The Next Night

We began with Cucumber Basil Lime Gimlets, which became my new favorite summer drink after I tried something similar at Brio. Betsy, Hedy, and Joe entertained us in their way and George in his.

Then we ate radishes with Danish butter and French salt. 

When I finally tore myself away to make dinner it was getting dark and by the time we ate it was so late no one thought of taking a picture until after we'd eaten most of it. I used the red peppers we'd grilled the night before to make Penne with Asparagus and Red Pepper from a Cook's Illustrated recipe, which was good but no better than the average decent pasta dish. I washed the leaves from our appetizer radishes and dressed them with a Dijon vinaigrette: a fine idea in theory, but I made the mistake of using the vinaigrette recipe from the magazine article that suggested using the whole radish this way, and it was hopelessly bland.

Dining in the Basement

I was pretty excited about how my basement looked with paper lanterns and cheerful plastic carpet-substitute, but it's still not exactly a beautiful dining room. Nevertheless, I'm so happy having a table set up down there. Not only is it a tremendous saving of effort (carrying tables and chairs from an attic closet to the living room or backyard was no fun, nor was it much fun having a table filling my entire living room when I had guests), but also it stays cool down there in the summer even when I've been cooking all day.

The peppers are for the next night's pasta

We ate marinated grilled steaks and grilled artichokes with a mustard/mayo sauce I found online somewhere. Both were pretty good but tough, the steaks because they were from a healthy grass-raised cow who lacked tenderizing fat, the artichokes probably because I bought exceptionally cheap ones (the only reason we had them at all was because I was amazed by the low price). After twice in my life experimenting with doing other things with artichokes (and ordering them grilled at both Cheesecake Factory and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant whose name I don't remember), I think in the future I will stick with steaming them and eating them with melted butter and maybe a touch of lemon. Why mess with perfection?

The outstanding parts of the meal were Summer Vegetable Gratin from Cook's Illustrated (which called for a crazy number of steps but might actually have been worth it) and Herbed Potato Salad with Bacon and Scallions from The Union Square Cafe Cookbook (which was not only easy but also could be made ahead).

Someone's second helping

Dessert, from a magazine-clipping recipe, was also amazing but a recipe was hardly needed. It was just fresh berries macerated in lightly sweetened citrus juice topped with whipped cream. The secret to its amazingness was that I was using homemade vanilla extract (a bottle of vodka in which vanilla beans had been soaking for months) to flavor the whipped cream, and it was so pale I feared it lacked a strong vanilla flavor so I used lots. The resulting cream had just the right level of booziness to cut the sweetness and give the dessert an almost elegant feel. Of course the picture couldn't be less elegant, because I forgot to take pictures at all until we were scraping the bowl. With it we drank cold-brewed coffee flavored with spearmint-infused simple syrup.

Afterward we drank delicious cranberry wine that George and Jamie bought at a vineyard in Michigan.

The grilling, the clothing, and the green leaves probably seem odd for a late October post; I'm behind again: this meal took place August 2nd.

Smoky Fried Chickpeas

Smoky Fried Chickpeas: good but insanely filling. I ate half-a-bowl late one morning and don't remember getting hungry again all day. I don't know that I'd make them again, for while they weren't exactly difficult, frying in large amounts of oil is a messy nuisance.

Hot out of the pan they had a delicious crunch that made me decide the smoked paprika and salt were overkill, but the next day when they'd softened and absorbed the spice I was glad I'd included it. If I did make these again, I'd omit the lemon zest which was hard to filter out so fried during both batches and came out bitter and burnt. Or perhaps I'd fry it with the garlic.

Double Broccoli Quinoa

Double Broccoli Quinoa is from 101 Cookbooks and the pictures there are far more beautiful than mine. It was OK and healthy enough to make me feel good about eating it, but much as I love cream, I wouldn't bother with it here if I made it again. It didn't seem to add anything and using more olive oil instead would have been healthier.

But I don't think I would make it again. With its barely boiling the broccoli and food-processoring the pesto, it was too fussy for such an ordinary dish and left me with more dirty dishes than it was worth. I could have simply sauteed broccoli in olive oil, tossed it with quinoa and garlic (while hot, to take the raw edge off the garlic), and sprinkled it with lemon, toasted almonds, and Parmesan, and enjoyed it more for far less effort.

Healthy eating aside, vegetables sauteed in olive oil with salt, pepper, garlic, and maybe some lemon has become one of my favorite things just because it tastes so good. Here I sauteed mushrooms as I just described and ate them over romaine lettuce with shaved Parmesan on top. It was both better and quicker than the broccoli quinoa.

