Archive for May, 2008
Tonight we ate dinner standing up around the stove, picking at the leftover roast chicken, some sliced apples, and some fish sticks K & N brought over for the kids. We weren’t all that hungry; late in the afternoon we had tea and I baked a bread pudding to send home with K, who came over to help me navigate the control panels of my websites. Why bread pudding? Awhile ago, N picked up one of those giant Italian loaves, the kind that come in a fabric bag tied with Christmassy looking fake twigs, and since then had the best intentions to do something with it. (Last time it was a panettone, which they sliced and turned into Italian toast for brunch. French toast, really, but you can’t call egg-dipped Italian bread French.) It sat in her living room for weeks, and finally over the weekend I came home to discover it hanging from our doorknob.
This one was coffee-scented with chocolate chips and this oddly sweet coffee goo in the middle. I cringed at the thought that it had a) come all the way from Italy, and b) sat in her living room for an extended period of time, and yet c) was still soft as a baby’s bum. Regardless, it needed to be used up, lest it turn into a doorstop or sit on the counter to be picked at for days on end. The obvious solution, since Sunday brunch is too far away, was bread pudding. When it came out of the oven it was too warm and heavenly smelling to resist dipping a spoon into.
I cringe again at the thought of posting a recipe that is essentially bread, sugar and cream, but if you’re a fan of bread pudding (I don’t understand how it’s possible to not be? Everyone loves French toast, and bread pudding is one better) this is a great basic recipe that you can do plenty of things with. I made giant pansful for an event with 200+ people in attendance and cut it cold into squares that everyone ate with their fingers, and it was a huge hit. Since it was a Spanish wine festival, I added raisins that had been soaked in Spanish brandy.
I’m sure not many of you will encounter the problem of having to dispose of a giant Italian bread, so I’ll offer up a good basic bread pudding recipe that is fantastic as is or can take on any number of aliases.
The Best Bread Pudding
1 – 1 ½ large loaves good-quality bread, or an assortment of bread ends
7 large eggs
3/4 cup honey or maple syrup
2 cups 1% milk
2 cups half & half
1 tsp. vanilla
Cut or tear the bread into 1” chunks in a large bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, honey, milk, cream and vanilla. Pour over the bread and let sit for a couple hours, stirring gently once in awhile.
Preheat oven to 400°F. Pour the bread mixture into a 9”x13” pan that has been sprayed with nonstick spray, or any baking dish that will accommodate the quantity you made.
Bake for an hour or so, until puffed, golden and set. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Other things you can do to it:
Apple Raisin Bread Pudding: Use raisin bread, and add a grated apple and shake of cinnamon to the egg-milk mixture.
Coffee-Chocolate Bread Pudding: If you don’t have a giant coffee-chocolate loaf, try spiking the milk with a tablespoon of instant coffee, and scatter some chocolate chips into the bread mixture (spread half into the pan, sprinkle with chips and top with the rest of the bread mixture, so that they don’t sink to the bottom),
Chocolate-Orange Bread Pudding: Same as above, but add the grated zest of an orange instead of the coffee.
Caramel Bread Pudding (with or without bourbon): Add a cup of caramel sauce to the egg-milk mixture instead of the sugar. If you like, add a couple tablespoons of bourbon or rum, too.
Pumpkin Bread Pudding: Add a 14 oz. can of pumpkin to the egg-milk mixture, along with a good shake of cinnamon. Use brown sugar or maple syrup.
Banana Bread Pudding: Use leftover banana bread – you’ll probably need 2 loaves. Add a handful of raisins and/or chopped walnuts or pecans and/or chocolate chips.
May 26 2008 | breakfast and dessert and sweet stuff | 3 Comments »
It’s a boy!
We planned to get a new washer and dryer this weekend; instead we got a dog. A border collie-husky cross, 10 weeks old, about the same size as W. So, two toddlers. My sister has been on a mission to find the perfect dog, and brought him home for a trial run on Saturday to ensure she wasn’t allergic. She was, but her allergies didn’t kick in until we spent several hours discovering how mellow and awesome he was, and so this morning we couldn’t bring ourselves to send him back. He is as yet unnamed - we are open to any and all suggestions. I want to name him John Cusack, but Mike won’t go for it.
