Last Night’s Dinner

As I’ve said before, I really believe that you eat with your eyes first, so I like to spend a little time on plating. Our dinner last night wasn’t anything fancy – a combination of beets, fingerlings and purple potatoes tossed with salt, olive oil and Herbes de Provence and then roasted in the oven, a salmon filet seasoned with salt and pepper and seared on the stovetop, my basic mustard vinaigrette and some pretty microgreens – but the presentation (and flavor) garnered a big “WOW” from my husband. It’s nice to know I can still knock his socks off from time to time.

I wasn’t in the mood for the dinner I had planned for Tuesday night, so once again I decided to switch things up. The thought of wrestling with a Kabocha squash with achy hands was pretty unappealing, and besides, I had the better part of a bunch of broccoli in the crisper drawer that was starting to look less than perky. What I really wanted was soup, and this easy, cheesy version was a big hit.

I started by sautéing about a cup of chopped onion in a little olive oil, then adding a couple of smashed garlic cloves and cooking them just until they were fragrant. Next I added my broccoli – the florets as well as the peeled and chopped stems. I poured in about 8-10 cups of my homemade chicken stock, added a pinch of salt, a few shakes of Tabasco, and two heaping tablespoons of Colman’s mustard powder, then covered the pot and let it simmer about 30 minutes, until the broccoli was very tender. I turned off the heat and pureed the soup with my stick blender, then stirred in about 1/2 cup of crème fraiche and my cheese – about 2/3 cup of grated Grafton 2-year aged cheddar, and 1/3 cup of Grafton 4-year.

I ladled the soup into bowls and served it with some of the winter mesclun blend that Mike has been picking up at the Greenmarket, but what I really wish we had had was some crusty bread – the tiny slices of leftover baguette we had weren’t quite enough to mop up the last bits of soup from our bowls, so in the end we just resorted to using our fingers (we’re classy like that). This one’s a definite keeper.

We’ve been trying to get back into the habit of having seafood dinners a few times a week, both as a way to reduce our meat consumption and to increase our intake of the beneficial oils and fatty acids fish contain. Much as with our other sources of protein, I try to make the best choices possible when buying seafood, choosing types which are local when possible, which are sustainable, and which are low in toxins.

I love adding anchovies to sauces and I have come to love them on their own as well. This is a good thing since they’re not only tasty, but they fit my criteria for the type of fish we want to eat often. Halibut is another favorite, and the wild Alaskan halibut we buy via FreshDirect is Certified Sustainable - it’s far from local, but I can feel okay about buying it when we don’t have much available that is.

In looking for inspiration when planning our meals for the week, I turned again to Sunday Suppers at Lucques, and when I saw the recipe for winter vegetables with bagna cauda I immediately noted it in my little cooking planner. This meal was actually meant to be our Sunday supper this week, but as you know I neglected to thaw the halibut in time. We bumped it to Monday night, and let me tell you it was totally worth the wait. Since I had cut and blanched all of the vegetables Sunday night, this was ready in just minutes - perfect for a quick and satisfying weeknight meal.

There are probably hundreds of recipes out there for bagna cauda; I used Suzanne Goin’s recipe for inspiration but tinkered around with my own proportions. While I think it could have used a bit more anchovy and garlic, it was so good Mike and I both finished our heaping helping of “bathed” veggies before either of us finished our halibut.

Bagna Cauda

1/3 cup good olive oil
5-6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1-2 tablespoons finely chopped anchovy filets
red chile flakes to taste
2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
2 tablespoons lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh thyme
kosher salt to taste

Melt the butter in the olive oil in a saucepan, stirring well. Add the anchovies and stir until they dissolve. Add the chile flakes, garlic, lemon zest and thyme and cook just a minute, until the garlic is fragrant and golden. Taste and add a pinch of salt if necessary.

This is traditionally served as a dip with blanched vegetables, but I tossed a mixture of raw endive and radicchio and blanched cauliflower, broccoli florets, radishes, carrots and fennel with small amount of the bagna cauda and spooned a bit more onto my sautéed halibut filets, finishing both with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

Somebody might have spaced on taking out the halibut to thaw for Sunday dinner. And somebody might have tried to waterbath it, but it was still hard as a rock as the dinner hour approached. So somebody had to come up with a Plan B, and somebody thanked her lucky stars yet again for pasta, that wonderful versatile food - a quick Alfredo sauce, a little Prosciutto, a little fresh basil and a salad on the side, and voila. This was not what I had planned, but it was not a bad alternative at all.

