Chicken Soup and Hippie Bread

Sunday night we had the chicken soup I started on Saturday. I used a whole chicken for the stock, but only put the dark meat in the soup, and saved the breast meat for weekday lunches. You can see there's a whole bunch of vegetables in there--broccoli and turnip and carrot and mushrooms. I also threw in a parmagiano-reggiano rind, some leftover canned crushed tomatoes and a little adobo from chipotle in adobo. It was really good. We used the chimichurri, which was kind of a mistake, I think, because while it tasted good, the chimichurri was too dominant and you couldn't really taste the soup.

In the background you can sort of see the bread, which came out well. I use about a 60-40 whole wheat-white combination, and this time I used KAF bread flour for the white, which worked well. I also threw in steel cut oats, cornmeal, wheat berries, and ground flax seed and was very happy with the results. To drink I had Newport Storm Red, which was nice and malty.

Dave, here's the link for the previously posted Rabe and Bulgur recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/241334

Enjoy!

Kale Soup and Broccoli Rabe

On Friday we got snow, lots of it, and Craig spent the entire day plowing driveways and parking lots.  I was glad he could even get home for dinner, and managed a quick kale and sausage soup.  The butcher makes sausage, and this was labeled hot Italian, but "hot" is relative, I guess.  We have some good bakeries around here, and Craig was able to pick up a loaf of delicious pain de campagne on his way home.  The Young's Oatmeal Stout was the last souvenir of my trip to Beers of the World in Rochester--guess I'll have to go back soon!

Last night I made an Epicurious recipe, broccoli rabe with bulgur and walnuts.  It was so much more interesting and delicious than I'd thought it would be, and so quick and easy.  

Yesterday I also made the chicken stock for tonight's soup, and so far it's looking pretty good.

Eggplant Curry

After a Friday and Saturday of serious meat meals, something vegetable was in order.  Last night we had eggplant curry, based on Rachel Ray, more or less.  In addition to eggplant, it had cauliflower, onion, red bell pepper, chick peas, and crushed tomatoes.  I used curry paste to season, but we were out of mango chutney--Trader Joe's ginger paste to the rescue!  

The camera battery went before we got dinner off Hollie, but it was pretty served topped with white rice, chopped cilantro, and chopped toasted almonds.

Yesterday I also took care of all the fresh cilantro we seemed to have acquired.  I made chimichurri, and can't wait to serve it with soup and homemade bread next weekend.

French toast and Eggman

Usually we have muesli or oatmeal for weekend breakfast, but this weekend we had to celebrate Eggman's return.  I buy eggs from someone at work, but for the past couple of months his chickens have been hibernating, and I've been reduced to hoping Lisa has extra duck eggs.

The chickens are up and running again though, and Craig made French toast with the leftover Sicilian bread from our Superbowl dinner.  We had frozen local strawberries to top it off.

Steak au Poivre

Now this is a Valentine's dinner!  We had steak au poivre, using a Cook's recipe for wonderful tenderloin steaks from the local butcher.  I made a sherry-shallot pan sauce, which was delicious, but next time I think a piece of bleu cheese on top would make them perfect.

We served them with truffle mashed potatoes (truffle butter we bought in Italy and truffle salt--can't afford the real thing) and oven roasted brussels sprouts that I had tossed in olive oil and ground coriander, cumin and mustard seed.  We enjoyed a 2004 Ridge York Creek Zinfandel with our meal.

After dinner we had the rest of the cheese from last weekend, with more of that amazing rose spread and a Dagoba Roseberry (rosehips and raspberry) chocolate bar.  Perfect!

Chipotle Shrimp and Chorizo

Craig made a wonderful Friday night dinner, as usual.  He dared an Emeril Lagasse recipe, something I'm rarely brave enough to try (my kitchen is not as big budget as his), making shrimp and chorizo in chipotle gravy with rice and swiss chard.  It was an excuse for Craig to cook with the wild-caught US shrimp he's been eyeing.  They were huge and delicious--Craig is very good with seafood.  We enjoyed Geary's HSA alongside.

