Finally Made Short Ribs!

And they were very good. Don't know why I waited this long. Oh I know why, they're expensive. I had a groupon to a butcher shop (in fact, to The Butcher Shop) and got them for half price. Sorry for the blurry picture. We were too excited to start eating to take the time to set it up better.

Tomato and Wine Braised Beef Short Ribs

adapted from Anne Burrell's awesome recipe

serves 6 reasonably, 4 ravenously

4-5 lbs short ribs

2 medium onions

3 carrots

2 ribs of celery

3 cloves of garlic

1 6 oz. can of tomato paste

1 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes in juice

2 1/2 cups red wine

1 quart of stock or water

1 bay leaf

3 sprigs of rosemary

for serving: a pound of wide egg noodles, boiled, drained and tossed with a tablespoon or two of butter, some chopped parsley, turnip and carrot chunks, roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper until tender and golden brown.

Season the short ribs with plenty of salt and pepper. In a big heavy bottomed pot (I used my dutch oven), heat about a tablespoon of oil and then brown the ribs thoroughly and deeply on all sides. While the ribs are browning you can cut all your veggies into chunks, and throw them all together into the food processor - grind them up to a fine paste. When the ribs are all browned, move them to a plate (remove some of the fat now in the pan, if there's a lot), throw in the minced garlic and stir around for about 30 seconds, and then add the veggie paste to the pot. Turn up the heat as high as it goes and let it cook - all the water will have to boil off first, and then it'll start to brown on the bottom of the pot. Anne Burrell says to let it brown and crust up on the bottom, and then scrape up the brown bits and stir them around, let it brown and crust up on the bottom again, scrape and stir again*. Add the tomato paste and stir around, let that brown really dark too. Then add the can of diced tomatoes and the wine, and a quart of either water or stock. Bring it to a boil, and let it bubble with the lid off until the liquid reduces by about a quarter to a third. Add the meat back in, cover it, and put it in a 375 degree oven for an hour. Reduce the oven to 300 and cook for another 3 hours.

At that point I took it out so I could bake a pie**, and so I let it sit on the stove top. Just before I put my egg noodles into boiling water, I removed the bones from the ribs, re-covered the pot, and put it back in the 350 degree oven for the 10 minutes it took to cook the noodles, etc. and then served it, with some roasted carrots and turnips.

*Full disclosure: during veggie-paste-browning-crust stage 1, I got distracted and accidentally let the bottom BURN. Not willing to give up/throw it away, I added some water and scraped up some of the bottom layer, then removed it all to a bowl while I cleaned the worst burned bits up off the bottom of the pan. Then starting with the cleaned pan, and feeling sure that those burned bits I had left in the veggie paste would just give the sauce a very deep rich flavor, I continued as if nothing had happened... and it turned out great. Even so I plan not to burn it next time, of course.

** here are some pie pictures, kind of like a before and after thing:

I made the crust with a mix of AP flour, white whole wheat flour and cake flour (because I was low on AP flour). It turned out great! Very flaky (I also credit this to the Cook's Illustrated method of substituting half of your ice water with ice cold vodka). Plus I used up the last of our malingering CSA apples all in one place. PLUS I had gotten some locally made SALTED CARAMEL ICE CREAM to put on top... so even cardboard would have been delicious that way, frankly.

Curried Carrot and Potato Soup

Yet another nearly-no-ingredient recipe! For those of you in the northeast trapped in by snow, you might be able to make this soup without leaving the house for ingredients - at least for me, everything in this soup is usually in my house. I pretty much made this one up (though it does bear some resemblance to the leek and potato soup our mom makes), and I love how it turned out, plus I think it could be used as a template recipe, and swap out the carrots for any number of other vegetables (cauliflower, sweet potato, broccoli, squash of various kinds... totally bulletproof: vegetarian, rich and satisfying, yet low fat).