While I’ve been fiddling around with my meatless chili recipe, Mike has done some tinkering of his own. This is the latest version of his “wintertime” pizza made in our trusty cast iron skillet. With its thick, buttery crust, this pizza is a completely different beast than the grilled pizza he makes in the warmer months of the year, but it is just as delicious.

I have a little notebook which I carry around with me, and as inspiration strikes I jot down ideas for meals or combinations of ingredients I’d like to try. As the weather turned colder and the selection of local veggies at the Greenmarket got smaller, I began to think about beets. Which, historically, neither of us has been particularly crazy about. At all.

But in our continuing quest to broaden our palates, we decided to give beets another chance, so from time to time I would write down a few thoughts about what to do with them. There was borscht, obviously, and also some sort of beet/goat cheese combo, but I like to think my best idea was this:

beets + beet greens + farro + bacon

Because really, what doesn’t bacon improve?

So when I sent Mike off to the Greenmarket yesterday morning, I asked him to pick up some beets, preferably with the tops still attached, as well as some of our favorite Tamarack bacon. He reported back that the only beets he could find were trimmed, but he was kind enough to go back at lunchtime and pick up some young red chard at my request.

After weighing my cooking and cleaning options, I decided to roast the beets in a foil pouch. I placed them into a 375 oven for about an hour and got to work on the rest of my ingredients while they cooked. I chopped four strips of bacon into about 1 inch pieces and placed them into a skillet to fry. In a separate pan, I cooked a cup of farro until it was tender but not too soft. When the bacon was crisp, I removed it from the fat and set it aside, and then removed about half of the fat and set that aside as well.

When the beets were cooked and cool enough to handle, I peeled them with a paring knife and cut them into chunks. I tossed them in with the cooked farro, then added the bacon and gave it all a gentle stir. I warmed up the fat that was still in the pan from cooking the bacon, added one finely chopped garlic clove and cooked it just until fragrant, then added my roughly chopped chard and a pinch of salt. When the greens were just wilted but still bright green, I removed them from the heat and added them to the beet/bacon/farro mixture. I placed the reserved bacon fat back into the pan to warm, then poured it, along with another pinch of salt and a healthy splash of sherry vinegar, over the mixture and gave it another stir.

The farro turned a rather comical shade of fuschia when it was tossed with the beets, but I have to admit that the deep red beets and bright greens were a nice change of pace from the red/brown palette of our recent meals. But did this dish change our minds about beets?

I’m pleased to report that it did. As I suspected the combination of flavors worked really well together, and the flavor of those roasted beets was far, far superior to anything we had tasted growing up. As it turns out, beets are yummy. Who knew?

Last week I received an email from the lovely Sarah of The Brooklyn Nester inviting me to participate in her celebration of National Pie Day. I’m not such a big fan of the sweet stuff, so once I confirmed that a savory submission was okay, I readily agreed.

Generally I rely on good quality all-butter puff pastry or prepared piecrust when I make savory pies, but since the addition of Robo McGee to our family, Mike and I have both been anxious to give homemade pastry dough a spin. Since he’s a little more patient with things like measuring things precisely, we decided that Mike would be in charge of making the dough, while I’d handle the filling.

As it turns out, I had spent some time on Monday making a batch of chicken stock, so I used a pint of that along with a couple of cups of pulled roasted chicken (left over from our last roast bird, which I had frozen and then thawed). A quick inspection of our countertop baskets and refrigerator produce bins turned up a few small potatoes, a leek and a carrot which I needed to use up, so I chopped them and sautéed them in a few tablespoons of butter until soft. I sprinkled a couple of tablespoons of flour over the veggies, stirred it through and let it cook for a few moments to get rid of any raw flour taste, then I added the chicken, stock, a couple of hits of Tabasco and some freshly ground black pepper. When the sauce was thick and the chicken very shreddy, I tasted it to adjust the seasoning, then tossed in a good handful of chopped fresh dill, some chopped chives, and a cup of green peas I had shelled and frozen last summer. With the filling done, I stepped aside and let Mike get to the pastry-making.

I had bookmarked Deb’s “pie crust 101” post in November, and after comparing it with a few others we found online and elsewhere, he decided to give it a try. He substituted an equal amount of butter for the shortening the recipe called for, and omitted the sugar since we wanted a savory crust, but other than that he followed the recipe to the letter. The result: silky dough that was incredibly easy to work with, and which baked up brown and incredibly flaky. It had a rich buttery flavor, but wasn’t at all greasy as some crusts I’ve tried have been.

