Oooh, Cherry Crisp!

I realized yesterday that if I was going to use the other pound of cherries in the fridge up before they went bad it was going to have to happen immediately, heat and humidity be damned! Mr. Pea and I (who will be henceforth known as Dr. Pea!) decided to make an actual meal (something we hadn’t done in several days) using the stove (and the oven! Wowza!). He made a delicious pasta salad that, had I snapped photos before we snarfed it all down, I’d show you! He took half a pound of bowties, cooked them, and after they cooled mixed them with 2 c torn spinach leaves, 2 diced plum tomatoes, a few chopped scallions and a dressing. The dressing contained (I think) 1/4 c of olive oil, a few tsp of mustard, a clove of minced garlic. It was divine.

We made corn on the cob and burgers stuffed with blue cheese. They were a little underdone but delicious.

Then we feasted on this here cherry crisp. It would have been even better with a cup or so of extra cherries, but I like my crisp-to-fruit ratio leaning towards the crisp, so I wasn’t complaining!

First, wash, stem, and pit at least a pound of cherries. Mix with a couple of T of sugar and a couple of T of flour in a baking dish (I used a 9″ glass pan).

In a bowl, mix 3/4 c flour, 1/2 c brown sugar (packed), 1/2 tsp cinnamon, a dash of salt, and cut in at least 4 T of butter. Pour on top of fruit and pop into a 375 degree oven for a half an hour. Oooh, tasty!

Changing Course

Several months ago, I righteously wrote all about the glories of the metal coffee filter. Less trash! Happier earth! More money! No days without coffee because one is out of filters!

Which is all true. Except…truth be told…I didn’t like it. I liked it at first, and figured that the coffee dust that always seemed to make its way into my cuppa joe would somehow miraculously stop. Instead, it actually got worse–I’d have a layer of silty stuff at the bottom of every cup that I’d inevitably somehow drink and of which my stomach was not a fan.

As such I have bid adieu to the metal filter and gone back to my trusty trader joe’s unbleached paper filters. I am tossing each and every one into the compost bin after use, though, so that must count for something!

Right, about that calzone…

So tomorrow is the big day when I defend my dissertation. A few edits later, I will be bidding graduate school adieu. You know, I haven’t *not* been in school since I was 4. It’s like having a looming freedom that’s just a little bit scary. Though I’ll be teaching, so it’s not like my life is changing that drastically.

Anyway, what? Oh, calzone. Right. So I made calzones the other night. Well, a few nights ago. They’re packed with spinach, ricotta, mozzerella, and parmesan. If I made them again, I’d change the mozzerella to ricotta ratio, but I was making the recipe up in my head as I went, so it wasn’t exactly perfect. When I reheated it the other day, though, it was even better. So there you go.

I made a wheat dough following Joe’s recipe on Culinary in the Desert, but instead of making four smallish calzones I made two enormous ones, about 6″ wide and 14″ long or so. We each ate half for dinner and half for lunch the next day. Here’s his recipe.

So make that, and while it rises, you make the filling.

You’ll need:
1 10-oz box frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
2-3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
1 c ricotta cheese
1 c mozzerella (or more!)
a good few tablespoons parmesan
salt and pepper
1 egg

Combine all these things in a bowl using your hands. Hands are much more effective mixers than spoons for this job.

Oil a baking sheet and dust with cornmeal. I have an enormous one for this job.

Roll out your dough. If you make four calzones like Joe does, follow his baking procedure. If you make two like me, bake for about a half an hour at 450 degrees. I started mine at 475 a la Joe, but I realized they were going to burn before they cooked because they were so large.

Serve with some tomato sauce for dipping. Reheats quite well in your office’s trusty toaster oven.

Cherries!

This week at the market cherries were on sale for $1.99 a pound. We don’t exactly grow many cherries in New England, so they’re rarely cheap. I’ve never cooked with them before, either, so this was a first for me. I picked up a bag that ended up being well over 2 pounds (whoops), took them home and promptly started baking.

Outside of cherry pie, I’ve heard rave reviews over the years of a mysterious dish known as a clafoutis. A little googling yielded a recipe from joyofbaking.com that I decided to run with. I made the batter and separated about a pound of cherries from the rest of the bag, washed, stemmed, and pitted them (you’ll want an apron for this–I had cherry juice everywhere). Once you get through that step, the rest of the clafoutis is very easy to make. It tastes a lot like a dutch baby–a baked, eggy pancake–stuffed with oodles of cherries. It’s delicious. The recipe said to serve it immediately, but we had it after dinner and have continued to enjoy it cold all week.

