Tagged with Entree …

Dec 26 2009
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Holiday, Main, Pasta

Christmas Dinner

For the second year in a row I was the only one of my siblings to make it home for Christmas. While the holidays aren’t quite as exciting when you’re the only one home, it certainly has its advantages. For one, I get way more presents than either of my brothers. And isn’t that what Christmas is about? Just kidding, Bobby and Kyle. I’m sure mom and dad gave you just as many presents as they gave me. You guys got ponies, too, right? If not you should be happy to know that they at least hung up your stockings this year unlike the last when mine was the only one dangling from the mantle.

Since there were only three of us around to eat Christmas dinner, we kept it pretty simple. I brought my pasta-making discs home, and my mom and I made an Italian dinner from scratch. Noodles, tomato sauce, meatballs, and a caprese-like salad were on the menu, followed by a chocolate tart and a mincemeat pie for dessert. Yes, you read that correctly. Three people and two desserts. That’s just how we roll. If it were up to my dad it would have been three desserts and no main course. That’s just how he rolls. And due to his running regimen he has no rolls.


When I was in Matt’s hometown last week I picked up a deeply discounted copy of the Silver Spoon Pasta cookbook at their soon to be no longer B. Dalton, satisfying my several month long desire to add that book to my collection. I set out to make meatballs and sauce from recipes in the book, and I ended up tweaking and adding on to both dishes. For the meatballs I combined about 1/2 lb. ground beef and about 1/2 lb. ground pork with an egg, a handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley, maybe 1/4 cup breadcrumbs, salt and pepper.

The fresh parsley was key to the tastiness of the meatballs. The original recipe called for a single sprig of parsley, but I used several. It helped to brighten the flavor of the little balls of meat.

The meatballs were first browned in a little oil over medium-high heat, and then the lid went on and they were transferred to a 350 oven for maybe 20-30 minutes until they were cooked through.

My mom’s 30+ year old KitchenAid may be on its last leg, but it still managed to crank out all of these pretty noodles.

The sauce was diced tomatoes, crushed red pepper flakes, Italian seasoning, garlic, and salt. It was OK (and much better than it looks in this photo), but it could have been better.

My plate.

My mom and I wanted to add olives to the pasta sauce, but since we knew my dad wouldn’t be thrilled we resorted to sprinkling them on top as a garnish. It was slightly weird, in part because they were cold and raw and in part because they were of the green, pimento-stuffed variety. Next time I’ll plan ahead and buy different olives and cook them with the sauce.

The salad was grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella balls, chopped artichoke hearts, fresh basil, vinegar, and oil.


I’ve been going through this awful phase lately where I haven’t been very impressed with desserts, but this Mexican Chocolate Tart has completely changed my outlook on decadent, chocolate things.

The tart was incredibly easy to make, it looks elegant, it tastes delicious, and it goes perfectly with a dollop of freshly whipped cream.

I was going to post a picture of the mincemeat pie, but the amount of time it takes to upload a picture with this slow internet coupled with the fact that I don’t like mincemeat held me back. Maybe next year.
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Dec 12 2009
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Cheese, Main, Pasta

Macaroni and Cheese

As much as I love cheese, I’m not a huge macaroni and cheese person. Sure, I ate my fair share of it when I was a kid, treasured shipments of Easy Mac when I was abroad, and still occasionally buy a box to keep in the cupboard, but to give you an idea of how infrequently I eat it I will tell you that a box of macaroni and cheese is good for at least two years beyond its expiration date. Slightly disturbing, but true.

My indifference to macaroni and cheese applies to eating it in restaurants as well as eating it from a box. I’ve had a few bites of Matt’s mac and cheese from Joe’s Garage, but I would never order it for myself because I would much rather blow calories on their fries with basil aioli. The same goes for Yum – I would choose their crispy fries with red pepper aioli over their mac and cheese any day. A few weeks ago, though, my mom, Matt, and I were eating at Nick and Eddie, and it turned out to be one of those rare occasions when mac and cheese sounded really good. To be completely honest it was the lobster that was mixed in with it more than the cheesy noodles themselves that prompted me to order it, but the bottom line is I picked mac and cheese over fish and chips. So basically, fries with good dipping sauces trump macaroni and cheese, but lobster trumps fries.

Although I have no problem going long periods of time without a dose of cheesy noodles, sometimes I do eat it more often than once a year. When I was home over Thanksgiving I went through the collection of old magazines that had been accumulating in the rack next to my bed, pitching a couple old copies of Vanity Fair and W before stumbling upon an issue of Saveur. It dated back to April 2005 (vintage!) and the theme was “American Artisanal Cheese.” I still can’t figure out how I had the good sense to buy it back then, but then I let it sit around for four and a half years before making use of it. When I saw the recipe for macaroni and cheese I knew I had to make up for lost time. It was my call to duty.

