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Archive for June, 2009
June 28, 2009 at 11:36 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
I got the recipe from here, and although I substituted pecorino romano for the parmesan due to price concerns, it’s essentially the same idea. It’s not unlike a margherita pizza, I guess, or a Caprese salad, except since I actually don’t like fresh mozzarella at all (too… wet) I skipped that part. But my point is that when you think of chicken parmesan, you think of something more sauce-heavy, and the cheese is melted all over, and that’s fantastic, and I kind of want one now except that I just made something for dinner that was very much like that (inspired by these, except not rolled up, and I forgot to take its picture so that’s all you’re getting). But my point is that this is much lighter and summerier, not unlike a salad. WHICH IN FACT IT IS.
Margherita Pasta Salad
Ingredients
1 chicken breast
1 large tomato, sliced
10 large fresh basil leaves
2 portions of a type of pasta appropriate to pasta salad – I happened to have this macaroni on hand, but rotini or penne would also be good
a whole bunch of sliced parmesan, or romano, or whatever suits you… if you need 10 leaves of basil, I suppose you need 10 slices of cheese
tomato-basil salad dressing (mine was sundried tomato)
olive oil
salt and pepper
Method
Put your pasta on to cook according to package directions.
Oil, salt, and pepper your chicken.
Bung it onto a grill until it’s cooked (now, we don’t have a barbeque, and I was just using a George Foreman, so it didn’t take any amount of time for me. Results may vary with a real grill – the original recipe gives detailed instructions).
When the pasta’s done, drain it and then toss it in a bowl with some salad dressing, salt, and pepper.
When the chicken’s done, slice it into… slices. Hmm.
Now it is arranging time! The original recipe has this happening on a serving plate, but we decided it would be easier to do on individual plates, plus Matt could avoid having tomatoes that way.
First step: tomatoes. Arrange them around the outside.
Next step: cheese. Slices go between the tomatoes – over one, under the next, that kind of deal.
Repeat with the chicken.
Festoon with basil leaves.
You may notice that this makes a ring around the outside of the plate and nothing in the middle. That is because the middle is where the pasta goes!
Add more of anything (salad dressing, cheese…) if you feel it is warranted.
June 24, 2009 at 10:53 pm · Filed under food, side dishes/appetizers
I served these as part of my Meat-N-Potatoes – Indian Style! dinner. To be fair, I didn’t go all out with a theme and play my Monsoon Wedding soundtrack or try to wrangle a sarong into a sari. Matt would have laughed so hard at me that he’d rupture something, anyway. I just made a couple of ordinary things in a way that was both a little different and a little related. Why am I so full of excuses about this? It’s not like you’re all about to laugh at me for being thematic, or get mad at me for not being thematic enough. I hope.
I really liked these. Partly it’s because I finally broke down and spent the money to get some turmeric, so I got to have the fabulous yellowness, but they are also beautifully spicy and gingery, and the garlic was just a little singed, which may not be what you’re supposed to do but to me, it brings the Asian flavour. I mean so many cultures use garlic, and the way Italian food, for instance, is garlicky is not the same as the way Southeast Asian food is. And Indian food. Anyway, I kept snacking on them for days after, even cold from the fridge. Nom nom.
Recipe is from Sea Salt With Food, although they refer to them as “dry” potatoes and I don’t really know if they’re any drier than any other kind of potato. I didn’t have any fennel seeds to sprinkle upon them. And I ditched the cilantro garnish because that stuff freaks my face OUT.
Spicy Ginger-Garlic Potatoes
Ingredients
A bunch of potatoes – I guess I had about 1/2 a pound, and I used yellow new potatoes
about a 1″ piece of ginger, peeled and chopped (but don’t worry about being too precise, it’s going to get food-processed anyway)
2 cloves garlic, peeled but not chopped
1 1/2 tbsp (that’s 1 tbsp, 1 1/2 tsp) water
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne
2 1/2 tbsp oil
Method
Boil the potatoes, whole and unpeeled, until done.
Drain them and leave them to cool completely, or as completely as you wind up having time for. I won’t judge.
While they’re cooling, make the sauce/paste/flavouring agent, whatever you want to call it. By which I mean chuck everything else but the oil into a food processor and let it rip. The ideal consistency is a paste, but my paste had little garlic chunks in it and I found that this was maybe even desirable. So don’t give your food processor a complex if it can’t totally destroy all of the solid matter.
Let’s assume your potatoes are cooled now. Peel them and cut them into bite-sized chunks.