So, in a food processor or mixer, whir together:
2 eggs
1/2 c flour
1/4 t salt
2 T sugar
3/4 c milk
1/2 t vanilla

Preheat the oven to 425 and let the batter sit while you do the cherries up.

Then, in the pan you’ll be baking in (a 9 or 10 inch skillet or baking pan), over medium heat, melt a tablespoon of unsalted butter. Add cherries and cook, 2-3 minutes. Add 2 T of sugar, and cook, 1-2 minutes. Pour batter over cherries and pop into preheated oven. Delicious! Easy! Cherries! Now I need to figure out what to do with the rest of them.

We ate our clafoutis with a spinach calzone dinner–more on that later.

Chicken Marsala

I just wrote an enormous entry explaining my absence and giving a detailed chicken marsala recipe, but when I hit the save button, I got a forbidden notice! and it turns out the auto-save didn’t work, and all I had left was this photo.

Lame.

To make what was a very long story short, I have a summer cold. I barely cooked all week, and felt ill on Thursday, the day I made this. Chicken marsala is easy to make, and best with risotto, but when you’ve eaten as much paella as we have lately, well, rice just wasn’t on the menu. We had potatoes boiled in a water and broth combo and coated with a generous layer of butter. Yum.

You can find the marsala recipe here:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/232152

I make it more or less exactly as it is written, only swapping in dried sage, and slicing my chicken breasts into fillets rather than pounding them thinly.

I hope you’re well! I just don’t have the energy to reproduce the wild and crazy entry I initially wrote. It’s sad, but true. I have to attend the birthday of my niece today so I need to save up all my energies for that

Veggie Paella

I started thumbing through back issues of Cooking Light on Sunday night, figuring that before I introduce any more cooking magazines into the house, I should really use the old ones more. Cooking Light has some great recipes, but the portions always seem a little nuts to me. Sometimes, if you have, say, two pasta dishes of the same volume, you’ll get one main dish serving that’s only 1c and the other will be 2c. It seems to me that this is how they keep things light–nothing clocks in over so many grams of fat, but if you followed their process, you’d be eating a weird variety of portion sizes every day.

Anyway, I decided to make Quick Vegetarian Paella last night, only I didn’t have any of hte “quick-cooking brown rice” the recipe called for. I had slow-cooking brown rice and plain-jane basmati rice. Figuring the latter cooks in less time than the former, I went with it.

About this time I also started making cocktails for Mr. Pea and myself. Maybe this was part of the problem. I don’t know how Julia Child drank and cooked at the same time. Maybe it’s because I was drinking gin and she drank wine. Anyway.

It didn’t dawn on me until, well, much later, that anything quick-cooking requires a good deal less liquid than anything long-cooking, because quick-cooking stuff has been processed to a point where typically it’s less fibrous and needs less broth or whatever to soften up. This occurred to me after I dumped 3 cups of basmati rice into the pot, but only 3 cups of liquid. I had to add, oh, 2-3 more cups of liquid to get the darn stuff to cook. And my god, we had a lot of paella. The original recipe is supposed to make ten cups, or 5 servings. We each ate a bowl, and there are four tupperwares stuffed to the brim with it, as well.

Don’t believe me? Here you go:

It’s a good thing this stuff was very, very tasty. It needed salt (Cooking Light, as a rule, does not believe in salt) and more pepper, but it was really very good! I’m going to provide you with their recipe with my adaptations, but remember–if you swap in regular white rice for quick-cooking brown, add a good deal more liquid and seasoning. If you swap in minute rice or something it’d be about the same. I wouldn’t use regular brown rice as the veggies you cook before you add the little grains would turn to mush before the rice would be done cooking.

Quick Vegetarian Paella, adapted from Cooking Light April 2005

2 T olive oil
2 c chopped onion
2 c 1-inch chopped green pepper
1 c sliced mushrooms
2 garlic cloves, minced
3 cups uncooked quick-cooking brown rice or basmati rice
2 cups chicken or veggie broth (more if you’re using white rice)
1 c water (more if you’re using white rice–you’ll need somewhere between five and six cups total liquid)
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp thyme (I think I only added a quarter. Whoops.)
2 c chopped tomato
1 c frozen green peas
1/2 c chopped green olives (disgusting–I left these out. Ewwww)
2 T chopped fresh parsley
1/4 tsp ground black pepper (you’ll need more, to taste)
1 14-oz can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped a bit (these are expensive! I had no idea! At $3/can, we have to finish all that paella!)

