Chocolate Cheese Cake

  

  
Jej mades a mighty delicious chocolate cheesecake. This is not exactly the recipe she used, because she has an even harder time following a recipe than I do, but we started with the same source material, and I added cocoa powder the same as she did. You will need a springform baking pan.

Pre heat the oven to 325.

crust:

2 cups peanut butter cookie crumbs
1/4 cup butter

Grind the cookies to a powder and put them in a microwavable bowl with the butter. Zap it for about 30 seconds, then mix the butter and crumbs thoroughly.  Press the mixture into the bottom of your pan and up the sides about an inch. Set aside.

Filling:

2, 8-oz things of cream cheese
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 cups greek yogurt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
teaspoon vanilla extract

If you have a food processor that is big enough to do the whole recipe at once, put everything in it and process it until it's smooth. (I don't have such a thing, but I do have a blender, which worked but was not too happy about it. ) Pour the filling into the crust and bake for an hour. See note #1! It will be still a little jiggly when it comes out of the oven, that's ok. Let it cool at room temperature for an hour, then stick it in the fridge over night and it will set up.

1. My oven is known to cook very unevenly. To compensate for this, I baked mine for 25 minutes, turned it around, and baked it for another 25 minutes. Remember, every time you open the oven, your cooking time increases by a few minutes so take that into account if you need to do the same.
2. Heating the cookie crumbs as well as the butter softens the crumbs. You need less butter to hold them together than you would if you were using crackers because cookies already have a high fat content.
3. Use full fat yogurt if you can get it. The original recipe calls for sour cream, so stop worrying about the fat content. It's a cheesecake for crissakes.

So why do I keep putting greek yogurt in things if I'm not worried about the fat content? Because sour cream is not a multi-tasking ingredient. I make my own yogurt because it's cheap that way, so that's always what there is in the fridge. In most recipes, you can use greek yogurt and sour cream interchangeably, but I can't eat a bowl of sour cream and cereal for my breakfast. Blerg. Yogurt is more tart than sour cream (which I like), and you have to be careful adding it to hot dishes because it can curdle, but mostly it's easier for me to use that than planning ahead and buying a whole other thing that doesn't go in anything else. I'm lazy, basically.

Garlicky Cheezy Taters

 

 
I actually looked at my blog the other day and I thought jeezus do I ever eat anything except tofu, broccoli, and noodles?

Yes, sometimes I eat cheese. Melty cheese is the best, and if you put it on potatoes, it is even better.

2 medium russet potatoes

2 T butter
2 T flour
1 clove crushed garlic

1 1/3 cup milk
1/2 lb grated cheese, maybe a little more
tsp Dijon mustard
dash of nutmeg
a pinch of lavender
pepper & salt

Pre heat your oven to 375.

Cut the potatoes into 1/8" slices. Butter a heavy, oven safe skillet and arrange the potato slices evenly in it. Set them on a medium low burner, and once you can hear them start to sizzle add 1/3 cup water, cover, and let them continue to cook while you make the sauce. No stirring.

In a smallish saucepan using medium heat, saute the garlic in butter until it is just barely starting to brown, then remove from heat. Mix the flour into the butter, wait a few seconds for the oil to soak into the flour, then add the milk. Put it back on the burner, and start stirring. When it starts to thicken, add the cheese. Stir until the cheese is completely melted, remove from heat, and season to taste.

Pour the cheese over the potatoes in the skillet. Top with additional cheese if you feel like it, and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until it's as brown as you want it.

Notes-

1. Yep, it's exactly like making mac and cheese. Plus garlic.
2. I used cheddar mainly, but I always think it tastes better with more than one kind of cheese. Be aware that cheap Swiss will be kinda stringy though.
3. This is very fatty. I like to put it on top of some arugula to eat it. It's like salad dressing.
4. Roux. I think the reason you melt the butter and then mix in the flour is to coat the flour particles with oil, which prevents them from clumping together when you add milk. Instead, the flour is distributed evenly throughout the liquid so that as the temperature rises you get a smooth sauce.
5. Remember not to toast the flour in the butter. If you do, the starches will have a reduced capacity to thicken the liquid, and the sauce may break, or separate into a bunch of little particles in a thin liquid. Tastes just as good, but it doesn't look very appealing.

Tamales!