In a nutshell, this recipe is a winner – easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious. We spent the rest of the evening brainstorming other things we could put into pies or tarts or bake “en croute.” I guess you could say we’re smitten.

I’ve been playing with recipes for meatless chili for some time now, trying to develop one that will become my go-to version. This black bean chili has come closest so far, though it still needs a bit of work. I used fresh mushrooms to approximate the texture of ground beef in the dish, and I was pleased with the result, though I think next time I’ll try a coarser grind. While this dish still needs some tweaking, it was very, very good, and is going to make great lunchtime leftovers.

I’m going to keep working on this one, and when I get it right I’ll post a recipe.

The food we eat and where it comes from have been hot topics for the last couple of years. The release of Michael Pollan’s latest book, as well as Wednesday’s piece in the New York Times about the lengths chefs are going to to raise awareness of how the meat we eat is raised and slaughtered, have stimulated a lot of discussion this week both online and in my own home. I feel strongly that the decision about what to feed yourself and your family is a complex and personal one. People need to decide for themselves what they’ll eat based on their income, ethics and lifestyle. I would never judge or lecture someone about their food choices, but I would like to discuss how we shop, cook and eat here at Chez Dietschyblossom, and what changes we hope to make going forward.

Over the last couple of years, Mike and I have tried to eat seasonal, locally grown or produced foods more often. I don’t expect that we’ll ever be true locavores – we like our citrus fruits, San Marzano tomatoes, wild Alaskan salmon and runny French cheeses too much – but we still try to buy the bulk of our fresh foods direct from the Greenmarkets or via FreshDirect’s local foods department. The fact that Mike works just blocks from Union Square makes it easy for us to shop this way – on market days, I’ll often send him off with a shopping list, or he’ll make a pass through the market on his way into the office, report back any interesting finds via email, and return at lunchtime to make his purchases.

Most Saturdays begin with our “food safari,” where we hit the Greenmarket in Union Square or Fort Greene or Greenpoint, then make the rounds of our favorite little specialty shops for cheeses, butter, eggs, wine, bread and pantry items like Frankies olive oil or Carolina Gold rice or Rancho Gordo beans or those imported canned tomatoes we love so much. This is our big shopping day where we try to purchase the bulk of our grocery needs for the week, and it is a fairly large commitment of our time and energy, but it’s fun to be out and see what’s in season, to talk to the people who produced what we buy and to find out what’s particularly fresh or tasty that week. I realize that shopping and cooking this way isn’t a realistic thing for many of you, but it’s what we do and while it can be exhausting, it has been fun and very worthwhile.

Shopping this way often leads to me changing up our meal plan for the week. Sometimes we’ll find something unexpected that I’ll want to buy and use right away, so dinners I had planned for the week will get shifted around or put off to the following week to accommodate new ingredients. It’s because of this that I’ve cooked guinea hen and chicken liver ragu, and it’s why when I make a lamb stew I now use neck bones rather than the cubed stew meat I would have selected previously (Karen from 3-Corner Field suggested it to me once and I haven’t looked back since). With meats in particular, shopping this way has made Mike and I start to look beyond steaks and chops and begin to experiment with more interesting cuts of meat; we hope to stretch our boundaries even more this year. We are meat eaters, and though I don’t anticipate that will change any time soon, we have given a lot of thought to the kinds of meat and other animal products in our diet and where they’re sourced from.

Mike has been vegetarian at various times during his life. I was a vegetarian from age 14 to 21, for reasons of squeamishness and taste – I just physically couldn’t tolerate the smell or texture of meat. Thankfully, it was during that time of my life that my love of cooking was blossoming, and with the help of The Moosewood Cookbook and other books and magazines, I was able to make myself soups and salads, pasta and bean and grain dishes, and not depend on processed faux-meats or prepackaged vegetarian dinners. My taste buds changed over time and I eventually added meat back into my diet, though I wasn’t giving much thought to how it was raised. I was a city kid, after all; the closest I ever got to cows and sheep and chickens was at the petting zoo, and the meat I grew up on came wrapped in plastic on Styrofoam trays.

My husband had a different experience growing up in southern Indiana. Mike’s grandparents raised hogs when he was a kid; he has memories of the butchering, and of eating ultra-fresh pork afterward. The only pork I had ever tasted had little to no flavor, so aside from bacon, I avoided it. Things changed after our first meal at Marlow and Sons. (Yes, I know I like to wax poetic about that place, but it really has had a huge impact on how we cook and eat at home.) Our neighborhood doesn’t have much of a dining scene, so we head to neighboring areas when we eat out. We had read about the oyster happy hour at Marlow and shortly after we moved to Bushwick, we decided to check it out.

