melting your mouth

Matt and I had a delicious, though perhaps not all that balanced or healthy, meal of steamed mussels and artichokes the other night. We first started eating mussels while we were studying abroad in France, where they are often served with French fries as “Moules Frites.” There, mussels are eaten not with one of those silly little shellfish forks as I’ve seen them served here, but by using one of the shells as little tongs to pull the meat from the other shells. (Sorry for the blurriness in the picture, but I thought it was worth including for purposes of instruction.)

We’ve cooked them a couple times since then, and they are very easy to prepare. A recipe in this months Cooking Light inspired us to make them again. This time, we simply steamed them with chicken broth, lemon juice, and some spices, and served them with some butter for dipping.

We also steamed an artichoke, which was originally planned as an appetizer but ended up being finished about the same time as the mussels. We also had some dipping sauce for the artichoke — as I said, not very healthy, but certainly delicious! If you’ve never eaten whole artichokes before, as we hadn’t until moving to California, they may require some eating instructions too. Basically, you pull off the petals, dip them in the sauce, and scrape the little bit of pulp off with your teeth. I didn’t take pictures of that part, but Elise has a nice tutorial. Also, you want to stop eating the petals when you get to the purplish ones in the center. This part is called the “choke.” It should be scraped out, leaving the delicious “heart” of the artichoke underneath.

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Sorry for the long hiatus, but the quarter is finally over and I should have a chance to blog a bit at least for the next couple weeks when things get geared up again. Everything has been so busy I’ve hardly even been cooking, much less taking pictures and writing something up. Matt’s been taking care of me very generously though, so I have been fed some pretty good meals in between working problem sets, exams, and grading. But I’m looking forward to getting back in the kitchen!

Here’s an easy side dish that always seems to impress despite its simplicity. We learned this from a friend when we were studying abroad in France a few years ago. I don’t have a real recipe and I always change it around a bit, but here’s the gist of it.

Stuffed Tomatoes

• small, round tomatoes, one for every two servings
• coarse breadcrumbs, preferably homemade, ~1/2 c per tomato
• fresh Parmigiano-Regianno, grated, a few tablespoons per tomato
• fresh chopped herbs, a tablespoon or so per tomato (rosemary, parsley, thyme, etc. … I use whatever I have on hand)
• minced garlic, about a clove per tomato
• salt and pepper to taste
• olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 F. Cut tomatoes in half. Place cut side up on a baking sheet. (You may need to cut a little bit off the rounded side so they will sit flat.) In a bowl, mix together breadcrumbs, cheese, herbs, garlic, salt, and pepper. Add enough olive oil so the filling can be barely held together when squished. Drizzle a little olive oil over the tomatoes. Mound the filling on top of each tomato half. Bake at 400 F for 20 minutes or so, until the top is a little browned and the tomatoes are cooked through.

In case you were wondering what I made for dinner to go with my French Bread — wonder no longer! Matt and I had Mom and Dad over for dinner so I could cook out of my new Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook that I got for Christmas. I chose one of her so-called “uncomplicated menus”, with a few changes. This is the original menu:

• Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Salad
• Carrot and Shallot Soup with Chervil Cream
• Charcoal-Grilled Chicken with Garlic Puree
• Cherries and Almond Cookies

We decided to change things around from this a bit. We had planned to make this menu back in January, and we bought ingredients and everything before Matt and I both got sick and had to cancel. We made the carrot soup then (I always like soup when I’m sick), and it was good but I wasn’t quite ready to have it again yet, so we decided to make our friend Kelly Branson’s butternut squash soup instead. Also, I’d been wanting to try the CBGB (cherries, biscuits, ginger, and butterscotch, oh my!) dessert Habeas Brulee posted a while back. But, we decided we didn’t need something quite so rich or complicated, and so we made just the almond biscuits and cherry sauce instead.

I’m not going to copy whole recipes out of this book, but I do have permission to share Kelly’s recipe for butternut squash soup which I highly recommend. I’ll give a summary of the other recipes though, and if you want more details, you can buy the book. Which, by the way, I highly recommend. I basically read the whole cookbook cover-to-cover between Christmas and New Year’s this year. It’s so beautifully written, and she includes interesting details about the origins of each recipe. Now, I just need to find an excuse to go eat at Chez Panisse!

Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Salad

I marinated the goat cheese rounds in olive oil and rosemary for a day. (It was supposed to be thyme, but I think Alice Waters would approve of using what I grow instead of having to buy something at the store.) Then I dipped the goat cheese in bread crumbs and baked it for a few minutes. I served this over mixed greens tossed in a light vinaigrette of olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Butternut Squash Soup
Recipe from Kelly Branson

Charcoal-Grilled Chicken with Garlic Puree

I marinated a whole chicken (cut into pieces) in garlic, red wine, and rosemary (again, it was supposed to be thyme, but I had rosemary so I used it). Matt grilled the chicken on a low charcoal fire. We also roasted garlic, and made a puree of that which we rubbed on the chicken after it came off the grill. We served this over roasted potatoes, and garnished with lemons.

