rivka

We tried a marvelous new recipe tonight: smoked salmon and apple quesadillas. They were delicious and very quick and easy to make.

The recipe is apparently originally from rec.food.recipes, but there are some formatting problems in the online version (12 cups of sour cream? For a dish that feeds four?) so I'm just going to reproduce the whole thing here, for my records.

Quesadilla filling (for two adults): I julienned 4oz smoked salmon (lox) and half a peeled and cored Granny Smith apple. I mixed these with 3/4 cup grated cheese (I used a pre-grated "Mexican blend" that I think was mostly Monterey Jack) and seasoned it with a generous amount of fresh dill and a splash of lime juice.

I melted a little butter and brushed the bottoms of two big tortillas with it. I split the filling evenly between the two tortillas, folded them over, and cooked them in my biggest skillet over medium heat for a few minutes on a side, until the inside was all melty.

We topped them with horseradish crema: I mixed together 1/4 cup each sour cream and mayonnaise, seasoned it with a tablespoon of horseradish, a tablespoon of fresh chives, and a splash of lemon juice, and thinned it with a tablespoon and a half of milk. This was easy enough to throw together while the quesadillas were cooking.

They were great. I wouldn't have thought of smoked salmon and apple, but it's a good combination. I don't think you'd want to use a sweet apple, but the tart crunchy Granny Smith bits were delightful. And the horseradish crema was delicious - I'm already thinking of other applications for it. (It would go well with asparagus or artichokes, I think.)

This would make a lovely entree for a summer brunch. Michael recommends a crisp, fruity white wine as an accompaniment for nonpregnant diners.

Tonight, I marinated some pork chops in beer, dijon mustard, vegetable oil, garlic, and paprika, and then grilled them on my charcoal grill. When I took them off the grill, I noticed that we still had plenty of life in the coals. Suddenly, I had a flashback to Girl Scout Camp, and a dessert we'd cooked in the campfires.

I asked Michael to cut three peaches in half and scoop out the pits. (I'm so allergic to them when they're raw that I don't even like to touch them.) Each peach went in the center of a square of aluminum foil. I put a pat of butter in the hollows left by the pits, topped the butter with a generous spoonful of cinnamon sugar (left over from the cinnamon toast I made yesterday), put the two halves of each peach back together, and wrapped them individually in foil. I dropped the foil-wrapped balls onto the grill, closed the top, and left them there while we ate supper - about half an hour.

They were perfect. Hot. Soft and juicy, but not mushy or unformed. Cinnamon-scented peach syrup had collected in the foil. With a scoop of vanilla ice cream? Simply heaven.

I tell you, those Girl Scouts knew a thing or two.

I've been meaning to post this recipe for a while now - it's one of our current favorites.

Put 12oz high-quality ground beef or buffalo meat into a bowl. Season with 1-2 teaspoons prepared horseradish and whatever else seems like a good idea at the time - I usually use a prefab mix that's a version of Montreal grill seasoning. Mix the seasonings in well with your hands and divide into four balls.

Cut some slices of smoked Gouda cheese into small pieces.

Flatten one ball of the seasoned ground beef into a thin patty and pile half the Gouda bits on top. Flatten another ball into a thin patty and put it on top of the Gouda, making sure to seal the edges together all the way around. The whole thing may need to be pressed a little flatter to make a burger of the desired thickness. The rest of the meat and cheese make your second burger.

Grill as you normally would, although if you usually cook burgers medium-rare you might want to leave them on the grill a bit longer, so that the cheese melts well. Serve on kaiser rolls.

Garlic mayonnaise would be an excellent topping, if you have some on hand. We usually just use mustard.

Because it's asparagus season now for so much of the northern hemisphere:

Smoked Salmon-Asparagus Pasta (adapted from The Joy of Cooking)

1 bunch asparagus, woody ends trimmed off
4 oz peppered smoked salmon (not lox, but the thick meaty stuff)
8 oz heavy cream
3 Tablespoons butter
1/2 pound pasta (I use thin linguine)

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Drop the asparagus in and blanch it for a couple of minutes - two minutes if it's pencil thin, four minutes or so for thick, mature stalks. Then fish the asparagus out with a sieve and put the pasta into the water to boil.

Cut the salmon into bite-sized pieces.

Melt the butter in a skillet. Put the asparagus in and turn until coated with butter. Add the cream and the smoked salmon and warm over low heat until the pasta is done. Divide the asparagus evenly into two bowls of pasta and pour the smoked salmon cream over the top.

Serve with Lipitor (or the statin of your choice).


Also: final Respectful of Otters hit count for the day - 7712. Sheesh.

curiousangel is learning how to cook some of our favorite quick, easy dinners, so that he can take over some of the cooking after Li'l Critter arrives. Saturday night he made pork chops and red potatoes. Tonight he made spaghetti with meat sauce, with only the occasional pointer from me.

