Nibbling Along

Brown Sugar Cookies

Don't you hate it when you write a whole post, and it somehow vanishes into the ether? Ugh. Oh well, you really need to know about these cookies, so I don't mind repeating myself.

You've probably had sugar cookies many times before -- in fact, you've probably had a lot of really mediocre sugar cookies, since for some reason they turn up like mushrooms after a rain in elementary-school classrooms anytime there's a celebration. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a well-made sugar cookie, but you have to admit that even at their best, they are not exactly a thrilling cookie.

These brown sugar cookies, on the other hand, will make your pulse race a little when you get a whiff of their warm, sensual aroma -- the deep caramel notes, the undertones of molasses, all infused with a gentle touch of vanilla. In an earlier age, daring explorers built fortunes satisfying European lust for these scents and tastes. This is, in short, a very sexy cookie.

Better yet, it's a very easy cookie to make. The butter is melted and browned, and then the ingredients are more or less simply stirred together. There's no need to go through the "chill, roll, and cut" rigamarole, as with a typical sugar cookie -- you simply roll each ball of dough in a little sugar mixture to get a crispy sweet crust, and bake.

These have become, by a wide margin, my new favorite cookie. They perfectly fill the niche in my soul which now and then calls me to putter around the kitchen, baking a sweet little something. Give them a try, and I'm sure you too will fall under the spell of their copious charms. You can find the recipe here. Enjoy!

I Also Have Books Which Aren't Cookbooks

Jason and I have a lot of cookbooks. He's a difficult person to buy gifts for, so I often end up getting him cookbooks as gifts, since I at least know which authors he's likely to like. We also have a lot of books in general, though I've been trying to cut down on my book acquisitions lately by visiting the library instead. It was either that or buy more bookshelves, which we really need to do anyway since ours are all bursting at the seams, and that's with a good chunk of our collection still boxed up in the garage. In theory, we could cull the books we own but actively dislike, but both of us have an almost pathological aversion to getting rid of books. It's just something we don't do.

Anyhow, I picked up this meme on And She Knits Too!; you are free to pick it up and play along as you like. These are the top 106 books marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users, meaning they are books which people own but haven't read. To play along, copy the list and bold the ones you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Simarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities (I hatehatehate Dickens)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (half in bold because I've probably read about half, all together)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood BIble
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
In Cold Blood
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I seem to have read about half the list. Not bad. It's not surprising that some of these books are owned-but-not-read by a lot of people (Ulysses, for example -- I don't think I could enjoy that book unless I took a really good literature class on it or something) but others are pretty light reads, which makes their "unread" status a little more surprising to me (The Hobbit, Neverwhere, anything by Jane Austen...). Funny to see Watership Down on the list, I was just thinking of rereading that. It was my favorite book from when I first read it, when I was 8 years old, until I read Crime and Punishment sometime when I was in high school. I don't think I have a definite "favorite" book anymore, but there are some I definitely love to revisit every few years.

So: what are you reading?

It's Easy Being Green

To be honest, I am not a huge broccoli fan. Not in general, anyway. It's ok raw, if there's some good dip on hand, and I don't mind a good beef and broccoli dish, but it's not often on my "short list" for favorite veggies. (The top spot is held by in-season asparagus, if you were wondering. Mmm, asparagus...)

This dish, though, really makes broccoli shine. I honestly think that even noted broccoli haters (President Bush the First) would be won over by a lovely warm bowl of pasta with broccoli pasta sauce. It's subtle, mild, and fresh-flavored. Enhanced with a handful of toasted pine nuts and a sprinkling of grated parmesan, and you have a really lovely meal. It's also quite healthy -- the only fat is from a little fresh olive oil, and there is no dairy or meat in the sauce itself -- without tasting like "health food." This is a dish which you'll occasionally find served at a good Italian restaurant, but it's incredibly simple to make at home. Quicker than takeout, too! You can find the recipe here.

