1/26 Black and White Pizza

I've been sick for almost a week now and there appears to be no end in sight. Not sure what I have, but it's been a while since I've had anything quite this bad. The worst part is I don't even know who gave it to me, so I can't blame anyone! Anyway, I wasn't cooking much earlier in the week because I felt tired and groggy. Sitting around the house doing nothing has gotten rather boring though, so I went and picked up a few things at the megamart today. The goal was to take advantage of the pizza stone I received for Christmas and had yet to use.

What I ended up concocting was nothing short of delicious. I call it a black and white pizza. I made the dough with some regular old flour, yeast and water. After kneading and proofing, I topped it with Italian Fontina, fresh ricotta w/ hot pepper flakes, wood ear mushrooms (a mild somewhat chewy yet thin mushroom) and caramelize shallots. And that's about it. The mushroom add an interesting texture and I certainly liked the "black and white" look. I'm glad I didn't make it red all over though.

1/22 mughal mushroom curry

Oh man. Start this out by stir frying raisins, a green apple from the backyard, and blanched almonds (this gets fluffed into the jasmine rice).

I have a great cookbook called Silk Road Cooking (so far, its crowning achievement is a fava bean braise with dill and poached eggs). This curry is one of its offerings, and it was quite good. The basic components are sliced white and brown mushrooms, onions, 1 tomato (canned, this time of year), celery, garlic, ginger, serrano chiles*, and whole milk yogurt. Seasonings are 2 tsps garam masala and 2 tsps curry powder, salt, and pepper.

*I decided not to seed the chiles (2 of them) since I like spicy. Wow. This was hot. Hot. But in a good way. Damn. I had seconds.

1/20 spinach and goat cheese custard

I'm really trying to get better at making homemade pastry crusts. A good pastry crust is both one of the world's simplest things and seemingly the most fleeting.

This was a decent use of a big bunch of spinach, scallions, garlic, and a nice goat cheese. I think the crust still needs more work - although this was my first version with veggie shortening (sure, I used the Spectrum naturals organic version, but its still mechanically pressed palm oil). It needs to be, like, browner, and more flaky. And, like, it needs to be higher up over the edge of the pan so I don't leak out custard guts all over the pan it was sitting in, forming some sort of horrible, burnt egg/fetus/thing.

01/09 Seasonal Chicken with Beer!

After being blamed for Heather's inability to post anything or carry the weight while I was busy with other... how should I say... endeavors, I decided I should take matters into my own hands and cook up a little somethin' somethin' for the kids. Truth be told, I don't actually have kids. But I digress. I've actually been cooking from time to time over the last couple months, but there were certainly weeks where I was living off of burritos and Indian food. I even grew to like the Anna's Veggie Burrito, which is a sure sign of needing to get back into my own kitchen.

Anywho... I was sitting on the Red Line last week, flanked by two people with very large rear ends, considering my options for dinner. I had a bunch of random things in the fridge including a whole chicken that didn't seem like they would amount to a whole heck of a lot. It being winter time, and me living in the northeast, there's not much in the way of fresh fruits and veggies this time of year. Then all of the sudden I had one of those "light bulb" moments, just like in a cartoon - in fact it was just the lights in the train that had turned back on, allowing the fat people to whip out their 'south beach diet' books. Anyway, my inspiration was a Mario Batali dish I'd made a while back, though I never referred to back to it and actually, I couldn't even really remember what it was.

Basically, what I came up with was chicken braised in Harpoon Winter Warmer beer. Yup, beer. Into the dish went two clementines, a bunch of green olives, pancetta, extra pancetta fat for good measure, some celery, one onion, maybe two - i forget, fennel/cumin/celery seeds, salt&pepper. Now I know what you're thinking - "that sounds awfully weird!" and "what Batali dish could possibly inspire that crazy concoction?". Well, I can't really speak to your first thought, other than to reassure you that it came together nicely fed me for several days. As for the Batali dish - after some searching, I realized what it was that I was thinking about on that bone-crushing train ride back from work. It's a lamb shank braised in white wine & tomato sauce with olives and oranges... not exactly the same thing, but you know what - the final product was pretty similar.

So there you have it, my first post since mid October. Now that I have my life back to some degree, I'm hoping I'll have more time to entertain you and make you hungry. So keep checking back as we bring this blog back to life!

1/14 fresh pasta with lemon/onion/pepper sauce

Its been exactly one month which is way to long to go between posts. I've been cooking this whole time, and plenty of decent things too. I blame the holidays and Tom and his stupid b-school distractions. Tom! Let's get back to basics!

And when I say basics, I mean butter.

Here is a very simple Mario Batali dish that can be thrown together in no time at all. It is sort of an italian/mexican hybrid dish; a tribute to the many mexican cooks who work in every kind of restaurant and influence flavors and preparation. The basic idea is to saute onions and jalapenos until nice and tender, throw in about 4 lemons worth of juice and zest, and then melt in one whole stick of butter. Just in case you want to know what a stick of butter looks like melting into a sauce, this is it:

**hint** lots of fresh ground black pepper is important here.

Toss with fresh parmesan and pecorino cheese:

Don't worry: I ate a huge portion of leftover brussel sprouts with pistachio nuts. That's right. It's healthy.