From California, With Love

This is not New Year’s resolution food, at least not unless your goals for 2013 involve incorporating more carbohydrates and fat into your diet. But it’s February, so even setting aside my antagonism toward the whole concept of resolutions, you’ve all had over a month to compensate with whole grains, dark leafy greens, etc., in which case one rich pasta dish isn’t going to utterly corrupt you, or you’ve already fallen off the wagon and this bit of indulgence isn’t going to do any additional damage.

Beautifully silky, creamy and elegant, with the warmth of lightly toasted walnuts and the brightness of good extra-virgin olive oil, this walnut sauce is neither complicated nor time-consuming to prepare. However, there is one catch, and it’s critically important to heed it: you really do need to make this with the freshest, highest-quality walnuts, because it will make the difference between a sauce that’s luscious nutty perfection and one that’s flat and dull or, even worse, bitter or rancid.

My walnuts were backyard-grown, very recently harvested, and lovingly shipped to me from northern California by His Lordship’s cousin. The first time I made this, I did it on-site during a holiday visit with walnuts from the same source. If you’re not lucky enough to have a West Coast connection, either wait until locally-grown walnuts in season are available in your farmers market, or seek out the best vendor you can find, preferably get them still in the shell, and make sure to taste the nuts before trying this recipe. If they don’t taste fresh and mild and sweet, use them for a more forgiving sauce, like pesto.

Slight post-facto edit: A rousing discussion with my Facebook friends made me think of a possible alternative if you can’t get really good walnuts.  Pistachios still in the shell are readily available year-round just about everywhere, and would definitely work as an alternative.  It will taste and look quite different, of course, but it should still give you the nutty, creamy unctuousness that’s the heart of this sauce.  As a bonus, if you have children, it will be entertainingly green and you can tell them it will make them strong like The Hulk.

Pasta with Fresh Walnut Sauce
(Mash-up of two recipes, one from Nigella Lawson’s Christmas Special, and one from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)
Serves 4 as a main course, 6-8 as a side dish

1 slice bread, crusts removed
½ cup cream or whole milk
1 cup walnuts, as fresh as possible and preferably hand-shelled
2 cloves garlic, peeled
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and freshly grated black pepper
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup Italian parsley, chopped
1 pound dried spaghetti rigate, fettucini, or other substantial ribbon pasta

Roughly tear up the bread and place it in a shallow bowl, pouring over the cream or milk. While it soaks, very carefully toast the walnuts in a dry pan over medium-low heat, tossing frequently to avoid burning, just until the nuts have barely started to turn golden and release a faint toasty aroma. Allow to cool briefly.

Place the nuts, garlic and cheese in a food processor and pulse a few times, until the nuts are broken up. Add the soaked bread and the liquid, with a hefty few pinches of salt and several grinds of pepper, and run the processor again until a paste forms. With the processor running, pour the olive oil down the feed tube and process just until you have a homogenous sauce that looks like a slightly grainy mayonnaise. Taste and correct the salt and pepper as necessary.

Boil the pasta in very well-salted water until al dente according to the package instructions. When you drain the pasta, reserve a good cup of the pasta water and set it aside. Toss the pasta with the sauce and the parsley, adding as much pasta water as needed to thin the sauce to a creamy consistency that evenly coats the pasta and allows the strands to caress each other instead of clumping. Serve immediately in warmed bowls.

Notes:

All resolution-bashing aside, there are some things you can do to lighten this up just a teeny bit, although it’s never going to be exactly what your doctor ordered. You can use low-fat milk instead of cream, whole wheat pasta and multigrain bread (provided it’s not too dense and chewy), and cut back a bit on the cheese, or you could serve smaller portions as a side dish beside a suitably healthy protein and a very large salad.

This would also work just fine as a vegan dish with non-dairy milk and omitting the cheese entirely, although in that case you’ll need to salt a little more aggressively, and you might want to toast the walnuts a tiny bit darker for added flavor. I’d also be tempted to add a very light grating of nutmeg for complexity.

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More Fun with Beets

I don’t just view beets as a non-toxic source of food coloring. They’re actually one of my favorite vegetables, and have been ever since I was a kid. Nonconformist that I was even then, I have always loved beets, and their accompanying greens, in every form I could get them.

One of the beauties of beets is that you get two vegetables for the price of one if you buy them with the tops on, as you should definitely strive to do since that keeps the beets fresh longer too. Beet greens are on the mild end of the greens spectrum, very close to spinach in texture and right next to chard, their near-relative, in flavor, but with thinner and more tender stems. This makes beet greens an ideal replacement or companion to either, as in the filling for this luxurious, thrice-green lasagna.

The combination of spinach and ricotta in lasagna, ravioli, or other filled pasta may be classic, but to be perfectly honest, it can also be kind of boring. You’re never going to offend anyone with it, but you won’t wow anyone either. Mixing in greens with a little more personality — in this case, the mellow mineral note of the beet greens and the bright peppery note of arugula — brings in genuine wow potential. Since I strongly prefer a white lasagna over a red one when the filling is this green, the more complex combination of greens creates a nice balance against the richness of the bechamel. This not-too-cheesy, creamy yet assertive lasagna is a great fit for the cooler temperatures we’re finally getting.

In case you’re wondering, the beets that came with these greens were roasted — my favorite way to cook them, because it concentrates all that sweetness instead of bleeding it into the boiling water — and turned into a vaguely Eastern European salad that I will probably write up next week.

