Most delicious pasta ever

This weekend, I decided I was going to cook. But I also had a bunch of leftovers I needed to consume. Mmmm conundrum. So I said "leftovers Saturday night, cooking Sunday night" as the weekend plan.

Well, earlier today, I pulled out my trusty Martha Stewart "real food fast" cookbook, which is pretty perfect for the every day, and organizes recipes by season. And I paged through the summer section, trying to decide what to make. The answer? Not most to the summer recipes, apparently, since they all relied on having a grill. Martha, don't you realize that not everyone owns a grill? Because some people don't have apartments that are amenable to grills! And reading all of the tasty recipes that require grills, and realizing you wont really be able to make them - not right, anyway, is quite upsetting. Would it have killed you, Martha, to include baking instructions, to make your recipes more flexible? Really?

But I digress.

Tonight, I went with the fettuccine with peas and prosciutto in a cream sauce. Can you say delicious? I can, and did, several times while eating it. Always a favorite at the occasional italian restaurant, and man, it was SO good. I did make one small tweak to Martha's recipe though. I added an extra (large) splash of cream, because the package of peas I bought was 2oz larger than called for. Also, I just felt it needed it. And that...was a good call.

this is how you make french toast

sorry this post disappeared - i was playing with uploads on my phone and it wasnt supposed to post the first time!

anyway. back on fourth of july weekend, i had a nice little staycation for the long weekend. and part of that meant that i had some time i could spend in the kitchen, cooking! so rather than spending money going out for brunch, Will and I decided to get together and cook brunch instead. french toast to be exact. with bacon. and no syrup needed -- we had a nice fruit puree that we reduced into a sauce instead. mmmm.

since will has cast iron, he started by frying up some bacon. mmmmm, bacon. meanwhile, i was making the french toast batter with some eggs and vanilla and whipping cream. i also started reducing the fruit puree (from a BBQ we had gone to the day before -- to be used for cocktails, but hey, there was leftover!) -- peaches, strawberries, sugar amd simple syrup. we added some more strawberries and thickened it right up. mmmm.



over on the cast iron pan, the bacon was off and the pan reheated to be set for french toast! will dunked the cinnamon raisin bread in the batter, and minutes later we had several pieces of warm french toast! we topped it with the reduced fruit puree, and some whipped cream we whipped up quickly (well we had the whipping cream, after all...)

mmmmm brunch!

Its always better with blueberries AND chocolate chips

While at the grocery store the other day, blueberries were on sale. Exciting. And then I was walking by the baking aisle, and I saw one of those bisquik shake and pours in a tiny size! Perfect amount of pancake batter for 2 people. Or, one person and leftovers. And so I thought...blueberry pancakes! How perfect on this holiday weekend!

And so this morning, I made pancakes! And tomorrow, I will probably also make pancakes! But hopefully I will make them look less demented tomorrow, after the practice today. The first one...failed horribly, which is why it is, in pieces, at the bottom of the plate, and covered by the last one, which looks soooo much nicer! And contains delicious blueberries and mini chocolate chips!

I like green things

so, one of the great things about my phone: takes pretty decent photos, AND will upload them directly to blogger. pretty cool! just doesnt do the prettiest formatting on them. ah well what can you do!

no time to write, but i started this post 2 months ago (in may. it is now july), and am just going to upload it (backdated, of course, since the date i started the entry was saveD).

things learned: roasted brussel sprouts are DELICIOUS and so much healthier than cooking them in butter and pancetta. okay maybe not quite as delicious but still pretty good. i like how the top leaves get really crispy, kind of like how roasted kale does. which is also awesome. anywho, as long as you dont burn the brussel sprouts...pretty good!



and asparagus, that lovely lovely green. here -- just sauting in a bit of olive oil. yum!

cookiecookiecookie

i may not have mentioned, but a few weeks back, i participated in a cookie takedown! and baked hundreds of cookies one saturday afternoon. see above, me with a platter of only maybe a third of the cookies that i made. but i am getting ahead of myself. let me back up...

about a year ago or so, i dragged tanya to the lamb takedown, in central square. i had heard about it through one of the various newsletters i get, and thought "i love lamb. this is 20 people making lots of delicious lamb. i must go to this." and let me tell you, that was an AWESOME decision. because it was deeeelicious. and while at the event, i must have signed up for the mailing list to be told about any future such competitions. so fast forward to a few weeks ago, and i get an email that there is a new takedown coming. a COOKIE takedown. could this be any more meant for me? i really don't think so. i immediately entered.

i started scouring my brain for which cookie to make. i was really tempted by the idea of making venetians, mostly because they are both delicious and incredibly impressive. but i decided against it when matt timms, the organizer, told me i needed to bring about 240 bites of cookie. even cutting those venetians small, with the pans that i have it would have required ~5 batches to make that many bites, and frankly, i cannot deal with that much almond paste and meringue.

so i continued thinking, and wondered "what is the cookie that everyone asks me for the recipe for? what is the one everyone loves?" and the answer came to me immediately -- the pistachio thumbprint cookies! AND it isn't that bad of a recipe to make! i knew i might still have to make 5 batches, though i would make the cookies smaller, but i could at least double a batch or two while doing it. so i set off to the grocery store for my supplies, and started baking the day before.

