Two at the Table

On Sunday, August 24, we planned a fun, casual dinner of Grilled Skirt Steaks with Parsley Oregano Sauce from Epicurious and Baked Tostones from skinnytaste.com. Kim tells us how it went.

When we feel like having a quick steak dinner, flank steak or skirt steak are our go-to cuts. They grill quickly and pair nicely with all kinds of rubs, marinades and sauces. I started by making the parsley oregano sauce in advance. I decided to make the whole amount of sauce thinking that it might freeze well (we’ve successfully frozen and unfrozen chimichurri in the past with good results and this seemed similar). Rather than dragging out the blender, I used our mini food processor, which worked out well. My other change to the recipe was using fresh oregano rather than dried and I think it added some really nice freshness to the sauce. I set the sauce aside and then decided to tackle prepping the tostones.

We became hooked on tostones during a trip to Puerto Rico last year and Tony has made them twice—both the traditional fried way and the much easier and incredibly tasty way using the Baked Tostones recipe from skinnytaste.com. This was my first attempt and it was a lot of fun!

I microwaved the green plantains as directed, but I decided to do them one at a time since this was my first attempt and the recipe suggested slicing them while they were still hot. The skins of mine only turned partially black (not completely black as in the recipe) but the texture felt right so I decided to keep going. Slicing them while hot was very easy and quick. I used the bottom of a glass Dijon mustard jar (which was the perfect size) to smash the plantain slices flat and was easily able slide the plantain slices off the bottom of the jar with an offset spatula.

Rather than spraying the baking sheet with cooking spray, I decided to lightly brush both sides of the plantain slices with canola oil. I also sprinkled both sides with salt. I then followed the directions to bake for 10 minutes and then turn over and bake for another 8 minutes. The tostones were a lovely golden yellow, crisp and tasty—and highly addictive!

While the tostones were in the oven, I pre-heated our stove-top grill, grilled the skirt steak about 1 to 2 minutes a side (our steaks were very thin, so they didn’t take very long) and let the steak rest for five minutes.

I then sliced the steak on an angle, plated with a healthy drizzle of the parsley oregano sauce and the tostones sprinkled with a little extra salt. We had a delicious Sunday night dinner that reminded us of our fun trip to Puerto Rico.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of September 7, 2014

We have a very busy week ahead, with Tony needing to fit his full-time job around four full days of training and Kim going all out as well. (We’re so busy in fact that we had to make all sorts of edits to the menu to make sure that we will use our time as efficiently as possible.) That said, we plan on finishing very strong with a special dinner on Saturday night.

We went to the Yankee game Sunday afternoon, so, as usual, we’re going to just have snacks for dinner. We have some cheese and crackers, plus hummus, not to mention a little bit of Rachel Khoo’s Sun-Dried Tomato & Ricotta Tapenade, from her “Sweet and Savoury Pates” cookbook, left over from last week.

On Monday night, we’ll have leftovers from the Eggplant and Three Cheese Calzone, a recipe we found in Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen cookbook, that we also made last week. The calzone was delicious the first time and promises to be just as good the second!

On Tuesday night, we’ll have steak sandwiches, using some of the grilled hanger steak that we made for our Steak and Martini night this past Friday.

Our good friend Lynee, who is also a faithful follower of our blog, asked us just last night “Do you ever cheat on making dinner?” The answer is yes, we do, sometimes. Two of those times will be Wednesday and Thursday. We’ve ordered a roasted chicken from Fresh Direct, along with two pre-made sides, and that will be our dinner for those two nights. We’d prefer to make dinner from scratch, but it’s just not in the cards this week. Plus, we would also prefer to remain “one couple enjoying dinner together” and not become “one couple stressing out over dinner together because we’re writing a blog!”

