Two at the Table

Tonight we made Chicken with Morels. The idea for making something like this came from a dinner that Kim had on our trip to Paris two years ago. When morels were available from our Internet grocer, Fresh Direct, this week, it was definitely time for Kim to try this recipe. We normally would have saved something with this many steps for a Friday or Saturday night, but since we both were taking Friday as a vacation day from work, we opted to do this on a Thursday night.

The recipe uses Maderia–a type of fortified wine like port–and we never had it before and we both thought it was delicious. The merchant at our local wine shop suggested it would make for a nice appetizer with some raw nuts. It did indeed and we enjoyed a glass of Maderia with some almonds and hazelnuts, as I baked a parbaked French bread.

The recipe called for dried morels but I used fresh ones with great results and simply skipped the steps for hydrating the morels. The sauce comes together very easily and it was definitely helpful to have all the ingredients measured and ready to use. Again, a nice thing about this recipe is that it finishes in the oven (I used my Le Creuset dutch oven), giving enough time to tidy up the kitchen and slice the French bread before sitting down to dinner.

Since I had never made this dish before, I opted  to make a simple salad so I could give the chicken and morels my full attention. I think next time, I would definitely feel confident enough to make a more elaborate vegetable side. I definitely recommend serving with the French bread. The sauce is delicious and the bread is perfect for soaking up every last drop.

Tonight we made Flaky Mushroom and Gruyère Tarts. This is one of Kim’s favorite vegetarian weeknight recipes to make. Here’s how it went.

To save a little time and add variety, I used a packaged gourmet blend of mushrooms plus a handful of baby portabella mushrooms that just needed to be quickly cleaned and sliced.

As the mushrooms cook, there’s enough time to grate the gruyère. While I didn’t do it this time, a nice addition as the mushrooms are sautéing is thyme. Assembling the tarts is very easy–just be sure to prick the puff pastry as the recipe indicates. Even though we normally halve recipes, for this one we do make the whole one for the tarts. They are so delicious, it’s hard to resist eating two!

Besides being delicious, another thing I like about the recipe is that I have a chance to clean up from making the mushrooms as well as assemble the salad and salad dressing while the tarts are in the oven. I used about half the suggested amount of salad greens but made the full recipe for the dressing so I would have it leftover for tomorrow night’s dinner.

Tonight we made Fish with Lemon and Brown Butter Sauce. Kim did the cooking and here’s here take on how it went.

This dinner is a quick weeknight meal. Since the fish cooks so quickly, I decided to start with our side first–haricots verts with shallots and slivered almonds–so that I wouldn’t have to worry about them and could give my full attention to the fish.

Rather than getting out more pots and pans to blanch the haricot verts, I put them in a microwave-safe bowl with a little water, covered with cling wrap and cooked them on high for about three minutes, just enough to take out the rawness. I quickly drained them and then sautéed them on low heat with the shallots and slivered almonds while I cooked the fish.

Cooking the fish was very quick, in fact I probably should have stayed on the low end of the recommended cooking time (one minute per side.) My other advice is to use a splatter screen–it make a big difference with clean up. A huge help in making the delicious sauce was to have all the ingredients measured and ready to use.

Dinner took no time at all and was a relatively light and flavorful weeknight meal.

Tonight, Tony used the Chili-Glazed Pork left over from last week to make Cuban Sandwiches. Here he explains, step-by-step, how he did it:

A Cuban sandwich, if you don’t know, is a toasted sandwich containing a layer each of pork, ham, Swiss cheese, and pickles; topped with mustard; and made on French bread. It takes a little more work than most sandwiches – think of it as complicated grilled-cheese – but it’s worth the effort. It’s fun to make because each layer is so different, which creates a great mix of flavors and textures.

You’ll want to start with a loaf of crusty French bread. Using not just good bread, but the right bread, is the key to a great sandwich. (Try imaging what it would be like to eat, say, peanut butter and jelly on rye or roast beef on cinnamon raisin and you’ll see what I mean!) Cut two, six- to eight-inch pieces from the middle of the loaf – using the ends will make it a little bit harder to flatten the Cuban later – and split each piece open. The picture below is of the two bottom halves.

Start with a layer of the chili-glazed pork. A traditional Cuban calls for shredded pork, but I’ve used slices (like in the photo below) and it’s worked just fine. I’ve also cut the slices into strips and even diced them up, but in the end, it wasn’t worth the extra effort.

Next comes the ham. Any kind will do (I just used boiled ham), but make sure it’s sliced thin. I used two to three slices per sandwich and piled them up as you can see below.

The next layer is Swiss cheese. I like to slice the cheese in half lengthwise so I can make sure it doesn’t hang too far over the edge of the bread. (The picture below shows one half piece on top of two slightly overlapping half pieces.) Remember, you’ll be toasting the sandwiches, so the more cheese hangs out, the more clean up you’ll probably have to do.

Next are pickles. I like to use the longer, flat sandwich slices, because they’re so easy to work with, but you can use round slices too. I’ve made these sandwiches using homemade bread and butter pickles, which are sweet and give the Cuban a very different, but equally awesome, taste. (Check back in over the summer and I’ll share my favorite pickle recipes!) Lay the pickles diagonally across the sandwich so you can get a little in every bite.