So between the chaos of suddenly getting a dog (!!) and scrambling to finish Animal, Vegetable, Miracle before I interview Barbara Kingsolver tomorrow morning, there wasn’t a lot of time to make dinner. Luckily, my mom brought over some fresh bison burger patties from Sunterra, which we tossed on the grill alongside a couple Portobello mushrooms. Grilled Portobellos make great burgers on their own, but Mike has always fantastized about topping another burger with one. I must admit, it was far easier and meatier than sautéing a panload of sliced button mushrooms, and fit snugly on top of the burger. To grill a Portobello mushroom, pull out the stem and scrape out the gills with the side of a spoon – the gills tend to be bitter – brush with oil and grill. If you like, marinate it in balsamic vinaigrette first – mushrooms are like sponges and will quickly absorb any flavours they meet.
And that’s it. One of the mushrooms broke into several pieces as W pretended it was his umbrella, but they are meaty enough that we grilled the pieces and it worked out fine. I realize the burger photographed above is lacking anything green; to be truthful I’d far rather have a salad on the side than adorn my burger with a couple measly leaves and a slippery slice of anaemic tomato. (To be even more truthful, I didn’t bother with a salad, just ate the burger. On the couch.)
We have a dog. What have I done??
May 25 2008 | bison and on the grill and sandwiches | 20 Comments »
I know, this hardly sounds like an ideal late-May dinner. October, maybe? But it has been raining for a week and the temperature has hardly crept past 10 degrees. We’ve had to turn the furnace back on, and as I write this I’m wrapped up in a flannel blanket like someone from a Neo Citran commercial.
I picked up a 2 pack of chickens at the grocery store yesterday, and, as always, it’s exactly as much work to roast two than it is to roast one. So why not set myself up for a weeks’ worth of leftovers? Leftover roast chicken is the most versatile kind; I’m already envisioning a nice big chicken Caesar salad tomorrow, maybe some quesadillas the next day, and when almost all the meat has been stripped off – soup. Or perhaps, since my Dad is out of town, I’ll bring the spare over to my mum to ensure she doesn’t subsist on Pizza Hut for the next 4 days.
Generally when I roast a chicken I don’t bother with any prep beyond rubbing it with a bit of oil and sprinkling it with salt and pepper, but since I now have a healthy crop of fresh thyme in my garden, I thought I’d put forth a little extra effort. So I crushed about 6 cloves of garlic into a few tablespoons of olive oil, and grated in the zest of a lemon, too. I went out in the rain and plucked out about half of my crop of thyme, careful not to completely obliterate my supply. I came inside, washed it and lost it.
Seriously. I completely lost my thyme somewhere in my kitchen, and never found it again. I wonder where my brain told me to put it. So… chicken with lemon and garlic it is. It would have been fab in the mushroom risotto, too. Not to mention the beets and carrots…
Roast Chicken with Lemon and Garlic
The only difference between roasting and frying chickens is size; fryers are a little smaller.
1 or 2 chickens, roasters or fryers
a couple tablespoons olive or canola oil
4-6 garlic cloves, crushed
1 lemon
a few sprigs of fresh thyme, chopped, or 1 tsp. dried (optional)
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 450°F. In a small bowl, mix the oil, garlic, grated zest of the lemon and the thyme. Pat the chicken dry, put it (or them) into any sort of dish or roasting pan, and rub all over with the oil mixture. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cut the lemon in half and put inside the chicken, or put half inside each.
Roast for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 375°F and cook for about another hour, or until the juices run clear and the joints wiggle in their sockets.
The risotto, of course, is because I haven’t been able to shake the memory of Mike’s barley risotto from River Café. (I wish I had the nerve to email Scott and ask for the recipe, but I don’t, even though he’s one of the nicest chefs I know.) It was simple to make, actually, exactly the same as making regular risotto with rice, but a little slower as the barley doesn’t absorb the liquid quite as quickly. This risotto would be great with a bit of blue cheese crumbled in at the end, so that it barely melts.
