Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, May 7, 2008 at 4:30 PM
You’ll definitely have some leftover pesto if you make this whole recipe, but that’s kind of the point. Pesto freezes remarkably well, and can be thawed in moments. Since I had made a large batch a week before, I was able to throw this meal together in approximately 10 minutes. Sure, my fish flaked apart into a hundred pieces when I tried to flip it, creating one of the uglier meals I’ve had in ages (that’s why there is no photo), but it was tasty.
I picked this from Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Dinners: The Essential Family Cookbook. And it’s not really a recipe as much of a technique. Have pesto? Jamie provides seven other simple meals to throw it on top of. That includes roast chicken, mussels, bruschetta, and grilled vegetables. I was feeling like fish. And the pesto certainly livens up the white fish, giving it an automatic freshness without much work at all.
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Posted by Lucy Baker, May 7, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Today's Cook the Book recipe is for thick, juicy, seared sirloin steaks. Not exactly your typical Mother's Day fare. But why shouldn't it be? Steak dinners are always special, whether eaten out at a swanky restaurant, or off a paper plate in your own backyard.
Paula Disbrowe's recipe marries hearty hunks of beef with a delicate, wine-saturated red onion marmalade. As she states in her head note: "I like the idea of giving a macho piece of meat a pretty and rather feminine treatment." The results are a little bit sweet, a little bit spicy, and definitely spectacular. What mom wouldn't love that?
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As is always the case with our Cook the Book selections, we're giving away a number of copies to lucky readers. Enter to win here.
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Posted by Raphael, May 6, 2008 at 8:30 AM
Dirty, dirty ramps.
Ramps are only in season for about a month or two, but there are a few ways to preserve them so you can enjoy their flavor all year long. My favorite long-term preservation technique is making ramp compound butter and storing it in the freezer. The ramps, locked inside the confines of the frozen butter like Han Solo in carbonite, are essentially stored indefinitely, capturing the "rampy" essence of early spring at any time of year.
The most common compound butter is beurre maitre d'hotel, or hotel butter, composed of shallots, garlic, fines herbes, lemon zest, salt, and pepper; the recipe that follows is a variation on this theme. Generally used for broiled or grilled meats or fish, hotel butter functions as a sort of flavor-inducing sauce. You may find a slice of it sitting, slowly melting, on top of a steak in your steak frites.
Ramp compound butter is great in a pinch, as you can easily pull a log out of the freezer and cut off a slice or two. It's especially good on pasta, in a risotto, or—my preference—tucked underneath the breast skin of a chicken. If you can keep it until fall, it works great under the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey. Don't delay—ramp season is short and is almost over.
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Posted by Blake Royer, April 29, 2008 at 4:30 PM
This "mojo" sauce has nothing to do with the word for magic touch, but you could have fooled me: this is one of the most delicious marinades I've had in ages. The recipe comes from Our Latin Table, and describes mojo sauce paired with pork as what Cubans are weaned on and live for. It "might possibly have all the ingredients that make up Cuban cookery," which isn't surprising. The marinade is simply olive oil, garlic, oregano, cumin, and citrus, yet it's far more than the sum of its parts. This stuff tastes good enough to build an entire cuisine on.
It also did wonders for the juiciness of thick cut pork chops, though it may have helped that I also brined them beforehand. But I'm convinced that the acidity of the citrus—traditionally made from sour Cuban oranges, but in this case with a combination of orange and lime juice—makes its way into the chop and tenderizes. Though it wasn't quite warm enough outside to go through the trouble of lighting coals when I made this, it did fine on a very hot cast iron skillet. As soon as summer gets here, I'm keeping some of this marinade very close at hand—it will go fine with that one other Cuban ingredient that mojo doesn't have: rum. Is it warm enough for mojitos yet?
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Posted by Lucy Baker, April 23, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Don't be put off by the long list of ingredients in today's Cook the Book recipe for Grilled Lamb with Salsa Verde, excerpted from the soon-to-be-released Oprah Magazine Cookbook. The lamb marinade is best prepared the night before, and in a pinch, the salsa verde can be made ahead, too. Plus, all those fresh herbs—rosemary, marjoram, tyme, mint, and parsley—lend phenomenal flavor. Not to mention the capers, anchovies, and feta cheese. What better way to celebrate a warm spring evening than with a backyard dinner of tender skewered lamb?
