Yogadad World

Lynn Rosetto Kasper is a food goddess. Her radio show The Splendid Table is one of the few food shows, radio or TV, that I make a point of listening to on a regular basis. She almost always has interesting guests and I often pick up a tip or two that I can put to use. In addition to the radio, she and cohort Sally Swift published The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper a couple years ago. It's one of my favorite go-to cookbooks when I don't have a lot of time to cook. Yes, it's Saturday. I should have beaucoup amounts of time to putter around in the kitchen making a dish with a gazillion ingredients. But after a quick trip to Indianapolis this week and a late arrival home on Friday, I just wasn't up to a lot of cooking today. So this morning, I sat down with the Supper book and found this recipe.

Growing up, I wasn't exposed to a lot of beans. My mom would make chili with kidney beans, but that was just about it. And I never developed an appreciation for that cold bean salad that you almost always find at summer potlucks. Lately though, as I've come to appreciate lentils more, it was an easy jump to make to this recipe.

We ended up making this the main course, well, more like the only course. But it would make a nice side dish if you were grilling a piece of pork or baking or broiling a cut of beef.

What made this dish was the fresh rosemary and the slow frying of the garlic. Make sure that the garlic doesn't over cook. It's easy to do. Then you're going to lose some of the fragrance that makes this such a delightful supper. Don't skimp on the rosemary either and try to use dried from that little bottle that's been in your cupboard for a few weeks or months. You won't enjoy eating your meal nearly as much.

This cooks up very fast. Once you have your garlic and rosemary cleaned and cut, it only takes a few minutes to get this from stove to table.

For dessert, we had apple-rhubarb crisp with rhubarb fresh out of the garden.

Rhubarb is another one of those foods that I just didn't appreciate it when I was younger. Now that I'm advancing through middle age at an accelerating clip, I find that it's pretty darn enjoyable.

I didn't use Granny Smith apples as called for in the recipe. Instead I dug out a few Michigan delicious apples that had been in the crisper for a week or two. A little too mushy for eating but perfect for baking. Their sweetness was a nice counterpart to the tart rhubarb.

Enjoy.

Ingredients
Topping
1/2 slice coarse whole-grain bread, coarse ground in a food processor (2 generous tablespoons crumbs)
3 Tbl fresh-grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
Generous 1/4 tsp fresh-ground black pepper

Salad
5 large garlic cloves crushed with 1/2 tsp salt and coarse chopped
1/4 c extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tight packed Tbl fresh rosemary leaves, coarse chopped
2 15-oz can white beans (cannellini or Great Northern), drained & rinsed
1 large handful mixed salad greens
Additional salt & pepper, to taste

In a 12-inch skillet or saute pan over medium heat, toast the bread crumbs until lightly browned, stirring often. Transfer the crumbs to a small bowl to cool. When cooled, stir in the Parmigiano and pepper. Set aside

In the same pan, slowly warm the garlic in the olive oil over low heat for 30 secs to 1 minute. Stir in the rosemary, blending for another minute or so, taking care not to burn the garlic. It should be very fragrant & just beginning to soften.

Immediately add the beans and fold them in very gently. Turn the heat to medium. Heat the beans through, about 3 mins., occasionally lifting and turning them as they heat, as stirring will turn them to mush. Add the greens and gently move them around in the pan until they are slightly wilted, 30 secs to 1 min. Turn into a serving bowl, top with the bread-crumb mixture and season with salt and pepper.

This is the best pizza I've ever made. It's not your standard tomato sauce, cheese, and two, three, or four toppings, but boy, was it tasty. I used no sauce or cheese, just mushrooms, potatoes, onions and a few spices. Good stuff.

For years, I've fooled around with pizza dough, trying recipe after recipe. But I could never get close to the same texture as pizzeria pizza dough. I even asked my daughter's boyfriend, who makes pizzas at Pizza Hut for the secret. Turns out the dough is delivered to them frozen, and they thaw and bake. It's not mixed on site. No help there. So I looked at book after book & website after website.

Last week, I was rewarded. I got My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey from the library. His no-knead bread recipe has been copied and adapted many times, including by Mark Bittman of the New York Times and the folks at Cooks Illustrated. Turns out he also likes pizza. His recipe is simple, elegant, and delicious. It's the closest I've ever come to pizzeria style dough. Two days after checking it out of the library, Shannon ran out and bought a copy. And tonight I put it to work.

I think there are a couple of differences between his recipe and the others I've tried. First, he says to shape the dough into a rectangular pan and place that in the oven on top of a pizza stone. Previously, I've baked the pizza directly on the stone, not in a pan. Second, the pan has been liberally coated with olive oil before stretching the dough out in it. The oil makes the dough a little slippery but made a big difference in the cooking. Last, he calls for more yeast than I normally use to make my pizza dough. That made the crust very light.

This recipe makes enough for two thin crust pizzas, and the crust is very thin. If you don't want to make two pizzas at once, you can cut the recipe in half quite easily or do what I did and freeze half.

