Lon GISLAND & Fresh Pasta

Today we got out to Long Island to get Jen some valued time away from the apartment and some time to stretch her still braced leg. The trip took us to Crate & Barrel where we hung out with some of the world's worst people. The world's worst person was a middle aged gentleman who, when Jen dropped her crutch, looked at her with a seething hatred as if she had taken a swipe at him with a morning star. He didn't even halt his scowl of disgust for the one second it would have taken him to do the right thing (which, in case you are a moron is to pick up the crippled person's crutch for them) because he was too busy hating her.

I hope he got into a car accident on his way home. Not a fatal one of anything. Just a bad enough one to total his car and give him chronic neck pain for the rest of his life.



Moving right along! I really wanted to finally make some pasta with the pasta maker I'd gotten for Christmas so I whipped up a quick dough, prepared and steamed some artichokes, and some other assorted ingredients to make ravioli filling.



What I made were lemon and artichoke ravioli with green olives and ricotta. Then I fried up a little sage in olive oil and butter and drizzled it on top of the cooked raviolis.

The raviolis were not much to look at. I made them extremely quickly (hence the poor form) because by the time we got home and started cooking it was already pretty late and we were getting a little hungry.

After that we watched a little TV and tried to shake off the experience of going to Long Island's worst Target on a trip that yielded us no purchases. It did, however, give Jen the opportunity to try on a number of silly hats and me the opportunity to have a coffee from Starbucks which reminded me how much I hate their terrible coffee. I think it's quite possible that they use an old grill brush to stir up the coffee after it's brewed.

I'm not quite sure why. Coffee doesn't even need to be stirred.

What Came First: The Chicken or the English Muffin Pizza?

I've been scanning lots of old pictures for the last few days and looking at those old pictures made me nostalgic for a very specific thing:



English muffin pizzas! It occurred to me that I haven't had an English muffin pizza in ages. I had most of the ingredients lying around. I even had fresh mozzarella in the fridge and a basil plant in the AeroGarden that is slowly taking over our apartment. It's probably a little unorthodox to use fresh mozzarella and fresh basil on English muffin pizzas. Generally I think Prego and Kraft singles are the acceptable toppings for a proper English muffin pizza.

I think there is a story that my mother made these for my father for dinner every night for a year. Something like that. I know that my dad would be content to live out the rest of his years never having another of these.



After the pizzas I realized that I didn't really have anything for dinner. In a pinch I pulled two ancient onion halves out of the crisper and carmelized them. I found some frozen chicken breast in the freezer that was unfortunately frozen in a giant block which. When I put it in the freezer like that I knew it was a bad idea, however, I was feeling lazy at the time and figured that that was a problem for Future Me. Well, Present Me became Future Me today and Present Me had a hell of a time smashing the chicken block against the edge of the counter to break off a piece.

Complete with a ripe avocado and a middle-aged potato I was able to make a dish that was almost as tasty as it was colorful. Tomorrow I will make a concentrated effort to get enough ingredients so that Sunday's dinner will be a little better thought out.

Until then, keep cleaning out those pantries and living the dream!

One Pan, One Rib, One Dream . . . BLEH!

As I prepare for 40 hours of time outside of work I can't help but be delighted by the fact that I get to cook some dinners which will A) use up some of the ingredients I've been sitting on for a while and B) make me happy to know I'm staying home for nearly two straight days!



Dinner tonight started off with this salad I made with yet more of these delicious grape tomatoes from Connecticut and some delicious muscat grapes. I accompanied it with Uniekaas Reserve Gouda and hazelnuts. I would normally use filberts but I only had hazelnuts available. That was convenient because it allowed me to use my second favorite nut-related jokes. My first favorite is this: Two peanuts walked down the street and one was assaulted. Peanut.

I guess that is technically a legume joke.



Along with the salad we enjoyed this delicious bread I got (for free) called placheta (or planchetta, or maybe planchita). I can't seem to find any information about it online but legend has it that it is a Transylvanian recipe. Seriously. Basically it's a cheese stuffed with cheese and dill and it is delicious. It is, however, impossible to eat without saying things like, "Bleh! I vant to eat more of dees beauteefool veettles! Ah! Ah! Ah!"



I actually found a farm potato rolling around the bottom of the crisper and I browned it along with the remaining spring onions and some halved shallots with garlic. Then I seared a beautiful ribeye which I'd gotten for a song (a $6.99 per pound song) with a little olive oil.

By the way: one pan. Thank you!