We’ll probably order in on Friday, but we will definitely make dinner on Saturday. We plan to make another day trip to Greenport, Long Island and to hit the Freehold Fish Market so that we can buy all the seafood we’ll need to make Tyler Florence’s Paella with Seafood, Chicken, and Chorizo. We know we’ll find lots of other tasty things at the farm stands that line the road we take home, so check back next week to see what things we’ll make with those ingredients. We’re also going to stock up on Oktoberfest beer, so check back in during the month of October as we plan our annual Oktoberfest dinner and beer tasting, which will feature home-made pretzels; sage rubbed pork chops with apples and cabbage; and other fun stuff too!

Wednesday night, we decided to use the pizza dough and graffiti eggplant we already had in the fridge to make Deb Perelman’s Eggplant and Three Cheese Calzone. Tony describes what he did to make this dish.

Kim got this dinner started on Sunday, when she roasted the eggplant. She simply cut an (approximately) one pound eggplant into 1/4-inch thick slices, laid the slices out on a couple of foil lined baking sheets, and drizzled the slices with oil. She baked the eggplant for about 15 minutes in a 425 degree oven and saved me a lot of time on Wednesday!

Making the filling was as simple as putting all the ingredients in a bowl – eggplant, (goat’s milk) ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan – and then sprinkling in some salt, pepper, and oregano, and mixing it all together. Even with grating the cheeses, this took very little time.

The next step was to roll out the dough. We had two balls of dough in the freezer that we planned to combine for this recipe. I took them out first thing in the morning so they would be defrosted by the time I was ready to make dinner. When I went to check on them after work, not only were they defrosted, but they had also risen a bit and fused together (they were in the same bag) into a sort of Frakendough. This worked out really well, as all I needed to do was knead the dough slightly and the two halves came together smoothly. I knew I were using a bit more dough than called for in the recipe, so I wasn’t surprised when I was able to roll the dough out into a circle a good bit bigger (maybe 14 or 15 inches across) than what is described in the recipe.

Rather than putting the filling in the middle of the dough and pulling the dough up over it so it met in the middle, I made more of a traditional half-moon shaped calzone. I simply put the filling in the middle of the dough and pulled up one edge of the dough over the filling until it met the other edge. As I did this, I smushed the filling down and around under the dough so that it would be evenly distributed and then crimped the two edges together. I used to skip the egg-wash step on most recipes, but I’ve learned that it really does make things look pretty so I did it this time; I was really glad I did!

The calzone went into the oven and I started on the dipping sauce. I mixed the crushed tomatoes, salt, garlic, and red pepper flakes together in a small saucepan (I skipped the optional sugar and red wine vinegar) and just heated everything through.

After about 20 minutes in the oven, the calzone came out. It was pretty enormous – easily enough for four servings – and a beautiful golden brown. The three cheeses came together really well and the eggplant was a nice touch. We have a busy week ahead of us and we are very glad to have leftovers from this dish!

On Tuesday night, after a weekend that ended heavy on steak and burgers, we made Ellie Krieger’s Sea Bass with Tomatoes, Olives and Capers, a super-fast, super-easy dish. Tony describes how he did it.

Prep for this recipe is minimal and really did take the 5 minutes the recipe said it would. The recipe calls for a small onion, but we had half a large onion left over, so I diced up an amount that I thought was equal to half of a small onion. (I was cutting the recipe in half, as usual.) I then chopped up a quarter cup black olives – while eating a second quarter cup of black olives. The rest of the prep just involved opening a can of tomatoes and a bottle of white wine.

I discovered that the cooking time for the recipe was a little off, as it says the dish only takes 10 minutes, but it actually takes 15. It’s a very small difference, so I suspect whoever counted up the minutes didn’t account for the fact that you need to cook the fish first (5 minutes) and cook everything else next (10 minutes). In any case, the cooking part is very easy as the fish just cooks a few minutes a side and the sauce just requires you to add new ingredients to the pan every couple of minutes and stir them in.

The sauce turned out great – tangy and briny and salty with a little bitter from the spinach. The sea bass, while cooked perfectly, was honestly a little dull on its own, but the sauce saved the day. We’ll come back to this recipe again, but will probably try it with salmon or tuna next time. (The sauce would probably go well over chicken breasts too!)

