Tag: onion

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

73. Sherried Mushroom Empanaditas p.38

The recipe is a combination of this one for full sized Sherried Mushroom Empanadas, and yesterday’s tuna empanaditas. Of course the full sized empanada makes way too much filling, so you’d need to cut it down.

I made these for the same party as the tuna empanaditas. They use the same puff pastry wrapping, and have the same baking directions. The filling however is quite different, and I thought it worked much better than the tuna. The filling is made of sautéed onion, mushroom, and red bell pepper with sherry, prosciutto, parsley, and bread crumbs. The flavour combination worked really well, I though the sweetness of the sherry might be a bit strange but it melded nicely with the other flavours, particularly the mushrooms and prosciutto.

The main advantage this filling had over the tuna was moisture. You can see in the photo that I drastically overcooked them, and there were a few that got completely dehydrated inside. The larger ones managed to remain creamy, with a crisp exterior making for a very nice contrast.

The recipe calls for Serrano ham, which is very much like prosciutto, but a bit tougher in texture, more flavorful, and a bit less fatty. I couldn’t find any for this dish, or any of the other times I’ve looked. It must be available in Montreal, because it’s on the menu at tapas bars, but I don’t know what their source is. The recipe gives prosciutto as an acceptable substitute though.

I was in Spain a few years ago, and fell in love with Serrano ham. The bocadillo de jamon was my preferred lunch, or tapas treat. I had 40 Euros worth of it taken away from my be American customs officials on my way home. The injustice still rankles me. I was only connecting through Newark, my ham and I never left the airport, but they still took it away from me. I would have had to sneak it past Canadian customs to get it home, but losing it to them was a risk I was willing to take. Now whenever I go through the post 9/11 security theatre lines at an American airport I shake my head at the futility of taking my shoes off, and damn them for taking away my precious jamon.

This recipe suffered from the same baking issues as yesterday’s tuna, but I think a bit more monitoring could solve that problem. The flavour combinations were really good, creamy mushrooms, a bit of crunch from the peppers, salty chewy prosciutto, the smooth sweet flavours of the sherry, and even a little freshness from the parsley. The overcooking was a serious problem, so I can’t give it full marks, but there are a lot of things going for this recipe.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

72. Tuna Empanaditas p.37

The recipe

These bite sized party favours are built with the duct tape of the home entertaining wold: puff pastry. A filling of oil-packed tuna, pimientos, capers, and onion is added to rounds of puff pastry, which are folded into semicircles and crimped. They can be frozen at this point, and baked whenever your heart desires.

The filling was very salty, and didn’t really taste like tuna. As I mentioned yesterday I don’t have much love in my heart for pimiento-stuffed olives, and they failed to impress me again here. The capers were really the saving grace, they contributed to the salt problem, but they brought a lot of flavour along with them. With more tuna, and better olives I think this could have worked out really well though. The ideas are sound, but I get the feeling they tried to make the dish too easy. Asking us to pit a quarter cup of olives isn’t an unreasonable demand, and they certainly don’t shy away from it in other sections of The Book.

The puff pastry section of the recipe was trickier than I would have guessed. The recipe calls for a round cookie cutter in the special equipment section. I didn’t have one and tried to make do with the edge of a wine glass. This isn’t a good idea, both because my glass couldn’t cut through and it took forever to go around the edges with a pairing knife, and because using a blunt instrument on puff pastry interferes with the puff. Puff pastry is made by layering butter and pastry, and when it hits the heat the water in the butter creates steam, thus puffing the pastry. Smooshing the pastry too much can compress the pastry layers, and displace butter messing with the puffing. In any case, this recipe makes 50 hors d’oeuvres, and the cutting, folding, crimping process takes quite a while. The recipe suggests it should take one hour active time, but I’m sure it took me two. I was quite late to the dinner party I was bringing them to, which is pretty bad form when you’re bringing the appetizers.

Before you’re ready to serve the empanaditas are baked on a cookie sheet at 400 degrees. The recipe says this should take 20 to 25 minutes. Mine were overcooked and dry within 15. As I was cooking these at a party, I had no way of checking that the temperature I set the oven to was really the temperature inside the box, but that’s a pretty big discrepancy.

In the end these didn’t come out too well. A few changes to the lineup in the filling, and more attentive baking on my part might have improved them dramatically. As is, mine were dried out and heavily salted. I like the concept of an empanadita, people might feel sheepish admitting it, but everyone likes mini versions of regular sized food. In this case the execution left something to be desired though.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

60. Prosciutto- and Parmesan-Stuffed Mushrooms p.27

No recipe, too bad.

These were an excellent appetizer. I brought them to a dinner party and they disappeared just like that. They’re mushroom caps stuffed with the cooked down mushroom stems, garlic, onion, bread crumbs, prosciutto, Parmesan, a useless dash of parsley, and an egg to hold it together. After the caps are filled they’re sprinkled with a bit more cheese, and drizzled with olive oil. Then they go into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.

