Angel food cake and a cardamom-lime fruit salad

Ed wanted angel food cake for his birthday cake.  This is slightly more troublesome than a chocolate cake or something, but I figured it was totally within my capabilities, aside from the whole I-don't-have-a-springform-pan deal.  I figured I would make little mini ramekins of cake, because those would be small enough that the cake couldn't collapse.  This worked.

I followed this recipe, except I cut it in half.  I also used less sugar... it was easier to just use 3/4C than to add in the extra 2 tbs.

If you follow all the steps in that recipe I linked to, you will have a successful angel food cake.  The one thing I did change is that I buttered and sugared the bottom of the ramekins (but not the sides!), so that it would be easier to remove the cakes once they were cooked.

I also put the extra batter into the heart-shaped pan.  This mostly worked, though the middle of the cake was a little deflated after it cooled.  Still tasted delicious, though.

The topping was a fruit salad in a cardamom lime sauce.  I put the juice of a lime, a tablespoon or so of sugar, and the seeds from a cardamom pod into a saucepan, and boiled that, while stirring, for ~5min.  This made it all thick and syrupy.  It was delicious.  Then I poured the syrup over a small fruit salad of a kiwi, ~4 strawberries, and half a starfruit.  That sat that marinating while we ate dinner, and the strawberries turned the syrup all pink.  Once we were ready for dessert, I dumped the fruit on top of some whipped cream on top of the angel food cake, and poured more syrup on top.  Delicious!  I could have eaten that all day long.  

Lobster risotto

It was Ed's birthday last week.  So, I made him a 5-course dinner, and paired as many of the courses as I could with tasty beer.  We started with gougères, and a sliced pear and some chimay.  Can't say no to appetizers like that!  

(I kinda forgot that these guys puff in the oven, so they ended up being pretty huge, rather than tiny little delicate bite-sized morsels.  Oh well, still tasted awesome).

They went poof!  and were cheesy.  These things are so awesome.  Click that link and make some.

Then we had the salad course, which was caramelized pears, toasted walnuts, avocado, arugula, and craisins, in a maple mustard dressing.  That was pretty delicious, too.

The main course, which I served with a Belgian white beer from Unibroue, was a lobster risotto.  Lobster has been wicked cheap around here lately, and it's always delicious, so I decided to try my hand at a lobster risotto.  This was a bit time-consuming, but well worth the effort.  

First, I cooked the lobster.  It was a little guy, just 1.16lb, and I boiled him for 8 minutes.  Once he was cool enough to handle, I pulled the meat out of the shell, and threw the shell back into a pot, with some onions and carrots and bay leaves and the rinds from the gruyère cheese that I'd used up in the gougères, to make a stock.

Once I had a stock, I just set that aside until it was time to make the risotto.

To make the risotto, I started with a diced onion.  In a big wok, I sweated the onion in some olive oil, then added a few cloves of garlic, diced up.  Once that was toasted, in went ~1C of arborio rice.  I turned the heat up to high and kept that moving around for ~1-2min, until it was also toasted, and starting to look translucent.  While all this was happening, I had a pot with half a bottle of cheap white wine (pinot grigio; not ideal, but it was what was on sale) and a pot of the lobster stock warming on the back burners.  Once the rice was toasted, I added the wine, ~1/2C at a time.  I'd add some wine, stir it around until the liquid was gone, add some more.  When the wine was gone, I started in on the lobster stock.

About 10 minutes into the whole process, I threw in the chopped chanterelle mushrooms, and a pinch or two of kosher salt.  Continue to stir over medium-high heat, adding liquid as necessary, until the rice is cooked, another 15 minutes or so.  Then I added in the chopped lobster meat, and some parsley for garnish.

We served the risotto with some roasted brussels sprouts, just tossed in olive oil and kosher salt and roasted at 400F for 15min, because green things are good for you, and, incidentally, delicious.

The risotto was utterly amazing, and delicious.  It always is delicious, but the lobster flavor made it even more delicious.  It may be worth making this again before the lobster season ends.

Dessert was angel food cake topped with fruit in a cardamom lime syrup, but I'll save that for another post.  We also had a cheese board.  And Allagash Interlude, for the final dessert beer.