Spinach, Arugula and Beet Green Lasagna
Serves 6-8

For the filling:
3 tablespoons olive oil
15 ounces baby spinach
15 ounces baby arugula
Greens from two bunches beets
1 small onion, finely diced
2 shallots, finely diced
15 ounces ricotta
1/4 cup grated parmesan
Salt, freshly ground pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg to taste

For the sauce:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 shallot, minced
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1/4 cup pureed canned tomatoes
Salt, freshly ground pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg to taste

For assembly:
6-8 sheets no-boil lasagna noodles
1 cup shredded mozzarella
1/4 cup grated parmesan

Thoroughly wash all the greens, and slice the beet greens into thin ribbons.

Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot and saute the onion and shallots until transparent. Add the greens in big handfuls, turning with tongs to cook evenly, and adding more greens as soon as the batch before wilts down enough to make room.

Once all the greens have wilted, set them in a strainer over a bowl until most of the liquid has drained off. Squeeze thoroughly to remove any remaining liquid, then turn the greens out on a cutting board and chop into bite-sized pieces. Put the greens in a bowl, stir in the ricotta and 1/4 cup parmesan, and season assertively with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Combine the butter and the minced shallot in a saucepan and cook over medium heat until the butter has completely melted and the shallots have softened. Whisk in the flour and cook for an additional minute or two, then whisk in the milk. Simmer for at least five more minutes, stirring regularly, until the sauce is well thickened.

Preheat the oven to 375 F.

Spread an 8×8 Pyrex pan with enough sauce to generously cover the bottom, and nestle in enough noodles to form a single layer without overlaps. Spread several tablespoons of sauce over the noodles, add half the filling in an even layer, and sprinkle with a handful of mozzarella. Repeat the layering process with the remaining half of the filling, topping with a third layer of noodles. Add the tomato puree to the remaining sauce, pour the sauce over the top layer of noodles, and sprinkle the rest of the mozzarella and parmesan evenly over the top.

Cover the pan with foil and set on a baking sheet in case of drips. Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and bake another 15 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling, the noodles yield to a sharp knife, and the cheese is golden-brown. Switch on the broiler and cook for an additional 3-5 minutes for a really brown and burnished top.

Cool for 10-15 minutes to firm up the lasagna and prevent serious roof-of-mouth burning.

Notes:

Be sure to season the filling really aggressively, since the noodles, cheese and sauce will mute the flavor a bit.

The addition of the small amount of tomato puree to the sauce is not enough to impart noticeable tomato flavor; it just adds some color and used up a small amount of canned diced tomatoes I had lying around anyway. You could easily leave that out.

If you don’t have beet greens, you could use a large bunch of Swiss chard instead, but trim away the stems and just use the leaves here. The stems can be chopped and added to soup or pasta with olive oil and garlic later in the week, but they’re a little too firm for this filling.

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A Tale of Two Polentas

Two polentas, both alike in dignity. They use the same coarsely-ground organic corn, the same simple seasoning of butter and grated Parmigiano Reggiano, and the same no-stirring concept. They should taste as identical as they look, right?

WRONG.

What we have here is not Shakespeare but Dickens: it was the best of no-stir polentas; it was the worst of no-stir polentas. One of them is smooth and creamy, with deep corny flavor and a wonderful, just slightly resilient body, and the other is thin, watery, and utterly flavorless. It’s with regret that I have to say that the scurvy knave responsible for the latter atrocity is Chris Kimball, for not keeping a tighter leash on his Cook’s Illustrated minions.

Polenta is not particularly challenging to prepare, but all that stirring is labor-intensive. No one wants to be standing over the stove for half an hour on a Wednesday, which is why the pre-made varieties in plastic tubes are such brisk sellers. Since I have those Wednesdays too, I’ve been using a no-stir, oven-baked polenta recipe from Madhur Jaffrey for years, but when I saw a new recipe in last month’s CI that promised to produce extra-creamy polenta in 30 minutes instead of Madhur’s 50, I was intrigued and hopeful.

On top of cooking the polenta, covered, over such low heat that burning wouldn’t be a factor, the recipe seized on the idea of using baking soda to soften the cell walls and speed up the cornmeal’s absorption of liquid. Both seemed perfectly sound in principle. What could go wrong?

Everything, it turns out.

This baking soda idea speeds up liquid absorption, all right. It lyses the hell out of the poor little starch granules and lets the water rush in like a tsunami, bloating them grotesquely up. Instead of “creamy”, what you get is gluey, and any flavor potential the corn ever might have had is diluted out into the gelatinized substrate, giving you a bowl of water-logged, gummy nothingness. It was so vile that my first impulse was to blame myself, for using cornmeal that was too fine and not up to the treatment. The recipe did insist on coarse-ground, an admonition I had not heeded because I hadn’t wanted to make another trip to the store.

So, giving the CI people every previously-earned benefit of the doubt, I marched out and bought proper, organic, coarse polenta. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I also decided to run a control by making Madhur’s recipe alongside, timing things so they would be ready at the exact same time. I would season them identically with a tablespoon of butter, two ounces of grated cheese, and several grinds of pepper, and use His Lordship as a blind taste tester. I gave CI a perfectly level playing field and a scrupulously fair chance.