Lickety-split

Ever since coming across this recipe a couple of weeks ago, I've had a hankering for some split pea soup. Today, I gave into that urge. My version is very simple, and requires very little active prep time. Just brown the pork (if you're using it) and sweat the onions and carrot, then add the water and peas and simmer into soupy oblivion. With some crusty bread and a glass of wine, it's a perfect meal. Few things in life are both this satisfying and this easy, so I hope you'll give it a try.

Irish Soda Bread Orthodoxy

I think that most people who love making food also love to experiment. Part of the enjoyment of cooking and baking is moving from inspiration -- whether from a glossy food magazine, blog, tv show, or the lusciousness of seasonal produce at the market -- to a finished dish, tweaking (or possibly winging) things the whole way. When it comes to cooking, and when it comes to baking very basic things like bread, I usually consider myself a happy, and for the most part successful, experimenter.

I realized recently, however, that there is at least one recipe on which I insist upon absolute orthodoxy. Deviations taste of betrayal, nihilism, and anarchy. My guess is that many people have at least one such dish in their lives -- a dish whose sense-memory is so profound and held in such high regard that any attempts to tweak, twiddle, or otherwise modify are tantamount to an attack upon the self. Most likely it's a dish made by someone in the family, a dish inextricably intertwined with one's childhood.

And what dish, you ask, turns me into a recipe fascist? It's my great-grandmother's Irish soda bread. Slightly sweet, flecked with caraway seeds and currants, and a little tangy thanks to the buttermilk, this quick-bread is the essence of comfort food for me. In the intensity of my adoration, I can tolerate virtually no alterations.

My sister prefers the bread without raisins, but on occasions when my mom has omitted them for her, I've felt disoriented and disturbed. My mom has also once or twice made the bread with a little wheat flour mixed with the white, and this too disturbed me -- as if I woke up to find all the rooms in the house painted in garish colors. Most recently, Jason's grandmother experimented with a Bisquick version of the soda bread, which was the most disturbing of all. It's not that this or other versions tasted bad -- it's just that everything but the original tastes wrong. In this case, since I rarely eat anything else with caraway or raisins in it (I'm picky about stuff in bread) it seemed strange to encounter them in a Bisquick-ey dough. If you went to a punk concert and suddenly turned to find your kindergarten teacher next to you, smoking a joint and hurling her underwear at the lead singer...well, you'd know approximately how I feel.

And now, I offer you this heirloom recipe, precious as it is. Though I may cling to orthodoxy, you are free to be as loose with it as you like. I do warn you, though, that your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren may develop an intense loyalty to the original recipe -- whatever they believe it to be. My great-grandmother Hannah Moynihan's recipe is here.

Crunchy

One of the things that distinguishes a good Mexican place from a mediocre one is its tortilla chips. When a waiter brings a basket to your table and they are toasty warm, perfectly salted, and deliciously crunchy, it's usually a sign of good things to come. A basket of greasy staleness, on the other hand, is generally a sign that you should get the hell out of Dodge or suffer the consequences -- which could range from a merely inadequate meal to one that leaves you suffering from Montezuma's revenge all night.

If your local eatery isn't all it could be in the tortilla department, don't despair -- you can make really good tortilla chips at home. Better yet, they're baked, so they're healthier than most of their restaurant or store-bought counterparts. I don't think anything is more important than the freshness factor, though: why eat chips from a bag that could be months old, when it takes a matter of minutes to make your own from fresh tortillas? Give it a shot. The recipe is here.

A Little Spicy

Since the first Project Spectrum theme is "Fire," I decided to experiment with some spicy comfort food -- arroz con pollo. I'd never made it, though I've eaten it and read a few recipes here and there, but I had some delicious and spicy homemade salsa in the fridge, arborio rice in the pantry, and four plump organic chicken thighs from Whole Foods.

