Eats For One … or more

Pan-Roasted Spring Vegetables with Brown Butter Sauce and Hanger Steak garnish

Leftovers + leftovers + new vegetables = a good meal; and the right equipment helps.

My brother accused me of openly coveting his Circulon skillet the last time we visited his South Carolina home. I believe we were cooking shrimp and grits.

My covetous manner paid off. Last Christmas; he gave me a Circulon 10 1/2-inch open skillet, 3-inches deep. Since I’m a mature home cook, I already had a 10-inch cast iron skillet and 10 and 12-inch stainless steel sauté pans, but to my mind, this was something special. Often, when I’m thinking about what to cook for dinner, I think about the pan to use and visualize the cooking procedure.

I had some leftover grilled hanger steak and a couple sprouts of broccoli, not used when I did a veal scaloppini with morel sauce, steamed broccoli as the vegetable. I thought of a pan-roasting procedure from a Cooks Illustrated recipe for Pan-Roasted Broccoli with Lemon Browned Butter. It’s something I’ve cooked many times, one of my favorite broccoli recipes. I can pan-roast the broccoli and garnish with the steak. Viola, a meal easily prepared in my Circulon skillet.

mise en place

As it turned out, there was a bit less broccoli than I thought, and a bit more steak than I thought. I needed other stuff I could cook in the same pan with the same procedure. Summer squash and tiny new potatoes from the Mariquita Mystery box will work. More vegetables than meat, that’s good. All cook in about the same amount of time. Good again. While I prepped the meat and vegetables, I put some rice in the rice cooker to catch the juices.

the vegetables brown

Brown the broccoli stems, squash and potatoes with a little oil… add the broccoli flowerettes and brown… add some seasoned water, cover and cook for a couple more minutes, uncover and cook off the liquid. Reserve the vegetables in a bowl.

Brown the steak in the same pan and reserve on a plate in a warm oven. Deglaze the pan with butter while making a brown butter sauce with a chopped shallot, garlic, salt, pepper; finish with lemon juice and fresh thyme. Add the vegetables to the sauce and toss – easily done in the deep skillet. Serve over rice, garnish with the steak.

Carol noted that the potatoes were superfluous with the rice, but I consider those fine tiny new potatoes a vegetable, rather than a starch.

But wait… there’s more; the Caprese Salad also featured leftovers. Half of a big pineapple tomato – I had the other half for lunch with cottage cheese (a favorite lunch in tomato season). A bit of Buffalo Mozzarella – most of it used on pizza Sunday night. The basil, OK, fresh from the Mariquita box.

One fine meal. Yum. And I have only the one pan to wash and a bunch more refrigerator space.

Greek-Style Braised Lamb Meatballs

Brother Tom is in the food service industry so he gets all the trade publications. He sent me a bunch of meatball recipes from Restaurant and Institutions Magazine (what a melodious name!) and asked me to give this one a test drive as I had served goat meatballs when he last visited. Carol is a lamb lover, so this was very appropriate. I got the ground lamb from Marin Sun Farms at the Farmers Market. Lucky it’s almost spring; hothouse tomatoes and mint are available at the Market, as well.

Apropos of many restaurant recipes… this has lots of ingredients in small quantities. I guess a restaurant always has cooked rice, lamb broth, fresh mint and dill on hand. I had to break out the rice cooker and make a batch for the three tablespoons and buy a whole bunch of mint for two tablespoons. One tablespoon of dill? Fahgeddaboutit. I used one teaspoon dried dill. Lamb broth? Nope, I used demi-glace gold. Also — oops — I put all the olives in the balls instead of reserving some for garnish. No matter. The baking time seemed right… balls browned; gravy bubbly and thick. Yum.

The labor was worth it as the balls were very good and very rich. I served them in a bowl with the gravy, chopped tomato and garnish as noted. C thought I should serve over rice or noodles. Maybe, but they were good straight, accompanied by a fine, big salad and good bread.

All was not lost, as I mixed up the leftover rice, salad, and garnish to make a rice salad for lunch the next day.