It was, to quote His Lordship, “not even a contest”. It took him exactly one bite to identify which was which, and to refuse a second bite of the CI version. Even with exactly the right kind of polenta, it was still weak, watery, and wretched. Madhur’s version was not only bursting with sweet, rich golden flavor and perfect texture, but also had some lovely caramelized bits along the edges that were just a little bit chewy, like good corn bread. Giving it just twenty extra minutes and refraining from any Frankenstein’s experimentation meant the difference between a pleasure and a punishment.

The only way I could salvage the CI batch was to pour it onto a foil-lined sheet pan, cut it into squares once (further) congealed, pan-fry them until golden-brown, cover with a cloud of additional grated cheese, and broil them. If I have to give something the Full Nacho Treatment to make it palatable, Kimball, it is not anywhere in the same galaxy as “a better way”.

So it pains me to have to do this, Chris, but I’m going to have to give you the same cold shoulder I gave Alton when he let me down. There are some corners you can’t and shouldn’t cut. My departed ancestors, whose ranks now include my beloved grandmother, are very disappointed in you and your lackey, who apparently doesn’t know the difference between polenta and library paste. I want you both to go to the corner and meditate on your shameful conduct, and don’t come back out until you’ve adequately atoned.

I am not even going to share the CI recipe, because I refuse to perpetuate that atrocity. Instead, I’m going to give Madhur’s, with my full, empirically-backed stamp of approval. There’s nothing remotely shameful about this one.

In terms of what to do with polenta, while a bowl of really good soft polenta is fabulously comforting all by itself, my current favorite topping is garlicky sauteed broccoli rabe and a fried egg. The crunchy, punchy greens against the unctuousness of the yolk and on top of the creaminess of the polenta is just about perfection, which is why what CI did to the poor unoffending cornmeal is such a travesty.

Oven-Baked Almost-No-Stir Polenta
(Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian)
Serves 2

3 3/4 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup coarse-ground yellow cornmeal (polenta)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, plus more for greasing
2 ounces Parmegiano Reggiano, grated
Freshly-cracked pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 F, and thoroughly butter a lidded casserole approximately 8 inches across and 4 inches deep.

In a bowl, mix the cornmeal with 1 1/2 cups of the water.

Bring the rest of the water to a boil in a large saucepan. Salt the water, then stir the cornmeal mixture and pour it slowly into the boiling water, stirring as you go. Return to a boil, still stirring, until it thickens, which will happen almost instantly.

Immediately pour the polenta into the buttered dish, cover, and bake for 50 minutes.

Stir in the butter, cheese and pepper. Serve immediately with sauce or toppings of choice, or pour into a foil-lined baking sheet for cutting into shapes and grilling or pan-frying later.

Notes:

The recipe can be doubled or tripled, or scaled even further up, as much as your needs and your casserole capacity can take.

If you want super-rich polenta, you can swap milk for half of the water.

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How I Spent the Snowpocalypse

Thanks to the copious and rapid descent of white stuff from the sky, I, along with much of the Mid-Atlantic region, was the beneficiary of an unexpected weekend in the middle of the week. I did mention before that there is an unhappy coincidental tendency for there to be the worst winter in decades shortly after I move somewhere, didn’t I? Yeah, sorry about that, population of the greater East Coast. No promises, but it’s usually a one-shot and the curse lifts the following year.

So anyway, what did I do with my snow days, you ask? Well, like a good little bee, I actually did some work that could be done from home, and which needed doing lest deadlines back up unpleasantly when I got back to the office. I also — I won’t lie — did plenty of slothing around on the couch, with my laptop, a warm blanket, and a huge cup of tea.

Since we have recently killed off the cable TV, thanks to the largely craptacular state of programming nowadays and with the cheering encouragement of a certain family member, I have been catching up on a lot of older material via Netflix, Hulu and DVDs, and getting re-acquainted with some old favorites. High up on that list is a tragic casualty of the writer’s strike and the generally out-of-step-with-mine tastes of the American viewing public, a delightful little confection called Pushing Daisies, which, if you aren’t familiar with it, you must go out and rent right now. It had everything I love: whimsy, intelligence, cute dogs, fantastic art design, random musical numbers, a soupcon of darkness, a whole lot of snark, and, last but decidedly not least, yummy-looking desserts.

The lead character being the owner of a shop irreverently named The Pie Hole, there was a whole lot of pie on the show. When I watched it the first go-around, I was too busy and harried to indulge the pie cravings it always engendered. It’s a different story on re-watching, since my acquisition of the entire series on DVD has coincided with a lot of stuck-indoors time. There was one particular pie that I had most wanted to try re-creating, and it occurred to me as I was lounging around, watching snow fall faster and faster, that I had everything I needed to finally try it, including the time. So I got off the couch and did it, and I had a lot of fun in the process.

The facts were these: a pear pie, with Gruyere cheese baked into the crust. As I love both pears and cheese, this sounded like nothing but win. Fortuitously, I had a bit of Gruyere left from my last visit to my delightfully surly favorite cheese monger, who gives major discounts on a rotating variety of cheeses if you buy more than a pound at a time. I had also recently tried out a recipe from Rick Bayless for freeform tarts, which had just the kind of sturdy dough that would stand up to this kind of wild experimentation. The only compromise I had to make was mixing apples in with the pears, because I didn’t have quite enough to keep it pure.

