Math Party

So, one of the perks of living at the new place is that I was folded into a group of fantastic people who have just begun getting together for dinner parties. All of them are grad students except me; most of them are involved in heartier fields than mine--math and health care--so in my head I've started calling them math parties.

So, we are hosting the math party tonight and in honor of said party, I made bread and pie.





The bread is from our dear friend Jim Lahey. It's the recipe for Stirato, or essentially, an Italian baguette.

I love baking bread, and my fall-back method for the last year has been the five-minutes a day way, but I just don't have space in the fridge, or the stomach, to keep around six loaves worth of dough. Those recipes make a LOT of (perfect, beautiful, artisan) dough.

Enter Jim Lahey, who uses the overnight rise method as well, but only one or two loaves' worth. And this fancy "bake in a pot" idea.

I don't have a cast iron pot, so I had to make a few adjustments, but I'd have to say that I am quite pleased with the results.

Stirato
Loosely adapted from Jim Lahey's recipe

3 cups all purpose flour plus extra flour for dusting (the Lahey recipe calls for bread flour, but alas, I am out)
1 1/4 tsp. table salt
1/4 tsp. active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups of cool water

Stir together the flour, salt, and yeast. Add water and mix with a wooden spoon until a wet, sticky dough comes together. Cover and refrigerate for 12 hours. Remove from the fridge and let rise for an additional 2 to 3 hours, until the dough is room temp and the surface is dotted with bubbles. The dough should have doubled.

Dust a work surface with flour. Scrape the dough out with your wet hand or a spatula. Dust the dough with flour and nudge it into a rectangle, roughly 8 by 10 inches. Lift one long side of the rectangle and fold it over to the center. Then fold in the other side (like folding a letter to go into an envelope). Cut this "envelope" into two equal pieces.

This is incredibly difficult, because the dough is extra sticky and wet, still. I kept adding more and more flour to the work surface, but I didn't want to really knead any into the dough. Because it might break the gluten strands? Or something? I don't know. Just note that this step is quite messy.

Dust the two loaves with a little more flour and then cover with a tea towel to rise for 30 more minutes. You know they're done when you can poke a finger into the dough and the impression stays. If the dough bounces back, let the bread rise 15 more minutes.

Half an hour before the end of the second rise (aka, right after you cover the loaves), preheat the oven to 475 degrees and put the pizza stone on the middle rack.

After 30 minutes (I suppose you should check the oven temp to make sure it's exact--I don't have an oven thermometer yet, so I don't do that. But you should.), carefully transfer ONE loaf to the pizza stone. Stretch it out so that it vaguely resembles a baguette shape. From the photos, you can tell how well that didn't work for me the first time. Whatever.

Cover it with an inverted 9 x 13 METAL pan. Bake for 20 minutes.

Remove the pan from the bread and let it bake for 5 to 10 more minutes. Repeat with the other loaf. Cool on a wire rack before serving.


Pretty. Ugly. Or at least, one is distinctly more baguette-looking.

Pie recipe to come. Happy party.

Summer Herb Pesto

I may be the only person I know who cannot grow mint.

Mint, hardy herb though it is, is one plant that I cannot keep alive. I don't know how, considering that it runs rampant through most people's gardens--in my father's backyard, it just keeps growing and growing, despite numerous attempts at cutting it back and transplanting it other places. It just keeps thriving.

Not so at my house. Mandy and Dan gave me a mint plant that I promptly killed within a week, even though it was treated with the same loving care that all my other living plants receive.



However, with the addition of a back porch in my life, I thought I'd give herb growing another go. So far, it has been a successful venture. So successful, in fact, that if I don't use up some of this oregano it's threatening to take over the window box. Thus, pesto.

This pesto combines a bunch of herbs--not just basil. And I subbed in walnuts for pine nuts, because they were what I had on hand. The method is loosely based on Heidi Swanson's post on how to make pesto like an Italian grandmother, though after another look at her photos, mine is decidedly more "rustic"-looking. I don't think the pasta salad will suffer.

Summer Herb Pesto

1/2 cup each fresh oregano, basil, parsley, spinach, walnuts
3 cloves garlic
a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

Heidi recommends using a mezzaluna, which is a half-moon shaped pizza cutter. I chopped everything by hand. It didn't take terribly long--I had slightly under a cup of pesto in about twenty minutes--from picking the herbs to packaging the pesto.

Quite simply, just chop everything. I started with the garlic first, and then added in the parsley leaves. Once I had a sizeable pile on the cutting board, I scraped it into a bowl and chopped some more ingredients. I did the walnuts last, but I don't see a strong reason for that. I think the chop, scrape, chop method lets the different sizes of the herbs come through, rather than pulverizing them into uniformity in the food processor.

Once everything is chopped, make a little cake of the herbs (I "caked" my pesto into the bottom of a small container) and then drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil on top--just enough to cover it.

