Posted by Anita on 09.11.06 1:01 PM
I never met a recipe I didn’t want to futz with. I suspect many people suffer from a similar affliction, but I had no idea how bad a case I had until yesterday.
I’m helping a friend test a recipe — which in turn is a mashup of two other recipes — for an article he’s writing, so I resolved to follow written directions to a T. Doesn’t seem so hard, does it? But it’s actually a lot more difficult than I’d imagined. No substiting homemade beans for canned? Damn. No leaving out ingredients that offend my purist sensibilities? Argh. And — because he specifically asked me to keep an eye out for missing steps and oversimplifications — no turning to the original recipes for clarifications on ingredients or descriptions. I think my brain might explode. At least the recipe allowed for roasting peppers on the grill, offering the standard broiler method as an alternate. Woo-hoo!
Are you a tinkerer, too?
cooking
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Posted by Anita on 09.06.06 10:50 AM
Mom had a craving for pizza, but we wanted to stick around the house to be with Dad. It was way too hot to turn on the oven, so we considered the grill. Cook’s Illustrated had a grilled pizza recipe [*link removed] that sounded pretty good (and less elaborate than the Mario version in Food+Wine), so off we went.
We had a little chicken left from dinner the previous night, and plenty of basil from a friend’s garden. Mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese rounded out the toppings.
The dough’s pretty wet, so it takes a well-floured hand — and all the tricks listed in the recipe — to get it rolled out. Even then, three of the four pizzas more closely resembled free-form amoebas than nice, round pies. But they sure did taste good… maybe not as good as real pizza, but a nice weeknight option (and a great way to use up leftovers).
—
* Edited to add: We removed the link to the Cook’s Illustrated pizza recipe in July 2008 in protest of their bullying tactics.
cooking, family
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Posted by Anita on 09.06.06 10:01 AM
Everyone knows about the natural affinity of pears and blue cheese, but unless you’re a fan (as I am) of the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market Cookbook, you might not have though of trying peaches avec bleu.
This recipe is good even when you make it with supermarket stuff, as we did… finding local produce in Vegas is virtually impossible. But I promise that you’ll make little grunty noises if you try it with good gorgonzola, perfect peaches, and Acme bread.
Peach Bruschetta with Bleu Cheese
Adapted from Becky Smith’s recipe, as told to Peggy Knickerbocker
4 slices country bread, or 12 slices good baguette cut on the diagonal
2 of the best peaches you can find
extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 pound soft gorgonzola
Halve peaches lengthwise, and remove the pit. Cut each half in half again, and peel each peach quarter. Cut the quarters into 1/4-inch slices, keeping them as flat as possible.
Place the bread slices on a medium grill, and cook until golden brown. Remove from heat and brush with olive oil. Spread with the cheese, and top with the peaches. Eat standing over the sink, slurping the peach juice from your hands.
cookbooks, cooking, farmers markets, recipes, shopping, Vegas
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Posted by Anita on 09.06.06 9:52 AM
Ever since she was a little girl, my sis has been an egg-o-maniac. I know my memory’s got to be faulty, but it seemed that soon as she was tall enough to reach the stove, she was whipping up gorgeous fried eggs every morning before school.
In our house, Cameron has the egg juju (in addition to the biscuit hand and many other culinary skills I covet), and my already mediocre skills have lapsed into downright dustiness. So it stands to reason that when I’m visiting family, it’s Patti who gets called on to turn oeufs into omelettes. I’m tasked with sauteeing mushrooms, pouring juice, or setting the table… and happily so, ’cause I know what’ll be on my plate in mere minutes.
breakfast, cooking, family
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Posted by Anita on 09.01.06 9:03 PM
I’m visiting my folks in Henderson, just outside of Vegas, where the temperature — at almost 9pm –Â is currently 88.2 degrees. Eesh! Mom says it’s gorgeous out and perfect weather for a walk; I think it sounds like a recipe for a sweat overdose. My preference: A nice sit-down in front of the computer, under the ceiling fan, with a cool bottle of Rolling Rock… ahh.
