Hearty Mac and cheese

I have a giant block of cheddar in my fridge. Well, maybe I should say "had", as it's since disappeared, but I was worried that I wouldn't get a chance to finish it before it went moldy. The first thing that came to mind was a mac and cheese dish, because mac and cheese is straight up awesome. This one has cauliflower and roasted squash in it, which adds a nice change in texture from just creamy sauce and pasta. 

Also, it turns out that multiple opinions on the "right" way to do mac and cheese can actually coextist. I discovered that Ed really likes his mac and cheese to be a solid block of food, that you carve out of the pan and eat with a knife and fork, pretty much. Can we say noodle pie? I prefer something with a creamier, runnier sauce, covered in more cheese and breadcrumbs, so you get a mix of textures. It's all about the textures for me. Luckily, you can keep cooking a roux to thicken it, or add more milk to thin it, so this is a recipe that can fit all tastes. Though you kind of have to choose, at the time. Generally the cook gets it her way :)

This isn't a recipe, so much as some flexible steps that will make you a tasty dish. Not like that's anything new. All the steps below can pretty much be done simultaneously.

1. In an oven-proof skillet (cast iron, perhaps), cook a diced onion to your happy point. For this dish, I just sweated it. Add some diced garlic.

2. Cube your squash (I think this was a butternut), and roast with some olive oil and salt until it's done. Brownness is ok, so blast that thing with heat, as it'll cook faster. Should take 10-15min. Boil a head of cauliflower, until al dente.

3. Cook some pasta, until just short of al dente. Drain.

4. While the pasta cooks, make a roux: melt a tablespoon of butter, whisk in a tablespoon of flour, and then whisk in as much milk as you need to get to the consistency you need. Grate a bunch of cheese. Add to the roux. 

5. Dump all of the above ingredients into a big bowl, and toss it around to mix. Taste, and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper. Add more cheese.

6. Put the glop back into the cast iron pan (you can mix in the pan if you're talented, but I would make a mess), top with more cheese and some breadcrumbs, and bake for 5-10 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling. You can broil a few minutes at the end if you want a crispier top.

7. Enjoy!

Stone fruit cake

I'm not a big cake person. I'll take ice cream, or pie, or cookies, or any other sort of baked good, over cake any day. But, there are some cakes that are very tasty indeed. Rich, lemon-y, Italian cakes with a hint of almond and pistacchio, for example. Anyway, not sure how I came about this cake, but I decided to give it a go, and I'm sure glad I did. I've made it twice now, once with the full amount of sugar and once with a little less, because it was just a bit overwhelming, and I think it's better with the less-sweet version. Then you can really taste the fruit.

I think this has become my go-to cake, at least for the time being. It's quick, easy to remember, and tastes delicious. Give it a shot!

Original recipe

The only change was to use 2/3C sugar instead of 3/4C. And, peaches rather than nectarines, since that's what I had. 

The second time, I had some very ripe plums, so those went in, and boy do they make it pretty, staining the area around the plum purple and tart and delicious. 

It'll look like way too much fruit. It's not; the cake will rise right up over that. You could even add more fruit. I bet this would be real pretty with raspberries.

See? Cake eats up the fruit no problem.


I pretend to myself that if I put a piece of cake on a plate, I will only eat that one piece of cake. The reality involves replacing the piece of cake on the plate as soon as the plate is empty...

Lemony shrimp and pasta

A few years ago, Ali was living in Amherst, and I would stay with her every week or two when I'd show up to talk with my adviser and do some actual work for grad school, sort of alternating between Ali's house and Peter and Gail's house. Anyway, Ali had a stack of Cooking Light magazines, I think they'd been gifted to her when Ross and Sam moved out of the country. This was a recipe, roughly, from one of those magazines, and it was quite good. Not just with the qualifier "for a Cooking Light recipe", but on its own! The bright and tangy lemon-mustard sauce brightened the pasta, and the capers provided bright little salty notes. I wanted to make it again, and amazingly, I actually found the original recipe online! This is a good one - quick, easy, and relatively cheap, depending on how many shrimp you use. Below is how I remade this recipe, since I'm incapable of following an actual recipe.

