product or with a mixture of flaxseeds and water which had been soaked overnight. I needed to make these cookies now. Not the next day. So, I went out on a limb. I took a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe and just didn't add the eggs. I did add some water (for the correct texture) and some honey (hoping for chewiness), and I didn't bake them long. In fact, they might have been very underbaked, but there were no eggs, so its ok.

I never actually ate any of these cookies. Ed wanted big cookies, so I made him big cookies, but that meant that I could only fit four on the baking sheet. I took the rest of the cookie dough to work with me =) (about two big cookie's worth, if you plan on repeating this recipe and want to know the numbers - 6 big cookies). I felt that I should probably leave Ed all four of the baked cookies. But boy did they look good! And the cookie dough is delicious - and you don't have to worry about raw eggs.

Eggless chocolate chip cookies
1 stick butter
1/4C white sugar
1/4C brown sugar
2 tbs honey
2 tbs water
1C flour
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1C chocolate chips

Cream the butter with the brown and white sugars. Add the water, honey, and vanilla, and stir until its a uniform texture. Dump the flour, soda, and salt on top, and stir that around to mix it up. Then incorporate that dry stuff into the wet. Once it looks uniformly mixed, add the chocolate chips.

You can either save the cookie dough in the freezer for munching, or bake at 325F for 10-15 minutes (depending on the size of the cookie). Be sure to take them out before they get too brown around the edges, nobody wants crunchy cookies.

Pinwheel cookies

I made pinwheel cookies the other day. I don't know what inspired me to do this, but, they were a real pain in the neck. Sticking to drop cookies from now on. The main annoying bits were the multiple steps and refrigerations, which I knew were coming, but still, it just seemed like too much work. I wanted a mint chocolate cookie, so I guess that is why I decided on pinwheel cookies. They're pretty, anyway.

I found a recipe here, but I'm re-pasting it below because I changed things around to make mine mint and chocolate. I also made two separate batches of dough. Seemed easiest.

Chocolate half:
1.5C flour
1/4tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt
1 stick butter
2/3C sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
6 tbs cocoa powder
2 tbs oil

Mint half:
1.5C flour
1/4tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt
1 stick butter
2/3C sugar
1 egg
1/4tsp mint extract
Green food coloring

You can use one bowl for this, but start with the mint, because you don't want chocolate color mixing with your green.

In a large bowl, cream the butter with your sugar. Add the egg and flavor extract. Add green food coloring one drop at a time until the dough is as green as you want it (you can skip this if you don't want green cookies). Mix together the dry stuff, and add it to the wet stuff, mix to combine. Roll up the dough into a roughly rectangular shape, and refrigerate for 30min.

Do the same thing for the chocolate, but add the oil with the wet and the cocoa with the dry.

After both rectangles of dough have sat in the refrigerator for 30min, take them out and cut them into 2-4 pieces (I cut four pieces, I recommend 2). Roll them flat, until they're ~1/4" thick. I rolled mine too thin, which made for very small cookies. I found the dough warmed up too quickly which made rolling a real pain, but a well-floured table did the trick for me eventually. As I said, I rolled mine too thin, which also contributed to my rolling problems.

Lay one sheet of cookie dough on top of the other, and cut the edges so that it makes a square. Roll it up like a cigar, and return it to the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Repeat this with the other pieces of cookie dough.

Once they've been refrigerated, take them out, slice them, and place on a baking sheet. Bake at 325 for 6-8 minutes (probably more if you made bigger cookies). They don't spread out at all, so you can crowd them a little.





The end pieces don't look so pretty... but they still taste good!

Pasta with squid

I'm pretty sure I saw this recipe on the Bitten blog a while ago, under a piece written about the dilemma about sustainable fishing. There was a recipe for something with lobster and something with squid, and I figured I'd try the squid, since I had a couple pounds in my freezer from the Chinese grocery store downtown. I can't find the post now, though. I don't remember how much I actually followed a recipe, but whatever it was, it was really good. The usual "stuff with pasta" approach to dinner!

Pasta with squid and tomatoes
Serves two, approximately. Add more pasta for hungrier folks

1/2 box pasta - preferably something small and chunky, not spaghetti like I used here. Italian grandmothers worldwide are rolling in their graves right now saying "you can't have a chunky sauce with spaghetti!"
~1-2C cherry tomatoes
1/4C fresh basil, chopped or chiffonaded finely
1/4C fresh parsley, optional
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2lb squid, all the bits that look mostly edible, chopped into bite-sized pieces
~1/4C breadcrumbs, for sprinkling on top
parmesan cheese, optional
~1/4-1/2C white wine
salt, pepper to taste
Olive oil

Get a big pot of water boiling. Chop the onion and garlic, slice all the tomatoes in half. Put a glug or two of olive oil in a fairly big frying pan, and sweat your onions. Add the garlic and cook until its golden brown. You can pull this off the heat now until the water is boiling, because you want to finish your pasta in the pan with all the stuff, and the stuff doesn't take long to cook.

