Bribes

The other week, I had said something about wanting to leave Monday night (instead of Tuesday morning) for Amherst, to avoid the snowstorm on Tuesday. I went off to coach, and when I came home, Ed was in the process of cooking a steak tenderloin, mushroom risotto, and opening a bottle of wine from when we were last in France. Needless to say, I stayed home that night! What a bribe =)

This makes me start drooling. The risotto was a regular sort of risotto, with oyster mushrooms and shitakes in it, and then some oysters and black trumpets fried in butter until they're crunchy, and sprinkled on top of the risotto. Oh man, I just started drooling again.

We also had a very tasty salad, with a cilantro-ginger-lime vinaigrette. The vinaigrette is the only real recipe from that night...


Cilantro-ginger-lime vinaigrette
About a handful of fresh cilantro, rinsed
~1" cube of fresh ginger, peeled
1 lime, its zest and juice
olive oil
lemon juice, to taste
salt, to taste

In a food processor, combine everything. Process that up, until it makes a smooth dressing. Taste it. Add more salt, lemon juice, or olive oil, as needed.

Potato-kale pancakes

This was a bit spur-of-the-moment, but, I wanted something hot for lunch, and I had kale and a potato to work with. Any time you fry something in a quarter inch of oil, it'll get my approval, anyway. And the Ed-stamp of approval. These were quite tasty.

1 potato, shredded
2 leaves of kale, rinsed, dried, and chopped into teeny little pieces
~1/2C shredded parmesan cheese
1 egg
cooking oil
salt and pepper

Grate your potato, and squeeze out the water. Then put it in a bowl. Add the kale, cheese, egg, and maybe 1/4tsp of salt and a couple grinds of pepper. Mix that around until its homogenous.

Heat a generous layer of cooking oil in a frying pan - the cast iron pan worked well for this. Once the oil is shimmering, use your hands to roll out hand-sized balls of the glop, and put it down in the oil. You'll have to work the potato stuff a bit with your hands, first, so that it all stays together, but it should stay. Once the balls of potato mixture are in the pan, flatten them a bit with a spatula.



Let the patties sit still for about three minutes, and they should be sitting there sizzling away. Once the bottoms are browned, flip, and shake some table salt on top of the side that just got flipped. Squish the patties with a spatula once you've flipped the patties.



After another 2-3 minutes, when that side is also browned, pull the patties out of the pan, and drain on a paper towel for a second before serving. Repeat the frying as necessary, I ended up with five patties. These are quite good, but if you fry up anything as little pancakes, and make it crunchy, and put cheese in it, well, I'll like it. The kale was a tasty addition though.

Filled cherry scones

I decided to try something other than the standard Alton Brown scone/biscuit recipe, and I tried the King Arthur Flour one, from another one of my favorite baking cookbooks. I hate to admit this, but this was the first KAF recipe I ever tried that failed. Luckily, it was just a texture fail, and I was able to rescue the batch of scones. They ended up tasting delicious, and in Ed's words, "these are delicious". So, its worth trying them, but with the modified recipe, not the original one. The filled bit comes from the final step - instead of just making a circle of dough and cutting out wedges, I made two circles, spread cherry preserves on top of the lower circle, and put the other circle of dough one top. Then I cut the wedges. Success!

Filled cherry scones
Made 16 large scones

2C white flour
1C whole wheat flour
1tbs baking powder
1/2tsp baking soda
1/4tsp salt
1/4C sugar
1 1/2C buttermilk (original recipe asked for 1 1/4C, which wasn't nearly enough, and I added another half cup, which was a bit too much)
1/2tsp almond extract
4tbs butter, frozen
~1/2C cherry preserves, or other jam

Preheat your oven to 450F.

Mix together the flours, baking powder, soda, salt, and sugar. Use a cheese grater to grate the butter into the mixture. Use your fingertips to rub the butter into the flour for 37 seconds. Dump in the buttermilk and almond extract, and stir just until the mixture comes together. It'll still be pretty sticky.

