Oeufs en Meurette

With Christmas cards to write, and presents to buy, and traveling to visit family, I was beginning to worry that I wouldn't have time to do this  month's Daring Cooks challenge. Luckily I found a bit of time yesterday to pull this one off, and I was absolutely thrilled with the result.

Jenn and Jill have challenged The Daring Cooks to learn to perfect the technique of poaching an egg. They chose Eggs Benedict recipe from Alton Brown, Oeufs en Meurette from Cooking with Wine by Anne Willan, and Homemade Sundried Tomato & Pine Nut Seitan Sausages (poached) courtesy of Trudy of Veggie num num.

Alton Brown is, by far, my favorite TV chef, and the next time I do Eggs Benedict I'll go straight to his recipe. But this time I chose to do the more challenging and complex Oeufs en Meurette - a poached egg on a slice of fried baguette, topped with a red wine bacon mushroom sauce.

Thanksgiving Pics

Here are some stray pictures from Thanksgiving, some taken by me, and some taken by my cousin Liam, as he likes to steal my camera whenever it's in his presence.

Green Bean Casserole

This is a somewhat non-traditional green bean casserole, in that it doesn't use French's Fried Onions or cream of anything soup, but it's a staple at our Thanksgiving, and a tradition that I've recently taken over the past couple of years.

Bacon Cheddar Chive Biscuits

Oh, my poor arteries. They're never recovering from this one.

Stuffed Artichokes

The first of my Thanksgiving posts is stuffed artichokes. This is my mother-in-law's recipe, and she really made them, but I watched closely so maybe I'll be able to do it myself next time. I love it when she makes these, and I now have a much greater appreciation for all the work that goes into prepping the artichokes. I think it makes them taste even better.

Thanksgiving

I'm working on three posts from Thanksgiving, one for each dish that I made. I may add another post with pics from the whole dinner, as well, time permitting. I'm giving a heads up so you don't miss them, as they'll all likely be posted around the same time, and I'll update the list below to link to the posts once they're up. They will be:

• Stuffed Artichokes
• Bacon Cheddar Chive Biscuits
• Green Bean Casserole
• Thanksgiving Dinner (maybe)

Yum! Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving :)

Beef and Lentil Soup

Winter is here. It may be barely halfway through November, but already the mall is playing Christmas music, we've had our first snowflake, and the scarves have been broken out.

Aww, who am I kidding, I love it! Well, at least until January 2nd, and then I just want to get all the coldness over with. But until then, I'm a giant Christmas nerd (you don't want to be around me between Thanksgiving and New Year's, as there is always some device playing constant holiday music, on top of a TV playing "Elf" or "Love Actually"), and scarves are totally in right now.

Another one of my favorite things about winter is Giada De Laurentiis's Lentil Soup with Beef. Nothing warms me up like a big bowl of this hearty soup, nothing short of a glass of Jameson, anyway. At least twice a winter I make a huge batch of this, freeze it, and bring it to work for lunch (and usually dinner, too... my job sucks). I've held off as long as I could, and now it's finally winter enough to break out this old favorite!

Crab and Artichoke Soufflé

Now we're cooking! This is what I signed up for the Daring Kitchen for. Technically challenging, classic dishes that everyone used to know how to do, but are rarely seen outside of stuffy French restaurants anymore. Of all the dishes I've been wanting to make, soufflés have always loomed as the most challenging. Let's see if they've earned their lofty reputation.

Dave and Linda from Monkeyshines in the Kitchen chose Soufflés as our November 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge! Dave and Linda provided two of their own delicious recipes plus a sinfully decadent chocolate soufflé recipe adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s recipe found at the BBC Good Food website.

Chicken Riggies

Must be something in the water over there in Utica. Although it's a small city of only 60,000, I have discovered three amazing dishes that were invented there and are quickly earning a name for themselves outside of Central New York. The first I encountered was Utica Greens - escarole baked with three types of julienned hot peppers, prosciutto, bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. Perfect side dish to a tender veal roast. Another Utica-born favorite is Tomato Pie. Picture a thick crust square pizza, very thick and chunky tomato sauce, and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese (no mozzarella), served room temperature. You can't possibly imagine why it's so good until you try it.