  

  
I have a powerful love for Trader Joe's green chili tamales. I love the fatty, puddingy, cheesey texture. I love how pillowy the dumpling part is. They're rich and fatty, and they aren't chewy at all, unless you microwave them until the cheese oozes out and gets stuck to the plate, but I like those parts too, so it's all good. But they cost 3 bucks for 2 tamales, so they aren't actually cheap.

I finally made some of my own. They aren't identical to TJ's, but the key factor, the fluffiness of the dough, is very close. Pete & Cynthia were out of town, so I went over to their house and borrowed their Kitchenaid mixer. It was awesome. I am so geeked. This  recipe made 19 tamales for me.

a bag of corn husks

Fill them like this

1 lb masa for tamales
2 1/2 cups hot water

1 1/4 cup shortening or lard or butter
2 cups broth or stock, cold or at room temperature

1/2 lb cheese, cut into matchsticks
roasted green chilis

Put at least 24 corn husks in a large pot of hot water to soak over night. They float, so you'll need to put a heavy bowl or something on them to keep them submerged.

Mix the masa with the hot water until it forms a thick paste. Cover it and set it aside for at least 30 minutes. I left mine over night.

When you're ready to make tamales, put the shortening in the bowl of the mixer, and beat it at high speed using the wire whisk attachment until it gets light and fluffy. Begin to drop 1" bits of the masa mix into the fat, allowing each piece to get somewhat broken up before adding more. Once half the masa is in the bowl, start alternating masa and broth or stock. When all the ingredients have been added, mix for a few more minutes to make sure there are no lumps.

At this point, the masa should look and feel like a rather light but stiff cake batter. Check to see if it's done by dropping a small dab of it into a cup of cold water. If it floats, it's got enough air beaten into it. If not, keep mixing. If it's too stiff, it won't hold air bubbles, so add a few spoons more water or broth.

They are a little messy

Drain the corn husks. Spread about 1/3 cup of masa on a husk, add a stick of cheese and a couple chilis, then roll the husk up. Fold the tail end of the husk up to keep the filling in, and tie a string around it. If you're freezing them, set them on a tray in a single layer until they get hard or the filling will ooze out. If you're going to steam them right away, make sure they sit upright in the steamer the whole time or again, the filling will ooze out. Fresh, they take about 25 minutes to steam.

Notes:

1. I would never even try this without a mixer. The ability to get the dough full of tiny air bubbles is all-important to get the fluffy texture.
2. Whatever kind of fat you use, it should be solid at room temperature, or it won't be able to keep air trapped in the dough. I used Crisco, because I was scared of the packages of lard sitting on the shelf. Not rational, but there you go.
3. Don't worry about rolling them up tightly. As they cook, the masa expands a lot. A bit loose is better than a bit tight, because you don't want the husks exploding.
4. The recipe calls for 1 1/4 cups shortening, but I think just one cup would be enough. I'm going to try the smaller amount next time. I think a slightly stiffer dough would keep its shape better during cooking.
5. The tamales will taste like whatever broth you use, so make sure it is a kind you like. I used concentrated chicken bouillon, which is fine, but next time I may use plain stock.

These are most satisfying. I'm not sure they're good for you, but I don't care. I even cooked a few in the microwave, which was a little sloppy, but it still worked. And it made those crunchy chewy cheese gloops on the plate. I admit that one of the things I like best about the TJ's tamales is the convenience of being able to throw one in the microwave at the end of the day like the lazy-ass I am. Eat them with salsa. You need something to balance out the grease. Unless you take them with you on a 7 mile hike, in which case just eat them like a barbarian with your fingers and lick the husks when you're done. And don't throw the corn husks into the gorge, that's crass.

Brussels Sprouts Again

  

  
Every time I eat brussels sprouts I wonder what happened to me that I now enjoy them so much. The first time I ate them was the last time for about 20 years. Mom got some once, and was very excited about them. She kept saying how she'd loved brussels sprouts, even when she was a little kid. I thought that was a positive sign. She cooked them in butter, and the buttery delicious smell did not prepare me for the sulfurous, bitter, mushy stringy reality of eating them. It was an early example of the many things which were to instil a profound philosophical skepticism in me. So, it's totally awesome and will knock my socks off and all like that, will it? Well, I'll believe it when I see it.

