Last Night’s Dinner

I’ve served salmon with lentils probably dozens of times since Mike and I have been sharing meals, and while it’s a great combination, last night I decided to change it up a bit. Since we were away last weekend and weren’t able to do our usual food safari, I had to stock up on a few provisions earlier in the week. I went a little crazy at Greenwich Produce, bringing home fingerling potatoes, Meyer lemons, little stem cherry tomatoes (I know, I know, but they were so pretty and jewel-like I couldn’t resist), red and golden beets, and a gorgeous bunch of rainbow chard. Since chard and lentils play so well together in soup, I thought I’d combine them to go alongside our salmon fillets.

I started by separating the chard stems from the leaves, trimming the bottoms and slicing the stems thinly. I sautéed them in a bit of olive oil along with a couple of smashed garlic cloves and a pinch of kosher salt until they were tender, and then added a cup of Puy lentils. I poured two cups of water into the pot, added a generous amount of fresh thyme, covered it and let it simmer over low heat. While the lentils were cooking, I rolled up the chard leaves like little cigars, sliced them into about 1 inch ribbons and gave them a good rinse, letting them drain but leaving a little water clinging to their leaves. When the lentils were tender and had absorbed almost all of the liquid in the pot, I added the chard leaves, gently stirring them through until they were just wilted. I dribbled in a little sherry vinegar, gave it another stir, and spooned the mixture onto our plates, topping them with our salmon and a quick little pan sauce of sharp Dijon mustard, white wine, and lemon juice with a knob of cold butter whisked in at the end.

The salmon was great but I really loved the chard and lentil combo. It was quick and wholesome and would actually make a great meal on its own, topped with a little feta or goat cheese (or one of my favorite poached eggs). I liked it so well, in fact, that I’ve packed the leftovers for my lunch today. As Terry B can attest, sometimes the side dish really is the star of the show.

It’s always a drag getting caught up at work after time away, but we got a bit of good news yesterday which melted my stress right away. I didn’t have anything specific planned for dinner, so when I swung through the market at Grand Central to pick up provisions, I decided to splurge a bit. I picked up a pound of lump crab meat and a container of crème fraiche at Wild Edibles, remembering the box of frozen artichoke hearts at home in the freezer, with thoughts of combining them in a rich and creamy gratin. I took the ‘chokes out to thaw when I arrived home and got to work on the rest of the dish. I spooned the crème fraiche into a large bowl and lightened it with the juice of half a Meyer lemon. I seasoned it with a bit of kosher salt and added a copious amount of chopped fresh herbs – thyme, chervil and chives. I picked through the crab meat and added that to the bowl, then added my thawed, drained artichoke hearts, folding the mixture gently. I divided it into two buttered baking dishes and topped each serving with some grated Fontina cheese, then baked them in a 400 degree oven until they were browned and bubbly – about 25 minutes or so. This gratin was definitely luxurious and very good, though next time I think I’ll go a little heavier on the lemon juice to balance out the creaminess of the crab.

I forgot to mention it, but we went away again this weekend. I’m a little distracted and in the process of digging out, but I’ll leave you with a few photos:

A delicious salad of roasted beets, beet greens, quinoa and cornichons with guanciale vinaigrette.

It’s a waffle. With foie gras. And maple syrup. Oh yes.

Tasty little sandwiches. We had one of each.

The best cocktail we had all weekend. Which sadly, isn’t saying much.

Home again, and dinner was a very uncomplicated affair: black-eyed peas, collards with smoked paprika and sherry vinegar, and a poached egg. Nothing fancy, just good, satisfying food.

I’m slowly getting back in the swing of things and hope to resume regular posting tomorrow. Hope you all had a great weekend!

This post was going to be all about my love affair with Anson Mills grits, and how excited I was to finally get my hands on some and cook them at home, but then a little something weird and wonderful happened.

See, I wanted to approximate the creamy texture of the grits I get at places like iCi and egg, so I decided cooking my grits in plain water just wouldn’t do. I got out a heavy bottomed pot and put in a little over 2 cups of Evans Creamery milk, a healthy dollop of their butter, and a cup of good old Brooklyn tap water. I covered the pot and turned the burner to medium heat, then turned my attention to prepping the rest of our meal.

I turned back to my pot after a few minutes and gave it a stir to incorporate the melted butter, and it looked a little strange. For some reason that I still can’t quite figure out, the milk had separated into curds and whey, and when I stirred it the curds stretched and came together to form a mozzarella-like ball. I was curious so I pulled it out of the pot with a slotted spoon and tasted it. To my surprise and delight, it was good, very fresh and milky. I set it in a little ramekin to cool, and later wrapped the ball tightly in plastic wrap and set it in the fridge while I finished making dinner.

