Roast lamb with pomegranate molasses and ras el hanout

Not too long ago, Ed and I (well, mostly Ed) cooked a leg of lamb for his family.  It was delicious. I love me some lamb, but this was better than anything I had ever thought of before.  It was a boneless leg of lamb, from the folks in Vermont that make that yummy sheep cheese. Since the boy sheep don't make cheese, they turn into food.  

We did some looking around on the internet, and settled on a 130F internal temperature to pull out the meat.  It rose another 10ish degrees once we'd taken it out.  Ended up medium, mostly, with the ends more cooked than the middle, and that worked well so that everyone can choose how cooked they wanted their meat.  Yum!  

Ed marinated the lamb overnight with pomegranate molasses on the outside, and some ras el hanout spice on top of that, which is a spice mixture that just made me drool as I dreamed about roasting meats.   We got it from one of the Armenian shops on Mt. Auburn street.  I recommend.  Anyway, after marinating all night, we brought the lamb to room temperature, filled the rolled-up part with caramelized shallots, and then we roasted at 400 for 20min, and 325 for the remainder of the time (an hour, maybe? kept checking the thermometer and removed at 130F).

The lamb was scrumptious.  I recommend it!

Fennel salad

For Thanksgiving, Ed and I headed over to his aunt's house in Lexington, with 34 other guests. This meant an easy time for cooking for us, as we didn't have to deal with a turkey, but we were assigned to bring some sort of salad or vegetable. Browsing through the Ottolenghi cookbook, I saw this salad, and I instantly knew I wanted to make it.I'm not a huge raw fennel fan, but it turns out that when you slice it thinly and add a delicious dressing, it's pretty scrumptious.  And so pretty! The salad was a big hit, and we made it again a few weeks later for Ed's family back in Rochester, where it was also a big hit. So, I highly recommend you make this salad! Pomegranates are in season in the fall and winter, so now's the time.

Fennel Salad:
2 fennel bulbs
1/2 pomegranate, seeds only
~1/2C crumbled feta
~1/2C fresh tarragon leaves
~1/4C fresh flat-leaved parsley

Dressing:
Juice of a lemon
Olive oil (maybe 2-3tbs?)
2 tsp sumac
Salt
Pepper

Fennel fronds and more sumac for decorating

Mix together all the dressing stuff in a bowl.  Taste, adjust, taste.  Roughly chop the parsley and tarragon, and add that to the dressing. 

Use a mandolin or verrrry thinly chop the fennel bulbs. I sliced them lengthwise, removed the core, and mandolinned them from there.  Reserve some fronds for garnish.  Crumbled the feta, and put everything except the pomegranate seeds in the bowl - they'll turn it pink if you mix them around too much.  Toss it all around, let it marinate for a bit, and mix in the pomegranate seeds just before you serve it. Sprinkle with more sumac and some fennel fronds on top, for garnish. Enjoy!

Kale rolls

So, back over the summer Ed and I were browsing around the farmer's market in Londonderry, trying not to spend all our money on a single bunch of kale (these veggies can be expensive at the farmers markets...), and totally got suckered into buying a deliciously tasty bread-stuff-with-kale-inside-it thing. I don't remember if it was loaf-shaped or what, but I do remember a deliciously crusty outer bit and lemon-y garlic-y kale mixture on the inside.  Too overpriced to buy more than one of these kale loaves, I set out to make one, but didn't quite get around to that until months after the initial experience.

These kale rolls are awesome.  They're basically a cinnamon bun, only instead of a flaky soft dough, they have the texture of a focaccia, crusty on the outside and moist on the inside.  I highly recommend making some of these.  They can be a hearty dinner roll, or just most of your lunch.  The garlic is a bit much for breakfast, I have to admit...

You need one recipe of normal bread.  I recommend ~2C warm water, ~1tsp yeast, ~1tsp sugar, and as much flour as that takes to get it to a kneadable state.  Knead, then let it rise an hour or two.

For the filling, dice some garlic (ok, lots of garlic, like 3-4 cloves), and toast that in a little olive oil.  Chop a big ol' bunch of kale into small pieces, and add to the garlic, adding more oil as needed and the juice from a lemon.  Cook until the kale leaves are at a texture you like them at - I like them with a little bite to them still, but I know some people like to overcook their greens till they're good and dead. Don't forget some salt and pepper.  The filling should taste pretty good on its own, once you're done with it.

