eggs on sunday

It’s Friday, and in our house, that means pizza night!

One of the things I’ve been thinking about doing with this blog is a “Friday Night Pizza” series, since B and I have had a tradition for the past few years of making our own pizza on Friday nights. It actually started as a “pizza and sci fi” night (since we used to watch a particular sci fi show while eating our pizza), but now it’s just a general pizza and movie night. I really love this tradition of ours: we’re both usually too tired on Friday night after a week of working to go out and do much of anything, so Friday nights are our time at home to unwind and eat some good pizza.

When Friday Night Pizza at our house began, we were buying the dough at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods; both of their brands are pretty good. But about a year into it, I came across Susan’s recipe for pizza dough over on A Year in Bread, and we have never looked back: this is the best pizza dough I have ever tasted! It’s crispy, chewy, and has a great flavor. Plus, you can make it early in the evening and be ready to bake the pizza about 2 hours later. I usually make my dough with about half white whole wheat flour, since we both like the taste of it.

If you’re going to make pizza at home often, I can’t emphasize enough how much a ceramic baking stone can improve your results. The fact that it retains heat so well is a boon for any bread baking that I do, but the pizza crusts especially benefit from it: they are crispy, light, and pleasantly chewy. We have a roughly 14-inch square ceramic baking stone in our oven, and it’s fabulous. (more…)

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have a mom who — among many other wonderful qualities — baked a lot of muffins. Weekend mornings were often filled with the warm, spicy smells of cinnamon wafting from the kitchen; on the table would be a basket filled with treats like pumpkin muffins, zucchini spice muffins (especially in the summer, to use up the bumper crop of zucchini that was always bigger than we’d planned), and applesauce oatmeal muffins. Her baking extended beyond muffins to other delicious treats, but the muffins are one of my fondest memories of our breakfasts together as a family.

The applesauce oatmeal muffins she used to make were one of my favorites, because they combined some of the flavors and ingredients dearest to my heart: apples, oats, and cinnamon. Last year, when I received Dorie Greenspan’s wonderful tome “Baking: From My Home to Yours” — from none other than my sweet mom! — one of the recipes that I immediately wanted to try was the Oatmeal Breakfast Bread. It has lots of applesauce, cinnamon, oatmeal and raisins in the batter, and a brown sugar-walnut streusel on top. Call it a variation on the applesauce oatmeal muffins my mom used to make!

This bread is unbelievably moist, and when it bakes, it perfumes your whole house with the comforting, welcoming, homey smell of cinnamon. Something about the aroma of cinnamon, for me, evokes feelings of being home — and because of that, it’s one of my favorite ingredients to cook with, hands down.

Have a slice as a delicious accompaniment to a hot mug of coffee or tea. Also, if you’re like me, you could consider the bread to be slightly more on the healthy side…applesauce takes the place of butter in the batter, and I like to make mine fully whole grain, using King Arthur white whole wheat flour along with the whole oats. The recipe actually takes really well to using the white whole wheat flour; it blends really nicely with the spices and oats without losing any of the — as Dorie puts it — “pudding soft” texture. And, I cut down just a smidge on the amount of sugar in the recipe, using 1/2 cup in the bread instead of the 3/4 cup in the original recipe, and I find it to be plenty sweet.

This is also my entry into this month’s Master Baker challenge. It was started by Nikki of Crazy Delicious, and each month of the challenge has a different theme — this month’s theme is cinnamon! I can’t wait to see the other entries.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Oatmeal Breakfast Bread

From Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours

Ingredients

For the topping:
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

For the bread:
2 large eggs
1 1/4 cups unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup flavorless oil, such as canola or safflower
1/4 cup buttermilk or whole milk (I’ve also used plain yogurt with good results)
1 1/4 cups all-purpose or white whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
pinch ground cloves
1/2 cup dried figs, apples, apricots, or raisins (I usually use raisins)
1 cup old-fashioned oats

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a 9×5 inch loaf pan, and tap out the excess flour.

In a small bowl, use your fingers to toss together the streusel topping ingredients (brown sugar, walnuts, and cinnamon.) Set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, applesauce, oil and buttermilk (or milk or yogurt) until they’re well blended.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and cloves. Stir in the oats.

In a separate small bowl, toss the dried fruit with 1/2 tsp of the flour mixture, just to coat. Set aside.

