Gnocchi with lamb ragu

We had a lot of lamb leftover from our last dinner party, so I made a batch of lamb ragu and served it with some homemade potato gnocchi. The recipe for the ragu was pretty standard: dice one red onion, thinly slice three cloves of garlic, brunoise one carrot. Saute the these ingredients over medium heat until the onions are translucent, add a few anchovies, add one large can of canned tomatoes, hand crushed, along with some sprigs of thyme and the lamb. Season with salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar. Let everything simmer and reduce for a couple hours. You want to keep the heat fairly low, otherwise the lamb will get tough and stringy.

Cold weather food

We're in the dead of winter here in Chicago, and while it hasn't been that bad, it's still cold enough to warrant some good, cold weather comfort food. So, last week, a few friends came over and we all put together a nice winter meal of leg of lamb, polenta with broccoli raab, pine nuts, and sundried tomatoes, roasted root vegetables, cahldo verde, some berries with balsamic vinegar and mascarpone whipped cream for dessert, and plenty of wine. This dinner party also gave Abby a chance to test out a camera lens that she's borrowing from our friend, Archie.

We started with a some of Mike's cahldo verde, a Portuguese soup with potatoes, kale, and chorizo or linguica. Here's the chorizo, served on the side.

and here's the soup.

I was thinking of just roasting the leg of lamb, but the butcher I got it from butchered the leg so poorly that I decided to go for a braise instead. Here's the braising vessel, our dutch oven, sealed off to keep everything inside during the cooking process.

And here's what the lamb looked like after a good sear (~8 minutes on medium high heat) and 7 to 8 hours in the oven at 275.

You can strain and degrease the braising liquids, reduce it a bit, and serve it with the lamb. Polenta is a great accompaniment for braised dishes since it soaks up all of the braising liquid.

Mike also whipped up a little brocolli raab dish to serve on top of the polenta,
and we also made some roasted root vegetables (celeriac, turnips, carrots, and parsnips).
Finally, here's a couple pics of the berry dessert that another one of our guests put together.

Bittman/Vongerichten fried rice

This recipe was posted on Mark Bittman's blog the other day. I thought I would give it a try. The crispy garlic and ginger was really good. I also added thinly sliced lap cheong since we had some sitting around our fridge. Here's the recipe.

Roasted chickpeas, swiss chard, and lamb sausage

This meal is quick enough to do on a weeknight. I've made a variation of this same chickepea dish here, and I've made several variations of chickpeas and greens here. Usually I stew the chickpeas with the greens, but this time I roasted the chickpeas with some olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika. For the chard, I just seared them with some olive oil, garlic, and red wine vinegar. To cook the sausage, just throw them in the oven along with the chickpeas. This only takes a few minutes of prep time.

RECIPE:

1 large can chickpeas

1-2 bunches of Swiss chard

2 lamb sausages

Olive oil

6 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp paprika

1-2 tsp red wine vinegar

salt, pepper

Preheat the oven to 350F. Drain and rinse the chickpeas. Toss together with olive oil, half of the garlic, cumin, paprika, and add salt and pepper to taste (toast the spices before using them to bring out the flavors). Place the chickpeas and sausages on a baking sheet/pan and roast for about 30 minutes.

While the chickpeas are roasting, rinse the chard, cut off the thick stalks, and cut crosswise into 1 to 2 inch strips. Heat up about 1 to 2 Tbsp of olive oil over high heat in a large saute pan. Add the remaining garlic. After a few seconds, when the garlic begins to brown, add the chard in batches. It will cook down fairly quickly. Season with salt, pepper, and red wine vinegar. You only need to cook the chard for about 5 to 10 minutes.

When everything is done, mix together the chard and chickpeas. Serve with the lamb sausage.

