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One Milk Product to Rule Them All

April 4, 2010 / posted in Food, Uncategorized / Comments Off

First, let’s get one thing straight: I’m a bad Jew. I don’t know what holiday it is (It’s Passover – Ed.) and I’m unclear on what my legal obligations are at any given moment. This makes me feel free to also be a bad Catholic, by marriage. Thus it came to me as rather a surprise when I decided to join my wife in giving up cheese for Lent. But here we are, 40 days later, and there’s been no cheese. Well, until now. Today, I get cheese.

I went to the Cheese Store to get something worth celebrating with. Cheese, to me, is kind of like bacon to other people. Or maybe sausage to me is like bacon to other people, which would make cheese my… pancakes? Anyway, cheese is awesome, and good cheese is even better. Usually the Cheese Store is a great place to shop because you can try as many cheeses as you like before you buy, but this time I couldn’t try, because it wasn’t Easter yet. (For the non-Catholics out there, Lent is a 40-day-long period ending on Easter in which you give up stuff. There may be other important religious aspects, but I’ve exclusively had romantic relationships with Catholic women for seven or eight years now and have only ever heard about the giving up bit. On Easter you get to start back up on whatever you gave up. Lent, by the way, starts on Ash Wednesday, which is that odd day on which Catholics all look like they’ve escaped from a mildly burning building.)

Anyway, after having my parents try a bunch of cheeses, and communicating with the cheese store clerk as if by semaphore — I asked him for a cheese with a flavor and texture profile, my parents tried a couple, they gave me some feedback, I asked for something else — I ended up with a soft, grape leaf-wrapped Sheep’s milk and two Basque cheeses. We generally like the Basque cheeses around here. For a little variety, I matched them with a baguette, arugula salad, and a little bit of proscuitto.

Cheese!

Cheese: it’s everything it was knocked up to be.

The funny thing is, I really enjoyed the challenge of giving up cheese for 40 days. I’m actually excited about the idea of giving up something else soon, maybe soda or cookies or something else I could do without. It’s pretty awesome, and I’m glad I finally decided to catch Lent fever!

Also, dearest wife: I signed you up for the cheese e-newsletter. I figured you wouldn’t mind.








Daytime TV-Friendly Dinners

March 2, 2010 / posted in Food, Uncategorized / Comments Off

Christmas brought a lot of things, not least of which was Rachael Ray’s Big Orange Book Cookbook. Now, I’m admittedly a big Rachael Ray fan, not so much for her cooking or her show as for her looks. But this was the first time I actually cooked anything from her. With no puns in mind, I picked a delicious-looking meatball recipe.

First I should probably say something about the Rachael Ray crush. If you’ve met my wife, you could probably guess that an aggressive, brash New Yorker with curvy hips would be just my twice. This came out early in our relationship: it only took a few weeks for me to fake up this photo for DJ L’il Bit:
Courtney or Rachael?

I’ll admit to being happy that I picked a redhead.

Anyway, back to the meal. It was quick, as advertised, although I complicated it up by making a side dish of mashed rutabagas. That’s right, rutabagas. If you caught the last cooking-related entry, you’ll know that rutabagas have become the low-carb household replacement for potatoes. They’re big winners, just boil them a smidge and the bitterness goes away. Tonight, we boiled them with salt and garlic, and then mashed them with rosemary, olive oil, and salt and pepper:
Rachael Ray's Meatballs

A great mashed potato substitute with half the carbs and twice the fiber. But the real point was the main course, the meatballs. I doubled the recipe, to make leftovers last all week long, and roasted them in the oven:
Rachael Ray's Meatballs

Meanwhile, I made Rachael’s fire-roasted tomato sauce with balsamic, adding in a bay leaf and some rosemary, mostly because the rosemary came from the backyard. Fire-roasted tomatoes in a can are incredible things, and, when you pair them with some delicately-sweated red onions, well, it’s just win all around
Rachael Ray's Meatballs

We threw a few frozen asparagus spears on the grill pan with some salt, pepper, and crushed garlic, just real quickly as a side dish:
Rachael Ray's Meatballs

Everything came together even better than I made it sound here:
Rachael Ray's Meatballs

It tasted even better than my non-existent food styling skills makes it look! With nothing but olive oil and lean beef, this dish is a cheap, healthy winner that we’re sure to make again.








