Category — Recipes
Anatomy of a Meatball
A good meatball begins as a tried-and-true recipe, either passed down through family lore, or traded with a neighbor, or copied out of a cookbook, catalog, website, or magazine. It gets made, to exacting proportions, over and over, until the dish fits comfortably like a worn pair of jeans and your body and mind go on autopilot when you’re in the kitchen.
One day, based purely on a shortage of this ingredient, or an abundance of that, the meatball recipe gets a dash of improvisation, and evolves. You add something that you hadn’t thought of adding before, or add a little less or more of something else, or substitute one ingredient for something else, and not only did you still end up with meatballs, they were better, because they were no longer someone else’s recipe, they were your meatballs.
Tuesday was spaghetti and meatballs night. These are my meatballs.
In its most basic form, a meatball is a lightly blended combination of one or more types of meat, bread, some dairy, and various herbs and seasonings. Beyond the meat, bread, and dairy, your greatest potential for customization comes in the seasonings. What I am listing here is what I did on Tuesday night, which was largely dictated by what was on hand and what was growing in the garden - your mileage will definitely vary based on the unique riffs that you take off of the main tune.
Here’s my list of ingredients. The recipe is highly scalable, so go crazy with your bad self.
1.5 lbs ground beef, 80% lean
1 slice bread
2 eggs
4 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
1/4 cup milk
1/3 cup grated parmesan
Bunch of herbs, 1 1/2 tsp salt, bunch of ground pepper
Olive oil for frying
Useful items - flexible spatula, high-sided frying pan, tongs
You Want The Sauce, Too?
28oz can of chopped or crushed tomatoes
More garlic, chopped
Oregano, or some other herb
Red wine
The Meat
Most recipes call for a blend of beef, pork, and veal, which contributes to a more delicately textured meatball than if you use just one kind. Most times, I am too lazy or frugal to hunt for ground pork and veal, so I use beef exclusively. The most important rule is this - the more fat in your meatball mix, the better the meatballs. I tried using 95% lean beef one time, and the results were horrible - dry, crumbly, rubbery meatballs that absolutely refused to absorb any sauce. I always use 80% lean; if you’re concerned about the fat content, realize that a lot of fat will be poured out and not end up in the finished dish. Then again, if you are really worried about fat content, you shouldn’t really be eating beef anyway.
Eggs
Rule of thumb, one egg per pound of meat, erring on the egg side. So, I had a 1 1/2 pound pack of ground beef, so I used 2 eggs to make the meatballs. Lightly beat the eggs with a fork before adding them to the mix.
Bread
Some recipes call for soaking bread in milk, others call for bread crumbs. I don’t see a difference in the end results - I like to give a slice of bread a brief spin in the food processor to make it into crumbs. So long as, in the end, your bread has formed a pasty mush with your liquid, you’ll be fine. You could probably get away with canned crumbs provided they are not too old and dry.
Dairy
I’ve seen recipes that use plain yogurt, and others that use milk. Again, for reasons of expediency, I use milk because it’s what’s most commonly on hand. I’ve used yogurt before, and you really can’t taste it in the end result, so the purpose of dairy is really as a moistening agent here.
The Extras
Here’s where you get to have fun and customize according to what you like, what’s on hand, or what seems to be a good idea at the time. Beyond the usuals of salt and pepper, the variations of herbs and spices that you can add to a meatball recipe are really flexible.
My personal taste enjoys a lot of garlic, and a nice hit of grated parmesan, so, at least to me, those two add-ins are essential to my meatball recipe. I generally chop about three or four garlic cloves into the mix, along with 1/4 to 1/3 cup of grated parmesan. When I went out to the garden, I snipped a handful of italian parsley, some thyme branches, and a bunch of oregano. After rinsing these clippings, I roughly chopped the parsley and thyme and tossed them into the bowl with the rest of my dry ingredients (bread crumbs, salt, pepper, parmesan, garlic) and gave the whole thing a good toss. I reserved the oregano for the sauce.
To this bowl, I then added about 1/4 cup of milk, and the two beaten eggs. Using a whisk, I stirred the contents of the bowl until I had a uniform mixture, then folded in the ground meat using my hands. At this point, I put the bowl into the fridge so that it could firm up a bit - if you’re pressed for time, you can skip the chilling.