Almond Biscuits with Cherry Sauce

Danielle at Habeas Brulee posted this gorgeous dessert a few months ago. She named it CBGB, for Cherries, Biscuits, Ginger and Butterscotch. The original version was almond biscuits, with a sauce made from sour cherries, garnished with candied, pickled ginger, and accompanied by butterscotch sauce. Some dessert, huh?! I’d still like to try the whole thing sometime, but for this meal, I wanted something not quite so rich and sweet. So I made the almond buttermilk biscuits and made a sauce of (frozen) black cherries, since I couldn’t find sour ones. I thought this was a perfect close to this meal. The cherry sauce was pretty sweet, but I added lemon juice for a nice tart flavor, and the biscuits were nice and crumbly but not too sweet. I definitely think I will at least make the biscuits again, and I might add some more almond extract next time, or maybe press some slivered almonds into the tops, as I wanted a little more almond flavor.

This is another recipe I’ve gotten from my grandmother Meme through my mom. It’s not originally her recipe, but comes from a church cookbook from Friedland, a small Moravian town outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The original recipe calls it a “Golden Corncake,” but I’ve always called it cornbread. Like my mom and my grandmother, I always make my cornbread in an iron skillet. We melt the butter in the skillet first, so the skillet’s hot when you add the batter and it gets a nice buttery crust.

I usually accompany cornbread with some kind of stewy, stick-to-your-bones kind of food, like chili, or in this case Jambalaya (thanks for the country ham, Mom!). It’s pretty good left over, but it’s definitely best hot out of the pan. I like to smear it with a little butter, and Matt’s taught me to make that honey butter, which is also a pretty good treat.

Cornbread

Ingredients:

3/4 c Corn meal (yellow)
1 c Flour
1/3 c Sugar
3 t Baking powder
3/4 t Salt
1 c Milk
1 Egg, well-beaten
2 T Margarine

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425 F. Mix and sift dry ingredients. Heat skillet in the oven and melt margarine in it. Add the melted margarine, milk, and egg to the dry ingredients. Pour into skillet. Bake for 20 minutes at 425 F, until golden and a little browned around the edges.

Pictures to come next week, when I return from a trip to Long Beach. But this is so good, I didn’t think you should be without the recipe for any longer than absolutely necessary.

I have only a vague recollection of having brussel sprouts once before a few months ago. I don’t really remember having a strong opinion one way or another the first time I had them. So I didn’t grow up hating them the way I hear some people do, but they were just sort of off my radar. Then my parents went and took a fancy cooking class down in Wastonville, and since then, both Mom and I have been making brussel sprouts left and right. I think Matt and I have eaten them as a side dish at least twice this week. (And no, the second one wasn’t leftovers. There are never any leftovers.)

So as I was saying, I don’t know whether I like brussel sprouts ordinarily on their own or not, but I sure love them this way. This recipe is delicious, and except for being doused in olive oil, pancetta, sugar, and chicken broth, they’re pretty good for me, right?

They take a bit of time to cook, but don’t be tempted to pull them out too soon, no matter how hungry you might be, as the best part of these sprouts are the golden browned caramelized edges. Oh, and the crisped up pancetta. That’s pretty delicious too.

Yet another recipe adapted from my mom and dad’s class at Mugnaini Imports. I’m telling you, these folks are real winners.

Ingredients:

6-8 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Sugar
1/2 c chicken broth
6-8 slices of pancetta
A few handfuls of brussel sprouts, cleaned

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 300 F. Drizzle olive oil generously over the garlic in a jelly roll pan. Roast in a low oven until barely golden, 10-15 minutes. (But check them often, you don’t want them to get too brown.) Sprinkle with sugar and add chicken broth. Cook for another few minutes. Take this out of the pan and mash up the garlic into the broth. If the garlic gets too brown or cooks too quickly so that it won’t really mash, no worries. Just stick it in the food processor or blender (or chop the cloves up by hand.) Set aside. Turn the oven up to about 400 F.

Meanwhile, parboil the brussel sprouts: add just enough salted water to cover (though you won’t really be able to cover since they float). Turn on the heat and boil for 5-10 minutes, until barely tender. (You should be able to stick a fork in them, but when you do you should still feel reasonably firm resistance.) Drain the brussel sprouts and set them aside until cool enough to handle.

Chop the pancetta. Brown it in the oven for a few minutes in the jelly roll pan.

Meanwhile, cut each brussel sprout in half along the same axis as the stem. When the pancetta is slightly browned (it doesn’t have to be completely done), mix the broth/garlic mixture, pancetta, and brussel sprouts. Cook in the 400 F oven about 15-20 minutes, stirring every five minutes or so, until the sprouts are nicely browned and the edges caramelized a bit.

Eat as soon as possible, as they are best when they’re hot. Though they are still good room temperature too. These are just delicious all around.