After a months-long hiatus, we’re back! We’ve moved our hosting, and lost some of our pictures in the process, so you’ll see that some posts from 2010 and 2011 are text-only. We’re working on retrieving the photos, but in the meantime, we’ve put up quite a few 2012 posts. Cheers and happy reading!
Mr. and Mrs. O
Photos from the first family feast we’ve made:
Vase made (!) by our friend CC, hand-carved nesting egg from her parents, flowers from AS, replica Faberge egg (a gift from Mr. O to me for Christmas), plates from my Dad, napkins from my Mom. It's a happy table.
The Breakdown: Lunch for four and a bit (us, our friends J and D, and a little guy who likes to take and throw food from our plates).
Hot Artichoke and Onion Dip
An 18-pound Ham
Deviled Eggs
Greek Salad
Blanched Asparagus
Couscous with Sultanas
and J made an absolutely amazing lemon cake (made with Tahitian vanilla) with whipped cream and lemon curd frosting. A perfectly sweet end to a lovely meal with friends.
After Thanksgiving, Mr. O and I, with our thrifty hats on, bought and froze a fourteen-pound turkey, without a clear idea when we ought to roast it.
And then came St. Patrick’s Day.
Now, the denizens of Chez O are only a quarter Irish (each), so we’ve never celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with green beer or renditions of Danny Boy. One year we might have had bangers and mash. But winter seems almost over, and we wanted to get together with friends (there are never enough weekend hours for visits!), so we decided that our turkey would meet its end in mid-March.
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Turkey can’t be served on its own — too majestic — so Mr. O made his Nana’s stuffing with breakfast sausage and onion, and a golden-brown gravy, while I made my Dad’s cranberry sauce, a simple green salad with vinaigrette, and Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake (which tastes like it sounds, with a fluffy cream cheese & cream frosting that floats on the cake like foam on a pint). Our friends (hey there, BA and AT!) brought us some lovely wine, and we had a cocktail composed of whiskey, ginger ale, and lime juice. Mr. Baby entertained us by destroying our carefully-built block towers, and the hours slipped away with conversation, clinking of glasses, and scraping of forks.
It’s never a bad day for a feast day.
When I (Mrs. O here) was growing up in Cleveland, we took an occasional trip to the Entenmann’s outlet near our house. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never met a pastry I didn’t like, but the older I get, the stronger nostalgia’s influence on my tastebuds. And boy, do I miss Entenmann’s kuchen (which, as a kid, I mentally spelled “c-o-u-c-a-n”). I know I could get it at the grocery store down the street, but it just wouldn’t taste the same without the bargain price.
Fast forward fifteenish (ok, nearly twentyish) years later, and enter Mr. O’s Nana’s brassadella (Italian coffee cake), which she calls “Italian pie”. She bakes the pastry in a pie tin, with a lattice pattern filled with damson plum jam. It is heavenly, and hard to make. Many, many months ago, I bought damson plum jam in the hope that I might master brassadella, but a small baby of my acquaintance has thwarted my plan.
But yesterday, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to have a breakfast pastry for dessert.
I knew that Italian pie is out of my reach, and research on kuchen (which, in German, is a generic term for cake, but here means a cakey breakfast pastry with fruit, or jam/jelly in the Entenmann’s version) led to lots and lots of recipes that involve yeast. Yeast is not to be found in my house, I’m ashamed to say.
As a last resort, I turned to my trusty Joy of Cooking — and there it was: a recipe for a yeastless quick kuchen. The JofC version calls for fresh fruit, but oh no, not for me. I had the jam and I wasn’t afraid to use it.
I was going for a pastry with jam spiraled on top, but experiments being experiments, the jam ended up in a layer on the bottom of the cake. Still delicious.
Lime-Glazed Kuchen with Damson Plum Jam
For the glaze:
Butter a 9-inch baking dish/cake pan/ pie dish (I used my purple round pie dish from my excellent mother) and preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a larger bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Alternate adding the flour mixture and eggs (one at a time), stirring just until all the ingredients are incorporated.
Spread the dough in the baking dish/cake pan/pie dish. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until a knife inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.
The amount of powdered sugar you’ll need to make a thick glaze depends on the amount of juice in the lime — but you do want the glaze thick. Milk might give the glaze a better flavor than mine had, but I didn’t have time to test that theory.
Once the cake is completely cool, pour on the glaze, let it set for a few minutes, and serve. Even better the next day, I think.
Mr. O and I, you may or may not be interested to learn, met three years ago tonight. That night we had a delicious dinner at a cozy Italian restaurant, and tonight we planned to make Chicken Marsala, one of our favorites.
Life does tend to impinge on plans, and after shepherding Mr. Baby through a (delightful) birthday party for a babyfriend, we were tired. Breading chicken seemed an insurmountable task.
Then, after Mr. O made me a hot chocolate/cocoa, we ran out of milk. That settled it: Mr. O had to go the store to buy milk, and so naturally he needed to pick up kosher dill pickles, kettle chips, and a reasonably-priced (= under ten dollars) bottle of white wine.
