Gourmet

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Chelsea

On a warm, July day, when a person (and her husband) is unjustly required to spend the shining hours of the afternoon working, teaching, holding office hours, what better treat could there be than to come home and indulge in a little gourmet dinner?

As I’ve divulged previously, I like cannibalizing from restaurant menus. Usually it’s not the dish I order, but another that was second or third on the list… or just barely missed the final, nervous, rushed decision as the server hovers above me… and I jot down the description on a slip of paper somewhere and try not to lose it in the subsequent weeks.

This time it was that Americanized, fancified Italian food-of-the-common-man: pizza.

Several weeks ago N. and I celebrated Friday by meeting some friends to drinks and dinner. We’d already eaten, so we swore to each other we would only drink one pint (for him), and one glass of wine (for me). Then we went to Agate Alley with our friends and ordered a huge, gluttonously greasy, spicy, salty, decadent basket of onion rings. I ate so many…

While we patted our fingertips on napkins to try and assuage our greasy shame, our friend S. ordered a personal size pizza topped with prosciutto, gorgonzola cheese, brandied figs, and a bright salad of fresh raw arugula, piled high right in the middle. I had never thought of putting figs on a pizza before, but it seemed so inspired. Though S. ate hers without the porky delights of prosciutto (one of those vegetarian types, you know), the idea of wafer-thin slices of cured pork-belly lingered in my mind when I recalled the recipe.

So I, so often operating as Dr. Frankenstein in the kitchen, decided a recreation was required. This pizza would be a hybrid – a loving, daring combination of Agate Alley’s delectable pie and the prosciutto and caramelized onion darling Ree of The Pioneer Woman has developed. With a hunk of gorgonzola languishing in my cheese drawer, it was just the right thing to do.

Ingredients (mostly approximated):

1 lump pizza dough (I shamelessly bought mine, pre-made, from Trader Joe’s fridge section)

1 medium to large sweet onion

2 TB brown sugar

4-6 oz. prosciutto

5-8 dried figs, sliced

1-2 oz. gorgonzola cheese, crumbled

1 cup (at least!) shredded mozzarella cheese

Big handful of arugula or basil

While my pizza stone heated in the oven, I caramelized my onions per the Pioneer Woman’s directions. Then, while I prepped all my other ingredients (grating cheese, slicing figs, playing with the dough), I forgot about the onions for a little bit too long and the brown sugar started to burn. But I decided to just call that “extra-caramelized” and be happy with it.

With the dough stretched, plunked onto the hot, cornmeal sprinkled stone and already starting to shrink back in on itself (it never wants to stay in a 12-inch circle; why not?), I quickly piled on the toppings: a drizzle of olive oil, evenly spread mounds of mozzarella, trailing slices of salty hammy goodness, cheese crumbles, figs, and dark, dark mahogany clumps of onion.

Into the oven at 450F it went, and about 12 minutes later, gasping, I edged it out and clunked it down on my stovetop. Lacking arugula, I sprinkled baby leaves of basil atop the whole thing.

It looked glorious. The crust was crunchy on the bottom, the cheese was golden and bubbling, the prosciutto had crinkled and crisped, and the figs were these dark, seeded pockets of mystery.

We ate. We ate more. The combination of salty and sweet has been hyped for years now, but that’s because it works. The sweet onions and tangy, sugary figs balanced the rich creamy funk of the gorgonzola and the perfect saltiness of the prosciutto. I would have preferred arugula to basil, because the licorice overtones of basil weren’t the perfect match, but the fresh greenness was definitely welcome.

I would never have thought of figs on pizza, but I would urge you to try them in this combination (or just figs and prosciutto, I won’t tell). Sliced thin, they warmed in the oven and just started to create their own glassy brulée atop their honeyed interiors. With chewy dough, creamy bubbling cheese, crisp-chewy ham, soft sweet onions, the crunch of the little seeds inside each slice of fig, popping between the teeth and tickling the taste buds, was the perfect final flavor of each bite.