I added salt and pepper to the ingredients list but I didn't add any into mine. Add both to taste. Store the fresh pesto in the fridge for about a week--or freeze it in an ice cube container for future use.

Freedom radishes

The first time I ate a radish was maybe only eighteen months ago.



I was at a cringe-worthy work gathering. Someone in my department had decided that the four of us communications kiddos should get together and watch the movie Office Space while snacking and relaxing on a Saturday evening. And, though I have seen that movie more times than I care to admit (and I don't want to see it too much, because it is just like my life sometimes), and because you can't really say no to a work "social event," I had to bedgrudgingly show my face. But at this party, there was a silver lining--a delightful spread of crudites, which included the lowly radish.

I was astonished. I had no idea that this beautiful, red-and-white slice was all crispy and peppery-delicious. I had no clue that biting into a radish created such a satisfying crunch. No one told me how my salads could benefit from the cheery and healthy addition of these little red bulbs. Later, I sang the praises of this humble root to my mother for much too long, before she finally shut me up by saying that the reason why I had never eaten a radish is because she would not tolerate them. Would not have them in her home.

Oh.

Well, anyway, I liked them. And I am forever changed and since then have been happily crunching radishes every chance I can get.

But I bought a TON of them at the farmer's market. A TON. And I was just getting tired of slicing them and dunking them in hummus. So I pickled them instead.

This is the first time I've pickled anything, so that in itself is quite exciting. It also means I had no idea HOW SMELLY the kitchen would get. Very, very smelly. But the vinegar-y brine odor is dissipating slowly, thanks to the intricate system of fans placed strategically throughout the house.



This is the brine. I had to adjust the amounts because I had a full jar to fill with radishes and not nearly enough brine the first go round. So this recipe actually makes more brine than you need.



Picked Radishes
cobbled together from several cookbooks

1 bunch radishes
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black peppercorns
1 dried bay leaf
1/2 tsp. dried mustard seed

Rinse the radishes and then slices them as thinly as you can. Use a mandoline if you have one. Put the sliced radishes in the jar you'll use for pickling and then put the jar in the fridge.

Mix together the other ingredients and heat over medium heat, occasionally stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool for about five minutes.

Get the radishes out of the fridge and then pour the brine over the radishes.



Let the jar cool on the counter for about twenty minutes before covering it and putting it back in the refrigerator. Let the radishes pickle at least overnight before eating. They should last around a week or so.

Ta da! That's all.

Please note that this recipe made extra brine. To use up the rest of it, I ended up pickling a red onion. We'll see how that tastes tomorrow.

Also, happy fourth. I have to be up early tomorrow, so I'm hoping the sound of fireworks will die down any minute now. Also, hey, these radishes might be perfect on top of a big, fat veggie burger. With some feta cheese and spinach and tomato. Welp, I know what I'm bringing to the picnic at my dad's house tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Settled? Another egg supper

I've been here since Memorial Day weekend, and I must say, things are going swimmingly. Other than just regular life stuff sort of falling into place (except boxes, there are always boxes), the kitchen is fantastic.

We've had a few dinner parties that have come and gone undocumented. Two pizza parties, with the phenomenal overnight pizza dough from Peter Reinhart, and one vegetarian dinner extravaganza. The pizza dough will probably have to make an appearance here, but I'm not sure I can recreate the other one. Basically, lots of marinated zucchini, eggplant, and other vegetables served with a delightful (non-dairy) garlic cream sauce. Plus whole wheat pasta tossed with olive oil, caramelized onions and basil from my mini herb garden. Yes, this is the good life, at least where food is concerned.

This breakfast-for-dinner meal comes to you from my deep desire to get food in my stomach after a rather exhausting run, as well as from an abundance of wax beans that I picked up at the farmer's market the other day. Easy, fast, delicious.


Roasted wax beans with slow-scrambled eggs

roughly half a pound of wax beans

1/4 cup sliced almonds

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

3 heads of green garlic (or scallions)

2 fresh eggs

fresh mozzarella (optional)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Wash and trim the green beans. Chop the green garlic in to small pieces, the same way you'd chop scallions to top baked potatoes. Add green beans, green garlic, sliced almonds to a 9 x 13 roasting pan. Toss the veggies with the oil and vinegar. Roast on the middle rack for ten minutes. Check halfway through, stirring the veggies to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan.

Spray a pan with cooking spray or add a teensy bit of butter or oil to the bottom of the pan. Crack the eggs into a bowl and add a touch of water. Mix them up. Put the pan over LOW HEAT and pour in the eggs. Stir them around a little, but try not to touch them too much. Basically, I just let these slowly turn yellow and stir them around every so often, until they're barely cooked--this is about the only way I will eat scrambled eggs.

