We just got done eating yet another meal made from a recipe I found on Mediterrasian.com — it’s a really attractive site whose point I don’t quite understand, but everything I’ve cooked from the site has been extremely good, and reasonably healthy, and I just thought you should know.
A few favorites so far:
Ginger steamed fish with stir-fried vegetables I got to make use of my new wok, Melissa ate some red peppers, and I came to terms with the fact that she really, really doesn’t like mushrooms.
Vietnamese baked fish Make sure you’ve really sealed the foil! Otherwise 10 minutes turns into 30 before the fish is done. But yum, and really easy (and theoretically quite quick).
Scallop, arugula and sun-dried tomato risotto I can make risotto! I am going to buy arborio rice all the time and make risotto out of everything! Literally, this was nearly that exciting.
Rebecca really wanted to make a particular kind of Christmas cookie (Candy Cane Cookies) that her mom used to make. Her mom cautioned us that this could be difficult, noting that she’d had to go through her own trial-and-error learning processes over the years. She included a few pointers in her email containing the recipe, and closed with this: “It may take a couple tries to get the hang of it.”
Duly warned, Rebecca put me in charge. This arrangement turned out to be a really good thing, and not just because I own the KitchenAid Mixer. I didn’t fully recognize the superiority of my baking skills at first, but this gradually became clearer. Her mom had warned of the dangers of trying to work with dough that is too sticky or too dry, so I reserved some of the flour, thinking I could add it if needed to achieve the desired consistency.
A-ha! We ended up needing about 1/4 cup less flour than the recipe indicated. Disaster averted.
The recipe for the Candy Cane Cookies requires that the finished dough be split in half. We were to keep half the dough white, and add red food coloring to the other half (you see where this is going…?). So I split the dough in half, and put one half in a ceramic bowl, returning the other half to the KitchenAid Mixer bowl. I figured that would be the dough to which we would add the red food coloring, mix a bit more with the mixer, then begin shaping the cookies. But Rebecca had other ideas. I spied her hovering over the ceramic bowl with the teaspoon of red food coloring, and tried to divert her to empty its contents into the KitchenAid Mixer bowl instead. But, alas, she could not be convinced that this was the better course, and even looked at me solemnly and said, “No more mixing. I promise.” Almost immediately, she realized the wisdom of my add-food-coloring-to-the-KitchenAid method. Disaster wasn’t necessarily averted, but we recovered quickly and were on our way.
Next, we shaped the cookies. We learned a thing or two along the way, and pretty soon had two cookie sheets with uncooked Candy Cane Cookies on them. We had to admit, they looked pretty good.
It was time to put them into our preheated oven. For 9 minutes. Only, for the first batch, we ended up leaving them in for around a half hour.
I know what you’re thinking, and no, they weren’t burnt! Not at all, actually. They were baked nearly perfectly. But they were HUGE! We didn’t realize how much the cookies would expand in size in the oven. So they took a really, really, really long time to bake. The end result was entirely edible, but also really really big, cookies.
We did the turkey thing the Sunday before Thanksgiving during our visit to Florida (which Melissa is in charge of documenting as we speak), so we thought we’d try our hand again at making pizza, after a less-than-stellar attempt a few weeks ago. We were inspired by Melissa’s brother Matt’s pizza creations during the Florida trip, and Melissa used her sister-in-law Ange’s semi-famous Friday night pizza dough recipe.
Melissa was in charge of the dough, because I have a poor track record with food that requires yeast (I do make a great flatbread, which does technically require yeast, but I think it’s just in there to make me feel like I can handle yeast. I can’t.) I have to say she did a thoroughly phenomenal job with the yeast and the rising and the whole thing, and it was very yummy.
I was in charge of the sauce, which I had quizzed Matt about extensively as he was making it. Here’s my rendition.
Melissa’s brother Matt had also demonstrated some dough-tossing skills, of which I was envious, so I decided to try my hand at it while Melissa tried her hand at my camera’s video features. It’s embarrassing, but! We raise the very important question of whether proper pizza dough tossing requires using your fist, or your open hand. Please comment below.
There was a brief moment of panic when Melissa was so excited to use our new oil and vinegar bottles that she accidentally poured apple cider vinegar (vinegar is in the short bottles!) on the uncooked pizza dough instead of olive oil (oil is in the tall bottles!), but after a bit of swearing and blotting, we recovered nicely:
As you can see, we got to make use of our new pizza peel, and we took turns being downright gleeful (there may have been jumping and clapping) at the fun of sliding the dough from well-floured peel to preheated stone.
We neglected to document the finished product, for which we apologize, but now it is all eaten and so it is too late. We’ll do better next time.
I’ve been making an effort to actually cook a little bit more lately, because my old excuse of how hard it is to cook for one doesn’t really work anymore. Unfortunately a large portion of my cooking repertoire is better-suited to dinner parties than to quick after-work meals, both in terms of time and money. So before each shopping trip lately I’ve been trying to go out on the internet to find practical recipes that are actually good and that might even produce leftovers we can take to work for a couple days. One of my favorites so far is Route 79, which has a bunch of cool Indian recipes on the right-hand side.
The best part is that the recipes are sort of ridiculously thoroughly illustrated — like, check out one of the pictures for Channa Masala, which we made the other night:
The Channa Masala wasn’t exactly quick — lots of simmering — but it made enough that we’ve been eating on it for days. We’ve got plans to track down some paneer so we can try the Mutter Paneer next.
Another recipe site that I like, which Garrett just reminded me of — Simply Recipes. We made the poached salmon recipe from there the other night, and it was as easy as promised.
We had ambitions to go to the grocery store today, but a birthday brunch for Melissa’s friend Denise lasted pleasantly longer than expected, so by the time we were done buying curtains, canisters, shoe racks, and a couple hundred dollars of other stuff, it was late and we abandoned our shopping plans. I’d wanted to cook a nice dinner now that my pots and pans and utensils were all back with me, so I did what I could with what we had left around the house: chicken breasts, old white wine, kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, chick peas, angel hair pasta, and some fresh rosemary, basil and thyme. Here’s what I did:
Cube the chicken breasts and put them in a bowl with about half a cup of white wine.
Add some olive oil and finely chopped garlic, rosemary and thyme. Add salt and pepper to taste. Make sure everything is well distributed, then marinate for at least half an hour, though longer is probably better.
Re-hydrate some sun-dried tomatoes (maybe half a cup?) in warm water and chop them up into little pieces.
Pit the olives and cut them in half.
Drain and rinse a can of chick peas.
Add a little bit of olive oil to a frying pan over medium heat. Add the chicken with the marinade. Cook for a few minutes til the chicken looks cooked on the outside, then cook for a few minutes more.
Add the sun-dried tomatoes, olives and chick peas. Stir for a couple of minutes and then cover over medium-low heat.
Boil the water for the pasta.
When you put the pasta in, uncover the chicken and add another half cup of wine. Simmer uncovered while the pasta cooks.
Drain the pasta and put it into bowls.
Ladle the liquid over the pasta, and top with the chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, chick peas and kalamata olives.