Here’s the cooking part. Take a large frying pan, preferably with tall sides (the meatballs will tend to splatter) and heat a small amount of olive oil on medium-high heat for about three minutes, then turn the pan so that the oil coats the bottom evenly.
Wet your hands. Take a 1/4 cup measure and measure out 1/4 cup of meatball mix from the mound, then plop it into your palm and roll it up into a meatball. The mixture should form a loose clump that holds together, but is not bouncy-bouncy hard. As you complete each meatball, place it carefully into the pan. You should be able to get a decent number of meatballs going in a ring around the edge of the pan, and a couple more in the center. Don’t crowd them.
After a few minutes, take a flexible spatula and shimmy it under each meatball, to separate it from the pan (don’t use tongs, you’ll rip the meatballs in half). After loosening the meatballs, use the tongs to carefully turn them to cook the other side. If you’re a perfectionist, you can repeat this process twice more, but generally browning them on two sides is enough to keep them from falling apart. I’ve never done this in a nonstick pan, so maybe using one would enable you to skip the flexible spatula.
As the meatballs progress to a more done state, you can begin pushing the initial batch to one side of the pan to finish cooking as you form and place more meatballs into the empty space. Don’t be overly concerned about overcooking them - they are large enough, and contain enough fat, to not dry out. As the first batch of meatballs seem done, you can transfer them to a paper towel with the tongs as you finish cooking the rest.
After all is said and done, you should now have a lovely batch of meatballs. At this point, you can let them cool completely and refrigerate or freeze them, eat them as they are, or finish them in some tomato sauce, as I have done here.
For the tomato sauce, I chopped more garlic, and set up my oregano and found myself some leftover red wine. I drained all but a couple of tablespoons of fat from the pan and threw in the garlic, along with a little more olive oil. When the garlic turned golden, but before it burned, I added the oregano and about a cup of red wine to the pan and scraped up all of the sticky meat leavings with a wooden spoon, then added a 28oz can of chopped tomatoes. Let this come to a simmer, add the meatballs (turn them to coat evenly with sauce) and let the whole thing cook, covered, at a low simmer for about 35 minutes.
Slow Roasted Zucchini, Sea Salt, Olive Oil
Since it’s the height of summer, there’s a lot of fresh, local produce to be had. While we don’t get out to the farmers’ stands often enough, the local supermarket has a wonderful program where they sell locally sourced fruits and vegetables, highlighting exactly where the food that you’re buying is coming from. A couple of weeks ago, there was a nice mound of zucchini that was so tempting, we bought a few without a real plan for what to do with them.
I have a truffle shaver which has, for years, been one of my favorite gadgets in the kitchen. Mind you, I’ve only ever shaved a single truffle on this contraption, but it works especially well with parmesan cheese, chocolate, and hard vegetables. It’s got a blade attached to a screw, and you turn the screw to make the opening wider or narrower as you need it. I hacked the ends off of the zucchini and, in a flash, had passed them over the truffle shaver, forming a neat pile of uniformly thin rounds on my cutting board.
Now, if the preparation is going to be simple, I suppose I’ll have to make the presentation a little snappier. I took a big round pan and started layering the zucchini rounds in concentric circles, alternating directions with each full layer. Between each layer I drizzled some good-quality olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt. When I was done, I popped the whole thing into the oven and slow roasted the zucchini for about an hour, until the rounds were browned along the edges and top.
This approach concentrates the already-summer fresh flavor of the zucchini quite well. The salt, as salt does with any food, enhances the subtle qualities of the vegetable, while roasting condenses and focuses the flavor. Next time, though, I think I’ll cut the rounds thicker, or into matchsticks, since slicing them this thin sacrificed texture a little, resulting in soft rounds instead of crisps.
Crepes with Smoked Salmon, Creme Fraiche and Chive
We had a fairly solid plan for breakfast on the morning following the Big Pig Gig. Since we only had a couple of overnight guests, we figured we would whip up some crepes on Sunday morning, something quick and easy that doesn’t require a lot of thought.
