recipes – Page 21 – The Kitchen Illiterate

Cooking some fish in Barcelona

Miss Crystal, former recipient of all my culinary experiments, insisted that I cook her multiple dinners during our time in Barcelona. A more than fair price for her and her housemates’ generosity in letting us sleep in their living room for nine days. So we took a trip to the Boqueria and waiting for inspiration to strike. There is no better place for kitchen inspiration than the Boqueria. We went in there with no idea what to cook, and as we wandered and pondered (ha! I’m a poet!), we seemed to stumble upon what we wanted seconds after we thought of them. “Perhaps some fish? Oooh, look, there are hundreds! Some fresh pasta? Wow, look, they’re making it right there!” If only all my shopping excursions were like that.

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Quick and Easy Dinner: Farfalle with Ricotta, Zucchini, and Italian Sausage

I didn’t think I was going to have anything to share until my return from Barcelona. I had no big dinner plans, no fancy ingredients, nothing, in fact, but whatever was already in the refrigerator, waiting to be used up before I left. And yet, I managed to pull together, in less than twenty minutes, an easy, inexpensive dinner that I decided I just had to share. Sure those multiple hour kitchen projects are fun, but sometimes quick and easy is just as delicious.

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Chicken Mole Poblano

Who would think that a seemingly innocent sauce could leave behind such destruction and havoc? That little measuring cup of mole you see above caused the biggest mess I think my kitchen has ever seen, and left me in its wake, exhausted and covered head to foot in sauce. I gave almost three hours of my evening over to making chicken mole (and cleaning up after it), but in the end, it was totally worth it. No, it didn’t turn out exactly as I expected, but then, I didn’t even really know what to expect, having had mole only once in my life before.

It took me awhile to figure out why none of the recipes I found for mole poblano contained poblano chiles. They generally all use chipotles, anchos, pasillas, anaheims. No poblanos. Then I discovered that poblano is also the name of someone who lives in Puebla, Mexico, the region where mole was pretty much invented. Aha. Well, I’m not sure my mole is in any way Puebla-style. I used the chilis I could find: guajillos, cascabels, chipotles, and a mild, light green pepper which, frankly, I can’t identify and was only labeled “chili” at the supermarket. You gotta love grocery shopping in New England.

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A Little Bit of Sole

The warmer months tend to bring about thoughts of salads and vegetables and all-around healthy eating. It’s around about now that my wintertime heavy cream binging starts to feel like a bad idea, and all my suddenly extra squishy bits start shouting at me, demanding green things and, inevitably, fish. I am not generally a seafood eater. I don’t get excited by the idea of lobster or oysters or salmon or mussels. I still remember the first time I found myself enjoying fish (at a restaurant called Skates in Oakland when I was 13), and similar memories are, well, few and far between. But around about May, when my mac and cheese regrets kick in, I find myself lingering at the seafood counter and buying things like sole.

Yes, it’s the annual “Please Try to Be Healthy, Laura” fest up in here, and I’ve now had sole for dinner two nights in a row. And you know what? I think I’ve also managed to form two new positive fish memories. Tuesday night I took another cue from Blake Makes and Bon Appetit and wrapped my sole fillets with a bit of asparagus up in parchment. Tonight, I threw caution to the wind. I cooked without a recipe of any kind. And I think I’ve decided sole might be one of my favorite kinds of fish. Who knew?

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Sun-dried Tomato and Caramelized Onion Scones

There is a little bakery across the street that consistently makes the Jamaica Plain’s Best list as the best local bakery, and frankly, I have no idea why. Sure, they make vegan cupcakes, and JP is just the sort of neighborhood where people will swoon for a vegan cupcake. And yes, there is a shortage of places to get a cup of decent, non-Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. But nothing, I tell you nothing about this bakery has ever impressed me. The pastries and pies look sloppy: I could frankly do a better job in my own kitchen. The croissants are not proper croissants, but more like bread dough shaped to masquerade as croissants. I ordered a sandwich once and the bread on which it was served was stale. At a bakery! And I won’t even get into the abysmal service.

For reasons unknown to me, however, I still occasionally visit this bakery, as though somewhere I can’t give up hope that my previous bad experiences were flukes, each and every one. I can’t account for my actions sometimes. What is they say about crazy people? On my last visit (the visit of the stale sandwich), I noticed some roasted red pepper, spinach, and caramelized onion scones in the display case, and the hamster wheels in my little brain immediately started spinning. “What a brilliant idea!” I thought. But I was not about to buy one of their scones (vegan, of course) only to be disappointed. No, I decided to go home and make my own.

