Recipe: A Celebration of Circles (pasta, sausage, and zucchini)

I love this recipe - it has fantastic visual appeal, and it is very easy. This came out of the Williams-Sonoma Pasta cookbook.

• four links fresh hot Italian sausage
• two zucchinis
• four cloves garlic, crushed then chopped
• 1 cup dry white wine (red's OK, too, but white will not turn the zucchini purple)
• 1/2 cup water
• parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper
• red pepper flakes
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter (although I guess salted is OK - we're adding salt to this dish, so why should it matter?)
• 12 oz. rotini (the wagon wheel type)

In a heavy saucepan, heat about a teaspoon of olive oil and saute the garlic until it's translucent - do not brown. It's better to undercook the garlic at this stage than to overcook, as there's plenty more cooking that this stuff will be involved in. Add the sausage, wat

er, and wine. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes. If the sausage is not covered by the liquid, turn them over half way through. Remove the sausage and set aside, and let the liquid continue to simmer until it's reduced to about a tablespoon or two. In the meanwhile, get get a large pot of salted water boiling for the pasta, and slice the zucchini into nice little circles about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Slice the sausage the same way. Once the wine has been reduced, add the zucchini, sausage, butter, and a tablespoon of olive oil and stir it all up. Add about a half teaspoon of salt, a few turns of freshly grated black pepper, and a pinch (or more) of red pepper flakes. Stir well, and heat on low while you attend to the pasta. Just make sure the sausage has cooked through.

When your pasta is finished (al dente, mind you!), drain, add the remaining olive oil (about 2 teaspoons), and toss. Serve in a large warmed bowl - just mix all of the ingredients together, and top with freshly grated parmesan. With dishes like this, I eyeball the pasta to make sure my proportions are right - I frequently make too much, so put about half the pasta in the bowl, add the sausage / zucchini mix, stir, and then add pasta until it meets your satisfaction from a visual perspective. Serves four.

Yummy!

Recipe: Butter Chicken (Murg Makhani)

With all of the globalization of the economy going on, I spend quite a bit of time in India - about two to three months per year. I've never been a big fan of Indian cuisine, although I've developed a taste over the past couple of years. I still don't know what the hell anything is when I eat in the cafeteria at work - it's a bunch of chafing dished filled with veg curries. I've found that yellow and orange are usually pretty good. If it's in the dish after the rice, put it on your rice. Grab some chapati. Life is simple.

Anyway, I thought I'd try my hand at making some of my own Indian food at home this week. I broke what I usually consider a cardinal rule - don't try more than one new recipe for any single meal. I wrote that rule when I had a dinner party and we ambitiously tried three or four new recipes including dessert. There were tamales, some kind of ancho-chile peppered and honeyed yams, and cream of jalapeno soup. Needless to say, our guests had to help us finish all of the cooking, and we served dinner about two hours later than planned.

However, I'm on vacation, so I threw caution to the wind, and made daal, butter chicken, and naan for dinner last night. The daal was OK, but nothing like what I've experienced in India - I prefer the moong daal (the yellow daal) and didn't see it at my local grocery store. I will find some and do this again. The naan turned out very tasty - the recipe I used had some flour, water, yeast, yoghurt, and some of my sourdough starter. You need only about two hours of leavening time, and cook on a stone in a 550 degree oven. I made it a bit too thick, and it had a nice pocket like pita bread, and it was a bit stiffer than the good soft naan I've had in restaurants in India. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it, and will make this again.

Now to the butter chicken. If you haven't had butter chicken, it's much like chicken tikka masala, although generally, it's not made as spicy. It has a creamy tomato gravy.

I found this nice recipe online - I substituted walnut oil for canola oil (I prefer olive oil or walnut oil to the other popular frying oils).  I found that I hadn't added enough cayenne, as I would have enjoyed more kick. However, you can spice to the needs of your palate. Also, if you have fresh peppers around, I think those should be added at the stage where you're sauteing the onion and do this instead of the cayenne. I think a habanero pepper would go great with this dish.

Here's a link to the recipe.  Note:  this will take about an hour.

Recipe from Sapna Magazine

BTW - I found something funny on wikipedia - I was looking up chicken tikka masala and found this hindi translation:
Hindi: चिकन टिक्का मसाला

The first word (चिकन ) is just a direct transliteration of the English word "chicken" rather than the Hindi word for chicken, "murg." Maybe that ties to the fact that the article says this dish was actually invented in the UK, so there is no such thing as murg tikka masala. Hell, I don't know.

dave

Polenta?

I'm a southern boy, so I really like corn grits. (as if there's any other kind of grits - but I'm just throwing a bone to my culturally disadvantaged readers here)

I still remember the day when I went to some fancy Italian restaurant and discovered that they had grits with class. Only they called it "polenta." That was a revelation to me. For the first time, I saw the possibility of ordering a $15 entree with grits (i mean, polenta) that didn't include bacon, eggs, or milk gravy.

