Kate F____, Girl Reporter

Three weeks ago we had my boss, one of Ben’s professors, and two of our friends from school over for dinner. I made everything out of Sunday Suppers at Lucques, though not all from one of the dinner menus. There are tons of photos here, and it was by far my most ambitious menu so far, so I’ll break this up a bit.

Chronologically, I started the brisket the night before and then braised it all day; baked the lemon tart shell in the morning and made the curd in the afternoon, made the lentils in the late afternoon and reheated them, cooked the raddichio while we ate our main course and while everything else reheated, and made the onion tart in the afternoon, then baked it when the guests arrived.

First course: Onion tart with Lardons
This is impressive and delicious but very simple. The shell is a frozen puff pastry sheet, scored around the edge so the crust will puff up.
On top of that is a layer of ricotta and creme fraiche, mixed with an egg yolk. That is topped with Comte cheese (or any gruyere, I guess), and finally a layer of lardons and red onions sauteed in the bacon fat. Hurrah!

It’s meant to be served with an herb salad but the Coop didn’t have enough nice looking herbs to eat them plain. I just served regular field greens.

Main Course: Braised beef brisket, served with lentils and roasted raddichio
As I said above, I started the brisket the night before–Goin recommends starting two nights before and braising it a day before, since you reheat the slices anyway. I will do this next time, but this time I just didn’t have the timing in order. It gets rubbed with crumbled chilis, garlic, salt, thyme leaves and cracked pepper, then rests over night in the fridge.

The recipe calls for a 6 pound brisket, since it’s great leftovers, and mine was closer to 6.5, in two pieces. That is a lot of meat, far more than I’ve ever cooked before. Goin is good about saying you’ll have to hang one side out while you sear the other, etc., and indeed I did have to. Then it went into the roasting pan while I cooked a ton of onions, carrots and celery, and cooked down balsamic vinegar, guinness and beef stock to make the braising liquid.

That got poured over the beef (I couldn’t quite cover it, since my pan was so big), and covered with foil–I ignored the plastic wrap instructions this time, having learned my lesson with the short ribs. Into the oven, for six hours. Once it was cooked, I pulled out the meat, chilled it so it could be sliced, strained the braising liquid, and when it was time to serve I reheated the sliced brisket in the liquid for a while. (Bad photo)

For sides I made lentils–cooked with onion, some chili flakes, etc. and roasted raddichio. I couldn’t find Raddichio Vecchio, the long narrow kind, and used the round heads. They are super super bitter, and I wasn’t a huge fan. The raw lentils and raw wedges of reddichio were pretty though:

To plate I made a long mound of lentils, put the slices of meat on top, the a few wedges of raddichio. All a big hit, but I want to try the raddichio again with the other type, or cook it longer, or maybe just do shaved brussels sprouts.

Dessert: Lemon tart with chocolate
(Entire recipe posted at link above)
I was a little dubious about mixing lemon and chocolate, but Goin hasn’t steered me wrong (flavor-wise) yet, so I went for it. I only had one meyer lemon, and made up the rest with regular lemons. I baked the shell blind in the morning, and then covered it with the melted chocolate and made the curd.

I had a little trouble telling when it was done–basically you whisk together eggs, egg yolk, sugar and lemon juice and cook it (stirring stirring stirring) until it thickens. I was jumpy about overdoing it, and instead underdid it a little–the tart set, but not as firmly as I’d have liked. The crust made a double recipe, though, so I froze the extra and made the tart again last week–much smoother this time, and I cooked it twice as long.

When the curd was cooked I took it off the heat, stirred in the butter and forgot the salt (oops), then strained the curd into the tart shell and let it set.

I learned a couple things at serving time:
1) My tart pan is not 10″, it’s 9. The shell was very thick, and there was a bit too much chocolate, so I really had to hack through it to slice!
2) When Ben is picking up more plates than he can carry, instead of mumbling “Please take two at a time,” I should remove the extras from his arm before he splats it onto the side of the fridge, the floor, and his pants. Hee. Particularly dramatic in this case because the curd was a little softer than normal.

The chocolate, by the way, is an amazing addition to the lemon curd. Somehow each balances the other–sweet/tart/acidic vs. bittersweet/creamy. It worked great.

Whew. I was in the kitchen from 9 a.m. until we ate, but it was worth it–everything came out great and I learned a lot about timing everything to get all the parts out at the right times. Whee!

Oh dear, I am weeks behind…

Tom came over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and I knew I’d be working all day so I hauled out the slow cooker and tried a recipe from a slow cooker cookbook I was given as a shower gift. I was told to use a pork loin roast or country style ribs, about 2 pounds of either, but the Coop butcher had neither, and offered me a bone-in loin roast (or something similar). I was suspicious, because it was a rather odd-looking cut, and super super cheap (I know, the delicious slow-cooked cuts are, but….really really cheap). It turned out to be great though, very flavorful and not too lean, and I do like cooking things bone-in.

