Gastronome

I love my pressure cooker. Skeptics believe that you can’t make anything tasty in it, because the pressure will break down any flavouring, but that’s not exactly true: like anything else, you have to use the pressure cooker for what it is best at, and modify the plan accordingly.

One of the things the pressure cooker is best at is risotto. I love risotto, but I don’t like the constant stirring. With the right proportions of rice to liquid, you can have your risotto cooked to perfection in 4 minutes (okay 10 if you include the initial and final fussing) and you don’t have to stir except at the very end.
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I have a new cast iron ‘cocotte’ dutch oven. I blame the lack of insulation in my 1930’s era house: it encourages one to want to make long-braised stews just to keep the oven going all day.

It being the weekend, I wanted to improvise a bit and putter. I had the seed of a recipe based on about five cookbooks: First, you marinate everything the night before. In the morning, you start with some bacon, render the fat, pull it out, brown some beef, pull that out, glaze some kind of mirepoix, pull that out, go back to the meat and braise it half the time in your cooker, add the mirepoix back, and wait…

So here is what I actually did, which isn’t exactly like any of my recipes but has the parts I liked best from all of them. It’s sort of a variation on beef bourgignon.
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I’ve made paella on the stove, in my yard on the grill, and over a firepit while camping in the redwoods. I hope someday to make it in the most traditional of settings - over a beach bonfire, sand in my toes and salt in my hair. The most recent version? Over a fire in my yard on a sunny Saturday afternoon - Derrick & Melissa and I harvested the fruits of the Alemany Farmer’s market (not quite as direct as from the sea), and came back to the wabe to sabre champagne, shuck oysters, and cook up a big paella. My paella is more a method than a recipe; culled from Moro: the cookbook, Cesar, a long websurf, and the paellas I’ve tasted. Makes it perfect for a market-inpsired brunch!

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Last night Heather came over for dinner, and I pulled out a little something I created Tammy’s birthday - tacos filled with grilled seafood crusted with coriander, cumin & chipotle. (Shrimp & scallops went into the original - last night I went with shrimp & tofu.) I like to serve the tacos with a bright, tangy mango salsa & a big green salad with avocado & colorful bell peppers. Just the thing for an early evening dinner after a hot (well, for San Francisoc) pre-summer day.

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Dinner: April 11, 2006

Originally uploaded by Jenblossom.

I’ve been wanting for a very long time to make mole from scratch. Mole dishes are something I love, though my Mexican grandma did not really make them when I was growing up - I’ve only really had them in restaurants.

I recently got my hands on an ancient copy of Diana Kennedy’s The Cuisines of Mexico, and while the mole recipes in it are inspiring, and something I definitely plan to tackle in the future, I just didn’t have the time or energy to deal with that yesterday. So I decided to just go ahead and do a “quick & dirty” version - not using a recipe, just putting in the things that typically go into a mole sauce, adding layers of flavor, just to see what I could do with a few hours of prep and cooking time. The result was pretty darn tasty, and I’ve got a bunch of mole “base” left over for future use.

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Inspired by my recent move - and the first week of real hot weather down here - I wanted to make something wonderfully Southern for dinner last night. I road-tested the recipe for veggie jambalaya from the latest issue of Bust magazine (Apr/May 06, pg 32). Who knew the Bust ladies could sling such mean Cajun fare? My vegetarian husband pronounced it “a keeper” and my toddler ate quite a bit before mashing it into the carpet, which is a picky 20 month-olds equivilent of a thumbs up!
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For some reason, meat in a double crust pie is a particularly French Canadian comfort food. This is my very favourite thing to do with leftover turkey.
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Another fabulous recipe from bills open kitchen: Spicy Beef with Corriander Relish. I actually made this for the meat entree the same night I pulled off the successful chickpea stew experiment. This was also the first time I tried grilling steak indoors in a new heavy iron grill pan and the results were perfection! Between this beef recipe and the chickpea stew, Bill Granger is now batting two for two in my kitchen. (I don’t know how I’m going to break it to meriko, but she’s never getting her cookbook back…)

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*taptap* Is this thing on? It’s been a bit - I’ve been travelling and working too much of late. (Hey, at least there was some travelling in there….) But tonight, back to creating something tasty and new for the Leckman-Borogove Sunday supper! I found a package of fregole at Lucca a few weeks ago - it looks like my beloved Israeli couscous, but toasted up nice and dark. This stuff is Sardinian - and it looks like the traditional dish made with it is fully of clammy goodness. I spotted an article in my local that mentioned that the good folks over at Incanto cook it like risotto with crab; that sounded good to me. Nothing being that easy for a Leckman-Borogove supper, I put together two different fregole dishes for our dinner tonight - a crab, thyme & shallot fregole, and one with tomatoes, chantarelles, white beans, and sage. (Warning: do not try and feed to the littlest Leckman.)

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Last week, Derrick had me thinking about slow-roasted salmon (reeeaaaaallly slow). Russell’s in crunch mode at work right now - lots of dinners delivered to work, and not so many shared at home together of late. Sunday he was home for dinner, and I wanted to make him something nice but unfussy. He called for pasta. I wanted to make sure he ate something green. I puttered around the herb garden and the kitchen, and what came out was a plate of orichiette tossed with a bit of butter, fresh rosemary, chile flakes, steamed broccoli, leeks melted in butter, and fried garlicy breadcrumbs, with roasted salmon piled atop. Mission accomplished, with good results.

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