I went ahead and cooked the grits in the remaining liquid in the pot, and they turned out beautifully. I stirred in a little grated cheese (Mecox Bay Sigit and Evans Chenango Jack) at the end and spooned them into bowls, topping them with some of the pork shoulder Mike made earlier in the week, which I shredded and reheated in some of its braising liquid along with a splash each of rye whiskey and sherry vinegar.

This was a good, hearty meal on a cold night and a great use of leftover pork, but I have to say the highlight of the night for me wasn’t a successful first go at making cheesy grits at home – it was the accidental cheese.

Last week I finally bought a copy of Nigel Slater’s “Real Fast Food,” and I have to say I fell immediately in love with it. I love the fact that it’s compact enough to fit in my (admittedly large) purse so I can peruse it on the subway, and I love the fact that it’s less a collection of “recipes” and more a collection of really fantastic ideas on how to put together ingredients to get something quick and delicious on the table. Life has been hectic lately, and I’ve begun to feel like I’ve fallen into a bit of a rut, but reading this book has been rejuvenating.

Mike, too, has become a big fan of this book, and when he spotted this recipe for Kidneys Cooked with Sherry, he asked me to work it into our meal plan sooner rather than later. I put some fingerlings on to boil when I got home from work last night and then left the kitchen to my husband. As promised, the dish came together quickly and with a minimal amount of fuss, and it was just delicious. Now, if you’re not a fan of organ meats, the texture and rich flavor of the kidneys might be a bit of a challenge, but I found them to be much more mellow than, say, chicken livers, and the sweetness of the onions and sherry provided a lovely contrast.

Kidneys Cooked with Sherry
(for 2, with mashed potatoes)
From Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater

8 lamb kidneys, halved and cores removed*
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon flour
1 wineglass of dry sherry (about 1/2 cup)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Drop the kidneys into the lemon juice and mix well. Leave for at least 10 minutes.

Heat the olive oil in a shallow pan and cook the onion until soft and translucent, about 5-7 minutes. Add the garlic and cook briefly over a medium heat. Turn the heat up to boil away any liquid. Drain the kidneys, dry them on a paper towel, and add them to the pan. Brown the kidneys on all sides, then stir in the flour and add the sherry with an equal amount of water. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the parsley, taste, and season with salt and pepper.

*The package of kidneys we picked up over the weekend was a little over half a pound and contained 4 kidneys. We felt like we had enough to satisfy us, but we would have liked more so next time around we’ll be sure to buy two packages.

I had hoped to give my system a bit of a break after our Valentine’s Day gut-buster of a meal, but I ended up doing quite the opposite. I kicked off my long weekend early, taking Friday afternoon off to enjoy a long, leisurely lunch with the lovely and delightful claudia of cook eat FRET fame. We met at A Voce, and bonded over two glasses of wine each and a steady flow of excellent plates – three appetizers, two pastas, and a positively swoon-worthy dessert. The food was fantastic, and I’d highly recommend A Voce to anyone looking for a nice place to dine in the city, but really, my dining companion was my favorite part of lunch. I haven’t smiled and laughed like that in far too long, and I look forward to the next time claudia and I can share a meal.

Since Mike and I had both had lunch dates on Friday, we did go a little light on dinner, nibbling on wild Portuguese sardines in piri piri, crackers, olives, good bread and a bit of cheese. We had a full day of running around ahead on Saturday, starting with a visit to Anne for our bread, eggs, milk and cheese for the week, and we ended up ferrying half a wheel of Bartlett Blue up to Karen at Union Square as a favor. In return, we got free cheese from Anne and the lamb kidneys we planned to purchase from Karen were comped as well. Nice. We had plans Saturday night but ended up staying in, too wiped out from the day’s activities, both of us feeling a bit under the weather. I whipped up a quick pasta toss, melting a little butter into some olive oil, sizzling garlic in it until golden, then adding chopped anchovies and capers to the mix. I tossed the sauce with some hot cooked linguine and topped the dressed pasta with coarse toasted breadcrumbs spiked with hot Dijon mustard.

On Sunday we picked up a Zipcar for the day, made a Target run, then headed down to Red Hook to stock up on some much needed provisions at LeNell’s and grab dinner at The Good Fork. No photos, but our appetizers and entrees were excellent across the board. If there was an easier way for us to get down there I think we’d be there all the time.

We woke early on Monday to ferry a few things over to the Salvation Army in Williamsburg, then enjoyed a big breakfast at egg and headed home to work on our remaining projects for the weekend. Mike returned the car and did some work on our computer setup, while I cleaned, culled and reorganized around the apartment. The day was unseasonably warm, so we opened windows and our back door to let in the fresh air while we worked. We were hungry again by mid-afternoon, so I put together some sandwiches using the last bits of tapenade we had in the fridge, some lightly pickled red onions, and some fontina, mortadella and sopressata we picked up over the weekend.