This would be perfect enjoyed with a crisp, semi-dry white wine, though the beer we drank with it was just fine. It is supposed to be simple fare, after all.

First fire

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Chelsea

Don’t look back. Don’t stop and talk to your loved ones. Do not pass GO or collect $200. Just grab your beer bottle, your children, your spouse, whoever, and run to your grill. You must make and eat this, now: Honey-lime Chicken Fajitas with Grilled Fresh Corn and Avocado-Orange Salad.

At my request, N. just lugged our baby gas grill out for its first showing of the season. It just needed to be dusted off, scraped down, and switched on. And then we cover it with unreasonably delectable things like these fajitas from the June 2008 issue of Cuisine at Home (the recipe for the chicken can be found here). With my numerous food magazine subscriptions expired, and me on a graduate student budget, I’ve started going back through old issues by month and, rather than cooking whatever I want willy-nilly, only permitting myself to use recipes from the month we’re in. Thus this month I have four issues of various titles from June to choose from. I didn’t need to look further than June 2008, though.

N. did an excellent job grilling the chicken breasts, which got crunchy caramelized exteriors from the honey in the marinade. While he was busy, I was able to compose our two sides.

Love it or hate it, the cilantro in this grilled corn mixture added bright, grassy freshness and went with the sweetness of the corn extremely well. Surprisingly, the queso fresco I crumbled over the top went along well too, probably because the salad was all freshness and crisp juiciness, and benefited from some creamy curds of cheese.

Because we had a sudden profusion (read: six) of tart garnet strawberries weighing down their respective stems in the backyard, I made a fruity addition to the Avocado-Orange salad Cuisine at Home offered. Eliminating the garlic from the recipe and using the orange’s dripping liqueur instead of lime juice (one of my limes was most reluctant to give up anything), I mixed the roughly chopped strawberries in with an avocado, an orange, a few pinches of cilantro, and some salt and pepper. Then I tried not to eat everything in the bowls while I waited for N. to bring the chicken in.

Fingers burning, we sliced it, then loaded up warm flour tortillas with thick moist slices of chicken, crumbles of queso fresco, sweet juicy pops of corn, and some green salsa (not homemade, but what can you do?). I substituted a spoonful of Avocado-Orange salad for the salsa on my second fajita, and was equally overwhelmed. So fresh. So fragrant. Such a pleasing, intriguing combination of flavors.

So quickly gone.

Breakfast for dinner close-up: Cranberry Fritters

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Chelsea

I am sitting on my front porch with my feet – in striped socks – crossed atop the white railing. It is 4pm and the outside temperature exceeds 70F. Earlier this afternoon, I pulled weeds and thinned our rows of broccoli and lettuce in the back garden with my sleeves rolled up. And I’m looking back to Friday. This past Friday ago, while rain and hail alternately pelted, flooded, and overflowed the lip of our driveway, I put my stove and oven into an overtime they haven’t seen since Thanksgiving. Everything was good, but what I want to discuss today is item 3 from that menu: Cranberry Donuts.

They were more fritters than donuts, really, but that’s close enough. Simple batter: egg, milk, sugar, flour, baking powder, cinnamon. And to add something special, a spare ½ cup of defrosted cranberries, barely pulsed in the food processor. No rolling, no cutting, no kneading, just tablespoon-fuls of this chewy, sticky batter into a pot of hot vegetable oil. I came close to disaster several times, because the batter was so sticky that it didn’t want to come off the spoon. The problem here, of course, is that resistance leads to increasingly vigorous shaking, which means when the fritter finally disengages, it hits the oil with a resounding, gut-wrenching plunk that means you will end up with finger confit if you don’t step back very, very quickly.

I escaped burns, and was able instead to watch the quick and wondrous transformation of a batter so raw and sticky it cannot even be called “dough” into these little two-bite-mouthfuls of extravagance.

