10/09 Pasta with Butternut Squash

On the verge of going out to get fried chicken for dinner, I decided to fight the craving and stay home instead. After sifting through the pantry, I ended up cooking myself another recipe from Bittman's blog. For you loyal readers with an amazing memory, you'll note that this is very similar to something Heather put together almost exactly one year ago! That too was inspired by Mark, though it was a tad bit more complicated.

The recipe is relatively simple. It's just some finely chopped/grated butternut squash, cooked slowly and mixed in with pasta. Pretty straight forward, though I was mostly just intrigued by what it would taste like. Note that the food processor did a great job with the squash - something I was initially a bit concerned about. I also did make my own pasta while the "sauce" cooked, since there wasn't really much else to the recipe and I hadn't made a batch in a couple weeks.

As for the taste? Well I guess pretty much what you'd expect... It actually goes really well together and if you like butternut squash I can't imagine someone not liking this. One suggestion a reader made on Bittman's blog was that the recipe would benefit quite well from a little fresh sausage and sage. I couldn't agree more and may try this in the near future since I now have half a butternut squash left.

10/8 Risotto Cakes

Inspired by a recent post on Mark Bittman's blog, I made a ton of mushroom risotto the other night for dinner. It was a pretty basic risotto with some not so home-made stock and some formerly dried shiitake mushrooms. All things considered, 'twas pretty good the first time around. Rather than nuking it today for the second go 'round, I decided to make some risotto cakes out of what was left. As I'm sure you can see, I did use a mold, but this could easily be done without one. I seared them in some butter (as recommended in Harold McGee's latest article to minimize stickiness) and served the three "cakes" with some lightly dressed greens. All in all, a rather successful meal.

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!

3/14 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!

2/19 Salmon Tomliatelle

Question: You've got an egg, some left over fish and an hour to cook dinner - what do you do? An omelet? Nah, that just won't cut it tonight. So with a little inspiration from old friend Jamie Oliver here's my solution to the problem.

I got home from work at 5:45. After taking off my jacket I immediately mixed 3/4 cup flour with an egg. I added in a squirt of tomato paste and a heap teaspoon (as Jamie would say) of fresh ground pepper. I gave it a whirl in the mini-cuisinart for 45 second and formed a dough. Some would call this a pasta dough. I let the dough rest 45 minutes in a covered bowl, which apparently develops the glutens or something technical like that. After 45 minutes I brought my water to a boil and started running the dough through the pasta machine. This takes just under 10 minutes - and I'm pretty bad at it. Miraculously, in that time the (well-salted) water had just come to a boil. I cut the pasta sheets into thickish strips. Tagliatelle? I'm not sure. I prefer to call them tomliatelle (because there's tomato in them of course).

In any event, I dunked my pasta in the water and quickly made a sauce - butter, parseley, capers, anchovies, yuzu (more on this another day - but it's an asian citrus fruit like a very flowery lemon) and the leftover steamed salmon from last night. Nothing here needs to cook - so 2 minutes on high heat was sufficient to melt the butter. Turns out this is exactly how long the pasta needed too - crazy how these things work out! Once done, everything was combined onto one glorious plate. Tomato-pepper tomliatelle and salmon. BAM! Parmesan? Nah... call me old-school but a drizzle of olive oil is the only other thing this dish needed.

Dinner was served at 6:43.

chicken a la delicious

Not sure what to call this one. It was inspired from a few different sources and came out pretty well. I think we'll work up from the bottom. First, a base of.... polenta! Nothing fancy here, just some salt, pepper, olive oil and.... polenta!! Go figure! On top of that we have a Zuni Cafe radicchio and parseley salad with bread crumbs, anchovy vinaigrette, and a grated boiled egg? yup, grated. Apparently Judy Rodgers knows what she's doing. Next up we have the hero of the night - roasted chicken with a parmesan/breadcrumb coating. "This reasonably slowly roasted chicken was butterflied and baked with tender love and care." Sorry, just practicing my marketing skills... As it turns out, despite being Italian, parmesan ain't half bad. And finally, to pull everything together, we have baked onions and bacon which provided a nice cushion for the chicken to roast on and an even better topping. I did not need inspiration for the bacon... All in all, i think this dish deserves a solid A-. Very tasty stuff.

