Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2010.12.12

Too hot to cook! Steak with chickpea saute

This is a fantastically easy (no offense honey) and oven-free dinner made by Mike the other night. It was absolutely great. Having just finished a 8 hour drive and air temperature still not much below 80, this was the way to go. 1 pan too!

Ingreds: (for 2)

-piece of steak according to your tastes. He used a medium sized strip steak well trimmed.

-can garbanzo beans

-chopped tomato

-two big handfuls of spinach

-cilantro leaves

-feta, for finishing

Directions: Salt and pepper your steak, then sear on both sides in very very hot pan, about three minutes per side. When just about done to your liking, remove and allow him to rest on a cutting board.

Back to your same pan, sautee the tomatoes, spinach, and garbanzo beans in some olive oil. Best to start with the beans and brown then, then add the tomatoes until soft, then spinach to wilt. Last addition: torn cilanto leaves and a measure of crumbled feta. Variety of texture and flavor is great and endless adaptations are possible.

A table!

I left for my trip to Provence with an arsenal of things I wanted to cook, techniques to master, and a willing and captive audience of 6 people. But to be honest I can't bring myself to reconstruct the week's menu word by word because the point, the whole point, is pictured above. Sure we had your basic Ari Kardasis lamb roast, moules provencale, pasta faggiole, and my baked chicken with olives, leftovers fritatta, and many creative salads, but the secret to any success we had is simply ingredients. The unbelievable butter, bread, vegetables, oil, fruit, and vinegar we had at our disposal help any cook so much she feels like a master. My search for certain ingrdeitns, such as very best butter, continues on in vain to the point that i've even considered trying to make it myself. So this post is just ot say that if there's one thing I learned it's to worry less about variety and just focus on quality with fierce dedication. That, and, if you make Sangira with Nyons rose and those strawberries pictured above, it will blow your mind.

Smoked trout omelet

I accidentally bought a ton of very nice eggs- the resulting need for creativity brought us this. Now, Mike says "eggs are for breakfast!" in a grumpy fashion, but isn't that crazy?
Here's my suggestion for your omelet pan- combine 4 eggs, salt pepper, 2 tbs milk. Let linger in buttered pan over medium heat until bottom starts to brown. Top will be quite liquid yet. Add to one half of omelet: 3-4 teaspoons of smoked fish (I used smoked trout), capers, fresh dill.
Fold omelet in half and allow it to full set. Give 1/2 to a grumpy person/serve with sour cream.
Benefits to this meal: it's delicious, takes 10 minutes, and does not require use of an oven, which is important in the dog days.

Mike's Birthday!

The Menu:
Heirloom tomato tart with olive/anchovy tapenade and goat cheese.
Mixed greens with basil vinaigrette
1950s style veal cutlets
linguine with fresh tomato sauce
fruit tart

I love Mike's birthday. His request for the occasion was "let's not mention it at all" which I interpreted as "go totally nuts."

Here are my liner notes:
Course 1
For the tapenade: soak 6-7 anchovies in milk for an hour and then rinse twice in milk. This takes a little of their intensity out and also cuts the oiliness. Combine in a food processor with 1/4 tsp dijon mustard and about a 1/4 cup nicoise olives. I used oil cured and I don't think that was the right thing to do because that brings its own very strong flavor which I felt interfeared. Combine on prebaeked sheet of puff pastry with your beautiful heirloom tomato slices which you have roasted at 250 in the over for an hour. Dot with goat cheese. Reheat. It's intense tasting even in little squares so I served with simple salad. This is only a slightly pared down adaptation of a French Laundry recipe.

Course 2
Now, I did make veal despite my fervent personal commitment to veganism but I realize many take issue with this. Please note that I think this could be made just as sucessfully with chicken cutlets. What you need is a three part dredging system and an oven warming at about 200. Dredge in flour, 2 eggs beaten, and then a mixture of about 1/2 parmesian, 1/2 breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, fresh chopped rosemary:








Have a watermellon supervise.







Then in some olive oil which you've heated until sizzling hot, pan fry the cutlets only about 3 minutes each side. Total cooking time for veal per piece is 5 minutes tops. You want a nice golden crust and the key to this I think is having a thick pan which will not vary wildly in temperature as you flip, remove, add more pieces. Transfer to the warm oven on paper towels.

I served this with a tangle of pepper linguine topped with a very simple sauce of chopped tomates, red pepper flakes, roasted garlic (when I roasted the tomatoes I threw a head of garlic in the oven along with). Serve your cutlets with a generous sqeeze of lemon, capers, and serve with lemon wedge.

