Pot Pie Empanadas with Cheddar Crust

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Chelsea

Unless you are feeding a large family, or your small family is a bunch of sauce junkies, chances are if you make something like the velouté I shared last week, you are going to have some leftovers. Mine worked out to just under a cup of sauce (you will probably have a touch more – I oversauced my chicken a bit because I was taking photos of the stream of velvet I was pouring), which was clearly too much to trash but, it seemed, not enough to do much with. True, I could have just warmed it up again and scarfed another cutlet, but that didn’t seem very original. Additionally, this sort of flour-thickened sauce doesn’t always reheat particularly well – think about the resolute globs of leftover Thanksgiving gravy. It was going to need some help.
Food Blog March 2014-3537 Food Blog March 2014-3543 When I thought velouté, I thought pot-pie. However, a mere cup of sauce didn’t seem like enough. Smaller quantities of sauce would require smaller packages. I’ve been tossing around the idea of hand-pies for a while (see what I did there? Yeah.), and suddenly it became clear that this final bit of sauce would become the base for the filling of pot pie empanadas, spiced up with chunks of cheddar cheese in the crust.
Food Blog March 2014-3513 Food Blog March 2014-3515 Yes. This was happening.

I think every culture has a snack food created by enclosing a savory little morsel in a puff of dough. Samosas, gyoza or pot-stickers, pierogies, Cornish pasties, think about it. For Spain, and for Central and South American cuisines, empanadas are that snack. A tumble of meat, cheese, and spices (with the occasional vegetable – a few summers ago I had a spectacular one filled with cheese and fresh spinach) wrapped up in a lovely soft dough that is sometimes baked but more often lovingly tipped into the deep fryer: it’s quite possibly my dream food.
Food Blog March 2014-3524 Food Blog March 2014-3526 Food Blog March 2014-3528 And here I was about to Americanize it beyond belief. The leftovers of my grad school training screamed things at me about colonization and cultural appropriation, but I swatted them down. It’s improving the classic by acknowledging and incorporating a new angle. Yeah.

And it was so worth it.

The dough here is baked, not fried. I don’t have a deep fryer, and to be honest, crammed with cheddar as it was, the crust did not provide the most airtight of seals. I would have been nervous about dropping these into hot oil.
Food Blog March 2014-3519 Food Blog March 2014-3522 There’s nothing to be nervous about when it comes to the taste, though. You can stuff these with whatever you’d like in a pot pie, meats or vegetables. I opted for potatoes, carrots, a few mushrooms, green onions, a breath of garlic, and some green beans that had been in my fridge for a touch longer than they should have. A bit of shredded up chicken breast completed the pot. These get cooked in the leftover velouté with a splash of white wine (and a bit of water, if you feel there isn’t enough liquid) until they are tender, then, once they are cool, jammed a mere tablespoon at a time into circles of sticky but pliable dough. A quick fold, a squeeze, and a crimp with the tines of a fork, and they are ready to bake.
I had designs on serving these alongside a salad for a balanced meal, but we never made it to the salad. We just ate these, burning our fingers and our tongues as we picked up one and another and another. These are pot pies for crust lovers. The dough becomes rich and crisp and flaky, and the cheddar cheese is, I have to admit, a bit of a stroke of genius. It’s a perfect little package, and writing about it now, I desperately want another.

Sometimes leftovers are better than the original. This, friends, is one of those times.

Food Blog March 2014-3534 Cheddar dough
Makes enough for 18-20 empanadas, if re-rolled once or twice
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt (this doesn’t seem like much, but the cheese is salty and the filling will be seasoned)
8 tablespoons very cold butter (1 stick), cut into cubes
½ cup extra sharp cheddar cheese, cut into cubes
1 egg
⅓ cup ice water
1 tablespoon vinegar

Dump the flour and salt into a food processor and pulse once or twice to mix them.
Add the cubes of butter and cheese and pulse 4 times for 3 seconds each. This seems fussily precise, but it worked very well.
In a small bowl, beat the egg lightly with the water and vinegar. Add to the food processor and pulse once or twice until the mixture comes together in large clumps. You’ll know it’s ready when it stodgily mashes against the side of the processor bowl, reluctant to whiz in circles anymore.
Turn this mixture out onto a large square of plastic wrap. Using the plastic wrap to help you, form it into a disc 5 or 6 inches in diameter, then wrap up and refrigerate for at least 60 minutes. This will allow the flour granules to absorb some of the liquid and fat, which makes for easier rolling, and the butter (and cheese) to firm up again, which makes for better texture.
While the dough chills, make the filling.