I don’t remember what I ordered that night, because the memory of Mike’s entrée is burned into my memory (and probably his as well). Braised pork belly. I will never forget when he took that first bite – he closed his eyes and said “Oh my God,” and just sat there for a minute, eyes closed, slowly chewing. “This is what pork tastes like – this is what I remember pork tasting like.” That bite of pork had taken him back to his childhood, to the flavor of that ultra-fresh pork he’d eat at his grandparents’ place. I had to try it, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a revelation.

The chef was standing near the exit that night when we left, and we profusely and rather embarrassingly thanked her for the meal, for the gift of that pork, and from that point on, we decided that we would seek out the good stuff, and as it turned out, the pork that we found that actually had that flavor that Mike remembered from his childhood is the pork that is being produced by people who sell at the Greenmarket. Not only does it taste the best, as it happens it’s also raised with respect for the animal and for the environment. Talk about a win-win situation.

We started with pork, but we have since arrived at a point where almost all the meat we buy is meat that was raised on pasture, our seafood is local or harvested in ways that don’t damage the environment, our eggs are from chickens who roam free and eat what they like, and our butter, cream and milk are from grass-fed cows. These foods do cost more than their factory-farmed equivalents purchased at a supermarket, but it’s a price we’re willing to pay, and we feel very lucky that we are able to do so – not everyone can afford to shop this way exclusively if at all.

2008 is going to be a year of big changes for us, and as such our food budget will need some tweaking. I’m already thinking of ways that we can continue to buy the types of animal products we want, but stretch them so that, for instance, one $30 pork shoulder can go into several meals. We’ve played with ingredient cycles a bit already, but I expect we’ll do so even more in the coming months. We have and will continue to try to use as much of every ingredient we bring into our kitchen as possible, to buy less and use more. We already save vegetable trimmings and bones to make stocks, turn old bread into croutons and crumbs, freeze parmesan rinds to toss into soups, but I want to reduce our food waste even more, and we would both like to make our meals a bit less meat-centric.

Last Night’s Dinner came about as a sort of progression from the photos I had been taking to catalogue our dinners on a day-to-day basis, and it’s interesting to me to look back and realize just how often we eat meat. While I’m very comfortable with the kinds of meat we eat and where it comes from, I do feel that we can reduce our footprint (not to mention improve our health) if we rely more on the great beans, grains and vegetables available to us, making meat a component part of a meal rather than the main focus more often than not.

I guess you could say this is the official Last Night’s Dinner position on the subject; I thank you for indulging me and I certainly encourage questions, comments and further discussion. On a completely unrelated note, Mike and I are celebrating our second wedding anniversary this weekend, and we’re kicking it off tonight with dinner at Hearth. I wish you all a wonderful weekend – regular posting will resume next week!

After a couple of late nights at the office which screwed up my meal plan for the week, I was back in the kitchen last night and ready to get back on track. It’s braising season, and while we often turn to that method of cooking for meats and hearty winter greens, I’ve wanted to experiment with other vegetables.

Mike had great success with the braised duck and carrots dish he made over the weekend, and as it happened that dish played a part in our meal last night, specifically, I repurposed some of the braising liquid which we had saved from that dish, added a bit of white wine and grainy mustard, and used it to cook my leeks.

I browned them in a little butter first, then placed them into a baking dish, nestled in a few sprigs of thyme and poured over just enough liquid to come up to the top of the leeks. I placed the baking dish into the oven at 325 degrees until they were very tender and the liquid was slightly reduced, about half an hour or so.

While the leeks were braising, I also crisped up six slices of Prosciutto San Daniele on a Silpat-lined baking sheet for about 20 minutes, turning them once halfway through cooking. To plate, I placed two slices of the Prosciutto down on each plate, topped them with half of the leeks and a little of the reduced braising liquid, and topped each stack with a poached egg and plenty of freshly ground black pepper, finishing with a sprinkling of crumbled Prosciutto.

As experiments go, this was a big success – the leeks were sweet and meltingly tender, the crisp Prosciutto lent a nice textural contrast and welcome saltiness, and the yolk of the egg created a rich and silky dressing that brought it all together beautifully. Mike’s only complaint was that he would have liked more leeks, and I agree. I’m definitely going to make this again, and I’m looking forward to trying it with fennel, endive, and other vegetables.