We have a pretty tasty set of dinners planned for this week. Apparently, our cat George thought so too, as he took a few bites out of the menu. (His brother, Henry, is probably going to try to steak a few bites off our plates!)

We took our four nephews and their mom and dad to a Mets game on Sunday, as a belated Xmas gift for the boys. After filling up on delicious Shake Shack burgers and fries at the game, we decided for a simple dinner of “Italian tapas” – cheese and dried sausage plus bread spread with Rachel Khoo’s Sun-Dried Tomato & Ricotta Tapenade, which is included in her “Sweet and Savoury Pates” cookbook. We used goat cheese ricotta to make the tapenade, and that switch worked out great!

We thought about burgers for Labor Day, but decided to switch things up a bit and used the left over hanger steak from last week to make Hangar Steak Sandwiches with Barbecue Sauce plus Pickles and Coleslaw. The pickles were left over from the great Bread and Butter Pickle Taste-Off of a few weeks back. We decided to save a little time and used Fresh Direct’s mustard coleslaw, which we really enjoy.

Since sea bass was highly rated on Fresh Direct this week we decided to have it for dinner Tuesday night and made Ellie Krieger’s Sea Bass with Tomatoes, Olives and Capers. The recipe called for black, oil-cured olives, which are one of our favorite kinds of olives, so we enjoyed this dish quite a bit.

We still have some pizza dough and graffiti eggplant left over from last week , so we’re going to make a version of Deb Perelman’s Eggplant and Three Cheese Calzone on Wednesday night. (Please note that the link will take you to an adaptation of the original recipe.) We’re going to use goat cheese ricotta in this recipe as well.

We have some mushrooms in the fridge, so on Thursday night, we’re going to make Rachel Khoo’s Chicken and Mushrooms in a White Wine Sauce. (Please note that the link will take you to a review/reprint of this recipe that appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.) Mushrooms and chicken are one of one of our favorite combinations, so we’re sure this recipe is going to be fantastic.

Friday night, we’re going to borrow a tradition from our friends Chris and Susanne and have Steak & Martini night. We’re going to make Grilled Hanger Steak and Bibb Lettuce and dress the lettuce with Ina Garten’s Green Goddess Dressing for a nice, simple dinner to close out the week.

On Saturday night, we made Mario Batali’s Chicken Saltimbocca with Asparagus, which turned out to be a huge success. I honestly don’t think we’ve made anything else in our six years of cooking together that looked so pretty on the plate and (despite having more than a few steps) was so easy to make.

What makes this dish special in that it uses a sweet, Italian dessert wine called vin santo (literally, “holy wine”) in the sauce. We had this wine during our recent trip to Tuscany and were excited to try cooking with it. One thing to note, however, is that vin santo can be a little on the expensive side, at least based on our experience. We think this recipe would probably work just as well with Marsala or Madeira, which should be much less expensive, or even with a white wine.

To make this dish, I first cooked the asparagus in boiling water for about 3 minutes, then drained it, and then cooled it under cold, running water. The asparagus was a bit soggy after boiling, so when I make this again, I will probably only cook it for only two minutes. I patted the stalks dry with paper towels and then put the asparagus off to the side while I focused on the chicken.

We bought a package of thin chicken breasts for this recipe, but they were still a bit thicker than the 1/8 inch the recipe calls for, so I placed each breast under a plastic bag and pounded it flatter with meat tenderizer. I put two sage leaves on each breast and then wrapped each breast in prosciutto. This sounded a little tricky on paper, but was pretty easy. I placed a slice of prosciutto across each piece of chicken (directly over the sage) so that they formed a cross and then pressed the prosciutto down to keep it in place. I then flipped over each breast and finished wrapping the prosciutto around it, again patting it down to keep it in place. I then dredged each piece of chicken in flour and laid the pieces on a plate so that they were not overlapping. (Overlapping the pieces tends to make the flour soggy.)

