Burrata, cress, and balsamic crostini

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Chelsea

The first week of school has come and gone and went to bed. That being the case, and with a wonderful friend in town, Friday afternoon happy hour was without question the right thing to do. N. and I frequently enjoy a weekend happy hour of some sort, whether that involves a decadent spread, or just a few nubs of cheese and some almost-not-stale-yet crackers with a handful of dried fruit. Either way, there’s something tasty, something to sip, and a breezy deck to sit on.

This week, though, called for something special. I had an alliterative crostini concoction in mind – a brash combination of burrata cheese, broccoli rabe, and a thick drizzle of balsamic vinegar all smeared atop a perfectly toasted slice of baguette. As these things usually turn out, however, ruled by what was on the shelves in the produce section, I had to make an adjustment or two. But I think what I ended up with was just as good – maybe even better.

Let’s talk ingredients. Have you had burrata cheese? Think fresh mozzarella, but then one-up the creaminess and milkiness and melt-in-your-mouthiness, and you’ve got something like burrata. It’s a globe of fresh mozzarella cheese, filled with a mixture of curds and cream. When you cut into one of these fragile little blobs, what emerges looks something like ricotta in texture, but it’s all mozzarella freshness on the tongue. It’s a very sexy cheese, and a smear (don’t even think in terms of slices) atop some well-oiled, well-toasted bread sounded dreamy. I found some in my Trader Joe’s, but I think most specialty or upscale grocery stores – or maybe even your usual haunt with a well-stocked cheese counter – would have it.

Though I wanted broccoli rabe for its bitterness, I settled instead on some upland cress, which I assumed was another name for watercress. A shamefully lazy internet search (read: Wikipedia) has taught me that though they look similar, upland cress is part of the landcress, rather than the watercress, family. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Regardless, either one has the necessary peppery bite to offset the creamy sweetness of the cheese. In a pinch, I bet arugula would work too.

To put it all together, I decided I wanted a play of temperatures. After a liberal bath of olive oil, I toasted thin slices of bread – mine was in the ciabatta family, with its floury crust and moist, springy interior. A gentle smear of burrata on this warm toast, followed by a few sprigs of cress wilted into a resistless pile, all topped with a definitive drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Done. The cheese melts a bit into the bread; the cress and the balsamic and the residual olive oil flavors melding together create a kind of salad component. They are, I hardly need to say, delicious. I couldn’t stop sampling. It’s not just a nice play of flavors, but a good study in textures. I am criminal at over-toasting my bread, and this batch was just on the edge of being servable. But against the softness of the cheese and the pleasingly stringy feel of the wilted greens, the aggressive crunch of extra toasty toast was right.

I’d recommend a light, crisp wine to pair with this; something sparkling would be extra nice. I’d recommend a sun hat and sandals, if you have the option, and a few friends to laugh with. And I’d recommend making a bit more than you think you want, because you’re going to eat it all.

Burrata, cress, and balsamic crostini

Ingredient quantities are a bit fast and loose here, because your demands for how much cheese, how many greens, and how liberal a drizzle of balsamic may be different from mine. And depending on how many people are clamoring for a taste and what size loaf you’ve bought, you may need more or less bread than I used. What seems most important is that one bunch of cress was enough to top 8 or so slices of crostini.

8-10 thin slices ciabatta or other fresh, artisanal bread

Olive oil, to drizzle and to cook the greens

1 bunch upland cress or watercress (or, as noted above, arugula)

Salt to taste

8 ounces burrata cheese

* Balsamic vinegar, for drizzling

Preheat your broiler. While it warms, arrange bread slices on a sheet tray and drizzle with olive oil on both sides. Broil until deeply golden. Depending on your broiler, this could take anywhere from 2-5 minutes. Keep a close eye on it. When it is well bronzed and crisp, remove and set aside.
While your bread toasts (if you’re a successful multi-tasker), prepare your greens by slicing off the bottom inch or two of stem (there may be an attached root bundle at the bottom too). Warm a teaspoon or two of olive oil over medium heat in a skillet and add the cress with a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring often with a wooden spoon or tongs, until the cress has wilted down but is still bright green. It will have lost much of its crunch, but that’s okay. We are looking for tenderness here.
Just like that, we’re ready to assemble. For each piece of toast, cut a wedge of burrata and scoop onto the bread. Be sure you get the outside coating of mozzarella and the creamy curds inside. Top the cheese layer with a few sprigs of cress, then drizzle some balsamic vinegar over the whole thing and serve immediately.

