Tahini, Chickpeas and Pita Bread on the Shopping List

Because I am SO making this, as soon as I can. A green salad with feta and tomatoes and you can call it Dinner.
Cook's Illustrated Restaurant-Style Hummus

Soup: The Series

I thought it might be fun to do a weekly installment on soup. Planning to make a soup each week will give me the opportunity to try some new recipes that are piling up and revisit some favorites too. It all started with this yoga class I signed up for. Dinner is tough on yoga night (Wed.) I want to eat early so I don't have to come home and eat late after class. Dear husband doesn't like to eat the minute he gets home from work. Soup proved to be the solution. I can make the soup in the daytime and eat when I want. Dear husband can reheat the soup when he's ready for dinner (and supplement with cheese as he is known to do.)

This is a great one to start with. It's a little different tasting than regular chicken soup, but still comforting and familiar. I like that it uses leftover chicken because we regularly have that around our house. Saffron is the only unusual ingredient and I really think you could leave it out. The lemon and thyme flavors are what stand out in this soup. The lemon is the best part. It gives it sort of a Meditteranean taste. And I think it would be wonderful if you weren't feeling so good. I halved this entire recipe because I only had a cup of leftover chicken and because I was trying it for the first time. Also I used fresh corn, cut from the cob, and I simmered it in the broth for the last 10 minutes with the vegetables. I will definitely make this one again and I might consider adding another veg, like spinach toward the end. I highly recommend this one. It's even better the next day.

Golden Chicken, Corn & Orzo Soup

by Jennifer Armentrout

To learn more, read the article:Quick & Delicious: Weeknight Comfort Food
Serves five to six as a main course.

ingredients

2 Tbs. olive oil

2 large ribs celery, finely diced

1 medium onion, finely diced

1 pinch saffron threads

1/2 tsp. dried thyme

2 qt. homemade or low-salt chicken broth

2 cups finely diced or shredded cooked chicken (such as leftover roast chicken)

1/2 cup orzo

1 cup frozen corn

1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

3 Tbs. fresh lemon juice; more to taste

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

how to make

tip: You might wonder why the orzo is cooked separately. There are two reasons. If you boiled the orzo directly in the soup, the starch from the pasta would cloud the soup broth, and the orzo would also suck up too much of the soup broth as it cooked. Boiling the pasta separately solves both of these problems.

Bring a medium saucepan of well-salted water to a boil over high heat. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large soup pot over medium heat. Add the celery, onion, saffron, and thyme. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables start to soften, 5 to 6 minutes. Add the broth and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce the heat to a simmer, add the chicken and cook until the vegetables are tender, about 15 minutes. While the soup simmers, cook the orzo in the boiling salted water until tender, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain.

Add the drained orzo, corn, and parsley to the soup and cook just until the corn is heated through, about 2 minutes. Stir in the lemon juice and season to taste with salt, pepper, and more lemon juice, if needed.

From Fine Cooking 74, pp. 90c

Garlic Shrimp

This recipe is from the current issue of Fine Cooking. I think the official name is Garlic Shrimp with Lemon Zest and Basil. It's from an article on garlic where the different facets of garlic flavor are explored. As you know, garlic can be mellow, like when it is roasted, or sharp when used raw. The garlic shrimp is supposed to be an example of a dish with sharp garlic flavor and is intended to be a starter course. I think an appetizer should be incredibly savory. One delicious bite to make your wine taste even better. Unfortunately, this dish really fell short. I think it was too oily and the oil didn't take on as much garlic flavor as I would have liked (although I was careful to slowly toast the garlic in it.) The lemon and basil didn't really help to brighten things either.

To prepare it, you make a garlic oil (then separate the garlic chips from the oil) and bake the shrimp in the flavored oil. The cooked shrimp are then garnished with lemon zest, basil and the garlic chips. I was expecting a more intense "scampi-like" garlic flavor but it just was too heavy.

On the plus side, I think cooking a bunch of shrimp this way is great to do for a party. It is easy to have everything prepped and you can just put it together and pop it in the oven. I just would adjust the amount of oil to only barely coat the shrimp and I might increase the garlic, add some chopped parsley and figure out a way to get more lemon flavor in there. Like perhaps, cooking the lemon zest in the oil to infuse it. And it is hard to resist adding some breadcrumbs. In my opinion, breadcrumbs make everything taste better. All I know for sure is there is a better way.

