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

Low Country Boil

I feel silly posting this since Aunt Carolyn, the progenitor of this dish at least in my memory, recently made a superb version. At least according to Ken Kinman's facebook page. But she doesn't have video!

These proportions serves 8 exactly with only 1 piece of corn left:

1 U shaped spicy cooked Andouille sausage cut into about 3/4 inch rounds

10 red bliss potatoes cut into haves and then halves again

1 1/2 lb med shrimp shells on

8 ears corn, broken in half

whole 8 oz box of Old Bay Seasoning!

large stock pot, filled with water

Sauces: I gave ketchup, lemon butter, and cocktail sauce in little dishes

This is the simplest thing you cold ever do:

Bring water to boil (45 minutes), add potatoes and box of old bay seasoning

when potatoes are getting soft, add corn and sausage, let boil return, add shrimp.

When shrimp are pink, drain directly from pot with someone holding the lid for you. You will both receive old bay steam facials which are extremely good for the skin.

Scoot down to your table lined with newspaper and simply dump out your boil!

(I like especially to make this for non Americans, last night I had three Russians, a Greek, an Italian, and perhaps most bewildered of all, a Californian.)

Mango Tarte

Here is the latest. I got a box of mangoes for $5 so this might not be the last mango-loaded meal.

Anyway, we started with a steak-frites, together with an intensely good Marchands de vin sauce (reduced red wine, demi-glace, shallots, lemon juice, butter). The steak was from Nature's Harmony.

Maybe it's worth pointing out here that although we do a lot of beef recipes we don't really eat that much of it. I always serve steak sliced. I think it makes it a better vehicle for the sauce that way, plus it encourages a more sensible approach to portions since you don't start with a big slab in front of you that you feel responsible for finishing.

What is pictured is a tarte. The crust is pate sucre, more cookie-like and less absorbant than other crusts. It is filled with pastry cream and coveed with a layer of chopped mangoes, and accompanied by a mango coulis (mango, lime juice, oj, blended and strained).

It was great. The tartness of the coulis cut into the sweetness of the pastry cream well.

We have been having some conversations about pastry cream across the Princeton-Athens axis. So I will include my recipe, which I have borrowed from Jacques Pepin Complete Techniques, which is one of those books that I hope I never have to live without.

I will give the full version of the recipe, although I halved it to make the mango tarte:

Creme Patissiere

2 cups milk

6 egg yolks (time for more meringue now)

2/3 cup sugar

1 t. vanilla

1/2 cup flour

1. Scald milk. Set aside

2. Whisk yolks, sugar and vanilla until mix forms a ribbon when the whick is removed (doing this job by hand makes it easier to check on your progress--it is hard work, though). Add flour and mix thoroughly.

3. Temper egg mixture by adding 1/2 of the hot milk and mixing vigourously. Work quickly here so you don't curdle the eggs.

4. Return tempered egg mix to the pot with the milk. Keep whisking.

5. Return pot to burner at medium heat, stirring constantly to avoid scorching and lumping---watch those corners!

The mixture will thicken quickly. When it does remove to fridge covered with plastic wrap to cool for at least one hour.

What to do with squash?

The Menu:Roasted Squash, teriyaki salmon with mango salsa
We bought this beautiful assortment of squash at the farmer's market last weekend and I've been trying to use some every night. I thought of tons of ideas- squash casserole, squash fritters, squash latkes, but quite honestly they're so delicious simply roasted that in the end that's all I've been doing. In addition we roasted a piece of fish and I made a simple mango salsa that was incredibly bright and exciting, I thought.
Salmon- I used a marinade composed of fresh ginger, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar. Baste, let sit 1/2 hour, roast at 475 surrounded by your squash or whatever vegetable you're making with it until fish is just cooked throughout, about 10 minutes.
Salsa- 1 mango, 1/2 red onion very finely diced, 1 tomato (cored, seeded) whatever herbs you have, I used a few ribbons of basil, splash red wine vinegar, juice of half lemon, spash of olive oil, few shakes of red pepper flakes, put in fridge for half hour or so until cold.
Combine!Note: Adithi, Claire and Heath are coming over tonight and as I write this Mike is at the grocery store with my list. I realized when I gave it to him it included only things from the produce section and a few from the dairy case, nothing in center aisles. I recall reading somewhere that it's best if possible to stay along the perimeter of grocery stores-- anything in the center aisles is not something you want to be eating. Anyway, we are celebrating Adithi's new job! She is a very posh lady and must go immediately to New York and leave the rest of this to this dowdy province with our "grocery stores."