Father's Day

Even with that mad day of multi-item catch-up posts I'm still behind, only now posting about baking for Father's Day. But that's OK, because I only kept my resolution to try one new recipe per week over the summer for three weeks, so I'm only three posts behind instead of seven or eight.

Above is a strawberry rhubarb tart from Once Upon a Tart . . .: Soups, Salads, Muffins, and More, a book I've many times flipped through and found appealing but have never cooked from before. My impression that it was better as a source of good ideas than of specific recipes proved to be apt. The tart was delicious (and I can't blame this book for the underbaked crust, as perhaps the problem was that I substituted an all-butter crust from The Gourmet Cookbook: More than 1000 recipesrather than use its part-vegetable-shortening one) and I think I would have liked it even better if I hadn't left the nuts out of the crumble topping (because of Joe's allergies, and a pity because the crust was all he ate anyway). But the quantities they gave were absurdly off. I bought less fruit than they suggested, and it still towered four or five times the height of the pan, to the point that it was so steep that it was hard to get the crumble to stick to it. I saved half the crumble for later and those of us who like our sweets on the sour side were happy, but none of the kids wanted to eat it.

Luckily, as it was Father's Day, I also made blueberry muffins, one of my dad's favorites. I used a new recipe from The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century and it's the closest I've ever come to the sweetness and texture of store-bought muffins. So of course I didn't like them, but they were perfect for people who like classic blueberry muffins (mainly my dad and Betsy in our family).  The only thing I'd do differently next time is butter the top of the pan because by the time I'd cooled them in the pan for 30 minutes as instructed they'd cemented themselves to it. (You can see by the crumbs and pieces in the edges of the photo what a time I had getting them out.)

Catching Up: Miscellaneous

An improvised pork stew, posted because I want to give props to the Trader Joe's whole wheat couscous I ate it over. I've never been terribly fond of couscous so when I bought this box on a whim it sat around for at least a year before I used it. Prepared according to the instructions on the package I liked it so much I immediately bought another box (and haven't used it yet:-).

The Ina Garten Thanksgiving recipes Google posted in November looked so good that when I had some sweet potatoes handy my first thought was her smashed sweet potatoes. I liked them but I loved the pork chop (Cook's Ill. Mar/Apr '09 pan-searing technique) with an improvised pan sauce of onions, garlic, white wine, and butter, mainly because pork from Bluebird Meadows farm is so delicious.

Macaroni and cheese from Simple Cooking: easy, cheesy, good.

Influenced by this and this and many other recipes over the years, I made a version of spaghetti with fried eggs. It was OK, but unless I were desperately in need of protein I don't know why I'd ever choose it over even more basic spaghetti aglio olio.

Or better yet, something like this.

Beef fillet sauteed with onions; mixed roasted organic potatoes; sour cream horseradish sauce. This photo was on my camera for a long time and whenever Joe beeped his way through my pictures, he'd stop and say, "Yum!" at this one.

French toast technique from A Homemade Life. Frying in hot oil gave the promised crispness, but next time I'd return to butter for the flavor. On top is blueberries cooked with lemon and ginger syrup.

Creamed boiled eggs on toast, my mom's (or rather Fannie Farmer's) old recipe. It tasted like Easter weeks of my childhood.

Catching Up: A New Cookbook

I buy most of my cookbooks used, so I rarely have the newest ones out there, but as I mentioned in the last post I sometimes obsess over a certain cookbook to the point where I buy it just so I can stop wanting to buy it. Too often, once I have one, it goes the way of my long-neglected brioche pans. But when I bought Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours (after making the tremendously delicious sample recipe for pumpkin stuffed with everything good) I was determined to try at least three recipes. 

Above is cauliflower-bacon gratin, and for once I thought mine looked as good as or even better than the food stylist's version in the cookbook. It was very good, but not great. Next time I don't think I'd bother with the expense of Gruyere as I think I'd have liked it as well with ordinary Swiss. Also, while the cookbook said it was best warm from the oven, I much preferred it cool the next day. 

Next was a similar (white vegetable, cream, Gruyere) potato gratin. It didn't look quite as beautiful--the liquid bubbled up the sides and engulfed the pretty browning on top--but tasted even better. I guess I like garlic more than bacon for adding flavor, and unlike this one, the cauliflower gratin had flour in it which made it stodgier. My favorite part about making the potato gratin was rediscovering the wonderful ease of using a mandoline to slice thinly. After a little trouble remembering how it worked, I decided I would start to use it frequently (and haven't used it since).