Twenty years later I was washing dishes for a living. One of the kitchen managers (they hadn't got all hoity toity and started calling them 'chefs' yet) decided to make some roasted squash and brussels sprouts. To my surprise, I thought, "hm, those really don't smell like ass the way I remembered". It took me about another year to realize that I actually liked brussels sprouts. I think I've written 3 or 4 posts about brussels sprouts now. Here is another thing to do with them.

1 pound or more brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved
handful of raw walnuts
handful of dried apricots
dab of butter
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp smoked hot paprika
tiny pinch of allspice
1 tsp sugar

chevre, because everything is better with cheese.

Put a dab of butter in a frying pan and add the walnuts, salt, and sugar. Fry on medium-low until the nuts are golden and the sugar has begun to form dark brown crunch bits. Toss evenly with the spices and remove from heat. Slice the apricots into sticks and toss them into the pan with the nuts, and give them a stir to get a little of the spices on them.


Put the sprouts in a lidded casserole with a little butter and a sprinkle of water. Microwave 3 minutes at a time until they are bright green and just tender. Toss with the nuts and apricots, serve with a few cheese crumbles.

David asked me how I come up with food ideas. I hadn't thought about it much before, but in this case, it went something like this:

1. I like the aforementioned sprouts and squash.
2. But I was bored with it.
3. So I thought about what it is about squash that makes it tasty.
4. That would be the fact that roasted squash is a little nutty, a little sweet, and has a little bit of texture.
5. So, use nuts, duh. Toasted ones are best.
6. And something sweet, but not very sweet. And not too squishy. Apricots are that, plus they have a nice color.
7. Bacon makes everything taste great, but I didn't have a hankering for that much grease.
8. So I added smoked paprika, which has a bacony smell.
9. But no protein, which is one of the things that makes bacon so good.
10. So, cheese.

And there you have it. Brussels sprouts with walnuts, apricots, and goat cheese.

Not a Real Pizza

  

  
It's round, made of dough, and has cheese melted on it to glue down the other toppings. But I think that this is still not a real pizza, which must have tomato sauce on it. And mozzarella cheese. Everything else is negotiable. But this still looks pretty appealing. I found the recipe in the paper, and it does have many of my favorite things: blue cheese, nuts, fruit. Bread.

8 oz crumbled blue cheese
a dash of cream*
1 apple
walnuts
a handful of arugula
pinch of minced fresh rosemary
salt & pepper

half a recipe of pizza dough

Pre-heat the oven as hot as it will get without being on broil.

Smash most of the cheese with the cream until you have a thick lumpy sauce. Keep a few crumbs for the top of the pie. Stretch out the dough and spread the sauce on it, slice the apple and arrange a layer over the sauce. Throw on a handful of arugula, the nuts, the rosemary, and the remaining bits of blue cheese. Dash on a tiny bit of salt, and a good amount of pepper. Bake for about 15 minutes.

Notes:

1. *I didn't have cream, so I mixed a couple tablespoons of dry milk with about 3 tablespoons of water. It was just fine. You could use actual milk too, I guess.
2. The picture shows that I constructed my pie backwards, i.e. with the apples on top of the arugula. It was ok, but I like it when the leaves get crispy and slightly black around the edges, so I would rather have put them on the top.
3. My walnuts were raw and frozen when they went in the oven, which probably helped to keep them from burning up. Burnt arugula is ok with me, burnt nuts are not.
4. The original recipe did not call for arugula, but I think it adds something. The original also called for pre-cooking the crust a bit, which appears unnecessary and fiddly.

It may not be real pizza, but it is real tasty. The apple juices cook out and mix with the cheese to make a sweet-salty topping, the nuts are crunchy and buttery, the rosemary adds a little sharpness to balance the richness of the cheese. It's pretty good for lunch the next day, but straight out of the oven, when it's still hot, crunchy, and chewy, it is amazing.

Cheesey Rolls

  

  
Here's another thing to do with the pizza dough/baguette recipe. I had to come up with a thing that I could take to a potluck that didn't involve a trip to the store. I'd already decided that I was going to be in the house all day, so I might as well make rolls, right?

Start with the same recipe for pizza dough, with the following changes: use half whole wheat flour, add 1 tablespoon of butter, and use half as much salt.

