Two at the Table

Panzanella on a warm July evening when the tomatoes are really good makes for a wonderful summertime dinner. Here’s how it went when Kim made it on Tuesday night.

I’ve tried many variations on panzanella and have really enjoyed trying different recipes. Sometimes I even combine recipes. This time though, I followed the recipe with one exception—I used heirloom tomatoes. I also made the whole recipe. Surprisingly, leftover panzanella is just as good as the night you make it. Plus, for Tony, the suggestion of one sausage link isn’t quite enough, so that was one more change.!

I used a parbaked whole-wheat French break loaf that we baked in the morning while we were getting ready for work. We let it sit out during the day to replicate the effect of day old-bread.

While I probably could have made the panzanella while the sausage was cooking, I made it first so that the bread would have time to soak up some of the dressing. It may have added an extra 10 minutes or so to our wait time for dinner but so worth it! I also found that it needed a little more salt and pepper than the recipe suggested.

Using pre-cooked sausage also moves things along quickly and means the kitchen doesn’t get too hot since we use an indoor grill pan to quickly warm the sausages up.

In just a short amount of time, we sat down to a delicious dinner filled with the tastes of summer. We paired this with our left over Cava from Tapas Night. (We have an awesome Champagne/sparking wine saver!)

We divided the left overs into containers each with half the remaining sausage link and got to enjoy it all again the next day at lunch.

We’ve gotten a few questions about us from our readers, so we thought we would field those periodically. We’ll mix the Q’s & A’s in with our usual posts and also add them to our “About Our Blog” page.

Q: How do you decide what to make?

A: A lot of things factor in to how we create our menus. One of the most important is just looking at the Web site of our online grocer, Fresh Direct. They rate all of their veggies, produce, fish, and meat, so if we see something that looks really good, or that’s featured because it’s in season or is on sale, we’ll work around that. We try to have seafood once a week, usually Sunday or Monday (or maybe Tuesday), so that we can use fresh fish and not frozen. We also try to eat vegetarian once a week. We hate to waste food, even herbs, so if we need a bunch of dill or head of cabbage for a recipe one week, we’ll try to find another recipe for later in the same week or early in the next that uses that same ingredient.

There always seems to be one dish on the menu that got there because of a conversation that started with “You know, we haven’t had X in forever”. At the same time, we’re looking at new recipes throughout the week and if we see something new and fun we’ll add that to the menu too. Occasionally, we’ll take a trip somewhere and see ingredients that help us plan a menu, like duck or shellfish or fresh veggies when we take day trips to Long Island. Last but not least, we generally save more complicated dishes for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and holidays because we have more time to cook.

We’re going to be a bit busy during the first part of the week, with a Yankee game on Sunday, dinner with friends on Monday, and a wine tasting on Wednesday, but we do have some fun dishes for you for Tuesday and Thursday. What’s more, we’re going to take a day trip to the town of Greenport on the North Fork of Long Island this Friday and will bring back lots of fresh seafood and produce that will inspire our dinners on Friday and Saturday – and Sunday, so check back for next week’s menu!

Tuesday night, we’re having Panzanella with Chicken Sausage, an Elie Krieger recipe that we’ve made several times before. (Please note that the link will take you to http://www.globalgourmet.com, where you can find the recipe.) Panzanella is a bread-based salad’ this recipe also includes tomato, cucumber, and red onion. It’s very satisfying without being too heavy. We’re going to change things up a bit and use heirloom tomatoes because they’re in season. We’re also using fully cooked sausage, which will greatly reduce the prep time for this dish.

On Thursday, we’re making the kitchn’s (www.thekitchn.com) Honey & Chili Chicken Thighs with Creamy Cilantro Sauce. Spicy Grilled Corn

On thursday, we’ re making the kitchn’s (www.thekitchn.com) Honey & Chili Chicken Thighs with Creamy Cilantro Sauce. The first time we made this dish, we fell in love with the sauce, which is bright and delicious and goes really well with the chicken. We’re also going to have Melissa D’Arabian’s (www.melissadarabian.net) Spicy Grilled Corn, which was another “love at first taste” recipe for us and perfect for summertime.

While we try really hard to give our readers the widest possible variety of recipes, on Friday we’re going to repeat one that we made (and loved!) a few weeks ago: Real Simple’s Sheet-Pan Clambake With Mussels, Shrimp, and Chorizo. We’re going to hit the Southold fish market on the way back from Greenport and buy all the seafood we need for the clambake.

