Two at the Table

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of December 13, 2015

With four (!) Christmas parties this week and plans for dinner out on Saturday, we won’t be doing much cooking, but we do have two new recipes this week.

The first is from The New York Times’ Food section: Orange Beef, which we’ll have with Basmati Rice. This is supposed to be a 30 minute recipe, so we’re curious to see if we can do it that quickly, though we know dinner will take a little longer than that to prepare because the rice will probably take closer to 35-40 minutes to cook, but it should still be fast. We’re been on a bit of an Asian-food kick lately, probably inspired by our Queens adventures, so we’re looking forward to trying this recipe.

The second is from a blog that’s new to us, Sommer Collier’s A Spicy Perspective’s, and it’s for Garlic Lime Oven Baked Salmon (with Avocado Salad). We were intrigued by this recipe, not only because it sounds delicious, but also because it features an interesting technique: grating jalapeños on a microplane.We’ve tried this trick with ginger and found that this approach really infuses whatever we’re making with ginger flavor. We think it will work just as well with the jalapeño. We’ll have the salmon with a simple avocado salad.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of November 29, 2015

We took a bit of a hiatus last week, as we had lots of fun dinner plans already laid out, including a trip to Hudson, NY that wrapped up on Sunday; a fun night at the New York Junior League’s Thanksgiving Eve Ball (on Wednesday, of course); and Thanksgiving dinner with Tony’s parents, on, well, Thanksgiving. We decided we would order in/eat out the other days of the week last week. We have another busy week planned, with each of us having plans with friends on Thursday (through we will try to have some snacks that night) and us having plans together on Friday and Saturday. Nevertheless, we’re planning on making four dinners this week: two tried-and-true favorites and two new recipes.

Monday night will feature tried-and-true favorite #1: Food & Wine’s Winter Vegetable Chili, which we have made and enjoyed several times. This time will be a little different, as we’ll be using both carrots and parsnips that we bought at the Hudson Farmer’s Market during out trip last week. We’ll pair the chili up with a variety of IPAs from the Southern Tier Brewing Company for a little beer tasting.

Tuesday night will feature tried-and-true favorite #2: Real Simple’s Flaky Mushroom and Gruyère Tarts, which we have also made several times. We’ll mix it up this time by using mushrooms that we haven’t combined in the tart before: shitake mushrooms, maitake mushrooms (also known as Hen of the Woods mushrooms), and oyster mushrooms. We’ll pair this up with a 2013 La Damnee Des Prieur Sancerre.

We’ll be trying something new on Tuesday, namely Food & Wine’s Salmon and Citrus Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing. We picked this out because it looked easy and delicious. While the ingredients (orange, grapefruit, and avocado) may make it a little better suited for summer, we wanted to give it a try. Michael of Wines by the Flask took us in a very different direction with this and suggested a Beaujolais Nouveau, specifically, a 2011 Beaujolais-Villages Jean-Mare 2011.

On Wednesday, we’ll be putting an Asian spin on dinner, with two new recipes from The New York Times that appeared a few weeks ago in a Food section that focused on easy recipes. We’ll be having Miso Chicken and Baby Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce. We’ll probably make some rice as well, just to soak up all the tasty sauce. We’ll pair this with a 2012 Sur Lie Muscadet Sevre et Maine, also suggested by Michael.

On Thursday night, we will both probably be home on the later side, so we decided to have an indoor picnic, featuring delicious cheeses from Dutch Girl Cheese along with some dried sausage and (more!) cheese from Chaseholm Farm, all of which we found at the Hudson Farmer’s Market. With such fatty foods on the menu, we thought it would be good to introduce some palate-cleansing bubbles into the mix, and will open a bottle of Gruet sparkling wine.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of November 15, 2015

It’s going to be a busy week again for Two at the Table. Kim has commitments at the New York Junior League almost every night this week, plus we have a fun trip to Hudson, NY planned for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with our friends Tom and Sharon. Nevertheless, we’re going to try a few new recipes this week, plus an old favorite.

First up is Black Bean Espresso Chili for Sunday night. This is a recipe that originally appeared in Bon Appetit. Tony is somewhat skeptical about this recipe for two reasons. First, it contains beans, which disqualifies is as chili as far as Texans are concerned. Second, the chili contains no meat, which will probably also concern any Texans reading our blog! But as Tony has learned from his very successful attempts at making Winter Vegetable Chili, good chili can come in many forms.