* Note: if your balsamic vinegar is thin, or is more tart in flavor than you enjoy, try this – heat about ¼ cup of balsamic with 2 teaspoons brown sugar in a small saucepan until it simmers. Stir to dissolve the sugar, and allow it to reduce almost by half, so you have barely more than 2 tablespoons. This will thicken and sweeten the liquid, making it more of a glaze. It will still be plenty strong, though, so you’ll only need a little bit for each crostini.

Pesto Parmesan Pull-Apart Bread #TwelveLoaves

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Chelsea

I’ve put off writing this post. I wasn’t sure how to begin. Every time I sit down to think about it, I end up surfing the net, scrolling through Facebook, seeing more and more headlines, reading more and more articles about the terrible things our world has been going through recently. As one of my friends and former colleagues put it recently, “the entire internet needs a trigger warning.”

I don’t often offer political or moral commentary on this site. That’s not its job. And I don’t often try to convince you that seeing things my way is the way you should see. My truths are mine, and yours are yours. But when terrible things happen, and when death and tragedy are instigated and framed through questionable motives – sometimes on both sides of the event – I question my own job here.

I’m not going to espouse to you what I think. Not today, and probably not ever, unless it’s something frivolous and food-related. I’m just going to say, with caution, that unless you have cut off access to emotions, to moral codes, or to the internet itself (I know, gasp!), over the past week or two – certainly over the past month – the world has been pretty depressing.

So that makes a food blogger wonder where she stands. When people are suffering, when people are angry and dying and struggling, for me, there is uncertainty: is it disrespectful or willfully unaware to coo over the cuteness of a cupcake or speckle my posts with just the right adjectives to describe the lusciousness of a sauce? I’ve considered this before, written about it before, and I always come back to the same conclusion: no. Food is important. Food means things, not just about nurturing our bellies but nurturing our hearts and our minds and, depending on what you believe, our souls. I talked to N. about this the other day, thinking again of how to write this post, and he said “we have to have some things to be happy about.” Food seems like one of those things.

Finally, what helped me figure out what to write so as to be aware of, respectful of, but not overwhelmed by these events I’ve found troubling, was the introduction to Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s cookbook Jerusalem. Looking back through this lovely book, I was struck by a short section they have titled “A comment about ownership.” In a place – whether that is a city, or a nation, or the world itself – where we feel a need for the power that ownership and control bring us, it is hard to share. We pull ourselves apart from one another in an effort to feel safe, or right, or justified. Ottolenghi and Tamimi argue that searching out the true “owner” of a dish through its national or personal origin is not only difficult, but futile. Either it has been made before, or there exists another, or three, or a dozen, similar dishes claiming different origins: a “variation on a theme” (16).

Though Ottolenghi and Tamimi are commenting on dish origination – which makes sense, as they like to provide a little background about the meals they offer – what struck me was not just where a dish comes from, but where it goes. For a long, long time, sitting down at a table, or a fire, or a bowl, has meant something more than filling your stomach. It means trust, or love, or a forging of bonds. You eat together and you end up sharing more than a meal. I’m not sure that’s still true, but I think it should be.

So weirdly, when it came time to sample this month’s loaf for the Twelve Loaves project, I had chosen something divisive in its very name: pull-apart bread. When you tear into it, this loaf peels into separate bits, as I see happening so often in our world. Yet its richness, its docile tendency to give up layers and hunks and edges, suggests it is meant to be shared. We pull it into soft fragrant pieces, but we’re doing that together, and the act of sharing brings us comfort and happiness.

I’ve wanted to try a pull-apart bread for a long time, particularly after seeing Deb’s nod to Welsh Rarebit on Smitten Kitchen. To answer the call of summer herbs for Twelve Loaves, I settled on pesto, blending the sharp-sweet, fresh licorice scent of basil with the usual garlic, pine nuts, and lemon juice. I amped up the parmesan quotient and included it not in the spread itself, but as a separate layer to melt and cling.

