On love and butter

Food thoughts by an insomniac

I'm having one of those toss in the bed unable to sleep nights. Sometimes on such nights, a little uninhibited knoshing does the trick and makes me sufficiently sleepy. I open the refrigerator and take little bits of cheese, spoonfuls of yogurt, and slowly shovel these into my mouth. I open boxes of cereal and often without even bothering to put the content into a bowl, munch away on the dry grains. After a few minutes my tummy feels full and I happily return to bed. Sometimes I leave behind crumbs and open cereal boxes, which serve as evidence of my late-night kitchen escapades. Other times I wipe the kitchen clean and it's as if nothing ever happened. Never mind that there's hardly any cereal left for the morning. It's all worth it and tastes much better at midnight anyways.

In any case, I've wasted too much time already. I'm off to the kitchen.

First apple pie of the season! and Joyce Maynard

I hadn't made a pie in ages but got a sudden urge on Friday evening after a long and tiring week. And so I ran to the grocery store and bought a pound of apples before my pie baking energy escaped.

In addition to being inspired to bake by the crispness of fall and my need to do something that doesn't involve staring at a computer screen, I had recently stumbled upon Joyce Maynard's website, where I discovered an entry on pie making. Apparently, Joyce Maynard is not only a writer and story teller, but also a pie maker. She teaches her late mother's pie making style and boasts, "I'm guessing the number of my pie students has probably reached the quadruple digits now, and I'm not about to stop. I have been known to travel with a rolling pin." I love Joyce Maynard's pie making spirit, the fact that her teaching of the craft serves a sort of homage to her mother, and that she uses the process of pie making as a metaphor for life. (For example, in her pie making video, Joyce Maynard says that she cuts that apples into uneven pieces since this is the way life is; uneven and unpredictable.)

Apparently, in her recently published book, Labor Day, one of the main characters teachers another to make a pie:

" We were his ticket across state lines. That was the story. I’d watched enough episodes of Magnum P.I.. to get it. Only then Frank turned around to face us, and he was holding a knife.These peaches, he said, looking even more serious than before. If we don’t put them to use soon, they’re goners. What did you have in mind? my mother said. There was a sound to her voice I could not remember ever hearing. She was laughing, not the way a person does if you tell them a joke, but more how it is when they’re just in a good mood and feeling happy. I’m going to make us a peach pie, like my grandmother did it, he said. First thing, he needed a couple of bowls. One to make the crust. One for the filling. Frank peeled the peaches. I cut them up. Filling is easy, Frank said. What I want to talk about is crust.You could tell, the way he reached for his bowl, that this man had made more than a few pies in his life."

The passage continues and provides detailed instructions for making a pie crust. The recipe calls for 3 cups of flour (for a double crust pie), 1 stick of butter, about an equivalent amount of shortening, salt and sugar.

After reading this I was inspired to try Joyce's recipe for pie crust making myself. While I have experimented with using butter, and shortening, separately in pie crusts, I hadn't ever before tried to use both in roughly equivalent amounts.

All in all I was pleased with the pie that I made. However, I had some trouble rolling out the dough. My theory is that this problem results from the fact that I took the oft-cited rule of pie crust making that one should never add too much water to an extreme. As a result, the raw pie crust dough was dry and therefore crumbly and difficult to roll. When baked the pie crust was tasty but remained a bit soggy. After this experiment using shortening + butter I decided that I prefer an all-butter crust, to a butter/shortening one, because of the far superior flavor that the butter provides. The apple filling that I made was quite delicious and consisted of ~ 1 pound of apples, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, sugar, lemon juice, rum, and corn starch.

After this pie making experience I was left with renewed energy for pie making, and with ideas for future pies. Stay tuned for more!

Olla Podrida

This perfect fall recipe was inspired by a dish that I had during my trip last December to the northern coast of Spain. As you can imagine, we tried many delicious foods while there (god, the food of Spain is just amazing!), but one dish, in particular, a bean and sausage stew that we had in the town of Burgos, was especially memorable. In fact, I've wanted to recreate that meal ever since our trip but it's only now, 9 or so months later, that I mustered up the energy and confidence to try.



After a quick internet search I decided that the dish that I remembered is something that's known as Olla Podrida. The so-called "authentic" recipe calls for blood sausage, which is really hard to come by here in the States. For my stew, I ended up using an Italian Sausage that we bought from a local farmer here in Carrboro--the use of this type of meat in the context of this stew is probably completely atypical and some might even skoff and roll their eyes at the thought of my having done such a thing. But my excuse is that this was meat that I trusted and that I could find relatively easily. So there.



Truth be told I ended up tweaking the recipe a lot--so much so that I don't know that
it's even appropriate that I titled this post "Olla Podrida." Nevertheless the outcome was really tasty. It made our apartment smell amazing and G. already bought the ingredients so that I can make the stew again!! And yes, it was so good that I wanted to record the recipe on this blog, before I forget what I did. And so here goes. This is a really flexible, loosey-goosey recipe (at least in my humble opinion), so enjoy and don't follow the instructions too closely!


Olla Podrida--North Carolina version

1 pound of Italian Sausage
1 pound of dried white beans, such as Great Northern Beans
1 onion, coarsely chopped
5 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons paprika
pinch of saffron
1 can of tomato paste
salt to taste
2-3 bay leaves
4 tablespoons of olive oil
red wine for cooking

1. First, cook the beans, in water and with the bay leaves. I did this in our slow cooker, but use whatever method suits you. I recommend taking them off the stove/out of the slow cooker when the beans remain al dente. This way you can simmer them with the other ingredients and make sure that the beans don't fall apart.

