Friday...

It's Friday and time for some Ogden Nash:

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish that I had one at present.

There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth--
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

Puttanesca

Last night we whipped up a batch of puttanesca. I'd never heard of puttanesca before trying it at Sweet Tomatoes (now Three Tomatoes) in Lebanon. It quickly became a favorite of mine.

Meg drove the production and we followed fairly closely the recipe found in The Joy of Cooking. We didn't do anything particularly out of the ordinary but the combination of anchovies, black olives and of course garlic proved once again that the ordinary can be divine. It was.


Buvez: Ruffino Chianti Superiore.

Shirred Eggs

Posted by Meg: Getting back to our theme of Sunday brunch, today we made shirred eggs.

I always wanted to make these because they just sound so good, but I haven't done it until now. They are very easy and absolutely delicious. I wasn't sure how to make them so I checked The Joy of Cooking. Remarkably, there was no recipe. I think the earlier edition must have had one. (This would be the same edition that tells you how to skin and cook a squirrel). Anyway, then I checked Christopher Kimball's, The Cook's Bible, and he had a recipe but he strongly recommended cooking the eggs in a water bath for 40 minutes. I was too impatient so I went to the internet. I checked out one of my favorite online references, myrecipes.com. This site searches the recipes from Cooking Light, Southern Living, Sunset, Coastal Living, All You, Real Simple, and Health and rates them.

I found a recipe for shirred eggs that looked pretty straightforward, so I went with it. First you coat a 6 oz. ramekin with butter, add cream (I used light cream instead of heavy cream), 2 eggs, salt, pepper, chives, and top with grated hard cheese. I used Parmigiano-Reggiano. Bake in the oven for about 12 minutes then let set for 2 or 3 more. While the eggs were baking, I wondered if Julia Child had a shirred egg recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Yes she did! But wait, what? "Shirred eggs should never be attempted in oven, as it toughens them." Drat. Too late. I'll try her method next time.

The eggs were delicious! They were a cross between an egg dish and a custard, rich, but not over-the-top. Paired with buttered toast and a glass of white wine, a perfect Sunday brunch!

Chutney Verde

Posted by Meg: This is a typical dilemma for us. We buy a bunch of parsley because some recipe that we are making calls for a small amount of it. We use about a quarter of a cup at most and then we have most of a bunch left. Usually it goes bad and I go into denial for a couple of weeks, keeping the mushy bag in the crisper. Not this time! We had a convergence of three kinds of parsley and I was determined not to let them rot.

Here we go: we had curly parsley, cilantro and flat leaf parsley. We washed it all and put it in the Cuisinart. We had equal parts of cilantro and flat leaf parsley and a handful of curly. We added some onion, fresh ginger, 2 jalapenos and 1/2 of a serrano pepper, seeded. Pulse. Then sweetened coconut, a handful of unsalted peanuts, lemon juice, rice vinegar, salt, pepper, cumin and chili powder. Voila - green chutney! We served it with our leftover harira and pita bread. Not bad at all!

Tyler: I have to jump in and say this stuff was really wonderful! Fresh and vibrant with a really nice bit of heat and tang. It was fantastic with the soup and pita.

Buvez: McNeil's Warlord Imperial IPA (not Long Trail as reported earlier...)

Harira?

Posted by Meg: Last night for dinner, we made a vegetarian version of harira, a traditional Moroccan dish. Harira is usually eaten during the holy month of Ramadan at dinner to break the day of fast but it is also served for special occasions. The recipe varies by region and family and typically includes lamb. It also almost always includes onion, celery, fresh ginger, lentils, chickpeas, tomatoes, cilantro, parsley, saffron and other spices.

We followed a recipe from Cooking Light magazine, which also called for mushroom stock which added heartiness to the dish. It also included cinnamon, cayenne and garlic. The harira was fantastic! It was somewhere between a soup and a stew and we served it with toasted pita bread. We did a little research this morning and found out that it is often paired with hard boiled eggs sprinkled with salt and cumin or with lemon juice on the side. I think we'll try this tonight.

Mushroom Frittata

Posted by Meg: Today, we decided to make a frittata. This was our third attempt and we are still trying to master it. The recipe was from the latest edition of Cooking Light - a Mushroom Frittata. Let me start by saying that if you throw wild mushrooms, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, fresh thyme and fresh eggs together, it's hard to go wrong unless you overcook things. But the devil is in the details. First, cook the mushrooms.

A quick aside: we saw "Julie and Julia" last week and the concept of "don't crowd the mushrooms" was reinforced. I always crowd the mushrooms. They reduce to a fraction of their original size so I figured you might as well pack as many as you can into a frying pan. Wrong approach, according to Julia and she makes sense. If you put too many in the pan, "their juices escape and they do not brown". So this time, I gave the mushrooms much more space although probably not enough. The frittata recipe suggested an 8-inch ovenproof pan and since we had a 6" and a 9" caphalon pan, we went with the 9".

The recipe said to coat the pan with cooking spray but, since we are recently so influenced by Julie Child, we went with butter. Bottom line, the frittata was delicious but a bit thin. Should have used a smaller pan. Also, part of the frittata stuck to the pan. I don't know if the outcome would have been different with cooking spray.


A footnote: we subscribe to Cooking Light for a reason. Great recipes, great flavor, less fat and bad stuff in our diet. But Tyler and I are both pretty frugal. The frittata recipe called for 3 egg whites. What to do with the yolks? Fry them up and eat them along side the frittata! I'm a little embarrassed by that. But last time I had to use egg whites and not yolks, the yolks languished in my refrigerator for a couple of weeks before I tossed them. But isn't that better than eating them? Tyler would not agree with me on that.

Prosciutto is my friend...

As part of the ongoing birthday week celebration, Meg brought home some prosciutto for me and today I tried, for the first time, the pairing (tripling?) of figs, blue cheese and prosciutto. We halved the figs, added a chunk of blue cheese and then wrapped the result in prosciutto. Because of the ongoing downpour outside, we didn't fire up the grill but rather broiled them in the little electric toaster oven.

Oh my goodness!

The tastes of the three meld together to form a deliciously fruity fig taste with the salt from the blue cheese balancing the meatiness of the prosciutto. One of those mouthfuls that you simply don't want to actually swallow. Wow! I love birthdays!

Buvez: Hennepin Saison from the Ommegang (O My God This is Good!) Brewery.

Birthday Steak au Poivre...

Meg and I caught the movie Julie and Julia the other night which, along with my birthday, inspired a trip through our volume of the Mastering The Art of French Cooking. What's the easiest thing in the book that I love? That's easy: Steak au Poivre. My reaction when I see a nice steak is to fire up the grill but this steak is cooked in a skillet. Hmmm... Oh, and then they put a sauce on it. Huh? Flaming brandy?

I wrote for help. My friend Roger, who years ago helped me understand how to use my fingers to tell when a steak is done, was kind enough to send along some helpful hints including 1) use some good beef stock for the sauce and 2) use a sear/oven technique to cook the steak.

So last night Meg and I melded Roger and Julia's ideas together and went for it using a cast iron skillet and a non-flaming approach to adding the brandy as we finished off the sauce.

Add to that some delicious roasted vegetables (potatoes, onions, fennel, celeriac with rosemary and olive oil) and a fantastic Maple Walnut Apple Crisp that Meg made with our own apples and it was a feast!

Buvez: Smashed Pumpkin Ale from Shipyard Brewing (preparation) and a 2000 Januik Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington State (from the dark years).