Overall, this is a pretty healthy recipe. Rather than hogging the spotlight, the meat plays a supporting role. Chunks of avocado and tomato add a fresh component, and if you like cilantro -- as I do -- you'll add a sprinkle of that as well. Good corn tortillas are a great platform for scoops of the rice and shredded chicken, and mitigate the spiciness.

The real key to the dish is good salsa. If you have some store-bought salsa which is really good, go ahead and use it -- but making your own is quite easy, and you'll get a much more rich, complex flavor, especially if you roast all of the ingredients, as we did in this recipe.

You can find the recipe for arroz con pollo here.

Building a Better Potato Salad

Sheesh, it's been a while! I've been busy. I'm also in the middle of deciding whether or not to continue maintaining this blog as a food blog. We'll see. In the meantime, though, I have made the most delicious potato salad in the world (seriously) and you absolutely have to try it. Not kidding -- it's the best.

In addition to being the most delicious, it is also healthier than other potato salads, probably by a fairly wide margin. For one thing, you're not using any mayonnaise. Instead, tender fingerling potatoes are drenched in a luscious, lemony vinaigrette and tossed with minced onion and a flurry of chopped fresh herbs.

Jason and I made a huuuuge batch of this for a family gathering on New Year's eve, and everyone loved it. It disappeared. The recipe calls for five pounds of potatoes, which seems like a lot; you could certainly halve or reduce the recipe, but keep in mind that you will soon be addicted. You can find the recipe here.

Foolproof Caramels

Funny, I sent Jason to work with a whole bucketful of caramels (115, to be precise) and this is what he brought back.

Every year for the past several years, I've been making these yummy little candies; I started out using the recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook, but have tinkered with it a great deal to achieve what I believe is a much more nuanced, richly flavored caramel.

The best thing about these caramels? They are practically foolproof. You don't have to mess around with boiling sugar, hoping it won't suddenly turn on you and harden up into a potful of sugar cement. You just toss everything into a pot, and stir it regularly until it hits the right temperature.

Hmm, one of the remaining candies seems to have disappeared.

Candy recipes, naturally, often recommend the use of a candy thermometer: to that, I say "Bah!" Candy thermometers are useless pieces of crap. They always get steamed up when you're using them, which makes checking the temperature (kind of an important step) damn near impossible. Grr -- they make me so angry. Then there's the "soft ball/hard ball/hard crack" nonsense, which asks you to drop dollops of your hot candy mixture into chilled water and see what happens. Maybe if you're an experienced candymaker you can do this gracefully and actually divine useful information from the result, but as far as I can tell, by the time I've done the cold-water test, the candy in the pot has continued cooking itself into the next stage.

Funny, the wrapper seems to have fallen off of the remaining candy. Mmm, look at those flecks of vanilla...

A probe thermometer, one of my all-time favorite cooking gadgets, circumvents all that nonsense, and makes the process incredibly easy to control. As long as you don't let the probe sit directly on the bottom of the pot (where the reading will be inaccurately high), you'll be fine. All you have to do is stir, and wait for the mixture to hit 245 degrees.

Then all you have to do is pour, cool, wrap, and share. Or not.

The recipe is here.

Blessings in Disguise

Guest Blogger Laura

Two years ago when we determined my son and I were allergic to gluten (think wheat) my first reaction was not one of delight. Picture a childhood with no pizza parties, classroom birthdays without cupcakes, no pasta or warm bread in restaurants. Thinking like that is not only self-defeating it’s just incorrect. The body adjusts to just about any food restriction in just a few weeks and unlike a weight-loss diet, once you start to feel the results of eating non-allergy causing foods you won’t want to cheat. Instead of no bagels think no headaches, no stomach pain and a good night’s sleep! The adjustment to a new lifestyle is a process but well worth the journey.

After reading the blog by the Gluten Free Girl, I realized that although we had adjusted to the new diet (we were making and eating everything I listed above at home now) but were not really embracing the full range of options open to us.

