Gail's salmon

Gail makes this amazing salmon on the grill, this mix of sweet and sour and spicy and savory, and the other day I called her up to actually get the recipe. Of course, then I lost it, so I had to call her again to post it here. 

This is totally worth making, even if you don't have a grill. Though, the grill makes it all crispy and delicious, so obviously that's the better approach. 

Brown sugar

Chili powder

Lemon zest

Coriander

Salt

Guessing at quantities:

2 tbs brown sugar

1 tbs chili powder

1 tsp cumin

1/8tsp salt

1/8tsp black pepper

Make this! You won't regret it, I promise. 

Tabouleh

We had a dinner yesterday that felt like a very typical weeknight dinner, and I realized I don't think I've ever written down my tabouleh recipe. It's delicious. This whole thing was delicious, but dinner should be delicious, especially if you have a beagle mentality and all food is something to be celebrated. Start to finish about 45min, which, for us, is a pretty quick dinner. Because half the time we're also washing last night's dishes and we're always making stuff from scratch and yadda yadda yadda. I have colleagues who say they won't make dinner if it takes more than 20 minutes, and I just wonder how that's supposed to work. You can't have popovers, then. 

Anyway, this is a dinner that relies mostly on the oven, and considering the recent break in the heat wave, this was a good night for that. You're looking at roasted cauliflower and broccoli, tabouleh with roasted chickpeas, and popovers. 

I already broke my popover in half to let out the steam, but they look way cooler when it's a leaning mound of puffed eggy custardy awesomeness. 

Start by turning the oven on to 450F. Roughly chop the broccoli and cauliflower, lay it out in a single layer on a sheet pan, drizzle generously with olive oil and sprinkle with kosher salt. Drop that onto the bottom shelf of the oven as it pre-heats. This will maximize your brown bits without overcooking the veggies.

Take a can of chickpeas, rinse them, shake dry and dump onto another sheetpan. Toss with some oil, salt, and zaatar or other spice mixture. Put these onto the top shelf of the oven, which is still preheating. 

Make your popover batter. Make sure the mixture is warm! and that your muffin tins are well greased! I wrote up the recipe here: http://alexjospefood.blogspot.com/2011/12/popovers-update.html. It works, and gets an excellent Ed-rating. We were actually calculating the cost of a batch of popovers, because at one of our favorite farm-to-table type restaurants, you can get a basket of popovers instead of bread, and $10 gets you four popovers. One batch, in the recipe above, yields 6 huge popovers, for about $0.12 apiece. As if you needed another reason to make your own popovers.

Anyway, flip the brassicas if you smell any burning. They probably want 5-7 minutes a side. Once the oven is pre-heated, remove the chickpeas, and put in the popovers. You'll want to not open the oven again until 15 minutes is up, so hopefully your brassicas are done at this point, otherwise they're staying in. Because it's summer, who cares if your broccoli is room temperature? The room is warm. 

While the popovers are doing their thing at 450F, make the tabouleh: 

Tabouleh

1 large tomato

2 mini cucumbers

1 bit bunch of parsley

2/3C dry bulgur

1 lemon

olive oil

salt

Boil 2/3C water. When it boils, remove from heat, stir in the bulgur, and let it sit, covered, for 5min or so. 

Chop the tomato and cucumber relatively finely. Chop the parsley finely. Stir those together in a big bowl with the juice of the lemon, a glug or two or three of olive oil, and a few healthy pinches of salt. When the bulgur is cooked, stir that in. 

This will be even more delicious tomorrow, when the flavors have sat. You can add things, adjust things, whatever - super versatile grain salad. Basil and mint are excellent additions, if you've got them.

Ok, now you have your tabouleh and the popovers are done with the 15-minute period at 450. Drop the oven to 350, and let the popovers cook another 15-20min. Pop the chickpeas back into the oven - they would do best with like 40 minutes at 300F, but that's not what we're working with today, and slightly-roasted/slightly-burned chickpeas are still better than straight-out-of-the-can chickpeas. 

Use your 20 minutes of wait-time wisely. 

When the time is up, if you aren't immediately consuming all 6 popovers, poke them all with a knife and return to the turned-off oven for 3-5 minutes while you put the rest of the food on plates. Sprinkle the chickpeas on top of the tabouleh, or just eat them straight, because they're delicious.

Oh, and bonus if you have some tahini sauce in the fridge - literally just tahini, lemon juice, salt, and water, taste and adjust until it tastes good. It's pretty delicious on the cauliflower and broccoli.