You will notice that the dough ingredients are given in weight as well as volume measurements. I recently bought a good kitchen scale and was pleased with how easy it was to put everything together using the scale, rather than the usual assortment of measuring cups and spoons. I suspect that the scale played a role in tonight's supper success.

Lastly a word about the toppings. I used mushrooms and potatoes. The recipe called for cremini mushrooms but the market was out so I used white button mushrooms. For the potatoes, it was Michigan-grown Yukon gold. The key to a well-done, tasty pizza was having the veggies sliced quite thinly. If you are very highly skilled you might be able to do that with a good chef's knife. I'm not in that league. So I used a mandoline. I'm sold on the gadget. I got uniform slices, quickly. There are many mandolines on the market, covering nearly every pricepoint so you should be able to find one that suits you and your budget.

We paired the pizza with one of our favorite Chiantis, Da Vinci Chianti. It's a pretty good, inexpensive Chianti. I often find it on sale for around $10.00 a bottle.

If you're not a fan of thin-crust pizza or think you aren't, you owe it to yourself to try this out.

Ingredients
Pizza dough
3 3/4 c (300 grams) Bread or all-purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp (10 grams) Instant or active dry yeast
3/4 tsp (5 grams) table salt
3/4 tsp plus a pinch (3 grams) sugar
1 1/2 c (300 grams) room temp water (about 72 degrees)
extra virgin olive oil for pan

Toppings
3/4 lb mushrooms
3-4 Yukon gold potatoes, peeled
2 small yellow onions, diced
1/3 c extra virgin olive oil
fresh thyme
fresh rosemary
fresh ground black pepper
oregano
Red pepper flakes

In a medium bowl, stir together flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Add the water and use a wooden spoon (or your hands) to mix until blended, at least 30 seconds. Cover the bowl and let sit at room temperature, until the dough has doubled in size, about 2 hours.

Oil two 13-by-18 inch baking sheets. Scrape half the dough onto each sheet. Gently pull and stretch the dough across the surface of the pan and use your hands to press it evenly to the edges. Make sure the pans are adequately oiled and press gently yet firmly. Pinch any holes together. The dough on each pan will be quite thin.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees with the rack in the center.

Use a mandoline to cut the mushrooms and potatoes. The mushrooms should be about 1/8 inch thick and the potatoes 1/16 inch thick.

In a medium bowl combine a quart of water and 4 tsp of table salt. Stir to dissolve the salt. Place the potatoes in the brine for about 90 minutes, until the slices are wilted and no longer crisp.

Drain the potatoes in a colander and use your hands to press out excess water. Pat dry.

In a medium bowl, combine mushrooms, potatoes, onions, and olive oil.

Spread potato and mushroom mixture on pizza dough, with a bit more of the mixture near the edges. Sprinkle with rosemary, thyme, and oregano.

Bake 20 - 25 minutes on a pizza stone. Remove from oven when the topping starts to turn golden brown and the edges begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Serve hot. Put jar of red pepper flakes on table for guests to add.

It's a snowy night in mid-Michigan. Not as snowy as further south & east, but enough to be troublesome. After getting home from work, the first order of business was shoveling the sidewalk and driveway. Our driveway is rather long and wide and it takes awhile to get done. Shannon helped so it wasn't too onerous. But we did have an appetite by the time we finished. Fortunately the meal we had discussed in the morning fit the bill perfectly.

This recipe is from one of my favorite food writers, Mark Bittman. He's a New York Times columnist, writing the Minimalist column and a blog, Bitten. He also has written a first rate cookbook and a non-cookbook about food, among other things.

The starchy rice, along with the egg topping, was great comfort food after coming in from the cold, covered with snow. The dish cooked up fast and was quite hearty. Dessert was a few orange slices, the sweetness nicely complimenting the saltiness of the soy sauce and sesame oil in the rice.

If you watch Bittman's video, you'll see he uses two pans - one to brown the ginger and garlic, the other to soften the leeks and heat the rice. He uses the first pan to also fry the eggs. I used one pan for the garlic and ginger, then put the leeks and rice in that pan, using the second to fry the egg. Too late I discovered that the Calphalon pan that I had assumed was non-stick had egg stuck to the bottom. After grumping around about the lack of quality in these pans, which are not inexpensive, I managed to pry the eggs, mostly intact from the pan, and get them on top of the rice. What I find a bit ironic is that the best non-stick pan I have is some no-name skillet that I think I got at Kroger for probably $10. Takes a licking and still no sticking. So next time we make this, I'll use el cheapo pan for the eggs and the other for the rice. Doesn't matter if that sticks a bit.

Ingredients
1/2 cup peanut oil
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons minced ginger
Salt
2 cups thinly sliced leeks, white and light green parts only, rinsed and dried
4 cups day-old cooked rice, preferably jasmine, at room temperature
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons sesame oil
4 teaspoons soy sauce.

In a large skillet, heat 1/4 cup oil over medium heat. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring occasionally, until crisp and brown. With a slotted spoon, transfer to paper towels and salt lightly.

