Edible Thistle

I don't like to trim artichokes. Pity, they are one of my favorite vegetables. When I see them on a menu or salad bar I jump but I rarely make the prickly thistles at home. Today there was a sale on artichokes and I figured I'd better try. Admittedly I took the easy way to a dinnertime recipe. First I trimmed the bottoms so each artichoke would stand up on it's own. I cut off the top third or so of the thorny leaves and a few of the tougher outer leaves and placed four in a covered baking dish with a splash of olive oil, S&P, and about 1/2 cup of water. I covered the dish with tin foil and the heavy lid and let the artichokes roast for about 35 minutes. After they cooled down (uncovered) I was able to reach in and remove the feathery choke and prepare the thistles for stuffing.
I wanted our artichokes to be a main dish so I opted for a hearty sausage stuffing. I simply pan fried Italian sausage (out of the casings) with shopped onion and plenty of garlic. To the cooked sausage I added breadcrumbs, grated parmesan and a dash of tomato sauce (I happened to have it in the fridge) for moisture. I placed the stuffing mostly in the center but also between the leaves of the waiting artichokes, drizzled the tops with more parmesan and olive oil and baked at 400º until heated through, about 15 minutes.
Admittedly these are going to win and vegetable beauty contest but this pretty quick recipe made artichokes accessible at home. I might just try it again.

Stuffed Artichokes

 I love artichokes but honestly I don't like the bother of cleaning them. Spiny and prickly and in need of a good rubbing with lemon juice to keep the edible thistles an appetizing color. But artichokes are in season and compared to the exorbitant prices I am seeing for organic vegetables -- a relative bargain. I picked up a few globes and found a new technique on the internet. I blanched the whole artichokes in boiling water  (4 quarts) with a bit of lemon juice (2 TB) for 20 minutes. When drained and cooled I easily peeled off the lower leaves, snipped the spines and cut each in half to remove the choke with the edge of a spoon. Much easier.
To serve I mixed up a stuffing of cooked Italian sausage (another gift from our pig raising neighbors), chopped garlic, parmesan cheese, crushed red peppers, bread crumbs and olive oil. I filled the leaves and the cavity of the artichokes with this savory stuffing and baked the vegetables, sprinkled with more parmesan and drizzled with olive oil,  for 45 minutes at 375º.
A surprisingly hearty and surprisingly popular easily made supper.

Pretty Quick Spaghetti Dinner

An uncooked pasta sauce -- briefly tossed with the hot, drained spaghetti is a great way to get dinner on the table in a hurry. Tonight I chopped up fresh dandelion, braised artichokes leftover from the other night's dinner, prosciutto and fresh mozzarella then sprinkled on minced garlic, crushed red peppers, shredded parmesan. All of that was combined with the hot spaghetti (just drained) in the cooking pot along with about 1/3 cup of pasta cooking water and plenty of cracked black pepper. I gave it all a good stir over just a tiny bit of heat until the parmesan and the water made a creamy coating for the noodles. Next time I'll toss in the mozzarella last minute -- it got a little clumpy, but otherwise pretty successful.

Dinner With Konstantine

An impromptu belated birthday dinner for our friend Konstantine.

Things to eat with toast.

Small plates, perfect for dinnertime conversation.

We started off with a caprese salad using the last of the arugula pesto and quickly pan fried currant tomatoes. I drizzled tomato flavored olive oil (left from sautéing the tomatoes) over the fresh buffalo milk cheese.
Arancini, a classic Sicilian treat. Saffron scented creamy rice (or leftover risotto) is wrapped around a tiny dollop of meat ragú. The assembled rice balls are dunked in egg batter, rolled in breadcrumbs and fried to golden brown. Equally delicious warm or room temperature, the Sicilian version is said to have gotten it's name because the golden color brings to mind the oranges trees of the island's hills. "Arancini" means little oranges. Artichokes are still at the farmers market. I braised these, trimmed but still whole, with fennel seeds, lemon juice and zest, carrot, onion and coriander. Then pan fried the cut, cleaned artichokes for crisp browned edges. Boiled down with lemon juice and olive oil the braising liquid made a quick sauce, perfect for sopping up with lightly garlic tinged crostini.