Now heat your oil in a pan.
When it’s hot, add the paste and stir-fry for 2 minutes.
Add the potatoes and stir-fry for 5 – 7 minutes or until they start getting a crust on them from the paste.
Devour voraciously.
June 21, 2009 at 7:40 pm · Filed under food, meals
I made this with spicy ginger-garlic potatoes (they’ll be the next post), and it amused me to have taken such a standard, literally meat-and-potatoes American meal, and made it all Indian. Ho ho ho, I’m so thematic.
Recipe is halved for a smaller roast, and comes from here. I didn’t make their accompanying pumpkin wedges, opting for the potatoes I mentioned earlier instead.
Garam Masala Roast Beef
Ingredients
~1/2 lb beef roast
5 cloves garlic
1 tbsp garam masala
1 1/2 tsp oil
Method
Take the beef out of the fridge 20 minutes before cooking.
Preheat the oven to 400.
Put the cloves of garlic in the middle of your roasting pan – they’re going to prop up your roast off the floor of the pan, so arrange them accordingly. You may find that 5 isn’t really enough. I think I may have wound up using 6 or 7.
Rub garam masala evenly all over the roast.
Plop it on top of the garlic cloves.
Drizzle the oil over it.
Sling it into the oven for 40 – 50 minutes, depending on your desired level of doneness.
When you take it out, tent loosely with foil and let rest for 15 minutes.
Serve drizzled with pan juices. You could also squeeze one of those roasted garlic cloves onto it… yum.
Oh, it looks like the one-year blogiversary of this site has come and gone. Whoopee.
June 18, 2009 at 2:08 pm · Filed under breads, food
I baked this bread because we bought fancy Irish butter. When we were in Ireland, Matt had been really impressed by the taste of the butter there (and also the beef – basically, anything you can get from a cow there is good times), so we bought some fancy imported butter a couple of weeks ago. I felt like it would be a shame to use it on regular old supermarket sandwich bread, so I wanted to bake something fresh and warm to put it on. I made it from this recipe from Kitchenparade, my former adopt-a-blogger mentor. Our mentoring relationship never really went anywhere, and part of this is my fault for something I just realized now (and by “now,” I apparently mean “last night, before I fell asleep watching the extras to The King of Kong): I honestly thought her main site, Kitchenparade, was just a collection of articles she wrote, and not a blog as such with commenting and so on. But that’s not true; she does have comments on every post. I just never saw them, because that section of the page loads last and is below a bunch of ads, so I never used to even find a comment link, let alone any comments. So I wasn’t commenting on her site, because I thought you couldn’t do that in the first place. I must have looked like a big jerk.
This bread is so english-muffiny it’s crazy. It’s got the nooks and crannies, it has a fairly english-muffiny flavour, I guess the cornmeal on the outside is english-muffiny too, and like an english muffin, it doesn’t really taste as good if it isn’t toasted. With mine that may have been because I think I undercooked it – the outside looked done, but it could have probably stood another few minutes in there for the interior to be… for lack of a better word, drier. When I was growing up, we had english muffins in the house most of the time – breakfast was huge in our house and I was genuinely sad when my diet changed after my Big Illness and I couldn’t eat before noon anymore, plus most breakfast foods were off-limits to me – but we often got the sourdough kind, so I sort of think of this taste as the “correct,” archetypical taste of the english muffin. Which this, of course, is not. So my skill at comparing the bread to an english muffin is not the best; therefore, take any comparison I make with regard to the flavour with a grain of salt.
English Muffin Bread
Ingredients
2 1/4 tsp yeast (or 1 packet; I’ve got a jar now, though)
2 3/4 cup flour, which Alanna advises us to “fluff,” but since I don’t know how to do that, I just stirred it before scooping into my measuring cup. Anyway, this aerates the flour and makes you use less of it, therefore making your baked goods fluffier. That was probably the number one tip I took away from the mentorship.
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 cup warm water
cornmeal for dusting
Method
Combine the yeast, sugar, salt, water, and 1 cup of the flour in a bowl using a hand mixer, mixing for 3 minutes. Mine, of course, has no battery life to speak of and gives up after about a minute, so I made stirring motions with the stupid thing for the rest of the time, which I figured was ok since Alanna gives a provision for if the dough gets too feisty – if you’re allowed to mix with a wooden spoon, it must be ok to move your dead beater around by hand, right? It didn’t hurt the bottom line, by which I mean the nooks-and-crannies situation in the finished loaf.