Just Souper

February 8, 2010 / posted in Food, Uncategorized / Comments Off

This winter has been full of cold, wet weather. This kind of environment is unfamiliar in LA, a land of single-pane windows, minimal insulation, and even less drainage. Given my druthers, I’d solve all problems with either technology or cooking. While technology may soon enough solve cold and wet through global warming, in the short term the best solution is a cooking one: a hot bowl of soup. So this winter has been full of soups.

Beyond the weather, I was also inspired by a gift DJ L’il Bit gave me not this Christmas but the one before: a cookbook called Sunday Soup. This is a fun cookbook filled with practical, seasonal recipes, and I really recommend it. I’ve enjoyed making the soups in it and it’s also inspired me to find more recipes, in places like Epicurious and Food & Wine.

The Soups

There’s our old standby, the garlic soup with poached eggs. This is a perennial favorite, made from slowly sautéed sliced garlic, simmered in beef broth, with a nice, thick slice of garlic bread and a couple of lightly poached eggs:
Garlic Soup with Poached Eggs

There was a great Tuscan bean soup, with kale and spicy sausage. I used fresh rosemary instead of dried, since we have the bush in the back, and rutabagas instead of potatoes. Yes, that’s right, Rutabaga. Not just a fun word to say, Rutabagas are a great ingredient in soups and stews, if you love potatoes but are looking to cut down on your carbs. These purple-and-white root vegetables have the right texture and the right flavor, and you can treat them just the same way.
IMG_1171

There was an absolutely delicious beef barley soup. It was so good that I forgot to take a photo. I don’t care if the characters in The Mentalist make fun of beef barley soup, it warms the bones and fills the stomach, and that’s what winter’s about.

And finally there was a cauliflower soup. I’ll be honest: this is the only one I took good pictures of the cooking process, so you get to see it in action. I know what you’re thinking, but this is a great soup that can stand on its own for dinner. And boy is cauliflower healthy for you.

First you start by sweating some leeks. Those French know their things, leeks help almost any soup
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Next, chop up a head or two of cauliflower. The more the merrier!
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Cook that all together and puree in a blender or, if you like soup like we do, get yourself a stick blender and do the work in the pot you cooked everything in. It’s so much easier, this change alone has made me not fear making creamy soups.

OK, this soup can’t be all healthy. First of all, add a little shredded cheese (I used a Gouda, and cut the amount from the recipe in half):
IMG_1118

And then sauté some cut-up prosciutto slices, until they become little meat chips (you don’t need to add much oil to do this, the rendering fat from the prosciutto will do the job for you).
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Stir in half the cheese; ladle the soup into bowls, sprinkle the prosciutto and some shredded cheese on top, and serve it forth:
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It’s cold, it’s rainy, come on Angelenos, soup is just, um, super this winter. We sure love it, even the little black dog.