Vegetables For Dinner

I tend to buy artichokes, and despite how much I love them, "forget" to cook them. I dread the preparation . . . snipping, tearing, peeling, scooping. And all that rubbing with lemon juice. But today I found a recipe so appealing (Artichokes Braised in Lemon and Olive Oil) I dove right in. The artichokes are braised in a flavorful broth with shallots, garlic, carrots, fennel and coriander seeds, then lightly crisped in olive oil. The braising liquid adds to a savory olive oil and lemon dressing. You can braise the artichokes in advance to spread out the work and the dish can be served room temperature. No reason to shy away.

"These are the best cooked artichokes I've ever had," James declared.

Worth the effort.
As a follow up I roasted the remainder of last week's potato harvest with some fresh shallots from our garden dressed simply with olive oil, salt and pepper.
I love fresh peas. It's a little late in the season here in sunny LA but I could still round up enough for this fresh springy salad, with snap peas, pea shoots, radishes, and goat cheese in a light mustard vinaigrette. Beautiful and light.

Spaghetti with Asparagus, Artichokes, and Smoked Mozzarella

Having good ingredients makes a quick dinner better and easier. While I was driving home from work James started the water boiling. All I had to do was sauté the asparagus in olive oil with chopped pancetta and garlic, add in some roasted artichokes, chili flakes, and a squeeze of lemon juice and wait for the pasta to cook. I drained the pasta and added the sauté mix along with a good sized handful of parmesan cheese, a knob of butter, and about 1/2 cup of the pasta cooking water. I stirred until the parmesan and the water (along with salt and pepper) made a creamy sauce, tossed in some cubes of smoked mozzarella and called James to the table.

Maybe it's cooking, maybe it's combining, but for us it's a late dinner in a hurry on work night Monday.

"Freezer" Dinner with Friends

James and I just put in our order for a cattle share from Hearst Ranch, and so, anticipating needing room in the freezer, I invited our friends Eric and Shari over for a freezer dinner -- what I could make from what I could find. Only one problem, when it actually came down to looking there wasn't much in the freezer at all. A couple of flavored butters from or annual oyster events, some left over chilis and stews from the "fridgeventory", a random package of puff pastry, and a couple of frozen naan. Nothing very inspiring and no hoard of proteins waiting to be conquered.

I had to make a trip to Costco the other day (that's how I ended up with 5 lbs of mussels) and staring blankly at the meat case I spied a brisket. That might be fun, I thought, and compared to the whole filet roast I also thought might be "fun", a pretty good value. With no menu idea I put the brisket in the cart and headed out.

Brisket seems so American, so barbeque, so corn on the cob. I had a big jar left of that delicious Chilean Spicy salsa I made the other day and thought that might be a good combo. I decided to smoke the brisket with a rub of Pimentón, onion powder, salt, sugar, cumin and pepper to echo the flavors in the salsa. At least we'd be clearing some space in the fridge.

What to serve with brisket -- it just seemed too dull, too 4th of July to go with corn on the cob and cole slaw but that's always what leaps to mind with brisket.

