I'm Back ... with Pesto

This summer has been ... dismal. I want to find something positive to say, but really, it's been the crappiest summer I've had in memory. It's why I had to take a hiatus from this journal. Actually it's not just summer's fault, it all started around April, so spring has some blame as well, but if I never have another year like this one it'll be too soon. Maybe fall will bring better tidings, and the Seattle weather is helping that right along, being cloudy and 68°F today.



In food news, my cousin now has a fresh vegetable garden, and so far it's yielded a lot of salad. A lot of salad. That's fine though, because with summer fruit and tomatoes bursting with flavor, there are worse things to have to eat. :D The other 'crop' her new garden has so far yielded in abundance is basil. After eating her basil, I must say that if you have the will and space (they can be potted) and don't have a brown thumb like I have, grow your own basil. It's 100 times more flavorful than the kind you buy in the grocery store. The difference is amazing.



So I've been having a lot of fresh mozzarella with basil and tomato, one of my favorite things to eat, and of course, with so much basil, it's practically a requirement to make pesto.

I tried making pesto with my mortar and pestle for the first time, and I just have to say ... those that make their pesto this way all the time, bless you. Bless your patience and tireless muscles, because I had to give up and bring out the Mini-Prep. Making pesto is such a cinch, and so delicious, that I'm not sure why I don't do it more often, even if I have to use store-bought basil. Toss the pesto with some pasta (preferably something like rotini, so the pesto can get nice and settled into all the little nooks and crannies) and sliced grape tomatoes and pow! You have a meal that bursts with flavor, each bite a revelation.

Seriously, it's that good.



Pesto (from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)

Ingredients

• 1 or 2 plump garlic cloves
• 1/2 tsp sea salt (plus more to taste)
• 3 tbsp pine nuts
• 3 cups loosely packed basil leaves, stems removed, leaves washed and dried (preferably Genovese (Italian) basil)
• 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan, preferably Parmigiano-Reggiano
• 2-3 tbsp grated pecorino Romano to taste
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp soft butter (optional)

Method

1. By hand: Smash the garlic with 1/2 tsp salt and the pine nuts to break them up, then add the basil leaves a handful at a time. (If you're impatient, you can speed things up by tearing the leaves into smaller pieces first.) Grind them, using a circular motion, until you have a fairly fine paste with very small flecks of leaves. Briefly work in the cheeses and butter, then stir in the olive oil. Taste for salt.
2. In a food processor: Use the same ingredients but in the following order: Process the garlic, salt, and pine nuts until fairly finely chopped, then add the basil and olive oil. When smooth, add the cheeses and butter and process just to combine.

A Simple, No-Fuss Tomato Sauce

No really. This is the epitome of simple. And mind-blowingly delicious.

You can't know how easy it is to make truly simple and delicious food until you've made this sauce -- then tasted it. The effort you put in is given back to you tenfold in a sauce that's bright and rich at the same time.



I love vegetables, and tomato sauces, but on their own they don't seem quite enough (this is why my stint as a vegetarian only lasted 3 months, years ago). What's missing is that fat mouth-feel. That rounded, complete, yes, this is what is filling and good, feel.

This sauce gives you that, along with an intense tomato flavor. There's nothing it in but tomatoes, a bit of salt, an onion, and the secret weapon ... butter. What, no garlic, no olive oil, no basil? It seems like a very non-traditional Italian sauce, and yet it comes from one of the most widely respected Italian cookbooks of all time, Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

It's so easy and so effortless that I can't imagine buying jarred marinara sauce again.



Marcella Hazan's Basic Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

• 1 28oz can of plum tomatoes (I got mine from Trader Joe's)
• 1 medium onion, halved
• 5 tbsp butter
• salt to taste

Method

1. Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and simmer for 45 minutes. Throw the onion halves away (or if you're like me, you'll just eat them separately).

