(As always, you can click on the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)
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You might recall that I recently came up with a meatball recipe that we really love, but in the interest of changing things up a bit, I decided to try a different spin. The “Swedish meatballs” I grew up on were simply meatballs browned and then simmered in canned mushroom soup, and the grey and rainy weather we had this weekend got me craving just that sort of dish.
I haven’t bought canned soup in years, so I’d have to build the mushroom sauce from scratch, and I decided to swap out a few of the seasonings in the meatballs themselves to bring them more in line with a traditional Swedish-style meatball. I rolled them smaller, ending up with 36 orbs rather than the two dozen in my original recipe. I also decided to brown them in the oven rather than on the stovetop, a method that worked really well and a great option for those of you who are averse to frying.
Creamy and comforting, served atop a pile of buttered parsleyed egg noodles, these meatballs were just the thing to chase the chill away on Saturday evening. Held in a crock pot, I’d imagine these or my original red-sauced version would be a great dish to serve at a casual party or potluck.
Truly Tender Meatballs in Creamy Mushroom Sauce
1 cup soft fresh breadcrumbs
¼ to ½ cup milk
½ cup fresh ricotta, drained if very wet
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2-3 teaspoons Kosher salt
½ teaspoon each Colman’s mustard, ground allspice, ground white pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg
1 lb. ground beef
½ lb. ground pork
Preheat oven to 400.
Place the breadcrumbs in a bowl and moisten them with just enough milk to cover them, pressing gently. Remove the breadcrumbs from the milk, squeezing out the excess liquid, and add to a large mixing bowl. Add the egg to the bowl and beat lightly. Add the ricotta, salt, mustard, allspice, white pepper, and nutmeg and mix until well combined. Add the beef and pork and, with clean hands, mix gently until the ingredients are evenly incorporated.
Scoop or pinch off small amounts of the mixture and roll into meatballs, placing them on a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes.
Creamy Mushroom Sauce
1 oz. dried porcini + 2 cups boiling water
¼ cup unsalted butter
8 oz. fresh crimini mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
Kosher or sea salt
1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons tamari
½ cup each heavy cream + crème fraiche (or sour cream)
½ cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Soak the porcini in the boiling water until very soft. When the mushrooms are soft, remove them from the liquid. Set the liquid aside and chop the mushrooms.
Melt the butter in a wide skillet until foaming, then add the porcini and crimini mushrooms. Season with salt and cook until golden brown, stirring occasionally. Add the flour and cook briefly until it no longer has a raw flour smell, then add the reserved mushroom soaking liquid, being careful to leave any grit behind. Add the tamari and bring just to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Add the meatballs to the sauce, stir in the heavy cream and crème fraiche or sour cream, and cook until reduced and thickened. Taste and adjust the seasoning, then add the parsley just before serving, reserving a bit to sprinkle on top.
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And sadly, I accidentally deleted every photo I took of our Sunday dinner. Oops.
(As always, click on the photos to view them with more detail in my Flickr stream.)
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This chicken? Make it. Seriously. Do not delay. I’m a sucker for anything with miso in it, so I already had high hopes for this bird, but it was even better than anticipated, and the Shoyu Onion Sauce put it over the top.
This was so good, in fact, that I saved the pan drippings from the chicken, as well as the leftover sauce (we only roasted half a bird, but made the full amount of sauce), and repurposed these flavorful leftovers for Sunday brunch. I tossed a couple of cups of cubed potato with the drippings and a little splash of oil, then roasted them in our iron skillet at 425 until they were cooked through, turning the potatoes about midway through the cooking time. I took some thin slices of steak left over from Friday’s dinner and gently warmed them in the leftover onion sauce, added a generous handful of sliced scallions to the cooked potatoes, and served everything (surprise!) with an egg on top.
What a delicious spin on steak and eggs.
So yeah, make this chicken. And don’t forget to vote.
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Ten years ago I still lived in my home state of Michigan. My role at work had changed so I was taking on new duties and responsibilities, and I had a totally opposite schedule than that of my husband. Years after graduating he had embarked on a new career path, which meant that I spent the majority of my evenings at home, working on multi-course dinners to serve when he returned late in the evening, drinking too much, watching a beloved kitty’s steady decline, and battling the depression that had landed me in the hospital a year earlier. I was also battling near-constant pain and fatigue that didn’t yet have a name assigned to it, shuttling between specialists for test after test, feeling utterly scared and alone.
