Meat Pie - Hearty food for when you run out of turkey

Mr. ToujoursDelish and I have now been to England to visit my family together several times. Besides coming back with a whole host of beautiful pictures of English flora and fauna (sheep and moss come to mind), Mr. TD has also developed a taste for Steak and Ale pie. I bring you, in a manner of speaking, a guest post as this meal was prepared by my hubs based on the recipe from the cafeteria at Croome Court*:

Hand-raised Steak and Ale Pie

Makes 6 individual pies (or one big one, in our case)

Pastry Crust

For the filling:

700 g stewing steak (8-ish oz of meat!)

450 ml traditional ale (not lager or stout...Jenny's note - unless that's all you have!)

120 g carrots - peeled and diced

2 tbs plain flour

1 medium onion, diced

sea salt and black pepper

As with most recipes, we did whatever the heck we wanted, so here it is in pictures:


Fry up the steak with a filling of your choice. In this case, it's parsnips and onions.


Add the ale (beer is a terrific meat-tenderizer, as is vodka, according to the Russian lady at our local booze shop).


Add flour.


Simmer it all until it's gravy-like..


Yum. I am sure some salting and peppering took place at some point.


If the pie crust looks as if it was home-made, it's because it was. I'm practically at my wit's end with pie crust, though. I think store-bought may wend its way back into my heart.

Poke a hole in the top for steam to evaporate. Or use a pie bird.

Et voila! Hearty, meaty, mid-winter, English fayre.


*Croom Court is a strange place. It has been owned by the National Trust, a terrific organization that swoops in and rescues historic buildings and places. This place, though, is basically a big empty stately house that the Hare Krishnas took over two or three decades ago and painted all the trim in wacky colors. The Trust is still trying to figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, you can tour an almost empty house filled with eager and kind docents who then very sincerely ask you to fill out a survey on what best should be done with the house. More pictures here.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

And Now - A Mound of Carrots

Let's say just the day before, you've worked your way through three pounds of zucchini by pureeing them into a soup. And now imagine you have an equivalent amount of carrots. The last thing in the world you want is another baby food-style mushy soup (even if it will be delicious - it's a lot of pureed vegetables for a grownup to handle).

So you turn to the second, and arguably more fun, thing to do with your excess of vegetables.

Cake!

A friend of mine told me to buy Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook because I had a food processor and I still didn't know what to do with it. She assured me that the vegetarian cookbook full of delicious recipes was a great way to put that processor to good use - there's always some vegetable to shred in the recipes. I shredded the pounds of carrots in preparation for sinning them up with sugar, butter, flour:

Mollie Katzen's Carrot Cake

1 1/2 cups butter

1 3/4 cups packed brown sugar

4 eggs

3 tsp vanilla extract

1tsp grated lemon zest

4 cups flour

1tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 Tbsp baking powder

1 tsp allspice (I didn't have this and didn't miss it)

2 tsp cinnamon

2 1/2 cups packed finely shredded carrot combined with 1/4 cup lemon juice

You can add 3/4 cup of raisins and / or nuts or 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut (if only I'd had some to hand!)

Preheat over to 350. I made half of the above quantity which goes into one standard loaf pan. If you make all of the above, it comes out to two loaves or one big oblong pan (e.g. your brownie pan).

Beat together butter and sugar until fluffy, then add vanilla and lemon rind.

Combine dry ingredient, then add to butter mixture, alternating with the carrot, beginning and ending with the dry goods. Don't overmix! (Does anyone know why? I think it's because it kills the butter bubbles you've so carefully made when beating butter and sugar together, and they go on to form the pleasing crumbly cake crumb. Any other reasons you know of?)

Bake for 40 or 50 minutes in the loaf pan, or 35 minutes in the oblong pan.

Although I made this cake in the summer due to the surfeit of vegetables in the house, the cinnamon, raisins, and nuts made this a gorgeously fall-flavored cake, perfect with a cup of tea and some cold weather swirling outside.