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.

1/14 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.

12/10 winter squash and seared radicchio risotto

Well this is a bit illogical, but I had about 4 butternut squashes which had arrived in my pantry over a series of weeks, so last weekend I cubed and roasted and froze all of it. The illogical part is that this recipe only called for one cup of roasted winter squash, and yet somehow I felt good about how I was making progress in "using up" an entire crop's worth of squash.

Here we have a simple risotto recipe with the addition of the cup of squash and one head of radiccho, cut into wedges and seared until caramelized a bit (about 10 minutes). For some reason I worried that I would mess up the radicchio and this would come out "gross" (in the parlance of our time), but it was actually awesome - just the right balance of sweet and bitter. I am no longer afraid of searing radicchio.

10/20 pasta with butternut squash and tomatoes

Mark Bittman ("The Minimalist") wrote a great piece last week about the ratio of pasta-to-sauce. I have to say I've always been a bit of a fan of the 1/3 pasta - to - 2/3 sauce ratio (when cooking with dried pasta - not fresh), so this was merely a nice reinforcement of an informal practice I was already observing to some degree. I decided to try out one of the featured recipes with this article, because - guess what - I had more squash from the CSA.

I modified Bittman's recipe a bit, making it a little more complex. For one thing, I blanched, peeled, and seeded the tomatoes, reserving the juice and throwing it back in with the sauce. For another thing, I cooked the sauce longer than Bittman seems to recommend here (probably close to 45 minutes). This ensured that the tomatoes had broken down and bit more and that the sauce had time to thicken. The squash, while tender, didn't break down with the increased cooking time. I also added several good glugs of olive oil at the end to give the sauce a bit more flavor and a nice sheen.

Experiment = successful! I'll be adding this to the rotation.

10/10 ligurian pesto

Molto, molto italiano (yes, I know this is a terrible indulgence to write these words). I have been dying to try a classic ligurian pesto (with blanched green beans and boiled potatoes along with pasta), and I have no idea what I was waiting for.

Here you go folks:One thing of note here. I got the "fancy" pasta (because that's the only kind that you can find at the Berkeley Bowl in the appropriate trennette variety). This happened to cost FIVE DOLLARS, which is a lot to pay for dried pasta. However, perhaps unfortunately (for my budget and underlying belief in what's right and fair), this pasta was amazing. The flavor was outstanding. It really made the rest of the dish shine. Those expensive pasta bastards.

10/09 sweet and sour butternut squash

My first Mario Batali recipe! As usual, the inspiration came from a CSA box item I hadn't planned for. This time, it was butternut squash. Maro has a recipe for sweet and sour pumpkin (zucca agrodulce) that caught my eye while flipping through the book, so I appropriated the recipe for butternut squash.

First, I peeled and diced the squash (approx. 3 pounds) into 1-inch cubes. I sauted the squash with a good 1/2 cup olive oil and several cloves of thinly sliced garlic. After this began to get golden and lovely smelling, I added add 6 tbsp of honey and 6 tbsp of red wine vinegar plus 2 tsps of red pepper flakes, then simmered for 12 minutes or so until the sauce was syrupy and the squash tender.

Mario suggests serving this with pasta (which I did, along with mint and grated parm), and it came out great. Prepare-ahead note: minus the mint and cheese, this kept in the fridge so all I had to do was boil pasta and prep the toppings.

The dish was so good, in fact, that I've thought of a brilliant hack that I plan on trying out soon. The idea is: Prepare per the instructions above, subbing peanut or veg oil for the olive oil. At the end, stir in a can of coconut milk and some lovely shrimps, and simmer gently until tender. Serve over rice with chopped mint and/or cilantro. Yum!