The cheeses were gruyere, a soft robiola cow/sheep milk mix, some sort of goat cheese round that I've forgotten the name of, and a very mild blue, that I've also forgotten the name of... it was a very delicious blue, though, and similar to a saint agur.

Beet burgers

I'm a bit behind on blogging some of the delicious things we've been eating lately, so here goes a stab at some posting.  These are beet burgers.  They were actually quite delicious, but got a mediocre Ed-rating, I think mostly because they're sorta weird.  They're kinda like a veggie burger.  I thought they were the perfect mix of crunchy and chewy and delicious.  The inspiration was from an Ottolenghi http://www.ottolenghi.co.uk/blog/2010/10/17/cake-geeks/">

recipe, but I ended up not really following that at all.  

I believe the ratio was:
2 eggs
1 raw beet, peeled and grated
1/2C bulgur, cooked
~1/2C random assorted fresh herbs (basil, dill, and parsley, here)
2tsp kosher salt
Some pepper
1/4 preserved lemon, diced
some fresh ginger, diced
1 clove garlic, diced
Some tahini - 2 tbs?

Mix everything up, then shallow-fry the patties until they're crispy and brown on each side.  It took ~5min a side, I think.

Drain on a paper towel, and salt lightly while they're still warm.

I topped mine with a yogurt-cucumber sauce.  It was a nice addition.

Very pink inside!

I liked how crunchy these were on the outside.  And they tasted deliciously like beets and herbs.  I'd make them again, for sure.  Maybe served with something, as opposed to just on their own...

Tomato tart season!

I've got this cookbook, that I love, from Ottolenghi, the pastry/catering shop around the corner from my grandfather's place in London.  I haven't cooked my way through it yet, but I'm slowly attempting to.  Anyway, in a nod to my easily distractible nature, I discovered that Yotam Ottolenghi has a blog, on the guardian.co.uk website, and I copied down a bunch of links to recipes I wanted to try.  I want to try them all!!  Unfortunately, though his food is delicious, his recipe-writing occasionally leaves something to be desired, and if you blindly follow the recipe and don't use your brain, you end up with a flop.  

This happened to me recently, with his tomato and almond tart.  In theory, this should have been amazing.  All the pieces are things I love to eat - fresh tomatoes, puff pastry, almond frangipane - but it didn't work that well all together.  This is as much my fault, since I should have noticed that all the stuff on top of the puff pastry was going to weigh it down too much to puff.  Alas and alack, I didn't notice, and this rich tart wasn't everything it could be.  Don't worry, though!  I'm not just reviewing a bad recipe, I'm posting a tomato tart recipe that totally worked, and is awesome, after the flop!  

The Ottolenghi tart promised to be a most luscious layer of rich, nutty sweetness, after the almond paste soaked up the juice of the tomatoes.  cool, that sounds tasty.  I suppose an option would be to make 1/4 of the amount of almond stuff called for, so it's thinner on the puff pastry, and to slice the tomatoes way, way, waaaay thinner.  Here's the link to the recipe:

link

The end result, unfortunately, revolved around the fact that there was too much stuff on the puff pastry.  It took 40 minutes to cook, rather than 25, and even then wasn't fully puffed.  It was also way too buttery - the whole thing just oozed out grease, constantly.  I find that kind of gross.  The overall tart was just very heavy tasting, and not a great use of puff pastry.  A pie dough would have stood up better to that sort of abuse.

With that in mind, I'd say my next tomato tart was a ringing success!  It didn't get a great Ed-rating, because he didn't try it when it was fresh, and the tomato juices had soaked into the pie crust of the leftover piece and made it all soggy, but it also didn't get a bad Ed-rating.  I liked this tart because I thought the ricotta filling did a nice job making the whole thing taste a little heartier and goopier, more like a pizza really.  Because pizza is awesome.  I recommend making this version, especially if your garden is still overflowing with tomatoes.  It's been a great way to use up our landlords' tomatoes… 

Alex's vastly improved tomato tart

1 shell of pie crust, pre-baked

2-3 *good* tomatoes (not the mealy supermarket kind.  this tart relies on good tomatoes), sliced to <1 p="p" thick="thick">

~1/2C caramelized onions

~1/2C ricotta cheese

~1/2C chopped basil

1 egg

salt and pepper, to taste

~1/4C grated hard cheese (pecorino or parmesan)

1 can of anchovies, optional

If you haven't got caramelized onions hanging about, cut an onion in half from end to end, and then slice off some half-rings from that, so you end up with long pieces.  Pan fry those for 20-30min on medium-low in some olive oil, until they're just beyond golden brown, but not yet burned.  They should taste sweet.  and delicious.

