Ravioli

Apologies again for being bad about posting. I have a whole bunch of images just waiting to be put on-line but I seem to be continually pre-occupied with this whole school thing... and sleeping. Sleeping is nice.

In any case, I thought I'd put up some photos of a recent visit from a couple friends of ours. We had a lovely weekend with them and spent a lot of time playing cards, drinking, and catching up. On Saturday night, we decided to make ravioli as its sort of a fun and interactive dish. In fact, making ravioli always reminds me a bit of doing arts and crafts during day camp... except that you can eat your final project. Hmmm, well I guess arts and crafts often involve dry pasta, which technically you could eat... and there are always some kids that eat a bit of paste... but I'm sure this final project tastes way better.
Anyway.

We started the meal with a scrumptious fresh cesear salad with homemade crutons and dressing (see above). Ken made the pasta and the fillings but we all worked together to stuff them. The fillings were a shitaki mushroom and cream filling, a chevre and savory filling, and a roasted corn and peppercorn cheese filling. The fillings were all pretty amazing and we ended up eating the extra with spoons. Once the pasta was cooked, we tossed it with butter and roasted garlic and served it with green beans. The three raviolis went together very well and melted in your mouth. Mmmm. To the left you can see pasta pictures and Friel and John putting the ravioli together. I also have other pictures of homemade pasta from different dinners, so I hope to write a more detailed account of how to make pasta when I post about one of those meals.

Take care and I'll try to post again soon.

Update

I know that its been ages since I've written. We've been a bit preoccupied by crazy complications in our lives and, of course, I'm just starting graduate school. (Turns out thats quite a bit of work. Who knew?) On the bright side, I have a lot of new scrumptious looking pictures of food. I promise to post some of them soon.

Until then... Toodles.

Penne with Sausage, Shiitake and Portobello Mushrooms, and Zinfandel

I made this dish the other night while Ken was at work. It was delicious and not very difficult to make. The recipe itself is based off of a recipe found in The Wine Lover's Cookbook written by Sid Goldstein. Ken and I like this cookbook quite a bit. I originally found it in the sale section of a bookstore, leafed through it, and was drawn to the detailed explanations of wine and food pairing. While many of the recipes are a little too complex for a beginner and call for rare and sometimes expensive ingredients, there are a number of innovative and really quite remarkable recipes as well. A number of our favorite dishes were directly inspired by recipes in this book. I would certainly recommend that a dedicated cook check this cookbook out... but vegetarians beware, most of the recipes involve meat or seafood.

Here's this recipe.

12 oz. Italian sausage
2 T olive oil
1 1/2 C chopped yellow onion
4 cloves garlic, chopped
8 nice shiitake mushrooms
(original recipe calls for 2 oz. dried porcini)
3-4 portobello mushrooms
1 T crumbled dried rosemary
1 T dried thyme
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp fresh black pepper
1 1/2 C Zinfandel
(original recipe calls for Syrah)
1 C chicken stock
4 tomatoes diced
(can use 2 cans of diced tomatoes)
2 T tomato paste
shredded Asiago cheese to top

1 lb. dried Penne

Saute the sausage over medium heat until browned. Remove the sausage with a slotted spoon and reserve (pat dry with paper towels).

Heat the olive oil and saute the onions and garlic until the onions are translucent (approx. 5 min). Add the mushrooms, herbs, salt and pepper and continue to saute until the mushrooms start to soften and cook down (4-6 minutes).

Add the wine and bring it to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the wine is reduced by half. In a saucepan, start heating water for the pasta.

Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, and chicken stock. Simmer until the tomatoes soften (10-15 minutes). Add the pasta to the boiling pot of water sometime while the sauce is cooking. When the sauce is at the desired consistency, add the sausage and heat through. Salt and pepper to taste.

Drain the pasta and add the sauce. Mix thoroughly (for the picture, I didn't mix the pasta and sauce which was sort of silly. It tastes better all mixed together and is very pretty as well.)

Top with shredded Asiago cheese and serve with Syrah or Zinfandel.

Tamarillos: The tomato fruit?

Ken spotted an unusual looking fruit as we wandered through the grocery store last weekend. Always willing to try something new, we purchased the fruit and brought it home to try. It was a tamarillo.

The fruit was described to us as tomato-like so we decided to first try it raw. It was unlike anything I'd ever had before. The first bite tasted a bit like a peach with a plum's texture. As I started to chew, the flavor morphed into a distinctively tomato-like flavor. The effect was not altogether pleasant but that may just be because it was so unique.

I think that we're both interested in experimenting with this fruit again. I've looked up a few recipes but if anyone has any suggestions please let me know. I'll certainly write a post if we come up with any tasty tamarillo creations.

Hearty Beef Stew

I grew up in rural Minnesota and no matter how far I travel or how different my life becomes, Minnesota will always hold a rather sizable chunk of my heart. I have no doubt that with little effort I could overwhelm you with memories, theories, and plenty of poetic sense and nonsense about my home state. However, I believe I have the restraint to keep my musings brief... at least for the moment. You may be wondering what any of this has to do with beef stew. While this is a reasonable question, the answer seems rather obvious to me. Being a Minnesotan, I cannot in good conscious ever discuss beef stew without first offering a brief nod to the land of 10,000 lakes. In Minnesota we know and love our stews, hotdishes, casseroles, pot pies, pasties... basically, we specialize in any hearty meal that involves a bunch of meat, potatoes, vegetables, and other miscellaneous items jumbled together in a large vessel. I can imagine nothing more welcome on a frosty afternoon than a steaming bowl of beef stew, and nothing more wholesome than a spread of 20 hotdishes and a sea of friendly faces at a potluck. It would seem like a terrible betrayal to write about this one beef stew and its rather charming chef without also acknowledging the lifetime of amazing food shared with me by the community that first shaped my life. Thank you all.

