"Master" Recipes

by Xani

The other day I embraced an empty house, some free time, and an abundance of summer produce.  I cooked, cooked, and cooked some more, and loved every minute of it.  Later, while reflecting on all I made that day, I realized that all my creations were essentially building blocks, which could be combined with each other and other staples to create hundreds, maybe thousands of dishes.  For me, this was something of a revelation, and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before.  When you prepare one ingredient or element for a particular recipe, be it a sauce, filling, cooked starch, whatever, there is no rule that says that all of that element must be used for just that recipe!  Why not make double the "element" and use the rest for some entirely different preparation?  Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?  Wait, maybe it doesn't.  Let me show by example:

And Now for Something Completely Different

by Xani

Long-time readers of this blog might have picked up on a theme-- EP and I are all about TASTE.  Sure, we "eat with our eyes" first, and food can be elevated by gorgeous presentation, but in the end, if it don't taste good, I ain't eating it.  I'd rather have a piece of delicious homemade pie, even if it is lopsided and falling-apart, than a picture-perfect pie from the bakery that just tastes blah.  So that's pretty much my rule with food: flavor over form.  But, there are exceptions to every rule, and these cupcakes broke all the rules!

Home-Cookin'

by Xani

From July 1-July 28 2011, I conducted a little experiment.  I challenged myself not to eat any meals or snacks that I didn't cook myself.  No meals out. No prepared foods.  No grabbing a snack from the vending machine.  No purchasing food or beverages except in "ingredient form" from the grocery store or farmers market, unless absolutely necessary (more on that below).  This whole plan was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the credit card bill after I got back my my late-June trip to California, but I also thought it would be interesting to see if I could stick to the rules I created for myself  (right up until we went to NYC for the last weekend in July, where we ate EVERY meal/snack out!).

During the experiment, I home-cooked every meal, snack, and beverage (including soda), EXCEPT:
-Three mandatory work lunches where bringing my own food was not an option,
-One lunch out when I was "on the road" all day running errands,
-One delicious (and comped) press dinner at Chazz,
-One birthday lunch for EP, paid for by our lovely Mother,
-One Dunkin' Donuts coffee, purchased for my by my boyfriend (believe me, it was absolutely necessary), and
-One dinner of boyfriend's leftover buffalo wings, which I had to eat in bed since the entire first floor of our house was under construction (also absolutely necessary, as cooking was not an option).

And that's it!  When you consider I generally eat three meals a day plus a snack or two, that means I cooked/prepared about 100 meals/snacks, and only "cheated" the above 8 times.  Not bad!

Turns out, when you can't go out for any meals, your other option is cooking.  A lot.  But that was fine with me.  I ended up making some really yummy food this past month.  The local produce is great this time of year and I found myself going to markets Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays some weeks.  But the fresh ingredients really make a difference.  Here are some of the highlights from this month:

Peach & Goat Cheese Gazpacho: Barely adapted from this F&W recipe.  This was a MAJOR hit and I will definitely be making it again before summer (and peaches) is gone.  A little sweet, a little tangy, cool and creamy.  Yum.

Greek Zucchini Fritters with Feta:  Another great use of summer produce.  The texture reminded me of a crabcake, but the flavor was nice and fresh with the feta and dill.  Served with a little homemade tzatiki on the side.

Ratatouille: a summer classic.  Ate this for SEVERAL meals.

Phyllo pizza: Another big hit.  We liked it so much we made it again a few nights later (with the remaining phyllo dough) with some different toppings.  But summer tomatoes and fresh basil are a classic combo, of course.

Quinoa salad:  Made this in a few different iterations throughout the month.  Cooked, cooled quinoa (super-easy in the rice cooker), random veggies, herbs and legumes (looks like this one has edamame, radishes, red bell pepper, black beans, tomatoes, parsley) and dressing.  Sometimes I like to "match" the dressing to the ingredients (chipotle and lime in the dressing, with black beans, cilantro and avocado in the salad, etc) but most of the time I just used my standard vinaigrette, flavored with lemon juice. Tastes even better if you let it sit overnight.