Pot pie filling
These quantities may not seem like enough, but remember, you are using only minute quantities of filling for each empanada. Overfilling dumplings is somewhere in the top ten of my frequent cooking mistakes, so trust me. You will have plenty.
2 tablespoons butter
1-2 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 green onions, thinly sliced in little moons
3-4 mushrooms, diced
2 small carrots (or one large), diced
1 small Yukon gold potato, diced
6 green beans, stems removed, sliced into ½ inch pieces
½ cup cooked shredded chicken
¼ cup white wine
1 cup velouté
Salt and pepper, and herbs of your choosing, to taste

In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat, then add the garlic, onions, and mushrooms. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms begin to brown, 5-8 minutes.
Add the potatoes and carrots, stir to combine.
Add the wine and velouté. Season with salt and pepper, if needed, and any herbs you feel inclined to add. Simon and Garfunkel’s usual suspects would certainly be welcome.
Cook over a healthy simmer until the carrots, which will likely take the longest, are almost tender. If the pan looks dry, add a little water or chicken broth. Depending on how small you have cut the vegetables, this could take anywhere from 10-20 minutes. Mine took about 15.
When the carrots are almost tender, add the green beans and simmer until they are just losing their raw crunch.
Kill the heat and add the shredded chicken, then let the whole mess cool to room temperature.

To assemble and bake:

Preheat the oven to 425F and spray two baking sheets with non-stick spray or line them with parchment paper.
Remove the dough from the refrigerator and unwrap it on a floured board. Using a rolling pin or a straight-sided wine bottle (it totally works!), roll it out into a rectangle or oval about ¼ inch thick. With the floured lip of a glass, a jar mouth, or a biscuit cutter, cut out into 4-inch rounds. When you cut, to avoid extra stickiness or tearing the dough, press straight down without twisting all the way through the dough. Once you have cut all the way through the dough, then you can twist the cutter a bit to loosen the round from the board.
Once you have made all the circles you can with the dough, gather up the scraps and roll them out again. One or two re-rollings should produce 18-20 dough circles.
Add about 1 tablespoon of the cooled filling to each round of dough. You will be tempted to add more. Don’t do it! A solid 1 tablespoon is about all that can fit without making a tremendous mess.
As you place each tablespoon of filling in the middle of the dough round, fold it in half and press the edges together with your forefinger and thumb. To seal each little half-moon package, set it down on the floured board again and press down on the edges all the way around with the back of the tines of a fork. This really crimps it closed, but it also looks pretty, which I’m a fan of.
Settle each empanada on your prepared baking sheet. They aren’t going to spread, so they don’t need too much room in between them, but you don’t want them touching each other. Each needs to get the full oven experience without its neighbors interfering.
Bake in your preheated 425F oven for about 20 minutes, until the crust is golden and crisp to the touch, and any filling that has had the misfortune of leaking out is bubbling assertively.
You will probably need to let these cool for 5-10 minutes before eating. Just enough time to, if you’re feeling virtuous, toss together a quick salad. Or, you know, not.

Photo Friday

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Project Sauce: Gnocchi and Broccoli with Blistered Sauce Mornay

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Chelsea

I think a lot about what I put on this blog – the content, the recipes, the types of food – and this often leads me down a rabbit-hole of consideration about what kind of blog this is. Perhaps because I’m an academic, or maybe just because I watch an awful lot of food TV, this frequently kindles an urge in me to categorize what I do here, to define myself and my food. This is not a baking blog, though I produce a lot of baked goods. It’s not a dessert blog or a gluten-free blog or a vegan blog or a comfort foods blog, and it’s certainly not an “easy and fast” blog… what is it? To figure out if I’m doing what I’m doing well, I feel I have to know what it is that I do.

