Successes and Failures

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Chris

Well, barely 24 hours into my “I will not eat out this week” challenge, I went out for lunch. I really can claim to have a good reason for it though. A good friend of mine was  back in town for two days before moving to NC and wanted to grab lunch. What was I to say. Learned quickly that bringing your own lunch does not really mesh well with a “let’s catch up” meal. So yeah. So much for that noble experiment. In more positive news, the Chouriço pizza (sans olives) at Massa is pretty freaking excellent.

On the other side of things, I was able to find some time last night to make another pasta primavera and use a lot of the veg in the fridge. I used up both sets of spring onions, the rainbow chard, and the yellow squash. The downside was that I overcooked the chard a little and it lost its really vibrant colors. Also, I thought it would be smart to use whole wheat gemelli (it was one sale and looked cool), but their rough grain texture and the Soviet grey that the chard cooked down to left me with a dish that was heavy and monochromatic. Not the sparkling crisp meal of summer veg I wanted.

Oh well. You win some and you loose some.

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Failed gnocchi transformed into an excellent sauce

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Chris

Giant rotini with a ricotta-spinach sauce and sauteed beet greens.

[Even though I did not post them, I did continue on with all of the pasta eating. I plan to catch up over the next day or two and post the remaining handful of "Pasta Week" recipes.] With the last two pasta dishes (Broccoli with chili pepper and Pasta mista in simple tomato sauce) turning out so well, I thought that I was a master and could now move on to something a little more challenging. As I was flipping through The Silver Spoon, I had seen a recipe for spinach ricotta gnocchi. They looked incredibly. Little green balls of cheesey goodness. And the recipe looked super easy to make.  Continue reading →

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Cold Bean Salad – Variation #1: Tomato, Basil & Herb

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Chris

Ok, not the best picture. But I promise you it is really, really tasty.

After eating so much pasta, I really needed to try something different this week. I needed versatile meal that would be filling, portable, and summery. Thankfully, the NYTimes article on bean salads got me thinking. Decided to mix and match some of the ideas from the article with what I had in the kitchen. Here is what I came up with:

1) Add 1.5 tablespoons salt to 4 cups cold water. Add 1 cup picked-over dried beans (I used a yellow eyed variety). Let stand at room temperature for 8-24 hours. (This takes a while, but it is the best way to re-hydrate beans. You can pressure cook them in an hour, but that is more effort than just letting them sit over night. All this means is you need to plan a day in advance for any bean dishes. But, as the article mentions, you can then save your re-hydrated beans in the freezer to make things quicker in the future.)

2) Drain and rinse beans well. Add to pot with 4 cups water, one onion – halved and studded with 3 cloves, bay leaf, two cloves garlic, and 1 teaspoon salt. Bring to simmer over medium-high heat, then reduce to low, cover tightly, and let stand for 30 mins.

3) Remove onion, garlic, and bay leaf using tongs. Drain beans and toss with olive oil. Stir gently so beans are coated. Let stand until cool. (I knew I wanted to add tomatoes so I used a Pyrex bowl; metal bowls and tomatoes do not mix.)

4) Here is where you can be creative and add whatever you like. I decided to play it safe with this first go-round and use simple flavors. I added chopped fresh herbs (basil, rosemary, thyme, and sage – way more basil than the other three), two tomatoes (seeded and chopped), a splash of balsamic, salt and pepper.

5) You could probably eat it right away, but I let it sit in the fridge overnight so all of the flavors could blend spend some time together.

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Food is work.

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Emily

Emily here.  I had a pretty busy weekend: two auditions, one opera performance for which I was helping run backstage, a three-hour rehearsal, and some attempts at relaxing and enjoying the days, which mostly ended with me saying, “Crap!  I have to start getting ready for [insert commitment here]!” So then you can understand why I paused in the middle of washing and drying all of our salad greens* on Saturday to ask,

“Why am I doing this?”

This question could really be the motto of our blog, and I have no intention of answering it right now.  But it did shine light on an essential point:  Food is work.  True, cooking is work, and I often read/hear things about how people don’t cook anymore because the “average American” doesn’t have enough time.  I sympathize with that to a point – when I spend an hour or more cooking dinner, that’s essentially my entertainment for the weeknight – and I wonder what we’ll be able to pull off when there are kids in the picture who need to be fed NOW. Preparing meals from scratch takes time.  Fair enough.