Knead the dough until it's smooth- I run it in the bread machine for 20 minutes. Then let it rest for an hour or until it doubles in size. Grate a half pound of cheddar. Roll the dough out until it's half an inch thick. Shoot for a rectangle about 2 feet long by 1 foot wide. Sprinkle on the cheese, and really smush it in. Roll the dough up tightly so you have a rope of dough about 2 feet long and about 2-3 inches thick. Cut off slices of the rope about 1 1/2 to 2 inches thick. Set them on an oiled baking pan about 2 inches apart, and let them rise for about an hour. Bake at 375 for 25-30 minutes, or until there are delicious brown bits of cheese oozing out.

If you want to get fancy, you can add chopped herbs, either in the cheese itself, or sprinkled on the outside, which is what I did.

A couple things that might help:

1. If you let the rolls rise in the oven next to a pan of hot water, the outside layers will stay moist, and hopefully, continue to expand at the same rate as the insides. I already had something else in the oven, so I couldn't do that. I think they'd look prettier if I had. One of my rolls exploded out of its layers.

2. It's important to roll the dough tightly. As it rises, any air pockets you leave in it will expand, and tend to make the rolls loose their shape. Pressing the cheese firmly onto the dough helps with this.

3. Flour the surface you roll the dough on. The dough is rather soft and sticky.

These are best hot out of the oven, like all rolls, but they didn't last more than a couple hours so I can't say after that.

Smelly and Non-Photogenic

  
Brussels sprouts are a thing I have only enjoyed for the past few years. They are undeniably stinky. They are also bitter, and taste a bit like dirt, and have a strangely squishy yet fibrous texture when they're cooked. They are not something you should ever try to feed to children, because they will resent you for decades. Trust me, there is no amount of nutritional advantage which is conferred by brussels sprouts alone that will justify trying to make kids eat them. Just feed them something less yucky.

Brussels sprouts are way beyond Food for Newbies, and this recipe is not for the faint of heart. It's quite pungent. Bonus round: I ate it with beets. Back in September, I ate some beets at a fancy restaurant. I would never have thought of putting sesame oil on beets, but it was pretty darn special. They made it look really cool by using 2 colors of beets, and putting a chimichurri-type condiment on the plate, and some other stuff, but the really important things were the sesame oil and the ginger  vinaigrette. There might have been jicama matchsticks in there too, I can't remember.


I think this really is gratin, because it has a cream sauce, and cheese, and garlic, and a crumb top.

 

Brussels Sprouts Gratin

1 lb steamed brussels sprouts, sliced thin
1 onion
1clove garlic
a little butter for frying
a pinch of salt

leftover cheese, several kinds- I used about 2 ounces of a very smelly blue, about an ounce of medium cheddar, and one lonely slice of smoked gouda
1 T butter
1 cup milk
1T flour
a shake of black pepper

1 slice of rather stale bread
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon butter
a little grated parmesan (I used the kind in a can)

Pre- heat the oven to 375.

Use an oven proof skillet. Slice the onions thinly, mince up the garlic, and saute them in butter and a pinch of salt until they are quite tender and transparent. Add the sprouts and continue to cook until heated through. Set them aside.
To make the sauce, grate or finely slice the cheese. In a small sauce pan on medium-low heat, mix the butter & flour. Fry the flour for about 2 or 3 minutes, then remove from the heat. When it has stopped sizzling, add the milk and stir thoroughly before putting it back on the burner. Keep stirring. When the milk is starting to steam, and is just beginning to thicken up, add the cheese. Stir until the cheese is all melted, and the sauce is thick. Pour over the sprouts.
Smash or grind up the stale bread and fry the crumbs briefly with the butter & rosemary. Top the sprouts with the crumbs and parmesan, and bake uncovered for 40 minutes.

Brussels Sprouts tips:

1. You could use raw sprouts in this recipe. Clean and slice them, and add them to the onions. It will take a little longer to saute them, but it will be fine. I started with steamed ones because I bought a whole giant spear at TJ's and cooked them all at once so that I could eat them for the rest of the week without too much fuss.
2. The kind of cheese in the mix is not too important, I was just using up leftovers. I will say that the stinky blue cheese is pretty excellent in this. It was too strong to eat by itself, but it was good for cooking.
3. It is probably important to take the roux off the heat before adding milk. I think it prevents you from overheating the sauce too fast and causing it to break.
4. Roux!?!? Er, I mean, the flour fried in butter.
5. I don't usually have fresh milk in the house, because I don't drink it. I used powdered milk reconstituted according to the package instructions. Nobody will ever know.
6. This recipe would be good for company, at least, a company of adventurous eating adults. It is very rich, and is nice in cold crappy weather when you just want to hang out, watch movies, and have a drink and a nosh. 