To make the ricotta filling, mix up the basil and ricotta and hard grated cheese and some salt and pepper, and taste.  Season with more salt or pepper however you like it.  Then add the egg, and beat until everything is of one mixture.

Spread the filling over the pie crust.  

Spread around the caramelized onions.

Lay the tomatoes out around the pie.  Maybe sprinkle with a little more grated cheese and a dash of salt.

Bake for 20min at ~350F. 

 Enjoy!

Roasted tofu

Yet another way to eat tofu!  This way was actually quite good - we marinated the tofu in a sauce, then roasted it on an oiled baking sheet until it was crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside.  Passed the Ed-rating with flying colors, too.  Turns out, tofu can be tasty, but we knew that.  It's just a protein to carry flavors.

The sauce was a mix of soy sauce, smoked maple syrup, butternut squash seed oil, and some sort of vinegar that I no longer remember.  And some salt, and possibly a dash of sriracha.  Tough to remember, but you basically want a sauce that's somewhat thick, with some sweetness in it so it'll caramelize nicely.  Balance the sweet/sour/salty/spicy and you'll have a winner.  I think we marinated the tofu for 15-20min, and I believe the tofu chunks took about 20min to brown up, and we flipped them once.  I recommend this one.  Make it.

Golden spaghetti

This was inspired by a post on Beyond Salmon, where she posted a recipe after spending a day working in a restaurant kitchen.  It looked like a tasty, interesting way to use a zucchini, and since I happened to have two different kinds of cheeses, making a pasta dish for lunch seemed like an excellent idea.  Can't say no to spaghetti in a creamy sauce with lots of cheese!  No Ed-rating, as he wasn't home for lunch, but I'll be trying this again for dinner sometime.  It was quite tasty.  I also really liked the idea of using the seeds of the squash for something useful, as opposed to slogging through eating them the normal way.  I've never been a huge fan of zucchini seeds.

Golden spaghetti:

Made enough for one large lunch.  I suppose you should add more pasta or another zucch if you want to stretch it.  This isn't Helen Rennie's original recipe, since I was missing a few key ingredients, like cream, and parsley.

1 golden zucchini

1/4 box of spaghetti

1-2tbs milk or cream

1 clove garlic, minced

~1/4C grated cheese (in my case, a mix of pecorino roman and ricotta salata)

salt and pepper to taste

Get a pot of water boiling for the spaghetti. Salt the water.

Using a mandolin, slice thin slices off the zucchini until you get to the seeds.  Rotate the squash, and continue, until you've sliced off all the non-seedy flesh in very thin slices.  Cut those slices lengthwise so that you have vaguely spaghetti-shaped pieces of squash.  Cut the seedy core of the remaining zucchini crosswise into pennies, and fry those in some olive oil on medium-high heat until they're browned on both sides.  Toast the garlic in the remaining oil, then add the zucchini seeds and garlic to a food processor or blender.  Add a dash or two of milk (or cream, if you have it… I had milk), and puree to a thick sauce.  Season with salt and pepper.

Once you've added the spaghetti to the water, fry the strands of squash in some olive oil or butter.  They'll take ~5min, at which point you should taste the spaghetti.  If it's ~3/4 of the way cooked, pull out some of the cooking water, then drain the rest of the pasta, and add it to the frying pan that has the zucchini.  Pour in the sauce, grate in the cheese, and continue to stir/cook until the spaghetti is cooked through.  If the sauce thickens up too much, add some of the pasta-cooking-water to thin it.  

Once it's done, plop in a wide bowl and enjoy!  Or you could try to twirl it into pretty little thingies, but that was too much work, really.