Last Night’s Dinner

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t have much patience for pastry, for the precision and measuring it requires, but I’m lucky that my husband does. A couple of months ago, we teamed up to make Gourmet’s Onion Tart with Mustard and Fennel, and it was a big hit with us.

Mike was really looking forward to revisiting the crust recipe once we got settled in and finally set up Big Red, and last night he did just that. For the topping, I sliced and crisped up two strips of Simmons Farm bacon, then softened three sliced leeks in the rendered fat. I mixed about half a cup of Renaissance Ricotta with about 2 oz. of young fresh goat cheese until they were well incorporated, and spread the cheeses over the crust, adding the leeks and bacon on top. I baked the crust in a 400 degree oven for about half an hour.

Though the texture of the dough was a bit stickier when raw than the first time Mike made it, he was really pleased with how it turned out, and so was I. It was light and tender when baked, with a great texture and flavor. I think we can safely add this crust recipe to our go-to list, as it’s easy to put together and will make a great base for a wide variety of toppings.

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.

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.

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.

(Thanks to the fact that we are now a two-laptop family, I can post what we’ve eaten right now - it’s like live-blogging dinner!)

I’m still hobbling around on my injured foot, and to add insult to injury, I have a full-blown, massive head cold. Since I was feeling so very unwell when I got home from work, Mike offered to make the mac & cheese I had planned for tonight’s dinner. I walked him through it and he did a spectacular job. (Thanks again, love!)

One significant change to my usual method: our neighbors had borrowed the deep baking dish I usually use for mac & cheese, so Mike baked it in the cast iron skillet instead. It turned out so well that I think we’ll use this method from now on.

I’m trying to stay upbeat about the fact that winter is staring me square in the face, really I am, but it’s getting mighty difficult. First off is the fact that Mike and I both seem to be fighting colds, our second colds of this young season. My head is stuffy, my sense of taste is dulled, and gosh it’s hard to get excited about putting together a meal that we will likely neither smell nor taste fully. I’ve got a case of the blahs, and is it just me or did I cook nothing but a week of brown-ish dinners? Yeah. Blah.

Dinner last night was neither colorful nor particularly inspired; in fact, it was a result of pulling a bag of this and a container of that and another container of some such out of our fridge and freezer, adding a boatload of veggies and tossing it all together. Those veggies came first, a combination of chopped leek, a few multicolored carrots and a parsnip, all cut into about 1/2 inch chunks. I sautéed them in a bit of butter, seasoned them with salt, and then covered them with a quart of our most recent batch of homemade chicken stock. We had some shredded cooked chicken in the freezer which I had thawed earlier, and I added that to the pot as well, then I lidded up the pot and let it come to a boil.

I wanted to thicken the stock a bit, but I didn’t want to go with something as rich as cream, so I decided to make a slurry of one part flour to about one and a half parts buttermilk, which I shook up in an old jam jar and then whisked into the boiling liquid. At this point I could have added some rice or pasta or beans to the pot, but I had decided I wanted dumplings, and rather than make a fresh batch, I thought I’d try using something we already had on hand: ricotta gnudi left over from the batch I made for Valentine’s Day, which had been individually frozen on a cookie sheet and stashed in a freezer bag (and which I had pulled out to thaw the night before along with the aforementioned chicken). I added the gnudi to the still-boiling broth, turning them gently with a spoon as they cooked. After a few minutes, I ladled some of the chicken and creamy broth into our bowls, then carefully nestled a couple of dumplings in the center of each.

I hate to even call this a recipe, because honestly, all I really did here was remix some odds and ends, but you know, it worked. I’d even go so far as to say it was quite good, satisfying our craving for something comforting without being super rich or heavy, and I really do believe that a good dumpling can chase the doldrums right away.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I generally plan our meals for the week in advance, sketching out which meal I want to serve on which night, but leaving a little wiggle room in case we need to switch things up. I had a porktastic duo scheduled for last night, utilizing some of the leftover roast pork I made over the weekend, as well as some delicious baked ham from a previous meal, which I had pulled from the freezer and thawed. I’m not kidding you when I say I was excited for this dinner – I thought about it all day and my mouth was watering. I Could. Not. Wait.

So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I got home from work, headed into the kitchen, flung open the refrigerator door to get started and realized that at some point over the last few days, I had put the remaining pork roast into the freezer.

Say it with me, people: “GAAAAAAH!”

My beautiful leftover roast pork was solid as a rock, and with no good way to defrost it quickly, the dinner I had been craving all day would have to wait. And I needed to come up with a Plan B, fast.

We didn’t have anything else thawed that I could prepare instead. I didn’t want to do yet another risotto. I’ve got a pasta dish scheduled for tonight, and while Mike and I both love the stuff, having pasta two nights in a row wasn’t really appealing to us. The takeout options in our little corner of Bushwick aren’t great, and to go out to eat would require us to get on a bus or train for 20 minutes or more. It was late, I was tired, and I just didn’t want to deal with it.

