Good cookin'

Kris and I went to Casa Bogaczyk last weekend for lots of baby holding, board games, and good food. Every time I visit Liz, I inevitably come home with some great new recipe like Liz's chicken salad or Zack's Polish breakfast or Kristen's mushroom quesadillas. This time it was chicken fajitas with beans and coriander rice. I came home and could not wait to make this for myself.

The beans take three or four hours, but they're so worth it and they make your kitchen smell divine.

Beans and lots of onions and tomatoes. Yum.

Cumin and cilantro and every good thing. The kitchen smelled amazing all afternoon.

This was the first time I used all four burners on my stove at once. It felt rather empowering.

The delicious result. A fajita or burrito or whatever with chicken, beans, coriander rice, sauteed vegetables, avocado, and sour cream. Yum. City.

Also, remember when I was trying to become an avocado person? I'm not sure how it happened, but I have become a full-on avocado freak. I would plant an avocado tree in my yard if I thought I was capable of growing anything successfully. This week I have had avocado on my fajitas, avocado grilled cheese sandwiches (one of the best things you will ever eat in your lifetime), and avocado salsa dip. I am now out of the beautiful avocados I bought at the Delallo store (most gorgeous produce ever) and nowhere around here has good avocados and I am in withdrawal.

I blame Kristen for this. She got me hooked.

Boeuf Bourginon

So, my year of conquering my terror of raw meat has come to an end. Here’s what I made this year:

January: Beef roast
February: Tacos
March: Pork roast
April: Enchilada casserole
May: Linguini with shrimp
June: Ground beef gravy with mashed potatoes
July: Tilapia Meuniere
August: Chicken breasts with mushrooms in cream sauce
September: Beef noodle soup
October: Delmonico steak
November: Halupki

I really did learn to be less horrified by raw meat, and I'm cooking with it more and more often. This experiment was such a resounding success for me, I'm trying to think of other things I could plug into this model. A Kiefer Sutherland movie each month in 2012, perhaps?

For my final meat meal of the year, I wanted to do something a little more extravagant and special, and I wanted to cook the meal for my family. I decided on Julia Child's signature dish, bouef bourginon.

This dish required me to deal with two kinds of meat (bacon and beef) and took about six hours of cooking. In the end the dish was so delicious and I learned that complex recipes with 34 steps are not something to be afraid of. You just start at step one and keep going through step 34, and in the end I had a knock-your-socks-off dinner that my family loved. Here it is in pictures...

There were 4 or 5 steps just for the bacon that started the recipe. You had to trim it, cut it into lardons, blanch it, saute it, and drain it. Really, Julia?

Carrots and onions were the vegetables that simmered with the dish. (Mushrooms are added later, but only after they've been quartered and braised according to strict instructions.) Because I was serving this to my father, I had to pull all the onions out at the end, but their delicious flavor remained.

Look away, Kristen! I had to pat the beef dry so that it would sear properly. This was the scariest part in terms of raw meat, but I definitely noticed the effects of my experiment. I grabbed that bacon with my bare hands and I didn't wig out if beef juice got on me. A year ago I'd have passed out, which is a painful prospect on my mother's ceramic tile floor.

My seared beef. I had to sear it in small batches so it didn't overcrowd, which took patience, but it was worth it.

Next, the carrots and sliced onions are browned, and when they hit the sauteing fat, the kitchen really starts to smell amazing.

Seventeen steps later, I had something starting to resemble the final product. 95% of that sauce is strong French red wine. Mom was just hoping little Jules didn't get drunk off of dinner. Jen was uncorking the bottles for me and after I poured the first bottle in and told her I needed the second uncorked, she exclaimed, "The second bottle! Are you sure you read that recipe correctly?"

Some sprigs of fresh thyme and it's ready for the oven. Julia's recipe said to simmer it for 3 - 4 hours, but I read that French beef (which she used when writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking) was tougher than American beef and she later said that Americans need only simmer it for about 2 hours, so that's what I did.

While the stew simmers, the mushrooms are braised in butter and olive oil. Julia recommends that you shake the pan to coat the mushrooms in butter and oil. Once they've absorbed the cooking fat, they'll brown nicely.

After the stew is finished in the oven, your work is not done. You have to sieve out the sauce, skim the fat, simmer it, add beef stock if necessary, and then re-baste your meat. This is also the proper time to dip a spoon into the sauce, taste it, and say to yourself, "Yum."

A little more simmering and it's ready to go. I served this with mashed potatoes (thanks to Jen for mashing them) and it was dynamite. (Dad went back for fourths.) I was so relieved it turned out well after all that work. We gobbled it up so fast, I forgot to get a photo of it on a plate, so I leave you with this shot.

