Top Your Own Pizza Party

This past Sunday, L., M., P., and our respective +1s came over for the latest round of Cook Club. We had all semi-tacitly agreed that it would be a more casual affair this time, and for whatever reason, I settled on making pizza. I made a bunch of antipasti/salads, prepped the toppings, made the dough, went a little crazy at Murrays’, and let everyone do their own thing. 

The pre-pizza spread: kidney beans with shallots and parsley; pan-seared shishito peppers; Treviso potato salad (with radicchio, from Lynne Rossetto Kasper); Sweet and Sour Grilled Pumpkin (which I’ve made before); Shredded Collard Greens with Walnuts and Pickled Apples; and sweet-tart salad of basil, sorrel, and apple (also from Rossetto Kasper–this was the star of the show, I think).

Really, though, the point is the pizza. Because of the limited amount of space in my oven, and also in my kitchen, we made our pizzas in pairs. But pizza only takes 10 minutes to cook (which I know to be a fact, from my summer working at Panzone’s) and cheese retains heat better than just about anything, so we all still ate at roughly the same time. I’d made pesto, and tomato sauce (from the many pounds of tomatoes A. and I picked up at Stoneledge), roasted peppers, made “oven-candied” tomatoes, cooked up some sausage, caramelize some onions, and bough pepperoni and mushrooms.

Enough with the preamble. Here are our beautiful creations:

For dessert, we had cookies and ice cream. There had been a request for a repeat of the pink peppercorn ice cream I made back in May, and who am I to deny someone ice cream? It’s a pretty basic vanilla custard base, with the addition of a tablespoon of ground pink peppercorns (separate post to come on that, probably). And then when you make ice cream, you wind up with a lot of unused egg whites–so I was pleased to find a recipe for something called Chocolate Puddle Cookies on 101 Cookbooks that requires a lot of them.

More photos of everything here.

It was, as always, a lovely evening in wonderful company. I am so, so glad that we started Cook Club. I think we could probably be eating take out and drinking box wine (not to knock box wine–there are some really good ones out there) and have just as good a time together, but thankfully, we have the option to have homemade meals with good friends, and who could ask for more than that?

Cook Club 2

[Guest post from M.]

L. has graciously allowed me to post a story to her blog about our most recent cook club.  As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago, L. gathered a group of us with the idea of having regular supper parties.  There are four of us, and we take turns hosting.  Whoever hosts is in charge of all the food.  The other three bring guests and drinks.  L. hosted our first dinner party, which you can read about here.

Sunday night, it was my turn.  Those of you in the New York area know that this past weekend was sweltering.  Disgustingly hot.  All I wanted to do was lay in my air-conditioned bedroom and dream of winter snows.  It felt like we were in Alabama, and as luck would have it, I had planned a menu of southern food from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook.  Even more lucky, I had done some of the baking the day before, and two of the main dishes were salads.  Regardless, by the end of the evening, my kitchen felt like a sauna.

So, on to the important things.  We started off with cheese straws (recipe from Mark Bittman; I don’t have a large food processor, and the Lee Bros’ recipe was a bit too reliant upon the food processor for me to feel as though I could adapt it reliably to my food-processor-less kitchen) and deviled eggs (recipe from the Lee Bros.).  I also had a big pitcher of sweet tea, and L. brought a pitcher of unsweetened white jasmine iced tea.  Delish!  I even dug out my grandmother’s hand-crocheted table-cloth for an added Southern touch (am I the only one who associates tablecloths with the South?  We never used them growing up — they seem most at home on a table tied to traditional ways).

After everyone had arrived and had had time to cool off with iced tea or wine, I started the grits.  I had planned originally to make grits with blue cheese, but with the weather, I thought the cheese might make them unnecessarily heavy.  I had already made the collards — vegetarian, but cooked in a smoky tomato onion sauce that gave them a nice traditional flavor — so I just heated those up as the grits cooked.  I had also prepared the two salads before my guests arrived — a succotash made of corn, cranberry beans, tomatoes, yellow squash, and basil;

and a “new ambrosia” made with grapefruit, oranges, avocados, celery, and cucumber — so C. tossed them with their dressings while I cooked. 

The recipe for the ambrosia is available online here.

I was most fond of the collards and grits, but I thought all the dishes turned out well.  It was nice, in this heat, to have cool dishes and to avoid the heaviness that comes with meals featuring too much dairy or meat.  Next time, I think I’d use less dressing on each of the salads, and I think I would de-seed the tomatoes before adding them to the succotash. 

