Recipe is from Food Network’s Michael Chiarello, who was that Italian chef on the first season of Top Chef Masters. While I wasn’t a fan of his attitude, his recipes are usually a hit. It’s named “Super Quick Minestrone”, which is to say that it still takes upwards of 40 minutes to make, but the process is straightforward and involves enough down time that you won’t really feel like you’re slaving away at the stove all evening.

I followed the recipe pretty closely, substituting sage sausage for the pancetta and foregoing the thyme.  My pasta of choice was wheat elbow macaroni, and I added some chili powder to the seasoning at the end. The result was better than I was expecting – a great balanced comfort dish.

Extra bonus: you can definitely practice your knife skills when chopping all the veggies up in the beginning. That part was the most tedious, but at least it will get better with practice!

Recipe reproduced from the Food Network website:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (4 ounces) tubetti pasta, or other small pasta shape
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 6 cups chicken stock
• 1/4 pound pancetta, cut into 3 pieces
• 6 medium garlic cloves, each cut in 1/2 lengthwise
• 2 cups finely chopped yellow onions (2 small onions)
• 1 cup small-diced celery (2 medium stalks)
• 1 cup small-diced carrots (2 to 3 medium carrots)
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped rosemary or thyme leaves
• 1 (14-ounce) can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 (14 1/2-ounce) can diced tomatoes
• 4 cups small-diced zucchini (green/yellow) (5 small zucchini)
• 2 cups small-diced, peeled russet potatoes (1 large russet)
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook according to package directions until al dente. Drain and transfer the pasta to a baking sheet. Toss the pasta with a little olive oil to prevent sticking.

In a large saucepan over medium heat, warm the chicken stock.

In another large saucepan over high heat, heat 1/4 cup oil. When the oil is hot but not smoking, add the pancetta and cook until it begins to brown, 3 to 4 minutes, turning occasionally. Add the garlic and cook until it begins to brown, about 1 minute, stirring occasionally. Lower the heat to medium and add the onions, celery, and carrots.

Cook until the vegetables are soft, 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent browning. Add the chopped herbs. Raise the heat to high. Add the beans, tomatoes, zucchini, and potatoes. Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Then bring it down to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are tender, 12 to 15 minutes, skimming any foam off the top of the soup. Season generously with pepper. Add salt, to taste. Just a few minutes before serving, add the cooked tubetti pasta. Serve warm with Parmesan and olive oil passed at the table.

Cooking notes: Add the cooked pasta just before serving. If it sits in the soup too long, it develops a flabby texture. Tubetti (little hollow tubes) are the classic pasta for minestrone, but you could substitute another small shape of pasta.

So I’m getting back in the game with a delicious little cookie that’s perfect with some tea or coffee.  The recipe originally calls for wheat germ, but I read a post by another blogger who substituted oat bran instead. Since I had oat bran on hand, I figured it was worth a shot. The result is a delightful, light cookie.

Note that the dough needs to be made at least 2 hours beforehand to allow chilling time. Plan accordingly!

Thanks to Flourchild for the recipe – I’ve basically copied her instructions below.

Ingredients

Whisk together the flour, 1/2 cup of the oat bran, baking powder and salt. Working in the bowl of a stand mixer or in a large bowl,run the sugar and lemon zest together with your fingers until the sugar is moist. Add the butter and, using the paddle or whisk attachment of a hand mixer, beat on medium speed for about 2 minutes, until creamy or smooth. Add the honey and beat for another minute or two. Add the egg and beat for about 2 minutes more, until you have a smooth, light , fluffy mixture. Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the dry ingredients in 2 portions, mixing only until each addition disappears. Scrape the dough out onto a large piece of plastic wrap and wrap well. Chill the dough for at least 2 hours, or for up to 2 days.

Getting ready to Bake: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats. Put the remaining 1/2 cup oat bran into a bowl. Remove the chilled dough from the fridge and, working with a spoonful of it at a time, roll the dough between your palms into 1-inch balls. Drop each ball into the wheat germ and turn to coat, then place the balls on one of the baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch of space between them(these don’t spread much). Use your palm or the bottom of a glass to gently flatten each cookie. Bake the cookies one sheet at a time, for 10 to 12 minutes, or until they are just firm to the touch. Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool to room temperature. Repeat with remaining dough. Storing: The cookies will keep at room temperature for about 3 days or wrapped airtight in the freezer for up to 2 months.