Pour the liquid ingredients over the flour mixture in the large bowl, and fold with a spatula just until they’re combined (try not to overmix.) Fold in the dried fruit, just until distributed throughout the batter.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Scatter the streusel over the top, and lightly press it onto the surface of the batter with your fingers. Place the loaf pan on a baking sheet (just so it’s easier to lift out of the oven when it’s done), and place in the oven. Bake for 50-60 minutes; I usually take mine out around 50 minutes. You can check that it’s done by inserting a sharp knife in the middle of the bread; no batter should stick to the knife.

Cool for about 10 minutes in the pan, then carefully run a knife around the edges of the pan and unmold the bread. Invert it back to right-side-up and cool it completely on a rack before you cut it.

I have a quick post for you tonight about a pasta dish I’ve been making recently. I’d been experimenting with some different recipes using ricotta cheese, and this one has risen to the top as one of our new favorite dinners (though leftovers are equally good for lunch!) It was loosely inspired by a penne with spinach sauce recipe in Giada De Laurentiis’s Giada’s Family Dinners, though hers doesn’t have ricotta cheese in it.

The lovely green, garlicky sauce is blended in the food processor while you cook the pasta, so the dish comes together really quickly. I usually use whole wheat penne, and serve it with some grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese. This is a dish Popeye would have loved — there’s spinach in the sauce, and more spinach tossed with the hot pasta! In these bleak midwinter days (we just got another 7 inches of snow), I guess you could say that an emerald-green plate of pasta is a form of color therapy, right?

We’ve been eating it just as is, with the spinach that’s tossed with the hot pasta and sauce only slightly wilted. If you like your spinach a little more wilted, I would saute it briefly in a large pan, with just the water clinging to its leaves, until it just starts to wilt - then add the cooked drained pasta and the spinach sauce.

And one more note - I think it would be really terrific with some fresh, diced tomatoes on top. How much I’m looking forward to those days of ripe tomatoes again!

____________________________________________________________________________________

Penne with Spinach and Ricotta

Ingredients
3/4 cup ricotta cheese (fresh would be the best, but if you can’t find that, I really like Organic Valley’s whole milk ricotta)
2 oz goat cheese
6 oz organic baby spinach (about 6 lightly packed cups)
2 garlic cloves
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
8 oz whole wheat penne (or other pasta of your choice)

Directions
Boil the penne in a large pot of salted water until al dente.

While the pasta cooks, rinse the spinach. Place half the spinach (3 oz, or about 3 lightly packed cups) in the bowl of a food processor, along with the ricotta, goat cheese, garlic, salt and pepper. Puree until very smooth. Taste and season with more salt or pepper, as you like.

Place the other half of the spinach in either a large bowl (if you want it only slightly wilted) or a large saucepan — see the note in my post above if you’re going to wilt it a little in the saucepan before adding the pasta. Once the pasta has cooked, drain it and add it while hot to the spinach, and add the ricotta-spinach sauce. Toss to combine well, and divide among 3-4 plates. Serve with grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese.

Serves 3-4.

So apparently, it’s meme time around the food blogs! I was pretty flattered to be tagged by Gretchen from Canela & Comino for a “5 Things” meme — I love what she cooks, and her photographs are always gorgeous! Being tagged for a meme is kind of a rite of passage in the blogosphere, and I was tickled to be tagged (say that 5 times fast!)

So here we go with my “5 things”:

1. I somehow always end up humming along to the music piped in over the loudspeakers in the grocery store. Usually this consists of 80’s and 90’s soft rock, and it amazes me to know that there is apparently part of my brain that remembers every lyric and note to these songs that I haven’t heard in about 15 years. The Whole Foods I used to shop in when we lived in Boston had a particularly good soundtrack; I used to bop down the aisles there, humming away. I don’t usually notice I’m doing it, though, until I sidle up to someone in the produce section to reach for, say, a head of kale, and they shoot me a surprised look. It does always put me in a good mood while I’m shopping, though!

2. I can peel an orange with my hands so that the peel comes off all in one piece.

3. Someday I hope to own a little flock of laying hens, tend a garden large enough to grow most of our own vegetables, and make all of our own bread (that I will bake in my outdoor wood-firing oven. Dream big!) And I’d like to try my hand at cheesemaking, too. Since we’re not there yet, I love to read books about people who’ve done this kind of thing: Fifty Acres and a Poodle, A Pig in Provence, and Animal Vegetable Miracle have been some of my recent favorites in the past few years.