And so it was that we had delicious tuna sandwiches (I will at some point reveal my secret for perfect tuna on this blog), chips, pickles, white wine, and no cooking for our anniversary.
Marsala next year.
My grandmother’s stroganoff is one of my all-time favorite meals. I’ve tried to duplicate it, but it never turned out quite right . . . until now.
Grammie’s stroganoff is thinly sliced beef in a creamy, thin sauce with mushrooms and onions. The sauce has an underlying flavor that I always thought came from wine or sherry; making the dish with either produces a nice meal, but it’s just not the same as what I grew up with.
The secret to the sauce, as I found out from Grammie this week, is brandy.
Grammie’s Stroganoff (Adapted)
[Grammie cooks the beef, onion, and mushrooms together, but my pan isn't big enough to cook everything at the right rate together.]
Melt butter and some olive oil in a pan (I play fast and loose with the amount of butter here — just start with a tablespoon and see how it goes.); add the sliced mushrooms and onions, and sautee until the onions are golden and the mushrooms are fragrant.
While the vegetables are cooking, get started on the noodles, and slice the beef thinly. The easiest way to cut beef into thin strips, I’ve found, is to let the beef defrost partially (either in the fridge, for a few hours, or in the microwave immediately before cooking), and slice it with a good bread knife against the grain.
Once the onions and mushrooms are done, transfer to a plate. Add more butter to the pan, a few drops of oil, and melt. Add the beef, a couple sprinkles of salt, and fry until just cooked through. The beef will release plenty of cooking liquid — instant sauce! Add the mushrooms and onions back into the pan, along with the brandy. Simmer a few minutes, until the alcohol evaporates.
Take the pan off the heat, stir in the sour cream, season to taste with salt and pepper, and spoon over those noodles. Serve immediately. Roasted carrots are an excellent side dish.
And now, on to dessert.
Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies are the best I’ve ever had. Try as I might, mine are never the same, but this last batch looked better than my usual under/overcooked blobs, though the buttery taste was undercut by too much flour. Alas, a baker I am not.
Broccoli, radishes, kalamata olives, orange peppers, feta cheese. It’s the end of the week in the Os’ fridge.
This past weekend, Mr. O happened to see a cooking show that featured a vegetable lasagna, and since we had yet to finish the grocery shopping, we thought, “why not?” We asked our Dear Friends LG and AR to come over for lunch, and set about preparing the ingredients.
You can find the original recipe here. Since spinach and I still aren’t entirely cordial, we substituted kale. We also caramelized four onions instead of three (we had the food processor out to make purees for Mr. Baby), and added sauteed porcini mushrooms (some progress in cordiality there, you see).
Unless you have the pre-cooked ingredients on hand, it’s a rather labor-intensive recipe. To make things simpler, we cooked the squash and onions one day in advance.
Mr. O made the bechamel and assembled the lasagna, and it was unbelievably delicious. Creamy, sweet, earthy. a bit spicy. Perfect.
To balance the richness of the lasagna, I determined to make a bright salad with my new favorite fruit — kumquats. They’re tiny citrus fruits, about the size of a mandarin orange segment. The peel is candy sweet and edible, and the pulp is lemony tart. Eminently eatable, but Mr. O thought he’d prefer them cooked or in a salad. And so, here is:
Watercress & Kumquat Salad
For the vinaigrette
Chop watercress very coarsely, and strew over a plate. Slice the kumquats, removing the seeds, into small rounds, and distribute over the greens. Add all the vinaigrette ingredients to a jar and shake thoroughly to combine, and pour over the salad just before serving.
The amount of oil depends on how much juice you get from your lemon, of course. The Wasabi mustard I used is a mild, sweet variety that was a gift from our Maine visitors — a slightly spicy counterpoint to the kumquats that picks up the spiciness of the watercress.
Earlier this week, I made Nigella Lawson’s Vietnamese Chicken and Mint Salad (recipe here), since I had poached chicken on hand and cabbage is 49 cents per pound at Russo’s. Absolutely fabulous, but, as anyone who’s ever bought cabbage knows, even a small head is about triple the eight ounces called for in this recipe.
So tonight I made it again, giving the recipe my own twist.
Chicken and Herb Cruciferous Salad
Dressing
Salad
1 pound green cabbage
Make a dressing in the bottom of a very large serving bowl. Slice the onion in a food processor and soak in the dressing for 15 minutes while the rest of the ingredients are prepared. Shred the cabbage and carrot in the processor, and layer on top of the onion. Chop the kale coarsely and add to the bowl. Chop the three herbs finely and add. Chop the chicken; drizzle the soy sauce and rice vinegar over it and let sit for a few minutes before adding to the bowl. Carefully toss the salad, making sure that all the vegetables have a coating of the dressing. Serve immediately (the salad gets soggy overnight). Crisp, refreshing, and an excellent midwinter cheery dinner. And we’ll remember it again come summer!