Tonight will be our REAL valentine dinner--I'd better take a nap to prepare.

Pizza and Beer

Last night was a very special Date Night indeed. Not only was it the day before Valentine's Day, but it was also our 4-month anniversary! How time flies. Craig consented to honor the occasion by letting me serve one of my very favorite dinners--pizza and beer. The beer is Southern Tier's IPA. Southern Tier is my new favorite brewery, and the boys at the beer store were really excited about this IPA--they were right. The pizza is from Pizza Pie-er, where the pizza is definitely a matter of you get what you pay for--expensive but sooooo good. It's a multigrain crust with puttanesca sauce, spinach, mushrooms, and chorico (pronounced "cherise" around here, don't embarass yourself like I did the first time I ordered it). I bought it half-baked and then had to drive it all the way home without busting into the box and eating it. I deserve a medal. We had some sauteed mushrooms, celeriac, and brussels sprouts to fulfill the vegetable requirement.

Seafood Stew and Mushroom Ciabatta

As promised, we had a lovely meal last night. I tried a couple of new things, mushroom ciabatta and ligurian seafood stew. I also had a small cheese incident at Whole Foods on Saturday morning--that's the trouble with sampling! We invited Craig's sister Lisa and her husband Chris to share in what I hoped would be the goodness--I was a little nervous. The seafood stew recipe, from Food & Wine, called for bottled clam juice, but I thought if I was going to expend the time/effort on it, I wanted a real stock, hence the fish heads in the previous post. The rest of that snapper went into the stew, and the branzini were from a pre-blog meal. If you've never removed gills from a fish head, I discovered that it's pretty easy to just hook your fingers in and pull them out--a knife just seemed to get in the way.

The ciabatta recipe was from the Bread Baker's Apprentice (Reinhart). Usually I bake whole-grain hippie bread with the Tassajara Bread Book as my guide, but every once in a while I go fancy. A pizza stone and a cast iron skillet steam pan transformed Hollie into a hearth, and I did my best with the pull and fold techniques. It came out looking pretty good:

It tasted good as well, but I definitely think I could use some practice. It didn't seem to have any of those big holes ciabatta's supposed to have, and it could have been crustier.

I decided to serve a vegetable first course, blanched then sauteed baby bok choi and carrots topped with shaved jerusalem artichoke and parmigiano reggiano.

And on to the seafood stew! In addition to the snapper, it's layered with onion, tomatoes, olives, shrimp, squid, mussels and littlenecks. The shrimp were the little wild ones from Maine, tiny and pink even before they're cooked.  It came out beautifully, despite the fact that I nearly forgot to add the fish stock (!).

It turned out serving it up wasn't too difficult, and we seemed to have just about the perfect amount of food. The recipe included orange zest, which came through beautifully, and the calamari were not overcooked, to Craig's delight.  We enjoyed a bottle of Planeta La Segreta (2005) with the stew.

We finished with a cheese course, chosen using the scientific method of What's Being Sampled at Whole Foods.

We had Laguiole (in the middle of the board), a crumbly French almost like cheddar but way smoother and just a hint of stinky and Campo Montalban, a mild Spanish (pretty sure) cheese that reminds me of Gruyere, which went beautifully with my new discovery, Armenian Tea Rose Petal Preserves. No lie--it's such an amazing taste, like roses but not in a bad soapy way. It just really was one of those flavor experiences that lets you know there's so much more out there.

What a fun meal, both to cook and to eat. And the best part is that despite 40+mph wind gusts, we never lost power!

Lonely Friday...

It's true--Craig went out last night with his friend James, so no one was there to cook me dinner at the end of the week.  It could have been disaster!  Fortunately, I haven't entirely lost my survival skills to domestication, and I managed to come up with something:

Surfin' Tacos to the rescue.  Every time I go there I try to get away from the veggie burrito with guacamole, but it's so good!  They fry their own tortilla chips, and it's always a challenge to get home with any left in the bag.  Perfect with a rich oatmeal stout.