So, no more food avoidance or bland gluten-free substitutions for us! Time to move past grilled fish, vegetables and bread made from rice flour. There’s a whole new world of recipes out there for us to try and meals we will truly look forward to eating. On last night's menu -  savory Chicken Pot Pie. Once my family got over the shock of Mommy cooking a meal that was not going in the microwave, they rallied around to help me pull out all the ingredients. Instead of a traditional pie crust the meal is cooked in a casserole with biscuit dough balls dropped from a tablespoon on top creating a golden brown visual delight when done.

The recipe itself (modified from The Gluten Free Gourmet Cooks Comfort Food) is pretty traditional involving diced cooked chicken, carrots onions and peas boiled in chicken stock and thickened with a flour paste, once in the casserole dish it’s all mixed with a bit of sour cream, a dash Worcester sauce and topped with that scrumptious biscuit dough.

The trick to successful gluten free cooking is in the flour – not only is it not wheat, it’s a combination of three or four different flours depending on what your making; rice, potato, amaranth, buckwheat (confusing name but not wheat at all), millet, quinoa and teff are some examples. See what I mean, you gluten glutens will probably continue to limit yourself to wheat flour for years while we will be experimenting with this wonderful variety of choices.

If you’d like to try something new head on over to the Gluten Free Girl’s blog or buy her new book, then to your Whole Foods or even just your local grocery store and see what’s available.

Bust Out the Blowtorch!

Mmm, who doesn't love picking up a spoon and gently tapping through the caramelized crust of a healthy portion of creme brulee? It's a very restaurant-ey dessert though; I never hear anyone waxing poetic over mom's homemade version. I suppose this is because it has a reputation for being "difficult," but if so, it's an undeserved one. Creme brulee isn't particularly difficult to make, though one does have to be careful when mixing the heated cream and the beaten egg yolks -- go too fast, and you'll end up with scrambled eggy bits, which is just disgusting. The process of adding the heated mixture to the eggs gently is called "tempering" and it's worth learning how to do properly -- so why not give yourself some practice?

If you don't have a kitchen blowtorch (coolest kitchen gadget EVER, by the way), you can use your oven's broiler to crisp the sugar topping on the brulees. Just keep a close eye on the little buggers so you don't burn them to death.

What else makes creme brulee seem complicated? Oh, yeah, the fact that you bake the custards in a bain-marie, which sounds hard but is really just a pan full of hot water. Not difficult, trust me! This is also done with cheesecakes and other baked custards to help cook everything evenly and gently. And hey, it's just water, so it's not like you have an extra dish to wash.

Okay, I think that's about all I have to say about creme brulee, except: Make it! Make it now! The recipe is here.

A Better Oatmeal

Oatmeal tends to be praised more for its healthful qualities than its taste and texture, which isn't surprising considering how often it arrives at the table looking like a bowlful of pulpy paste. "Instant" oatmeal and rolled oats just don't stand up well to the ravages of boiling water, and the amount of starch they release guarantees a gummy, gluey texture.

There is, however, another way: steel-cut oats, also called "pinhead" oats, are oat grains which have been sliced, but not pounded into oblivion. These oats don't fall to pieces when cooked into a creamy oatmeal, but retain a pleasant tender bite reminiscent of good risotto. Like all good things, oatmeal from steel-cut oats takes a little longer than its "instant" counterpart, but a single bite will convince you it's time well-spent. The recipe, which is adapted from one by Alton Brown, can be found here.

Beyond Pie

Delicious though it may be, pumpkin pie is not my favorite use of this season's star squash. I love pumpkin bread, which is why I think it's ridiculous I waited so long to get this recipe from my mom. This isn't one of those bland, gummy-textured imitators you'll find in lousy bakeries and coffee shops across the country this time of year: this is true love. It's moist, well-spiced, and thoroughly pumpkin-ey.

