recipes – Page 33 – The Kitchen Illiterate

At least I know I can always make excellent Beans and Rice.

Delicious Beans and Rice

I fell in love with beans and rice during my brief attempt at vegetarianism, in high school. My mom discovered that together they make up a complete protein, and I’ve been eating them ever since, even after I renewed my relationship with hamburgers. I’ve experimented with multiple variations, I’ve used mixes from a box and from scratch, I’ve added chicken and sausage and beef, but no matter how I put it together, it is always deeply satisfying. When I was in college, this was a meal I made at least once a week, and it occurred to me the other day that it had been quite awhile since it had graced my kitchen. More significantly, as the one dish I’ve perfected from countless experiments, it was a dinner that has been surprisingly absent from this website.

The version I made last night was actually different from any I’d made before, and I think one of my very best. I had some leftover portobellos, which I’d never used before, and I decided to add tomato paste and red wine: both new additions. I also tossed in a dash of some kind of creole seasoning, which has been on our spice rack for who knows how long, but I suspect that it didn’t really add much to the overall taste, so I left it out of the recipe. I should probably remove it from the spice rack, too.

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Perfecting Pizza Dough with a Portobello Spinach Pizza

Portobello Spinach Pizza

I have a cookbook shelf crowded with recipes for pizza dough. They are all very similar: yeast, flour, oil, sugar, salt, water, or some combination of the above. They vary mainly in proportions, or in rising time, and in how much pizza dough each recipe will make. The last time I made pizza, I used Giada’s recipe from Bon Appetit, and I quite liked it (which I suppose proves that occasionally Giada and I can get along). I wanted, this time, to try something new, so I pulled down a cookbook I haven’t yet had a chance to use: Peter Reinhart’s American Pie. (Well, I guess I have had the chance to use it, I just haven’t.)

What immediately frustrated me is the quantity of pizza dough all the recipes make. This is a problem I have with other bread cookbooks as well. I do not need four loaves of bread, or six 10-inch pizzas. I have enough problems with leftovers as it is. Why, oh why, do cookbooks tend to assume you’re cooking for a family of twelve? Despite the fact that Reinhart offers a gajillion different dough recipes, I didn’t want to fuss with any of them, because I just didn’t want to have to do all the crazy math calculations to reduce the recipes. Back to Giada is was. I did, however, pick up some great tips.

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Roasted Mashed Potatoes, and another Roasted Chicken

Roasted Mashed Potatoes

I had been thinking all weekend about why mashed potatoes are always made with boiled potatoes. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone cooking the potatoes in another way, so of course, I had to give it a go. How would they turn out if the potatoes were roasted, instead of boiled? What about roasted with a chicken, so the mashed potatoes would have all the chicken juices mixed in? Well, now I can definitively tell you, they are awesome.

I, once again, tried to find a new way to roast the chicken: I decided this time to rub it with a gremolata, a mix of parsley, lemon zest, and garlic. I suppose the only thing that makes this different from past chickens is the addition of parsley, but it turned out well. I have been having some problems lately getting the chicken cooked all the way through. I suspect I need to buy an actual roasting pan. The pan I’ve been using is much too small, and with potatoes thrown in the bottom, the chicken is mostly raised above the sides of the pan. I’ve heard that the higher sides of a roating pan help poultry cook all the way through by refracting heat or something like that, so my too-small pan might be the problem.

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Failed Meatball Bolognese

Turkey Bolognese

So far, Giada and I are 0-2 as far as the Everyday Italian recipes go. I have not yet relayed my ricotta cakes story here, but the problem I had with her turkey meatball recipe was similar, and I was left feeling sorely disappointed. And meatball-less. Yes, the bolognese-like sauce that resulted was delicious, but it was not meatballs.

I’ll be honest and say that I only half followed her arancini recipe to make ricotta cakes, so the failure could very well have been mine. But the meatballs? I followed Giada’s lead to the letter. And instead of cooking up into beautiful bites of meaty goodness, they fell apart completely in the pan. It was useless trying to cajole them into retaining their round shape. Completely useless. They were determined to become bolognese. What went wrong, Giada? What went wrong?

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Mozzarella Olive Bread

I have been having dreams about baking bread for a week, and yesterday I finally had some time to do it. I wanted to try something different, something inspired by one of my new cookbooks, Margaux Sky’s Beautiful Breads and Fabulous Fillings. This cookbook, though…this cookbook I have some problems with. Every single recipe calls for Lowry’s Lemon Pepper. And for some kind of crazy complicated sauce. Everything looks beautiful, but when I sit down and read the recipes, I realize I don’t want to go to all the trouble. I suspect that this book will serve mostly as inspiration, which is exactly what it did yesterday. I didn’t even end up using her basic bread recipe, because it called for all kinds of stuff, like half and half, that I just didn’t have in the house. Simple is my bread-making motto.

Instead, I tried another new bread recipe: Jamie Oliver’s. I couldn’t find the recipe on his website, but it was published in The Return of the Naked Chef (which was the first grown-up cookbook I bought). Reading through the recipe, my first thought was it seemed to require a lot of yeast. A lot. But as a novice bread maker, I went ahead and followed directions. I added a lot of yeast. And I ended up with monstrously large bread. I actually shouted out when I opened the oven door and realized it had expanded to three times its size!

