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Michael Voltaggio’s Indian-Spiced Short Ribs

April 25, 2010 By kellypea

Garam Masala

Something happened to our Sunday dinners this busy season.  They’re usually what I manage to hang on to after watching our weeknight dinners dissipate one by one from thoughtful, healthy salads and planned entrees, to a quick forage through the wilted inhabitants of my veggie bin for something to saute with rice or pasta.  Throw in some garlic and it’s dinner, right?  Hardly, but it can be eaten in a bowl, sometimes as late as 9:30 p.m. while we’re huddled in our dimly lit family room in front of a recorded show and making weary attempts at questioning one another about the day.

It’s no wonder that looking forward to uninterrupted time in the kitchen draws my attention to the weekend where the result is pleasant time together over a meal that is special — read:  is served on a plate at a reasonable hour.  The idea of “special”  seems to be part of a process to me;  a recipe catches my eye and lingers on the periphery of the minutiae that accumulates in my head, and somehow I manage to remember the main ingredient while on one of my less than stellarly organized grocery shopping trips.  The remembered ingredient is then wedged into my freezer, which just might contain the very same ingredient somewhere in its depths, as a reminder that Sunday dinner is a possibility.  Hopefully, this classifies me as an optimist.

Time goes by.  Other ingredients are collected in other stop-after-work trips to the store for the cat food or laundry detergent I forgot on the previous trip, and because those ingredients are often perishable, they become part of a different meal (see above).  It’s a vicious cycle.

Finally, the day arrives as it does each year.  Busy season ends, and glimmers of a normal life surface.  The long-awaited day in the kitchen and meal are planned and the big question looms:  Will it have been  worth the wait?

Absolutely.

(And this has nothing to do, of course, with the fact that Chef Voltaggio not only took the time to comment on my effort, but put a shout-out about my speck in the food universe on his site, Voltaggio Brothers in “Food Writing.”)

A gracious and hearty thanks to Michael Voltaggio!

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Filed Under: Beef, Braised, Chef's Recipes, Cookbooks and Magazines, Food and Wine, Herbs and Spices, Meat, Method, One Pot, Slow Food Tagged With: , , , ,

Coq au Vin

January 16, 2010 By kellypea

Pearl Onions

I love cooking with wine.  Although I do enjoy a dry white splashed into a pan of caramelized shallots for deglazing, or marsala stirred into a mixture of sauteed mushrooms and garlic before a bit of cream is added, I most enjoy meat or poultry braised slowly in red wine over the course of a Sunday afternoon.  Anticipation builds as a heavenly aroma fills the house making us all a bit anxious for dinner time to arrive to see whether the finished product lives up to its promise.

Sometimes, I’m a fairly hard sell.  It isn’t so much that the most recent recipe I’ve experimented with isn’t good;  they very nearly always are.  But think about it.  Once you’ve had an amazing version of something you truly enjoy, it’s challenging for anything else to replicate the wonder of that first bite.

Mention Coq au Vin and someone will ask about what the special occasion might be.  When you consider that any braise is done because the meat used is not an expensive cut, and needs to cook for a long time to make it tender, you know it isn’t necessarily a fancy dish.  In the case of Coq au Vin,  traditionally, the farmer’s old rooster became the dinner.  Bacon, mushrooms, onions, and a liberal quantity of red wine made for quite the send off for that old rooster, and a savory treat for the farmer after a hard day’s work.  All things considered, Coq au Vin is a one pot dish.

I’ve had my eye on a recipe for Coq au Vin I first saw in Saveur. The only reason I haven’t made it before now is that it required marinating the chicken overnight and sometimes my lack of planning gets the best of me.  That oversight hasn’t kept me from making Coq au Vin because I just choose a different version.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t solved the problem.  I’ve wondered about how the marinade might change the complexity of the flavors and whether this particular recipe might be the one to best all of the others.

Evidently, I’m not the only one. It just so happens that it’s the source of the next recipe I’d like to try for Coq au Vin.  Might it be the one?  I’d have to actually find a rooster that doesn’t have his feathers on to get started…and deal with his kidneys.

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Filed Under: Braised, Chicken, Cookbooks and Magazines, French, Method, Mushrooms, One Pot, Other Cultures, Poultry, Saveur Tagged With: , , ,

Irish Porridge with Fruit and Nuts

December 23, 2009 By kellypea

On the days I most want to sleep in, I find myself staring into the dark wondering what time it is.  Falling back into a sound sleep rarely happens as mental list-making begins.  This isn’t something I choose to do, but once it begins, I give in and quietly head downstairs to wait for sunrise.

The most pleasant aspect of being awake at 3 a.m. is the quiet; the refrigerator’s soft whirring and a clock ticking somewhere in the house magnify the silence.  If I’m lucky, I will have remembered to bring my book downstairs, finally able to read more than the pathetic page or so I manage to get in each night before nodding off.  Otherwise, I’m left to leaf through food magazines or cookbooks, looking for an excuse to organize a dinner to try a few new recipes.

Within a few hours, the room takes on a rosy glow as the rising sun creates a burst of purple, then magenta against the clouds over the mountains in the east.  When it finally crests the skyline, brilliant light shoots through the kitchen window, creating a show of  patterns against the wall that has me reaching for my camera.

