Catch Up/Run Down

It's been a hell of a month since my last post - end of semester, dissertation writing, term paper writing, term paper grading, pizza party throwing, with occasional bouts of trying to get some damn sleep. But as of yesterday I'm a free woman, with my paper turned in and my grades recorded and only my dissertation to keep me company (that one's not going away any time soon). So apologies for the long radio silence, and hopefully I'll be able to catch up soon on all the wonderful things I've been making. Yes, there's a lot of them, and they were wonderful (pizza! falafel! arepas!), and I have pictures, lots of pictures. Meanwhiles, here's some of the best things I've put in my mouth recently. I suggest you follow my lead where possible.

Purple Haze chevre
 Remember my last post, where I talked about how awesome goat cheese it because it doesn't make me sick? Since then I've been trying out all the wildly expensive goat and sheep cheeses at the Co-op (and by all I mean about 3 so far) to see which are worth the time & money. Answer: this one. My main problem with most goat cheese is that frankly it tastes like I'm licking a goat, which, forgive me, is not generally on my to-do list. Purple Haze costs something like 7 bucks for a little 4-oz slice, which is ridiculous, except that it tastes amazing. Like seriously, mild and creamy and not like goat sweat at all. And the outside is dusted with lavender and fennel pollen. If your pretentious artisanal bullshit alarm bells are going full blast here I don't blame you, but seriously, unbearably precious as it admittedly is, this shit's good. Though while I love fennel almost as much as avocados, and therefore life itself, if you're not a fan of the liquorice family this might not be the cheese for you. In which case good, more for me.

Little bundles of joy, fancy toothpicks optional.

Purple Haze chevre stuffed in a date and wrapped in prosciutto
Sweet salty creamy liquoricey porky hell yes. (As suggested by their website.) The only trick is to use enough cheese & prosciutto to counterbalance the sweetness of the medjool date, which is basically honey in solid form. I can't eat more than like two of these at once, but those two make me very happy.

Beltane Farm feta
While we're talking goat cheese, can I mention Beltane Farm? I got a container of their goat feta at the Wooster Square farmers' market ($8. Ouch.) and literally could not stop eating it. No really, literally. I'm always a sucker for feta, but these guys nailed it like woah. I've yet to try their herbed chevres, but eagerly anticipate the chance. Probably next Saturday. I'll let you know.

Sono Bakery at the farmers' market
I missed the farmers market this morning and I was pissed - no delicious delicious baked goods for me. Sono does a lot of things very well, but my hands down drop dead favorites are the caramelized onion/olive focaccia and the apricot pistachio tart. The former reminds me a lot of the pissaladiere I ate in Nice, but fluffier. And yes, I could totally make this myself instead of spending $7.50 on a big chunk of bread with toppings, but a) the last two times I've tried to caramelize onions I've forgotten about them and ended up with a pile of charcoal, which doesn't bode well, and b) then I couldn't eat it on a bench in Wooster Park by the cherry trees. Yes, I know it was raining today so I couldn't have done that anyway, and I don't care.

Wonderful, gooey, half-eaten apricot tart.

#2 on the list of wonderful things they make is the apricot tart. I'm a total sucker for stone fruit, particularly apricots, and particularly when there's pastry involved, as evidenced by my weekly apricot danish at the Auckland city farmers' market this past summer. This is a butter tart crust, with ground almond filling and fresh apricot halves on top, covered with crumbled pistachios. The photo's crap, since I took with my phone in the park - this was not going to last long enough to make it home to my real camera. I plan to buy like five on my birthday later this month and go to town.

Restaurant Week at Oaxaca and Yolande's
Restaurant week is long gone, but at least some of this is still on the menu and totally worth ordering. For starters, Oaxaca. The first course, black bean soup was good but nothing special - I could make it myself. The main dish was slow-cooked pork shoulder with cinnamon and ginger and all sorts of other spices. The flavor was so deep and layered and downright fantastic I nearly melted right there. It reminded me of the lamb vindaloo at Thali, which is one of my favorite dishes in New Haven (same owners, no coincidence). I want that recipe. And dessert, an 'orange-scented flan with caramelized sugar', was quite possibly even better. Not so sure I caught the orange, but there was definitely cardamom in there, and an anise cookie. My only gripe was a too-sweet bit of grape something. No need for extraneous touches, just leave the flan alone.