On Monday night, Tony will have the much-anticipated Free-Form Autumn Vegetable Tart with Bacon Marmalade from Food & Wine. We knew this was an ambitious project when we first put it on the menu last week, but despite dividing the labor (Tony made the jam and prepped the autumn vegetables and Kim made the dough), we just could not find the time and energy to make this dish on a weeknight. We actually never did; we’re making it on Sunday afternoon for a late lunch and will have leftovers on Monday.

Tony saw that sea bass was rated pretty highly on Fresh Direct, so he found a recipe that would let him take advantage of that and make a nice dinner on Tuesday: Sea Bass with Prosciutto and Sage, also from Food & Wine. This dish is an interesting variation on an Italian classic: Chicken Saltimboca (literally, “chicken that jumps into your mouth”), so Tony is anxious to try it. He’ll pair this with some cous cous, just to mix things up a bit.

On Wednesday, Tony will have one of our favorite dishes and, if we’re being honest, one of the few recipes we know by heart: Ina Garten’s Chicken with Goat Cheese and Sundried Tomatoes. While it’s not super-fast–you should allow an absolute minimum of 35 minutes in a 350 degree oven to cook a bone-in chicken breast, which is what we’re using for this recipe–it is very easy to prepare. (Though the recipe says to use a boneless, skin-on chicken breast, we always use bone-in, skin-on chicken. It takes a little longer to cook, but we find that chicken on the bone almost always tastes better than boneless.)

For dinner on Thursday, Tony was poking around the freezer to see if we had any Romesco sauce left over, (sadly, we didn’t), but found two boneless pork loin chops, so he’ll use those up to make Pork with Grapes and Tarragon. We found this recipe over the summer and wanted to try it then, but never worked in into our menus. Tony’s excited to give it a go!

We leave for Hudson after work on Friday and won’t be back until Sunday evening, so there won’t be much cooking for Two at the Table over the weekend, but with all the great restaurants in Hudson, there will be no lack of eating!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of November 8, 2015

We have a pretty busy end to the week – we have plans with friends Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights – so we’re front-loading the menu this week and making some fun things between Sunday and Wednesday.

On Sunday night, we’ll have Ina Garten’s Coquilles St.-Jacques. Even thought this recipe is designed to be made ahead, we’ll probably just prep it in the afternoon and cook it in the evening. We’ve written about this dish on the blog before and when we saw that scallops were featured on Fresh Direct, we decided to make it again.

On Monday night, we’ll have left overs, namely, the Chicken Baked on a Bed of Bread and Swiss Chard that we had Friday night. We thoroughly enjoyed it for dinner Friday night – Tony may have finally overcome his dislike of capers, which are featured in the recipe – and are looking forward to having it again on Tuesday. 

On Tuesday, we’ll have a dish we planned to make last week, Rosemary Pork Chops with Butternut Squash Puree, but didn’t quite get around to making. We have all the ingredients already, so this one should  be pretty quick and easy.

We’re making something entirely new on Wednesday night: Food & Wine’s Free-From Autumn Vegetable Tart with Bacon Marmalade. We’ve had a lot of success with tarts in the past, from the Hip Foodie Mom’s savory Onion, Mushroom and Thyme Tart to Jacques Pépin’s sweet Country Apple Galette, which we featured during our Frocal (French-inspired, locally-sourced) Thanksgiving last year, so this one should be right up our alley. The one thing we will note is that this recipe is VERY involved for a weeknight. The estimated total time for making this dish (prep plus cooking) is 2 hours and 15 minutes; as with most dishes we make for the first time, we’re going to  assume it will take a little longer. So, we’re going to do most of the hard work, like making the bacon marmalade, prepping the veggies (which should keep until Wednesday), and making (and then freezing) the dough, Sunday afternoon. We’ll make the tart Wednesday night and probably have enough left over for at least a couple of lunches later in the week.

We should start by saying that Tony’s Very Italian Mother makes AWESOME homemade pasta: spaghetti, fettuccine, and if she has time, ravioli. Tony has wanted to try his hand at making pasta for a while, but was waiting for the right time. He bought a pasta making attachment for our Kitchen Aid stand mixer and, knowing his pasta wouldn’t be as good as his mom’s (spoiler alert: it wasn’t!), gave it a go last Sunday. Here’s how he did it.

