Why so non-sinful, Fettucine with Prosciutto, Tomatoes, and Cream?

For our "pasta with sauce that's not from a jar" challenge, I picked this recipe, because "Fettucine with Prosciutto, Tomatoes, and Cream" sounds like The.Most.Decadent.Pasta.Ever. I imagined a lake of creamy tomatoishness with getaway islands of proscuittio, and a couple of linguines floating lazily by.

However, the pasta was actually pretty light, so that was kind of a let-down given my expectations, but it was still good. I basically fried some prosciutto kind of how you would bacon and then put it aside; sauted some garlic, added 3 cans of petite diced tomatoes,* then threw in some parsley, 1/2 a cup of cream, grated parmesan, and pepper, and then put the proscuittio back in. The recipe kind of quit before specifying whether you should mix the pasta and sauce together before serving it or not. Since I overcooked the pasta a bit, I washed it in cold water so it wouldn't get even soggier, and then felt I had to add it to the sauce to heat it back up to a reasonable temperatur. The whole thing didn't take long at all.

All in all, it was good but not mind-blowing. I would make it again but maybe with a different kind of cured meat, since the prosciutto didn't add as much flavor as I would have thought (and also cost $7 for a half pound).

*I did not understand the "not from a jar" rule to exclude canned tomatoes, although I'm sure Myrtle is going to make her sauce entirely from scratch using heirloom tomatoes she's been growing on her fire escape, at which point I will feel like kind of an asshole.

Week 3: Pasta with sauce not from a jar

And, go!

Week 3: Pasta with sauce not from a jar

And, go!

Apple Fudge bars AKA Chocolate Cake AKA Apple Crisp

Ok, I found a recipe for apple "fudge" bars and thought that sounded great. Well, it turned out to look, taste and feel like chocolate cake with just a hint of apple in it. I had no ingredients for frosting, so it was pointless, I brought it to work and it was devoured.






Next I decided to stick with an old standby and make apple crisp, because I like it and I'm craving desert. This recipe seemed good because of the lemon, but I didn't have lemon so I used my Minute Maid Light Lime Drink. It tasted grreat! The lime made it super tangy and good. I got it from the foodnetwork page, which I like.
6 McIntosh apples, peeled and diced into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 cup flour or fine graham cracker crumbs
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 stick butter
1 pint vanilla ice cream
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. In a 9 by 12 baking dish, combine apples, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar. In a small bowl, mix flour or graham cracker crumbs, brown sugar and butter together using the tines of a fork and your fingers, working until even, small crumbles form. Sprinkle topping evenly over apples and bake 15 to 20 minutes until apples are just tender and topping is golden brown. Top dishes of apple crisp with small scoops of vanilla ice cream. YUM!

Bite me, apple tartlets

At the pastry shop near my house, you can buy apple tartlets for about $4 each. After making them from scratch last Sunday, I've decided that forking over a few bucks is well worth it!

I found a Cook's Illustrated recipe for apple tartlets online, and they ended up tasting great -- especially the crust, which has a cream cheese base. But the process drove me batty, and I felt like throwing in the towel at several points during the process. Basically, I've learned that pastry dough is a delicate operation, requiring cold dough and limited handling/futzing. Which sort of conflicts with my cooking, um, style.

Anyhoo, the pictures below highlights some of the process that I totally recommend for people who are more patient than me! (Nao and Myrtie, I'm looking at you...)

Here's the lil' food processor, filled with dough. You pulse the dough ingredients until they're nice and sandy.

Mmm. Look at that tasty dough ball. After you form it, you flatten the fucker and slice it into wedges...

And then it's back into the refrigerator. After cooling, you turn these little wedges into disks.


Then it's time for the delightful rolling-between-parchment-paper process. Roll on a surface with some sort of grip/friction, because they can slide all over the place. Feeling almost done? Nope. It's time for more dough refrigeration and apple peeling, coring and slicing.

