PANCETTA-WRAPPED CHICKEN BREASTS WITH LEEKS AND THYME

I’ve long admired Jamie Oliver from a cuteness standpoint, but this is the first of his recipes I’ve actually made. I must say, I’m impressed, even though I’ve tried this twice and not yet managed to execute it perfectly. Don’t worry—the fault is not with the recipe, which is of the simple mix-things-together-and-throw-in-dish-then-bake variety—but with my supply chain. Namely, the pancetta. I think of it as a fairly common ingredient, but neither my beloved Trader Joe’s nor my usual big corporate grocery store carry it sliced, only cubed. So the first time I attempted this recipe, I went to a new Italian market near my house (which I’d been looking for an excuse to visit, but it turned out to be lamer than I’d imagined—mostly an overpriced sandwich shop with a half-assed selection of imported groceries), walked up to the meat counter, asked for a half-pound of pancetta, and watched as the guy cut it off the big marbled chunk in the glass case and wrapped it in paper for me. But I guess I wasn’t really paying attention, because it wasn’t until I got home that I realized the pancetta wasn’t sliced. (Not really the Italian market’s fault, but I still don’t think I’ll be going back there again.) I had to slice it myself, which resulted in thick, rather stubby strips I sort of had to lay awkwardly across the top of the chicken breasts instead of wrapping them around. It worked OK, but it wasn’t the thin, crisp, elegant layer of meat I’d imagined.

I wondered if one might substitute good-quality bacon, and so I tried that the second time I made this recipe (documented in the photo shown above). Bacon did indeed work much better for wrapping, but surprisingly, I didn’t notice the same depth of flavor in the finished dish. Also, the bacon released a lot more fat than the pancetta, so that my leeks were basically swimming in grease by the end of the cooking time and had to be lifted out with a slotted spoon.

Obviously the answer is to embark on a thorough search for proper sliced pancetta (I’m hoping Whole Foods might be the solution to this conundrum) and try this a third time, but I wanted to share the recipe with you now because regardless of all my ingredient problems, I can still tell that it’s a great recipe. This is the kind of dish that takes barely any effort to make and yet produces food delicious and sophisticated enough to serve at a dinner party and spend all night basking in the compliments. The pancetta and thyme do much to spruce up boring chicken breasts, but it’s the leeks that are the superstars here, cooked until they’re meltingly tender and sweet, with winey and porky undertones. Served with a refreshing green salad, it’s an easy yet impressive meal—quick enough for a weeknight, yet worthy of a special occasion.

The original recipe served just one person and was written in Jamie’s casual, almost careless style—few precise measurements, just a knob of this and a pour of that. So everything is pretty much to taste, but in increasing it to serve four, I’ve tried to quantify things as best I can. The one thing that befuddled me about the original was that it called for 6 or 7 pancetta slices for just a single chicken breast (and you’ll notice that in the accompanying photo, that chicken is pretty well blanketed). This seemed excessive, especially when multiplied by four, unless those slices are super-short or something? With the bacon, I found that two slices wrapped around each breast covered it adequately, and for my own serving (shown above) I only used one—both for health reasons and because I like the spirally look of the single slice with peeks of chicken showing through. So I’m leaving the pancetta quantity totally to your whim, along with the oil (you don’t need much) and the wine. Experiment—I think no matter what, you’ll be impressed with the result.

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (if the breasts are large, as they all seem to be nowadays, I like to use just 2 and slice them in half to make 4)
4 large leeks
about 12 sprigs fresh thyme
olive oil
1 tablespoon butter, cut into pieces
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
white wine
enough sliced pancetta (or good-quality bacon) to wrap around the chicken breasts

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

2. Place chicken breasts in a bowl. Wash and trim the leeks, remove outer leaves, and cut white and light green parts into ¼-inch-thick slices. Add leeks to the bowl along with leaves from about 6 thyme sprigs, a splash of olive oil, the butter, salt and pepper, and a swig of white wine. Toss everything together.