Thanks for following my adventures in cooking with meat. Bon appetit!

Eleven down, one to go.

November's meat meal was, by far, the most labor-intensive and scary: halupki.


The labor-intesive part: boiling cabbage and peeling off the leaves.



Then you have a nice big bowl of cabbage leaves and your kitchen smells like brussel sprouts, which is lovely if you like brussel sprouts, and I do.



The scary part: A big bowl of ground beef and pork, which you have to mix with rice, garlic, etc. I nearly fainted.



My very first halupki roll. I was so proud.



Soon I had a lovely mountain of them, and they were pretty, so long as I didn't think about what they were stuffed with.



Into the pot with tomatoes to be braised for three long hours.



And then gobbled up with mashed potatoes. A true western PA delicacy. I love living in an area where lots of Polish immigrants settled.

You see this sandwich as you want to see it, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.

Dinner tonight was a hot pepper cheese and potato chip sandwich.


This delicacy was imagined up by either Kristen or Alexa or possibly both of them together in one wild and crazy fit of mad GENIUS. You grab some squishy bread, add hot pepper cheese, pop on some potato chips--Pittsburgh style (if the cheese is super hot, go with regular chips, but if it's only regular-hot, go with Gibbles Red Hot chips), and then squish it down like Allison the basketcase in Breakfast Club when she made her Cap'n Crunch/Pixie Stick sandwich.

Yum.

Beautiful Snack

I love pomegranates. They're tasty, and they're gorgeous to boot (which a snack ought to be if it possibly can). Like a bowlful of shiny little garnets.


No wonder Persephone couldn't resist.

Becoming an avocado person*

*That sounds like the name of a hideous Canadian sci-fi movie you'd see on MST3K.

You know how they say if you introduce a food to a kid 12 times, the kid will start to like it? (I think that's how my mother got Julia to eat asparagus. Blech.) Well, I'm about to try that with avocado.

I have never liked the taste of avocado (though I love the consistency) but it's apparently terribly healthy for you, so I think I should throw myself onto this bandwagon. I do not envision myself drinking those avocado smoothies that Kristen and Nicole and Becky love to make (the horror) but I am determined to make myself like guacamole.


I went to the DeLallo store in Greensburg this weekend and nearly wept at the beauty of their produce. The euphoria caused me to buy two avocados before I even knew what I was doing.


I have to say, cutting open an avocado is a lot of fun.


This recipe called for just scooping out the meat and mashing it with a fork.


The DeLallo store also had a huge display of gorgeous Roma tomatoes, one of which I chopped up for my guacamole salsa.


Then you add chopped green onion (which always makes me think of my grandfather) and half a jalapeno, chopped fine. The recipe listed fresh cilantro as an optional ingredient and I jumped right on that because, to paraphrase George Costanza, I would ensconce myself in cilantro if it were socially acceptable.


Sprinkle on some salt and pepper, add the juice of one lime, and give it all a mix.


Now, perhaps the true reason I am gobbling this down like a pancake-eater on Fat Tuesday is the lime and cilantro (one of my favorite flavor combinations ever) or the crisp green onion or the juicy Roma tomatoes. Maybe I'm not an avocado person just yet. But I'm getting there.

Sauce Day

It smells like my childhood in here.

Supremes de Volaille aux Champignons

Well, this one was rough. To be honest, when I started my scheme to cook one meat meal per month in 2011, I thought to myself, "I'll probably never make it to chicken." Chicken is, to me, the most terrifying of all the raw meats. It looks revolting and it's squishy and disgusting. Just picking up the package to put it into my cart was a saga. And that was only the beginning...

Thus far, every meat meal I've done was begun with trepidation and ended with me admitting that it wasn't all that terrifying after all. Not so with the chicken breasts, or "supremes" as the French call them. This was every bit as horrifying as I feared it would be and more. The worst part is that I have three chicken breasts left in my fridge and I just don't think I have the strength to try another meal with them.

I got this recipe from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I was drawn to it because of a scene in Julie and Julia where Julie makes the dish. It just looked so mouthwatering. It's the scene where she learns, "Don't crowd the mushrooms. Otherwise they won't brown."


This is a Julia recipe, so of course we start with lots of butter.


I couldn't bear to photograph the raw chicken. Just know I was squealing in horror and disgust as I maneuvered them into the skillet. I briefly considered throwing away the tongs I was using, but I only just got them and they're really nice. But here's a shot of the beautiful sliced mushrooms in bubbling butter.


Then I added in heavy cream and Madeira wine, which I got carded when purchasing (yay!)


After the sauce thickened, I popped the cooked supremes back into the sauce. Julia's instructions said to spoon the sauce over them, but in the movie Julie nestled them into the sauce and it looked delish.