Here's how I we make my our spaghetti:

1/2 pound linguini fini (Yes, I know that means it's not "spaghetti" at all. Hush.)
1/2 pound hot Italian turkey sausage
1/2 jar Classico Cabernet Marinara sauce
1 medium zucchini, diced
1 small red bell pepper, diced

Start water heating for pasta. Remove the sausage from its casings and brown it in a little olive oil over medium heat, breaking it up into small pieces. When the sausage is almost cooked through, add the vegetables and saute until the zucchini is golden. Pour in the sauce and turn the heat down to low. Drop the linguini into the boiling water, boil for six minutes, and drain. Top with sauce, which will be very thick.

curiousangel did a great job. Dinner was delicious. But tragically, the fact that he cooked meant that I had to do his job - the dishes. I guess no clever plan is foolproof.

I just whipped up a preliminary batch of Hypoallergenic Power Trail Mix, based solely on what was already in the kitchen:

Roasted peanuts
Roasted sunflower seed kernels
Bran twigs (from "Kashi GoodFriends" cereal)
Granola clusters (from same)
Sweetened dried cranberries
Dried mangoes torn into nibble-sized pieces
Chocolate chips

I am inordinately pleased with myself. Protein, healthy fats, vitamins A and C, fiber, and dense calories, all in a portable, easy-to-eat format. Plus chocolate, which has been scientifically linked to easier temperament in babies. Plus, it's salty. And crunchy. And chewy. And sweet.

Mmmm, salty.

(cross-posted to food_porn)

Yesterday, we had telerib and Moe over for a cookout, mosquito-fest (I'm so sorry, telerib, we didn't know. Neither one of us gets bitten), and Scary Music War.

The menu had to be carefully chosen so that (a) I wouldn't wind up spending a lot of prime visiting time in the kitchen, and (b) the house wouldn't become unhospitably hot from stove use. Here's what I came up with:

The Menu:
Havarti dill and horseradish cheddar cheeses, with assorted crackers

Anchor Steam and McHenry beers

Grilled marinated salmon with tropical fruit salsa
Summer couscous salad
Tossed salad with parmesan-honey-lime dressing

Fat Bastard chardonnay

Denver chocolate pudding with vanilla ice cream

Coffee and tea

The Preparation:
All the cooking happened in advance except for grilling the salmon and making the salad dressing. Oh, and the cheese tray. I would've just dumped slabs of cheese onto the tray and given our guests knives to help themselves, but curiousangel made a nice little display of sliced cheesy goodness. Maybe he was nervous about trusting me with a knife around a Republican guest, or maybe it's just his superior aesthetic sense.

A couple of hours before the guests arrived, I cut a massive two-pound salmon filet in two and set it to marinate in a half-cup of olive oil, two or three tablespoons of lime juice, cumin, salt, pepper, and lots of minced garlic.

I took a little of the leftover garlic and put it in a bowl with a cup of dried couscous. I poured a cup and a half of water over the couscous, covered the bowl with foil, and left it to reconstitute while I chopped up some baby carrots and red bell pepper into a tiny dice - about a half-cup's worth. In a small bowl I mixed more olive oil (about a quarter cup), a couple tablespoons of lemon juice, some parsley, salt, and pepper. By that time the couscous had soaked up all the water, so I stirred in the diced vegetables and the dressing, recovered it, and put it in the fridge to chill.

I made the tropical fruit salsa for the fish: one barely-ripe mango, an eight-ounce can of pineapple chunks in natural juice (drained), and half a red pepper, all diced and seasoned with a splash of white vinegar, some crushed hot pepper flakes, and just enough sugar to take the edge off the tartness.

The tossed salad was easy: a bag of precut mixed salad greens, a sliced cucumber, a sliced tomato. (The dressing had a minced clove of garlic, yet more olive oil, some lime juice, salt, honey, and some grated parmesan. It was still a little too tart - the dressing recipe needs work, which isn't surprising given that I threw it together at the last minute.)

I also made the Denver chocolate pudding and popped it into the oven. It wound up way underdone - the same thing happened last time I made Denver pudding, but doesn't happen to baked goods in general with this oven. I'm not sure what's going wrong. Maybe the oven does run cool, and I only notice it more with Denver pudding because it's so hard to tell when it's done.

Then the guests arrived, and I was done cooking until it was time to grill the salmon over a charcoal fire. We sat in the courtyard drinking beer and demolishing the cheese tray, and then moved inside for the main course and dessert after I grilled the fish.

