Author: laura k

Tahini Vegetable Ravioletti Salad

Tahini Vegetable Pasta Salad

Thus far this is definitely proving to be the summer of the salad. I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much pasta salad in my life, but I’m not complaining. I am a pasta addict, and if I can eat it cold, on a hot summer afternoon when all I want to do is lay down in a bucket of ice, so much the better. And adding a ton of vegetables makes me feel slightly virtuous.

The part that’s proving to be a bit of a challenge is coming up with unique ways to dress all these pasta salads. The mayonnaise option is over played, and I can’t be satisfied just drizzling some cold vegetables with oil and vinegar or Italian salad dressing. Where’s the creativity in that? And like most other things I attempt in the kitchen, I just can’t bring myself to make the same thing twice, so I’m constantly experimenting with dressings and vegetable combinations. So far there has been a lot of household happiness as a result of my various experiments, so I guess I haven’t gone wrong yet.

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The most glorious summer of all…

Ice Cream Maker

This summer promises to be extra spectacular. Why? Because my kind and generous parents sent me the greatest summertime diversion ever as a birthday gift: an ice cream maker. A red, shiny, beautiful ice cream maker. And because they are so brilliant, they also sent a copy of David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, the book that is showing its lovely cover all over the internets these days. My excitement for ice cream is boundless. I want to make new and different varieties every single day, but if Crystal and I went through that much ice cream, well, let’s just say neither of us can afford a whole new wardrobe. As it is, I’ve only had the thing for a week and I’ve already made two batches.

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Too much beautiful meat?

Tasty pasta

If you’re anything like me, you probably end up with tons of leftovers after any social gathering that involves food. And in the summertime, a lot of those leftovers are probably grilled. Our Fourth of July gathering was attended solely by people who believe it’s better to have too much than not enough, and the refrigerator at the end of the night, stuffed full of grilled sausages and hamburgers and hot dogs and steak, was a staggering sight. I mean, the guys manning the grill outside cooked up twelve hamburgers and two pounds of sausages and a whole, huge Tri-tip steak for about eight people. No one can eat that much meat.

As the resident chef in our humble abode, it fell to me to figure out what to do with all that leftover meat. I mean, no one wants to eat microwaved hamburgers all week. Of course there is the obvious: barbecue-sauce slathered grilled chicken breasts can be shredded for chicken salad sandwiches. Steak can be sliced up and added to salads or slapped between two pieces of bread. But who wants to be obvious?

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What to eat with meat? Potato Salad and Cornbread!

Picnic Salads

It took me weeks to decide what to serve alongside all that meat at our cookout party on Saturday. I pored over all my cooking magazines and did numerous epicurious searches. There are so many picnic options I was having a hard time committing–I knew I wanted to make some kind of pasta salad, but I wanted it to be different. And potato salad is one of my favorites, but it’s usually so predictable and boring. What to do, what to do? My option paralysis was setting in and I almost threw in the towel and told everyone else to bring something, but at the last minute, inspiration struck.

Inspiriation was inside an old issue of Bon Appetit, where I glimpsed a recipe for Potato Caesar Salad. I had been thinking about making caesar salad anyway, but this sounded almost like divine intervention. I love potato salad, I love caesar salad, and I felt pretty sure this was not a picnic table standard. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, because I wanted to try a very traditional caesar dressing (and yes, I know raw eggs are generally bad news bears at a picnic, but we were very conscientious about keeping it refrigerated.) And it was a knockout–even people who said they usually hate potato salad luurved it. And I love it when that happens.

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Meat, Meat, Beautiful Meat

Meat Valentine

Whew–this has been a week of serious grilling. Between the Fourth of July and my birthday a few days later, I have ingested more red meat than a person should be allowed, and the food coma has prevented me from sitting down and writing about any of it. Pulled pork, steak, hamburgers, sausages…it’s exhausting just thinking about it. But it was all sooo delicious. Mmm. Meeeat.

This past Saturday we had a little gathering to celebrate the fact that I managed to age another year. Of course I had to make all the food myself. All of my food-loving friends wanted to bring something, but I refused to allow it. Control freak? Perhaps. For some reason, I got really excited about planning a menu, and I enjoy cooking so it’s not as though it was a pain in the ass to cater my own birthday party.

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Pizza Chronicles, Part Six (or Eight): Stonewall Kitchen and a Pizza Stone

Look at that crust!

