This recipe is a riff on one I saw recently in Fine Cooking magazine, and represents such a classic combination of Italian flavors I knew I had to try it right away. I made it with a great gluten-free pasta made by a company called Ancient Harvest. They make it with quinoa and corn flours, hence the beautiful golden color you see in the photo. This was originally supposed to be our Meatless Monday meal this week, but as we had so much roast pork tenderloin left-over form the weekend, we ended up eating that on Monday instead. Meatless Tuesday doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but there you go.
Mango Soufflé with Coconut-Lime Crème Anglaise
If you are looking for something special and sweet to make your mom for Mother's Day, have I got a dish for you. After taking a few months away from Food52's weekly recipe contests, I decided to hop back in this week and crafted this dish to enter into their contest for "your best mangoes". To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of mangoes, I mean I love their flavor but find that carving around the monster pit in their center to be a bit of a pain. Plus, it seems that there is so much waste once the fruit has been peeled and the pit removed. Anyway, for the two that I carved up for this dish I was very patient, extracting all of the goodness from them I could and I have to say that in the end my efforts paid off in a BIG way.
Roasted Garlic Risotto with Pancetta and Spinach
One of the things I love most about risotto is how it feels right at home in any season. In the fall and winter you can load it full of hearty meats and chunks of root vegetables for a warming feast on a chilly day. In the spring and summer it takes well to a lighter hand, and shines when used with spring veggies and herbs. Given that we're just getting started with spring here in the northeast, this risotto straddles these two styles by combining a richness brought by roasted garlic and pancetta along with a lightness enhanced by the use of peas and baby spinach.
Milky Way Tart
A couple of days ago, Muppet, who had decided that we'd been making not nearly enough desserts as of late, sauntered over to our cookbook collection and pulled down Joanne Chang's fabulous Flour cookbook for a look-see. Five minutes later she was waving the book in my face, showing me all of the post-it tags that marked recipes she wanted to try. As most of them were rather large layer cakes, I asked her to take another swing through the book and try to find something a little more modest in size, "oohhh…good idea, she said, "bikini season's right around the corner"
My thoughts exactly.
Beef Pho
As much as I've enjoyed pho over the years, up until now I'd never made it myself. Now that I've seen first hand how easy and truly delicious this Asian soup can be when made at home, I certainly won't be waiting years before making it again.
The other day when I was at my butcher shop buying the skirt steak for our last post, I bought a little extra planning to toss it in the fridge after cooking and slicing it a few days later to use in this pho. As I always share with my students, cooking extra one day with a planned left-over meal in mind is smart weeknight meal planning, and with a recipe like this pho in your repertoire, it's a tasty plan as well. Left-over pork, shrimp or chicken would all be awesome in this dish.
Skirt Steak with Black Olive Aioli
Now that the sun is shining again after a week's worth of much needed rain, I'm in the mood for a delicious grilled dish, and this skirt steak certainly qualifies as that. Those of you who are Suzanne Goin fans may recognize this recipe as a slight adaptation of one from her gorgeous cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques. It's a book I've owned for a year or more, but am just starting to cook from now….silly me for waiting so long.
Goin is a chef of impeccable taste and extraordinary technique, yet what strikes me most about her food is how real and unpretentious it all feels. I can't wait to cook more dishes from this fabulous book.
Curried Chicken Salad
One of the lessons I stress time and again when teaching Cooking Matters classes is the idea of planning for the creative use of left-overs. Let's face it, most folks don't have the time (or the desire) to cook from scratch every night, so it really pays to look out over the course of your week and plan on left-overs from one night to feed you again a few days down the road.
I Bow Down to Jim Lahey and His No Knead Bread
As best I can determine, this recipe was the first viral success story of the food blog age way back in 2006. It was then that Mark Bittman wrote about Jim Lahey's revolutionary and quite unconventional no-knead bread technique, and in the process enticed a whole new generation of home cooks to craft their own artisanal loaves.
Why, you might ask, am I dedicating a post to a recipe that has already been so widely touted in the blogosphere? Because even though all the great food bloggers from Bittman, to my friend Stacey at Stacey Snacks have written about this bread, if I can tempt just one of my intrepid readers to try this recipe, then it's worth my effort to share it once again……yeah, it's that good. In fact, it is so good, and so easy that unless you are one of the lucky few that have an artisanal bakery within walking distance of your home, I bet that this will become your go-to resource for the highest quality bread.
Triple Chocolate Cheesecake
You gotta love birthdays around here. They may not be very good for our waistlines, but they sure are tasty! Our lovely young Peyton just turned 15, and as is our custom when one of us tacks on another year, we (oui) kitchen slaves craft a meal and cake of choice for the lucky celebrant. For her birthday meal Peyton chose an Asian theme with a Ming Tsai crab maki roll, and a Wagamama chicken gyoza, and for dessert, this insanely good chocolate cheesecake.
Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and Apples
It's been a while since we've had brussels sprouts around here so when I saw some small, lovely ones at the market the other day I just had to buy them. For those of you out there like me that HATED them as a kid, I urge you to give them another try. If your childhood experience with the little buggers was anything like mine, and you submitted to eating overcooked, sour, disintegrating slug-like morsels whenever your mom whipped them up (sorry mom, I know that's the way everyone cooked them back then), then it's time to give them another try.