And yet at the same time, that same academic part of me that studied too much post-structuralism in graduate school screams “No! Don’t limit yourself! Don’t draw yourself into a box! Categories are restricting. Categories are unnecessary. Categories are a lie.”

True enough. Too often, categories are a lie. They lead me into grandiose, Walt Whitman-esque resistance. And yet, because blogging is, by being essentially writing, an experiment of selfness, in order to better understand myself, I have to better understand what I do here.

And maybe that’s it. Rather than stating what this is, blocking myself into a stationary category that may someday become too small for my own swelling and developing, maybe it’s better to talk about what I do, and what this blog does.

Here’s my latest approximation: I re-imagine classics. Not the most original or most creative, I assure you, and not always strictly true, but I think it’s a pretty good explanation for most of the recipes that end up here. Discontent with as is, I poke around and try anew. Ignoring, in some respects, the idea that a classic is a classic for a reason, I demand that it learn flexibility and try on new styles, metamorphosing, growing, moving. Do, don’t just be.

(Obligatory, shamelessly decadent sauce-pouring pictures)

This week’s recipe is definitely one of those that define what I do here. Furthering our exploration into the sauce world, I take a classic, simple, comfort food: broccoli cheese potatoes, and turn its world over, draping thick, cheddar-laden robes across a dish of pan-fried gnocchi and lightly blanched broccoli, letting the cheese sauce sink gracelessly into the crannies between before blistering the whole top under the broiler for a few minutes. It’s a revelation. But then, that shouldn’t be so surprising, because the classic combination it pulls from is already so good.

Sauce mornay is basically a béchamel that’s been dressed up with the addition of cheese. It is French, as so many of them are, and in application can be used to add gooey goodness to everything from crepes to vegetables to macaroni and cheese. Not a fan of cauliflower? Roast it and drench it in a mornay sauce. I can almost guarantee you’ll be a convert. Making a cheese-y potato soup? The base to which you add broth or stock will likely be something very similar to a mornay. Fondue and Welsh rarebit are other closely related preparations, though whether they are offshoots, coincidences, or legitimate progenitors is likely not provable.

Traditionally, the cheese added to a mornay is a blend of parmesan and gruyere, a particularly nutty variety of Swiss cheese. I like extra sharp cheddar in mine, though, the sharper the better. My mornay sauce, it’s only fair to tell you, is thicker and has a much higher proportion of cheese in it than is strictly traditional. My reasons for this, as I’ve mentioned before, are largely that I like the taste of cheese more than I like the taste of the sauce it becomes. This seems a bit silly – why make the sauce if what you’re really after is the cheese? – but this creation is so velvety and thick and luxurious that it’s worth tinkering with until you get the consistency and cheese percentage you are happy with.

As for the rest of the dish, I can’t take ultimate credit. The inspiration for pan frying the gnocchi comes from Nigella Lawson, the (for me) true domestic goddess. Rather than boiling them and risking gumminess or spongy bits falling about, she sautés them until golden and crisp, as I’ve done here. They are then ready – anxious even – to suck up the lush cheddar velvet we’re going to douse them in. Adding the broccoli, blanched in salted water just until crisp-tender, is my attempt to make this a complete meal and dislodge some of the guilt you might feel about the amount of cheese you’re going to consume. Plus, who doesn’t love broccoli with cheese sauce? Again, classics, but jammed together in a fresh way that I hope will delight you.

I’m giving you two versions of my sauce mornay recipe here – one quite pared down and basic, though, as I noted above, cheesier than what is typical (many mornays call for only a few tablespoons of cheese) – one “kicked up” with the integration of some more complex, exciting flavors. Use and play at your own discretion.

