Not That I Died

Heya, so here is the situation. I haven't updated in forever. I still cook, in fact I've been cooking a lot more lately. I actually made something really exciting lately that I would have loved to share with you, but unfortunately I didn't take any pictures (it was Tortilla-less Cabbage Leaf Enchiladas).

The previous name of this blog was "Cooked and Eaten in a Portland Basement". I still live in Portland but not in a basement. I've moved into a nice SE Portland house with a lovely gas stove (which works) and other wonders such as a dishwasher (nice). I have procured two cats which I share the care and feeding of with my lovely domestic partner. She is an amazing cook, and a sometime food blogger as well.

Last night I went to this:

Beast Vegetarian Wine Dinner

LOCAL WILD MUSHROOM SOUP
CRÈME FRAICHE & PIMENT D’ESPELETTE

STUFFED PETITE COURGETTES
KENS BREAD, SWEET CORN & FRESH SHELL BEANS
ROASTED SWEET PEPPER & HEIRLOOM TOMATO SAUCE

HAND CUT SPINACH PASTA FILLED
WITH DELICATA SQUASH & FRESH RICOTTA
SHAVED PARMESAN & FRIED HERBS

BELGIAN ENDIVE WITH MARS-VENUS GRAPES
BROWN BUTTER & AGED BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE

~ SELECTION OF STEVE’S CHEESE~
CRACKED BLACK PEPPER AND FLEUR DE SEL SHORTBREAD
OREGON WILDFLOWER HONEY
POACHED APRICOTS & FRIED MARCONA ALMONDS

BRULÈED FIG AND HONEY MASCARPONE TARTLETTE
AGED FIG BALSAMIC

It was really amazing and really expensive. I didn't get any pictures of that either. Basically at this point, you are looking at a failed blog. I think there is a chance I will get back to it, but for the moment, the most I can tell you is: I'm still alive. I still cook. I still eat. And you should too.

Chicken Leek Stroganoff

Yum! Tonight was a tasty dish adapted from a recipe by Jamie Oliver: Chicken Leek Stroganoff. This is my second time making it, but I didn't change much.

The recipe in a nutshell: Cook some rice, simmer some leeks, mushrooms, and chicken in a light cream sauce, dish the sauce over the rice, garnish and enjoy! It's a "19 minute" recipe which invariably takes me longer for some reason, but it's still pretty quick and easy.

I'll put the ingredients I used, you can cheap out if you like.

Chicken and Leek Stroganoff

Kosher Salt
Ground Black Pepper
3 large garlic cloves
1 cup jasmine rice
1 large organic leek
2 big handfuls crimini mushrooms
2 free-range organic boneless skinless chicken breasts
organic extra virgin olive oil
1/2 stick organic unsalted butter
2 glasses of (organic? local?) white wine
1 small glass of water (might as well get it ready) This will affect the final thickness of the sauce; err on the side of less water
1 bunch fresh organic parsley
1 heaping cup organic plain yogurt
1 organic lemon

Cook the rice*. I used a rice cooker. I cheat. Jamie uses packets. He cheats too.

Peel and dice the garlic cloves. Slice the ends off the leek off and save for future stock-making. Slice the rest of the leek twice lengthwise and then slice widthwise about 25 times. You want small leek pieces here. Slice the mushrooms into flat mushroom-looking discs and keep separate. Slice the chicken into fingers and keep separate as well.

If you keep them on the same cutting board it makes it harder to add them one by one... though technically it's okay to keep the mushrooms and chicken together. But is it sanitary?

Hm? Oh, the recipe! Right! Sorry, got lost there for a minute.

Put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil along with the butter and garlic in a large frying pan on high heat. Once the butter is mostly melted or starts to sizzle, add the leek and one glass of wine. Do something else with the other glass of wine, maybe drink it? Add the small glass of water and some salt and pepper, stir once lightly, then partially cover it. Give that five minutes while you "finely chop the parsley, stalks and all". Reserve part of the parsley (chopped or otherwise) for garnish.

Add the chicken, most of the parsley, the yogurt, and the mushrooms to the leeks. Bring to a boil, stirring, then reduce heat to a simmer for 10 minutes or until sauce has thickened to your liking. Squeeze half a lemon's juice into the stroganoff just before serving. Add further salt, pepper, or other seasoning if so desired.