Pasta with shrimp and chickpeas

1 box Pasta

Shrimp (vary the amount based on how many shrimp you want - we went with a half pound for two of us)

1 can chickpeas

several handfuls of fresh arugula

1 red onion

several spoonfuls of capers

1 clove garlic

olive oil

Sauce: 

1 lemon

1 spoonful dijon mustard

A splash of olive oil

a pinch or three of salt

a pinch or three of freshly ground pepper

Get your water boiling. Lots of it. Salt it.

Dice the onion, sweet on high heat in olive oil until there's some browned bits. Dice the garlic, add that to the pan and cook until it's starting to get fragrant. Cook the shrimp, a few minutes (2?) on each side, until they're just pink. When they're nearly done, throw in the capers, chickpeas, and arugula/spinach/swiss chard/baby lettuce of any sort to wilt, and once the greens are wilted, take off the heat.

Meanwhile, make the sauce - juice the lemon, mix with mustard and oil and salt and pepper, taste and adjust. 

Once the pasta is done (cook to your preferred cookedness), mix it all together. We got a solid four servings out of this, two for dinner and two for lunch.

Enjoy! 

Zucchini with tahini and feta

Ed saw a recipe somewhere, that he wanted to try, and who am I to complain about interesting new dinner ideas? This one turned out quite tasty, I think he got the idea from here. We used two different kinds of feta, because we had it - one for crumbling and one for frying. And the fried feta was AMAZING.  Good golly, go buy some firm feta and fry it, you'll be in love instantly.

Anyway, what we have here is a mishmash - there's a tahini sauce on the bottom. I wish I remembered what went into it. Lemon, salt, and probably a little water and/or olive oil.  Then rounds of zucchini, that we fried lightly on either side, as well as some rounds of the stem of a king oyster mushroom, since we had some of those in the fridge. Mushrooms fry up so nicely. We toasted the hazelnuts and crumbled the feta on top, and served with a few slabs of fried feta - slightly aged, I think, at least it tasted that way, and we got it from Sophia's, as we get all our tasty feta. We fried it in a little olive oil in a nonstick pan, and it was delicious. Oh, I mentioned that already? 

We'll make this again. Though, as is our wont, probably with totally different ingredients and methods.

Braised endives

One thing we'd really been enjoying through the winter and early spring this year were braised endives. I think we've finally settled on a "favorite" way to cook them. I've always loved just cutting them in half and frying them in a pan until they're done, but we've discovered that frying them first, in some butter for flavor and color, and then adding some liquid and braising them until they're done, that's the way to do it. The endives will just melt in your mouth, not in a mushy way, but in a silky way, with a little bit of crunch still at the root of the leaves. This braising obsession may be in part because we've started making lots of veggie stock - we've just been throwing all our veggie scraps into a big tupperware that we store in the freezer, and once every week or three we boil it all down into stock. So far we've had some interesting combinations. Don't bother saving your radish greens. And squash peelings are not good eats, either.

Anyway, we now have a surplus of vegetable stock. Here's a good way to use it up. Start with a pat of butter in a frying pan. Halve your endives lengthwise, and place into the melted butter. Salt the top, grind on some pepper, and leave them put over medium-ish heat for maybe 5-10 minutes, until you've got some nice color.  Once you're happy with the amount of browning, pour a cup or two of stock over the top, and let that simmer away for another 15-20 minutes, until it's easy to stick a fork into the tops of the endives. Pull them out of the braising liquid and grate some parmesan cheese on top, though obviously you could skip that step if you didn't have any cheese.

Simple and delicious.

Berry ricotta cake

This is a bit of a modification of a recipe that came from the Amateur Gourmet, who got the recipe from the Village Bakery. It looked too complicated in terms of measurements (1/4C + 2 tbs? I can't do math like that, are you kidding?), so I messed with the amounts of things until they fit the various measuring devices that I have in my house. This may be a bad approach to baking, but it tends to be the one I take... in the end, it was a success. Mostly. I felt like if you were eating the cake with your hands, it was too greasy, but maybe that's a sign that you shouldn't eat cake with your hands. Tasting the batter I was worried things would be too sweet, but it's fine once it cooks.  So, I declare success! Will definitely make again, because I love dense polenta cakes. I'm going to try leaving out the olive oil altogether, see if that makes it more of a finger food cake.