We’re going to do something a little lighter Saturday night. We’ll start with a salad of  Heirloom Tomatoes with Goat Cheese. We’ll use the tomatoes we plan to buy on our trip to Long Island along with what may very well be the best goat cheese in the world, which we’ll buy during our visit to Catapano Dairy Farm. If you are anywhere in the vicinity of the dairy farm, you owe it to yourself to stop by and purchase some goat cheese (and goat milk fudge and yogurt, not to mention fresh eggs) and to visit the goats, as we did earlier this spring.

With the salad, we’ll have Ina Garten’s Savory Palmiers, which we’ll make using pre-made puff pastry dough but home-made pesto, which will use the basil that, you guessed it, we plan to buy on Long Island!

Mushrooms are a go to ingredient for us on nights when we try to eat vegetarian, which we try to do at least once a week. When our truffle oil arrived from a winery we visited in Tuscany during our trip there in May, pairing it with mushrooms seemed just perfect. Here’s how it went when Kim made Bobby Flay’s Parmesan Crusted Portobello Mushrooms with White Truffle Oil.

Since we were having this as our main dish, we made the full recipe, which was a satisfying and slightly decadent main course.

I first combined the Parmesan, thyme, salt and pepper. The recipe wasn’t very specific on the amount of salt and pepper so I probably ended up doing a teaspoon or so of each, making the assumption that the Parmesan would also impart some saltiness.

I got the Portobello mushrooms going cap side down on the grill pan and five minutes turned to be just about right for mine. The recipe assumes that you have an outdoor grill but I found that using a stove top grill pan worked perfectly. I turned them over for the additional six minutes of cooking time and meanwhile, I also got the oyster mushrooms started in a sauté pan.

I turned heat off the Portobello mushroom and sprinkled the Parmesan mixture into the mushrooms. Since I didn’t have a cover on my stove top grill, I simply put a piece of foil over the mushrooms and the intended result of melted cheese happened quite nicely.

While I was waiting for the cheese to melt, I distributed some arugula onto our dinner plates and lightly dressed it with a squeeze of lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil and of course, salt and pepper. Using my fish spatula, I slid two grilled Portobello mushrooms on each plate, drizzled with the long-awaited truffle oil and topped with the oyster mushrooms.

We paired this with a delightful Chianti Classico from our trip to Tuscany and enjoyed a wonderful dinner that reminded us of our special vacation.

Tonight we decided to make Heirloom Tomatoes BLTs. Tony explains how very, very easy it all was:

The only challenging thing about making a BLT is figuring out how not to make a mess while cooking the bacon. I can’t claim to have invented a way to do this, but I have a way to do this. I lined a small, rimmed baking sheet with foil and placed a rack inside it. (I used one of Kim’s rectangular cookie cooling racks.) I then laid five strips of bacon across the rack, which was all that would fit, and put the bacon in a 350 degree oven.

I checked the bacon after 15 minutes and decided it need more time and then took it out of the oven 10 minute after that. The 25 minutes was enough to cook the bacon until it had just started to crisp around the edges. I didn’t turn the bacon while it was in the oven, so I had to be careful, because a little bacon grease had pooled on the top of each strip and a lot had collected in the bottom of the baking sheet. I used a pair of tongs to carefully tip each piece of bacon sideways over the baking sheet to drain the grease and then transferred the bacon to a paper-towel-lined plate. When the bacon had cooled, I blotted it with the paper towels, transferred it to the cutting board, and cut it in half to make it easier to work with. Normally, I would have saved the bacon grease, but this time I didn’t, as I had no real plans for it. I am certain I will regret this decision soon and quite possibly for the rest of my life.

While the bacon was cooking, I was able to prepare everything else. I cut four, medium-thick slices from a heirloom tomato and seasoned them generously with salt and pepper. Tomatoes can be a little dull on their own, so you definitely want to use at least a little salt to liven them up.

Using another “life hack” I picked up along the way, I cut all four slices of tomato in half to make it easier to arrange round slices of tomato on square slices of bread. (You can see how I did this in the photo below).

Having taken care of the “T” in BLT, I next took care of the “L” by simply tearing off four leaves from a head of Boston lettuce that we bought for these sandwiches as well as the Pasta With Peas, Prosciutto and Lettuce. I also toasted four slices of sourdough bread and since a BLT isn’t really complete without mayo, reached into the fridge to grab the chipotle mayo that Kim made earlier in the week for the Cilantro Lime Salmon Cakes with Chipotle Mayo recipe. (This was the only change we made to the recipe as it didn’t seem to make sense to make garlic may when we had fantastic chipotle mayo already made up.)

The final step was assembly. I put a little mayo on the bread (both sides)…

…then piled up the tomato, bacon, and lettuce.