When I make grits at home (it's been awhile, I admit it), I use the real grits - I'm not a big fan of the instant stuff. That's probably why I don't do it all the time, as it makes a big mess of your saucepan. Regardless, it's just the right thing to do. 

The funny thing is, the last time I had grits, I was in India. Don't even ask me how that worked out - it's a long story. Let's just say it was Monday morning at 5AM and I was watching the Superbowl, eating grits and bacon. with a colleague, while trying to explain the game of football to our Nepalese cook. 

Back to the topic here - I bought a tube of readymade polenta the other day. I wanted to try out an Italian recipe with the stuff at home, and if it worked out, then I figured I'd move it into the rotation using the actual home made stuff. It worked out.

• 1 pound polenta
• pasta sauce
• olive oil and butter

I just heated up about 1/4 cup of olive oil and about 1/4 stick of butter and fried the polenta pieces sliced about 1/4" thick.  They came in a tube, so it was basically a cylinder of about 2" diameter. Saute the polenta for about 5 minutes. If they're not covered by oil, you'll need to flip them. Serve with pasta sauce (arrabiata, puttanesca, or marinara) and top with parmesan. This is a nice side to any Italian meat dish.

Recipe: Tortilla Soup

This is one of my all time favorites, and there are a number of ways to make this, so it's hard to go wrong.  You can make it very light, to serve as a "cup o' soup" appetizer, or fill it up with chicken and/or veggies to make a meal out of it. This can be a veg or non-veg dish - just substitute vegetable broth for chicken broth, and that's it.

Start with six cups of chicken broth.  First choice - homemade broth from a roasted chicken. Second choice, fresh broth from the store.  Third choice, canned broth (in those cardboard boxes) on the grocer's shelf. Last choice - chicken boullion cubes. When I cook chicken or turkey, I like to take the carcass and make a nice broth. Just bring it all to a boil, and then let it simmer for a couple of hours. I was reading a cooking book about making consomme, and for that, they were simmering very clean bones for something like 8 hours to make a very clear broth. That's not what we're doing here - I'll throw in the skin and everything. After cooking, strain it well and use immediately or refrigerate.

If you refrigerate the broth after making it, the fat will solidify on the top, and you can easily spoon it off before using it for a recipe. If you intend to use it immediately, you'll have to separate the fat with one of those broth cups with the spout that pours the broth from the bottom of the cup.  I've also found that if I put a freshly made broth in the refrigerator rather than the freezer, I'll be more likely to use it in the next week. I still have three tubs of turkey broth in the freezer from Thanksgiving 2005.   

The other feature of tortilla soup is, well, the tortillas. Corn tortillas are required for this - and they don't have to be too fresh, as you're going to fry them up. If you're making an appetizer, use one tortilla per person, and for a meal, use two. This is a bit more than you'll put into the soup, but people tend to snack on these things. I like to cut the tortillas into 1/4" wide strips, then fry them in batches - you don't want to put so many in there that they stick together. Get your oil good and hot so that one drop of water dribbled in the pan makes a mighty commotion (about 7 on my electric range). If the oil is too hot, the tortillas will brown immediately. If not hot enough, they will be greasy and soggy. Your job is to find the middle ground. If you find the middle ground, the tortilla strips should become nice and crispy within around one minute, and still retain their yellow color.

The recipe

• 6 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• fried tortilla strips
• two medium sized tomatoes
• 1/2 large white onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 habanero or jalapeno pepper (watch out if you're a softie!)
• 1 tbsp cumin
• 1 tsp salt
• a few turns of fresh grated black pepper
• 1 cup grated cheddar or jack cheese
• 2 ripe avocados
• (optional) a handful of cooked chicken pieces (i use leftovers from a roast and make this the next day)
• (optional) fresh carrots / chayote squash

After washing (I assume you're clean - I'm talking about the vegetables here), put all of the vegetables into an oven proof dish and broil on low for a few minutes - maybe just two or three.  You will probably have to remove the peppers before completing this exercise, as the recipe does not call for "the charred remains of one habanero pepper."  The goal is to get the tomatoes nice and falling apart, and the onion sweetly smoking.  I prefer to use a smoked onion for this - cut in half and put in the smoker, but I'm not always smoking. The garlic should be a nice paste at this point.

Bring the chicken broth to a boil, slice and dice all of your vegetables (including the optional ones) and toss them in. Add the spices, stir, and bring to a nice simmer. If you're using additional vegetables such as carrots or squash, you want to let this simmar for at least 15 minutes to get those flavors to blend. Otherwise, 10 minutes is OK. If you're adding chicken to the soup, add it about two to three minutes before serving. Chicken boiled to pieces for a long time loses its flavor, and since you already have a nice chicken broth, all you need from these pieces of chicken is substance (and you need it to warm up, eh?). I trust that you've already completed making the tortilla chips by now, or you will have to just put this pot on a back burner and let it go a bit longer.