Curried Carrot and Potato Soup

serves 6 generously

2 tbsp ghee* or 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp oil (or just 2 tbsp oil if you wanna go vegan style)

2 large or 3 medium onions, chopped

1 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced

3-4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 jalapeno (or any green chile), minced (I took out almost all of the seeds and the soup was nice and spicy... you should check your chile's spiciness before deciding how many of the seeds and ribs to include)

8 carrots (4 cups coarsely chopped)

2 big potatoes (4 cups coarsely chopped)

2 quarts of water

1 tbsp of your favorite curry mix, or a tsp each of ground cumin, turmeric, coriander; 1/2 tsp of ground cardamom, and maybe some allspice

salt and pepper

for garnishes you could throw on: plain yogurt, chopped cilantro, a little sprinkle of garam masala, crisp toasted pita chips**

In a large heavy bottomed pot, heat ghee (or oil, or oil and butter) till it's nice and hot, and add the onions, sprinkling on a little salt to help the onion to soften. Let them cook on medium high for about 7 minutes, till they're soft and a little bit golden. Add the garlic, ginger and chile. Let all that cook for another 5 minutes, till it smells awesome. Then add all the spices, and some salt and pepper. Let the spices toast a while, and then add the carrots and potatoes. Turn the heat down a little, and stir everything around and cover partially. After about another 5 minutes, add 2 quarts of water. Bring it all to a boil over high heat, then turn it down low and let it simmer for 20-30 minutes until the vegetables are very soft. Puree the soup, either in batches in a blender*** or with a stick blender (definitely the best way! You should get one if you don't have one), until nice and smooth.

We had this with a big salad and it was a great dinner on a very cold night, garnished with a dollop of plain yogurt, a sprinkle of garam masala and some chopped fresh cilantro. This froze really super well, also.

*you can make your own ghee really easily! Melt any amount of butter (this stuff keeps for a long time in a jar in the fridge) - I did 2 sticks - in a heavy bottomed pan. Let it cook over low heat for... a long time. Scoop the foamy stuff off the top and discard, and some solids will fall to the bottom and brown (don't let them get super dark, just golden). Strain it through cheesecloth and store it in a jar in the fridge.

**The pita chips I had made a while ago by baking fresh pitas in 350 degree oven till it dried out and then broke them into pieces; the second time we had this soup, I decided to turn the remaining pita chips into croutons - I heated some olive oil in a big frying pan, added some crushed red pepper and a minced clove of garlic, then added the pita chips and browned them, and sprinkled with a little salt and pepper. They were super great in the soup - salty and crispy.

***if you use the blender, be really careful, maybe let the soup cool down a while before pureeing, if you have time (you can make this ahead easily and re-heat when it's dinner time). Also when you put the top on your blender to puree hot stuff, you should take the middle cap out of the top of the blender and put a kitchen towel over the hole and hold it on securely while you puree - that way the head of steam won't blow the lid off and spew boiling soup everywhere. Be really careful, start the blender on low and increase the speed gradually. I only go so far as to mention all this (which I'm sure you all know already) because I have blasted hot soup all over my kitchen and myself before, and want to spare you the experience.

Baked Galletti with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe

For my birthday, our beautiful friend Rebecca gave me David Tanis' cookbook A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes which is an absolutely gorgeous book and I can't wait to make every single thing in it. David Tanis is the part time head chef at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters' restaurant in Berkeley. As such, he obviously puts a lot of emphasis on eating seasonally and locally. The idea of a recipe for a "platter of figs" is clearly silly since that would require no recipe at all. But the point is that if you are eating seasonally, you really don't need to do much at all with your ingredients – they are already absolutely delicious as is.

Anyway, last night I made his Orechiette with Fennel Sausage with some slight modifications. As you know, we like to cook what we might already have around, so I used a galletti style pasta instead of orechiette, since I had that in the pantry. Galletti means cocks combs and they do look like little rooster combs, semi circular with a little ruffle on the edge.

Instead of making my own fennel sausage as the recipe suggests, I just bought some at the store. GASP! This was a hearty and delicious baked pasta dish, but the addition of broccoli rabe and the use of only one type of cheese lightened it up in a really great way so it wasn’t as heavy as you might expect.

Ingredients: (this is cut in half from the recipe)
1 lb short cut pasta
1 lb sausage (we used a mild Italian, not in the casing)
1 bunch broccoli rabe
½ lb ricotta cheese
Grated pecorino
Olive oil
S&P
Crushed red pepper
Butter for baking dish

Bring a large pot of water to the boil and then salt it generously. Add pasta and cook until al dente. Strain pasta out of the water (you will use the same water for cooking the broccoli rabe so don’t chuck it down the drain) and spread on a baking sheet. Drizzle with a little olive oil so it doesn’t stick together.

Add broccoli rabe to the pasta water and cook for one minute. Strain and roughly chop.

In the meantime, heat olive oil in a pan and add minced garlic and crushed red pepper. Add the sausage (removed from casing, if applicable) and brown.