There seem to be two schools on pull-apart bread. One involves rolling little spheres of dough and jamming them into a pan together, so when they cook they swell into one another and form tenuous ties. This is also commonly called Monkey Bread, especially when it is sweet. The other, which I haven’t seen as frequently but which I chose to work with after seeing Deb’s offering, results in something more like a Pillsbury Grands biscuit or puff pastry stood on end. It involves rolling the dough thin, slicing it in long strips, layering those strips and slicing them into squares, then levering those stacked squares – like servings of lasagna or birthday cake – sideways into a loaf pan like a deck of cards to rise into one another and smash together during baking. As you peel the warm layers apart, you get the bite of pesto and the salty richness of parmesan.

I want you to make this. It’s a bit of a project, but it’s so, so delicious. And when you make it, I want you to share it. Pull it apart, by all means. But let that action by extension pull you together.

Pesto Parmesan Pull-Apart Bread

Makes a single 9×5 inch loaf

Adapted heavily from Smitten Kitchen

For dough:

2 teaspoons yeast

2 teaspoons sugar

½ cup milk, warm but not hot

2 ½ – 3 cups bread flour, divided

1 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons soft butter

2 eggs

For filling:

3 garlic cloves, skins removed

¼ cup pine nuts

2 tablespoons lemon juice, or to your taste

4-5 cups packed basil leaves

½ cup (approximately) olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

2 cups parmesan cheese (I know, but it’s so fluffy! 2 cups is practically nothing… besides, you’re sharing…)

In a glass measuring cup, warm the milk. I like to pop it into the microwave for 20-30 seconds. When it is just warmer than body temperature (poke your fingertip in – it should feel just warm to the touch), add the sugar and the yeast and stir it up. Let this sit for 5 minutes or so while the yeast wakes up and begins to bubble.
Meanwhile, combine the salt and 2 cups of the flour in the bowl of a stand mixer and stir to combine. When the yeast and milk mixture is bubbly and smells like bread, add it to the flour and salt and mix on low speed using the paddle attachment until damply crumbly. Add the butter and the eggs and mix on low speed again.
Add an additional ½ cup flour and mix to combine. As soon as the dough starts to come together and there are no longer dry swaths of flour, switch from the paddle attachment to the dough hook.
Knead for 3-4 minutes until a soft dough the consistency of play-dough forms. If it looks really sticky or is not coming together or pulling away from the sides of the bowl at all, begin adding the additional flour 2 tablespoons at a time, kneading for a bit in between each addition. You may not need all of the additional flour – I only used 2 ½ cups total.
Lightly grease the inside of the bowl (or switch to a clean, lightly oiled one), flip the dough over a few times to ensure it is lightly greased as well, then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set it aside for 50-60 minutes to rise. We are looking for the ball of dough to double in size.
While the dough rises, make the filling. Drop the garlic and the pine nuts into the belly of your food processor and let it run for a few seconds, until the garlic and pine nuts become a fragrant crumble. There is still some blending to go, so they don’t have to be a smooth paste yet.
Add the lemon juice and as many of the basil leaves as will comfortably fit, and turn on the processor. Most of the basil will almost instantly be shredded into tiny bits. If it isn’t, or if nothing seems to be happening, take out the lid from the food chute and begin pouring in the olive oil through this chute in a slow, steady stream.
Once there is room in the food processor bowl again, add the remaining basil leaves, if there are any. Repeat the olive oil streaming process until you have a thick paste. I usually end up adding my basil in two or three batches. You may use more or less olive oil – this is somewhat according to preference, but you do want a fairly thick pesto that you can spread, not pour.
Taste for seasoning; add salt and pepper and pulse to combine. Set aside until dough is finished rising.
When the dough has doubled in size, punch it down by gently depressing your fist into the center. Let it rest for a minute or two, then turn it out onto a well-floured board and, using a floured rolling pin, roll it out to a rectangle of about 12×20 inches.
Spread pesto over the entire rectangle of dough, right up to the edges. We don’t need a bare margin for this loaf.
Cut the rectangle crosswise into 5 strips of 12×4 inches (so the short edge of the initial big rectangle becomes the long edge of each of the 5 strips). Sprinkle one with about ½ cup parmesan cheese – this will be the bottom of the stack.
Carefully, using a spatula with a long blade or a dough scraper to help you, top your parmesan covered base with another strip of dough. Sprinkle another ½ cup parmesan atop this new layer.
Repeat until you have a stack of five layers, though the final layer will not have cheese on top, which is fine.
Gently, exceedingly gently, use a serrated knife to cut the dough layers into 6 segments of about 2 inches each. Turn each segment layer-side up (showing off its stratigraphy) and snug it into a greased 9×5 inch loaf pan. You can turn the pan up on its short end to make this a bit easier – take a peek at Deb’s images (link above) for a visual. Follow this with another segment, and so on, to create a stack of layers. When you finish and set the loaf pan back on its base, Deb says this looks a bit like a full card catalog drawer, and I think this is a good assessment.
Cover your strange, layered loaf with plastic wrap and set it aside to rise again for 30-45 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350F so it is ready when you are.
Once the dough has risen again, which will squash the layers together a bit, remove the plastic wrap and stow your loaf it in the 350F oven for 25-35 minutes until it is puffy and nicely bronzed on top.
Cool a minimum of 10 minutes in the pan (though 15 or even 20 is probably safer; mine collapsed upon removal), then carefully flip it out and serve warm for best flavor and “pull-apart” effect.

