Mushroom Stroganoff

It doesn't make a good picture, but it made a pretty tasty dinner. I tried to keep it pretty healthy, using 2% Greek yogurt and some buttermilk for the sauce, and whole wheat egg noodles. I threw in some of the leftover turkey, but restrained myself from also tossing in the broccoli (that and a few crumbled potato chips on top and I'd have to call it hot dish), and served that steamed on the side.

Roast Turkey

Whole Foods sells half turkeys, which is still a whole lot of meat. I brined ours, then rubbed it under the skin with olive oil infused with sage, rosemary, thyme, and garlic before roasting. Whenever I cook something that takes that long, I worry I'm going to push Hollie over the edge, but she did great, and the turkey came out really well. I served it with broccoli rabe sauteed with garlic, nicoise olives, and clementine zest, and with sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes were the real winners. All I did was mash them with a little butter and salt and pepper, so they must have been really good to begin with. I got them at the coop and they were definitely prettier than the usuals from Stop and Shop. I'll definitely be making those again soon! We drank a French white table wine, Vin de Savoie Jongieux, which was not the right wine for this meal, but would be wonderful in the summertime with cheese and crackers.

White Chicken Chili

On Sunday I used a recipe I'd copied from somewhere to make chicken chili.  The recipe calls for boxed broth, but I made my own with a whole chicken, and apparently ended up with too much, because it was more like soup.  Still good, especially with the addition of shredded monterey jack, greek yogurt (my first time trying that--now I can see why people are so enthusiastic about it), and a spicy tomatillo salsa that I made and froze last summer.  It wasn't as flavorful as I'd hoped, but had a great amount of spiciness.  I drank an Old Man Winter (Southern Tier).  We also had the brussels sprouts we FINALLY rescued from our satellite garden at Lisa's--we were lucky they were still so delicious!  And of course, hippie bread with herb oil.  I ran out of whole wheat flour when I was making the bread, so it was more "hippie" than hippie, but it crusted really beautifully and, with oat groats and wheat berries, had a wonderful texture.

Vegetarian Paella

Craig made "vegetarian paella" on Friday night.  Once again, he chose a recipe I never would have gone for, and it turned out really good, and seemed to be way less work than traditional paella.  In addition to the vegetables, it contained soy sausage, which I'd never had before and had my doubts about, but it was very good.  He served broccoli rabe sauteed with garlic and crushed red pepper alongside.

Beans N Greens

For date night on Wed I made Cook's recipe for pasta with beans and greens. It actually specifies whole wheat spaghetti, which is good because that's what we had. I used collard greens and instead of the garlic chips they suggest, I sauteed some crumbs from my most recent hippie batch with garlic and olive oil. The recipe calls for kalamata olives, and I'm pretty sure this was the first time I actually remembered to include them--they're a great touch.

Cauliflower Gratin and Oven Fires

Craig loves cauliflower. It's not too high up on my list, but I try to make it for him once in a while, and it was recently featured as a healthy food in the NY Times. One of the recipes in the Times was for a cauliflower gratin with goat cheese. I more or less followed the recipe, and we both thought it was really good. It was certainly easy. I served it with hippie bread, a big salad, and squash from the CSA. I thought the squash was terrible, whether because I halved it and froze it, or just because it was terrible, I couldn't say. Next to the salad is a plate of dipping oil for the bread--leftover herb oil from a foccacia I made the other day. The wine is a 2007 Cotes du Rhone, which I liked better than Craig did, but we both enjoyed.


Here's the foccacia I made last week. I used the recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, and this is the first time I've been unhappy with a recipe from that book. The result is outstandingly delicious, but the process can be dangerous and inconvenient. He has you put 2 cups of olive oil on the dough as it proofs and says it will all get soaked up, which I did not find to be true. The first time I made the bread I didn't think it through and used a flat baking sheet (he doesn't get specific). Of course, all the oil dripping off the sheet started a fire in poor Hollie's belly! Fortunately, a box of salt was all I needed to put the fire out, and the foccacia was yummy. This time, I bought a good rimmed baking sheet and a new box of salt and only used 1 C of herb oil. Still, the oil boiled over and started another (much smaller) fire. So the foccacia came out slightly underbaked and because we vent with our windows, our house was very smoky and very drafty that evening. It's so good though, I'm determined to get it right. I used some leftover whiskey cheddar on the second batch, but you couldn't really taste it. Maybe next time I'll try a cheese with a stronger flavor. Also less oil.

