Dinner Guests

We usually make a lot of food, so friends and loved ones drop by to eat with us. Here is Mrs. C's cartoon rendition of one of frequent dinner guests.

His shirt says "Build Levees" because he studies rivers and cool shit like that

He's saying "I'm going to throw away this phone" because he's kinda old school and doesn't like having a cell phone.

He's thinking "Hootelolly" because he's kinda crazy, being bearded and all.

I don't know what the "I love the Jesuits" stuff is about.

In general, we like having him come around because he brings some good dinner conversations.

Mrs. Squash

Hi there! Afterhours has been bugging me to stop slacking on the blogging, so here I am. Okay, so let me make this quick.
Picture # 1: Squash bread pudding. I don't really remember how I made it. This picture is from, like, two O Chem tests ago!
Picture # 2: More squash. This time in a risotto with half arborio rice and half wild rice. Oh, those little red flecks are peppers from our neighbor's garden. The reason we ate so much squash is that there were also Delicata squash in the garden. Delicata is my favorite kind of squash, but the ones in the garden were not as good as the store-bought ones. I say, leave squash growing to the experts, especially when you live in Berkeley where the summers are chilly. Anyways, these squash dishes were cheap, satisfying, and a bit mushy. The crunchy-chewy quality of wild rice was a good counterpoint to the mushiness of the squash.
Picture #3. This was delicious! It may look a bit like airplane food from the 1990s, but the dish had a warmth and depth to it on account of cinnamon sticks and cloves. This recipe is called "Irish Stew," but it is actually a Parsi recipe from the wonderful book, My Bombay Kitchen:Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking, by Niloufer Ichaporia King.

It's Decorative Gourd Season!

McSweeney's has the most awesome article about how every fall, our nation develops a gripping collective obsession with gourds of all shapes and sizes, written from the perspective of the anti-Martha Stewart, and aptly titled: It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers!

Here is Mrs. C, tenderly looking after the gourds. Note the look of devotion (perhaps even obsession?) in her eyes.

I thought the carving was Mrs. C's self-portrait, but apparently it was a skull. Go figure?

Oxtail Soup

Whenever I tell people I'm making Oxtail soup, they genuinely ask me, "Ox have tails???" I guess in your day to day you don't really ask these kind of questions, but the answer is "yes, but not anymore."

This is one of the heartiest Korean soups you can make and by far one of the easiest. You just need 3 ingredients.

1. You get about 2 pounds of oxtail and trim off as much of the fat.

2. Put them in a pot and add water so the tails are submerged, add 4 cloves of garlic.

3. Bring to boil and lower heat and simmer for 2-3 hours. After a while the broth takes on a beautiful nutty color and it tastes really really good because of all the flavors coming out of the bone. The meat will be super tender and come right off the bone. The best part are the clear squishy tendon bits.

4. Season with salt and pepper to taste, garnish with green onions

5. Serve with rice of course!

The best way is to just use your fingers. It's more satisfying that way.

Chili Lime Cashews

We, at this blog, don't give snacks the credit they're due. We had half a bag of raw cashews left so, coated them with chili powder, ground coriander, dash of salt, brushed the whole thing with a little olive oil and squeezed some lime juice on top and roasted in the oven for 15-20 min at 370.

Cashews are pretty awesome on they're own, but they were even better all jazzed up this way.

Salmon Cakes with Yogurt Chive Sauce

Just look at these orange beauties grilling up! There's something to be said about the wonderful aroma of well-seasoned salmon filling your house. It had some coriander, cayenne pepper, chives, lemon zest and good ole mayonnaise. Check out the recipe here.

After many foodings (food+outing) Mr. A and I have come up with our ratio theory to food pricing. The more stacked a food is, the more expensive. If it is taller than it is wide, then it will be more expensive: French food, New American, you get the picture. If its wider than it is tall, it is less expensive: Mexican platters, Chinese food, Pizza! The salmon cakes were served to look more expensive than they really were (total cost less than $20 to make 6 servings.) They rested on some polenta with grilled tomatos, and a sprig of oven-roasted kale with a side of yogurt chive sauce.

Aleister being pouty because he couldn't have any salmon.

Chicken Piccata with Arugala

Hello dear reader, sorry for the delay. Exams and such. But we have been cooking up a storm this past month and have some gustatory delights to share.