Flour a work surface, and dump out the dough into two equal-sized balls. Smoosh them down with your fingers until they make equally-sized discs, and spread jam on one of the circles. Careful to not overwork the dough - just sort of squish it into a circular form. Move the second circle onto the first, so that you have dough - jam - dough. you can squash that out a little wider now that its filled.


Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into 16 pieces, however you'd like. If the dough is sticking to the knife, feel free to flour it occasionally.

Carefully transfer the scones to a greased baking sheet (or two). Turn the oven down to 400, and bake for 20 minutes, until they're golden brown on top. Don't eat them all at once when they come out of the oven... you'll get a stomach-ache.

Biscuits

Biscuits are delicious. This is Alton Brown's buttermilk biscuit recipe, from his book I'm just here for more food. Make these, they have a high Ed-rating, and are quite delicious. Also, you can have them in the oven in 10 minutes. And out of the oven in another 15.

2C flour
4tbs baking powder
1/4tsp baking soda
3/4tsp salt
1C buttermilk
1/2 stick butter, frozen

Mix all the dry stuff together. Use a cheese grater to grate the butter into the dry stuff. Use your fingertip to rub the butter into the flour for all of 37 seconds. Dump in the buttermilk, and mix just enough to combine. I sort of fold it, usually.

Now comes the tricky part. The recipes all say to knead the biscuits and then cut them into shapes, but I've always just made plops of dough. I decided to try both. In the end, I think I prefer the kind that is just dropped onto the baking sheet, because they are crispier, and I like the shaggy look. The kneaded/folded ones were too much like a dinner roll. Still light and flaky, but just less delicious.

Bake 15-20min at 400F.





Regardless of whether they're lumpy or smooth, biscuits are delicious straight out of the oven. I think that plate is biscuits is basically all I ate that day...

Raspberry chocolate oatmeal muffins

I wanted to make muffins, and I was thinking of making blueberry oatmeal muffins, because I'd remembered them being awesome. However, I didn't have any blueberries, and I wanted to put chocolate into the muffins. I solved problem number one by walking down to the corner store (a much faster prospect than digging out my car and attempting to get out of the driveway), but all they had by way of frozen fruit was raspberries. For $7. Yikes. But, I haven't bought any food yet this week and it's already Wednesday, so I felt like it would be ok to splurge on frozen raspberries. It was a big bag, anyway.

I walked back home with the raspberries (and milk. I'd needed milk, too.), and looked up some recipes for raspberry oatmeal muffins, and everything kept pointing back to this person's muffin recipe. I figured if enough other people liked her recipe, I'd follow it, too. The big difference between her muffins and the kinds I usually make is that she was making a butter muffin instead of an oil muffin. I find butter to be too many extra steps, but at least this recipe was just melting it, as opposed to creaming it or some other labor-intensive process. The end result was delicious, but raspberries and chocolate are a match made in heaven, so I was sort of expecting deliciousness. Its not a very sweet muffin, but again, the raspberries and chocolate take care of that. I've posted the recipe below, but I followed the original one almost exactly. Almost. I am incapable of following a recipe as it's given to me...

Raspberry chocolate oatmeal muffins
Made 12 big muffins

1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4C sugar
1/2C (1 stick) butter, melted
1C milk
1C rolled oats (not quick oats)
1tsp lemon juice
1/2C white flour + 2 tbs white flour
1/2C whole wheat flour
1/2tsp salt
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp baking soda
some cinnamon
1C frozen raspberries
1/2C chocolate chunks

Combine the oats and milk and lemon juice in a bowl, and let it sit. The original recipe said let it sit 1hr, I got impatient at 30min, and that was just fine. Buttermilk is an acceptable substitute for milk+lemon juice (which should be vinegar, anyway, but I didn't have any).

Preheat your oven to 375F.

Melt the butter.

Put the egg, vanilla, sugar, and butter into the bowl with the milk and the oats. Stir that around thoroughly. Dump all the dry goods (flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder) on top, and mix those around lightly so they're uniform before you fold them in to the wet stuff. Add the raspberries and chocolate, and fold that into the batter. Don't overmix things.