Are the results refined and elegant? Heck no. Just take a good look:

They are rustic to the extreme, the way they spread and flatten and get speckled with gold from the toasted cheese. Absolutely no beauty contests are going to be won by these tarts. However, and much more importantly, they are both tasty and intriguing, with juicy, lightly spiced fruit surrounded by a crumbly, melting, rich dough that would, with a bit more salt and a much heftier hand with the Gruyere, make a really good cheese straw.

These tarts are basically a re-engineered cheese and fruit course, which makes them ideal for those who only grudgingly accept dessert. There is no sugar in the crust, and very little sweetener in the filling. While the baking tarts filled the house with the scent of fondue, they’re not aggressively cheesy in flavor, especially after they’ve cooled to room temperature, at which point they just hint at cheese.

I think it would be very interesting to play some more with this idea — maybe rosemary and parmesan with just apple or cheddar with cranberries. I might even get really daring with the chemistry and see what goat cheese or brie would do in place of the cream cheese, maybe with sour cherries.

First, though, I intend to test out this idea of individual “cup pies” made in muffin tins, with honey baked into the crust. Yum!

Pear and Apple Tarts with Gruyere Crust
(Extremely loosely adapted from Rustic Cajeta Apple Tarts in Rick Bayless’s Mexico: One Plate at a Time)
Makes 6 tarts

For the pastry:

1 1/3 cups (6 ounces) all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 1/2 ounces cream cheese
1 1/2 ounces Gruyere, grated
1 1/2 teaspoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons ice water

For the filling:

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 Honeycrisp or other crisp-tangy apples
3 ripe but still firm Comice or Anjou pears
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
Juice of half a lemon

Cut the butter and cream cheese into small cubes and place in the freezer for 15 minutes.

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt for the pastry in a food processor and pulse several times to mix. Add the very cold butter, cream cheese and Gruyere and pulse a few more times, until no pieces of butter larger than a pea remain. Sprinkle the vinegar and ice water over the mixture and pulse briefly until the dough just starts to come together in moist-looking large crumbs that hold together when pressed between your fingers. Tilt the dough out onto a large piece of plastic wrap or a quart-sized zip top bag, seal tightly, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Peel and core the apples and pears, and slice into sixteen wedges each. Melt the 3 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat and add the apple wedges. Cook, stirring frequently, until all the apples are browning at the edges. Add the pears, maple syrup and cinnamon and continue cooking until the fruit are tender but still holding together. Turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Cool the filling to room temperature.

Once the dough has chilled and the filling has cooled, divide the pastry into six equal pieces and squish each section into a ball. On a floured work surface, roll out each ball to a rough circle around the six inches in diameter.

Set the first circle of pastry onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Pile one sixth of the fruit in the center of the circle, leaving behind the juice. Make sure at least an inch of dough is left clear around the fruit. Fold the pastry over the filling, pleating as you go, and leaving some fruit exposed in the middle. Repeat the process for the remaining circles, leaving 2 inches of space between each tart. Put the sheet into the freezer for 15-20 minutes, while the oven is heating.

Heat the oven to 400 F.

Bake the tarts, straight from the freezer, 25-30 minutes, until golden brown. Serve warm or just at room temperature.

Notes:

Although they’ll keep for about a day, I think these are best when recently made. If they’ve been sitting overnight, try reheating them in the oven to crisp the dough back up.

I think the dough is just a tiny bit too rich, so next time, I’ll cut back the butter in the pastry by four tablespoons and up the Gruyere to three ounces, plus extra for sprinkling on top, as they did on the show. This time, I was necessarily limited to the 1 1/2 ounces I had left after we made a frittata for breakfast, and obviously I wasn’t able to pop out and buy more!

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In Lieu of Sunday Baking

I think I’ve made clear my feelings about New Year’s rituals, particularly the odious habit of encouraging the making of doomed-to-failure resolutions. Without doing any such thing, I can still understand the impulse to consciously dial things back for the next couple of weeks, just to balance your system back out after all the holiday crapulence. That’s always how I feel come January 2nd, which is why our first homemade meal on coming home from our travels was a very simple, gentle and nurturing soup of mushrooms and barley.

His Lordship and I both come from food-loving families and cultural traditions, so you can well imagine the levels of excess that were reached during the ten days we were among them for the holidays. At several points, one or both of us swore we were going to fast for a week from the minute we got on the plane. On top of that, we came home to temperatures that can be described with sincerity as arctic. It was (and still is) painfully freezing, with the kind of windchill-enhanced lows that suck all the moisture from every inch of exposed skin the minute you step out the door and make your lungs hurt with the very first breath you take.

This soup is easy to pull together from a mostly-bare cupboard, and will do your overloaded digestive system and your chilled limbs good. It should also serve as a competent place-holder until I put up a new lentil recipe, in keeping with the one start-of-the-year tradition I seem to have established.

Mushroom Barley Soup
Serves 4 as a main course, or 6 as a first course

1/4 ounce dried porcini mushrooms, reconstituted in 1 cup boiling water
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small yellow onion, diced
3 ribs celery, diced
2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced in thin half-moons
8 ounces button mushrooms, quartered and sliced
1 cup pearl barley
5 cups vegetable stock
1 rind from a smallish piece of parmesan cheese
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat and add the onion, celery and carrots, plus a pinch of salt, and cook until the vegetables begin to wilt. Lift the porcini out of their soaking liquid and roughly chop, reserving the liquid. Add the porcini and button mushrooms and continue cooking until everything begins to caramelize. Add the barley to the mixture and cook for several more minutes to toast it.