I've been flipping through Saveur magazine and in spite of the 6lbs of meat covered in dry rub in my fridge I keep turing my head towards rustic French dishes, crispy Fougasse and vegetable ragouts. It didn't seem to go together but I decided why not. A quirky dinner best appreciated by friends.
We are cheese lovers as are our friends Eric and Shari. When I saw burrata at Costco (why don't I go there more often) I immediately imagined this riff on nancy Silverton's Caprese Salad from Mozza Restaurant. Oven Roasted cherry tomatoes, pesto sauce brightened with a finish of lemon juice and creamy soft cheese.
I've never made fougasse before, or eaten it. Something about Saveur's picture of the herb and olive topped bread made the recipe impossible to ignore. Besides I am getting a little weary of no-knead style breads (although there are a few to come). It was nice to have my hands in dough again and these crisp breads, although I don't know if they even vaguely resemble the authentic variety, were perfect with our array of cheese, olives, and thinly sliced salumi.
The main course. I really wasn't sure how long to smoke the meat. I heated the gas grill and then turned off the middle and right burner. I put the meat in a foil roasting pan over the un-heated part of the grill. Over the flames, using two more metal pans, I poured a bottle of beer in one (for a little extra moisture) and filled the other with soak mesquite chips. About 4 and half hours later (and about 45 minutes resting time covered in foil) we had smoked through, pretty tender meat ready to soak up the spicy salsa.
Well, something had to come from the freezer. Back in April James had kindly shucked and frozen the fava beans from our front yard winter crop. With the addition of some farmer's market asparagus and artichokes this vegetable ragout, also from the June July 2010 issue of Saveur magazine, seemed like perfect way to showcase our winter crop and clear a little space.
Light summer tasting potatoes? I split a little pile of yellow fingerlings rom out garden and roasted them in the oven with olive oil , salt and pepper until the cut edges were crisp and golden brown. Following a recipe I saw on epicurious, I topped the potatoes with an herb salad of parsley, tarragon (a favorite of James' but not one of mine -- I figured that was good way to keep me away from the potatoes), mustard, red wine vinegar, and olive oil sprinkled with finely chopped hard boiled backyard eggs (thanks girls!).
Dessert was another matter. I started by wanted to get Jim Lahey's chocolate coconut bread checked off as I am baking my way through his My Bread cookbook. James doesn't eat all that much chocolate -- and, as if the case with most sweet things that are bad for my pants size I have a hard time staying away from it, so . . . it seemed like a good idea to have some friends to eat it with us in case it was really really good. But can I serve toast for dessert? And, what goes with toast? I found a recipe for buttermilk pudding (another one from epicurious) that seemed like a good combo and I had buttermilk waiting to be used in the fridge. Done. But then while flipping through Lahey's cookbook, checking my ingredients I spotted sweet foccacia, now that had to be delicious and used apricot jam and I could substitute in my own homemade stone fruit jam, left over from my pop tart filling. Besides, didn't seem like a bad idea to have a backup in case that coconut chocolate bread (what the hell will I ever do with that) was underwhelming (as indeed it was) Deconstructed bread pudding? Toast and milk pudding for dessert? Different but not too bad. I suppose -- and, two more recipes down.

Now all I need is a freezer dinner to clear out from my freezer dinner.

Pasta Is Our Standby

I've been coddled at sea level for a long time.

As I set out to make a quick pasta dinner for James in the dreaded hotel "kitchenette" I remembered my time in Colorado and my neighbor Roger (a flatlander and a Kansas native) saying -- "it's darn near impossible to fry chicken at 10,000 feet." Years of California cooking have nearly erased the memory of special instructions for baking cakes and the lower temperature, slower cooking boiling water dishes from my mountain cuisine. At higher elevations water boils at a lower temperature -- great for a braise or a simmering stew but not exactly the ticket for pasta which becomes tender and magically still toothy in rapidly boiling, super hot water with the shortest cooking time possible. An easy 10 minute dinner in California became a half hour of worrying and stirring in New Mexico.

All I did was sauté some chopped bacon (pancetta would have been the thing if I'd had it), onion, garlic, and lots of pepper (wish I'd had some crushed red pepper handy -- bought a bunch for gifts but none to use it seems) in some olive oil. When the bacon was getting crisp -- that took a bit, still have the smoke alarm issue -- and the onions softened I tossed in about a cup of artichoke hearts (chopped) I bought from the olive bar at Whole Foods and gave it all a good stir around with a healthy knob of butter.

When the pasta was finally cooked I reserved about 3/4 of the nice starchy water and stirred it, the drained pasta, the sautéed mixture, a good dose of parmesan cheese and a quick squeeze of lemon over medium heat until warmed through and nicely combined.

Hmm . . . spaghetti at 7000 feet, no wonder slow simmering rice and polenta took hold in the Alps. Next time a nice risotto.