Combine the pasta, broccoli rabe and sausage in a bowl and then add your ricotta. Stir to combine and pour into a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with grated pecorino (I used about ½ cup) and cook covered at 400 degrees for 15 minutes then uncover and cook for an additional 5 minutes to brown the top.

Cooking Makes Me Happy

I had a crap week. One of the worst in a long time. No one died, no one is terminally ill and compared to a lot of folks out there it probably wasn't that bad. But for me, it sucked. There was a lot of crying hysterically in both public and private places. There were a lot of demons dealt with and sadness about the past. There was not a lot of cooking, or eating. Not once time during this suck of a week did I even think about cooking something for myself, let alone eating anything. But tonight I realized, I not only like to cook. I love to cook. And cooking makes me happy. And so I forced myself to cook something tonight. It wasn't the most creative or intricate thing I've ever done. But I made myself do it, I enjoyed the process and for the first time since last Tuesday, I ate a delicious meal that I WANTED to eat. And I ate all of it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, follow your happiness, whatever it is, even if you have to force yourself to do it. And to everyone who has lent their words of support this past week, thank you. You make me happy too.

In case you're wondering, that's a parmesan crusted pork chop, roasted white and sweet potatoes with sage and slaw. It was awesome.

XO.

Potato and Onion Cakes for Share Our Strength

While we were always lucky enough as children to have three squares a day, there are many kids (17 million in fact) in this, the wealthiest nation on earth, who shockingly do not. There is an organization many of you have probably heard of called Share Our Strength, which has a simple mission - to end childhood hunger in America. We are very happy to be participating in their Share Our Holiday Table blog event, to help spread the word and raise money and awareness for this important issue.

Our contribution to the virtual potluck is a "gourmet" side dish (because we are oh so gourmet) and we decided to do one which we made for Christmas a few years ago, but wanted to tweak a little bit: Potato and Onion Cakes. They're fairly easy to make, but result in lovely individual servings (they get baked in a muffin tin) to go with your Roast Beast (or what have you).

Potato and Onion Cakes
modified slightly from Martha Stewart Living
makes 12

ingredients:

4 tbsp unsalted butter, plus more for tin
salt and pepper
brown sugar
balsamic vinegar
white wine vinegar (or red wine, whatever you have)
whole sage leaves, 12 for garnish
2 small red onions, sliced into 12 1/4 inch thick slices (to fit into the bottom of
1 heaping tbsp chopped herbs - we used a mix of thyme, sage, and rosemary from my garden
6 medium potatoes (some red, some white)
2 small-ish sweet potatoes
4 eggs
1/2 cup shredded gruyere
1/4 finely grated parmesan
1/2 cup finely ground fresh breadcrumbs

Preheat your oven to 400.

Shred the potatoes (we had small red and white ones, and also a couple sweet potatoes from the CSA). We used the shredding function on the food processor, one of the world's greatest inventions. You could also use a box grater, if you like to shred a little skin into your meal. Just kidding. Allow the shredded potatoes to drain in a colander.

Meanwhile, prepare your muffin tin (this recipe makes 12). You'll need to HEAVILY butter the bottom and sides of each cup, so use softened butter, which slathers easier. Do not skimp. Sprinkle each cup generously with salt and freshly ground black pepper, then sprinkle into each cup 1/4 tsp brown sugar. Lay a sage leaf (pretty side down) in the center of each cup on top of the sugar. Place a round of red onion on top of that and press down. Finally, each cup needs 1/4 tsp balsamic vinegar, and 1/4 tsp white wine vinegar on top of the onion.

Now for the potato mixture: In a large bowl beat 2 eggs lightly, add the chopped herbs and salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze as much liquid as you can from your shredded potatoes (I did it a handful at a time) and add them to the egg mixture. Add the cheeses and the breadcrumbs and stir gently but thoroughly until combined.

Heap the potato mixture onto each onion round in the muffin tin, packing it down lightly and smoothing the top flat.

Cut the 4 tbsp butter into 12 equal pieces, and dot the tops of each potato cake with its fair share of butter.

Pop the tin into the oven and bake (on the bottom rack) for 30-40 minutes - the cakes should be deep brown around the edges.

Take the tin out and let the cakes rest in the pan for 5 minutes, then slide a knife around the edges to loosen. To turn them all out at once, we put a sheet of wax paper on top of the muffin tin, then an inverted baking sheet on top of that, and flipped them all over. Full disclosure - some of the onion rounds stuck and needed to be coaxed out. But that was easy to do. And they still looked pretty.