Then, Drink-O happened. Plus we went to bed at 3:30am. And I forgot to make the crepe batter ahead of time, and in the morning I discovered that a crucial element for the batter, milk, was nowhere to be found in the fridge. We also felt like a truck hit us.
So, crepes never happened on Sunday, and we ended up at a Bob Evans on Sunday afternoon, which is the best place to grab a meal of breakfast food after a night of BBQ and booze-fueled debauchery. After a couple of days, when everything was cleaned up and put away and the house returned to normal, I picked up some milk and went about implementing my crepe plan, two days late and for dinner instead of breakfast.
Hardware-wise, it’s nice to have a crepe pan. It’s not absolutely essential, and if you don’t have one you can always use a non-stick saute pan. I’m very idiosynchratic about my crepe-making process - I always use my same crepe pan, and I have to always use my wooden spoon that measures out exactly the 1/4 cup of batter that I need for each crepe. But, at minimum, you need a nonstick pan, a ladle or other means of providing a consistent measure of batter, a nonstick spatula, and a nonstick pair of tongs.
The batter recipe that I use is from the site Chocolate and Zucchini, and you can get the recipe there by clicking on the link. You’ll find most crepe recipes don’t vary much in their ingredients - flour, eggs, water, milk - as long as you end up with a thin batter, you should do just fine.
Like my other favorite quick meal, omelettes, crepes are more about technique than anything else. You need to get your fillings in order before you start cooking, so chop whatever needs chopping (in this case, smoked salmon and chives) and have them close at hand. Open up your container of creme fraiche (sour cream is a good substitute) and put two spoons in there (one to scoop, one to push off the creme fraiche onto the crepe).
Now comes the fun part. Take your pan and set it over high heat, and put a drop or two of water in the center of the pan. Take some butter out, and get a pat of butter ready (for each crepe, about half a tablespoon, maybe even less, depending on the size of your pan). When your water droplets sizzle and boil away, the pan’s hot and ready - put your butter in, and use your spatula to spread a thin layer of butter across the pan’s surface.
Using your left hand, hold the pan above the stove at a 45 degree angle (handle pointed down towards you - and if you’re left-handed, reverse whatever I’m saying here). With your right hand, equip your ladle, and ladle about 1/4 cup of crepe batter into the pan, keeping the ladle at the same position while swirling the pan to allow the batter to coat the surface and form a circle. Don’t worry if your circle isn’t perfect, it’ll be hidden when you fold it. Set the pan back down on the burner and cook the crepe for about 30 seconds until the top is dry and the edges begin to curl.
Equip your spatula, and shimmy it underneath the crepe, lift it, and flip it over to cook the other side. After you flip, start laying your filling ingredients in one quadrant of the circle (not a full half, since you’ll be folding this). By the time you’re finished, it’s time to flip and fold - use your tongs to grab the edge of the crepe, drag it over the filling, and fold again to form a little wedge. Shove this off onto a plate and start on the next crepe, adding more butter to the pan and letting it melt completely before ladling more batter.
Repeat as necessary. You’ll find that you have more than enough batter, so it can keep for a day or two in your refrigerator. We like to make a batch of dessert crepes, using things like Nutella, peanut butter, marshmallows, and/or bananas and chocolate. Really, anything you can get your hands on would work just fine. There are no crepe police.
Counting Down to The Big Pig Gig
The road to the Big Pig Gig is paved with test recipes. This past weekend, we stayed in and beta-tested three of the recipes that we were planning on serving next week. One is an appetizer, one’s a side, and one’s a dessert. All three turned out amazingly well and are a go for starring roles at the Big Pig Gig.
The unofficial theme for this year (at least in my head) is True South, and, as such, there’s more of a Southern bent to the menu than in previous years. One true Southern staple, and a delicacy that I had a lot of while in South Carolina, is pimento cheese. The people who I’ve spoken with around these parts all have expressed some degree of unfamiliarity with pimento cheese, so maybe it deserves a little explanation here.
Pimento cheese is a concoction of cheddar and cream cheese, mixed with pimentos and a pinch of this, a dash of that. If I had to classify it, it’s kind of a spread of sorts, although it is very common for people to make pimento cheese sandwiches as a quick and cheap lunch. Every family in the South has a particular recipe for pimento cheese, but often times people will just skip tradition and buy it from the grocery store. Having had some homemade stuff down in South Carolina last week, I can tell you there’s no beating a pimento cheese made with dedication and personal pride.