Serve yourself a big, fat helping of green beans and eggs. I sliced up a few balls of mozzarella in the middle just to make the plate pretty and to satisfy my eat cheese every day mantra.

Eat up, preferably on your new back porch, watching the city go by and throroughly enjoying your late Saturday afternoon.

What we eat when we talk about moving

Soon there will be a new kitchen to explore--a new kitchen with counter space and a dishwasher and still, a pantry. It boggles the mind what I have to look forward to, well, tomorrow.

But until then there are only boxes. Only boxes and cobbled-together meals and a lot of eating at restaurants, which is not to be complained about surely.

What follows is probably the last meal in a long series of "fusion" creations coming from the desperate need to stop buying groceries because I don't want to move them. Difficult, since the grocery store is perhaps my favorite place of all time. Once I went on vacation and went to a different grocery store every day. As part of the fun.

This is a riff on picadillo, a savory and sweet Latin American hash whose title means "small bits and pieces." There are Cuban versions, Mexican versions, Puerto Rican versions--mine is more of a Clean Out the Fridge version. It can be served with rice or over bread, or scooped up with triangles of tortilla. You'll see from the top photo that I actually originally planned on tiny pasta bows, but it turned out we didn't really even need pasta.

Picadillo con chorizo

1/2 lb fresh green beans

1 red bell pepper

2 small shallots

6 oz. spicy chorizo

1 package of corn tortillas (or use flour, whatever you like)

This recipe really just lets the chorizo take center stage, followed by a crisp bean supporting role.

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash and trim the green beans. Cut into half-inch pieces. Chop the red pepper and shallots into similar-sized pieces. Brown the chorizo. It will produce a fair amount of drippings. Reserve that for cooking the black beans, if you're into that.

The chorizo will start to spatter around a little. Add in the chopped shallots at this point, followed by the pepper and green beans. I really like crisp vegetables, so I added these in last--if you like them a little more mushy, you might want to cook them first, because the chorizo really only takes a few minutes of cooking time.

While the chorizo is cooking, warm the tortillas. I spread them all out on a large cookie sheet and throw them in the oven for a few minutes while everything else is coming together. You want these nice and warm and soft.

Black beans

1 12 oz. can black beans

leftover chorizo pan that has not been cleaned

1 clove garlic

salt and pepper

Mince the garlic and cook it in the chorizo fat. Add in the black beans and season as necessary. These are ready when everything is heated through and smells so good you can't bear not to start eating.

Serve the picadillo with warmed tortillas, black beans, tomatoes and a salad on the side.

To eat picadillo, rip a triangle from a tortilla and fold it to make a little scoop to pick up the meat (similar to the way you might eat curry with naan bread).






The nice thing about picadillo is that you can really adjust it to whatever season you like. I have had it with ground beef, chopped apples, peppers, and potatoes.

Eggs in bell peppers

My relationship with food and drink is pretty trendy.



By which I mean, my taste buds crave the same things over and over, and then I'll abandon them for something entirely new (not that I don't run around the kitchen in my neo-eighties romper from Urban Outfitters, but that's a story for another time).* Sometimes I just have big taste preferences that pop out of nowhere and I eat them three, four, five times in a week and then no more. I just like thing X right now. A lot.

Last summer, the things I really liked were gin martinis and any Italian dish involving spicy sausage.

This past winter, I kept hankering for bourbon and curry. So many curries were made or eaten at disappointing Indian restaurants. (I recently removed one curry from the freezer to eat for lunch last week or some time, and I have to say, my flirtation with curry hasn't extended as well over the warmer months. Or maybe, don't freeze coconut milk for very long.) Also soup. More soup that you could shake a bread stick at.

But lately my food trend has been "what can I put underneath a poached egg?" and this breakfast is no exception to that rule.



Poached Eggs in Bell Peppers
loosely adapted from everydayfoodmag.com


1 large bell pepper, any color
4 eggs
salt
pepper
water

This recipe is a riff on the classic "Egg in a hole" type of breakfast that I used to eat as a child--a hole ripped in a piece of toast and then an egg fried in the middle--my parents called them "One-eyed Petes," which is not a name I'd like to dwell on for very long. The best part of those was the buttery, crunchy little bit of bread that had been ripped from the center of the bread. Very ceremoniously, I always ate that bit of bread last. Like an after-dinner espresso or something, at the fine age of eight or nine.

Anyway, onward. Cut the bell pepper into half-inch strips. I didn't bother with either end (they're in the fridge now, waiting to be used for something else), I just cut straight through the widest part to make the rings. Heat the stove to medium-high heat. Put the rings in your frying pan (one that has a lid) and then crack an egg into each one. Pour about a quarter-inch of water into the pan, put the lid on, and let them do their things.