Now roll out your dough to ~1/4-1/2" thickness.  It doesn't really matter; the thinner your dough, the more rolls of kale you get, the thicker your dough, the more bready it'll taste.  This is sort of like a pizza dough - one size does NOT fit all.  

Spread the kale filling across the entire rectangle of rolled-out dough.  You don't want the filling to be too thick, but you also don't want it too thin.  Not the most helpful of statements, sorry.  Roll the dough, starting with the long end, until you have a single snake.  Then cut into ~3-4" slices.  Flip them onto the cut side on a greased pan, with a bit of space between the rolls.  Let that rise another 30 minutes or so, then stick them in a 400F oven for 20-30 minutes; until they're done, really.  One option is to brush melted butter or olive oil on top of the rolls just before baking, and that'll help them turn golden brown on top.

Enjoy!

If these directions are too vague... well, the good news is that even if you don't quite get it perfect, this is a tasty enough bread recipe that it's worth making a couple times to perfect it!

Snaussages and root veggies

Sorry for the dearth of posting - life went and got busy, somehow.  

Ed went to Carl's Sausage Kitchen the other day, and came home armed with a lot of sausages.  These ones were some Hungarian variety, possibly debrecener?  Anyway, they were quite tasty, just spicy enough that they left your mouth warm, not burning, with delicious flavor to them.  Yum!

We had meant to make a soup, of parsnips, celery root, and a potato or two, but it turned into more of a mash than a soup.  A good chunk of frozen chicken stock helped with the flavor of the soup.  Bacon bits on top also help with flavor!  We roasted up some yellow carnival cauliflower too, just the florets, and sprinkled them on top all pretty-like, and fried some sage leaves in butter.  Pretty darn tasty meal!

Popover pancakes

I decided that I wanted to experiment with some new breakfast ideas, rather than oatmeal, for the gazillionth time.  I prefer cheerios, but cheerios don't last me very long, since I'll eat half the box in one sitting.  mmmm, cheerios.  So, three days after buying cheerios, I no longer have breakfast food, and end up back with oatmeal.  Anyway, one of the problems with oatmeal is that while I find it totally edible, and actually enjoy it when you take the time to cook it slowly without stirring and there is good chew to the oats and you've put lots of fruits and nuts on top, well I don't enjoy it *enough* that I can sit there and eat enough of it that I'm not starving to death by 10am.  I'm pretty sure part of this is that oatmeal is mostly carbs, with a smidge of protein, and my body is REALLY GOOD at burning through carbs.  So anyway, I decided that maybe I should try eating a breakfast that has more protein and fat in the mix, but I don't really want to be eating bacon and sausage every morning.  That doesn't seem healthy.  And also, it's expensive for both your wallet and the planet to eat meat.  I get sick of eggs really quickly, so that's also not the answer, and I don't feel satiated by smoothies. 

So in a semi-compromise, but also in a bid for deliciousness (though anything vs bacon is hard-pressed to win that battle), I decided to try making popover pancakes.  Real pancakes don't really solve the problem of incorporating more protein and fat into breakfast.  Popovers are delicious, and consist mostly of eggs and milk.  But popovers take a lot of time to bake.  So, the birth of popovers cooked in a frying pan!  But of course, I didn't have milk.  This is a problem, but a solvable one, because I did have yogurt.  Plain yogurt and milk are totally substitutes...

1/2C plain yogurt
1 egg
1 pinch of salt
1 pinch of baking soda (popovers don't take leavening, but I didn't have a 450F oven to play with, and I did have yogurt, so baking soda it is)
1/2C flour
1 tbs butter, for cooking
1 peach

So, dump the ingredients into a 2C measure.  This lets you pour out your popovers!  And creates less mess to clean up.  Use a fork to beat everything together.  Melt the butter in a big frying pan.  Wash and cut up your peach (you can leave skin on).  Pour out some pancakes into the frying pan, dot with peach pieces.  Cook ~5min on one side, til the bubbles pop and don't re-fill.  Flip.  Cook another 3min.  Consume!  This made 4 pancakes.