Heat olive oil in a stockpot–a big, tall pot–over med-high heat. Add onion, pepper, mushrooms, garlic, and saute for five or so minutes. Stir in rice, broth, water, and thyme, bring to a boil. Cover, turn the heat down, and simmer away. Check on it occasionally to make sure your water-to-rice ratio is ok; that’s how I discovered my little error. With regular white rice, this part takes about 15 minutes–the recipe calls for ten.

Stir in tomato, peas, disgusting olives if you’re using them, parsley, pepper, and artichokes. Cook a few more minutes to finish the rice and warm everything up. Add at least a half-teaspoon of salt and stir in–check it to see if it needs more.

Make sure you’ve got either a crowd or a lot of plasticware. I imagine this would also be good with a little chopped chicken, but it was quite delicious on its own.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we had gin and tonics. 2 oz gin, 5 oz tonic water (avoid spraying all over your kitchen, like I did), and a squeezed slice of lime over ice. Tasty and cool.

Zee Book Eez Finished (nearly)

I have not cooked much at all this week but I have a good excuse–my dissertation, all 350 pages of it, is done. Nearly. I submitted it for the defense, which is scheduled for a little over a week from now. It still needs some tweaking, but more or less, it’s ready. I hope. I also picked up a very surprising full time gig this week for the next academic year. I’ve been in school every year since I was four–this is my first salaried job with benefits, ever. And I’m much closer to thirty than twenty! So it’s been a very good week but also a very zany week, getting all these pieces together. The few days I did cook we pretty much just snarfed down dinner in short order, so no photos. But finally, after some mad printing Friday night ini the department office, Saturday morning lent itself to a leisurely breakfast. So I made blueberry pancakes.

Several years ago I searched long and hard for a good pancake recipe, one that rose up nicely and stayed formed, rather than spread out to make a thin cake. After I tried a whole bunch, I settled on one I think I initially found on allrecipes. I’ve been modifying it ever since.

The basic recipe is as follows.
Put in a bowl and whisk together:
3 1/2 t baking powder (that’s how they get so tall)
1 T sugar
1 t salt
1 1/2 c flour

Then, in a big old liquid measuring cup, whisk together
1 1/4 c milk
3 T canola oil or melted butter
1 egg

Add liquid to dry and mix until just combined–it’s not going to be very smooth. You’ll see a reaction pretty quickly from the baking powder–this stuff gets incredibly thick and airy.

Cook pancakes over medium high heat–this usually takes at least one batch to get just right. I added blueberries since they’re in season now. Makes anywhere from 10-12 pancakes, depending on how big you make them.

When fall comes around again, I’ll have to remember to share my pumpkin pancake recipe with you. They’re perfect on a cold morning, but that won’t be anytime soon!

Ratatouille-like Vegetable Saute

I moseyed down to my neighborhood’s branch of the Boston farmer’s market this past Saturday. My neighborhood is a small one, and there was only one veggie vendor, which was a little too bad. They did, however, have some nice-looking vegetables, so I picked some up to stash in the fridge. I also went to the local middle eastern grocer; they make their own delicious pitas, feta cheese, and olives, and sell produce at very low prices. I hadn’t been there in ages, though I used to go once a week or so. In my two stops, I got tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, and some tiny eggplant. I decided to make a vegetable saute with them last night, and it was pretty good.

First, I chopped up about a third of an enormous vidalia onion. I added it to olive oil in a wide saucepan over medium-high heat with 2 cloves of minced garlic. I turned the heat down and let them cook 5-10 minutes. I added a little salt and pepper. In the meantime, I chopped into 3/4″ dice 1 zucchini, 1 summer squash, and 2 tiny eggplant. I added these things, with a little more salt and pepper, to the onions. I tossed them around, and let them cook for about ten minutes. I chopped up 2 1/2 tomatoes (two from the market, 1/2 that was left in the fridge), and tossed them in with a good pinch of dry oregano and a smaller pinch of basil. I popped the lid on, turned the heat down to mediumish, and let it cook a good 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally. The idea was for the veg to get very soft, but not turn to mush. I removed the lid, cooked off a little of the liquid left in the pan, and added a T or so of chopped fresh parsley. I tested for seasoning, added a little more salt, and served it with some couscous. It was quite delicious with a little parmesan cheese on top. Maybe next time I’ll take it in an entirely different route and instead of Italian spices, add some curry powder. I bet that would be good, as well.