Ingredients:
1 stick of butter
3/4C sugar
1/4C olive oil
2 eggs
1 tbs vanilla
1 tbs honey
3/4C flour
1/2C cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1/2tsp salt
1C ricotta
1/4C greek yogurt (it called for sour cream, but we get our greek yogurt from Sophia's, and the consistency is basically that of sour cream. That ain't no diet greek yogurt. And, well, I didn't feel like going out and getting sour cream)
~1/2 package frozen raspberries

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the rest of the wet ingredients except the ricotta and sour cream. Combine the dry ingredients together. Mix wet and dry. Fold in the ricotta + sour cream.

Butter and flour a 9" diameter cake pan. Spread half the batter into the pan, top with berries. Spread the other half on top of that, and again top with berries. The amount of berries depends how obsessed you are with them!

Bake at 350F for 50 minutes.

(As you can see, I baked a little taster cake for myself, as well as the full-sized one for everyone else. Had to know how it would taste!)

Prosciutto pizza

Promise, we've been making dinner, I just haven't blogged about it. This is a quick one - awesome combo of things to put on a pizza: 

- Ricotta

- Arugula

- Prosciutto

- Sage

- Caramelized onions

Pizza is tough to make into a quick meal; even when you take shortcuts. I don't rise my pizza dough very long, just while caramelizing the onions, which is a good 30 minutes. That also gives time to make the ricotta - dump all your about-to-go-bad milk (because why else are you making ricotta?) into a pot, heat til nearly boiling, add a couple glugs of lemon juice, and set aside after stirring so it'll curdle. Strain, and this doesn't need much compressing, since you're just going to turn around and put it on pizza. 

We also made one cute little calzone, pictured. Same stuff, inside. 

Even though each pizza only takes 5-10min to cook, you still have many little pizzas to cook. The best situation is probably to be doing it a la group dinner style, just eating them as they come out of the oven, but we cooked all of them, because we happened to be using the kitchen table to stage all the ingredients. Poor planning!

Chicken korma

I loooove Indian food, but in general, it is cheaper, tastier, and a lot quicker to just pay Bombay Palace to deliver some tasty tubs of sauces and braised meats. But, I wanted to try my hand at actually making chicken korma the other day, and figured I'd follow a recipe. Roughly, anyway. The gist of it is that you marinate the chicken a bit, you toast your spices, you create a sauce base, and then you add more stuff and simmer for a while.  Total success, except that when I doubled the amount of red pepper flakes (because that makes sense when you haven't tried a recipe, right?), Ed found it barely edible. This is interesting, because usually he's the one who doesn't notice spice; I found the dish to be hot, but delicious, while he mostly just found it hot, and was sweating.  I may have just won in a spice battle. Anyway, unless you like your food really hot, I recommend that you stick to 1 tsp of red pepper flakes, not the 2 that I used.  

This is a dish with a lot of ingredients, but mostly it's just spices.  And if you already have most of those spices (doesn't everyone keep a large tub of cumin seeds at ready use?), that part is easy.  The other special tool for this dish is a spice grinder - we have a coffee grinder that we use specifically for spices, and that works really well.  You can toast ground spices, but you have to be super duper careful not to burn them. Whatever you do, don't skip the spice-toasting step.  Totally adds the depth of flavor that I expect in good Indian cuisine. The other thing I tend to keep on hand is a jar of almond flour, mostly because I use it in pesto, but also sometimes for baking things. If you don't have this, you can buy some, or just use a half cup of ground cashews instead, since you're already buying cashews to put in the dish.  

Marinate:

2" piece of ginger

8 cloves garlic

2 Tbs olive oil

2 Tbs lemon juice

1/2C yogurt

4 chicken thighs, skinned and deboned (or, any other form of chicken that you happen to have on hand)

Spices:

2 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsp coriander seeds

2 tsp black peppercorns

1 tsp fennel seeds

6 cardamom pods

~1/2 stick of cinnamon, ground

~1/2 tsp nutmeg, ground

2 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp ground turmeric

2 tsp red pepper flakes (this is too much for a normal person)

1 bay leaf

(You could just use ~4tsp of a good garam masala instead of the first 7 spices, if you have that on hand. I'd still toast it)

Sauce base:

1/2C almond flour

3 Tbs olive oil

1 Tbs honey

1C chicken stock

The actual stuff in the dish:

1 onion

3 Tbs tomato paste

1/2C half & half

1-1/2C yogurt

1C golden raisins

1/2C cilantro, chopped

1/2C cashews

More salt, to taste

First things first: if using chicken thighs, take off the skin and the icky fatty bits. Debone, and throw those bones in a pot with some water to get some stock boiling.  Then chop the chicken into bite-size pieces, and put in a bowl to marinate. To make the marine, use a food processor to combine the ginger, garlic, lemon, and olive oil, and dump that over the chicken with a hefty spoonful or two of yogurt. Mix it around with your hands, and then set it aside while you prep other stuff.  