I ate these plain, and they were delicious.  They aren't fluffy like pancakes; they're custardy like popovers.  Tomorrow, I am going to try putting some more yogurt and some rhubarb jam on top.  And maybe sprinkle with walnuts.  And maybe play with using a different flour than white flour, or see what happens when I use some almond flour in there with regular flour.  Or, since these aren't sweet except for the peach parts, I could go the savory route, and top with cheese, or avocado, or tomatoes and basil...

And hey, it's after 11am, and I'm not dying of starvation!

Though now that you mention it...

Nutritional breakdown -
Popover pancakes with a peach: 560cal, 22g fat, 73g carb, 23g protein
Oatmeal with a peach and walnuts: 360cal, 13g fat, 52g carb, 11g protein
So clearly, I just need to find something tasty and full of fat and protein to eat with my oatmeal to make it until lunchtime.  Back to the bacon hypothesis.  Or I could cook my oats in milk, but that makes it harder to clean the pan.  Or, keep eating popover pancakes!

Garlicky olives and panzanella

We got some jumbo green olives from the Greek store the other day, and decided to try and make those delicious marinated olives you can get from Whole Foods that cost $11.99/lb.  I'd say this was a raging success.  We used garlic (lots), preserved lemons, and red pepper flakes, and the result was very tasty when warm, and divine once it had sat in the fridge overnight.  Yum!

Garlicky Olives:
Olives, of some quantity (1-2C?)
A few cloves of garlic
1/4 of a preserved lemon
Red pepper flakes (~1/2 - 1tsp)
Olive oil

Warm some olive oil in a pan.  Dice your garlic and preserved lemon.  Toast the garlic lightly, then add the olives to the pan with the lemon and red pepper.  Cook for a bit, probably 10min, then put in a bowl and serve with toothpicks.  If you have the patience, leave the olives in the fridge overnight so the flavors can meld.  Enjoy!

Clearly, this was a long day.  Ed went out riding his bike and got mega sunburned, but revived upon smelling the garlicky olives, and then was happy to eat some panzanella, which is one of my favorite hot-weather salads of all time, even more so when you have some day-old bread that really needs using.  It's darn tasty, and gets a good Ed-rating.

Panzanella:
1 avocado
1-2 good tomatoes
1 cucumber
1/4 red onion
Lots of basil
1/4 loaf of french bread, or the equivalent amount of other bread
1 lemon
olive oil
salt
butter

To make the croutons, cut the bread into ~1/4" slices.  Toast the slices in a pan with the butter until one side is toasty golden brown.  Remove the bread from the pan (one side should be slightly chewy, one side should be crunchy and taste like butter), chop into bite-sized pieces.

Chop everything else into bite sized pieces.  Dress with salt, lemon juice, and olive oil.  Toss it all around in a bowl.  Serve, and enjoy!

Pasta with tomatoes and basil

Basil, tomatoes, and Parmesan cheese. these are some of my favorite things! Also, Rubaeus beer, which is a beer brewed with pure raspberries.  this makes a pretty darn good dinner, even though Ed is out of town.  Fresh tomatoes and basil on pasta with lots of Parmesan, really is one of the best ways to eat fresh pasta.  I highly recommend you try it!  For the real Alex – experience, eat it out of the mixing bowl straight from the pot!

With this sort of meal, you have to finish it with fresh peaches. Now THAT makes for true summer dinner!  Even better, you can cook it in the time it takes pasta to cook, so basically, seven minutes. Add some olive oil, some salt, and plenty of cheese and you're ready to go.

Nectarine season

It's nectarine season!  Fresh ripe nectarines have to be one of my favorite things ever.  A nectarine imported from California is a totally different beast - hard, mealy, and not that sweet (I'm sure it's the importing part, not the California part, that screws them up like that).  Local stone fruit is impossible to beat.  When you bite into a nectarine and the juice just runs down your chin and covers your hands, that's when you know life is good.  Nectarines are a nearly perfect fruit - they pair with meats, they pair with cheese, they're good in desserts, they're good raw... is there any situation where nectarines AREN'T your go-to fruit?  Didn't think so.  Unfortunately, the season here is far too short.  Massachusetts peaches and nectarines are so delicious, but so ephemeral.  Take advantage while you can!  Yum!

Also, a little St. Agur cheese never hurt anything...

Bluefish

I wanted to cook something delicious, and I vaguely remembered that it is bluefish season 'round these parts, so I went by Whole Foods to see if they had any sitting in their fish counter. Whole Foods, because it happens to be next to Marty's, which is where I dropped off Ed to acquire beer. Successful mission, and I walked out with a hunk o' fish and a tub of pistachio gelato. Yum!