Tonight we're going to a birthday party and I'm leaving the camera at home.  Tomorrow though, we are having one out of control dinner.  Here's a hint:

The kitchen smells soooo good right now...

Date Night

Wednesday, February 5
Way back when Craig and I first met, we tended to go out on Wednesday nights. Somewhere along the way we made it our official Date Night. These days we mostly stay in and I cook.
This week we still had some leftovers from Saturday that needed to be used (I am fairly obsessive about using up leftovers). In the background you can see the last of the soup, and in the foreground are quesadillas made from the leftover tortillas, filled with roasted poblanos and queso blanco, with a little chile powder. They were good, but needed a little something--I think next time I would add a little pineapple or something else fruity. For the veg I browned mushrooms, added cumin and garlic and deglazed with tequila before adding spinach. Craig enjoyed a Geary's HSA, his favorite, and I had Avery 14'er ESB.

A Weekend of Good Eats

Friday, February 1
Craig cooks dinner on Fridays--it's long story and has to do with how embarassingly unpleasant I can be when I'm hungry and tired and asked to make anything more complicated than cereal.

I don't remember what our dinner on Friday the 1st was called, just that it was warm deliciousness involving chicken thighs, dried fruit, olives and grated carrots. I think Rachel Ray, and I think one of her Middle Eastern-style recipes. It surprised me with all its flavor, being a 30-minute meal and all.

Saturday, February 2
First

Our friends Henry and Marion came to dinner for Groundhog's Day. They got a little turned around on the drive, which is always frustrating. We were glad to be able to be able to welcome them with a glass of wine and a first course of sweet potato, apple, and chipotle soup, garnished with these amazing fried corn tortilla strips, tossed in cinnamon and sugar.

I got the recipe from Food & Wine. The first time I have cooked from that magazine, and I thought the recipe could have been better-written, also I needed a REALLY BIG WARNING about leaving lots of space when pureeing hot soup (sorry about your backpack Craig); it was very delicious though, and those tortilla things were soooo good.

Entree

For our entree I made Tuscan roast pork with rosemary-shallot jus and potato roesti from Cook's Illustrated, and braised baby pak choi, from me. I did the pak choi in sherry and chicken stock with some honey and New Mexico chile powder; it turned out really well I thought. We got the pork from a wonderful place in New Jersey called Bobolink Farm (http://www.cowsoutside.com/). They sell amazing artisan cheese and breads, and at the right times of year, healthy and humane veal and pork. The pork is a guest-occasion favorite, delicious and most of the work is done before company arrives, but I had never made a potato roesti before--think a really really good hashbrown.

This picture isn't great but you can see how beautiful and crisp the potatoes are!

Dessert

Dessert was Mollie Katzen's upside-down gingerbread with almonds and cherries, and whipped cream, of course. The gingerbread is from Vegetable Heaven and is really really good. She uses fresh and candied ginger, but none of the dried powder. And it's sweetened with honey and molasses, so you can fake like it's all healthy (I know I know--sugar=sugar=honey=sugar--I enjoy the myth).

Sunday, February 3

Superbowl Leftovers

Of course, we had killer leftovers on Sunday. I didn't quite know what to do with those bones, but I was determined not to waste them. Basically I just braised some kale in the leftover jus, and threw all the pork bits on top to heat up that way. We also had soup and Craig bought some bread--he had a hard time finding any (who knew bread was a Superbowl staple??), but ended up at a bakery where they offered him a choice between "Italian" and "Sicilian." Geography lesson over, he came home with Sicilian, which turned out to be a perfect squishy white bread sponge for some olive oil with salt, pepper and fennel seed.

Craig's brother gave us some Jerusalem artichoke tubers (roots? rhizomes?) which we sliced on top of the salads. It being the Superbowl and all, we drank beer--Fuller's ESB and Geary's HSA. And of course, leftover gingerbread while we watched the Patriots become another victim to the Giants' recently energized defensive line--wonder if Brady can even move today...