Dinner in the Yellow House

The merguez

Do normal people get food obsessions, or is this strictly the realm of food bloggers and their equally food-centric partners?  Ever since Tobias read about the North African sausage merguez in Marcus Samuelssons's The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa, he has been constantly talking about finding and eating some of it.  Several times, he's said "I really feel like having merguez for dinner tonight", despite the fact that he's never tried it.  I wouldn't have been surprised if one day he came home from work with plane tickets to Tunisia to go there and hunt down the merguez, that is how intent he was on trying it.

Today, while at the Village Butcher looking for something to put on the grill for dinner, he was delighted and I was relieved to find that they produce merguez sausage inhouse.  We bought four, assuming (correctly) that the kids wouldn't be too interested in this spicy and unusual sausage. 

Inspired by the merguez' North African roots, I rummaged through my pantry to find an old package of couscous that I bought ages ago, but keep forgetting to use.  It was actually Israeli couscous, which I prefer to normal couscous, and here is how I cooked it.

Israeli couscous with nectarines

250g Israeli couscous
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cups chicken broth
1 tsp cumin
3 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley
1/2 nectarine, chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan, then add the onion and sautee until golden.  Add the couscous and stir to coat, then add the chicken broth and the parsley and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for ten minutes.  Stir in cumin, salt and pepper and nectarine.

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I also picked a few things from the garden to go with the sausage.  Tobias put the zucchini on the grill along with the merguez, and I cooked up the beans and chard.

 

The merguez was tasty, with what Tobias called a "slow burn".  I'd be interested to try a more authentically-sourced version to see how close the Village Butcher got with their rendition.  I could have used a bit more flavour other than just heat. 

With a spicy sausage, I don't like to drink to any sort of wine where the nuances of the flavours really matter.  It's the perfect time, therefore, for a little El Torito, a tempranillo/garnacha blend that also happens to be the cheapest wine available in Canada that is actually enjoyable to drink.  I picked up this bottle at Everything Wine (more about that place soon) this week and the cashier actually did a doubletake when she saw the price, CDN$7.99.  Hoorah for El Torito!

Here is the end result: merguez and couscous with veggies and El Torito. A quick, easy, and tasty Saturday night dinner for two.  And hopefully the end of my spouse's merguez obsession.

One sauce, two dinners

Last week I made papardelle with prosciutto and peas, using this cooks.com recipe. We were celebrating a new part-time job for me so we cracked open the Castello de Banfi Poggio Alle Mura 2001 Brunello we'd been saving for a special occasion. This lusty but smooth Sangiovese really should be paired with something heartier, but I didn't want to wait anymore for it, so we opened the bottle and crossed our fingers.

We lucked out, because the wine complimented, rather than clobbered the cream sauce. A lovely match that we won't be enjoying again anytime soon, since the Brunello was a gift that is way out of our normal price range for wine.

The next night, I had nothing planned for dinner, but I did have a fresh bunch of spinach, courtesy of my SPUD harvest box. Now had I been cooking for just myself, I may have just sauteed the whole bunch with garlic and butter, tossed some nutmeg over, and called that dinner, but that's not going to cut it with my spouse and kids, so instead, I scoured the fridge for more LOs (Yellow House shorthand for leftovers) and came up with the remaining prosciutto and pea sauce and some polenta. These all seemed like likely companions and so I conceived...

Polenta with spinach, peas, prosciutto, garlic, and cream

1 bunch fresh spinach washed, dried, and chopped
3 big cloves garlic, chopped
1 T butter
enough cooked polenta to cover a 9'X9' Pyrex dish (I prefer the kind you cook yourself, but some of the stuff that comes precooked in a plastic tube would be okay. Just slice it up and arrange in the dish.)
1 cup prosciutto, peas, and cream sauce (see link above)
3T freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1. If the polenta is cold, put your Pyrex dish into the oven and turn on the oven to 300 degrees. My oven takes just under ten minutes to get to temperature, and by that time, the polenta was warmed through.
2. Melt the butter in a pan and add the garlic. Saute the garlic till golden, then add the spinach.
3. Cook the spinach, stirring occasionally, until it is nicely wilted.
4. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the cream sauce.
5. Pour the spinach mixture over the polenta, sprinkling the Parmesan over it.
6. Broil on low for 3-4 minutes, just enough to turn the Parmesan brown.