I don't even flip the eggs. I check on them after about a minute and then sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and then let them keep cooking until the white has lost that clear-ish tint on the top. When they're done, the water is somehow all sucked into the pepper, making it just the perfect texture of firm but definitely cooked.

This recipe idea has already taken me to all sorts of culinary places in my head--what other round things could I put an egg inside? I think it might be fun to poach an egg inside a ring of red onion and then serve it over a bed of carpaccio or just thinly sliced roast beef. With some sort of horseradish hollandaise sauce. I've heard of little egg custards baked inside sugar pumpkin shells, and I'm thinking they could work for egg cups too, but you'd have to put two eggs in each one. The possibilities are endless!



The rest of the breakfast was pretty straightforward. A piece of french toast with sliced up peaches on top. The bread was some sort of store-bought freezer thing I'm trying to get rid of--hey, everything is better covered with peaches. I soaked the bread in the leftover egg wash from the almond pastries a little bit further down (waste not, want not!), some rice milk, and lots of nutmeg and cinnamon.



The other two things in the lead picture are roasted potatoes cooked with honey and chili powder (sorry, I don't have measurements), topped with goat cheese and red pepper sauce.


Red pepper sauce

1 red pepper
1 clove garlic
glug of olive oil



Mince the garlic and then cook it with a little bit of olive oil on low heat. This step is to cut the garlicky taste of the garlic. Last time I made this sauce, I used tomatoes and raw garlic, and it was VERY good. So good that I think every person I came in contact with for the next week knew how good it was, which is not generally something I require of my meals. SO. Cooked garlic is milder.

Roast the pepper over an open flame until it gets charred and wonderfully blistery. Turn it every so often to keep the charring even. It'll start to get soft and at that point, chop it into smaller pieces (remove the ribbing and seeds) and add to the garlic.



Stir it all around and continue to cook the pepper until completely soft. Blend the garlic and red pepper in the food processor and then sprinkle it all over your breakfast potatoes.

Friday breakfast, done and dusted.

* That's a joke. Please know that I stopped wearing rompers before learning how to tie my own shoes.

Folie aux amandes, part deux

So the problem with the recipe below is that it actually makes a blue ton of almond filling.

Perhaps you are a not a cook like me, and you happen to have 102 pounds of puff pastry on hand, due to an extreme love of baklava or an intimate relationship with a bulk foods provider.

But in case you happen to be more of a lackadaisical cook (like myself) and aren't swimming in the papery, buttery stuff, there will be a lot of leftover filling for the little almond pastries featured below.

And hopefully, your coworkers are also going to want to eat some sort of almond mess long after those teensy twelve pastries are gone, so the best option is clearly to make a coffee cake. Especially if, like me, your office party is at 2 on a Friday, prime time for coffee and wishing you weren't doing any work at all.


"What may seem like leftovers but is actually the real deal" almond coffee cake

1/2 C. butter, softened (one stick)
1 C. white sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 C. all purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
pinch of salt
1/3 C. rice milk (I'm sure cow milk is fine, this is just what I had)
2 oz. cream cheese (I used neufschatel cheese)

1 C. almond filling (see recipe below)
2 oz. cream cheese (I used neufschatel cheese)
2 T. confectioner's sugar
pinch of powdered ginger

confectioner's sugar, for garnish
sliced almonds, for garnish

1. Cream the butter and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla; beat well. Add in the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Fold in 2 oz. cream cheese and pour in the rice milk at the end. Beat until smooth.

2. In a small mixing bowl, beat almond filling, 2 oz. cream cheese, confectioners' sugar and ginger until smooth.

3. Spoon half of the cake batter into a greased 10-in. tube pan. Top with filling and remaining batter.

3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to wire rack. Once cooled, invert cake to a plate.


There she is, baking and golden brown.

4. Top with confectioner's sugar and slivered almonds before serving. I say that now, but I may end up drizzling the cake with some leftover cranberry simple syrup and then adding the almond sprinkles.

Trust me, no one at work is going to ever want to think of almonds ever again after this party.


The finished product. I went with confectioner's sugar after all.

I haven't even gotten to the brownie recipe for tomorrow yet, though really I may not post it here, since it's cribbed directly from allrecipes.com and uses the evil stepchild, shortening.

I would like to say I am the girl who makes a better, more healthy version of these brownies with a fat that doesn't make me cringe. The truth is, I have shortening in my pantry that I'm dying to get rid of before I move and I can't figure out how else to do that than to pawn it off on my unsuspecting work friends. Let this blog serve as a confession booth as well as a depository for recipes I've tried and maybe failed.

So, off to bed I must go, since I have my standing Friday brunch date in a few short hours and there is still a red pepper sauce to prepare. Good, gastronomical things are happening for breakfast tomorrow, involving the prettiest poached eggs you ever did see, and a lovely sauce to boot. But those, my dear, will have to wait for another time.

Ta ta.