It was during that time that I came in contact with a community of people online: comic book and music geeks, pop-culture fiends, artists, writers, all gathered in a network of forums. It was largely because of these people and their friendship and support that I took a huge leap of faith, leaving my home state and unsalvageable marriage to move to a city I had never even visited. It was both terrifying and thrilling, and after an initial rough patch I settled into my new life in Boston. My online community of friends grew wider, and many of these friends became “real life” friends, too – there were drink-ups and dinners out, lunch dates, parties and other gatherings, one of which would really change my life.
I walked, everywhere, in every kind of weather. I cooked for me and me alone for the first time since my vegetarian teenage years. I took myself out to eat, too, trying new things at new-to-me restaurants, falling in love with new flavors and techniques, determined to recreate them at home. In the bright, sunny Somerville kitchen I shared with my roommate, I began to really change the way I cooked and ate, and the way I thought about food in general. I lost a bunch of weight without even really trying, and was the healthiest I’d been in years.
Before long I’d be making regular trips to New York City. You see, one of those Internet friends had become more than that, and for a year we carried on our courtship long-distance. I’d leave work early on Fridays, rolling suitcase in tow, and hop on a bus to spend most weekends indulging in good food and drink with my sweetie. Our first “real” date began over steak frites at a corner café in Brooklyn. Over time, I’d introduce him to oysters, escargots, and foie gras, and he got me back on pork – as a guy who grew up with family that had raised pigs, he knew how the good stuff should taste, and when we found it in New York, there was no turning back.
Mike and I fell in love with the city’s Greenmarkets, with Chinatown, with the market at Grand Central Station, with the restaurants and specialty shops that served up all manner of deliciousness at the same time we fell so deeply in love with each other. After one long year of sucking the marrow out of every weekend we spent together, we decided to shorten the distance between us – I’d move to New York, a dream I had had since my first visit years earlier. My first six months there were spent rooming with a friend, her big, fabulous kitchen and back yard a rare treat in the city, and did we ever put them to good use. Toward the end of that six months, Mike and I started looking for a place together, landing in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a big, airy space with wide plank hardwood floors, tons of great light, and to our delight, a big back yard just perfect for grilling and gardening. And it was while living in that space that we prepared the meals that led me to start this blog not long after we celebrated our first anniversary. Last Night’s Dinner is, more than anything, our story, through food.
So very much has happened in the years since. We left New York and found an amazing home and community of friends here in Providence. We have had incredible opportunities and good fortune come our way over the last year, and I love that so many of you have been part of it. But change has always been hard for me. I had to laugh when I realized that so many of our recent meals – roast chicken, “Garbage Soup”, simple seafood and pasta preparations, and a rich and meaty lasagna – echo dishes I first posted about in the earliest days of the blog. I guess without even planning to do so, I’ve been going back to basics, to my comfort food, to steel myself for what lies ahead, but even I am getting really bored by it.
It’s not lost on me that much of what is going on right now parallels things that were happening in my life 10 years ago. My role at work has changed. I have taken on new duties and responsibilities, and I soon will have a totally opposite schedule than that of my husband. He is embarking on a terribly exciting and challenging new career path, which means that I will soon spend the majority of my evenings at home, with a beloved kitty whose health is in decline, working on… who knows what. Cooking, I hope. Writing, when the words come. (Not drinking too much, obviously.) Savoring precious time (and hopefully a meal or three) with my husband whenever I can. I have no clue how I’ll feel 10 years from now when I look back at this time in our lives, but right now it feels overwhelming, and more than a little scary.
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The doldrums drag on. Work has been busy, the weather in New England has been damp and grey, and I’ve been struggling with a nasty bug that kept me home and in bed on Thursday under a pile of blankets and slumbering kitties. I made it to work on Friday, hacking and coughing through the day, and when I came home all I could think about was soup. Small problem: we were fresh out of stock, and I absolutely didn’t have it in me to make more. I could have made that old standby Potage Parmentier, but we were also out of potatoes, so I took a page from my dear Grandma’s playbook and made a version of a little thing we like to call “Garbage Soup.” It’s a clean-out-the-fridge-freezer-and-cupboards kind of soup, endlessly adaptable, and better than it has any right to be.