Basic Mornay

Makes about 2½ cups

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons flour

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

1 ½ cups milk, at room temperature, if possible, for easier integration

2-3 cups grated extra sharp cheddar cheese (or the cheese of your liking. I use a whopping 3 cups of extra sharp New York cheddar)

Key for this sort of sauce is having all of your ingredients ready to go from the beginning. You don’t want to get to the “whisk constantly” part and realize you haven’t grated your cheese yet. Do yourself a favor and have everything ready and waiting for you before you begin.
In a skillet over medium heat, melt the butter. When it is melted and bubbling, sprinkle in the flour and stir to combine with a whisk. The mixture will become thick and a bit crumbly.
Add the salt, pepper, and nutmeg and stir to combine.
Add the milk slowly – no more than ½ cup at a time – whisking insistently and constantly as you add it. You want to combine it smoothly into the thick roux (butter and flour mixture) you’ve created, and avoid lumps. Adding 1½ cups of refrigerator cold milk all at once makes lumps much more likely.
Keep whisking your mixture gently as you pour in each addition of milk. When you have added all of the milk, turn the heat down to medium-low and continue to whisk gently and languidly (or more ferociously if you have ended up with some lumps… it happens…) until the sauce begins to bubble.
Once the sauce reaches a gentle simmer, whisk until it thickens slightly – something a bit thicker than melted ice cream, perhaps the viscosity of a soft porridge or cream of wheat (remember that stuff? God I loved it as a kid).
Now that your sauce is thick, turn the heat down to low and add the cheese a small handful at a time, whisking after each addition until it is completely melted and incorporated. After a few minutes, you will end up with a thick, rich, pale orange (if it’s cheddar) sauce. If you are using cheddar, you might notice that your sauce is just barely grainy. That’s okay. It will still work really well in whatever application you’re using it for. Cheddar is just such a crumbly cheese that it doesn’t melt as silky smooth as other, softer cheeses.

Kicked-up Mornay

Makes about 2½ cups

2 tablespoons butter

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

2 tablespoons flour

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper, or to taste

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 ½ cups milk, at room temperature, if possible, for easier integration

2-3 cups grated extra sharp cheddar cheese (or the cheese of your liking. I use a whopping 3 cups of extra sharp New York cheddar)

See notes above about having all of your ingredients ready to go before you begin cooking this sauce.
Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. When it has melted completely, add the finely minced garlic and stir gently.
When the garlic is sizzling and has barely taken on color, add the flour and stir to combine with a whisk. The mixture will become thick and a bit crumbly.
Add the salt, pepper, nutmeg, cayenne, and mustard, and stir to combine.
With the spices and flavorings integrated, follow the remaining directions for the standard mornay sauce above.

Gnocchi and Broccoli with Blistered Sauce Mornay

Serves 3-4

1 pound gnocchi (I use premade, go on, judge me…)

1-2 medium heads broccoli, cut into bite-sized florets

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 recipe kicked-up mornay

Heat a large pot of salted water to a boil, then (carefully!) drop in the broccoli florets. Return the water to a boil and cook for just a minute or two, until the broccoli reaches your desired state of crisp-tenderness. Drain well and set aside in an ovenproof dish. I used a 9×9 inch square pan, which worked well.
In the same skillet in which you intend to make your mornay, heat the 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. When it glistens as you let it flow across the pan, add the gnocchi and toss lightly to get them all in contact with the oiled surface of the pan.
Cook the gnocchi, tossing occasionally, until all are golden and they have gained a dry, crisp crust. This should take approximately 8 minutes, depending on how hot your stove’s “medium” is. While you wait for the gnocchi, tossing them occasionally, turn on your broiler to preheat.
Once your gnocchi are golden and all have a crisp crust on at least one side, toss them with the broccoli you prepared earlier.
Now make the mornay sauce, following the directions above. When it is thick and rich and adequately cheese-laden for your tastes, pour it over the top of your gnocchi and broccoli, letting it sink down into the crevices in between, and settle in a substantial layer across the top. You may not want to use all of the sauce, but the quantity you apply is up to you.
Place your sauced dish in the broiler and let it rip for 5-10 minutes, checking frequently, until the cheese sauce across the top bubbles and blisters, and the exposed broccoli florets begin to get crusty and brown. Then all that’s left to do is serve yourself up a bowl and enjoy.