But, of course, the most important part of any meal is dessert.

I had cooked a buttermilk pound cake the day before.  It was my first attempt at making a pound cake, and it turned out beautifully.  I’m still slightly traumatized by the amount of butter that went into it, but the results were divine.  I topped the cake with some plain whipped cream, a sauce made from blueberries that I had picked in New Jersey the weekend before, and fresh blueberries (sadly, not fresh picked). 

So, all in all, a lovely dinner with old friends and new.  We survived the heat and proved that a vegetarian southern feast is not an oxymoron.

Word of the Day: Cruciferous

I have a news alert set on nytimes.com to send me an email every time a story is published in their Recipes for Health series. Each week, the author, Martha Rose Shulman, picks a theme of sorts (e.g. healthy grains; pantry items; vegetable pies) and offers up 5 recipes. They’re not always of interest (like the week on tomatoes that showed up just after all the news about the blight…) but especially with all the new-to-me ingredients I’ve been getting from Stoneledge, it’s nice to have an ever-growing list of new-to-me recipes of same.

However (and you know it’s big when I break the rules and start a sentence with “however”), my news alert did not work this week. This week’s theme was collard greens. So boo to you, New York Times. Luckily I have friends looking out for me, like A., who pointed me towards a Food Network recipe for Vegetarian “Southern-Style” Collard Greens, from someone named Sunny Anderson. I rarely watch the Food Network anymore (though I’ve recently discovered the marathons of Lidia Bastianich on some channel called Create…) so I have no clue who this Ms. Anderson is, but her recipe for collards fit the bill. And was delicious.

As with some kale I cooked up recently, the general methods are not unique. But there are some good small variations, and you can’t argue with the end result.

Start off with some onion in a big pot, in a mix of olive oil and butter (always a hit combination).

Add chopped garlic and red pepper flakes.

Then add the collards (the recipe doesn’t state this explicitly, but I implicitly inferred that the stems needed to be cut out before being chopped). I should note that this is in fact a mix of collards and turnip greens, since the two seem to be interchangeable in many ways, and I hadn’t yet used the greens from the previous week of turnips.

Stir it all up and then add a few cups of the stock of your choice (Better than Bouillon chicken is what’s generally in my fridge for occasions like this, though I’m in the market for a reliable pre-made vegetable stock) and cook, covered, for 40 minutes.

Then as a final touch, add some chopped tomatoes. I went with canned, because I had some leftover that needed to be used, so my greens were a bit more watery than they are probably meant to be. Still, a success. (Thanks for the tip, A.!)

And now, a brief interlude. It turns out, according to the emergent intelligence of wikipedia, that on a genetic level, collard greens are indistinguishable from kale (though not the Siberian variety), broccoli, cabbage (though not Napa cabbage), and cauliflower. That is probably not paraphrased very well. What I mean is that they are the same as far down as their genus and species (Brassica oleracea) and it is only at the cultivar level that they differ. Similarly, the turnip I am about to prepare (below) is the same thing as Napa cabbage, bok choy, mizuna, and broccoli rabe (Brassica rapa, hence rabe, or rapini). My understanding of plant genetics is that, therefore, any of those different cultivars could be crossed together without too much trouble (hence broccoflower). And the slightly obsessive organizer in me now wants to redo all the vegetable tags for this blog according to species…

Moving on.

This is the biggest turnip in all of creation. It weighed over 2 pounds.

After much debate, I decided to go with a Bittman recipe for Braised Turnips with Mustard Sauce that I found on a blog called Eat This. While collards and turnips do not make for the most bio-diverse of dinners, it turns out that the turnips take about 40 minutes to prepare, which is perfect because what else are you going to do while the collards are simmering? You’ve got all that time to kill anyway, so you might as well cut up the turnip into big chunks and cook it in olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, for 10 minutes or so, turning the pieces so they get nicely browned.

And then you can check on the collards, which are coming along nicely, before you pour in the stock of your choice and let the turnips simmer for 10-15 minutes, until they’re tender.

Check the collards again, then remove the cooked turnip chunks to a bowl. Mix together some whole grain mustard with cornstarch (or ideally arrowroot powder, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw away that stupid box of cornstarch just because it doesn’t really fit with my new hippy-dippy semi-healthy cooking preferences. I will use every last teaspoon of it if it kills me. Which it probably will.) and stir that into the liquid left in the pan.

Cook for a few minutes, until it thickens a bit, and pour it over the turnips.

