side dishes for the American icon

Sometimes we just have to have a big steak.  Well, sometimes Jim just has to have a big steak.  I am happy with three or four ounces of meat, plus a couple of side dishes.  I try to do something green, but I am also fond of potato with steak.  One of my favorite ways to make potato is to do a twice-baked potato.  It is an easy preparation, that can be done in a couple of steps.  When the oven is already on, you can bake a potato and simply store it in the fridge.  Then, when you are ready to make your twice-baked potato, shred a little cheddar cheese.  I prefer a very sharp white cheddar, because it offers up big cheese flavors without the necessity of using much of it.  I also like to add a little horseradish, a bit of dried or fresh shallot, white pepper, and salt.  But the options are nearly limitless.  In the summer, if I have them in the garden, I add some chopped chives.  A touch of nutmeg is nice.  Different varieties of cheese can be a welcome change, such as Gruyere or Parmesan.  Adding a little thyme or chopped parsley can be nice.  As can a crumbled up slice of leftover bacon.   I sometimes use cream for moisture.  Sometimes sour cream or creme fraiche.  Last night, I had buttermilk, which is a lowfat option for making creamy potatoes.

add your chosen aromatics to a bowl, 

then you can simply add the mashed potato and some moisture

One tool I rely on when making potatoes is a ricer.  I love it for the ultra-creamy texture it gives to potatoes.  Just scoop the baked potato out of the shell, and run it through the ricer for very creamy lump-free potatoes.

A ricer makes very creamy and light potatoes

the creamy potato mixture can be spooned into the potato shells or,

for a more dramatic effect piped in with a piping bag

Twenty minutes in a 400 degree oven produces light puffy potatoes with a cheesy bite.

I love the crisp brown bits on the top of the baked potato

There are several things that always have a home in my fridge.  I am never without garlic, onions, mushrooms, sweet red peppers, or lemons.  They last a long time, and they can be pressed into service for everything from vegetable dishes to sauces and soups.  

 kitchen staples garlic, red peppers, and mushrooms pressed into 

service for a broccolini side dish

I had a bunch of broccolini last night, which can be pretty boring just steamed and dumped in a bowl.  So I minced some garlic, slice up some mushrooms and red peppers, and heated a little oil in a pan.  The mushrooms and peppers sauteed for about 10 minutes on fairly high heat, to coax out the moisture and caramalize them a bit.  Then the minced garlic goes in for a quick two minute saute on a bit lower heat to bring out its wonderful fragrance.   Then the broccolini goes in with half a cup of wine, or half a cup of water and the juice of half a lemon, and steams until it is just crisp-tender, and a beautiful bright green.

everything sautes in just a few minutes

mixing up your veggies adds interest and texture to any dish

Italian American treat

I am a sucker for a good chicken parm.  Unfortunately, it is all too rare in a sea of Italian American joints that serve flabby, overcooked chicken, swimming in a sea of gloppy cheese and overly sweet sauce.  Ugh.

As I have said before, my tomato sauce has simplified over the years.  All my complicated herb combinations and long list of ingredients has fallen by the wayside in favor of a very simple sauce that pops with tomato flavors and the heady scent of garlic.  Its simple.  Garlic sauteed in a good bit of olive oil, diced tomatoes, salt, and red pepper flakes.  I then give it a short buzz with the immersion blender to smooth it out a bit and give it a creamy texture.

tomato sauce, simple and full of flavor

The chicken is pretty simple, too.  I either buy chicken cutlets, or let out a bit of aggression by pounding chicken breasts thin -- to about a quarter inch.  I cooked some linguine and tossed it with the sauce.  While the noodles were cooking, I doused the meat with buttermilk, then pressed them with a good coating of Panko breadcrumbs seasoned with salt and pepper.

the coated cutlets are simply sauteed in a bit of hot olive oil

they cook for about 4 minutes a side

I am not a fan of flaccid chicken swimming in gooey cheese.  I want my chicken crisp, so I skip the layer of sauce, and sprinkle on a bit of parm.

the cheese will melt on the hot cutlets, but a run under the broiler

will speed up the process

Simply serving the chicken over the sauced noodles makes for a great dish.  A little added parsley brightens up the whole thing.