Potato Salad Yumminess

Do you sometimes see a recipe and know immediately that you have to make it (or a version of it)? I've been reading La Tartine Gourmande for the past couple of years, and while the recipes are gorgeous and aspirational, I haven't found myself making that instant decision.

With the dressing for potato salad, it was different. She combines lemon and olive oil, my salad mainstays, with mustard and tahini, and I knew that it would be a winner.

I didn't follow the rest of the recipe - for me, the dressing was a main draw.

Lightly boil new potatoes, leaving on their skins. Only cook them until they are soft and doughy as only potatoes can be (I am not the world's hugest potato fan, but there is something nice about the soft powdery doughiness that can be achieved through some methods of cooking).

Combine dollops and squeezes of all of the above-mentioned ingredients, plus salt and pepper, to taste. You will get a rich and creamy sauce to dress the potatoes in. The rest is up to you - add spinach, cress, parsley, cheese, mustard seeds - and you have some gorgeous picnic food, and even better work-snack food.

Summer Summer Summer

I'd better get this post out fast before summer disappears!

This is the summeriest dish we had the whole season - breaded drumsticks baked in the oven with delicious roasted corn on the cob squirted with lime.


If you haven't made breadcrumbs from scratch before, I recommend it. It was a doddle, and they were so fluffy and gorgeous, and baked up brown and crispy. Just zap slices of bread in the food processor, and you get the cloud of bread pictured above.


It's funny to say goodbye to summer here in SF, just as the sun makes its first protracted appearance...

Second Annual Summer Pizza Post

It's that time of year again - time to figure out what to do with a barrel of tomatoes, fresh spinach, and an enormous bouquet of basil:


Particularly if you don't want to eat pesto at the moment because of its tremendous garlickyness.

Time for another summer pizza!

I've learned a few things about pizza in reading about it between last year and this year. The most crucial of all - bake it in the hottest possible oven - I'm talking 500 degrees here, people. It will crisp your crust and brown your cheese and all will be well. You may need to dismantle your smoke alarm to do it, but it's worth it.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...It's a Mound of Zucchini

Say you get a CSA. Say your family gets a CSA too, and they happen to be going out of town after taking delivery of their vegetable box. What do you get?

That's right. You get buried under an enormous mound of zucchini. And carrots. And leafy veggies. All needing to be eaten asap.

After the kitchen sink crisp, I decided to tackle the zucchini. They were shiny and green and didn't deserve to be left to rot.


(On a side note, when will they start delivering these veggies with their beautiful blossoms? I long to make battered zucchini flowers stuffed with cheese.)

One effective way to get rid of a lot of veggies fast is to boil them down into a soup.

If you're in a hot part of the country, you may wonder at how I can see a fresh summer vegetable and conjure up the notion of a thick and hearty soup. And I would ask you, have you been to San Francisco in the summer?

Everything you have ever heard is true. It's freezing. Let's just say that today, I am wearing one of my heaviest sweaters. No coat, but this is a sweater I would only wear in the deadest of winter in Boston because otherwise I would overheat.

Now you know how cold it is and how I can even think of making soup.

Oh, and if you fancy making this in your heat, refrigerate it. It makes a lovely chilled soup.


Curried Zucchini Soup (adapted from Everyday Food)

Ingredients:

1 onion

1 tsp curry powder

1 tsp garam masala

lots of zucchini

2 slices of bread

4 cups chicken broth

Fry up the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add spices until fragrant, then add the zucchini, bread, and chicken broth. Bring to a boil, then simmer until veggies are soft, 15 minutes. Blitz in the blender, perhaps run through the strainer, and voila. Or if preferred, refrigerate, and then voila!

A Quick Non-Summery but Delicious Detour

There's this restaurant close to work. Part unassuming, part over-priced, and all delicious. They make crispy pizzas topped with wild boar and fig, or squash and goat cheese, and a mean, unlean pressed Cubano which drips grease like a member of the T-Birds.