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Polenta and Vegetables with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

While my chocolate creme brulee may have been a triumph, since then I’ve experienced nothing but culinary catastrophes. “But that food doesn’t look catastrophic,” you may be thinking. That just goes to show that my new camera has more talent in the kitchen than I do. That, my friends, was a burned vegetable, bitter sauce disaster. In fact, the original sauce is NOT the sauce pictured above. The original sauce had to be thrown away because it was horrible and could not be salvaged with all the spices in my gigantic spice rack. I ended up using basic tomato sauce, because I needed something to cover up the taste of burnt asparagus.

I hate it when meals I’ve been anticipating turn out to be completely not rad.

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Chocolate Creme Brulee

The semester is finally over, and I have spent this first week of summer break being very happily lazy. There are a ton of projects I want to work on this summer, including a redesign of this here blog, but right now I am thoroughly enjoying not having anything to do. And what have I been doing with all this free time? Besides re-reading Harry Potter for the seventy-second time, and sleeping in, and taking really long walks in the lovely May weather, I have been, of course, cooking.

Last summer my housemate, Miss Amelia Bedelia, bought me a lovely creme brulee set, which, much to her chagrin, sat unused in the pantry all year long. With Amelia getting ready to leave us for the summer I realized the only fitting and proper thing to do was to break out the torch and make some creme brulee. I also recently received, from the ever-generous folks at Blake Makes and Amano Chocolates, several bars of incredibly rich, perfectly bittersweet dark chocolate. Amelia loves chocolate, Amelia loves creme brulee, so clearly, chocolate creme brulee was the answer.

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Chocolate-Caramel Slice

I received raucous cheers and applause for these babies. I am not kidding, there were whoops and shouts and there was some profuse praise, I think brought on by the sugar high these things induce. They are rich and almost unbearably sweet, the chocolate sugar overdose avoided only by the bits of salt scattered across the top. And they were an overwhelming hit with everyone who tasted them, even the mostly vegan woman who happily ate them despite the fact that they are loaded with butter and sweetened condensed milk.

When I first read the recipe in Bon Appetit, I thought they sounded lovely but were probably more trouble than they were worth. The recipe has three parts: the crust, the caramel, and the chocolate topping. It involved a candy thermometer. It involved cooking and then chilling and then cooking and chilling some more. But I wanted to do something impressive for the last-day-of-class party we had in cataloging, so I thought I’d give it a go, and as it turns out they are not nearly so difficult as they sound.

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Cauliflower Broccoli Flan with Spinach Bechamel

I’m not really sure why this is called a flan. It didn’t really seem like flan to me, but perhaps I didn’t make it quite right. Still, it was delicious, and I highly recommend you make room on your plate for this dish as soon as possible. Like Chicken Florentine, this side dish can pretend be very healthy, what with all the vegetables. However, beneath its green and vitamin-filled-seeming appearance lurks decadence: creamy, cheesy, wonderful decadence.

I first came across this recipe a few years ago. A housemate at the time discovered it in the May 2005 issue of Bon Appetit, and she raved about it non-stop. She made it at least three times in the short few months I lived with her, and when I moved out, she realized she hadn’t copied the recipe and begged me to email it to her. Yet despite her raves, I never thought to make it myself. I was still feeling undecided about cauliflower, so I promptly forgot about it. And for some reason I have yet to understand, a few weeks ago I remembered it. My feelings about cauliflower had since become decisively positive, so I decided I had to try it out, to see what all the fuss was about.

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Fiddlehead Ferns: A sign that spring has finally arrived

Even though it was cold and rainy all weekend, I knew spring had truly arrived when we went to the market yesterday: The place was full of bright shiny produce the likes of which haven’t been seen around here for over six months. I was giddy, and my carefully planned (short) grocery list was quickly forgotten. And in the midst of the bountiful bounty, an unmistakable sign of spring sat, quietly curled up and waiting for me to discover it.

I had never heard of fiddlehead ferns before moving to Boston, and had no idea anyone would ever want to eat any kind of fern. When Mr. X pointed them out to me a few years ago, I thought for sure these east coast people were insane, but I’m nothing if not adventurous (if only culinarily) so I bought some, sauteed them, and realized that even if these east coast people are crazy, they are totally right about the fiddlehead ferns. They taste so fresh and green and almost grassy, they are a wonderful arbiter of warmer (and better fed) days ahead.

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