Linzatortoise

This one’s for my dad.  If it weren’t for my dad, I would not today, nor ever before, nor probably ever again, make a Linzer torte.  It’s just too…much…butter.  Plus, I really need my dad around to grind the walnuts for me.  That’s the deal.  I, at my father’s compulsion, create a masterpiece, but only if he grinds the walnuts.  And then we all sit around and talk about how much butter we just ate and how delicious it was.  Somehow my grandfather never experienced this ritual until today: “What’d you call that thing?  A linzatortoise?”

This all started at least 17 years ago (we regret to inform you that the grease-stained Saveur page shown above lacks a date), when my dad came across Maria von Trapp’s recipe for Linzer torte.  What’s a Linzer torte?  I didn’t know; I was 10.  But with Maria Von Trapp as my second most venerated heroine, if she liked it, I liked it.  And so the linzertorte replaced ye olde standard biscuit as Parrish’s contribution to the Bergquist family table.  We are all called to something.  My dad has called me at least five times in the past week to remind me to bring my tart pan home with me for Thanksgiving.

What I love about Linzer torte is the crust.  It’s full of chopped walnuts, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, and the magic (butter) to melt in your mouth without falling apart in the pan.  The crust is nutty against the jam filling’s tanginess; the whole thing tastes bright and golden.  Like all the best indulgences, you know (because you SAW what you put in it) that you shouldn’t eat it every day, but it feels light enough to eat today.

What I hate about Linzer torte is the crust.  It is soft and buttery and absolutely cantankerous when you try to roll it out, which isn’t a problem until you get to the basketweave top crust.  To make the bottom crust, you press dough into the bottom and sides of a tart pan.

But, once you get to the top crust, you have to roll six flat strips of dough and lay them daintily across the top of the filling without tearing them or letting them stick to your fingers or to the counter, and you can’t leave ugly fat or skinny sections because then you’re just laying yourself at your oven’s mercy.  It reminds me of playing with melted play-doh before I had developed fine motor skills.  However, I am here to tell you that I have perfected the technique.  Refrigerate the dough for 15-30 minutes before rolling the strips.  Then take each of six uniformly sized bits of dough, and, working with light hands, roll it into a log on a lightly floured countertop.  Once you have a log of about 1/2 inch in diameter and almost as long as you need it, lightly flatten it with a rolling pin.  Carefully lift it and lay it over the filled bottom crust.  If this is easy for you, congratulations: you are daintier than I, and I shall call you “Maria.”

My favorite part of the LT-making process is taking the tart out of the pan.  Set the pan on a bowl (smaller in diameter than the pan itself), and slide the removable side ring down.  Remember back in the days of film cameras, when you used to go pick up 3-day photo prints?  Remember that anticipation and relief when you opened the envelope of photos?  Relive that moment.  Make a Linzer torte.

And that is pretty much that.  I didn’t have cloves today, so I applied a tidbit from a Linzer torte article in this week’s New Yorker.  Lemon zest.  Always a welcome addition.  And then, although we shouldn’t have, we did, and it was delicious.

Linzer torte, the von Trapp way:

1 1/2 cup flour

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground cloves

(1/4 tsp grated lemon zest–my addition)

3/4 cup finely ground walnuts

12 tbsp unsalted butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg

1/3 cup red currant jelly

1/3 cup raspberry jam

2 tbsp sliced almonds

confectioners’ sugar

1. Combine flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and walnuts in a bowl.  Mix well and set aside.
2. Beat butter with an electric mixer on medium speed.  Gradually add sugar and beat until mixture is fluffy.  Beat in egg, reduce speed, and add flour mixture, mixing until just combined (dough will be soft and sticky).
3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Butter and flour a 9″ tart pan with a removable bottom.  Flour your hands and press half the dough into the bottom of the pan.  Press half of the remaining dough into the sides of the pan.  Form the remaining dough into six balls and store in refrigerator, 15-30 minutes.
4. Combine jelly and jam in a bowl.  Mix well and spoon into crust.
5. With floured hands, roll out one of 6 remaining balls of dough on a lightly floured surface until it is 9″ long.  Lay it across filling.  Repeat with each ball of dough, one at a time, and crisscross strips of dough over filling (three strips each way), pinch side and top crusts together, and sprinkle with almonds.
6. Bake until crust is golden, 30 minutes.  Cool, remove from pan, and dust with sugar.