i am going to give you the recipe, which comes from my grandmother's christmas cookie recipes -- i dont know where it came from before that. i will mention, however, that i didn't *quite* make it this way. that is because it had been a while since i made the cookies, and i had a bit of a memory lapse. you see, in my memory, the nuts get mixed into the cookie dough along with the chocolate chips. in real life, the cookies are supposed to be rolled in the nuts on the outside. while this didnt totally kill me in the competition, and people still liked them and even told me they liked the texture a lot....i am so disappointed in myself for doing them wrong and unknowingly changing the cookie! also, i think that by making them smaller (and thus only having to do a triple batch to get ~300 bites) i made them a bit less delicious, and based on the fact that i had >100 leftover when i left, i could have made them bigger and more delicious. i guess they cant have been too bad though, because they won an honorable mention prize! which included a madoleine pan, so i have some new recipes to try!

links to a few of the blog posts written about the competition:

• official blog post from matt timms, the takedown man


• post from a blogger who was there, who took pretty pictures of the competition

and now, the recipe!

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 tsp almond extract
2 cups flour
1 package (3.4 oz) instant pistachio pudding mix
1/2 cup miniature chocolate chips (normal size also work)
2 cups finely chopped pecans or walnuts

In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until smooth. Add egg and extracts; mix well. Combine flour and pudding mix; add to the creamed mixture. Stir in chocolate chips. Shape into 1-inch balls; roll in nuts. Place 2 inches apart on baking sheets, make a thumbprint in center of cookie. (I use parchment paper to make it easier. you dont need to butter the sheets in any case, there is enough butter in these cookies that they wont stick)

Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes. Remove to a wire rack to cool.

Filling:
2 tbsp butter
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 - 3 tbsp milk

For filling, cream butter, sugar, vanilla and milk. Spoon into center of cooked cookie. Let stand until set (the filling should be fairly thick)


Enjoy!

omelet success!

so, a little known fact about me: i am incompetant when it comes to flipping foods in a frying pan. thats right: all foods. not just things like pancakes. pretty much anything that could be flipped. this incompetence also extends to omelets. they always end up a scrambled mess. i honestly dont know how people do them and make them look right. my dad makes omelets all the time, giant ones filled with delicious cheese, ham, potatoes, onions, and they are gigantic and feed many people. and they look right. mine? scrambled messes. scrambled depressing messes.

well, the other day, stuck home because of the snow, i made an omelet for lunch, filled with leftover yummy roasted vegetables and some feta cheese. and this time....this time i was successful!! this time, i made an omelet that didnt turn out to be a scrambled mess! now, its not perfect or beautiful, but this time, my omelet at least kinda sorta looks like an omelet.

a weekend in

so last week, there i was at work one day, and i got a craving for cheese. like, a yummy cheesy pasta dish. and that made me think of a food52 recipe i had seen, that just looks utterly delicious -- a cheesy pasta with pumpkin in it. omg it looks to die for, and someday i am going to make it. but as i was looking at the recipe for it, i was also hit by a craving for pizza. and so i decided to combine my cravings by making a cheesy butternut squash pizza. triple points because i had almost all of the ingredients in my fridge already. i swear those things all go together.

so i stopped at whole foods, and picked up some of their pizza dough in the refridgerated section. FYI: it is deeeeelicious stuff. i peeled and cut up some butternut squash, and threw it in the oven along with some garlic cloves. an hour later, i mashed the lovely roasted stuffs together. i then stretched the pizza dough out. turns out i am very bad at this. i tried to do it in the air, because how else does one really do it? (i actually dont know, so if you have tips for easier ways to stretch pizza dough out, let me know!) anyway, i didnt really do it effectively, but i like thick dough anyway so thats fine.

so i sprinkled corn meal out on the baking sheet, and then the dough. and i rubbed it with oil. i then spread some fresh mozzerella out, that i had shredded. and then glopped on the mashed butternut squash and garlic. and then i spread out some onions i had caramelized. and then i sprinkled some pancetta i had crisped up. and THEN, i cut some shavings of bucheron on top -- a really delicious goat cheese that i bought at wholefoods the other week in the bin ends basket but didnt actually have anything to do with. threw it in the oven (500 degrees) for about 10 minutes, and it puffed up into deliciousness!! best pizza ever.

the next day, i went with a nice snowday comfort: pot roast (with carrots and onions), mashed potatoes, and roasted veggies. yummmm.

a plummy day.

i wrote the below, in italics, back in september. and delayed uploading the photos and then forever passed. lets try to get better about that...

i was once asked what i do to relax / de-stress. you know, after a long week at work, or if something less-than-happy happened in my personal life, or whatever. and i had to think for a minute or two, but it eventually came to me: spending time in my kitchen. which is probably one of the reasons that i sacrificed location for an amazing kitchen with my current apartment. what does this mean, exactly? it means i like to spend time in my kitchen, chopping, cleaning, preparing foods. it relaxes me and gives me the opportunity to structure and organize things, which is nice for someone slightly obsessive-compulsive like me.