When the batter drops into the pot, with a heavy plunk or even a less fear-inducing hiss, it sinks for half a moment before buoying back to the surface. It sizzles like onions in a hot pan, and somehow magically holds itself together to float in a lazy circle around the pot, trying to bump and mesh with any fellows you add. I played chaperone with a slotted spoon. It only takes about two minutes before the lower half of the fritter, concealed like an iceberg below the surface of the oil, is mouthwateringly golden and crispy and needs to be flipped over before it verges toward mahogany. The second side takes even less time, since it has already been submerged in its initial dip into the oil, and when it too is crisp and the color of perfect toast, or a dark caramel, it should come out and bathe on a layer of paper-towels, spreading its extra grease almost obscenely until the paper-towel is suddenly transparent.

While still warm, I rolled these dense nuggets around in a cake-pan containing around ½ cup of mixed cinnamon and sugar. Though much of the oil threatening to seep in past the crisp crust was thwarted by its paper-towel session, enough moisture is retained on the outside of each fritter to hold onto a sparkling coat of sweetness. That the batter drops into the oil in irregular shapes ensures that crunchy nooks and crannies are created, almost as if their sole purpose was to hold extra sprinklings of spicy sugar.

Before I was done frying (my pot could only hold 4 or 5 at a time without crowding or cooling down the oil too much, so I did several batches), I couldn’t keep myself from sampling one of the freshly sugared spheres. Oh heaven. It doesn’t seem like the batter could possibly be in the oil long enough to cook through, but it does. The outside is crispy and has a nicely textured crunch not only from the irregular shape and the fry, but also from the sugar, which provides its own gritty pleasantness. The inside is densely fluffy, and the cranberries pack the perfect amount of tart sourness to combat the sweetness of the dough itself as well as the sugary topping. I don’t tend to like cake donuts, but it was hard to stop myself from eating more than one.

After the party started and plates were loaded almost beyond bearing capacity, I didn’t notice anyone eating them. Yet, when I went back to the table for my second helping (or third, but who’s counting, really?), the cake pan I’d loaded them into was empty but for a remaining few spoonfuls of cinnamon-dusted sugar.

Even without the sun streaming across the faded red patio stones of my porch, that makes me feel a little warm inside.

The Week of Magical Eating: The End

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Chelsea

After a week of hard work for N. and plenty of cookery for me, I came home from grocery shopping last Saturday and routine disintegrated. N. and I looked at each other, and we looked at our books, and we looked at the tentative sunshine falling onto our porch, and we decided to take our dog-daughter to the beach. Sure, there was cooking to be done and reading to be done, and editing and grading and cogitation.

But there was also this:

And that made it all worthwhile.

And then when we got home, sandy and tired and smiling, the house smelled like strawberries from the buy-one-get-one-free sale I couldn’t help but take advantage of during my grocery adventure. So there was nothing else to do but eat them. A whir of cream with a sprinkle of sugar in my trusty stand mixer, some quick coring knife-work, and two beautiful glasses, and voila, dessert is served.

First Bounty

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Chelsea

Though we have been harvesting sugar snap peas by the bowlful for the past few weeks, and though we probably still have enough preparing for maturity on the vine for me to freeze a bagful, it didn’t feel like we really had a harvest on our hands until a few days ago, when I picked these:

I know it seems crazy, and I know I’ll be sick of it before August is over, but despite the heat and despite the impending pounds of zucchini and despite my encouragement to myself to eat better at breakfast time, I couldn’t resist. Despite all that, I made zucchini bread.