Which brings me to the pimento cheese recipe that made the cut. I came across this recipe in the book Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill, which I picked up at an outlet store for eight bucks, but is well worth every penny even at full price. Having flipped from cover to cover, I love this book so much I’m putting it into the sidebar for this site.
I won’t give away Mr. Stitt’s recipe here, but I can tell you that it does stick to the common pimento cheese template of cheddar and cream cheese, and is amazingly quick to whip up in a food processor in all of five minutes and provides a damn fine classic example of pimento cheese. We’ll be serving it alongside a stack of saltines and Ritz crackers - the first batch is nearly gone, and it’s only been two days.
Act Two was a brand new recipe for cornbread. I’ve been a creature of habit for years now, having found a recipe for cornbread and sticking with it every year for the barbecue. That was true until we went to Charleston, and ate at the Hominy Grill, where they served a cornbread that was so light and airy, I would have given my right arm for the recipe. As it turns out, I just needed to buy their cookbook for $12, and whoop, there it is. By Grapthar’s Hammer, what a savings.
So, about this cornbread - my previous cornbread recipe, that which held the title of “my” cornbread for going on about five years now, was made from stone ground cornmeal, was fairly thick and dense, and had about two cob’s worth of corn kernels mixed into every batch of batter. I thought I would never leave it. The Hominy Grill cornbread, though, was a revelation - presented as a wedge, it was unlike any other cornbread I had ever tasted, almost cakelike in its crumb, collapsing easily into an almost creamy texture, but still retaining that Southern quality of not being too sweet.
I was hopeful that I would be able to replicate the same qualities that we had so enjoyed in the restaurant. I found that the key to the lightness was a greater amount of baking powder than I had seen in a cornbread recipe prior - when wet, the batter was almost foamy as I poured it into the pan. Some 30 minutes later, after taking it out of the oven, I had a sense that I had gotten it right. After letting it cool a bit, and cutting into it, we knew that we had found our new cornbread recipe. We whipped up an impromptu dish of honey butter and attacked the thing like it had insulted our mamas.
The last test recipe was for buttermilk pie, another dish that we had tried at the Hominy Grill and another recipe that was included in the small booklet that we had bought from the restaurant. Made from a simple batter of buttermilk, eggs, sugar, and a little bit of lemon juice, the pie presents a light ending to what presumably will be a very heavy meal of barbecued pork (and chili, and mac and cheese, and cornbread, and red rice…) for most people attending our bash. The recipe was easy to follow, and turned out tasting exactly like the version that was served to us in the restaurant. So, we have our dessert, or at least our contribution to dessert, along with whatever anyone else decides to bring.
Oh yes, that, and a little something called Jack Daniels Chocolate Ice Cream. More on that later.
Chinese White Cooked Chicken
Here’s something you may not know about me - I don’t like to cook when it’s just for myself.
So, when my wife was out of town for two nights this week, I needed to come up with a way of feeding myself that didn’t involve too much effort, since I was already disinclined to be in the kitchen anyway. On the first night, I stopped at the supermarket and picked up a hoagie for dinner, and a small chicken. I ate the hoagie the first night, and the second night I made this dish.
When I was growing up, my mom used to always refer to this as “Chicken in Water” which is pretty much what it is. It’s more technique-based than ingredient-based, but the charm of this preparation is that it requires almost no effort beyond boiling water, and results in absolutely foolproof, perfectly cooked chicken. The key is to let the chicken steep in the hot stock long enough so that the heat penetrates the bird throughout, bringing the temperature up so that the meat is fully cooked.
Chinese White Cooked Chicken
1 small chicken, rinsed
A pot of water, enough to fully submerge the chicken
Ginger
Garlic
Chinese rice wine (optional, but good if you have it)
Salt
Bring the pot of water to a boil. While you’re waiting for the water, slice a knob of ginger into four or five pieces, and smash three or four cloves of garlic, and add both of these to the water along with a cup or so of rice wine.