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.

Project Sauce: Bechamel

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Chelsea

I think it’s a good idea to start with the basics. I don’t rush my students straight into composing multi-source research papers; starting a new project here seemed to hold to the same strictures. I’m not racing right into hollandaise. I’m not drenching your January palates with demi-glace, homemade mayonnaise, or even beurre blanc (though these are coming, have no fear). No, we’re going to start with something foundational, and at least for me, something familiar: bechamel.

Here’s the thing, though. As I’ve dipped my toe tentatively into the field of culinary history (side note: one of my new secret pretend-careers is culinary historian – fascinating!), what stands out more and more brightly to me is how rarely familiar actually is. Bechamel is an excellent example. It’s a white sauce. It’s one of the classic mother sauces. It forms a base for numerous other sauces: the luscious cheddar and beer laced concoction you drape over toast to make Welsh rarebit. The silky, creamy mess redolent of parmesan that becomes alfredo. Even the simple melting glory you toss with elbow noodles to make macaroni and cheese (can you tell we’ll be delving into cheese sauces?!). But its history is not without contradictions. Even the Medici family figure into it! According to some Catherine de Medici brought a retinue of Italian chefs with her into France when she married Henri, Duke of Orleans, and bechamel sauce flowed straight from their kitchens out into the rest of France. There are stories that it was invented by (though more likely named for) a steward called the Marquis Louise de Bechameil. The tradition of reducing cream sauces probably began in 18^th century France, but the “mother sauces,” of which bechamel is one, were created in the 17^th century. And boiling or simmering food items in milk, as some bechamels do, goes back to medieval cuisine.

National and temporal origins aside, there are even disputes about what goes into it. I’ve always made a bechamel sauce from three main ingredients: butter, flour, and milk. But there are thoughts about what kind of dairy should be used, and which flavoring agents are permissible, and some traditional recipes even call for sticking an onion with cloves and letting this flavor the milk as it heats.

Lest we get confused right out of the gate, however, I’m going to stick with what feels familiar and comfortable. Butter, flour, milk. A pinch of salt. A grind or two of pepper. French traditionalists would have me use white pepper, since it won’t disrupt the homogenous ivory color of the sauce, but I like seeing those little specks of flavor. Not to mention, I didn’t have any white pepper in my kitchen. A sauce made of butter, flour, and milk can only taste like so much, so I’ve also adopted the Italian addition of some nutmeg, freshly ground, to amp up the flavor. Now we have a lightly speckled pool of creaminess, like the slight freckles on a fresh egg.

Here’s how a bechamel works: you melt butter, add an equal portion of flour, and cook for a minute or two to allow the flour to dissolve and distribute. This combination – equal parts butter and flour – is called a roux, and it is the classic thickening agent. Everything from gumbo to cream gravy is thickened with roux.

To transform the roux into a sauce, then, you have to add liquid. For bechamel, that’s milk. So we add a quantity of milk, preferably warm, a little at a time, whisking and whisking until a velvet smooth sauce forms. The quantity of milk added depends on the desired thickness of the final end product. Being sure the milk is warm, and adding it slowly, guards against lumps. This sauce is about luscious smoothness and creamy thickness. Lumps won’t do.

The magic of bechamel is that you won’t know how thick it is going to be until it starts to simmer. It takes a bit of time for the flour granules to hydrate, and only once they are fully incorporated and warm enough to bubble will the true viscosity of the sauce reveal itself. The one we are going to produce here gets just a touch thicker than a pool of melted ice cream. It’s easily pourable, but it will also coat the back of a spoon, clinging in a smooth layer until you, say, run a finger through it to have a taste.