Oh, and did you notice I made them with the spinach catalan. Raisins are so good in savory dishes!

A Mom Moment

Some time ago, Fine Cooking (issue 56) did an article on Chocolate Chip cookies. They played around with the Toll House Cookie recipe to adjust for a personal preference of crispy or chewy cookies. The ingredients are the same, but some changes in the amount of butter and flour and also the temperature of the butter and eggs were made. Ever since, I have made the recipe for the Crispy cookies instead of the Toll House recipe. I just think it tastes better than the original. But last night I decided to make the Chewy Chocolate Chip cookie recipe because I know the boys like a chewier cookie (and I like trying new things.) While they were out playing after dinner, I quickly put the batch of cookies together. And just as they were just coming in, the first tray of cookies was coming out of the oven. I had freshly baked cookies to offer as dessert. Warm cookies will stop them in their tracks everytime. It was a triumphant Mom moment.

The cookies themselves was good. But they didn't turn out as chewy as I expected. As you can see in the picture they are still a little flat and crispy (and I made an effort to keep the dough cold.) Maybe if I made them bigger they would have stayed thicker, but I followed the directions exactly since it was my first time with the recipe. They are a little softer than my regular ones. But if you like the big monster soft cookies, these aren't it. (That recipe - I'm still looking for.) These are however very tasty. They have more butter than the original Toll House and notice how much vanilla - 3 times as much! Good stuff.

Chewy Chocolate-Chip Cookies

by Bonnie Jean Gorder-Hinchey

To learn more, read the article: Baking Chocolate-Chip Cookies Two Ways

I use butter and eggs right out of the refrigerator so the dough stays cool and the cookies maintain their thickness during baking; I also use ungreased cookie sheets. To keep the cookies soft and chewy, store them in an airtight container along with a slice of bread.

Yields about 9 dozen 2-1/2-inch cookies.

ingredients

10-3/4 oz. (1-1/3 cups) unsalted butter, cold

1-1/2 cups packed light brown-sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs, cold

1 Tbs. pure vanilla extract

17 oz. (3-3/4 cups) unbleached all-purpose flour

1-1/4 tsp. table salt

1 tsp. baking soda

12 oz. semisweet chocolate chips

how to make

Arrange oven racks in the upper and middle positions of the oven. Heat the oven to 375°F.
Using a mixer fitted with a paddle, beat together the butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar, starting on low speed and gradually working your way up to high speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 3 min. once you reach high speed. Scrape the bowl and beater. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat on low until blended. Beat on high until light and fluffy, about 1 min. Scrape the bowl and beater.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Add this to the butter mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until just blended; the dough will be stiff. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Drop rounded measuring teaspoons of dough about 2 inches apart onto two ungreased baking sheets. Refrigerate any unused dough. Bake until the bottoms are golden brown, 8 to 10 min., rotating the sheets halfway through for even results. Remove the sheets from the oven, let sit for 3 to 5 min., and then transfer the cookies with a spatula to a wire rack to cool completely. Let the baking sheets cool completely before baking the remaining dough.

From Fine Cooking 56, pp. 55

Halibut Season

We've been eating halibut once or twice a week now that it is fresh in the market. To me there's no fish more delightful to cook. It is easy and takes to many different flavors. Many people (not me) object to salmon because it tastes too strong or oily. Halibut has none of that. It is just pure white fish, slightly dense but still tender. It is a lot like cod and can be interchanged with cod in most recipes. But I think cod is more flaky, more watery and looser in texture.

So here's a couple new recipes I've tried. The first is Spanish-Style Halibut from the My Recipes website. The only thing that defines this as "spanish" is the use of smoked paprika to season the fish. If you've never tried smoked paprika, I would recommend buying some because it's a very nice spice for seasoning meat or fish. It has all the smoke flavor, but a little less heat than chipotle powder. You could easily do chipotle powder in this recipe though. I think it would work just as well.

I liked this recipe because 1. Both the fish and the spinach are cooked in one pan, minimizing mess 2. There is bacon in the recipe and still it is light. 3. It is very adaptable, I could see using this spice on shrimp and making the exact same dish. When I make it again, I'm going to add raisins to the spinach. That is a classic combo called Spinach Catalan - a very spanish way of doing spinach. We have it this way all the time. I was lucky to find Deborah Madison's recipe on-line.