Christmas Dinner

This year was the first time that I spent Christmas outside of Washington state. While my family has a tradition of getting together on Christmas Eve, this year, it was a bit quieter. Nothing was planned for Christmas Eve, so Abby and I decided to have her brother, Tony, and my brother-in-law, Mitch, and niece, Midori, over for dinner. We did a "surf-and-turf" menu with salt baked branzino and an herb-crusted rib roast served with brussels sprouts and bacon and roasted potatoes. None of this is really new. I've made each of these dishes before, so I won't go into detail about the preparation, but here are some pictures.

Above is the branzino, peaking out of the salt crust, and below is a picture of the finished product with some olive oil that we brought back from Tuscany.

Here's the rib roast.

And hear are the brussels sprouts. Usually, I half or quarter the brussels sprouts and roast them, but this time around, I just shelled (peeled off the leaves) and sauteed them.

Top Chef Finale Dinner

Abby and I had a couple friends over for the Top Chef finale. I didn't get many great pictures, but you can check on one of our guests' blogs for an account. We forgot to record the episode of Top Chef, so we were never actually able to watch the show on our "Top Chef Dinner Night." At least the food was good.

A few meals from this fall

It's been a long time since anything I've cooked has shown up on the blog. Looking back through the archives, the last posting that featured something that I cooked was way back in July. Between moving, vacation, and getting ready for the job market, we haven't had a lot of time to cook and have been eating out a lot. I have been cooking, though. I just haven't been taking pictures or updating the blog. I won't post recipes here since I can't really remember a lot of them at this point, but here are pictures of a couple of the meals I've made this fall.

Earlier in the fall, I was able to take advantage of some of the great farmer's markets in Chicago. There is a weekly market a few blocks from us in Wicker Park, where I was able to get fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn to make a nice gazpacho.

On another trip to the farmers market, I got a bunch of cherry tomatoes, green beans, and fingerling potatoes and used these along with toasted pine nuts, shaved parmesan, and aged balsamic vinegar, and fresh hand cut noodles for a nice pasta dish.

As the weather got colder, I started buying veggies like brussels sprouts and beets. In the picture above, I roasted brussels sprouts and beets. The brussles sprouts were roasted with garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. The beets were roasted with olive oil, salt, pepper, and orange zest. I served this with a pork tenderloin that had been brined in a mixture of apple juice, salt, brown sugar, mustard seed, thyme, and bay leaf. The roasted pork loin was dusted with fennel pollen and served with an apple reduction and some couscous.

Since moving back to Chicago, I've also had the opportunity to have a few meals with my sister's family. It's nice to have family in the same city and do family dinners. For one of the meals, I made a tagine with chicken, chickpeas, and apricots. This is a really good dish, so I'll try to post a recipe at some point. I really like this picture of my niece, Midori, waiting patiently for her dinner.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of my shopping in the Fulton Market area where there are some great butchers and fishmongers. Most of the stuff here is wholesale, but they have a few retail outlets. Isaacson and Stein is a great place for seafood and its only about a 5 minute drive from my place. On one of my more recent trips there, I picked up some Chilean Sea Bass.

I marinated it in a sake-miso mixture using the Nobu recipe and served it with crispy sushi rice cakes and seared spinach.

Chicago dogs

Chicago has an amazing culinary scene, but to most people, it hot dogs and pizza may be the first things that come to mind when thinking about Chicago food. While I haven't had time to do a comprehensive tour of all of the best hot dog joints in the Chicagoland area, I've had the opportunity to check out to of Chicago's finer hot dog establishements: Hot Doug's and Superdawg. These places are both very good and very different.

Superdawg is a drive-in place that looks like it hasn't changed in several decades. A somewhat creepy pair of hot dog statues sit on top of the drive in. They had red lights in their eyes, making them look like demented dolls from some B-level horror flick. Their hot dogs are awesome, though.

Superdawg is a great example of a classic, Chicago style hot dog.

The Superdawg comes tucked in a box with fries and a pickled green tomato. Both of the accoutrements are awesome, but the real star, of course, is the hot dog.

A Chicago style hot dog must have a giant pickle, mustard, and no ketchup. This is the only kind of dog they serve at Superdawg, and they do it well.