I also ended up with some pretty delicious bread. The crust is near perfect. The cheese formed a lovely ribbon of melty salty goodness straight through the middle. The olives did decide to take a trip down and out through the sides of the bread, but the olive taste suffused the rest of the loaf, and when you do get the occasional meaty kalamata bite, it’s a bit heavenly. I will definitely be making this bread again, though I might cut back on the yeast a bit. Or a lot.

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Spaghetti Squash with Swiss and Pancetta Bechamel

Spaghetti squash was a staple in my house growing up. My mom baked it in its shell with meaty marinara and a thick, melted layer of mozzarella, all nice and browned on top. I’ve made it a few times, myself, and it’s always a failproof favorite in the household. And I’ve always done it the same way: marinara and mozzarella. This time, I decided to try something different: I baked it with a swiss cheese and pancetta bechamel.

No matter how many times I make spaghetti squash, I can never remember exactly how to cook it. Steamed first, then shredded and filled with stuff? Shredded and filled, then baked? A few calls to the mom, and interweb searches, and I have my duh moment: The squash should be cooked, and then the sqaushy inside is shredded with a fork into its familiar spaghetti-like form. Then it can be topped with yummy things and broiled. This time around I didn’t quite get it right, but the recipe below will detail the way it should have been done, not the way it was done.

I’ve always served spaghetti squash as a main dish, because it’s so filling on its own. You could probably serve it as a side, at a big dinner party or something, with chicken or a roast or fish or…whatever else people serve at big dinner parties. Either way, it is my favorite of all the squashes. Any vegetable that can masquerade as pasta gets five gold stars from me.

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Orecchiette with Spicy Sausage and Broccoli Rabe

Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe

My kitchen quieted down a lot toward the end of last week, for various reasons. I spent way too much time out of the house, eating bad fried foods at the pub, and re-heating leftovers out of extreme laziness. But this week I have some fun food projects planned, so another weeklong absence will not have to be endured by my faithful readers (ha!).

I bought this broccoli rabe over a week ago, and I was a bit afraid that it had gone bad. There was an air of old greens smell coming from the bag, but I took a chance, and rinsed it all off to see what could be salvaged. Turned out, almost all of it. I’d never cooked broccoli rabe before, and in fact, had never even seen it. The handy dandy interwebs, unfortunately, didn’t help much as I tried to figure out how, exactly, one preps broccoli rabe. Everything I read said to trim the stems and quarter it. Quarter it? It’s mostly leaves! How do you quarter leaves? What?! I ended up just chopping it into roughly two-inch pieces, and I think it turned out just fine.

This is one of those simple, classic Italian pasta dishes that I’ve been seeing everywhere lately, and for good reason. It was quick, and the minimal number of ingredients really ensures that the flavors can stand out. It was a good choice for a first broccoli rabe cooking experiment, because there was sausage to save the dish, if I hated it, but I could also actually taste the broccoli rabe enough to realize that I don’t hate it at all.

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Making my own Marinara

Marinara in a jar or two

Since I’m working from home today, I thought it was a good day to make marinara. I think I was inspired by one of my new cookbooks, Giada’s Everyday Italian. Most of her recipes start with a basic marinara, and I think I would feel like something of a wimp if I started writing posts about how I doctored jarred marinara. It seemed like an easy and important staple to have in the refrigerator, anyway, and today, I had plenty of time.

This was, in fact, so easy that I suspect I’m going to have to make it regularly, kind of like chicken stock, just to have on hand. I changed up Giada’s recipe a bit, but essentially all marinaras are the same, right? Mirepoix, tomatoes, herbs. You can’t go wrong.

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Fish Tacos with Chipotle Tortillas

Fish Tacos

I first started making these fish tacos in college. I think I found the recipe in some local newspaper or something, I don’t remember where. Of course, there are more fish taco recipes in existence than I’m capable of counting, and people have strong preferences about whether the fish should be fried or sauteed, or topped with cabbage, or with white sauce or salsa or just lime juice and on and on and on. I like this recipe because it’s incredibly simple and light. Growing up in San Diego, I don’t recall eating fried fish tacos, but then again, I didn’t eat many fish tacos at all. I didn’t really cultivate a taste for fish until I was much older.

When I’ve made these in the past, I didn’t actually serve them topped with anything, but the white sauce recipe from The Paupered Chef sounded like an excellent addition. I also used their recipe for tortillas, the same recipe I used last time I made them, with a slight modification: I added some chipotles for some color and a little kick. This was a super excellent dinner.

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Risotto, Conquered: Roasted Asparagus and Ham Risotto with Truffle Oil

Asparagus, Ham, Peas, Risotto

This past weekend, I decided to tackle risotto once again. My previous attempts had been abject failures, but I’m the kind of lady who is determined to figure things out, at least in the kitchen. Thankfully, this time I cooked with Mr. X, who’s masterful knowledges lead the way to risotto victory. This time, it was perfect: creamy and flavorful, and actually cooked all the way through, which is something you generally want with grains, I think.

What was my problem? A lack of recognition that restaurant low-level heat is a lot different from home kitchen low-level heat.

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