Just a suggestion here, since I don’t remember exactly how I made the sauce: sauteed cauliflower and white beans with spaghetti, spring onion, and a sauce with Dijon mustard, flour, butter, and vegetable stock.
This superbowl weekend, we made two versions of chili. The first chili is is a white chicken chili (topped with cilantro and strained yogurt) based on a version I ate at Don Pablo’s years ago, and the second is a red bean and ground beef crockpot chili. Both delicious, but the winner is the white chili, by a field goal.
A fruit salad with homey staples and exotic faraway fruits.
Here and There Fruit Salad
Mix all the fruits and juices in a bowl and let sit for about a half hour to let the flavors meld.
Potato and Cauliflower Curry
Heat oil in a large pan; add curry powder and stir until fragrant. Add garlic and onion; cook for two or three minutes. Add cauliflower, potato, carrots, and chicken stock; cover and simmer for ten to fifteen minutes until the vegetables are tender. Add the pepper and kale, and turn off the heat once the kale is bright green, the chicken is warmed through, and the peppers are slightly softened.
To make this recipe vegan/vegetarian: omit chicken breast, and use vegetable stock in place of chicken stock.
This weekend, we Os received a visit from our family in Maine, and in their honor, I made what am calling a Maine trifle: a chocolate blueberry trifle.
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Maine Chocolate Blueberry Trifle
Make sandwiches of the blueberry jam between layers of chocolate cake, and layer the “sandwiches in the bottom of a trifle dish. At this point, you’d normally soak the cake layer with a suitable liqueur, but I couldn’t find a blueberry-based liqueur and I forgot to drizzle our Chambord over. Ah well.
After making the custard, let it cool an hour or so, and then drape over the cake. Wrap tightly and leave in the fridge overnight.
Just before serving, rinse the blueberries and layer over the custard. Whip the cream for a final layer, and top with a few reserved blueberries. Serves 6-8.
My usual comfort foods are pretty run-of-the-mill — brownies, mashed potatoes, spaghetti, scrambled eggs and toast.
But sometimes comfort takes the shape of a salad. Nothing fancy — just the kind of “old fashioned” salad that I remember eating as a child. Pale green romaine, shredded carrots, radish coins. And zesty Italian dressing right out of the bottle. Delicious.
After salad, we moved on to bread and butter and black bean soup. The soup is just a pound of black beans simmered for a long time in what we’re going to call hot ham water, for all you Arrested Development fans.
As you might have noticed, we Os are on a Nigella Lawson kick, and when ham went on sale this week, we bought one to make Nigella’s Ham in Coca-Cola. The basic idea is to boil the ham in several liters of Coke (with an onion thrown in) and then glaze it at high heat once it’s done. Of course, the recipe is meant for an unsliced ham.
We got a spiral-sliced ham.
So our hot ham water is super-salty, super hammy, sweet, black broth. Nigella advises saving the broth, cooking it with black beans, cumin, and lime, and serving with cilantro. We found it delicious, but thanks to our mistake, very, very strongly salty and sweet. We froze the rest to add a little at a time to split pea soups.
Mr. O picked up a bunch of watercress instead of cilantro at the market today, but we viewed this event as a mishap of opportunity. And so I present: watercress and radish salad, a little taste of Mr. McGregor’s spring garden on a snowy Boston day.
These seem, to me, more a cross between a muffin and a cupcake. I didn’t frost them, since I wanted them to remain baby-friendly for HH and (now toddler) Q’s visit.
You can find the recipe here; I added extra lemon zest and wasn’t disappointed.
Plain tom yum broth (no shrimp, but still not quite vegetarian, thanks to the fish sauce), and lime & avocado chicken salad sandwich. Dessert: pumpkin chocolate whoopie pies. I make them smaller than standard whoopie pies (I get twenty from a recipe; bake for 10 minutes instead of 14) –so that two may be eaten at once without too much guilt.
Speaking of whoopie pies: I’ve gone the ganache route and the cocoa powder route for the frosting, and I think the latter is better. If you’ve got a thick chocolate frosting recipe that you love, please share.
Mrs. O’s father was able to make a last-minute, twenty-four-hour trip to see us this weekend, and we celebrated with cake, champagne, and chicken with forty cloves of garlic (Ina Garten’s recipe), to which we added one extra clove. With four cloves of garlic in the sauteed broccoli and cauliflower (also with red pepper flakes, olive oil, and parmesan), our garlic total came to forty-five cloves.
Interestingly enough (to us, at least), the garlic in the vegetables had a much stronger flavor than the garlic in the chicken dish. Long simmering in wine made the garlic mellow and soft, so that, even with careful stirring, the cloves broke up almost entirely. The sauce was creamy with garlic, and perfectly delicious.
We did miss out on the garlic trifecta — we served plain rustic bread, instead of garlic bread. Drat. Maybe next time.
