Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Portrait of a Saturday Morning
My house. Noon.
What D wears to make brioche cinnamon buns.
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Friday, September 19, 2008
In-Home Entertainment
With all the bacon and dumplings and oddly-flavored naan lately, I know it looks like I never actually eat at home.
Which I do.
Sometimes.
Proof: This pizza, which I made last week. In my house. I have this troublesome compulsion to grocery shop, buy a ton of perishable goods, and then eat out every night until everything I bought goes bad. I know I have a problem, and this pizza is part of the solution. Pizza is a great way to use up whatever's hanging around the fridge, on the brink of moldy death. In my case, critical patients included prosciutto, mushrooms, spinach, cherry tomatoes, and a tub of ricotta cheese.
I know that making pizza dough is really easy and cheap and blah blah, so shoot me, I bought prepackaged dough from Trader Joe's because it costs all of $2 and saved me at least an hour of prep time. Some might argue that this whole defense of me cooking at home isn't even cooking, because I'm actually really just assembling all my groceries on top of store-bought dough, to which I respond "meh" and point out that I had to turn on the both the stove and the oven for this venture, which constitutes cooking.
Anyhow. Here's the recipe:
1 bag pizza dough
4 tbsp olive oil, divided
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 lb fresh spinach, washed
1 cup cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 cup cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives, sliced in half
(optional) 5-6 thin slices prosciutto or other cured meat
fresh mozzarella cheese
fresh ricotta cheese
1/2 tbsp crushed red pepper flakes
salt and pepper, to taste
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
On a lightly floured surface, roll out the pizza dough to fit whatever you're cooking it on (I used a cookie sheet, so my pizza was rectangular). Brush with 2 tbsp olive oil.
Heat the remaining oil in a saute pan over medium heat until it shimmers. Add the onions and garlic. Cook until onions get soft, 5-7 minutes. Add the spinach and saute for an additional 2-3 minutes.
That's all the cooking we'll be doing today.
Arrange your pizza: I layered the prosciutto on the bottom, then mozzarella, the spinach/onion mix, mushrooms, and sprinkled the tomatoes and olives on top . And then spooned globs of ricotta over that. Salt, pepper and red pepper flakes were last.
Bake for appx. 25 minutes, or until crust is brown.
This recipe screams for adaptations, substitutions, additions or subtractions. I was trying to use up what was in my fridge, and pizza is pretty much a blank slate. It's stupid easy to make, but for some reason people are always really impressed with homemade pizzas. So remember, kids, every once in a while it's ok to have a night in.
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Thursday, July 10, 2008
Dumpling Dilemma
Some kitchen tasks go above and beyond the realm of “practical.” Last month, the New York Times published an article on “recipe deal breakers;” which vary, of course, according to the chef, their budget and their kitchen space. The following is an account of a recipe that had many, many deal breakers for me: the use of cheesecloth, a 24-hour refrigeration period, expensive ingredients, tedious dumpling folding, and more. Why, might you ask, would I ever subject myself to such a recipe? Sometimes you have no choice. As part of my work, I cross-test recipes submitted by various chefs to determine if they’re acceptable for the “average” home cook. As for this Tomato Essence with Chanterelle Mushroom Dumpling number, I’ll let you be the judge:
This is what 5 lbs of tomatoes drained of their essence looks like.
The resulting liquid was almost clear, with a strong flavor and aroma of tomatoes (without the nuisance of actually seeing or eating them).
On to the dumplings: The filling was made of sautéed chanterelle mushrooms(clocking in at approximately $30/ lb), which were later chopped to a rough paste in the food processor.
After chilling the mushroom paste, I painstakingly folded tablespoon-sized dollops into 50 (thankfully pre-made) dumpling wrappers and sealed the edges with an egg yolk. Then the dumplings were boiled in the tomato essence, creating what was essentially a highbrow version of wonton soup.
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