3/24 Shepherd's Pie

So what happens when you cook a 5lb+ leg of lamb for 3 people? Well you have leftovers of course! And what do you do with slow cooked leg of lamb?!? Well, you already read the title above, so yes, you make shepherd's pie.

Now, I'm pretty sure a lot of you have already heard my rant about shepherd's pie. If not, here it goes: IF A RESTAURANT TRIES TO SELL YOU SHEPHERD'S PIE COOKED WITH BEEF, RUN AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE TOWARDS THE NEAREST EXIT. It's really quite simple... Shepherds care for sheep. Sheep in turn provide wool, milk and meat among other things. Cowherds care for cows. Cows and sheep are different. If you want a Cowherd's Pie, by all means order one, I'm sure they're tasty. But if you order a shepherd's pie - at the very least, you should expect to be eating lamb soon thereafter...

So anyway, I cooked the lamb with diced onion, chopped garlic, quartered cremini mushrooms, frozen peas, white wine, tomato sauce, fresh thyme and salt/pepper while I prepared some mashed potatoes (2 russets did the trick). Once both were done, I topped the lamb ragu with mashed potatoes and cheese and baked the whole thing in the oven for 25 minutes at 400 degrees. Now I used Gruyeres instead of some sort of lame British cheese and I used homemade tomato sauce in my "ragu" whereas traditionally you would just use stock... Thus my pie is not quite a real shepherd's pie, but at least I DIDN'T USE BEEF DAMN IT!!

So there you go. This wasn't as good as yesterday's lamb & flageolets dinner, but it wasn't far off and it's a great example of how you can turn leftovers into something quite tasty.

Oh, one last thing. If, for some dumb reason, you drop your chef knife -- don't try to catch it with your leg. The results will tend to fall somewhere between less-than-ideal and horrific. Additionally, this can, and probably will, delay the enjoyment of your dinner.

3/23 Easter Leg of Lamb

Cooked up some lamb this weekend for Easter. Followed two recipes that I’ve used in the past, and they worked just as well as in the past. First the lamb. This one came out of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. It’s the “seven hour leg of lamb.” Just like it sounds, you basically cook the leg of lamb at a low temp (300 degrees) for 7 hours in a sealed cooking vessel of some sort. Before it goes in, you stuff it with slivers of garlic and throw in a few carrots and onions, white wine and herbs for good measure. Cover, bake and voila! Essentially you get confit leg of lamb that falls off the bone.

Traditionally in France, lamb is often served with flageolets beans. These are essentially small premature kidney beans that once cooked are creamy and delicious. For these I followed a Thomas Keller recipe out of his Bouchon cookbook. Essentially, you quick-soak these by bringing them to a boil and letting them sit for an hour, then you cook them for 2-3 hours with aromatics – but no salt (this apparently toughens the beans). Then you finish them in butter, salt/pepper, thyme and comfit garlic… like I said, very creamy and tasty. (btw it's worth clicking on the picture to make it bigger if you don't do this anyway!)

While we're at it...

Chef Heather

Here is an interpretation of my "hobbies" brought to you by Ms. C.E.R.

3/20 Clams and Chinese Sausage

I do like clams and these are no exception. Started this off by sauteeing an onion and some celery with some La Chang chinese sausage in olive oil. After a few minutes I added some clam juice I had left over from I dunno what. After that evaporated and the onions were nice and soft I threw in some garlic sambal (chili sauce) to balance off the sweetness from the sausage and a few large glugs of white wine. Brought everything to a boil and added the Mahogany Clams from Maine. I find these to be a great bargain at $5.99 for a whole bag at Whole Foods. Closed the lid and waited for them to start popping open. At that point, it's just like waiting for popcorn and I started drooling. As they opened i took them off the heat one at a time so they wouldn't get chewy. You've gotta love animals that have built in timers - brilliant!. Once they were all out, added a heaping tablespoon of creme fraiche and served it all up with some tasty bread. mmmm mmmm good!

3/16 Spring veg ragu w/ homemade papardelle

This was sort of a "its spring, glorious spring" kind of dish. Lots of picky and time-consuming prepping (artichokes, fava beans, leeks, and fennel) are braised together in a bit of water. Its sort of interesting to see the bright green of the artichokes and the favas fade to a more respectable muted gray-green in their cooked form.