Serves 4 as an accompaniment to grilled steak or 2-3 as a standalone dinner.

Wednesday Night Small-Plate Extravaganza

Sorry about the disappearing act.  Having a sick baby has meant not much cooking and not much time for blogging for the last several days.  I did manage to sneak out and enjoy a great meal at The Little Thai Place on Monday night.  That restaurant is, I think, my current favourite take-out place in town.  Eating in is pretty good too, though the tables are a bit rickety and the atmosphere is stripmallesque.  Their green curry with eggplant, beef and coconut is amazing.  I could eat it every day. 

Time away from the kitchen got me thinking of lots of things that I've been wanting to try so last night I did a hodgepodge sort of dinner: lots of small plates, all ready at different times as I fit the preparing of them into a schedule of doing dishes, supervising homework, playing with trucks, sweeping, assisting my spouse in the backyard with a garden project he's working on, and helping my seven-year-old prepare for an upcoming Taekwon-Do rank evaluation. 

The first one is the dish I alluded to last week, the one I made with the beet cooking water.  Presenting...beet jello!

That's caviar and sour cream on top.  I was excited to try making this, and it was fun to make, but unfortunately - and this is extremely rare - I didn't actually like eating it.  The flavour was just...bleh.  It's jellied borscht, which sounds weird, but good.  It's a little better with sour cream and dill, even though I love caviar and the caviar was recommended.  My picky seven-year-old hated it, which was sad because she dug into it with such relish (thinking it was a typical sweet Jello).  My spouse liked it, making this the only food in the world that I really dislike and he likes.  It sure looks good though, no?

The next dish is just as weird, and I was just as keyed up about making it.  Presenting...crispy avocados!

These are made by dredging avocado quarters in a cornstarch/berbere mixture (and the use of berbere should tell you where I got the recipe from), then in egg whites, then frying them.  The result was...sort of okay.  Not smashing.  So far, I was zero for two in my small plates experiment. 

The next dish was not experimental in the least.  It was good old grilled peppers: predictably delicious.

I make Delia Smith's Piedmont Peppers a lot, and these were very similar in flavour, but more nibbly, because the peppers are sliced thinly then marinated.  The marinade is made of mashed up anchovies, garlic, parsley, red peppers flakes and olive oil.  The peppers should be roasted and peeled first.  And of course, they taste better the next day. 

At this point I was sick to death of small plates and needed something hearty to fill up the bellies so I whipped up some pesto chicken salad (chopped up cooked chicken, prepared mayonnaise, prepared pesto), cut open a baguette and slapped some of the salad down on it.  The photos of this do not do it justice, which just goes to show that things that look the best (see jellied borscht above) and are the fiddliest to make are not necessarily the yummiest. 

Beets and Rosé on the beach

Do you know that prior to acquiring Vegetable Love I sometimes let the beets from my SPUD harvest box go bad in the pantry?  Well it's true, I did.  This is shameful in light of the discovery of so many great beet recipes, courtesy of the great Kafka.  The first was the Red Russian Soup, which was a taste sensation of the highest degree.  The next three were made from the same bunch of beets.  One bunch of beets -- three separate dishes.  People, beets are versatile. 

So, Wednesday night we took a break from Tae Kwon-Do and decided to have a cycling picnic.  What's a cycling picnic,  you ask?  Well, a cycling picnic is a picnic which you get to by cycling.  Sounds boring, right?  Only if you've never experienced the frustration and joy that is trying to stuff all the necessary items for a picnic for four into two panniers.  Frustration when you can't find the plastic wine glasses and have to settle for glass tumblers that clank around worryingly in the bags as you ride along.  Joy when you arrive at the beach and see that nothing has spilled and the food is still in good shape.  (Though not for long; sand will get into everything, no matter how careful you are.)

