3.25.12: pizza and the return of Mad Men.

Sweet and Sour Fig Pizza with Goat Cheese, Shallots and Thyme

Do you still have “Zou Bisou Bisou” stuck in your head after last Sunday’s Mad Men? (Did I just get it back in your head after you thought you had bested that earworm? Sorry.) While it was inevitable that we were going to celebrate its return after at 17-month long hiatus with food and drink, the fact that you only rarely see any of the characters with food (with none of it looking all that appetizing to boot) meant that I wasn’t going to adhere to any strict theme, save for insisting Michael make us a round of Old Fashioneds. Certain nods to the show, after all, must be made, and cocktails have always felt far more appropriate than food.

Caprese salad and old fashioneds.

Besides: we had finally gotten a couple of new half sheet pans at Chef’s the day before, and I was in the mood for homemade pizza.

06.16.11: dinner (wild king salmon paillard, sweet-and-sour shallots, and Bloomsday)

Wild King Salmon with Sweet-and-Sour Shallots

 After all there’s a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers’ buckets wobbly lights. Give us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don’t maul them pieces, young one.

Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.

Ah, I’m hungry.

–James Joyce, Ulysses (chapter 8, “The Lestrygonians”)

Happy (belated) Bloomsday, that wonderful day that celebrates the majesty and the weirdness that is James Joyce’s Ulysses and allows the people who slogged through it (self included) to feel smug for a day while they quote it! The rest of the post doesn’t really have anything to do with Joyce or Ulysses, but I wanted the excuse to share one of my favorite food-related quotes that is both delightfully hilarious and grotesque.

Onward! 

02.27.11: dinner (beef and oxtail bourguignonne)

Beef and Oxtail Bourguignonne

[Editor's Note: Michael is filing this while at a conference in California, so he deserves a few props.]

Over Christmas,  I made a point of requesting a large number of cookbooks in the name of expanding my culinary repertoire boldly into the realm French cookery. One of my first attempts was an as yet unpublished, seemingly straightforward Beef Bourguignonne. While everything seemed right on the surface, the final product was a bit too dry for my liking. I wondered if our very lean American supermarket beef was to blame for the discontinuity. We resolved to try again, this time with an ingredient that we hoped would be more foolproof.

11.07.10: dinner (spaghetti and roasted peppers FTW…almost).

 

Spaghetti with Red and Yellow Peppers

Michael likes to rile me up any way he can (and I respond in kind by calling him Wrong-Way-M60 because last winter he hopped off the train and got on a M60 that took him to LaGuardia instead of home), and one of his more recent tactics to stir up my (completely not-serious) ire is to talk about how bread/pasta=poison. I’m not exactly sure where he got on this particular tangent, but as we were walking towards the A on Saturday I started quoting one of my favorite infomercials ever, nevermind that that it’s not real. It gets the “difficulty in using everyday products” scenes perfectly.

 

And, of course, there is this amazing bit:

Tracy: [doing commercial] Bread is one of the worst things in the world, but we’ve already needed it–until now. By burning three different types of meat together, the Tracy Jordan Meat Machine takes bread out of equation. Now you’re sandwich is all of the good stuff.  [takes bite] That’s delicious!
Dr. Spaceman: And it’s healthy. Hi, I’m Dr. Leo Spaceman. I’m a working physician with a degree from the Ho Chi Minh School of Medicine.
Tracy: Dr. Spaceman, is it true that bread eats away at your brain?
Dr. Spaceman: We have no way of knowing, because the powerful bread lobby keeps stopping my research!
Tracy: Well folks, bread will never maybe attack your brain again. Because, say it with me, “Meat is the new bread!”

It’s a little scary how we can quote this show at any occasion, especially the first season, but I love to cook while having this show on in the background. I feel like Liz Lemon would approve of the food being made–the more indulgent, the better. While I couldn’t see her making this pasta dish herself, I could easily see her tucking into it because it’s that good.

