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.