Here's a very simple dish that tastes divine! Serves 4-6

Make the lemon-butter sauce:

1. Sautee 6-8 finely diced garlic cloves in TBSP of olive oil

2. add 1/2 cup of salted butter and melt over low heat, stirring so it doesn't burn

3. add 1/4 cup of water

4. add 2-3 TBSP of freshly squeezed lemon juice, depending on if you like more tartness. If it's too lemony, add more butter and water to dilute.

5. add salt to taste

Make the pasta with fixings

1. Boil water with pinch of salt, and throw in your choice of pasta. Drain out the water when it's cooked and set aside

2. Dredge chicken breast fillets with flour, salt, pepper and thyme

3. Lightly brown chicken in some olive oil. Check to make sure its thoroughly cooked.

4. Slice the breast meat after cooking so that the meat stays juicy and put back in pan.

5. Add the cooked pasta and 1/4 cup of capers to the chicken

6. Add the lemon-butter sauce to the mix

7. Lastly add about 5 cups of baby arugula and allow it to wilt, but don't overcook. You want the color to be bright green. Arugula has a peppery herby flavor that will mellow out when cooked. It adds such a good flavor to any mediterranean dish.

8. Add last sprinkles of freshly ground black pepper

Serve up with your favorite white wine!

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We tried the pasta out with some refreshing beet salad with more arugula and asian pear Recipe from epicurious. Roasting your own beets takes FOREVER!! so just get the ones in a can--they taste pretty much the same. Even though Mrs. C doesn't agree with me.

Italian Aspirations

These eggplant rolls are tasty, easy to make, and cheap! The only ingredients you need are the following:

-eggplant
-ricotta cheese
-mozzarella cheese
-parmesan cheese (if wanted, for sprinkling on the top)
- fresh basil
- tomatoes
- red pepper flakes
-olive oil
- oregano
- salt
-pepper
-garlic
- other spices (sometimes I like to add fennel or thyme)

Cut the eggplant into slices. I find that the best thickness for each slice is 1 cm or so. Roast the slices in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until they are tender and pliable (you need to roll up the ricotta/mozarella filling in there).

Make the ricotta/mozzarella filling. This filling using fresh basil, oregano, salt, and pepper. You can use goat cheese instead of mozzarella for a stronger tasting roll. I like to add a bit of fennel and thyme.

To make the sauce, you use some garlic, red pepper, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I like to use the fresh red hot peppers from our garden in addition to the red pepper flakes. Simmer the sauce for a while so that it takes on the spicy flavor.

Finally, wrap each eggplant slice around the filling to create an eggplant roll. Line up the rolls in a pan and cover all of them with the spicy tomato sauce. Place the pan in the oven, covered with foil, and bake at 350 for 15 minutes or so, until hot.

Bon appetit!

Tempeh Over Rice

This is Yumi here, reporting for the first time from sunny Los Angeles with a (semi)-vegetarian slant. Howdy.

When Chef Eileen asked me to write for her communal food blog as an occasional guest contributor, I was super-excited! I got so excited I decided to whip out my digital camera and take photos of the dinner I prepared that night--tempeh and stir-fry vegetables over jasmine rice.

This is hardly a difficult recipe. I threw together peas, carrots, onions, scallions, ginger, garlic, a splash of soy sauce and who knows what else in a big fat saucepan. Nothing like the rush of improvisation that comes from the ticking time bomb that is your non-perishable vegetables.


Burn, baby, burn

The hardest part of this easy-peazy recipe was unwrapping the plastic wrapping on the Trader Joe's tempeh. Seriously, that shit is wrapped tighter than the dainty soles of a Chinese empress. Our kitchen scissors and the tempeh packaging went into an epic scuffle (below), and the kitchen scissors finally won.



Rock, tempeh, scissor...

For those of you who don't know, tempeh is Indonesian fermented soy cakes and has a distinctive nutty flavor. People love it or hate it, and I fortunately fall into the former category.



I just tossed the tempeh straight onto an oiled pan and added maybe a splash or two of soy sauce. Next time I do tempeh stir-fry, I plan on marinating those suckers overnight. I did a BBQ marinade tempeh baked in the oven earlier this week, and those were mighty tasty.



Toss the tempeh and the veggies over the rice. Add a scoop of plain yogurt and a sprinkle of shredded nori for kicks. Accompany with red wine, and you are all good to go.



This is why I think I need to food blog more. I take the time to look at the meal I prepared for myself. I clear away the table so I can focus on the food. After documenting the whole process, I don't want to mindlessly nom-nom away at it. I want to really make the effort to taste everything.

Coming soon to a communal food blog near you: pumpkin ravioli? Soba noodles? Mashed potatos? Stay tuned to find out!