Love it.

Pumpkin Manicotti…on a TUESDAY?

So, I have a couple of problems.  1) I keep forgetting to take pictures of my food.  2) When I get something in my head, there’s not a lot that can keep me from making it happen.  As in, why would I make manicotti from scratch on a tuesday, when I’m behind on reading and sleep-deprived and facing a couple of deadlines?  Well, partly it’s because those deadlines are looming in the hazy distance, like headlights on a pre-dawn highway–if they were glaring me in the face I would NOT be making manicotti.  But also I just kinda can’t NOT.  Last time I made manicotti, I left my entire wallet on the bus on the way to work because I got so excited about the recipe (Lydia!!!  Why?!).

I ate pumpkin manicotti about a month ago at this vegetarian restaurant Seva in Ann Arbor, and I’ve been wanting to re-create it ever since.  Last week, a friend gifted me two sugar pumpkins that came in his CSA box.  Said friend and I were both going to be meeting a study group this tuesday, so, before I could think about whether I really wanted to be rolling pasta on a TUESDAY, I went ahead and proposed that we study at my house and I’d make us dinner.  On Monday before said tuesday (also known as yesterday), I faced reality and almost bailed.  I suggested that maybe we should stick with the original plan and meet at a bar.  Then I remembered those two sugar pumpkins waiting on my counter, and how they deserved to be treated right and turned into something amazing.  So I made a bargain with myself to buy manicotti noodles instead of going ground-up, and I hit Kroger between my 10 AM class and my 1 PM meeting.

Aaaand they didn’t have manicotti noodles at Kroger.  Then I spent most of my afternoon today rolling pasta, roasting pumpkin, and making bechamel sauce.  But I’m here to tell you it was totally worth it.  No pictures, but you can look at the ones in the recipe.  I used arugula instead of spinach (which I recommend), and pretty significantly increased my pumpkin-to-cheesiness ratio in the filling (I had two pumpkins and used them both; the recipe only calls for one).  I might even try making it even pumpkinier next time around by reducing the cheese a bit more, and I’d add a bit of white pepper to the bechamel sauce, but overall this recipe was a HUGE WIN.  The nutmeg, sage, mild cheeses and cream, and pumpkin all complement each other beautifully to create a balanced, smooth, delicate, and distinctive dish.  It’s also really easy to do in segments.  I peeled and roasted the pumpkin and put together the bechamel sauce, barely made it to a meeting, then mixed up and rolled out the pasta, went to another meeting, boiled the pasta, assembled the whole thing, and boom.  Done.  Pour some white wine, and study session go.

I called it a productive afternoon because of the increased efficiency I will gain tomorrow (due to loss of time today), and because I spent most of it listening to the Diane Rehm Show and Talk of the Nation.  That works…right?  Hooray for autumnal deliciousness!!!

Marshmallows, fondue, and mustaches

So, speaking of community, as it turns out, graduate school is a great place for it.  A few friends of mine decided that, while we’re here going into lots of debt, depriving ourselves of sleep, and probably driving ourselves to alcoholism all for the cause of saving the world in one way or another, we should really be spending time talking to each other about what we’re doing here and what we don’t know about what we’re doing here, in the hopes of helping each other figure it out and motivating each other when it gets a little boggish. (Yep, that sentence is not what we call ‘tight writing.’ I burned out on that last friday).  Hence, we’ve set aside some time on sunday nights for a little mini salon, the first of which was tonight.  For which chocolate fondue was made.  And what better to dip in chocolate fondue but…

…homemade marshmallows.  Which I have never made.  Deb had me truly nervous.  Her take on the endeavor?  “The paddle was gunked to the bowl and the scraper was glued to the paddle and then — and it is my duty to implore you not to do this at home — you think, “well, I’ll just wipe off the paddle with my index finger” and then your index finger gets knit to the scraper and then you think “well, let me use my other finger to wipe this one off” and all of a sudden, you’ve got strands of marshmallow strung from each finger to the bowl, the mixer, the paddle, the scraper, each corner of the pan, your shirt, the floor…”