Sesame Beets

4 or 5 medium size beets
2 or 3, 1/8"-thick slices of fresh ginger, cut into little matchsticks
about 4 T rice vinegar
about 1 T palm sugar, or brown sugar. I'm still trying to use up my palm sugar.
1/4 teaspoon salt
sesame oil to taste

Peel the beets, and cook as you ordinarily would.* I tend to slice them up first and then microwave them. When the beets are tender, put the ginger bits in a sauce pan with 2 tablespoons of vinegar, the sugar, and the salt. Simmer them until the vinegar has reduced by about half, and has formed a syrup. Add the remaining vinegar and pour over the beets. Toss with sesame oil.

You could get a little fancy by saving the ginger slivers to sprinkle on top of the beets after you toss them in the vinaigrette, and maybe adding a bit of chopped cilantro. Obviously, I just wanted to eat my lunch already.


* General digression on beets: Beets are another thing you should only feed to children under select circumstances. Use caution, and accept rejection easily. However, if you're going to cook them anyway, there are lots of ways to do it. You can boil them, but I prefer not to, because then you just dump out the boiling water along with half the beet flavor. You can steam them, with very similar results, and more equipment. You can roast them with their peels on in a 350 degree oven, which really makes them taste the best but takes forever, and then you have to put them in tupperware, let them steam loose from their skins for about 10 minutes, then peel them. It's easiest, in my opinion, to skin them with a yankee peeler, slice them thinly, and microwave them for 3-5 minutes at a time until they're tender. Add a couple tablespoons of water to create steam, and stir them frequently. You need a container that has a good lid, and be aware that it may spit beet juice all over your microwave if you let it get too much water in it.

mmmm...Melty cheese.

  

  
Pizza is a nearly perfect food, in my opinion. It has melted cheese, and it has bread. And tomato sauce. If it hasn't got tomato sauce and cheese, it really isn't pizza. It might be tasty, but pizza needs red sauce and cheese. Mozzarella, not some other kind.

I used to be a fan of TJ's pizza dough. It ain't bad, but making your own is a no-brainer when you think about the fact that buying dough costs $2 and making it costs about...50 cents? Pocket change. That's a buck-fifty to use for cheese, damnit!

Remember the baguettes? The procedure was kinda fiddly. I said the hell with it, threw all the ingredients in the bread machine at once, kneaded, proofed it, then stuck it in the fridge. Half the dough made one 12" pie. I even used a bottle of marinara from the store for sauce, and it was great. I do like traditional pizza sauce, but I need my ingredients to multitask. You can put marinara on pizza no problem, but pizza sauce on spaghetti is a little weird- it's too sweet.

Pizza!

425g bread flour
255g water
11g salt
3g instant yeast

Knead everything together for 10 minutes. If you don't have a bread machine, don't worry. Just work everything into a pretty smooth ball for a few minutes. Let the dough rise for 45 minutes in a warm place (I leave it in the machine), then put it in a tupperware thing big enough to let it double in size overnight. If your lid hasn't got a vent built into it, don't seal it tight, or the expanding gas pressure in the dough will pop it off eventually.

When you're ready to make pizza, pre-heat the oven to 550, or as hot as it will go before it's on broil. Tear off half the dough and lightly poke the air out of it, but don't knead it, or it won't stretch out when you want it to. Cover it and set it aside while you assemble your ingredients and wait for the oven to heat up.

Once the oven is hot, stretch the dough into a circle and top it with your choice of decorations. Sauce, cheese, other stuff, then another light layer of cheese to anchor things down. It only takes about 10 minutes to brown a pizza at that temperature.

Tips!

