The Pappardelle

Yu-um! The broadest noodles this side of lasagna are pappardelle. Often used with heartier sauces, the pappardelle is both my favourite pasta and the Thrifty Sifter's. It was a natural fit for making dinner at her place the other night. This recipe is a nice bridge between the dry, sea-influenced sauces of Sicily with the tomato-based Tuscan sauces of my youth.

Ingredients:
8 vine-ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup of dry sauvignon blanc
6 garlic cloves
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup pitted Kalamata olives, roughly-chopped
1 package (roughly a pound) of fresh, tri-color pappardelle pasta
1/2 cup of fresh Italian parsley, roughly-chopped*
1/2 cup of fresh basil, roughly-chopped
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
6 ounces of crumbled feta cheese, divided

One thing I like about the tri-color pasta is that the red is flavoured with paprika whilst the green is flavoured with spinach. It's subtle, but it's a damn good subtlety.

While I don't normally shop there, we picked this pasta up in the Garden of Eden. Strangely this food retailer is the first result for the search term "Garden of Eden," though I'm positive the Biblical legend has been around much longer. See for yourself.

Look at those lovely tomatoes. YUMMO! These were just the right ripeness; a little soft, very juicy. Quite easy to seed, I found.















Once you've chopped up the tomatoes, you'll purée 2 1/2 cups of them (this isn't ALL of them) with the wine and garlic in a blender. It's going to look frothy and pink and you're going to think I'm screwing with you. I assure you I'm not. Just go with it.

Pre-heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Once it's good and ready, add the oil and heat until it develops a slight shimmer. Add the puree and the olives to the oil and cook until the sauce begins to thicken. This can take 6 - 15 minutes, depending upon your skillet and heat.

You can see the sauce beginning to orange.

There you go, it's getting nice and red. Soon it will be thick and awesome.

By the way, did I mention that while the sauce is cooking you should be heating the water for the pasta? Yeah, you should do that.

You'll want to salt the water a bit. I cook fresh pasta for 3 - 5 minutes until it's hot and slippery.

You're now going to drain the pasta and keep some of the liquid aside. Add the drained pasta, chopped parsley and basicl, and vinegar to the sauce in the skillet.

Keep the heat on and toss until the sauce coats the pasta. If it's ending up a bit dry, add the reserved liquid in small doses until it's the right consistency for you. Cook three minutes more.

Add salt and pepper to taste, then mix in the remaining chopped tomatoes and half of your feta.

You're almost done. This last part is really hard. Put the mixed up pasta in a bowl and cover with the remaining feta.
Oy vey!

Yeah, I spilled a little, but it didn't screw up the final result.

We had a terrific dinner and I even persuaded the Thrifty Sifter to make her literally-irresistible choco choco chip cookies for dessert. Read her chocolate chocolate chip goodness here.

***

In some other blog news, we will be welcoming Yum Veggie Burger to the blog next week as we prepare a veggie burger for her and your edification.

I have also been invited to guest blog The Pot Roast for Tribeca Yummy Mummy. We'll have more on that once it comes closer to fruition. I'm also apparently a guest uncle!

Salt it bitches!

*If you have a Thrifty Sifter in the house, keep her away from the parsley. She will eat all of it.

The Pot Roast

I'm in a financial crunch this month. It's nothing drastic or lasting, but I'm caught between a trip to the Grand Canyon and another coming up to Northern California, so I must be parsimonious over the next week and change.

What better way than to cook a ton of meat I can reheat again and again over the next few days? So I did a little research and found The Pioneer Woman's recipe. While I consider myself a better writer, damn if she can't take some great photos. Hers do the meal more justice than my photos or prose. 

 

 

This, like the last recipe, is fairly simple. I'm going to tell you up front: you will miss the potatoes. Buy a couple to include with this. Also, taste frequently, but you'll need more salt and pepper than you think. 

My favourite part is, I think, browning the onions. My apartment could NOT have smelled better.

Also, while cooking I sometimes like to watch a little television. In this case I was catching up on the relaunched Doctor Who. 

I'm also pretty proud of the carrots and meat. I'm still full from eating this as I write, but that meat makes my mouth water even more. Time to get a vodka and guava juice...

At this point you basically throw everything in the pot and put it in the oven at low heat for several hours. I was feeling kind of ill this day due to some bad tacos I had at Trailer Park the night before. I also went to a Queensrÿche show and drank quite a bit. Also had a great conversation with singer Geoff Tate backstage after the show about saxophones for twenty minutes. 

So while this bad boy was a-roasting, I took a nap on the couch, then hit the gymnasium. Got home with enough time to shower and then be greeted by this.