Official 2009 Holiday Kitchen Buyer’s Guide

December 3, 2009 / posted in Food, Otherwise Uncategorized / 2 Comments

I like to cook. You may have “read”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/cat_food.html. Any chef loves their gadgets, and, being a geek, I do so more than most. While I do tend to think that the solution to almost any problem is technology, I don’t like to keep things around that don’t really, really work. Since it’s the holiday season, and that means getting stuff for both of the major world religions of which I am a member, here are a few such gadgets I suggest you put on your wish list this year. For your online shopping convenience, I’ve included links to buy all these goodies at “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F&tag=wadearmstrong-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957, which incidentally gives a smidge of the price of your purchase to me, at no cost to you. I’ve also tried to pick reasonably-priced entry-level options, for particular holiday season.
*Ice Cream Maker* — Everyone loves Ice Cream, but the homemade kind is really exceptional. Not only do you get any flavor you want, but the quality is really outstanding. And, if you make it “Philadelphia Style”:http://www.foodchannel.com/recipes/586-philadelphia-style-vanilla-ice-cream-, with no eggs, it’s remarkably easy. I like our little Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker.
*Stick Blender* — It’s winter, and there’s no better time for soups. Nothing makes a soup great like a creamy texture. Sure, you could puree your soup in batches in a blender, but that takes a long time and makes a big mess (bigger if you don’t hold that top on _real_ tight). We get a ton of use out of our stick blender; at under $30, the entry-level Cuisinart is a great deal.
*Digital Thermometer* — Making a dramatic, delicious, and healthy roast is easy, if you use a thermometer rather than try to ballpark it by minutes-per-pound. A digital thermometer with a probe that sticks into the oven and a display that sits outside where you can read it easily is what you need. For years I used this one — it even beeps when it’s reached your target temperature.
*Digital Scale* — It’s not just for the bakers and the drug dealers anymore. If you’re interested in losing weight, then it’s all about portion control. Weighing your ingredients, or dividing up your leftovers, with a scale is the easiest way to manage your portions. I’ve been using this digital scale for years.
*8″ Chef’s Knife* — It’s a little pricey, but a knife is something you hold every time you cook, you owe yourself a good one. And here, bigger is better. The chef’s knife is the most useful shape, with a point small enough to dice garlic with, but a long blade that you can use to chop any onion, potato, or bell pepper. The longer knife will make it easy to attack those big onions without any sacrifices on the garlic end of things. My favorite knife in the kitchen is this one from Wusthof.
*Offset Serrated Knife* — This is the best thing out there for bread (including sandwiches!) and also for tomatoes; instead of needing to push down to cut, which can crush a delicate thing like a beefsteak or a cheese steak. The trick with the serrated knives in general is to buy them as cheap as possible, so I suggest this nine-inch one.
*Lemon Squeezer* — While it’s not citrus season, when that time does come around, you’ll get much more juice from your lemons and limes, at much less effort, with one of these handled squeezers. Plus, they look great.
*Mandoline* — It’s not an instrument at a renaissance faire, it’s a very, very sharp thing, that slices vegetables and fruits nice and thin. If it’s easy to fix your veggies nice, you’ll make ‘em every day! We tried out this perfectly serviceable entry-level mandoline and discovered that we couldn’t live without it.















And I Am Become Old

April 27, 2009 / posted in Food, True Life Stories / 4 Comments

Growing up, we were always big on the family meal. Breakfast was in a nook behind our kitchen, at a yellow and white Formica table that just fit in the corner next to the basement stairs. When I was young, I would read the cereal boxes while my parents read their newspapers; I learned every ingredient and every serving suggestion and solved every puzzle on the back. While we weren’t a sugary-cereal household, my mom and I did have our own breakfast indulgence: back in the days before most people used skim milk, we’d pour whole milk on our cereal and then top it off with some half-and-half.
Of course, that was when I was young. Sometime in elementary school the selection changed: next to our varied flakes and occasional Life cereal appeared this small box, filled with something very dense: “Alpen”:http://ow.ly/4c6Z muesli. Instead of a bowl full of “Corn Bran”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrRE0Mvunvo, Alpen meant a couple of tablespoons of tan dust with oats in it, and my mother’s new skim milk on the top. Later, my father came back from a conference in Sweden, bringing a nifty viking ship model I liked to play with, and a reprehensible habit of putting his muesli on plain, unsweetened yogurt. The yogurt’s sour smell seemed to take over the whole sink when I washed the breakfast dishes, even more so when my mother picked up the yogurt habit too.
Alpen disappeared, and it was a while before “Mueslix”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNnHWVO9cx4[1] came on the scene, but somehow my parents persisted in ruining even something delicious like Cracklin’ Oat Bran by putting it on yogurt. I vowed that I would never ruin my cereal thus,[2] and even stuck with whole milk into college.
So it is somewhat to my shock that I find myself having cereal with yogurt several mornings every week. I deceive myself that it’s not cereal with yogurt but instead a parfait, some special mixture of yogurt, honey, and granola; but let’s face it, I eat cereal with yogurt. The dollop of honey makes it nothing but sweetened cereal with yogurt. Worse, the cereal is either Grape Nuts or Kashi GoLean Crunch.
This is not what I thought adult meant. But it sure is tasty.
fn1. Is that Max von Sydow?
fn2. It’s not that I don’t like yogurt — I love it — or that I have a problem with plain yogurt — I eat it — just the yogurt/cereal combo always bothered me.