Now, spread the top half of the bread with good Dijon mustard and put it on the sandwich. Your fully-assembled, ready-to-be-toasted Cuban will look like this:

Before you toast the sandwiches on the grill, press them flat a bit – don’t get too carried away, or the Cuban may slide apart! – and the brush the top and bottom of each sandwich lightly with olive oil. Now you’re ready to toast. We use a cast-iron grill pan for this step, but you can use a frying pan. Turn the heat to medium low and place the Cubans on the grill. You’ll want to put something heavy on top of the sandwiches to help keep them flat; we use a large Dutch oven (it’s actually a small Dutch oven inside of a larger one), but anything heavy and non-flammable will do. I usually cover the sandwiches with aluminum foil before putting the weight on top. This has nothing to do with the cooking process; I just do it so I don’t have to clean the bottom of the Dutch oven.

A lot can go wrong in the toasting stage: you can burn the bread if the heat is too high and you can make the Cubans fall apart if you flip them too often. Keep the heat low, toast for 10 minutes a side, and flip once and only once. I found it’s best to stay in or near the kitchen during this part. You don’t want the weight to slip off and you don’t want the bread to burn. The perfect toast looks something like this:

We served this with a small green salad and salt-and-vinegar potato chips. A nice, cold bottle of very hoppy IPA was the perfect complement.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of June 1 2014

A bit of a busy week this week, with a couple of Yankee games on Sunday and Monday; a lecture at the New York Historical Society on 19th century architecture in Paris on Tuesday; and tickets to the Governor’s Ball music festival Friday and Saturday. Even so, we still planned to make dinner four nights this week, including Sunday after the game and Tuesday after the lecture.

First up is Cuban Sandwiches on Sunday. (This is how we used up the leftovers from the Chili-Glazed Pork from last week.) No specific recipe to give you here, but we’ll walk you through it step-by-step.

Tuesday night is Fish with Lemon and Brown Butter Sauce. This is a recipe from Rachel Khoo’s fantastic”The Little Paris Kitchen” cookbook. If you’re not familiar with Rachel’s blog or her show “Little Paris Kitchen” on the Cooking Channel, you owe it to yourself to check them out. We thought this would be a great meal after the lecture, not only because it’s pretty quick but also because French food after a lecture on Paris just seemed right.

On Wednesday night, we made another recipe perfect for a busy week: Flaky Mushroom and Gruyère Tarts. Since this dish uses packaged pastry dough, it’s really a snap. It’s very light, so we usually make the whole recipe, which serves four, and a simple salad. We’ve this paired it with a few different kinds of white wine (Pinot Grigio, Riesling, Sancerre) and even a rosé.

For dinner on Thursday, we tried something new, Chicken with Morels. This was our first attempt at this dish. We’ve shied away from it in the past because morel mushrooms are kind of expensive, but our local internet grocer had them on sale, so we decided we would splurge. This one is a bit rich (it uses, butter, heavy cream, and creme fraiche – a type of sour cream – and Madeira wine, a fortified wine from Portugal), but we really wanted to give it a try! This recipe serves six, so we decided to cut it in half and have one serving left over to take to work for lunch.

We’re spending Friday and Saturday night (Sunday too!) at Governor’s Ball, so no home-cooked dinners those nights, but we’ll report back on the food trucks!

Sometimes on a weekend night we might try to do a recipe that is a little more involved than what me might attempt on a weeknight, but this Friday night, we went for a recipe, Chili-Glazed Pork with Sweet Potato Hash that is pretty easy, but requires a bit more equipment.

In a small kitchen, just how many dishes we want tackle also factors into selecting a recipe. This one requires a food processor but the results are worth it and there’s just enough time while the sweet potatoes are sautéing to get it washed, dried and put away.

The pork tenderloin is super easy since it goes in the oven and only requires a quick basting twice. We put the pork in for four minutes, turn it over, brush it with the maple syrup, than repeat again in four minutes. The recipe says 10 to 12 minutes; this time the pork was perfect at 160 degrees on a meat thermometer after 10 minutes. Letting it rest for 5 minutes is essential—we often do so under a piece of tented foil—that way it says really juicy.

The hash is simple and delicious and has a nice kick with the suggested addition of hot sauce—this time we used Siracha but other times we’ve used Tabasco. Both are a nice addition. Even though the recipe doesn’t specifically state it, we use salt and pepper in it as well as it is sautéing.

Unlike other recipes where we often make half the recipe, this one we make the full one. The hash makes a great left over for lunch and the pork makes for especially delicious Cuban sandwiches.

Tonight we made one of our favorites: Ina Garten’s Chicken with Herbed Goat Cheese. We paired it with an arugula salad with black, oil-cured olives and a mustard vinaigrette.