And happily for me, they also make breakfast. Not simply of the egg-and-cheese sandwich variety, but healthier fare like granola and steel-cut oats with banana and walnut.

I ordered the oats after a harrowing trip to the DMV. I meant to be healthy and good, but what I got was the oatmeal equivalent of a vanilla sundae - rich, creamy, with all of the right little ingredients to make it memorable. Possibly honey, definitely cinnamon, and a generous helping of heavy cream to round it out.

So, I made it at home. No heavy cream. No lightly-roasting of the walnuts. But filling, warm, delicious.

Also, on a health-kick note, steel-cut oats are better for you than rolled oats in that they haven't been as processed and had half of the goodness thrown away. This is why they take longer to cook and are more filling than regular oats. All that extra goodness.

*As an addendum, I just read yesterday that you could make this in your rice cooker. Well, I tried it. With milk. And as I was sitting in the living room waiting to hear the click, I thought, what if it doesn't work? Doesn't milk boil over? The answer is...kinda, and it made an unholy mess of the cooker. It was cooked, but it would be much better on the stovetop or cooked only with water in the cooker.

Kitchen Sink Crisp

What to do when you have too much fresh food in the house? This has been the dilemma in my house the past few weeks.

Today's option - throw it all into a crisp.

First, I prayed that this was rhubarb (we inherited this from a vacationing relative):


My other thought was that it could be chard, which also has red stalks and veins, but I decided to take the plunge and treat this as rhubarb. And I only know how to do one thing with rhubarb.

Bake it in a pie.

It was the perfect excuse to rummage around and find other items in need of lovin' - peaches with a rotten piece to cut out, wrinkly plums in the fridge, cherries that should have been past their sell-by-date, yet were surprising firm and shiny looking - and plop them altogether into what I shall call The Kitchen Sink Crisp.


If you find yourself in the same boat, find your fave crisp recipe, which will go something like:

Toss the fruit with X amount of sugar (I always halve this), flour / cornstarch (as thickener), and lemon juice (to brighten the flavors).

Cover them with a crumble made from butter, flour, sugar, oats, and nuts. Nuts are my new favorite thing to put on top of a crispy crumble. Always incorporate these - they roast and soften and caramelize and are quite the loveliest thing.

Et voila! Here you have it:

Whatta to do with Ricotta

Although it may seem like I'm doing no cooking at all, I promise I am. It's been quite a whirlwind of finding new recipes to try and having a go.

I settled upon a recipe for pasta with spinach, ricotta, and pine nuts, and learned that I don't get ricotta. Granted, I bought the kind that Marcella Hazan warns against. The kind (gasp!) in a plastic tub that oozes both curds and whey (Little Miss Muffet would be in heaven until the spider showed up). It's tasteless and grainy, and quite frankly spinach + ricotta was a really bland combination.

As I still had more than half a tub left, I decided to go the fail-safe way, i.e. BACON. This recipe for pasta with bacon, ricotta, and peas was much better - heartier, saltier, tastier, and for a brief moment, I could understand the allure of ricotta (except I still can't get over the graininess - is expensive ricotta grainy? Should I splurge?).

This recipe is from Everyday Food Fast which has nice recipes, and they are indeed fast. I am going from memory here:

Pasta with Ricotta, Bacon, and Peas

You need:

8 oz bacon
1 onion
all or some of a tub of ricotta
butter
two handfuls of frozen peas
parmesan

Fry up the bacon until cooked how you like it. Take it out, drain most of the fat, and fry up the onion in the remaining fat. Chop up the bacon to bite-sized pieces. Boil up the pasta, throw a little bit of water into the pan with the onions and fat, add the peas. When the pasta is done, toss it with ricotta and butter, and mix in the onion, peas, and bacon, and the juices from the pan. Finish it off with some grated parmesan. I can't really remember if I salted much - these are some salty ingredients - but ground pepper goes a long way in this dish, so don't forget to add that.