Mushroom Barley Risotto
Use any kind of mushrooms you like in this risotto. I found some dried ones and soaked them; if you do this, you can use the soaking liquid along with the stock, but make sure you strain it to get rid of any grit.
canola or olive oil, for cooking
2 Tbsp. butter (optional – you could use only oil)
1 onion, finely chopped
1 cup pearl or pot barley
5 cups stock (I used a 1L tetra pack of stock plus about a cup of water that the dried mushrooms had soaked in)
2 cups (or as many or as little as you like) chopped mushrooms – button, brown, Portobello, or 1 cup dried mushrooms, rehydrated in boiling water
1 garlic clove, crushed
In a medium pot, heat a drizzle of oil with a tablespoon of butter over medium heat and sauté the onion for a few minutes, until it’s soft and translucent. Add the barley and cook for another minute, then pour in about a cup of stock or other liquid.
Cook, stirring often, until most of the liquid has been absorbed. Add another cup and cook in the same way, adding stock and stirring until all the stock is absorbed. It should take almost an hour.
Meanwhile, heat another drizzle of oil and the remaining tablespoon of butter in a large skillet and sauté the mushrooms until they release their moisture and start to turn golden. Stir into the risotto and season with salt and pepper.
Serves 4-6.
But. Truly? My favorite part of this meal by far was the roasted beets and carrots, cooked again in a balsamic-honey glaze that virtually candied them. I ate almost the whole batch, then mopped up the rest of the sauce from the pan with a chunk of bread, fantasizing about how next time I’ll double the sauce ingredients and pour the whole mess over a bed of salad greens, maybe with some crumbled goat cheese and toasted pecans. After the gym.
Beets take longer to roast than carrots; I wrapped them in foil and stuck them in alongside the chicken for the first hour, then pulled them out and cooled them outside and slid a pan of chunked carrots tossed in oil into the oven beside the chicken. When they were starting to turn golden and the beets were cool enough to handle, I peeled them and sliced them into a skillet with 3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, 2 tablespoons of honey and 1 tablespoon of oil – in retrospect there was enough oil in the pan with the carrots. The carrots went in too and I turned up the heat until the mixture bubbled and thickened, covering the veg with a sticky glaze. It was fantastic.
Honey-Balsamic Glazed Roasted Beets & Carrots
You don’t need measurements here – but I’ve listed the proportions that I used; you can adjust each accordingly. The veg could be roasted in advance, then reheated in the balsamic and honey on the stovetop just before serving.
3 largish beets, tops trimmed
4 largish carrots, peeled and cut into 1″ chunks
olive or canola oil, for cooking
3 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
2 Tbsp. honey or maple syrup
Wrap the beets in foil and roast them in the oven (at 350F – 400F, or whatever temperature the oven happens to be on) for 45 minutes to an hour, until tender. Set them aside until cool enough to handle.
Peel and chop the carrots and toss with a drizzle of oil in a baking pan. Roast for about half an hour, turning once or twice, until soft and starting to turn golden. Place the balsamic vinegar and honey in a large skillet, then add the carrots to the skillet along with any oil that has accumulated in the bottom of the pan, and when the beets are cool enough to handle, peel them with your fingers and slice into wedges into the pan.
Set it over medium-high heat and cook until the mixture bubbles and the liquid thickens, coating the carrots with a sticky glaze. Serve immediately, or cool and serve over a salad.
Serves 4 (or 2 if I’m there).
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May 24 2008 | chicken & turkey and grains and veg | 4 Comments »
We kind of skimmed past dinner, anticipating eats and drinks at Velvet before a show at the Grand tonight. We tried to make an art opening en route, which along with Vancouver-style rain slowed us down somewhat, leaving us time for tapas (small plates) and shared pasta. It was like the grown-up version of going to Earls and ordering appetizers (cheese sticks and chicken fingers, washed down with virgin strawberry daquiris and chased with mocha Kahlua pie to share – ah, to be 15 again).
The food was truly spectacular. Of particular note the bread, which I forgot to enquire the source of, was medium-dark and nutty, and served with soft sweet butter sprinkled with a little coarse, flaky salt. I love that. I ate my way through half the bread basket before our tapas came: coconut shrimp, olive tapenade, and crackers with brie, pecans and, get this: balsamic caramel (I know!) Then Mike ordered Saffron Conchigliette (read: pasta shells) with shrimp, scallops, mussels, garlic and basil, and I had a warm spinach salad (that means it was gently wilted) with smoked bacon, cashews, brie, and maple balsamic vinaigrette – enough to almost render it a soup; fortunately I love it that way. Both were every bit as good as they sound. I took plenty of photos that don’t do the food justice – it’s tough in a dark space when you have to use flash.