Reduce heat under skillet to medium-low and add 2 tablespoons oil and leeks. Cook about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until very tender but not browned. Season lightly with salt.

Raise heat to medium and add rice. Cook, stirring well, until heated through. Season to taste with salt.

In a nonstick skillet, fry eggs in remaining oil, sunny-side-up, until edges are set but yolk is still runny.

Divide rice among four dishes. Top each with an egg and drizzle with 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil and 1 teaspoon soy sauce. Sprinkle crisped garlic and ginger over everything and serve.

Tonight's supper was a soup I made Sunday afternoon and stashed in the refrigerator for later in the week. The recipe was from Sunday Soup by Betty Rosbottom. This wasn't my first soup from the book. Rosbottom's recipes for Russian Vegetable soup and Butternut Squash and Apple soup with Cider Cream were both very good. (I froze the Russian Vegetable and am just now finishing it up. It freezes very well.) I'm not sure what happened with tonight's soup, Cold Weather Potato Chowder with Caraway Cheese. I have a couple theories. But first the recipe.

Ingredients
4 slices bacon, cut in 1/2 inch pieces
1/2 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup diced celery
1 lb red-skin potatoes, unpeeled, cut into 1/2 in. dice
1 Tb minced garlic
2 cups chicken stock
2 cups whole milk
1 cup (4 oz) Harvarti cheeese with caraway seed, coarsely grated
1 Tb unsalted butter @ room temp.
1 Tb all-purpose flour
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
2 Tb chopped fresh chives for garnish

Saute bacon in large heavy pot, medium heat, until browned & crisp. Transfer bacon to paper towel to drain, save 2 Tb bacon grease & discard the rest.

Add onion & celery to the bacon drippings and cook until softened, about 5 mins. Stir frequently. Add diced potatoes & saute for about 2 minutes. Add garlic and saute, stirring, for 1 minute.

Add chicken stock & milk to the pot & bring mixture to a simmer. Cook soup at a simmer until the potatoes are tender, for 10-15 mins. Do not boil soup. (Soup can be prepared to this point 1 day ahead. Cool, cover, & refrigerate. Reheat over low heat & proceed with recipe.)

When ready to serve, add the cheese, a little at a time, stirring until melted after each addition. In a small bow, mist the butter & flour with a fork to make a paste. Whisk into the soup, a little at a time, and cook until completely blended, for 1 to 2 minutes. Salt & pepper to taste.

Ladle into bowls and sprinkle each service chopped chives & bacon.

Sounds great, eh? Mine wasn't. Not even close. It had a bitter, sour taste to it. I think I went wrong when I didn't follow the recipes admonition to add the cheese and the flour paste just before serving. Instead, I shrugged, and added both on Sunday, then stuck the soup into the refrigerator. I think that somehow the cheese & potatoes weren't good together in the fridge. Alternatively, it could have been the cheese. I couldn't find Harvarti with carraway seeds at the store so I picked up some Havarti dill cheese. It's possible that dill was not the right herb to use in this soup. A third possibility is that the milk was just a little bit off. It'd been in the fridge for a while but it smelled ok. Normally, my nose doesn't go wrong. This time it might have.

I think I'll give this recipe another go sometime and correct all those things. Maybe next time, it'll be the tasty treat that it should be.

Right now, I'm heading back to the kitchen to find something a bit more satisfying than this soup.

Tonight's dinner came from The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern cookbook. This was our first recipe from their book and it was a resounding success. We paired the fish with a glass of Sutter Home Gewurtztraminer, which nicely balanced the acid from the lemon. Normally I'm not a big fan of wines made from this grape, but for our meal tonight it worked quite well. The trout were frozen and came from the Lansing City Market. Serves two. From start to finish this took about an hour. The book says 20 minutes, but that's very, very optimistic.

Ingredients:
2 Tbl all-purpose flour
1 1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper
2 trout fillets (6-8 oz each)
4 Tbl unsalted butter (1/2 stick)
1 large lemon segmented
2 slices bread, toasted, crusts cut off, cut into fine dice
1/2 mixed fresh herbs such a dill, mint, & parsley
2 Tbl good tasting extra-virgin olive oil
1 tsp white vinegar

In a small bow mix flour, salt & pepper. Sprinkle over both sides of the trout fillets.

Melt the butter in a medium saute pan, cast-iron preferred, over medium heat until the froth begins to subside. Place the fillets in the skillet, skin side down and cook until the skin is crispy, about 5 minutes. You'll see the sides of the fillet begin to turn brown when it's done. Turn over and cook for about 3 minutes

While the fish is cooking, toss the lemon segments, diced toast, and herbs in a bowl. Dress with the olive oil & vinegar, and set aside.

When the fillets are completely cooked, place the lemon-herb mixture on each plate, lay a fillet, skin side up, over it and serve immediately.

The fish was very tasty, and we rate this recipe a keeper. We thought we'd need a side dish so cooked up a bunch of jasmine rice, which was unneeded. The bread, lemon, and herb concoction was all we needed to accompany the fish. The rice was schlepped off to the refrigerator, to await another day. We have plans for it later this week.