Flour and Water

Where to start? It's been a long day and as I watch the Oscars my back throbs slightly from over-exertion in exercise and chores. We've been busy every weekend for the last month so the plan-less weekend was a welcome respite. Did I take it easy and recharge? The answer is no. Amidst the errands, groceries, trip to medical lab for glucose test for Shelese, chopping, prepping, and cooking... I'm tired! As I reflect on my weekend activities I realize my fatigue and long for another day to the weekend. Despite sore muscles and heavy eyelids I find myself in a culinary whirlwind on this crisp and sunny Sunday; not because I have to but because I love to. About a month ago I ordered Ideas in Food, which explains why their recipes taste as good as they do. I'm on the chapter that celebrates the result of mixing flour and water. Let's all bow our heads in a moment of appreciation of the glory which is ground wheat and water. Seriously! How many people across the world subsist on a simple mixture of flour and water and other ingredients? I'd venture to say without researching it that most of us do. Let us also appreciate this simple fact: few things are as soul satisfying as eating fresh-baked anything. Fueled by the aforementioned literature and the items in our fridge that needed to be consumed, I got to work. We had smoked gouda and English Cheddar that would spoil soon, fresh organic baby artichokes from this weeks Abundant Harvest box, and recently roasted roma tomatoes and thyme. We had about eight baby artichokes so I cleaned them and soaked them in lemon ice water.

I mixed together a simple flatbread from Ideas in Food and started them rising and resting. There is nothing more than flour, water, olive oil, and salt in the dough.

After ample rising the dough was rolled out and stuffed with shredded gouda and cheddar. Placed on lightly oiled parchment on the underside of a baking sheet and baked about 15 minutes at 500 degrees. The flatbread was brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with coarse sea salt and pepper.

Started to saute the artichokes in olive oil until browned slightly and added in shallots, garlic, and onion. Once the aromatics softened I threw in the slow roasted tomatoes I made yesterday. Splash of vermouth, reduced, then added water and S & P.

Homemade pappardelle made with many egg yolks is always the way to go when you're eating fresh and simple ingredients. I would get into the details of how I made the noodles but I'm simply being lazy. The recipe came from the same Ideas in Food book. One thing I would do differently is to go a little thinner. I think I took half of them to one notch thinner on the noodle roller. Some where so silky and practically melted in our mouths; the other, well, they where different... but not much.

The noodle only saw boiling water for about two minutes before being added to the sauce with about a half cup of the noodle cooking water and sauted for about three minutes.

We started with a simple salad with onion, dried cranberries, feta, topped with S & P, a nice olive oil, and aged thick Modena vinegar.

Monday Night Lasagna

Hey all. It's been awhile... sorry I've neglected everyone in the blogosphere. Quite honestly it's either neglect you or neglect my bed-ridden pregnant wife; no-brainer is an understatement. Since Shelese was put on bed rest I've had to pick up the slack and to be honest I didn't think it would be that dramatic of a change, with her being a second-year medical resident, she spent a lot of time working. Well that was flat wrong! My resident resident did a lot more than I realized. Between work and cooking and walking the dog and washing dishes and clothes and the rest of the house, precious little "ME" time exists these days. I feel like a 1960's housewife. Maybe a pint of ice cream and a good ol' Tupperware party will do the trick? Maybe not! It's all good practice for life after our daughter is born... did I mention that we're having a girl! Very excited indeed, we're both thrilled. Despite feeling overworked and sick of house chores I would not trade places with my precious wife who has to stay near horizontal 23 out of 24 hours a day. It's all worth it for every kick she gives us and we are eagerly awaiting her arrival. In the meanwhile, infrequent blogging is the best I can do. Last Monday I came home fired up to make and photograph my freeway-derived recipe brain child and photograph it and post the pictures and write about it and yeah, fired up! By the time I washed the dishes from our previous nights dinner (gross I know, get over it) and cooked and photographed, the most I could do was post the photos unpublished. It's Thursday now and what's that cliche about lateness being superior to neverness? Well insert it here and here we go. I took some liberties with the format of lasagna but most of the key players showed up for the game. The ingredients in the meatballs were ground turkey, bread crumbs, dijon mustard, parmesan, shallot, and parsley.

