12.03.11: dinner (orecchiette with sun-dried tomatoes, tarragon, veal stock and some other stuff)

Orecchiette with Tomato, Tarragon and Prosicutto di Parma

You know how when you make a tomato sauce and there’s all of those dark red or purple bits on the side of the pan? I want to make this sauce taste like that.
–Michael on the way home from Fairway after I nagged him to death about his super-secretive sauce idea.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I wish I had some profound reason for our collective silence, but to be honest, it boiled down to not feeling terribly inclined to write about food. The Thanksgiving holiday leaves me with nothing to say about holiday cooking since we’re not the ones cooking it, and we have to travel, and frankly I’m over writing about various squashes and how good they are with sage and rosemary and waxing endlessly on the deliciousness of roasted vegetables.. Yeah–they are all awesome. We know that. Let’s move on.

Over the course of the fall Michael and I have been tweaking red sauces fairly often, in part to rebel against the beige-ness of what tends to be made this time of year. This is a dish that evolved from that culinary puttering (see Michael’s quote above) as well as a very intense desire to have a sun-dried tomato pesto with orecchiette after a rather silly conversation on Twitter (see the #pastawar tag to see what I mean). Michael completely ran with it and flatly refuesd to give me the details of what he was thinking as he gathered ingredients at Fairway. Bastard. But I trusted him because he had a vision, and that vision included prosciutto di Parma, and there was no way I was going to object to any of it.

07.09.11: home-curing salmon (Copper River sockeye gravlax with goat cheese over a bagel)

Copper River Sockeye Gravlax with Goat Cheese on a a Pumpernickel Bagel

Much like any supermarket around the country, ordering anything from the deli department at Fairway can require a wait of some duration on the weekends, and you just have to roll with the punches and try not to shoot too many death glares at the hapless dad ordering half the case’s contents a quarter pound at a time. Being a New York supermarket, though, Fairway also has a smoked fish counter right next to the deli where you don’t have to take a number and usually it’s a very simple in-and-out process…until you get stuck behind the mom ordering two pounds of smoked salmon for her brunch that day, and they don’t bring in another person to help alleviate the growing line behind her as the slicer stands there methodically making her way through the enormous salmon fillet (and then another fillet because one was not enough). I guess it was to be expected–it was Saturday morning on the Upper West Side, after all–but when you only need someone to spoon some alici into a plastic dish and hand it over to you, your patience wears ever thinner as each expertly-cut slice of pink fish is added to the pile.

The mom turned to us with an apologetic smile on her face–at least she waited with us, I suppose–and remarked that maybe she should have just gotten some pizzas or sandwiches after all. I silently grumbled that Fairway has a catering office so she could have at least called ahead, but by then it was a  cow’s opinion so it didn’t matter either way. (Incidentally, one way I entertain myself while waiting for such things is mentally flipping through my internal encyclopedia of pop-culture references. That leads me to giggle for no reason, but at least that ‘s better than giving strangers the stink-eye, right?)

That particular shopping trip came to mind when I was slicing through our little piece of gravlax last week, as I was only trying to slice enough to top half a bagel each for Michael and I as a mid-afternoon snack. Getting those gorgeous slices is not nearly as easy as it looks–no wonder the pros slice at the pace they do.

01.29.11: dinner (a riff on Heston Blumenthal’s “perfect spaghetti bolognese”)

Pork-Lamb Ragu over Tagiatelle, inspired by Heston Blumenthal

It seems to me that, in some ways, it’s easier to explore culinary innovation in Britain precisely because we have no strong food tradition to enchain us.

Heston Blumenthal, In Search of Perfection

We’ve had a copy of In Search of Perfection on our cookbook shelf for a few years now, but never cracked it open because it is one of those books that are less a cookbook but rather a book on food; after all, it only contains recipes for eight dishes in the span of nearly 320 pages. It’s the companion to Heston Blumenthal’s first BBC series in which he sought to dissect favorites in British cuisine, ranging from bangers and mash to pizza, and figure out a way to create a “perfect” rendition of each dish (all while readily admitting that one’s personal Platonic ideal is another’s culinary hell). He’s known for being grouped in with other so-called “molecular gastronomists” (just don’t call them by that term) and his restaurant The Fat Duck is consistently ranked among the top three in the world, this year trailing only Norma and El Bulli. Blumenthal’s style of food is one that often requires various pieces of special equipment like sous-vides machines, and while they are certainly interesting to see in action on episodes of Top Chef, it’s one we’ve never really embraced because we don’t have the storage space for such things and Michael gets to actually be a scientist every day as it is–sometimes it’s best to leave your work at work and let the professionals and those who are passionate about it do it well.

11.28.10: dinner (stracciatella and fritatta, inspired in part by Nigella)

Stracciatella of Tarragon, Semolina Flour and Pecorino Cheese

I have to say that I kind of love the habit of coming home after a weekend trip to Pennsylvania and indulging in a soup and an eggy dish. We did it back in August with gazpacho and our ugly-but-delicious tortilla, and after Thanksgiving we toasted to our uneventful Amtrak ride with lovely stracciatella and a simple fritatta. As we worked together to make the meal, both Michael and I started to channel Nigella Lawson a bit because both of these dishes seemed like ones you might see on one of her many BBC programs: fast, loaded with vegetables but all with a heavy does of indulgence. There may have been some bad British-accented commentary going on as we cooked, but I won’t say for certain. All I will confirm is that dinner came together in very short order that night–and that’s something, I think, we could all use in this otherwise hectic time of year.