And then her husband comes in with coffee and a camera.  I managed to avoid most of that mess, although I did have a brief moment of panic when I dumped the hot, syrupy, caramelly sugar mixture into the gelatin/cold water mixture.  I bought a candy thermometer at Kroger this morning, but I needed 240 degrees F, and my thermometer only went up to 220…this was the moment of truth.  But in the end, I only left about 1/6 of the mixture in the bowl at the end, there was a light dusting of powdered sugar all over my kitchen, I generated an obscene number of dishes to wash, and the marshmallows were strangely flat.  BUT, I must say, they were quite delightful when dipped in chocolate fondue with a banana slice, a gingersnap, or all by their lonesome selves.  Most importantly though, we ate them with character mustaches on while talking about the varied ways we all came to find ourselves in this program, came up with at least six Big Little Questions we could spend hours discussing, and I can’t wait for next sunday, 9 PM.  There will be costumes.  And not just because it’s Halloween.

Also there are about a bajillion marshmallows leftover so I will be eating some epic fluffernutter sandwiches this week.  Make these.  Use Deb’s recipe.  Linked above.  All I have to add is: you can do it with just one mixer.  But make it a powerful one.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Pasta! And a delicious salad, too.

My little sister Sunnie came home for fall break and I was lucky to get to spend some quality time with her.  In her short stay we were able to visit a rockin’ pumpkin patch, do some thrifting, and spend an evening cooking and baking.

The pumpkin patch at Hollin Farm is pretty fantastic.  This isn’t Pigboy Willy’s Parking Lot Pumpkin Patch.  This is a beautiful farm nestled in the hills of Delaplane, VA where you walk (or in my case, trip) around pumpkins still growing on their vines.  My mom, sister, and I made our choices then headed to the “pick your own greens” portion of the farm.  Here we “harvested” delicious salad greens, radishes, and the feature of this blog post: beets!

If you don’t think you like beets, give them a try. Sunnie didn’t like beets until… oh… 3 hours ago, and she was pleasantly surprised.

We prepared our handpicked beets by roasting them in a shallow water bath for about 30 minutes.  Unlike supermarket beets, our beets were small, so the roasting time was relatively short.  We sliced these into bite-sized pieces and made an amazing salad using the greens and radishes we picked and drizzled it all with a light balsamic vinaigrette.

The beet greens themselves were beautiful so we incorporated them into dinner as well.  I saute spinach and fold it into my pasta all the time, so I thought beet greens might work out the same way.  I neglected the fact that beet greens bleed bright red just as much as beets.  The result?  A delightfully light pink pasta.  Or what my sister has fondly dubbed “Breast Cancer Awareness Month Pasta.”

Roasted Beet Salad

1 lb roasted beets, sliced
1 large bowl of salad greens (we used a spring mix with lots of arugula–delish)
4 oz crumbled goat cheese
1/8 cup pecans (or walnuts), lightly toasted
1 large radish (or 2-3 small ones), sliced

Combine all ingredients with a vinaigrette of your choice and enjoy!

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Pasta

1lb pasta (we had the luxury of making some fettuccine from scratch)
1lb cooked beet greens
3-5 tbs cheese (we used both goat and parm)
Salt & pepper

Cook pasta and beet greens and toss together to combine.  Fold in a few tablespoons of cheese and add salt & pepper to taste.  Enjoy with girlfriends.  Get edumacated.

The Salty Chocolate Oat Cookie or “How I Started to Make Crack at Home”

Soundtrack: “Diablo Rojo” by Rodrigo y Gabriela

Once upon a time, in a place far, far away (eight metro stops, to be exact)… I worked in downtown DC, right next to the Teaism at Lafayette Park.  This prime location resulted in many, many trips for Teaism’s amazing chai (NOT to be confused with that milky sugar gunk that Starbucks sells), ginger scones, bento box lunches, and of course: The Chocolate Salty Oat Cookie.