Baked Tofu Spring Rolls and Peanut Sauce

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Chelsea

As I noted last week, I’ve been out of town. In fact, I’ve been off the continent (though not out of the country). Now that we’re back on the mainland, I suppose I owe you a few reflections.

Kauai is beautiful. But if you’ve ever seen Jurassic Park, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or even the opening sequence of M*A*S*H, you already know that. It’s a tropical island dotted with beaches and rainforests. It couldn’t be anything but beautiful. But what struck me as we wandered, sandal-and-swimsuit-clad, through the little towns and massive resort complexes, was how friendly it was. I don’t just mean ordinary smiling helpful friendliness. That much is expected too, since so much of the island’s industry is built on tourism and the service jobs it requires. I mean food friendliness. Many, many businesses proudly assert themselves as GMO-free. The Kauai Coffee plantation, which we visited one afternoon (photos to follow, I’m sure), is basically off the grid. They are entirely water powered by rainfall and river flow from one of the island’s mountains, and create enough energy to power parts of nearby towns as well, sometimes. It is one of the most sustainable businesses I’ve come across, but they don’t shove it in your face, just pronounce it matter-of-factly and leave you feeling that yes, this is the right thing.

It’s not just that, though. It has become reasonably common practice in large restaurants or fine dining establishments, and even in some chains, for menus to include vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free options. On Kauai, even many of the smallest, most local food stands are open and friendly to the idea. I guess maybe “food friendliness” translates to “willing accommodation.” There are menu codes indicating which foods are prepared without gluten, without dairy, and which can be quickly adjusted to include or remove allergens. And what was most friendly, to me, was that many of these adjustments did not involve an extra cost. Why should it, I thought, when sometimes this change is as simple as enshrouding perfectly grilled fish in a corn tortilla rather than flour?*

In that spirit, then (and because I promised my friend Ch I would post this recipe oh, a month ago…), today I want to bring you one of my favorite, most dependable and well-received party snacks that just happens to also be vegan and, if you make it with the right sort of soy sauce (even Kikkoman has a GF option now!), gluten-free as well. These pretty, tasty, surprisingly easy spring rolls involve shreds of bright carrot, bibb lettuce, fresh grassy mint, and rice noodles, a stick of tofu pressed, drizzled with soy sauce, and baked until meaty and firm, all lovingly wrapped in rice paper. Then, if you’re me, you whip up a quick batch of pantry-scavenged peanut sauce to dip them into, and you have something suitable for almost every meal. They aren’t totally allergen-free, because if you can’t have rice you can’t have the noodles or the wrappers these use, and if you have problems with peanuts, peanut sauce is of course out of the question. But they do manage to come close, accommodating the need to avoid animal products and that pesky gluten monster. Plus, they are fairly cheap to make, produce large quantities, and most importantly, are just plain delicious.

Spring rolls are a good food to take to a party, but they are also a good food to produce party style, because they can easily incorporate an assembly-line style production method. Last month, I had a few friends from work over who wanted to learn to make them, and we sat around the little table in my little “dining room” and spent the afternoon rolling, and, as you might imagine, eating, spring rolls. They kindly acquiesced, probably thanks to the free snacks and wine I was plying them with, to let me snap a few photos of the process, so that’s what you’re seeing here. Thanks, ladies!