3. Remove the chicken breasts from the bowl. Pour the leek mixture into a baking dish just large enough to hold the chicken snugly (an 8- or 9-inch square glass dish works well). Wrap each chicken breast in a single layer of pancetta and place in the dish. Drizzle lightly with olive oil and scatter remaining thyme sprigs atop and around the chicken.

4. Bake in the center of the oven for 25 to 35 minutes.

Serves: 4
Time: 45 minutes

DELICIOUS PORTLAND

Over the July 4th weekend I paid my first-ever visit to the Pacific Northwest, spending most of the time in Portland, which is revered as a foodie mecca for its bountiful fresh produce and local microbrews. I hoped to eat and drink as many tasty things as I could, documenting all of the tastiness with photos of every meal. In this I was only marginally successful. First of all, I was only there for three full days, and I would have needed about a month (or possibly a second stomach) to make my way through my wanna-eat list, so I regretfully shelved some of my food dreams (seafood, brewery tour, Tillamook ice cream, Pix, The Tin Shed, Roots Brewery) for another time. Secondly, travel eating always involves compromise for the sake of expediency—you’re hungry or someone else in your group is, you don’t know the lay of the land, and you just need to eat what’s readily available at the moment so you can get on with your sightseeing. Even I’m not about to spend an entire vacation in the pursuit of restaurants, not when there’s Powell’s and The Grotto to see. And the photo thing fell by the wayside on the second day. Restaurants were dark, or I was too eager to eat, or the food wasn’t that exciting, or I would have felt weird whipping out my camera. I can, however, present you with this excellent portrait of my first morning’s breakfast (I must say, our breakfasts were uniformly excellent on this trip, but this one was my very favorite), an open-faced bacon-tomato-avocado-poached-egg sandwich at Café Marron in Spokane:


Here are three more delicious Portland moments:

1. Circumstances conspired to allow us to dine in the home of a real Portlander, a sort of friend-of-a-friend (well, actually, a father-of-a-friend-of-a-brother) none of us had met before. I knew it was a good sign when we arrived at his lovely house and were immediately drafted to pick raspberries for the dessert. Sitting in the backyard, we drank wine (a good Syrah we’d picked up, at the Maryhill Winery on our way into town) and chatted while dining on a delicious homemade chard-rice casserole and salad featuring vegetables from the garden, followed by an amazing chocolate tart (like this one, from Jamie Oliver’s book Cook With Jamie) garnished with the fresh-picked raspberries. It was our first night in Portland, and it was perfect.

2. In Portland I became determined to finally try this year’s (or last year's?) food-blogger-darling dessert, the French macaron (not to be confused with a coconut macaroon, this is a ground-almond-based sandwich cookie that looks rather like a tiny hamburger, with two rounded layers enclosing a creamy filling, available in a wide array of colors and flavors, making it as photogenic as it is delicious). Of course these are probably widely available in L.A., but in my normal, sensible, well-balanced life I try to avoid bakeries, and traveling is always such a good opportunity to (a) try something new and (b) indulge. Though we weren’t able to make it to Pix, where my source assured me that the salted-caramel macaron was so good “you almost need to eat it in private,”* two varieties of macaron, chocolate and mango, were available at Ken’s Artisan Bakery, just a couple of blocks from our hostel. On a restless late-afternoon walk while my travel companions were resting, I decided to go for it. I had chocolate, of course, and it was delicious—lightly crisp on the outside, tender within:



3. On the final night of our trip, we decided to splurge at Higgins, a highly recommended restaurant in downtown Portland that emphasizes local, organic, seasonal, sustainable food. And wow, it was a great dining experience from beginning to end—excellent food in a relaxed, unpretentious-but-still-fancy atmosphere. K and I both had good regional wines (I don’t remember what mine was called, but hers was “Jezebel”). S had a roasted-beet salad and a cold vegan soup made from pureed potatoes and almonds, seasoned with smoked paprika (it sounds odd, but was quite good). K had a beautiful piece of salmon with vegetables and homemade spaetzle. I had a fabulous sweet-pea risotto featuring three forms of peas—peas, pea pods, and a pea puree swirled in. The sweetness of the peas was perfectly balanced by rated Grana Padano cheese, smoky little chunks of coppacola, and salty wafers of fried Parmesan. I don’t even particularly love peas or risotto, but I loved this. It was the kind of restaurant where you sensed that anything you ordered was going to be delicious, even if it was something you didn’t normally like. This caused us agonies of decision-making over the alluring dessert menu, but at last we settled on house-made rhubarb sorbet and hazelnut ice cream, both served with an assortment of tiny house-made cookies and an amusing cube of Cognac gelee (think freestanding, upscale Jell-O shot). But the show was stolen by the third dessert, and utterly amazing raspberry-ricotta tart with a lavender shortbread crust (I’d been skeptical, fearing it would taste like potpourri or something, but was pleased to be proven wrong—thanks for sticking to your guns on that one, K!). In short, I will definitely be returning to Portland, and Higgins will be on the itinerary.

*This turn of phrase led us to fantasize about opening a restaurant featuring a dessert so supposedly decadent and delicious that when you ordered it, you would simply be brought a plate with a silver key on it. You would get up and go to the back of the restaurant, where your key would open one of several little phone-booth-sized red-velvet-padded rooms, inside which your dessert would be waiting on a silver platter, for you to eat in private, able to groan and gorge to your heart's content, away from strangers' eyes. The dessert wouldn't really even have to be that special; it would all be in the fun presentation. If anyone executes this idea, I demand a lifetime of free desserts!

CORN, ARUGULA, AND BACON SALAD

Courtesy of Simply Recipes, this is a simple salad that vaguely reminds me of my favorite summer meal, BLTs and corn on the cob. (Hmm, I bet BLTs made with arugula [BATs?] would be really good.) The sweet corn, salty bacon, and peppery greens, and slightly sour vinaigrette all balance each other perfectly. (I especially loved that the imparted another dimension of flavor, but was barely noticeable; I don’t enjoy strong vinegar flavors.) I’d never heard of boiling corn in the husk before, and I tried it with one eyebrow skeptically raised, but now I’m a convert—I really could taste the difference in flavor, and as a bonus the corn was much easier to shuck.

I served this salad with quesadillas for an easy Sunday night supper, the perfect end to a brutally hot weekend. (This is my new, amazingly delicious technique for making quesadillas—I used to just toast them in the oven, but when my oven broke last month, I tried this and was blown away—they are so crisp and tasty, perhaps even better than grilled cheese sandwiches!) While the salad is best immediately after you add the dressing, I ate the leftover servings a few days later and although the arugula was wilted, everything still tasted dandy.

4 large ears of corn
2 cups chopped arugula
4 strips bacon, diced and cooked
⅓ cup sliced green onions
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
⅛ teaspoon ground cumin
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Cook the corn by grilling, steaming, or boiling the ears (cook them in their husks for more flavor). Let cool, remove the husks and silk, and cut the kernels off the cobs.

2. In a large bowl, mix together corn, arugula, bacon, and green onions. In a separate bowl, whisk together the oil, vinegar, cumin, and salt and pepper. Pour dressing onto salad just before serving and toss well.

Serves: 4
Time: 30 minutes

BLUEBERRY CRISP

My friend J and I drove up to Somis and picked blueberries on Sunday! Blueberries always seem at a premium here in SoCal, even when they’re in season, so I was excited that in exchange for just a little driving and manual labor, I could get such a bargain—I picked 2½ pounds for just $8. The picking went slowly at first because blueberries are so small and hard to spot on the bushes (at least when they’ve been regularly picked over by other paying customers), but once I got the hang of it, my hunter-gatherer/obsessive-compulsive skills kicked in. Even though the day was brutally hot and sunny, the work was fun, sort of like a treasure hunt where the big “Eureka!” moment happened over and over every few seconds. It felt more pleasant than past U-pick experiences I’ve had with other fruits: blueberry bushes are relatively tall, so you don’t have to backbreakingly hunch over them as you do with strawberry plants, but they aren’t prickly like raspberry plants; moreover, blueberries stay firmer than other berries and don’t make your hands all sticky.