4. I always cook to music. My favorite singer in general to cook with is Ella Fitzgerald; I just adore her. I usually just listen to a huge playlist of all my Ella CDs when cooking, but if I had to choose just one that’s my favorite, it’s Let’s Fall in Love.

5. I can recite all the prepositions in under 20 seconds. Don’t ask. Suffice it to say I had to learn them for 7th grade English class, and they’ve stuck ever since.

And now, after sharing my “5 things,” it’s time for me to tag some other bloggers!

Figs with Bri
Erin Cooks
Technicolor Kitchen
And Then I Do the Dishes
Straight From the Farm

Hope you’ll all consider participating!

“5 Thing” Meme Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their Blogs.

I don’t know about you, but for me, 3:00 in the afternoon is when I am 100% ready for a snack. I usually try to have something relatively healthy on hand (lest I raid the freezer and start eating frozen brownies), so it’s easiest if the snack is ready to go; no lengthy prep.

B and I both love hummus, and many times that’s what we’ll snack on, but I get antsy for a change every so often. Variety is the spice of life, no? This is where bean dips come in. One of my favorites is this white bean and roasted red pepper dip: it’s super flavorful, easy to throw together, loaded with fiber, Vitamin C, and Vitamin A — and, it’s a beautiful orange hue. The sweet roasted peppers and the smooth, mild white beans are brightened a bit by the slight background tang of a little balsamic vinegar, and of course it has garlic - what isn’t great with a little garlic?? It’s great as a dip, but would also be really tasty as a spread on sandwiches or crostini.

I like to make a batch on the weekend, then divide it into containers for us to take to work during the week. If I’m really on top of my game, I also cut up a bunch of vegetables and toast some whole wheat pita wedges on the weekend so they’re all ready to go with the dip. Granted, that level of planning ahead doesn’t always happen — but when it does, afternoon snacks are a beautiful thing.

____________________________________________________________

White Bean and Roasted Red Pepper Dip

Adapted from Vegetarian Classics by Jeanne Lemlin

Ingredients
1 can white beans (Great Northern, cannellini, navy, etc.) — drained and rinsed
1/2 cup chopped roasted red peppers (homemade or from a jar, patted dry)
1/2 tsp coarse salt
3/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp paprika
2 garlic cloves
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 tsp balsamic vinegar

Variation: omit the cumin and add in 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil leaves

Directions
Place the drained beans, red peppers, salt, cumin (or basil), paprika, garlic cloves, olive oil, and vinegar in a food processor. Blitz until smooth. Serve as is, or refrigerate until later.

Makes about 1 1/2 cups.

I’ve been feeling like a lighter, brothier soup lately — but one that’s still chock full of colorful vegetables, and maybe some beans. This is my version of minestrone: garlicky broth, diced tomatoes, emerald-green spinach, ribbons of cabbage, bright orange carrots, creamy white beans and cute little ditalini pasta. It’s fantastic with some grated Parmesan cheese on top, and a nice chunk of crusty bread alongside doesn’t hurt, either (I think I say that about a lot of things!)

_______________________________________________________________________________

Minestrone Soup

Ingredients
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 cup celery, chopped (about 2 ribs)
1 cup carrots, chopped (about 2 carrots)
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes with their juice (I like Muir Glen Organic)
2 cans white beans, such as cannellini, great northern, or navy - drained and rinsed
8 cups water, vegetable stock or chicken stock
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
3 thyme sprigs
1 bay leaf
2-inch piece Parmigiano-Reggiano rind (optional)
1/2 head small green cabbage, thinly sliced
1 cup ditalini pasta (or other small chunky pasta)
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
10 oz baby spinach
2 tsp red wine vinegar

Directions
Heat the olive oil over medium high heat in a large, heavy stockpot. Add the chopped onion, carrot, celery and garlic and saute until the onion softens, about 5-7 minutes. Add the can of diced tomatoes (with the juice), the drained and rinsed white beans, 8 cups water (or stock), 2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground black pepper, thyme sprigs, bay leaf, sliced cabbage, and cheese rind (if you’re using it.) Bring to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 10 minutes.