Better than both of these, however, is the lovely Chicken Riggies. Any self-respecting Central NY restaurant has it on their menu, and everyone from the region has their own version. Essentially, it's chicken in a hot pepper tomato cream sauce over rigatoni (hence, the "riggies"). Being someone that LOVES tomato cream sauces, it's no wonder I quickly fell in love. I don't normally like food that's too spicy, but the cream tames it a bit, and it's very easy to alter to your level of heat tolerance by how many and which type of peppers you use.

Homemade Macaroni

One of my super awesome wedding shower gifts was the pasta roller and cutter attachments to the Kitchenaid mixer, which, despite repeated insistence to myself that I would break it open any day now, has sat sadly in its box for 6 embarrassing months. 

This Sunday I finally decided to try my hand at homemade macaroni, so my shiny new attachments got to show off their stuff. 

Roasted Butternut Chowder with Apples and Bacon

Perfect Autumn recipe, Mark Bittman's Roasted Butternut Chowder with Apples and Bacon.

Creamy Tomato Basil Pasta

Tomatoes + cream = <3

What is it about the combination of tomatoes and something creamy that makes me so happy? Tomato mayo sandwiches in late summer are perfection. And I've invented a ketchup-mayo condiment (Tomayo) that I'm going to bottle and sell some day that's awesome for dipping fries in.

So when I came across this recipe for Creamy Tomato Pasta from Kitchen Trial and Error, I had to try it. It was actually the first tomato sauce I've made from fresh instead of canned tomatoes.

Stuffed Grape Leaves

I <3 olive oil. I can't live without it. Take away butter, cake, even my carbs if you have to, but for the love of food, please leave me my olive oil.

If there were ever a diet I could do, which there isn't, but if there were, it would be the Mediterranean diet, since it's the only one that seems to have the reverence-bordering-on-cultism for olive oil that I have.

This month's Daring Cooks challenge, stuffed grape leaves, fit right into my pro-olive oil agenda. Our October 2010 hostess, Lori of Lori’s Lipsmacking Goodness, has challenged The Daring Cooks to stuff grape leaves. Lori chose a recipe from Aromas of Aleppo and a recipe from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. I'd never really been a huge fan of stuffed grape leaves, but I'd only tried them twice. I really liked these ones, though (I chose the Wara Einab - cold stuffed grape leaves), so I think I'll keep trying them some more.

Confession Time

I've worked at my job for a little over a year and a half now. Every day when I walk in the building, I could walk left to go to McDonald's, or walk right to go to my office. Every day for a year and a half I've been strong and made that right turn.

Apple Butter and Homemade Pretzels

Daring Cooks time again!

The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

I chose to do the apple butter to get myself into the fall mood. On Saturday morning we stopped by the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market to stock up on the apples. We'd never been before, so we got so excited by all the fresh produce, breads, cheeses and meats that we picked up some tomatoes, greens and elk jerky, and even stayed for lunch (I had nachos from Magdalena's Menu, he had a curry sampler from Thunder Mountain Curry). I couldn't find Golden Delicious so I went with Gala instead. Four pounds ended up being about 14 apples, as they were small.

I was somewhat less excited about this challenge than the previous ones, as it didn't involve a meal or any challenging new culinary techniques. Canning was definitely new, and maybe could be considered challenging, but didn't do much for honing my cooking skills, really. Still, it was a good thing to know how to do, and I do love apple butter, so overall it was a fun challenge.

However I did find the recipe and instructions to be very confusing, ambiguous and contradictory, so just a warning - there may be a bit of kvetching (not to mention improvising) in my writeup below.