A loves blueberries in any form with a fiery passion; I enjoy eating them raw, but don’t particularly care for them in baked goods (muffins, pancakes, etc.), where they seem to gain just a bit too much intensity. So we both agreed the majority of my haul should just get rinsed and put in a big bowl in the fridge for noshing throughout the week (I’ve been eating them every morning on my plain yogurt; so good!). I did freeze just a few of them, so we could enjoy them later (to freeze blueberries: without rinsing them, lay them on a single layer on a baking sheet and place it flat in the freezer until the berries are hard, then pour them into a container or plastic freezer bag—this keeps them from clumping together; when you want to use them, just defrost and rinse). But I did feel like celebrating my blueberry coup with something special, so I whipped up a mini blueberry crisp. I just used the apple crisp recipe I’ve already posted, adapted it following the cookbook's directions for using blueberries instead (basically, you just add more flour to keep the filling thick), and halved the recipe so it wouldn't use too many of my precious berries.

The result? Yum, of course. Some of my blueberries were on the small, tart side (I like ’em that way), so they responded well to being baked with sugar. I did think the end product had an overwhelmingly intense-blueberry quality I wouldn’t want to eat all day long—I would have preferred it balanced with some vanilla ice cream, or a slightly higher topping-to-filling ratio. But wow, there’s nothing like eating a spoonful of warm, gooey, sweet baked fruit and thinking, “I just picked these this morning!”


This is the full recipe, which I halved (luckily, I inherited a cute little 1-quart baking dish from some unknown source at some point):

5 cups fresh or frozen blueberries
4 tablespoons granulated white sugar
½ cup regular rolled oats
½ cup packed brown sugar
7 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ cup cold butter, cut into small pieces
¼ cup chopped nuts or coconut (I used blanched almonds because that’s what I had on hand)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. Place blueberries in a 2-quart square baking dish. Stir in the white sugar and 3 tablespoons flour.

3. In a medium bowl, combine the oats, brown sugar, flour, and spice. Add butter and mix with two knives, a pastry blender, or your fingers until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in nuts or coconut. Sprinkle mixture over blueberries.

4. Bake for 30–35 minutes or until topping is golden. Serve with vanilla ice cream, if desired.

Serves: 6
Time: 40 minutes

OATMEAL-JAM BARS

I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I like making jam a lot more than I like eating it. (Whereas usually eating the food I make is my favorite part!)

Don’t get me wrong: jam is tasty! But it’s really hard for me to get through more than one jar per year. I don’t eat a lot of toast (even though I adore it; it just doesn’t fill me up for breakfast), and I don’t have a high tolerance for sweet things in the morning anyway. I’ve experimented with eating jam in other ways—for instance, it’s an excellent way to perk up plain yogurt or oatmeal—yet still I’ve got a backlog of perfectly good homemade fruit preserves getting old in my pantry and refrigerator. The main problem is that last winter when I canned a batch of apple butter to give to friends and family for Christmas, at least half a dozen of the jars didn’t seal (I think some of the lids were too old), which meant they weren’t shelf-stable, so I couldn’t mail them or pack them in my suitcase to bring to Minnesota and give away. They were perfectly fine (in fact, the apple butter is darn delicious, if I do say so myself), but they had to be kept in the fridge—and most of them are still there, lurking in the back, six months later. Apple butter is great on toast, but it’s kind of weird stirred into yogurt (there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of commercially made apple yogurt), and now that it’s full summer (100 degrees in Pasadena today!) a bowl of steaming apple-butter oatmeal just doesn’t appeal.

So I was on a mission to find a recipe that would provide a worthy end to my apple butter and any other old jam I might have lying around now or in the future. Because I don’t really want to stop canning jam! It makes me feel all cozy and Little-House-on-the-Prairie-like. But I know that Ma Ingalls would not approve of me wasting perfectly good fresh fruit by canning it, letting it sit on my shelves for a year, and then reluctantly throwing it out for fear of botulism. Appropriately enough, it was The Pioneer Woman who came to my aid with this insanely easy, delicious, versatile recipe for oatmeal-jam bars. Did someone say oatmeal? I love oatmeal!