Yolande's, two days later, was empty. I was literally the only person in the restaurant. Which is sad, 'cause the food's pretty good. For brunch it's a crepe place, and totally affordable; lunch and dinner it goes all bistro and the prices double. But for Restaurant Week, whatever. This meal was brought to you by the letter O, for overkill, in the best way possible. Appetizer: French onion soup, with a giant dollop of gooey, melty gruyere in the middle (the crouton sank). Possibly more cheese than soup. I consider that a good thing. Course two: 'Lamb chops, lamb merguez, and a fried duck egg with greens and tomato Provencale'. Well. The chops were dainty and nicely pink in the middle, the merguez was a good solid sausage, the duck egg was runny and rich, the 'greens' were ramps cooked with an equal volume of bacon, and the whole thing was cooked in roughly a stick and a half of butter. So it was delicious. 'Tomato Provencale', as it turns out, is half a tomato, roasted with breadcrumbs, herbs, and a little cheese. Hardly a light dinner, but with a glass of cheap cote du Rhone to cut the richness, a really really good one. Dessert was an apple tarte tatin that could've used an extra few minutes in the oven, and which I couldn't eat more than a few bites of, due to a stomach full of animal fat. Then a walk home under that trippy-ass rainbow they projected from East Rock in honor of the city's 375th birthday. Definitely an evening I'd repeat.

So in short: Eat fancy-pants goat cheese. Make a focacia. Go to Yolande's. Thank me later.

And some cherry blossoms to eat it under.

Love my Goat

Okay so that's actually the name of a wine I used to love in college but now find more or less undrinkable, but anyway. A few months ago I bought myself the 'Jerusalem' cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, and it is wonderful. It's an absolutely gorgeous book - gives Alford & Duguid a run for their money in the Beautiful Local Photography category (and if you don't know Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's cookbooks put down your computer now and run to the nearest bookstore - sorry, who am I kidding, Amazon - and buy ALL OF THEM.). Despite drooling over pretty much the whole thing, I've only made a few recipes so far. I promise I'll post about the falafel and babaganoush project soon (early word: I think I screwed up the falafel since they were a little dry, but despite the slight moisture problems everything was insanely delicious), but I'm here today to tell you about the rather long-windedly named Conchiglie with Yogurt, Peas, and Chile.

Well, that and goats. And sheep, which frankly I prefer. You probably already know that I've got issues with milk, which tends to make my body hate me in various ways, despite the fact that cheese ranks just after cured pork products in my list of Best Things Ever In The World. Cured pork products being #1. This nudibranch might be #3, and avocados are probably #4. But I digress.

I recently had lunch with a friend of mine (at a pizza place, appropriately enough, but which was so worth it), who used to have a milk allergy, and he pointed out that if you're allergic to cow's milk sheep and goat's milk products should be just fine, since, being from a different animal, they contain different proteins. This a) makes perfect sense, and b) kind of blew my mind, because OMG I CAN EAT THAT CHEESE AND NOT HATE MYSELF LATER. (Disclaimer: I may or may not have an actual milk allergy. If I do it's certainly not the dangerous kind, otherwise I wouldn't have been at a pizza place. It may just be a sensitivity, maybe combined with some lactose intolerance; all I know is I'm physically a much happier person when I don't eat dairy in ways I won't get into here. Some people do have life-threateningly severe milk allergies and my heart goes out to them and please take them seriously in restaurants 'cause it's a real thing. But I'm not one of them, so sometimes I decide that creme brulee is worth the consequences and eat it anyway. Also Blogger wants to auto-correct brulee to Breugel, which is an interesting mental picture but no.)

Goat yogurt + basil + peas = sauce

For the lactose-intolerant crowd, more good news on goat. According to to an internet food blog I like called My New Roots, goat milk also has less lactose than cow's milk, is more easily digestible, and otherwise way healthier that cow's milk. (Full story here: http://mynewroots.org/site/2008/05/goat-is-the-new-cow-2/). (Disclaimer: Getting nutritional science from a blog is always a sketchy proposition, so please go look up the actual science somewhere other than Wikipedia before you believe me. But make her amazing Raw Brownies first.) Same goes for sheep, though maybe to a lesser extent. Still, most goat cheese tastes to me kind of like licking a goat (not that I'd know first hand), while sheep's cheese is just plain delicious. To each his own.