Plate by dishing stroganoff over a serving of rice and garnishing with parsley and lemon wedges. Serve with any remaining white wine.

I also added a dab of yogurt for the sake of photography.

Magical Pizza

My oven's computer crashed, leaving me oven-less for months. I've done some things with the toaster oven in the interim, but now it looks like a new (new as in Craigslist, not new as in new) oven is on the horizon. Not wanting to make my landlord waste his money buying me a new oven that may not work either (such are the perils of Craigslist), I decided to give the oven one last try last night.

The pizza was a bit of a cheat, but here is the recipe just the same:

Asparagus pizza and pasta
1 ball of fresh pizza dough
1 large organic tomato
1 small organic heirloom tomato (stripey)
3 cloves organic garlic
1 large organic yellow onion
Organic extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
Italian spices (rosemary, thyme, oregano, etc or premixed)
1 lb. fresh pasta (I used capellini)
Fresh mozzarella to taste
Hard flavorful cheese such as romano to taste
1 bunch asparagus

Place a pizza stone* on the bottom rack of your oven. Remove other racks if possible. Preheat the oven to its highest temperature (mine goes up to 550 F).
Roll pizza dough into a perfect smooth ball with your hands and leave it to sit on the counter for 10 minutes, preferably wrapped in plastic wrap.

*If you don't have a pizza stone, your pizza may end up a big soggy on the bottom. This is what happened to me. It was tasty despite this.

Peel and roughly chop onion. Peel and finely chop garlic cloves. Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in the bottom of a heavy pan on medium high heat until flicked water sputters. Add garlic and push around the pan for one minute, then add the onion along with a large pinch of salt. Stir onions a few times until they are well oiled, then chop tomato and asparagus, keeping heirloom tomato separate.

Once onions are starting to get soft and tasty, add chopped asparagus to pan, stir, and reduce heat to medium. Put a pot of water on to boil, with a teaspoon of salt stirred in. As if that wasn't enough, flatten the pizza dough on a floured pizza pan (or y'know, cookie sheet) and flour the top of the dough. Stir asparagus until fork tender, add italian spices to taste, then reduce heat to keep warm.

Drizzle olive oil on the pizza, and layer with heirloom tomato, s reasonable amount of the cooked asparagus-onion mixture, and fresh mozzarella (if in small balls, it's fine to leave them intact), reserving mozzarella liquid if any. Slide pizza into super hot oven on top of pizza stone, and check after 10 minutes and then every 2 minutes for a nice, brown, tasty crust.

Meanwhile, add chopped tomato to the remaining asparagus mixture (should be most of what you started with), and stir to incorporate. Grate hard cheese over the top of the mixture, and add mozzarella liquid if so desired. If liquid added, raise heat and stir to reduce while pasta boils. Boil pasta to desired doneness or just below, then drain. If undercooked slightly, you can add it to the "sauce" of asparagus et al to finish.

When complete, combine pasta and sauce if not already combined, and remove pizza from oven to rest for five minutes. Add additional salt if needed.

The pasta turned out really well, the sauce combined well with the cilantro capellini I picked up. The pizza dough I used had sort of a sourdough taste, which added a delicious flavor to the other simple ingredients. I didn't use a pizza stone, but I think this falls under the cardinal rule of pizza, in that there is no such thing as a bad pizza, even if it's soggy. The crust around the edge was perfect, and that makes up for having to eat the rest with a fork.



The magic is that the oven worked at all, though it took a ridiculous amount of time to preheat and made a pretty egregious noise while doing so. I'm going to hold out for a new one.

Oh no, what happened to all my posts??

Some things have changed in my recent absence; notably I now live in a completely different Portland basement than the one I posted from previously. Also, I'm now Cooking With Gas ™.

I have eaten in the interim and taken many pictures, so I'll be occasionally offering looks back into the Lost Months ™, but meanwhile here is what I cooked and ate (in a Portland Basement) last night.