The last time I made bluefish, I followed a recipe of sorts from Beyond Salmon.  As always, she does a great job describing how to cook fish, and it was quite delicious, though it's hard to go wrong when you're also involving crunchy potatoes.  I also made popovers, because I felt really bad that I had gone to work (via the T) with both car keys in my purse, and so Ed had also had to take the T, when otherwise he would have taken my car... anyway, he likes popovers, so I made him popovers. They were pretty darn tasty, as usual, and opening the oven to stick in the fish did not mess with their popping ability, thankfully!

We also had an endive languishing in the fridge, so I figured I'd better cook that up, as substitute for a green thing with our dinner.  Cut in half lengthwise, and cooked low and slow in a frying pan with some oil and salt.  The leaves just melt into deliciousness! Some cheese sprinkled on top never hurts, either.

The fish was perfect - flaky but moist, and very meaty-feeling, while the taste is kind of mild and not fishy at all.  Bright flavors from lemon and parsley complement it well. 

This was a tasty beer - some sort of Belgian from the clearance rack.  It's probably a 50-50 chance of getting a winner vs undrinkable shit from that shelf, and this Belgian was solidly in the middle of that range.  Totally drinkable.

Unfortunately, in a complete failure of the day, I fell asleep before remembering that I'd bought gelato! 

Unsuccessful soup

Not everything turns out perfectly.  This soup, for example.  Was perfectly edible, but didn't taste all that awesome.  It was a broth of chicken stock, curry paste, and coconut milk, and I think the curry paste made things too oily.  The soba noodles were good, anyway, as were the kelp strands.  It only gets featured here, because it's a lovely yellow color, in a blue bowl, and I think that's pretty.  So, yeah, not a success, but a very pretty little bowl of soup.

Finnish eating

I just got back from the World Orienteering Championships in Finland, and I was pleasantly surprised by the food options.  I guess I've only ever been to northern Europe in the winter, where the food options tend to be centered around meat and potatoes, with an emphasis on the potatoes.  But summer! Summer is awesome!  because strawberries!

Strawberries are probably my favoritest food ever, so the fact that there were those small delicious sweet little strawberries for sale everywhere in Finland - from the grocery store to roadside stands to farmers markets (or whatever you'd call the Finnish equivalent) to the arena of the WOC finals - that really made my day.  The nectarines were also pretty awesome, but they were from Italy, not Finland.  Anyway, we were cooking the first week, and at a lot of fish, and strawberries, and nectarines, and my favorite meal probably included the crepes that we filled with fish stuff, though everything was pretty scrumptious.  I never got around to taking photos, but here's a photo of breakfast one day: museli with yogurtti (drinkable yogurt) and strawberries and nectarines.  Good fuel for the day.



Once in the official WOC accommodation, food was taken care of in a cafeteria, buffet-style.  Breakfast was much more boring, with much less fresh fruit than I'd like, but plenty of variety of whole wheat breads, butter, yogurt, jam, and cold cuts.  They reliably had oatmeal, meatballs (?) or mini hotdogs, and baked eggs.  Lunch and dinner both always featured pickled fish in the cold bar, with grated carrots, and often some other pickle options, but not the most inspired salads, as far as I was concerned.  And there was *always* a potato option at lunch and dinner :).  Conveniently, they labeled the food with a picture of whatever animal it came from, so I'm fairly positive I ate reindeer at least once.  Rudolph!  Overall, totally acceptable, but not the most inspired.  Plenty of carrots, beets, and rutabaga.  Not much by way of leafy greens.

I was looking forward to doing some more cooking upon returning home, but it's a gazillion degrees right now, so we've just been eating salads and drinking cold things.  Until this heatwave breaks, that's what's on tap! 

Olive bread

This is a good bread.  Definitely got a high Ed-rating, and most recently a high real-person rating, too, when I brought it to dinner the other day.  Use good kalamata olives - canned olives will just taste like canned olives, which can be tasty if there's nothing else to eat in your house, but the kalamata olives taste way better.  This bread used a starter, which is how you'd do sourdough if you're into that, but I'm not, because there's no way I'd keep a sourdough starter alive; I can't even keep plants alive.  Anyway, I find the bread is easier to knead when you've used a starter, and then it rises wonderfully once you knead in all the extra stuff.  But I haven't figured out how to get those big holes, which to me is the mark of tasty bread.  Ed likes that this stuff is a pretty uniform texture.  I want big holes, like in the no-knead bread that I sometimes make.  I probably just have to let it rise longer after I shape it.  