For this recipe – for all recipes as far as I’m concerned – it’s really important to get your mise en place together before starting. For the balls themselves, everything goes into one bowl and gets mixed up, but the sauce ingredients come into play one or two at a time. Here are breadcrumbs, herbs, spices in the big bowl. Lurking beneath them are the bread cubes and cream. Chopped olives and the famous three tablespoons of rice are in the smaller bowl.

I’m starting to make the balls. Pinch off a batch of lamb mixture and roll between your palms. It helps to wet your hands from time to time between balls. (more…)

So I said at the end of my Noodle Chicken story. Well, I have now cooked the beef. As a bonus, I cooked another batch of chicken during the first three hours of beef cooking. Both went in the fridge.

I used boneless beef short ribs from Golden Gate Meats. The meat poaches for eight hours at 170°F. I learned to control the water temperature by cracking the lid on the pot to a greater or lesser degree to keep the temperature in the acceptable range of 165 to 175. Although 8 hours is a long time, the cooking doesn’t require much attention. I checked every 30 to 45 minutes.

The poached beef was almost as tender and velvety as the chicken, but there was no mistaking the rich beef taste. Once cooled and shredded, the beef and its broth can be kept in a covered bowl in the refrigerator for a week or so.

The next day I made the Noodle Beef. The method is the same, but the ingredients vary to go with the meat — red bell pepper and Napa Cabbage to complement the chicken, carrots and bok choy for the beef — along with the common ingredients; scallions, garlic, ginger, chile paste and noodles.

When cooking the chicken version I found the recipe hard to follow. It’s written as though John Thorne made it up as he went along and prepped his vegetables while he was cooking. Maybe he did make it that way, but I’m not seasoned enough to cook like that. I have learned that if I get my mise en place together before starting to cook I don’t forget stuff. What one does with the carrot, for example, (2 medium to large carrots, peeled, cut into thirds and sliced vertically into wide thin strips.) I would note in the ingredients, rather than in the instructions. So I altered the recipe for the way I work. (more…)

My wife and I have been traveling the San Francisco – Reno route the past few months to help son Brian find and move into a new house. We were tired of “the usual” stop at Ikeda in Auburn, not to mention their long lines and limited menu (cheeboigie or cheeboigie?). A friend suggested stopping in Newcastle for Newcastle Produce and La Fornaretta, an Italian place (“the best pizza,” she said).

Our first Newcastle stop was in the late afternoon and La Fornaretta was closed, so we had a sandwich and salads at Newcastle Produce. Excellent, and what an interesting shop with lots of good and local products.

Last week we arrived in Newcastle on the stroke of noon and were the first seated at La Fornaretta. As he took us to our table, the ebullient Italian owner raved about his fresh seafood and especially the fresh clams over linguine. How could I resist?

The dish was magnificent and so simple I figured I could recreate it at home. (more…)

Leftover Grilled Flank Steak
Chicken and Prawns
Pork?

One of my favorite Asian cookbooks is A Taste of the Far East by Madhur Jaffrey, the celebrated Indian actress and cookbook author, published in 1993.

The book is one of those big, heavily — and beautifully — illustrated cookbooks and by now is stained and marked from frequent use.

Today, I was faced with the situation of leftover grilled flank steak — not a bad situation to be sure — one I’ve faced many times. A flank steak runs about two pounds or more. Two people — at least these two people — can eat less than half of that for a substantial dinner. The options — steak salad, steak hash, throw it into some kind of soup — are good, but get tiresome after a while.

I remembered the wonderful Madhur Jaffrey dish, Noodles with Chicken and Prawns. It’s comfort food on the spicy side… something I’ve cooked for guests to hearty acclaim. Why not pinch-hit the steak for the chicken and prawns? (more…)

Last August, I wrote a piece called Cooking from the TV which compared the TV version of a recipe to the book version – and the perils thereof. The subject was Tomato and Sausage Bake from the Food Network show, JAMIE AT HOME by Jamie Oliver.