The recipe feeds six, but we, of course, are only two. (We have managed to get Six at the Table, in spite of living in a typically small New York City apartment.) Cutting a a recipe into thirds can be hard, but in this case, it’s very easy. We used about two ounces of herbed goat cheese and two big basil leaves per chicken breast. We made one addition, which is totally optional: we added a couple of sun-dried tomatoes, cut into strips, to each breast. We’re not sure if we saw Ina Garten do this on her show or if we came up with the idea ourselves, but it is a nice touch.

There’s nothing to chop, so prep only took about 5 – 10 minutes. All you need to do is slide the goat cheese, basil, and sun-dried tomatoes (if using) under the chicken skin. The order doesn’t matter too much, but we’ve found that adding the cheese first helps hold the other ingredients in place. When you’re done rubbing with olive oil and salting and peppering, it should look something like this (the lighter spots under the skin are the goat cheese, while the darker ones are the sun-dried tomatoes and basil):

Chicken breasts on the bone take a while to cook: at least 30 to 40 minutes for this and most other recipes we’ve tried. This gives you time to clean up your kitchen before the food comes out of the oven, which is a must if it’s small like ours, set the table, etc. It’s always a good idea to use a meat thermometer to check the chicken’s internal temperature; there’s no such thing as medium-rare chicken!

The chicken was juicy, the goat cheese provided a nice bite, and the sun-dried tomatoes gave the dish some more depth of flavor.We paired this with a Riesling for another lovely dinner.

Welcome to our first official write-up of one of our dinners!

Tonight we made Pasta With Spicy Sausages, Tomatoes, Rosemary and Olives. This is a perfect weeknight meal. There are only seven ingredients: the four in the photo above, plus olive oil, garlic, and pasta. Even better, it’s a very flexible recipe. It calls for spicy sausage, but you can use sweet. You can probably leave out the olives if you don’t like them. We love rosemary, so we wouldn’t skip it, but you could. The first time we tried this dish, we used whole wheat pasta – and learned that we really don’t like whole wheat pasta!

Since we didn’t have to do much to the few ingredients we used, prep was very fast. The recipe says to dice the tomatoes, but we just cut them into small pieces. The smell of freshly cut plum tomatoes always reminds Tony of home. For as long as he can remember, his Very Italian Mother and Very Italian Father, or VIM and VIF, who’ll you’ll be hearing more about, have bought bushels of tomatoes every August to make their own tomato sauce, which they use throughout the year. Everyone would pitch in and over the course of a couple of days, they would make dozens of quarts of sauce. (Check back with us in August for an update on how this year’s batch turned out!)

The only change we made to the recipe was to cut the rosemary sprig into four pieces. We figured this would make it easier to work with (it did) and get more rosemary flavor into the dish (it seemed to do that too). The only issue we had while cooking is that the sauce didn’t seem to be thickening up very quickly. We added about a tablespoon of tomato paste and raised the heat a bit, which did the trick. As far as consistency, you’re going to go from the photo on the left below, where the tomatoes have released a lot of water, to the one on the right, where the water has mostly cooked off.

This dish was as good as we remembered. Every bite was infused with rosemary and burned with just enough heat to keep things interesting. We paired this with a bottle of Chianti Classico for a simple but enjoyable weeknight meal.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of May 25 2014

This was our second week back from an amazing trip to Tuscany. Last week, we ended up ordering in and eating out quite a lot. Now that we were over our jet lag and settled back into our routine, we decided to try a few new things, mixed in with some old favorites.

We had been planning to make Ina Garten’s Pissaladieres (a very oniony pizza) since before our vacation. Kim first had this dish on a trip to Paris two years ago. With pizza dough already in the freezer and onions already on the counter, we decided to have it on Sunday. (FYI – the recipes calls for anchovies, but you can leave them off if you prefer.)

For any given week, we try to plan a balance of fish, chicken, meat and at least one vegetarian night. We usually use the fish as early in the week as possible, so we decided to try a new recipe on Monday: Salmon Steaks with Swiss Chard, Asparagus, and Almond-Red Pepper Sauce. The recipe was part of a Real Simple article on “one pan dinners”, but given our small kitchen, we had to spread things out over three pans. (It was much easier than it sounds!) There was also a recipe for a sheet pan clam bake that we’re definitely coming back to this summer.

Tuesday night would be the first day back at work after the long weekend, so we decided to keep it simple and make pasta.  We don’t make pasta all that often, so we try to do something a little different when we do. We found a recipe several years ago in the New York Times for Pasta With Spicy Sausages, Tomatoes, Rosemary and Olives and decided to make that again.

We had plans for dinner with friends on Wednesday night, so we moved on to Thursday and one of our favorites: Ina Garten’s Chicken with Herbed Goat Cheese. We make this dish at least once every couple of months because it is very, very simple and very, very good. We decided to make a quick and easy side of sautéed spinach to go with it.

We decided to make another favorite on Friday: Real Simple’s Chili-Glazed Pork with Sweet Potato Hash. The recipes uses a pork tenderloin, which is cooked under the broiler, so it takes no time at all. The best part is there are always leftovers, which make for great Cuban sandwiches on Saturday. (Hint, hint – check back this weekend for notes on the Cubans!)