Don’t mistake these for health food, because they’re totally not; they’re buttery and they’re sweet—in fact, the first time I tasted them they seemed too sweet, and I thought, “Oh, I won’t want to eat very many of these,” and promptly gave a bunch of them away to my coworkers. Then, later in the week, after dinner, I was hankering for a little dessert and I ate a bar and OMG SO GOOD. The flavor was strongly reminiscent of a non-chemical-laden apple NutriGrain bar crossed with an apple crisp or cobbler or crumble; the texture was addictively soft and chewy and slightly sticky. I will definitely be making these again, because I’ve got two more jars of apple butter left in the fridge and maybe even some older jam stashed away in the cupboard. That’s the best thing about this recipe—you can use just about any flavor you want. PW used apricot in the original, I’ve already testified that apple was awesome, and I am just dying to try a berry-flavored version. Folks, I would even—gasp!—buy jam at the store to make this recipe. And if that’s not a glowing recommendation, I don’t know what is.

Oh yeah, and did I mention it’s really, really easy to make? If you don’t believe me, click over to PW’s original writeup, which walks you through step with step-by-step photos.

1½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups oats
1 cup packed brown sugar
1¾ sticks butter, room temperature, cut into pieces
1 10-to-12-ounce jar of fruit jam or preserves, any flavor

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Using an electric mixer, combine all ingredients except jam in a large bowl until completely blended (it should have about the consistency of crumbly cookie dough).

3. Press half of the mixture into a buttered 8- or 9-inch square baking pan. Spread jam evenly over crust. Sprinkle second half of mixture over the top and pat lightly.

4. Bake 30 to 40 minutes or until light brown. Let cool completely (this may take several hours), then cut into squares.

Yield: Maybe 24 bars? (I cut mine super-small, about half the size of PW’s)
Time: 1 hour

FORK-CRUSHED PURPLE POTATOES

I mentioned this recipe a few posts ago, but it needed another go-round to work out the kinks. Attempt #2 happened on Sunday night, as part of a tongue-in-cheek purple-and-gold meal (“gold” being represented by corn fritters) I created to sustain us while we vainly cheered for the Lakers during the NBA Finals. (Boo, Lakers. But yay, I guess, for my dear former Timberwolf Kevin Garnett, who was hilariously gobsmacked upon winning last night—crying, babbling, giving shouts out to “ ’Sota” [I’m so going to start calling it that], using the f-word so many times that vast portions of his speech were bleeped out, and possibly hitting on his female interviewer.)

This time, I deviated from the original recipe by briefly sautéing the shallots in olive oil instead of leaving them raw, and for me that was the one adjustment needed to push this over the edge into side-dish perfection. At least for potato-salad-phobes like me, this is the ideal summer potato dish: It’s got the comforting texture of rustically chunky mashed potatoes, but with a light, lemony flavor and cheerful, festive color. It’s easy to make and doesn’t need to be eaten piping-hot. And watching the color “bloom” as you add the lemon juice is just endlessly fun.

(One note: Your color results will vary depending on the type of potato—I didn’t use the Purple Majesties the recipe specified, just whatever anonymous purple variety the farmers’ market happened to have, and you’ll notice mine are a delicate shade of lavender instead of the brilliant plum hue of the Smitten Kitchen’s.)

1 pound small purple potatoes, washed
4 small shallots, minced
2 tablespoons fresh-squeezed lemon juice
3 tablespoons good extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons parsley, chopped

1. In a large pot, cook potatoes with skins on in heavily salted boiling water until tender, approximately 15 minutes.

2. Remove potatoes from pot, and let them sit until cool enough to touch.

3. Meanwhile, put the empty pot back on the stove (dry it out first if necessary), add the olive oil, and warm it over medium heat. Add the minced shallots and cook until tender, about 5 minutes.