Finally, you throw the apple mixture on, do your best pinching the edges of the dough to form some semblance of crust, and bake. About halfway through baking, you coat the tartlets with egg whites and sugar. And, if you're like me, this is when you drop a bowlful of egg whites on your kitchen floor. Then clean up the egg whites, while cursing apple tartlets, Cooks Illustrated and the sink full of tartlet-related dishes. Bon Appetite!

Appatoulille

Since I don't have a working oven, and a lot of apple recipes involve baking, finding a recipe this week was a bit of a challenge. Then I turned to the people who know apples best - the fine folks of Washington state.

Although the standard reaction when I said that I was making Apple Ratatouille was, "ew," this recipe intrigued me because I love ratatouille but my tummy hates eggplant. Why not try it with apples as a substitute?

The first thing that I realized about this recipe is that it involves A LOT of dicing. See!


The second thing that I realized is that it makes A LOT of food. Although the instructions pretend like it can all be made in one skillet, I had to transfer it to my big stock pot for the last few steps.


The third thing that I realized is that it calls for way too much salt. To counteract this, I added the liquid that I had drained off of the tomatoes and about double the amount of walnuts. Not only did that cut the saltiness, the extra walnuts really upped the yum factor.

I decided to make it an entree by serving it over cous cous, and I topped it off with some grated parmesan cheese.


In the end it turns out that all of the dicing was worth it. The apples added just a hint of sweetness, but were not overpowering, and the walnuts really made the dish. Yum!

Thank god, because I have a lot of leftovers.

Let's call it "Apples with Cheese and Peanut Butter"

I bought apples at the farmer's market last Saturday, unsure of what I would do with them but fully committed to the Pants Off Cook Off regime. The problem is that on Wednesday night (the only night this week I was going to be home for dinner, and at a reasonable time) I 100% reverted to my natural state of eating, which is: wait until I'm really hungry to think about what to eat, then get the foodstuffs into my mouth as fast as possible. So, I cut up an apple and some slices of cheese, and opened a jar of peanut butter, and alternated apple-n-cheese, apple-n-peanut-butter. Trashy, yes, but still yumm, as my cat confirmed for me my licking the cheese.

Unholy Stir-Fry

I made stir-fry this week. With apples. It was kind of bizarre.

First of all, I've never actually made stir-fry myself. I've watched other people make it. And I've eaten it and enjoyed it. So I kind of thought I knew what I was doing. Turns out stir-frying is even scarier than I had imagined. I found a recipe somewhere in which stir-fry was made with apples. But then I just decided not to consult the recipe, like, at all, and just sort of toss things into the giant pan at random. Arguably, this technique could probably use some perfecting.

The Ingredients:
Onions, Garlic, String beans, Carrots, Chili Powder, Cumin, tofu, small can of tomato sauce, soy sauce and...apples.

Looks good so far, right?

Anyway, I truly had no idea how to stir-fry. Luckily, Arie was on hand to explain to me that stir-frying has to happen on rather high heat, and that I should remove the tea kettle from the stove because "oil is going to fly everywhere." Wee!

My "technique," if you will:

First, I chopped up an onion, some carrots, string beans, and garlic. Then I cut the tofu into 1-inch squares, and fried them for about 5 minutes, flipped 'em, and fried them for another 5 minutes. Then I removed them from the stove and put them aside on a paper towel. Then I busted out the wok, and began frying up the chopped veggies on fairly high-ish heat in vegetable oil. All was going well until I realized that this stir-fry needed flavor. And just frying the veggies would be a wee bit...dull. So that's when I pretty much began dumping things into the wok at random. Soy sauce? Check. Chili powder? Check. Cumin? Check. Tomato sauce? Check. After about 10 minutes I decided it was pretty much 'done,' so I added in the pre-fried tofu at the end. After I removed it from the heat, I sliced up some apples and threw them in. And I served it over brown rice. It was really, pretty much the most random thing I have ever eaten.

The finished product:

(Served with a pina colada in a pilsner glass - classy).