Marrowbones and Montreal

On Tuesday night I went to New World Bistro (yum!) before going to see Eat, Pray, Love (yuck.). I'd never been there before but I always wanted to try it. So I was bored at work earlier in the day and decided to get myself excited about the menu. Well, they have a section of the menu called "Forbidden Pleasures," consisting of duck rilettes, morcilla (a kind of blood pudding), pork belly, pate, sweetbreads and ... wait for it ... marrowbones!

I fell in love with New World right away. Any place brave enough to put these nods to serious eaters on their menu must have their act together. I decided to go with the marrowbones as Anthony Bourdain has said several times that marrowbones will be his deathbed meal. And the man's practically eaten everything in every country, so you know it's good.

Oh, he was right.

The consistency was almost like an aspic, sort of jiggly and soft. But the flavor... it was like drinking meat drippings.  Why doesn't everyone eat this? Oh right, the jiggly. Yeah that part was slightly un-nerving, but totally worth it for the flavor.

It was served with apple butter, sel gris and rye toast. Well, the menu said it was rye toast but if my rye ever saw the inside of a toaster I'd be shocked. The rye flavor totally overpowered the flavor of the marrow, so I think I'll ask for something milder next time. The apple butter I thought didn't make a whole lot of sense with it either. Maybe I'm missing something or didn't do it right. The sel gris though was an awesome touch, if you were careful not to use too much. This was such an exciting adventure for me! Oh man, 20-year old Erica that would only eat chicken fingers and BLTs would not even recognize me.

New World was actually totally packed; in Albany it's unheard of to wait 45 minutes on a Tuesday night like we did. But what I didn't plan on (because I don't have cable) is that the chef, Ric Orlando, just won Chopped, which I guess is a Food Network reality show or something. I'm pretty sure we were the only ones in there that didn't come to see the newly-famous Chef Ric. Oh well, I'll definitely be back when the hype dies back down. Or, for New World's sake, I hope the hype never does, as it's well-earned.

This is a first for my blog, in that this is the first post from a restaurant and not from my kitchen (hence the phone pic). And for the next week and a half there'll be a lot more restaurant pics, as we're leaving for our delayed honeymoon to Montreal on Saturday! The entire trip is focused on eating and drinking (what else would you expect from a couple of fat boozers like us?), so I plan to document all the swanky Parisian-inspired restaurants and all the corner poutine stands that we happen across.

Adieu til then!

Russian-Style Pierogi

Cześć! What a perfectly timely assignment from the Daring Cooks. Three weeks ago, I got married and changed my name from McCarthy to Levendosky; what better time to start learning to cook Polish food? I really (*reeeeally*) love Eastern European food. Heavy on the meat and potatoes, often fried, light on the vegetables, it's my kind of cuisine. I'd had pierogi before, but only frozen, and certainly never made them myself, so this was a very fun new dish to try.


While it was time consuming, for me this recipe was somewhat simpler in that you can basically do everything beforehand, and put it all together at the last minute. Or put it all together and boil the pierogi ahead of time, and fry them at the last minute. Either way, it avoids my usual pitfall of just not being able to get the hang of cooking multiple items and making sure they're done at the same time. 


The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale. I wanted to do a dessert pierogi, but ran out of time. Now having attempted traditional pierogi, however, I will be very comfortable breaking out of the mold and getting more creative with them in the future.

Mushroom Quinoa "Risotto"

Living up to my word, more quinoa! This one I'm really proud of. This is probably the first recipe I've ever made that I didn't use a recipe for. I made it up, all on my own, using my own ideas, experience and imagination. Also, it tasted great.

I was staring at the jar of quinoa, wondering what to do with it, when I remembered its awesome powers of substitution for rice. I love risotto, so why not make a traditional mushroom risotto using quinoa instead of arborio? And it never missed a beat. 

