Posts Tagged ‘Cooking’

A Trio of Pizzas

Last night Evan and I had a few friends over for dinner and I made pizzas — three of them. I’ve been working on perfecting my pizza recipes, and we have some clear favorites so far.

Bell Pepper Pizza

Bell Pepper and Onion Pizza

This has been one of our favorite pizzas pretty much since the first time I made pizza from scratch. We love it so much we make it every single time we have pizza and we haven’t gotten bored of it yet. The secret is that the peppers and onions are marinated in a little bit of red wine vinegar, garlic and olive oil. I make a fresh pizza sauce, use mozzarella cheese and finish it off with some fresh basil. It’s a modification from the Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook. Simple and delicious!

Pear and Caramelized Onion Pizza

Pear and Caramelized Onion Pizza

I made this pizza for the first time yesterday, and I was thrilled with how it turned out. It’s a pear, caramelized onion and pine nut pizza with provolone and parmesan cheese. I cooked the onions for close to an hour and added some balsamic vinegar at the end, and then sauteed the pears briefly in that same pan and with a little bit of rosemary. I also brushed the crust with garlic and olive oil before I put the cheese on.

Mushroom and Zucchini Pizza

Mushroom and Zucchini Pizza with Goat Cheese

I’ve made variations on this pizza a couple of times. It has mushrooms and zucchini sauteed in olive oil, garlic and oregano, mozzarella and fontina cheese, and a little goat cheese added after baking. It also has the same tomato sauce I made for the pepper and onion pizza.

Since I first started making pizza, I’ve also found a new dough recipe that I like a lot. It’s from The New Vegetarian Epicure and I’ve made it three times now — it always turns out light and fluffy, and I’ve started folding over the edges to make a nice rim around the pizza. I also use the sauce recipe from The Vegetarian Epicure, which has lots of fresh tomatoes and herbs cooked down into a very flavorful sauce.

OK, now I want to make more pizza…

2 Comments

May 18th, 2010 - Cooking

, , ,

Rescuing a Bread Disaster

Whole wheat bread

Monday night I decided to make a loaf of no-knead bread. I’ve made this simple and delicious bread many times and for some reason it always turns out differently — I don’t know if I’m just not consistent with how I’m making it, or switching up the flours as I sometimes do has more of an effect than I thought it would, but this bread looks and cooks differently each time, though it always ends up tasting good.

Well, Monday I really messed up. I was mixing the dough together from memory and doing it quickly, and I forgot — wait for it — the yeast. This bread only has four ingredients — flour, water, salt and yeast — and I managed to forget one!

Worst of all, I didn’t even realize until the morning, so after sitting out all night on my counter, my dough was just a gluey, saggy and wet lump. I wondered if I could just add some yeast in after the fact and tried to mix in the quarter-teaspoon the recipe calls for. After letting it sit awhile, it seemed that the yeast had just settled into one area of the dough and was just creating bubbles in a small area, not throughout.

Still, the dough had an interesting consistency, and I thought that it could possibly be saved, so I decided to look up recipes that use a preferment mixed in with more flour, yeast and water to create a richly flavored bread, and I came upon a rustic bread recipe that used similar proportions of ingredients for its preferment.

So with my unintentional preferment of 2 cups bread flour, 1 cup wheat flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of flaxseed meal, 1 5/8 cups water and 1/8 teaspoon of yeast added after the fact, I added 2 cups bread flour, 2 cups wheat flour, 1/2 teaspoon of yeast, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1 1/2 cups water and mixed it all together.

I ended up with a huge amount of dough, and I had trouble working with it on my small counter, but after a good amount of kneading and some extra flour (the preferment was much wetter than it should have been), I had a nicely textured and very elastic dough.

I let it rise for about two and a half hours, folding it twice during that time, then split it in half and formed two loaves, which I let rise for another hour and a bit.

I was encouraged by how much the bread was rising and I felt like it would turn out pretty well once I baked it. When I put it in the oven at 450 degrees on a baking sheet dusted with cornmeal, I didn’t expect the loaves to continue to grow quite as much as they did. I ended up with two giant loaves that fused together a bit. I took them out after 35 minutes, when they looked nicely browned and the crust had a nice thump to it.

The bread softened a bit when it started to cool, so maybe I should have cooked it another few minutes, but the loaves looked great and when we cut into them they had a decent texture — a few large air bubbles, a thin and crispy crust, and a pretty robust wheaty flavor.

Bread cross section

The air pockets seemed to congregate near the top of the bread

I’m glad what looked like a bread disaster turned out to be a big bread success. It was one of my prettiest and most delicious simple loaves. I’ll definitely be trying something similar again. And with a proper preferment, I’m sure I’ll get much better air bubbles throughout the loaves.

wheat bread

No Comments

May 14th, 2010 - Cooking

, , , ,

So One Night I Was Inspired to Make Gyoza…

One night about a week ago, it was getting a bit late and I hadn’t figured out what I’d be making for dinner when I saw a photo a friend posted on Facebook of homemade potstickers.