Pasta is pretty simple, ingredient-wise: all that’s in it is eggs and flour, and, depending on your recipe, water and salt. I had watched my mom make pasta enough times that I could probably try to replicate her approach, but since her recipe is basically “use one egg per person and then add enough flour to make the dough”, I figured I would start out by using the recipe that came with the instruction manual for the pasta maker. My rate limiting step was not going to be my desire to make a lot of pasta, but space to lay out the pasta before and after it was cut, so I halved the recipe. I put two eggs, 1 3/4 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon of water, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt into the bowl of the stand mixer and mixed at low speed using the paddle attachment for about 30 seconds.

At this point, the dough had not come together at all, so I added one more egg – the eggs I was using were small, so I was hoping that 3 small eggs would get me close to the 2 large eggs called for in the halved recipe – and a couple of tablespoons of water. I figured if the dough was now too wet, I could just add more flour. After mixing for 30 more seconds, the dough came together perfectly: not too wet, not too dry, and just a bit stretchy.

I switched over to the dough hook on the stand mixer and kneaded the dough for about 2 minutes on low speed. The dough pulled away from the sides of the mixing bowl just the way it was supposed to and was very easy to dump out onto a lightly floured cutting board. I kneaded the dough by hand for two minutes (this was much more satisfying than I though it would be!) and let it sit for about 20 minutes.

I floured the cutting board lightly and then cut the dough into pieces about 1 cm thick.  I attached the pasta roller to the stand mixer, set it to thickness level 1, and began passing the pieces of dough through, folding them in half a few times as the recipe instructs. After about maybe four or so passes at level 1, I moved to level 2 and passed the dough through again, but this time without folding. The dough still seemed a little thick, so I ran it through level 3, which seemed to be perfect. When I’ve watched my mom do this step, she ends up with pieces of dough that are all about three inches wide and two feet long and all of the same thickness. Mine were, shall we say, a little less uniform. I had a few pieces that were squares about six inches on a side, a few that were perfect, and a few that were almost too big to work with.

As I mentioned, I was a little limited by space, so my plan was to roll out two or three pieces of dough, switch from the rolling attachment to the (fettuccine) cutting attachment, cut the pasta, and then start the process over. All in all, this approach worked out well. I was able to fit three pieces of rolled out dough on the cutting board without any trouble, but I probably could have used a little more flour to make things go more smoothly. Switching between the rolling and cutting attachments wasn’t too much trouble, though I did have a “Lucy at the candy factory” moment: I failed to really secure the cutter for the first batch, so rather than it staying in place and the cutting cylinders rolling, the whole thing started to spin around, with a sheet of pasta flapping along with it! The cutter worked well and the pasta separated pretty easily. It took about three cycles to roll and cut all the pasta, but it didn’t take too long. The only other thing I should have done differently is to spread the cut pasta over a lager baking sheet, or used two smaller ones, rather than pile it up as in the photo below. The pasta clumped a bit, but a few vigorous stirs after the pasta went into the boiling water and the clumps were gone.

Since fresh pasta cooks quickly (the fettuccine only took three minutes), it was time to eat before we knew it. We plated the pasta, ladled on the sauce (which we made a few weeks ago, using my mom’s recipe), sprinkled on the grated Parmesan cheese, poured the wine, and sat down to eat.

The pasta, which not as good as my mom’s, was still excellent. It was rich but still incredibly light and cooked perfectly. The sauce will good too; I added a few shakes of red pepper flakes to it when I reheated it so it had a little bite. We had a great dinner, but I will have to keep practicing until, maybe someday, my pasta is (almost) as good as my mom’s!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of November 1, 2015

We have lots of fun plans this week, from watching our friends run the New York City marathon on Sunday to having dinner out on Saturday, plus we’re making four new recipes.

We were feeling like making a few vegetarian (or mostly vegetarian!) dishes this week and found two new ones for Monday and Tuesday.

On Monday we’ll try a recipe we found on The Minimalist Baker website: White Bean Kale Salad with Tahini Dressing. While it has a few steps (making croutons, preparing the beans, preparing the salad, and making the dressing), none of them sound very complicated. The recipe uses 10 ounces of kale, so we have feeling we’re going to have leftovers, which will make for a nice lunch later this week. We’ll serve this with a greek white that our friend Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits picked out for us, a 2014 Domaine Sigalas Assyrtiko Athiri from Greece.

