Sharlene's second cooking lesson

At the beginning of the summer, Sharlene and I had grand plans to do a number of regular cooking lessons. One month into the fall, we got around to cooking lesson number two. This time around, she made paella. Here she is, looking like quite domestic.

And here is the finished product.
We made vegetarian paella that had artichoke hearts, tomatoes, red bell peppers, peas, carrots, and a healthy dose of saffron. We served the other components (chicken, chorizo, clams, mussel, and shrimp) on the side so everyone could mix and match according to their own preferences. You lose some flavor cooking paella separately like this, but the flexibility it provides makes it a great dinner party dish.

Roasted leg of lamb

Abby and I were shopping at the Market Basket the other day and I decided to pick up a leg of lamb. I hadn't had lamb in a while, and that's about as much excuse as I needed. The thing with this cut, though, is that even the smallest one I could find was way too much for two people, so rather than deal with leftovers, we had Wei Shun, Lauren, and Michael over for dinner.

I prepared the lamb by rolling it out, smothering it with a paste of garlic, olive oil, rosemary, thyme, mustard, salt, and pepper, and trussing it back up again. The lamb was served on top of melted leeks and flageolet beans (these are hard to find, but Christina's spices, right down the street, has all sorts of rare ingredients) in lamb jus. The thing about the beans is that they were dried, and they probably should have soaked for a lot longer. They tasted fine, but the texture was off.

Lake Luzerne

A few weeks ago, Adam and Natalie invited Jon, Katrina, Abby, and me up to the Pollets' cabin on Lake Luzern. When camping...or cabining...or whatever it is we were doing, cooking out is imperative. We spent most of the day playing tennis, vollyball, or swimming and then the guys were sent out to get food for dinner. Being guys, we chose burgers. Cheddar jalapeno burgers, to be precise. Jon and I had made them a week or so earlier and they were good enough to merit a second go-round.

By the time we got around to cooking, it was pretty dark, and the charcoal was really smoky. Good thing Jon never leaves the house without his trusty headlamp.

Clearly, Jon and Adam were psyched about the burgers, although if I were a betting man, I would bet the Jon was slightly more enthusiastic...not sure what would give me that idea.
Natalie and Katrina preferred the corn and grilled vegetables. They were kind enough to share some of the corn with Jon.
The next morning, Katrina made an excellent batch of French toast that was enjoyed by all.

Wedding planning

In early September, Abby and I went to Chicago to go to a friends wedding and get some of our own wedding planning underway. We spent a day running around the city to meet with the photographer, check out a church, a bakery, the venue, and, finally, at the end of the day we went to the caterer's main kitchen for a tasting.

We tried out three salads. Here are two of them. I forgot to take a picture of the third one. We also tried a number of hors d'oeuvres, some good, some not so great. We think we'll go with the last salad pictured. Everyone liked the fresh berries in it, and the flower petals were a nice touch.
The salads were followed by three sample main courses. Fish, chicken, and beef. Surprisingly, the chicken was the best of the three. The fact that they used truffle butter in the chicken probably didn't hurt. I also liked the beef dish, the brussels sprouts in particular, but everyone else seemed to think that a lot of guests would not be as excited about them.




We finished off with a desert plate, which probably won't make an appearance at the wedding.

I don't think any of the dishes will show up on the wedding day menu in their current form, but that gives us a good excuse to go back for another tasting.

Heirlooms

Every week, a farmer's market comes to Harvard Square, and last week, one of the stands had a bunch of great looking heirloom tomatoes on sale. Here are two salads I made. The first is a caprese with basil, parsley, and chives from the herb garden on our back porch.


For the second salad, I combined a variety of different colored tomatoes with shallots, garlic, basil, parsley, salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Its a pretty simple salad that is only as good as the ingredients that you put into it.
This salad was part of a larger meal that I made when Gustavo was visiting our place for a couple of days. Below is penne with peppers and sausage. For this dish, start by making a simple tomato sauce with San Marzano tomatoes if they are available. While the tomato sauce is cooking, begin prepping the peppers. The finished product will look a lot better if you use a variety of different colored peppers. The key to making this dish good is to peel the outer membrane off of the peppers. Its a bit of a pain, but it really makes a big difference in the texture of the dish. I usually cut the peppers into quarters and then take the skin off with a vegetable peeler. Once the peppers are peeled, cut them into squares (about 2cm) and throw them in with the tomato sauce. Next, slice up a couple sweet Italian sausages and cook them separately with a bit of olive oil. It is easier to get nice thin slices if you partially freeze the sausages. If you put them in the freezer when you begin to make the tomato sauce them enough time to firm up. Add the sausages to the sauce when they are cooked and season the sauce with a pinch of red pepper flakes, salt, and balsamic vinegar. Add the vinegar a little bit at a time and stop once you can just begin to taste the vinegar in the sauce. Peppers, sausage, and vinegar is a classic combination, and the goal is to try to get a nice balance between all of those elements in this sauce. Be judicious with the vinegar, though, since too much will over power all of the other flavors. Let the sauce simmer for a little while to let the flavors mix, and then to finish the dish, spoon some of the sauce into a pan with some almost cooked penne (any shaped paste will work well) and cook the sauce and pasta for a minute or so. This last step helps the flavors of the sauce penetrate the pasta and is something that you should do with any pasta dish.

As a first course, I made a bunch of mussels. These are good, easy, and cheap. You can prepare mussels a million different ways. For this dish, I cooked up a lot of garlic with shallots, pancetta, and a generous portion of butter. After a few minutes, add a cup or so of white wine, bring that to a boil, throw in the mussels and cover. After a couple of minutes, the mussels are done. Season with some salt and pepper and garnish with parsley. Serve with bread to soak up all of the broth. That's all there is to it. It takes about 15 minutes to make and all the ingredients cost about $8.

Southern cookin'

A while back I signed up for one of those book clubs where you get a whole bunch of free books up front. I figured that it would be a good way to stock up my cookbook library, and I really thought that I would get around to canceling my membership as soon as I was able to. Of course, they make it really hard to do this - you have to actually send in a letter, as if anyone uses paper mail anymore - so I still haven't gotten around to canceling. You also have to go to the website and opt out of the selections that they otherwise send to you every month. This is yet another thing that I usually never get around to doing. Usually, I send them back, but when a Southern cookbook showed up on my doorstep, I was intrigued. This is my first crack at Southern food: collards, Hoppin' John (rice w/ black eyed peas and some other stuff), and chicken braised in beer, onions, and tomatoes. The first two dishes were from the cookbook, the last one was just something I threw together to get rid of some cheap beer that had been sitting in the pantry since our last party.

It was a pretty hot evening, and since we were doing a Southern dinner, Andre mixed up a batch of mint juleps on the rocks.