I had planned to make some gooey, cheesy enchiladas for dinner on Monday night, but when a delivery man arrived at our door bearing a shipment of Rancho Gordo beans, I veered in a different direction. The warmth of the day was fading and rains were moving in, so a big pot of beefy chili felt like just the thing. Chili is one of those things that I never make quite the same way twice, but I was so pleased with how this batch turned out I decided to take notes. It’s a bit time-intensive what with the use of the dried beans, but I think the flavor and texture are well worth it.

Before I get to the recipe, let me just say hello and welcome to any of you who have wandered over here from REAL SIMPLE. What a nice surprise to be mentioned and what an honor to be in such great company. I hope you like what you see here!

Beef and Black Bean Chili

1/2 lb. dried black beans (I used Rancho Gordo’s Black Valentine)
Cold water
1 bay leaf
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2 tbsp. olive or vegetable oil
1 red onion, peeled and diced
3 large cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
Kosher salt
1 lb. ground beef (I used grass-fed ground beef from Hardwick)
3 tablespoons good-quality chile powder (I used Mike’s homemade blend, based on Alton Brown’s version)
3 teaspoons ground cumin
3 teaspoons dried oregano
1/2-1 teaspoon ground chipotle powder
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 28 oz. can fire-roasted whole tomatoes with juice
1 bottle amber ale (I used Abita)
2 tablespoons canned green chiles, chopped
—————————————–
Shredded cheese, sour cream and scallions for serving

Place beans in a pot, add the bay leaf and a generous amount of cold water. Cover and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to the lowest temperature possible and continue cooking the beans until they are very tender. Discard bay leaf.

Add the oil to a deep, heavy-bottomed soup pot and add the onion, seasoning with salt and cooking until softened. Add the garlic and cook just until fragrant, then add the ground beef, breaking it up with a spoon. Add a bit more salt and cook the meat until it loses its raw red color, then add the chile powder, cumin, oregano and chipotle powder, stirring through to coat the meat. Let cook over medium heat a few minutes longer, then make a hot spot and add the tomato paste, allowing it to toast before stirring it through. Add the tomatoes, breaking them up with a spoon, then add the beer and chiles. Drain the beans and add them to the pot, stirring well. Cover and simmer over low heat for an hour or more. Serve with your favorite sharp cheese, sour cream, and sliced scallions – a squeeze of fresh lime juice would also be good but we were out of limes.

Happy post-Valentine’s Day! I hope you are all basking in the afterglow of whatever sort of fun you engaged in yesterday.

In the nearly five years that Mike and I have been together, we have never gone out to dinner on Valentine’s Day. In fact, with the exception of our traditional anniversary meal at Marlow and Sons, we prefer dining in on most real or manufactured holidays. It gives us a chance to do a bit of “stunt cooking,” trying new preparations and working with higher-end ingredients. When brainstorming ideas for our meal, I looked back through a long list of bookmarked recipes. I came across a photoset of the mini Beef Wellingtons the dynamic duo over at Married with Dinner had prepared over the Christmas holiday and it sounded like just what I was looking for. I mean, really, filets of beef, mushroom duxelles, puff pastry, foie gras… what’s not to love? As it turned out it was an extremely easy dish to put together on a weeknight since the most labor-intensive stuff could be done ahead of time.

Mike mixed up a batch of pastry dough on Wednesday, experimenting with a mix of half butter and half rendered leaf lard, but he was a little unsure about how well it would work for the Wellingtons, so I picked up an emergency back-up package of DuFour all butter puff pastry. He seared the filets in our cast iron skillet when he got home from work on Thursday and set them in the fridge to chill, and I prepared the duxelles in the same pan when he was finished. Once the mushrooms and meat were both well-chilled, I rolled out the pastry and got ready to assemble, layering the duxelles and filets on top of the pastry, topping each with a slice of foie gras, sealing them up and brushing them with a bit of egg wash before placing them into a preheated 400 degree oven.

Because of the thickness of our filets, I let them bake for about 18 minutes before removing them and letting them rest while I sautéed a handful of green beans and made a quick pan sauce, again using our cast iron skillet. I combined about half a cup of red wine and an equal amount of Bobolink’s suckled veal demi-glace, reducing it until it was thick and syrupy, and finishing it with a knob of cold butter before spooning it onto our plates, setting the Wellingtons on top.