They looked great — the edges were crimped nicely, the dough was slightly translucent, and even though they were filled with pork, they inspired me to at least find out what it would take to make them.

Searching online, a lot of recipes I found just ignored the dough and said to buy it premade, but since I wasn’t about to go out to the market, I needed to know how it was made. I finally found a site that posted a recipe, and it was inexact at best, but I tend to be inexact in the kitchen, so I decided to try it out.

I started with my filling, which I had to improvise a bit to deal with the ingredients I had on hand. I settled on broccoli, tofu (which I crumbled), garlic and soy sauce. I started it going in the pan and cooked it until the broccoli was nice and green and everything smelled good.

So I went another direction and was inspired to make gyoza. Surprisingly easy!

Gyoza put together and waiting to be cooked

Then, to make the dough, following the recipe I found I eyeballed about the same volume of flour as the filling I had, added a little salt, then mixed in hot water until the dough felt good — not too soft and not too stiff. Then I separated the dough into small pieces and started rolling them out into circles about 4-5 inches in diameter and quite thin.

When I started stuffing them, I realized they were a bit larger than the gyoza I had had before, but I couldn’t exactly go and make them any smaller at that point so I just went with it. I only had a small amount of filling left over when I was done, and I doubt I would have even had that had I not started worrying that I was going to run out and adding a bit less filling to the last few potstickers.

To get th dough to stick together, I only had to pinch the edges — no egg wash or water like you’d need with the store-bought variety. And the consistency was right since they stretched well to accommodate the filling.

To finish cooking the gyoza, you put it in a pan with a little oil until the bottoms are browned, then fill the pan about halfway with water and cover to steam them. The first batch I did I crowded a little too much and a few stuck together, but the second batch turned out better.

potstickers

Gyoza almost done cooking

They did look like the real thing, they tasted fresh, and I liked my filling choice. It also didn’t take as long as I thought it might — about an hour start to finish. I read that you could also freeze them before the final cooking steps and just cook them later.

I’d love to experiment with other fillings and work on getting the size just right, but I think my little evening experiment went quite well for a first try with very little to go on as far as a recipe.

No Comments

May 5th, 2010 - Cooking

,

A Deconstructed Eggplant Parmesan

eggplant parmesan

I never liked Eggplant Parmesan much as a kid. I just didn’t really like eggplant, with its black skin and mushy insides. But things have changed a lot since then. I eat eggplant regularly and have had many a delicious eggplant parmesan in many different styles. And though I’d looked up recipes for eggplant parmesan before, I’d never attempted it since it seemed like a time-consuming dish to make.

But last week a new recipe popped into my Google Reader for “Healthy Eggplant Parmigiana” and I just had to take a look. I suppose it’s healthier than the traditional breading and frying the eggplant versions, but it’s still not exactly healthy, with a good amount of cheese and olive oil. But, of course that’s what makes this dish delicious.

Essentially, it’s just chopped up eggplant and tomatoes mixed in with some parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs and topped off with mozzarella cheese. And after it’s been in the oven about 40 minutes, all the flavors just come together beautifully underneath and crispy, browned crust.

I had to make a few modifications to the recipe — I didn’t have enough tomatoes to puree or any canned tomatoes, so I just mixed some tomato paste with water until the flavor seemed right. I also didn’t use panko breadcrumbs — I just used some toasted breadcrumbs I’d made recently with some leftover Irish soda bread.

Eggplant Parmigiana

Anyway, this recipe is definitely worth a try — it’s hearty, easy to prepare and has lots of vegetables. I served it with a very simple green salad with a dijon balsamic vinaigrette.

Check out the recipe at the Diner’s Journal blog.

No Comments

May 2nd, 2010 - Cooking

, ,

Homemade Raspberry Pop Tarts!

Pop Tarts and Cinnamon Sugar Cookies

Homemade Pop Tarts and Cinnamon Sugar Cookies

Yesterday, Evan saw a post on Lifehacker about making your own pop tarts. Now, it’s not that we’re even pop tart or breakfast pastry fans — neither of us grew up eating them, and we don’t really eat anything of the sort now, but those flat little fruit-filled pastries do have some nostalgic appeal. I remember eating them on camping trips with my summer camp as a kid.

I took a look at the recipe and it didn’t seem too difficult — just some pastry dough and jam thickened up with a little corn starch for the filling. And as I’ve been a bit of an early riser lately, I decided to play around with making these this morning.

The dough was a little difficult to work with — it has a lot of butter in it, and though it wasn’t that warm in my kitchen, then dough would warm up quickly and start sticking to the rolling pin. I ended up sandwiching the dough between parchment paper on the bottom and plastic wrap on the top to roll it out to the right size and thickness.