* This doesn’t, of course, guarantee 100% safe dining for people with celiac or other severe gluten intolerances, since kitchen cross-contamination is always a concern. But it is nice that for those avoiding gluten, even casually, there’s a cost-free option.

Baked Tofu Spring Rolls

Makes 18-24, depending on the width of your tofu slices. Each one then gets halved, leaving you with 36-48 snackable pieces.

14 ounce block firm or extra firm tofu, sliced horizontally into three thin squares

¼ – ½ cup soy sauce or tamari (gluten-free soy sauce, but check labels carefully)

3-4 ounces dry rice noodles (sometimes called Maifun or Rice Sticks; I like Dynasty brand)

3 carrots, peeled and grated

1 head butter lettuce, leaves removed, halved, and crisp rib removed

30-40 leaves mint from one bunch

Round rice paper spring roll wrappers (I like the brand with the rose on the label)

Warm water

At least three hours before you want to serve your spring rolls, slice the tofu as described and press it by placing the thin squares between layers of paper towels and placing something heavy on top of them. I often use my cast iron pan for this. A baking dish weighted with cans or bottles works well too. Leave the tofu to press for at least 60 minutes to squeeze out some of the water.
During the last 15 minutes of pressing, preheat oven to 325F and line a baking tray with aluminum foil. Space out the tofu squares on the aluminum foil, being sure they don’t touch.
Dribble each square with soy sauce to coat and bake for 60 minutes. After the first 30 minutes, dribble the top of each square with more soy sauce, as the first application will have soaked in. When they are done, the edges of the squares are deep brown, solid, and feel a bit rubbery. Remove and let cool completely, then cut into ½ inch strips (roughly index-finger-width).
While tofu bakes and cools, prep the other ingredients – grating carrots, stemming mint leaves, separating lettuce leaves, etc. Submerge the rice noodles in hot water and let them steep for 8-10 minutes, until they feel flexible and are tender when bitten. Drain well and set aside to cool.
To roll, set up an assembly line – mint, then lettuce, then carrots, then tofu, then noodles. Be sure to have a plate or other vessel on which to place your finished rolls at the end of the line-up. Add warm water to a wide, shallow dish or bowl that the rice paper will fit into. You will address this step first.
Here we go: submerge one rice paper wrapper in the warm water and let it sit until it becomes completely pliable. I find this tends to take somewhere between 30 and 45 seconds.
When the rice paper is ready, remove and place on a flat surface. If you wish, you can briefly spread it on a paper towel to soak up some of the drips, but this isn’t strictly necessary.
Place 1-3 mint leaves around the rice paper wrapper, bottom surface facing up. This ensures the top, more attractive side of the leaf will be visible through the wrapper on the finished roll.
Next, place a piece of lettuce in the center of the wrapper so the longer edge of the lettuce (if there is one) faces you. Sprinkle this with grated carrots (a few teaspoons, though I always eyeball it).
Lay a piece of tofu in the cradle of lettuce and carrots you’ve created, positioning it with the long edge facing you (so, horizontally – see photos above for reference). Top the tofu with a small pile of noodles – no more than a few tablespoons, were we picky enough to measure them out – arranging them across the tofu.
Now we roll! As the wrapper faces you, fold in the left and right “edges” over the short sides of the tofu, so what you have looks like a long oval with two squared-off sides. Next, take the side of the wrapper closest to you and fold it completely over your fillings, then pull tight toward you. Roll up the wrapper, tucking each revolution tightly so the fillings are well contained. The tighter rolled, the better they will stay together.
Repeat until you run out of tofu slices! You will get a nice rhythm established. I find I can complete a roll in the time it takes a new rice paper wrapper to soften. Then you are all set to start the next.
Just before serving, halve each roll on the bias (with a diagonal cut) for attractive presentation.
These will keep, packaged in an air-tight container in the refrigerator, for 1-3 days. Let them come to room temperature before serving, as the rice paper is a little tough when cold.