Once you've added the pasta to the water, add the cherry tomatoes and the wine and the herbs to the pan. Cook those for about three or four minutes. Test the pasta, if it seems close to done (as in, its edible, but a little TOO al dente for regular eating), drain it, and add to the pan. Toss around the pasta for a few minutes, until it tastes done. Then add the squid and the rest of the herbs, and cook that for about a minute, maybe two. You don't want to overcook squid, or it'll taste rubbery and blah. Don't be afraid to taste it, after a minute. Its probably done. Serve this onto a plate and sprinkle bread crumbs and/or parmesan cheese on top.

Cheese Straws

I made these a while ago when I was sending Sharon the care package, but the recipe was big enough that I didn't end up cooking the whole batch. I wrapped about half the batch in plastic and stuck it in my freezer, and then found it yesterday while rooting through looking for something else. Three months apparently was no problem for these guys, clearly they have enough butter in them, because they turned out GREAT. In Ed's words, "these are going to disappear SO FAST". But really, how can you go wrong with butter, cheese, and a little spice?

The recipe is straight from King Arthur Flour, and really doesn't require any tweaking whatsoever. I've reprinted it below with what I did for shaping the straws:

2-1/2 C Flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp salt
3 C cheddar cheese, grated
1-1/2 sticks cold butter (from the freezer)
1/2 cup + 2 tbs water

Combine the flour, baking powder, cayenne and salt. Using a cheese grater, grate the butter into the flour mixture. Add 1-1/2C of the cheese. Use your fingers to rub this mixture together, sort of working some of the flour into the butter and cheese, but not too much. You don't want to melt the butter. Add the water, and mix it until it forms a dry dough. Wrap it in plastic and chill for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, take out the dough, flour the table, and roll it out to a 12x18" rectangle. Sprinkle on the remaining cheese. Fold the dough in thirds (like a letter), and roll it out again. I folded and rolled one more time, and then put it back in the refrigerator. After 10 minutes, I took it out and rolled and folded three more times. It is so stiff after the chilling that I figured I'd just give it one more fold and roll while I was at it. Or something along those lines. Then return it to the fridge for another 10 minutes.

To form the straws, I rolled out the dough and just used a knife to cut rectangles. Most of them I just baked as they were, but some of them I tried twisting them as I put them down on the baking sheet. This sort of worked, but mostly they just untwisted before setting in the oven. All that folding and rolling made for a wonderfully flaky dough, though.

Bake the straws for 10-15 minutes at 400F, until they're golden brown.


It sounds like a lot of work, but it is TOTALLY worth it to make these little cheesy bits of goodness. Because they're delicious.

Banana Peach Smoothie

Anna had told me about an amazing banana peach smoothie that she had had the other day, and I was intrigued. I don't really like smoothies, but banana and peach sounded like a good combination. I figured I'd give it a go. I have a blender, but we rarely use it, so this was one of my few chances to use the damn thing. In went half a banana, half a peach, half a cup of yogurt, about two tablespoons of lemon juice, a quarter cup of water, 2 tablespoons of honey. Spun it around. It turned kind of orange-y pink. It actually looked quite appealing. I tasted it. Tastes like a smoothie. Thick. I don't like thick drinks. I'd much rather have the fruit chopped up on the yogurt. Alas, I'm still not a smoothie drinker. But the flavor was wonderful! I think maybe if I had a curly straw, I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

Chipotle Corn Muffins

We have a can of chipotle chilis in adobo sauce. I don't really know why, I know that I bought it, with some idea of something I was going to do with it, but I've since forgotten that idea, and still not done anything with the can of chilis. So, Ed opened it the other day to make something spicy, and while that tasted fine and all, we were still left with most of a can of chilis. I had seen a recipe on Epicurious the other day for corn bread with chipotle chilis (maybe this was the elusive reason I bought the chilis in the first place!), so figured I'd go with something like that, but I used a random sort of recipe... it worked. The muffins ended up moist on the inside, with a fair kick. Given that I just about doubled the spice, that makes sense, but its not overwhelming. I was definitely NOT leaping for a glass of milk or anything, I just liked the hotness. When I got a chunk of poorly-chopped up pepper, that was a little too spicy, but overall, it was just about perfect.

The batter was also a beautiful orange color, what with the red peppers and their spicy juice being added to the yellow batter. It was quite appealing to look at.



Chipotle corn muffins
Makes 19

1C corn meal
1C white whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4C brown sugar
1C yogurt
1/2C milk
3 eggs
2 tbs oil
3 tbs chipotle chilis in adobo sauce
1C corn kernels

Preheat the oven to 400F. Grease or line a muffin tin. Sorry about the uneven number of muffins, thats just how it turned out.
I suppose you could try filling each tin higher than 3/4 full.