Crumby Chicken

(this is how I cooked it, see below for how I would do it differently next time)

• 2 large organic boneless skinless chicken breasts


• 4 sprigs of italian flat-leaf parsley


• 1 peeled garlic clove


• 2 tablespoons of butter


• 1 pinch kosher salt


• 1 pinch ground black pepper


• 1 lemon


• 1/2 cup cracker or bread crumbs


• 2 tablespoons plain flour


• 1 large egg


• olive oil

Zest ze lemon, and food process the zest, garlic, parsley, butter, salt, pepper, and crumbs until the mixture is very fine. Put it on a plate so that you'll be able to dunk chicken in it.

The parsley in my crumb mixture left me with very green crumbs.

Whisk the egg by itself in a bowl suitable for dunking chicken breasts in.
Put the flour on another plate.
Cut some slits in the bottom of the chicken breasts, put them in some plastic (plastic bag, plastic wrap, whatever you've got), then take your girlfriend's prized cast iron skillet and whack the chicken breasts repeatedly.

She won't find out. If you don't have a girlfriend's cast iron skillet to use, a mallet would be okay, or some other big heavy flat implement suitable for chicken flattening. Flat chicken cooks faster and more evenly, as you may know.

Extract the breasts from the plastic, and coat them first in flour, then in egg, then in crumbs. You'll want them fully coated for best results.

Crank the oven way up, put the chicken breasts on a metal cooking dish (cast iron skillet perhaps?), drizzle some olive oil over the top of them, and put them in for 15 minutes.

This is exactly 15 minutes. The black crust is a good thing. Er... did I mention I now use a gas stove?
Imagine that it's really tasty, and the picture starts to look better.
Serve with lemon wedges (if you have any lemons... like say the one you zested) and a green side dish of your choice. I chose a green salad with a vinaigrette.

Results: Tasty. You could also fry the chicken at 5 minutes a side in some olive oil on the stove top, which would probably be even tastier, but more messy. Next time I do this recipe I will probably marinade the chicken somehow first, use more garlic, and less butter (the crumbs were more like a paste). I used bread crumbs here, but the recipe I was going from actually suggested crumbled cream crackers; what's a cream cracker anyhow?

Rosti (n) /roh-stee/ - anything shredded and fried in a portland basement

This falls under tasty and somewhat messy. It follows the rule that "even if you don't generally like something, it probably tastes good fried." If you like celeriac and radishes, so much the better.

Celeriac and Radish Rostis

Ingredients:

1 celeriac bulb (sub 3 large potatoes if you prefer)
1 bunch radishes (approximately 250g)
1 small bunch carrots (approximately 300g)

4 tbsp all-purpose flour
salt / pepper to taste
1 tbsp sprinkleable thyme
1 tbsp finely diced (or granulated) garlic

4 individual tbsp olive oil

Shred carrots, radish bulbs, and peeled celeriac bulb into a good sized bowl. Squeeze excess moisture out of mixture (use the bottom of another bowl, or squeeze handfuls of the mixture over the sink. Trust me, this helps). Mix flour and spices into the... mix. Take a picture.

Did you take your picture yet? Here's mine. Yours doesn't need to include a dish brush.

Prep a plate to receive the rostis by layering some paper towels on it. Add one tablespoon of the olive oil to a large, flat pan over medium-high heat. Create smallish patties of the shredded mixture and gingerly place them in the oil once the oil is warm (shimmery). Use a spatula or similar device or you may get injured and I may get sued. That would suck.

Take another picture.

Cook patties for approximately 3 minutes on each side, waiting until underside is brown and crispy before flipping. If you nudge one of the rostis and it moves easily in one piece, it is probably ready to flip.

These ones aren't quite ready to flip.


Here are some flipped rostis. Note the lovely brown color, like McDonald's hasbrowns. If they look like Denny's hashbrowns, you probably should have waited. Actually these ones have some burnt spots... maybe I waited too long? Nah, I like burnt spots.

Scoop out the rostis once they are finished on both sides and place them on the paper towels. Remove any excess bits if you are worried about them scorching, add more olive oil and more rostis, and repeat until the shredded mixture runs out.

Blot and serve. Serving suggestions: Some sort of creamy topping, such as sour cream or a creamy aoili, would be great. They are similar to potato pancakes, so if you have a preferred serving style for those, it should apply. The carrots will make them mildly sweet, maybe like sweet potato pancakes.