4. While the shallots are cooking, peel the warm potatoes with your fingers. Place them in a large bowl and, using a fork, gently smash them, maintaining a fairly chunky consistency. Pour in the shallot and olive oil from the pot, then add lemon juice, salt, and pepper and fold gently to combine. Sprinkle parsley on top.

Serves: 4
Time: 30 minutes

MONSTER COOKIES

Hands down, these are my new favorite cookies.

One funny detail I didn’t mention about the Broken Oven Fiasco is that during the insane four-week wait for the electrician, our building manager (totally blameless and a really nice guy who once got pranked by David Letterman while they were both students at Ball State) placated me by giving me permission to use the oven in the apartment next door, which currently happens to be vacant. This was a stroke of luck that got me through some rough patches—the night we discovered our oven was broken while we were in the middle of making pizza, the special birthday dinner and cupcakes I made for my mother, and the day I decided I Absolutely Deserved Some Cookies, Damn It, Brokedown Oven or No.

Cooking next door was one part fun adventure and one part annoying sitcom trope. On the plus side, it was useful, of course, as well as gratifying my curiosity about the neighboring apartment (turns out it’s designed completely differently than ours, except, eerily, for the kitchen, which is laid out identically). On the minus side, every baking operation involved carrying heavy and often skin-searingly hot dishes of food out through our sliding screen door, across our patio, out our front door, down an outdoor sidewalk, through the front door of the next-door apartment, across its patio, through its sliding screen door, across pristine wood floors I had to avoid tracking dirt onto, and then all the way back again multiple times. On one occasion, I did all this in the rain. On other occasions, I suffered the embarrassment of running into mystified neighbors outdoors while wearing oven mitts and carrying casserole dishes. And on the day I made these cookies, I burst into the next-door apartment to retrieve my final tray of treats from the oven only to discover that a couple of prospective tenants were looking at the place. After awkwardly explaining what I was doing there, I joked that the apartment manager paid me to ensure that the vacant apartments always smelled enticingly like fresh baked goods. I tactfully didn’t mention to them that I’d found the brand-new oven in that apartment to be woefully inferior to my old Thermador next door. I also didn’t offer them any cookies. I’d already tasted one and deemed them too good to share.

I picked this recipe (from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, which I really need to check out, via Bake or Break) mainly because I’m a sucker for oatmeal and I had some M&Ms to use up. (On Valentine’s Day 2007, A filled my gumball machine with white, pink, and red M&Ms, and yes, it had really taken us that long to eat them all. After a year, they had taken on an oddly hard, crumbly texture. I knew that baking them into cookies would disguise their staleness.) I do love M&Ms in cookies, but the real stars here are (a) the peanut-butter flavor and (b) the butterscotch chips. I adore butterscotch, but somehow I forget how much I love it until I actually taste it. I’d never baked with butterscotch chips before, and when I opened the bag of Nestle butterscotch morsels (obscenely priced at over $4 at my neighborhood grocery store) and tasted one, I was dismayed to find that they tasted like sickeningly sweet chemicals. But mixed into cookies, blending with the soft oatmeal-peanut-butter dough and contrasting with the chunks of chocolate, they are awesome. Not too photogenic, mind you—definitely lumpy and “homestyle”—but chewy, luxurious, with a variety of flavors that all work well together.

These cookies were really easy to make (at least for normal people who don’t have to run back and forth between two different apartments). The recipe only uses one bowl, always a plus. The dough seems strange (it barely has any flour in it!) but comes together with little difficulty—a bit on the loose and crumbly side, so that the occasional chip or M&M would fall out when I formed them, but I just gave the dough lumps a squeeze and pressed the stray bits onto the top. The original recipe is for enormous ¼-cup cookies (“monster”-sized, I guess), but I dislike big cookies and just formed them normally, in heaping tablespoons (really heaping—probably about 2 tablespoons of dough per cookie).