After being inspired by Tom's "isn't this easy, even you can do it" homemade pasta postings, I decided to pull down the pasta machine and make homemade wide egg noodles to go with the ragu. It really was easy (although I got tired wrists kneading the dry pasta dough for ten minutes per my recipe's instructions). The noodles had great flavor and texture. I didn't run them through the thinnest setting of my machine which left them pretty hefty - I might do that next time. Which should be soon!

3/15 Saturday night is pizza night

Just when you thought that Tom and I couldn't possible make any more pizzas, think again! A pizza is always good. It works with whatever is in season and is a good bet when you're cooking for people you haven't met before (and thus cannot gauge potential food preferences and dispreferences).

I was inspired both by Tom's pizza night and my own success with getting yeasted tart crusts to rise, so I decided to make my own pizza dough. I really hate it when it turns out that homemade is like 10 times better than the convenience of store bought. My own dough was much lighter and more willing to be stretched out (without rebounding back into a ball - what is this a product of? Glutens? Only science can say). It was a joy to work with.

Here are the two pizzas. The first (above) had sauted mixed greens (kale, mustard, chard, and spinach) plus goat cheese, mozzarella and olives. The second had roasted portobello mushrooms,
sauted spring onions and garlic, fotina, and arugula. I prefer the mush pizza, but they were both pretty tastey.

3/14 More on tart crusts

I spent the weekend in the kitchen, despite the beautiful California spring weather and the weeds taking over my backyard patio.

I started Saturday off with a smoked salmon tart. You may remember this tart (or quiche) - I've posted about it previously. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to document more fully the making of a non-yeasted tart dough, especially since my proficiency level has increased exponentially from the early days (read: September).

A good crust starts with cold butter, cold water, flour, and salt. That is it. The key is not to add too much water. I make mine in a tiny food processor and stop adding water as soon as damp, loose crumbs form.

The second step is to roll out the crust to the desired thickness (large enough to fold over the edges and create a lip when the crust is placed in the tart pan). I finally have enough rolling pin skills to do this well. Here is the crust pre-oven:

Next, the crust is frozen briefly before baking for 25 minutes. Here is a shot of my home-made pie weight (kidney beans in foil) and sauted green garlic and spinach, waiting to fill the tart:Last but not least, the pre-baked tart shell is filled with the sauted greens, smoked salmon and a custard mix of eggs, milk, and creme fraiche (I beat 2 eggs and 1/2 cup creme fraiche in a 2 cup pirex, then pour in enough milk to bring to a total of 1 3/4 cups) and baked for about 40 minutes.

Finally, serve with a salad dressed lightly with honey and spring onion vinaigrette:
Take a brief tour through my past tart / quiche exploits. While they were all pretty yummy, I think I'm finally getting to the point where I'm making something quite lovely that gets the details right.

3/14 A spring quiche/tart/thing

This was made more recently (on March 3). I have been making a lot of different tarts and quiches lately, with either yeasted or non-yeasted crusts. I had been avoiding the yeasted crusts since I was having a hard time getting the dough to rise properly. This time around, I put the dough in my oven on "warm" and let it rise in there, which helped considerably. I think the oven was probably still too warm even though I had some good rising action happening, so next time I do this I will leave the door propped open a little.

A yeasted dough can be simply spread in the tart pan and the ingredients poured right in to bake. A non-yeasted dough needs to be prebaked. I was having a lot of problems with bubbles forming in the bottom of my non-yeasted doughs, even when I was pricking holes in the crust to let the steam escape. One of my friends reminded me of the old "foil and beans" trick to weight down pre-baked pie crusts, which I have employed once now to great success.

Another trick when baking a filled quiche (either yeasted or non) is to really wait until you see a nice brown crust to pull it out of the oven (as opposed to relying on the old, "45 minutes and it's done" rule).

The real moral here is that this particular quiche, which had asparagus and red onions, was the product of many a trial and error. I'm a "learn by repeating" kind of girl - even though I consider myself relatively adept in the kitchen, even I have cooking disasters.

A recent example came when I tried to make muffins with buttermilk in the batter. I blended my dry ingredients together and then went to mix in the buttermilk. Thinking it would be faster to use my electric mixer, I blended for a few seconds and then noticed the buttermilk separating into solids and water. It was disgusting. I had to throw the whole thing away and didn't have any muffins. I still don't know precisely what went wrong, but I know next time I will not not not use an electric mixer.