I love the story behind The Chocolate Salty Oat, and I appreciated the convenience of being able to get one every day if I should so choose (and I often did).  The salty-sweet combo of chocolate chips and sea salt is unbeatable, satisfying the cravings that often hit cubicle drones like myself at 2:30pm.  The oats add a great texture and mouth feel, and you can even pretend like it’s kinda healthy.  Kinda.

But one thing bothered me about The Chocolate Salty Oat: crumbleage.   Take one bite or try to break the cookie in half and you have several medium chunks and a LOT of little crumbs.  An 1/8th of the cookie ends up pulverized on the plate (or desk, as was often the case with me).  This slight annoyance combined with a new job that took me away from my daily fix left me searching for a newer, better cookie.

So I started researching how I might make my own version of The Chocolate Salty Oat.  It turns out I’m not the first to do so.  And after several attempts, I think I finally have a product I like.  I give you: The Salty Chocolate Oat Cookie (Lame, I know.  I’m working on the name).

The Salty Chocolate Oat Cookie

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
1/4 cup white flour
1/4 cup rice flour*
3/8 cup cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3-5 oz semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup + a few tablespoons of oats
pink himalayan sea salt for sprinkling**

*if you don’t have rice flour, regular flour is fine
**ha.  regular sea salt works too–the chunkier, the better!

Preheat the oven to 350.  In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugars.  When well combined, add the egg and vanilla and incorporate into the butter/sugar mixture.  Gradually add the flour, cocoa, salt, baking soda, and oats.  When just combined (don’t overwork the dough after adding flour), fold in the chocolate chips.  Drop by heaping tablespoons onto cookie sheets and bake for 10 minutes.  Check on cookies, and if they look undercooked, bake for 2-4 more minutes.  When done baking, immediately sprinkle the cookies with salt and allow to cool.

Enjoy with a glass of unsweetened soy milk!

Cake before dinner…are we real adults yet?

A place never quite feels like home until I’ve cooked for people there.  Dinner parties have been discussed with a lot of different people here, but (and this is probably best for all of us), the size of my apartment has prevented me from inviting over far too many people and then not feeding them until midnight.  Apparently, however, nothing has kept me from not reading a recipe carefully enough.  This is why, last night, we made not one but two pasta sauces, plus a birthday cake.  They were all wins.

The cake happened because one of our classmates Ben was planning a birthday party…a middle school themed birthday party…and several of us were discussing said birthday party a few nights ago.  Another classmate Laura (who showed up to a picnic last week with my very favorite cookies, from The Best Recipe…I immediately knew we’d be friends) asked Ben whether anyone was baking him a cake.  His reply was “not to my knowledge.”  Neither Laura nor I is willing to accept a cakeless birthday situation.  Her face lit up with possibility and I proclaimed, far too loudly, “Laura!  You already have the cookbook with the very best cake recipe in the world in it!” and smacked my hand across the table far too energetically.  Ben being a self-proclaimed non-sweet-eater, we didn’t even have to worry about suiting the cake to his liking.  Still, I stand by my assertion that this recipe is the Best in the World.

Obviously, where there’s cake there must also be dinner.  Laura and I invited our other friends Kara and Kristin, and with a couple of bottles of wine, lots of Alanis Morisette (in the spirit of preparing for Ben’s middle school party), and my three culinary muses (America’s Test Kitchen, Lidia, and Deb), my apartment was christened.

We started out with The Best Recipe:  classic white layer cake with butter frosting and raspberry-almond filling.  I know, white cake sounds boring.  But this cake is delicately textured, moist, and flavored with almond (as all white cakes should be).  A bit of raspberry jam and almonds between the layers add just the right touch of tang and texture to complement the fluffy frosting.  Also, Laura brought her A game in the form of homemade raspberry jam.  We embellished the cake with almonds around the outside and a big, bold “Ben,” writ large in jelly.  Who needs a pastry bag when you’ve got a pinky finger and a butter knife?

While the cakes were baking, we turned to Lidia’s Simple Tomato Sauce recipe, which I apparently hadn’t read closely enough (or remembered well enough) to realize that it needs to simmer for an hour and 45 minutes.  Not to worry, Deb came to the rescue with a 10-minute tomato and almond pesto sauce that did not disappoint.  Good thing I’d visited the Ann Arbor farmer’s market that morning and had a bunch of basil and some last summer tomatoes in the arsenal.  I had feta and walnuts rather than pecorino and almonds, but that worked out fine.  The great thing about living in a studio is, my apartment still smells amazing from the basil, tomato, and almond deliciousness.

