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.

Labor of Love

Last weekend–or two weekends ago, by now–was the first night of Cook Club. As I mentioned in a previous post, M., L., P., and I have started this club, and I was the first to host.  And I just have to say, I have never prepared a meal quite like that before, and I’m not likely to do it again anytime soon.  Even when it’s my turn to host again, I don’t think 6+ courses for 8 people is going to happen.  After Sunday, I needed about 2 days to recover before my brain came back online.

But the truth is that I loved every moment of it, from the trips to the greenmarket, to waiting while the fishmonger gutted & scaled my red snapper, testing the cheese, wrapping each asparagus spear–it was an utter joy.  A labor of love, as the expression goes.  In part, it was love for my friends, my delightful dinner companions, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that it was more for the love of food, the kitchen, the cooking process.  Or maybe it’s really the intersection, playing hostess, because that’s where I get to enjoy my food with my dear friends.  And nothing makes me happier than that.

I’ve done an overview of the menu already, but here are the highlights, in living color (not a terribly thorough documentation, I’m afraid, since we all got a little too caught up in the eating to remember to photograph the dessert course…).

Olives with almonds, blood oranges, dried red peppers, and thyme (Tyler Florence’s recipe), ready to go in the oven:

The table set with hors d’oeuvres (the olives, plus Smitten Kitchen’s cheese straws, and grilled asparagus wrapped in prosciutto or truffled cheese with pear mostarda):

 

Cucumber avocado soup with lime:

Ready to serve the soup course:

Spinach salad with pine nuts, golden raisins, and blood orange vinaigrette:

One of the two red snappers I cooked:

Same, after being stuffed with blood oranges, shallots, and herbs, crusted with salt & egg white and baked for a half hour or so:

And this is what was inside when we cracked open the crust:

Me, trying to portion out the tasty filets without butchering the fish too badly:

And here you can see not only both fish (one still crusted) but the potato ramp gratin in the background:

(There are loads more photos of the whole fish process at my flickr feed, courtesy of M., who served as my staff photographer for most of the night.)

And this, sadly, is the only evidence of the rhubarb tart.  The vanilla pink peppercorn ice cream went too quickly to show up on camera at all.

I think, though, that it is likely I will make the ice cream again.  The tart was good, for sure, but there is only so much time left in the rhubarb season, and if I’m going to make something else, I’ll want to try another recipe.

And so, almost 5 hours later, we declared Cook Club a success, and called our first meeting to a close.
And C. was a darling and broke the rules by doing almost all the dishes for me.  We’ve figured out the date for the next round (last weekend of June), and I for one can’t wait.  Playing hostess is the best, but being a guest can be pretty damn awesome, too.

Cook Club

I have a history of coming up with brilliant ideas for projects and then not really, you know, following through. But what I have learned over the years is that if I tell enough people about the project in question, then I’ll have to do it because otherwise when people ask, “So, how’s that bladibla you were so excited about?” I’d have to answer, “What? Oh, yeah, that. I kind of wasn’t as serious about it as I sounded when I spent two hours last week outlining my elaborate plans.” I employed this strategy when I started practicing aikido this year, and it worked beautifully.

The other thing that helps with follow-through is involving other people. That is the method that proved immensely useful in college when a group of us created a self-taught children’s literature course, known far and wide as The GISP. The GISP was initially my idea, and then once I rallied enough people to take on the heavy lifting, I pretty much sat back and watched, occasionally threatening to punch someone in the face if we didn’t keep Alice in Wonderland on the syllabus. But I guarantee that if I’d been left to my own devices on that one, it never would have happened. So thanks, ladies (you know who you are).

This time around, the idea for the project was not actually mine. Supper Clubs are an increasingly common phenomenon, and I’ve heard such lovely things about the one my friend S. is in that I just had to join in the fun. S. calls hers a Cook Club, and I’ve brazenly stolen that, though with a few adjustments to the rules and regulations. The way it will work is that we take turns hosting & cooking, so that the host always does all the cooking & clean-up, and the guests just bring something to drink and their sweet selves. And everybody gets to bring a date. So you get a wonderful home-cooked meal in excellent company every few weeks, and only have to prepare such a meal every few months.

M. (also a GISP alum), L., P., and I are getting together for our first Cook Club this weekend. And since it was (sort of) my idea, I’m hosting the inaugural dinner. And can I say, I am maybe getting a little too excited about this whole thing. I have already made the vanilla pink peppercorn ice cream (adapted from Orangette’s book) that will be served with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Alsatian Rhubarb Tart (minus the meringue topping). Because of course, dessert gets taken care of first.

I paid a bazillion dollars (not really) for a jar of pear mostarda at Murray’s, which will be lightly spread inside prosciutto or truffled cheese (also from Murray’s) wrapped around grilled asparagus spears. I’m cooking up a batch of Tyler Florence’s marinated olives & almonds, a recipe that’s always been in the back of my mind to try out. And if I get really ambitious, I might also make Smitten Kitchen’s fantastic cheese straws.

There will be a cold vegetable soup, possibly the avocado/cucumber one from my detox week (healthy or no, it was delicious) unless there’s something interesting at the greenmarket on Saturday morning. Also a Catalan-style baby spinach salad, with sultanas, pine nuts, and a warm shallot/blood orange vinaigrette.

For the main course, I’m going to attempt some version or another of a salt crusted fish roast, served alongside Deborah Madison’s potato leek gratin. Conventional wisdom is that you should never try out a new recipe when you’re having dinner guests, but since I do not generally adhere to convention in any area of my life, I see no reason that the kitchen should be any different.

I really can’t wait. To the point where I’m having a hard time concentrating on work because I’m in menu-planning mode. I’m going to do an early greenmarket run on Saturday, then spend all day in the kitchen, and most of Sunday, too. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres start at 5. Wish me luck…