How to read these blogs....

HOW TO READ THESE BLOGS...

In most cases, I don't write the recipes, I tell you how it went, what to be aware of, how to make them or, maybe even make them better. Sometimes I just want you to understand why I came to the decision to toss the puppies! That said, reviewing the recipe as you read my blog should be the most enlightening way to make sense of it all. It definitely will answer questions and help you avoid the same mistakes I made....and I always make some. Error goes hand in hand with the trial part of the process. Embrace it! Because you can't avoid it. Errors are the 'cracked eggs' of the soufflé. Now let's have some fun...

(fyi YELLOW FOLDER recipes are 'Keepers'...watch for the YF tag accompanying these recipes)

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Tales From the Dark Side...of My Kitchen!


It’s no secret I love to cook, but I’m the last one to say that I’m a perfect cook!In fact, I probably make more than my share of boo-boo’s in the kitchen, sometimes really ugly, extremely distasteful ones too!

In part, this may be because I’m allergic to following a recipe...exactly. I like to think of recipes as ‘suggestions’, and the more I respect the cook who wrote them, the more closely I may follow them. I am comforted by the knowledge that even those folks have screwed up royally more than once. Ina Garten, aka The Barefoot Contessa, is one of my favorites. She knows her way around a recipe and generally, I have good fortune following her guidelines. But Ina is on the record that she never serves a new recipe to unsuspecting diners until she’s made it at least three or four times herself.

Now, Ina lives in the Hamptons, so I’m assuming she can afford that luxury, but me, well, I can’t buy four or five times the necessary ingredients just so I can perfect the dish first, not to mention practicing for three days to make one meal! I’ve got other stuff to do...like pay my utility bills! So you might say I make my mistakes ‘in real time’.

Therefore, if I’m going to offer up my recipe tips, I feel it’s only fair I come clean about a few of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way, so I’m going to include the occasional tale from the dark side of my kitchen.

I can cover a lot of ground just by telling you that for years I couldn’t make cookies without burning at least one sheet of them. This is nobody’s fault but my own. The recipes pretty clear on not overcooking, and common sense tells me I can’t leave cookies in the oven forever without dire consequences...usually involving the smoke alarm.

But truly, the reason this happened over and over is because I had a tendency to wander. Maybe I’ve got a bit of ADHD. The last sheet was in the oven, mixing bowl was washed, cookies tucked into a baggie or jar (not to mention some I might have consumed...) and well, the garden needed weeding or a column needed writing or work was calling. I’d only be a minute, just gonna get this little thing done--BEEP! Smoke alarm and burned cookies. It took years, and I still fail occasionally, but I learned the hard way that you aren’t done till you’re done. I still wander, but usually not as far.

I’ve learned that you can save yourself a lot of grief by reading ahead in a recipe. Case in point, an apple torte that appeared lovely on the cover of Bon Appetite but was a test to make and tasted even worse (Honestly, I hold a particular ingredient in the recipe, 'dry white wine', in this case chardonnay, responsible for what ended up being a hideous aftertaste, so really, do you blame me for messing with recipes?).

Anyway, piece of cake!...or torte, I thought. Until I got to the point where I’d peeled the stuffing out of the inside of two large loaves of French bread yielding over 8 cups of moist bread crumbs. I dumped them on a cookie sheet and stuffed them into the oven to dry out , ground up some hazelnuts, peeled the 2 pounds of apples called for in the recipe (well, really three, you know, I like more apples in a tart) and then came up short when I read the crust directions.

They called for THREE cups of breadcrumbs.What that-- Didn’t I just disgorge EIGHT cups from two loaves of French bread? Nowhere did it call for the remaining five cups. Why on earth did they have me do that? I reread the recipe; no clue. I checked the recipe online; no different. I was so frustrated (and frankly, the rest of the recipe wasn’t going too well either) that I wrote a pointed letter to the recipe editor at Bon Appetite asking what was up with this recipe. Geez!

Finally, I returned to the kitchen where I took at closer look at my drying bread crumbs. Funny, they didn’t look the same. They looked like...less. Duh! Drying breadcrumbs shrink. I had about three and a half cups, just over what the recipe called for. Darned if those professionals didn’t know what they were talking about. Of course, it would have been nice if they’d given a girl a clue, but I guess they figured that would be insulting my culinary intelligence, such as it was. Probably why they also never answered my letter.


Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Spaghetti Bolognese






There’s nothing like spaghetti with Bolognese sauce on a chilly winter night...or a pleasant summer evening, for that matter. Particularly this recipe, which is so scrumptious I like to make double batches so I’ll have some to freeze. Okay, first, in case you are clueless (we all are at least once about everything, right?) it’s pronounced bow-la-naze...or close enough. It’s basically a meat sauce but really, it’s so much more. The combination of ingredients creates a wonderfully complex mĂ©lange of flavors...ahhh...it tastes really, really good!

This recipe started out on Emeril Lagasse’s website and has trickled down to my Yellow Folder (favorite recipes) relatively intact! Naturally, I had to tweak a thing or two. My husband says I’ve never met a recipe I could follow....he’s so funny, but he’s probably also right!

So, a few TIPS before we begin, or course:

**Food Processor: Yes, you can chop and dice you’re way by hand through all these veges if you like-I have, but not everyone finds that sort of activity as therapeutic as I do. Strangely, some find it tedious. All these veges are ready in seconds(or thereabouts) with a food processor. And yes, you can also use that Slap Chop if you sprung for one of those.

**I love Barilla Spaghetti with this-not the Thin Spaghetti, the regular spaghetti is thin enough. It’s perfect, really.

**I make this in a very large frying pan with deep sides. If you don’t have that, a Dutch Oven/stock pot works fine.

Okay, if you want to compare to Emeril’s original recipe, here’s the link:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/linguine-bolognese-recipe/index.html

Spaghetti Bolognese

Ingredients (all this stuff is going into the same pan..except the spaghetti and parmesan):

6 slices of bacon (Emeril likes pancetta too, but really, who has that sitting around?)

1 1/2 cups chopped white onion (yes, you can use yellow or even red, but it will be completely different! Okay, no, not really... it won’t make much difference, I just like the white onions here. )

1 1/4 cups finely chopped carrots (if you’re trying to keep the kids from knowing there are veges in here, make it super fine, but otherwise it’s nice if you can still tell there are carrots!)

3/4 cups finely chopped celery (ditto the above!)

Salt and Pepper to taste...start with a half teaspoon each and add more later if you like-pace yourself, there’s plenty of salt in the other ingredients and you don’t want to end up with too much, because there’s not going back , baby!

1 lb. lean ground beef (think 90/10)

1 lb. ground pork

1/2 cup Riesling or Pinot Grigio (I’d avoid Chardonnay; it has a bitter taste that I find does not play nice in recipes. Emeril prefers white wine vinegar, but this is so much better!)

1 1/2 Tb. minced garlic

1 and a half small 3 oz. cans of tomato paste

1 Tb. sugar (just a bit of sugar cuts the acidity and brings out the tomato taste.)

3 cups beef broth (if you make this yourself with bouillon, rather than buying it ready-made, be sure not to make it too strong or you’ll risk overdoing it on the salt.)

Combine:

3/4 cup milk and 3/4 half and half and set aside

Spaghetti

Parmesan

Once you have all these ingredients chopped, measured and ready to go, it’s just a matter of going through the steps to a really wonderful meal!

Okay, Let’s Cook!

Cook the bacon in your large pan until crisp. Set the bacon aside on a paper towel to dry and meanwhile, add the onion, carrots and celery to the grease, along with the salt and pepper and cook on medium until the veges are tender and beginning to brown in spots. Don’t overdo it!

Scoop the cooked veges into a dish and set aside, then add the ground beef and pork, and crumble up the bacon and add to the pan. Stir to break it up as fine as you can and brown it evenly.

Add to the meat: wine, garlic, and tomato paste and cook for 2-3 minutes. Then add the veges back in with the meat and cook a couple minutes more.

Add the beef broth and bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer 15 minutes. Now add about a third of your milk mixture and simmer 15 more minutes. Repeat this process until you’ve added all the milk. The sauce will get thicker and creamier with every addition.

Meanwhile....heat the water for the pasta. During that last 15 minute interval you can set out your dishes, prepare the pasta, grab the parmesan-and a nice baguette with some butter would be good too. Add pasta to suit to you dish, scoop a generous amount of sauce on top and sprinkle with parmesan. That’s it, no need to add a salad unless you want to. I assure you, this is a meal all on its own--Enjoy!