When the water is at a full boil, add a splash of salt (as you would for pasta, about that much).
Carefully lower the chicken fully into the boiling water, making sure the water fills the cavity of the bird, and bring the water back to a gentle, bubbling boil.
For small chickens, let this cook for about 10 to 15 minutes. Put a lid on the pot, and turn off the heat.
That’s it. Now all you have to do is let the chicken sit in the water for at least an hour, and it will be fully cooked. You can even let it sit longer and it won’t dry out. Plus, you’ll end up with a nice pot of chicken stock that you can use for soup later on.
To serve
Use a pair of tongs and fish the chicken out and onto a platter. Remove and discard the skin, and use forks to pull the meat from the bones. A good pairing is to serve this over buttered rice topped with a little bit of soy sauce or sesame oil, and scallions or chives.
Cold Food for Hot Weather
We’re coming off of our first heat wave of the summer, four straight days of 98 degree weather which culminated in violent thunderstorms last night that finally brought some relief.
On Monday, it was so hot that I had absolutely no desire to cook anything, nor did I want to venture out into the heat to pick something up. Whatever I made, I wanted it to be cold and really easy to make with things that I already had in my kitchen.
My solution was cold peanut noodles (you may see variations of this recipe as cold sesame noodles, but seeing as the bulk of the recipe is peanut butter…).
A quick search on the internet turns up lots of recipes for cold peanut noodles, and they all basically read the same. Some of the recipes can get complex, but especially when I’m in a rush, I’m going for the most straightforward preparation possible.
Here’s a quick and dirty mockup, based largely on a Tyler Florence recipe that I found on Epicurious. Feel free to adjust proportions and add items as you please.
Cold Peanut Noodles for Hot Summer Weather
3/4 lb of spaghetti
2 Tbs soy sauce
2 Tbs rice vinegar
1 Tbs sesame oil
1/2 Cup peanut butter
1/2 Cup water or stock
Protein of some sort - tofu, cooked chicken, cooked beef, really anything
Put a pot of water on to boil.
While you are waiting for your water to boil, put everything else into a small saucepan and set it over medium heat. Whisk everything together, bring to a simmer, and turn off the heat. Sauce is done.
Make your spaghetti. Drain it, and run some cold water over the noodles to cool them down. Tumble the pasta into a serving bowl and toss it with the sauce, adding your protein if you are using it.
This is good at room temperature, or even cold right out of the refrigerator.
Additional Hints: I like to make this super spicy, which you can do by adding hot sauce, or sambal if you have it on hand. It’s a spicy red chile mash that you can find in Chinese grocery stores, and some supermarkets. Other neat additions would be chopped cilantro or cucumbers.
Perfect Scrambled Eggs
I took the day off from work today.
After mowing the lawn, watering the garden, and refilling the bird feeder, I decided to treat myself to one of the most basic, yet misunderstood, of food preparations - the scrambled egg.
If your exposure to scrambled eggs has only been in restaurants, or at brunch buffet lines, then you probably do not understand my enthusiasm for the dish. After all, it’s only eggs and butter, something to be whipped up quickly and in mass quantities for a crowd, right?
But that’s the problem - our society has taught us to interpret scrambled eggs as a dish that’s to be made as quickly as possible. Here’s the real truth - haste is the enemy of scrambled eggs. High heat makes for tough, dried out eggs, and result in the short-order scrambled eggs that you find in diners, and the egg jerky that you find in buffets that’s been sitting over a sterno flame for an hour.
Preparing perfect scrambled eggs requires the exact opposite of the process to make an omelette. When sauteing an omelette, you want to work quickly, tilting and swirling your pan to coat the bottom with egg, over the highest possible heat so that the egg sets and you can roll it around whatever filling you’ve chosen.
For scrambled eggs, you want to cook them as gently as possible, over the lowest heat possible, to yield the most delicate structure that you can. Perfect scrambled eggs should take a long time to make, and should just barely hold together. It’s a spot-on dish for a day off from work.
This is my recipe for Perfect Scrambled Eggs. You can jazz it up a number of ways, which I am sure will show up here soon, but today we’re starting with the basic master recipe. As with all recipes with fewer than five ingredients, the better the quality of your ingredients, the better the final product. Find the best eggs and butter you can get your hands on.