Put all the whole spices (cumin, cardamom, coriander, pepper, fennel seeds) into a pan, dry, and toast on medium-ish heat until you can smell them. Keep them moving around, and definitely keep an eye on these - you don't want to burn your spices! Once the spices are toasted, grind them in a spice grinder, and puree the almond flour, oil, honey, and stock with the spices to make your sauce base. This will taste pretty strong, remember that it's getting diluted with cream and yogurt.

Next up, start the actual dish - dice your onion, and sauté the heck out of it, til you've got some caramelization. At that point, add the tomato paste, and let that start to brown a little on the edges. Mush it up with the onions, and let things continue to meld. After about 10 minutes, add the chicken, and cook that on high heat for a while, before adding the sauce, the bay leaf, half and half, yogurt, raisins, cashews, and cilantro.  Let that simmer for a minimum of a half hour; if you're using chicken breast instead of thighs you probably want an hour.  I think it could probably go for up to 2 hours, if you had the time... I was hungry, so waited it out to 30 minutes and then dove in.  The sauce will reduce a little; if it's too thick, you can use more of that chicken stock you've been boiling to thin it out.  

Here's the final consistency, before we ate it.  We cooked it in a big pan, starting with an aluminum pan and transferring to a bigger nonstick once we realized how over-full the aluminum pan was.  I think a dutch oven may actually be the preferred vessel here.  Next time!

Serve with rice, and/or naan if you've thought that far ahead.  This is totally worth the ginungus ingredient list.  And, it got me over my fear of making Indian food, though I still think it's a better deal to just call up Bombay Palace for delivery...

Cauliflower with tahini sauce

For Christmas, I wanted a hearty veggie dish that still looked festive. One of the gifts I'd given my parents was a cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, Jerusalem, and I'd challenged them to cook their way through the book.  I figured maybe I could help them out, and start them out with a recipe from the book.  I'd recently had a very similar dish at Sofra, and small middle eastern cafe in Cambridge, and it was delicious, so I had a good idea that tahini sauce and cauliflower were a good match. And, with the pomegranate seeds and fried green onion pieces, it was a seasonally-appropriate color, too!

The base of the dish is roasted cauliflower, and I discovered that not all ovens happily burn the bottom of the pan the way mine does at home. Bummer.  I like the browned bits! Luckily, put it hot enough and you'll get results. I don't think I followed the proper recipe for the sauce, likely because I didn't have all the ingredients I needed, but what I came up with was tasty nonetheless. It's also quite simple, and quick to prepare. Bonus! Here's my version...

Roasted cauliflower in tahini sauce
1 head cauliflower
3-4 dried red peppers
Olive oil
3 sprigs green onions
Seeds from 1/2 pomegranate
Tahini
Lemon juice
salt
pepper
water
Pomegranate molasses

Cut or break the cauliflower into bite-size pieces. Split the red peppers lengthwise, and toss both cauliflower and peppers with olive oil and a decent sprinkling of kosher salt.  Spread into a single layer on a baking sheet, and roast for ~20 minutes at 450F.  You should get some browning, but you don't want blackening.

As that cooks, extract the seeds from the pomegranate. You can either use the thwack-with-a-wooden-spoon-into-a-bowl method, or painstakingly remove the seeds one at a time. The thwacking method might make more of a mess, but it's a heckuva lot more fun.

Chop the green onions into ~1" pieces, and cut lengthwise. Fry those over high heat in some oil, just to take off some of the bite.

For the sauce, put ~1/4C tahini into a mixing bowl.  Add ~2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and a few pinches of salt and some grinds of pepper.  Stir in a tablespoon or two of water, and taste. Add more tahini if it's too lemon-y, more lemon if it's too tahini-y.  Thin with water as needed; you want a runny consistency.

Once the cauliflower is done, lump into a serving platter, and drizzle the sauce all over the top.  Use 2-3 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses and drizzle that over the top.  Sprinkle the green onions and pomegranate seeds over the top, and serve.  Mmm.