Christmas dinner

This year's Christmas gathering was a little smaller than usual with Laura, Mitch, and Midori all back in Chicago. Normally, Laura and I do most of the kitchen work on holidays, but this year I put my mom to work as sous chef. On Christmas day, my parents had their friends, the Mike and Liza Morell over for dinner. I don't remember my parents being big wine connoisseurs when I was back home, but I suspect those to may have something to do with the increasing quality of the wine that they consumer. One of their sons is a vintner and the other a chef, so its a real foodie family.

The Christmas menu included flank steak stuffed with olives, pine nuts, and currants, braised escarole with fried garbanzos and garlic chips, mustard crusted, roasted fingerling potatoes, and a beet salad with arugula and goat cheese. The first two dishes come from a Tom Douglas cookbook that I got for Christmas a couple years ago. An online recipe can be found here. A couple notes about the recipe: unless you like things very rare, cook for a couple of extra minutes. As you can see from the picture above, it's pretty much black and blue in the middle. I like it this way, but I suspect most people don't. Also, frying the garbanzo beans is a bit of a pain in the ass if you don't have deep fryer. One approach might be to toss the garbanzos in olive oil and salt and than place on a cookie sheet under a broiler, shaking frequently, until they crisp up. I'll try this if I ever make the dish again. The potato recipe was pretty good, but the crust burns easily and it is a bit heavy on the mustard, so you probably need a bit less mustard and you need to toss the potatoes around more than the recipe recommends. The beet salad was the one orginal thing that I made for this meal. Or, at least, I wasn't going off of someone else's recipe. Its really simple, and quite tasty. Here's the recipe if you want to try it at home.

red beets (I think I used two large beets above)
orange (juice and zest...remember to zest before you juice)
taragon (optional)
good quality olive oil
red wine vinegar
kosher salt
coarsely ground pepper
arugula
goat cheese

Cut the tops off of the beets, clean them off, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper and wrap them in foil. Cook in the oven at 375F until soft. This should take an hour or so. After an hour, you can unwrap the foil a bit and poke the beets with a pairing knife. When its done, the knife will slide in with minimal resistance. It could take as long as two hours....I really can't remember.

When the beets are done, let them cool a bit, then rub off the skin and dice to the desired size. To rub off the skin, just use a big wad of paper towels. This will allow you to get going while the beets are still hot and will keep you from staining your hands red.

In a bowl, toss together the beets with about two tablespoons of roughly chopped tarragon, the juice from half of an orange, a teaspoon of orange zest, and a dash or red wine vinegar and olive oil. In a separate bowl, whisk together about one tablespoon of the juice from the other half of the orange, a teaspoon of red wine vinegar and a bit of olive oil (start with one or two tablespoons and adjust to taste), and salt and pepper. Toss this vinaigrette with the arugula (only use a little bit, you don't want to drench the salad) and arrange it on a serving plate with the beets and goat cheese.

You can make the beets well ahead of time, and at the last minute, dress the greens and combine the ingredients.

Thanksgiving '07

Thanksgiving was a bit earlier than usual this year, and Abby and I completely forgot about it until about a week beforehand. Luckily, enough friends were around to fill the table on such short notice.

Abby went overboard making the place settings. Here's the table before...

and after...

The menu included two types of cranberry sauce
Two types of stuffing
A 17.5lb turkey


a bunch of other stuff...
and four different desserts
At the end of the evening, Aiden treated us all to a little concert.

Weekend at the Cape

Normally, birthdays entail a late night out in some place like Central Square, but Jon took things a step further this year and organized a weekend retreat to Cape Cod. Evidently, surfing in the U.S. is not just a West Coast OR summer thing. There were quite a few people braving the cold November waters off of the Cape.
Jon was very excited to get out of the city.So, excited, in fact, that he was stuck in a permanent victory double fist pump, or whatever you want to call that pose, for most of the weekend. Here we are, several hours later, at dinner....still excited to be here.
Dinner was a big batch of seafood stew using all of the best products that the Cape had to offer.

Mac 'n cheese

I didn't feel like going to the store, and when looking through the fridge and pantry trying to figure out what I could whip up, I noticed a box of elbow macaroni tucked away on the pasta shelf and decided that mac & cheese would be a good option. It's been years since I had last made this dish, and I had enough other ingredients to round out the dish. Mac & cheese is a great, classic, unhealthy dish, that you can put all sorts of little variations on, and I decided to make two versions, based on the ingredients at hand. Since I had just made a big southwestern dinner, a southwestern mac and cheese was obvious. I also had some Spanish chorizo - very different from Mexican or Portuguese chorizo - and manchego in the fridge, which I used to make a Spanish version. To make mac and cheese, you start with a bechamel sauce (flour/butter/milk), melt a lot of cheese into it, mix in the cooked pasta, sprinkle bread crumbs on top, and finish in the oven. On top of that basic recipe, you can do pretty much anything you want. For the southwestern mac, I used cheddar cheese, jalapenos, garlic sausage, and topped it off with some left over red pepper sauce. I had meant to add some chipotle puree to the cheese sauce, but I completely forgot about it, which is too bad since that was the main leftover ingredient that got me thinking about a southwestern mac and cheese. The Spanish version had the chorizo and a manchego-safron sauce. I thought the Spanish one was better, but I'll have to try making the southwest version agian, this time with the chipotle.

Mesa menu

I often buy cookbooks, look at them, and, at most, cook one or two recipes from them. That's not to say that they are useless. They do, after all, provide a lot of great ideas, but still, it would be nice to use them a bit more. So, when I got my latest cookbook, the Mesa Grill cookbook, I figured a dinner party would be a nice way to knock out a lot of recipes at once. I was able to make an appetizer (corn pancakes with mango serrano crema), a soup (pumpkin soup with chipotle), an entree (spice rubbed pork tenderloin with bourbon ancho sauce and a smoky red pepper sauce), and a dessert (molten chocolate cake with dulce de leche). I also added a couple things of my own: an apple and manchego salad, cheddar and jalapeno polenta, and spicy garlic kale. Here are some pictures of the food.






A dinner party would not be complete without great company, and Eliana, Sebastian, Jon, Katrina (first picture below), Suzanna, William, Melissa, and Dino (second picture below), ably filled that role (they also all did a great job of bring some great wine to the table).

Orrechiette with Sausage and Rapini

I make this dish fairly often. I've always used boxed pasta for this (I think the DeCecco is the best of the widely available pastas), but this time a tried to make pasta from scratch. The ingredients for orrechiette are flour and water. That's it.
After kneading the dough and letting it rest for a while, roll it out into tubes, cut it into disks, and shape them into little cups. I found that the dough puffs up quite a bit while cooking, so its best to cut the disks as thin as possible (unless you want think chewy pasta, which isn't necessarily a bad thing). The other ingredients in this dish are olive oil, garlic, sausage, red pepper flakes, and rapini. Stem the rapini and cook the leaves and florets by placing them in water and bringing it to a boil. When the water starts steaming, the rapini is done. Cook the sausage separately in olive oil with garlic and a dash of red pepper flakes.

Once the sausage is mostly cooked, add the rapini along with some of the water used to cook the rapini. Combine the mixture with the pasta, let it cook for a while so the pasta absorbs some flavor, serve with freshly grated parm, and enjoy.