I heated a tablespoon of olive oil in the Dutch oven and browned two chicken breasts for about 1 1/2 minutes per side, putting them on a rack set over a baking sheet when they were done. (As you can already see, there are a lot of steps to this recipe, but I also hope you can see how easy each step is.) I then repeated this process for the remaining two breasts.

The next step was to make the sauce. I added the vin santo and chicken stock to the Dutch oven and boiled it over medium-high heat until the liquid was reduced by half, which only took about 2 minutes, not the 4 minutes mentioned in the recipe. I whisked in the butter and then carefully placed all four pieces of chicken in the sauce. I put the asparagus on top and let everything heat for a couple of minutes. Though the recipe doesn’t say to do this, I spooned the sauce over the asparagus and chicken while they finished cooking. Finally, I put two pieces of chicken on each place, with half the asparagus arranged on top, and spooned the sauce over everything.

This dish was intensely flavorful, but also very well-balanced, as the sweet vin santo in the sauce went quite nicely with the salty prosciutto, the savory sage, and the slightly bitter asparagus that also feature in this recipe. We paired this with a bottle of 2011 Poggio Della Costa Grechetto, a white wine made in the Lazio regain of Italy, for a truly wonderful dinner.

On Tuesday night last week, we made Ellie Krieger’s Ratatouille with Red Snapper and Herbed Goat Cheese Crostini. We’ve made this before, but we introduced two twists this time, one planned and one unplanned. The planned twist was a small one: we substituted beautiful, purple-streaked-with-white “graffiti eggplant”, which no less an authority than my Very Italian Father advised would be less bitter than regular eggplant. (He was, of course, correct.) The unplanned twist revealed itself when we opened the package of “red snapper filets” and found that it contained tuna steaks instead.

Prep for this dish does take a little while, as I had to dice a good-sized eggplant, a medium onion, and two zucchini, not to mention mince some garlic and chop some basil. I had hoped to do the prep for this dish on Sunday, but no such luck. In any case, it wasn’t too difficult. Cooking the ratatouille was much easier than prepping the ingredients. I first cooked the eggplant for about 5 minutes then took it out of the pan. I next cooked the onion for about 5 minutes, then added the zucchini and garlic and cooked those with the onion for about 7 minutes. The final steps were easiest of all, as I returned the eggplant to the pan, added the tomatoes and seasoning, and simmered everything for about 10 minutes. For some reason, I decided not to use our trusty Dutch oven for this dish, but instead used a good-sized skillet. I’m not going to waste much time trying to figure out why I thought this was a good decision, but I won’t repeat it either!

While the ratatouille was simmering, I had time to prep the crostini. I rubbed one side of about a dozen slices of crusty French bread with garlic and then spread each slice with a little herbed goat cheese. I figured the crostini would toast under the broiler right after I had cooked the snapper, which also had to be cooked under the broiler.

I was very confused when I opened the package of fish, but once Kim confirmed that it was indeed tuna and not red snapper, the next steps were actually pretty easy. I heated some olive oil in another skillet and seared the tuna for about 1 1/2 minutes per side, which was just enough time to get the crostini toasted as well.

Despite the unexpected change, dinner was great. I probably could have seared the tuna over higher heat, because while it was perfect on the inside it could have used a bit more char on the outside. The ratatouille and tuna paired together very well, so well in fact that we may use tuna from now on. I picked up a French rose on the way home and, as Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits (www.columbuswines.com) promised, it proved to be a very well-balanced pairing with the fish and ratatouille.

Before we start, a shout out and heartfelt thanks to our good friends Jimmy and Elaine, who did us one better (fifteen better actually!) Saturday night with a Seventeen at the Table dinner at their spectacular new home. Dinner was phenomenal and the Seventeen were the best company you could ask for.

We’ve been on an unplanned hiatus for the past two weeks as we’ve had to deal with some things that made it had to make dinner and even harder to blog about it as often as we usually do. We have a very ambitious menu planned this week, with seven dinners in seven days, but we are both anxious to get back to one of the things that makes us happiest – planning, preparing, and enjoying dinner together.