To learn more about Share Our Strength, and to find out what you can do this holiday season, please visit The Share Our Holiday Table Donation Page.

Here's a short video about the No Kid Hungry Campaign (and who doesn't love the Dude?):

And please take a minute to check out the Share Our Strength site:


Finally, here are some other blogs participating in Share Our Holiday Table, please visit them!

December 13: Sides

Gourmet

• The Urban Baker (read the post)
• Heather Christo (read the post)
• We Like to Cook, and Eat (read the post)
• Plum Pie (read the post)

Family Friendly

• What’s Cooking (read the post)
• Dine and Dish (read the post)
• The Evolving Cook (read the post)
• Katrina Runs for Food

Vegetarian

• My Kitchen Addiction (read the post)
• Taste as You Go
• Flamingo Musings (read the post)

Gluten Free

• The Whole Gang (read the post)
• Jenn Cuisine-- A mostly gluten free cooking blog. (read the post)
• Creative Cooking Gluten Free (read the post)

December 10: Entrees

Gourmet

• What’s Gaby Cooking (read the post)
• Food Blogga (read the post)

Family Friendly

• Life in Recipes (read the post)
• Bluebonnets & Brownies (read the post)
• Foodie Tots (read the post)

Vegetarian

• The Peche (read the post)

Gluten Free

• The Sensitive Pantry (read the post)
• Nourishing Meals (read the post)

December 9: Soup

Gourmet

• edible cville (read the post)
• The Runaway Spoon (read the post)
• A Girl, A Market, A Meal (read the post)

Family Friendly

• Ladles and Jellyspoons (read the post)
• Two Dollar Dinners (read the post)
• All About Alton Brown (read the post)
• Cookie Central's Great American Bake Sale (read the post)

Vegetarian

• Good Life Eats (read the post)
• Feed Our Families (read the post)

Gluten Free

• Celiac Teen (read the post)
• Celiacs in the House (read the post)
• Gluten Free Life with Jen (read the post)
• And Love it Too! (read the post)

December 8: Salads

Gourmet

• The Bitten Word (read the post)
• girlichef (read the post)

Family Friendly

• Food For My Family (read the post)

Vegetarian

• Glugle Gluten-Free (read the post)

Gluten Free

• Add a Pinch (read the post)
• Gluten Free Diva (read the post)

December 7: Drinks

Gourmet

• Food Woolf (read the post)
• The Gringo Chapin (read the post)
• Neo-Homesteading (read the post)
• Three Many Cooks (read the post)

Family Friendly

• Fat Wuz Here (read the post)

Vegetarian

• Lexies Kitchen (read the post)
• Simply Sugar and Gluten Free (read the post)

Gluten Free

• Gluten Free Easily (read the post)

December 6: Appetizers

Gourmet

• The Italian Dish (read the post)
• Recipe Girl (read the post)
• Neo-Homesteading (read the post)

Family Friendly

• Family Fresh Cooking (read the post)
• Giving Up on Perfect (read the post)

Vegetarian

• Two Peas and Their Pod (read the post)
• Smith Bites (read the post)

Gluten Free

• La Fuji Mama (read the post)
• Wenderly (read the post)

pasta with swiss chard ragu

A couple weeks ago, I had two vegetarian friends (Phil from NYC and Reba from Maine) coming for dinner (plus Axel F of course), so it seemed like a perfect time to try out this intriguing recipe (Pennette with Swiss Chard Ragu) I read in a Mario Batali cookbook that our friends Keith and Heather gave us for a wedding present. The cookbook is really fantastic - it's the kind of Italian cooking where there are about 4 ingredients, and the preparation is pretty simple, but the flavor is great. I had a beautiful bunch of chard from the winter CSA, so it was perfect. Sorry - only one (rather poor) photo taken when Phil was having seconds and suggested I should blog it...


You'll see, this is another one of those nearly-no-ingredients meals, but it was so so good. Plus the extra beauty of this recipe is that you can make the ragu ahead of time - which was great since I was teaching late that night (our friends and I were converging on my house all at the same time). So I made the ragu the night before, and kept it in the fridge, then all I had to do when we all got to my house was boil pasta and reheat the chard and toast some breadcrumbs.

