I make a lot of impromptu pasta dishes for the boy. Because he's hungry around six p.m. and his dad rarely gets back before eight p.m. it's inevitable that we eat separately. I try to give him leftovers from our dinner whenever possible so that I don't raise a picky eater. We like spicy food, though, and sometimes we just finish eating everything. When that happens, I usually boil some pasta and improvise a cheese and vegetable combination. Peas, carrots, a bit of ham if I have any about - they all go in the bowl and he seems happy enough with the result.
He even likes broccoli. His dad thinks I cast a spell on him or force fed it to him until he gave in, but really he just decided he liked it from the word go. I was thinking of him, when I decided to make this dish for his dad and myself this week. Broccoli, mushrooms (because I can't resist them with pasta), garlic and cheese in a wonderfully fragrant and filling dish. It's not much of a recipe, but it was so delicious that I'm going to write it up anyway.
Continue reading "Healthy Quick Pasta: Kieran's Broccoli Pasta"... Pumpkin is undoubtedly the king of American pies, but very few people ever use an actual pumpkin to make their pie. Instead, they use processed pumpkin out of a can. I can't complain too much about that (I've used the canned pumpkin and enjoyed the resultant pies on many holidays). But I'd like to suggest that if you want the home-made feel there is a pie you can make that is no less delicious than a standard American pumpkin pie, but that starts with a main ingredient you can break down yourself without ending up covered in pumpkin guts.
If the pumpkin pie is King at Thanksgiving time, I think the sweet potato pie is at least the Duke and maybe even the Prince of Pies.
This particular sweet potato pie is infused with what I think of as Thai flavors. I don't add glangal or bird peppers (though believe me, the temptation was there), but instead of cream, I used coconut milk and spiced it with not just cinnamon and nutmeg, but with a little cardamom and ginger. Of course there's a little brown sugar on top, but I also added some finely crushed macadamia nuts. The crust is made from down-home graham crackers, sugar, and butter. It all comes together to make one of the more delicious pies you'll ever have.
The only question is whether you should serve this filling pie hot or cold. I like the pie cold where I can take my time savoring the flavors, my wife prefers to warm up her slice of pie before eating so she gets the full effect of the aromatics. Bake this pie and you can help resolve the debate about the best way to serve a slice.
Oh, and at the end of the recipe is a mystery you can help clear up if you're the detecting type.
Continue reading "Spiced Sweet Potato Pie"... This Saturday I was really looking forward to going to the market. For one reason or another it's been a few weeks since I've made it there and we are really still in the height of Interesting Vegetables Season. I sat at the bus stop for about 15 minutes, waiting for the number 53 bus to take me to my favourite place to shop. And after 15 minutes a number 94 bus showed up. I glanced up from my book and saw, without registering in particular, a French flag on the bus. I continued reading for five minutes before it occurred to me to wonder why on earth the bus would be sporting a little French flag. Ah. 11th of November. Remembrance day, how ironic. And the number 53 bus doesn't run on holidays, even if they happen to fall on a Saturday. So I considered my options: walk for 20 minutes to the market, shop and drag 10 or more kilos of groceries back with me, or go to the supermarket and get free delivery because I'm pregnant. It wasn't a difficult choice. So I stood up and explained the futility of waiting for the number 53 to the girl waiting next to me at the stop (only two busses stop there, so it was apparent she was on the same pointless quest as myself) and dragged myself to the Monoprix.
Supermarket shopping does have some advantages over the market. First, of course, there is the free delivery. They also sell a variety of cheap wines, toilet paper, detergents and dry spices. And on Saturday I saw a plump duck in the meat section and it just begged to be bought and roasted. I am not a huge fan of duck, but I get tired of the triumvirate of beef-chicken-pork that mostly goes through our kitchen and I love the stock it provides. (See here for the best use for duck stock.) I roasted it with a daring (for me) combination of spices: hot paprika, thyme, oregano, salt and a couple of star anise tossed in the cavity with an orange. It looked beautiful about ten minutes before it was done. But by the time I removed it from the oven, the skin had blackened a bit and it looked decidedly less appetising. So this is not a post about how to roast a duck. We'll assume you know better than I do how to roast a duck so that it doesn't look burned. (It tasted lovely, though.) This is about what to do with that scant cup of duck meat that remains when you buy an extra big duck for only two people. You check your cookbooks and find that they are surprisingly bare of recipes for ducks, let alone leftover duck recipes. And then you make something up.