On Sunday night, we’re making a new version of an old favorite and will try Epicurious’s (www.epicurious.com) Grilled Skirt Steak with Parsley Oregano Sauce. We make skirt steak pretty often as it’s easy, quick, and super-flavorful. We’re always on the lookout for new ways to make it and this recipe, which features lots of parsley, oregano, and lime, sounded perfect. We’re going to pair this up with Baked Tostones from Gina Homolka’s Skinny Taste website  (www.skinnytaste.com). Tostones, which are made from green plantains, are traditionally fried, but having made the fried version once (right after a trip to Puerto Rico), we decided we had to find a better way. This recipe, which we’ve made once before, is that better way!

Monday night, we’ll have Food & Wine’s (www.foodandwine) Lemon & Herb Tilapia. We’re going to pair this with a great side from Ina Garten (www.barefootcontessa.com): Snap Peas with Pancetta and Parmesan. We’ve made this side before, including for guests, and it never fails to please. We think this pairing is going to work very well, with the crunch from the peas and fried pancetta contrasting nicely with the soft, flaky texture of the tilapia.

We saw that graffiti eggplant, which we had never heard of before, was very highly rated – five out of five stars – on Fresh Direct, so we decided to use it to make Elie Krieger’s (www.elliekrieger.com) Ratatouille with Red Snapper and Herbed Goat Cheese Crostini on Tuesday. Unlike traditional eggplants, which are so purple they’re almost black, graffiti eggplant are a much lighter shade of almost pinkish-purple with streaks of white. We thought they would look really pretty in this recipe, which is one we’ve made several times before. Since we’ve made it before, we know that it takes quite a bit of chopping, so we may do that in advance if we can.

We’ll keep things simple on Wednesday with Deb Perelman’s (www.smittenkitchen.com) Everyday Margarita Pizza, which we’ll pair with a simple arugula salad. As we’ve mentioned before, we use pre-made dough whenever we make pizza. This time, we’re trying a whole wheat version of our usual pizza dough, just to see how it turns out.

On Thursday we’re going to try something very different for us – Thai food – when we make Little Thai Cocottes from the “Mini Cocotte Cookbook” by Le Creuset. We’re excited to try this dish, as it uses ingredients that we have no experience with outside of a restaurant, including coconut milk, lemongrass, and lime leaves. We added a side of pre-made Coconut Rice to our Fresh Direct order to have alongside this dish.

We were in the mood to have chicken some day this week, so we’re going to make Mario Batali’s (www.mariobatali.com) Chicken Saltimbocca with Asparagus on Friday. This dish features vin santo (literally “holy wine”), a sweet Italian dessert wine that we had on our trip to Tuscany this past May. It was great after dinner, but we’re very curious to see what it’s like to cook with and will pay a visit to Columbus Wine and Spirits (www.columbuswines.com) and see if our friend Michael can help us find a bottle.

Since we’re going to have some leftover Parmesan and mozzarella cheese, we figured we could have an Italian tapas night on Saturday. We purchased some dried italian sausages, one sweet and flavored with fennel and one hot and flavored with Calabrian chiles, to have with the cheeses. We also going to make a Rachel Khoo (www.rachelkhoo.com) dish, Sun-Dried Tomato & Ricotta Tapenade, from her newest cookbook “Sweet and Savuory Pates”, to mix things up a bit.

Tony doesn’t usually do much baking, but he’s been wanting to make a recipe for  Cherry-Vanilla Scones for a while. Recently, he decided to give it a try.

Prepping most of the ingredients for the scones was pretty simple. I sifted together the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar), mixed together the wet ingredients (one egg, one egg yolk, vanilla, heavy cream, and buttermilk), and made the egg wash (egg and water). The only hard part was pitting the cherries and slicing them into quarters. I didn’t realize how much two cups of pitted, quartered cherries was until today!