A little S & P of course.

Started some salted water boiling for the noodles. I would love to try this again with homemade noodles; in fact, a wider noodle would have better suited the final arrangement.

After mixing the meatballs up, tossed them in a hot pan with olive oil and browned.

After the meatballs were browned and removed I was left with a beautiful fond in the pan and threw a classic mirepoix in to start the sauce. Typically the mirepoix is in the background of a sauce. It lends that herbal, unctuous, vegginess that we expect to hold up a great sauce. In this case I wanted the veggies to play a more substantial role so I chopped them a bit larger and didn't soften them too much. Many sauces strain the mirepoix out at some point but I wanted them to stand front and center.

Tossed in some fresh thyme, bay leaves, and chili flakes.

The meatballs found their way into a baking sheet and into the oven to finish cooking.

After the mirepoix softened a bit I deglazed the pan with some vermouth and followed with some chicken broth. Once boiling I cut some tomatoes in half and grated them into the pan. This is a great method I found in one of Jose Andres books; it yields a nice consistency and is fast.

Take the noodles out just al dente of course.

After the broth has reduced a bit I threw in some cream and got excited.

The plating...

That's ricotta in there with the sauce.

Voila!

Paired nicely with Bogle Petite Sirah (crazy good deal for a great wine).

Hodgepodge Update

Happy holidays to everyone. May your days in the wet cold be filled with warmth, merriment, butter, and sugar... and maybe a little bacon. I've got a lot going on lately, as indicated by my lack of blogging. If I have a lot to blog about, then I have little time to blog about it. Here is the quick update. My beautiful wife, Shelese, is 14 weeks pregnant (yay!), had planned to go to Kansas (Shelese's home-state) for Christmas, wife put on bed rest, bored out of our minds, watched more movies in the last three days than is probably healthy (could have blogged during movies, I know... but I was doing something productive, I promise), started a DIY project to hand-make a wooden spoon (the productive thing I was doing during the movies), and the usual kitchen activity.

So here is the wifey at about three months pregnant. The only way we knew she was pregnant was, the pregnancy test of course, and her nearly constant nausea and off-the-wall taste preferences. She found so many foods that she usually loves very off-putting, e.g. avocados and mushrooms.

One month later and you can see the shirt is pretty much maxed-out on space in the belly region. Stay tuned for more pics.

Here is a pic of our little squirmy at 14 weeks. Photogenic no? We are so excited to meet the little offspring! So here is the deal though; we're dealing with an incompetent cervix. That is the clinical term, and no, her cervix did not take an aptitude test and fail to be deemed, "incompetent." It's a bit short and the doctor wants to do a cerclage (I'll let you look that up if you don't know what that is... this is a food blog for goodness sake). The doctor tells us, "not to freak out" and that, "he'll fix it." And we believe him. He's a fascinating guy! His reputation is that he is one of the best high risk OBs in the nation and you get that feeling when he's with you. Pretty quiet, no-nonsense, constantly yawning because he delivers every baby and is up late with patients every night. Long story short, all should be well after the procedure, however, Shelese has been ordered to modified bed rest for the R E M A I N D E R OF THE P R E G N A N C Y! That's six months!!! She started bed rest last weekend so I started a new project that I'll explain later. No matter, we would do anything for our little squirming baby.

Here is our other baby.

This is our genius doctor. Notice the fanny pack and too-short scrubs. 

Okay, switching gears again, keep up please. Here is my project. Thanks to my good friend, Jord, I had the pleasure of reading Mark Frauenfelder's, Made By Hand, his proclaimed story of, "Searching for meaning in a throwaway world." In short, the book is his personal account of doing things for yourself in a modern world. Mark explains the journey that took him from Los Angeles to the Cook Islands back to Los Angeles and his Do It Yourself (DIY) exploration of keeping chickens and bees, modifying his espresso machine, and carving wooden spoons among many other DIY projects. Inspired, I set out on my first DIY project of the year. Ran to the Depot of the Home and picked up some basic wood carving tools and a piece of poplar and this is what I had in a few hours.