Luckily, Arie was a good sport and ate two whole bowls. When I asked him what I should call this "recipe," he suggested either "Apple-Rice-Prima-Stir-Fry" or "Tomato Apple Stir-Prise."

Actually, the apples were totally wrong, but the rest of it was quite yummy.
Sorry, apples. You lose.

Week 2: Apples

Post away!

Yucky Acorn Squash Soop (intentionally spelled like Poop)

I have never posted on a blog before. I hope this looks ok. I looked up millions of squash recipes, but I did not have all ingredients at home, especially chicken stock, and i just got a puppy, so going to the store is a big ordeal. Needless to say, I adlibbed using variations of recipes online.

1/2 acorn squash
1 green apple
2 red potatoes
1 yellow onion
pinch coriander
5tsp butter
salt
1 cup cream
1 cup water
2T olive oil

Most online recipes suggested using green apple to tang up the sweet of the squash. This proved to be problematic later on. I roasted squash, apples and potatoes with butter that I melted with a little coriander in it. The oven was at 400 for 30 min. Then I pureed them with cream. Then I cooked diced onions in olive oil. I added the pureed soop to this.I added salt as I felt necessary. Once all was hot and well mixed, I repureed all the items. Then I put it in the fridge to cool and served with french bread. John did NOT like the apple factor. That's all he could taste and thought it was gross and sweet. I liked the taste but felt like I was eating baby food and could only eat half a bowl before I got sick of it. I don't really like cold soop.

Slightly muddy gazpacho

I was very thrilled that Week 1 of the Pants Off Cook Off was cold soup, because gazpacho is one of the 5 food categories I have ever made successfully. I picked this recipe because, you know, high ratings on Epicurious, and also it uses canned tomatoes, which makes it easy.

The recipe basically calls for pureeing half the stuff in a blender while reserving the other half, chopped up, for chunkiness. This is a good idea, I think, because my previous attempts at gazpacho have tended to veer too far in one direction or the other: all homogeneous like baby food, or too chunky, like salsa.

It's also a good idea because the first, pureed half of the gazpacho looked a lot like poop. The poopy color is probably an unavoidable result when you puree green and red stuff together. I probably worsened the problem by substituting green peppers for the celery in the recipe (I don't like celery, with the stringy things and all). Next time I'd try red pepper instead. Also, I had bought about half of the tomatoes fresh instead of canned, so as to class up the operation, and instead of pureeing all the tomato I just chopped some--but I think the canned ones have more juice, which would probably also help make the pureed part more red.

After I added the chopped stuff, though, the results improved dramatically. I let it sit in the fridge overnight, as per the instructions, and had it for dinner the next day. My verdict: quite good, although not the very pinnacle of gazpachoness. In addition to the aforementioned color issue, it could stand to be spicier. Altogether, though, I feel it was a pretty successful venture into the kitchen.

Only two things in this world are too serious to be jested on, potatoes and matrimony. (Irish Saying)

I made the above recipe for Vichyssoise. It was really good because potatoes taste good, leeks taste good, and you know what else tastes good? Fat tastes good! And this soup is loaded with heavy cream. Yum, yum, yum.

Recommendation: Do not attempt to make this soup without a great big heavy-duty food processor. I squished up the potatoes with a hand mixer (which the recipe says that you can do). This was not a good idea. Although it worked and everything tasted grrrreat, my kitchen was covered in creamy, white potato spooge.

Another recommendation: Make the stock from scratch! It makes all the difference. I made my stock with carrots, celery, onion, garlic, turnips, parsnip, tomatoes and lots of salt and pepper.





Before simmering for about an hour, I added my total favorite thing ever into the pot -- a bouquet garni!!

Bouquet Garni

3 fresh Italian parsley sprigs, 1 bay leaf, 1 fresh thyme sprig

Combine all the ingredients in a piece of cheesecloth

Fold up and secure tightly with a piece of string

Use as directed.
Voila!