I dug into it right away. Definitely did not add enough salt or pepper to this, as I mentioned above. The onions and carrots were done to perfection, but I needed to have left this in my oven for at least another hour or so, bringing the total cooking time up to five hours. 

Still, I've got a tasty dinner waiting for me for the next few days, and tomorrow I'm adding some potatoes to the mix. 

Your soundtrack for this entry: Queensrÿche - Empire

The Chipotle Chicken

After the success of Ingredient Chili, I was left with a hankering for spicy, but not too spicy. Don't get me wrong, I've gone toe-to-toe with Adam D. from Killswitch Engage in a contest to eat the world's hottest curry. My mother once put me forward to eat Texas' hottest habanero salsa as a boast to one of her friends. But, I wanted to dial it back a bit.

My go-to ingredient when I want spice and flavour without the face-melting experience of Jamaican hot peppers or the staid fresh jalapeño, is the chipotle jalapeño. Some peppers have that smoky flavour naturally, but I'm a big fan of the smoky flavour that gets there using smoke.

For this meal I had some extra canned chipotles from a previous meal and wanted a way to get them used up before they went bad. This recipe takes a cue from my Rushed Roast Chicken Breast, which I make due to the inexpensive cost of chicken breasts with the bone in and the recipe's ability to cook during my gymnasium time after work.

Ingredients:
3 canned chipotle jalapeño peppers
5 garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 stick of butter or 4 tablespoons of margarine (I use the Yum Veggie Burger and Circadian Sift-approved Smart Balance Organic)
1 small whole chicken
2 potatoes
2 yellow onions
2 cups of chicken stock

Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees F. 

This is a fairly-simple recipe. It's best to let the butter sit at room temperature for a bit to soften it up, much as the Thrifty Sifter tells me you need to do when baking. Place the chipotles, garlic cloves, and butter or margarine in a food processor and blend on pulse a few times.

Put the whole chicken on a plate and loosen the skin from the body. I often tend to tear the skin over the breasts because I haven't practiced doing this enough, so be gentle. Once loosened, spread the chipotle-butter mixture under the skin all over the meat. Then spread the mixture over the skin and inside the chicken's body cavity.

Cut the potatoes and onions into eighths and put in the bottom of a stoneware baker. There's a fancy French term for these I'm not remembering, so I'll keep calling it a baker until someone tells me otherwise. Cover the vegetables with the chicken stock, then place the chicken on top and cover.

Place the baker in the oven and cook at 450 degrees F for an hour to an hour and a half.

The Thrifty Sifter gave it a thumb's up and cleaned her plate. By the way, if you dig the vase in the background, it was created by the über-talented Rosemary Forrest of Forrest Pottery. I may be biased; her daughter is one of my closest friends.

Your soundtrack for this entry is: Best Coast - Boyfriend (Ghostwaves Remix)

The Actual Tacos/The Ingredient

Yes, yes, YES! I neglected to post the final product yesterday. You know what? It's not all lost because when I make tacos I make enough for at least three meals. Mostly that's because it's hard to find recipes for single people or even couples a lot of the time. Serves 6!?! Who has six people over that often?

Look, I love my girlfriend and my friends, but I spend a lot of time alone, too. Where are my recipes? If anyone reading this can point me in the direction of a food blog geared toward dinner for one so I can use it on those occasions I'm alone, I would be very grateful.

Today's "leftovers" are not really leftovers. My taco recipe actually gets better after a day (or three). It may be the acids in the various ingredients working their magic breaking down the chicken meat and mixing the flavours, but whatever it is it's great. In this batch I also added an eighth of a teaspoon of Blair's 3 A.M. Reserve Ingredient.  My best friend purchased this for my birthday, had it signed by the creator, and we finally uncorked it last week in a chili which generally went undocumented for this blog.

However, my friend Leandra snapped the below photo of me trying the Ingredient for the first time. It's a sneaky thing. At first you won't think it's hot at all, then your whole gastrointestinal tract heats up and your mouth is on fire for fifteen minutes. I love spicy food, as you will learn while this blog grows.

Most people who were there said "Never again," "You're insane," or "Why am I friends with you?"

As an aside, I found this for you Yum Veggie Burger. Try some on your next cookout. You have to love that honey contains boron, one of the coolest elements.

Your soundtrack for this entry is Snake River Conspiracy - Sonic Jihad.

My Favourite Tacos

Tacos. Tacos are my favourite food. Some kids like spaghetti, some hamburgers, and some rich people food. Well, when I was a kid I'd get three tacos and an extra taco shell from whichever taco place my Mom decided to visit that evening. Sometimes it was the frightful Taco Bell, and other times it was real Mexican food from a California purveyor.