This is probably ~1C olives.  Looks like a lot, but it's just right.

Kalamata Olive Bread

Makes one loaf

Starter:

2-2.5C flour

1/4tsp yeast

1.75C warm water

Mix together all the start ingredients.  It was really humid today, so I used 2.5C flour instead of the usual 2.  Then let that sit for 2 hours.  At the end, it should look all loose and bubbly, like the photo above.

Dough:

2-3C flour

~1C olives

~1tbs salt

a glug or two of olive oil

Add two cups of flour and the salt and olive oil to the start, and mix that with a spoon until it comes together enough to knead.  Knead for a while, until it makes a nice little doughball.  Add the olives, and knead/fold until the olives are all combined.  You'll probably need to add another cup of flour to keep things workable during this process.  

Looks like too many olives...

But it's not too many - just right!

Let the kneaded dough sit in a greased bowl for another 2 hours.  At the end, it should be soft and pillowy, and about twice as large.  Transfer that to a baking sheet, that's either been greased or has coarse cornmeal on it.  

Preheat the oven to 450.  Once that's pre-heated, in goes the dough, and turn the oven down to 350.  Bake for 20-40min, checking every 10min or so; remove the bread once it's toasty golden brown on top, and has a hollow sound when you knock on the bottom.  This one took 40min for me.

Try to let it cool at least 5-10min before cutting into it.

Enjoy!

Thai stirfry

We stopped by the Super88 the other day, picked up some fresh udon noodles.  These guys are interesting, just super thick, chewy, and strangely delicious noodles.  I figured we had the proper ingredients for a stir fry, of the Thai variety, if only because of the limes that I had kicking around.  Stir fry dishes are pretty loose when it comes to a recipe, but Ed started eating this and declared that it got an extremely high Ed-rating.  Then he considered for a bit, and amended the statement to be "the best cabbage dish I've ever had", and then amended the Ed-rating to even higher, as in this is so tasty he'd actually pay money for it at a restaurant.  I'm not sure what the difference was - I mean, this was one good stir fry - but I figured I'd better write down the pieces that turned it from a pile of cooked food stuffs into a unified dish.

 

I started by flavoring the oil.  Into the wok went a solid glug or two of vegetable oil. Once that was hot, but not yet smoking, I dropped in a dried red thai chili, cut into thirds or so.  All the seeds immediately fell out, and that gave a really nice kick to the dish.  Toss that around for a bit, maybe 30s, and once you can smell the spice (if you want really spicy, add 2-3 peppers), throw in some minced garlic, ginger, and thinly sliced lemongrass.  In retrospect, I should have done with the lemongrass what I did with the pepper, and thrown in a large chunk or two, just to flavor the oil, rather than cutting it into pieces, since it wasn't a fresh stalk of lemongrass, so it was kind of woody.

Aromatics set, now it was time for the filling bits.  About a quarter of a head of purple cabbage, diced, and some floppy-looking use-me-now-or-never kale made up the veggies.  On top of those went a large pinch (a small handful?) of brown sugar, a few small glugs of soy sauce, and a small glug of fish sauce.  Once the veggies were no longer raw, in went some cubed firm tofu and the udon noodles.  And the juice of two limes.  Then a large handful of basil leaves, and some cilantro leaves fresh on top once you pull it off the heat.

The only thing that really would have made the dish is if we'd had some ground peanuts for the top.  Anyway, I think it was the large quantities of lime juice that sealed the deal for me; we'll be making variations on this for a while!

Fried halloumi salad

We picked up some halloumi the other day at Russo's.  It's basically a cheese curd.  And delicious!  One of the best ways to eat this cheese is when it is grilled or fried up, so that it's got a slightly smoky flavor and some crunchy bits, as well as the telltale squeakiness of a cheese curd.  mmmm.

We fried up some slices in a pan, then threw those down on top of a salad of bitter leaves - kale, radicchio, arugula, frisee, maybe some others.  I think the dressing was a pretty simple vinaigrette of lemon, dijon mustard, and olive oil, though I am seeing some chopped pickled garlic in the photo, so clearly we put some of that on top, too.

