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Every recipe I've ever tried for Moules Mariniere (pg 126 of How to Eat) has been pretty much the same: mussels in a broth of wine, butter, garlic, shallots, parsley. Nigella's is just the same. Why mess with perfection? Every time I make this, I kick myself for not doing it more often.

Conclusion: Loved it.

Obviously, I needed bread to sop up all that lovely broth. Jennifer Reese's recipe for Everyday Bread (pg 8 of Make the Bread, Buy the Butter) met my last-minute needs. No kneading necessary, this dough just gets stirred together and then left to proof in 2 loaf pans for two hours. After two hours, my dough had not risen much, so I turned on the oven for a minute, then put the pans in, and after a half hour, it had leveled with the pan. Huzzah!

This is a heartier loaf than I expected. Guess that's the wheat flour. Very dense, with a nice crust.

Conclusion: Liked it, and it's Charlie Approved.

I tried one more stewish Nigella recipe: Lamb and Bean Braise (pg 139 of How to Eat). I conclude that I do prefer lamb stews to beef. Matt thinks stew is a waste of lamb, and he thought there were too many beans. And he wanted to know what Nigella has against potatoes. (Nothing. The answer is nothing.) Oh well. I thought it was really tasty, and the beans absorbed much delicious broth (red wine and balsamic vinegar, with herbs and orange peel).

Conclusion: Liked it.

I count three chocolate puddings in How to Eat, so I simply had to make one. I went with the Gooey Chocolate Puddings (pg 169) recipe from the Fast Food section, as I am lazy, and I love the word "gooey."

This easy recipe produces a layer of cake on top of liquid chocolate goodness. Holy mother. Joy of joys, the recipe makes four ramekins, so we have two for dessert tomorrow. WORD!

Conclusion: Loved it.

Phew!

Charlie's birthday shenanigans have come and gone. A few good friends came. Cupcakes were eaten. Fun was had. I have mixed feelings on celebratory days. I resent the Navy for keeping us away from family, but I'm also so grateful for the friends that we make at each of our stations. The universal isolation forges surrogate families, and it makes me happy to see Charlie surrounded by people who love him, even if we're not related.

Earlier in the week, I made Kale with Chorizo and Poached Egg (pg 149 of How to Eat). This is a recipe that I wish I had on-hand back when Matt was out to sea for 7 months. When I'm by myself, I don't cook much. I hadn't discovered that I enjoyed cooking yet at that point, so I practically survived on cereal, eggs and toast, and english muffin pizzas. Lame. I like to think that if I had a recipe like this in my catalogue, I'd have eaten better. This took no effort, and was delicious.

Boil kale. Cook chorizo. Add kale to the cooked chorizo and mix it all up. Top with a poached egg.

Conclusion: Loved it. This is my new "Matt's out of town and I'm feeling lazy" dinner.

I baked Cocoa-Buttermilk Birthday Cake (pg 257 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking) for Charlie's birthday. Dorie says that this is a good choice, "whether you're celebrating your baby's first birthday or your great-grandfather's ninety-fifth." I disagree. This is an incredibly rich cake, which is not what I think of for a kid's birthday party. It was good, but every adult that tasted it took one bite, said, "Wow, that's good," and immediately followed it up with, "I need a drink." Charlie licked the icing off his fingers, and wanted nothing to do with the actual cake. Whattaya gonna do?

)

 Conclusion: Liked it, but it's not really a kid's cake.

I waste most buttermilk I buy. The cake needed a cup, so instead of buying yet another bottle, I used Jennifer Reese's recipe for homemade Buttermilk (pg 53 of Make the Bread, Buy the Butter). Couldn't be easier. Vinegar + milk = buttermilk. Jennifer stipulates that this method works fine for baked goods, but that you should use fresh buttermilk for "buttermilk soup or a Southern buttermilk pie--or anything that relies heavily on buttermilk's unique satiny-rich-sour personality." For my general purposes, souring a cup of milk at a time will work just fine.

Conclusion: Loved it because it will reduce my enormous buttermilk waste.

Baked ziti was the main dish at Charlie's birthday party. I planned to buy ricotta cheese because of it's convenience, but I just couldn't do it when I saw the little 2 cup containers were SIX DOLLARS each.  Reese's recipe for Ricotta Cheese (pg 198 of Make the Bread, Buy the Butter) involves a gallon of milk and some vinegar (two bucks and change), warmed on the stove, then left to sit for twenty minutes until curds form on top. Drain the curds for twenty minutes, and voila! Cheese.