Salmon with Asian Pesto

November 23, 2008 / posted in Food, Photos / No Comments

With all the “basil from the housewarming party”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003702.html, I could hardly resist making all manner of pesto. The Thai basil basically dared me to make an Asian-flavored pesto, and, once made, the perfect match was clearly a simple grilled salmon.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397861957_imaaF-M.jpg!
The pesto was fun to make — I replaced the olive oil with a mix of canola oil, toasted sesame oil, and fish sauce, and added little ginger. Delicious! Serve just as a sauce, or dip in!
(In the above photo, the sides are just some sauteed squash and onions, and mashed cauliflower.)
(Also, note how few photos there are here — this is what happens when I’m in charge of taking the pics, when the AIG is taking them or directing me, she makes sure I get “coverage” like the good TV producer she is!)















Peanutty Tofu & Cabbage Asian Salad

November 9, 2008 / posted in Food, Photos / 4 Comments

The summer just won’t quit here in Southern California, which means summery dishes even as the night comes sooner. A good Asian salad is a great weekend lunch or light weeknight dinner, and this recipe is pretty low-fat and responsible.
Cut a head of cabbage into ribbons — we just got a mandolin, and that’s the perfect tool.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/413373058_JYxck-M.jpg!
Do the same for a couple of peppers and an onion:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/413372652_83hpm-M.jpg!
Now make the sauce. Combine rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, a bunch of peanut butter (I like chunky), garlic crushed in a press, ginger crushed in a garlic press, and a touch of toasted sesame oil to really bring out the nutty flavor. Mix together, and then thin with water until the consistency of salad dressing.
Drain a block of tofu and cut it into good-sized thin strips. Press and drain these a little more; you’ll get a great texture this way. Heat a little oil in a wok and quickly pan-fry the tofu, then remove it and put it aside:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/413373738_4ndYV-M.jpg!
Add a little more oil and put in the peppers and onion, and stir-fry until a little soft. Crush a garlic clove over it, stir, and add the cabbage. Stir until the cabbage is just a little soft, then turn off the heat and add the sauce, tossing well. Mmmm!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/413374439_5exW4-M.jpg!















Homemade Margaritas

November 9, 2008 / posted in Drink of the Month, Food, Photos / 2 Comments

One of the benefits of living in California is the year-round summer. That means every day is a great day for a Margarita, and, with a lemon tree in our backyard, that means homemade sour mix for those Margaritas!
First step is to make the sour mix. You can use lemons, limes, or a mix of both, although limes alone are often too sweet. Since we’ve got that tree, lemons were the obvious choice. Mix an equal quantity, in cups, of lemon juice and sugar, then heat that over a flame, delicately, so that the sugar dissolves in the lemon juice. Stir periodically and you’ll get a nice, clear, and remarkably yellow-green liquid. Leave that to cool in the fridge overnight.
Get your sour, a good tequila — not really a sipping tequila, but, please, something better than your stock Cuervo — and some triple sec or other orange liqueur of your choice. Pour a tiny bit of the sour mix onto a plate and a coarse salt, such as kosher, onto another.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/352086971_dGeA4-M.jpg!
Dip the rim of your glass into the sour mix, then into the salt — get a nice rim.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/352087564_v6Y67-M.jpg!
Fill that glass with ice — it’ll make it seem more like what you get in a bar or restaurant, and they don’t just do it because ice = profit; the coldness makes the drink taste good and, as the ice melts, the bruising helps you finish it. Then pour in a good two ounces of tequila, and fill almost to the top with your sour. Try it — with your smooth, delicious homemade sour, and a slightly higher-quality tequila, you might not need the triple sec, which really just serves to smooth out the harsh edges.[1] Make another for later, and then another for a friend!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/352087827_Z75jW-M.jpg!
fn1. It does this for any drink, so try it!