In contrast, Hot Doug's serves a vast array of different dogs. This place is a tribute to all things sausage. When you walk in, you see this quote on the wall, and this more or less captures the vive of the place.

To give you an idea of the variety they offer, here are some of the specials.

And they always have a weekly special.

This is the kind of place that carnivorous foodies love. It has been feature on "No Reservations" and I'm sure it has received all sorts of foodie hype in other venues. With this hype comes long lines. When we went here, the line was wrapped around the block and we had to wait around 45 minutes to order. At Superdawg, we waited about a minute.

We tried a number of different hot dogs at Hot Doug's, but because of a memory card glitch, we only saved pictures of the Chicago style dog

and the "Game of the Week"

We also tried the Foie-gras dog and a few other specials. The foie dog was probably the most novel dog that we ordered, but I don't think I would try it again. It's a bit rich. The other dogs were awesome, although I think that Superdawg's Chicago style dog is better.

I thought that both of these places were really good. For a great Chicago style dog, do to Superdawg, but if you are in the mood for something a little more adventurous and you don't mind long lines, you should definitely hit up Hot Doug's.

While I'm on the topic of Chicago dogs, Abby and I have become proud new dog owners since we moved to Chicago. Here's our pup, Hachiko. We adopted him from a rescue organization in late September, and he's about a year old now.

New city. New workspace

In August, we moved from our old apartment near Harvard Yard in Cambridge to a nicer, newer place in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. Among the many new experiences associated with moving to a new home and city, a new kitchen is one of the things that is most pertinent to this blog. It is, after all, where a lot of the food on this website is produced. While my new kitchen is certainly a cut above my old Cambridge kitchen in form, I'm not sure that it is a step forward in function.

Here's the old kitchen in Cambridge:

and here is the new kitchen in Wicker Park:

The new place certainly looks nicer. We traded linoleum floors and faux granite counters for hardwood and real granite, and I love our giant new fridge. We also got a lot more cabinet space and, thankfully, our new cabinets don't look like they are straight our of the 1950s.

We also got this nifty chalkboard and a built in wine rack.

I love how the new kitchen looks, but there are some things about the old kitchen that I miss. In our old place, we had a big walk in pantry that had tons of storage space. There's no pantry in our new place, so, in spite of all the extra cabinets, I feel like I have less storage space. We also don't have space for a breakfast table or kitchen island, so we don't have as much usable counter space. I often like to have several different things going at once in the kitchen, so this is a big drawback. Also, the sink in our new space is smaller, which is really annoying.

I'm sure I'll love the new kitchen after I've had some more time in it, but for now, I'm still getting used to it.

Venice: Our last supper at Osteria da Alberto

Nearly four months after returning from our trip, I finally am getting around to the last post from our Italy trip. Staying true to our strategy of eating at Slow Food endorsed restaurants, we decided to stop in at Osteria da Alberto for our final meal in Italy. The food here was simple, flavorful, and provided a fitting end to a fantastic culinary trip.

We started our meal with mussels with parsley and lemon and a big bottle of white wine. Like just about every other restaurant we went to in Italy, the house wine here was high in quality and low in cost.

Next, we had a seafood risotto. Usually I'm not that impressed with risotto. It's something I make often, and usually, I think that the stuff I make at home is just as good as anything I invariably pay too much for at a restaurant. That was not the case here. This was, hands down, the best risotto I have ever had. The rice was perfectly cooked. A lot of the time, risotto is overcooked so it gets all mushy, making it impossible to distinguish each grain of rice. Here, each grain had a little bit to it, but it was cooked just long enough so the interior wasn't chalky. The rice was perfectly flavored with a subtle seafood broth and bits of assorted seafood such as mussels, scallops, and fish.

We finished with squid cooked in its own ink served with polenta. Again, this dish was perfectly prepared. The squid was nice and tender, and the lightly grilled polenta was perfect for sopping up the tasty squid ink sauce.