Macaroni and Cheese

Somehow, despite being a big fan, I haven't made macaroni and cheese since I was cooking things out of boxes with powders. And there is a special place in my heart for ye olde Kraft macaroni and cheese. But for a couple years, I've been intending to make a more grown-up version of it, with bechamel or some such sauce. The arrival of the Ruhlman cookbook helped spur me on to actually do it.

The sauce is fairly complex. There's some caramelized onions and shallots, five or six different spices, fish sauce, and sherry -- and probably two or three ingredients I'm not remembering. It's pureed, then tossed with the pasta and some cheese, covered in more cheese and butter-soaked panko, then baked. (Yeah, it's not a low-calorie dish). For the cheese, I used a blend of cheddar and parrano.

It ended up less creamy than I was expecting. Not a bad thing, just different. It was definitely cheesy, and removing the covering halfway through baking gave the top a nice crispiness. I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) by how much it made; more than enough for my wife and I for dinner, with four containers of leftovers for lunches this week. This is going to be a great dish for potlucks.

Apple-Pie Pork Chops

By some strange coincidence, there is no supermarket between the store where I pick up my CSA and home. There is a Yes! Organic Market across the street, but their selection of meats is pretty limited, so I usually avoid them. But the other day, I had no idea what I wanted to do for dinner anyway, and I figured I'd go to Yes! and poke around. They had some good looking, relatively cheap pork chops, so I picked them up. 

I wanted some fall flavors, and I still had some crabapple schapps. I know pork chops go well with apples, and it's fall, so time for fall flavors! I've never marinated with alcohol, and I was eager to try: I put a good slug of the schapps in a bag, along with some thyme and some cinnamon, and threw it into the fridge for a few hours.

I was a little worried that it would marinate for too long, and the pork would end up mushy, since it was in the fridge for five hours. It turned out, it may have been a bit longer than ideal, but not too long. I fried the pork chops for about 10 minutes, turning up the heat at the end to get a bit of a sear. I really enjoyed these. The pork was good and tender from the marinade. It was, however, a bit disconcerting to be eating pork that tasted an awful lot like apple pie. If I do this again, I'll marinate for a shorter period of time, and probably not bother with the thyme. It was overpowered by the other flavors, and so a waste of thyme.

Tomato and Onion Stuffed Pork Chop

Occasionally, you're at the store, and you can't find what you're looking for. This time, I was at Harris Teeter trying to find a nice big juicy pork chop. They didn't have a nice big juicy pork chop. They did have small butterflied pork chops, which didn't look too bad, and my wife suggested we could stuff them with some of the heirloom tomatoes we got in our CSA. So we picked them up and took them home.

We poked around the internet, and found this recipe to use as a guide. So I chopped up one and a half tomatoes with an onion and a not insubstantial amount of garlic. I fried that in a tablespoon of butter and a roughly equivalent amount of olive oil. There was a lot of liquid floating around, and I was tempted to just wait until it had all boiled off. But I thought that would just mean the vegetables would end up stewed and tasteless. So I let it cook a while, and then used a slotted spoon to transfer the vegetables to a bowl, so it wasn't too liquidy. The vegetables then got mixed with some feta and some fresh oregano and basil. 

I ended up with a lot of filling, so I don't think I even used half of it to stuff the pork chops. Once stuffed, I put the pork chops in the oven at 400 degrees and let them cook for 30 minutes. The pork chops ended up a bit overcooked. 25 minutes would have been sufficient I think. The stuffing, however, was absolutely delicious. We covered our green beans with it, and it was just as good as the duck fat roasted potatoes, which is saying something!

Pre-Race Carb Loading with Homemade Pasta Sauce

Photo by Nadi0, from flickr.

Chris and I have the Cherry Blossom 10 miler coming up tomorrow morning, which means an excuse for carb loading! And if there's anything I love as much as pasta, it's making pasta sauce. Now, I'm not generally opposed to buying prepared foods, but one thing I've never understood is the point of pasta sauce out of a jar. Homemade pasta sauce is so easy, almost as fast, fun to experiment with, and always so much tastier. It's also really forgiving; the recipe I'm about to post isn't really a recipe, as I didn't measure anything, and did quite a bit of improvising. These are the ingredients that ended up going into the sauce:

Several garlic cloves, sliced
Part of an onion, diced,
One Habanero pepper, de-seeded and diced
One pint of grape tomatoes
Chicken broth
Dry vermouth (white wine would also work, but we didn't have any)
Fresh rosemary
Fresh mint
Dried basil (fresh would be better, but I forgot to pick some up at the store)
Sliced olives
Couple pinches of sugar

I started by sauteing the garlic, onion, and habanero over medium heat until everything was soft, about 5 minutes or so. I then dumped in the grape tomatoes, and let them sit until the outsides started to caramelize and they started to burst. This takes about 10-12 minutes, and I stirred occasionally to keep the onions and garlic from burning. You don't want to stir too often though, or you'll keep the tomatoes from charring. Once a few had burst on their own, I used a potato masher to mash the rest of them just a bit. I prefer a chunky sauce, so I still wanted some large tomato chunks. I mixed in a bit of sugar to balance the acidity of the tomatoes, and then I added some chicken broth and dry vermouth, along with the herbs and olives. I kept the heat pretty high to reduce the liquid, and once the liquid was an appropriate consistency, I reduced the heat to low until I was ready to use it. As simple as can be!