I had mine with an avocado aioli mixture, similar to the dipping sauce I use when eating artichokes, except with avocado.

The recipe is add ingredients to a bowl and mix. The ingredients are one avocado, two tablespoons of mayonaisse, a splash of soy sauce, a splash of balsamic vinegar, a few grinds of black pepper, a smidge of spicy mustard, and a tablespoon of diced garlic.


Mush up and enjoy.

This color indicates I added too much soy sauce and balsamic vinegar. The mayonaisse may have also been extraneous given the creaminess of the avocado. If you try it, let me know what you think.

Sauteed Mixed Greens, Rice Pilaf with Scallops, and Roasted Beets with Onions

Tonight I made a large dinner, fairly simply, over the course of an hour. I used scallops, rice, olive oil, butter, cream, flour, salt, pepper, beets, chard, kale, rosemary, leeks, onions, and garlic, most in somewhat random amounts. This was the end result:


And boy is it good.

For the beets, remove the beet greens and set them aside, then place the beets in a foil packet with chopped onions (they'll be quite tender so take that into account when chopping), garlic, and whatever spices you like, as well as some olive oil. I stuck a healthy swatch of fresh rosemary in the packet this time. Then cook the packet in the oven at 450 degrees for 40 minutes. Sizzle sizzle.

For Pilaf, simply saute some chopped onion in a saute pan with a lid, then brown some rice lightly with them. I used long grain jasmine rice; any long grain rice will do, some wild rice added in isn't a bad thing either. About 1/4 onion per cup of rice, once the rice is lightly browned add two cups of broth for each cup of rice, and bring to an active boil. Once boiling, place the lid on the pan and reduce the heat to simmer (medium-low to medium heat). Check after 10 minutes (a glass lid is quite helpful here), the pilaf is finished when all moisture has been absorbed into the rice. I garnished mine with chopped leeks, chives also work for this.

The greens are a simple saute with a roue. Heat oil in a pan until water flicked into the pan sizzles and pops. For chard, you can give the big stems the foil packet treatment like I did, or just start cooking them first. Once the stems have a good head start, add the leaves. Some time after the chard leaves, you can add thinner greens like kale (I generally remove the stems) or even leeks. Beet greens are probably last on this list, since they don't take much time to cook at all. I cook my greens until they are really done, but you can "stop early" if you like your greens a little crisper. I add water during the process to sort of steam the greens, if the pan still has oil in it this can cause some splatter so be careful. When the greens were almost finished I added some wine, cooked that off, and then pulled them out of the pan.

I deglazed that same pan with a little more wine and some water, and then plopped in half a dozen scallops. I seared them on both sides, let them absorb some of the tasty moisture, and then set them on top of the pilaf. I added some more water to deglaze the pan again, and once everything was off the bottom I added some cream and flour to make a simple sauce. I pour the sauce over the greens, but it would have been good on the pilaf as well I'm sure.

You can fit this on a plate however you like, but I put the scallops on top of one side of the pilaf, the onions from the beet packet on top of the other side, and the greens (with the "gravy" on top) on the other side of the plate. The beet got its own home between them, and the chard stems (from a separate packet) ended up being my seconds.

All of these recipes are really simple and substitutable, I could have easily used chicken instead of scallops for example, and any combination of greens would have worked.

Parsley Pesto with Walnuts

On tonight's menu I had two recipes planned, one which was sent to me with my veggies and one which I researched online after coming into possession of a huge box of apples. This is about the first recipe:

Parsley Pesto with Walnuts
Recipe from care2.com

• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, toasted (I used a toaster oven)

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil (organic)


• 1 cup packed fresh flat-leaf (Italian) parsley


• 1/4 cup vegetable broth (I subbed mushroom bouillon)


• 6 cloves garlic, peeled


• 1 tablespoon plain unseasoned bread crumbs


• 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt, or to taste


• 16 ounces spaghettini or other thin pasta

1. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, process walnuts, oil, parsley, broth, garlic, bread crumbs, and salt until smooth

Check. I only used 4 cloves of garlic, since the cloves were massive.



See what I mean?