2.When the beans are nearly finished cooking, saute in a dutch oven or large sauce pan the sausage in 2-4 tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat until it is browned and fragrant.

3. Add the onions to the sausage and saute for a 1-2 minutes.

4. Add the garlic and saute with the onion and sausage for a minute.

5. Add the beans, about a cup and a half of the water that they cooked in, the spices, tomato paste, and a nice chug of red wine to the sauce pan. Add salt to taste. Give this a nice mix.

6. Now allow the ingredients to simmer on medium low to medium heat for about an hour or so (or longer, if you have the time).

Serve with crusty bread and a glass of red wine.

Welcoming fall

Well hello there, long time no see. My last post was ages ago, in February. Since that time we survived a long, cold winter (especially for North Carolina) and an equally brutal summer. And already it is time to celebrate the arrival of fall. I always become nostalgic during this time. The smells of the season, the falling leaves, they make me sentimental and ever so aware of the cycles of life. The colors and the smells that appear during this time make these things tolerable and beautiful and so any sadness is engulfed by beauty and hope.

But enough of the sentimentality. Fall is also a great time to begin to think about food and cooking again. Because it's now that the days become shorter, the temperatures begin to drop in the evenings, and I want nothing more than to smell spicy warm bubbles emanating from my kitchen. And it is with these thoughts that I resolve to cook more this season and to post more! Because I realized that this blog is a wonderful way for me to catalog the flavors and events of the seasons. Well I guess I missed most of the winter and all of the summer of 2010. Hopefully I will manage to preserve some of fall 2010. And with that I leave you with some food images from these past few months. Until next time!

Valentines Day Oreos

It all started innocently enough. We were invited to a Valentine's party and I wanted to make cookies. I remembered the homemade oreo cookie that I had tried (and loved) on a previous occasion and thought this the perfect excuse to try the recipe again. Of course I could not resist the idea of making the cookies heart-shaped, but the cheap-skate in me did not permit me to run out and buy a heart shaped cookie cutter for this one occasion. So I searched my house high and low for something that could stand in as a cookie cutter until I discovered an old plastic heart-shaped container that had previously held m&ms. PERFECT. Never mind that this heart-shape was completely enormous and would cut equally enormous chunks of dough that would become even more ridiculously large after baking.




Well, after first batch entered the oven I realized just how bad of an idea this really was. The cookies had trouble holding themselves together, and they grew so large while baking that some of the dough expanded beyond the cookie sheet, fell on an oven coil and started a mini fire that I had to extinguish with baking soda. So much for heart-shaped oreos.

After that fiasco I followed the recipe and took teaspoon sized scoops of dough, shaped these into small balls, and then flattened them to produce more traditional, round cookies. I was still not beyond dying the oreo filling pink in honor of the holiday and so my red food coloring was put to good use.

In any case I'm posting this recipe because the cookies are delicious (esp. when baked the appropriate size). They taste like store-bought oreos ... but oh so much better!


And as you can see, spreading the filling on these cookies is lots of fun:

The recipe can be found on the smitten kitchen blog.

Caramelized pear tart on a snow day

When I heard news of the impending snow storm I did what every respectable southerner does in the wake of such weather reports: I bee-lined it to the grocery store.

And I bought pears. Thank goodness we were already well stocked with milk because my grocery trip would have been pretty disappointing otherwise, given the lack thereof in the already ravaged dairy section.



I really needed those pears though, because there is no better day on which to bake a pie or tart than one on which you are snowed in and feeling cozy and longing for the smells of warm fruit and butter baking in the oven.


I'd been lusting after the recipe for this pear tart for some time--since I saw it on the fantastic pie devoted nothing-in-the-house blog. And let me tell you, this recipe did not disappoint. In fact, I have now declared this my favorite fruit pie/tart recipe of all time. It involves first caramelizing the pears in a cast-iron skillet on the stove top, followed by baking it upside down style, with the crust on top in the oven, and then flipping the whole thing to make the tart face right-side-up.



I really can't express how good this recipe is. The crust does not suffer from the soggy problem that plagues many other fruit pies, and much of the crust ends up with a caramel layer which is so delicious, I do not even have the words.



An added perk to all this is that the cooking process is very beautiful (or at least I found it so--this may be evidenced by the perhaps excessive number of pictures that I've included in this post). But really, starting with the pears themselves, which I think are a particularly nice looking fruit, even when they do have some bruising and spotting on them, and moving on to the process of watching the butter brown and mix with the sugar and then bubble around the pears as they caramelize...this is definitely a picture-worthy process!




CARAMELIZED UPSIDE-DOWN PEAR TART,

from the nothing-in-the house blog,
which she says she found in the Gourmet cookbook:

4 large firm yet ripe Bosc pears
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Recipe for one half of a pie crust (i.e. the bottom half)

Peel, halve, and core pears. Heat butter in a 9- to 10-inch cast-iron skillet over moderate heat until foam subsides, then stir in sugar (sugar will not be dissolved). Arrange pears, cut sides up, in skillet with wide parts facing out. Sprinkle pears with cinnamon and cook undisturbed, until sugar turns a deep golden caramel. (This can take 15- 25 minutes, depending on pears, skillets, and stove.) Cool pears completely in skillet.

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 425°F.

Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface with a floured rolling pin into a 12-inch round and trim to a 9 1/2- to 10 1/2-inch round. Arrange pastry over caramelized pears, tucking edge around pears inside rim of skillet. Bake tart until pastry is golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool 5 minutes.

Invert a rimmed serving plate (slightly larger than skillet) over skillet and, using pot holders to hold skillet and plate tightly together, invert tart onto plate. Serve tart warm with vanilla whipped cream.