today i had a lovely day like that. i peeled and chopped up all the carrots i got in my farmshare this week. i shucked, de-cobbed, and made soup out of the corn on the cob from my farmshare this week (and i roasted some to go with some avocado as a soup garnish. yum). i peeled and cut up potatoes and onions for roasting. i cut up a watermelon into chunks for this week. i roasted and peeled some beets for this week. i washed and cut up and made into a cake some lovely plums i got at a farmers market on friday.

it. was. lovely. and exactly what i want in a weekend.

so about that plum cake. my good friend kaitlin, who i went to high school with, posted a picture of a gigantic tub of plums on twitter, way back when. and they sounded delicious. so when i found them at the farmers market not a week later, i had to buy a little container. but what was i to do with them? especially since i had never consumed ones that looked like them before! make a cake! thats what!



i went with a recipe from food52. a friend of mine turned me on to the site quite some time ago, but i have to admit i don't use their recipes that often. i love the fact that they are well-illustrated, and tested to be sure that they work well (at least the contest winners!) but i find that my cooking style isnt neccessarily the same and so i dont try all of the recipes on there.



this plum cake recipe, however, looked great, and so i of course had to try it, since i had the plums. i liked the way that the plums were layered into the cake too. it was quite delicious. but of course i don't ever have a reason to make dessert, because who is going to help me eat it! one of the difficulties of my single life -- no one to help eat leftovers! i once made apple crisp for a party thinking it would be all gone and of course people barely ate half of it! i cant eat that much leftover!! and then when AJ&UB came for dinner in december, AJ brought a small cheesecake, but then left half of it for me! how am i supposed to get through it! so coming back to the plum cake. i ended up bringing it to dinner with bryan and emily, and left a bunch with them, which is how i solved the plum cake issue!

such a tasty hiatus

okay. i know i have had QUITE the hiatus. someone at work mentioned to one of the new hires (my awesome buddy who also likes to cook!) that i have a cooking blog and i was like "well, technically i havent updated it in months! months!" it is depressing. i even stopped taking pictures of things that i cooked. well that, and i stopped cooking quite so much because i was insanely busy at work. but still! i made the duck again in december when my aunt and uncle visited, along with a bunch of delicious sides, and no pictures! and the plum cake post that is going to go up shortly after this (but might get backdated) -- i wrote that entry ages ago, when i actually made the cake, but i delayed posting because i needed to upload the photos, and it has taken MONTHS to bother to do that.



but tonight...tonight i decided that i needed to post about my most delicious dinner. because tonight, i made shrimp curry. this recipe came from emily, who makes it with bryan fairly often i guess, and made it once when i came over for dinner. and i was like "omg omg this is delicious" and i was craving it the other week, and emily was kind enough to send me the recipe so that i could make it myself! to much success. it really just is happily delicious. possibly one of the reasons for this is that there are 5 tbsp of butter in it. you can see from the picture below that there is a LOT of butter in there with the onions. and it is DELICIOUS. when em did it, she had cashews and avocado and something else as toppings. but when i went to whole foods, there were no ripe avocados! they were all a few days off! so, i did cashews and green olives which actually worked out really well.



the side to go with is carrots and parsnips. sauteed a bit then through some chicken stock in, then when they were all warm and crispy and falling apart, i threw some butter in. it looks terrible, because the veggies are falling apart, but it was DELICIOUS!!! DELICIOUS!!!!!

and the recipe for the shrimp curry, since it is not found online:

3 pounds lg. shrimp (frozen shelled, deveined lg shrimp, thawed and drained) (I only used 1 pound, because i was making just for me -- i have about 4 servings and lots of delicious sauce)
5 tbsp. butter
1 sm onion minced
2 1/2 tsp. curry powder (i threw a little extra in)
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1 1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground ginger (em uses fresh ginger, and you can throw a little extra in)
2 cups milk
1 cup chicken broth
1 tsp. lemon juice (i omitted this! because i didnt have any!)
6 cups hot cooked rice (i used white sushi rice! and it was delicious. and i didnt make enough because i only cooked 1 cup!)

1. If using fresh shrimp, shell and devein them; rinse with running cold water.

2. In 4 qt saucepan over high heat, heat 3 in. water to boiling. Add shrimp; heat to boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat to low; cook 1 minute or until shrimp turn pink and are tender. Drain.

3. In 3 qt saucepan over medium heat, stir in hot butter, cook onion till tender. Stir in curry powder; cook one minute. Stir in flour, sugar, salt, and ginger until blended. Gradually stir in milk and chicken broth, and cook, stirring constantly until mixture thickens. Add shrimp and lemon juice; heat through. Serve shrimp with rice and accompaniments.

Accompaniments: In separate small bowls, place two or more of these accompaniments to be sprinkled over servings: chutney, golden raisins, salted almonds or peanuts, pineapple chunks, crisp bacon, flaked coconut, sliced avocado, green olives.