Apologies: I'm an idiot, and I somehow forgot to take a picture of my soup when it was actually done. I think that this is because I made the stock on Saturday, and the soup on Sunday, and on Sundays I am forgetful. I'm very sorry, because it looked really cool.

Update: I'm possibly even dumber than I thought I was. I actually did take a picture of my completed soup. I just forgot. Not so bright.

Cool as a Cucumber Soup

Since there is nothing I love more than variations on the Cucumber + Yogurt theme (Indian food without Raita is like night without stars!) I decided to try my hand at making Cold Cucumber Soup.


I looked around on the internets for awhile to find the perfect recipe, but none of them seemed quite right. So here I go, winging it.

(Please forgive my pictures. All I had with me was my cell phone, so the images are a bit grainy.)

The stars of our show. (Not Pictured: Salt, Lemon)

The Process:

• I couldn't decide if I wanted to try a mint version or a dill version of the soup, so I made the bold choice to use both. This was a good choice.
  

• I decided to use greek yogurt instead of regular yogurt to give it more depth and better consistency. I think with a thinner yogurt the soup would have been way too watery.

• I used one clove of garlic and this made the soup very garlic-y. Yum. As long as you don't plan to make out later. A few dashes of cayenne pepper also gave it a little kick, and a couple of tablespoons of lemon added some balance.
  

• You all know how I am about salt, so, um, "salt to taste."

• Basically, after peeling, seeding, and coarsely chopping the cucumber, I threw everything in the blender.
  

Blend it, blend it.

The Presentation:

• I held back some chopped up cucumber to throw in after blending to give the soup a little more crunch. Because I was feeling fancy, I also set aside a few thin slices of cucumber and a sprig each of mint and dill.
  

• One of the recipes that I found called for an avocado mash to serve in the center of the soup. That sounded like blasphemy, but it did give me an idea for a side dish for the soup--avocados with lime juice and salt plus some fancy tortilla chips I had lying around. Oh yeah, and of course wine.

Ta-da!

The Verdict:

There were no unbiased judges for this experiment, but I really liked it and would make it again. It is a pretty light soup so if I was cooking for, say, Arie I would probably serve it as a side, with a much heartier main course. It also tasted even better the next day, so the next time I make it, I might prepare it ahead of time and let it chill in the fridge for a few hours.

Kind of Awesome, Kind of Eh: Thai Watermelon Soup

Honestly, I picked this recipe because it was the weirdest one I could find...chilled watermelon puree with hot peppers, ginger, lime -- a slew of other spices -- and crab.


Here's how it hashed out.

The process:

• Lotsa mincing. Basically, you just mince all of the veggies, saute them and then puree them with some pre-pureed watermelon.
  
• Lotsa pureeing. You should use a blender. I don't have one so, I used a teensy little mini food processor. It took lots of batches, covered my kitchen with watermelon juice (user error, not the recipe) and was sort of maddening.
  
• I broke some rules. The recipe advises you to strain the watermelon and veggies after everything is pureed, but that seemed weird to me. Sort of like eating bizarre-o Kool Aid. I totally recommend the pureed-but-not-strained version, which was sort of like gazpacho.
  

The verdict:
The Watermelon broth was a total success. Unlike my other cooking efforts, it had a really complex flavor, sort of like something you'd find in a Thai restaurant. With, like, professional chefs. Honestly, though, the spicy and tart flavors really balanced the watermelon's sweetness. Really unique, great and not at all watermelon-y.

BUT, the crab was sort of gross. Instead of buying fresh crab (what am I, a millionaire?), I chose some fancy canned crab from Whole Foods. Nothing was wrong with it, per se, but it was just kind of eh. It totally grossed out Tim, who ate a few bites like a champ, and then chose to eat the non-crabified version (which I totally recommend for vegetarians). Maybe with fresh crab -- or even some other seafood, like shrimp -- it might be perfect?

Now, what am I going to do with all of that leftover crab?

Week One: Cold Soup

I know a few of you have already gotten to work on your soups. You are all authors now on this blog and can post your pics and observations!