Perfect Scrambled Eggs
Butter
3 eggs, preferably organic or at least free range
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
Take a nonstick pan and set it over medium heat. Place about 2 Tbs of butter into the pan, and keep an eye on it while you whip your eggs up. You want to let that melt, and tilt the pan so that it gets an even coat of butter. Once your butter is melted, turn the heat to the lowest possible setting. [note - all of my recipes presume gas cooking; if you are working off of electric burners, have one set to low and transfer the pan over to that one]
Crack the eggs into a small bowl, and use a whisk or fork to stir them up until you have a uniform beaten egg mix. Pour the eggs into the pan.
Take a nonstick spatula or spoon, and give the eggs a good stir. Wait a bit. Stir some more. What you’re doing here is incorporating the bits of egg that have cooked into the bits of egg that haven’t yet cooked. As the eggs heat up, they’ll start to slowly firm up - the key is to reach this point in as much time as possible. Avoid the temptation to turn up the heat - the eggs will cook faster, but they will be nowhere near as delicate, and you will have missed the fun train.
When the eggs are done to your liking, tip them into a serving bowl and top with a fresh grinding of pepper and some salt. Welcome to the world of real scrambled eggs.
Random Quasi-Mexican Chicken Dish #1
This is not a pretty dish. The picture above is merely for the purposes of illustration.
This all started with oregano, which I have an abundance of in my garden. Oregano behaves much like mint does, in that it gets everywhere and doesn’t ever die off. Since I have more use for oregano than mint, though, I let it live, since it seems to happily coexist with my thyme and my insane sage plant.
So, I have this fresh oregano, and I snipped a bit of it out of the garden. The last time we went grocery shopping, I picked up a can of green chiles without a specific plan on what to do with them - at worst case, they’re really good stirred into a batch of scrambled eggs.
I had forgotten to take any meat out of the freezer, so I was stuck with frozen chicken thighs and breasts. I decided to go with the thighs, but since they were frozen I knew that I’d have to cook them for a while to ensure that they were completely done. That ruled out any sort of roasting or grilling, so my thoughts turned to stew.
In the pantry, I found an unopened bag of Great Northern beans. Despite the fact that I didn’t soak these overnight, it wasn’t a problem since I have a pressure cooker.
So, to sum it all up, I had oregano, green chiles, chicken thighs, and white beans.
This is what I made:
Canola oil
4 chicken thighs, preferably thawed
2 to 3 Tbs oregano, chopped
1 can green chiles
8oz Great Northern beans, or other white beans
White wine
Garlic, chopped
Chicken stock
Get your beans ready - if they are dried, cook them according to the package instructions, and if they canned, open the can, drain them, and rinse them off.
Heat a thin layer of oil in a wide pan until shimmery. Lay each chicken thigh, skin side down, into the pan, and saute without moving for about 7 minutes, then turn each thigh to cook for another 5 minutes. Remove to a clean plate, and pour off the excess oil/fat in the pan, leaving about 2 Tbs.
Throw your garlic into the pan and fry that up, until golden. Take some wine and deglaze the pan, scraping up all of the chicken bits. Add about 2 cups of chicken stock, then the beans, chiles, and oregano.
Place the thighs back into the pan. Add more stock so that the liquid level comes up about 1/2 to 3/4 up the thighs.
Bring to a simmer, cover, and turn the heat to low. Cook for 1 1/2 hours.
Before serving, take the thighs out and remove the meat from the bones. Add the meat back to the pan.
Butter Fried Sage Blossoms, Co-starring Pasta, Chicken, and Lemon
Two of the garden items that survived through this past winter were the thyme and the sage. As a result, both have gotten an early start on their growing, and it’s gotten to the point where the sage plant is absolutely thriving, reaching halfway to my hip and having developed light green and purple blossoms.
Now, I knew that you could cook zucchini blossoms, but I had no idea what to do with sage blossoms. I tried eating one off of the plant, but the flavor was a little too intense in its raw state - like a little grenade of sage flavor. So, I decided to try the best approach to cooking any untried food item - fry the suckers in butter.