It was delicious!  I recommend making it.  You could grill your halloumi if you don't want to fry it, but make sure the pieces are thick enough - it does melt a little bit as you apply heat, and you wouldn't want it to fall through the grill!

Cauliflower and cheese galettes

I don't remember where I got the idea for this, but I know that somewhere on the internet, I'd seen somebody making little single-serving galettes filled with vegetables and cheese.  It looked good, and like the perfect thing for a picnic, because you could just eat them with your hands, since since we were traveling off to Saratoga Springs for a weekend of orienteering racing, picnic-type foods are what you want.  Also, I'd so much rather refuel with real food than with random bars and gels and stuff.  Tastes better.  So, real food it is!

These are Ed-approved, because they tasted good, but he wasn't such a fan of the whole planning ahead for food at races idea.  He's not really into the whole planning ahead deal in general.  Not like that stopped him eating them after the race.


They're filled with a grated summer squash, some roasted cauliflower, ricotta cheese, and possible some parmesan? I can't remember.  And an onion, and some garlic.  And an egg.  You mix together all those things, put them in the middle of a small round of pie crust, fold up the edges, and back until the top of the crust is golden brown.  I'd guess around 20min, but this year nearly a month ago that I made these, so things are a little fuzzy.


Pretty tasty with a side of crispy kale, too.  I topped them with some grated sumac, which has a delicious lemony-flavor, so tasty!  But you could skip that part.  You could also fill these with anything at all.  Pretty flexible, as long as it's relatively uniformly textured and not too gooey.

I'll definitely make these again!

Iced coffee

Oh boy, I'm way behind on posting some of the delicious things we've been eating.  So I figure I'll come back to blogging by not blogging about food at all, but about iced coffee.  I didn't used to be an iced coffee fan, but with the heat wave that had just gone through, I knew I would not be able to deal with drinking hot coffee, and I do love drinking out of a straw.  I'm not sure I could drink iced coffee without a straw - it's that engrained.  

Anyway, I used to make iced coffee by just chilling down some regular hot coffee.  BUT! I was intrigued by trying out the cold-brew method after reading that it changed the way the coffee came out of the coffee grounds (there may be a technical term for that), something about not activating some of the tannins, resulting in a less bitter drink.  Not that bitter is a bad thing, but I wanted to see if cold brewing the coffee resulted in a better product.  I think it does, in the end.  It tastes richer, if that makes any sense.  And I love watching the milk when you pour it in (yes, I like my coffee with milk.  Don't judge), all swirly and pretty.

To make cold-brew coffee, put about twice the amount of ground you'd normally use into a jar (mason jar works well), and pour in some cold water.  Keep in mind if it's a big jar, you're making two cups of coffee, so put in enough grounds for that.  (4-5 heaping scoops).  You don't want it to come out watery!  Stir it all around, then put on a lid and leave it in the fridge for 8-12 hours.  Come morning, dump the whole thing into a french press, press, and drink!  

One thing you definitely should do - make some coffee ice cubes.  That way, you aren't watering down your coffee by putting water ice into it.  I also recommend using a coarse grind, the same as you would for a French press.

I recommend this stuff.  Especially when the temperature cracks 90 degrees.

Beans, beans, they're good for your heart...

I do love me some good beans.  Especially when you put bacon and avocado on top, and eat them with jalapeno cheddar cornbread.  

 The cornbread was easy - buy a tub of cornmeal, follow the instructions on the side, but add in some jalapenos, diced up finely, and grate a bunch of cheddar on top.  I halved the recipe, and it made enough to fit my heart-shaped pan.  Perfect!  I didn't have fresh jalapenos, but I did have pickled ones, and that was pretty delicious - I recommend it.  They came in a can, from Shaws.  I'm sure you can find them at other stores.

The beans were easy, too.  I forgot to soak them this morning, so did a quick soak when I got home - bring to a boil, then turn off and let them sit for an hour.  Drain off the soaking liquid, then add more water, salt, a beef bone (or a pork rib, or a chicken leg, or really any piece of animal with bone and tendons attached to create delicious flavor), a bay leaf, a quartered onion, and 3-4 smashed garlic cloves.  Simmer for 45min, until they're soft.  I think they're best if you let them cool in their cooking water, because then the skins won't break.  