3/14 A veg pizza

Okay, I made this on February 3. That was a long time ago. Over a month. I know.

In any case, it seems only timely that I post a veg west coast pizza in response to Tom's pizza extravaganza. I like to make pizza, but I tend not to make my own crust - I buy TJ's premade dough, which is lazy but not half-bad. This means pizza does not have to be started in enough to time actually let the dough rise. I normally don't start cooking on a weeknight until 7:30-8, which means that getting bread rising action is not really going to happen.

This is a classic Greens pizza, with roasted tomatoes and garlic and thinly sliced, roasted potatoes. Add to this manchego (spanish sheep's cheese with a profoundly pleasing salty bite), gaeta olives, and basil. I was really happy with the crust-to-topping ratio with this pizza, and I actually ate leftovers on the plane to D.C. for the Smart Growth conference. It was way better than my usual cross-country meal of three bags of Jet Blue's signature Tierra Blue Potato Chips.

(it's worth looking at up close to see the perfect level of meltyness and crust browning)

3/8 Pizza Night

So Haskell had the grand idea to make pizza last night. Pepperoni just wasn't going to cut it, so we made a quick trip to Fromagio Kitchen in Cambridge, where we found a few top-notch toppings. We bought some fancy pants fontina cheese, some brown clamshell (honshimeji) mushrooms, fresh mozzarella and basil. We then took our toppings one step further - as I tend to do with these things - and picked up some duck prosciutto and some lardo. Now lets talk about how good those two things are. Duck prosciutto... Had it a couple weeks ago at Central Kitchen and loved it. 'Twas just as amazing this time. Each slice is about equal proportion cured fat and meat. This particular version had a good amount of black pepper on it too. And lardo??? I've actually never had the stuff before... well not when it's just "lardo." Basically its just pork back fat, cured like prosciutto and sliced thinly. So essentially, it's like eating the fat from prosciutto. I can't tell you how good this is.

So onto the cooking. Haskell made the dough while I started preparing some stuff to snack on. Some olives, ciabatta, olive oil, mimolette cheese and the aforementioned lardo. We also cracked open a 1985 Vosnes Romanee, a red burgundy that had aged wonderfully. So clearly, we were off to a good start...

Ok, onto the pizzas. The first one was pretty basic but very well executed by Haskell. We started off pretty simply with mozzarella, previously home-made tomato sauce, basil and fontina. We noticed the dough was lacking salt, but otherwise a flawless pie. Oh, and at this point Dave came over to help with the eating – lest you think that two people could eat all this food alone.

Onto the second pizza. Things got a bit more creative here. Toppings included duck prosciutto, ricotta, fontina, slivers of green olives, and lightly dressed arugula on top of everything after the pizza came out of the oven. The duck was crisped up like bacon, the ricotta was nice and sweet and the arugula had its characteristic pepperiness. Very tasty.

Pizza three... clamshell mushrooms, tomato sauce, fontina and basil. The mushrooms were lightly sautéed before being added to the pizza and had a nice bite to them. We're starting to be quite full now, not helped by the fact that Dave is now watching Roadhouse on the TV - not a movie that one should watch while eating.

Final pizza... ricotta, olives, lardo and tomato sauce. we we're stuffed by now and probably didn’t really appreciate this one. The lardo mostly melted into the pizza which was definitely not a bad thing. By the end of the night, we had eaten all but two of the slices, which if you do some math is a lot of pizza. Anyway, the best pizza of the night? In my opinion, the duck prosciutto was the winner - but I'm not sure what the others thought. In any event, besides the whole over-eating thing, I would say it was a pretty successful evening.

3/7 Mushroom and Olive Ravioli

I can't believe it's almost been two weeks since I last posted. Truth be told, I've actually been cooking quite a bit - but for the most part I've just been making fresh pasta. I think I've made it 4 or 5 times in the last two weeks - spaghetti, paprika linguine, pepper papperdelle and tonight - ravioli. I thought I'd post this one cause it was quite tasty. Again, from start to finish (including eating) this all took 1.5hours. I even had time to bake banana bread while the pasta dough was resting.

So for the filling I used fresh ricotta, green olives, mushrooms and thyme. Delicious! A bit of olive oil and parm on top and thats it. There's really not much more to say, other than everyone should start making fresh pasta if they haven't already. Time for some banana bread!