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, April 9, 2008 at 4:30 PM
I've been having a lot of fun flipping through The Ethnic Paris Cookbook. It's unpretentious, easy to use, and full of tasty dishes that seem to be entirely too simple, if a little hard to believe. And this one is no different. The sauce is the perfect counterpoint to the broiled chicken—it takes on an almost mustard-like tang, but has a much brighter flavor thanks to the lemon. It's so perfect, in fact, that it's easy to forget that the recipe has raw potatoes in it.
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Posted by Blake Royer, April 8, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I'm usually suspicious of any alterations to traditional basil pesto—those fancy, misguided ideas like trading out pine nuts for pistachios. "Don't mess with perfection," is my feeling. Except in many cases, these other pestos aren't trying to mess up a good thing—they're traditions of their own. Pine nuts, basil, Parmesan, and olive oil may be the most popular and arguably the most sublime of these concoctions (known officially as pesto Genovese), but there are others great ones, like this one from Sicily: pesto Trapanese.
Other than replacing pine nuts with almonds, it's not a sweeping change. But the recipe also adds cherry tomatoes, and they offer a little sweetness. Their crushed juices also help counteract the relative dryness of the almonds, which, unlike softer pine nuts, refuse to give themselves up to the pesto—they remain distinct and crunchy, adding a wonderful textural interest to the dish that pesto Genovese sometimes lacks. I found that a little pasta water was the essential step to keep it from drying out too much and helping to bind everything together.
What are your favorite non-Genovese pestos?
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, April 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I was quite the picky eater in my youth. I didn’t touch green beans, wouldn’t go near cooked carrots, and never had a salad I liked until junior high. But against all reason and logic, I did love artichokes. From the moment I started eating artichokes, I remember actually enjoying them. Perhaps it’s the activity of picking up off the petals, dipping them in butter, and pulling off the “meat” of the vegetable with my teeth. What fun food to eat!
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 2, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Although I love dried legumes and pulses more than most non-vegetarians, and although I love the vegetables and meat dishes in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, I tend to avoid the chapter on dals. I think this is because the first dal recipe I ever tried was Jaffrey’s moong dal. “This is North India’s most popular dal,” she writes, “and it is eaten with equal relish by toothless toddlers, husky farmers, and effete urban snobs.” That sounds delightful, right? But it calls for a full tablespoon of turmeric, which was definitely not to my taste. I wonder if my American turmeric is not so great or if it’s my American palate. What do you think?
Recently I had much better luck with her chana dal cooked with lamb. . Chana dal is a hulled and split dal whose grains are a little larger than split peas; it is a member of the chick pea family. In this recipe, it is cooked with so much lamb that it seemed more like lamb stew than a dal to me, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.
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Posted by Blake Royer, March 31, 2008 at 4:00 PM
This might look a lot like a coleslaw recipe, and I'll be the first to say that coleslaw isn't one of my favorite foods. I've had too many disappointing experiences with the stuff in little paper cups, tasting like it had been tossed in Miracle Whip. No disrespect; it's just not my thing.
And yet, this cabbage salad recipe from Pork & Sons—a side dish to the smoked Boston butt—really makes the case for cabbage with mayo. Rather than shredded, the raw cabbage is sliced into wide ribbons, which maintain their crunch under the blanket of silky sauce, a homemade mayonnaise with a piquant handful of cornichons, capers, and shallots. And what a sauce it is—I made extra and have been painting it on bread to make amazing ham sandwiches. Red wine vinegar and mustard provide an appropriately spicy background to balance out the richness. I think of it as French-ified coleslaw.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, March 14, 2008 at 4:00 PM
The fiancée and I have something for sweet potatoes, especially in fry form. We like them fried or baked, crisp or soggy. They are such an odd twist on an old standby, and they work more often than not. So I was quickly sold on this recipe, which presented not only big fat sweet potato fries but an interesting-looking sauce with lots of lime.