Mix together the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix the wet ingredients. Add the wet to the dry, and fold to combine. Bake for 20-25min.

Broccoli Rabe Quiche

We had some broccoli rabe, which I'd never tasted before, and after tasting it the first time, Ed decided that he wanted to make a quiche with it. Somehow, the whole "Ed is going to make a quiche" turned into an "Alex is making the quiche for Ed" scenario. He did cook the bacon that was to go in it, so I shouldn't complain too much. And it turned out wonderfully, as quiches almost always do.

Quiche with bacon and broccoli rabe

1-1/4C flour
1 tsp salt
4 tbs butter
2 tbs frozen bacon grease (or more butter if you don't save your bacon drippings)
2-6tbs cold water
3 eggs
1/2C milk (we used 1%)
3 pieces of bacon
~1C worth of chopped broccoli rabe
1/2 tsp salt
1/4tsp pepper
~1/2C grated cheddar cheese

The crust:
In a food processor, combine the flour and salt. Add the butter in chunks, and process until the butter is all chopped up. Add the bacon grease and process that until thats in chunks, too. Add about 2 tbs of cold water, and process. Continue to add water and mix until you have a fairly dry mixture that holds together if you pinch it. Don't add too much water. Dump the pie dough onto a surface, form it into a ball, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 20-30min.

Alternatively, buy a pre-made pie crust. But those are just so expensive when flour and butter are practically free.

The quiche

While your crust chills, dice the bacon, and cook it until it is brown and crunchy, or maybe not crunchy if you don't like crunchy bacon. I happen to like bacon to be crunchy. Take it out and drain it on some paper towels. Bowl your broccoli rabe for 5-10 minutes, until it tastes cooked.

Once your crust has chilled for 20-30min, preheat your oven to 350F. Roll out the crust so that it is a little larger than your pie pan, and put it in there. Cut off the ragged edges and dock it with a fork, then bake it for 10-15min until it is just turning golden brown. Meanwhile, mix together three eggs and half a cup of milk, and season with salt and pepper.

Once the crust is out of the oven, a lot of recipes say to brush it with an egg yolk, but that was too much work for us, so we just layered in the bacon and broccoli rabe, and poured the liquid stuff over the top. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Put the quiche back in the oven and cook for 35-40 minutes, until it is set and no longer jiggles if you jiggle that pie pan.

Let it cool at least 10 minutes before slicing into it.

Fancy dinner

Ed decided that he wanted to make a fancy dinner. He didn't know what, but eventually decided on a stack of some sort. The original plan was a pile of goopy blue polenta, with some swiss chard leaves around the outside of that, and then a stack of tofu (marinated, and grilled on the george foreman), taro root fritters, and turnips. With a cilantro pesto sauce. This sort of worked out, except for when we found little moth larvae crawling around in the blue polenta, so had to scratch that idea. Yuck.

The really fancy part of this was that he wanted to make a cheese custard thing with a citrus marmalade and raspberry coulis on top. He's been watching molto Mario on teh interwebs, and Mario Batali made a cheese custard dessert with ricotta and parmesan, so Ed sort of did that, with mascarpone and parmesan. It was interesting, I actually quite liked it, but without the marmalade and raspberry coulis it would have tasted more like a cheese soufle. Anyway, it was good. I really liked the citrus marmalade, too, that was key limes and a lemon or two. and lots of sugar. The raspberries I would have preferred raw. I think you can probably find the recipe for the cheese custard thing if you look it up on the google...

Sharon wants dinner...

Looks like a sandwich!

The dessert! We would have been fine with that much custard for three of us... we'll see how it is for leftovers!

Ed and his marmalade.

Millions of peaches

peaches for me! Maybe not millions, but at least 12. In-season peaches are the best thing ever, I love any fruit that requires that you slurp up the juice from around your mouth after every bite.



Jackie had been raving last weekend about the peaches in wine thing that she saw here. We didn't have any peaches to try it out, but we had plenty of alcohol. Since the leftover alcohol came back to Boston with me, and now I have peaches, this was the first thing I tried. Of course, I didn't want to make eight peach's worth of this dessert, so I sort of made up the measurements. I sliced up one peach, pulled off the skins (I love it when they're so ripe you can just pull off the skins!), tossed it with two tablespoons or so of sugar, put it in a tupperware, and covered it with the Chardonnay we had in our fridge. I think it would have gone better with one of the bottles of Pinot Grigio, but we didn't have any of those open.


After letting it sit in the fridge overnight, I tried it. Yum. The peaches weren't that much sweetened, and they weren't that much alcoholed, but they were just even better than they had been the day before. This would be SO GOOD over ice cream. But its pretty good without the ice cream, too. Even Ed, who claims he doesn't like peaches (I know. I should get out of this relationship before its too late! The boy doesn't like PEACHES!) thought this worked nicely.

So, until my peaches are gone - which could be soon - I'll keep one in the fridge, marinating in a white wine syrup, for occasional munchings.