1. Do use bread flour. All purpose flour won't give you the chewy texture a good pizza has.
2. Also, letting it sit over night is important. This recipe skips the dinking around with pre-fermentation and stuff, so the sitting in the fridge is essential to develop flavor.
3. Why in the fridge? Wouldn't it be better to let it sit on the counter where it's warmer? Well, no, because at room temperature for that long, the yeasts would start turning the starches into alcohol, and the dough would be over-fermented. The low temperature in the fridge keeps things under control.
4. Too much sauce will make the cheese slide off in a painful lava flow onto your lip and chin.
5. Remember, if you use any fresh greens, they will shrink into almost nothing as they cook.
6. If you use any hard vegetables or any meats, be sure to grill them or something before topping the pizza with them. At the speed at which the pizza cooks, raw squash, for instance, will not be done by the time the dough is crispy and the cheese is a little brown.
7. I don't have a pizza stone, but I do have one of those perforated metal pans. If you have neither, just don't use one of those insulated double-walled cookie sheets. The idea is to have the bottom of the pie get as crispy as the edges, or it won't have enough oomph to pick up a slice when it's done. Use a thin metal pan, or even just a sheet of tinfoil. Whatever you use, oil the dough slightly to prevent sticking.


This is actually the 2nd pizza I made with this batch of dough, and if anything, the dough is better after sitting in the fridge for 4 days. The first one, on Wednesday night, was a pretty standard mushroom & cheese version, which was good, but this one has roasted squash and italian sausage with arugula. Very nice for fall. I was reading the food section of the paper, and they had a special on squash or pumpkin, and there was a suggestion for pumpkin with pesto on pizza which I thought sounded nice. I was also thinking of the sausage & cornbread stuffing Pete makes and serves with squash. No cornbread here, but you get the idea.

Breakfast Sammie

   

   
Rosemary might be the most overused herb in Portland, but that might be because it's real tasty. And grows weedlike in these parts, except on my porch. I'm sure that's my fault- I repotted my rosemary kinda late in the spring and it never did snap back. Over the summer I realized how many things I usually put rosemary in because my poor little plant just sat there cowering in its pot and never gave me enough branches to cook with. Eventually I snuck down the block one evening and pulled a couple twigs off the behemoth rosemary growing in my neighbor's yard. They really add zazz to my eggs.

egg
rosemary
cheese
tomato
bread
mayo

I mince up the rosemary and sprinkle it over a fried egg with a pinch of salt. It's important to break the yolk just before you turn it over, or you'll have an explodingly messy sandwich. Cheese goes on the flipped egg. If you cut it evenly thin, it will have just slumped into melty ooze by the time the egg is done. You can toast the bread if you want to, for me it depends on how long ago I made it: more than a day or so and untoasted bread is less appealing. Mayo goes with tomato. That's one of those because-it-just-does things, in my book.

 

Probably not Gratin

  

  
I bought broccoli and cauliflower the other day, thinking that I was not eating enough vegetables. I like cauliflower naked pretty well, but raw broccoli is unpleasant to me- it's the texture. Sort of dry, and scrunchy, and then it falls apart into all these little bits that will poof out of your mouth if you aren't careful. Fortunately, I am happy to eat it cooked. Now that I'm a grown-up, the sulfurous stinkiness of cooked broccoli is not so repellant as it was when I was a kid, and cooking improves not only texture, but the ability of broccoli florets to accept flavoring agents. Like cheese.

1 1/2 cup broccoli florets
1cup cauliflower florets
1 medium onion, diced
1 clove crushed garlic
1 tsp fresh thyme
1tsp fresh oregano
1 head of fresh lavender buds
3 eggs
2 tablespoons cornmeal
1/3 cup water
a generous tablespoon of butter
1 cup grated cheese
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 350. Use a heavy oven safe skillet.

Mince the herbs. Beat the eggs, water, cornmeal and herbs in a bowl, and season with a little salt & pepper. Set it aside to let the cornmeal soak up some water.

Put a little butter or olive oil in the skillet, and saute the onions until they go transparent. Add the garlic and stir it around for about a minute, then add the florets and a dash of water to create steam and cover the pan. Stir it from time to time to keep it from over-browning, and when the cauliflower is tender, take it off the heat and let it cool down a bit.

Stir the cheese into the egg mix. Melt the butter and stir that in too, then pour the mix over the vegetables, and poke them around a bit to get the cheese evenly distributed. Bake for 20 minutes, the turn on the broiler, move the oven rack up and brown the top until you like the way it looks.

