recipes – Page 28 – The Kitchen Illiterate

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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An Improvised Paella with Sausage and Shrimp

Paella

It must be all the talk of Spain that’s been circulating around our house lately, what with the wifey expatriating herself to the land of pork, but I was struck last week with a very strong desire to make paella. I’d never even tasted paella, much less made it before last night, but according to those who’ve actually travelled out of the country (i.e. people who are not me) this is a very excellent version and I managed to do justice to the classic Valencian dish. We even made it on Sunday, the day on which paella is traditionally eaten Spain, so I feel assured that I am properly preparing Crystal for her Spanish sojourn.

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Chili Cornmeal Crusted Mahi Mahi and Fried Okra

Fish and Okra

It was a happy day in my life the first time I tasted fried okra. It was back in the college days, when Crystal was still living at the Market Street house, and she fried up the biggest batch of fried okra I’d ever seen. Well, it was the only batch of fried okra I’d ever seen, but I instantly wanted to see more. She sent me home that night with a quart-sized zip lock bag full of the stuff, which I stuck in the refrigerator and ate cold all week. You might think that sounds terrible, but it was an awesome snack when I was studying and writing papers and drinking beer. I’ve wanted more ever since, so I have no idea why it took nearly seven years before Crystal and I thought of frying up another batch.

When I saw fresh okra at the market last weekend, my excitement knew no bounds. I instantly snatched up handfuls and brought it home to the lady. Of course, she had only ever made fried okra with the frozen stuff before, so this was an experiment for both of us. A tasty experiment.

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Day o’ Salads: Corn and Black Bean Salad with Cumin Lime Vinaigrette

Corn and Black Bean Salad

I try to eat salad everyday. It’s usually just some mixed greens and carrots with whatever salad dressing I have in the refrigerator, but occasionally I’m capable of getting creative. And my creativity was encouraged by Lisa over at La Mia Cucina, who’s throwing a Salad ‘Stravaganza. She asked for my salads, and I am only too happy to oblige. And yesterday, I obliged with not just one salad, but two. Two salads in one day? Am I crazy? Well, yes, but that shouldn’t have been your first indication of that.

I’ve been pondering this Corn and Black Bean Salad for a few days. Now, corn and black bean salads aren’t really that unique. I see them everywhere, so I wracked my brain trying to think of some way to make this one different. Most of the recipes I’ve seen call for cilantro, and because my dear, dear wifey/housemate Crystal loathes the stuff, that was obviously not going to work. I thought and thought and thought, but it wasn’t until I started throwing vegetables into a bowl that an idea finally occurred to me. Isn’t that just the way it always works?

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Aish bel lahm and broccoli bil banadura

Aish and broccoli

The Middle Eastern Cookbook has been sitting on my shelf virtually untouched for many, many months. Everytime I’m tempted to experiment from its pages, I’m put off by the ingredients I don’t have and, frankly, the less than appetizing pictures. I mean, the photograph of Kofta on page 71 is enough to put a person off food for a couple of days. But last weekend, tempted once again by an unfamiliar cuisine, I cracked the book’s spine and immediately my eyes fell on a recipe for Aish bel lahm. The picture looked like something I’d had before. Something I’d had and loved.

When I was in college my friend Sarah’s father, an Armenian man who’d moved to the States from Lebanon many years before, would occasionally bring her some frozen flatbreads, topped with either delicious meatstuffs or a tangy herb paste. I could never get the name right, but I loved them, and when we both moved away from Santa Cruz and I couldn’t remember what the damn things were called, I wondered if I’d ever get to try them again. When I saw the picture of Aish bel lahm, it was like running into an old friend. An old friend I was going to eat for dinner! Mwah hah hah! Ok, sorry.

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Buerre Noisette (with some pasta and stuff)

Buerre Noisette

Last night I again found myself in the position of trying to throw together dinner without going to the market. I wanted to try something new, but had to do it using only the ingredients already living in my refrigerator. I wanted to experiment with a new sauce, but having discovered earlier that all of the various dairy products and stocks had gone bad, my options were limited. Not only that but my pasta, chicken and prosciuotto tortellini, was pretty dang flavorful, so I wanted a sauce that wouldn’t overwhelm it. What to do, what to do?

The Joy of Cooking to the rescue! After perusing pages upon pages of sauce recipes and basics, I finally discovered one with only two ingredients. Two ingredients I actually had. A buerre noisette. I only say it the French way because I’m pretentious like that. Otherwise known as a brown butter sauce, it’s pretty much exactly that. You cook butter very slowly over low heat until it’s just about to burn, then add a tiny, teeny bit of an acid (lemon juice or white wine vinegar) and you have about the simplest sauce there is.

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Bad bread, bad!

Bread disaster

I’m not sure how I do these things, but yet again, I baked a loaf of bread that ended up mutilated. Oops.

I decided to bake bread this morning because the last half of the loaf I bought was run through with mold, and my current fund shortage eliminated the possibility of a trip to the market. Besides that, it’s a grey, 50 degree day here in Boston, and it seemed a good day for baking. And I even decided to try a new recipe.

I’ve avoided Margaux Sky’s Beautiful Breads and Fabulous Fillings before now because her recipes always seem to call for so many ingredients. Plus they make enough dough for four loaves of bread at a time, and using 18 cups of flour at once seems decadent to me. But this time I decided to go for it. I decided I could do the math and quarter the recipe. We had milk AND half and half AND eggs in the refrigerator, which never happens, so it seemed almost destiny. Margaux Sky’s Basic Whole Wheat Bread here I come. Except not.

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