"Stuffed" Chicken

By Sunday I had really had enough of red meat, so I decided to try out Cook's recipe for "stuffed" chicken. You butterfly and brine the chicken, then sort of hang it across an aluminum foil bowl that holds your dressing, the idea being that most of the fat drips down outside the bowl into the pan, while the yummy chicken juices still get into the dressing to flavor it. It worked well, and was very very good--it would be a great easy casual company dish. The stuffing is made with mushrooms and leeks and is very tasty, and there was certainly a lot of chicken fat outside the bowl when it was finished. I served it with braised baby pak choi, and also reheated the potatoes from NY's Day (sometimes my need to use up leftovers overcomes my good sense), which we mostly skipped in favor of the dressing.

New Year's Day

Craig and I had our post-Christmas Christmas on New Year's Day, and presents were of course accompanied by some good food. Craig made breakfast--he's very good at pancakes. These are banana-pecan buttermilk pancakes, with a little Italian salami alongside. The pancakes were really thick, almost like banana bread, and yummy, especially with maple syrup.

For lunch I made fancy toasted cheese on baguette. I used two cheeses, an aged gouda and gran queso, which is described as an American Manchego.  I added some jarred roasted red peppers and Penzey's pasta sprinkle.  A little bit of WF smoky harissa hummus (sooo good!) made the sandwiches perfect.

Dinner was to be a roast we dry-aged in the fridge for a couple of days. It was a loin-end rib roast, a beautiful piece of meat. We followed the Cook's instructions, having it cut off the bones for browning and easy carving, but tied onto the bones for roasting. We also served brussels sprouts with pecans and parmesan and horseradish mashed potatoes (Cook's), which were incredible.

Here's the roast just out of the oven! We don't own a decent roasting pan, but it was small enough to fit in a cast-iron skillet, and that worked well. Craig was really excited to try out his new carving knife!

And the dinner. Everything was so delicious and so special. We drank a wine we bought on our honeymoon while visiting the Gagliasso Winery in La Morra, Italy. A 2001 Barbera, it was just perfect for the meal. Look at that meat--even with a kitchen full of untrustworthy thermometers and Hollie Hobbie up to her usual tricks, it came out beautifully. A good sign for 2009.

Dinner was so filling, we had to skip dessert--the aforementioned gouda and gran queso, and Valdeon, an amazing amazing Spanish blue, and Cahill's Irish Whiskey Cheddar (I couldn't resist buying it, and I liked it, but Craig did not care for it).  There was plenty of meat to enjoy for several more days.  We had leftovers with leftover ravioli the next night, then tossed with Italian egg pasta the night after that, and Craig's still eating it for lunch.  I'm kind of over red meat for a day or two.

New Year's Eve

Craig and I had to work on New Year's Eve, and I had to drive home in a pretty good snowstorm, so we wanted a dinner that was nice, without being a lot of work.
I indulged in the salad bar at WF, getting some sort of Provencal chicken salad, with olives and cherry tomatoes. We put that on top of mixed greens for a filling salad. For our main course, we got raviolis and sauce at a local place I'd never been to before. They sell frozen pasta dinners that are made right in the back of the shop. I chose spinach raviolis and butternut squash raviolis, and a vodka sauce. The sauce was really really good, not too heavy, and we were both impressed by the raviolis, particularly the squash, which were seasoned with nutmeg. To drink we had what Craig's wine club calls "the ultimate food wine," Tamarack Cellars Firehouse Red Columbia Valley 2006. I liked it and did think it went well with the food, but didn't enjoy it as much after we finished dinner, maybe because it was no longer with food?
For dessert, garnets in blood, from the Cafe Pasqual cookbook, just pomegranate seeds, Riojas wine, and a little sugar. You wouldn't want a huge bowl, but a little bit is a really nice treat.