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.

Halumi radicchio salad

We made this salad the other day as a fridge-cleaner, but it ended up being really quite delicious.  A tangy lemon vinaigrette on a salad of fried haloumi, baby golden beets, chickpeas, and grilled radicchio!  

To grill the radicchio, we cut the head into quarters and just placed on the rack in the oven at 400F. I don't remember how long it took, but I'd check at 15 minutes; you want some browning but not burning.

The beets were just boiled; these were little guys so they cooked in a half hour or so. It's a can of chickpeas, and the haloumi we fried in a drop of oil in a non-stick pan, then cut into strips.  The dressing was a mix of lemon, oil, salt, and pepper. Simple, and delicious.  Also on the plate is a candy striped beet (without any stripes) and some crunchy kale, but the important part here was the salad.  Definitely eat the bitter radicchio with the sweet beets, earthy chickpeas and salty cheese - that's a winning combo right there!

Thanksgiving

Oh man, am I ever behind in posting pictures and recipes of yummy things.  Since I don't know where to start, I figure Thanksgiving is probably a good place.  Possibly overwhelming; you may not get many recipes with this.  Zan and Becky came to eat and drink with us, which made for excellent company and a really fun day.  

We started with appetizers. Ed really wanted to make a vegetable terrine, so he spent a long time roasting vegetables and getting everything *just so*.  It was a very pretty terrine, unfortunately, it sort of just tasted like cold vegetables, with too much aspic on top.  I don't really know how to improve on the fact that the terrine just tasted like cold roasted vegetables. I like roasted veggies, but the other appetizers were far more interesting.  

Other appetizers included a smoked salmon plate, some chicken liver pate that Ed made that we served with shallot jam, that he also made (and this was delicious), some turkey pate that was made with some unknown parts of the bird that maybe should not have gone into the pate (this was not quite as delicious; much more gamy and not really all that delicate), and some hummus and veggies.  All my favorite things!  

We made this immediately after going for a long-ish run in the snow, so were all quite chilled by the snow and quite excited by the appetizers.  Ed managed the perfect photobomb... 

The ladies showing their excitement without the photobomb...

So, after a few more hours of eating and drinking and talking and laughing, eventually dinner was done.  Mashed potatoes, delicata squash with sage and thyme and oregano, pull-apart garlic bread, two kinds of cranberry sauce/chutney, roasted Brussels sprouts with ham and gruyere, sausage and apple stuffing and roasted turkey thighs.



No idea what's going on in this photo, but it makes me smile.


Here's a photo of my plate, which may have been overloaded. And I may have gone back for seconds, and felt quite uncomfortable after that.  But I just loooove stuffing! And you only get it once a year! It took me days to be hungry again.



No photos of dessert, but we had a slightly-more-caramelized-than-ideal tarte tatin, with vanilla ice cream, and I was so stuffed that I barely had any of it.  I should also mention that Zan arrived armed with a beer or three for each course, that we paired pretty darn successfully!

Here's the cranberry chutney recipe, at least:
2C apple cider vinegar
1 onion, diced
1/4C fresh ginger
2 tbs orange peel
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp ground clove
12oz cranberries
1.25C brown sugar
2 bosc pears

Cook the spices and the cider until it's reduced to ~1.5C (10min).  Add everything else, and simmer for 30 minutes, then mash coarsely.

And the stuffing, which was so delicious - I used Pioneer Woman's recipe.  Highly, HIGHLY recommend this one.  We cooked it underneath the turkey thighs, so all the drippings went right into the stuffing.  Win!

Oh, and here's the shallot jam. This one's a little estimated, since Ed made the shallot jam...

Start with several pounds of shallots. Slice thinly.
Cook on low with plenty of duck fat and salt, for 20-45min until you're starting to get some good caramelization.  Add some cider vinegar and some sugar. How much? Only Ed knows. Some. Also good are some raisins, preferably golden raisins.  Add more duck fat as needed.  Keep cooking. If things start to stick, you can add some water.  Keep cooking. Taste occasionally and keep cooking. After about an hour, it's probably ready.

This was really good with the chicken liver pate. I have no idea what the recipe for the pate was, sorry!