Course 3
This is the fruit tart of death and destruction! I made it once disasterously the week before and it basically spontaniously combusted and melted at the same time and everyone just shook their heads and gathered up their coats. Since then I have been determined to get this right and the only really difficult thing is the patisserie creme. Too thin, and what you have is a creme anglaise, too thick and you've made custard. I think I got it right by following, to the letter, the Barefoot Contessa recipe which calls for cornstarch. Here, basically, is how you do it:
-beat 6 egg yolks and a 1/4 cup of sugar until it falls back into the bowl in a ribbon. Stir in three tablespoons of cornstarch.
-bring to a boil 2 cups of milk and add it, whisking, to your eggs.
-transfer egg/milk mixture back to pot you were just using
-cook, stirring constantly on medium high heat for about ten minutes
-bring to a boil and then turn heat to low and cook for a few more minutes
- remove from heat and add 1/4 tsp vanilla, 1/4 tsp almond extract (if you like)
Now chill thoroughly, I even let mine go over night, but cover with platic wrap directly on top so a skin doesn't form.
-make either a shortbread crust or a graham cracker crust, freeze it if the latter, top with the patisserie creme, and cover generously with fruit. In the shops this is usually seen covered in some sort of clear gel but I don't like that. Does anyone? Not the greatest picture, but comme ca:

Vegetable Plate

There is no shortage of vegetables available in the market now. Tonight's menu was:

fried cabbage

breaded okra

pole beans cooked with cured pork belly

mashed potatoes with pesto

These are all simple dishes, but especially good with local ingredients.

For the beans we boiled them with diced pork belly until the beans were tender. Bacon, salt pork, or ham would do also here. Salt this dish at the end because the pork will be salty and the salt will come out in the water and help to season the beans. Ours needed a little extra but if you salted in advance you would end up with too much.

For the potatoes, we peeled and boiled, then smashed with a hand masher. We made a simple pesto out of basil garlic, butter, and olive oil, then added the pesto to the mashed potatoes (to taste), along with half a cup of milk. We fished out the potatoes with a slotted spoon instead of pouring to reuse the boiling water for cabbage.

We boiled the cabbage in the potato water, shocked it in cold water, then sauteed it with a small onion and a cayenne pepper diced. We should have boiled it a little longer, as the spines took a while to lose their toughness. To compensate we dropped the temperature of the frying pan, covered it with a lid, and added a half-cup or so of the liquid from the beans to steam the cabbage. It was well cooked in the end but took a few extra minutes. Fortunately, we saved the least forgiving dish, the okra, until last, so no one had to stand by tapping their feet.

The okra got a covering of flour, then dredging in lightly beaten eggs and corn meal. They got deep fried. I realized halfway through that we didn't have any pepper sauce so I did a quick improv. with two cayenne peppers rough chopped 2/3 cup cider vinegar, and 1/2 t. salt (maybe more--I was doing it by sight). Liquify in blender, and you are good to go. It was great on both the okra and the cabbage

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La Cuisine Grossmanne

I sometimes write about produce we get from my friend Gary Grossman. When he's not growing truckloads of mizuna or selling cucumbers to 5 and 10 he has another version of haute cuisine, which he describes below:

One of the more perplexing problem faced by the modern gourmand is what to do with those left-over fast food meals that your kids never seem to consume completely. Ah yes, our kids, no matter how many beautiful presentations of farm fresh veggies and organic meats you serve them they always seem to prefer chicken fingers and fries from the local deep-fry stand. Today I came up with a delightful solution for fast-food left-overs, when the daughter of well-known food blogger Charles Platter visited my younger daughter Anna. Yes, serve them to the daughter of a food blogger – it is a worthy revenge for all of those healthy meals that my daughter had eaten at his house. Well the secret of re-serving fast food is to prevent any oxidation while it’s in the fridge. So we made sure that the fries and chicken fingers were tightly wrapped in plastic wrap. We then reheated them in our vintage 1980 toaster oven that has a wonderful patina of old oil and let me tell you, the girls were squirming in their seats in anticipation. No need to be fancy here, we just served the lunch up on a bed of aluminum foil placed over the toaster oven tray, and before we knew it, those plates were clean. Of course the meal required sauce de tomate, which is not pictured due to copyright issues. Mangez-bien mes enfants. Gary Grossman