A big, warm bowl of comfort: Roasted cauliflower and dill soup

Roasting the cauliflower mellows its flavor in this hearty, creamy [but dairy-free] Roasted Cauliflower and Dill Soup. Substitute vegetable broth for the chicken stock and you’ve got a satisfying vegan meal. Recipe below.

A quick note: I’ve totally dropped the ball in terms of providing any ideas for Thanksgiving this year. But at the end of the post, I’ll provide a few links for some interesting sides.

As proof that you just never know where inspiration will strike, this soup started out as a tuna sandwich. On a recent Sunday, that’s what sounded good for lunch. But Marion and I wanted our sandwiches on better bread than we had at home, so we walked up to Kurowski Sausage Shop, a Polish deli/grocery/bakery in our neighborhood. By the time we had walked the five or so blocks in the brisk November air, though, some soup was sounding pretty good—and Kurowski serves up delicious homemade soups fresh and cheap in their refrigerator case.

After flirting with bigos and borscht and some other Eastern European delights, we settled on a hearty cauliflower soup flecked with fresh dill. Being no fools, we got two containers—a whopping $1.29 each. Back home, the tuna sandwiches became half-sandwiches, bit players to the soup’s star performance. And as I leaned over my steaming bowl with big chunks of cauliflower and carrots, I knew I would be attempting my own version soon. Continue reading “A big, warm bowl of comfort: Roasted cauliflower and dill soup” →

Homemade pizza, quick enough for a weeknight

Mushrooms, arugula, red onion and mozzarella come together with [gasp!] ready made dough for this Mostly Wild Mushroom Pizza, about as fast as delivery. Recipe below.

Let me start with a confession. This is the first pizza I’ve ever made. We love pizza, and Marion occasionally makes it, always a treat. But mostly when we want pizza, we order out. That’s because when we think of having it, it’s often either [a.] close enough to dinner that we don’t have the time or patience to make pizza dough or [b.] a weeknight and we’ve been at work all day, which means see [a.].

So when I was invited to test a ready-to-bake thin crust pizza dough, Pillsbury® Thin Crust Pizza Crust, I jumped at the chance. It’s not that I’m afraid of making pizza dough [okay, well maybe I am just a little]; it’s more that I hate to plan ahead. And even though pizza dough is decidedly unfinicky and nonfragile, unlike many bread doughs, there’s also a bit of the pain-in-the-ass factor at play here, at least for me.

But if someone else were to make the dough and I was free to concentrate on the toppings, I would be intrigued. And I was. I was even further intrigued by the fact that this was thin crust dough. Despite Chicago’s reputation as a deep dish town, there’s an ever-growing contingent that prefers thin crust. Count me in that group.

Okay, so I had some dough to play with, courtesy of Pillsbury. [Full disclosure time: They sent me the pizza crust dough for free, and that’s how I’m reviewing this product, for free.] Now I had to figure out what I wanted to do with it. First, I nosed around Deb’s excellent Smitten Kitchen archives. Deb loooves pizza and shares great ideas for making it on her blog from time to time. I’ll include links to some great tips she has in the Kitchen Notes below. You’ll find more about how the pizza dough performed there too.

Next I hit the library. I came away with a few books on pizza, including one by noted Italian chef Wolfgang Puck. But the one I gravitated to and learned the most from was a practical little volume, stuffed with recipes, helpful tips and gorgeous photographs, called Pizza! It’s by two London-based food writers, Pippa Cuthbert [by way of New Zealand] and Lindsay Cameron Wilson [by way of Canada]. They talk about equipment, give recipes for various doughs [and yes, I will make my own at some point] and devote an entire chapter to classic pizza recipes. And then they take off in many directions, just as pizza itself has done.

Reading through numerous recipes in Pizza!, I came up with lots of ideas to try. More important, I got a good sense of basic techniques for working with topping ingredients and the encouragement to experiment. Continue reading “Homemade pizza, quick enough for a weeknight” →

Pasta, vegetables and overcoming deal breakers

A mix of vegetables takes center stage in this Pasta with Chickpeas, Fava Beans, Pecans and Spring Peas, with bacon playing a supporting role. Recipe and variations—including vegetarian and vegan versions—below.