Sizzling garlic & chile

So back to the conchiglie: I was at the local Co-op, which is kind of hippy-ish, and saw they had both goat yogurt, which I figured would make a good breakfast, and sheep-and-goat feta, which I love feta. (The non-cow dairy downside: probably twice as expensive as the bovine equivalent.) I quickly discovered I was wrong about goat yogurt being good for breakfast, at least this brand: it was way too strongly goaty for the granola I put on top. So I opened 'Jerusalem', since the Middle East has a strong record of using yogurt in cooking, and found this. Long story short, it was delicious and easy, and it didn't make my body hate me, and you should make it. The End.

Sadly, the tomatoes were a later discovery.

Shells with Yogurt & Peas 
Adapted from 'Jerusalem' by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

One tip: This makes a lot of pasta, and while it's still pretty delicious reheated - I was happily eating leftovers for a week - the pasta tends to get a little soft and the sauce loses its texture, so I recommend serving it somewhere it's got a decent chance of getting finished. You'll notice there are actual measurements here; that's 'cause it originally came from a real cookbook. Feel free to just eyeball them, like I did.

1 1/4 cups thick (Greek) yogurt from the ungulate of your choice
1/3 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed or minced
1 cup peas (thawed if frozen)
1/2 lb pasta (shells, or not.)
1 tsp hot pepper or chile flakes
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 cup chopped basil
1 cup chopped mint (way less if dried)
4 oz crumbled feta
salt & pepper
1 cup cherry tomatoes, sliced into halves

1) In a mini-food processor, mix the yogurt, 4 tbsp oil, 1/2 cup peas, and basil. Go until you get a nice minty-green sauce without too many chunks. If it's too thick, add more oil.

2) Start the pasta. Let it boil til al dente. Drain.

3) Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a pan. Add the chile, paprika, and garlic. Saute til the garlic is fragrant but don't let it brown more than a little.

4) Put the yogurt sauce in a large-ish serving bowl. Stir in the pasta a little at a time (supposedly if you do it all at once the sauce will separate; I didn't check). Add the peas, feta, mint, tomatoes, garlic in oil, and S&P to taste (the recipe says 1/2 tsp of each; I found it undersalted but that will depend on your yogurt, feta, and tastebuds). Stir it all together. Garnish with a sprig of mint and more chile to taste.

Happy Passeaster Fools' Day!

Today's Easter and Passover and April Fools Day all at once, which is pretty much winning the variable-date holiday lottery, and definitely cause for brunch. So I invited some people over, cooked something relevant for each holiday, and drank far too much of the sangria D. brought over. It all got devoured before I even thought to get out my camera, so no photos (update: photos of leftover charoset and sangria; you're on your own for the rest), but here's my recipes:

Passover: Coconut Charoset


This isn't traditional for anybody as far as I could tell, but it was all things I had in my pantry. I kept going back and forth over whether to make Charoset or just cooked apples; in the end I wound up somewhere in between and it was delicious. I like the slippery texture and extra protein from the flax seeds, but if you don't have any just up the amount of nuts to make up for it. This makes enough to serve many; all measurements are pretty rough since I made it up as I went along. Orange zest or a splash of wine would probably go well too.

4 apples
1/2 cup almonds (or walnuts)
1/3 cup golden flax seeds
1/3 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
~1 tbsp apple pie spice (or 2tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp alspice, 1/2 tsp cloves, pinch of nutmeg)
1 tsp cardamom
lemon juice
pinch of salt
2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp brown sugar
Butter

1) Pulse the nuts in a food processor until roughly ground/finely chopped (or just buy them that way). Put aside in a bowl. Peel and core the apples, chop roughly. Either pulse the apples in the food processor until they're finely chopped (but NOT yet turned into applesauce) or mince them by hand. Put in a bowl and toss with some lemon juice.

2) Heat a good bit of butter in a pan over medium heat. Add the apples and nuts and stir for a minute. Add everything else (best to start with less than the total honey/sugar and spices and add to taste), plus another teaspoon or so of lemon juice. Mix thoroughly. Cook partly covered until the apples start to soften but don't quite lose all of their crunch, maybe 10-15 minutes. Serve with matzoh for the observant or crepes (below) for the not.