Coconut Shrimp

Two posts in one hour! Unprecedented. Don't get too used to it ;)

The main course for John's birthday lunch was coconut shrimp. He requested shrimp, and since our wedding (one week ago today!) I've been in mourning over the coconut shrimp that the State Room served at the cocktail hour. It was probably one of the top 3 things I've ever tasted in my life. Of course, it being my wedding, I didn't have much time to stop and savor. And since the State Room is a banquet hall and not a restaurant, it's not like I can go back there and order it again. Ever. :( . All I can hope for is that someone I know gets married, has their reception there, and orders the coconut shrimp. That's a lot of "if"s.

So the second best thing was to try to make it myself. Overall not bad! I'd never made shrimp before, and only recently even started eating it. But next to the State Room's shrimp, this was the second best I'd ever had. Even more fun since I made it!

Mediterranean Quinoa Salad

John requested shrimp for his 26th birthday dinner, and I asked what he wanted as a side. He said, "I don't know, I think we still have that quinoa in the pantry." Having never made quinoa I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, so I searched through my collected recipes and found this Mediterranean Quinoa Salad. What a great way to start someone off on quinoa! It tastes like pasta, so you'd never know you were eating an incredibly healthy grain.

I plan to eat this salad for lunches for the rest of the summer (or until I get sick of it, which will be pretty soon, knowing me). I will definitely be using this recipe a lot in the future, and probably mixing it up a bit. Mostly vegetarian (except for the chicken broth) and super high in protein, I think this is one I can really stick to. So here it is!

Chicken with Pecan Cream and Mushrooms

Sorry I'm late with posting for this month's Daring Cooks Challenge! Wedding is in 2 days (:-O) so you'll have to forgive if this is post a bit short. Still lots to do!

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

The four challenge options were Chicken with Pecan Cream and Mushrooms, Asian Noodle Salad with Cashew Dressing, Chicken with Curried Tomato Almond Sauce, and Walnut White Bean Dip with Rosemary and Sage. The White Bean Dip sounded right up my alley. So of course I chose not to do that, as it wouldn't really be challenging my skills or taste buds. That one was just a bit too safe. The Asian Noodle Salad was out, as I mentioned before I'm really not into Asian cooking. I'll do it if a challenge ever requires it, but given the option, no Asian Noodle Salad for me. And curry is something I can't like no matter how much I try. And by "can't like" I mean I can't even be in the same room when it's cooking. So I was left with the Chicken with Pecan Cream and Mushrooms. I didn't feel this was too safe, as using nuts in savory dishes is completely new to me. I had an idea of what I thought it would taste like, but it ended up being completely (and pleasantly) different.

Pâté and Bread

If my goal in starting this blog and signing up for the Daring Cooks challenge was to break out of my comfort zone and cook and eat things I never would think to do otherwise, my second Daring Cooks challenge was a huge success! I probably would have gotten around to making enchiladas at some point in my cooking adventures, but pâté? Never. And bread? I was deathly afraid of baking. What a learning opportunity this turned out to be!

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

I chose to go with the traditional chicken liver pâté. If I'm going to do pâté, I'm going to do pâté. No messing around with safe vegetarian or seafood options (who ever thought I'd consider seafood the safe option??). And the choice between French baguette and sandwich loaf was an easy one for this francophile.

New Camera!

Good news, everyone!


Last night John surprised me with my wedding present a few weeks early, and it was ... the greatest camera in the world :D  A shiny new digital Canon Rebel EOS SLR. My mom had the film version of this camera, and I fell in love with it when she let me take it on a trip to France when I was 16. I got one for myself shortly thereafter, and we had many good years together, especially the semester of college when I took a photography course. 

Enchiladas

My first Daring Cooks challenge!


Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

I was really excited and nervous about my first Daring Cooks challenge. The recipe was pretty different from what I'm used to cooking, and the steps were certainly very involved. But that made it all the more rewarding. The result was exactly why I joined the Daring Kitchen, and why I started this blog - I was inspired to cook something out of my comfort zone, both in taste and technique. I tried new ingredients I'd never used before, and new methods that I'll certainly be able to carry over into other recipes.