Thoughts:

While there is nothing fancy about this dish, and it is almost identical to the fritatta I made a while ago, I think I like this a little better. Again, it's all about texture. Cauliflower is more delicate than potatoes, and cooks faster, giving the finished product a lighter feel despite the added butter in the eggs. (You could probably skip the butter, but why?) I think the cornmeal may have something to do with it, but it's hard to say. I really just used it because I needed a binding agent and that's what I found in the cupboard. It did create a few crunchies around the edges, which was nice.

Almost any cheese would be good, I had cheddar. Visually, I like the orange cheese, but I think swiss or gruyere would taste more interesting.

Come to think of it, there is a fancy thing: the lavender. That's very important. Lavender has an astringent character which balances well with all the fat in the dish.

As I was cooking this, I couldn't figure out what it is that makes something 'au gratin' as opposed to any other thing made in the oven. So I looked it up, and apparently, to be au gratin the dish should have a crust baked onto it, preferably made of buttered breadcrumbs. There are no crumbs here, so this is not gratin, unless you take the secondary accepted definition of a baked dish with cheese, which cheese forms a browned crust on top. That makes most recipes for mac and cheese fall under one or the other of these definitions.

Elbows Au Gratin sounds revoltingly twee.
 

Ok, maybe I'm starting to get it

This is probably the acme of third-grade comfort foods. Maybe without the mushrooms, I can't remember if my niece likes mushrooms. The only reason I mention it is that it is an admirable use for the tomato sauce I was so unenthusiastic about. I put it on some papardelle a couple days ago, with some sausage, and thought, well, that was ok... And then I decided that I wanted some mozzarella sticks with marinara. I know. Shaddup. But the mozzarella did its magic and then I looked at my leftover crumpets. Hmmm.

Pizzoids

leftover crumpets
some of the tomato sauce from my other post
slices of mozzarella
mushrooms, if you want. I wish I had some pepperoni.
a pinch of oregano- yes it really is oregano...god!

Heat the oven to 475.

Split the crumpets, unless you're hungrier than that, in which case use whole ones. Spread a generous gloop of sauce on each one, sprinkle with some oregano or other herbs of choice, top with cheese and whatnot. Takes about 10 minutes to cook, if your oven light is busted and you keep popping the oven open to check on things.

Dude! Remember frozen pizza bagels?!? Those things were totally awesome and these taste just like that! But without being full of shit that'll kill ya faster than plain cholesterol will! That tomato sauce is so going to become a staple in my fridge.

Good Lord, it's too hot to eat lunch

I'm glad I bothered to take a quick shot of this, because it turned out to be a very tasty thing. I might even enjoy the weather, at this rate.

greens
ham slivers
bell peppers
herbed goat cheese
pine nuts
cheap balsamic vinegar
pretty decent olive oil
really good sherry vineagar

I think it was the vinegar combination that did it. The sherry vinegar has lots of personality, but I think I would find it overpowering if I put it on there by itself. It's a little bitey. The cheap balsamic adds sweetness, the olive oil is a medium-peppery kind, and it goes really well with the cheese.

I know, I keep going on about the damn strawberries!

I finished a whole heaping pint of them last Saturday, and wished that I'd bought a heap more. I woke up terribly disappointed the next morning that there weren't any left, and was reminded of this illustrated book of the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti where one of the protagonists eats magical fruit and pines away for it thereafter. I don't plan to do anything so melodramatic, but gosh dangit, I really wish I had some more of those right about now. Here's the salad I had for dinner on Saturday night:

a handful of fresh spinach
some strawberries
half an avocado
some blue cheese- a medium rather than extra sharp kind
balsamic vinegar & olive oil
salt & pepper if you want

Brussels sprouts for breakfast indeed!

This weekend I got some brussels sprouts at market and made up a mess of my favorite sprouts and squash dish. It made more than I anticipated, and in order not to get bored of it, I came up with this.

Sprouts & Squash

1 large stalk brussels sprouts
1 largeish butternut squash
olive oil
salt & pepper
pumpkin pie spice
butter
honey or maple syrup

Peel & cube the squash, toss in olive oil and a liberal shake of salt & pepper and bake at 375 until tender. A few brown bits is good, but not required. When the squash is done, halve the sprouts and put them in a lidded pot with about 1/2 cup water and a couple tablespoons of butter, and a pinch of pie spice. Steam them until the sprouts are bright green & tender, stirring occasionally to make sure they cook evenly. When they're done, add the squash and a tablespoon or 2 of honey or syrup to taste. Very easy.