The squeak of floorboards upstairs lets me know that someone else is awake and so I can begin my favorite breakfast.  The aroma won’t quite attract attention that bacon does, but it will be a welcomed treat just the same.

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Filed Under: Breakfast, Method, One Pot, Pasta, Rice, and Grains Tagged With: , , , , ,

Shrimp and Corn Chowder

October 11, 2009 By kellypea

Shrimp & Corn Chowder It’s only a matter of time once the hint of Fall teases me with cool afternoons that I start thinking of soup.  I’m not partial to any kind of soup in particular as long as it’s warm and satisfying.  Sometimes I long for a clear broth and others something silky and smooth.  This time, I was in the mood for something chunky with a bit of richness — like clam chowder — except I didn’t have clams.  Seafood chowder sounded excellent too, but I wasn’t sure the tilapia I had in the freezer would be the right kind of fish for that.  No, I’d have to settle for the plump pieces of shrimp I had and the sweet corn and potatoes that needed to be used instead.  I just needed to find  a recipe that wouldn’t take up an  afternoon to prepare.

I enjoy my recipe searches because in the process I compare and contrast general quantities of ingredients, consider the variety of spices used and admire an unusual spin here and there.  It’s always nice to find a version that is healthy without taking away the satisfying aspect of the dish, too.   Every once in a while, I find a recipe that stuns me.  In my search for Shrimp and Corn Chowder, I found a recipe that seems to be making its rounds, finding it posted at several different sites.  Serving six, it calls for one quart of half-and-half, one quart of heavy cream, and one-half cup of margerine. Seriously.  I just about fell out of my chair wondering why on Earth it was necessary to put that much fat into a recipe that could easily do with much lighter ingredients and avoid classifying it as diet food.

Thankfully, I found a great recipe at Nook & Pantry, and although I didn’t follow it exactly as written, my version is not too far off.  Shrimp & Corn Chowder anyone?

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Filed Under: Chefs and Bloggers, Herbs and Spices, One Pot, Potatoes, Quick & Easy Meal, Seafood, Vegetables, soup Tagged With: , , , , ,

Cream of Greens Soup: Dandelions, Spinach, and Arugula

April 22, 2009 By kellypea

Earth Day Soup When I think of Earth Day, I think more about how I was raised instead of an event marked on a calendar that occurs once a year.  I guess my mother was green before her time simply because she needed to be frugal with her earnings.  But that’s not all.  Her common sense was what was really at work.  If you’re a single mother who works split shifts and have three children under the age of six, you put all of them in the tub at the same time and teach them that the water cannot rise above their belly buttons.  Absolutely no showers, ever.  You rinse your two girls’ very long hair with a tablespoon of  apple cider vinegar mixed with water they wished was warm instead of shockingly cold.  You nag your children incessantly until they understand that lights are turned off when not in use and that electricity costs money — which sadly does not grow on trees.  You make your children’s clothes, and as much as your younger daughter may not love the idea, pass the older daughter’s clothes down once outgrown.  You make shorts from cut off pants, either outgrown, or made possible by knees that have worn through.  You purchase less of everything and teach them how to take care of what they have, because if they don’t, they’re not getting anything new.  You make popsicles from koolaid poured into ice cube trays and dole them out over a few days like they were gold nuggets.  You remind them to bring home from school each day, not only the brown bag their lunch was in, but the baggies their chips and sandwiches were stuffed in to.  You teach them to clean their plates at meals, and never, ever to waste food.  Ever.   Or else.

And you teach them how to eat their vegetables — especially the green ones.

In celebration of Earth Day and smart, frugal moms everywhere who were green long before it was the cool thing to do, this soup is for you.  It’s healthy, and made with a bit of this, and a bit of that from my vegetable drawer.

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Filed Under: Gluten-Free, Local Resources, Meatless, One Pot, Quick & Easy Meal, Soup, Salad and Sandwiches, Spring, Vegetables Tagged With: , , , , ,

Chicken Soup with Southern Dumplings

February 2, 2009 By kellypea

When we were in the thick of our remodel, I had my eye out for magazines that would help me narrow down the paint choices since we were having the whole interior repainted.  O At Home caught my eye while I was standing in line at the grocery store because The Color Issue was emblazoned across its cover and promises of 21 frsh, can't fail palettes lured me to throw it in my basket. 

Along with the good advice I came across that did inevitably help me choose my colors, tucked in the back was an article on One-Pot Meals with gorgeous photos of food I wanted to make right then and there.  Of the four recipes featured, I tried Alice Waters's Winter Minestrone first with average results.  I could take the blame for this because I used scarlet runner beans instead of cannellinis, and potatoes instead of turnips, but neither of those changes would have turned this soup into something less than good if it had been a decent tasting recipe to begin with.  I love minestrone, and this recipe just didn't cut the mustard.

The second recipe I tried was Art Smith's "Chicken and Dumplings."  It caught my eye because I grew up eating very different dumplings than the flat, egg noodles looking strips nestled in the clear broth and vegetables I was staring at.  I had to try it since my life long idea of a dumpling was a dollop of wet dough that was dropped onto the hot contents of a pot of chicken soup or stew and covered for a time to steam and puff up before being uncovered to finish off the cooking.

Dumplings2

Besides, it was going to be tough to ignore a piece of chewy dough.  Sad but true.  Unfortunately, again, something was amiss….

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Filed Under: Chicken, One Pot, Poultry Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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