 

Third, and least successful, was beef cheek daube with carrots and elbow macaroni, substituting chuck roast for the beef cheek. I might try this again with better-tasting meat (instead of grass-fed but disappointingly weird-tasting cow) but I think there are better things to do with a good chuck roast that don't involve chocolate and macaroni.

On a cooking-from-a-cookbook roll, I tried one more: spur-of-the-moment vegetable soup, aka stone soup (the carrot version). I felt silly even following a recipe as it was very much what one would do without one, making soup from what's in the fridge, but I was so glad I had: It was the biggest success of this post and healthy to boot! Garlic, ginger, sweet from carrots and onions, salty from chicken broth. . . mmmm. . . .

I don't regret buying this cookbook new and plan to try more soups from it next winter.

Catching Up: Baking

This post provides more evidence, if any were needed, that I'm more a cook than a baker. The photo above (Tuscan Walnut Bread) is the only unqualified baking success thus far in 2011, and even it I'm going to qualify a little: I liked it (hence success!) but I'm not sure anyone else was particularly crazy about it. It was salty and chewy and chock full o' (wal)nuts.

For the same January dinner I made Old-Fashioned Brown Bread. Arguably it should be called my only success--it worked and people seemed to like it--but when I bake I'm not aiming to duplicate the cottony bread sold presliced in plastic bags, and if I'm eating brown bread I like it to be the healthy brown of whole grains. Going by this recipe old-fashioned bread gets its color from of molasses.

What I loved about baking this bread was the excellence of my new Pampered Chef stoneware loaf pans (Thanks, Mom!)

February brought hugely disappointing brioche. I often can't stop thinking about a particular cooking gadget or cookbook, but find the obsession too often ends when I acquire the coveted item. Brioche pans were no exception: after finally buying them in a variety of sizes and materials I never made brioche. Noticing that the candied orange peel I'd bought to make the orange brioche recipe that came with the mini King Arthur brioche pans was nearing its expiration date was the impetus I needed.

I'm not sure if not baking it for a particular occasion was good or bad. Good because it didn't rise at all and was almost too damp and stodgy to call bread--I'd have been embarrassed to serve it; bad because it meant I had to eat it all (or throw it away and I'm anti-waste). It's horrible to eat something too sweet and too heavy knowing there are sticks of butter in it. But the fluting was pretty and I still look forward to making classic brioche someday.

The real disaster, heartbreaking because it showed even Cook's Illustrated can fail, was Boston Cream Pie for my mom's birthday. Not that every CI recipe I've made has been flawless, but this went wrong in the ways CI's obsessive testing is supposed to prevent. I followed the directions to the letter, but even after the proscribed night in the refrigerator the custard runnily overflowed.

The unattractive dripping of the chocolate was my own fault (how does one achieve artfully artless drips?), but it certainly didn't help. Hideous but delicious: luckily the celebration was family only.

Vegan Lasagne Bake

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=10995.0

I had been wanting to try this recipe for awhile as the combination of eggplant, spinach, and portabellas sounded good to me. The opportunity finally presented itself Sunday what with guests expected. And, even after they canceled due to illness, I went ahead as planned. After all, I had the ingredients, and I like having leftovers.

I baked the eggplant as directed, except that I lined the pan with aluminum foil rather than using non-stick spray. Generally I oil the foil under these circumstances, but forgot this time. However this was no problem as the eggplant didn't stick.

Every time I bake eggplant I recall my mother's description of the first – and possibly only – time she was making her Russian-Jewish mother-in-law's "fake" caviar recipe. She forgot to prick the eggplant and it exploded disastrously in the oven. So be forewarned.

One of the people commenting at the original website thought that there was way too much garlic in this recipe, but I thought there wasn't enough, of the baked kind anyway. As to the one minced clove, I completely forgot to add that. The instructions call for baking eight cloves of garlic (in a foil packet) sprinkled with thyme, rosemary, basil, oregano, and covered with olive oil. I used extra-virgin olive oil but skipped the rosemary since I couldn't find any on my cluttered spice shelves, and I'm not overly fond of rosemary anyway. I'm thinking a small casserole would be a better container for baking garlic as it was difficult to scrape all of the oil & herbs from the foil. Or perhaps the packet could be lined with parchment paper.