You can do a lot with a bechamel. As I noted earlier, it is the foundational component of a good cheese sauce. It’s also the classic white sauce component in a traditional lasagna. It can be draped over steamed vegetables, or make the base for a chowder or other cream soup, or even rest gently over a pounded, breaded, pan-fried chicken cutlet. But since I am working with classic and simple here, I wanted to go with a dish that really lets you experience the creamy loveliness of a bechamel: croque monsieur.

Now you’re raising your eyebrows. I know; croque monsieur is essentially a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. Ham and swiss, to be specific. It’s a name taken from the French verb croquer, which means “to crunch” or “to munch.” Thus the sandwich is, if I dare, a Mister Crunch. N. loved this. He’s been calling the sauce in question a “bleckmel” to make me laugh; he knows full well how to pronounce it (he did take French, after all), and he was so delighted by the literal translation of our dinner that he started to call it a “Crunchy Human” sandwich, eliminating the gendered title: a sandwich for everyone! (I should note, however, that there is a “female” version of this sandwich: a croque madame is the same grilled ham and swiss, with the addition of a gently fried egg on top.)

So let’s do this. A perfectly crunchy sandwich, laden with melting swiss and a thin layer of smoky, salty ham, topped with spoonfuls of perfectly creamy bechamel, sprinkled with more cheese, and broiled until golden bubbles swell on the surface. It’s a fork-and-knife sandwich, and it’s far from a light lunch, but it is, I think, a good way to start.

Bechamel

Makes approximately 1 ½ cups

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 ½ cups whole milk, warmed slightly in a saucepan or in the microwave

a pinch each salt, pepper (white is traditional, but I used black), and nutmeg (freshly ground is preferable)

In a medium pan, melt the butter over medium to medium-low heat.
Add the flour, sprinkling it in around the pan rather than dumping it all in one spot; this will help it incorporate easily and quickly. Stir it around with a whisk, letting it mix with the butter to form golden clumps, which will slowly collapse into a pale yellow, lightly bubbling mass. This will take 1-2 minutes.
Once the flour and butter have cooked together for 1-2 minutes, begin adding the milk. Pour in only about ¼ cup at a time, whisking constantly during and after each addition. The butter and flour mixture will get quite thick and pasty with the first few additions of milk. That’s fine – just keep whisking, fully incorporating before each additional pour of liquid.
After a few additions, the mixture will begin to resemble a sauce, thinning out and liquifying. Keep whisking. Inattendance will result in unincorporated hunks of flour, and thus a lumpy sauce.
Once you have added all of the milk, you won’t have to whisk as vigorously. Just keep turning your whisk through the sauce in lazy figure eights, dreaming about your weekend or the tropics or the lecture you are planning on Anglo-Saxon England (that might be just me), as it heats through.
When your sauce is slightly thickened, approaching the texture of melted ice cream, add the salt, pepper, and nutmeg. You want just a nice little sprinkle of each, to add subtle flavor.
Continue your lazy whisking until the sauce barely begins to bubble. It will be just a touch thicker than melted ice cream now – something like a thick royal icing or even a powdered sugar glaze.
Lower or turn off the heat until you are ready to apply the sauce.
Bechamel behaves best when warm. As it cools, it clumps and forms a skin like you’d find on a pudding. It can be stored in the refrigerator, covered tightly, and reheated in a pan if needed, but will be best on the day it is made.

Croque Monsieur

Quantities are per sandwich. Make as many as you wish!

1 teaspoon dijon mustard

2 slices of bread (a french loaf would be traditional; I used sourdough, because I’m not)

2-3 thin slices of good ham

½ cup grated swiss cheese, divided (I like Gruyere. Emmantaler would also be lovely)

