Mushroom Sandwiches

While I have no photo for you, I did make dinner tonight–portabella mushroom sandwiches. While Mr. Pea said they were good, I’m on the fence, and it’s mostly because of user error.

Portabella mushrooms are great big fungi. I’ve tried making them on the grill with some luck, but tonight I did them in a deep skillet/saucepan. After taking off their woody stems (I bought HUGE caps), I dusted the dirt off of them, placed a couple tablespoons of olive oil in the pan, and made mistake #1: I turned the heat up too high. My idea was to sear the caps, but what ended up happening was that the parts of the pan that did not have direct contact with the mushrooms got reaaaaally hot. Then when I flipped the caps, the bits of cap stuck to the pan that weren’t now covered (ie, I can’t flip onto the exact same spot) got reaaaaallly hot, and a little smoky, even after just a couple of minutes.. I splashed the caps with Worcestershire sauce, salt, garlic powder, and pepper, and covered the pot. If the pan wasn’t so hot, the mushrooms would have generated enough liquid for a gentle steam. Instead, we got a bit of steam and a whole lot of water that just made the hot mess of the pan worse–we got crazy amounts of smoke. If I was paying attention, I would have caught this, but I was dawdling online and didn’t notice until the kitchen was terribly smokey. Olive oil smoke is really pretty nasty, too. Then I added the cheese and covered the pan, adding water to the pan and turning the heat down. While this caused the burning and smoking to stop, the steam that resulted flavored the delicate mozzarella I made this afternoon expressly for a tasty mushroom topping and instead of creamy dairy goodness, it just tasted like portabella and olive oil smoke. While they weren’t terrible, these sandwiches were not what I’d hoped, either. However, they would be really tasty with just a little modification, mostly to the heat–keeping the heat at medium would eliminate the smoke and the burned flavor of the cheese.

Lesson learned!

Delicious Cheesy Pasta with Beef

Tonight’s dinner satisfied a craving I’ve had for some kind of creamy pasta that wasn’t necessarily Italian and was instead more southwestern. This recipe, which I made up as I went along, fit the bill. The cheddar I used came from the deli–”slicing cheddar,” it was called–and seemed a little creamier than the cheddar you get in brick form. The texture was a little more like American cheese, which I suspect is why, as it melted, it turned into a smooth and tasty sauce with jolts of solid cheddar throughout. Grated cheddar would probably work just as well.

You’ll need:
1 T olive oil
1/2 small onion, chopped
12 oz ground beef (we got the nice all natural stuff at the store)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes with green chilis
1/2 c or so tomato juice (I froze the juice from a drained can of whole tomatoes–I used half of it here, so it’s an amount you’ll want to eyeball)
1/4 lb cheddar, grated/chopped/whatever
salt and pepper
8 oz penne, cooked

Start by getting your salted water ready and penne going. My penne only took 5 minutes to cook.

In a deep skillet, add oil over medium heat. Add onions and saute until they start to soften. Add beef, breaking up with wooden spoon, and brown. Add garlic partway through. Add can of tomatoes and tomato juice. Cook until mixture thickens, about five minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add pasta and cheese, stirring but then letting it set to melt the cheese. Stir again and serve. Yum!

Coming out of hiding. And pizza.

Well, I’ve been quiet about a week now, ever since the yogurt experiment. We ate darn near most of it; the last bit of the last jar is in a batch of coleslaw for dinner later. And we lost some of the strawberry yogurt—the sugar/fruit started to mold around the rim so we figured we’d best toss the end of it for safety’s sake. But outside of eating yogurt, there’s been other stuff going on. We started packing. Our car was robbed. We packed much faster. Mr. Pea was bitten by a dog. I went to a conference in Philadelphia. This week, after today, is going to be totally crazy. But at least it’s the next-to-last full week of classes (joy! joy! joy!). I have a school thing 9-5 on the next two Saturdays. Then I have exams, and then we move. Joy! Joy! Joy!

Hang on, gotta stir the granola.