I seared the roast, then cooked a TON of floured onions until they were brown, added and cooked down some hard cider, poured it into the slow cooker, and added in a handful of prunes.

After 7 hours on low the meat was completely shredding–this must be close to the cut used for pulled pork–and tender, the prunes were fat and jamlike, and the sauce was nice and thick and glossy. (Awful photos, I’m sorry.)

I was low on appropriate starchy sides (new potatoes would have been good) so I fell back on risotto, as per usual.

I tried the Gateau Piege from Chocolate and Zucchini again, but still ran into trouble. I’m not sure what’s going wrong–last time it was undercooked, this time it split horizontally so the top and bottom separated. Weird.

Berries in the snow:

Siamese Dried Porcini:

The cardinals that live in the trees outside my window:

Major snow:

My paperwhite:

The nutcracker ornament my grandmother sent me–very similar to my favorite ornament growing up, the one I *always* put on the tree:

Chef Yossi “Lotion de Chef,” an oil-free lotion designed for cooks. I got a package of CY stuff while I was still at [Magazine] last summer. I only opened it when my hands started cracking a couple weeks ago, and it actually is the first hand lotion I haven’t hated–since it’s oil-free, it doesn’t leave your hands slimy.

Finally, my Valentine’s present, a set of four demitasse cups, creamer and sugar bowl, all in Wedgwood Basalt. One day I will have a wall of silhouettes in a dining room, and in the middle I’ll hang a floating shelf and put the basalt-ware on it–like 3D silhouettes, how meta!

I still had half of a ham steak in the freezer, so I pan-fried it for dinner one night last week, and served it with roasted new potatoes and homemade apple sauce. If you’ve never made applesauce, please please give it a try next time you want some: it is SO EASY, especially if you have an immersion blender, that once you’ve tried it you will never crack a jar of Mott’s again. My mom would be the best person to give a serious recipe/instructions for people who want to actually can sauce, but I just make a cheater’s version when I want a little bit to go with pork chops, etc.

Peel and core a few apples–flavorful, not-too-tart ones like Fuji are best, and it’s nice to mix a few types together. For two of us, I used three apples, two Fuji and one Gala, and ended up with a nice bowl of leftovers. Cut up the apples and throw them in a small saucepan with a bit of water–maybe an inch? Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cover; cook the apples until they are quite soft.

Then pull out your immersion blender and puree the apples. Taste and see if they need sugar–if you’re using Gala, Fuji, etc, you probably won’t. Add cinnamon to taste.

That’s it! Easy easy easy; the hardest part is peeling the apples. (Cooking the apples with their peels/cores and running the result through a foodmill is the traditional way, and it makes more flavorful sauce. But for a quick weeknight side dish, this way is simpler. Especially since I don’t have a foodmill.)

The next day I ate the leftover applesauce with Nancy’s yogurt, made right in my hometown and only recently available on the East Coast. I wish I had a digital copy of the photos of me on my first birthday, being fed yogurt and applesauce by my aunt Suzanne. My mom says I used to put away the same size bowl of it that my dad did!
Healthy and delicious:

About six months after Ben and I started dating we went very far north/east in Maine for spring break. Apparently we had missed the memo about going somewhere warm… Anyway, I was excited to get to cook, since we lived in a dorm, and I asked Ben what his favorite meal was. He said Beef Stroganoff, so I talked it over with my mom, got a recipe, and when we got to Maine I bought some nice beef, cream, a bunch of good mushrooms, etc., and made a very labor intensive stroganoff. He took a look, a bite, and said, “This is not stroganoff.” Needless to say, I was less than pleased, and I never made it for him again. It turns out he was thinking of Poor Man’s Stroganoff, which is much simpler and made with ground beef, not painstakingly cubed steak. I told him that he could eat it at home on vacations if he liked his mom’s version so much, but six years later I finally gave in and asked Christy for her recipe, which turns out to be so far beyond simple that I’m kicking myself for not making it much earlier. This is comfort food, and not glamorous, but I fed two hungry guys on a cold night, and they were both very happy. This time Ben was pleased as punch! I didn’t include mushrooms because I shopped before getting the recipe, and Ben insisted there aren’t any in it. There are supposed to be, but you chop them up very, very small.

So here you go: Christy’s Poor Man’s Stroganoff

1 lb. ground beef
1 medium onion
1/2 lb. mushrooms
8 oz. sour cream
salt & pepper to taste

Sauté the onion till soft, then add the beef, breaking it up into little sections. Stir occasionally and keep breaking the clumps of beef into smaller sections with the spoon. When completely cooked, drain off the fat, add in the mushrooms and sour cream, and heat thoroughly for a minute or two. Serve over rice or noodles.

The stirring in of the sour cream gave me pause, since it looks totally gross at that point:

But once I stirred in the cooked egg noodles things straightened out and the sour cream coated the noodles and made a nice sauce:

I didn’t heat it quite long enough after adding the sour cream, but the guys ate the whole thing–a pound of meat, a pound of noodles.