This was a truly luxurious meal, and as it turned out, when we added the cost of the filets of grass-fed Angus beef from Elk Trails, the tin of D’Artagnan duck foie gras, the puff pastry, the ingredients for the duxelles and pan sauce and the bottle of wine we picked up to go with it, we actually spent less than we do on most dinners out at our regular haunts. Nice, and we didn’t have to worry about disapproving stares when we mopped up the last little bits of pan sauce/beef juices/melty foie gras with our fingers.

Wine Pairing: Once we decided what we were cooking, we made a beeline for Uva Wines and asked wine guy Dan to recommend a bottle. We wanted something a little splurgier than normal, and he had a few good suggestions in our price range. He went to retrieve a bottle we had selected from the cellar but returned with that and another option, this 1999 Billard-Gonnet Pommard Premier Cru. One of the other store employees had recommended it as a great wine and a good match for our meal, and because it had a few more years in the bottle than the other wine we were considering, we decided to go for it. It was a delicious wine, round and velvety in the mouth with aromas of dark fruit and leather.

With Mike and I both working on prep for our Valentine’s Day dinner, I wanted to keep dinner really simple last night. We picked up some beautiful fennel pollen sausage from Violet Hill last weekend, and my original plan was to make a pot of sausage, white bean & kale soup, but I forgot to pre-soak the beans and we didn’t have any canned in the cupboard, so I went for a pasta toss. I removed the sausage from its casings, crumbled it and cooked it down until it was browned, then added a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, coating the sausage with it and letting it caramelize. I added one head of kale, chopped, to the pan and sautéed it until it was bright green and tender, added salt and a little pasta water, then tossed in my cooked pasta. I added some freshly grated parm off the heat before serving. This was nothing fancy, just a good, hearty meal for a chilly night.

I’ve been tweaking a lot of my favorite standards lately; last Saturday’s mac & cheese, for instance, was made with more bechamel than I have traditionally used, making it extra creamy and luxurious, and I also used a different blend of cheeses, adding a blue and a creamy cheese to the mix. When planning our meals for the week, I decided to reserve the remnants of a Poilane loaf I brought home on Friday and use it for one of our other favorite comfort food dinners - a savory bread pudding - and I decided to play around with my usual recipe.

We had a couple of leeks in the fridge that I wanted to use up, so I chopped those and sautéed them with half a pound of chopped thickly sliced pancetta. That got tossed with my cubed bread, along with a handful of chopped fresh sage. I fiddled with the proportions in my custard, combining six eggs with two cups of whole milk, one cup of heavy cream, a little kosher salt and a couple of tablespoons of Colman’s dry mustard. I added my cheeses to this - about a cup each of grated Parmagiano Reggiano and Mecox Bay Dairy Sigit (a really delicious Alpine-style cheese), then poured the mixture over my bread cubes. After a bit of tossing and squishing, I transferred the mixture to a buttered baking dish, added a bit more grated cheese on top and placed it into the oven, baking it at 375 until it was puffy and browned.

Though parts of the bottom got a little over-browned, this was probably my favorite bread pudding yet, rich and creamy in the center, with crisp edges and a crusty, cheesy top. I will probably use this base going forward, but I need to remember to let the pudding rest a bit longer once it comes out of the oven - that added creaminess makes for a molten hot center and steam burns on the roof of the mouth are no fun.

After the long week we had, I was really feeling the need for some inspiration, so on Saturday morning Mike and I headed into the city to do a food safari. After brunch and a quick stop at Uva to pick up a good bottle of wine for our Valentine’s Day dinner, we went into the city to go to the Greenmarket at Union Square. With Mike working so close I don’t go there as often as I used to, so I was anxious to see what sort of treasures we could find at the winter market.

I was delighted to see Yuno’s Farm there on a one-off winter appearance. They weren’t selling a wide variety of things, but I was immediately drawn to these beautiful young mustard greens with their spiky green and violet leaves (which reminded me of a Disney villainess). I filled a bag and moved on, already beginning to change my plans for our meatless Monday dinner.

By the time we finished our shopping, we had a beautiful selection of root vegetables, grass-fed Angus fillets and pork sausages for later in the week, and those beautiful greens. We headed home with our bounty, ducking in to Essex Market to visit our favorite cheese goddess, and I revamped our meal plan for the week.

Since my recent experiments with roasting beets have been so well received, I decided to roast them again along with some multicolored potatoes and carrots and Silver Queen turnips from Windfall Farm. I tossed my roasted vegetables with a mustard vinaigrette and placed them on a bed of our mustard greens, then topped them off with a poached egg.

I was pleased enough with how these salads came out - they were certainly pretty to look at and the texture of the roasted vegetables and creamy egg worked well together - but I would have liked a little more flavor contrast, perhaps from a bit of sharp or tangy cheese or a punchier vinaigrette. This is definitely a dish we’ll have again.