Grilled Pesto Flatbread

November 9, 2008 / posted in Food, Photos / 2 Comments

Pizza’s great, and with all the great basil we got for our “housewarming”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003702.html, a pizza with pesto replacing the marinara seemed obvious. The AIG also has this great, old, well-seasoned grill pan that we use for just about everything, so grilling the pizza sure sounded fun. Thus, super-adult, super-fun, grilled pesto flatbread!
It was almost sad to see the basil chopped into a fine paste by the Cuisinart — almost. Really, there’s nothing like a fresh pesto made with just olive oil, basil, pine nuts, garlic, and some pecorino or parmesan; but we wanted to get a little crazy with it. More specifically, we wanted to make it low-fat, so we halved the pine nuts and replaced them (useful for their emulsifying action) and most of the oil with roasted garlic. Try it by throwing in a head of roasted garlic before you drizzle in the olive oil for your next pesto! (Keep the raw garlic for the flavor, too.)
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335817235_2eguT-M.jpg!
Thanks to our “local Farmer’s Market”:http://marvistafarmersmarket.org/, we had a bounty of lovely tomatoes to go with our basil.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335823237_xgtps-M.jpg!
We halved some fresh cherry tomatoes, sauteed up some red onions, and grilled some frozen artichoke hearts for toppings.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335820482_jQ3R4-M.jpg!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335819916_QrBur-M.jpg!
Then: flour out a board, and roll out your pizza dough. My choice: pre-made from Trader Joe’s.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335818225_Mqcus-M.jpg!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335818799_Pk5Z9-M.jpg!
Brush your dough with olive oil and put it that side down on the grill. Brush the other with the oil and turn the dough over when it’s started to get a little golden on the bottom. Spread on the pesto, and distribute the toppings (don’t count on melted cheese with this cooking method, so do like we did and crumble some feta or something like that).
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335821594_87UeY-M.jpg!
The result: Delicious!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/335822204_KuD9n-M.jpg!















Delicious Meatless Low-Carb Lasagna

November 9, 2008 / posted in Food, Photos / 4 Comments

Healthy cooking can be fun. So can unhealthy eating! Everybody loves a good lasagna, but that Italian delectable is filled with fat and calories and not exactly great for the ‘ol ticker. So we whipped up a meatless, semi-cheesless, low-carb, and otherwise trend-compliant version, semi only because we added a bit of Pecorino for some richness. It came out light and delicious!
The cheese replacement is actually tofu, which we can make come out with the same texture as ricotta.The first step is to slice the tofu into thin strips, which we then pressed, weighted down by plates and books, to drain them of the extra liquid they contain and that would otherwise turn this dish into soup:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397889426_2AoPS-M.jpg!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397888743_VtqBb-M.jpg!
The pasta replacement is very thinly-sliced eggplant (we used the thinnest setting on our mandoline). Since you typically use dried pasta in Lasagna, it’s again very important to remove excess water from the eggplant. We used the old-fashioned method of sprinkling the eggplant with salt, letting it sit for 15-20 minutes, then blotting off all the water that’s beaded out. Since, I’ve been told that microwaving your eggplant does the same thing with a lot less labor and no need to rinse afterwards.
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397890169_nqGMn-M.jpg!
While your ingredients are draining start some marinara sauce with canned, crushed tomatoes; shallots; and garlic; and also slice some mushrooms thinly (they’ll add richness later).
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397894310_8gfrx-M.jpg!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397895648_Vyaaw-M.jpg!
When your tofu’s drained, mix it with finely-chopped basil, lemon juice, pecorino, and drained frozen spinach, then mash that mixture together into something with the texture of ricotta. We used basil and lemons from our backyard!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397891634_MLx4m-M.jpg!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397892974_efpXw-M.jpg!
Now build the lasagna. Start with a layer of marinara:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397896334_bCihF-M.jpg!
Then a layer of eggplant, replacing the pasta:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397897016_hVsrK-M.jpg!
Then a layer of tofu mix, replacing the ricotta:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397899858_6tMHq-M.jpg!
Then a layer of mushrooms, which will cook up delicious and rich:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397898411_ZScaF-M.jpg!
And so forth, until you’ve used up your ingredients. Top with marinara and a bit more pecorino for a nice little crust:
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397900459_eKZwe-M.jpg!
Bake it a while, and then enjoy it, hot and delicious! (But watch out; if you portion it when hot, it’ll fall apart. Portion your leftovers before you heat them and you’ll get a nice lasagna-looking stack!
!http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/photos/397901099_xHJ9r-M.jpg!















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