You wont find a link for the next recipe because it is from the current issue of Fine Cooking. But it is called Sear-Roasted Cod with Horseradish Aioli and Lemon Breadcrumbs, but I made it with halibut. I had to laugh when I read through this recipe because the preparation is similar to what I've been doing with fish for a while now - that is, spreading a flavored mayo on the fish to adhere some toasted, seasoned breadcrumbs. I adapted it from an Oven-Fried Chicken article from FC84. It is a great way to get crunchy fish with no frying. However, this horseradish aioli is better than any flavored mayo that I've put together so far. Besides spreading it on the fish, we put a little dollop on our plates to dip the fish in because it was so tasty. It would be a great sauce for a crab cake or to dip a fried shrimp into (arteries, be damned!) - kind of like a remoulade. There's also a little parsley salad that you make. That I would probably skip next time, maybe instead, I'd just add some chopped parsley to the crumbs.

As a side for the halibut, I made a nice asparagus dish from Barefoot Contessa Cooks Family Style. It's just roasted asparagus on which you grate a little parmesan on at the end. It went nicely with the flavors of the fish and is very seasonal too.

Happy Halibut Season, Happy Spring!

Whole Wheat Flour Need Not Apply

I'm not much of a cake person. I would pick pie or a creamy custard over cake any day. And because I don't really get excited about cake, I've never put any energy into learning how to make a decent one. However, in the course of things, I have made a few cakes from scratch, mostly as a vehicle for some fruit or another.

But my dear son requested a homemade cake for his birthday. A birthday cake, a real, live, layer cake with frosting in between and specifically NO FRUIT of any kind involved. He wanted yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

So, I figured, this was an opportunity to stretch my culinary wings and learn how to make the classic birthday cake topper, buttercream. I set to work. First with reading. I started with CooksTalk, of course, and the folks over there sent me over to Real Baking with Rose. That's Rose, Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of The Cake Bible, and Supreme Goddess of All Things Baked. The woman is a baker extraordinaire, but she's also a scientist. Her recipes are measured, tested and thought out to the extreme. And she's very generous about sharing her knowledge. She will answer just about anyone's question on the website. I don't own her book. But kind friends at CooksTalk suggested her recipe for Classic Eggwhite Chocolate Buttercream and I found her recipe for Rose's Favorite Yellow Layer Cake on her website. Next came the shopping: butter, more butter, chocolate, more chocolate, pasteurized eggwhites. (Since I planned to serve this to children, other people's children, I couldn't be too careful.)


As I mentioned, I have made cakes from scratch before. So I was more worried about the buttercream than the cake. I decided to give the recipe a test run by making cupcakes for my son's actual b-day. I decided to make Amy Sedaris' vanilla cupcake recipe from this incredible website. And to make the chocolate eggwhite buttercream (recipe in link above) to frost them.



I had a great time making this buttercream. I was venturing into unknown territory and it was exciting. I carefully chopped and melted my chocolate. I whipped my eggwhites and prayed that what I thought was stiff peaks is what RLB thought was stiff peaks. And then I, ever so patiently, added a pound of butter, by the tablespoon, to the eggwhites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Whew! that took a long time. All the while, I didn't believe that those eggwhites could possibly absorb all that butter. At one point the mixture looked curdled. But the wise, all-knowing RLB talked me down from the ledge with her instruction on how to smooth it out. After all the butter was added, I got to mix in the melted chocolate and I was rewarded with an ethereal-ly light, but incredibly chocolatey buttercream. It was so smooth, creamy and velvety in my mouth, I couldn't believe it. And it was very easy to work with.

To make a long story short, since I had success with the cupcakes, I felt confident making the cake for the actual party day. The second time through, the buttercream recipe came out just as well. The cake itself was good too, but hardly noticeable because the buttercream was so delicious. Sure I could use some lessons on how to properly frost a cake (I know I should have saved some white icing and used a different tip to do the lettering,) but to 11-yr old boys (and one sweet one in particular; it was just fine.

Orange Roughy Revisited

Here's what the Lime-scented Orange Roughy looks like before it is cooked. I posted about it before and it didn't look appealing at all. But just look at how gorgeous it looks before it steams. After being in the oven for 20 minutes, all the bright green loses its oomph. But it still tastes delicious. This is one of my favorite recipes from Cooking Light.