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese

2-3 tablespoons bechamel sauce

Spread the inside of each slice of bread with dijon mustard. You might want more than a teaspoon, but I tend to prefer my sandwiches light on the mustard.
On top of the mustard, mound all but 2 tablespoons of the grated swiss cheese, then spread it carefully and gently over the bread to form an even layer.
Add the slices of ham on top of the cheese, folding or manipulating their shape where necessary so they aren’t hanging over the sides. Top with the remaining piece of bread.
Spread the outsides of both pieces of bread with the butter. I like to do this by placing the sandwich in the cold skillet I’ll be toasting it in. That way, when I flip the sandwich over to butter the other side, I won’t make a mess or lose any of the butter – it will just be resting against the cooking surface.
With the sandwich in the skillet, heat it over medium heat. Don’t go any hotter than this! You’ll be tempted to crank the heat up. But it takes a while for the cheese to melt, and we don’t want the bread to burn in the meantime. Slow and steady.
Toast the sandwich until the bread is golden and crisp, and the cheese inside is well melted: 4-5 minutes per side over medium or even medium-low heat. Meanwhile, preheat your broiler.
When the sandwich is nicely toasted, turn off the stove. Spoon 2-3 tablespoons of warm bechamel over the top slice of bread. Use the back of the spoon to spread it out – you want an even layer, completely covering the slice. Corners and edges poking out will get too dark under the intense heat of the broiler.
Once you have an even layer of bechamel, sprinkle the remaining swiss cheese and all of the grated parmesan right over the top, again trying to create an even, complete layer.
Carefully place the skillet into your broiler (if you have handles on the skillet made of anything but metal, be sure to wrap them in aluminum foil first) and broil for 3-5 minutes, until the sauce and cheese on top melt, bubble, and attain a slightly crunchy bronzed layer on top.
Remove from the broiler (be careful – the handle of your skillet is now incredibly hot. Don’t ask me how I know this), plate, and serve bubbling hot! You can cut the sandwich in half if you like, but since you are probably going to be eating it with a fork and knife, pre-slicing might not be necessary.

Cheesy Brussels and Bacon Mashed Potato Cakes

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Chelsea

Generally speaking, N. and I are boring restaurant attendees. One drink apiece, no appetizers, an entrée for each, and by then we are too full for dessert. The most exciting thing we do (hold your breath, folks) is to share plates, particularly when we are torn between what we want to order. This is likely borne out of graduate school poverty, though in a world of extravagant portion size it seems like a reasonable practice to continue.

But once in a while, an appetizer or a side dish sounds so luscious, or so interesting, or so, I don’t know, good (are we still allowed to use that word?), that we can’t resist it. At one of our more favorite haunts a week or two before the holidays, we were enticed by just such a side – a craggy mass of mashed potatoes threaded with strands of Brussels sprouts and bacon, a suggestion of cheddar, and broiled until the top was smattered with crusty dark bits. It sounded like a dream. It was… fine.

As I ate it, I couldn’t help but feel that the flavors could have been stronger. More cheese. More bacon. More crunch. It needed to be, perhaps not a heap of mash subjected to broiling, but shaped into tender cakes and fried in a pan. Yes, cheesy patties shot through with ribbons of Brussels sprouts and chunks of bacon, fried up in the very bacon grease the meaty bits had expelled as they cooked. Crunchy, creamy, melting, with enough green that a very imaginative person could just barely declare them virtuous.

What I ended up with was a marriage of that classic British leftovers dish bubble and squeak (though certainly in a modern reinterpretation), and a latke so unkosher that we might as well have piled shrimp on top and called it a day.

Yukon gold potatoes have quickly become my standard for mash (I could even call them the “gold” standard, but you might groan at that, eh?), and this dish is no exception. Their flavor is terrific – hearty and rich – and they whip into lovely buttery fluff. And here, where texture is intentional, there is no need to peel them. The tissue-thin skins shred into the mix and echo the ribbons of Brussels sprouts. Chewy crisp hunks of bacon stud the cake with smoky saltiness, and do yourself a favor and use the sharpest cheddar cheese you can find – it needs to be saliva-inducing to stand up to the other flavors here. A single egg, lightly beaten and worked in, holds the cakes together, and then it’s just a question of heating up your cast iron skillet and frying them to order. I can imagine scarfing these for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and I’m admitting nothing, but they are even acceptable stolen cold out of the fridge.