Easter: Arugula Zucchini Frittata
Easter for me is all about chocolate and jelly beans. But since I'm waiting for tomorrow's sales to buy my candy, second place goes to eggs, spring veggies, and salted pork products. I found this recipe from Bon Appetit for a leek-and-asparagus frittata, which seemed appropriately spring-like, then proceeded to change everything about it except the method, because I had a zucchini and onions in my fridge but no leeks or asparagus. Also I'm not too crazy about asparagus. Anyway, I encourage you to do the same. Serve with a slice of baked Easter ham, or some tasty crispy bacon. Feeds 5, apparently.

2 slices bacon (or some bacon fat, or butter, or olive oil if you're being responsible)
1 zucchini, sliced into half moons (I used the medium setting on my mandoline then cut the rounds in half, makes things way easier.)
1 onion, chopped
8 eggs
1 large handful of arugula, torn up a bit
1/4 cup ground romano cheese
S&P

1) In an oven-proof skillet (I used my cast iron), cook the bacon. When crispy, remove from pan with a slotted spoon and enjoy as chef's treat, leaving the drippings in the pan. Alternatively, heat up some butter, oil, or bacon fat reserved from last time you made the stuff.

2) Saute the onion over medium heat in the bacon (or other) fat. After about 2 minutes, add the zucchini. Saute until the zucchini is softened and the onions are transparent.

3) Meanwhile, beat the eggs. Add the cheese, arugula, a generous pinch of salt, and an equally generous dose of black pepper. Mix well.

4) Here's where my instructions start to match up with BA's. Pour the egg mixture over the veggies and stir once or twice to get it all mixed in. Cook partly covered over med-high heat until almost set - there will be a bit of raw egg in the center; don't worry about it. Stick the whole pan under the broiler for about 3 minutes, until it's puffed up and cooked through. Cut into slices and dig in.


Because they're delicious and it's brunch: Crepes
This recipe is very slightly adapted from the 1975 edition of the Joy of Cooking. It's the only thing I still make from that book, but I love it.

3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tbsp powdered sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup milk (I used drinkable coconut milk and found I needed a bit more)
1/3 cup water
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp almond extract (optional but good)

1) Whisk together the dry ingredients.

2) In a separate bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Make sure the eggs are well-beaten.

3) Add the wet ingredients into the dry ones. Stir briefly. Don't worry if there's a few lumps; they'll disappear on their own. The batter should be somewhat thin, definitely of pourable consistency.

4) Heat a bit of butter in a smallish pan. Add about a quarter cup of batter. (I just use my quarter cup measuring cup, usually not filled quite all the way.) Tilt the pan so the batter covers the whole bottom, fairly thinly. Cook until the bottom starts to brown, then flip and cook til golden. Lather, rinse, repeat.

5) Serve with charoset, fresh berries and whipped cream, sliced mangoes and whipped cream, chocolate sauce, maple syrup, lemon curd, powdered sugar; you really can't go wrong.

Red wine = invisible fruits :-(

 

And because we're grownups and we can: Dolly's Sangria
This is roughly what I saw her do, with a little twist of my own.

1+ cup each:
-chopped peaches or nectarines
-green grapes
-fresh blueberries
-sliced strawberries
1 bottle white wine
2 cans Fresca
lemon or lime juice to taste
Ice
(1/4 bottle of red wine, optional but really good)

1) Mix everything in a big pot. Let sit for a while to soak the fruit. Drink in a large glass. Have seconds.

Some Good Southern Cookin'

Okay so none of these things are actually Southern food. But I cooked them while in the South, so close enough. Shuddup.

I'm currently in North Carolina visiting my dear friends J. & R. and their two dogs and two cats. So far we've gone out for barbeque and Mexican and pizza and big breakfast skillet hashes, and while it's all been utterly delicious dear lord is there a vegetable in the house? Well yes, as it turns out, since J and I stopped at a farmers market in Raleigh on the way home from the airport. So last night for dinner we skipped the leftover pulled pork and I cooked us up what basically amounted to a big pile of tasty tasty veggies: cauliflower/squash soup, sauteed green beans with tomato, and roasted spiced sweet potato wedges.