I suppose it’s a side dish, but we just dumped the wedges into a large bowl and went at them without any thought of a main course. It might not seem healthy attacking a large greasy stack of French fries, but these are baked, and the yogurt sauce felt light and satisfying. It succeeds because of the play between the pungent, earthy seasonings and the quick, zippy sauce. Either way, it’s another adaptation from Martha. And for that we thank her.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 14, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Enchiladas may not be an essential part of everyone’s cooking repertoire, but this recipe from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook is so easy and versatile that I tend to be evangelical about it. Though the results are not authentically Mexican or even authentically Tex-Mex, they are consistently yummy.
The key here is that you can substitute two to three cups of just about anything pre-cooked for the three cups of chicken in the ingredients list. I like to make them with beans and kale, pulled pork, and even roasted potatoes and cauliflower. You could try beans and squash (inspired by 24 Boxes), and I’ve been meaning to try a breakfast version with scrambled eggs for a while now. (My only unsuccessful combination so far involved rice, which was just too starchy baked into the tortillas. This recipe is also not really good for cheese enchiladas. For cheese enchiladas, do yourself a favor and turn to Homesick Texan.)
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Posted by Adam Kuban, March 5, 2008 at 5:45 PM
- makes 10 tomato halves -
Oven-roasting tomatoes concentrates their flavors and is a good technique for pepping up the less-than-ideal tomatoes of winter. Oven-roasted tomatoes are juicier and softer than jarred or bottled sun-dried versions.
Use This Recipe In
Artichoke, Oven-Roasted Tomato, and Goat Cheese Panini
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, February 29, 2008 at 4:30 PM
It might have a plain-jane name, but the authors of the Cafe Flora Cookbook
know what’s up: “Our inspiration for this dressing was—dare I say it?—ranch dressing! But we gussied it up a bit.” Besides the mayonnaise there isn’t much that is similar between the two, but it somehow does manage to remind me of that classic. It is probably because of the body, though I expect I will actually use this version on a regular basis. Why? Well it’s tangier, more complex, and doesn’t taste like it’s immediately clogging my arteries.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, February 20, 2008 at 4:15 PM
It began its life as a pizza sauce, nothing more than some canned tomatoes, a slug of red wine and olive oil, and some salt. After all the dough was used, I poured the bright red liquid into a plastic container and moved it to the back of the fridge. In the old days (probably a year ago) I would have forgotten about it until a week later when I’d open it up, give it smell, and then wash it down the drain.
But no longer. Ever since I discovered eggs in purgatory, I’ve never had a problem with getting rid of leftover tomato sauce. The recipe is dead simple (sauce and eggs), but tastes far more complex. It is my go-to recipe whenever I have the chance. But for the sake of shaking things up, I decided to see what other simple recipes awaited some leftover tomato sauce.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, February 15, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I didn’t mean to shake things up; I was just being resourceful. Here I was with a perfectly ripe avocado and not a lime to be found. When I usually face such draughts of product, I make do. But messing up the perfect duality of avocado and lime felt like a sin. I couldn’t just let that avocado sit there and turn brown on me. It’s hard enough finding ones that are ready to eat.
I did have some frozen corn. So into the depths of Google I went searching for some kind answer. I came out with this rather novel asian-inspired guacamole that replaced the acid of the limes with vinegar and added depth of flavor with toasted sesames seeds and sesame oil. It’s certainly not a replacement for the perfection that is guacamole, but it is an interesting change. If I had to change anything, I would have left the sesame seeds out—they messed with the consistency of the creamy product. I think a toasted sesame oil would be perfect. Anyway, just like the Mexican standby it was eaten very quickly.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 15, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent a summer studying in Paris. Although I knew enough to make a trip to Berthillon, discovered Nutella, and would hang around Fauchon staring at the piles of shining produce (decidedly unobtainable on our student allowance), I did not have a life-changing food epiphany; I developed no attachment to open-air markets and stinky cheese. For the most part my friends and I ate an inoffensive lunch of baguettes and Boursin in the Luxembourg Garden and ordered ice cream at Häagen-Dazs in between our mornings in class and our afternoons in churches, museums, theaters, and parks. We were there for the culture and the language—not the food!