feeding an Italian American addiction

scampi, the sequel

Most home cooks have just a dozen or so by-heart recipes in their repertoire.  What they don't realize is that a few small changes can transport those dishes into a whole new realm.  I really enjoy the marriage of shrimp, garlic, and butter; and I had all three in the house today.  I also had some spinach left over, as well as some oven-dried tomatoes in the freezer.  I don't care for the appearance of tomato sauce with spinach pasta, but with dried tomatoes, I thought it might be nice.  And I like the touch of home made pasta, which is a snap with a food processor and a pasta roller.

the pasta starts with a couple of cups of washed spinach

and an egg

Once the spinach leaves and eggs have been pulverized, in goes the flour.  I ended up using a cup and a third.  One quick aside -- I never use cooked spinach for spinach pasta, even though that is typical of spinach pasta recipes.  When you use fresh, the cooked noodles are a bright, fresh green, rather than a sad, gray-green mess.  The added bonus is that you don't have to precook the spinach, so the dough comes together in under two minutes.

enough flour is added to make a pebbly looking mixture

that gets wrapped in plastic wrap and rested for half an hour

rolling the dough takes a couple of minutes with a pasta machine

the cut noodles are then tossed with a bit of rice flour

The rice flour better resists turning gummy, but regular flour will do in a pinch.  Seriously, including the rest time for the dough, I made homemade spinach noodles in under a half an hour.  Seems like they should be in just about any cook's repertoire.  But I suppose I am kidding myself.  If you don't feel like doing it, just buy some fresh spinach noodles at the market.

I had some oven dried tomatoes in the freezer that I did last summer, but sun-dried tomatoes would work just fine.

cute little oven-dried tomatoes from last summer's farmer's market

I sauteed four cloves of garlic in a tablespoon of butter for under a minute, added some shrimp, sauteed those for about 3 minutes, then added a cup of wine, took the shrimp out of the pot, and reduced the butter and wine with the tomatoes.  I added in the juice of one lemon, and a bit of salt and pepper.

The reduced sauce is infused with the tomato flavor, without the muddy color

The shrimp jumps back into the pot for two minutes.  Then in goes the cooked pasta (which cooks in under two minutes), everything is tossed a bit, and on to the plate.  You truly can make a flavorful and interesting meal in under an hour.  And the more lovely thing for me is, even if your puttering and futzing about, this still all comes together in under two hours.  

not bad looking for a Monday night dinner

an adventure with flour?

I love a thin, crisp pizza with a bit of char on the crust, and just a sprinkling of toppings.  Not for me, the oozing cheese and topping overload that dominates the current chain pizzeria world.  Which led me to the google world of pizza.  And one reoccurring theme in that world was double zero flour from Italy.  It wasn't easy to find, it was expensive, and from the majority of sources, it required purchasing a very small quantity at a ridiculous price, or buying a 55 pound bag, and what was I going to do with 55 pounds of flour?

Finally, I found a source that was parceling out 20 pounds of the by now must-have flour.  So I ordered.  And, much to my surprise, it most certainly makes a difference.  The dough, produced with water, salt, and yeast, stretches more easily than dough produced with all purpose flour, and is certainly WAY more manageable than dough made with bread flour.

I always start the dough with a sponge

A sponge is really just the dough, made with less flour than you will ultimately need.  It allows part of the flour to really hydrate, and kick starts the yeast.

with the final addition of flour, the dough is still soft,

but elastic and workable

The Italian flour was extremely supple, and stretched easily.  I heated a pizza stone in a 550 oven, because I was too lazy to pull out the grill and heat it.  The grill is really the only way  mere mortals without a pizza oven are able to hit temps over 800 degrees, which is ideal for thin crust pizza.  The dough made such a difference on the final texture of the crust that next time I won't be so lazy.  The additional 300 or so degrees will certainly make a difference.

the sauce is an exercise in simplicity -- sliced garlic poached in

olive oil, fire roasted tomatoes, salt, and red pepper flake

When I first started making pizza, I made a very complicated sauce, loaded with a variety of herbs and aromatics.  Over the years, I have discovered that in the case of pizza sauce, less is more.  Limiting the flavors to garlic, salt, and pepper allows the tomatoes to really shine.  I adore the fire roasted tomatoes from Muir Glen.  I even prefer them to San Marzano tomatoes from Italy, which is heresy in the world of pizzafiles, but oh well.  I do take some perverse pleasure in being an iconoclast.