 I was a little worried that it would be grainy, because the curds looked big to me, but it wasn't. I had a hard time refraining from eating the whole sweet batch with a spoon. It stayed creamy after being baked with the ziti, too.

I'm never buying ricotta again. We're all being defrauded by the dairy industry.

Conclusion: Loved it.

 Plus, the liquid left behind by the cheese is whey. Reese says to replace water with whey in bread and bagel recipes. I don't know what impact it has, but I'm going to find out. It keeps for ten days in the fridge, so I better get baking.

Eating my curds and whey.

FFwD: Broth-Braised Potatoes

I totally forgot to post for French Fridays with Dorie this week. I didn't forget to cook, just to blog about it. Things are nutso here. Charlie has had a respiratory and ear infection all week, it was his birthday on Wednesday, and we're having a party for him on Saturday, so between cleaning and cooking and coddling, I haven't thought much about blogging. It didn't help that I posted about Broth-Braised Potatoes (pg 358 of Around My French Table) last May.

The first time around, I loved these simple potatoes, boiled in broth and herbs. This time, I wasn't as wowed. They were fine, but not especially memorable. One difference, which might be the key, is that the first time, I bought baby (or maybe fingerling?) potatoes, as specified in the recipe. This time, I just used the red potatoes that I had in the house. They weren't nearly as velvety and soft as the potatoes of my memory. Note to self: respect the type of potato called for in a recipe.

Still, it's a lovely, easy potato recipe, and one which I should make more often.

Do Leeks Count as a Vegetable Serving?

 You may notice an uptick in pork-related cooking in the future. A few weeks back, Matt decided to do as the Texans do, and try hunting. He shot a feral hog, and apparently is now hooked. By hooked, I mean obsessed. It's super weird. I don't have a problem with the hunting itself, though it's not something he's ever expressed an interest in before. My conscience is more peaceful eating a hog that spent it's life wandering around, doing what hogs do, rather than cooped up shoulder-to-shoulder in a pen and being fed antibiotics. I read the book Eating Animals a few months ago, and it actually managed to change the way I look at meat, which I didn't expect. I've been buying as much as I can once a month when a grass-fed organic farm brings ice chests full of beef and chicken to the Farmers Market. What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Feral hogs.

The thing with the hogs is that, since they've spent their lives running instead of being fattened, the meat is tough. Really tough. And there's a lot of it. And Matt went hunting again today, even though we still have 3 hams and 3 loins in the freezer from last time. He promises not to go again until we eat what we have. Phew!

So I really need to find a way to cook this meat that makes it a little easier to swallow. Literally. It's dry. haha. Matt wants to get a meat grinder so we can make sausage. That may be the way to go.

I'm rambling about. Sorry. Anyway, today I cooked Nigella's Roast Loin of Pork (pg 286 of How to Eat). It's hard to actually call this a recipe, because she doesn't provide measurements. She suggests that you rub cloves, cinnamon, and cardamom into the meat before roasting it, and toss in a glass-full of cider or wine to help make a gravy, so that's what I did, eye-balling the spices. She said to cook it for 20 minutes a pound. This loin was a little less than a pound. Twenty minutes just seemed too short. I should have trusted her and checked it then, but I let it go for thirty, because that's how long my roasted leeks needed. I overcooked it. My bad. The seasoning was mighty delicious, though, and would have been great on a moist piece of meat. It smelled like chai when I rubbed it in, which was lovely.

Conclusion: Liked it. I don't hold the tough meat against the recipe.

Nigella recommends Roast Leeks (pg 286 of How to Eat) as an accompaniment to the pork. Oh my lord. These were delicious. I could have stuck my face in a whole bowlful. All you do is cut thick chunks of leek, toss them in oil, add salt, and roast. It doesn't get much easier than that. The outside of the leeks brown up and get that nice burned onion flavor, while the inside stays mushy and sweet. I'm going to be making these a lot. Nightly, perhaps. Matt's not home from the hunt yet (so, so weird), so if I eat his serving, he'll never even know they were here. Mwa ha haaa!

Conclusion: Loved it. LOVED it.

Hunting update: Matt and his friend shot a hog, but when they went to go get it, a herd of cattle tried to stampede them, chased them back to their car, then followed the car as they drove away. Huh?? I...I have no words. I couldn't make that up if I tried. On the upside, I still only have one tough hog to eat.