As a child I didn't know better and Taco Hell was just as good as anything else. The older I became and the more spice I liked, the more I went in search of great tacos. Still, it took until my mid- to late-twenties for tacos to become my favourite food. Only then did I realize they were the perfect combination of meat, crunch, spice, cheese, and vegetables.

I'll skip all the intervening experimentation and get to the point. I found my favourite taco recipe and it is Michael's. According to his Food Network bio he is one of their personalities. Having not owned a television in 13 years, nor had cable in 15, I have no clue who he is. But christ his tacos are good.

First I start off cooking the chicken (according to the recipe). One of the main problems with this recipe is smoked paprika. Look, you can find hot paprika. You can find sweet paprika more rarely. However, I've never once seen smoked paprika in my local grocery. The Thrifty Sifter found it once through her mother, but that's it. So in this recipe I use hot to replace the smoked.

You can see my trusty laptop on the kitchen trolley with notes open for this very entry as well as the recipe. I've mostly got Michael's recipe down, but it's good to get a refresher ever couple of times. One thing I forgot is just how good oregano smells.

All of the ingredients pictured above make their way into the pot at left. The one trick to this recipe is to "over-brown" the chicken. It will get more juicy in the final mix, but it needs to have the fuck cooked out of it before being added to the rest of the recipe.

Another tip with this recipe is to only add half the chicken stock or broth to the recipe at first. Let it cook until it's thick, then add another two cups and cook for longer. I've never found the chicken to be tender enough in the time allotted by the recipe.

After about twenty or thirty minutes, add some more stock and cook another half hour or so. I often add more peppers at this point since I like the fresh pepper taste, but that's up to you. In this case I went purely for chipotles and it wasn't that spicy.

Next up come the garnishes. I LOVE cilantro and onions, so I chop the onions over roughly-chopped cilantro and get a nice mix of both to spread over my tacos.

The radishes are pretty awesome and most people don't think to have them on tacos, even though they be authentic.

Tomatoes: sometimes I take the time to get the seeds out, sometimes I don't. Tonight I didn't.

I also don't usually use iceberg lettuce, but when I do I choose Foxy produce. Never do I get brown, wilted lettuces.

One of my favourite winemakers is Santa Carolina. If their website weren't so horrendous, I would link you directly to my favourite of their wines, the carmenere, which is a long-lost grape varietal from France. Tonight I chose their sauvignon blanc and was not disappointed.

When making this recipe, like my local taco truck, I like to place all the toppings into their own area. But I do so in a large container so I can keep it for later. Even I can't eat 12 - 18 tacos in a sitting.

Here I have a large-size Ziploc with red onion and cilantro mixture, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and sliced radishes. Tomorrow I'll unpack that and my filling with cheese for dinner. If there's anything left over, I'll pop them into some containers for lunch on Wednesday. 

While I'm here, just after this picture I added some more salt to the bubbling filling. This recipe ALWAYS needs more salt. I've never once made it where I didn't add more; usually I added a lot more. It's not that the rest of the spices don't cut it, but it just needs some salt attacking the rest of the flavours to get the job done.

Unfortunately, I was so hungry and so excited that I neglected to take a photograph of the final product. I can assure you it was tasty.

Your soundtrack for this entry is Huey Lewis & The News - Greatest Hits

The Veal Burgers

One of the problems with starting a blog before you go on vacation is that once you've started it you go on vacation. I've spent the last couple of weeks preparing for and taking a camping vacation to the Grand Canyon and Arizona with the Thrifty Sifter and just got back last night. Jeremy did do some cooking on that camping trip and Ms. YVB wants me to post pictures. Maybe I will, though I claim pictures of Annie's Mac and Cheese can't be that interesting.

Today I planned my regular kickball game in Astoria Park. Congruent with the World Cup final, we had the bare minimum number of players. Worn out I returned home to shower before going to Hellgate Social as we normally do after kickball for cheap eats, good beer, and fun folks. Of course, once showered and drying off I felt worn out from my vacation and traveling. Instead of going out, I decided to grab grub makings and cook.

For most of my life my father had a few dishes he cooked for dinner. None of them were complex and, all in all, they were each quite tasty. One of these was the burger. His main trick involved using salt, pepper, and veal baby food in mixing his patties. Most people think this is weird because you're putting baby food in a burger. I think it's weird because they make human baby food made out of cow babies. Either way that stuff holds the burger together well and makes it taste great.

Tonight I decided to make veal burgers with an apple-celery slaw. No side dish since, seriously, a pair of burgers are quite enough food.

For burgers:

• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 portobella mushroom caps, halved
• a few tablespoons of olive oil
• 1 small package of ground veal

For slaw:

• 2 celery ribs
• 1/2 Granny Smith apple, cored (left unpeeled)
• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon whole-grain mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar

First I got my onion and mushrooms prepped for the blender. Peeled and halved, an onion and two mushroom caps make an excellent face.