It’s getting really, really dark here for 9:30 in the morning–it looks like about 8:30 in the evening. We’ve had a bunch of storms roll through since yesterday and it seems another one is coming. Batten down the hatches!

Macaroni Salad

While I love the variety one can have with pasta salads for the summertime, I still often find myself coming back to traditional macaroni salad, especially on weeknights. Maybe this is because it’s kind of comforting–I grew up eating it on the patio with the family; it’s also because it’s inexpensive and easy. While I love feta cheese and numerous veggies in a good pasta salad, I also love to get by on the cheap. That’s when I turn to my old pal, macaroni salad.

I made this for two of us, with leftovers–it would feed four or five as a side, and can be easily doubled or tripled.

Start by boiling, together, a little less than a half a box (half a pound, that is) of elbow macaroni and a couple of eggs. My elbows were said to cook in eight minutes, so I put the eggs in first (they usually take nine). As always, I broke the shell, so there was a whisp of white in the water. When both are done, drain, rinse with cold water, remove the shells, and rinse some more. If I were smart I’d do this hours before dinner so the cold water rinse would be unnecessary, but I made this at about 5:30 last night.

Dice up half a cucumer, about a quarter of an onion, and, once they’re cold, your eggs. You could also add celery here, or maybe carrot, or whatever floats your boat.

For the dressing, I mixed about a tablespoon of spicy mustard, a little over a 1/4 c of light mayo, a couple of tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (white or red wine would also work here). To that I added a pinch of kosher salt, a couple grinds of pepper, a pinch of red pepper flakes (I’ve learned the hard way not to shake the jar over a bowl), and a good pinch of Green Goddess salad dressing herbs from Penzey’s Spices, one of hte most fantastic spice resources on the planet. According to the site, Green Goddess contains “green onion, sugar, basil, celery flakes, minced garlic and dill weed,” but you could easily sub any similar combination of herbs, dried or fresh, in your dressing. Taste it as you go along–you might want more spice, more vinegar, more salt.

I add the dressing to the pasta only right before serving, as the pasta tends to suck it all up and lose a lot of the vinegar tang. The next day, as I munch on the leftovers, I usually add a little bit more vinegar and a tad more salt to perk it up.

This salad is great with burgers or anything else you pop onto the grill.

Bagels

There is a group of food bloggers out there in the wilds of the internet known as the Daring Bakers. They’ve made some crazy, elaborate things that I would never even dare to try, lacking both the time and cash to do so, but this month they made bagels. Reading a number of Daring Baker posts on these tasty breakfast breads, it became clear that their was a wide variety of success and failure rates, and most people said that the bagels were good, but didn’t look as expected. I made bagels once, I think when I was a teenager, and I don’t remember it going well. I decided that now was the time to try again.

The Daring Bakers worked with the recipe found here, and one glance at it and you’ll notice that this is hardly a simple recipe–it’s practically a novel. Bagels contain a minimum of ingredients–yeast, flour, sugar, salt, water–but a multitude of steps. The first step was to proof the yeast, make the dough, let it rise and then form the bagels. Here are mine. You let them rise only briefly once you shape them.

All bagels feature an initial cooking phase of boiling. You drop your bagels into a pot of boiling water with a little sugar. My bagels, which were previously about 4″ across, grew enormously. Here they are in the pot. The surface of the bagels became all bumpy during this stage, which, from what I gather from the Daring Bakers, is common, but kind of ruined the nice smooth exterior I expected.

A lot of my bagels took a bit of a beating coming out of the hot water, as my spider skimmer thing is only so wide, and dented them a bit. It was a shame, but there wasn’t much I could do. Once they’re boiled, the bagels sit on a clean dishtowel, and you can coat them with an egg wash and add toppings. I added poppy seeds to two, sesame seeds to two, kosher salt to two, and left two plain.

Then the bagels are baked in a 400 F oven, and flipped over partway through the baking. This was done in order to keep them from flattening on one side, but several of my bagels became flattened on both sides as a result.

Here are the finished bagels–the ones that didn’t flatten. They’re very tasty, though not as toothsome as I would have liked, and a bit more bready than bagely on the inside. I look at it as a lesson–now I know I can do it, so I’ll look at some other recipes and try it again sometime. I only made a half-batch, and we’ve polished off four already. Sadly, there isn’t any cream cheese in the house, but they’ve been good with butter and blueberry jam. If you have two hours to kill and are looking for a challenge, bagel making will both eat that time and offer you the opportunity!