sugar-cured pork jowl: the new bacon

Sugar-cured pork jowl (courtesy of our CSA and so amazing I don't even have words)

Grape tomatoes

Pan-fried russet potato and sweet potato with mozzarella cheese

Two over-easy eggs on toasted Tuscan round with grated parmesean

a random meal

My friend is in town visiting for New Year's, and it happens that she has a pasta machine herself and is very adept at making ravioli, something my boyfriend and I have not attempted except with wonton wrappers. We also had some leftover pasta dough in the freezer from our first pasta-making event a week or so ago, so this gave us an opportunity to use it. However, possibly because the dough had been frozen, rolling out the pasta dough proved to be more difficult than last time, with lots of air bubbles and weird stretch marks (for lack of a better term). I think we spent at least an hour making a grand total of 12 ravioli. Luckily my friend and I made a great team: I mastered rolling out the dough, and, being the perfectionist that she is, my friend fashioned the beautiful ravioli.

Ravioli filled with goat cheese and pesto, topped with vodka sauce, olive oil and grated parmesean

My boyfriend's contribution to the meal was to make home-made chicken soup. That's right, the stock was made from scratch, which is actually the easiest thing in the world to make, provided you have chicken bones and access to boiling water. I am feeling a bit under the weather, and chicken soup is clearly the best way to get me back to 100% for New Year's tomorrow night!

back from vacation with a new camera

While away for vacation, I got a new digital SLR camera. This panini was my first real attempt at playing with it, and it's clear I need more practice - I wasn't used to the weight of the camera, looking through a view-finder, and the "double-click", where first the camera focuses, then it takes the picture. The end result was that a lot of my pictures came out blurry, or with weird composition. I am most excited to experiment with the aperture to get nice depth of field. However, what I learned today is that in order to do so I need to get the tripod set up, because of the slow shutter speed associated with small apertures. So although I am happy with the final picture I chose, I know it would have been more awesome had I been using the tripod so I could have achieved a cool "blurring into the distance" effect.

Prosciutto, arugula, mozzarella, and roasted red peppers on Tuscan round

come eat chicken

One item we have been getting from our meat CSA this winter is whole chickens, and it isn't easy to motivate ourselves to cook chicken in that form when it is just the two of us...which makes a perfect excuse to invite people over for dinner.

In terms of what went on in the kitchen, I think this was our most successful "cooking for others" experience for two reasons:

1) We had a solid plan for the menu so could do a lot of prep work an hour or so before we had to actually begin cooking. This made for less clean-up and chaos once the cooking was underway

2) I was responsible for two dishes (mushrooms and parsnips), and actually made them myself with very little assistance from my boyfriend, aside from frequently requiring reassurance - "Do you think I cut these too small? Is it okay that they aren't all the same size? Do you think I can add cream now?..." ...my boyfriend's patience with me is really pretty impressive.

Mushroom caviar (inspired by this post on Smitten Kitchen, although I didn't follow the recipe): crimini mushrooms, portabello mushroom soup, garlic, beer, rice vinegar, cream, chives

Served with toasted ciabatta

Butternut squash & sweet potato bisque: butternut squash, sweet potato, apple, carrot, celery, onion, smoked paprika, maple syrup, and sage

Chicken lined with bacon and stuffed with cabbage, carrots, celery, turnips, fennel and garlic

Rapini sauteed with garlic and bacon served on a bed of purple cabbage

Roasted parsnips tossed in a horseradish-herb butter

I think it was generally agreed that the horseradish parsnips were the star of the night. Even though this was a recipe I got from Simply Recipes (linked above), I was still very proud since I executed the dish completely on my own. This is definitely something I will make again.

As for the chicken, it was cooked well, but despite my boyfriend's elaborate efforts (involving the bacon layer underneath the chicken skin as well as soaking the chicken overnight with the veggies and chicken stock) these flavors didn't really penetrate the meat: the chicken tasted like chicken. I think next time we are going to focus our efforts on some kind of sauce to go with the chicken, rather than killing ourselves trying to inject more flavor into the meat itself.

rustic home-made pasta

Tonight we finally tried out our brand new pasta maker, which I'm very excited about because I kind of love playing with dough. Now, I've always been impressed when competitors on Top Chef or Iron Chef make their own pasta, but now I'm calling their bluff: any pasta recipe I've seen says that you need to let the dough set by refrigerating for an hour, so how, on a show like Iron Chef where there is only an hour to cook, does anyone make their own pasta?? That doesn't even seem possible unless there are a ton of pasta-making secrets being kept from the public - I'm on to you, Food Network!