On Tuesday, we’ll try a new recipe from the Rural Intelligence website, namely, Baked Radicchio on Bread. This recipe uses Treviso-style style radicchio, which looks like a large red endive. The recipe suggest serving this with prosciutto on the side, so we’re going to give that a try. We’ll have the radicchio with a 2014 Vietti Arnesi Roero, also suggested by Michael.

On Wednesday, we’ll go pretty much full-on carnivore and make Rosemary Pork Chops with Butternut Squash Puree. If you’ve ever worked with butternut squash, you know it can be a little time-consuming to peel and cut, so, to save a little time and effort, we bought pre-cubed squash. We’ll pair this dish up with an Oktoberfest beer, which we bought on our last trip to Greenport, Long Island for an Oktoberfest dinner that we never quire found time to make.

We’ve had roasted chicken the last two Fridays, and loved the other recipes we tried, so we see no reason to break the streak. We’ll be having Chicken Baked on a Bed of Bread and Swiss Chard on Friday. We’ll have this with a hoppy IPA for a classic roasted meats/hoppy beer combination. And so ends another tasty week at Two at the Table.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of October 25, 2015

After a bit of  a quiet week for cooking last week, we’re going at it full force this week with three new recipes, plus fresh-made pasta. Here’s what we have planned.

On Sunday night, Tony is going to put our newest kitchen gadgets (pasta making attachments for our Kitchen Aid stand mixer) to use and will try to make fresh fettucine. This will also allow us to use us some tomato sauce we’ve had in the freezer for a little while. We’ll start with the basic pasta recipe included in the instructions for the pasta maker, and while we don’t expect the pasta will be as good as Tony’s mom’s, we’re excited to give it a try.

We were in the mood to have fish Monday night, so we flipped through the Yellow Table cookbook and found a recipe for Cod with Brussels Sprouts, Bacon, and Carrot Puree. Since halibut was very highly rated on Fresh Direct, we’re going to substitute it for the cod.

On Tuesday night, we thought it might be fun to go vegetarian. Kim remembered having seen an Ina Garten recipe for a mushroom salad, so we flipped through our cookbooks until we found a recipe for Warm Mushroom Salad. We’re going to cheat a bit and use prosciutto as called for in the recipe, so this won’t be entirely vegetarian, but we know it will be good.

To make up for our little cheat on Tuesday night, on Wednesday we will absolutely have a vegetarian dinner when we make Skinnytaste’s Spicy Black Bean Burgers with Chipotle Mayo. We’ve never made anything like this before, so we’re curious to see how we do with this recipe. The black bean burgers need to be frozen before you use them, so we’ll probably make them Tuesday night (the mushroom salad should be pretty quick to make, which will give us a little “extra” time to cook) and cook them on Wednesday.

Kim will be at a New York Junior League meeting Thursday night, so Tony will be on his own. He’s not at all sure what he wants to make, so he will probably wing it. A visit to his mom and dad’s may be in order!

On Friday night, we’re making a dish from Rachel Khoo’s newest cookbook “Kitchen Notebook,” which Tony’s friends Jourdan, Marnie, and Rebecca were thoughtful enough to give him as a going-away gift when he left his last job. We wanted to make something very different–for us at least!–so we settled on Sticky Chicken with Malaysian Salad, which we’ll serve with basmati rice. (Please note that the link will take you to the eat, little bird web site and a write up of the recipe.)

Tony will be out Saturday night taking photos of the Village Halloween Parade, so Kim will be on her own and is hoping to be busy handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. And that wraps up another week for Two at the Table!

Menu for the Week: Two at the Table Menu Week of October 18, 2015

It will be a bit slow cooking-wise this week, as Tony will be flying solo for most of the week and we have dinner plans for the weekend. The menu is pretty simple, but we hope to post some write-ups of the dinners we’ve made over the past few weeks, like Delish’s Grilled Portobello Steaks with Sundried Tomato Aioli and Baked Zucchini Fries, The Kitchn’s Crispy Paprika-Parmesan Fish Fillets with Sautéed Chard, and Giada DeLaurentiis’ Lamb Osso Bucco.

We visited our friend Colleen and her little boy John on Sunday. We had a great time;   John is a sweet, fun kid with a sweet sense of humor and endless stores of energy and Colleen is always a pleasure to talk to. After a huge, delicious lunch (chicken and ribs, plus two kinds of pie!), we weren’t very hungry for dinner, so we ditched plans to order in and just had adult beverages (beer for Tony, wine for Kim) and watched TV.

