just stuff I threw together

From my friend Jan:

A small dab of goat cheese on a small square of dark chocolate, washed down with a glass of blueberry juice 

her verdict: Yum Yum!

Once again there has been too much to do and no time to shop. And yet we need to eat. Foraging in the freezer I turned up the last 2 salmon patties from Costco - wild alaskan salmon in burger format, one of our favorites. We were out of bread products but still had the last packet of Trader Joe frozen Jasmine rice. So we have protein and carbs - but what about veggies?

Rummaging through the crisper (my friend says it should more accurately be called the rotter) I turned up a few mushrooms and a bit of kale that needed some serious sorting through. Not quite enough for a meal for 2 so I needed something else. The cupboards yielded pineapple which inspired a sweet and sour stir fry. It turned out amazingly well considering its origins.

Here’s how it went down:

Fried up the salmon patties in a little oil and removed to keep them crisp. Quick and easy - about 4 minutes a side.
In the same pan I added the mushrooms, a bit of onion, kale and finally half a can of pineapple with just a bit of the juice.

For flavor some soy sauces and sweet chili sauce and for sour some rice wine vinegar.

I let that cook down a bit and poured the lot over the salmon patties nested on a bed of rice.

Turns out that pineapple works well with salmon after all and does a bang up job standing in for vegetables some times.

Well New Years has come and gone and all thats left of the parties are hazy memories and a cabinet of leftover liquor. So what do you do with the three bottles of Stoli you were convinced would not be enough - never mind the fact that the amount you purchased worked out to like 10 White Russians or 20 martini’s a piece. The answer lies in a spicy pasta sauce originating the Bologna region of Italy. I first experienced this dish growing up in NY/NJ where it first gained popularity in America. It’s most commonly served with chicken or prawns but you could really use any protein that can stand up to a strong sauce.

I’ve written the recipe as I think it’s best but many of the ingredients can be substituted to suit different tastes or availability of ingredients. There are two exceptions: first, the vodka. Use good vodka. I’ll elaborate in a minute. The second exception is the cheese - Pecorino Romano is a sharp, salty, semi-hard sheep’s milk cheese that really makes this dish sing. Feel free to substitute parmesan cheese, or get creative if you like, but if you enjoy this dish enough to make it a second time I urge you to try it with the romano cheese and let me know what you think.

Ok, back to the Vodka. Like I said, use good vodka. This is a rule I follow religiously with all forms of liquor, beer, wine, olive oil, spices - you get the idea. To quote Papa John - Better ingredients make a better pizza. Now chances are you already have decent vodka at your disposal but if not I’d suggest rethinking why you have so much vodka leftover in the first place. My personal favorite for this dish is Monopolowa but I’m willing to bet any mid-range vodka will yield pleasing results.

Penne alla Vodka
(Serves 3-4)

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2C vodka
• 1 can Muir Glen fire roasted tomatoes (for extra tomato flavor add tomato paste or fresh tomatoes)
• 1 lg onion, medium dice
• 1 head garlic, minced (you could use less - but why?)
• 1 Tbs cayenne pepper (a jalapeño or other hot pepper will also work)
• 1 C heavy cream (often called whipping cream or heavy whipping cream)
• 2 Tbs butter, softened (professional chefs use unsalted - if you use salted go easy on the cheese which will be salty)
• 1/2 C Fresh grated Pecorino Romano Cheese

Preparation:

1. Sweat the onions in oil or butter over med-high heat. Cook until translucent or even golden but do not brown or burn.
2. Add garlic and saute briefly - until pungent garlic smell is noticed; usually about 30 seconds.
3. Add caned tomatoes including any juice and cayenne pepper. Saute until nearly all liquid has cooked off. Stir frequently enough to prevent scorching of tomatoes.
4. Add vodka and again cook until most the liquid is evaporated being careful not to scorch.
5. Add heavy cream and reduce heat to medium. Reduce cream by about 1/3rd.
6. Turn off heat and finish with grated cheese and softened butter (butter is optional but will add richness and sheen to the sauce).

The taste should be a creamy tomato with a strong cheesy richness and a pronounced heat. If any of these parts are off the flavor will seem a little lacking - play with the recipe until you get it to your liking. All that’s left is to serve it with a hollow pasta such as rigatoni, ziti or penne.

Garnish with fresh basil.

Enjoy!!

whoops this comes a bit late but Scott Noble, a real chef - as in he does this for a living has joined the fold and his first post sounds good to me… real good.

note to self: add author attribution to posts

Ok, so wow - so very happy that we delayed last nights dinner plan until today. Our mealtime adventure started as when, as sometimes happens, Jim did a little impulse buying … he came home a few days ago with a gigundo organic rib eye steak and declared -   “I think we should start eating steak”.