Eggs Florentine over Polenta Cakes

Chef Eileen: After days of eating breakfast in the car on the way to school, my favorite thing to do is spend a couple hours making and savoring Saturday brunch. The idea kind of grew organically...."oh look, we have some extra spinach and polenta....maybe we can make an eggs florentine....we'll have to somehow turn polenta mush into a cake...and of course this will need hollandaise sauce." I can verily say that making hollandaise sauce makes me feel like a professional cook.

But first the polenta!

Step 1: Normally when you cook polenta, it's a gooby, grit-like mess. Delicious but also amorphous. So, after cooking it, I wrapped it in tin-foil to shape it into a log, and chilled it in the freezer so that it would form a solid cake, then I sliced it and grilled them.

Step 2: Hollandaise Sauce

Recipe can be found here. Instead of cayenne pepper, I used paprika. Its a rich sauce, and it doesn't save too well so adjust recipe to make only as much as you need.

Our plates: Riverdog farm eggs with wilted spinach, hollandaise over grilled polenta cakes, grilled tomato and basil, plum and white peach fruit cup, Peet's coffee and fresh squeezed orange juice.

Chow Down: New England Clam Chowdah

Chef Eileen: Woah, the chowder's like overflowing lava. Because they only sell good chowder at fisherman's wharfs and the alternative would be cans, I always thought it must be difficult to make. They've got us all fooled! It's so easy to make. This one I made is heartier because it has more chunks of bacon bits and celery. Here's the recipe:

Recipe:

1. Boil 2 cups of cubed yukon gold potatoes in 16 oz of clam juice until soft. They sell clam juice. Weird isn't it? Yukon golds are nice because they don't become too mushy after boiling and hold their shape.

2. In a separate pan, finely dice and brown 4 slices of smoked bacon. (You can save a 1 inch square of bacon and crisp it to garnish the dish as we did above.) In the lard, saute 1 cup of finely diced onions and 1.25 cups of finely diced celery with 2-3 bay leaves and 2 pinches of thyme. Add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste. Cook until vegetables have softened.

3. In a large soup pan heat 1 cup of half and half (or cream if you prefer) with 6-8oz of minced canned clams over low heat. Add in the boiled potatoes and clam juice. Next add the sauteed mixture of vegetables and bacon. I also added a pinch of red chili flakes to make the chowder more flavorful. Lastly, add about 1-2 tablespoons of flour to thicken. Stir over low heat until the chowder becomes really thick.

4. Make bread bowls by cutting a loaf of sour or sweet loaf into 1.5 inch thick slices. Scoop out the insides. You can toast these bread bowl guts to make croutons. Place bread bowl on plate and line the bottom of the bread bowl with some bread crumbs to absorb some of the liquid so it doesn't leak out. Scoop.

Best served on rainy days!

Eat Up, Me Hearties

I made this borscht based on a recipe I found on Epicurious (just search for borscht on the site). You start out by making a delicious beef broth using some canned beef broth, a beef shank with the bone still in it(cheap piece of meat but very good), and some onions. I simmered that for about an hour and a half and then I took out the beef shank and cut out the good pieces of meat (it's mostly bone and tendon, but it makes a very flavorful beef broth when you boil it).

Then came the carrots, beets, and potatoes with a tiny hint of dill and garlic (plus the obligatory salt and pepper) while they simmered. After about a half hour, it was ready to serve. I chopped up 3/4 cup fresh dill and put it in the soup. Then we served it in BIG BOWLS with plain unsweetened yogurt and a dill sprig on top. To go with the soup, we cut up a lot of pieces of bread really thin and put thin garlic slices on them. The sharp bite of garlic complements the earthy borscht flavor quite well.

Since we're geeks, we decided to research what wine pairings go with borscht. The answer? A Chianti. So we had that with the borscht and concluded that the wine experts we relied on were definitely right. Red wine with red soup. That's the way to go.

But our meal didn't stop with borscht and wine. I also made some flavorful swiss chard. It was a recipe I learned to make in the coops when I was cooking for sixty or so people per night. It's quite easy. You sautee some finely diced onions in butter, brown sugar and dijon mustard (to taste; I prefer more brown sugar personally). Then you add some chard and steam it. Finally, you top it off with some freshly chopped roma tomatoes (or whatever you've got available) and lots of capers. Delicioso.