So the parting words of our program director, delivered on the bus that was dropping us off at the airport, came as something of a surprise. The dapper white-haired man in his white suit and tiny sunglasses leaned on his cane and solemnly said, “If you remember only one thing about this program, let it be this: in a vinaigrette, you must use three parts oil to one part vinegar. It never fails. Try different oils, try different vinegars—your friends will think you’re a genius.”
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, February 11, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I’ve been dreaming about enchiladas recently. I’m not sure where the hankering came from, but it certainly wasn’t helped after I had some spectacularly bad ones at a local Tex-Mex outlet. I decided to tackle them myself. There is no standard sauce, and some can get very complicated. When I found this basic red sauce that contained six ingredients and could be done in less than 20 minutes, I gave it a shot. To my amazement, there’s not a tomato to be found in it. Shows how much I know about enchiladas.
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Posted by Lauren Krueger, February 1, 2008 at 3:15 PM
From 1995 to 2003 the California Avocado Commission held an Avobowl, in which guacamole recipes relating to the regional specialties of teams playing in the Superbowl were pit against each other in a taste test. Five out of eight years, the winner of the guacamole contest accurately predicted the winner of the football match. Eerie, eh?
Well, it seems as if the Avobowl is no longer a contest, as the Hass Avocado Board would prefer it if we all just get along. They don't care who wins, just as long as you eat your share of Superbowl guacamole. And you probably will:
The HAB estimates fans will eat 49.5 million pounds of Hass avocados on this year's Big Game Day—enough to cover Arizona's University of Phoenix Stadium football field, end zone to end zone, more than 19.1 feet deep in avocados.
Though the Avobowl is no longer, the HAB has provided different recipes for Giants fans and Patriots fans, based around team colors (in one case) and regional foods (in the other). If these guacamoles were to do battle, who would win?
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Posted by Jamie Forrest, February 1, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Try out this blue cheese dip recipe after reading my associated post: The Best Blue Cheese For the Ultimate Super Bowl Blue Cheese Dip.
The Ultimate Super Bowl Blue Cheese Dip
Adapted from Saveur, Issue #31
- makes about 2 cups -
Ingredients
8 oz. cream cheese
1/2 c. heavy cream
1/2 c. sour cream (or a strained yogurt like Labneh)
1/4 lb. Mountain Gorgonzola (a.k.a. Naturale), or other cow's milk blue
2 scallions, finely chopped
Procedure
Gently beat together the cream cheese, the heavy cream, and the sour cream. (I used a food processor, but only pulsed it briefly; you could probably also use an electric mixer on a slow speed.) Add the crumbled cheese and the scallions and stir to mix, making sure to keep some of the crumbles intact.
Posted by Robyn Lee, January 31, 2008 at 3:45 PM
This salsa picante is a homemade version of Pace Foods founder David Pace's famous picante sauce. The key ingredient is chopped fresh jalapeños with the seeds. This salsa may be used as a chip dip, taco sauce, or when heated used to substitute Spanish sauce or ranchero sauce. And, who knows, you could even serve it with other Super Bowl snacks this Sunday.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, January 30, 2008 at 4:45 PM
This full flavored vinaigrette came from the Cafe Flora Cookbook, a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle that I’ve never been to. Oh well, I’ve had a lot of luck these kind of works, because they tend to pack a lot of flavor into meager vegetables that I’d never treated correctly. This time it’s the shallot, an ingredient I’d sometimes just added raw to a vinaigrette.
Who knew it just needed a nice roast? It gets creamy and pungent, the perfect balance for the spicy and tart mustard. It is designed to be poured atop a spinach and smoked mushroom salad, the latter item I’d never heard of before. According to the book they are described as an “obvious substitute for bacon.” Guess what I substituted? It turns out smoking mushrooms is much harder than walking to my butcher and buying some real smoky bacon. But the choice is yours. The vinaigrette will taste fantastic over just about anything.
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