This being one of my all time favorite foods (except for my stint as a vegetarian) I couldn’t find any fault with his logic. There just remained the question of what to do with it to fully celebrate the flavor and luxury. We don’t often cook meat in the house due to the intense interest our cats have in it and the fact that we don’t often eat meat just out of habit. To say I am rusty at preparing such things would be overly kind. But its hard to go too terribly wrong with great ingredients, which we happened to have on hand.

The first would be the cup or so of semi-sauted Chanterelle mushrooms from the freezer. This fall we went mushroom gathering for the first time and harvested many more than a sane person could eat in a month. We were giddy from the hunt and brought them all home. After giving some away we still had an excess, and our mushroom mentor Linda said that by quick frying them halfway in butter you could store them in the freezer. New Year’s steak seemed the perfect time to finish off the last batch.

In supporting roles would be some lovely organic purple kale and a couple of shallots left from Thanksgiving preparations. Here is how it went…

In my very largest frying pan I defrosted the chanterelles with a bit of extra butter and a couple of finely diced shallots until it was all becoming a lovely golden color. Then I added some chopped kale on top and mixed it together until the kale was wilty and brightly colored. I removed this from the pan leaving as much butter behind as possible and added a bit more.

Then one big steak was seared on both sides until it was just about done (or so I thought) when I added back the veggies and a handfull of finely chopped parsley. The steak was seasoned with salt, pepper and a dash of worcestershire sauce. I had some trouble getting all of the meat to the same level of done-ness and ended up cutting it in half so I could rotate things around. I removed the greens and mushrooms to the plates as a bed for the steak and splashed brandy on the steak in an impromtu tribute to Steak Diane.

As seems to always happen we started in eating before I thought to get a photo for the blog, so the plating is sloppy and its not the best image - it was so incredibly tasty though. I am going to try to be more mindful of taking the pictures in the future.

Jim has declared this better than restaurant steak (although not topping Ruth’s Chris) and wants to start a weekly steak tradition. Unfortunately many parts were a overdone (medium rather than medium rare) so we only had glimpses of how great this meal could have truly been. But it gave us a goal and so starts our quest for 2008 - the perfect steak.

Happy New Year
Its been too long since I have posted and I did miss some stellar opportunities with holiday foods I pretty much invented. Then today, we needed lunch and didn’t want to spoil our appetites for our special new year’s dinner, so I did the combine leftovers thing - lentil soup and pumpkin (not the same can as the previous post!). Rummaging in the cupboard I came up with the additions of paprika and hot sauce this soup proves that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I might do this again on purpose since the pumpkin made it creamy and smooth and the paprika added both color and sparkle. Anyone have another example of this to share? Here’s to a great new year of making things up as we go along.

Tomorrow, November 3rd, is Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day. It’s cheaper to make an excellent two and a half cases of your favorite porter, lager, or IPA than it is to buy. All it takes is some basic equipment, good sanitation practices, and the ability to follow a recipe. If you can make a Betty Crocker cake out of the box, you can brew beer!

I’ve been brewing for about ten years, with long lulls for darkroom building, other home remodeling, raising small kids, and other distractions. Still, I’ve managed to do about 14 or 15 batches in that time, and every batch I brew confirms how easy it is to do, and how satisfying it can be to hold that finished glass of beer in your hand, knowing you had everything to do with getting it there. With all of the batches I’ve done, I’ve ended up with leftover ingredients: hops, vacuum-packed and shoved into the back of the freezer; dried malt extract (or “DME”); adjunct grains with names like “Munich” and “Crystal”, sealed up in Ziploc baggies and piled up in the homebrew box in the pantry–you get the picture. The good news is that you can use many of these grains, hops, and other elements anytime, for another recipe.

Faced with a box of leftover beermaking supplies late last year, I decided to make some beer. After seeing what I had on-hand, it looked like I had most of the ingredients for a Porter-style beer. Named for the strong-shouldered working men who hauled heavy loads day and night in the London of centuries past,
“porter” usually refers to a darker-looking, somewhat heavier ale. It isn’t too bitter, and shouldn’t have much of a hop taste or aroma. It is usually seen as “sweeter” than a bitter-style ale, and lighter in body than a stout. Think roasted barley, or the smell of a nice whole-grain bread coming fresh out of the oven, and you can imagine the taste of a porter.

The following is a recipe, then, for what I call Leftover Porter. But the type of beer you make is entirely up to what sort of leftover stuff you’ve got laying around from previous brewing sessions. The point is to use it, and make something good out of what was just a pile of grain and dried flowers! The only thing I had to buy was the yeast (since I prefer liquid yeast, and it doesn’t keep).