On Monday night, Tony will have barbecued chicken, which he’ll make using the same approach we use when we make Barbecued Chicken with Short-Cut Collard Greens. He’ll probably throw together some veggies too, as we have carrots in the fridge and corn in the freezer.  A cold, hoppy  Six Point Bengali IPA will be the perfect beverage to accompany dinner.

On Tuesday night, Tony plans to have dinner with his brother and on Wednesday, he’ll have some leftover Lemon Lavender Chicken, which we made last week. We know from experience that this dish heats up really well, so Tony is really looking froward to it. Here’s hoping he can remember to but some French bread on the way home!

Kim will be back very late on Thursday night, so Tony will head over to his parents’ house to have dinner and to say good-bye to his cousins Rosa and Vincenzo, who return to Italy on Friday.

We’ll probably go out or order in on Friday (we haven’t had sushi in a long while) and we have fun dinner plans with our friends John, Janice, John, and Rachel on Saturday, which will wrap up another week for Two at the Table!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of October 11, 2015

We have a fairly light social schedule this week, which gives us a bit more time to cook. We have three new recipes on tap, plus an old favorite, and we’re excited to try them all. 

Tony was inspired on Sunday to make something we don’t make very often: mussels. He found a simple recipe for Mussels Steamed with Vegetables in White Wine. We had most of the ingredients on hand already (carrots, celery, even leeks, all from the French Chicken Pot Pies we made the week before last), so all we had to do was buy some mussels and we were good to go.

We’ll have leftover Bucatini all’Amatriciana on Monday night, but will try a new recipe on Tuesday: Food & Wine’s Salmon, Broccolini and Fresh Red Chile Papillotes. This recipe involve enclosing the salmon in parchment paper and steaming it. We’ve made a similar recipe before – Ina Garten’s Herb-Roasted Fish – using red snapper, and it was very good, so we’re excited to try a similar approach with salmon.

On Wednesday, we’ll make a recipe we planned to make a little while ago but didn’t get around to: Delish’s Grilled Portobello Steaks with Sundried Tomato Aioli and Baked Zucchini Fries. If it turns out well, we’ll keep it in mind for future vegetarian nights!

Kim will be at a New York Junior League meeting on Thursday and Tony will be on his own. Since the baseball playoffs are in full swing, Tony will order in something ballpark-y, like a burger or maybe even hot dogs. On Friday though, Kim is going to make one of our favorites:  Rachel Khoo’s Lemon Lavender Chicken. We’ve written up this recipe before, and we’re looking forward to making it again. We’ll pair this up with a sparkling wine: a Blanc de Blancs from Bedell Vineyards, which we picked up on our last trip to Long Island.

Tony’s cousins Rosa and Vincenzo came over from Italy for his parents’ 50th anniversary party. We’re hoping to take them out to dinner Saturday night at Piccolo Venezia, an Italian restaurants in Astoria, Queens (where Tony grew up), which is a local institution. It’s one of Tony Bennett’s favorite restaurants, so we always hold out hope, however slim, that we’ll see him there!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of October 4, 2015

Lots of big events this week (Tony starts a new job on Monday, we have tickets to the American League Wild Card game at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, and Tony’s parents will celebrate their 50th anniversary on Saturday), but that’s no reason for us to not plan a fun menu!

On Sunday night, we will use a spice packet that our friend Caroline brought back for us from her recent trip to Italy to make Bucatini all’Amatriciana, which we’ll have with an arugula salad. We’re going to follow the recipe on the spice packet, but if you follow the link, you’ll find a recipe from Bon Appetit, which gave us the inspiration to add pancetta (which was not included in the spice packet!) to the sauce.

We’ll make something new on Monday, a recipe that keeps with our pattern of having fish early in the week: The Kitchn’s Crispy Paprika-Parmesan Fish Fillets with Sautéed Chard. This quick, easy recipes sounds perfect for a weeknight. 

Tuesday night is the Yankee game, so ballpark food will be in order, but on Wednesday, we’ll make another recipe from The Kitchen: Easy Rosemary-Rubbed Pork Chops. We’ll pair this with some leftover red potatoes from when we made Delish.com’s mustardy Potato Salad.

The rest of the week will be pretty easy, with left over bucatini on Thursday, dinner out on Friday, and the anniversary party on Saturday. So, only three nights of cooking this week, but we’re proud that we were able to fit three new recipes into a very busy week!