Bon appetit.

Tea Party Truffles

The main secret to a successful afternoon tea is the company and a never ending pot of hot tea.

The second secret is to try and achieve a balance between starchy foods and non-starchy foods. I love going to tea here, here, and I've even been here, but you really have to steel yourself for feeling overbreaded and bloated at the end of the tea that features sandwiches, tea cakes, and scones.

All three of the items are traditional to a tea, but I would recommend when throwing one at home, to choose two of the three traditional tea foods, and make the rest of it up with a combination of fruits and salad, and a sinful surprise (to make up for a lack of cake, or sandwiches, or crumpets).


My surprise treat of choice for my first tea party in our new home was the truffle. I remembered from my college days, when a friend made them for a dorm party (talk about an overachiever!) that they were supposed to be ridiculously simple. As one of the few recipes to make chocolates that does not involve tempering, a process I am sure to make a hash of when I finally get to it, I realized they would be perfect for the tea.


I found a simple recipe in this little cookbook - essentially, you make a ganache, melting fine chocolate with cream, then cool it in the fridge before rolling into balls (a messy business, as the chocolate does start to melt all over your hands). Then you can roll the chocolate in a topping - cocoa and coffee powders are popular, but I rolled mine in muscovado sugar for some added crunch.

Couldn't be simpler!

As Promised - Gelato

I promised you some stories about my new toy - the freezer bowl ice cream maker attachment for the Kitchenaid.

First, a note about fridges.

We went through a few weeks where I was certain the fridge was broken. The milk kept going solid (not just sour, but solid: one day it would pour, and the next day, cheese). Everything developed a rind of mold, white, green, black, a veritable rainbow of different molds, including my jar of grape leaves, which are pickled!

I had basically decided I wanted a colder fridge, and had examined the dial. It said Medium. Well, I wanted the fridge colder, so I turned the dial all the way to Minimum. For Minimum temperature...

It was in this confusing time of non-refrigeration that I started using my ice cream maker. The liquid in my freezer bowl was always sloshing around when I got it out of the freezer (instead of being a solid frozen mass of ice cream-making capabilities).

All this to say that for the first round of ice cream making, everything was working against me. Well, my own refrigeration snafu was certainly working against me.

As was the recipe I chose. I decided to start with the purest of ice cream recipes - one from My Favourite Ingredients - which involves making a custard of multiple egg yolks which you heat over the stove.

Heating egg yolks over the stove can lead to curdling...and my custard curdled. Not curdled in the gone-bad kind of way (thankfully; I'd had enough of rotten food). But curdled in the oops-the-eggs-have-cooked-and-made-large-eggy-blobs-in-my-custard-kind of way.

Not to be deterred, I put this lumpy custard in my unfrozen freezer bowl and proceeded to churn the ice cream. I will not mention that I did not have the patience to cool the custard ahead of time, because without a frozen freezer bowl, this would have made no difference in the end. What we ended up with with a lumpy yellow runny liquid that was sweet and vanilla-flavored.

An inauspicious beginning.

But...as you may have guessed from the deliciousness pictured above, things certainly got better.

First, J had a go at the fridge. "You had it on the warmest setting," he said. I did a dance of joy. My freezer bowl was not broken after all!

Second, I decided to avoid egg yolk custard ice cream recipes until I had more of a handle on them. I wanted something a bit...easier.

Third, I found this easiest recipe known to man on the Scharffen-Berger site. It has four ingredients. Which even häs Häagen Dazs beat.

Sicilian Chocolate Gelato

3 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tablespoons corn starch

Hmm. Corn starch. After having researched coconut fats last year, and discovered that the corn lobby was in part to blame for disparaging coconut oil, and with everything I know about corn being fed to animals who shouldn't really have corn, and corn replacing sugar, and corn in my breakfast, I'm not one to gravitate towards recipes with corn in them.