I cut each sandwich in half and plated them with some potato chips and the last of the fantastic Recipe Girl bread and butter pickles we made a couple of weeks ago during our bread and butter pickle taste-off. We popped open a couple of  Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPAs, put on the Yankee game, and had a very casual but delicious dinner.

Cilantro Lime Salmon Cakes with Chipotle Mayo made for a delicious, new way for us to enjoy salmon. Kim tells us how it went on Tuesday night.

I had never made anything like salmon cakes before but the recipe seemed very straightforward and despite having several steps, simple enough for a week night.  Like many of our recipes, I made only half.

The recipe called for a skinless salmon fillet; mine was not skinless but I guessed the skin would come right off after I roasted the salmon. I only needed to roast my piece of salmon for 10 minutes and then slid it right into the fridge on the sheet pan to cool.

As the recipe suggested, while the salmon was roasting, I made the chipotle mayo. We had both chipotle in adobo and chipotle flakes around and since the author of the recipe preferred chipotle powder, I thought why not grab our spice grinder (actually a coffee grinder we only use for grinding spices) and make our flakes into powder. The experiment worked and the chipotle mayo came out perfectly with a nice amount of spiciness. Even with this extra step of making the adobo powder, I still had plenty of time to make the mayo and clean up a little bit before moving on to other parts of the recipe.

Again, as the recipe suggested, while the salmon was cooling, I prepped the other ingredients for the salmon cakes.  Because the whole recipe called for one beaten egg, I just guessed a little bit on what half a beaten egg was. Once all the other ingredients were ready to go, the salmon had cooled and my guess that the skin would come away easily as I flaked the salmon was accurate. I was very glad I didn’t struggle with trying to skin my own salmon before cooking.

Mixing the ingredients for the salmon cakes was exactly how the recipe described—it was very easy to get it to a “moist tuna salad” consistency.

I dipped the cakes into the bread crumbs and got them going in a skillet. Mine took a little longer than two minutes a side to brown. They took about 4 minutes a side and while I had to turn up the heat a little bit from medium just to get them going, I eventually turned it back down to medium. I suspect this might have been because I was using a non-stick skillet.

The salmon cakes came out gorgeous and browned perfectly. I plated them with a dollop of the chipotle mayo on top and paired with nice green salad with a few chives sprinkled in. The salmon cakes were incredibly flavorful with wonderful texture of tender salmon and a slight crunch from the onion and red pepper and the chipotle mayo was a perfect accompaniment. I’ll definitely be making these again and agree with the author of the recipe—they’d be great for company too.

On Monday night, we made Seared Tuna with Chimichurri Sauce and Greens. With the help of a food processor, this dish came together very quickly. Tony describes how simple it all was:

As we mentioned in our menu post earlier this week, dinner tonight was a mash-up of two recipes: the Seared Tuna with Chimichurri Sauce and Greens recipe from Food & Wine and the Chimichurri recipe from The New York Times. Since the tuna takes so little time to prep, the natural place for me to start was with the chimichurri. You may remember that when we made the Grilled Shrimp with Black-Eyed Peas and Chimichurri the week before last, the process was entirely manual, with lots of chopping involved. While you could probably make this recipe by hand, it was nice to be able to use the food processor. I just put in everything except the olive oil, made sure it was well mixed, and I was done with the first part. The second part was even easier – I mixed in the olive oil, slowly, by hand, until it was fully blended in with the other ingredients.

For the tuna, I just seasoned it with salt, pepper, and thyme and then seared it quickly in a pan in which I had heated some olive oil. (Since I was cutting the recipe in half, I only needed to use one pan, not the two called for in the recipe.) The two pieces were very different thicknesses – one about an inch and one about an inch and a half – so I cooked the thinner piece for about one minute per side and the thicker piece for about a minute and a half per side. Both pieces came out just about perfect – seared on the outside and very rare on the inside. I deployed the trusty splatter guard and was able to keep the mess to a minimum.

To serve, I first tossed the greens with some of the chimichurri, which Kim thinned out with a bit of olive oil to make it more like a salad dressing. I next laid the tuna, which I had sliced, on top of the salad, and then drizzled the fish with more chimichurri. We paired this with a nice Sauvignon Blanc for a lovely weeknight dinner.

Having had a great afternoon at the Yankee game and seeing a walk-off win, we were definitely in the mood a fun dinner. Tonight’s menu fit the bill. We tag-teamed on this one, so we’ll both explain what we did!

Asparagus with Manchego

Kim: After Tony trimmed the asparagus, I put them on a foil-lined sheet pan and drizzled them with a little olive oil. I sprinkled them with salt and pepper and mixed them to coat. I arranged them in one layer and slid them into a 350 degree oven.