I still have half a bag of the precious butterscotch chips left. Originally, I was thinking I’d try them in a different cookie (maybe the Oatmeal Scotchies recipe on the bag?), but now that I’ve grown to love these monster cookies so much, I’m seriously contemplating just making them again.

3 large eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon corn syrup
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup unsalted butter, melted
1½ cups chunky peanut butter
4½ cups rolled oats
½ cup all-purpose flour
¾ cup semisweet chocolate chips
¾ cup butterscotch chips
¾ cup M&Ms (mini or full-sized)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease baking sheets or line them with parchment or silicon mats.

2. Combine eggs, both sugars, vanilla, corn syrup, baking soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add melted butter, peanut butter, oats, and flour and mix thoroughly. Stir in the chocolate and butterscotch chips and the M&Ms. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes to allow the oats to absorb the butter.

3. Drop the dough by heaping tablespoons onto baking sheets. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until lightly browned.

Yield: 4 to 5 dozen
Time: 1½ hours

PESTO POTATO PIZZA

Here’s my excuse for not posting in a month:


My oven was broken for four weeks, people. Then the electrician finally arrived…and took it away, leaving behind a gaping, cat-enticing hole in the wall of my kitchen. Sure, it’s possible to cook ovenlessly, and I did so, bravely soldiering on preparing meals on the stovetop day after day, but it’s amazing how many of the exciting new recipes I’d been wanting to try required an oven. Suddenly all my food cravings were for precisely what I couldn’t make: pizza, cookies, roasted chicken and vegetables. So when my darling vintage Thermador was returned to me, fully functional (they even fixed the broiler, which had been broken for about two years), not surprisingly my zeal for cooking (and writing about it) came roaring back too.


Of course it seemed appropriate to inaugurate the rejuvenated ol’ oven with a new pizza recipe. I was already aware that potatoes are great on pizza; pesto and potatoes are a natural pair, and I just happened to have some homemade pesto in my freezer, so when I saw this pizza at Eggs on Sunday (just one of the delicious ideas in the “Friday Night Pizza” feature), I went for it. And it was my kind of pizza: super-delicious, super-easy. I might have gotten a little overenthusiastic with the oven, because everything on my pizza turned out very browned—tastily so, but it’s easier to distinguish all the ingredients in Eggs on Sunday’s photo than in mine. I added some extra basil because I wanted to use it up; it was fine but unnecessary. The only thing I’d really do differently next time would be to use fresh mozzarella. Just for expediency, I went with the shredded mozzarella I keep in my freezer for ordinary pizza-making, but with its higher moisture content, I think fresh mozzarella would work much better here. Potatoes are so starchy and there’s no actual sauce on the pizza (the pesto pretty much bakes into the dough), so even though it was completely delectable, I will say the texture was on the dry side. Fresh mozzarella would have made things a little gooier.

1 ball pizza dough (about 1 lb)
2 medium or 1 large red potato, thinly sliced (to about ⅛-inch thickness)
About ½ cup pesto
Grated Parmesan cheese
Fresh mozzarella cheese
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Place the thinly sliced potatoes in a medium bowl. Drizzle them with some olive oil, and toss in a good pinch or two of coarse salt and a few grindings of black pepper. Lay them in a single layer on a baking sheet and roast in the oven for about 10 minutes, flipping the slices halfway through. You want the potatoes to be just barely tender (not mushy); they’ll cook more when you put them on the pizza.

3. Remove the potatoes from the oven and raise the heat to 500 degrees. Stretch out your ball of pizza dough and lay it out on a baking sheet that’s been generously dusted with cornmeal.

4. Spread the pesto out all over the pizza dough. Top with the slices of potato, arranging them in a single layer. Sprinkle the pizza with a little grated Parmesan, then top it with torn pieces of fresh mozzarella. Bake for about 8–10 minutes, until the crust is golden and the cheese is melted.