Friday Dinner: Chicken Friand

I know, it's been a long time. I don't even have the excuse that I don't have any food pictures to share. I do. It's just ... laziness. I'm not going to lie: it's winter and I don't like being in my kitchen. I hate that I don't want to be in my kitchen when I love being in my kitchen. But when I can see my breath and washing veggies freezes my hands, it's hard to want to do it.



A good impetus is the resumption of Friday night dinners. I can't let Trix make yummy, homemade things while my contribution is takeout or pb&j sandwiches, can I? Of course not. But that doesn't mean my post-vacation apathy about blogging is as easily dismissed. (Though I did change the layout a bit -- just a subtle stretching.) Well, maybe not so much apathy as just getting back into the habit. That said, let me say that the recipe I'm sharing today is actually one that we made last week. Hey, it's only a week late -- that's not so bad, is it?

What we made was chicken friand, and it was delicious. The recipe makes 6 pastries, and even if you're just cooking for 1 or 2 people, like me, you'll want to make all 6. Why? Well, as mentioned before, they're delicious. On top of that, they freeze well. So the initial effort of making them yields multiple yummy, hot meals.



Essentially, puff pastry is stuffed with a mixture of chicken, gruyere cheese, and mushrooms, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and rosemary. It's then baked until puffy and golden brown, and topped with a thick mushroom gravy. It's perfect cold weather food.



I'm normally not a huge fan of rosemary, but it works well here. In future I may add just a tad less than the recipe calls for, but would otherwise not change a thing. The sauce is especially wonderful, though it thickens after the first day and needs to be thinned out for subsequent reheating (and doesn't freeze all that well). But it's so good and easy that it may be my new go-to gravy for just about anything, including mashed potatoes.



Chicken Friand

Ingredients

• 1 1/2-2 cups rotisserie chicken, diced
• 1 package (2 sheets) frozen puff pastry, thawed
• 2oz dried shiitake, porcini, or mix of dried mushrooms
• 1 can chicken broth
• 3 large scallions, white and greens, minced
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 6 tbsp butter, divided
• 2 cups chopped fresh mushrooms (such as white button or cremini), chopped
• 4 tbsp flour
• 1/2 cup heavy cream (milk or half/half)
• 1 tsp dried rosemary
• 1 egg, beaten
• 4oz Gruyere cheese, shredded
• salt, to taste
• pepper, to taste

Method

1. Pour chicken broth into a bowl and rehydrate the dried mushrooms in it for as long as it takes to fully hydrate the mushrooms -- varies depending on the size of the mushrooms you're using (my shiitakes took about 30 min). When they're hydrated, squeeze the broth out of the mushrooms, chop them up, and transfer them to another container. Set both aside.
2. In a large pan with a lid, melt 2 tbsp of butter and saute scallions and garlic in it. Add the fresh and rehydrated mushrooms and saute until cooked. Season with salt and pepper to your preference. When done, transfer the mushroom mixture to another container.
3. Clean out the pan, then melt the remaining 4 tbsp of butter in it. Add 4 tbsp flour, stir in well and cook 1-2 minutes to make a roux. Slowly pour the mushroom-infused chicken stock into the roux, stirring all the while to keep lumps from forming. Set the sauce to barely simmering, and stir every few minutes. When it's thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, reduce heat to low, stir in the cream, and place the lid on it. Stir every 5 minutes or so.
4. In a large bowl, add the diced chicken and 1 tsp dried rosemary. Add 1/2 of the mushroom mixture. Add the shredded Gruyere, reserving a tbsp or two for the sauce (or none, if that's your preference). Take 2-4 tbsp of the sauce and add it to the chicken mixture -- just to wet the mixture a bit and help combine everything evenly.
5. Unfold a sheet of thawed puff pastry and roll it out to thin the dough, about 3 times each way. Cut the dough into thirds.
6. Mound a generous 1/2 cup of filling on half of each dough piece, leaving room around the edges to seal. Wet the edge around the filling with egg wash, fold the other half over to encase filling, and use the tines of a fork to press it closed.
7. Brush the tops of each pastry with egg wash. (At this point, the raw, filled pastries can be flash-frozen on a parchment-lined tray, then individually wrapped and bagged for long-time freezer storage. Thaw pastry before baking.)
8. Bake at 350°F for 25 minutes on a sheet tray lined with parchment paper. The pastries should puff and turn golden brown.
9. While the pastries are baking, add the other half of the mushroom mixture to the sauce and stir in. Optionally you can add a bit of Gruyere (if you reserved any) here as well. There should be about 1/4 cup sauce for each pastry.