Also, it doesn't seem genuine. A gelato, probably the eggiest of ice creams, made without an egg in sight.

Ah well, I'm sure glad I gave in. It helped that I saw recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appetit that also featured gelati thickened with corn starch.

On I went with simmering 2 cups of the milk on the stove, and mixing together the remaining milk with the other ingredients. These were then all "scraped together" and heated until thickened.

Then, with uncharacteristic patience learned from experience, I cooled the custard in the fridge before churning it in the freezer bowl.


Once churning, the results were promising. It was thickening into a glorious shiny chocolaty dessert.

And then. The moment of truth. You have to taste it to believe it. I would say that this was the most delicious chocolate ice cream I have ever tasted except you might suspect I was exaggerating.

To which I say, you'd just have to try it.

Coconut Coconut Cake

I walked to the grocery store with the full intention of buying almond flour for Nigella's Damp Lemon and Almond Cake - a buttery eggy yellow cake with a base of almonds moistened with lemon juice and lemon zest. When I arrived at the grocery store and surveyed their flours - semolina, amaranth, and numerous others I would have no idea what to do with - it became clear that they had no almond flour to speak of.

But they did have coconut flour. It was so fluffy and white and appealing. I thought, I'm sure I can replace the almond flour with coconut, and then, not being sure that coconut and lemon would be a perfect combination, I decided to replace the lemon juice and zest with coconut milk. And so we have a perfectly coconutty adaptation of one of Nigella's nicest tea cakes:

Coconut Coconut Cake.

1 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar (a little less actually - coconut seems a sweeter base than almond)

4 eggs

1/3 cup flour

1 1/3 cup coconut flour

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 can of coconut milk (half thick stuff, half watery)

8 inch springform pan

350 degree oven

Cream butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs, adding a bit of flour after each egg. When all flour, eggs, and butter have been incorporated, stir in the coconut, vanilla, and coconut juice. Pour into the pan, and bake on a baking sheet for about an hour (until the edges go brown - a gorgeous caramelized rust). Moisture will leak out of the springform, so be sure to have a baking sheet to capture this or else you'll make a big mess in the oven.

Enjoy.

Braised Duck Legs

Ha! So, I have discovered I cannot tease my readers (thanks, Y!) with photos of delectable food without any background as to how it came to be. I would like to fill you in.

First of all, duck legs are surprisingly affordable. I would recommend buying them whenever they show up at the supermarket (if you are lucky enough to have a butcher, then buy them whenever you want). They are also arguably the most delicious part of the most delicious bird. Ever since I was a child, and my friend's mother said, "I've made duck for dinner, I hope you like it," not only have I loved it, I have viewed duck as the premo-super-luxo-meat. It is rich and fatty and dark and moist and there's really nothing quite like it (not beef, not turkey, not pork - all of which can dry out and frequently need sauces to bring them back to life).

I learned in this exercise what braising was - cooking big pieces of meat slowly in liquid. I referred to Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food to learn how to braise, although I left out the olives and leeks in her braising sauce, as I wasn't sure how much I would like olives with my duck. Instead, I seared the duck legs skin side down for a moment, before adding broth and wine to the pan, and sticking it in a 425 ° oven for half an hour. Turn the legs skin side up again, remove liquid if the skin is not exposed, and then keep in the oven, lowered to 350°, for another hour. At the end of it, you will have, as witnessed, deeply browned duck with a glorious braising sauce. One is not supposed to eat poultry skin (have you ever noticed how they always include the question, "Do you eat chicken skin?" in those "How Healthy Are You?" or "What is your Body's Age?" quizzes?), but I defy you to miss out on the golden skin of these duck legs.

Favo(u)rite Ingredients

We were the happy recipients of no fewer than six cookbooks this past Christmas, and while I have read several of them back to back, it was high time I gave some of these recipes a go.