Put the batter into lined muffin tins, and bake for 25-30min. I think mine took just about 30min, the raspberries add a lot of moisture. The muffin tops will be golden brown, and spring back when you poke them, when they're done. Remove to a cooling rack, and enjoy!


The muffins were really crumbly, but, moist and delicious at the same time, if you can get your head around that. Mostly, they were just awesomely raspberry-y and chocolate-y, which is what I was going for.

Pitas

After our lettuce pitas the night before, I decided to make some actual pitas for lunch, so we could put our leftovers from last night into fresh pitas. I followed this recipe, and it worked beautifully. Didn't take too long, either, which was nice.


Pitas
3C flour
1.5tsp salt
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs yeast
1 1/3C warm water
2 tbs olive oil

Put the warm water in a bowl, add your yeast and sugar, and let it sit for five minutes or so to proof the yeast. Then dump in everything else, stir it until its mixed, and dump that lot onto a floured table or some other surface for kneading. Flour your hands, and knead the dough for 5-10 minutes continuously. I set a kitchen timer for that sort of thing. When you're done, the dough should feel wonderfully elastic and stretchy, and smooth.

Grease a bowl, and let the dough rise somewhere warm (mine went near a radiator) for an hour. The original recipe called for longer, but I was hungry. The dough should have doubled in bulk by then, if not, let it keep rising for a while. Once it's doubled in bulk, dump it back onto that floured surface, and cut it into 8 pieces with a knife. Roll each piece into a round ball, and let those sit while you pre-heat the oven to 400F.


Once the oven is warm, roll out the first ball into a flat pizza shape. Don't roll it too thin, just pretty thin. Put one to two pitas on a baking sheet at a time, and bake for 5-8 minutes, until they're really poofed up.
You don't want them to get too brown, because then they'll be crispy instead of soft and pliable.

Let them cool for a little bit, and then cut them in half and proceed to stuff them with things. Here we have leftovers from the lettuce pitas from last night. Quite tasty. Although according to Ed, I overstuff my pitas.


Ed's version of a pita. Not nearly enough stuff inside.

Lettuce pitas

Ed is admonishing me to post more recipes more often, since I keep taking photos of things but not doing anything with them. I'll try to upload some of our yummy meals in the next few days. I've sort of given up on the whole tasty-healthy-cheap idea for now - not that everything I cook isn't at least one of those adjectives, and often two, but given that I'm only in Amherst for two nights a week, I'm not buying food for myself as often. Mostly, I steal food from our fridge at home, and brave Ed's wrath when he discovers all the kale has gone missing out of the fridge. At least I don't take his beer...

Anyway, Ed had gone to Russos and gotten lots of veggies, but he called me up as I was driving home from Amherst and asked me to pick up something bloody from the store. I stopped by Whole Foods, because they have yogurt pretzels in the bulk section (not that I'd ever sample from the bulk section), and they had some top round (I think?) that was relatively cheap and looked pretty good. I want to say it was around $5/lb, which puts it on par with hamburger when you're looking at the WF meat case. Anyway, half a pound of that went pretty far, since we ended up slicing it.
*drool*

We both decided pitas would be just the thing, but, we had neither pitas nor the patience to make some. So, we made lettuce pitas, and that worked out pretty well. Sort of interesting, but very tasty, and pretty healthy too.

The stuff for inside: steak (boy is that cooked perfectly), tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, and a sort-of-tzatziki sauce that Ed had made a day or two before.

The tzatziki is the only real recipe, and being an Ed-recipe, all quantities are approximate...
Combine: greek yogurt, diced feta cheese, diced cucumber, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I think that is more or less in descending order of quantities, but just keep tasting it until it tastes tangy and creamy and salty and delicious.

The mushrooms are giant oyster mushrooms (we get them from Russos - they're like $3.98/lb, which is actually the same price as the white button mushrooms, and they taste way better. Score!), sauteed in butter and kosher salt. The onions have just been sliced and cooked for a while until they're just starting to caramelize.

Lay your stuff on the fatter end of the lettuce leaf, and try not to over-stuff, because lettuce breaks. Cabbage might have been better, but we only had redleaf lettuce.

Roll it up, attempt to seal it shut, and eat!