Poached Eggs and Salmon

Let's say you go through a period of time where certain food are off-limits. What would you crave?

I missed runny egg yolks and smoked salmon like you wouldn't believe and spent the second half of my gestation imagining the day when I would learn how to poach on egg so that I could combine two of my favorite foods in a delectable, rich salad, with the orange yolk breaking just so over the pile of lettuce leaves and salmon.

Mission accomplished. One of the most delicious salads ever. Poaching an egg ain't the easiest way to cook an egg, but it sure is fun and can have amazing results.

Next up...baked eggs. Another way to enjoy scrumptious runny-yolked goodness.

Pretty Side Veggies

It would seem from my near-radio silence on this blog that I may not have been cooking much recently, and many of you would be sympathetic, imagining that in my current state I am spending much more time with my feet up than planted firmly on the kitchen floor.

And yet...cooking is happening. It's happening with frequency, and in some cases, with results I continue to be really happy with. What isn't happening is the coordination of photos, recipes, and sitting down to write at the computer to transmit the message.

But here is an opportunity too good to pass up. An image already uploaded by Mr. Toujours-Delish. A recipe so easy, I don't need to be near my cookbooks to tell you about it. And pretty enough to bring to a holiday function, in our case, a lovely family dinner hosted by Mr. TD's sis in Berkeley!


This is, according to the Barefoot Contessa, a tian. Tian is a word that means cosmos, sky, heavens in Chinese, and apparently also refers to this type of French veggie dish. She shares the recipe here.

Here's how we made it:

Fry up an onion and some garlic until translucent. Line the bottom of the roasting dish with it.

Chop up a variety of round vegetables to roughly the same thickness. We used potatoes of a wide variety of colors - pink, yellow, purple, and white - as well as Chinese eggplant, which are smaller versions of the big purple kind, tomatoes, and zucchini.

Drizzle with olive oil. Season. Add a fresh herb or two (we used rosemary instead of thyme).

Bake for half an hour to forty minutes to cook the veggies somewhat.

Grate cheese ALL over it (2 oz. of cheese is NOTHING - grate the whole slab onto it if you want). Add a bit more salt and pepper.

Bake until gloriously browned and cheesy.

Word to the wise - these vegetables all let off a lot of water when they roast. As such, this dish didn't travel as well as we had hoped. The back seat of the car ended up with a rosemary-infused oil slick. But the veggies were still tasty.

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.