I really like the flavor of this dish, but I have to confess I need to refine my turnip-cooking skills, because the texture is just mush. Sometimes mush is what you want, but I think these would have benefited from slightly less simmering.

Oh, and mustard is also in the Brassica genus (species varies by color of the seeds), so this dinner was REALLY low on the bio-diversity scale. At least there were some onions in there, and tomatoes…

Paid Content

This week has been rather trying in ways that have nothing to do with food, hence the paucity of new posts. This week also found me cooking collards again, though I think I’ve found a good way to do it now, courtesy of Cook’s Illustrated. I have been on their email list for years, getting both the letters from Vermont from Christopher Kimball and the bits of often useful info from America’s Test Kitchen, but I have never subscribed to the magazine nor paid for access to the site. For some reason, I decided this was the week to do just that–pay for site access, that is. (I do not need another magazine coming into my apartment.)

I first learned about Cook’s Illustrated when I did the Columbia Publishing Course. I think it was Kimball himself who came and talked to us about their business model, which is ad-free (though not sponsor-free) and dependent heavily on subscribers. It’s basically Consumer Reports for cooks, a repository of ingredient and equipment reviews, as well as thoroughly tested recipes. Just the place to find the best way to cook collards, right?

They have several variations on Quick Cooked Greens, but the one that jumped out at me was With White Beans and Rosemary (possibly because I still had some cooked pinto beans in the fridge and the rosemary in my windowbox is doing great…).

So. Assuming you have cooked beans already (or canned, whatever), the first thing is to stem the collards and chop them coarsely.

Cook them in boiling salted water for about 7 minutes, just until tender (I went a little longer). Drain them, and dunk them in cold water, then drain again and squeeze out as much water as you can. Then chop a bit more.

Then, take your slivered garlic, chopped rosemary, and a little red pepper flakes and heat them in a wide skillet in olive oil. NB: do not start this while you’re still dealing with the greens unless you especially like burnt garlic, because it goes from golden brown to blackened much faster than you think.

Add the greens and stir it all up, then add the beans and either some cooking liquid from the beans if you were smart enough to save it, or some kind of stock, or just water. Simmer, cover, and cook about 5 minutes. Season with salt (it’s going to need it), and serve with shaved parmesan.

Other variations, for interested parties, include With Bacon and Black-Eyed Peas, With Black Olives and Lemon Zest, and With Penne and Prosciutto. I might actually find myself excited to get collards again.

The Veggies That Grow Together Go Together

I remember reading somewhere, not too long ago, that one of the principles of the now ubiquitous “seasonal cooking” concept is that things that grow in the same ground together, at the same time, tend to taste good on a plate together. So it’s kind of gratifying when I start looking up recipes for the weekly bounty and find something that prominently features multiple items.

Such was the case with Deborah Madison’s potato and leek gratin, which J. and I made Thursday night. Potatoes? Check. Leeks? Check. We cut the recipe almost in half (I only got 2 lbs. of potatoes), made it in an 8″x8″ baking dish, and subbed in cheddar for gruyere. Which only means I have to make it again so I can do a proper taste test between the two…

Mandolin the potatoes, slice and rinse the leeks, and dump them in a pot with a couple of sliced garlic cloves, a bay leaf, and a couple of thyme sprigs. Cover with milk, add a couple of big pinches of salt, and simmer gently until the potatoes are tender.

Note: keep the heat as low as you can, or else be prepared to spend some quality time at the sink, scrubbing scalded milk off the bottom of the pan.

Drain the whole thing over a bowl so you reserve the milk. Then layer the potato mixture in a baking dish, alternating with shredded cheese, and seasoning with black pepper and nutmeg.

(for another example of J.’s skills at neatly layering thin slices of potato see this entry)

End with a layer of cheese, pour in the reserved milk (or most of it), and stick it in a hot oven.

Tada!

As a side, I prepared braised collard greens. I have decided that this vegetable is not destined to become a commonplace ingredient in my kitchen, because I don’t understand how a leafy vegetable that needs to be cooked for at least a half an hour can possibly retain any nutrients. And while I like the flavor enough, there are lots of others I like more.

In this preparation, first you have to boil the greens (stems removed) for 10 minutes. THEN you put them in a skillet with a tablespoon of ghee, some sliced green onions, and some of the cooking liquid for at least another 15 minutes, ideally more. Serve with hot pepper sauce (the spice and the vinegar are both great complements to the deep slightly bitter richness of the collards).