They're in the middle of a move, so cooking dinner went something like this: Dig through boxes for a cutting board and soup pot. Get out the veggies, oil a roasting dish. Realize the only thing we've got to chop up two huge sweet potatoes and a butternut squash is a little steak knife. Send R back to the old house to get the real knives. Get a movie up on Netflix til R gets back. Chop the potatoes, get them in the oven, peel and chop the squash and cauliflower, get them roasting too. Go to chop onions and garlic, realize we have no onions and garlic. Send R out to get them while he's picking up his cheese steak (not a vegetable kind of guy).  Watch another 20 minutes of said movie til R gets back. Get everything sauteed, simmered, roasted, and blended. Start to finish: something like 2 hours. But I swear, if you actually have your stuff on hand and not hidden in boxes across two houses all this takes an hour, tops, or 40 minutes for just the soup.

Winter root soup is really having a moment right now - see this recent post from the Times, and My New Roots' fantastic Reverse Universe Soup. My favorite version just uses plain cauliflower, which is not a root but is delicious. The basic recipe is this: take any of the sort of vegetable you might roast (cauliflower, winter squash, parsnips, celeriac, etc), boil them in stock until they're tender, season, and whiz up in the blender until smooth. Cauliflower cooked this way ends up tasting like you dumped in a quart of heavy cream, when really there's nothing dairy at all in there, just a good dollop of olive oil at the bottom (unless you put in a cheese rind, which I strongly recommend you do). It's also a nice blank slate for flavors - thyme and rosemary would go well, as would cajun spices, or some curry powder, or whatever. Leave everything but salt & pepper out of the pot and add to your individual bowl instead, so later when you're eating the leftovers for a week - a head of cauliflower makes a lot of soup - you can change it up and not get bored. Other veggies, like celeriac, are a little more specific in what spices will go - definitely French/Italian, probably Cajun, but I'd be a little hesitant about going the Indian route in that particular case.

The sweet potato wedges are a recipe out of Gourmet, which I love. Again the spice blend is up to you, but this one's particularly good. And the green beans are as simple as it gets. Together it's an indulgent-tasting detox dinner, or each dish on its own makes a good side with whatever else you're making. If you're doing all this at once, get the sweet potatoes in the oven first, then do start the soup, and cook the beans while the soup's simmering.

Random Root Soup
Various roastable veggies (cauliflower, parsnips, winter squash, sweet potatoes, normal potatoes, celeriac, parsnip, parsley root, turnip, etc)
1 big yellow onion
2-4 cloves garlic (to taste)
Chicken or vegetable broth
Salt & pepper
Olive oil
lemon juice
Spices of your choice
Optional add-ins:
  -rind of a good salty white cheese, like romano or sharp provalone
  -bacon
  -pasta
  -chewy grains like barley or quinoa, cooked
  -cooked lentils or beans
  -fresh parsley

1) Turn your oven on to 350. Chop up your veggies (not the garlic & onions) into 1-inch cubes or smaller. Put in a pan, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and stick in the oven. Don't worry if the oven's not preheated yet. (This step is totally optional, but it makes the whole thing cook faster. Feel free to skip it and just chop the veggies while the onion is cooking. You'll have to boil them longer in that case.) (Also, if you're making sweet potato wedges too, get those in the oven first, then just stick this pan in as well, no worries about the temp being higher.)

2) Roughly chop the onions, then start to saute them in olive oil in the bottom of a soup pot big enough to hold all your chopped veggies. (If you're adding bacon, chop it small and fry it up with the onions if you want it pureed into the soup later, otherwise do it first and set it aside, with the grease to cook the onions in.) When they start to get transparent, add the garlic, chopped. Saute a minute or two more.

3) Pull the vegetables out of the oven and dump them in the pot. Pour in enough broth to cover. If you do want to herb up the whole pot or if you're adding a cheese rind, now's the time to do it. Let it bubble away until the veggies are soft enough that you can stick a fork in 'em.

4) Blend the whole lot until smooth, either using an immersion blender or a countertop one. If you're using a normal blender, make sure to loosen the little clear plastic bit in the middle of the top and keep your hand on the lid so it doesn't explode scalding liquid when you turn it on. Stir in lemon juice, salt and pepper, spices and add-ins to taste. Eat with a slice of good bread.