This lovely book fascinates me. I have seen single subject cookbooks (meat, dessert, chocolate, cheese), but never a book organized around someone's favorite ingredients. To have that kind of chef-ly authority is impressive and a move like this, audacious. I kept thinking, Who are you, and how come you're so awesome that you can arrange whole chapters around cherries, or olive oil, or tomatoes?

I thought on my favorite ingredient, and wondered if I lacked imagination when the first one that came to mind was salt. Salt salt salt.

Then it would have to be olive oil, lemon, and garlic. How very mediterranean of me.

What are your favorite ingredients?

One of Skye's favo(u)rite ingredients is asparagus. Given the time of year that it is, bouquets of bright green asparagus are abundant at our local grocery store, and it seemed like a perfect time to try a new recipe.

The recipe is a bacon-based soup with rice - you fry up bacon and onions, add water and rice until the rice is almost ready, throw in sliced asparagus until it goes an even brighter green, and drizzle with olive oil.



If you're wondering why my version ended up entirely purple...it's because I used a wild rice we've been throwing in almost everything - the grains are almost black, and release a beautiful purple stain into the water. But it does make for odd-looking food. I served this to my mother on her first trip to SF, and I said to her, "Dinner's purple. But it's delicious."

Top of the World

Looking down on creation.
And down a great big waterfall.

My New Toy

I finally ordered it. Muchos frozen (and not-so-frozen) adventures to come.

Cassoulet Love

Once you've made Mark Bittman's cassoulet a few times, it becomes, like all of my favorite recipes, something of a kitchen sink recipe. Have a few Brussels sprouts that need some love? Kale? Chard? Zucchini? Kidney beans instead of cannelinis? Bacon instead of bone in chicken? GO FOR IT!

Our Tiny Kitchen

My mother-in-law shared this great post called "Small Kitchens, Great Meals," in the Huffington Post in celebration of tiny kitchens, and I was inspired to share ours with you after all. We have affectionately dubbed our kitchen, "The Submarine Galley:"

On a normal day, it's stacked to the ceiling with drying dishes, mixing bowls, trays on top of the fridge.

On the counter, we have olive oil, sugar bowl, toaster, tea caddy, and kettle (with the miniature microwave oven perched precariously above these items on the crooked, homemade shelf). I use the stepping stool as a cooling rack and the top of the fridge to stash the cookbook when I need all two feet of the counter space.

That said, we've made some yumminess in this small space and have learned to navigate the kitchen together in a carefully-choreographed routine. Also, I'm sure everyone's kitchen has challenges. What are yours?

Chocolate Soufflés!

As you may be able to tell from the artful photography, I enlisted the site's official photographer (but usually photographer-at-large) to photograph my second outing as a maker of soufflés. It was to be my second glory. My repeat success at making soufflés, those oh-so-troublesome (and oh-so-eggtastic) delicacies. Proof that soufflés are within the realm of possibility.

The occasion required the correct-sized ramekins. Martha, whose individual chocolate soufflé recipe I was following, asked for 10 oz ramekins, so I scoured our local hardware / kitchen stores to find two matching 10 ouncers.

Then the pleasurable work began. Weighing the chocolate:

Whisking hot milk and eggs yolks into a custardy pudding (or puddingy custard) base:


Whisking the egg whites separately, oh-so-separately, for it is their magical properties that provide the soufflé with its souffle - breath:


And then here is when things went slightly awry. Fold the egg whites into the chocolate, ensuring they do not lose their lift:


I was so ginger with them, that I ended up with this motley mess:

I honestly don't know how you fold hot melted chocolate into cold egg whites and mix them up so that the soufflé becomes uniformly brown without losing its lift.


What I do know is this. They were so delicious we forgot to take a picture of them when they came out of the oven. I know, I know, it sounds like a convenient excuse, a way not to show how they came out a little lackluster.

But chocolate custard baked to a frothy crisp is going to satisfy and delight. Even if it's not going to win any chef-of-the-year awards.