But I have to leave you with something. Before we left, we were snacking on an olive oil loaf cake made with lemon, rosemary and some chopped pears (added as an afterthought in my usual attempt to not waste half-eaten pears, nor have to down yet another one).
Lemon Rosemary Olive Oil Cake
4 large eggs
3/4 cup sugar
grated zest and juice of a lemon
1/2 cup regular or extra virgin olive oil or canola oil
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking power
1/4 tsp. salt
2 sprigs of rosemary, leaves stripped off and chopped
1 unpeeled pear, finely chopped or grated (optional)
a couple more sprigs of rosemary to decorate the top (optional)
Preheat oven to 350F.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs for a minute, until frothy. Beat in the sugar and continue to beat for a few minutes, until the mixture is thick and pale. Beat in the lemon zest, juice and olive oil.
In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Add it to the egg mixture and stir by hand until almost combined; add the rosemary and pears (if you’re using them) and stir just until blended.
Pour into an 8″x4″ or 9″x5″ loaf pan that has been sprayed with nonstick spray. Lay a couple sprigs of rosemary on the top. Bake for about 45 minutes, until golden and springy to the touch.
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May 24 2008 | cake and eating out | 1 Comment »
Today, I wanted to demonstrate (to myself as much as anyone else) that dinner in under 15 minutes does not have to involve take-out or be previously frozen. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Well, sometimes there is.)
We stopped at the grocery store on the way home from a long meeting with our accountant. Tired, with our heads full of numbers and our car in the shop, I was determined to not give in to the lull of the rain and the security of my baggy sweater and pick up fast food - something perfectly excusable on a day when you find out your car, taxes and dental work are going to cost more than a trip for two to Europe.
So I picked up some fresh wild salmon (I’ve never understood why frozen battered fish sticks were considered convenience food, when they take 25 minutes to cook, and a fresh fillet of salmon takes only 10) and when we got home, I told Mike to time me. I turned the oven on to 425F, put the kettle on, slapped the salmon on a cookie sheet and spread each piece with a spoonful of pesto (sorry for the recurring ingredient, but I know W will eat pesto salmon). Then I rummaged through the fridge and found almost a full pint of wrinkly grape tomatoes, so cranked up the heat under my cast iron skillet and glugged in some olive oil, then dumped in the lot of them. (Had I been in less of a hurry, I might have spread them on a cookie sheet and roasted them, then pulled out the sheet, put the salmon on it and returned it to the oven for 10 minutes.)
The kettle whistled. My plan was to pour boiling water over plain old couscous, which takes under 10 minutes to morph from dried to edible, but discovered that someone (most likely me) had poured cornmeal into the couscous jar. Damn.
So I think the timing stopped at that point as I did some damage control and put a pot of water on instead, thinking I could do up some sort of simple/rustic Italian pasta tossed with olive oil, garlic and tomatoes (this is the way Giada does it, right? and she’s a goddess). When it came to boil, I remembered the package of Israeli couscous I found at Bite in Inglewood on the weekend – big, slippery, pearl-shaped nuggets of pasta that just might work out. I’ve never made Israeli couscous before, but it was easy – you cook it just like pasta, but for a bit longer. The salmon went in and out of the oven (10 minutes per inch of thickness) as it boiled, and when it was finished the tomatoes were soft and starting to blacken. I threw in a few squished cloves of garlic for a minute or two, along with the teeniest pinch of dried red pepper flakes, then drained the couscous and dumped it in and tossed it about to coat it with the garlicky oil and nudge the browned bits from the bottom of the pan.
It looked fantastic as is, to be honest, but when I remembered that there was feta in the fridge, I had to crumble some of it in. If you don’t have Israeli couscous in your cupboard, and I don’t expect you to, this would work equally well with ordinary couscous, or orzo, or probably any shaped pasta.
Yum-O.
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May 22 2008 | seafood and vegetarian | 3 Comments »
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