This is a great base recipe, because it's so easy to adjust. The addition of olives was a last-second decision because I thought they sounded good, but they could easily be left out. Chicken broth could be replaced with vegetable broth, water, or extra wine, though you'd want to add a bit of salt if you don't use any broth. Mint could be left out, oregano could be added. I also think roasted red peppers would be a nice addition, for a bit of smokey flavor. I strongly prefer bite-sized tomatoes, such as grape or cherry, because keeping them whole for a bit allows the outside to get a bit caramelized, but if that doesn't matter to you, then a can of diced tomatoes would do. For a smooth sauce, you could run everything in the blender before adding to pasta. The list of possible additions or substitutions goes on and on; pasta sauce is extremely forgiving, so it's a great way for both new and experienced cooks to get some practice improvising in the kitchen.

Mussels are hard

The hard part of mussels is the cooking. My wife and I both love mussels, and are fortunate to live in a town that features many excellent places to eat them. But until last year, we had never tried to make them ourselves. Then I happened on a recipe for grilled mussels, which sounded really interesting, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

The results were not good. The recipe was fine, but at least half of the mussels were undercooked, most of them severely. The problem is, mussels are pretty finicky. It takes about 5 minutes to grill them (8 to steam), but that's an average. You mostly have to watch them, and wait for them to open. And by open, I mean open wide. So the second time I grilled mussels, I was a lot more patient, and they turned out a lot better.

Recently, we've been craving seafood again, and scallops are just a bit more expensive than we really want. So my wife picked up some mussels, I sent her a recipe from Serious Eats, and she cooked them up for me (I have a really great wife!) She mostly followed the recipe, just adding rosemary, shallots, and leeks. The broth was really flavorful, and went great with the baguette she picked up, but the mussels, as a rule, were very underdone. I don't think we ate more than half of them. So, as a gentle reminder, when you cook mussels, cook them well! They should be open wide. Recipe after the jump.

Lamb Chops with Tomato Butter

When we're looking for a recipe, I usually turn to Epicurious for ideas. Their browse feature is great, allowing you to page through recipes with as broad or narrow criteria as you might wish, and their community is really great. Thanks to the reviews, I've only rarely had something from them that wasn't above average. (Though, on the other hand, the cooking times are also generally above average.) The last time I was on there, I was looking for something quick and easy to prepare after my run. I found three recipes, and my wife picked out the lamb chops with sun-dried tomato butter.

I don't normally like lamb as much as steak, due mostly to its gaminess, but these were great! The walnuts and tomatoes in the butter helped balance out the gaminess of the lamb, and the cayenne pepper added a subtle spiciness. Unlike a lot of epicurious recipes, this one really was quick and easy. Recipe after the jump.

Bacon Bourbon Beef

After brunch recently, we had a large quantity of bacon left over. Since we don't usually have bacon in the morning, we figured we should use it for dinner. A little bit of searching, and we found this recipe for beef tenderloin steaks with smoky bacon bourbon sauce. It sounded great, but when we got to the store, we found that the short ribs looked fantastic, so got those instead. (My wife also really liked the apple fritter, but that's a different story.) Of course, short ribs necessitate a different cooking method from tenderloin.

What I did is take the ribs and brown them in a skillet. I put them in the slow cooker with the ingredients for the sauce, deglazed the pan with water, and added that to the slow cooker as well. I added some rosemary, because I like rosemary, and a chipotle pepper to give it a bit of heat and some additional smokiness. We left it on low for about seven hours.

It turned out great! Fork-tender, of course, but with a really good flavor to it. There was a bit of heat from the chipotle, but not much, and it added some complexity and balanced well with the bourbon. The asparagus made a really nice complement to the meat. When I do this again, which I think I will, I want to try reducing the liquid to make a sauce, as I think that would make it even better.

Arugula and Goat Cheese Ravioli

The glass on the right is prosecco, if you were wondering.

Since it was Saturday, and we didn't have much else to do, we thought we'd do a more elaborate recipe. So, ravioli. This recipe come from Gourmet, and calls for handmade ravioli filled with a blend of arugula and goat cheese. This was our first time making handmade pasta of any sort, and it was an experience.

It can probably be summed up by saying that we started cooking around 4 in the afternoon, and started eating around 8:30, and almost all of that was active time. Now, that's a bit misleading, since we discovered around 5 that we didn't have enough arugula (we needed a pound!), and so I did things around the kitchen like fill ingredient bowls and wash dishes while my wife went to the store to get more Arugula. If that hadn't happened, we still would have spent a lot of time cooking, but not quite as much as we did.

And making ravioli by hand is hard! I kinda wish I had a pasta machine now. I've never been much good at rolling out dough, even if I'm making something like pizza where it doesn't need to be particularly thin. So here, where it wanted to be really thin, I wasn't much good. But I was apparently good enough! While the ravioli was not the best ever, it was pretty good. The flavor was awesome; I can tell why people swear by homemade pasta. But it was a bit chewy. Not horribly chewy, but it could have been better. The filling was quite good. It would have been better if we had been able to de-stalk the arugula, but that would have required far more time than it was worth. Overall, a worthwhile way to spend an afternoon, if not the best dish we've ever had.