As you can see, whether it was the monster zucchini I grated up that exceeded the recipe’s requirement a little bit, or whether it was because my thrift store loaf pan was on the small side, I had extra batter. Fortunately, my sweet little too-seldom-used ramekins called to me from the cupboard, and I heeded their siren song. In addition to the loaf, we also had four big muffin-sized servings. The advantage of this was that they were ready for consumption much sooner, and consume we did. Here’s my serving suggestion:

The recipe I use for zucchini bread right now is from Bon Appetit’s latest cookbook. This isn’t the magazine, it’s the full book, and this particular version is called Zucchini Spice Bread. It has a hefty teaspoon of cinnamon added to the standard mix, and with 2 cups of zucchini as well as a cup of toasted nuts (I used pecans because I was out of walnuts, and may have liked it better with the substitution), it seems like one of the healthier quickbreads out there, as well as using up a decent amount of zucchini. And the flavor. The flavor is stupendous. Since the nuts are toasted, they donate more of a crunch and a warm richness to the bread. Because there is so much zucchini, they don’t dry out the bread too much, which is sometimes a complaint I have about nuts. The zucchini itself is mild but still present, and the bread is not too sweet. It has a nice moist crumb to it but the top gets crusty, so the whole thing is just a medley of textures that I really enjoy. Here’s to the joy of baked goods, the joy of home grown vegetables, and the very special joy of being able to eat them both at the same time!

Wedding Cake Redux

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Chelsea

Yesterday, N. and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. I know, I know, we’re practically newlyweds still, and maybe that’s why I wanted to make something special for us to eat. N. wanted to go out to dinner, since I cook a lot, and so I hatched a plan for dessert. I’ve been getting a subscription to Cuisine at Home, and a few months ago I received an issue with a recipe for Pink Champagne Cake. At our wedding, the cake flavor was champagne, and the filling was fresh strawberries. It looked like this:

Chelsea_Nick-264

Though this recipe didn’t call for strawberries, the idea behind it seemed perfect, so early yesterday morning while N. was in a class, I set to work on what was easily the most complicated cake I have ever baked. The first part was easy:

Like any cake, the layers needed to cool completely before frosting them, which was convenient because it gave me ample time to clean up the incredible mess I had created in the kitchen. Not only do I enjoy creating food, apparently I like to throw my whole self into the process. When the cakes were cooled and the kitchen was clean(er), I embarked on step two: frosting. This cake was more complex than my normal baking projects not only because the batter involved champagne, two mixing bowls, and egg whites, but because the frosting was a multi-step process as well. The first frosting step was for the filling between the two layers. Here I decided to go a few extra kilometers in recreating our wedding cake, and arranged slices of fresh strawberries atop the frosting layer:

Next, after carefully stacking the cake and performing some fancy heating, cooling, whipping, and folding with gelatin, heavy cream, and the remaining already mixed frosting, I carefully stacked on the second layer, frosted the bejeezus out of the whole thing, and then covered the cake and refrigerated it so that the frosting could set up a little before eating. When it came out, it looked like this:

Then we ate it. The addition of strawberries was really wonderful, both for reminiscence sake and because the frosting was powdered sugar based, which is often too sweet for me. The tart juiciness of the strawberries cut the almost overwhelming sweetness of the icing, and the layer of red in the middle was pretty, since I didn’t use the food coloring required to make the “Pink” part of the recipe’s title. This didn’t seem necessary, both because our wedding cake was not pink, and because I didn’t want to spend the money on food coloring. This is a change I would advise keeping. My only other critique of the cake, which was ultimately my fault, would be to use white shortening in the frosting. Mine was butter flavored and yellow, which is usually fine, but it did make the frosting on the cake a creamy color, when bright white would have been a little more aesthetically pleasing.

But the important thing here is the flavor. It was delicious. The cake was moist and a bit dense, and though it was not particularly strong, there was definitely a hint of champagne flavor in there. It was definitely more complex than a simple white or yellow cake, and maybe with a simpler frosting – just whipping cream, sugar, and a splash of champagne – this would be a perfect showy dessert. In fact, with so much left in the fridge, I might just have to taste it again and make sure it’s as good as it was last night…