But my realization was even simpler: food itself takes time.  I could have bought a head of lettuce, or a big plastic box of greens from Whole Foods (those things kind of creep me out…), but the food I chose to buy demanded a lot of hands-on work in order to consume it at its best, and in order to get the most out of it.  And on Saturday morning, when I had my first audition to prepare for and the rest of the day ahead of me, and I had only made it halfway through the bag of salad, I paused.

Normally, I don’t give a second thought to the time I put into my food.  But the time crunch I felt on Saturday and the monotony of going through leaf after leaf made me realize just how much time I do commit to what I consume.

*Background info: we bought a bag of mixed baby lettuce leaves from the University City High School stand.  We love them, love their program, and try to always buy one thing a week from them.  But the bag of lettuce was pretty wet, and wet leaves in a plastic bag equals quick spoilage.  (The lettuce towards the bottom had already started to turn.)  Plus, it was packed in there pretty well, making it a steal for $4, but further compounding the tendency to spoil.  So I spent 20 minutes cleaning, washing, drying, and rebagging our salad for the coming week.  Actually, putting the time in on Saturday has made packing lunches on busy weekday morning so much easier.
**Handy tip: adding a paper towel (usually folded in half) to a bag or container of greens will help keep them fresher longer by absorbing moisture that otherwise causes them to turn.
Posted in Food/Drink, Home and Garden, Home Cooking, Summer | 4 Comments

Upping the Ante: No Eating Out until Friday Night

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Chris

I said yesterday that I was going to see if I could eat everything (perishable) in my fridge. This was after dumping a huge load of formerly awesome veggies in the compost and the full scrub out of the fridge (esp the crisper drawers) due to the mold the veg had turned into. (I neglected to mention the pound of bacon that is also in the fridge in my list yesterday – that is going to make things much easier.)

I am going to up the ante on my challenge barely 12 hours into it: Until Friday night, I will not eat anything outside of food that I have prepared myself at home. So, no eating out. No restaurants. No quick snacks. No cookies.

Of course this is made infinitely easier by the fact that I left my ATM card in the machine and lost it. So, canceled that and waiting for the new one to come. My last cash was spent doing laundry this weekend. Because of this, a lot of the temptation to eat out has been taken out of the equation by the simple fact that I cannot. I guess it is not really that much of a challenge if I am taking away one of the biggest factors: keeping myself from spending, but whatever, I still have credit cards or could borrow cash…

Emily has already posed a perfect goal for the end of the week: Friday night dinner at Square Burger – Steven Starr’s take on NYC’s Shake Shake, but in Franklin Square. Excellent goal.

Now to make this salad tide me through the rest of the afternoon…

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Tidbits: Bean dishes, Car batteries, Green bus stops, battery-powered SEPTA trains, Penn Alexander news,

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Chris

Ran across a number of cool stories this week and wanted to pass them along. Let me know if you like these links and I will keep posting anything that is worth sharing. (Maybe this will become a weekly feature.) Also, if you have read anything that Philly/urban cooking/gardening/sustainability-related, please feel free to share.

  • Emily has started following the new column in The New York Times focusing on small, urban kitchens. This week they featured a cool article on bean salads. (Got me thinking about bean salads – inspired the one I made yesterday.)
  • The Spruce Hill Community Association (SPCA) drafted a statement to handle the admission caps at the Penn Alexander School.
  • A new battery design by MIT that could drastically reduce emissions by making electric cars more economical and easier to fill up.
  • Grid posted three interesting article about neat sustainable projects going on in the city: 1) A new battery plan for SEPTA regional rail trains to capture energy in braking, 2) New green roof bus shelters courtesy of the PWD, and 3) An overview of the Philly 2035 report released by the Planning Commission.
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Waste = A Challenge for this Week

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Chris

Destined for the compost bin...