Leftover Porter

Ingredients:

• 6 pounds Muntons dark Dried Malt Extract
• 1 pound Muntons light Dried Malt Extract
• 12 oz. Chocolate Malt, crushed
• 5 oz. Crystal Malt, 10 Lovibond (that’s a measure of how much sugar is in the malt), crushed
• 8 oz. Crystal Malt, 50 Lovibond
• 1 oz. Cluster hops, 6.2% alpha acid content (for bittering)
• 1.5 oz. Willamette hops, 4.9% alpha acid content (for bittering and aroma)
• 0.5 tsp. Calcium carbonate (to adjust the water hardness)
• 1 tsp. Irish Moss (to help clarify the beer as it cools)
• Wyeast “British Ale II” yeast

Process:

• Crush malts in a ziploc bag, hammering them with a rolling pin (if they aren’t already crushed). This will help to release the sugars in the malts later on. Transfer these to a cheesecloth or mesh nylon bag (”hop bag”).
• Place the bag of malts into a stockpot with about 2.5 gallons of cold water. Bring to just under a boil. Remove the bag of malts. Reserve for the compost pile.
• Add your Dried Malt Extract and Calcium Carbonate. Mix in thouroughly. The DME will stick like crazy to your spoon, and clump (after all, it’s basically sugar). Be patient and stir it all in. Then bring the mix up to a full rolling boil. Watch to make sure it doesn’t boil over! Sticky wort on the stove is nasty to clean up. I keep a mug of ice-cold water nearby to damp down the foam as it gets too close to the top of the stockpot.
• Add the Cluster hops. Putting them into a hop bag will make it easier to remove all of them later on, but you can strain them out later, too, if you want.
• 15 minutes into the boil, add the irish moss.
• 25 minutes into the boil, add the Willamette hops.
• 30 minutes into the boil, remove the pot from the heat. Cool down to about 90 degrees or so.
• Pour the stuff (we call it wort) into a fermentation vessel, usually a glass carboy, 5 gallons in size. Top off to make 5 gallons. Use distilled water to avoid any contamination. When the temperature of the wort gets to about 70 degrees, pitch the yeast into the wort, mixing in without aerating it too much. Cap it with a hose running into a bottle of water, and sit it in a dark place where the temperature will remain at 68-70 degrees, for seven to ten days. slap on an airlock after the foamy stuff (”krausen”) finishes blowing out of the carboy and through the hose.
• After about ten days or so, you can transfer the wort to a second carboy via syphon, which will help make a clearer beer. But it’s not necessary. Wait until the liquid in the airlock bubbles less than once a minute or so, and then bottle your beer!

Notes: I’m glossing over the importance of sanitation, and how to do it, and some of the details about how to “rack” your wort into the fermenter, etc. But any good homebrew store will sell you a book that talks about these particulars. The important thing is to experiment, using what you have on hand.

And if at any point in the brewing process, you feel stressed, remember the brewer’s mantra: Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew.

Due to circumstances beyond my control we ended up with most of a large can of pumpkin and half of a rotisserie chicken in the fridge. I knew there must be some way of combining these items and using them both up before they were forcibly migrated to the back and forgotten until they evolved to something capable of self-directed movement. I started thinking about a local Thai restaurant’s awesome Asian pumpkin curry and an experiment was born.

As I often do I started looking through recipes for somewhere to start. Hard rains were taking down the internet at the time so I was limited to what I have at hand and not much insight turned up as to what exactly might be added (note to self - need more cookbooks containing curries). So armed only with my general accumulated knowledge of what spices pumpkin usually has as friends and that its pretty hard to mess up chicken - this is what I came up with:

In a large soup pot heat up -
1 Tbsp of olive oil
2 cloves crushed garlic
about 1 Tbsp shredded fresh ginger (I keep it in the freezer)

Add the shredded meat of about one half of a cooked rotisserie chicken to brown while adding a quarter of red onion sliced fine and some cumin, coriander and about 1/4 cup of chopped cilantro (mine was frozen). Once the onions have done their thing (become translucent) I added in the pumpkin (about a cup and a half I think - big can minus a bit) and about 8 oz of chicken stock. The stock was actually made on the spot with a Tbsp of “better than bouillon” with 8 oz of boiling water added, so I think this made it extra salty.

Once that is well mixed and over medium heat or a bit lower I added more spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and a bit of chili powder. At this point I started to get a little nervous because it was getting thick and I was on the fence about adding canned tomatoes. I know they go in some curries but all I had were ones with Italian herbs so I opted to look for something else instead - in the end I think it was a good call.