Tea Eggs

Chef Eileen made these amazingly beautiful eggs (called tea eggs). The first step is making some hard boiled eggs. Once they're hardboiled, you crack the egg shells ever so slightly (like the one in the picture). The cracked eggs are then simmered in a mixture of tea (in this case oolong), soy sauce, sugar and five spice powder (mix of anise, cloves, cinnamon, pepper and ginger). After a while (between 1 and 2 hours), the eggs begin to take on the beautiful tie-dyed, marbled look you see above.

Yummy!

Cauliflower Salad and Salsa over Sole: aka is this dish mediterranean?

Cauliflower Salad with Green Olives and Capers is the name of the recipe in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. The dressing, also from that book, was a zesty mustard vinagrette with a hardboiled egg yolk mixed in to give it extra substance. Chef Caroline used black kalamata olives, and she forgot a key ingredient-the 2 cups of chopped watercress. Oh well, nobody noticed! But that would have added a nice spicy note to balance out the earthiness of the raw cauliflower.
This saucy sole was prepared using a combo of two recipes (p. 314 & 315) from Fish Forever: The Definiteve Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Preparing Healthy, Delicious, and Environmentally Sustainable Seafood by Paul Johnson, who owns a fish shop in Berkeley. That is a really long title, and all that typing tired me out. Good night y'all. Signed, Mrs. C

Summer-Easy Gazpacho and Cornbread

Gazpacho with pi-avocado (because we are nerds after all). This was Monday night dinner. You don't even want to know how old that avocado was, but underneath the brown goop we managed to find some beauty and deliciousness. That hydrangea from Chef Eileen's lab garden is still perfectly pristine-looking after several days in the vase. Exactly what kind of experiments are going on at your lab, Chef Eileen???

Gazpacho Recipe can be found here We substituted red wine vinegar for the sherry vinegar and added some tomatillos, cilantro and avocados too. Key here is to puree a lot of red tomatoes to get the color so you don't have a green gazpacho from the tomatillos, and add a yellow tomato to sweeten it up. Best served chilled!

Basic Cornbread, recipe from (once again) Deborah Madison. Chef Eileen decided to use all whole-wheat flour along with the cornmeal sweetened with a mix of buckwheat and clover honey, so it was extra hearty with a satisfying texture. Making cornbread is just about as easy making a pot of rice if you have two people working on it.

Recipe:

Preheat oven 350 degrees

Mix dry ingredients: 1 cup cornmeal + 1 cup whole wheat flour (use pastry grade if available)+2 tsp baking powder + 1/2 tsp salt

Add in wet ingredients: 1 cup milk + 2 eggs + 1/4 cup butter or oil (use a flavorless oil like canola)

Sweeten with honey: we used a little bit of buckwheat (1 TB) because it has a strong aroma and 1 TB of regular clover honey.

Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Nectarine-strawberry Yogurt Pie

This pie from last weekend was lovely and not too sweet. Sadly, only the photograph remains. Chef Eileen took the basic yogurt tart recipe from earlier and let her imagination add the rest. The crust was made of crushed up chocolate cookies. The shine on top is from a jelly of mashed up nectarines, strawberries, sugar and cornstarch to thicken. Don't ask me how or how much constarch--Eileen is the master of cornstarch in this house. I am not. The Yogurt Tart recipe is from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison.

Recipe:

Crust: pulverized Newman's organic chocolate Alphabet cookies and patted cookie dust together in bottom of man. Funny to take think that we took a cookie, smashed it, formed another "cookie" and baked it.

Custard Filling:

Strained plain lowfat yogurt using coffee filters (because we couldn't find cheesecloth) for 30 min, to get the whey out which takes out some of the sourness. Added 1 egg, 1 tsp vanilla and sugar to sweeten. Poured yogurt mixture into crust and baked at 250 for 20 minutes. Yogurt should be firm when done.

Topping: Pureed nectarine and strawberries. Over low heat, mixed puree with 3/4 cup of water and added sugar to taste. Added cornstarch--about 2 TB? to thicken. The jelly should be translucent and peachy colored and not cloudy. Pour jelly on top of yogurt and arrange fruit slices on top!

Chill for a few hours before serving. Yum!

Leftover Day

French Onion Soup using leftover sourdough bread, those last-few onions, old white and red wine. It may look like bread with melted cheese, but there is soup under there. Find the full recipe here. We modified it to use week-old red wine in addition to some white, and it had a richer and sweeter taste. The hydrangeas were picked (poached) from the flower bushes around the building where I work.