And here's the final product. I was so stressed from dealing with raw chicken that I didn't even make a vegetable.

It was really delicious, but I don't know if I can make it again for a few years. That chicken really put me through it. I'm gonna need some time to recover.

It's the little things, people.

Today I was sitting at work, tired and fried, and then I suddenly remembered I had a smuggled piece of banana bread from Sarah's wedding in my camera bag, and I couldn't wait to get home. Brightened my outlook right up.

Sometimes that's all it takes.

Tilapia redux, this time with pics

The Tilapia I made last weekend was so delicious, I couldn't get it out of my head. So I made it again and this time I used a non-finicky photo card.


The recipe is super easy. First you mix up some flour, black pepper, and kosher salt. People, are you using kosher salt? Because it will change your life. It's flaky and a little crunchy and quite ten times better than regular salt.


Brown up some butter (yum city) but don't let it get too brown. This is a quick and easy dish, but it's one of those ones that you have to pay attention to or it can get away from you.


Before I started browning my butter, I chopped up some fresh zucchini and yellow squash and threw it in a pan with a little butter and kosher salt. Soon the kitchen was smelling amazing, and I just love the fresh, bright colors.


You pat your fish dry, sprinkle one side with a little salt, and dredge it in your flour mixture. Easy as anything, even for someone like me who is terrified of actually touching raw fish, despite the fact that I love sushi.


Pop it in the butter and cook one side on low for two minutes. When you flip them over to cook the other side (two more minutes), you add the lemon juice. That's when the butter gets all bubbly and delicious and the two form and wonderful lemon-butter sauce for the fish.

I didn't have any fresh lemons on hand tonight, so I just used lemon juice from a bottle and the dish didn't suffer one bit.


The recipe also said to sprinkle it with fresh parsley before serving but I was too lazy to do that. And too eager to dig in. Delicious!

Now I'd like to try my hand at making other fish dishes, so recommendations for good recipes using mild-flavored fish would be much appreciated.

Tilapia Meuniere

July is really busy and I am nothing if not Her Majesty, the Queen of Procrastination (yes, kneel please), so here, on July 31st is this month's meat meal. I will not take any guff from people claiming that fish is not meat. Kristen doesn't eat it and it's terrifying to handle, so it fits both my criteria for meat.

I went with Tilapia Meuniere, adapted from the Barefoot Contessa's recipe for Sole Muniere. I had tilapia on hand and not sole, so there you go. The Contessa claimed it was a quick and easy meal and my girl Ina Garten has not let me down yet.

I had some mouthwatering photos to show you, but my camera card is being finicky. All I can tell you is, you brown up some butter, throw in some fish that has been salted and dredged in a flour mixture, and fry it up. When it's good and going, you add fresh lemon juice, and the juice and butter create this sauce that I cannot even describe in words. You'll have to imagine something sublime all on your own. I trust you to do it justice.

It's lemony and buttery and crazy delicious. And who would ever know if, in the privacy of my own home, I licked the plate?

Don't judge.

Upon arriving at Aunt Linda's...

Melis: Hey Mags, look at all that ice cream.

Maggie: Ooh, look at all that sauce.

She's a good Italian girl.

Salsa!

You know how, if you're speaking to someone whose first language is not English, and he doesn't understand you, your instinct is to repeat yourself very slowly and very loudly? This always happens to me when I order takeout from Rey Azteca. When I order extra salsa (Which, how could you not? Their salsa is heaven in tomato form.) the guy on the phone always thinks I'm asking for flautas. So, the conversation, including the one I had today, goes thusly:

Ali: ...and a large salsa.
Rey Azteca guy: Flautas?
Ali: No. Salsa.
Rey Azteca guy: Flautas?
Ali: No. No flautas. SALSA!
Rey Azteca guy: Si. Flautas.
Ali: SALSA!

And, I thought, "How silly to repeat myself slowly and loudly as though that will magically translate my words into Spanish." And then I realized every word I was speaking, after the question of flautas came into the business, WAS Spanish. So, I really don't know what to do about that.

After some continued shouting, I got my salsa. And it was delicious, marvelous, totally worth the laryngitis.

Meatland!

Last night, Amanda, Gena, and I went to Fogo de Chao, or as I like to call it, Meatland. (Kris, you may want to stop reading now.) It's a wondrous place where men roam around with skewers of filet mignon, ribeye steak, lamb chops, pork, etc. You are given a card, red side up. When you flip the card to green, the men with the skewers swarm on you like bees on that kid in the movie My Girl. (Spoiler!) They started piling meat on my plate. I couldn't have stopped them if I'd wanted to.

The rest is a blur. Two hours later we left and awaited the onset of meat sweats.