Tuesday with Rose, Mark, and James

matzo

Usually about this time, we're mulling over the results of our entry for Tuesdays with Dorie. This weekend, however, the cake baking clashed with Passover. So instead of baking with Dorie, Lee did a little baking with Rose (Levy Beranbaum, that is).

With a recipe from The Bread Bible, Lee made a batch of fresh matzot for our Saturday seder. He also cooked a beef brisket in the Mark Bittman style. And Jen tackled her first ever potato gratin using James Peterson's Essentials of Cooking as a guide.

We'll be back to Dorie next week with a peanut butter torte, as chosen by Ugg Smell Food.

Matzo Brei Pancakes

Matzo Brei

Every year, Lee's dad makes a delicious scrambled egg and matzo dish called matzo brei. I had it for the first/only time during our first Passover together in 2006.

This morning, I decided to try my hand at making matzo brei for Lee. While looking for a recipe, I began reading about all of the different matzo brei variations on Mark Bittman's blog. It seems that matzo brei is like stuffing/dressing: every family has their own way of doing it, and people are fiercely loyal to the matzo brei of their youth.

In light of this, I decided not to emulate Bill's splendid recipe (especially without him here to guide me!), instead trying something totally new. Lucky for me, Lee is always on board for experimentation.

One of the comments on Bittman's blog seemed intriguing, and I decided to adapt that gentleman's recipe. Thanks, Bruce Kleinman!

Start by breaking three sheets of matzo into 1/4" to 1/2" pieces. Pile your matzo into a colander and rinse them under hot water for five seconds. Squeeze out the excess water.

In a mixing bowl, combine two eggs, 2 tablespoons of milk, and a pinch of kosher salt. Add the matzos to the egg mixture.

Heat up a large cast iron skillet with 2 tablespoons of butter (I know! but you'll need it). When the foam starts to subside, drop spoonsful of the matzo/egg mixture into the pan, forming dollar-sized pancakes. Go ahead and smush them a little with the spatula while they're cooking: that will help them hold together. After a minute or so, flip your matzocakes. Transfer the finished product to a plate and eat with a drizzle of maple syrup.

This recipe made eight small pancakes, a good serving for two (or three, if you add some fruit alongside). They taste rather like French toast, but with a distinctive matzo flavor. You could add some finely diced shallot or green onion and eat them as a savory dish, too, but I liked them sweet. We might make these again before the week is out.

Happy Passover!

Cake Friday: Olive Oil & Rosemary Cake with Orange Confit

Olive Oil & Rosemary Cake with Orange Confit

We've had the Babbo cookbook since it was released and for six years it has moved with us. That's three states and probably a dozen apartments. But have we cooked from it? I'm embarrassed to say no. We've been making a serious effort to either use or retire the cookbooks we've collected, so last week, we dusted off Babbo and quickly found the Olive Oil & Rosemary cake. It was love at first sight: a sweet and savory pound cake with six ingredients. The only item we needed to buy was the fresh rosemary and it was on.

The cake was incredibly simple to make, and the end result was moist and flavorful. It was dessert-like but not too sweet (which had its down side: we each ate two slices). We apologize, Mr. Batali. More recipes from Babbo will be made soon.

To accompany the cake, Lee made orange confit from a recipe we found on an old NYT Minimalist video. Here's how it works:

Take four whole oranges and blanch them in a dutch oven of water for 30 seconds. Dump the water and do the same thing again. Then quarter the oranges and put them in the pot with two cups of sugar and enough fresh water to cover. Keep the whole thing at a low simmer (just a stray bubble here and there) for eight hours. You might need to add a little extra water from time to time, to keep the oranges covered. When eight hours is up, you can take the oranges out and let them rest, covered and at room temperature, overnight. The next day, arrange the oranges in the bottom of the dutch oven with two cups of sugar and enough water to cover (again). Keep it at a simmer for eight hours (again). Let them rest over night. The third day: orange slices, sugar, water, simmer. The oranges are quite delicate by the end. They're soft enough to cut and eat with a fork (rind and all); the flavor is kind of related to that of marmalade, albeit with a fuller orange flavor.