Stir in the ditalini pasta and chopped parsley, and cook until the ditalini is done - about another 10 minutes. Stir the spinach into the soup until it’s wilted and bright green. Finally, add the red wine vinegar and stir to combine.

Taste and adjust the salt and pepper if needed. Serve with grated cheese on top.

Makes about 8-10 servings.

Boy, oh boy, oh boy…earlier this week, since I had President’s Day off, I decided to experiment with something that I’ve been excited about trying to make for a while now. Actually, ever since November — when the tv show Pushing Daisies introduced the idea of the “cup pie.” And now that I’ve had some cup pie success, I’m so excited to post this recipe!

What’s a cup pie, you ask? Think cute-as-a-button, little miniature single-serve pies, baked in a cupcake pan! The main character in Pushing Daisies is a pie-maker, and his girlfriend convinces him to add “cup pies baked with honey” to his menu. Besides the fact that I have a serious weakness for any “miniature” single-serve dessert, cup pies are for people who love the pie crust (like me) — there’s a slightly higher crust to filling ratio than regular pies. I was envisioning an exact replica of a full-size pie, with a fluted crust and decorative slits cut to let the steam escape included.

I have, for some reason, always been a little scared of making my own pie crust. There’s so much debate about flakiness, tenderness, butter vs. shortening, ice cold ingredients, etc. that I was always a little hesitant to jump right in and choose a method. But I bit the bullet and did it on Monday, and WOW were the results good. I used an all butter pie crust recipe (I’m not a big fan of shortening) from Gourmet magazine and it was so incredibly flaky, and tasted great, too (that’s what you get with butter.) I’m already thinking of other recipes to make with this pie crust.

I used a standard muffin cup tin, but spaced the cup pies out so their crusts wouldn’t touch each other; I also made sure to lightly butter the cups and rim around the tops, so the crust wouldn’t stick. It took me a few tries to get the hang of shaping them, but I think I finally managed to get a technique down — pressing the pie top down around the edges to firmly seal it was really key (my first run of this recipe resulted in a few loose tops!) I filled them with diced apples tossed with cinnamon and a little sugar. MMM.

I was so happily surprised, and pleased, at how cute they were! Exactly how I’d pictured them…fortunately, this was one kitchen experiment that went right!

(more…)

Fennel is one of those things that I have wanted to like for a long time. You know the feeling when you think you should like a flavor, and it’s mildly distressing that you can’t in good faith say that you truly do? That was me and fennel. I kept thinking “Maybe I just haven’t prepared it the best way. Maybe this was a bad bulb. Maybe I didn’t eat it at the peak of flavor. Maybe I cut it too thickly. Maybe this wasn’t the right recipe to try it in.” Excuses, excuses.

Part of the reason I’ve wanted to like fennel so much is because I think the plant itself, with its creamy white ribbed bulb and feathery green fronds, is a thing of pure beauty. And I’m definitely not a picky eater; there are few foods I dislike, so how could I not like something as pretty and supposedly tasty as fennel? The problem lays with licorice. That is one flavor solidly on my “disliked foods” list, and I guess my wariness of licorice-y flavored things always got in the way of me giving fennel a real fighting shot.

All that has gone out the window recently, though. Inspired by my love of lentils, I was looking for new things to cook with them and came across this recipe on epicurious.com, from the January 2007 issue of Gourmet magazine. It is delicious — and it has fennel in three (!) different forms! A fennel trifecta, you could say. Nothing like going whole hog on this fennel thing, right?? The tasty little French le puy lentils are sauteed with carrot, celery, onions, garlic, fennel seed, and diced fennel bulb; chopped feathery fennel fronds are tossed in at the end, and you serve it with some slices of browned sausage on top (for which I used turkey sausage — and the fennel used in the sausage seasoning was, I think, a good match.) The fennel wasn’t overpowering at all, actually it was rather nice and sweet in the dish; we’ve really been enjoying it paired with a slice of crusty bread and a glass of red wine…yum!

(more…)

Gone, gone, so far gone are the Carvel ice cream cakes of youth. A homemade ice cream cake, like the pretty pink beauty above, is a head and shoulders above anything you could buy. Besides the fact that there are endless variations you can make — just choose your cookie crumb type and ice cream flavor — there’s something I find so gratifying about unmolding one from its springform pan and seeing all the different layers. Sure, they require a bit of planning ahead, but much of the time required to make them is just the freezing steps in between. You can make your own ice cream for the filling, or use your favorite store-bought kind.