Lime curd

I had two limes that had been sitting in our hanging basket a bit too long, and knew it was time to do something with them. Lime curd. No idea where the idea came from, but once I thought it I knew I had to have it, because lemon curd is one of my favorite foods, so lime curd isn't that far off. I couldn't remember goes into curd, so a little googling later, I came up with this. The reason for the funky egg/egg yolk thing is a compromise between some recipes calling for whole eggs, some recipes calling for egg yolks, and me having very small eggs on hand.

It was delicious. I took a picture of the curd spread on bread, but don't let that fool you. I mostly have been eating this stuff with a spoon out of the jar.

I would double the recipe if you have enough limes. Since I only had two, I made a very small batch. Considering the spoon situation I mentioned above, this is probably for the best.

1 egg

1 egg yolk

2/3C sugar

1/4C lime juice (this was a little short using just the lime juice, so I topped it off with bottled lemon juice I had in the fridge)

Zest of both limes

2tbs butter, in pieces

In a metal bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, juice, and zest. Place the bowl over a pot of boiling water to create a double boiler. You could do this straight on the stove top, but then you risk adding too much heat at once and scrambling your eggs. You want to just slowly bring them up to heat, stirring continuously. If they start to scramble, immediately pull the mixture off the heat and continue to stir.

After 5-10 minutes, the curd should be thickened, and pull away from the edge of the bowl. At this point, lower the heat even more, and stir in the butter, one little piece at a time, melting it slowly into the curd.

Then lick every appliance you used to create the curd. Pack a jar or a tupperware, or use immediately. This stuff is so versatile. You can use it as a layer between cakes, you can fill linzertorte-style cookies, you can swirl into cheesecake, you can spread on bread, you can stir into oatmeal, you can top ice cream, you can fill cupcakes, you can spread onto shortbread, you can bake into a glorious lemon tart, or you can eat it with a spoon. 

Sourdough English muffins

A few months back, Ari gave me some of his sourdough starter. This means we've been making lots of bread. Luckily it's a hearty starter, meaning I can leave it in the fridge for a week or two between feedings, but still, there's more baking going on than usual. At least, we've been going through flour a lot more frequently than before.

The other weekend, I didn't have anything planned, and I picked up our dog-eared King Arthur Flour cookbook, to see what they had to say about sourdough. I learned that the addition of baking soda can nullify some of the sour flavor, which could be a very useful tidbit of information if you're looking to make non-sour sourdough things. Or I could just use yeast, but it's sort of like, why use yeast if I've got the natural stuff sitting in a jar in my fridge? Anyway, besides several variations on bread, which we've discovered by now on our own, King Arthur Flour had a recipe for English muffins. That sounds delicious! Time to try it. 

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/sourdough-english-muffins-recipe

I used half the recipe, since we're only two people after all.

May have burned one. Oops!

How about topping with butter, jam, and a scoop or two of cottage cheese or ricotta? I recommend.

Squash mac and cheese

This is one that's worth making again! Mac and cheese is delicious, and now you can make it nutritious AND orange at the same time... that was your goal, right? right? Crap, I guess not. Well, regardless, this was good, and even got a good Ed-rating. You could skip the oven part, and just call this a pasta sauce. It works all ways.

Start with an onion. Everything starts with an onion. Chop it up, and fry in some oil until it's caramelized. At which point, add some garlic and a handful of fresh sage.

The squash: Peel and cube a butternut squash, saving the seeds because roasted butternut squash seeds are delish. Delicata seeds are the best, but butternut seeds are a close second. 

Add some butter to your pan, and fry up those squash cubes, leaving them in place long enough to get some browning. Browning = flavor. If you're a big fan of squash chunks, leave some aside to stir into the pasta as chunks instead of sauce.

Then food process everything in that pan until it makes a beautiful orange sauce. It might be chunky, but don't worry, you'll be adding the cheese sauce shortly, and that'll thin it out and help with the processing.

As the water boils for the pasta, start the sauce. 

Make a roux - ~2tbs butter, whisk in 2tbs flour, cook while whisking for 5 minutes, and add some milk. Probably about a cup? Keep adding and whisking until it's the thickness you like. Add some to the food processor to help puree the squash. Dump the pureed squash back into the pan with the roux, and taste and adjust seasoning. Salt, pepper, a hint of nutmeg. Dump in ~1-2 cups of grated cheese. Stir until that is melted. Set it aside.