My mom tells me she originally got the recipe from Sunset Magazine, though I don't know what issue. It's been a while, I can tell you that. She modified it by cutting down on the overwhelming quantity of sugar in the original, and I've tinkered with it as well. Instead of all white sugar, I use some brown sugar to add more depth of flavor, and I've tinkered with the spices a bit as well.

Be warned: this recipe makes a TON of pumpkin bread. I made three large loaves, but you could just as easily make enough muffins to feed an army, or a batch of mini-loaves to give as gifts. Just be sure to keep plenty for yourself! Click here for the recipe.

Cinnamoney? Sweet? Crunchy? Sign me up.

Oh, how I love crunchy things. And cinnamon? Yes, please!

Cinnamon candied walnuts. You know you want some. They are insanely addictive little crunchy munchies, and they only take about 20 minutes to make (well, twice that if you have to shell all the walnuts, but still -- pretty quick).

I think I may have to make some of these to give to people as holiday gifts, but that might be dangerous for my health: I have a hard time not gobbling up a whole batch as soon as they're out of the oven. You've been warned. Recipe here.

Feed Your Inner Cartman

One of my favorite South Park moments was when Cartman tricked his friends into leaving the room so he could eat the skin off of every single piece of fried chicken in the bucket. It's not exactly a heart-healthy move, but haven't we all secretly wanted to do just that?

Of course, it's not just because crunchy, mahogany-brown fried chicken skin is delicious (though it is.) It's because the meat is so often under-seasoned -- bland and listless in comparison to its crispy shell. Homemade fried chicken doesn't have to have this problem. I use liberal amounts of Lawry's seasoning salt (which is also good lightly sprinkled on popcorn, by the way) and a nice hot fry in Crisco to guarantee a flavorful, juicy interior worthy of the crackly exterior. It's the perfect way to feed your inner Cartman. Recipe here.

Sweet Squash

My love of orechiette is well-documented on this blog. For lunch today, I decided to make a fall version of my favorite summer pasta dish -- and what's more appropriate for fall than butternut squash?

This is pretty easy to make, especially because you can roast the butternut squash a day or two ahead of time. If you roast a couple at once, you can also whip up some butternut squash soup...I've got an easy recipe for that, too, which I promise to share soon. In the meantime, if you want a simple pasta dish, enjoy this one. Recipe here.

All Hail Caesar!

I'm very picky about salads. I've got a sensitive nose for wilty greens, of which there are always a few in those prepacked baggies, and those misters in the supermarket gross me out, so I'm not fond of the stuff on the shelves, either. Luckily, I can always get some good salad greens at the farmer's market, and if I don't make it there, hearts of romaine stand up pretty well to the bag treatment. I love the crispness of romaine, and I especially love Caesar salad, so that tends to be my default salad. Which is fine, because I'm addicted to it.

Michael Ruhlman has been blogging about the disappointing pervasiveness of the bland and boring chicken Caesar on restaurant menus, and I agree with his assessment -- but I do think that homemade Caesar salad is a whole different beast. Bottled dressings are, excuse my language, completely fucking disgusting, and I'm sure every major chain restaurant uses the same 5-gallon drum of the stuff from Jordano's or a similar supply company, but homemade Caesar is delightfully tangy, a lovely interplay of raw garlic and anchovy and creamy egg yolk and Parmesan. Good olive oil brings all the ingredients together in the great "group hug" that is emulsification. Want to top it with some boneless skinless chicken breast? Easy. Or, you could go really decadent, and try Ruhlman's "Chicken Fried Pork Belly Caesar" which I totally plan on making as soon as I can get my hands on some pork belly. Or just have it plain -- it's up to you. Recipe here.

Soup for You

Both Jason and I dislike cauliflower, but love cauliflower soup. Is that weird? I don't think it's too strange, because my main objection to cauliflower is its texture. It's kind of waxy, and grainy...ugh. I'm just not a fan. I didn't know I liked cauliflower in soup form until having a delicious sip of it served in a demitasse in a favorite restaurant. Divorced from its (awful, yucky) texture, cauliflower actually tastes pretty good. Very good, actually. As I discovered when I began developing my own recipe for it, this soup is both simple and quick, and a perfect comfort food on a chilly evening. A little grated parmesan and a drizzle of very good olive oil makes a perfect garnish. Give it a try -- the recipe is here.