Spiced Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potatoes, washed and optionally peeled.
Olive oil
Salt
Equal parts oregano, coriander, and fennel seeds, plus paprika or cayenne to taste
Or whatever spice mix you like

1) Preheat the oven to 415. Cut the sweet potatoes in half across their circumference, then into wedges lengthwise, roughly into eighths. Toss in a baking dish with olive oil, salt, and a generous amount of spices. Roast for 20 minutes, flip over, then until they're nice and soft, roughly 20 minutes more depending on size.

Beans & Tomatoes
String beans, washed
Garlic
Broth
A tomato
Salt
Olive oil


1) Trim the ends off the beans and cut them in half. Smash the garlic cloves under the flat side of a knife.

2) On fairly high heat, saute the beans in oil, stirring frequently. The beans will turn bright green in the heat, maybe brown a little. Add the garlic, saute a minute more. Add a half cup of broth and cover. Once most of the broth has boiled off (2 minutes?) add the chopped tomatoes and stir for another minute. Salt to taste and serve.

Grampa's Chicken & Onions

A few times a year I go visit my grandfather in either Florida or New York, and aside from his pickled herring for breakfast (I'll just have a bagel, thanks), the food's usually great. Baked eggplant parm, lentil soup, damn good bagels. For some reason I've had roast chicken on the mind recently, so I called to get his recipe, which is cooked in a pyrex dish with onions and potatoes, and there's few things better than onions & potatoes cooked in chicken fat. Of course when I asked about it he shrugged and passed the phone over to his wife, but I'm calling it Grampa's chicken anyway. So there.

This is everything I want in a dinner: easy, one dish, and friggin' delicious. You basically chop op the onions and potatoes, put them in a pan with the chicken, season, bake, and serve in the pan, nothing to wash but a knife, cutting board, and said pan, after you finish the chicken. The whole thing takes an hour or two (depending on your chicken), but active time is about 15 minutes, tops. Sounds about right for a worknight.

I left the onions in quarters to save space, but sliced thin is better.

Grampa's Roast Chicken & Onions
1 chicken, or assorted bone- and skin-on chicken parts
A few onions
A few waxy potatoes, washed
4-5 garlic cloves
Olive oil
Salt &  pepper
Herbs/spices of your choice
Chicken broth
A splash of white wine (optional)
Any other veggies you want to roast (optional)


1) Preheat the oven to 350. Give the chicken a rinse & pat it dry. (I used a pair of chicken breasts - whole bird's a bit much for one person.) Set it in the biggest pyrex baking dish you've got, with a little olive oil underneath to keep it from sticking.

2) Cut the potatoes into quarters. Slice the onions. Arrange them and the garlic cloves around the chicken in the dish. Any other vegetables you feel like roasting should go in here too - I'm thinking cauliflower would be good.

3) Add in enough broth to fill about a centimeter up the side of the pan, plus a splash or two of white wine if you've got it handy. Drizzle a little olive oil over top, then salt, pepper, whatever herbs you like (I used sage and smoked paprika; rosemary or thyme would be good too).

4) Roast for about an hour at 350, depending on the size of the chicken, then finish it off for 15 minutes at 400 to crisp the skin. It's done when the you can easily stick a fork into the potatoes, the juices run clear, and there's no pink when you cut into it.


5) Serve with a simple green salad (arugula & avocado did it for me), all doused in the chicken juices from the pan. Feel free to pour the fat off the top if you like, but that's kind of missing the point.

Catching Up: Meat and Potatoes, but Classy

I just got back from a four-month stint living and doing dissertation field research in West Papua, Indonesia. (See Climbing Volcanoes to read about that.) The food in Indonesia is wonderful, full of spices, chiles, coconut milk, tofu, tempe, and deep-fried bananas. What it is not is varied, and while I absolutely love my landlady's young jackfruit curry, by the time December came around I was seriously jonesing for some bread, prosciutto, red wine, and real cheese. White rice is good, white rice three meals a day gets old. So when I got home one of the foremost things on my mind was to catch up with all the old delicious things that I'd missed, and one of those things was lamb chops. Rare, seared, salty, tender lamb chops like the ones I got in New Zealand, with a side of green beans and oniony potatoes. For one thing, lamb costs rather a bit more here than it did in Auckland and isn't quite so fresh either, but I got a decent package of loin chops from the co-op here. The potatoes are adapted from a recipe I got from Saveur a while back, but with olive oil instead of duck fat because even I have limits I couldn't find duck fat on short notice. (The original, amazing but slightly pickier recipe is here.) The beans are an old family favorite. Altogether my kitchen smelled amazing and it made me happy to be back in the US, despite the January weather. The hot showers helped too, but there's definitely something to be said for the lamb.