Deglaze the pan with the porcini soaking liquid, thoroughly scraping up the brown bits from the bottom. Add the stock, parmesan rind, thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then cover the pot and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Cook until the barley is tender, 30-45 minutes.

Taste and correct for salt and pepper as needed. Discard the bay leaf and parmesan rind before serving the soup.

Notes:

The barley will continue soaking up liquid in the fridge, so you will probably have to add a bit of hot water to the leftovers before reheating the next day.

The cheese rind might seem a strange choice, but it adds depth of flavor and makes full use out of a pricey ingredient.

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A Slightly Different Take on Holiday Goodies

Every year, I participate in a Secret Santa exchange. Every year before this one, I have sent my giftee whichever cookies are in that year’s repertoire, but this year there was a hitch: I drew a giftee who can’t have sweets.

What to do? Simple enough: switch to crackers. I hadn’t made them before because I’ve always considered crackers to be a quick convenience, to be bought for having with cheese or butter and jam when a full meal isn’t called for. With cookie energy that needed repurposing, though, I went scavenging through my cookbooks for non-sugary equivalents that would demonstrate the same degree of care and cheer that I’d like to think my holiday cookies show. Knowing that the recipient likes cheese, I concentrated my search on cheese crackers, and got exceptionally lucky on the very first go.

Now, I will grant you that these cheddar crackers, spiked with chipotle and given extra depth with some whole wheat flour, don’t look all that exciting. The first one or two may not even seem very exciting. Tasty, crispy, and finally a little bit zippy, yes, but exciting? Except…

Except that you will rapidly find yourself compulsively popping one after another until half the batch is gone, because the heat is seductively cumulative and the crunch is thoroughly addictive. If you’re looking for snacks to go along with your New Year’s Eve cocktails, you can’t go wrong with this grown-up version of the goldfish crackers children devour with similarly insatiable greed.

I’m delighted the challenge could be met so easily. I think these crackers are every bit as special as a holiday cookie, and I’m pleased to report that my Secret Santa giftee thought so too!

Spicy Cheddar Crackers
(Adapted from Cheddar Cheese Crackers in Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads)
Makes around four dozen teeny nibbles

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon chipotle chile powder
1 1/2 ounces very sharp Cheddar cheese, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water
1/2 teaspoon molasses
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Additional room-temperature water as needed

Whisk together all the dry ingredients until the chipotle is evenly distributed, then place in the bowl of a food processor. Add the cheese cubes and pulse until finely ground.

Stir the boiling water, molasses and butter together in a glass measuring cup until the butter has melted. With the processor running, pour the mixture through the feed tube. If the dough doesn’t come together, add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Once the dough forms a ball, process for an additional 20 seconds to knead. Tip the ball onto a sheet of plastic wrap, form into a flat disk, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 400F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Divide dough into four equal pieces. Leaving the other three wrapped while you work, shape the first piece into a cylinder and then flatten it out on a work surface. Roll out to a rectangle 14-18 inches long and around 6 inches wide, and 1/16 inch thick. Fold into thirds, turn a quarter-turn, and roll back out to a rectangle 1/16 inch thick. Transfer to one-half of one of the prepared baking sheets, and repeat the process with a second piece of dough, setting it on the sheet beside the first.

Dock each sheet of dough thoroughly with a fork, then use a pizza cutter or sharp knife to trim any scraggly edges in order to get a neat rectangle. Cut each sheet lengthwise into quarters, then divide each crosswise into an even number of small inch-long squares or rectangles. Sprinkle with the additional salt.

Bake until well browned and crisp, 10-12 minutes depending on the thickness of the dough. Place the sheet on a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the final two pieces of dough.

The crackers will theoretically stay fresh for weeks in an airtight container, but I really wouldn’t plan on them lasting out a single week.

Notes:

It occurred to me as I was rolling out the third of the four pieces that this dough is more than resilient enough to stand up to the pasta machine, which would make the rolling out much, much faster.

Should you be so inspired, you could find tiny little fish-shaped cookie cutters and make your very own goldfish for grown-ups.

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Easter Pie for Christmas

In keeping with my not-quite-there-yet attitude toward the holidays this year, there is one food that I’ve been craving since my little outburst of decorating two weekends ago. As it happens, it’s a holiday food, yes — but the wrong holiday.

This savory pie filled with spinach, ricotta and parmesan and seasoned with nutmeg is not traditionally a Christmas food. It’s an Easter food, which is why the Italian name for it, Torta Pasqualina, means “Easter Pie”. When I was growing up, we did have it for Easter, but I loved it so much that my mother could be persuaded to make it at other times of the year, and now that I’m a grown-up, I can make it for myself at Christmastime if I want to.

The catch is that it had been so long since I’d watched Mom make it that I pretty much forgot how, and would you believe that scouring through every single Italian cookbook I have, including the supposed bible of Italian cooking, did not turn up a recipe quite like what I was looking for? Oh, there were plenty of pies made with ricotta and greens, but either the dough was wrong (puff pastry? I don’t think so. Sweet pastafrolla? Even worse!) or the filling wasn’t right (prosciutto is definitely out and chard is nice but not what I was looking for here).