Even though this heat is nothing surprising given the location and time of year, I still felt like I was walking into a furnace when I stepped off the plane. (It was only 105 then, at 6pm.) Not really feeling like turning on the oven, or even firing up the grill, we made a nice dinner out of a rotisserie chicken from the market, and a bowl full of orzo salad Mom had whipped up from a Giada DeLaurentiis recipe off of the Food Network site. It was the perfect antidote to the heat — crisp, cool, and satisfying without being too much.Â
Giada’s Orzo Salad
4 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 cups orzoÂ
2 cups garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 1/2 cups teardrop or grape tomatoes, halved
3/4 cup chopped red onion
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint (or flat-leaf parsley)
About 3/4 cup Red Wine Vinaigrette (recipe follows)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pour the broth into a heavy large saucepan. Cover the pan and bring the broth to a boil over high heat. Stir in the orzo. Cover partially and cook until the orzo is tender but still firm to the bite, stirring frequently, about 7 minutes. Drain the orzo through a strainer.
Transfer the orzo to a large wide bowl and toss until the orzo cools slightly. Set aside to cool completely. Toss the orzo with the beans, tomatoes, onion, basil, mint, and enough vinaigrette to coat (about half of recipe below). Season the salad, to taste, with salt and pepper, and serve at cool, or at room temperature.
Vinaigrette Dressing
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons honey
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Mix the vinegar, lemon juice, honey, salt, and pepper in a blender. With the machine running, gradually blend in the oil. Season the vinaigrette, to taste, with more salt and pepper, if desired.
cooking, family, recipes
Comments Off on It’s a dry heat
Posted by Anita on 08.24.06 7:53 AM
Last Saturday at the market, Steve gave us a copy of a recipe for Carne en su Jugo — a traditional dish from Jalisco — that he said was indescribably delicious.
We finally got around to making it last night… and he’s right. It’s a gorgeous soupy, spicy dish that’s somehow hearty and light at the same time. If you’ve already got the beans cooked, it’s even quick enough to make on a weeknight after work.
Carne en su Jugo, Estilo TapatÃo
Adapted from Savoring Mexico
1/2 pound good-quality bacon, cut into small sticks
1 pound beef sirloin tip, thinly sliced on the diagonal and then coarsely chopped
4 cups rich beef broth or stock
2 chiles chipotles en adobo
2 small bay leaves
2 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. ground pepper
1/2 pound dried beans – soaked, cooked and drained (we used Red Nightfall)
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
8 large spring onions, grilled
4 serrano (or 2 jalapeño) chiles, minced
2 limes, quartered
In a frying pan, slowly fry the chopped bacon over medium-low heat until crisp, then drain on paper towels. Raise the heat to med-high and cook the beef in the bacon drippings for about 2 minutes. Remove the beef with a slotted spoon, and place in a large, heavy pot.
Put chipotles in a blender with about 1 cup of the beef broth, and blend until smooth. Add the chile-beef liquid to the large pot, along with the remaining beef broth, the bay leaves, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer until the meat is tender, approximately 20 minutes.
Warm the beans over med-low heat. When meat is cooked, divide the beans among 4 bowls, then ladle the meat and the broth over the beans. Garnish with the bacon and cilantro, and lay 2 onions along the rim of each bowl. Pass the diced serranos and limes at the table, and enjoy with good-quality tortilla chips.
cooking, meat, Mexican, recipes
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Posted by Anita on 08.21.06 4:55 PM
Boy, did we have a blast this weekend… so much so that I’ve been too beat to blog.
Saturday found us in the usual place: Breakfast at Primavera — ack! no chilaquiles? I suppose migas are close enough — then a long wander around the Farmers’ Market. Highlights included taste-testing about a gazillion peaches (oooo… Frog Hollow didn’t make the cut), looking far and wide for the best heirloom tomatoes, having an excuse to splurge on burrata at Cowgirl, discovering the previously mentioned tri-tip of luv at Prather, and scooping up the weekly bag of gloriously bacony avocados from Brokaw … mmm, mm!
Back south again with a stop at In-N-Out Burger en route to Target and the Colma BevMo for their big Grand Reopening sale (had to use that $10-off-$40 coupon!). Then back home, for a bit of prep cut short by realizing that we’d forgotten a few things… Off to Noe Valley on a “bourbon and bouquets” run, stopping at French Tulip — where we ran into Sean, quelle surprise — for hydrangeas and such, then on to Urban Cellars for a shockingly overpriced bottle of Knob Creek.
Whew. No wonder I’m tired… that sounds exhausting. But at the time, it felt like a nice and leisurely preparation for the dinner party we hosted on Saturday evening, jokingly (but accurately) called “bounty of the market, plus cheese”.
As our guests arrived, we started with a round of Currier cocktails on the back deck, accompanied by gorgonzola-and-peach bruschetta from the Ferry Building cookbook. Moving to the table, we paired a surprisingly affordable Yalumba ‘Y Series’ viognier with a salad of heirloom tomatoes, rosemary salt, burrata, and toasted pain-de-mie breadcrumbs (photo, above).