I served the enchiladas on Cinco de Mayo, although that was more of a coincidence than anything else. We served them with rice and beans, and we had three other people over to try them out - my friend Amber, her boyfriend Ron and my sister Beth. Everyone agreed that the dish was amazing, particularly the salsa verde. I really couldn't get over how flavorful that was. The enchilada stacks stayed constructed nicely, and didn't slide around or fall apart when trying to eat them. Overall the experiment was a success! And I can't wait for my next challenge.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am a very lucky girl. Not only do I have wonderful friends and family, but I'm marrying into a wonderful family too. And I was lucky to have all of them, my old and new family, in attendance at my bridal shower last week.

Little by little I'm starting to use each of my shiny new kitchen gadgets, but one of the first that I was eager to break out was the Kitchenaid Mixer. Oh, it's pretty.

And what better way to break it in than chocolate chip cookies? Being a big fan of Alton Brown (my inner nerd is showing) I decided to try one of his essential chocolate chip cookie recipes - he does The Thin, The Puffy, and The Chewy, and I settled on the latter. No particular reason, but chewy sounded good at the time (spoiler alert: I was right).

Basic Macaroni and Cheese

Well that didn't take long. It only took until my second post to do macaroni and cheese. I held out for as long as I could, really I did. But macaroni and cheese is my absolute favorite meal of all time. Every shape of pasta, every type of cheese, every special addition. I've done chorizo and chiles, I've done fontina and gruyère, I've done tomatoes, I've done tuna, I've done peas and prosciutto, I've even done a macaroni and cheese from leftover welsh rarebit sauce (that was John's favorite). And believe it or not (gasp!), I even like it from the blue box from time to time.

My only rule is I don't make the same kind twice. Why should I when I love each variation as much as the last? I might as well keep trying new ones. In my recipe files, I have "breakfast dishes," "meat and chicken entrees," "soups and stews," etc., but I have a whole separate folder for just macaroni and cheese. And there are dozens I have yet to try (thanks, Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board!).

Believe it or not, I don't believe I've ever done just a basic, solid mac and cheese, at least not in recent memory. So that's what I set out to do the other day.

Creamy Tomato Basil Soup with Orzo

After a very exhausting weekend of house guests and my bridal shower, I somehow found the energy to cook for the week on Sunday night. But due to my laziness exhaustion I decided to do something quick and easy - tomato soup.

My specialty, and the one dish I can consistently cook well, is tomato sauce. I learned it from my grandmother, born in Italy, who learned it from her mother, and god knows how far back it goes from there. She usually uses salt pork instead of, or along with, olive oil, and almost always adds pork chops or ribs. The result brings me back to Sunday dinners, squeezing 15+ people around a tiny kitchen table, a vocal tug-of-war between half a dozen conversations.

When I have the time and ambition, I follow her method to the letter. But when I'm trying to be healthy, cheap or quick, I modify it to a marinara, substituting the salt pork for olive oil, and adding a good deal more basil. To me the combination of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and basil is one of the most purely, simply delicious meals I can imagine. It's so good I can drink it. And I often do skip the pasta and eat the sauce just as a soup, which is what I decided to do here, adding heavy cream and orzo for some heartiness.

Hello!

While I'm not a fan of jumping on bandwagons, (and food blogs are a hell of a bandwagon at the moment), I've decided to start my own food blog for a few reasons.

1. I freaking love food. I love to eat it, I love to talk about it, I love to read about it, I love to learn about it, and I love to cook it. But mostly eat it. 
2. I've recently discovered the Daring Bakers and Daring Cookers challenges, and I was inspired to participate. Each month they post a new recipe to cook, photograph and write about. This will force me to try cooking and eating things that I might otherwise not think of or be brave enough to attempt.
3. My bridal shower is coming up in a week and a half, and I'm going to be getting some pretty sweet kitchen equipment. And I refuse to be one of those people that has top-of-the-line gear and lets it rot in the back of the pantry. 
4. I want to spend more of my free time cooking, and writing about what I cook will provide a way for me to keep track of what I've attempted, what I've liked and didn't like, and what I did wrong (which will be all the time). I've read a lot about food over the past couple of years, but all that has done is made me realize that you can't learn food from a book. It's strictly trial and error.