Clean Out the Fridge Frittata

Sometimes you don't really have a specific meal in mind for dinner but you know you have food in the fridge. A bit of a red pepper, half a bag of spinach, cheese - that kind of thing. You just have to use your ingenuity to come up with something. A frittata, which is like an open-faced skillet omelette, works wonders for using up odds and ends and makes an elegant dinner.

I read somewhere, I think it was in a Pam Anderson book, that you can have an omelette for breakfast with OJ, but a frittata you can have in the evening with a glass of white wine. I like omelettes for dinner too, but I wouldn't think of drinking wine with one. But with a frittata, I could see it; it is almost like a crustless quiche. And it has italian roots, so a wine pairing is natural.

I found, when looking up recipes, that most call for 8 to 10 eggs. A dinner for 4 in a large skillet. I needed a mini frittata. Googling gave me this recipe for Frittata for two, but I've got to admit that I only used proportions here and I didn't follow the exact cooking instructions. I did end up running it under the broiler but for far less than 2 minutes. When it is golden brown underneath and set all the way through, you can run it under the broiler to brown up the top. Then cut it in wedges and serve. My frittata included spinach, red bell pepper, onion, a small amount of ham, and cheddar cheese. But there is an infinite amount of combinations you could do. I was tempted to add asparagus, but I decided to use that on a side salad with blood oranges. Curiously, citrus and asparagus go good together. This was a really tasty, healthy dinner. By the way, the frittata doesn't have to be hot, it can be served room temp too. The taste of the different veggies comes through more when it is not super hot.

Jalapeno-Baked Fish a la Rick Bayless

This recipe is from Rick Bayless' Mexican Everyday. I've had this book for a while but haven't cooked much from it. I don't know why because Rick Bayless' recipes are always very reliable and tasty. But this day I was looking for something to do with some mahi mahi and came up with this recipe after a suggestion from one of the CooksTalk people. Well, I don't have enough good words to say about this simple delicious preparation, Jalapeno-baked Fish with Roasted tomatoes and Potatoes. It is easy to put together and it includes a side dish in the preparation. (That scores major points with me.) Plus there's some heat involved which makes my dear husband happy. Mahi mahi is a fish that can stand up nicely to a spicy prep, but you could use other fish too. There's a few extra dishes involved because you have to use a food processor to put together the salsa under which the fish and potatoes are baked. But you aren't using any pans, so I think it balances out. Baking a dish is always an easy dinner. You put it together and into the oven it goes. No trouble until the timer goes off and you can relax and think about a side dish or salad. I served spinach alongside ours and I think it made a great accompaniment. We were surprised at how good the potatoes were. I wasn't sure I'd like potatoes in a tomatoey sauce, but it works!

Adventures with Whole Wheat

I've been playing around with whole wheat pastry flour quite a bit lately. Just substituting small amounts to different things that I regularly make to see how it affects taste and texture. I make biscuits often for my boys and I always feel somewhat guilty about it because, other than the fact that they are homemade, there isn't much in the way of wholesomeness to redeem them (the biscuits, not the boys.) So I decided to try them with whole wheat pastry flour. The cool thing about WWPF is that you can substitute it for white flour 1:1, which makes it easier to work with in a recipe. Of the flour called for in the recipe, I used 1/3 WWPF. I was worried that the heavier wheat might keep them from rising but they puffed up nicely. They came out more golden brown with tiny specks of brown instead of lily white but nobody noticed and of course, I didn't say anything. They slather honey or jam on them anyway so I figured I'd get away with it.

The next thing I decided to try was pie crust. I made a cherry pie using my Barefoot Contessa's Perfect Pie Crust recipe and again, substituting 1/3 ww pastry flour. Here the switch was hardly detectable at all. The only place where I could detect it was on the thick edge. It may have been little more dense but not by much. I used frozen sour cherries for the filling and used my favorite recipe from Fine Cooking for this pie.


Next up, pizza. Again I used my regular pizza dough recipe (from FC) and substituted 1/3 with wwpf. Here is where I noticed the addition. The crust was just not as crispy and crackly as I like it. There was a definite chew. Thinking about it more, it may have been the fact that I used pastry flour and not regular whole wheat. Pastry flour is not meant to develop gluten. That's why it gives you a tender flaky pastry crust. But for things like bread and pizza dough, you want the gluten strands to develop. The whole point of kneading is to develop those elastic strands. So I might try this again with just regular whole wheat. But if I'm making it for the whole family, I'm going to stick with regular flour. The boys couldn't express why but they were less enthusiastic about this pizza than normal.