Lamb chops wit the works.

Lamb Chops
This isn't even a recipe; I don't know why I'm even writing it down except that it would be odd to post about a lamb dinner and not put in instructions for the lamb. So here goes.

Set lamb loin chops on a plate; generously salt & pepper both sides. Let sit for a few minutes.
Put a little olive oil in a cast iron skillet and let it get really hot. Add the lamb, and let each side cook til it's brown and crusty. Cover for a slightly less rare chop. In any case it'll be pink in the middle and delicious. Hold the edges onto the pan and let them brown too. Let rest for 10 minutes, then enjoy.

Potato-Onion Galette
Waxy potatoes
Half as many onions, sweet ones work well.
Caraway seeds or chopped sage leaves
Olive oil, butter, duck fat, or some combination of the above.
Salt & pepper
Bacon or prosciutto (optional)

Preheat oven to 425. Slice the potatoes thin (it's easiest with a mandoline); put in a large bowl. Slice the onions equally thin; add to the same bowl. Add an handful of chopped sage leaves or caraway seeds, plus S&P to taste. Finely chopped bits of crispy bacon or prosciutto are good too, added either now or as a garnish at the end. Toss everything until well-mixed. Add a healthy amount of olive oil, melted butter, or whatever fat you're using and toss to coat. Put the mixture in a pyrex baking dish and bake 45 minutes to an hour, until potatoes are tender and everything's nice and brown.

Lemon-Garlic String Beans
String beans, washed
Garlic
Lemon juice
S&P
Oil
1/4 cup broth

Slice the end off of the string beans and cut them into reasonable lengths. Heat some olive oil in a pan on medium -high heat. Add the beans, and let them cook, stirring, til they turn bright green. Turn the heat down and add the garlic, stirring so it doesn't burn. Cook a minute or two, then add a large-ish splash of broth. Cover and cook for a few more minutes, not so long that the beans lose all their crunch. Take the top off so the broth evaporates. Add a few squeezes of lemon juice and s&p to taste.

Have a little priest!

After two months of eating and loving meat pies in New Zealand, I decided to make my own. Mike, Nicole, and Trevor came over to help, so kudos to Mike for fantastic mash, Trevor for owning the crust, and Nicole for having the foresight to bring salad to mitigate the fat/carb/salt bomb that is a meat pie. This recipe is kind of long and involved, but if you buy the crust it's mostly chopping and stirring. If you make the crust there's some additional mixing and rolling involved. Anyway, it's not hard.

I found two recipes that looked like they were along the right lines and mixed & matched. (Yes I know these are Aussie rather than Kiwi. Shut up.)
www.taste.com.au/recipes/11987/basic+meat+pie
http://australianfood.about.com/od/beeflamb/r/AussieMeatPie.htm

I always preferred steak pie to mince, but you can either get a fairly cheap cut of meat and cut it into bite-sized chunks or use ground beef/lamb/pork/turkey/buffalo/whatever. What animal(s) exactly you use are entirely up to you. These recipes all call for a puff-pastry top, but the two little stores near me didn't stock puff pastry and damned if I'm gonna make it myself, so we did the classic mashed potato top instead. Personally I thought it was pretty wonderful, but that might just be all the garlic talking. As always, a little crisped bacon and/or grated cheddar would not be an unwelcome addition to the filling, if you're into that sort of thing.

The result was something along the lines of this:

Pie, salad, sauce.

New Zealand Awesome Meat Pie

Filling:
~1 1/4 lb meat (lamb or beef is good; pork chop was a little dry but shoulder/butt would work)
1 onion
2 carrots
1 stick celery
3 cloves garlic
Other veggies (peas, zucchini, chopped tomato, whatever - also optional)
Bouquet garni - take your pick of herbs, I used thyme, rosemary, and smoked paprika
Worcestershire sauce
splash of cider or red wine vinegar
2 tsp tomato paste
1 1/2 cups broth of your choice
1/2 cup red wine (optional)
Salt &pepper to taste
Cornstarch or flour to thicken

Bottom crust:
Buy frozen shortcrust or google a recipe. I used this one: http://britishfood.about.com/od/recipeindex/r/scpastry.htm

Lid:
Use frozen puff pastry, or:
2 big Idaho potatoes
milk, butter, a dollop of garlic-chive cream cheese
garlic
S&P

1) Cut the meat into small (1cm?) chunks, unless you're using mince. Chop all the veggies into small pieces. Peel your potatoes, cut them into big pieces, and set to boil.