2. Cook pasta in boiling water until al dente. Reserve 1/4 cup cooking liquid, then drain pasta in colander.

Check. I went to war with the pasta I had, but I'm not really a spaghettini fan anyhow. Neither is my spell check.

3. Place pasta in a large serving bowl and add the parsley-walnut pesto and reserved cooking liquid. Toss well to combine and serve at once.

Tasty results achieved: the pesto was good and easily prepared. The recipe boils down to "boil water and puree stuff", but I did miss the last step: I did not "serve at once" because I was in the process of my second recipe: Apple Galette.

Fajeating

Today's tasty experiment was trying to make my family's famous fajitas, but without using fajita mix from a packet. I have to say it was quite a success. This time I have photographic evidence to back me up.

First I chopped a large yellow onion quite fine while some olive oil heated in a skillet over medium high heat. Once the oil was shimmery, I tipped the onions into it an pushed them around with a spoon to coat them in the oil and keep them from sticking to the pan. I added a touch more oil and a sprinkling of kosher salt, and then got to chopping a bell pepper.


First I cut around the stem and tugged out the peppers guts, then sliced it in half, and then diced it up. You could dice your peppers and onions smaller or larger, but I was in the mood for fairly small bits as you can see. I added those to the pan as the onions were just starting to get translucent, and stirred them up, adding another splash of olive oil. Then I let that cook while I chopped up some chicken. I'll spare you the raw chicken picture, not sure what I was thinking when I took it, but it looks like chopped up raw meat. Not really tasty.


I sliced up two chicken breasts and added them to the mix, as well as some (say a 1/4 teaspoon each) chili powder, cumin, seasoning salt, garlic, and black pepper. After the chicken was essentially done (all white, no pink inside when split), I added some lime juice and mint, stirred it up, and then removed it from the heat.
I added chili powder to my own tastes, and warmed up two tortillas in the same pan, one at a time.


Once the tortillas were ready, I filled them with the fajita filling and some shredded cheese, and voila. As you can probably figure out, there's a lot of fajita filling leftover, but as you can see by the empty bag, I'm out of tortillas. The debris nearby is from the onion and the bell pepper. I scooped it into the bag and stuck it in the fridge. Is bell pepper good for chicken stock? I guess there's one way to find out.

The fajitas were tasty, but I'm gonna kick up the spice a notch next time. Sadly, I didn't have a jalapeno handy.

Chicken breast and beet green sautee with roasted onions and beets

My plan is as follows: Just after receiving a produce delivery, go through the handy included list and figure out what logical dishes spring forth from the cornucopoid bin. When beets turned out to be one of the items included, I found myself having nothing spring to mind whatsoever, a problem I thought I had better address shortly, since I anticipated further beets in boxes to come.

After some research I determined that the (somewhat scout-ish) method of cooking beets at high heat in the oven for 40 minutes in an aluminum foil packet seemed like a good way to go for a "beet beginner" such as myself. I removed the greens from the beets, and put the beets on a large square of foil, then drizzled them with olive oil. I also chopped an onion into the mix, particularly since the whole affair reminded me of grilling on the barbecue, which always requires an onion. I also included 3 diced garlic cloves (to add some aromatic flavor) and 3 undiced ones (to provide tasty bites of flavor on their own). I sealed the packet, slipped it into the oven at 425, and then prepped some chicken.

I slipped a chicken breast into a dish that was just the right size for marinating, and salted, peppered, thymed, and balsamic vinegared it, just a sprinkling of each. Then I poked holes in it until it was quite receptive to marinating, and then filled the dish with red wine to cover the breast. I used a Cabernet Sauvignon because that's what I had sitting by the stove, but it was sweeter than the ideal; next time I would probably use something drier.

With about 15 minutes left, I started some rice in the rice cooker, and addressed the beet greens. The tops of the beets are tasty and spinach-like, so if you like greens, you might want to hold onto them, as I did. I sauteed some more garlic, the beet greens, and a diced bunch of celery in a skillet while the rice cooked and the beets finished. Once the greens and garlic were mixed and starting to cook, I diced the chicken breast into the saute, and added the marinade to the pan as well for good measure. It sizzled as you might expect, and by this time there was also a quite prodigious sizzling noise coming from the oven. I cooked the beet greens quite well, making sure they were extra wilty, since that is how I prefer my greens... you are welcome not to cook yours to death, but my results were tasty nonetheless.