08.01.10: dinner (tomato and tarragon pizza…followed by goat cheese, salami and roasted red pepper pizza)

Tomato, Tarragon and Parmigiano-Reggiano Pizza

What is the appeal of making pizza at home? I mean, you have to make the dough, pray that the humidity is in your favor to ensure that it is elastic enough (but not too elastic) and also pray that the pizza will make it in one piece from the peel to the oven, regardless of the amount of cornmeal spread on the peel to help the process along. Yes, there are many things conspiring against you when you attempt to make pizza in the summertime, but one key advantage has you coming back to through more dough down every time: the power of custom toppings.

08.28.10 (tapas and A GIVEAWAY!!)

Wild Mushrooms with Herbed Cheese

This time last year saw us frantically scrambling in our beloved New Haven apartment as we packed and cleaned and squeezed all of our possessions into a U-Haul on our trek to Manhattan (and this was after only finding out where we were moving to eight days prior to our move-out date). The month of August was, to be honest, a period of great uncertainty and stress for many reasons: my commute was becoming so bad that taking back roads from Milford to New Haven was preferable to standing in traffic on I-95, our apartment had been leased out for September at the beginning of the month and we didn’t have an apartment to go to in NYC until a week prior to our move-in, and we were faced with all of the normal stresses of moving without knowing where the fuck we were going to until the last minute possible…or so it seemed.

A small respite in the midst of all of that uncertainty was a trip to Barcelona’s New Haven location for a lovely meal for Michael’s birthday. I knew that the geniuses behind the restaurant had released a cookbook around that time and was hoping to check it out while we were there. While the food was amazing as always, the service was off and we ended up leaving in a huff (without me looking at the book) and I ended up bitching about said service on Twitter. They responded quickly, apologized profusely and even offered to give us a meal on them, but given that we weren’t living in the area anymore, I never took them up on it because we no longer lived in New Haven.

Of course, I ended up getting the cookbook as a birthday present a few months later and for the past year we have cooked our way through much of the book with every recipe taking us back to fun nights we’ve had at the restaurant…and that’s where our giveaway comes in.

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.

1.03.10: dinner (testing out the Sicily cookbook).

Linguini with Anchovies, Tomatoes and Tarragon

Pasta has become a once-a-week thing at our household, a truce of sorts to satisfy my cravings for it and Michael’s desire not to eat too much of it, so I am now determined to make the absolute most of every opportunity I can get to enjoy it.  While this has led me into a state of nearly paralyzing indecision as I fret over what length and shape to use in order to maximize the other players in the dish, it has encouraged me to dive into cookbooks again to try any new combination I can get my little hands on.

Enter one of my newest cookbook additions:  Sicily:  Culinary Crossroads. 

On getting one's hands dirty via container gardening.

Sage seedling

Despite growing up in a household boasting flowerbeds all over the property and a sizable vegetable garden, my gardening skills are sadly, wanting.  My first attempt at growing herbs several summers ago left me with a somewhat viable rosemary plant (a fact I am attributing to the plant’s inherent hardiness rather than my green thumb) and dead lavendar and sage plants.  Another try was slightly more successful my first summer in New Haven–we enjoyed fresh oregano and thyme for most of the summer before a drought killed them–but due to the flurry of activity last summer leading up to two weddings (including our own), growing our own herbs slide preciputously down the priority list.  With Romeo almost always having what we need (and usually a good price for the quality), we normally never had a problem going through a batch of parsley during a week’s time, and having fresh tarragon and sage for a weekend dinner would just signal a need to get creative with the remaining amounts for weekday meals.

Then we went to Italy and had access to a true bounty of herbs to use as we needed–and we realized that we only needed a sprig or two because the quality was just that much greater.  For much of the winter and early spring the thoughts of sprouting a more modest version were on my mind constantly, especially as we’ve taken to make brown butter sage sauces to go with our fresh pastas so frequently.  Michael was initially hesitant but I managed to convince him that it was a good idea and not too complicated, and Saturday we became the proud owners of this sizable sage plant and a smaller French tarragon plant (it seems to have thinner leaves than the tarragon we usually find in the market).  A modest $27 investment in a trowel, potting soil and some terracotta pots later, and we are in business.  To add to the fun, I picked up some rosemary and lavender seeds to try sprouting, though I’m not as confident in my ability to germinate actual seedlings from, you know, seeds.  But it’s worth a try, right?

05.03.09: dinner (subtitle: dinner for one).

 

Pizza with Mascarpone, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Tarragon

 

 

Michael is currently on his way back to PA to head out to State College for his younger brother’s senior art show (confidential to D:  congrats!), thereby leaving me to my own devices in our kitchen for the next few days.  Craving more pizza after our escapade two weeks ago, I started the dough-making this afternoon and, in an effort to use more of the 1.5lb tub of mascarpone that we had from last weekend, came up with this creation.  It’s still not empty, but I feel less wasteful than I did a few days ago.  I also succeeded in carrying on Michael’s tradition of setting off the smoke detector for no good reason when I took my pizza out of the oven, likely due to the extreme heat emanating from even the slightest open door.

There are two pieces of pizza left in the fridge for Michael to enjoy when he returns to town on Tuesday, so…bonus.