From years of using lasagna noodles rolled up with a cheese filling to make "canneloni" I have developed my own system of cooking these noodles. Although I have a large stockpot with a pasta insert, I cook only one third of a sixteen-ounce box at a time, finding this amount more manageable. I nest them in the pot as shown once they start cooking. After draining the cooked noodles, I move them with tongs into a bowl of cold water to rinse, then lay them on a kitchen towel to drain. I return the cooking water to a boil and do likewise with each remaining third. Yes, I know that it's really not correct to cook pasta in starchy water but I do it anyway, and for lasagna recipes only. The kitchen towels I use here are actually recycled pieces of high–thread-count Egyptian-cotton sheets that I had cut into reasonably-sized squares and finished with a zig-zag edging. They're nearly lint free, and I've gotten a lot of use from them in my kitchen.

I found it difficult to peel the eggplant once it was cool and was wishing I had tried immersing it in cold water while it was still hot. However it was easy enough, although time consuming, to scrape the pulp from the outer skin, especially with the help of a grapefruit spoon that I'd once found in a thrift store. Moreover, I should have left the eggplant in the oven longer as it wasn't evenly cooked. So, after dicing it, I gave it a minute in the microwave.

I dissolved a third of a cube of vegetable bouillon in about six ounces of boiling water with which to saute the onions and sliced portabellas, although I don't think "saute" is the proper term when cooking without oil or fat. I rarely use vegetarian bouillon but when I do it's Rapunzel brand. For those of you watching your salt intake, it does contain a significant amount of sodium despite having no salt added. The spinach, drained if frozen – and I did use frozen – was added to the onions and portabellas to cook for another minute or so. And then these vegetables were combined with the eggplant and the contents of the garlic packet. I decided to finely dice the garlic cloves, although this wasn't mentioned, in order to distribute them more evenly.

I think of lasagna as layers of noodles going first lengthwise, and then crosswise, with a cheese filling between the bottom two layers making a sort of sandwich, and with a tomato/meat sauce separating these repeated "sandwiches," so perhaps this recipe should be called "nasagna" or "vegetable noodle bake" to dissipate this mental image. I did alternate the noodles lengthwise and crosswise, and, because the baking dish I was using has rounded corners, I trimmed the lasagna noodles to fit with my kitchen shears. (I love kitchen shears, especially mine that cleverly come apart. A gift from my youngest son. I don't remember my mother ever using kitchen shears when I was growing up. I'm not sure she even had any then. But my mother-in-law used them and I learned how handy they can be from my husband.) For this recipe I layered as directed with my favorite bottled pasta sauce, noodles, and vegetable mixture, topped with pieces of vegan "mozzarella."

According to the package this Follow Your Heart brand "Vegan Gourmet Cheese Alternative" melts and can be shredded. I considered trying to grate it but it seemed too soft to grate. Perhaps one should try chilling it first in the freezer if this is desired. I put some on a small piece of lasagna and gave it twenty seconds in the microwave, and, yes, it did melt nicely. However it didn't melt for this lasagna recipe in my Corning-ware baking pan in the oven. Had I read the "melting tips" on the package I would have found out that, for casserole toppings, this "cheese" should be melted under the broiler, or covered. And it probably didn't help that I was baking at twenty-five degrees lower than the recipe said – as one is supposed to do for Pyrex, and, I believe, for Corning ware. One of my sons tells me that he has used it successfully for pizza and within a recipe. Of course it doesn't taste like real cheese, but it is definitely reminiscent of cheese, so a nice option for vegans.

Because I was using soy cheese, I ended my layering as directed with lasagna noodles topped with the "cheese." Which, in retrospect, was a mistake, as the noodles curled up at the edges and got crunchy, and the cheese toasted rather than melted. I tried putting more pasta sauce around the edges toward the end of cooking to hold down the noodles, along with covering the casserole with foil, but this didn't really help. I think lasagna noodles simply have to be under some sauce to cook properly. I covered the leftovers (still in the casserole) with foil while still a little warm and when I took them out of the refrigerator the next day, the moisture had equilibrated so the top noodles were no longer crunchy, but just right. Incidentally the cheese no longer melted in the microwave once it had gone through the baking process.

The nice photo of a layered serving at the top of the page could be taken only when the lasagna was cold – the one below shows how it looked when served freshly made and hot. I wasn't working very efficiently, and I was taking photos as I went along, so preparation took me a good two and a half hours, but I think it will go faster the next time. And, yes, I do plan to make it again.