This batch was built on the last three links of Hill Farm sweet Italian sausage I had in the fridge, crumbled and cooked until deeply browned, then lots of onion, carrot, celery, garlic, a can of San Marzanos with their juice, a parmesan rind, and plenty of thyme and parsley. I added some cooked red beans to the mix, as well as corn, peas, and green beans from the freezer, and several big handfuls of torn kale. With a hunk of bread from Olga’s and some sea salted butter, this soup made for a humble but totally satisfying meal.
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Friday night, we ordered in. Saturday we skipped the farmers’ market, grabbed a bite at Farmstead, and spent a semi-relaxing day at home with the cats. Mike roasted a chicken, and I burned the Brussels sprouts.
Sunday morning, I broke not one but two yolks while attempting to make eggs for our breakfast. I burned the toast. I made a quart of beef stock, three quarts of chicken stock, and a batch of fresh pasta (none of which I ruined, thankfully), then I stood at the stove with a Blood and Sand in hand, frying batch after batch of hand-cut frites to go with our Valentine’s steak au poivre (which I neglected to take a photo of).
I also made this soup. It was one of the weekend’s more successful endeavors.
I’m home due to the holiday, Mike’s up at Cook & Brown, and I had really hoped to tackle at least one big cooking project while putting together some training materials for work today, but my heart’s just not in it. Maybe it’s the winter doldrums settling in, or the fact that I tend to freeze up in the face of change and uncertainty (which we’ve got plenty of these days), but I’m feeling overwhelmed and uninspired. I’m not sure how to get my kitchen mojo back.
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Too damn long ago, Jen and I wrote up my (then) latest recipe for iron-skillet pizza. When we posted the recipe, we included this note:
NOTE: The original recipe says this makes two 9-inch pizzas. We have a used a modification of this recipe several times in a 12-inch iron skillet and have finally decided that it’s too much dough, even for a 12-incher. When next we make this, we’ll reduce the flour from 4 cups to 3, and we’ll reduce the amounts of other ingredients accordingly. When we do, we’ll post the revised recipe.
Nearly two years later (I was tempted to wait for the actual anniversary, but my better angels won out), here it is. I’ve used this recipe a couple of times now, and I think it’s ready for prime time.
What I chose to do was to adapt my grilled or pizza-stone crust recipe and rework it with butter. The 2008 recipe also called for butter, and we like what it does to this kind of crust. When you have a deep dish pizza, it’s very good to have a flakier crust. Otherwise, the pizza can become too leaden in texture.
- 3 c flour
- 2 tsp instant dry yeast
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1/2 tsp sugar
- 1 cup water
- 3 tbsp butter, softened
- Combine flour, yeast, salt and sugar in bowl of standing mixer.
- Add water and butter.
- Combine well, using the paddle attachment on low speed.
- Knead, using a dough hook, until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl and crawls up the dough hook. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons water if dough is dry and not coming together. If dough is too wet, add 1 to 2 tablespoons flour.
- Grease a medium bowl with olive oil and add dough to the bowl. Cover and let the dough rise until it doubles in bulk, about an hour. (Or, you can make the dough a day in advance and proof it in the fridge overnight, like I often do.)
Baking instructions follow roughly what’s in the original post. Prepare your toppings. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Grease up the skillet, pat or roll your dough out, and line the skillet with dough. You build the pizza the way you want and bake until your toppings brown appropriately.
This crust is versatile. We’ve used it with a veggie pie of spinach, mushrooms, tomato sauce and cheese, and we’ve also enjoyed a meaty sausage and onion pie.
Try it out and let me know how you like it!
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So this was the beautiful one, the one that worked out the way I had hoped they all would, the one that wasn’t sludgy, didn’t fall apart as I tried to flip it, the one that was tender and tasty. And the dozen or so crepes that came before it, and all but two that came after, each met different, disastrous ends in their own way.
You see, even though I promised myself that I was going to play things safe for a while, I’ve been itching to work with this local rye flour for ages. I finally brought some home on Saturday, hoping to make crepes with it, light but hearty crepes to wrap around a filling of seasonal vegetables and a fried egg. Kind of like I did here, but a wintertime version.
So I started with a base ratio for crepe-making, and I tested and tweaked, and I’m not yet there but this one crepe was so good I am determined to make it work. (The winter ratatouille was a complete success, and details will come to you soon, I promise.)
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