This week I had some heirloom tomatoes from Bruins Farms market stand (greenhouse tomatoes to be sure), some thick bacon, and a fine coil of sausage from The Fatted Calf. What a perfect circumstance to revisit that recipe.

Starting ingredients

Clockwise from the tomatoes:
Tomatoes – three kinds of heirlooms… you can see some rosemary in the pan already.
Focaccia — goes onto the serving plate to capture the juices
New potatoes – not part of the original recipe, but what the hell, they can roast right along with the rest.
Unpeeled cloves of garlic just below the potatoes.
Bacon – this has already been rendered in the roasting pan for about five minutes.
Thyme
Basque sausage from The Fatted Calf

Assembled in the roasting pan

First, I put the roasting pan in a 375 oven for five minutes or so to render the bacon. Drain the bacon on paper towels. Put the tomatoes in until the skins blistered and I could pull off most of the skins with tongs.
Out of the oven, I slid the bacon under the tomatoes and added the potatoes and sausages. Back in the Countertop Convection Oven on fan bake for 30 minutes.

Out of the oven and ready to serve over the focaccia. Drizzle with your good olive oil and you are set for a flavorful and comfortable dinner. Yum.

I saw some really nice, fennel at the farmers market recently and it reminded me of a fennel cake I’d had in London, so I went to Cheese Plus and asked if they had “Beekswell” cheese (that’s what was in my notes). Ray, the owner, said they had Berkswell, a raw milk sheep cheese from England. I figured that must be it, and bought a wedge of nearly a half-pound.

Fennel and Berkswell Cake at St John Bread and Wine in London

St. John Bread and Wine is Fergus Henderson’s smaller restaurant in the Spitalfields area of London (northeast). We visited last October when we also toured France and Spain. I asked the server how it was made, it seemed so simple. She consulted the kitchen and advised that, “it is sliced fennel, layered with Beekswell goat cheese and baked. To finish, the top was spread with a mixture of milk and cheese and broiled for 2 or 3 minutes to brown.”

They served the cake with pickled walnuts.  (After making my cake, I learned that Cheese Plus sells Pickled Walnuts in a can.)

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Tomato and Sausage Bake

Tomato and Sausage Bake Adapted from Sweet Cherry Tomato and Sausage Bake, from the Food Network show JAMIE AT HOME by Jamie Oliver. The show is based on the book of the same name.When I got home from the Farmers Market on Saturday, Carol had Jamie Oliver’s show, Jamie at Home, on the kitchen TV. He was doing a show on tomatoes. What luck, I had tomatoes in my bag. Jamie’s recipes are always easy and usually good, especially the ones from this show.I stopped and took notes, even as C was saying, “You can get the recipe on the internet.” When the show was over, I went to the Food Network website, found the “Tomatoes” show and copied the recipes to a Word document. Then I checked my notes against the recipes. As usual, there were differences.Warning: When you see something interesting on a food TV show — take notes. You can always look up the recipe on the internet, but sometimes it’s a similar recipe, not what you saw. Also, on TV you can see techniques that aren’t noted in the recipe.In this case, for example:

Recipe — cherry tomatoes, TV — he did it with whole tomatoes of varying sizes and colors. Recipe — 375 ° oven, TV — he cooked in an outdoor, wood fired brick oven. Now he wouldn’t write a recipe for an outdoor, wood fired brick oven, but the temperature in that oven is way higher than 375. Recipe — No bacon or salt pork. TV — he started with bacon or salt pork in the pan and rendered the fat, then took out the bacon and flavored the fat with herbs. Recipe — Chopped garlic. TV — Unpeeled garlic cloves. Recipe — He put everything in the pan at once and popped it in the oven. TV — He put the tomatoes in first to blister the skin, took the pan out and pulled the skins off. Then added the sausages and back in the oven.On TV, he did some “extra dishes” with the leftover sauce. The recipe on the internet said, “Our agreement with the producers of “Jamie at Home” only permit us to make 2 recipes per episode available online. Food Network regrets the inconvenience to our viewers and foodnetwork.com users”

Anyway, you get the drift. Take notes.

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