The mushrooms just cook through, and the filling melts into the gills making the whole things creamy and delicious. The prosciutto and Parmesan add wonderful flavours of their own, as well as a good bit of salt which helps release the essence of the mushrooms. In theory the parsley is there to add some colour to the filling, but I didn’t find it very appealing. There is a lot of liquid in mushrooms, and the bread crumbs were there to soak it up. The 1/4 cup crumbs for 24 mushrooms the recipe recommends was a little on the low side. They could have stood to be dried out a bit.

This recipe worked really well, it was easy to do most of the prep at home, and then finish off the final assembly and baking at a friends place. I love appetizers that can be easily transported, either finished, or mostly finished. Almost inevitably you will be asked to bring things to a party more often than you’ll host a party of your own, so ease of transport is a key criterion in looking for a good hors d’oeuvre.

The filling would work equally well in little vol-au-vent, but stuffing the caps really emphasizes the mushroom flavour, and makes them more fun to eat. The balance of flavours was spot on here, the mushrooms were front and centre, with the prosciutto and Parmesan acting as capable supporting players. This recipe is a mycophobe’s worst nightmare, but a good trick to have up your sleeve if you’re asked to bring a little something to the party.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

57. Onion Parmesan Toasts p.34


The recipe

These were remarkably simple little appetizers with some old school flair. It falls into the ancient and proud “stuff on toast” camp of appetizers. The secret to this style of appetizers is to give something either healthy or expensive prime billing in the name, but to make absolutely sure that most of your on-toast topping is creamy, cheesy, fatty, or preferably all three.

Here the role of healthy is played by a sweet onion, cheesy is played by Parmeigiano-Reggiano, and fatty is portrayed by mayonnaise. By volume there are 3/4 of a cup of onion, and a combined 3/4 of a cup of the cheese and mayo. By weight however the creamy fatty team makes up most of the toppings. A bonus rule for old school on-toast appetizers is to avoid unusual spices that might scandalize the croquet ladies. Garlic would be a bit outre, and curry powder is firmly in the province of those bohemian ne’er-do-wells that are tearing this country apart. My dining companion and I brought some guacamole to a family affair a while back, and when my grandmother tried it she said “who made this green stuff? It hurts my mouth”. Here the spices are kept safe and stayed, fresh ground black pepper. Of course pre-ground would be more familiar to the bridge club, but we can modernize a little bit.

I didn’t think I was going to like these all that much, broiled mayonnaise seemed a bit weird, but it really worked. The toasts, cocktail rye of course, crisped up nicely and the topping browned beautifully. I feared that the mayo would break under the heat, but that didn’t’ happen. The onions cooked enough to soften a bit and give off a great deal of flavour, and the cheese turned golden-brown and delicious. These were a fun easy throwback, that was yanked forward into modern times for some very good reasons.

The Book is a celebration of Gourmet Magazine’s 50th anniversary. A lot of the recipes are weighted towards the ’80’s and ’90’s though. It’s nice to see one that very clearly showed up in the earliest issues.

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Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

53. Old Fashioned Meat Loaf p.448

The recipe

Take cover! NORAD has detected an extraterrestrial turd loaf coming in fast over the arctic. It wants our Humpback whales to save the future.

This was not the most visually appealing dish I’ve ever made, but it did taste good. I think it’s um, distinctive, shape helped with the flavour too. I’ve made meatloaf in a loaf pan before, and while it’s geometry is soothing, there isn’t all that much surface area exposed to direct heat. This loaf developed an excellent crunchy crust which really made the dish. The secret to the crispy crust was a healthy slathering of ketchup before it went into the oven.

I’m quite proud of The Book for using ketchup here. They didn’t seem to feel bad about it, or tell me that I really should be making my own, or ordering heirloom tomato preserves off the internet. They recommended plain-old funding-John-Kerry’s-political-career ketchup. Maybe this was The Book’s attempt to show that they’re in touch with the common man? who knowns? But I appreciate it.

This is a classic meat loaf recipe that doesn’t deviate or experiment too much. There are a couple of nice touches, but generally it’s straight up memories of childhood comfort food. It starts with a sweat of onions, garlic, celery, carrot, and scallions (one of the slight deviations from the textbook). Then ground beef, pork, breadcrumbs, eggs, and parsley are lightly mixed together and shaped into the giant worm of Arrakis. It’s then covered in ketchup, and baked through.

The book recommends having the butcher coarsely grind beef chuck, and pork tenderloins for this recipe, instead of using the finely textured twice-ground meat that’s available pre-packaged. It wasn’t a command from on high, so I just bought the stuff in the display case. I now see that The Book was right and I was wrong. The flavours in the meatloaf were excellent, its main problem was the texture. It was too tightly packed and dense. Using more coarsely ground meat would almost certainly have taken care of the textural issues, and made this an even better loaf.