In the end, I had to do a lot of remixing, combining of elements, and filling in my own blanks to come up with a recipe closer to what I remembered. It’s not quite 100% there, and I will probably have to consult with Mom to figure out where the ratios were a little off, but it’s really darn close.

If you’ve never had this pie, imagine something a little like Greek spanikopita, except milder and eggier and denser. At least for me, it’s an incredibly comforting flavor, plus it’s green! Green is Christmassy, right? It’s also better cold than fresh out of the oven and will keep for days in the fridge, which makes it an excellent option if you want to make it ahead and devote most of your holiday cooking energy to fussy rolled-out cookies or wassail or what have you.

Torta Pasqualina, or Italian Spinach and Ricotta Pie
Serves 8-10

For pastry:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) salted butter, cut into 32 pieces
4 tablespoons non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon water

For filling:
2 12-ounce bags frozen spinach
1 16-ounce container part-skim ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano
2 teaspoons each salt and freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
4 large eggs, beaten

Place the butter and shortening in the freezer for 10-15 minutes to chill thoroughly.

Place dry ingredients in the food processor bowl and pulse several times to combine. Add the butter and shortening and pulse again until sandy, 12-15 times. Beat the water into the eggs and add to the processor, and process until the dough starts to form a ball around the blade. Divide the dough into two pieces, one comprising two-thirds of the dough. Form each piece into a flat disk, wrap tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Defrost the spinach in the microwave, then squeeze bone-dry in a colander or a dish towel. Place in a large bowl and stir in the cheeses, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Taste the filling and correct the seasonings as necessary; it should be slightly over-seasoned since it will be eaten cold. Stir in the eggs. Set aside.

Set the rack at the lower-middle position and heat oven to 350F.

Roll the larger piece of dough into a circle large enough to line a 9-inch springform pan. Tuck the pastry into the pan, letting the excess hang over the sides. Spread the filling onto the pastry, leveling and smoothing the top. Roll out the second piece of dough and set over the filling. Trim the excess, tuck the edges under, and crimp. Cut an X in the center and pull back the corners to leave a vent for the filling as it cooks.

Bake the pie for 60-70 minutes, until the pastry is golden-brown and the filling that peeks through the opening in the crust looks dry and set. Cool completely before eating, and refrigerate any leftovers.

Notes:

I used salted butter because I’m hoarding the unsalted for holiday cookie baking, but if you only have unsalted around, add 1 teaspoon salt to the dry ingredients.

Using lower-fat ricotta is not only fine but even preferable here, since the full-fat kind can make this unpleasantly rich in combination with the eggy pastry.

Many versions of this pie crack additional whole eggs into the filling, which bake to a hard-boiled consistency and make for a pretty presentation when the pie is cut open. If you want to try this, use a big soup spoon to create 4-5 evenly-spaced deep indentations in the filling once you’ve spread it inside the pastry, and carefully crack an egg into each well. Cover the pie with the second layer of pastry and proceed as instructed.

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Merci, Maman

I have been madly in love with Jacques Pepin’s mother, and more importantly with her reckless ingenuity, ever since I read The Apprentice.  I immediately knew I’d have to try her every-known-rule-breaking cheese souffle, and it was everything I had hoped and more.  I have made all kinds of variations on it since, and it has become a favorite dinner with a simple salad. Naturally, it’s a perfect brunch dish as well.

It’s flatter than a traditional souffle and just a smidge heavier, somewhere between a traditional souffle and a frittata, but it’s so beautifully, perfectly eyes-closed easy and no-compromises delicious that nothing whatsoever is lost.  For all its luxuriousness, it’s also quite a recession-friendly dish, since eggs are cheap and while it’s amazing with imported Gruyere, it’s also great with less exalted domestic cheeses.

It’s the most sublime way of using up all kinds of leftovers, too.  Previous incarnations have included pepper jack with green onion, and aged gouda with cremini mushrooms sauteed in Marsala.

Cheese and Asparagus Souffle
(adapted from Maman’s Cheese Souffle, in Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice)
Serves 4-6

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the dish
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
7 large eggs, well beaten
2 1/2 cups (approximately 6 ounces) grated cheese, preferably Gruyere
1 bunch fresh asparagus, roasted or steamed

Butter a 6-cup gratin dish and set aside.

In a saucepan, melt the 6 tablespoons butter over medium heat, then add flour and whisk over the heat until fully absorbed and starting to simmer. Whisk in the milk, and continue stirring until the sauce is thick and smooth and comes to a boil, 1-2 minutes.

Pour into a large bowl and allow to cool for 10 minutes.  In the meantime, preheat the oven to 400F.

When the sauce has cooled, fold in the eggs and cheese. Slice the lower stalks of the asparagus thinly and stir into the egg mixture, reserving the tips for garnish.

Pour the mixture into the buttered dish and bake until puffy and well browned on top, 30-40 minutes.  Serve immediately, garnished with the reserved asparagus tips and accompanied by a simply dressed green salad.

The deflated leftovers are delicious cold or reheated the next day.

Notes:

The original recipe called for five extra-large eggs, but the time I mistakenly made it with an extra egg, I preferred the additional lightness.  Since I  have to make a special point of buying extra-large but always have large on hand, I’ve scaled the recipe for the equivalent of six extra-large eggs.