I also made a slight modification to the recipe and used a cup of all purpose flour and a cup of white whole wheat flour to try to make it a little healthier. For the filling I used low-sugar raspberry preserves, and since I didn’t have corn starch, I used some corn flour, which did the trick just fine.

Ultimatley, my homemade pop tarts were delicious — the pastry was rich and soft though still kept a good structure to support the filling. The filling was sweet and its flavors mixed well with the crust, and the pop tart tasted less like the flat brand-name treat and more like a delicious cookie.

Also, since the pop tarts need to be trimmed to an exact size you end up with some extra dough, and the recipe suggests to just turn those into cinnamon sugar cookies, which turned out just perfectly.

I don’t want to think about quite how much butter went into these pop tarts, but they are an impressive treat to make and thankfully taste like they’re in a totally different food category from the boxed variety.

You can check out the recipe at Smitten Kitchen or King Arthur Flour.

2 Comments

May 2nd, 2010 - Cooking

, ,

Even More Incredible Veggie Burgers and Buns

I love a good veggie burger and have posted about them frequently — whether it’s been cooking them or eating them — but until a couple of days ago, I hadn’t yet mastered the art of making buns. Well, everything changed with the help of a recipe I stumbled across in the New York Times. I had a good feeling about it since it was from one of my favorite LA restaurants, Comme Ca, and when I made these, I was not disappointed.

I could tell from when I started working with the dough that the buns would be light and airy, and as the dough rose, I got more and more excited.

burger buns

I also started preparing my veggie burgers. I modified the black bean burger recipe I’ve been using for a while to incorporate ingredients I had around, including squash and mushrooms, and I cooked the squash, mushrooms, onions and garlic before combining them with the black beans and making the patties to enhance the flavors.

Everything turned out really well, and I served the burgers with avocado, sauteed onions, lettuce, ketchup and mustard. I think I’ll be making these again soon (like possibly this weekend).

The completed veggie burger with cheese, lettuce, sauteed onions and avocado

The completed veggie burger

4 Comments

April 10th, 2010 - Cooking

, , ,

Asparagus and Cauliflower Gougère with a Beet and Grapefruit Salad

Gougere with Asparagus and cauliflower

The gougère right out of the oven

Friday night I decided to try something new. I didn’t really know what at first, but as I was flipping through my Vegetarian cookbook, I came across a recipe for a mushroom and cauliflower gougère. I didn’t have any mushrooms, but I did have some asparagus, so I decided to try my own version of the recipe.

The recipe came together quite quickly. I made the dough, which includes a generous amount of butter and cheese, and spread it around the sides of a cake pan. Then I quickly cooked up some onions, cauliflower and asparagus with some pureed tomatoes, thyme and rosemary, and put the mixture in the center of the dough. It went in the over for about 40 minutes, and it puffed up like crazy. The dough doubled in size, but by the time it reached the table just a few minutes later it had lost some of its airiness.

Gougere with Asparagus and Cauliflower

The gougère on the table, slightly deflated

The gougère was quite decadent. The dough was creamy yet fluffy, and the vegetable filling balanced out the richness of the dough. I also thought it looked quite beautiful — and the asparagus made for a nice colorful addition. I thought it turned out even prettier than the photo in my cookbook since it was more colorful. I was also surprised that this was relatively easy to make. Including the beet, grapefruit and goat cheese salad I made, everything took about an hour and a half.

Beet, grapefruit and goat cheese salad

Beet and Grapefruit Salad - taken on my iPhone

Since I started getting my LOVE Delivery veggie boxes, I’ve been getting a lot of beets, and I find that I absolutely love cooking with them. I was a little intimidated when I first was faced with cooking beets since I’d never cooked one before, but just simply roasting them and then peeling them is about all you need to do.

This salad was particularly tasty and it looked very pretty, though the warm beets did start running a bit in the dressing when I moved the plates.

Recipe: Beet, Grapefruit and Goat Cheese Salad

Ingredients:

  • 1-2 beets
  • 1 small grapefruit
  • 1 small shallot
  • red wine vinegar
  • olive oil
  • lemon juice
  • goat cheese

Directions:

You’ll need about half a beet and half a small grapefruit per person.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash the beets and wrap in foil. Put the beets in the oven for 40 minutes. They are done when you can easily pierce them through the foil with a knife. (You can roast beets in advance and keep them in the fridge.)

Unwrap the foil and allow the beets to cool until you’re able to peel off the skin with a paring knife. Cut the beets in half and then create quarter-inch thick slices.

Peel your grapefruit and cut it in half. Slice those halves into quarter-inch thick slices, removing any seeds.

For the vinaigrette, finely chop the shallot and place it in a small bowl. Pour in red wine vinegar until the shallots are just about covered, and let them sit for at least 10 minutes. Add olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste.

Alternate the beet and grapefruit slices in a line on your salad plates. Spoon a small amount of the vinaigrette over the salad and top with some crumbled goat cheese.

No Comments

March 4th, 2010 - Cooking

, , , , , ,