Macaroni and Cheese
From Saveur, April 2005, based on a recipe from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating

1 lb. tube-shaped pasta
2 tbsp. butter
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 sprig fresh thyme
1/4 cup dry white wine
2 tbsp. flour
3 1/2 cups milk
2 tbsp. dijon mustard
1 lb. aged cheddar cheese
Salt and pepper
1-2 tbsp. coarse bread crumbs
Although the recipe calls for a pound of aged cheddar, I couldn’t get myself to spring for an entire pound of pricey cheese. I went with a little less than half a pound of Dubliner and supplemented that with cheaper stuff. In hindsight it would have only set me back a few more bucks to just stick with the aged variety, but the combination of the two produced a perfectly acceptable result so I guess I shouldn’t worry about it.

On a side note, I heard on NPR last week that most of the cheddar you buy at the store (like the variety on the left) is only a few months old at most. It came up in a discussion of a 15-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin that’s selling for $50/pound.

Start by cooking your pasta until it’s not quite cooked through. The recipe suggests cooking it for 6-7 minutes, the box of rigatoni I used said 14 minutes until al dente, and I cooked this for about 8-10 minutes. After cooking the pasta, drain it, rinse it with cold water, and drain it again. Set it aside while you work on the sauce.

As far as types of pasta go you can use penne, rigatoni, macaroni or any other tube-shaped pasta you like.

While the pasta is boiling, grate the cheese. I just kind of guessed with amounts. You need about 4 1/2 cups, and I probably had a generous 4 1/2 cups.

Have your onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme ready.
Melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a large saucepan over medium heat.
Add the onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme. Cook for several minutes until the onion softens.
While that’s cooking, get the remaining ingredients ready. The only white-ish wine I had was a bottle of vinho verde that had been opened in my fridge for long enough that it had lost its fizz, and I don’t think it hurt the quality of the dish.
Add the wine and cook for 2-3 minutes.


Discard the herbs and the garlic, and add the flour. Cook for one minute. I’m not sure if I overestimated the amount of time the wine was cooking or not, but most of the liquid had cooked off by the time I added the flour.

Slowly add the milk and then the mustard. The recipe tells you to reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer, but I didn’t have any kind of simmer to maintain after I added the milk. I guess I added it too quickly, so if you run into the same problem bring the mixture to a simmer and then reduce the heat.
Now we get to the exciting part – constantly stirring the mixture for 30 minutes! I suggest timing the cooking so this part coincides with an episode of Jeopardy. That way you can learn fun(ny) things while stirring. Did you know that another name for chewing tobacco is West Virginia coleslaw?
Go ahead and preheat your oven to 400 at some point in here.

After 30 minutes or so the mixture should be thick and creamy and will coat the back of a spoon. Here’s a little tip: slippery rubber spatulas are not as good of a tester as an actual spoon.

Remove the mixture from the heat, and mix in 2/3 to 3/4 of the grated cheese. You’re supposed to add a handful at a time and make sure the cheese is completely melted before adding the next handful, but I didn’t read that part of the recipe until after I’d dumped a bunch of it in.

Season with salt and lots of freshly ground pepper.
Mix the cheese sauce with the pasta.

Pour the mixture into a large baking dish.

Top with the remaining cheese and the breadcrumbs.


Bake at 400 for about 25 minutes, or until the top is golden.

We ate this with pieces of roasted squash to make ourselves feel better about the extreme amounts of cheese.
The only thing I would consider doing differently next time is to bake it in a large, rimmed baking sheet instead of a deep baking dish to increase the surface area of the crusty top.

One more thing, if you want to do some of the work ahead of time you can do all of the steps through adding the noodles and sauce to the baking dish, and then stick it in the refrigerator until you’re almost ready to bake it. Take it out while the oven is preheating, add the topping, and then bake it as you normally would.
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Dec 10 2009
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Chicken

Life Lessons and Rotisserie Chicken

In the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would give you all a few tips on gift-giving. I know this is a food blog and all, but trust me, I have some very important advice to give.

1. Give people puppies. They’re cute, and everybody loves them.

2. Tip number 1 has one very important exception. If you are my brother, give your wife a kitty. Seriously, JUST GET HER A KITTEN ALREADY!

3. Re-gifting is a perfectly acceptable practice. However, if you are going to re-gift, you might not want to re-gift to the daughter of the people who gave you the gift in the first place because she might tell the original gifter about her exciting new gift and the truth will come out. Even if several years have passed since the gift was originally given. I’m talking to you, Grandpa and Grandma! But thanks for the rotisserie (Mom and Dad). I really like it.