Pasta with Swiss Chard Ragu
adapted from Mario Batali's Molto Gusto

serves 6

Ingredients (I'll put my changes and additions in brackets):
-1/4 c extra virgin olive oil [I probably added a bit more than this during the cooking process]
-1 small white onion, halved and sliced 1/4 inch thick
-3 [or 4] garlic cloves, smashed and peeled [and coarsely chopped]
-1 pound Swiss Chard, trimmed and sliced 1/4 inch thick [I chopped up the stems separately into a pretty small dice, and just did the leaves in 1/4 inch ribbons]
-4 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces
-salt and pepper [Batali lists salt twice, first Maldon salt or other flaky sea salt, which at something like $80/lb, I have never tried... I'm sure flaky salt is miraculously wonderful and all... but I just used regular kosher salt, which he also calls for later in the ingredient list. I think we can just use one kind of salt and still live with ourselves]
-1 pound pennette [I used spaghetti instead, it was really nice actually]
-3/4 c freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus extra for serving
-1/2 c coarse fresh bread crumbs [plus another crushed garlic clove and some crushed red pepper flakes]
-[I also roasted some grape tomatoes to toss in, see below]

How I did it:

Heat the olive oil over medium high heat in a large, wide bottomed pot. Add the garlic, onions a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes if you want, and the chard stems - they ought to cook a little before you add the leaves, since they're tougher. Stir it all around and season with salt to help the onions and the stems soften. After a minute or so, add the chard leaves, a little more salt, and some freshly ground pepper, and let cook another 5 minutes or so, stirring occasionally to encourage the chard to wilt down. Then add 1/4 c of water and cover and reduce the heat to low. Let it cook another 20 minutes or so, until it is very soft (continue to stir occasionally).

Now in the recipe, he adds the butter chunks, stirs till they melt, and then he says you can stop here, set the ragu aside to cool and store in the fridge for up to 2 days. I left the butter step till later - because I felt like something special probably happens when the cold butter emulsifies into the hot chard juices, so I wanted to do that right before serving. So I stored it pre-butter.

When you're ready to eat, put a big pot of water on for the pasta (once it's at a full boil add a generous amount of salt and the pasta and stir around), put the ragu in a very large, deep saucepan (big enough to hold the addition of the cooked pound of pasta when the time comes), and warm the ragu gently - when it's hot is when I would stir in the 4 tbsp of butter.

For the breadcrumbs, I ground up in the food processor about 3 slices of some bread I had made that was a few days old, and good only for toasted breadcrumbs by then. I been baking earlier in the morning, so I took the opportunity to put the breadcrumbs on a baking sheet (tossed them thoroughly with a few tbsp olive oil, salt and pepper) and put them into a 350 oven for about ten minutes. I set it aside, on the pan, while I left for the day to teach. When I was back home and the pasta was boiling, I turned on the broiler and put them under the broiler and kept pretty constant watch over them, stirring a couple of times so they didn't burn.

You could also do them in one step, in a non-stick frying pan: heat 2 tbsp olive oil and 1 tbsp butter, a peeled and crushed clove of garlic, and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes, add in the breadcrumbs, toss around thoroughly to get all the oil distributed among the bread evenly, and fry, stirring semi-constantly, until they start to turn golden and sound dry in the pan.

Either way set the breadcrumbs (once golden) aside in a bowl to keep them from over-browning.

When the pasta is al dente, drain (saving a little pasta water) and add it to the chard ragu along with 1/4 cup of the pasta water, and toss the pasta with the ragu over medium heat until the pasta looks evenly coated with the chard sauce. Add more pasta water if things look dry. Add the cheese and toss around to combine. As the pasta water heats, the starch in it thickens and turns silky - yum.

OH YES, the tomatoes! I had some grape tomatoes (one of those rectangular packages, not the small square ones) - I had roasted them ahead of time with olive oil, salt and pepper, at 350 for 30 or 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they looked collapsed and a little golden. I tossed these with the finished pasta. They made for a nice bright contrast to the deep dark ragu flavor. Consider this an optional addition, but it was darn good.

Serve the pasta with the breadcrumbs and additional cheese on the side.

Winter CSA Update

I continue to be amazed by the amount of food in our winter CSA share. This week's haul:

Arugula

Broccoli

Butternut Squash

Acorn Squash

Spring mix

Carrots

Sweet Potatoes

Parsnips

Radishes

Cabbage

Turnip

Kale

Swiss Chard

Bell Pepper

Pears

Apples

Red and White Potatoes

Off to enjoy the bounty!