Failed Alfredo

Sometimes my cooking experiments are complete failures. Such was the case with my first attempt ever at an alfredo sauce from scratch. I hadn't done much research -- I was just following a recipe that'd been posted on LJ -- and didn't know the cardinal rule for making alfredo sauce: don't let it boil. If you let it boil, it separates, creating butter and fat solids, and is basically unsalvagable after that.



In the above picture, it was still in the very early 'warming up' stages, so it looks fine. If only I'd kept it there, I would have been okay. But I thought that it needed to bubble a little more, so I turned up the heat and brought it to a boil. Big mistake. Sigh. I added in the parmesan cheese at the end anyway, hoping that it would somehow save it (it didn't). I ended up drizzling my pasta with some of the 'sauce' anyway, and the flavor was super delicious. I can only imagine how good it would have been if the texture and consistency had been right.

The good news is, I've discovered a great linguine from Trader Joe's. They have different kinds of linguine, and I give a big thumbs up to the garlic and basil one. (I bought another kind also, but can't remember the type, and in any case haven't tried it yet.)



There's the packaging for it. It does cost quite a bit more than the regular pasta ($1.99 for 8 oz., when you can get twice that of the plain kind for $0.99 -- however at this particular TJ's I couldn't find any plain long pasta except for spaghetti and angel hair), but it's quite good.



Here it is cooked, a bit past al dente as I was so busy trying to save the sauce that I left the pasta boiling a little too long.

Saturday Dinner - Rotini Pasta with Vegetable Marinara, Banana Cake, Miniature Pineapple Upside-Down Cake (Special Edition)

Tonight was a special edition of Jade and I's Saturday night dinners, being that it's Friday. That's because tomorrow is my birthday! And I'm going to my cousin's for some fresh boiled crab. Mmm.

But back to tonight! We made a version of a dish that I used to make a lot when I was a poor legislative correspondent on Capitol Hill, making peanuts. This was a favorite meal because it was fast, cheap, filling, and had some nutritional value. But back then I only ever used pasta sauce that came in a jar, and usually made it with long pasta such as spaghetti or fettucini. Tonight, however, I made my own sauce, and as I was out of long pasta, used rotini -- which actually might have been a better choice.



We each made different desserts -- I made what was supposed to be a low-fat banana cake, except I didn't have milk, so used canned coconut milk instead, so the low-fat thing kind of went out the window, which is okay for me since I'm not restricted to having 10 grams of fat per meal, as Jade is. Predictably, the cake was soft, moist, and delicious, which means I'll probably have to continue to make it with the coconut milk! Still, I think it would still be great with the nonfat milk the recipe originally called for. Jade made miniature low-fat pineapple upside-down cakes, which looked so yummy I wish I could have had one! They were made in honor of her mother's birthday, which happened to be today.





All in all, a very simple, satisfying meal that was good and low in fat! Well, more so if you were at Jade's house instead of mine.