PIES!!  So, this is a little off-point but I was super-excited to get the opportunity to make the pies for my dear friend Kim's birthday BBQ (actually, a grilled-pizza and bloody mary brunch, but when the grill is fired up and cornhole is being played, it's officially a BBQ).  I got some great tips from my blogger friend Sarah and ended up making a peach-blueberry pie with pecan crumble topping, as well as a sour-cherry with almond lattice crust.  They were SO.  GOOD.  I got all the produce from the farmers market and the flavors were just incredible.  Not to mention my tender, delicious crust that never fails me.

So, using mint.com (great program for tracking spending, BTW) I can see that, even with my increased grocery/farmers market costs, I still spent over $200 less on food and alcohol than I would in a normal month-- not bad!

Overall I'm happy with my experiment, and I think I've learned a few lessons about how to make dinner happen when I don't feel like looking-- going out is not the only option!

What did you cook in July?

X

Celebrity Karma Strikes Again

by EP

Xani and I haven't had the best of luck in our quest to meet celebrities.  Sure, we've hung out with Michael Midgley of Top Chef fame, and we saw Dennis Quaid at In N Out Burger in LA.  We also spied a handful of celebs when we were in NYC for Xani's birthday in February (ahem, Sandra Oh and Michael Imperioli -- not together), but for the most part, we repel celebrities, instead of attracting them.  Don't they know we're up and coming celebs ourselves?!

We thought, when we went to try Chazz: A Bronx Original, a new Italian-American restaurant in Harbor East, that our luck just might be turning around -- after all, one of the owners is Oscar-nominated Chazz Palminteri!

We arrived in the welcoming space on Aliceanna St., and unfortunately, our bad luck had struck again.  No Chazz (except in photos and movies playing on screens around the restaurant).  But, in place of producing a famous person, the friendly staff at Chazz provided us with a fantastic evening.

When is a Recipe YOURS?

by Xani

As some of you may know, EP and I are lawyers.  So are our parents, and so is Dave, my boyfriend.  I mention this as background/explanation for why, on Sunday night, after many, many cocktails, and many, many pounds of lobster, the five of us were discussing not family memories, not the fate of the O's season, but copyright infringement and the intricacies of changing, using, re-printing, and selling a recipe.

This is normal for us.  In fact, Dad recently purchased this little torture device so that, when we run out of our own hypothetical questions, we now have literally thousands of legal quandaries at our fingertips.  Joy.  But this past Sunday we were discussing a real-world scenario involving pie.

You see, we had just finished an amazing, belated Father's Day dinner.  We drank champagne, slurped uni shooters (not for the faint of heart, as they included uni, ponzu, tobiko, sake, hot sauce, and a raw quail egg yolk), ate the season's first green tomatoes, pan-fried with remoulade sauce, then tucked into 12.5 pounds of lobster and my best-ever batch of onion rings.  And then, it was time for pie.

Adventures in Baking: Bagels and Buttercream

by EP & X

Recently, we had the opportunity to attempt some challenging baking techniques, and whaddya know?  They turned out alright!  I think it was the combination of luck, some skill, and way too much time watching cooking shows/reading food blogs.

Experiment One: The Cake

Nuts for Coconut (Oil)

by Xani

Wait, don't run away! Does the phrase "coconut oil" have you heading for the hills? It's got a bad rap. If you're a regular reader of THIS blog, you've stuck with us through pork fat, chicken fat, butter and cream galore, so don't let a little coconut oil scare you off...

Parisian Eats Highlight Reel: Crêpes and Galettes

by EP

Gardens at Versailles

While we were in Paris, we ate.  A lot.  (And managed to walk most of it off - win!)  I won't lie to you, Dear Reader, and say that every morsel of food we ate was spectacular - there were definitely highlights and lowlights.  But for the most part, we had some great bites, and I will try not to drool all over my computer as I recount them for you over the next few posts.

First up: Crêpes and Galettes:

Before I went to France, I was not into crêpes.  I thought they were just boring pancake wannabes.  I felt they were trendy but without having any real merit.  Like...Ke$ha, for example.  But when I went to Paris, Rachel informed me that having crêpes was on her list, and who am I to deprive a dear friend of a requested foodstuff on vacation?  While Rachel and I were in Versailles (with another WU friend, Danielle), after a wonderful tour of the palace and self-guided tour of the expansive gardens, we stopped for lunch at a non-descript crêperie on a darling little street.