Drain the pasta when it is still very al dente. Stir in the squash-cheese sauce, and load it into a casserole dish. Sprinkle a little more cheese on top, and bake another 15-20 minutes, until everything is bubbling and delicious. Or you can totally skip that step and just eat pasta with the cheesy squash sauce. It's all good!

Ingredients
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a handful of fresh sage
1 butternut squash
1 lb pasta (small shapes, of any variety)
1-2C grated cheddar
2 tbs butter
2 tbs flour
1-2C milk
parmesan cheese, for serving



I like my pasta smothered in parmesan cheese.


We added green things.

Pizza

Pizza needs anchovies, right? Anchovies, bay scallops, pesto, sauteed leek, and cheddar (I think?). 

Delicious. But maybe a *few* too many anchovies. 

I use a basic bread recipe with maybe four glugs of olive oil into the dough while mixing to make a pizza dough. I only rise it for 15-20 minutes, then get on with rolling it out. It'll still taste delicious (if not quite as full a flavor), and we're hungry NOW. 

Pesto - 

Grind a hunk of parmesan with a clove of garlic in a food processor

Add as much basil as you can fit, a few shakes of almond meal, and a few pinches of salt

A glug or three of olive oil

Process until green and smooth

Add more oil if it won't grind

Taste, and adjust

Pumpkin cinnamon rolls

It's autumn, which means all things pumpkin. I usually don't go too crazy for this stuff, but a few weeks ago we had two guys staying with us, one our American friend living in Madrid, and one his Spanish friend. Greg has been missing all things American, like maple syrup, cheddar cheese, and all things pumpkin spice. Juanma had no idea what he was in for, when they went to the grocery store and came back with EVERYTHING pumpkin spice. To be fair, I think the pumpkin spice thing is overdone, but it is good in small doses, and I do love me my squashes.

So Greg and Juanma got me thinking about pumpkin spice, and I had a box of pearl sugar that I'd picked up in Sweden (the best souvenirs are the edible sort), and I don't really like the glaze part of cinnamon rolls anyway, so it was time to make pumpkin cinnamon rolls, with pearl sugar instead of a glaze. I found the pumpkin in the dough makes for a very flavorful and fluffy roll, not at all bready, and the pumpkin in the filling makes it even more moist. I highly recommend taking the five minutes to brown the butter rather than just melting in the microwave - deepens the flavor. I'm thinking that these rolls don't need to be an autumn-only sort of thing... I'll be making them all year!

Dough
2.5 tsp yeast
1/2C warm milk
3/4C pumpkin puree
1 egg
5 tbs butter, melted and divided
2 tbs sugar

3.5C flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cardamom
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground ginger

Filling
1/4C pumpkin puree
The other half of the butter you melted earlier
2 tbs white sugar
1/4C brown sugar
1/4tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon

Topping
Pearl sugar

Assembly
Melt the butter in a saucepan. Take it a little beyond melted stage, and brown it. It'll sizzle and spit for a while, and then it'll stop sizzling and turn brown. This makes it taste so nutty and delicious, you don't want to skip this step.

Warm the milk, and stir in the yeast and proof it. Then add about half the melted butter, the pumpkin, the egg, and the sugar. Stir that around, and then in with the dry goods! Start with about a cup of flour and all the spices, and then keep adding flour until you get a dough you can knead. Turn it out to a floured surface and knead, maybe 8 minutes.

Return the dough to a greased bowl, and let it rise 1 hour, until just about doubled in bulk. It becomes this beautiful orange color; I love it.

Once the dough has risen, generously flour a surface, turn out the dough, flour the top, and roll it out. It'll be loose, soft and pillowy - I think because of the pumpkin. You want a sheet about 11x17".

Mix the pumpkin puree with the remaining melted butter, and brush that onto the dough. Sprinkle the sugar on top, and the cinnamon on top of that. Roll up the sheet of dough starting with the end nearest to you, until it makes a neat little log. Then cut the log into ~1" slices. If you use a serrated knife, you won't squish the spiral. Try to cut without applying any downward pressure.

Arrange the rolls flat-side-up in a greased pan (two 9" round pans, in my case), and let them rise another 45 minutes.

Once they've risen, sprinkle the tops with pearl sugar, and bake at 350F for 25 minutes. You could brush the top with melted butter before adding the sugar, but you can also skip that step.

Devour.