I took yummychunklet's suggestion and am linking this post up with the folks who participate in Forever Nigella. As far as I can tell from my forays into How to Eat, I love Nigella, so cooking something--anything!--from her book once a month is a challenge I'm more than happy to take on.

Not a Day for Cooking

Last night, I had a grand ol' time drinking mojitos and eating tacos at my friend's Girls Night. Today, I paid the price. Namely, Charlie gave Matt a really hard time going to bed last night (as in, screamed for me for two hours), and then woke up a lot during the night. This created a very cranky, very clingy little monkey who would not get off of me. I think his face is forever imprinted in the thigh of my pants, Shroud of Turin style.

Anyway, by dinner time, I'd had it. I was a frazzled mess, and apparently even a dish as easy as Lemon Linguine (pg 230 of How to Eat) was beyond my skill-set. The sauce, if you will, is made of raw egg yolk, parmesan cheese, lemon zest and juice, and heavy cream. I threw in some leftover roast chicken, because it seemed like a good use for it.

Problem #1: The recipe calls for TWO POUNDS of linguine. My brain started to putter as I tried to do fractions to figure out proportions of sauce ingredients for only half a package of pasta. I took the easy way and made a whole pack of pasta, knowing full well we were never going to eat that much and the leftovers wouldn't reheat.
Problem #2: I forgot to halve the egg yolks, so to only use one instead of two. So then I was spooning out what looked like half of the broken yolks. It was dumb.
Problem #3: Right around when the pasta was ready and timing became a factor, Charlie needed more blueberries, more cheese, more blueberries again, more cheese again, etc. Totally forgot to add butter right after the pasta drained, so the noodles solidified. Nigella says that "butter is the best flavoring, best texture, best mood enhancer there is." I agree, but apparently I was beyond salvation.

I accept that if I'd been taking my time and my focus wasn't being pulled in four directions at once, I would have tasted it and tweaked the flavors before mixing it all together. It wasn't lemony or cheesy enough. I like the concept, but what I ate wasn't good enough to bother trying again, unless the only ingredients I had in the house were an egg, pasta, cream, and a lemon.

Conclusion: Just okay.

Next Thursday is book club. Now I know to plan to order a pizza on Friday. 

FFwD: Quatre-Quarts

I love Dorie's baking recipes. I do. It just makes me laugh that, no matter how basic the recipe appears, it still sets off a bomb in my kitchen. Quatre-quarts (pg 434 of Around My French Table, participating in French Fridays with Dorie) is no exception. Dorie says in her intro that, like a pound cake, this recipe is "based on equal measures of four ingredients: eggs, flour, sugar, and butter."

Four ingredients. That sounds easy enough to contain, dish-wise. Except that the butter needs to be melted first. The eggs need to be separated--whites whipped in the stand mixer, yolks mixed with sugar in another bowl. Flour, baking soda, and salt goes in another bowl. I do fully admit that I've broken a number of my Pyrex bowls in the past year, so when I say that the recipe uses every bowl in the house, that's not really THAT impressive of a feat. Still, for something that only uses four basic ingredients, dirtying up four bowls just strikes me as funny. I need to get out more.

What you get at the end of all the dish-washing is a fairly dry vanilla cake that serves as a vehicle for getting the topping of your choice to your mouth. I made a mixed berry compote and amaretto whipped cream, and it was good. I probably wouldn't have liked the cake much without the adornments. I brought it to a friend's for dinner last night, and couldn't help but notice that people--including myself--were taking seconds and thirds of the berries and cream, but not of the cake. It's okay as a basic recipe that I'm glad to have tucked away for the future when I'm wondering how to use up fruit sauce, but it's not something I'd ever want on its own.

Conclusion: Just okay.

I Should Know Better By Now

I need to accept the fact that I don't like stew. I keep thinking that if I can just find the right recipe, I'll be converted. I give up.

Beef Braised in Beer (pg 397 of How to Eat) was different than any other stew I've tried, so I thought it was worth a shot. A lot of prunes soak in stout (I used Guinness, due to its awesomeness) for two hours. Cook some onions and carrots, brown some floured meat, and throw everything into a Dutch oven to cook at low temp for 3 hours.

This picture won't sell the recipe to anyone. Sorry.

If you like stew and prunes, you'll probably love this. The Guinness/prune combo created a rich, balanced broth. I just don't like stew meat. Period. No offense to the recipe. It's just my own thing.

Conclusion: Just okay. I bumped it up from dislike, because the broth was very good.