I had milder Madrigal instead of Gruyere on hand, so I substituted Parmesan for the last half-cup to add sharpness.  Do the same if you’re using standard American swiss or cheddar.

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The Twice-Baked, Cheesy Wages of Sin

Parmesan-Cheddar Biscotti with Nigella Seeds

“That’s the spirit, George. If nothing else works, then a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

– Blackadder Goes Forth

You could call me persistent.  If you’re feeling charitable, that is; what I really am is stubborn.  The surest way to get me not to do something is to command me to do it.  Conversely, when I choose to do something, I so loathe admitting failure that I will keep banging my head against the wall in question until I succeed or drive myself and everyone else crazy, and quite possibly both.  It’s a family trait.

I mention this to provide context for my insistence on spending the last two nights in a row baking savory cheese biscotti until past midnight.  There are so many other productive things I could have been doing, things more directly pertinent to the fact that we’re moving 3000 miles away in three weeks, but no, it’s I’m going to get this right, dammit.

It started with a recipe for almond and cheese savory biscotti that I had pulled off the package of yerba mate tea bags and stuck on the refrigerator.  I really liked the idea of a cheesy biscotti, and on Monday night I decided to finally translate the recipe into English and try a batch, hopes high, only to have them dashed.  Bzzt! No, I’m sorry. Thank you for playing.

They sucked, actually.  They were way too eggy and stretchy, had no actual cheese flavor to speak of and little of any flavor besides eggs, and the almonds just didn’t work, structurally or tastewise.  I threw out the recipe, relegated this batch to dog treats, which the Monster is ecstatic about, and insisted on trying again.  Since all but a few of my cookbooks have already been packed up, I was going to have to find a new recipe on the interwebs instead.  Much Googling later, I found this recipe, which had all the features I was looking for: extra fat for a shorter, more tender dough; a much higher proportion of cheese, considerably more seasonings, and no distracting nuts.  I made a few more tweaks to better fit the mental picture I had developed and use up more pantry items.

I originally thought about flavoring them with caraway, in a re-creation of the yummy cheddar and caraway cheese straw I had as a breakfast appetizer in Pike Place Market in June, but then I recalled the jar of nigella seeds I’ve had sitting around forever.  They were another no-idea-why-I-bought-it impulse snatch, committed during some past trip to the Penzeys boutique. (It’s a good thing it’s way out in the burbs, because I can’t make it out of there without spending less than $50 and giving the poshly-groomed sales ladies a coronary by cross-sampling their entire chile section.)  If you don’t do much Indian cooking, you’re probably familiar with nigella seeds only from their use in Russian rye bread.  They have a very similar flavor profile to caraway seeds — pungent, resinous, faintly oniony — and I thought they would go well with cheese for the same reasons caraway does.

The cheese ended up being half extra-sharp Canadian white cheddar and half Parmeggiano Reggiano, because those were the dry cheeses I had in my cheese drawer.  Where the original recipe uses wine, I had wanted to use up the dregs of a bottle of sherry, but it ended up not being enough, so I supplemented with brandy as the closest match.

I could tell immediately that this was more like it, since the dough was easy to shape into two loaves for the initial baking.  While baking, it filled the kitchen with the cheesy-winey smell of fondue, and that can never be a bad thing.  The loaves came out a perfect golden brown, and when I cut into them, they had a nice tight but holey structure, threaded with strands of cheese and an even distribution of wedge-shaped black nigella specks.  The still-warm end bits I tested before the refrigeration step had a good strong seedy flavor and a soft, rich texture.

Proto-Biscotti

The twice-baked slices were exactly what I was hoping for the first time: crisp and light, cheesy but not oily, with a nice contrasting bite from the nigella seeds.  Now I’m really curious about what a gruyere and blue cheese with brandy variation would be like, or a dry aged gouda and Belgian beer.  I’m also tempted to swap some of the oil and cheese for the tapenade I have in the fridge, coupled with herbes de provence.

In addition to achieving vindication, I used half the jar of nigella seeds, all of our sherry, more of the olive oil, and half our store of cheese, the other half of which went into mac & cheese for dinner tonight.  I also managed to pack up half the kitchen while I was in there anyway for these and the Sunday baking.

See?  Sometimes pig-headedness can pay off.

Cheddar-Parmesan Biscotti with Nigella Seeds
(Adapted from Savory Cheese Biscotti at Su Good Sweets, originally adapted from A Passion for Baking by Marcie Goldman)
Makes approximately 6 dozen thin biscotti

1/2 cup olive oil (extra-virgin not necessary)
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
4 teaspoons nigella seeds (aka kalonji or charnushka) or caraway seeds
1/4 cup each sherry or brandy, or 1/2 cup of either one
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus additional flour as needed
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup grated extra-sharp cheddar
1 cup grated Parmeggiano Reggiano

Preheat oven to 350 F, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a stand mixer, blend oil, eggs, sugar, salt, pepper, garlic powder and nigella seeds.  Add the sherry and/or brandy and mix well.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and baking soda.  Add the cheese and toss together lightly with your fingers until the cheese is evenly distributed and coated with the flour.

Add the flour and cheese mixture to the liquid ingredients and mix on low speed until well combined.  If necessary, add just enough additional flour to get a dough that holds together but still looks moist and soft; do not add so much that it turns dry and crumbly.