A couple nights later, I fed the same two guys (Ben’s friend’s wife was out of town for a couple weeks, so we had him over a lot) a dressier pasta dish, though based on the same principles. Mark Bittman wrote in the Minimalist column in the Times a couple weeks ago about pasta with gorgonzola sauce, which sounded like an appealing and easy non-meat-based dinner. He added in halved cherry tomatoes and chopped arugula to add flavor, on the theory that both are reliable veggies in the middle of winter. Sound familiar? It’s the same pairing as the base for the parmesan-crusted chicken breasts.

This recipe was super easy and really delicious, once again the guys wolfed it down. It has the advantage of also being extremely pretty to look at.

Mark Bittman’s Cheesy Pasta
From the NYTimes, 1/24/07

Yield: 3 to 6 servings.

Yum, I’ll be making this again soon.

Ok, in my past life (as a magazine writer in NYC) I got lots of cool stuff sent to me, since I covered design/lifestyle type issues. One of my favorite things was the pile of pre-publication proofs of books we were always getting, and I brought the best of the food-related ones with me to NH. The only one I’ve really used so far is Christopher Kimball’s The Kitchen Detective, from the editor/founder of Cook’s Illustrated. Right after we moved here I tried his Polenta Pound Cake recipe, and discovered the big flaw to using proofs of cookbooks: They haven’t gotten their final fact-check, and they’re missing stuff like page numbers, certain ingredient quantities, etc. I cooked so rarely in Brooklyn that I never noticed the gaping holes in these books! Anyway, the pound cake tipped me off, since it said to bake at 325, a very low temp for a cake like that, and it took over an hour and a half (instead of under an hour) to finally cook. Oops!

Well, non-baking recipes don’t require the same precision, and the other night I made Kimball’s “Four-Minute Chicken Cutlets” for the second time. Here’s the thing. They don’t cook in four minutes for me, because chicken seems to be my achilles heel, and I can’t get my head wrapped around preparing it. I feel stupid that I can cook pork and beef with no qualms but get all freaked out trying to get chicken ready to go… I had a really terrible time cleaning the boneless breasts and pounding them thin. I definitely didn’t get them super-thin like the recipe requires if you want them to cook in less than four minutes. I ended up on the phone with my mom, up to my elbows in chicken, completely freaking out because the breasts were tearing instead of pounding thin. Turns out I’m an idiot. Instead of slipping them in a ziplock or between saran wrap, I’d put them between PARCHMENT PAPER, meaning they couldn’t scoot around at all while I pounded them, meaning the poor things were shredded. Live and learn. I did salvage them, using my mom’s excellent advice to simply cut the breasts into smaller pieces so I could cook the thick and thin ends separately.

Anyway.

The wonderful thing about this recipe is the coating, which combines shredded parmesan with store-bought superfine breadcrumbs, to great effect. It’s a salty, flavorful, crispy coating, and makes chicken taste really savory and exciting instead of dull. Kimball’s recipe is really long (he does the CI thing and talks about how he tested all the elements of the recipe, etc.) but here’s my very short version:

For four chicken breasts (halves of big ones):
Season with salt and pepper
Dip the chicken breasts in egg white (he says 3 egg whites for this amount, I could have used two)
Dredge in 1/2 cup fine bread crumbs mixed with 3/4 cup grated parmesan
Heat 4 T olive oil until just smoking, cook the chicken 1.5-2 minutes on each side (he says to pound it to 1/4 inch. Mine was at least 1/2 inch and so took longer to cook).

Serve on a bed of arugula with sliced tomatoes over it, and some basil over the tomatoes if you want. I used cherry tomatoes, cut in half and dressed in sherry vinegar and olive oil/ salt/pepper, which added a nice juicy layer. (Cherry tomatoes tend to be pretty tasty even in the middle of winter.)

I over-roasted my new potatoes while trying to get all the chicken cooked…ah, well.

Before the chicken we had my third version of the cauliflower soup, this time made with Broccoflower! It’s a cross between broccoli and cauliflower (….obviously), and is an amazing shade of bright spring green, not quite captured by my photo:

I was hoping the soup would also end up bright green, but since the inside of the broccoflower is white, the soup was very pale green. I left the cheese out this time, and just sprinkled a little on top, which made it really light and nice, a perfect first course.

For dessert I made the Gateau Piège from Chocolate and Zucchini. Due to a slight clerical error in the original version of the recipe (it’s been fixed now) I underbaked it by quite a lot, so the middle was much denser and flatter than it should have been. I loved the flavor though, and it was super easy–I want to try it again this week, maybe with lemon this time.

Overall a very uplifting mid-winter meal, with lots of fresh flavors. I’ll try all of it again, hopefully with fewer bumps but a similarly tasty end product.