The stuff in the picture is an egg scramble with the squash as prepared above, with a little bit of leftover red bell pepper and some sheep milk gouda. Brown the pepper & sprouts in a bit of butter first, then throw in the eggs. When they're about done ( it'll only take a sec) remove from heat, top with cheese and cover until the cheese has melted. Sprinkle with a pinch of fresh rosemary if you like it.

Bacon Peach Galette with Arugula and Other Stuff

This is based on Josh & Annette's giant gallette which they brought to the picnic back in august. Here's Josh's original recipe; I became re-enamored of bacon after buying some to go in my bean milk the other week.



My recipe:
3 small onions, julienned
3 large peaches, cut into slices
4 or 5 pieces of bacon, I used Nieman Ranch dry-cured
1 T mixed rosemary & thyme, minced
pinch of salt
a handful of arugula
about 4 oz. of some type of nutty semi-hard cheese, cut into thin slices. I used a stinky old piece of abondance and a few chips of sheep's-milk gouda. Muenster, pepper jack, ossau-iraty, or some types of mellow blue cheese would also be good picks, as would some good parmesan.

1 recipe of pastry for a 2 crust pie, I used this one, but of course, I used butter rather than shortening.

Have your crust made up before you start the filling. I made mine the night before, which I think I will not do again if I'm not trying to save time. Refrigeration makes the dough harder to deal with. Just my opinion.

A word about the peaches. I had some sort of disappointing ones. If you get some with bitter skins, peel 'em first!

Preheat the oven to 400.

Cook the bacon until it's crispy, then pour off all but about 2 T of fat. Chop the bacon roughly and reserve.

Caramelize the onions in the fat on medium-high heat. Stir sometimes to prevent burning. Browning is good, burning no. A pinch of salt helps, also Josh suggested a pinch of sugar of you want to jazz up the caramelization process. I got pretty good results without the sugar, I imagine it depends on the onions somewhat.

When the onions are mostly transparent with lots of gooey brown stuff, throw in the herbs, bacon and peaches. You don't really want to cook the peaches so much as just get them hot through. When everything is thoroughly hot, check for salt, and remove from heat.

Roll the dough out into a circle about 14 " across. It really helps to roll it on a big sheet of parchment, that gives you something to handle it by when you're trying to get it on and off the baking tray. Or, as I did, use a pastry cloth for rolling, then flop it onto a bit of tinfoil. Pour half the filling onto the crust, lay on a handful of arugula, most of the cheese, the other half the filling, a few more sprigs of arugula and the rest of the cheese. Loosely fold up the crust and slop on an eggwash if you want it to look like the picture.


My pie took a good half hour to cook. I think Josh's times are because he uses a convection oven which will speed things up a lot. I might turn the heat up to 425 or 450 to get it browner at the end.

If you can stand to, let it get cool before serving, so the filling doesn't all just ooze out.

mmmmmmm......

Pancakes for dinner? Seriously?

I had been thinking about pesto on pancakes ever since I moved out of Pete and Cynthia's house. Lazy me misses Pete's cooking. Anyway, I really need his pancake recipe, because while trader joe's pancake mix is fine, it isn't what I originally wanted. The thing is, P & C actually keep milk in their fridge and I believe he puts some in his pancakes. Since I don't drink real milk, it's something I never think to buy, and if I did, chances are it would spoil before I used it. Unless I'm making yogurt, and then there wouldn't be any left over for other stuff.

At any rate, here's the picture, it turned out really pretty.

So: pancakes with 2 kinds of pesto, tomatoes, ham, and fresh mozzarella.

I had to cut back my basil plants before they bloomed and went to seed. I made regular and lemon-basil & walnut pestos. The lemon-basil version is fine, but once the leaves are all chopped up, the lemon scent is rather muted. Also, I think I should have stuck with my original inspiration, which was breakfast, and had poached eggs with it.

But it was a really quick dinner, (except the part where I spent 20 minutes taking pictures of it) and I bet a glass of 2 buck chuck wouldn't have hurt either.

Also, I really want one of those little kitchen blowtorches. I wanted the cheese to get brown crunchy spots, but the pancakes started to get too crispy.