In honour of making pasta from scratch, we decided to go all the way with the home-made rustic theme, and my boyfriend made as rustic a sauce as you can get: the base of the sauce was made by cutting tomatoes in half, putting them "face down" in a pan with oil, and just letting them...well, just letting them become liquid (neither render nor reduce seem like the right word, but I suppose there must be a more technical term for this...anyone?).

Fresh fettuccine and home-made tomato sauce with garlic, basil, rosemary, pork sausage, kalamata olives, and grated parmesean cheese

meat and two

Sirloin steak

Steamed broccoli with cheddar cheese sauce

Pan-fried yellow zucchini slices

apples

As I've mentioned a couple of times now, my boyfriend and I ended up with quite a large accumulation of apples from our Fall CSA. The problem is that neither of us are big apple-eaters, both preferring the more tart apples (like Granny Smith) compared to sweeter red apple varieties we got from the farms. But last night I read the first section of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, and learned that apples are only the coolest fruit ever.

Did you know that the tree grown from an apple seed will bear no resemblance to the parent-fruit? Apples have such a range of genetic possibilities that they can actually cover the entire colour spectrum (seriously, blue apples can exist!), and if you find one that tastes good the only way to duplicate the tree (and by extension, the fruit) is by grafting. In fact, finding one good apple tree in your orchard was the number one way to get rich in 19th century America - most apple trees produced apples that were only suitable for making hard cider. As Pollan notes, the apple was America's grape, cider America's wine.

Today the market has narrowed the unthinkably large range of the apple down to just a few varieties (Red & Golden Delicious, Macintosh, Jonathan, Granny Smith) which, with the exception of the Granny Smith, cater to the narrowed, one-dimensional, 20th century definition of "sweet", which is nowhere near as complex as it once was when table sugar was not readily available. This smaller market that includes just a few varieties of apple is also why it is getting more difficult to grow apples - they are not allowed to evolve with their environment because they are essentially clones.

Anyways, you should read Pollan's book for more incredible thoughts about the apple. He is such a wonderful writer that although I am still not rushing to devour the apples we have left, I did immediately subject them to a photo-shoot.

square bowls make everything more awesome

We saved the stock from last night's poaching, including the vegetables, and added some beef soup bones (courtesy of our CSA), a bouillon cube, and some additional spices to make the soup tonight. There were also apples in the poaching liquid from yesterday, and I was surprised how well the apples worked in this kind of brothy soup. Apparently they are more versatile than I thought!

Soup: home-made beef stock, carrot, turnip, onion, apple, horseradish and five-spice

Pork dumplings

salmon + apple? really? (...and more new plates...)

My boyfriend and I are developing a slight plate-buying addiction, justified by the fact that we need diversity in my food photography. My boyfriend has been eyeing these red and black plates at Target for a while (i.e. every time we go, since we always spend way too much time in the kitchen-wares section). Although I wasn't as excited about them at the time of purchase, all I could say when we ate off of them was how much I love them. (Stay tuned for our new black square bowls that will hopefully debut on the blog in the near future).

So tonight's dinner was inspired by new plates, the desire to properly poach - my boyfriend spent the afternoon reading about poaching in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen - and The Flavor Bible, that gave us the following flavor affinity to work with: salmon + apple + horseradish. That we should try apple with salmon was great news, since we still have an entire drawer of apples from our fall CSA that we are struggling to use.

In the end the poaching cooked the salmon to perfection (really to more of a "just barely cooked", which I love), and the apple added a nice note to the vegetable medley.

Salmon poached in home-made vegetable stock with carrots, turnips, apple and horseradish, topped with creamed leeks

inside-out omelette

Two over-easy eggs and sliced sheep's basque cheese on top of and below sauteed collard greens, purple cabbage, orange pepper, vidallia onion and garlic

Crispy bacon

Rosemary & olive oil toast sticks

Promoting The Flavor Bible, aka the best "cook book" ever

The overall vision of tonight's meal was my idea, but I have to give credit where it is due. First, the lovely vidallia onion-basil sauce was entirely my boyfriend's concoction. Second (and more exciting to those of you without access to my boyfriend), the inspiration for flavor combinations must be attributed to The Flavor Bible.