Boz was quality control.

I'll post a picture of the finished project soon. On another note, this was dinner tonight. I roasted a chicken according to the Zuni method and served it on top of a potato, leek, and raclette cheese hash brown, carmelized Brussels Sprouts, and left-over mushroom cream sauce from the Stroganoff from a few weeks back.

Thanks for reading and happy happy holidays to all of you!

A Good Idea

Have you ever combined about two parts ginger ale with one part bourbon (a nice one with vanilla and caramel hints) and a scoop of vanilla ice cream? If you answered no, perhaps it's time to try it out. Make sure that you get a bite of vanilla ice cream before it melts! Damn, simple pleasures. Thanks for reading.

Beef Stroganoff al la Thomas Keller

What do you do when you buy cream for a dish and you only need about a third of it? Well, you embark on a two day preparation of beef stroganoff of course. I know that's not what most of you were thinking but perhaps next time you have leftover cream, you will...

Lately, I've been trying to cook intuitively; you know, think about what's in the fridge and pantry and bang out a really good dish. It's been going well, hopefully you'd agree with me since the products most often end up here, in the blogosphere. I decided that I need to mix it up a bit and execute some recipes from my favorite chefs. In my opinion, an experience even the best home cooks need to do on a regular basis.  So the first in my recipes entries is, Beef Stroganoff by Thomas Keller. For those of you that don't know who he is, let me first say that I have a bit of a man crush on him. Not only did he lead the only west coast three-star Michelin rated French Laundry in Napa, he has his prints all over several other culinary creations ranging from cook books to television to other restaurants. Never have I executed a recipe more intricate and detail meticulous than one of Kellers. I have his Ad Hoc at Home book; he claims that it is a gourmet interpretation of classic home-cooked favorites. When I hear, "home-cooked favorites," I picture tasty one pot, rustic dishes that get right to the flavor point. The recipes in Ad Hoc are as complicated as the blueprints for a nuclear reactor. Okay, I exaggerate a bit but they are intense. I'll get right to the point, here is my execution of his stroganoff.

Add leeks, mushrooms, onions, carrots, garlic, thyme, and bay leaves to a bottle of red wine and reduce until the wine is a glaze.

Meanwhile sear the beef (should have been boneless short rib, I used boneless chuck roast instead) in oil and set aside

Chop up more aromatics and spices (leeks, carrots, onions, thyme, and bay leaf), add them to the wine glaze and cover with cheese cloth to create a pillow for the beef to rest upon.

Add beef broth to the pot.

Create a parchment lid, cover the braise, and place in oven for about two hours.

Remove beef, strain, and reserve braising liquid.

The ingredients for the rest of the dish are below. I told you Keller was intense. It's no wonder The French Laundry can get away charging a minimum of $240 for a prix fixe dinner, without wine. Cream, creme fraiche, mushrooms, butter, bay leaf, thyme, peppercorns, cubed braised beef, parsley, canola oil, noodles (pappardelle preferably).

Process the mushrooms and add them to onions softened in butter and cook until liquid is evaporated.

Add cream and sachet of bay leaf, thyme, and peppercorns.

Meanwhile brown mushrooms in butter and canola oil. Keller instructs to turn each mushroom over after three minutes to brown both sides.

Small bamboo forceps are one of my best friends in the kitchen.

The same goes for the braised beef, browned and flipped. Then into the oven for about ten minutes.

The cream sauce is blended and strained and put back on a low flame. The browned mushrooms are then added.

The finished product was as good as it looks. The beef would have been much more tender had it been short rib but I did enjoy the chuck roast for it's deep beefy beefiness. The preparation of the beef, while labor intense and time consuming, left a nice little crisp to the browned bits. The mushroom cream sauce is the true star of this dish though. The processing and later blending of the mushrooms embedded the essence of mushroom deeply through the layers of silky cream, tangy creme fraiche, and peppery thyme. Seasoned with gray or sea salt and chopped parsley, the dish is as visually stunning as delectable.

Paired nicely with a dry red, in this case a Barbera.

Thanks for reading. Anybody have some favorite chef recipes worth sharing?