Artichoke Pasta

Cooked penne pasta and artichoke hearts (glass jar-type, with the marinade) mixed in with basil, pepper and a bit of oil to hold it all together. We had it last night, but tonight should be even better because (a) it'll have had a day to get the flavor mixed in across the board and (b) will add some chicken to the mix as well.

Maybe it'll be good for photos later tonight, not really sure....it certainly wasn't last night! Need to get back to recipes that look good in photos!

Eggplant Noodles

This is one of the most labor intensive with so little reward dish I think I've ever done. Take an eggplant and peel. Then slice lengthwise into quarter-inch-wide platters, and lay out on a cooling rack. Dose with salt and wait fifteen minutes for the salt to draw out the moisture. Then flip and repeat. Wash the platters thoroughly and pat dry. Then slice again into quarter-inch strips and pan sauté with a de-seeded and chopped tomato, basil, heavy cream and parmesan cheese. It'll thicken a little bit, then serve and top with bread crumbs.

Tada! All that for barely enough for one person. Not a good return in my opinion. But next I think we are doing a chicken-artichoke pasta. That should be good for sure!

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Everyone has a favorite spaghetti and meatballs recipe, right? Wrong! I had not been satisfied with really any that wasn't out of a glass jar (sad huh) in quite some time. I would try and try but was getting nowhere. But tonight - victory!

The secret (at least for my tastes) is to do the sauce in two parts - one part is the drainings from whole canned, peeled tomatoes reduced with wine and sherry vinegar (and sugar AND basil AND sage) and left to barely simmer on the stove. Take the other goodies (chopped carrots, onions, celery, (mirepoix for y'all back home) and some smashed garlic (lots!)) and broil them with some oil and pepper until the onions are browning, then add the whole, peeled tomatoes and bake for fifteen minutes or so. Mash that in with the reduction on the stove until your desired consistency is reached.

For the meatballs, I have started mixing them in the handy mixer (meat, egg, seasoning) and then baking the shaped meatballs until 120F, and then finishing them off in the pan. It helps keep the meatballs from breaking apart and is much more consistent in temperature from one to the other.

Noodles are...well...noodles. Angel hair tonight. Pretty boring!

All together with some lemon broccoli and it's a good meal for sure.

What good is cooking with wine if you can't enjoy a little? Also - photographing pasta is not something I can do yet. Looks nasty, but it really was good!

Stuffed (well, topped) Mushrooms

It is mushrooms on mushrooms tonight!

Take portobello caps, brush with oil and herbs, and start to bake them a little bit. I put them on a cooking rack in the oven and got them going while ....

Start pan roasting chopped mushrooms with onions and once they brown, mix in heavy cream, parmesan, bread crumbs, herbs and pepper. Get it all going in a pan and after it simmers for one minute let it cool for ten.

Put the oven on high broil and fill the caps with the topping. Broil for three or four minutes, then eat up!

Turkey Salad Sandwiches

This one was a nice easy way to get back into following a recipe full of measurements and proportions. For the past year I've been pretty much cooking from memory and not doing anything to an exact recipe. Gets pretty stagnant after a while...

So, basically, get roast turkey and a variety of accoutrement - celery, dried cranberries, lemon juice, onion, pecans, mayonnaise (1/2 cup to every pound of turkey to keep the consistency right), salt and pepper. Mix up, chill for at least 30 minutes (some recipes say an hour) and then eat up on some toasted bread.

Tasty!

We're back!

Took a long while off but will attempt six updates in the next seven days. We're pulling recipes that look good from Alton Brown's Good Eats: The Early Years, a rocking Christmas present.

To be clear from my end though, this isn't cashing in on the Julie & Julia or whatever (although Achewood did cover the phenomenon well before the movie, so I still feel like it would be a legitimate go-to-for-inspiration source) - this is just a chance for us to cook up good food. That and try our hand at that everlasting bane of commercial photography - trying to keep food from looking like crap in pictures.

So read on for our first entry in quite some time....

Pizza!

This week we decided to make home made pizza, as "from-scratch" as possible. Inspiration was....a desire for pizza. And a yellow pepper that needed to be eaten up, and uhh....a chance to use the mixer? Yeah, that's enough inspiration.

So...first things first - gather up your ingredients for the pizza dough.

Per pie... 1 packet yeast 1 cup warm water (105-115 F) 2 - 3 cups flour 2 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp salt
Dissolve all the yeast in the water in a warmed mixing bowl
Add the oil and salt, then 2/3 of the flour
Mix with dough hook if you have it for 2 minutes
Add the remaining flour 1/2 cup at a time until it starts to clean the wall of the mixing bowl (usually about 2 minutes) then mix for 2 more minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl - someplace warm - and cover from drafts for 50-55 minutes.
Get all your toppings out and start preparing them. We used a medium sized can of tomato sauce for two pizzas with a little bit left over. About 3 cups of mozzarella went into the two pies as well, in addition to all our toppings.
After the rising time, pre-heat the oven to 450F. Your dough will have doubled in size, you'll need to punch it down and then get ready to spread on a surface.
So...this is a difficult thing, I always let my pizza stone and cast iron dish heat with the oven so it doesn't go into the hot oven cold, but how to spread out the dough? We had to make the pizza shape on another surface and then transfer the dough to the hot stone/iron. THEN we could add the sauce and toppings. It started to cook a little bit, but we moved as fast as we could to get the pizzas into the oven. Anyone else have any better solutions?
Be sure to put a bit of cornmeal onto the pizza stone before you put the dough down, it really helps with the flavor and also makes removing the pizza from the stone easy as...well...pie! These pizzas are loaded down and ready for about 20 minutes in the oven...maybe a little more or less, be sure to start checkin them out at 15-16 minutes.
About 20 minutes later...Pizza #1
Pizza #2!

Mmmm tasty!