I luuurve our pizza stone. I’ve never had such crazy, impassioned feelings for a kitchen implement before, but this is true and lasting love. This is neverending devotion and infatuation. This pizza stone is the answer, the solution to all of my dough baking woes, to my not quite perfect crusts and my constant feelings of pizza dissatisfaction. Now that there is a pizza stone in my life, I can scale the peaks of pizza perfection, I can create crispy cheesy bites of wonder and glory rivaling anything the local pizza delivery man can send my way. My dreams of creative pizza experimentation can be realized.

Ok, I might be waxing just a bit too poetical, but when I pulled this pizza out of the oven last night, I couldn’t help feeling a little thrill in my heart. It was, yes, the best pizza so far. I realize I say that every single time, but I also take that to be a sign that my methods are improving. And method, shmethod, the single best pizza improver so far is the pizza stone.

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My First Cherry Pie

Cherry Pie

One summer about six or seven years ago, my friend Charlie and I went out to pick blackberries by the DeLaveaga disc golf course in Santa Cruz. We fought through brambles and stinging bugs and filled a couple buckets with blackberries, enough to try to bake a pie. What we didn’t do, though, is figure out how to make pie crust, and our kitchen experimentation ended up a disaster. We decided to settle for a sugary blackberry sauce to pour over ice cream, and we were perfectly satisfied. But pieless.

About four years ago, my good friend PJ Burks came to visit in Boston, and we went apple picking. It was a glorious fall afternoon, and we filled bags and bags with the most delicious apples I’ve ever tasted. We came home with all of our apples and decided to make a pie, but remembering my previous crust difficulties, we bought a premade crust. Our apple pie was beautiful and we were very proud, but my heart remained rankled by the fact that I had to yet to really, truly, and honestly bake a pie.

Last week I bought an enormous bag of beautiful cherries, and I decided this was it. This was the time to bake a pie, a real pie, from scratch, with a lattice-top crust and everything. And when the weather finally cooled down enough, on Friday, I did it. I baked my first cherry pie.

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Tortellini Salad with Creamy Herb Dressing

Tortellini Salad

It has been so wickedly, unbearably hot here these past two days that I can’t do any of the things I want to do in the kitchen, like make pizza or bake a cherry pie or get anywhere near the stove. It is such oppressive, mind-melting heat that it feels like August, not June. Our apartment is on the third floor and has an amazing ability to retain heat like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I’m not sure why we’ve never bothered to put in an air conditioner, but if this past week is any indication of what the rest of the summer will be like, it might be about that time.

So what does a person eat when it’s so hot it requires all your energy just to open your mouth? Salads. Cold, refreshing salads. This is when Lisa’s salad round up comes in very, very handy. I perused, I pondered, I tried to stay upright in front of my computer when all I really wanted to do was lay down in a tub of ice. And then I chanced upon the best hot night dinner ever: pasta salad.

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Caramelized Onion Tortilla Espagnola

Tortilla?

In keeping with our little household Spanish theme, the other night I decided to make Tortilla. The Spanish version of Tortilla (Tortilla Espagnola) is not in any way the same as the Mexican version of tortillas. In fact, Tortilla Espagnola is pretty much just a frittata with potatoes. But it is delicious. It’s a staple in any tapas spot, served either warm or room temperature, and it is awesome.

As I searched through recipes for Tortilla Espagnola, I realized one thing: They are all boring. The only ingredients listed were potatoes, eggs, and salt. Blech. Dull dull dull. Frittatas, the Italian version of the same thing, are often way more interesting, including all kinds of stuff like peppers and spinach and meat and cheese. I’m sure you can find Tortilla that includes some of this yummy stuff, but none of those recipes were available to me. The major differences I could see between a Frittata and a Tortilla were the cooking method and the fact that Tortilla always includes potatoes. Otherwise, they are pretty much the same dish, so I decided to try my hand at some kind of bastard child of the two. A Tortatta, if you will. Heh. I’m a dork.

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Better Bread: The Experiment Continues

Lovely Loaf

After my last disastrous loaf, I knew I just had to get back on the proverbial horse and try again. This time around, I decided to continue the project I began last winter and try to learn the fundamentals of bread making. Without a solid foundation, I figured, I would just end up with many, many exploded loaves. And no one wants that.

Barring running out and buying a new bread book (which I want to do, but the bank account says stop buying books), I searched around on the interwebs and found a great bread lesson series at The Fresh Loaf. I stumbled upon this site last winter, and then promptly forgot all about it, as I am wont to do. Despite the fact that this wasn’t actually my first loaf of bread, I decided to follow the lessons from step one, because I am just that kind of orderly, rule-abiding lady.

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