Divide dough in half and shape into two parallel logs, around 12 inches long by 3 inches across, with an even, flat top.  Bake 40-45 minutes, until the loaves are golden on the top and bottom and slightly cracked.

Cool the loaves to room temperature, then wrap each well in foil and refrigerate for one hour.

Return oven to 300 F.  Remove one loaf from the refrigerator and slice on the diagonal into thin slices, not more than 1/4 inch thick.  Set the slices flat on a parchment-lined sheet and bake until crisp, approximately 30 minutes, flipping halfway through baking.  Repeat with the second log.

Cool completely on the sheets, then store in airtight containers to preserve crispness.

Notes:

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: do not be tempted to make biscotti as thick as the ones you get with your latte. It’s much better to risk making them too thin than to err on the side of wider, resulting in biscotti that take forever to dry all the way through and, once dry, are so hard as to risk jaw disclocation.

I might increase the salt to 1 1/2 teaspoons next time.  If I had used only parmesan, it would not have been necessary, but a half-cheddar mix could use just that bit more salt to set off the cheese flavor.

I’m really not sure the refrigeration step is necessary.  The original recipe insisted that it would make sure the biscotti stayed intact while slicing, but the two thin edge slices I took off as a test while they were still warm came off just fine, and a delicate enough hand while transfering to the baking sheet should really take care of the rest.  I might try it without that step next time to see if it changes the texture at all or if the room-temperature slices are just too delicate to handle.

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Kitchen-sinkakopita

More fun with phyllo

While I’m normally a language fascist and many flee the sight of my red pen, I can’t resist smartass neologizing no matter how linguistically improper I know it to be.  I’m sure someone in Greece has put a contract on my head for the insult I just perpetrated, but I’m a hopeless reprobate and I will quite certainly sin again.

Besides, albeit with apologies to the entire Grecophonic community, I can’t think of a better shorthand for this vegetable-bin-emptying yet tasty riff on spanakopita.

As I only used one of the two 8-oz sleeves of phyllo when I made the vegetable pie and mid-week baklava at the beginning of July, the other was still sitting in my refrigerator, staring reprovingly back at me from the second shelf every time I opened the door.  Since the plan this weekend was for a quiet Saturday night at home to start the always-delightful process of packing up for a move, I had time to make individual pockets instead of a big pie, and decided to cram as much as possible into each little pocket.

Since my fridge contained a rapidly-wilting bunch of chard, a container of cremini mushrooms, and a tub of feta, that was the starting point.  On a previous run of “stuff everything in a phyllo wrapper”, I had potatoes to use up and chose to grate them for better integration with the other ingredients instead of precooking and dicing them.  The grated potatoes added body to the filling and balanced the saltiness of the feta while melting nicely into the background, and as I had a few little potatoes in the cupboard, I used those too.

A few of these pockets make a nice first course, and the cooled leftovers are a great midnight snack.  You could make a large pie from the same filling and cut it into big squares as a main course, but as long as I have time, I always prefer the self-contained triangles because of the better dough-to-filling ratio and enhanced crispness.

The observant eye might notice that there are sesame seeds in the recipe but none in the picture.  That would be because this batch was all gone by the time my schedule opened up for a photo shoot, but these pictures were still in my archive from that prior run in which I discovered the virtues of grated potatoes.  While this small an amount of seeds adds a negligible bit of additional flavor, it really helps with the visual impact and is worth doing if you have a big tub of sesame seeds lying around, as I do.

Chard, Potato, Mushroom and Feta Phyllo Triangles
Makes approximately 24 (your phyllo and filling volume may vary)

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
8 oz cremini mushrooms, diced
1 large bunch chard, tops finely sliced and stems diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon each dried oregano and dill
3 small potatoes, grated
Salt and pepper
10 oz feta

8 oz phyllo pastry sheets, defrosted
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
1/4 cup sesame seeds

Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat, and add the onions with a good pinch of salt.  Once the onions have softened, add the mushrooms and cook until they release their liquid.  Add the greens, garlic, herbs, and salt and pepper to taste to the pan and saute until the stems are tender.  Finally, stir in the potatoes, cover the pan, and cook until the potatoes have lost their raw texture.

Remove from the heat, crumble in the feta, and correct the salt and pepper as needed.  Set aside to cool briefly.

Preheat oven to 375, and line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone baking mats.

Remove one sheet from the roll of phyllo, covering the remaining dough well to prevent it from drying out.  Brush one half of the sheet lengthwise with butter, folding in half lengthwise to create one long, narrow strip.  Brush the top of the sheet with butter again.  At the bottom edge, place two heaping spoonfuls of the filling, then take the bottom right corner of the pastry and fold over the filling to touch the left edge and form a triangle.  Flip the triangle over repeatedly to create a sealed pocket.  (If you’ve never done this before, see this diagram for the folding technique).  Lay the sealed triangle on a baking sheet, and repeat with the remaining phyllo and filling.  Since they won’t really rise, the pockets can be placed quite close together, although not touching.

When all the dough has been used up, brush the tops of the triangles with the remaining butter and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.  Bake for 20 minutes, or until the phyllo is deep gold and crisp.

These are best after you’ve allowed them to cool just a bit.  The cold leftovers will lose their crispness, but will still be delicious and will travel well.

Notes:

The first time I made this greens-mushrooms-potatoes configuration, I used arugula and was pleased with the peppery bite.

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