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.