*A note about bacon grease: I found, as I fried these, that bacon grease lends terrific flavor, but because it can be shot through with remnants of browned bits from frying the bacon, it can make the exterior of the cakes quite dark. To prevent this, as in the directions below, I recommend that you pour out the grease, reserving only a tablespoon or two. If you’re feeling particularly fussy, you can strain this reserved portion, but I wouldn’t be too worried about that. Discard the rest (or save for some other application) and wipe out your pan in between frying the bacon and frying the cakes. When it is time to fry again, combine the reserved bacon grease with some olive oil. You’ll still get the smoky, unctuous flavor, but the olive oil raises the smoke point and will produce a golden, rather than an almost-black, crust.

Cheesy Brussels and Bacon Mashed Potato Cakes

Makes 12-14 cakes of 3-inch diameter

4 medium Yukon gold potatoes (about 1 pound), each cut into large chunks of roughly equal size

2 tablespoons milk

Salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste

8 ounces Brussels sprouts (about 12 large), stemmed and stripped of any discolored or damaged outer leaves

8 ounces bacon, diced

4 ounces shredded cheddar cheese, the sharpest you can find

1 egg, lightly beaten

2 tablespoons bacon grease reserved from frying the bacon

2-4 tablespoons olive oil

Deposit potato chunks in a pot of salted water, bring to a boil, and cook until they are fork tender but not mush. This should take, depending on the size of your potato chunks, 7-10 minutes after the water comes to a boil. Drain and cool potatoes completely.
While potatoes are cooling, fry the bacon pieces in a skillet (my preference is cast iron) over medium heat until they are golden, almost crispy, and cooked through. Fish them out with a slotted spoon and set aside on a plate lined with paper towels. Reserve 1-2 tablespoons of the grease, discard the rest, and wipe out the pan to clear any bacon bits residue (see note above).
Using the slicer disc on a food processor (or a very steady hand and a sharp knife), shred up the Brussels sprouts into a mixture of ribbons and wafer-thin slices.
Shred the cheddar cheese.
By this time, your potatoes should be just about cool! When they are at room temperature, place them in a large mixing bowl and add the milk, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Whiz them up with an electric mixer until more or less evenly combined. It won’t be a completely smooth mixture, because we’ve left the skins on, but it will come together into a buttery golden mash.
Add the cheese, Brussels sprouts shreds, and bacon pieces to the potatoes and mix well. I started out using a rubber spatula for this, but quickly switched to my hands, which did a much more thorough job. Taste for seasoning and add more salt, pepper, and garlic powder if needed.
Add the lightly beaten egg and mix to combine.
Using your hands, shape the potato cakes. Gently form rounds slightly bigger than a golf ball, then flatten them into patties about 3 inches in diameter. As you finish each patty, set it aside on a plate.
When your patties are formed, heat the olive oil and the reserved bacon grease in your skillet (to save on dishes you can, and should, use the same skillet you cooked the bacon in) over medium-high heat. When the oil shimmers, add the cakes. Don’t crowd them, though. Each one should have space around it – they shouldn’t touch one another. In my 9 inch cast iron skillet, 4 at a time was perfect.
Once you have placed the cakes, don’t mess with them. Leave them alone for 4-5 minutes (4 minutes and 30 seconds was perfect for me) before flipping. You will need to do this with deliberation. Slide a thin spatula under each one quickly and firmly, then flip and leave alone for another 4-5 minutes. Disrupting the cakes too early, or fussing with them too much, will result in sticking, smashing, and general disintegration. They need time to form a stiff crust on each side before they will consent to flip cleanly.
Continue, frying 4-5 patties at a time for 4-5 minutes on each side, until all cakes have been cooked. You may need another dollop of olive oil after a few batches to re-slick the skillet. If the oil starts to smoke or the cakes are frying up darker than you like, turn the heat down to medium.
As you finish each batch, serve them immediately, or to hold them until all are cooked, stow on a cookie sheet lined with a wire rack in a 200 degree oven.
As with all fritter-type beasts, these are best consumed as soon after taking them out of the oil as possible.