Grate the cheese and slice up the avocados. You can allow your guests to make their own bowls with an assembly line of chips, cheese, soup, then avocado, or you can serve it yourself. Put the chips on the bottom, then a pinch of cheese, pour in the soup, and garnish with avocado.

This will easily make four big bowls or six to eight cups o' soup.

Recipe: Dave's Marinara

I have to admit it - I love pasta.  Real pasta made from durham wheat semolina. I try that whole wheat pasta every now and again, but it just doesn't taste good.  I'm sorry, guys, but I'm about taste.  Brown rice tastes good.  Whole wheat bread tastes good. Whole wheat pasta? Fuggeddaboutit.

This recipe will go with your favorite meat / seafood accompaniment. Ordinarily, I'll use Italian sausage, but on occasion, will substitute shrimp or some other ocean critter. Last night, said critter was mollusks.

My preferred way to make a marinara is to use fresh Roma tomatoes. Sure, you can use a 28 oz can of stewed Italian tomatoes, but if you have time, the real deal is the best.

About the wine - I usually use wine from the bottle that I'll be serving with dinner.  If you're not cracking a bottle on this occasion, a cooking wine is fine. I prefer Marsala for cooking, it has a very nice flavor. If you do the Marsala thing - go buy a bottle at your local discount liquor store, rather than spending $5 on 1/4 of a bottle of  cooking wine at the grocery store. In the liquor store, it will be over near the sherries and ports, and you can buy the cheapest bottle for $6 or $7.

• 2 pounds ripe Roma tomatoes (about 12 medium sized)
• 6 medium to large cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp oregano (or some fresh stuff if you can find it)
• 4 sprigs fresh basil (at least 20 leaves) or  2 tbsp dried (yuck)
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/4 cup red wine
• olive oil
• (optional) mushrooms
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp red pepper flakes
• 6 oz. can of tomato paste
• meat or seafood of choice

Get a big saucepan of water boiling - this can be the same one you'll cook the pasta in.  Once the water is at a full boil, add the tomatoes. Let the water return to a boil, and then let those tomatoes roll around for a good five minutes or so. You should see a few of them splitting before you remove them from the heat.  

Drain these bad boys in a colander, and cover with ice.  The ice causes the skins to split on all of these, and it lowers the temperature enough to where you can handle the tomatoes with your bare hands.  Once the tomatoes have cooled enough, peel off the skins, and move them to the cutting board.  If required, cut out the stem area of the tomato with a paring knife.  

(We're multitasking now)  While all of this is going on, get some olive oil going for sauteing the garlic.  If you're going to use mushrooms, you'll need at least two tbsp olive oil.  If not, 1 is about right. Hell, I don't know, I just pour that stuff in the pan until it looks right.

Anyway, in a medium skillet, heat up olive oil to medium-low.  I prefer to crush unpeeled garlic cloves with the flat blade of a large knife.  This makes it easy to remove the skin, and releases a lot of oil.  I mash it enough to break it into a few pieces, and then I chop.  I used to mince garlic in a garlic press, but if you mash it enough prior to chopping, the effect is about the same, and it's one less tool to put in the dishwasher.  Add the garlic to the heated olive oil, and saute until translucent.  If you're doing mushrooms, add them within a minute or two of the garlic (prior to achieving translucence) and get the whole batch going together at the same time.

Once the garlic is translucent or the 'shrooms are done, add the wine.  let that bubble and reduce to about 50%.  Note - if you're doing Italian sausage, you'll need to have this cooked by now.  One method is to bake for 30 minutes on 400 (poke with fork prior), or just strip off the skin and brown like ground beef.

While all of this is going on, chop the aforementioned tomatoes and dump into a medium saucepan.  Purists may want to remove the seeds at this point,  but that's kind of a pain in the ass.  Add the bay leaf, red pepper flakes (to taste), salt, oregano, and tomato paste.  Combine with the sauteed garlic, and bring to a nice simmer.  If you have fresh basil, chop that up and add it now.  

In the meantime (you have to stay on your toes), you should have the water for the pasta boiling.  A good linguini takes about 7-8 minutes to boil, so add the linguini to the water once you have the sauce on a low simmer.  If you're doing mussels, add them directly to the sauce now.  Let the sauce simmer until the pasta is done; the mussels should have opened up by now. Serve with parmesan (fresh grated Reggiano is the best, but I guess some Kraft out of the can is ok - it beats sawdust, at least).

Garlic bread and a salad will fill out this meal.  When I'm baking, I use ciabatta for garlic bread - it's the best.   When I was a kid I was always confused why my folks bought French bread to make garlic bread for an Italian meal.  I don't know - it was just some cognitive dissonance that I had to get over.