What's Cooking (Take Two!)

Looks amazingly good. What proportion of duck meat vs ricotta? What texture were you aiming for? Did you make the pasta or are those... wonton wrappers?

[Jenise]

Looks amazingly good. What proportion of duck meat vs ricotta? What texture were you aiming for? Did you make the pasta or are those... wonton wrappers?

All I can answer you is: enough. No recipe here. And not wonton wrappers.

The meat was breast meat shredded with the plastic mixing blade on my ancient Cuisinart. I added enough ricotta, maybe 3:1, to hold it together, plus chives, parmesan cheese for tang, sesame oil for fat, and five spice powder as seemed right. The texture goal was what would hold together as a little meatball so that the pasta could be formed around it. The pasta was real pasta--3 eggs, 2 egg yolks, 2 cups AP flour, 1 tsp salt and just a few sprinklings of water. My recipe is somewhere halfway between the yolk-heavy 'rav dough' in the book Flour & Water and Martha Stewart's basic 3-egg dough--I've worked with both, and in my climate this is what has worked best for ravioli. I kneaded the dough at setting no. 1 and then folded it in half over a generous few pinches of fresh chives to work same in before proceeding to thinner settings. Btw, on the Kitchen Aid I have had no luck with ravioli on setting 6--I max out on five because 6 stretches and breaks though I sense I'd like the thinner 6 best.

[Jenise]

Our Dork tasting group is coming over tonight. Food, other than snacks, is rarely provided (not because it's not allowed, but because no one else cooks), but I'm doing a whole southern-themed buffet dinner. The wine theme is Sparkling-Not-Champagne (we do Champagne every December), so no wine match required because I have no idea what's coming.

I'm serving:

Buttermilk biscuits
white-cheddar pimiento cheese
'Pork and Beans': thinly sliced roast pork loin layered over a bed of white beans and topped with a collard green pesto
cold shrimp with a dipping remoulade
platter salad of grilled peaches and shaved watermelon radishes on mixed baby greens

And at least one other thing but I suddenly can't remember what it is.

[Jenise]

Grilled Spanish chorizo with a Cune 'Monopole' white. Bought 18 pounds of these sausages from Uli's in Seattle for tomorrow night's big Asado, and am going to selflessly (cough cough) sample the goods to make sure they'll be up our standards.

Of course, Jenise, we all expect you to defend the flag of, um, er, I mean, hoist the... well, you know.

My annual indulgence of a fresh truffle arrived yesterday,,,,,,,,so into a jar in the fridge with some eggs overnight, welll why wouldn't I?
So for lunch we had the eggs scrambled with shaved truffle and melted butter just because life is too too short not to lash out from time to time. The truffle is lovely, good perfume I started with a 75 gram beastie so there is enough to have some really yummy dishes.

[Jenise]

Barb--you go, girl! Where does your truffle come from?

[Robin Garr]

Forgot to post this the other night: Martha Rose Shulman's Zucchini Parmesan from the NY Times. It was excellent, and I loved that all the veg ingredients came from our garden or the farmers' market.

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Recipe link:
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017 ... i-parmesan
“This is a simple layered casserole with three elements: roasted zucchini, a really good homemade tomato sauce and Parmesan. Roasting, rather than frying the zucchini, allows you to cut down on olive oil and time.”

[Jenise]

Can't see the recipe link without a subscription, unfortunately. Did you dessicate the zucchini first?

[Jenise]

Dinner last night was a big asado with the neighborhood wine club. My contribution was the prep work for 18 pounds of sausages, 18 pounds of boneless chicken thighs, and 12 tri-tips. Well, that and I ran the whole thing, too. 72 attended.

[Robin Garr]

Can't see the recipe link without a subscription, unfortunately. Did you dessicate the zucchini first?

Funny, I thought 'net links shot through the paywall.

But basically, I sliced the zukes lengthwise into slabs, tossed with olive oil, S&P, and roasted for about 15 minutes at 450 until they were nice and brown, which also accomplished some desiccation. Then stacked in alternate layers with thick tomato sauce and Parimigiano Reggiano and baked at 350 for about a half-hour. Thassall! The flavor combo was super, and whatever additional liquid cooked out of the zukes went up with the angels' share.

Tonight's dinner will be chao larou (stir-fried bacon in Sichuan bean sauces).

-Paul W.

Can't see the recipe link without a subscription, unfortunately. Did you dessicate the zucchini first?

Funny, I thought 'net links shot through the paywall.

Worked for me.

[Jenise]

Can't see the recipe link without a subscription, unfortunately. Did you dessicate the zucchini first?

Funny, I thought 'net links shot through the paywall.

Worked for me.

Sometime the NYT links DO work for me, and sometimes they don't. I have no idea why I get a mix. This week I'm 2 for 3.


Last night for dinner I made a pizza. The fridge is kind of bare because I've been too sick to restock, which isn't exactly an exciting situation, but it does sometimes lead to a situation where you've got to come out of the corner swinging--or starve--and some of my most creative moments are also my most desperate.

Such was last night's pizza.