The menu was a classic "Use up the SPUD box" meal.  We had to use celery, beets, potatoes and dill.  So we ate

• beet salad with celery, dill and capers (from Vegetable Love)
• beet greens with bacon, white beans and walnuts (from Vegetable Love)
• potato salad with dill and lemon (from my brain)

I thought such a meal would present Nick, our food and wine pairing guru at Mark Anthony (2560-A Sinclair Road), with a difficult challenge.  Not so!  He was totally ready for us and when I explained what we were eating, immediately cried out "Rosé!"  Okay, maybe he didn't "cry" it out, but he did seem excited, and ran to the back of the store to grab a copy of the latest Wine Spectator, where they talked about pairing beets with rosé wines. 

He wanted us to try a sparkling rose by Deinhard and indeed, we wanted to try it, but not for a beach picnic.  Not when we were going to be drinking out of the kids' milk glasses.  No, for this dinner we needed more of a workhouse (read, cheaper) rosé.  So we tried the Château Guiot Costières de Nîmes Rosé Rhone and it was great: a perfect cycling beach picnic wine to go with beets, beans and potatoes and snickerdoodles for dessert. 

The adults loved it all, the baby loved the beets and the beans and the picky seven-year-old ate just enough of the greens and beans to earn two cookies. 

Careful readers are thinking: didn't she say three dishes from beets?  Did she put beets in the potato salad too?  I did not, but I did save the cooking water from the beets and will be making something very cool with them this weekend.  Stay tuned. 

Presto Pasta Night: Addis Ababa Edition

New York one week, Ethiopia the next.  Can you tell I've got a bit of wanderlust right now?  Good thing I can satisfy it (a little, anyway) in the kitchen.  But what does pasta have to do with Addis Ababa?  Well, according to Marcus Samuelsson, Italian is the only type of foreign food you can find there.  So, he published a recipe for trout spaghetti in his wonderful book, The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa. 

I am using his book as an entree into the world of African cooking, which I want to learn in order to cook for my little sister, who lives at the base of Mt Kiliminjaro, in Tanzania.  It's a little wimpy of me to start with one of the more European-influenced recipes in the book, I know, but I can't resist anything noodly and furthermore, I'm still a little scared of injera. 

One great thing about this recipe is that it can be made fairly quickly.  The trout has to cure for a few hours, but you could prepare that and then disappear for a couple of hours, say, take in a Tae Kwon-Do class or something?  Then come back and do the rest in about thirty minutes. 

I also loved that I got to use three of the herbs I currently have growing in my garden: mint, chives and basil.  But just a little bit of basil, thank goodness, because my spouse is very protective of that plant. 

As for the berbere, you could make your own, which is probably a smart thing to do, but if you, for example, enter the spice store and realize that there is no way you can happily gad about collecting all the necessary spices with your 17-month child in tow, then don't worry, you can also get a premixed berbere.  I went to my favourite bulk store, For Good Measure, and they mixed me up a pot on the spot. 

So, without further ado, here is how I made Marcus Samuelsson's Trout Spaghetti:

Into a rectangular glass dish, put two trout fillets that you have sliced as thinly as you can manage.  Squeeze two limes over them and add as much chopped mint as you want.  Now add a tablespoon of berbere and 1/4 cup of olive oil and mix it all around.  Cover with Saran wrap and put in the fridge.  Put on your dobok and go to Tae Kwon-Do. 

Come back from Tae Kwon-Do, take your dobok off, put on some pajamas, and stir the trout bits around. 

Put on some salted water to boil.  Once it has boiled, add your spaghetti and cook for nine minutes.  Chop up an onion and put it into a frying pan with 1/4 cup olive oil, a tablespoon of berbere, and 3 tablespoons of butter.  Cook over low-medium heat for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. 

Meanwhile, string and cook some delicious fresh peas to serve alongside.  Also, get your ricotta ready.  I used storebought ricotta, but Marcus Samuellson would have you make your own fresh cheese.  If you want instructions for that, you're own your own, because I took the lazy route: stir some salt and chopped chives into a half cup or so of ricotta. 

Now, drain your spaghetti, put it back in its pot and scrape every last tasty bit of the onions and sauce into the pot and mix well to combine.  Fold in your trout bits and a couple of chopped up basil leaves.  Serve dolloped with the cheese and with some nice sweet peas alongside. 