My dining companion and I occasionally like to have cook-offs. Kind of like Iron Chef in the privacy of our own home. This dish was my entry for battle meatloaf, and I’m happy to say that it swept the judges votes. Her entry won top marks for presentation and style, but it just couldn’t compete on seasoning and depth of flavour. I’ll have to write the Heinz company to thank them.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

51. Spaghetti Alla Carbonara p.221


The recipe

This was delicious, but then anything with this much cheese and pancetta had better be. I didn’t have the heart to go out and find guaniciale (unsmoked cured hog jowl), maybe that makes me less hard core that I should be, but the pancetta worked wonderfully. This was very easy to prepare. The fat from the pancetta is rendered, and used to brown the onions. The white wine is then added and reduced to make a sauce, the cooked spaghetti is tossed in, and a mixture of eggs, parmigiano-reggiano and pecorino romano, salt, and pepper is stirred in after the pasta is off the heat. The spaghetti partially cooks the eggs, which gives the sauce the half-thickened super smooth texture that makes Carbonara what it is.

There were two main problems with the recipe as written: water, and salt. The only liquid in here is a 1/8 cup white wine (after reducing) and the eggs. The pasta was wonderfully saucy for the first minute after it was tossed, then it got thirsty and all my sauce was gone. Adding some of the pasta water would have solved this problem, and tossing my plate with a bit of it rescued my dinner. The other issue is salt. The dish has got 5 Oz pancetta, and more than a cup of parmagiano and pecorino. The pasta is cooked in salted water, and a bit of salt is thrown in at the end for good measure. The saltiness of the meat and cheeses can vary wildly, and top producers seem to have less salt than the cheaper brands. Either the folks at Gourmet keep salt licks in their desks, or they had access to less salty ingredients than I did. It wasn’t inedible, but I woke up parched in the middle of the night.

There’s a little note at the bottom of the recipe about eating eggs that aren’t fully cooked. I suppose there is a real risk of contamination, and I’m certain that the people at The Book have lawyers to make sure notes like that get in there, but where’s the joy? As a young healthy person I get to feel invulnerable and poo poo warnings like that. I’m certainly willing to take the one in several thousand odds of food poisoning to eat less than fully cooked eggs, meats, and fish. It’s a risk I understand and am willing to take. Unfortunately it’s not a risk I’m allowed to take in a restaurant anymore. No more medium rare burgers, and maybe I’ll never get to try sous-vide. How long before hollandaise is gone (not that I’d mourn it’s passing actually)? What about a runny yolk for my toast? I worry that these things I love will just become unavailable, or I’ll have to sign a waiver to order off the “irresponsible” section of the menu. What is the world coming to? Why in my day…. grumble, grumble… snore.

Other than those little complaints, it really was a delicious dish. Despite all the cheese and pancetta, it wasn’t nearly as heavy as the Carbonara you’d get from the local Italian joint. In fact there’s no cream in here at all. The texture was also much lighter. Once I’d added a bit of water the strands of pasta were flavorful, and well coated enough not to stick, but not swaddled in the overwhelming amounts of sauce you sometimes find. With the salt and water caveats in mind this can be a great dish, the recipe as written gets slightly lower marks than what it can easily be changed to become.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

46. Eggplant Caviar p.11

No recipe this time, but honestly you’re not missing all that much.

I think this came out to be less than the sum of it’s parts. Essentially it’s broiled eggplant, sweated onions, garlic, and green pepper mixed with fresh tomatoes, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper. All good stuff up to this point, but it all went for a spin in the food processor, and came out a mushy unappealing terra cotta.

The idea is to chill this for a few hours and then serve it with crackers or baguette. In this regard the texture was way off, it had tiny chunks in a soupy liquid destined to slip and slide. Its texture was wrong in the same way that store bought salsa can be wrong. If it had been completely smooth and thickened it could have worked well, if it had been left chunkier with something to bite into it might have been nice. As it was all the ingredients lost their individual identities, but didn’t really meld into a flavour partnership. Bland, watery, and ugly was the take home message of this dish. I had 12 hungry people in my living room devouring anything put in front of them, but there was plenty of this left at the end of the evening.

A day or two later I cooked down some the remainder and used it as a pizza sauce. It worked remarkably well in that incarnation. Eggplant, tomato, and onions all have a lot of water in them, I think the water either had to be left in the cell structure of the vegetables, or cooked out. Food processing it just left is soupy and uninspiring.

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The Book Vegetables

37. Swiss Chard and Chickpeas p.542


the recipe

This quick stew was fine, nothing special, but fine. It’s centred around swiss chard and chickpeas, with a bit of tomato, onion, garlic, and lemon juice. It was a bit bland, and the flavours never really came together. The fibrous swiss chard and grainy chickpeas didn’t make for the most appealing texture either. On the other hand it was a heathly and simple side dish.