This latest ice cream cake creation has an all-natural chocolate cookie crumb crust, homemade raspberry ice cream (from David Lebovitz’s wonderful ice cream book The Perfect Scoop — and, I have to say, it’s the best raspberry ice cream I’ve ever had), and a chocolate ganache on top that I gently set fresh whole raspberries into. I admit, I’m big fan of the chocolate cookie crust and chocolate ganache on top — I used the same approach with my chocolate peanut butter cup ice cream cake.

I’ve also been referring to this particular cake as “the cake that did not want to be made.” This was the dessert I was planning to serve on Valentine’s Day, but after a serious of false starts with my ice cream maker, it wasn’t until the end of the weekend that I actually had success making it. We have the Cuisinart ice cream maker, whose bowl you have to freeze at least 24 hours before you plan on making your ice cream. I tried cutting this a little short, and by the time I realized my custard wasn’t freezing because the bowl hadn’t been cold enough, the bowl had completely thawed. Back to the freezer it went, but the next day I was (again) too impatient and tried freezing the custard before I realized the bowl wasn’t completely frozen. Arrgh! So back to the freezer again. This time I left it in 48 hours, and turned the temp on my freezer down a bit — that did the trick, but just to be sure the third time was a charm and no more bowl thawing occurred, I actually ended up churning the ice cream in my (uninsulated) garage. I know, the things I do for dessert! Luckily we have outlets in there, so I just brought out a little card table, set the ice cream maker on it by the outlet, and let it churn in the 40 degree temperatures.

One last thing to note — as I do with our baked cakes, I use a smaller springform pan to make our ice cream cakes. A cake made in a 7×2-inch springform is a good size for 2 people to share over a few nights. In the recipe below, I’ve given amounts for both a 7-inch springform and a larger 9- or 10-inch springform pan. (more…)

There’s something about this time of year. The excitement (for me at least) of the first snowfall and the “newness” of the cold, festive winter weather has worn off — but we’re not anywhere near a definite start to spring. Here in upstate New York, we might not start getting consistently warmer, spring-like weather until mid-May…so to me, February through April is kind of like winter limbo. Here’s where I run into the problem: I start to anticipate all the spring-like things to come in February and March, a few months earlier than I know full-on spring will settle in. (Could it have to do with all those packets of vegetable and flower seeds that finally arrived this week?)

Don’t get me wrong, I love my warm winter soups, roasted root vegetables (roasted anything, actually), and smells of warm things baking in the kitchen. But right about this time of year I start to think about emerging from “nesting” mode and yearn for something with a decidedly fresher, crisper, “spring-ier” taste. Bonus points if the food is a “spring-like” color — in other words, green, green, green.

So this probably explains why we have been gobbling up this lime cabbage slaw by the bowlful lately, multiple times a week! It’s dead easy to put together, and is just the remedy for these mid-winter blues. I had been thinking about making something like this when I happened to see a similar recipe in the latest issue of Bon Appetit — though theirs uses red cabbage and slightly different proportions. We’ve eaten this on its own as a side dish, as a salad with some slices of avocado (yes, more green!) and piled into tortillas with fajita-style chicken and queso fresco. It’s best if you can let it sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes to allow the flavors to meld and the cabbage to soak up a little of the acid, so if you’re serving this with something else, make it first and let it sit while you prepare the rest of your meal.

Take a citrusy, crunchy bite and maybe you, too, can start imagining all the good things to come this spring!

Crunchy Lime Cabbage Slaw

Ingredients

1/2 head green cabbage, core removed and sliced very thinly (about 4 cups)
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
zest of 1 lime (about 1 tsp)
juice of 1 lime (about 2 tbsp)
1/4 cup chopped cilantro

coarse salt and pepper, to taste

Directions

Place the thinly sliced cabbage in a large bowl.

In a smaller bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lime zest, and lime juice. Pour over the cabbage and toss to combine. Add the chopped cilantro and toss until it’s distributed throughout. Season with coarse salt and pepper (you really do need to season it with salt) — start with about 1/4 tsp salt and work your way up from there if it needs it, according to your taste.

Let the cabbage sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes, to allow the flavors to meld.

Serves about 4.