Gotta finely chop them funguses and funyuns. Pulse just a few times and you're done.

Cook it all up in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil for about ten minutes (until the liquid has boiled off).

Once cooked, take it off the heat and let it cool off in a bowl for a while. Don't let it get cold!

Whilst you're awaiting the completion of the above liquids' evaporation, why not begin construction of your celery-apple slaw? I did.

Putting the shredder on the food processor, I ran the pair of celery ribs and the half of the apple through. Were I to do this again, I'd use the whole apple, but had assumed it would add too much liquid.

Next I whisked together some mayo (sorry Gianmichael), whole grain brown mustard, vinegar, salt, and sugar. Like the above-mentioned GM I dislike mayonnaise, but am not so orthodox that I can't have it in the occasional foodstuff as an ingredient.

Put this aside for about twenty minutes so all the good stuff can meld together flavourfully.













At this point it was time for a drink.

This was a Carivin Reserve tempranillo from 2007. It smells much fruitier than it tastes. Honestly, I picked it because the foil was a nice red (yes, I sometimes pick wines by the way they look). It worked out again as this wine was fantastico.

As you can see above, it's time to start mixing the veal and the mushroom/onion mixture.

This'll make about four patties (two for tomorrow night's dinner).

Finally got to break out my cast iron skillet for the first time!

Burgers cooked and deployed on some nice poppy seed knots I found at the Key Food.

Topped with celery-apple slaw.

The final product is tasty, juicy, and somewhat different from your normal burger. Definitely making this recipe for other folks for dinner.

Damn, still making me nommy four hours later.

Your soundtrack for this entry is the Benea Reach album Alleviat.

The Beef Udon

Udon is one of my favourite dishes. I've still never eaten an authentic dish, but a Manhattan lunch joint I frequent taught me to love the firm, square noodle.

It wasn't until last week that I decided to take a shot at making an udon dish myself. First stop: epicurious. I'll admit I've leaned a bit too heavily on them recently for recipes, but they have a great iPhone app, thousands of recipes I can search easily, and valuable user ratings for each.

Today: Udon with Grilled Flank Steak.

Unfolding the meat and applying the mixed marinade was the best part of this recipe. Were I to make this recipe again, I would let the meat marinate at least two hours. 10 minutes is enough to add a hint of flavour, but not enough to add to the overall taste of the final dish.

Yes, that's my new acacia cutting board. After 12 years of only having a tiny plastic one that slides everywhere, it's a welcome addition to my kitchen.

Of course there's nothing quite like the crackling of fresh, garlic-covered meat in the pan. Pre-heat those suckers, drop some olive oil in, and let them go to town.

Yes, those are peas next to the handle, and we've got more to say about them.

Hey, there's those peas again. There's something sexual about pea pods. That thing is that they're part of the pea plant's reproductive cycle.

This recipe actually calls for sugar snap peas, which weren't available at United Bros. the day I made this recipe. Instead I substituted some flat peas.

These definitely should have been prepared for cooking much better. For instance I only removed the stem, but forgot to remove the tough, stringy bit that runs the length of the pod. This was my first mistake with the peas.

My second mistake was putting the peas in at this point. I made a rookie error and didn't read ahead in the recipe. These were only supposed to go in the last minute of the udon boil.

As you can see I left a single pea in the boiling udon to remind me of my human imperfection.

At this point I also flipped the flank steak its single flipping time. After a few more minutes of cooking, I placed it on my small cutting board to rest.

This meat was too well-done with me, which I should have recognized from the recipe. Meat that I prepare for myself is usually seared and very rare.

I sliced this up across the grain and took a couple of test bites. Can't say as I was terribly impressed with the marinade. Like many "Asian" recipes aimed at a Western audience, it seemed too full of ginger.

Most Chinese and Japanese dishes I've tried containing ginger use it much more subtly.

Now, judging by the amount of broth I'm going to guess this is a bastardized form of yaki udon (at least according to my minimal reading on the subject). The broth-to-noodles ratio was pretty low.

If you read the recipe you've probably just noticed an anomaly. Yes, those are carrots, which are not called for. I have a strong propensity to have a good colour-balance in my meals. In this case there was an awful lot of brown and green in the recipe, but nothing on the red end of the spectrum.

And with the broth finished, I apportioned half the udon to a nice-sized bowl, put one sliced steak in, and poured the broth away. Topped with cilantro it looks cute.

In the end it actually looked better than it tasted. The recipe seemed too tangy on the broth side and not flavourful-enough on the meat side. Fresh cilantro is a plus, but the peas ended up being tough to eat.

It's always the damn peas...

Your soundtrack for this entry is Grand Magus' album Hammer of the North.