For the main course… there goes that tri-tip again, offered with a side of our friend Wendy’s luxurious penne-and-cheese, the winner of a recent mac-n-cheese cookoff among our old Seattle crew, and a Galante Vineyards Carmel Valley cabernet. (We won’t talk about the haricots verts that we forgot to serve… oops.)
Dessert was easy but good: We stole a page from our friends Russ & Nick’s dessert tricks, sweetening mascarpone with honey… which we then drizzled over Ciao Bella grapefruit-Campari sorbetto, topped with a few perfect raspberries. Then coffee in the living room, served with a platter of kumquats and shortbread, and another of madeleines and macarons from Miette, and some Recchiuti fleur de sel caramels.
Hard to imagine we had the strength to get up the morning after such a glorious evening, but shopping waits for no woman! Another early stop at JoAnn’s en route to Toys ‘R’ Us — our niece is on her West Coast tour and must have Dora! — then home for a quick nap before the family arrived. Thank goodness we have an appreciative audience for our leftover mac and cheese.
breakfast, cooking, dessert, entertaining, farmers markets, food boards, Noe Valley, shopping, wine & bubbly
3 Comments »
Posted by Cameron on 08.21.06 11:35 AM
Don Carne is the gangster name of my good friend and sometime bandmate; the “Don” is an honorific. He sports a sticker on his car that says “Animals are tasty.” Every now and then he catches a hand-wringing PETA zombie in the act of trying to peel the sticker off. Hilarity inevitably ensues.
The Don also likes to say, “You don’t make friends with salad,” which is why we all froze in shock when he told us that he was planning to marry a vegetarian. However, such is the power of his meat fu that his lovely bride is now a fan of hamburgers and cheerfully experiments with all but the gooshiest animal parts.
I feel like I’ve been channeling Don Carne recently. This weekend we had some friends over for a small dinner party and I grilled a slab of Prather tri-tip slathered with a paste made up of roughly equal amounts of garlic powder, pepper, and salt brought together with olive oil. Sear, and then roast on indirect heat until done. Wow, wow, wow. I can’t wait to do it again.
Right now, I’ve got some beef ribs sozzling in a dry rub in the fridge, and they’re destined for the grill tonight. Yabba dabba doo, baby!
cooking, entertaining, meat
3 Comments »
Posted by Cameron on 08.18.06 6:13 PM
Somehow, this became the week of braised meat. In addition to the oxtails mentioned previously, I made carnitas.
I didn’t really grok carnitas until very recently, and I certainly wasn’t capable of cooking good ones until I found this recipe. It’s my all-time favorite Internet find for three reasons: It’s practically idiot-proof, it really works, and right in the middle it reminds you to call your mom.
That said, I often feel odd when I cook carnitas. I live near the Mission district in San Francisco, and there are roughly 2.3 million taquerias within a mile of my house. In fact, some of the best carnitas that I’ve ever had are at the taqueria that Anita and I consider our “local.” For an investment of five minutes and two dollars paid to a local business, I can get a carnitas taco that doesn’t have to step aside for anyone. Compare that with $15 or more, plus five hours of cooking. Given, it’s easy time that you can do other things with and it makes the house smell great, but five hours is five hours.
This is the same kind of thinking that eventually made me pull the plug on brewing my own beer. The scale was a little different: three days of work scattered across six or eight weeks of waiting, plus time spent cleaning and storing the gear. But the theory was the same, and the argument was completely insupportable when I could go down to the store and buy a six-pack from local boys who done good.
But what I suspect it comes down to is that I like to do things that I’m good at, even if they’re completely superfluous. Much to my chagrin — as it seems like something that a competent man should be able to do — I was never very good at brewing beer. But I can say with a total lack of modesty that my carnitas kick ass.
beer, cooking, literary, meat, Mexican, The Mission
2 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 08.15.06 8:01 AM
The amount of lard seems high, but [Diana] Kennedy says much of it falls into the water or is absorbed in the husks. “Pork lard, please, no substitutes,” she says. “Anyone who can’t eat lard should not be eating tamales.”
— Grand Dame of Mexican Cuisine, San Francisco Chronicle, 08.09.06
She’s got 80+ years behind her, so you figure the girl must know a little bit about making do. Of course, she’s widely known as a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, but in this age of soy cheese and Semi-Homemade, it’s a treat to hear someone say a food’s not worth eating if you don’t do it right.
cooking, Mexican
2 Comments »