Sundays are often when I cook whatever I’m posting the following Wednesday. But this past Sunday found me spending more than an hour at the Crafty Beaver hardware store, puzzling out what I needed to solve a minor plumbing problem and build a small bookcase. [Don’t be overly impressed—the bookcase is going to be, shall we say, elegantly simple.] Then I spent a good chunk of the afternoon solving said plumbing problem and starting on said bookcase. When it became clear I wasn’t going to get around to cooking, Marion offered to make this wonderful dish, solving both dinner and what to post. All I had to do was not start devouring my meal before I photographed it. I’ll let Marion tell you how this excellent pasta came together.

The other day the New York Times ran an article by Kim Severson in which good cooks were asked about their recipe deal breakers, “those ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and walk away.”

Experienced, talented cooks cited abstruse ingredients [48 freshly picked grape leaves, vast quantities of fresh animal blood], fussy or intimidating instructions [the recipes of Thomas Keller were particularly noted], recipes with several recipes within them, recipes that demand dangerous conditions, extreme equipment [a couscousière, cornet molds—and I say that as, um, the owner of cornet molds, and of a heavy copper tin-lined tarte Tatin pan, hauled home from Paris, that has become a place to keep our bananas]. My favorite example was the author’s own: She will not make any dish that requires an assistant. That made me laugh out loud.

Like every person reading the article, I immediately started putting together a similar list in my head. What magic words stop me from trying a recipe? Here are a few:

3 sticks butter
1 cup lard
The phrase “on the third day”
Any amount of insects [I will cheerfully eat pretty nearly any organ meat, but cannot make myself even consider eating an ant, a grub or a cicada]
Dried bean curd sheets [I shy off thanks to a series of ridiculous kitchen disasters years back that pretty much became one of those little private running jokes, in this case between me and a never-conquered recipe called Tinkling Bells]
“Have your butcher bone the pig, leaving the head intact” [that recipe, by the way, also includes the phrase “re-form the pig in its original shape,” which sounds so wistful somehow]

I have been cooking certain cuisines for years, but a long time ago I recognized that no matter how far I reach, there is always going to be an unbridgeable gulf between me and the most genuine examples of these foods. I have already said I am not going to eat anything with insects in it. I am not going to eat anything that in the US is construed as a pet. I am not going to eat any endangered mammals, and certainly not their paws.

Also, I am not going to cook anything out of a book the size and weight of a table, no matter how elegant the illustrations.

Years ago, I was standing in our back yard and reading some Martha Stewart magazine and came across a recipe for a ham baked on new-mown grass. There was a great deal of information about the grass you should choose to mow, how to make sure it is pristine, how to cut it… All I remember is opening my fingers and letting the magazine fall out of my hands and walking away from the magazine, which I believe eventually blew out of our yard or perhaps even decayed there, I don’t care, whatever, and I never read any other Martha Stewart publication again until a couple of weeks ago, when my sister [who for a couple of years had been saying, “It’s not what you remember!”] snuck a copy of Martha Stewart Living into a pile she was passing on to me. Okay, so I read it, fine, and once I navigated past the annoying crafts and the too many pastels I came across a pasta dish that, of course, sounded good, so good we had to mess with. Meaning that, for today at least, one of my ancient deal breakers has been overcome.

This descendant of Martha’s recipe asks you to cook the pasta in a moderate amount of water until the water is all absorbed and concentrated and cooked away leaving just pasta. I am usually nervous about this approach, not least because it means standing over the stove for seven or eight minutes and stirring pretty often, rather than wandering off to pick up the newspaper or look out the window at a puzzling brown bird. But I really like the technique here. It endows the pasta with a depth that is needed in a dish this spare.

This recipe begins with a lot of pasta—one pound uncooked—so it will serve five to six people easily. The next day Terry was able to celebrate Take Your Wife’s Cooking to Work Day. Continue reading “Pasta, vegetables and overcoming deal breakers” →

The last salsa cruda of summer

Tomato Basil Salsa Cruda with Pasta makes a fresh light meal or an impressive side. Recipe below.