Pork belly is a cut of meat that’s not often used directly in Western cooking, though it’s the cut that’s used to make bacon and pancetta.  It usually has the skin attached, a layer of fat under that, and then tender, marbled meat under that.  Any Asian grocery store with a butcher’s counter will stock it, it’s very cheap, and it’s really, really good.  The only thing I’d add to the recipe is to be careful when you’re scoring the skin to put the herb/spice paste in.  Pork skin is tough to get through, so either use a sharp knife, or a serrated one, and be careful to let the serrations do the cutting, rather than pushing down and sawing the skin back and forth.  The deeper into the top layer of fat you can get the herbs and spices, the better.  As the pork belly roasts, the flavors from the rosemary, thyme, and fennel will be carried down with the melting fat, seasoning the rest of the meat as it drips into the pan.  I didn’t take any pictures, but below is the image from the recipe page, and it’s turned out exactly like this:

Slow-Roasted Spiced Pork at Cook Almost Anything

I know, I know, George already posted a risotto recipe, and mine is not that different from his, but it’s simpler, and has things in it I like. So there.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups arborio rice
• 6 cups liquid*
• 2 tbsp. olive oil or butter
• 1/2 cup parmesan cheese
• extra things: mushrooms (about a cup, white and crimini), spinach (a couple handfuls, chopped), blue cheese (a couple tablespoons) in this case
• salt and pepper to taste

* You need about four times as much liquid as rice. I split mine up like this: 4 cups vegetable broth; 1 cup water; 1 cup wine. I’ve seen recipes that suggest only 1/2 a cup of wine, and all the rest broth… the main reason I put water in is because the easy-to-buy container of broth only has four cups in it. You could also, obviously, use chicken broth.

Directions

1. Heat up/melt the olive oil or butter in a big pot. Add rice and stir until coated.
2. If you’re using wine, add it now. Stir constantly until it’s mostly absorbed.
3. Meanwhile, cook the mushrooms and spinach separately.
4. Add the rest of the liquid about 1/2 cup at a time, waiting for each batch to be absorbed before you add more, stirring stirring stirring as you go. The rice should be
5. Mix in the mushrooms and spinach, stir around, cook for another couple of minutes.
6. Add the blue cheese and parmesan cheese and stir until melted. Add salt and pepper if you want them.

This recipe is deceptively simple. The drawback of amazing risotto is that it takes about an hour of constant stirring and pouring.

I have been trying to cut down on meat lately for health reasons, which will go one of two ways as far as you all are concerned:

1. Lots of yummy vegetarian recipes posted here!
2. I become lazy and eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly.

So far I’m still being relatively un-lazy, so I modified my mom’s White Chicken Chili to be veggie-ful. I love white chili because I’m not a big fan of tomato sauce, onions, or peppers, all of which are usually heavily present in traditional chilis. This chili is spicy but light, and as soon as I eat up a batch I want MORE.

Ingredients:

• 30-40 oz. vegetable broth (or chicken broth, if it’s easier to find and you don’t care about the “vegetarian” part)
• 4 cans white beans — I recommend Cannellini or Great Northern — or the equivalent of dry beans
• 1 can red or pink kidney beans, or the equivalent of dry beans
• ~1 cup fresh green beans, chopped into 1″ pieces
• ~1 1/2 cup fresh white mushrooms, chopped into quarters
• 2 tsp. cumin
• 1 tsp. ground cayenne
• 1 tsp. oregano
• 1/2 tsp. ground cloves
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Pour the broth and all the beans into a big pot (don’t forget to drain the beans to reduce sodium, and rinse them to reduce it even more), and simmer over medium heat for about an hour, stirring occasionally. The broth will get thicker.
2. Add vegetables, and cook until they’re beginning to get soft.
3. Add spices, and cook for about another half hour.
4. Serve plain or over rice. Excellent with Monterey Jack or cheddar (or both) cheese sprinkled over top, if you swing that way.

You can find a pretty good transcript of the recipe here (but not quite complete, annoyingly), if you don’t have the cookbook. Note that you will also need her instructions on sauteing mushrooms (this one is a direct, complete copy) and brown-braising pearl onions (close enough), even if you think you know how to do these things.

Some notes:

• One of the best things about the original recipe is the detailed information on wine. It recommends pairing with “a fairly full-bodied, young red wine, such as Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Bordeaux-St. Émilion, or Burgundy,” and using any of those or a Chianti to go into the stew.
• 3 cups of wine = 1 bottle. I doubled the recipe. Whoo!
• I bought pre-cut-up stew meat, some of which was cut a lot finer than the other, and on the whole big chunks worked a lot better for drying and browning.
• Conversely, I couldn’t find an unsliced chunk of bacon anywhere, and regular old thick-sliced seemed to work okay.
• I over-salted because I forgot, as always, to account for the massive amounts of salt in bouillon cubes. Use caution, or perhaps better beef stock.
• Blanching helps when you realize you have to peel 48 pearl onions.
• I couldn’t really get the sauce to thicken in the end, but it seemed to end up okay just letting it reduce a lot even if it never really reached light-spoon-coating consistency. =/

For extras, here is the rosemary bread recipe I have been fussing with of late. It’s sort of long but that’s because the procedure is the complicated part; sorry. Start this ~3 hrs before you want to eat it.