I think this was a case of great things being inappropriately combined. Sauteed swiss chard with a bit of onion garlic and lemon is an excellent summery vegetable dish. Simiarly a simple chick pea salad with those ingredients is a satisfying dish any time. Put them together and add tomato, and you get something less than the sum of it’s parts. I don’t think tomato would be particularly good with the chard or the chickpeas alone, and it didn’t really add much to the stew.

On the plus side the ingredients were easily available, there was almost no effort involved in making it, it’s cheap, and it feels healthy. Unfortunately “tastes really healthy” is the food equivalent of “has a great personality”.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

34. Brisket a la Carbonnade p.423

the recipe

Sorry for the long interval between posts, I was out of town last week.

I’ve made this recipe twice, on the left is my first attempt, which was almost black, dry, and found me trying to deglaze the sides of my dutch oven to end up with a sauce. On the right is attempt number two (with carrots and parsnips thrown in a few minutes before the end), which fell apart at the touch of a fork, was loaded with flavour, and had more than enough gravy to go around. The difference? tinfoil, and a watchful eye.

This is a classic Belgian braised dish, a brisket, braised in beer, with onions. There are a lot of things to love about brisket. In this dish it capitalizes on the magical powers of braising, which can turn nearly inedible (and dirt cheap) cuts of meat into fillet mignon tender bites. It’s also more flavorful than the loin cuts, and has got a bunch more connective tissue. Connective tissue + long slow heat = gelatin = home made Jello time. Sounds kind of gross, but it makes sauces saucier and gives them a mouth feel you can’t get any other way. I believe unctuous is the word for this sensation, and I can’t think of a less appealing word for such a nice attribute.

This dish was as simple as you could wish for, I just browned the brisket, softened the onions, then added the brisket and the rest of the ingredients back into the pot. After bringing it to a boil I covered it and put it in the oven for the next three and half hours. No maintenance necessary, or so I thought. When I pulled attempt number one of this dish out almost all the liquid had evaporated, the onions were nearly black, and the brisket was starting to dry out. The next time around I paid a good deal more attention to it. I think the lid of my dutch oven doesn’t sit as tightly as I might wish, so I sealed it with tinfoil the second time. I also checked it once an hour, and added more beer as necessary. Attempt number two was superior in all ways but one. The first time around the onions had been cooking in so little liquid that they got really deeply caramelized, which added a great level of flavour which was missing in the second attempt.

I wouldn’t change a thing about this recipe. It takes four and a half hours, but you’re only working for twenty minutes. It uses a really affordable cut of meat, and packs huge flavour into every bite. It’s cooked in beer which gives you lots of room to experiment with different brews. And, it’s a great excuse to fondle your dutch oven.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

29. Pork Chops With Onion Marmalade p.480


the recipe

I made these for a bunch of hungry hungry boys during a trip to Toronto. It was a nice change from pizza and bar food. Our dinner was a quiet moment in the midst of a rowdy weekend. We sipped wine, listened to light jazz, and enjoyed some classic comfort food. Pork chops, green beans, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce; sounds like a stereotypical home cooked meal. It was delicious.

As a side note, cooking in someone else’s kitchen is a deeply weird experience. It’s almost like looking through their medicine cabinet. They keep their pots there? Why do they need HP sauce in an industrial size bottle? Is it a faux pas to joke about the bottle of Emeril’s spice mix? It also highlights how many little things you know about your own kitchen (Of course the top left burner only gives 2/3 the heat of the bottom right). Also, I’m almost guaranteed to cut myself when I’m not working with my own knives. I’ve started bringing a few of my own things with me when I know I’ll be cooking somewhere else, but it feels a bit rude.

These chops came together easily. They’re seared first, then cooked through in a broth made from the pan juices, onions, balsamic, and red currant jelly. I admit, I cheated and just used a jelly from the fridge, it was red though. The recipe called for boneless centre-cut chops; as I was feeding a crowd I bought the super-pack from the mega-mart. Some of them were boneless, some bone-in, all delicious. I think I tripled the recipe (sextupled the linked recipe), and the liquid proportions were off, but I adjusted and everything came out fine.

The key to these was the dried rosemary. Fresh herbs are superior to dried for almost all applications. This isn’t one of them. The rosemary is with the chops right from the initial sear, so they’re contributing to the flavour from the beginning and because the rosemary ends up in the broth it’s rehydrated by the time the dish is done. The rosemary flavour permeated the whole dish. I don’t think you could have gotten this penetration using fresh, I suspect a lot of the flavour developed during the initial sear. Fresh would just have burned, but the dried stuff held up well.

These were satisfying, came together easily, and didn’t cost a fortune. They’re a winner.