Anyway, after your 3 minutes are up, chuck in the remaining flour and continue mixing or stirring until fully blended.
Now it’s time to put it in the receptacle in which it shall be baked. Alanna advises a casserole dish, but I don’t have one of the appropriate size (1 1/2 – 2 quarts), so I used a regular old loaf pan. Anyway, grease whatever you’re using and dust it with cornmeal, and get your dough into it. Don’t worry about making it all super even and perfect, it’ll work out.
Dust some more cornmeal onto the top there.
Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise for 30 – 60 minutes or until doubled. Mine definitely didn’t need the full 60 minutes – it was already starting to touch the towel after 30. I can’t remember, though, it might have been a hot day.
During the rising period, turn on the oven to preheat to 400.
Once your dough is risen, sling it into the oven for 30 – 45 minutes. The top being golden is a good sign, but, as my dad would say, necessary but not sufficient. My loaf’s top was golden after 30 minutes, and I took it out, and I feel that the inside was not quiiiiite cooked enough. Also the top kind of fell in when it cooled. If your oven door has a window (mine doesn’t), maybe keep an eye on it from the 30 minute point onwards, and if it starts to get too dark, take it out? I’m not trying to make you burn your bread here, but I want to encourage you to err on the side of baking longer rather than shorter.
Cool on a rack, but definitely have a slice before it’s all the way cooled. This is a best-eaten-warm bread, and toasting it is good, but fresh from the oven is better.
June 14, 2009 at 6:49 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Ok, first of all, there are two things I made between the last post and this (actually, 3, but I didn’t get a photo of the Big Pot O’ Carbs I made at Matt’s mom’s house when we were down there for his grandmother’s funeral). I don’t know if I missed the photos when I did my big download off my camera the other morning, or whether I forgot to take a picture of one of them, or what. Fortunately, if I forgot to take a picture of one of them, I have more in the freezer. The other’s long gone, though…
Anyway, on to this soup (halved). I love beans. Is that so wrong? This soup has both white beans (what did I use, cannellini beans? I think so) AND green beans, and I’ve been snacking on leftover raw green beans ever since. Crunchy! And even in the soup, even in the leftover soup, they stayed crunchy, which impressed me.
Ham and Bean Soup
Ingredients
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1/2 a carrot, or 1 small carrot, sliced
1 rib celery, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 cups chicken stock
8 oz ham, diced
1 19-oz can cannellini beans
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 a bay leaf
1/4 lb green beans, trimmed and cut into inch, inch-and-a-half-long segments
pepper to taste
Method
Heat the oil in your soup pot.
Saute the onion, carrot, and celery for about 10 minutes or until softened.
Throw in the garlic and continue sauteeing for another couple of minutes until fragrant.
Add everything but the green beans, except hold back half the can of cannellini beans. You’ll add it later. If there’s not enough liquid, throw in some more stock or water (I used an ice cube of veggie stock).
Cover and simmer for an hour.
If you’re fortunate enough to have an immersion blender, immersion-blend the soup a bit to make the beans into a thickening agent. If, like me, that is still on your wish list, using a potato masher is not a bad alternative. You don’t need to go crazy on this, just give them a bit of a bash.
Toss in the other half of the can of beans and the green beans and heat through.
Incidentally, I’m not going to try submitting to Tastespotting anymore. Not so much because I never make it – I have no illusions about taking good photos – but because I read something that Sarah, who runs it, posted on her blog, and that’s that she finds posts of just a recipe and a photo boring, and that the people who make such posts are also boring. I made a specific decision not to talk about my life much anymore – that was my old journal, and this is my foodblog, and this replaced that – and so she’s basically saying that since I don’t want to tie every recipe into the story of what I did that day or a little lesson about life or something, my submissions are never going to be accepted even if I do get good at taking pictures. Which is fine; I’ll just submit at Foodgawker instead. It’s good to know the rules. I could see myself getting quite frustrated if I finally got talented (or ever prioritized taking a picture of the food over eating it) and still couldn’t get a picture accepted and not knowing it was because the recipes weren’t accompanied by little anecdotes about my life.
June 11, 2009 at 11:30 am · Filed under food, meals
Matt saw this recipe on the Phantom Gourmet (the show, though, not the website, although the recipe is up there) and fell instantly in love. So I made it for him. I think he liked it more than I did, but then again it is a meatloaf… wrapped in bacon… with macaroni and cheese in the middle. That’s right.