Mike mixed us each a Jack Rose and we sat and thought about what to do. We had enough ham that I could use some of it tonight and still have enough left over for future use. We had potatoes. We had plenty of dairy – butter and cream, and we’ve always got cheese. Why not make a gratin?

I pulled out my deep baking dish, buttered it, set the oven temp to 400, and started chopping, ending up with about 2 cups of ham, cut into about 1/2 inch cubes, and about 4 cups of small Yukon Golds, sliced into 1/4 inch thick rounds. I placed one layer of potato slices in the bottom of the baking dish, sprinkled the ham on top, and then scattered about a cup of grated gruyere over that. I topped it with a layer of the remaining potato slices. I whisked together 12 oz. of half and half, 1/2 cup of crème fraiche, salt, black pepper and a teaspoon of Colman’s mustard powder, added a cup of little green peas I had blanched and frozen over the summer, and poured it over the potatoes and ham. I sealed the baking dish with foil, and put it in the oven for 40 minutes, then pulled it out, removed the foil, added another layer of grated gruyere, some grated parmesan and fresh thyme, and placed it back in the oven for about 15 minutes until the top was golden and bubbly.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out, and I have to say the next time I make a gratin I will take the extra step of making an actual Mornay sauce for it, but despite the rather “broken” cream sauce I ended up with here and the fact that it’s not the prettiest thing I’ve made, our dinner was a tasty, filling, and satisfying meal – not at all bad for a last minute substitution.

It occurred to me as I started to put this post together that the very first time I prepared this dish was for the first Thanksgiving Mike and I ever spent together. I was still living in Boston at the time, and we had planned to spend the long holiday weekend together in New York as well as to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for ourselves and a couple of friends. One of those friends was a vegetarian, so I wanted to prepare something that would serve as both a veggie side for us and a substantial main course for her, and thus my roasted vegetable and gruyere tart was born.

This is almost embarrassingly simple to put together – just cut up a variety of autumn vegetables (I used a mixture of tiny Brussels sprouts, parsnips, multicolored carrots, butternut squash, and crimini and chanterelle mushrooms) into roughly the same size, toss them with salt and a bit of olive oil, and roast them in a 375 degree oven until tender, about 40 minutes. Sprinkle a generous amount of fresh thyme and chopped fresh sage over the veggies and gently toss. Roll out your crust and place into a lightly oiled pie plate, leaving a bit of overlap around the edges (I generally use good quality prepared pie crust or, as I did last night, all butter puff pastry. Feel free to use homemade crust if that’s your thing). Spread about half a cup of grated gruyere cheese on the crust, add your veggies, sprinkle a bit more cheese on top and fold over the loose edges of the crust. Place back into the oven (at 400 degrees) for about 20 minutes, until the crust is golden, then slice into wedges and serve. As a side dish or main course, it’s simple enough for a weeknight dinner, but nice enough for company – a real double-duty gem.

We took a break from our duck cycle last night for a meatless Monday dinner of mushroom lasagna. Last night was damp and chilly, and while this wasn’t exactly a quick and easy weeknight dinner, it was a perfect night for a rich, baked and layered pasta dish. This was a bit of an experiment; my standard lasagna is a more traditional Bolognese version and I wasn’t really working from a recipe here, so while it needs a bit of tweaking I was mostly pleased with the result. I started by soaking some dried porcinis and slicing about a pound of fresh mushrooms (a mixture of criminis, chanterelles and shiitakes). I sautéed some chopped shallot in a mixture of butter and olive oil until soft, and then added the mushrooms and a pinch of salt. When the mushrooms had browned and cooked down a bit, I added a tablespoon of tomato paste to the pan to caramelize, then stirred it through and added the liquid I had strained and reserved from soaking the dried porcini. I added a generous amount of fresh thyme and let the mixture cook until almost all of the liquid was gone, then transferred the mushrooms to a bowl and set them aside.

I made a béchamel in the same pan I had used to cook the mushrooms, enriching it with about a cup each of finely grated Fontina and Parmagiano Reggiano cheeses. When the cheeses were melted and the sauce was smooth, I began layering: a bit of olive oil rubbed in the bottom and sides of my baking dish, a bit of béchamel, and a layer of partially cooked egg pasta sheets, then béchamel, mushrooms, sliced fresh mozzarella and another layer of pasta. I repeated the layers, finishing with the remaining béchamel, mozzarella, and a grating of parm on top, then placed the lasagna into a preheated 400 degree oven for about half an hour, until browned and bubbly. I let the lasagna rest for about 10 minutes before serving.

I wasn’t entirely pleased with the texture of the pasta sheets I used, and I think the dish could have used a bit more béchamel than I made, but overall, the flavors were there and this was a tasty and satisfying meal – it’s definitely a recipe worth working on.

My standard macaroni and cheese, dressed up with a little crispy bacon and served with a side of sautéed rainbow chard - another of Mike’s favorite meals.