I just spent the evening cleaning out the fridge. In the pile to go to the compost bin are a number of what used to be tasty looking foods that just were let sit too long and rotted. I really hate wasting food. It is a waste of money and a waste of resources. A lot of the food came from Em’s CSA share, and to be honest, I did not really have a plan for it. But, instead of buying new stuff, I really should have buckled down and figured out what to do with it. Instead, I let it go funky and ended up tossing:

2 heads of broccoli
5 carrots
Bundle of rhubarb stems
Radishes
Lettuce
Kale
And some really moldy stuff that I could not figure out what it once was

So – my challenge for the week is to not throw out any thing else from the fridge and to find interesting ways to use it all. Continue reading →

Posted in Food/Drink, Home Cooking, Summer | 1 Comment

Broccoli with zip

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Chris

Sometimes the simplest recipes are the best. This one comes from The Silver Spoon – the bible of Italian cooking. I really have been getting more and more into the style of simple cooking where you can taste the flavors of the ingredients (as compared to really fancy ones that require lots of steps which end up masking some of the flavors). This recipe is almost too simple, but it is really tasty and fresh.

Wash and cut the broccoli into small florets. Cook in salted water for 5 minutes. (Salting the water helps to keep some of the minerals in the veg.) Saute some chopped garlic (about 2 cloves) and a red chili in about 2 Tablespoons of olive oil. I used dried red pepper flakes instead of the chili. If you make this substitution, make sure they they get enough time in the oil so that they re-hydrate a little. Strain and add the broccoli. Toss till mixed. (Again, I left a little extra moisture on the broccoli so that it would help hydrate the dried chilies.)

Cook your pasta of choice (I used Riccette – which look a bit like drill bits) until al dente and mix with the broccoli mixture. Cover with freshly grated parm. I really thought the zip of the pepper did an incredible job of allowing me to taste the broccoli through its contrast.

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Pasta mista with simple tomato sauce

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Chris

Pasta Mista = Mixed Pasta. A dish with more than one type of pasta?! How crazy?!

Pasta mista translates to mixed pasta. It is pretty much the scraps left over in the pasta making process. Little bits of this, pieces of that. Instead of letting them go to waste, they are saved, packaged, and make for a fun dinner that looks like pasta Armageddon.

Last summer, Emily purchased a couple pounds of tomatoes, all of the imperfect ones from the market, and made a giant batch of pasta sauce. The simple sauce recipe from The Silver Spoon calls for cooking skinned and seeded tomatoes with whole garlic cloves and fresh basil. She made close to a gallon, not cooking it all the way down, and froze it to get us through the winter.

In need of an easy meal and with the fun pasta pieces calling out to me, I defrosted this sauce and simmered it for a while, bringing it down to more of a sauce-like consistency. The real key to the sauce, however, was the combination of fresh herbs that I tossed in. Our garden is doing well this year, and by waiting until Spring, I was able to finely chop some rosemary, thyme, sage, and basil and add it near the very end of the simmer. This way the herbs released their oils and flavor, but did not overcook.

Pasta was cooked to just al dente (in heavily salted water) and then tossed right away with the sauce. I then let it sit for a little so the pasta could soak a little. Tossed with fresh parm. Boom! Simple, but wow those herbs added some incredible taste. Awesome start to figuring out how to use all my pasta.

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Why Beer Week is the best idea ever

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Chris

I have had a crazy week. Three back-to-back crazy events (awesome ones btw – just did two screenings of The Best and the Brightest to packed houses) and ended tonight with an hour to kill before the train. I figured I would grab a beer and catch some of the Phillies game. Stroll down to Stephanie’s and run into Lew Bryson at the bar.

Not only did this make my night as I was able to chat with one of the top beer writers, but I got to tell him about our trip to Pittsburgh and how most of it was planned using his book Pennsylvania Breweries.

Emily and I had met Lew at a special beer event hosted by Tria to celebrate the 4th edition of his guide to drinking in PA. The evening was packed with obscure beers from around the state and great stories.

Not only did Lew recommend an excellent beer that I probably would never have tried (Urban Chestnut Brewery’s Winged Nut – brewed with chestnuts, it is a cross between a nut brown and a wheat beer), but he also gave me a perfect suggestion of the type of Irish whiskey that we should use when we toast Joyce on Bloomsday next Thursday at the Doylestown Bookshop.

Damn I love beer week.

Posted in Eating Out, Food/Drink, Liquid Refreshment | Leave a comment