As American as Birthday Pie (flaky apple pie)
It’s been a while since I was able to undertake a crazy baking project. So when a rare free evening opened up, I sprung on the chance to go for broke. Especially when I realized that my free night was falling right before a labmate’s birthday. Jacques moved to the States only a couple of months ago from, as is consistent with his fictionalized name, French Belgium. With his birthday approaching, Jacques elaborated on the treats and attention he usually demands from friends and co-workers on his special day, quick to point out that he wouldn’t be asking the same of us. That is, at least not this year, so soon after he met us.
Jacques was without a doubt joking, but I’ve been eyeing apple pie recipes for a while now and things just came together. I was going to get my big baking evening and Jacques was going to get an elaborate birthday dessert, gosh darnit. Yes, I’ll take any excuse to bake.
“Turkey” Day? Pumpkin Day! (cheesy stuffed pumpkin)
Even as a vegetarian, I never saw anything wrong with a giant turkey as the centerpiece for the family Thanksgiving table. Both for the obvious reason (I’m pretty sure the other 20 or so guests would be mad if my dietary choices ruled the dinner menu) and the fact that a cooked bird actually looks rather impressive. At least until it’s carved, when things can get pretty gross.
Then I got into food and a hundred different food blogs, and I read so many posts this year telling me that a proper vegetarian needs to find a proper vegetarian centerpiece to replace the no-longer-necessary bird. I largely considered this hogwash. Who cares about an edible centerpiece, when the table is bedecked with such an impressive array of sides? For many years, I even considered it a competitive advantage to be able to avoid the main dish. And yes Thanksgiving is a competition – whoever eats the most without getting sick wins. Losing that extra burden brought on by the turkey really helped me out year after year.
This summer, I (Amanda) made the 101 Cookbooks recipe for gnocchi with peach champagne sauce. It was delicious, but you can’t get good peaches in the fall and winter. So one day during a particularly boring law class, I daydreamed about a fall version of the dish. And my co-adventurer Emily of course went along with it. As long as it doesn’t involve peeling an orange or eating small woodland creatures, she’s game for pretty much any food adventure.
The autumnal sweetness of the sweet potato gnocchi is paired with a surprisingly savory sauce of roasted pears and champagne (or your favorite Baptist-friendly alternative to champagne). To pump up the complexity of the dish like they do on that Top Chef show we both love, we also topped it with some of our cranberry chutney. It basically tasts like what I imagine an Italian version of a Thanksgiving meal would taste like. Although actually I’ve been in Italy on Thanksgiving before, and all I had was some Italian restaurant’s bad interpretation of American Thanksgiving food. Trust me, this gnocchi is better than the yam dishes I had on that day. At least, I think they were yams. . . .
This is not a hard dish to make, but it involves a few steps that require a lot of waiting around – kind of like bread-making, an activity of which I am also a devotee. So plan to make this when you have a good chunk of time and other stuff to do around the house (cleaning, homework, other boring stuff) that you can do between cooking steps.
Savoring Fall (spiced cranberry chutney)
Thankfully, I’ve never experienced the canned, gelatinous disaster presented as an afterthought on so many Thanksgiving tables. If the only texture of your cranberry dish is the ribbing of the can from which it came, something’s wrong. I’m not sure what Amanda thinks, but I find it almost sacrilege that those bitter red berries are reduced to a diluted mush without any of their original character or brilliance. Think of how shameful it must be for those poor cranberries sentenced to canning. I imagine them wondering just where in life they went wrong to deserve such an inglorious fate. Should I have taken that extracurricular bush falling opportunity? Did I not pay attention enough during chemistry to learn about proper acidification? Most importantly, will my parents ever be proud of me?
This pondering came later in life though, because as early as I can remember my cousin’s grandfather always made a proper sauce with fresh cranberries. And the cranmommies and crandaddies of the berries he uses each year must beam with pride and send their neighbors and relatives obnoxious, overly glowing Christmas letters. “BennyBerry is the highest berry on the prestigious east-facing branch and worked so hard to achieve his deep red hue that area cooks took notice!” I love Mark’s sauce and am happy to know that I’ll get to taste it again come Christmas. I have the recipe somewhere, but when Amanda and I needed an acidic red foil to the sweet flavors of our peach and yam gnocchi dish (more on that later), the recipe was nowhere to be found.
lazy woman’s rice krispies treats
Sometimes you want some Rice Krispies treats and you buy a bag of mini marshmallows and a box of Rice Krispies and you have every intention of making those delicious little things. But in the morning, you have a craving for them and you just don’t want to wait, and you just don’t have the time to make those treats (even though they’re not very labor intensive). Well, here’s my solution for you. Throw some mini marshmallows into your morning bowl of Rice Krispies cereal and satisfy your craving the easy way. If you want the dryer sort of marshmallow that goes best with cereal (as in Lucky Charms), leave the marshmallows out on the counter (covered, lest you get bugs) and let them dry out a bit overnight. But that’s a lot of effort, and all you really want is some marshmallows and Rice Krispies, right? Right.
Shrimp Amando (fettucine alfredo . . . sort of)
(This photo was actually taken in June 2012 – I thought I’d update the post a little! Admittedly, I didn’t change anything else of significance in the post, but I used the recipe, and two years later, it still hits the spot!)
According to Wikipedia, fettucine alfredo was named after some dude’s restaurant in which he invented the famous dish. So “alfredo” is not like “lasagna al forno,” which has a very functional meaning (lasagna from the oven – meaning the noodles are both boiled and cooked). To me, this means I can rename it if I want to. Particularly if I tweak the dish enough that it tastes a lot like alfredo but also sort of tastes like a different dish.