The toppings for this pizza were simple.  I found some fresh buffalo mozzeralla, so I used that, along with a little pesto I had in the freezer, and a bit of parmesan cheese.

toppings are limited, to let the crust really shine

On the buffalo mozzarella... well, for me, it wasn't worth the price tag.  Perhaps what I found wasn't a stellar example of the cheese, but I hardly tasted a difference between it and cow's milk mozzarella.  I will refrain in the future, unless someone convinces me that a different brand has a markedly different flavor profile.

Even in the wimpy 550 oven, the pizza browned and crisped beautifully.

a crisp crust, with a bit of char

So, in the end, I certainly think it was worth seeking out the Italian 00 flour, and I will continue to experiment with it.  I want to try making pasta with it.  Since it makes such a supple dough, I imagine it will make very silky pasta.

The big lesson here is to know your flours.  All purpose flour is great for a lot of things, such as popovers, cookies, and general use in the kitchen.  Very soft flours, like pastry flour and White Lily (a soft winter wheat flour available mainly in the South) are great for tender baked goods cut with fat, such as pie crusts, cakes, pancakes and biscuits.  Bread flour is good for bread, but I think it is too glutinous for pizza dough, and results in a tough crust.  

The more I cook, the bigger the variety of flours that find a home in my pantry.  Right now I have a little can of Wondra flour for thickening, white whole wheat flour (a variety of very light flour that looks much like white flour, but is whole grain -- love it for bread), Italian 00 flour, all purpose flour, corn flour, pastry flour, White Lily, rice flour, potato flour, and semolina flour.  I need a bigger pantry....

the vegetarian life?

I saw a training video today, featuring a speech by the WF CEO, John Mackey.  I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, but he was essentially advocating a diet with whole foods, and little or no animal protein, processed foods, or sugar.  He defines processed foods as the obvious (cheese doodles and candy bars) along with the less obvious -- cheeses, milk, vegetable oils, meat, butter, and eggs.  Not sure I see how eggs are "processed" but I do know that life is healthier with less of all of those things.  I'm not ready to give up meat, or eggs, or butter for that matter, but I am ready to look for ways to incorporate more veggies into my diet, along with less fat, and animal protein.

To me, that means thinking of meat as more of a condiment than a main dish, and going easy on the cheese and butter.  The cheese is a particularly tough one for me, as is the butter.  And let's not even discuss bacon -- a food group of it's own for my taste buds, though I don't really eat that much of it.  A once a week treat for me.

At any rate, the video got me thinking of dishes that are interesting to me as vegetarian meals.  Which lead me to chili.  A chili rich with vegetables, beans, and warm spices hardly needs meat to be satisfying to my palate.  And there is no better way to cook beans than the pressure cooker.  It can do in 20 minutes what takes all day to do on the stove.  I used Adzuki beans, which are small red beans, cooked for 10 minutes in the pressure cooker.  While they cooked, I roasted a variety of peppers, some garlic, zucchini, leek, and onion.

the veggies require very little prep -- peppers can be

roasted whole, and the onions quartered, but the 

leeks really need to be cleaned

roasting the veggies draws out the oil,

and creates a silky texture

Once the beans are partially cooked, the chopped veggies can be added.

the veggies require only a rough chop

The veggies, a couple of tablespoons of chili powder, a couple of teaspoons of ground cumin, and a couple of teaspoons of oregano and salt go into the beans, along with a 14 ounce can of diced tomatoes, and the mixture is pressure-cooked for another ten minutes.  The result?  A rich, thick chili with loads of flavor, no added oil, and a great variety of vegetables.  But I do love a little cheddar cheese with my chili, so I grated on a bit.  I adore good cheese.  The secret, of course, is to buy well-aged, strongly flavored cheddar.  Then, a little goes a long way.

would anyone even notice that the meat is missing from this sort of dish?