Still Grilling

It's October, but the weather doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. While some days lately have been chilly, and while we have gotten a little rain, this weekend felt almost like summer. It was definitely a grillworthy weekend, so that's exactly what we did -- we fired up the barbecue, and grilled up some tasty leg of lamb.

We didn't set out to cook lamb this weekend, but on a trip to Costco, we debated the various wares and noted that the boneless leg of lamb looked pretty good. I love lamb -- I think this recipe has helped me to realize that lamb is possibly my favorite food with a face and four legs. Beef is nice, but it's a little boring. Beef is the guy with a wife, a dog, two kids, and a house in the suburbs. Lamb is more like that guy's cooler, handsomer younger brother.

What's interesting to me is the fact that lamb also always seems to have an Australian accent -- what's wrong with the wooly little dunderheads we grow in California? I've seen them hanging out in fields next to the 101 on drives through the central part of the state, so I don't know why lamb from Down Under is so common in the freezers and refrigerated cases at the supermarkets here. It seems inefficient, considering both the long distances involved in its transportation, and the extremity of the environmental damage sheep cause to the Australian environment (I won't go into the reasons why, but Australia's soil can't "rebound" quite as quickly from the kind of damage caused by grazing as the land in America can). Hopefully as consumer demand for more locally and regionally grown foods increases, this will change, and we'll all be able to eat more sustainably. Anyhow, the recipe is here. If the weather remains fair, fire up your grill next weekend, have a few friends over, and have a last hurrah before the weather figures out what's going on. 

Berries and Pears and Cake, Oh My!

I am generally too lazy to bake cake from scratch, so I am always happy when my sister-in-law Kim volunteers. This is an especially delicious cake, and I like that I can justify eating large quantities of it by treating it as essentially a serving of fruits. The original recipe contained only pears, but Kim and I discussed potential pear pairings, and we both thought that blueberries would be an ideal pear compatriot. This proved to be completely true. Because it would just be too healthy otherwise, Kim whipped up a delicious berry-infused whipped cream to top it. The berry coulis used to flavor the whipped cream is painted on the plate, and provides a lovely intense, sweet/tart counterpoint to the richness of the cream and the subtler flavors of the cake. Sorry I'm not posting a photo with those delicious cake counterpoints, the light had gone by the time we tucked in, and the only shots I got are sadly blurry. Trust me when I say it was both delicious, and as beautiful as the unadorned version above. The recipe is here. Thanks, Kim!

Fluffy Little Pillows

Jason and I have a disagreement about meatballs. I prefer to brown them in the oven, he prefers to brown them in the pan. These were pretty good though, so I'll concede that browning them in the pan led to some delicious flavor -- but he dirtied way more dishes this way, so if he wants to stay ahead, he'd better wash up.

As much as I love pine nuts, I was initially a little skeptical about adding them to a meatball. I'm not a fan of nuts in most breads or cookies (I know I'm not alone in this), so I wasn't sure the textural contrast would appeal to me. However, my concerns were unfounded. The pine nuts formed a nice counterpoint to the fluffy little pillows of meat in which they were embedded. Next time, I think I'd like to try to make these with turkey instead of a beef/pork combination, as I've found ground turkey thigh meat to make an excellent meatball. The recipe was adapted by Jason from one he saw on our new most-TiVo'd cooking show, Molto Mario.

Asparagudelicious

Poor vegetables. They are so often mistreated -- abused, even -- in homes and restaurants all over the country. All too often, veggies are relegated to "side" status, tacked on to the back of the plate as an afterthought. Children turn up their noses and engage in battles of will and endurance with parents in order to avoid eating the one item they've been told is on their plate because it's "good for them." Ugh. It's just sad.