A quick note before I get started: Check out Kitchen Notes at the bottom to see how Marion adapted her delicious Plum Cake with pears as the prune plums disappeared from store shelves for the season. But read this post first—no dessert ’til you’ve finished.

We didn’t have a garden this year. What with our move and everything, it just didn’t happen. So for the first time in years, we didn’t have tomatoes and basil and rosemary and a host of other goodies straight from our yard.

But at the farmers markets, the produce stands, even the grocery stores, you can see the season changing. Some summer staples are disappearing, and those that remain just don’t seem the same. The peaches that I reveled in for the first time in years are now sometimes being a little more iffy. And tomatoes, though still plentiful, aren’t the deep, robust red found just a week or so ago.

If you’re lucky enough to be harvesting your own tomatoes and basil—or if, like us, you do all your harvesting retail—here’s a quick, delicious way to make use of some of summer’s remaining bounty.

Both Italian and Mexican cooks lay claim to the term salsa cruda, with very different meanings. For both, salsa cruda means uncooked sauce. But Mexican salsa cruda is, well, an uncooked salsa—salsa verde is one example. [Oh, and by the way: Show of hands, who doesn’t know that salsa has replaced ketchup as the number one condiment in America? That says something cool about the American palate, I think!]

For Italians, salsa cruda is truly an uncooked sauce, most often to be served over pasta. The only thing you cook is the pasta itself. When you toss it with the salsa, the pasta cools down a little and the salsa heats up a little, creating a light late summer/early autumn meal. A month or so ago, I posted one of my favorite Italian salsa crudas, Pasta Shells with Italian Tuna and Artichokes. This one is even simpler.

Tomatoes are the star of this dish, and straight from the garden is best, of course. I didn’t even think of tomatoes as more than an ingredient in sauces or ketchup until I tasted one Marion had grown in our backyard in St. Louis. Suddenly, I understood what the big deal was.

Store-bought tomatoes are getting better, though. More varieties, better quality—I even saw heirloom tomatoes on a recent Whole Foods visit. Our go to tomatoes at the store these days [not counting grape or cherry tomatoes] are tomatoes on the vine—sold, as the name implies, still attached to the vine. I have to admit, the first time I saw this, I assumed it was just another marketing ploy to separate foodies from their money: Tomatoes sold on the vine command a considerably higher price than their plucked brethren.

But it turns out the vine really does make a difference. It continues to supply nutrients to the fruit, even after harvesting, naturally ripening them and producing firmer, juicier, better tasting, more nutritious tomatoes. How much the actual stem adds to the party isn’t fully understood, but that’s only part of the story. They tend to be better varieties to begin with, and receive gentler handling in harvesting and shipping to keep them attached.

Handle with care. Here are a couple of quick tips on keeping tomatoes and getting the most flavor out of them. First, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never refrigerate tomatoes. As in never. That is the quickest way known to man to rob them of flavor. Also never, never, etcetera place them upside down, resting on their “shoulders”—the raised, well, shoulders around where the stem attaches. All that pressure concentrated on those small points is a perfect way to bruise them and promote rotting. Place them right side up, on their bottoms.

Whatever tomatoes you use—homegrown or store-bought of any variety, including plum tomatoes—this simple, flavorful treatment makes for a light meal on its own or a fabulous side that will vie for attention with a seared chop or other main course. Continue reading “The last salsa cruda of summer” →

Chilled soup and a cool borrowed memory: Watercress Vichyssoise

Creamy and unexpectedly chilled, watercress vichyssoise makes a cool first course for the last hot days of summer—or paired with a crusty bread, a satisfying light lunch. Recipe below.

HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED? Summer is almost gone, and we haven’t gotten around to making any cold soups. No gazpacho. None of Marion’s delicious attempts at recreating the cold cucumber bisque we used to get at Café Balaban in St. Louis—she never matches our fading memories of it [it’s been years since we’ve had it or they’ve even served it], but she always creates something summery and fresh. So when I saw a simple, authentic sounding recipe for vichyssoise over at Katie’s Thyme for Cooking, I had to give it a try. Continue reading “Chilled soup and a cool borrowed memory: Watercress Vichyssoise” →