We're definitely making this one again.

Baked Eggs

outside, inside
Originally uploaded by Ricestein

Baked eggs are my new favorite thing. Picture it: a lightly buttered ramekin. A few ingredients that complement eggs (here - feta and spinach, but we've also laid down just a bit of diced pancetta with ribbons of basil) and the egg cracked on top. Off into a 350-degree oven for about half an hour and voila! They're like tiny quiches, without all the fat. And easier to make for a brunch (or for house guests) than, say, individual omelettes, yet so much nicer than a box of doughnuts.

Shrimp and white beans

No photo of this one, yet, but I just needed to rave for a moment. We started dipping into Mark Bittman's big list of 100 fast and easy recipes from earlier this summer, and we have fallen in love with the simplest recipe of all. It's for shrimp and white beans, which we have started eating over toast.

Basically, you take some shrimp (we use frozen from Trader Joe's) and chop them into little pieces. Open a can of white beans, put them in a frying pan with a little olive oil and chopped garlic. Then, add the shrimp. The whole thing cooks up pretty quickly, and somewhere near the end I usually squeeze half of a lemon over the whole thing and sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. The last two times we've eaten this, I made a side salad, using the juices from the pan (deglazed a la Bittman with a dash of sherry vinegar) as a dressing. A slice of toast on the side, and the meal's complete. It keeps us full and energized, and the shrimp juice makes a surprisingly wonderful salad dressing.

Avgolemono & Greek Salad

After receiving the America's Test Kitchen big book of chicken and poultry recipes, I was looking forward to making a true chicken stock from scratch, something I've never tried before. When Jennifer requested her favorite soup, avgolemono, I thought that would be a perfect place to start for a rainy, windy winter's day. I decided to pair it with a simple Greek salad, once again dipping into Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

First, the avgolemono. Made of about 4 pounds of whole legs, one diced onion, two bay leaves, and 12 cups of water, the stock simmered uncovered for three hours. I only poked at it every once in a while to skim off the foam and fat that settled on top.

According to America's Test Kitchen, you can simmer up to five hours to get a fuller chicken flavor, but we were getting hungry. So, I strained the solids and discarded them (the chicken at this point had really good texture but hardly any taste; we might have been able to save it by turning it into chicken salad, but neither one of us thought it would be worth it). Then I added a cup of arborio rice, which simmered for about 20 minutes while I prepped the rest of the ingredients: 1 cup of fresh lemon juice, 1/4 cup chopped parsley, and four eggs whisked together. When the rice was tender and plump, I whisked the juice/parsley/egg combo into the soup. I whisked as quickly as I could to keep the eggs from cooking into egg-drop strands. There were still some slight bits of white, but overall the soup was thick and creamy.

The salad was really basic, and I stuck to Bittman's recipe word for word, mostly to see how it would come out. He uses all the usual suspects (lettuce, olives, feta, mint) and one unexpected (radish). A little olive oil and fresh lemon juice on top finished it off.

A Year in the Kitchen.

Happy New Year!

I thought it would be fun to document some of the things we cook in 2007.

Lee and I kicked off the new year with a roast goose, which we shared with some wonderful friends at a New Year's Eve dinner party. We bought a frozen goose from Whole Foods and, following Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything, we roasted the goose, uncovered, in a 350 degree oven for 3 hours, pricking the skin about every twenty minutes. Geese have very thick skin, and pricking it allows the excess fat to drip off, leaving a tender, juicy bird with crackling skin.



We stuffed the goose with chestnut sausage stuffing and seasoned the skin with salt and pepper. Rounding out the dish was a plum and port wine sauce, which was good enough to drink from the pan.

This was our first time cooking and eating goose, and we were thrilled with the result! I think it may become our new holiday bird of choice.

Jen