And without further ado, the recipes.  If you want The Best Recipe’s full discourse on why things absolutely must be mixed in the order and amounts prescribed, you’ll have to buy the book.  It is too much to type here.  But really you should buy the book anyway.

CLASSIC WHITE CAKE:

1 cup milk, room temperature

1/4 cup egg whites (about 6 large), room temperature

2 teaspoons almond extract

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 1/4 cups plain cake flour

1 3/4 cups sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened.

BUTTER FROSTING:

1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

1 pound (4 cups) confectioners sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon milk

1 pinch salt

RASPBERRY ALMOND FILLING

1/2 cup blanched slivered almonds, toasted and chopped coarse

1/3 cup seedless raspberry jam

FOR THE CAKE:

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees.  Generously grease two 9-inch round cake pans and cover pan bottoms with rounds of parchment or wax paper.  Grease and flour lined pans.
2. Pour milk, egg whites, and extracts into 2-cup glass measure, and mix with fork until well blended.
3. Mix cake flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in bowl of electric mixer at slow speed.  Add butter; continue beating at slow speed until mixture resembles moist crumbs, with no powdery ingredients remaining.
4. Add all but 1/2 cup of milk mixture to crumbs and beat at medium speed for 1 1/2 minutes.  Add remaining 1/2 cup of milk mixture and beat 30 seconds more.  Stop mixer and scrape sides of bowl.  Return mixture to medium speed and beat 20 seconds longer.
5. Divide batter evenly between two prepared cake pans; spread batter to pan walls and smooth tops.  Arrange pans at least 3 inches from the oven walls and 3 inches apart, and bake 23-25 minutes, until knife or toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
6. Let cakes rest in pans for 3 minutes.  Loosen from sides of pans with a knife, and invert onto greased cake racks.  Let cool completely, about 1 1/2 hours.

FOR THE FROSTING:

1. Beat butter, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, milk, and salt in bowl of electric mixer at slow speed until sugar is moistened.  Increase speed to medium; beat, stopping to scrape down bowl, until creamy and fluffy.  Avoid overbeating, or frosting will be too soft to pipe.

FOR THE FILLING:

1. Before assembling cake, set aside 3/4 cup frosting for decoration.  Spread small dab of frosting in center of cake plate to anchor cake, and set down one cake layer.  Combine 1/2 cup remaining frosting with almonds and spread over first layer.  Carefully spread jam on top, then cover with second cake layer.  Spread frosting over top and sides of cake.  Pipe reserved frosting around perimeter of cake or top.  (We spread slivered almonds around the outside of the cake).
2. If you have occasion to take this cake to a middle school birthday party, you should probably be wearing overalls, clogs, overly branded outerwear, and pigtails:

LIDIA’S SIMPLE TOMATO SAUCE (From Lidia’s Family Table)

INGREDIENTS:

1. 8 cups (two 35-ounce cans) canned San Marzano or other Italian plum tomatoes, with juices.
2. 1 large onion, chopped in small pieces
3. 1 medium carrot, chopped in small pieces
4. 1 inner rib celery, chopped in small pieces
5. 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
6. 1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
7. 2 cups water
8. 2 bay leaves
9. 1 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes
10. 1/2 teaspoon honey (optional)

STEPS:

1. Put the tomatoes through a food mill, or a colander or sieve, set over a bowl.  If you’re sieving the tomatoes, push the flesh through, scraping against the sieve to extract all the pulp and juice.
2. Put chopped celery, onion, and carrot in the food processor and pulse several times, until you have very finely chopped small shreds.
3. Pour the oil into the sauce pot, stir in the chopped vegetables, and set over medium-high heat.  Sprinkle on the salt.  Cook for 3 minutes or so, stirring frequently, as the vegetables start to sizzle and soften; don’t let them brown.
4. Pour the milled tomatoes and juices into the pan, and stir with the vegetables.  Rince out the bowl and the tomato cans with the water, and pour this into the saucepan as well.  Stir in the bay leaves, honey, and pepper flakes, turn up the heat, cover, and bring the sauce to a boil, stirring and checking it frequently.
5. Adjust the heat to maintain an active summer, with lots of small bubbles all over the sauce. Cover and cook for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.
6. Remove the cover; raise the heat so the sauce is still bubbling energetically and gradually reducing.  Cook for another hour or so, stirring frequently to make sure nothing’s sticking to the bottom of the pot.  Turn down the heat as the sauce thickens (and if the bubbles are bursting out of the pot).  Taste for salt near the end of cooking, and add more if needed.  When the sauce has reduced by about a quarter and is concentrated but still pourable, remove from the heat.
7. Let the sauce cool; remove the bay leaves.  Allow the flavors to mellow for an hour or two.  Use however much sauce you need immediately; refrigerate or freeze the rest.

LINGUINE WITH TOMATO ALMOND PESTO

Deb will give you better, more entertaining, baby-anecdote-filled instructions.

Tuna Burgers (Thank you Paula Dean)

Tuna Burgerrrrrrr

My roommate and I were feeling productive one Saturday and decided to make lunch.  We pooled our resources and discovered we probably had the right ingredients for tuna burgers. After some googling I was thrilled to find that Paula Dean actually had a recipe that required only 10 minutes of prep and 10 minutes for cooking. My kind of girl!

We didn’t have all the ingredients she called for but came up with some creative (and tasty] solutions.  Here are Paula’s instructions and our alternatives in parenthesis:

• 2 (6-ounce) cans solid white tuna, drained (kinda necessary)
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs (crushed corn flakes work just as well)
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
• 1/2 cup finely chopped celery (we decided this wasn’t necessary)
• 1 tablespoon chopped pimento, optional (optional, indeed)
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1 1/2 teaspoons prepared horseradish (or a heaping spoonful of garlic paste will do)
• 1 clove garlic, minced (note heaping spoonful above)
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Simply combine the tuna, eggs, and crushed corn flakes in a bowl.  Then add the onions, garlic paste, and pepper (or any of Paula’s other original ingredients if you want to be fancy). We accidentally added the oil to the mixture, even though she just meant for us to use it in the pan for frying the patties.  They still ended up being delicious which is why I love this recipe – it’s pretty foolproof. Next, form the mixture into 4 patties and heat them in the skillet. Brown on each side for about 5 minutes, then put them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven at 350 degrees until golden brown.

We also made baby potatoes with rosemary and garlic (Ok, ok, it was pre-packaged seasoning but it was still ah-mazing) so we had our burgers bun-less.   We did use wasabi mayonnaise (thank you Trader Joe’s) as a dipping sauce. Highly recommended.

Bottomline: this recipe is super easy and is now a staple in my “what should I make that’s easy, doesn’t take many ingredients and will be ready before I start eating my hand” repertoire.  I recently prepared it before a wedding and it helped me power through 6 hours of rocking out on the dance floor in heels. A girl’s gotta do…

I think Paula would be proud.

Zucchini Risotto (and what not to forget)

Initially I was going to post a comment on Genie’s Facebook wall about my dinner the other night, since I was actually talking to her as I was making this dinner.  But I realized that my thoughts would exceed the acceptable span of a Facebook comment, and I also realized that this is, in fact, what the Community Kitchen is for.   Here I am in Michigan, cooking for myself, talking to friends on the phone and meeting awesome new folks.  There you all are wherever you are, and here is this forum for sharing our food, or at least our thoughts about it.

So what I made for dinner tonight was a zucchini risotto, which was great but under-spiced (this is where Genie would have come to the rescue), and it lacked nuts and wine. I love risotto for its creamy texture, which complements the crunch of whatever vegetables I have in my fridge.  Also it ends up being a complete meal if you add cheese, meat broth, nuts, or some other protein.  It’s not a hard dish to make, but you should have a little bit of time on your hands and a need to take things meditatively, catch up with a friend, or listen to music for a while.  My recommendation: Eric Bibb’s Home to Me.