When the timer set for the beets went off, I removed the packet from the oven and spilled its contents into the saute pan with the heat reduced a bit. I tested the beets with a fork and found that two were quite yielding, while the others were a little tougher, so I took out the two that were finished and scraped off their peels with a fork. Once the others were a bit softer and had given a little flavor to the saute (and vice versa) I extracted them as well and gave them the same treatment. The rice finished and I added it to the saute as well, mixing it all up quickly and then taking it off the heat.

Unfortunately, I ate it so quickly that there are no pictures. If you make this, please do send your pics my way, so I can show people how tasty it looks.

All This

Tonight, as per usual of late, I arrived home fairly late to my basement flat in Portland, Oregon, having made a stop on my way home from work at the market to retrieve some organic chicken breasts, some mushrooms, and some ready-to-cook biscuits. The biscuits were the hardest item to find, having required a second stop; Whole Foods had nothing resembling Pillsbury, while Zupan's had an item in their freezer section that seemed close enough. On Tuesday I had received a "bin" from Organics To You, which was filling in for a lot of the other ingredients in my planned dinner.

I had decided on chicken stew, and looked up my mother's recipe only to be reminded once again that I do not, in fact, own an electric "crock pot". Between that and the recipe requiring 8 hours (as crock pot recipes often do) led me to improvise (as I often do). The results look and smell tasty.

I ended up with far too much of everything to cook in the dutch oven I ended up using, so I also made some roasted taters, which you can see in the bowl with the stew. Which is stew and which is roasted potatoes? It's probably all stew in this bowl, now, but the roasted potatoes and the stew leftovers are carefully segregated in the fridge for future starchy applications.

One key ingredient was homemade chicken stock. If this is not a concept you are familiar with, here is the short version: save everything you cut off of your vegetables while cooking, put those in a bag in the freezer. Carrot tops, the woody bits of mushrooms, anything that you'd equate with chicken bones, except from vegetables. Also, save chicken bones. When the bag is full, boil all the goodness out of the ingredients, save the stock, throw away the bits. Enjoy flavor.

The recipe for the chicken stew is essentially as follows:

Prep: Roughly chop two cups of potatoes, two cups of carrots, a cup of onion (a large onion should suffice), a 1/4 cup of celery, and a cup of crimini mushrooms. Dice two large chicken breasts into bite sized pieces. Have 4 cups of chicken stock ready. If needed, season the stock (if the stock is particularly bland, add 1/4 teaspoon each of parsley, thyme, and oregano). Dice enough garlic to suit your tastes, a tablespoon would be plenty. Prep either 7 parcooked biscuits or an equivalent amount of biscuit dough (this can be done during the simmering phase as you'll have some time).

Saute: Heat a teaspoon of oil (olive oil or vegetable oil) in a large dutch oven until shimmery and then saute the carrots and onion for 1 minute. Add the chicken and saute the mixture until the chicken has lost most of its outer pink color (should be white or slightly browned).

Simmer: Add the remaining chopped ingredients and 4 cups of chicken broth or stock. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat (if your stove is like mine you'll still need it at least medium high) to simmer the broth for 10 minutes.

Add biscuits: Add the biscuits or biscuit dough directly to the top of your stew, place the lid on your pot, and simmer an additional 5 minutes. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees. After the five minutes have elapsed, remove the lid and place the entire pot into the oven, near the top. Check your stew every five minutes until the biscuits have reached the desired consistency. I like mine well browned on the top and dumpling-like on the bottom.

Remove, let cool briefly, and enjoy.

The roasted potato "recipe" is pretty simple. Just chop potatoes and other tasty vegetables into a 9x13 or other roasting dish, drizzle with olive oil, toss with garlic and herbs, and roast at 475 for about half an hour, keeping an eye on them the whole time. You can also roast potatoes in the same dish with a chicken, or add chicken stock to the roasting pan for softer, more flavorful potatoes. I added 1/4 teaspoon (by which I mean several hearty shakes) each of parsley, thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes, and dill, as well as a pinch of salt. Delicious.