Myself, I’m not so wild about meatloaf, and if it was just macaroni and cheese with bacon in it, I’d have been all set. Or I’d even have settled for macaroni and cheese with chunks of meatloaf mixed in. And it would have been better if it was homemade real macaroni and cheese instead of American Kraft Dinner – which is not as good as Canadian Kraft Dinner, by the way, they don’t understand here why everyone eats it all the time there, because what they know as Kraft Dinner is lame.
Bacon-Wrapped Meatloaf With Macaroni and Cheese Inside
Ingredients
2 lbs ground beef
1 cup seasoned breadcrumbs
I guess the equivalent of 1/2 a roasted red pepper, chopped
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 tbsp Italian seasoning
salt
a bunch of bacon
a box of macaroni and cheese (you’ll have some left)
Method
Make the macaroni and cheese according to pacakge directions.
Preheat the oven to 350.
Mix the beef, egg, garlic, Italian seasoning, peppers, breadcrumbs, Worcestershire sauce, and salt (basically, everything except the bacon and the macaroni and cheese) until the mixture adheres together.
Line a loaf pan with strips of bacon going across the short length of the pan. Be sure to press them into the corners and so on, and let the excess hang over the sides, you’ll wrap it over the top of the meatloaf later.
Fill the pan with half the meatloaf mixture and sculpt a tubular depression into the middle.
Fill the depression with macaroni and cheese.
Cover it up and fill everything in with the rest of the meatloaf mixture.
Wrap the dangling edges of bacon across the top, patching with more bacon if necessary (it will be).
Bake for 25 minutes. I found I preferred to put the loaf pan on a baking sheet instead of straight onto the rack, because there was a certain amount of sizzling and dripping of grease, and I wasn’t interested in starting a grease fire in my oven.
Take it out and drain the fat off – this is the hard part, since obviously it’s hot, but gaining any kind of handhold on a loaf pan is hard enough even when you’re not using potholders or oven mitts, and you have to be tipping the thing and holding it while all the copious amounts of fat drain off.
Sling it back into the oven for another 25 minutes.
The original recipe says you can serve it with ketchup, but that’s gross. She says about a heart attack in a loaf pan.
Matt didn’t notice the red pepper the first night we ate it, but I guess the flavour came out more after it had time to sit in the fridge, and whenever he ate leftovers of it, he could taste them. He still ate it, though – the healing power of bacon made up for it, I guess.
June 4, 2009 at 3:31 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Another union meeting for Matt, another salmon pasta dish for me. We’ve got a nice little arrangement going on here. And this time my magical powers did not work, and I made the whole thing without him walking in in the middle of it. Such is life, I suppose. By which I mean, not always as magical as you expected. Pesto salmon, however, is as magical as can be expected, so at least that’s some consolation.
The recipe is from here, but of course I cut it down for one person. And I made the pesto myself, but with almonds instead of pine nuts since I had a bunch of almonds left over from the chicken, and pine nuts are ridiculously expensive anyway. This time it worked out ok in the food processor, and wasn’t too low or flat for the blades to reach like last time. In case anyone is wondering how I make my pesto: handful of basil leaves, handful of parmesan, handful of pine nuts (or almonds!), glug of olive oil, process or smash with the back of an ice cream scoop until it’s a paste. I don’t know how much it makes. Enough. I wouldn’t say “too much,” because what even is that, but it was just about right for this dish.
Seriously, this is the least precise recipe in the world. First I make my pesto by handfuls, and then I start messing around with “serving-sized” amounts of the other major ingredients. I’m leaving that up to your interpretation as to how much a serving is of everything. Plus that makes it easy to double or whatever.
Pesto Salmon Pasta
Ingredients
olive oil
salt and pepper
1 serving-sized piece of salmon – for me, this was about the size of the palm of my hand, which is… I have a tape measure right here… say 3″x4″? But I have small hands.
1 serving pasta
pesto… say a couple tbsp worth, more if you want, less if you also want
parmesan for garnishing
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Cook the pasta according to package directions (better to start on it before getting going with the salmon, I find, because I did the salmon first and then had to wait for my pasta to finish). The original recipe has you adding some oil to the pasta water as well as just salt. I never, ever do this, because it reduces the ability of the sauce to adhere to the noodles. All the Italians back through my family tree would haunt me if they caught me adding oil, I have no doubt.
Line a baking sheet with foil and plop the salmon down on it.
Brush the salmon with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Throw it in the oven for 12 minutes.
Take it out and break it up with a fork.
Toss it and the pesto in the drained pasta, adding a little bit of the pasta water if you feel it is necessary.
Serve with parmesan on top.