This ultimately boils down to a way for me to learn from my cooking disasters experiences in a more structured setting than just throwing pots and pans across my kitchen and vowing never to cook again. In that sense I don't actually expect anyone to read this besides me. So I'm laying out a few guidelines that I intend to follow:

What I Will Do

• Post recipes, pictures and comments on the food I make. Always recipes. It makes me sad when I read a food blog that talks about how great something is that the author cooked, and then doesn't even give the recipe. I'm not terribly creative or skilled in the kitchen, so I need detailed instructions! For that reason most of what I cook will come from someone else's recipes (I'll always cite them) and not from the top of my head. I'm just not there yet.
• Post a discussion of the food that I eat when dining out (because I do that a lot too). Maybe pictures, but I don't know if I want to be that guy in the restaurant taking picture of the food.
• Use complete sentences, proper grammar and spelling, and keep exclamation points to a minimum. On my days off from being a food nerd, I'm also grammar nazi.

What I Will Try To Do, But Can't Promise

• Post every day. Not sure how this is going to go, but I will try.
• Post even my most embarrassing culinary failures.
• Try anything that is considered a food in any culture, anywhere. This means the nasty bits of obscure animals, daring combinations, even durian. Nothing good can come from sheltering yourself from trying new things. Most of the time I don't like the new things I try. I'm a very picky eater. But that's precisely why I have to keep trying new things. How else will I know what I like and don't like?

What I Will Probably Not Do

• Talk about my life outside of food (HAHA as if I had one!). It's annoying when I'm looking through the posts on a food blog and we have a roast chicken, ooh that looks pretty, oh wow, she made lasagna with eggplant instead of noodles, that's interesting, aaaaand now she's talking about her kid's play date that he had yesterday. Really? I don't care. And I don't expect you to care either.
• Not dumb down food. No short cuts. No quick fixes. No pre-packaged, pre-sliced, pre-cooked. No Campbell's Soup recipes. If I'm gonna cook, I'm gonna cook. If I find a recipe that calls for something pre-packaged, I'll try my best to make that thing from scratch too. Of course now I'm reminded of a quote from the great Carl Sagan (my nerd-ness transcends the food world), "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
• Bake often. I just don't have much of a sweet tooth. I'll probably throw in something that really strikes me now and then, but overall I'd rather save my calories for butter, oil, breading, cheese, cream, pasta, and other savory goodness. Which leads me to ...
• "Lightening" anything up. If a recipe happens to be naturally low-fat, low-calorie, whatever. That's great. But if it calls for milk, I'm using whole milk. Not only does the dish just come out better, I am strongly suspicious of any process that takes the calories out of a completely perfect and wholesome food. Give me real, full-fat butter any day over some I-Honestly-Can-Believe-It's-Not-Butter-Because-It-Tastes-Like-Freaking-Plastic product. That just can't be good for you.
• Cook Asian food often. It's just not my thing. I've found some Vietnamese dishes I like that I might try. They tend to be milder. Chinese food is hit or miss for me, both American take-out and restaurants I've been to in Beijing. Obviously these two are completely different styles of food. I just happen to not be into either. The entire country and culture of Japan just scares the shit out of me. And, despite my continued efforts to try, I just cannot bring myself to stomach curry. If I find an Indian dish that doesn't call for curry, I'll try it. 

What I Will Absolutely Not Do

• Use cilantro. Soapy pennies. 'Nuff said.
• Cook any recipe by Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee. I know they're hugely popular and many people love them. I just don't have a lot of respect for what they do.
• Pretend I have any experience, expertise or career ambitions in the food industry. I am the definition of amateur. I just like food and want to learn about it.