• 2 1/2 tsp yeast, which is~1 packet
• 2 c. warm water, ~110-115 F, which is warm but just shy of scalding
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 4 c. flour. Bread flour is nice if you can get it, and if you do not consider extra gluten cheating.
• 2 tsp. minced fresh rosemary plus more for topping. Fresh is important! You can sub out some for fresh thyme.
• olive oil, corn meal, sea salt

Dissolve yeast in the warm water and sugar. If it’s NOT instant/fast-acting/bread-machine yeast, give it <5 min to froth up. Otherwise, immediately add flour, salt, and 2 tsp rosemary and stir until blended. Do not knead! Cover and let rise for 1 hour or until double in size; bonus points for putting it someplace slightly warm and moist.

Oil a baking sheet and sprinkle with corn meal. Perhaps try oiling your hands instead of flouring them, as the dough is super sticky, then divide it in half, shape each half quickly and loosely into a round by tucking the edges under, and place on the baking sheet. Cover and let rise another hour. The stickiness is again a problem; cooking-sprayed plastic wrap is the only thing I’ve managed to use that DIDN’T stick horribly and make the top of my loaves lumpy.

With bread, some last-minute rising happens in the oven and for that you want things hot and steamy (har). Start heating your oven early, maybe half an hour into the second rise, to 450 or “lots.” My oven here has no numbers on the dial between 350 and 500 so I use my imagination, but I don’t think getting it too hot is a possibility. If you have a pizza stone, put it in now. Also put a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the oven (or something else which can be raised to high temps empty, then have cool water thrown in it without exploding).

When bread is again about doubled in size, brush with olive oil and top with more rosemary and plentiful crushed sea salt. Get yourself some water, maybe 1/4 cup, on hand near your oven as now you must act quickly! Put the bread in (just stick the pan on the pizza stone if using one, unless you want to get fancy and try to slide the bread onto the stone directly), dump the water on your previously-heated skillet or whatever where it will send up exciting clouds of steam, and close the oven door quickly. Bake 10 min, adding more water for steam if it runs out. Then turn the oven down to 375 and bake another 20 min or so until it’s golden-browny.

Ingredients:

• Potatoes (yukon golds are best)
• Whipping cream
• Butter
• salt to taste
• 1-2 bulbs of garlic
• olive oil

Gloria will tell you that I am a measure-twice-cut-once kind of cook. I am very careful with quantities, and I don’t improvise very well. This is the one exception, so I’ll go over quantity pretty carefully.

HOW MANY POTATOES?
It’s hard sometimes to gauge how many potatoes you need. You really need to judge what the rest of the meal is like and how fat your diners are.

They are all different sizes! Fuck you!

I usually go for around half a pound of potatoes per person, if you have time to measure. If you don’t, about four people is four potatoes that you’d chuck to ward off a medium-persistent robber.

Step 1. Roast some garlic. I think we’ve gone over this in an earlier post, so here is an MS Paint synopsis:

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUU--

Step 2. Boil potatoes. I usually cut the potatoes into 2″x2″x1″ cubes, but it’s not an exact science. Gloria likes it when I leave the skins on, so I am lazy and leave the skins on. Boil them until they cut like butter with a fork.

Step 3. When your potatoes are soft enough, drain them really well, then put them in a mixing bowl. Drop 1/2 a stick of butter in there for around 4 potatoes. (Actually, regardless of how many potatoes I use, there’s usually a 1/2 stick of butter in it.)

Step 4. While the butter is melting, retrieve your roasted garlic and pop the soft cloves out of their pods. Put them into the mixing bowl with everything else.

Step 5. Take an egg beater to your potatoes, low speed. While the eggbeater is going, pour some whipping cream in. Usually I use anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 cup, but it really depends on the texture you want. We used 1/4 cup for about 3.5 pounds of potatoes last week, and it made a smooth, dense mashed potato.

Step 6. Season. You want to use some salt, definitely, but it’s at your discretion. I love throwing some pepper into mine, and maybe some Lawry’s seasoned salt. But if you’ve got only one bulb of garlic in there, less intense flavors are necessary. Remember, the base is creamy and buttery.

It does.