2) Drop the meat in a pot with some oil and brown over high-ish heat. Put the meat to the side in a bowl; leave the oil in the pot. (I'd crisp the bacon here if you're using it the get the juices in the pot, then add it to the filling at the very end.) Add the onions to the same pot and saute on medium til they start to soften. Add the carrots, garlic, tomato paste, and celery. If you're using something like turnips that takes a while add it now; things like zucchini and peas should wait. Saute for a couple of minutes.

3) When the veggies start to soften, add the broth, wine, and a few good shakes of Worcestershire sauce. Stir and scrape up all the good brown stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add you herbs, put the meat back in, stir once, turn the heat down and leave it to simmer. If the liquid gets low, add more broth or water. You want some gravy in this, so it shouldn't be soup but is shouldn't be dry either.

4) Start on the crust, which takes longer than you think. I blind-baked it thus:
 - Preheat your oven to 325.
 - Roll out the dough thinner than you think - it'll double or triple in thickness when it bakes. Use lots of flour to do so.
 - Sprinkle a few breadcrumbs in the bottom of each pie tin (I used over-sized muffin tins for individual-sized pies). Drape a sheet of dough over the pie tin. Push it down, form it to shape, smooth out the sides, and cut off the extra. You now have little pastry cups for the sides and bottom of the pie. Repeat for each tin, rolling out the extra you just cut off to re-use it.
 - Prick the dough a few times with a fork. put a layer of tinfoil in each cup to cover the dough. Fill each foil cup with rice, beans, small stones, pie weights, whatever. Bake for 10 minutes.
 - Take out the foil and weights to expose the dough. Up the temp to 350. Bake another 10-ish minutes until it gets golden.
- Set aside to cool.


5) When the potatoes are fork-tender, drain them and let them sit for a few minutes so all the water evaporates off. Then mash them with lots of salt & pepper (potato absorbs salt like it's its job, so taste as you go and don't wimp out with the shaker), crushed garlic, and the dairy products of your choice. We used a few tbsp butter, a splash of almond milk, and a big dollop of my vegan coconut-based garlic-chive cream cheese, which was really friggin good, but plain milk and normal cream cheese will also do the job, if you can digest the stuff.

6) Taste and season the innards as necessary. I found mine needed a little salt and acid. You could use lemon juice or a touch of vinegar; I stirred in a good squeeze of ketchup, and it did the trick. We're real classy here. This would also be a good moment to stir in any bacon or cheese you're using, probably before adding any extra salt.

7) Take some liquid out of the pot of filling (1/3 cup, maybe?), and mix in a few tbsp of flour or cornstarch, as much as it'll hold. Then stir that glop back into the pot. This is a good moment to add things like chopped zucchini. Simmer 5 minutes more to thicken. Make more slurry if need be - you want thick, gloppy, oozy gravy.

8) Fill the pie tins with filling. Maybe sprinkle some cheese on top or add a slice of tomato. (I didn't.) Cover with a sheet of puff pastry, extra short crust, or a dollop of mashed potato. (We pressed little pie-sized patties of potato together in our palms, then set them on top and added more around the sides as necessary. If you're trying to impress someone you could pipe it on.) Cut an X in the middle of the top if you're using pastry. If you like, brush it with egg to make it shiny.

9) For a potato top, bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes, mostly to heat everything through, then broil for another 3 to get the top a little brown around the edges. For pastry it's more like 20 minutes at 375, until golden. Set aside to cool.

10) Eat with plenty of ketchup and plenty of napkins. Salad is a good idea.

Update, Pi Day 2015: I made this for a Pi(e) Party with 1lb ground beef, 1/2 lb bacon (chop into bits, crisp up in the pan, and use the fat to cook everything else in), mushroom broth, carrots, celery, onion, and peas, (seasoned with thyme, herbs d'Provence, and a bay leaf), and it was phenomenal. Better than the steak pie the actual Aussie made. I win.