Leftover salad into which we threw in the some tomatoes and some oranges. To the right is leftover pasta in a homemade pesto sauce using some free basil, supplemented with fresh basil from our front yard, "bottom of the bag" walnuts because we don't have pine nuts, garlic, and orange juice because our lemon tree is out of lemons.

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Several people have commented that it must cost a fortune to eat this way ("gourmet," they say). In fact, the opposite is true. The three of us share all our groceries which comes to about $25-30 a week per person for practically everything we eat (breakfast, lunch, dinner), aside from the occasional eating out. Most, if not all of the meals (salad and wine included) have cost between $3-7 a person. A couple things that probably helps us cook restaurant fare at a fraction of the cost:

1) We eat mostly vegetarian

2) Spices, dried herbs, oils and vinegars are probably the best investment. We save a lot because we make our own sauces and dressings in small quantities that are all used.

3) Buy produce that's in season.

4) Nothing goes to waste.

Fruits of the Sea

Caroline bought these overripe bite-sized strawberries at the farmer's market, so we made a salad with them. The lemon cucumbers (which is a cucumber masquerading as a lemon) add a nice color, and candied walnuts were a sweet crunch. We also made a strawberry vinaigrette using strawberries, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. The balsamic and berries go well together because both are tangy and sweet.

How to make candied walnuts: 1) Heat oil in pan until hot but not boiling (best to use heavy, monounsaturated oil like olive oil) 2) dissolve sugar into oil, turn up heat until sugar becomes brown and carmelized but still liquid 3) Add walnuts 4) wait until walnuts are covered with syrup 5) set them out on a plate to cool. Don't use paper towel to catch the oil because it will stick to the walnuts. Take caution during transfer because they will be super hot from the oil and will sizzle. Put in freezer to help cool.



We could barely concentrate today at school because we were all thinking of Anna's seafood paella. I'll have her put up the recipe, but as a preview, it involves risotto flavored with smoked paprika and saffron with mussel, cod, shrimp and prosciutto! Here's a tip for mussels: do not use if they are chipped are opened prior to cooking. Boil in mixture of white wine and water. Use some of the mussel juice to flavor foods!

White wine sangria with pear and strawberries. A sauvignon by Chateau Moulin de Ferrand...yeah fancy shmancy. So far our favorite of the $7 wines. It's rich, dry, yet fruity with a clean finish.

Cat v. lemon cucumber

What is that thing?


It's getting closer!


Pounce!

Rainy Day Comfort

Rainy days call for warm mushy gobs of savory goop. For breakfast, we had sweet potato, delicata squash, and carrot puree soup in chicken broth with chives as garnish. It's really simple. Cut up veggies. Add broth. Bring to boil and cook over low heat until soft. If you want more flavor, you can uncover and let the broth reduce a bit. Use handheld blender or whisk to mush up. Season to taste.



Chef Anna then prepared second breakfast of Paprika country-fried potatoes with carmelized onions! More mush!


Our living room could double as a cute cafe


For Dinner, Alan and I tried to replicate Julia Child's ratatouille (egg plant, bell peppers, zucchini, tomatos, onions and parsley) over quinoa with Aidell's roasted garlic and gruyere sausages. Recipe can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57749-2001Oct2_4.html

Thanks to Target for an adorably named red wine. It was sweet and light.

A little extra somethin' somethin

Amuse Bouche = "mouth amuser"

Higher end restaurants will often serve patrons a complementary amuse bouche or Lagniappe ("a little something extra") to entice or give a preview of what's to come. They're usually bite-size appetizers to give tastebuds a transition between courses.

TARTS and PIES

Chef: Eileen and Sharri: Homegrown red plums with allspice glaze in crumbly shortbread crust. Downright tasty! Sharri taught me the secret of cutting butter into cubes and having little pockets of butter in the crust so it crumbles.


Chef Caroline: Strained Saint Benoit yogurt with brown sugar in a pecan shortbread crust. Did you know that the stuff strained out of yogurt is whey? It's a yellow-colored sour watery liquid. Not very appetizing looking.

Prosciutto Nectarine Pizza

Chef Eileen: "Mostly" whole wheat pizza dough topped with prosciutto, yellow nectarines, tomatoes, arugula, goat cheese and olive oil. The perfect summer time pizza and combination of savory and sweet.

Creamy swiss chard pasta

Chef Caroline: Bucatini with Swiss chard and garlic in goat-cheese cream sauce. Paired with a Spanish red Protocolo, which was medium to light bodied. Spicy and bright. Alright for a $7/bottle.