I suppose this post is a little more for the purpose of handing out gift-giving tips than for giving you ideas for using your George Foreman Baby George Rotisserie because let’s be honest, I must be one of about 200 people that actually has one of these things. Right? I put it on the same level as the product hawked on my favorite informercial – that cooker that makes anything you could possibly want (Chicken breasts! Pancakes! Corndogs!), as long as you don’t mind all of your meals being in a perfect half-moon shape. I almost made a crack about the Magic Bullet, but if someone re-gifted me a Magic Bullet I would totally use it. And don’t get me wrong, I love my George Foreman Grill. But a rotisserie? A rotisserie?

Anyway, I thought I would show you what you can do with your own rotisserie, should one be re-gifted to you one of these days.

Start with a chicken. The recipe book that came with the rotisserie said that a 4 to 5 pound chicken will feed 4 people. I found this pretty shocking until I remembered the time in college when my friend Justin got drunk and woke up with two chicken carcasses on the floor next to him. Impressive, isn’t it?

Select some sort of seasoning mix, spices or herbs. I used Pluto’s Jerk Seasoning, which is totally awesome.
If you’re interested in ordering your own, refer to the info on the label. Their jerk sauces are really good, too. Easy access to Pluto’s products are one of the worst things about my brother and sister-and-law leaving North Carolina.
Anyway, rub seasoning or spices all over the bird.  I’ve always thought chickens look really vulnerable in this position, and I finally figured it out. It’s the wings. This is the exact position we would have to be in during tornado drills elementary school – curled up on the ground with your hands over your head. This leads me to the age-old question: which came first, the chicken or tornado safety?
Truss the ol’ bird, and load it onto the rotisserie rods. I really couldn’t think of a graceful way of saying that. Nor could I get a remotely decent photo.  Fire up the grill!
This is what I ended up with 45 minutes to an hour later. It cooked a lot faster than the instructions suggested. More importantly, it was really tasty.

The skin crisped up nicely, and the inside was tender and juicy. Matt and I ate some of whole pieces, and there were a ton of leftovers that we made sandwiches with.

I have a bone to pick with the wishbone, though. My brothers always laid claim to the wishbone when we were growing up, so now that they’re not standing in my way you can be certain that I take advantage of that little bone. I let it dry out for a little bit, and when Matt and I broke it we ended up with two even pieces in our hands and the middle section flying through the air. Whaaaaa? Whose wish comes true if the wishbone ends up in three pieces?

Finally, here is something you can make should you not be one of the select number of individuals who owns a rotisserie. Cut a squash in half (this is a delicata), rub it with a tiny bit of olive oil (at least I think I did that), sprinkle it with salt, cumin, and a little cinnamon, and roast it in a pan with a little water loosely covered with foil at 350-400 until tender. It’s pretty hard to mess up, and it tastes delicious.
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Nov 30 2009
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Main, Vegetarian

Vegetable Potpies with Sweet Potato Biscuits

The night before Thanksgiving my brother made delicious vegetable potpies from a recipe in Food & Wine. They were a great way to fill up on veggies before feasting on turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes the following day, and they’d make a good meal for any cold winter night. I’m a big fan of traditional potpies (like the chicken potpie I made a year ago), but this one comes with far less guilt since it’s stuffed with vegetables and topped with a sweet potato biscuit.

The original recipe called for parsnips, brussels sprouts, pearl onions, cauliflower, and celery root, but it takes well to substitutions. Instead of brussels sprouts ours had beets. My mom was really excited about purple pearl onions, so those went in instead of white ones. Being easily excitable runs in the family.

Bobby did most of the work on the filling.


And I got to make the biscuits.


These biscuits are delicious and would be great eaten on their own.


My mom kindly spiked some eggnog with whiskey for us to enjoy while we cooked. My dad doesn’t drink, and I’m pretty sure he thinks that one drink makes you drunk. While this is generally not the case unless you’re maybe a small child or my friend Sarah, it was certainly the case with these suckers. You could get drunk on the fumes alone. I’m not sure if it was the fact that I don’t really like eggnog or that I’m still not over the last time I drank large quantities of whiskey and chased it with karaoke, but I simply could not handle this stuff.


After being tossed with olive oil and seasoned, the vegetables are roasted for 30 minutes.

Then a milk/cream/flour/butter/spice mixture gets combined with them. I guess what I said before about this being a healthy alternative to chicken potpies is not entirely true.

The mixture is divided among 8 4-inch ramekins. It should be fine in a larger dish, too, if you don’t want to mess with individual servings.
Each dish is topped with a biscuit and a sage leaf or two.
Bake for about 15 minutes.
These go really well with a side of tart cranberry sauce.
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