The recipe is from Café Zuni, which is just over the bay, but it’s a pretty expensive joint, and doing it yourself is not too hard. Smitten Kitchen’s summary (which is what I linked above) suffices here, except I will make the following notes: (1) I only had 10 hours to salt the chicken, though 1-3 days is the recommended salting time (it still turned out quite good and I’ll do it right when I inevitably repeat this recipe someday). (2) It was very difficult to find a chicken quite small enough. To be fair, I only had time to look in one store (see the first note) but I went to Andronico’s which has fairly good meat selection. I managed to find a 3.68 pound free-range chicken, so that’s what I used. (3) Once in the oven (which you start at a whopping 475˚F) the chicken was very good at hissing and spitting and getting chicken fat all over the oven’s heating coil (oh how I wish we had a gas range) which led to a lot of smoke; long story short I ended up removing the batteries from our smoke detector.

As you can see, I served it with the bread salad (recipe also in the above link). For dessert, Brandon (my guinea pig for this dinner) and I had poached pears, also a first!

Pears poached in spiced vin santo

• 2 small pears (pref. d’Anjou) peeled, but not cored or stemmed
• 1 750 mL bottle of Italian dessert wine such as vin santo or marsala
• 1/2 cup of water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cinnamon stick, broken in two (this is harder than it sounds to do)
• 1 tbsp vanilla bean paste (or a real vanilla bean)
• 1/2 inch ginger root, peeled and finely chopped
• for serving: whipped cream or 1/2 cup mascarpone cheese, honey and powdered cinnamon to taste

Combine the wine, water, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and ginger in the smallest (but still deep) saucepan you can find. Bring to a boil on medium, then reduce to right below a simmer and add the pears (position them so that the liquid covers as much of the pear as possible). Cook for 20-30 minutes or until tender (so that it yields to a fork), rotating them occasionally so that they pears poach evenly. Once they are soft, remove the pears to a serving dish and reduce the remaining poaching liquid by half. Serve the pears standing up (you might have to slice off the bottom to make them stand) covered with the poaching liquid/syrup (strained, of course), and with a small dollop of whipped cream or honeyed mascarpone.

Anyway, now I have a leftover chicken carcass and poaching liquid. Probably I will turn the chicken into chicken stock and also chicken-and-barley stew. The poaching liquid will probably get added to hot apple cider to create INSTANT HOLIDAY CHEER. Science!

Ingredients

• 2/3 cup shortening
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/3 cups honey
• 2 tsp. lemon flavoring
• 5 ¼ cups flour
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 2 tsp. salt

Directions

1. Mix shortening, sugar, egg, honey and flavoring thoroughly. Measure flour and stir together with baking soda and salt. Blend in. Chill dough.
2. Heat oven to 375o. Roll dough out ¼” thick. Cut into desired shapes.
3. Place 1″ apart on lightly greased baking sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until no imprint remains when touched lightly.
4. When cool, ice and decorate as desired.

You can’t really see under the Santas here, but this year I debuted some new Hanukkah shapes as well: a menorah and a dreidel. We’ve also been making Stars of David for a while. Cookies for everyone!

You can make a ginger bread version by substituting brown sugar for granulated, molasses for honey, and 2 tsp. cinnamon plus 1 tsp. ginger for lemon flavoring.

I stole this tin from my mom because I thought it was pretty.

Next up: THE DECORATENING.

Hazelnut macaroons

• 2 3/4 cups hazelnuts, shelled and skinned (see below)
• 2 plus 1 egg whites, room temperature
• 2 1/2 cups sugar (I used 1/2 cup less, and it was still very sweet, so use your discretion)

To skin hazelnuts, place on a foiled baking sheet in an even layer and roast in the oven at 375˚F for about 8-10 minutes. Pour the toasty nuts out onto a kitchen towel, then fold the towel over the nuts and rub the towel against your nuts (??) vigorously to remove as much of the outer skin as possible. The skin is not really bad or anything, and it won’t all come off anyway, so this is really kind of optional. Also optional: toasting the nuts anyway… the taste of toasted hazelnuts is better than raw, in my opinion, but it’s up to you!

Preheat the oven to 300˚F and line a cookie sheet with butter-greased parchment paper. Grind the nuts fine in a food processor and place in a large mixing bowl. Whisk two of the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the nuts in smallish batches. Fold the remaining egg white in, and then add the sugar and mix until fairly homogeneous. Roll into 1-1 1/2 inch diameter balls and place on the cookie sheet slightly flattened. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until lightly browned. [I had to do it in two batches because our bakeware sucks, and each batch was around 20 cookies.]

Whatever you do, don’t let any water or milk touch the chocolate as that causes it to “seize” and do weird things to the texture. Use chocolate and nothing else (maybe sugar is okay, but there’s already two cups in the cookies for god’s sake).