The Analysis:
The only thing I would change, if I had it to do over, is the vegetable dish. I think I ended up with one too many sharp-citrusy flavors - something softer and creamier would have been better. Maybe asparagus with herbed mayonnaise, or something.

This is the most I've ever had done in advance for a dinner party, and I loved it. I really enjoyed being able to hang out in the yard, drinking beer and chatting, instead of running back and forth to the kitchen. It was also good that the house had a chance to cool off before we ate - the dining temperature was much more comfortable than it would have been if we'd eaten right after I prepared a cooked meal.

The whole thing was a lot of fun. I want to entertain more.

It's been a looong time since I made an Experimental Food Corner post.

Tonight was definitely an EFC kind of night - it's been a long time since I've been to the grocery store, and I had no intention of going to the store before making dinner. So I knew that I'd be throwing dinner together out of whatever happened to be in the fridge.

I did have some meat: about a pound of "turkey cutlets," or slices of turkey breast meat about 1/4 inch thick. I formed a vague idea about the kinds of things that go into turkey piccata, started some rice, and began:

I mixed some flour, salt and pepper, and a handful of grated parmesan cheese in a shallow dish, and dredged the turkey cutlets in it as thoroughly as possible. Then I dropped them, two at a time, into a generous skosh of olive oil that was sitting in a skillet over medium-high heat. In contrast to my usual habit of anxiously turning food again and again, I let them sit in the oil until they were crisp and brown on one side, and then turned them. When they were crispy golden brown on both sides, and cooked through, I removed them to my toaster oven to keep warm.

Most of the oil cooked away by the time I finished the second pair of cutlets, so I dropped a chunk of butter into the pan - about a tablespoon and a half, I guess. I turned down the heat a little, but the butter melted and browned very quickly. I whisked in a handful of the leftover flour-and-parmesan-cheese mixture I had dredged the turkey pieces in. It didn't make a smooth paste, of course, because of the cheese pieces, but when I judged that the flour had dissolved I added a half-cup of chicken broth and two tablespoons of lemon juice. I let it boil for a few minutes, whisking, until the sauce was smooth and thick and the cheese was mostly melted. (There were still little concentrated nubbets of parmesan, though.)

Then I served up dinner: rice spread over the bottom of the plate, turkey cutlets on top, and some sugar snap peas blanched in the rest of the can of chicken broth, on the side. Just before eating we ladled some sauce over the top of the turkey.

It was really good. The sauce was a rich brown from the pan drippings, and had an intense lemon punch. The parmesan cheese in the sauce gave it a lovely rich mouthfeel, and the crunchy parmesan in the turkey cutlet coating was delicious. It was very satisfying for a quick weeknight dinner. (The total cooking time was just under half an hour.)

I've been interested in developing sauces and marinades for the last year or so, and I'm always really happy when I get a sauce right.

Because of our family crisis at Thanksgiving, we wound up getting our Thanksgiving dinner from a Piccadilly Cafeteria. We tried their carrot souffle, and it was surprisingly good - rich and carroty, with a creamy, velvety texture almost like pumpkin pie filling. It was too sweet for my taste, though, and a little one-note - I wanted to taste some spices underneath the sweet carrot flavor.

I found the recipe online and went to work this evening, making my own adjustments. Wow, was it good. wcg, curiousangel and I scraped the one-quart casserole dish clean, and I'm still wishing for more - I bet it would make a great breakfast. Mine turned out much lighter in texture than I remember the cafeteria's version was - it melted in my mouth. The balance of sweet and spice was perfect. I've already promised to make it for my family as part of Christmas dinner. Really, words cannot express how tasty this was.
( here's the recipe: )

So we had some milk in the fridge that needed to be used up. I decided that I was in the mood for something lemony-creamy, but I couldn't find any recipes online that fit the picture in my head. So here's what I did:

I browned some chicken breast tenders in a mixture of butter and olive oil. When the chicken was cooked through, I removed it to a bowl and covered it with foil to keep warm.

I drained off about half the fat and whisked a couple of spoonfuls of flour into the other half, over medium-low heat. When the roux had formed into a smooth paste I added the juice and zest of a large lemon, a splash of white wine, and lots of black pepper, and then whisked it smooth again. Then I started adding milk, a tiny bit at a time, pouring with my right hand and whisking with my left. I brought it up very hot (it would start to bubble if I stopped whisking, but with constant stirring it stayed just below the boil) and kept stirring until the sauce had reduced and thickened somewhat. Then I added a generous handful of grated parmesan and stirred until the cheese was more or less melted.

In the meantime, I'd made some linguini fini. I piled it into pasta bowls, arranged the browned chicken on top, and then poured on the sauce. It was delicious - delicately flavored, very light and fresh-tasting, with a lovely aroma of lemon zest. Definitely something to go into the permanent rotation.