Continue reading "Duck risotto"... Today I sat down for the first time in a couple of months to balance our accounts. And sadly, I was somewhat embarrassed to see the number of checks that were made out in the last few months to Domino's pizza. Before you jump all over me about how disgusting a habit they are (yes, we are no longer university students) let me point out the following:
a) The first trimester of pregnancy is VERY tiring.
b) Domino's delivers.
c) They know where we live.
d) The only other place I know that delivers to our neighborhood (and we called them a lot too) is a local Indian restaurant, Delhi Darbar.*
So, no, Domino's is not healthy and no, it's not the greatest pizza in the world. But sometimes you just have to ignore the rules for a little to keep your sanity. We are slowly getting back to normal. Another way I coped with the whole "I'm too tired to cook and too nauseous to face the kitchen" dilemma was to resort a few times to frozen or tinned meals. Yes, the boy had his first frozen dinner, a hachis parmentier, or cottage pie. He loved it. Ground beef in tomato sauce and a mashed potato topping: who can blame him? And I tried something I've always meant to give a whirl, a can of cassoulet.
When I first moved to France, I worked for nearly a year as a live-out nanny and I have to say that the food my "average" families ate was a revelation to me. I had an image of French families gorging on foie gras and camembert and and didn't realise that in reality, like the rest of the Western world, French parents have busy work days and rely heavily on prepared foods. One family I worked for had a separate full freezer in addition to the fridge/freezer and ordered enough to fill it from the local frozen food store, Picard, every two weeks. (Even the fact that there exists a very successful chain of stores devoted to nothing but frozen food had me amazed!) So while the French DO eat wonderful cheeses regularly and foie gras and oysters on special occasions, they also have their share of tins of sauce bordelaise and freezers of fish filets. And tins of cassoulet.
Continue reading "Cassoulet in a Can"... Nopales, the paddles of the prickly pear cactus, are a staple in Southwestern and Mexican cuisine. They are usually boiled or pickled, and made into salads or sold in big jars as strips.
I think a good cactus paddle, however, can make for a pretty good vegetarian main course dish. I set out to prove it by searing these cactus paddles like a steak and turning them into main dish of a vegetarian meal.
Unlike steak you purchase at the store, cactus paddles have lots of little prickers on them. Obviously, a mouthfull of spikes is no treat (unless you like Whizzo Chocolates' "Spring Surprise", that is), so we must clear them off first to prepare the paddles.
Take a large kitchen knife. Holding the knife at nearly vertical across the width of the cactus, scrape the surface of the cactus until the little pockets holding the sharb barbs come off. Trim the edges from the paddles. RInse and inspect carefully for any remaining barbs. Remove them by scraping.
That's all you need to do to prepare the paddles for the recipe below. I served these with a baked onion, two lime wedges apiece, and slices of plum tomato. Delicious.
Continue reading "Cactus "Steaks""... I've mentioned a few times my increasing dissatisfaction with the Observer newspaper. But like a bad romance that just won't die a dignified death, every once in a while there is a spark to remind me why I fell in love in the first place. A couple of weeks ago, the Critic brought back a copy of the Observer Food Monthly from a trip to the UK. And this time, instead of filling the magazine with reviews of each others' new books and restaurant information that could easily be culled from ten minutes on the web, the editors actually decided to include some good recipes. (What a novel idea, eh?) Tucked among them (they were all along the lines of "The Perfect...") was this recipe for the perfect loaf of bread. And having tried the recipe, I have to agree. It's not the perfect yeast loaf, mind you. But then for this busy pregnant mother, a perfect loaf does not include three to four hours of mixing, kneading, proofing, shaping and baking. The dough can be made up in about as much time as it takes your oven to preheat and then it bakes for 35 minutes, while you make the rest of the dinner. On a cold early winter work night, what could be more perfect?
If current trends hold, at about 3:00 Eastern time today, Too Many Chefs will receive its one millionth page visit.
To go from 0 to 500,000 visits, it took us just under 2 years. To double that, it's taken us only 9 months and a couple of days. It's clear that people want to eat well and that more and more, people are rejecting the notion that you have to go to a restaurant to get a good meal, or that the only food you can cook at home comes in a box or frozen package.
Thanks to everyone who's read, commented on, or suggested improvements to this site and of course to my co-authors, especially Meg, who's been the constant partner to this venture, and to the Redhead, who's been my constant partner in all my other ventures.
So just how much is a million in food terms?
You get about 210 pounds of meat out of a 300 pound side of beef, and with 2 sides per cow and a 1/4 lb of beef per burger you'd need 595 1/4 cows to make a million burgers. When I was a kid, I thought that if I won the lottery, I'd go to the local McDonald's to order and pay for a million burgers just to make the guy behind the counter have to go outside and change the sign.
Alternately at 228 grains of rice per teaspoon, 1,000,000 grains of uncooked rice is about 5.7 US gallons of the stuff or about 4.75 Imperial gallons. Anyone have any recipe suggestions using 5.7 gallons of dry rice? I feel a sequel to Black Bean week coming on...