Maybe someone out there likes their veggies boiled or steamed until they're grey zombies of their former selves, but that's not my thing. I'm all about roasting. Roasting concentrates flavors, caramelizes, and adds textural interest. My approach to virtually every vegetable out there is "give 'em hell."

One of my particular favorites is asparagus. Sometimes Jason and I will have an entire meal of roasted asparagus, with some bread on the side. The other night, we had a very simple meal of good bread, some delicious salami from the Woodside Deli, and a big pile of asparagus we'd roasted until the tips turned crisp and brown. We gobbled it up, using our fingers as our only utensils. The tips were deliciously crunchy, the flavors nutty and sweet. If you were serving it for company and wanted to gild the lily, you could shave a little bit of aged gouda or parmesan on top, or drizzle it with a bit of syrupy balsalmic vinegar. Oh, yeah, and a fork.

The (laughably simple) recipe is here.

The Quest

For a while now, Jason has been on a quest to discover the perfect roast chicken method. The skin needs to be crisp, the meat moist, and he wants a whack of chicken-dripping-infused roast vegetables to be done at the same time. This is more difficult than it sounds.

First off, you've got quite a few options as far as the chicken itself is concerned: you can choose from conventional, free range, organic, or kosher at many supermarkets, and you've still got the option of brining it at home. Roasting chickens range in size from about 2 lbs (the smallest I've seen -- it was an Aaron's Kosher chicken at Trader Joe's) to 4 or 5 lbs or more. The one option I really think is lacking is capon -- castrated roosters. Apparently they have excellent flavor, but production in the US is very limited. I've never seen one for sale, anywhere, though it may be that they are more popular in other parts of the country.

We've found that with roast chicken, smaller is better. This bird is just 2.6 lbs; I'd get two of these if you were going to serve four people. It's a kosher chicken, which is not always an option, but seems to be carried pretty consistently at my local Trader Joe's. If you can get it, kosher poultry is great because it is essentially brined in order to make it kosher, making your life that much easier.

One method of chicken roasting I like involves butterfling the chicken and roasting it over a "rack" of vegetables, but this tends to make for delicious veggies and slightly dry chicken, so we decided to go with a whole roast method. In Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook, he recommends trussing the chicken to create a more compact roast -- a suggestion I'd have to second, based on these results. (For a turkey, though, I don't like trussing: a turkey is humongous, and opening up the cavity to allow hot air to cook it from the inside out as well as the outside in makes for a faster-roasting, better-tasting bird.)

Cook's Illustrated detailed a chicken method several issues ago which separated the chicken and veg for part of the cooking time, then combined them later, but their method invovled the use of a rack, a gravy separator, and just more stuff than I wanted to have to wash. We used just two pans: our heavy cast iron pan and a baking dish. The cast iron pan does double duty: first, you roast the chicken in it, then while the chicken rests, you remove the roasted veggies from their baking dish and toss them in the drippings and fond on the bottom of the cast iron. This way, you get delicious, not-too-greasy veggies, and a perfectly roast chicken. It's a delicious weekend dinner, and goes perfectly with a glass of your favorite Pinot Noir. Recipe here.

Heirloom Tomato

My love of heirloom tomatoes is well documented on this blog, my love of yarn, on this blog. When I saw that Sundara had a limited edition sock yarn called "heirloom tomato" there was no way I could resist.

I'll Be Back...

Just a little FYI: I probably won't be blogging for the next week or so. Jason's going to be away on a business trip to London and Amsterdam (poor guy, he has to take the side trip to Amsterdam to go to a party celebrating the 10th anniversary of a business they work with) so I'm going to go hang out with my in-laws while he's gone. It'll be nice to have help with the baby, so I'm going to be sure to cook them something nice one night while I'm there. Should be fun, and I'm going to try to relax and knit and not do much more than check my email. Have a good week!