09.05.10: dinner (ancho-braised lamb tacos)

Braised Lamb Tacos with Shallots and Cheddar Cheese

“I want to braise a tongue and make tacos like the kind we had at La Esquina,” Michael said to me on a grey and slightly unseasonably cool Sunday.

My mind immediately goes back to the Friday a week prior and us leaning against an outdoor counter while wolfing down various tacos and remembering in particular how good the veal tongue ones were. “Sound fine to me. Do you have a recipe?”

“Lemme do a quick search. I’ll find something.” Alas, this idea was not to be. This time, anyway.

09.18.10: dinner (“tapas” with sweet potato latkes and Spanish-inspired wings).

Sweet Potato Latkes with Greek Yogurt

After the previous weekend, indulgent in pork shoulders and roast chicken, I tried to keep my options open and free, although this meant I had no plans for dinner up until dangerously close to the zero hour. I decided that we could put on of E’s fifty Spanish cookbooks to use, but we came up with little in the way of ideas save for dishes that ‘would be great some other time’. It was a problem.

08.22.10: dinner (Vietnamese dishes courtesy of Emeril Lagasse)

Vermicelli Salad Bowl with Vietnamese BBQ Pork Meatballs

I don’t know how far back to go with this one. Okay. In New York around seven, I used to enjoy watching The Simpsons, often while eating (yes, we eat in front of the TV, I know it’s bad…) Then, one night, I was horrified to realize that they were removing my precious cartoon for some lousy talk show. But I’m a survivor, and I made do. I started watching Emeril Live on Cooking Channel. I like the show, it just gets a bit repetitive at times, is all. And even though The Simpsons has returned to its predestined time slot, I still flip back to the big E often, I can’t help it.

Recipe rehash: quinoa pasta with zucchini and Gorgonzola

Quinoa Linguini with Zucchini and Gorgonzola

This is one of those phenomenally easy, light and filling recipes that knocks you on your ass, and I must give credit where it is due. This was taken from a recipe from Gina DePalma and made just a little bit lighter with the substitution of quinoa pasta for the farfalle…but to be honest this recipe–filled with flavors from shallots, zucchini and Gorgonzola cheese–would likely make cardboard taste good. I believe the assertion that the best Italian pastas have the most sparing of sauces, and this dish is no exception.

Go get the recipe here.

Go make fun of my original photo (taken within the first few weeks of living in this apartment) here. Seriously, you can rib me for this–especially since the photo above is genuinely so much better.

07.04.10: dinner (mussels steamed in Victory Golden Monkey is always a good decision).

Victory Golden Monkey-Steamed Mussels with Breadcrumbs over Spaghettini

One lone bottle of Victory Golden Monkey has been languishing in our fridge for a while not because we don’t like it, but out of a strange dance of politeness. Neither Michael nor I wanted to be the one to finish it off, I think, out of deference to the other, and so it sat by itself at the bottom of the kitchen door shelf, neglected and forgotten. Que triste.

Lest you start feeling too bad for this bottle of beer, I urge you to watch this to snap you out of your funk:

OK, so I just wanted any excuse I could find to post this–sue me! More importantly, if you want to see what we did with this lovely bottle of beer, well, follow me after the jump!

02.27.10: dinner (new homemade pizzas to share!)

Our stand mixer hard at work

Reading so many other fellow food bloggers out there I think clouds my perspective when it comes to stand-mixer usage.  A casual conversation at work will reveal that while many of my coworkers own a Kitchen Aid (or similar) mixer, it seems that other than holiday baking time, it tends to sit dormant for most of the year.  I was this way for a while (worse, really, as I’m not usually inclined to bake sweets), but ever since I found Jim Lahey’s pizza dough recipe and Michael a pasta dough method that didn’t require him to make a well, our little guy gets a workout a few times a month at the very least.  This time around, our craving was for some homemade pizza.