I picked up a bottle of wine on my way home. The bottle claims that Cabernet Franc and Lemberger are fabulous partners. Apparently the blend of these two grapes is "seamless." Thank God. My refined palette would laugh at an inappropriate grape combination. Could you imagine if they'd combined the Cabernet Franc with something like a Montepulciano or a Sangiovese? Oh my goodness, that would be crazy!

For dessert: more matzoh crunch and the latest episode of Chuck which my horrible, stupid TiVo failed to record due to its insistence on crashing and displaying the green screen of death instead.

Local & Lazy

Maybe it's laziness. I prefer to think it is a throwback to simpler times, an homage to the Alice Waterses and Mark Bittmans of the world. My favorite meal to cook is a simple one, with as few ingredients and seasonings as possible. The farm share really opened my eyes to the deliciousness of beautifully grown produce whose flavor does not need to be drowned out with much added fat or seasoning. The added bonus to this is being able to pare down my spice rack and keep my fridge a little lighter on inventory.

I'm also a big fan of trying to cook everything in one pan. One pan cooking may be my favorite method of cooking, trying to time everything so it completes its cooking process at the same time.

Another thing which contributed to my recent culinary evolution was the trip to France last summer and experiencing a truly French style meal where every protein needn't be accompanied by both a starch and multiple vegetables. A duck breast may only be served with roasted potatoes; a tenderloin of beef may only come with mashed potatoes; fillet of fish may only be accompanied by some sauteed spinach.

Okay, a lot of it has to do with the fact that all of these methods and facts combine to promote my own inherent laziness, but it really is a true beauty to experience food in this simplistic sense when you're working with great ingredients.

I like to call this method: lazy cuisine.



For a lazy salad I used some mixed greens, crushed pecans, goat cheese, and avocado with some olive oil and lemon juice.



I carmelized the leftover spring onions (I purchased way more than I thought I originally needed) with a little garlic, butter, and olive oil then added some oyster, shiitake, and crimini mushrooms. After they were done I made some room for two salmon fillets in my pan, seared them with olive oil, lemon, garlic, salt, and pepper then scooted them to another corner of the pan and threw in some of the first nice asparagus of the season into the pan.



I carefully selected the wine pairing for this meal by grabbing the first white wine I could find (because white wine is supposed to go with fish, you see) which was this Liebfraumilch. It was perhaps a little too sweet for this meal which suggests that maybe my wine pairing technique needs to be refined. Clearly that cannot be the case. There must have been something wrong with the wine or something.



For dessert: matzoh crunch. The best part of the lead up to Passover is this delicious dessert made with chocolate, matzoh, brown sugar, and caramel. I have Friday off of work and I think I might spend 80% of that time just eating matzoh crunch until I go into shock from the rising blood sugar level.

That is my plan anyway. I'm probably too lazy to actually do it.

Return of Real Cooking

Today was my first day off in a little over two weeks and I was going to do some cookin' and eatin' if it killed me. Overall it went pretty well though I could have done with far less laundry.



For lunch we had a visitor. When she's not busy kicking our asses at Wii Bowling, sometimes Heather will meet us for lunch (or my nemesis, brunch). Today she came up to visit the still immobile Jen. Selfishly, I prepared my favorite lunch of smoked salmon, bagels from Mike's Bagels, leftover pizza, and mimosas.

Like some sort of greedy little hog I ate as much smoked salmon as I could, then made tea and had two cupcakes before lying on the couch in shock and eventually falling asleep for a brief nap.

We spent most of the afternoon watching the remaining episodes of Firefly which we started watching the other day. After running out of episodes of Chuck we decided to branch out and watch the complete works of Adam Baldwin, which I believe is the standard reaction for anyone who sees Chuck.



For dinner I cleared some shrimp out of the freezer by making a spicy shrimp boil. I used the remaining champagne, lemon, coriander seed, black peppercorns, bay leaf, hot sauce, cayenne pepper, chili powder, salt, and lemon to flavor the boil then quickly cooked and chilled the shrimp.



To accompany the shrimp I served greens, cocktail sauce, sour cream, avocado, sliced tomato, and diced red onion.



For the main course I carmelized some spring onions with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper then seared some duck breast with the same seasoning. I also made a tiny amount of balsamic glaze for the onions.

At the current moment, I have enjoyed smoked salmon, duck, and a good healthy amount of chocolate. We have one more episode of Firefly as I eat a generous portion of yogurt straight out of the container and follow that up with some delicious See's chocolates.

If it wasn't for the return to work tomorrow this would be the perfect night.

But I'm not going to let my imminent return to work spoil the Adam Baldwin for me.