Anyway, I made some pizza last week that was just a very different pizza from most that I make, and I photographed it to share with you once I had the chance. Typically I make thin-crust pizzas, partly because we like them but also because I’m too lazy to make enough crust and let it rise, dig out the pizza stone, heat it up, and so on. But I was feeling ambitious last week, and less fearful than usual. We have a pizza peel, one of the gadgets we registered for when we got married, but which I’ve never been any good at using. The couple times I tried to use it–make the pizza on it, shake pizza onto the stone–I ended up with a gloppy mess, as the dough would stick and then turn into a heaping mess thanks to my shaking. But last week, it worked out, and it worked out because while previously I’d smoosh the crust onto the peel, this time I realized that caused sticking–instead, I hand-tossed it, turning it into a circle and letting gravity pull it along, finally resting it on the heavily-cornmealed peel when it was ready. Then I dressed it, and slid it in the oven. The results were startlingly tasty. While I love our little pizza place down the street, there might be no going back now.

The dough I modified from a recipe here, which I found while browsing different pizza recipes. I made it less wet by about 1/4c water, and worked it into a firm ball and kneaded it until smooth, rather than going the no-knead direction in the fridge. For sauce I blended the drained whole tomatoes from a 28 oz can with two or three big cloves of garlic and a handful of parsley, plus some s&p. We used half of this mixture on 2 pizzas. The rest is in the freezer.

Then I just shredded some mozzarella and parmesan, added it, and topped it with chopped leftover roasted asparagus and slid the dressed pizza onto the stone in the hot oven, some 475 degrees (which in my oven is anywhere from 420 to 525). 12 minutes later, the crust had risen–the edges extra-puffy–the cheese had melted, and it was delicious.

I apologize for the shoddy photo, which doesn’t do the pizza any justice. Our kitchen has shoddy, yellowy lighting. Hopefully the next one will be better.

What the…

Typically when I log in here wordpress tells me that I can make this blog sweetpeacooks.com for $15 a year. Today it told me it could become mybabypeacooks.com. Where’d that come from? Very mysterious….

I hope you all had a good Easter–I ate out with my family, which was a little odd, since we’ve never ever eaten out on a holiday. The day was nice, though. Back to work today–reading, writing, hopefully packing, and getting in a walk once the temp goes over 45. Man, it’s cold for April. Or, it’s cold for me. Tease me with 60 degree days and I have a hard time going back.

I haven’t forgotten about you.

I just haven’t recharged the camera batteries and I’ve been too swamped to do anything creative in the kitchen. I did mix one of the jars of yogurt yesterday with berries I’d frozen last summer–I defrosted them, banged away at them with a masher and then mixed them with honey before adding them to the yogurt. We’ll see if that gets Mr. Pea on board.

Last night we had a late-night feast on mozzarella sticks and garlic bread. By late-night I mean 9pm, but still–I don’t think I’ve gone to pick up that kind of stuff well after dinner in years. They were tasty, though, and my favorite kind of mozzarella sticks–square and buttery. We watched bad tv, ate our snacks, and laughed about it. It might contradict my yogurt-making self to eat fried cheese, likely previously frozen and containing at least one weird additive, after making a healthy dinner, but I can live with that.

Yogurt in action!

Here it is, folks–the yogurt I made on Sunday. I was going to post this yesterday but my camera batteries died right as I took the photo, so it had to wait until I good steal them from a remote when Mr. Pea wasn’t looking. After the yogurt finished incubating on Sunday I stuck it in the fridge overnight and ate a spoonful the next morning. I was the guinea pig, not just in terms of flavor, but also in terms of “if leaving milk warm for 8 hours makes someone ill, let’s find out.” All was fine. The next day I ate a bowlful of yogurt and granola, like this one, and we watched carefully. And I was fine! Hey, if people have been making this in desert climates since ancient times and not getting ill (er, maybe they did on occasion), leaving it in a cooler and popping it in the fridge couldn’t be so bad.

I really like this yogurt. Yep, it’s plain, but it’s got less tang than, say, Dannon’s plain has, and it really didn’t turn out watery at all. It’s got a nice, smooth, buttery aftertaste which at first put me off but which I’ve come to really like. It resembles it’s mother culture, which was a container of Stonyfield farm nonfat plain. I haven’t strained any yet to see what yogurt cheese tastes like, but it’s on my agenda.

Mr. Pea, on the other hand, is less enamored with my little science project. He isn’t too keen on plain yogurt and while I swore this was better than typical plains, he is very ‘meh’ on the whole thing. I might stir in a few tablespoons of last summer’s strawberry jam into a jar (we have 4 pint jars of yogurt in the fridge from a half gallon of milk) and see if that helps. They should last at least 2 if not 3 weeks in there, so even if he continues to dislike it, I can probably eat most of it myself. We’re down to 3 jars already, anyway.