Peanut Sauce

Makes a generous 1 cup

½ cup peanut butter

½ cup water

2-3 tablespoons soy sauce or tamari

1 tablespoon sriracha or other hot sauce

1 tablespoon grated ginger (if the fresh ginger is frozen, it grates really easily)

1 tablespoon rice vinegar or lime juice

In a small saucepan, combine all ingredients over medium low heat. Stir gently with a small spatula or a spoon.
As the ingredients melt together, at first the mixture will look watery and very grainy. Keep stirring gently, and it will smooth and thicken to an almost-pourable texture.
Taste for seasoning. If it is too salty, add an additional tablespoon each of peanut butter and water. If it is not spicy or salty enough, add more sriracha, soy, or ginger as needed.
Serve warm.
As it cools, the peanut sauce will separate slightly. Stir vigorously to re-combine.

Fig, gorgonzola, and prosciutto crostini

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Chelsea

Let’s talk about hazing for just a minute. I don’t mean the kind that covers the skies down here in Southern California – that filmy grayness that hangs a little thicker the closer to get to the skyscrapered center of Los Angeles. I don’t mean the kind that fills your brain when you remember there’s still a week of school left, and who knows how much grading after that. I mean the kind that happens when you’re the new guy. Being the new guy at my job means, through none of your own doing, that you are the party planner. At the department meeting in November, with no previous knowledge of customs or expectations, you suddenly get told that you (with any other new hires for the year) are in charge of planning the holiday party.
You do it. It turns out fine. And in my case, you end up with some funds left over. And suddenly the hazing becomes self-inflicted. You find yourself sitting in your boss’s office suggesting we organize something for the end of the spring semester as well because, well, why not? We work hard. We might want a party to celebrate the close of the school year. So when May rolls around, you remember that suggestion, and those leftover funds, and suddenly you’re planning a happy hour for the colleagues you can’t believe you’ve grown so fond of in just a year, and feeling, under the weight of the grocery bags, again quite lucky to have landed this position.
When I plan a party, I have a tendency to go overboard. Potlucks N. and I hosted during graduate school became theme parties. We were late to our graduation party because I wanted to make sure the pulled pork I’d made to share was perfect. Though I was determined to keep this work function a casual, easy-to-throw-together affair, I still found myself sketching out a shopping list two weeks in advance, when we weren’t even sure where the party would take place yet.
And then I was suddenly not just adding ready-to-serve items to the list, but ingredients. I was menu planning.
It seems to me that a gathering of the sort I executed this past weekend – a casual happy hour in a gorgeous community clubhouse in San Pedro – is perfectly lovely with entirely purchased snacks. A selection of red and white wines, good cheeses, some crackers and a vegetable platter, and perhaps some nice briny olives and hard salami, more than does the job. But adding one or two homemade items really makes things special. For me, these included some spring rolls and peanut sauce (I may share the recipe at some point, if I can get my act together), some freshly baked sourdough bread spiked with rosemary, and a crostini combination I am crazy for that was gone within the space of an hour.
This crostini blends salty and sweet in a tremendously successful way. It’s pretty, it smells fantastic, it looks impressive, and it is so easy there’s barely a recipe at all. That’s what we all need, I think, for the end of the semester.
Ready?
You slice a baguette, drizzle the slices with olive oil and pepper, and toast them. No salt, since we’ll be adding cured meat and cheese in a moment. You spread them with fig jam, nestle a half slice of prosciutto atop each, and then add a sprinkling of gorgonzola cheese. Then you shove the whole tray under the broiler for a few minutes until the edges of the prosciutto are crinkling and toasting with heat, and then you scoop your little toasts onto a platter and send them out to watch them disappear. Done. If you want, you can add a little wisp of baby arugula to the top for greenness and another peppery punch. As you can see, I did a tray without prosciutto, to allow vegetarian snackers to partake as well.

*Note: these quantities are approximate. Depending on how well oiled you like your bread, how peppery you want your toasts to be, and how thick a layer of jam and cheese you want to offer, you may need slightly more or slightly less than I’ve suggested here.