The berbere-flavoured noodles make for a very unusual pasta.  It definitely tastes like Ethiopian-Italian fusion, which is exactly what it is, I suppose.  I will make this again soon. 

Thank you again to Ruth, the host of Presto Pasta Nights, who appears to be persisting in her South Beach Diet efforts.  What stamina!

Burgáns Albariño and Pistachio Trout

Ever since we first tried Burgáns Albariño for Wine Blogging Wednesday 20, Tobias and I have gotten regular cravings for it.  Interesting that Tobias only thought it was okay that first time, and now he's a real fan. 

Last Saturday evening we wandered down to Mark Anthony's for a bottle and stopped at Pepper's for some trout, which I thought might be a nice match.

"So, any great new recipes for me today?"  I asked Nick, our favourite wineseller and the genius behind the Tokaji and apricot bread pudding idea that is my favourite food/wine pairing to date. 

"Recipes?  Oh, I've always got recipes.  What are you thinking about having with it?"

"I've just bought some trout fillets."

"Ah, trout.  That will be good.  Here's what you should do: bread the fillets in ground up pistachios.  That would be a very nice match with the Albariño.  A little beurre blanc, mmmm."

"I've got pistachios!  That sounds great.  And beurre blanc.  Okay, I'll do it."

And here is how I did:

1 recipe of Virgin butter
2 trout fillets
1/2 cup shelled pistachios, ground fairly fine in the blender or in a coffee grinder

Smush the nuts onto both sides of the fillets then broil them about 4 inches from the broiler until they are done.  Mine took about 3 minutes a side, but you'll have to judge for yourself, depending on the thickness of your fillets.  Pour over the virgin butter.  Serve with  boiled or steamed asparagus (with a generous amount of the virgin butter poured over that as well), orzo, and Burgáns Albariño.

This is a nice easy Saturday night dinner, easily and quickly made for two, by two.  A word of caution: only attempt the "by two" part if your kitchen is large and neither of the two is suffering from pre-menstrual syndrome.  Otherwise the wine may end up being more than purely a taste sensation, and become a necessity for continued marital peace. 

And here is how I make orzo:

1T butter
1/2 cup orzo
1 cup chicken stock
1T chopped fresh basil, or 1 teaspoon dried
1T freshly grated Parmiggiano-Reggiano

Melt the butter in a saucepan.  Add the orzo and stir until all the pieces are coated with butter and go ahead and let them get a little bit brown if you like.  Now pour in the stock and turn up the heat.  Let it come to a boil then immediately turn to low and cover.  Leave for 9 minutes.  Turn off heat and stir in basil and Parmy.  If I wasn't serving this with the Virgin butter, I would add more Parmy. 

Presto Pasta Night: I ♥ NY Edition

The truth is, I've only ever been to New York once, and it was 11 years ago.  But I can love it from afar, can't I?  And one day I will love it in person again.  And when that day comes, the first thing I will love is a visit to S'mac, the macaroni and cheese restaurant.  Yes that's right, a restaurant that serves nothing but macaroni and cheese!  Only in New York. 

But since that visit is still long off, I have decided that I am going to try to recreate all of the scrumptious-sounding mac n' cheeses on the S'mac menu.  I see now that they have put up an instructional video and a recipe for their mozzarella mac n' cheese.  I didn't see that the last time I visited the website, or else I would have started my quest with that one.  Instead, I started with the one that sounded the tastiest: the manchego mac with fennel and shallots. 

Here is how I made it:

5 T butter
2 T flour
2 cups milk
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/2 onion, minced
Salt and pepper to taste
2 1/4 grated manchego cheese (available at Charelli's)
2 cups elbow macaroni
1-2 fennel bulbs, sliced
1 T olive oil
8 shallots, chopped
1/2 cup Panko bread crumbs

Put shallots and fennel in a pyrex dish with the olive oil and cook at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, or until the fennel is to desired crunchiness.  Remove from oven, lower the oven temp to 350 degrees and chop up the vegetables a bit more if desired.  Set 6 cups of water to boiling in one large pot and the butter to melting in another.  Once the butter has melted, add the flour and cook over medium heat for a minute or so while whisking.  Whisk in the milk, add the onion, paprika and bay leaf and simmer for fifteen minutes to thicken, stirring frequently.  When the water boils, add salt and macaroni and cook for eight minutes. 