If any of you bravely make your own yogurt, messing around with bacteria in your kitchen, let me know how it goes. One of my colleagues at school yesterday said I was a throwback to the 70s. Hey, if I can be an ardent feminist and make most of my food from scratch, I think that’s a label with which I can live.

Growing cultures, deliberately and on accident

Today I set about making my own yogurt. Mr. Pea seems to think I’ve fallen over the deep end and insists I need a catch phrase like “I can do that!” but said like Urkel. The process isn’t hard–heat up milk to 195, cool down to 110, add starter yogurt, mix, incubate. Currently we are in the incubate phase. I’m not sure how well it’s going as after I poured my yogurt into jars (I’m incubating in our little cooler, and the big pot wouldn’t fit), lots of tiny bits of starter yogurt were floating at the very bottom of my pot. So we shall see. Hopefully it’ll set up, maybe just need a little draining, and then I can stir in some strawberry ‘jam’ and be on my merry way.

On the other hand, we accidentally left out our parmesan cheese, wrapped in plastic wrap, on the table in our rather warm dining room overnight and well into today. It was kind of sweaty and gross, so we tossed it. This is rather sad, as it’s a pretty new block of cheese and I hate throwing away food. At the same time, it was a pretty new block of cheap Argentinian parmesan, which we both agreed was rather bland, so it gives us an excuse to get some of the real deal sooner than planned.

We are going out to eat in a few hours. We made it through nearly an entire week of no take-out/eat out. We were doing this for budget rather than health concerns, so when we ‘cheated’ and went out on Wednesday night for pizza but didn’t have to pay for it, it didn’t count as veering out of our plan. Technically we should wait until after 7p today to make it through the solid week, but one of my colleagues wants us to meet up for beer and pizza at five, and frankly, we’re ready.

And it begins.

I packed the first box today. We signed a lease on a new place last weekend and we can begin to move in May 1. I want to be totally in by May 10, even though our lease at our current place doesn’t expire until May 31. If we’re paying for both, I’d rather be in the quieter new one. So I have packed the first box. 45 more to go.

Last night our neighbors were kind enough–again!–to remind us why we are going. Our upstairs neighbor, with whom we had a minor tiff, has been great ever since he yelled at me. Our next door neighbors have been the real issue. Last night they had a little get-together starting at 11. Cars drove down the driveway–next to our bedroom windows–dropping people off, parking, leading to lots of chatting. I was in bed at this point, trying to catch up on some sleep. Ha! Beginning at 2 am people began to leave. One person left pretty much on the hour until 5 am. We woke up for every single one, as they’d have a nice chat before getting into their cars. Plus someone’s alarm went off. One girl at 4 began shouting. Awesome!!! It would be much worse if we just signed a lease to stay, rather than to go.

And so I pack. Happily, this time.

Poor Man’s Pastas

I had every intention of writing this post yesterday but this week has been really crazy at work. The semester is reaching that screeching pitch where the kids are over-busy and turning into zombies, and I am over-busy both with them and with committee work. That’s a warning of sorts to potential future faculty: if you don’t like serving on committees, maybe you should rethink your career path! So far I enjoy it a lot, but it’s a lot of madness and chaos these days.

The other night Mr. Pea and I enjoyed a very simple pasta, one that is considered a traditional “poor man’s pasta” because of the paucity of ingredients. We got to talking and came to the conclusion that most poor man’s pastas are tasty enough to envy those made with expensive ingredients and are made extra-special by the short amount of time you can make them in. The one we made the other night was a breadcrumb-based dish; but aglio e olio–spaghetti tossed with olive oil that’s gently simmered with garlic and a little red pepper flakes, topped with pecorino or parmesan–is another great example. Even carbonara–pasta with eggs and a little bacon–is a poor-man’s pasta.

Pasta with Breadcrumbs
This is best made with fresh breadcrumbs that you’ve made yourself, blitzing a heel of bread or so in the food processor or blender, but we’ve also made it using unseasoned breadcrumbs from a can. Serves 2.

6 oz pasta, preferably a long cut like spaghetti or fettucine
3/4 c bread crumbs
1 T extra virgin olive oil
1 T unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
salt and pepper to taste

Get your pasta going. With 5-10 minutes left, warm up the oil and butter together over medium-high heat and add garlic. Cook a minute, being careful not to let it brown. Add bread crumbs, toss to coat, and let it get toasty, 5-10 minutes. Toss pasta with crumbs, season with a little salt (we don’t use pepper, but you could), and voila. Delicious.