Being somewhat quick on my feet, a bit fearless and generally not too bright I decided to stir in about a quarter cup of yogurt. This was a good call as it turned out because not only did nothing bad happen but the texture became something new and interesting - somewhat along the lines of a good sag paneer - creamy, light and fluffy. I added some more chopped cilantro and running out of that about a quarter cup of chopped parsley. Taste tests proved - there was still something missing so…

I turned to my usual all purpose back up ingredient - hot sauce. I was pretty careful and end up not using too much. On a whim I also through in a couple of tablespoons of Avjar (hungarian red pepper sauce/spread) which really perked things up and pretty much finished things off.

A quick simmer to meld things together yielded something pretty wonderful and we couldn’t stop eating it. I still think there might be one more ingredient missing but can’t put my finger on it - anyone have any ideas on what to add next time? Because I am pretty sure there will be a next time even if fate doesn’t arrange for me to have a can of pumpkin and a rotisserie chicken sitting next to each other in the refrigerator.

You might have noticed by now that here at Made Up Food we are not afraid of pre-packaged items. But they have to be good - at least as good as the “real thing”.

One that I am a huge fan of is Trader Joe’s frozen rice - both the Jasmine and Brown varieties are (almost) better than I can make from scratch and zap in the nuke-o-matic in 3 easy minutes. Sounds too good to be true, but so far its been great every time.

Stock up when its in the store cuz its so popular they can’t seem to keep it in stock.

Here’s a recipe I want to try from over at Table for Two: Chicken and Brown Rice Casserole that also happens to use one of my favorite condiments, Sriracha.

* Careful you don’t burn your fingers opening that hot package the way some people have.

My wife, daughter of a hippie family that made their own tofu, has always turned up her nose at my suburban Wonder-Bread-eating culinary youth (well, we did eventually start eating Roman Meal, which I suppose is a little better), but despite my love for her, I have no shame about my eating education. We did, after all, eat a lot of healthy, diverse food–we just ate a lot of sloppy joes, tuna noodle casserole, and grilled cheese sandwiches, too.

With this exposition in mind, let me present a scenario: It’s 1984. Your mom or dad has just made a chocolate cake (Betty Crocker, out of the box) and finished frosting it using the frosting-in-a-can. But, of course, there’s frosting left over, and nothing goes to waste in this house. So it goes into the fridge, awaiting a later fate. A few days later, burritos are made–lovely, shreds of beef, jack cheese, refritos, and lots of green chiles, of course. There are flour tortillas left over. Into the fridge they go. Now, there they are on the same shelf…perhaps it was only a matter of time before the invention of…

The chocolate burrito.

“Eeewwwww!”, you say. But, as with so many amazing experiences in life, first impressions can be deceiving. So take a walk down the dark side of the dessert (or in my case, breakfast, or coffee-break, or lunch) street, and make a chocolate burrito.

The process couldn’t be simpler: Get your flour tortilla, left over from the other night’s south-of-the-border fest. Please don’t use a corn tortilla, ok? That’s just sick. Lay it on a clean, flat work surface (or in the palm of your hand if you’re in a hurry). Get out that half-empty can of chocolate frosting. Any brand will do, but I prefer Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker, something in the milk chocolate to chocolate fudge spectrum. It might help to thrown the can in the microwave for a few seconds to soften it up–you don’t want to break the flaky four tortilla as you spread the frosting. Slide your knife around the inside surface of the frosting container, scooping up a tablespoon or two of dark, sweet goodness. Spread it onto the tortilla. Repeat. Ideally, you want a coating of frosting that is thin, but thick enough to cover the ridges and valleys of the tortilla itself. A coating about as thick as the tortilla itself usually works well, but it all depends on how sweet your tooth is.

Then,roll it up. If you are working with a smaller tortilla–say, soft-taco-sized, you end up with a roll about an inch in diameter, sort of like a taquito. If you are using a full-size burrito holder, you’ll end up with something approximating, well, a burrito. If you’ve used the perfect amount of frosting, you get a nice alternation of frosting/tortilla/frosting/tortilla, spiraling all the way out into your sweaty, anticipatory hand.

Serve with a glass of ice-cold whole milk. Because this isn’t health food you’re eating. You might want to make a second one in advance…you know, just in case. Despite my now much healthier eating habits, I have a soft spot in my heart for the chocolate burrito, and to my wife’s chagrin, I plan on imparting this affection on to my little girls as well. As for my wife: well, I have yet to catch her in the act of making one of these, but there are times when I swear there is less frosting in the can than there was earlier, and all of the tortillas seem to have mysteriously disappeared….