As the beans were cooking, I chopped up two pieces of bacon (mmmm, bacon), rendered it for a while, then threw in half a poblano and another clove of garlic.  That got tossed on top of the beans, plus some avocado chunks, cilantro leaves, and some squeezes of fresh lime juice.  Yes, beans can be delicious!  They really needed a taco instead of corn bread, but hey, corn bread is easier.

The dark green stuff is crispy kale.

Baba ghanoush

Take one eggplant.  Halve lengthwise.  Pour a little olive oil onto a baking sheet, and put the eggplants cut-side down onto the baking sheet.  Bake at 400F for 20-30min, until the skin is wrinkly and starting to burn.  Scoop the goopy innards into a food processor.  Mix with ~1/4C tahini, the juice of a lemon, ~1tsp kosher salt, and a clove of garlic.

Dump into a bowl, top with some parsley or basil or cilantro, paprika, pomegranate seeds, or pine nuts (optional).  Eat with carrots, pita chips, tortilla chips, bread, or a spoon...

Definitely got a good Ed rating from this one.  The hands-on time is less than five minutes, and I think that includes washing the food processor.  Next time you're wanting a dip of some sort, I recommend this one.  Smoky, tangy, vibrant, and delicious.

Pork spinach meatballs

I was wandering through Shaws, looking for things to inspire me to cook dinner, and found myself in the meat aisle, looking for deals.  Often you can find cheap deals on meat there, and while I find that pretty darn sketchy, I figure as long as you cook the manager's special stuff that night, you'll probably be fine.  I lucked out twice - thanks to those sketchy manager's special deals, I got a pound of ground pork for $1.10, and four beef bones for $0.60.  Cook that stuff til it's good and dead, eep.  What is wrong with our agricultural system that meat can be that cheap?

Anyway, the ground pork put me in mind of the meatball subs we'd had at the end of a long adventure race in Canada last fall; one of the flavor options had been something about pork, and then I got the idea that I wanted to put spinach in my meatballs.  So, a head of garlic and a pound of frozen spinach later, I was ready to go.

First things first: flavor.  Toasted spices are where it's at.  I think just about anything that imparts flavor is a good start, but I went with fennel seeds, cumin, mustard seeds, and red pepper flakes.

Salt, spices, meat, one egg, one small yellow beet (grated), 10oz of frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed, a few cloves of garlic, some bread crumbs... 

Smoosh it all together, with a utensil or your hands.

Make balls.  Heat oven to 350F.

Bake for 15min on an ungreased pan, then flip and bake another 10min.  Eat, or freeze.

Actual quantities: 

1lb ground pork 80% lean

10oz frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

4 cloves garlic

1 yellow beet, peeled and grated (raw)

1/4C bread crumbs

2 tsp kosher salt (you could get away with 1tsp, if you're scared of sodium)

2 tsp fennel seeds

2 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tsp mustard seeds

Toast spices in a dry pan.  Grind.  Put everything in a bowl, mix together, make balls, bake for 25min.

Roasted duck breast

I love duck.  I think I always have - I have memories of eating duck even as a little kid, and enjoying it. So when Tiffany came by Boston and we had a dinner date at home, I was pretty sold when I saw the duck breast in Savenor's.  I believe that the trick to perfect duck is that you need to render out most of the fat from under the skin, first, so that you can actually eat the skin, and it's delicious and crispy.  The meat is pretty damn good even if you don't eat the skin, but crispy duck skin without any of the gross fat is my idea of heaven.  *drool*

But first things first - we needed appetizers.  And that's where Formaggio's comes in.  The fact that we only walked out of these with one hunk of goat cheese, some sopressata, rabbit pate, and sourdough bread showed amazing self restraint, on the part of all of us.  The three of us managed to eat nearly this entire board of deliciousness before dinner, and still have room for dinner - that's what Eating Buddies are about, I guess!  The sopressata wrapped around a pear slice with a bit of hard aged gouda was pretty awesome, fyi.

We also had some pickles - carrots, turnips, garlic, ginger, and spicy kohlrabi.

The eating buddy thing - Tiffany, Ed, Chris and I were eating buddies in highschool.  I don't even know what this means, except that we really liked to eat good food.  Some things don't change...