Tony: After about 10 minutes, I took the asparagus out of the oven. As a final step, I shaved some manchego on the warm asparagus and then sprinkled some Spanish paprika on top.

Kim: Personally, I would have either roasted the asparagus a little longer or grilled them on the grill pan.

Chorizo with Honey

Tony: We had some chorizo left over from the clam bake, so I simply cut that into 1/4-inch slices and warmed it in a pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes

Kim: My job here was easy – I just drizzled the chorizo with some wildflower honey that we purchased on a recent trip to bear Mountain, NY.

Mushrooms with Thyme

Tony: I started with half a pound of baby bella mushrooms that I cut into quarters. I heated a little olive oil in a pan and when it was warm, added the mushrooms. I sprinkled them with salt, paper, and thyme and let them cook for about five minutes, until they had started to soften but weren’t too soft. A sprinkled them with a little red wine and then cooked them for another minute or two.

Cheese, Olives, and Caper Berries

We rounded things out with some cheese (Mahón, a Spanish cow’s-milk cheese), olives that we had in the fridge, and caper berries.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of July 20 2014

Welcome back! Let’s jump into another week of recipes!

We had a bit of a hectic week last week, so the Tomato Scallion Shortcakes with Whipped Goat Cheese we were supposed to make Tuesday night actually turned into lunch Saturday afternoon (which you can read about here) and Tapas Night, which was supposed to be on Thursday night, didn’t happen at all. Since we’re going to another Yankee game Sunday afternoon, we figured we could reschedule Tapas Night for Sunday. As before, the menu will include Chorizo with Honey, Grilled Asparagus with Manchego, and Mushrooms with Thyme. We still have the bottle of cava we ordered last week, so we’ll be opening that with dinner.

On Monday night, we plan to make  Seared Tuna with Chimichurri Sauce and Greens. This recipe is a good example of how we sometimes pull together ideas from different places to design a meal for a given day. While reading the food section of the New York Times Magazine Saturday morning, we saw an interesting recipe for Chimichurri. It caught our eye because is contains oregano, which we still have left over from the Greek Salad with Oregano-Roasted Salmon. We saved the Times recipe for future use and then started checking Fresh Direct to get more ideas. We saw that tuna was highly rated and on sale and when we started looking for tuna recipes, we found one on the Food & Wine website (www.foodandwine.com) that, coincidentally, uses chimichurri. So, we’re mixing and matching recipes for the tuna dish, taking the cooking directions and salad from Food & Wine and the chimichurri recipe from the New York Times. We’re going to pair this with a bottle of Montes Sauvignon Blanc.

Tuesday night, we’re going to make Cilantro Lime Salmon Cakes with Chipotle Mayo. This recipe is not hard, but it has a few more steps than most of the recipes we use, as it calls for, of course, cooking the salmon, using it to make the cakes, and then browning the cakes. It sounds a like such a great summer dish that we’re going to give it a go and pair it up with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

When we travelled to Tuscany this May, we visited the Torciano vineyard for a tasting and lunch. The main course was lasagna, a recipe we’re going to try to replicate for a special anniversary dinner we’re going to make with our friends Tom and Sharon on Jan 3rd, which is almost exactly halfway between their 1st anniversary and our 5th. What made the lasagna extra special was that it was drizzled with truffle oil. We ordered a few bottles of wine, including a special bottle for our anniversary dinner, and a bottle of the truffle oil. When the delivery arrived this week, we knew we needed to make something that used the oil and went with the wine. We were excited to find Bobby Flay’s  Parmesan Crusted Portobello Mushrooms with White Truffle Oil, which we’ll have with one of our bottles of Torciano Baldassarre Rosso Tuscano.

Tony realized that the week was trending very vegetarian/pescatarian, so he decided what we needed was some bacon. So, on Thursday night, we’re making Heirloom Tomato BLTs. Heirloom tomatoes are in season in late summer, so we’ll probably make a few things using them in the coming weeks. They are really delicious and more interesting, flavorful, and colorful than regular tomatoes. We’ll have the BLT’s with some more of the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Finally, for Friday, we’re going to make a pasta dish that we rally enjoy (and that has the added benefit of letting us use up the lettuce!): Pasta With Peas, Prosciutto and Lettuce. When we first found this recipe about four years ago, we thought that the idea of lettuce in pasta was a little odd, but we really enjoyed it and have come back to it at least once every summer. We’ll have the pasta with an Italian white wine, Bastianich Friulano.

After another busy week of cooking, we’re planning to have dinner out on Saturday night, but we’re looking forward to trying several new recipes this week!