And thus we have the “Shrimp Amando” – named after me. Because I can. Whatever, men name stuff after themselves all the time – buildings, babies, vast empires. And who cares about Alfred?
Mmm . . . look how yummy all that shrimp looks, getting itself all sauteed in butter and olive oil and garlic and leeks. Yes, leeks. Leeks in Alfredo? No, you say, it can’t be done!! Yes it can, if I rename the dish after myself, I can do whatever I dang well please.
lasagna al forno
I was never a lasagna person growing up. There are a lot of standard “American” dishes that I only discovered as an adult, because my mom’s cooking is heavily influenced by her Texan and Cajun heritages (which is a very positive thing, in case that’s not clear). So while a lot of other families were eating meat and potatoes, or meatloaf and potatoes, or lasagna and other pasta dishes, I had a lot of beans and delicious rice, chicken and delicious rice, gumbo and delicious rice, etc. Seriously, that rice was and is delicious. And if you think making rice that delicious is easy – well, you’re wrong. But more on that some day in another post far, far away.
This lasagna is not terribly easy to make by the world’s new “30 minute dinner” standards. It’s not a one-pot recipe by any means. Every time I make it, I curse the fact that I must dirty several mixing bowls in the process. But then once I have a bite of this lasagna, all is forgiven. There’s a freshness and a lightness to this lasagna that is very different from the heavier sorts that usually grace America’s tables. Those are delicious, too, but they’re a different dish altogether.
apple galette with chocolate & apricot filling
We’re galette crazy here at emandam. Ok, maybe it’s just me, although I’m pretty sure I heard Emily swooning over a zucchini galette at some point this summer. Anyway, this isn’t exactly a “galette,” unless you get a bit fancier with the dough folding than I did the few times that I made it – I’m fully capable of fancy-pants galette making, mind you, but I kept having problems with my rolling pin not staying well-floured and it made rolling the dough thin enough rather difficult. Anyway, while mine doesn’t look quite as fancy as a typical galette, yours could, and it’s certainly not a tart (since I don’t have a tart pan), so it’s a galette. Period, end of discussion. Harumph.
Honey, I Forgot the Bread (simple sage thyme stuffing bread)
I think we can all agree that it isn’t Thanksgiving without the family’s variation on stuffing. It also isn’t Thanksgiving without someone in the family forgetting a vital ingredient after all the nearby stores are closed. This year that person was me. I was so excited about a particular stuffing recipe and had spent an entire month talking it up to every guest of the two Thanksgiving feasts for which I was cooking. So when I realized that I had no stuffing bread after the one bakery in town had closed, I had two options. Curse myself loudly and succumb to the failure of a no-stuffing Thanksgiving. Or give myself a pep talk and commit to a little bit of extra work for homemade bread. I actually ended up realizing that the ‘curse myself’ and ‘give myself a pep talk’ bits were not mutually exclusive, but I refused to ruin Thanksgiving. Or Fakesgiving, as Amanda, I and our friends called Thanksgiving Take II.
Since Wednesday night was already jam-packed with steps for various Thanksgiving recipes, tackling a fussy, overcomplicated bread recipe was not an option here. Especially considering the fact that I was just going to drown the product in cream and cheese and stuff it into a pumpkin. No, I needed simple, flavorful and fail-proof bread. And all of that from my first attempt at making a standard bread loaf. I’ve done all sorts of breads, starting with pizza dough a couple years ago and working my way up to asiago ciabattas and the everyday bread recently. That said, I’ve never attempted a plain Jane, normal sandwich bread, despite the virtual stack of tempting loaf recipes in my bookmarks list.
In Pursuit of Paprika (Hungarian wild mushroom soup)
This September I said goodbye to Amanda and our friends for a couple weeks, leapt across the pond and trekked through the great continent with the sole mission of acquiring myself some authentic Hungarian paprika to smuggle back home. Nothing could get in the way of me and that ingredient key to so many Magyar dishes. Like the goulashes I can’t even eat based on that whole meat avoidance thing. Okay, so the plan was a little flawed but don’t say I never learned to live by the Girl Scout motto ‘be prepared.’ Maybe someday I’ll abandon this 13 year vegetarian phase and really, really need to make a myself a heaping portion of goulash STAT.
Truthfully, I didn’t really make my way to Europe solely for an ingredient. (There goes my foodie street cred. Kitchen cred?) I actually had a meeting to attend in Switzerland and used the opportunity to visit Budapest and soak in its intriguing culture and turbulent history. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time abroad, but it remains mind-boggling to visit a country with a memorial moratorium on beer glass clinking that’s lasted almost as long as my country’s entire history.
I could go on for days about my experiences in the little city that could – from staving off jetlag amid the music and sparkle of the opera to strengthening new friendships during a miles-long, late-night jaunt after a subway snafu. For now, though, I’ll get back to the food. The one place in town where the tourists and locals really seem to come together is the Great Market Hall (Nagy Vásárcsarnok). Upstairs is strictly tourist kitsch and the basement houses a small grocery store and dozens of fish stalls, but the ground floor offers the melting pot of those traveling through and living in Pest. Next to the old grandma filling up her cart with fresh vegetables or the butcher’s frankly unappetizing array of kidneys, livers and ears, you’ll find tourists trying the local fried bread speciality (langos) or me picking up some paprika to take home.
emandam 