Rotini with Vegetable Marinara

Ingredients

• 1 28oz can diced tomatoes
• 1 8oz can tomato paste
• 1 cup water
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 1/2 cup dry red wine (I used Merlot)
• 1 zucchini, cut into 1/4" rounds and then cut in half
• 1 celery rib, peeled and cut into small pieces
• 5-6 white button or cremini mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp marjoram
• 1 tsp basil
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 cups cooked rotini
• 8oz fresh broccoli
• 1 1/2 tbsp olive oil, divided

Method

1. Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a saucepan or Dutch oven.
2. Toss in the diced onion and stir to coat. Add the sugar. Cook onions until they're translucent and getting soft. If it seems there's not enough oil for the onions you have, add a little more -- you don't want them to turn brown and burn.
3. Carefully pour in the red wine, and cook for a few minutes until it's reduced a bit.
4. Add the can of tomatoes, juice and all. If you're pressed for time, mash the tomatoes a bit so they're not quite so chunky. If you plan to let this simmer for a couple of hours, you can skip that step.
5. Mix the tomato paste with the water, and add to the sauce. Bring it to a boil.
6. Toss in celery, zucchini, and mushrooms, and stir to coat. Let that cook for a couple of minutes.
7. Add the garlic, herbs, and salt and pepper to taste.
8. Let the sauce simmer for 2-3 hours on low heat, stirring once or twice. The resulting sauce should be chunky, but the vegetables should be soft and there should be plenty of sauce.
9. About half an hour before you're ready to serve, make the pasta as directed on the package.
10. In another saucepan, heat 1/2 tbsp of olive oil. When it's hot, add the broccoli and stir fry until the broccoli is bright green and just about done. If you need to, add more oil as you definitely don't want the broccoli to burn.
11. Add cooked rotini and stir a bit, but don't actually cook as it'll stick to the pan.
12. Ladle in the vegetable marinara sauce and stir until all the pasta is coated. Add more if your preference is for more sauce.
13. Cook for a minute or two, then ladle into a pasta bowl and serve. We left out the cheese to keep this low fat, but you can sprinkle some parmesan on at the end.

I had to wait for the steam to dissipate to take this photo -- and even then some remained. I didn't want it to get totally cold, though, since I still had to eat it!

Banana Cake

Ingredients

• 2 cups unbleached flour
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 c bananas, mashed
• 2 eggs, slightly beaten
• 1/2 cup coconut milk (or nonfat milk for low-fat version)
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Prepare a 9" square baking dish with cooking spray; set aside.
3. In a small bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt; set aside.
4. In a mixing bowl, combine bananas, milk, oil, eggs, and vanilla extract.
5. Add dry ingredients and mix well.
6. Spread batter into prepared pan.
7. Bake for 35 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. (If you use nonfat milk, it may only take 25 minutes as originally directed, so watch the cake to make sure it doesn't overbake!)
8. To prepare glaze, combine honey and cinnamon in a small bowl. Mix well. Drizzle over warm cake.

If you make the low-fat version, you can check out specific nutritional information here, which is the recipe I adapted.

Miniature Pineapple Upside-Down Cakes

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 15oz can's worth of drained pineapple juice (see topping)

For the topping:

• 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter
• 7 tablespoons of brown sugar
• 1 15oz can of crushed pineapple, drained (save the juice)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. In a mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients.
3. Slowly stir in the eggs and milk to the dry ingredients. Add some of the crushed pineapple to the batter if desired.
4. To make the topping, melt butter in a sauce pan.
5. Slowly add brown sugar until you get a nice-looking glaze. Pour the glaze into a pan (or distribute evenly among mini pans, if making small cakes).
6. Add the crushed pineapple, spreading it evenly in the pan(s).
7. Pour the cake batter over the glaze and pineapple.
8. Bake for 35 mins if making a large cake, 15 to 20 if doing minis. You can slice and serve directly out of the pan(s), or turn over so that the pineapple glaze is on top, for upside-down cake!

Note: To make low fat, use 1% low fat milk, and substitute 4 egg whites for the eggs -- it makes the cake a little heavier than is ideal, but the fat to taste ratio remains intact.

Miniature pineapple cakes, with a cell phone to show size.