After the white sauce has thickened, remove from heat, remove the bay leaf, add salt and pepper to taste, and stir in the cheese.  Keep stirring until it has all melted.  This is the most fun part of the recipe.  Drain the macaroni and add it, with the vegetables, to the the sauce, mixing well.  Now spoon the mac n' cheese into a nice blue casserole.  Non-blue casseroles are also acceptable.

Melt the remaining 3 T of butter in a small pan and add the bread crumbs.  Cook over medium heat until browned a little, mixing with a wooden spoon.  Spread breadcrumbs over mac n' cheese and cook at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes, or until bubbly. 

Serves 4 for supper, with a green salad in a plain vinaigrette and a nice crisp New Zealand sauvignon blanc (or in my case, beer and nothing). 

In the yellow house, everyone loved this, though the flavour of the manchego is pretty subtle.  Next time I would add more fennel (I used just one small bulb) and more shallots (I used six).  I am not opposed to a little Tabasco on top, but keep in mind that manchego is expensive and subtly flavoured, so if you want to taste it, go easy on the hot sauce and/or ketchup. 

Thanks again to the wonderful, stalwart Ruth, who is undertaking the amazing task of hosting Presto Pasta Night while she is in the throes of the South Beach Diet, Phase 1!  Good luck Ruth!

Dinner for the Spring Equinox

Ah to be in Venice.  If I were, I might be eating risi e bisi today, on the first day of spring, although March 20th does seem awfully early for peas, even in Italy.  Up here in British Columbia, we won't be shelling peas from the garden for many months.  So instead of a dinner welcoming spring, we had one that was more of an adieu to winter: Nigella's old-fashioned beef casserole and double potato mash. 

I wanted to use what I had, and not go down to the grocery store, so I only followed her recipes loosely, using IPA instead of stout, lemon instead of orange, much less meat than is called for, a leek, and some shitaakes.  I didn't measure the potatoes at all, just used the three sweet potatoes I had leftover from the last SPUD order.  Everything turned out delicious.  I mean, how can you cook beef in beer over a low flame for three hours and not have it be delicious, right? 

This could very well have been our last truly wintry dinner this year, and although I am glad that winter is over, I'm going to miss the food.  I'm sure I'll be craving some slow-cooked beef long before it gets cold again. 

New Recipe Number 18: Nigella's Double Potato Mash (recipe linked above)

New Recipe Number 19: Nigella's Old-Fashioned Beef Casserole (recipe linked above)

The Perfect Sunday Dinner (and Dessert)

This past Sunday, I was in a celebratory mood and what better reason to celebrate than our oven getting fixed?  Turns out that it hasn't been working properly for years and I never noticed, because I had never had a gas oven before and simply put its poor performance down to the fact that it wasn't electric.  Now, thanks to a visit from Paul at JBD Appliance, my darling comes to temperature in 5-10 minutes and never needs to re-ignite midway through baking something.  O wondrous oven! 

I decided that we would have a proper Sunday dinner, with candles and wine and skirts on the girls and nice shirts on the boys.  Also, we would have dinner early so M'hijo, my 13-month-old, could sit with us the whole time.  We typically eat late in the yellow house and M'hijo is often already abed by the time we manage to sit down for supper. 

But candles on the table or no, I didn't really feel like killing myself over dinner, and didn't want to go grocery shopping, and furthermore, the real star of the day was Madam Oven, and I didn't want to show her up by doing a lot of fancy prepwork.  Better that she do the majority of the work for this meal so that we could truly appreciate her talents.  So, roast chicken and veggies it was. 

New Recipes 5-7

Serendipity

Last week I was trying to think of a new and exciting way to use up a head of cauliflower that I got in my SPUD box and oh, by the way, it would be nice to use that ginger before it gets mushy too, when bam! I magically happened upon Ruth's recipe for stir-fried cauliflower with ginger and peas.  Okay, "happened upon" is not quite accurate, since Once Upon a Feast is a regular read of mine.  But still, such great luck that Ruth posted the recipe precisely when she did.