The Flavor Bible is amazing, and a really cool alternative to a cook book. It is like a dictionary of ingredients, except instead of getting definitions you get a list of other ingredients that go well with the ingredient you searched. The more awesome the pairing, the more the ingredient is highlighted (either in larger font or in bold). The result is that The Flavor Bible provides inspiration and ideas without constraints, which is especially perfect for my boyfriend and I: I like to tell him what ingredients he should use (now selected with the help of TFB), and he likes to play in the kitchen without instructions.

Tonight I bought some beautiful veal scallopini, looked up "veal" in The Flavor Bible, saw that (among many things) it goes well with mushrooms, basil, and tarragon, and the vision for our dinner tonight was born! In the end I think we achieved one of the ultimate food-goals: making a meal where eating all the components together tastes better than any component on its own. Well, actually, there's a bit of debate here, as my boyfriend thought that the richness of the risotto overpowered the veal, but my counter-argument was that the sweetness of the tarragon in the risotto highlighted the veal. Yeah, that's right, dinner tonight was like judges table on Top Chef! (But seriously, to me this tarragon-veal combination was the gem we would not have discovered without TFB).

Pan-fried veal scallopini

Wild mushroom risotto: arborio rice, white wine, beef stock, onions, dried wild mushrooms* (porcini, shiitake, crimini, maitake, oyster & chanterelle), butter, tarragon & parmesean cheese

Vidallia onion & Basil sauce

*the stroke of brilliance we stole from Jamie Oliver's risotto recipe was to use the water in which the mushrooms were re-hydrated in the risotto as well.

Pizza with the perfect combination of toppings

olive oil, vodka sauce, garlic, onion, diced salami, kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, basil and tons of mozzarella cheese

Stew in the style of chili

Me: Cheese on stew?

Boyfriend: You know you want it.

Stew with beef, carrots, butternut squash, turnips, radishes and purple cabbage topped with Italian blend cheese, served with buttered toast

Gorgonzola ravioli on a bed of sauteed collard greens, topped with vodka sauce with grape tomatoes and diced salami, finished with grated parmesean

The Next Level

Ok, we have officially reached the next stage in my food photography: my boyfriend bought me professional photo lights for Chanukkah (yes, we exchanged gifts 5 days early, get over it). I had joked a couple of weeks ago that he would do this...and here we are.

So behold my new photo studio (set up in a place where it is actually not in the way), and check out some of my first test-shots.

Simple, hearty, and (mostly) in one pot

Chicken legs, pork sausage, carrots, radishes and turnips poached in chicken stock with onions and garlic

Cheese grits made with Italian blend cheese and bacon

Sauteed beet greens

Sunday Breakfast Platter

Sweet potato pancakes

Bacon & sausage

Over-easy eggs

Breakfast starring farm-fresh sausage

Pork sausage (from our CSA)

Sauteed mini-potatoes and grape tomatoes topped with melted Italian blend cheese

Over-easy eggs

Toast

Not our prettiest meal, but still tasty

After polishing off the leftover butternut squash tart when we got home from work, we were in the mood for something simply satisfying for dinner. Although my boyfriend got a bit over-zealous with his home-made garlic sauce, once we worked past "the garlic sauce layer" the flavors really came together nicely. The stroke of genius (all credit to my boyfriend) was using the baster to squirt the beef jus into the pitas as the final touch.

Pita pockets stuffed with sliced beef roast, onion, radish and grape tomatoes, smothered in garlic sauce and finished with beef jus

Butternut Squash Tart: My First Ever Recipe!

The last two times my boyfriend and I made butternut squash tarts this fall we followed recipes I found on the web. This time, we were crazy: I took my favorite parts from the two previous tarts and combined them, NO RECIPE!!! I took charge of the kitchen, told my boyfriend what tasks I needed him to do, and I executed my vision. The end result was pretty amazing. There are some small things we would change next time, but overall I'm basically awesome.

Butternut squash tart:

- combine two defrosted store-bought pie crusts into a ball, then roll out into one sheet

- in a bowl combine cubed butternut squash, caramelized onions & garlic, bacon, goat cheese, grated parmesean and sage

- put squash goodness into center of dough, leaving a 1 inch border

- fold over edges of crust

- bake for approx. 1 hour at 375

Seared pork chop

Sauteed mustard greens

Butternut squash tart

In this week's box...

This is our last CSA produce box until spring! (We started our meat & eggs CSA on Sunday, but I felt there was something perverse about taking a picture of a pile of raw meat each week...)

1 butternut squash

4 radishes (with greens)

swiss chard

mustard greens

beet greens

4 apples

5 turnips

3 sweet potatoes