This dish happened to turn out vegetarian, since all I had in my pantry was vegetable broth.  Therein began the underspicedness, and bullet point #1: when using vegetable broth, add salt.  My general rice-making M.O. (picked up from my dad) is to use chicken or beef broth instead of water, and not to add salt.  Veggie broth works differently.

I chopped and sautéed a couple of small onions and 3 cloves of garlic in a pan with a bit of butter, added about a cup of Arborio rice, sautéed that for about a minute, and dumped in some veggie broth.  Here comes bullet point #2: risotto should have wine in it.  What I should have done before adding the broth was to add dry white wine, which really enhances the flavor.  After the wine was absorbed, I would have turned the heat down and added broth.  But I didn’t have white wine, so I cut straight to broth.

From there the basic strategy is to add hot broth a bit at a time, allowing the rice to absorb almost all the liquid before adding another bit.  For spices I added dried thyme and a bay leaf, but would have added fresh rosemary and fresh thyme if I’d had them.  I threw in some cubed zucchini early on and grated smoked mozzarella at the end, which is when I also should have added salt and pepper.

Bullet points 3 and 4 are: add nuts (for crunch and protein), and don’t add the vegetables too early.  I added raw, cubed zucchini with my second addition of liquid.  It got mushy; I should have added it later.

Sooooo, here’s my recipe, revised.  Substitute any vegetables you want, and determine when you add them to the rice based on how long it will take them to cook.  Also all these measurements are approximate.

You need:

1 cup Arborio rice

1 chopped onion (2 if they’re small)

chopped garlic (you decide how much)

2 T butter

About ½ cup dry white wine

2 cans vegetable, chicken, or beef broth

thyme, rosemary (preferably fresh)

1 chopped zucchini

½ cup slivered almonds

½-1 cup sharp grated cheese of your choice (asiago, parmesan, romano; I used smoked mozzarella because it was what I had)

salt and pepper

1)    Pour your cans of broth into a small saucepan, cover, and heat over low heat.

2)    Sautee the onions and garlic in the butter in a separate large, heavy saucepan with a non-reactive lining.

3)    When the onions are translucent, add the rice and sautee, stirring often, for about a minute, until the rice just begins to pop.

4)    Add the wine and stir, wait about a minute until the wine begins to boil.

5)    Add about 1 cup of stock and some rosemary and thyme, and reduce heat to medium-low. The trick with risotto is to make sure the rice absorbs the liquid slowly; the mixture should be bubbling, but only barely. Add more hot broth when the rice has absorbed the first addition and continue in this manner until the rice reaches an al dente texture.  If you run out of broth, start adding water.  Stir after each addition.  Partway through cooking, add the zucchini.

6)    When the rice is al dente, add your nuts, grated cheese, and salt and pepper to taste.  Stir, and eat up!

Who Eats Dinner Before Midnight?

Soundtrack: “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem

Back in April, after several successful (not to mention delicious) dinner parties, shared lunches, and restaurant adventures, members of The Community thought it would be both fun and practical to share our love of food over the intertubes.  Cue: The Community Kitchen!

As the blog was in the works, Parrish, Amber and I planned a dinner party with friends.  We needed pictures for said blog, after all.  Inspired by my favorite cookbook, the menu was as follows:

Bruschetta
Prosciutto and Melon
Greek Salad a la Garrick and Natalie
Roasted Asparagus
Green Beans with Goat Cheese
Ravioli with Pear, Pecorino, and Toasted Walnuts in a Brown Butter Sauce
Apricot Tart
Chocolate Tart
Root Beer Floats with Cookie Dough Coconut Milk Ice Cream

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Yeah.  Sounds like a lot of food.  And it was all delicious.  But this inaugural post is going to focus on the ravioli, made from scratch and absolutely amazing!

The amazing ravioli also took about six hours to make and we didn’t sit down to eat it until close to midnight.  Did I mention we were attempting to make ravioli from scratch for 16 people?  It may have been a bit ambitious.

The recipe came from Lidia’s Family Table, with a few creative revisions on the part of The Community.  Okay, it was all Parrish‘s idea to add the toasted walnuts, and what a wonderful idea it was!

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