I'm getting over a bad cold and spent most of the day in denial that I'd actually have to produce something later. It was 5:50 when I finally forced myself to confront the issue. In the fridge, among other things canvassed were four leftover grilled Spanish chorizos from last Friday's asado (so about 80% fat-removed in cooking) some already-grated smoked cheddar I bought for a Southern take on the cheese+pesto appetizer mushrooms talked about in another thread (I made a collard green pesto to blend with the smoked cheddar, took them to a backyard BBQ), some already-grated mature cheddar I put in an enchilada pie last week, one small green bell pepper that I grew, and half a big red onion.

When I looked in the freezer and saw the wad of pizza dough, I realized I had a perfect storm. Into the food processor went the sausage for grinding. This isn't the way I am used to adding meat to pizza, but after buying a pizza in Kona, Hawaii, topped with Portugese sausage wherein the sausage had been cooked/drained/ground fine enough that it's presence in the pizza was all about seasoning and hardly at all about texture--except the lack of it, which I found exceptionally and unexpectedly refined and attractive.

Then I dumped that into a separate bowl and added a 14 ounce can of Muirglen fire roasted tomatoes and pulsed that a few times to make a coarse sauce. That went on the dough followed by the ground sausage, the two cheeses, red pepper flakes, the sliced onions and bell peppers. It was fun to add those two fresh ingredients: like it seems all couples, shortly after combining our lives Bob and I adopted a mutual favorite pizza combo that had probably not been in either of our previous top fives of sausage, onion and bell pepper. So this pizza was something of an homage to that along with a sense of how far we've come since then, combining the elements, even if via odds and sods leftovers, that are emblematic of what we do and who we know. Still sausage, bell pepper and onion, but a much more evolved version. Our life, it was all there in the pie.

And it was outstanding.

A trilogy of shrimps for the amuse bouche which was part of the menu for my wife's birthday lunch.

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Roasted shrimps in tomato jelly with yellow paprika, grape tomatoes and basil.
Braised shrimps on cucumber salad with sour cream and dill.
Steamed shrimps with saffron cauliflower and lobster bisque

[Robin Garr]

... I've been too sick to restock ... I'm getting over a bad cold ...

I hope you feel better soon, Jenise! The pizza sounds pretty curative, though!

[Jenise]

... I've been too sick to restock ... I'm getting over a bad cold ...

I hope you feel better soon, Jenise! The pizza sounds pretty curative, though!

Oh it's just a summer cold. But I hate summer colds! And I went without tastebuds for three days!

Heinz - As always, those dishes look great!

Tonight, another couple came over for a picnic in a nearby park. I made a chicken salad out of Ottolenghi's "Jerusalem" cookbook. For this one, you sear and then roast some boneless, skinless chicken breasts. While that's happening, you have a whole orange that's been sliced into twelve sections simmering with honey, vinegar, and water. When the chicken's just done roasting, you let it cool and then shred it coarsely by hand. Take the softened orange with its syrup and pulse it in a food processor. Then toss the chicken with plenty of sliced fennel, cilantro, mint, basil, about half of the orange stuff, sliced red chili (I used sriracha), lemon juice, olive oil, and S&P. The salad was great and our friends brought a lovely onion and cheese tart. And, as God is my witness, both went extremely well with a bottle of a Gnarly Head "Authentic White", a cheap white blend from a Lodi winery that clocks in at 11.5% abv..

[Jenise]

Mike, I didn't think 11.5% was possible from Lodi! Somebody must be getting smart and picking some grapes early.

We got back yesterday from a six day camping trip into the wilds of B.C. My god, what a beautiful place--we were in awe. Those of you who have only been to Vancouver haven't even gotten past the surface. We were travelling with another couple who have a rig identical to ours; we stayed in a different camp every night and prepared every meal in camp. We had breakfasts like crab cakes topped with fried eggs, broiled tomatoes, and a stunning bright yellow-skinned red-fleshed watermelon that I bought on the way. And dinners like grilled duck legs that had been in confit, topped with a fresh blueberry-balsamic gastrique and accompanied with marinated potatoes seared in the duck fat along with a 2010 Goldeneye Pinot Noir from the Anderson Valley, and smoked duck ravioli finished in a mushroom-dry marsala cream sauce with a 2007 Faiveley Burgundy. Oh, and that night for dessert, we had a fresh cherry pie we'd purchased in a town we drove through that was, definitively, the best cherry pie of my life.

And today is the annual terrine dinner at Bill Spohn's. CAN'T WAIT.

Smoked Duck Ravioli sighting!

Eager for the full report on the Terrine Convene.

I will be making Tuscan ragu with sausage, beef, and porcini tonight.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Smoked Duck Ravioli sighting!

Eager for the full report on the Terrine Convene.

Damn that ravioli was good! I made them out of the leftovers of our July 4th quackers before we even knew we were taking this trip. Once planning was underway, I prepped a mushroom-dry marsala-shallot base here at home and turned that into a sauce on site by adding a half pint of cream to it and cooking it until it changed color then in went the ravioli I cooked separately plus some diagonal slivers of asparagus that I blanched in the pre-ravioli water. It was disgustingly elegant for two-burner campfire cooking.

I am sure Bill's writing up the Terrine report as we speak.

[Jenise]

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I'm also impatient for the terrine report!

I'm home from work today, so I went way outside of my traditional breakfast regime (a single Clif bar) and made toast with ripe avocado, sliced homegrown tomatoes, and a bit of Maldon on top.

I could get used to that.