With the prepping done, it was time to start mixing. I folded the wet ingredients into the dry and when I was done, the dough was very wet and sticky. So I folded in about a quarter cup more of flour. I next folded in the cherries. When I was down with this step, the dough still looked a little wet, so I mixed in about another quarter cup of flour. At this point, the dough looked much better, so I divided it into two rounds, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for an hour.

After an hour in the fridge, I took the dough out and cut each round into eight triangles. Since I knew I would be baking the scones in two batches (it just seemed easier that way, though of course it took more time), I left half the dough in the fridge. With a little flour on my hands, I was easily able to transfer the scones to a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. They went into the oven for about fifteen minutes and while the recipe doesn’t say to do this, I turned the cookie sheet 180 degrees halfway through the cooking time so the scones would bake evenly.

In spite of my worries about the dough begin too wet, the scones turned out perfectly. They were light and fluffy with lots of pieces of cherry and a nice hint of vanilla. I realized when I was done that I probably only used 2 cups of flour to begin with, even though the recipe calls for 2 1/2. This would explain why things turned out so well after I added the “extra” 1/2 cup of flour. This is a recipe I will try again before cherries go out of season, so I will be much more careful with my measuring next time!

Wednesday night didn’t go quite as planned and we just didn’t feel like cooking dinner, sousing the Crispy Salt-and-Vinegar Potatoes in the Warm Spinach Salad with Fried Egg and Potatoes just wasn’t in the cards. Kim’s original thought was to try to make this same combination for a nice Saturday lunch but she took one look at the recipe and deemed it just a few too many pots and pans for a supposedly relaxing lunch at home. We still wanted to use the eggs and spinach and the idea for baked eggs came to mind. Kim did a quick Internet search and was motivated to make her own creation inspired by these three recipes: Baked Eggs with Spinach and Cream, Baked Eggs with Canadian Bacon, Spinach, and Aged Cheddar, and Baked Eggs with Wilted Baby Spinach. Here’s how Kim’s Baked Eggs with Canadian Bacon and Spinach came together.

I did a quick audit of the recipes and realized we had quite a few of the ingredients or something similar around. I remembered we had left over Canadian bacon in the freezer from when Tony made the Barbecued Chicken with Short-Cut Collard Greens, so the first thing I did was find that and defrost it a little bit in the microwave as I let the oven pre-heat to 350 degrees.

I loved that the Baked Eggs with Wilted Baby Spinach suggested sautéing shallots before adding the spinach and was very glad to see we had a nice shallot out on our counter so I could try this. I’ve always done spinach in olive oil but I liked the suggestion in Baked Eggs with Canadian Bacon, Spinach, and Aged Cheddar to use butter and thought I’d give that a try. In addition to salt and pepper, as the spinach wilted I added just a touch of freshly grated nutmeg.

As the spinach was wilting, I chopped the Canadian bacon into bite-size pieces and sprinkled them at the bottom of each of the buttered Le Creuset cocottes. I then layered the wilted spinach with shallots on top. I loved the idea of the Asiago cheese from Baked Eggs with Wilted Baby Spinach but since I didn’t have Asiago around, I used a small sprinkling of Parmesan instead right on top of the spinach.

I cracked two eggs into each cocotte and seasoned them with a little salt and pepper. Borrowing a step from the Baked Eggs with Spinach and Cream recipe, I added   approximately one tablespoon of heavy cream (left over from Tony’s Cherry-Vanilla Scones, which he’ll be posting about soon) and another little sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.

I placed both cocottes on to a baking sheet and slid them into the oven and set the timer for six minutes. I also put into the oven on another baking sheet of some leftover bread to toast while the eggs were baking. After six minutes, I rotated both baking sheets and set the timer for another six minutes. After four minutes had passed, it was time to take out the bread and in another two minutes we had delightful baked eggs. I sprinkled the eggs with some chives and parsley before plating with the toasted bread. We enjoyed a pleasant and very savory Saturday lunch at home with glass of rosé.