I picked a handful of sage blossoms and some sage leaves and washed them, setting them aside to dry. I figured the best delivery device for fried sage in butter would be pasta, so I made some spaghetti and, seeing that I was already cooking anyway, threw some chicken breasts in for good measure.
I’ll start with the chicken, which is a variation of a recipe that I’ve seen before using veal. If you want everything to come together at the end, you should also start a pot of water boiling for your pasta before making the chicken, and squeeze and zest your lemons.
Chicken with Sage and Ham
2 chicken breasts, pounded slightly to uniform thickness (or as close as uniform as you can)
2 sage leaves
2 slices of ham
2 toothpicks
Flour, salt, pepper
Olive oil and butter
Get yer chicken ready! Take your flattish chicken breasts and add salt and pepper to both sides. Place a sage leaf on each, then cover with a slice of ham. Use the toothpicks to stitch the ham to the chicken breast, then dust both sides of each chicken breast with flour.
Heat a saute pan over medium heat until hot-hot-hot. Put about two tablespoons of olive oil in, swirl to coat, then add a small pat of butter, also swirling to coat. Wait a bit so that the butter begins to darken ever so slightly, then lay your chicken down in the pan. Saute without moving (the chicken, not you) for 5 to 7 minutes, depending on thickness (again, the chicken, not you), then carefully turn and cook the other side for another 5 to 7 minutes. Remove to a clean plate and cover with foil.
Pasta with Sage Blossoms, Lemon, and Brown Butter
8 oz pasta
Sage leaves and blossoms
3 Tbs unsalted butter (more or less)
Juice and zest of one lemon
Black pepper
Drop your pasta into your boiling water and start your timer. You want to time this so that the pasta is done and in a colander by the time you begin the sauce.
As the pasta cooks, melt the butter in the same pan that you used for the chicken until it begins to brown slightly, then add the sage blossoms and leaves and step back about four feet, because the moisture in the sage will create some hot fat splatters. Fry the sage for about 30 seconds, then add the lemon juice and zest.
Leaving the heat on low, add your drained pasta to the sauce and toss it around. The pasta will absorb the butter sauce beautifully. Turn off the heat, add a few grindings of black pepper, and turn the whole thing out into a serving bowl.
Serve the chicken on a bed of the pasta, with lemon halves on the side.
Introducing My Cookbook Collection
For some people, it’s shoes. For others, it’s consumer electronics. For me, the object of my collection obsession, as it has been for a number of years, has been the cookbook.
You may have noticed that, so far, a lot of the recipes that have appeared on The Best Food Blog Ever have been sourced from cookbooks and culinary magazines, and this is by design. I am approaching the development of this blog much like the evolution of my own skills in the kitchen. At first, you prepare recipes exactly as they are presented in a cookbook, to the letter, and as someone new to the kitchen, you fear any variation lest you “mess up” the final dish. Then, one day, you really want to make a particular recipe and you find out that you’re missing one small ingredient - and you substitute, and it works. Then you do this more and more, and one day, you’re using the cookbooks and recipes as launching points, taking an idea here, a technique there, and making your own creations based on tried-and-true past experiences.
That’s my rationale for having so many cookbooks. Quite a few of them are good for only a handful of recipes, but they are solid, dependable recipes that will always work. Others, like the Joy of Cooking and The New Basics, are the go-to books for master recipes covering a broad range of different ingredients and techniques. Still others form the basis for my core knowledge of ethnic cuisine, and I try to limit myself to the “best of the best” for a certain nationality, but someone’s always writing a better one that will be published one day, and that will invariably end up in my bookcase.
The oldest cookbook that I own was probably picked up when I was fifteen, and the most recent was likely found at an outlet store for a killer price. I used to avoid books that had a lot of fancy photography and advanced layout (I still have a small collection of Frugal Gourmet paperbacks) but in today’s modern times that’s all we seem to get, and I don’t mind the shift. I’ve come to realize that food photography can go a long way towards illustrating what a dish is supposed to look like, and without it, you’ve lost an important barometer of how well you’re executing a dish.
Perhaps the best part about finally buying a house was being able to display all of my cookbooks in one place, as opposed to having random stacks of them on the floor in our old apartment.
Well, that, and the larger kitchen.