So. Ken made this stew as part of the meal planning/organizational extravaganza that I mentioned in the previous post. In the end, the stew was really quite remarkable. I probably shouldn't give away the big secret that made this stew so fantastic- but, eh, what the heck. The secret ingredient was the leftover reduced beef gravy from the roast dinner. It was extremely rich and flavorful and was just the right addition to transform this stew from a good meal into a succulent mouth watering experience.

The recipe follows. As autumn sets in and cold weather starts to arrive, I highly recommend making a nice stew. Really, there's nothing quite like it.

1 lb cubed raw beef
3 carrots coarsely chopped
1 onion, chopped
4 potatoes in chunks
green beans, cleaned and cut into sections
2 tomatoes, coarsely chopped
4 C beef stock
1 T tomato paste
1 bay leaf
dried thyme, salt & pepper to taste

Cook the carrots and onions in a heavy saucepan over med-low heat until they are just starting to caramelize. Next add the tomato paste and fry it for about 1 min. Then add the stock. In a regular frying pan, brown the beef chunks. Once the meat is browned, dump it and everything else into the saucepan and cook for 4 hours.

We ate the stew with toasted and buttered sourdough bread. Yum.

Roasted Beef, Roasted Rosemary Potatoes, and Roasted Asparagus

To economize and have more organized meals, Ken and I have been working on planning our shopping and cooking schedules ahead of time. I have no idea if we'll actually be able to do this for more than a few days but so far its been working alright. At this point we have managed to use a chuck roast to make roasted beef and a delicious beef stew and we're planning to turn a roasted chicken into enchiladas and chicken pot pie.

Below are a series of photos of the meal prep. I am not going to write out a recipe because I think its fairly intuitive. (If anyone would like the recipe, please feel free to write a comment and I will put it up.) The only slightly unusual thing that Ken did while making the sauce was to reduce beef stock for a long time to make it more flavorful.

Look for a recipe and photos of the beef stew very soon.
cheerio!

p.s. Ken just came over to look at the pictures I was putting up and started muttering angrily at himself. Apparently, he wrapped the roast the wrong way. He said if the striations in the meat were going lengthwise, the meat would have been more tender after it was sliced. Not a cooking disaster per se, but I'm sure he'll be more careful next time.

Pan-Fried Tilapia with Salsa Verde and Spinach and Tomato Pilaf

I don't really have much of a story for this recipe. We wanted to have fish for dinner one night last week and Ken came up with this recipe. We chose tilapia because it is a mild-flavored and affordable fish. Most tilapias, according to Ken who knows a lot about fish for some reason*, are omnivores. This means that they are easy to raise in fish farms and the flavor difference between wild and farmed tilapia is small.

The dish turned out quite well and the contrast between the salsa verde and the mild fish and rice was tantalizing. Unfortunately, the final pictures did not turn out as well as usual for a few reasons (which include things like pan frying instead of deep frying, which yields a less evenly coated batter; the similarly mottled appearance of each component of the final plate; over-sized portions; and an impatient and starving photographer.)
Huh. I guess I did have something to say after all. In any case, I've included a recipe below.

Spinach and Tomato Rice:

When Ken makes rice, he usually begins by sweating some small onion pieces over low heat in a saucepan with a bit of oil. Once the onions turn translucent, he adds the rice and fries it for a bit over high heat (stirring frequently). When the rice turns a sort of pearly color, then he adds the appropriate amount of water, brings the pot up to a boil, covers the pot, and puts it in the oven at 350 until it is cooked (20-30 minutes). I always used to make rice on top of the stove, but I have been completely converted to this method of making rice. Not only do you save stove space, you avoid having to watch for boiling over and the rice NEVER burns to the bottom of the saucepan. Its amazing. If you don't cook rice this way, you should. (If you don't want onions in the rice just leave them out and lightly fry the rice before adding water.)


In any case, this rice was slightly more complicated than what I've described above. Before Ken added the water to the rice, he also added about 1 C of diced tomato and fried the tomato with the rice/onions until they were a little soft. He then added a bay leaf and the water and put the covered saucepan in the oven. Once the rice was cooked, he removed the pan from the oven and set it on the stove to cool. He opened the lid and added several large handfuls of fresh spinach and covered the pan again. The spinach began to wilt while the rice cooled. Once the spinach was a bit wilted he tossed the spinach into the rice until evenly mixed and added salt and pepper to taste.

Salsa Verde

10 tomatillos
1 medium white onion
poblano chillies (or favorite green chili) to taste
fresh cilantro to taste
lime juice
salt
pepper
sugar to taste (very little- just enough to cut the bitterness of the lime)

Roast the tomatillos in the oven until they are soft and the skin starts to have dark spots. Let them cool and then put everything in a food processor and blend until it is of the desired consistency. Cool in refrigerator.

Pan-Fried Tilapia

To make the tilapia, ken cleaned and washed the fish and then evenly coated it with corn flakes. He lightly fried the fish in oil over the stove.

So that's all seems easy enough, huh?
It was a nice refreshing meal on a summer's day and really didn't take too long. Plus, we had mad left over salsa verde which was very nice.


*Ken wanted me to point out that "some reason" is actually that he enjoys fishing as a hobby and that it is also part of his job to know about the fish he cooks. I maintain that all of those rationales were adequately covered by the more general category of "some reason". Nevertheless, now I've explained it all and everyone feels happier. Relationships are all about compromise folks.