Fig, gorgonzola, and prosciutto crostini
Makes 24-30 toasts, depending on how thick you slice your baguette
1 french baguette
¼ cup (approximate) olive oil (or olive oil spray)
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ cup fig jam
10-12 slices prosciutto, halved into fat rectangles (as opposed to long, skinny ones)
¾ cup crumbled gorgonzola cheese
1 bunch baby arugula, optional

First, preheat your broiler.
Slice your baguette on a bias into ½ – ¾ inch discs. Arrange on two baking trays in a single layer. Brush (or spray) with olive oil and sprinkle with black pepper. Broil for 2-3 minutes or until the top of each slice is golden. Flip over each slice and broil another 1-2 minutes until these, too, are golden. Set aside to cool slightly.
When the toasts have cooled enough to handle without toasting your fingertips, spread each one with a thin layer of fig jam, being sure to get all the way to the edges.
Top the jam with a slice of prosciutto, fluting it a bit as you set it on the bread so that it sits up like a rumpled napkin, rather than lying flat. This will ensure a bit of crisping, and it looks awfully pretty.
Sprinkle some gorgonzola crumbles atop the prosciutto, trying to keep them on the toasts as much as possible, rather than on the baking tray around the toasts.
Place your loaded sheet trays back into the broiler and let them go for just a minute or two, until the edges of the prosciutto are sizzling and crisp, and the gorgonzola starts to wilt and bubble slightly.
Remove from the oven, settle on a serving platter, and top each with a curl of baby arugula, if desired.

Photo Friday

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Chelsea

experiments with crostini

Savory Greek “cheesecake” dip

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Chelsea

Ricotta cheese and I have a strange (strained?) relationship. I want to love it. Dishes in which it features – lasagna, calzone, a certain breed of cheesecake – sound to me decadent and worthy. But when I do eat it, I feel torn. It’s a texture thing, isn’t it? It has this graininess – a kind of luscious roughness that doesn’t feel quite right. I want it to make up its mind. Either be feta, all craggy and crumbling and tang, or be mascarpone, relentlessly silken. But ricotta is neither. It resists singularity. It hovers in the middle there, taunting me with its bothness.

Just before our annual in-laws holiday shuffle, I needed to use up some of our perishables, and there was half a container of ricotta, lonely and renounced in the back corner of the fridge. With lemons coming in on my backyard tree, I suddenly thought of a feta dip flavored with lemon zest and oregano and garlic that I’ve made dozens of times, and wondered how it would fare with this creamy cousin as its star player. I’d also been itching to try baked ricotta, after hearing that it transforms in the oven into something airy and rich. With a block of cream cheese also wailing its abandonment and crackers to use up before the trip at the end of the week, hey presto, my lunch menu was suddenly all about a savory Greek inspired dip.

Unlike a standard baked ricotta, I didn’t add any eggs here. This omission, plus the addition of cream cheese, kept the dip quite thin – not the quasi-souffle texture you might be expecting. Were I to make this again, I might add an egg or two just to puff it up a bit more. If you try it that way, let me know how it turns out.

Thanks to these changes, what you’re getting here is essentially melted creaminess that, at least when it’s hot, won’t even need spreading, covered by a layer of golden-brown bubbles that are easily pierced with the persistent corner of a cracker. It’s soft, it’s hot, it’s herby and spicy and perversely fresh, thanks to the lemon zest, and while I had it with crackers, it could be easily compelled to drape itself over sticks of fresh vegetables or bread. Pita chips, too, would be particularly nice. I’d be clever and current and say it would make a superb addition to a Superbowl game day spread, but I’ve narrowly missed that opportunity which, for me, seems somehow fitting. Instead, bake yourself a batch of this to fend off the post-holiday cold of the next month or two, when winter always seems the longest.

Savory Greek “cheesecake”dip

Makes a generous 1 cup

4 ounces ricotta cheese, at room temperature

4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

Zest of one lemon

¼ teaspoon dried oregano, or ½ teaspoon fresh, finely chopped

3 pepperoncinis, finely minced

Salt to taste (start with ¼ teaspoon)

Preheat the oven to 400F and spray or oil a 16 ounce (2 cup) oven-safe dish. I used the smallest soldier in my Corningware collection.
In a small bowl, mix the cheeses thoroughly until they are quite smooth. Lumps are the enemy here, as they signal incomplete incorporation.
Add the remaining ingredients, mixing well to combine evenly. Taste for salt and add more if needed.
Using a rubber spatula, scrape into your prepared dish, smoothly the top a bit for even browning.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the top is burbling and oil is sizzling around the edges.
If you want more browning, carefully place it under the broiler for a few minutes to let some of the bubbles turn deeply golden and barely crusty.
Remove from the oven and let sit for 5 minutes or so, just until it is cool enough to eat without scorching your throat. Serve with chips, thin slices of toast, crackers, or a crudités platter.