Back to the duck.  First I salted the meat and skin.  Then (not pictured), I scored the skin in a cross-hatch pattern, with a very sharp knife.  You want to cut through nearly all the fat, but not into the meat. That lets the fat render out better.

Next comes the rendering part.  In a cast iron skillet, I put the duck skin-side down on low heat, and left it there for the next hour.  Meanwhile, we devoured cheese, meat, and fruit.  mmmmm.

Also, we had an interesting foamy rhubarb rosemary cocktail.  Not my favorite, but an interesting drink.

Anyway, after the fat has rendered almost completely out (you may have to pour it off a few times - save that fat, it's delicious for cooking potatoes), you can think about cooking the meat.  I hit the oven at 350F, and toasted up some spices: cumin, cardamom, sumac, pepper, and fennel seeds, in a dry pan.  Grind those up, add a pinch of salt, then rub both the meat and skin with generous amounts of toasted ground spices.  Flip the duck over so that it's now meat-side down, and transfer to the oven for ~10min.  15min yields medium cooked duck, which is overdone in my opinion.  

Take it out, let it rest for 5min or so, then cut across the grain into slices.  Serve on top of something that'll soak up any juices.  In this case, we had a moroccan flavored salad of orzo, tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, parsley, cilantro, and pomegranate seeds.  

This was delicious.  I really want to go cook a duck breast now.  The spices don't matter, because most of the flavor comes from that perfect, crispy, drool-inducing skin.  mmmm.

Roasted cabbage pear salad

What do you do with the other 3/4 of your head of cabbage? An excellent question, because all the best recipes for cabbage have cabbage playing a very small part. For good reason. But I had to use up the rest of the cabbage before it was too late (can't waste food!), and stumbled across this recipe. Good idea! I actually *like* roasted cabbage, so this was bound to be a success.

Naturally, I didn't follow the recipe exactly, but made up a dressing of dijon mustard, lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper, and tossed the roasted cabbage and pear chunks in that. Also, toasted walnuts win me over every time. So it ended up being a pretty quick thing to make, and I'll totally make it again. 1 pear, half a cabbage, ~1/4C chopped walnuts, and some shredded hard cheese. Yum! And it even got an ok Ed rating, which is pretty good considering we're talking about a dish consisting primarily of cabbage.

Cabbage apple slaw in a maple dressing

When you buy a head of cabbage, there is a lot to it.  Enough that after chopping off about a quarter of it, you're left wondering what the heck you're supposed to do with the rest of it.  I considered this, because I've made that before and it was delicious, but my cabbage was green, not purple, and I didn't really feel like cooked cabbage, anyway.  I decided on a cabbage salad/slaw thing, mostly because recently I had one of those delicious Vietnamese salads in Chinatown where it's raw cabbage and carrots and cucumber and herbs and a yummy dressing, and the cabbage is actually quite edible.  We also had some sour cream in the fridge, and I was thinking that maybe I could turn that into a dressing of note.  The end result included apples, basil, cilantro, toasted walnuts, and a handful of raw grated beets on top, tossed in a creamy, sweet and sour dressing.  It was really good!  Yet another way to make cabbage edible!



Cabbage apple slaw
1/2 head of cabbage, thinly sliced
1 apple, cut into matchsticks
a small handful of basil leaves, chiffonaded
a handful of cilantro leaves, coarsely chopped
a handful of walnuts, chopped and toasted
1/2 beet, peeled and grated

Dressing
Sour cream
Maple syrup
Sherry vinegar
Olive oil
Worcestershire sauce
Sesame oil
Salt
Dijon mustard

For the dressing, put all those ingredients on a table.  The dressing wants to be ~1/3 sour cream, 1/4 vinegar, 5/12s everything else (did I just complicate things? Yes I did.  Go with 1/3, 1/3, 1/3).  I mix all the flavors before adding oil, and I found I didn't need much oil to cut the vinegar-y-ness.  Taste along the way.  Adjust as you like.

For the salad, mix everything except the beets into a big bowl.  Toss with plenty of kosher salt and then the dressing, and let sit for a bit so the cabbage can soften.  When you're ready to serve, put a pile of slaw, and top with a small handful of grated beets.  They're deliciously sweet and earthy tasting, and make the salad look much more appealing because of the color.  If you add them too soon, though, everything just turns light pink, and reminds me of 1950s jello salads.

Also, this got a totally satisfactory Ed-rating.  It was good!