Serves: 4
Time: 30 minutes

MISCELLANOUS RECIPE NOTES

I hope some of you have noticed (Anyone? Anyone?) that even though I may not post a new recipe every day (or even every week, despite my best efforts), I’ve been steadily adding photos to all my old entries so that you can see what these recipes look like in action, and hopefully be tempted into making some of them. Granted, I have no photographic expertise or interest in food styling, so what you’re seeing are clumsy, un-Photoshopped images of the food right before I eat it, impatiently taken in a dark kitchen on a point-and-shoot camera by someone whose hands are probably shaky from low blood sugar, but you still get the idea. I guess I’ve been spoiled by the Internet, because nowadays I find myself reluctant to even try a new recipe if I can’t see a photo of how it’s going to turn out. So, in case you’re the same way: I’m working on it. 66 down, only about 120 to go!

I also find myself reluctant to post a new recipe these days unless I’ve got a photo to accompany it, unless it’s something you just absolutely have to know about right away, like the D.I.Y. taco seasoning. This means that some of the recipes I’ve tried recently have slipped through the cracks—some good but in need of further refinement, others satisfactory enough but not anything I need to make again. Still, you might find them interesting or useful, or I might want to refer back to them later, so here you go:

To Make Again


BANANA CAKE: This is the cake I made A for his birthday, and it turned out beautifully, if I do say so myself. I might have written a full post about it, if I’d remembered to actually take a picture of the inside of it. All you can see here is the frosting, and that was nothing special—in fact, it was an emergency fudge frosting I whipped up from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook after this chocolate fudge frosting recipe somehow went horribly awry just a few hours before I intended to serve the cake. (I don’t blame that recipe; I think it was my execution. Somehow I must have overcooked it, because it turned out really hard and unspreadable, like actual fudge.) As an emergency frosting, it was great—easy to make, used ingredients I had on hand, and tasted good. But it really didn’t do justice to the cake underneath it, the awesomeness that is this banana cake recipe (ignore the caramel-walnut-upside-down part). I will definitely be making that cake again. But it needed a darker chocolate frosting, like a ganache, or maybe no frosting and just some chocolate chips stirred into the batter?

FORK-CRUSHED PURPLE POTATOES: Take a look at these beauties at The Smitten Kitchen. Of course I had to try them—the lemoniness was too potent for me to resist, especially when it involves a magical chemical reaction by which the lemon juice actually makes the potatoes an even brighter shade of purple. Mine didn’t seem to be quite as photogenic (in fact, they turned a rather alarming shade of hot pink), so I didn’t photograph them, but I’ll certainly make this side dish again. I did find the result a little overwhelmingly oniony—all the crunchy raw shallots seemed distracting, both flavor-wise and texture-wise. I’d like to try sautéing the shallots in the olive oil until they’re tender, then pouring that over the boiled potatoes and adding the lemon juice and parsley. Yum.

CINNAMON-RAISIN NO-KNEAD BREAD: No-knead bread is great, so why not punch it up? I tried this recipe from Not Eating Out in New York, and it was pretty tasty, both on its own (toasted, with butter) and later as French toast, as shown in the original post. I’d like to try it again with some revisions, however, before I add it to my repertoire. The recipe calls for sugar to be sprinkled over the top of the dough before baking (which is done at very high heat in a covered container), and perhaps I overbaked my bread (I don’t have a big Dutch oven—future gift ideas!—so I have to divide it into two smaller loaves cooked in succession, and maybe I didn’t adjust the cooking time accordingly), but the sugar burned, which not only created a terrible mess in the baking dish, but also imparted a bitter taste to the bread’s crust. Meanwhile, the inside of the loaf didn’t taste quite as sweet or cinnamon as I’d hoped, making me wish I’d just mixed together all the sugar with a generous amount of cinnamon and swirled it inside the dough. All in all, however, you can’t complain about quick, easy cinnamon bread, so I plan to stick with this one.

STOVETOP BAKED BEANS: I’ve never felt compelled to make baked beans before, but the urge struck me suddenly while I was contemplating how best to use up the hot dogs left over from my birthday beach bonfire party. The answer: an early-summer faux picnic, with hot dogs grilled on the George Foreman and served in buns with all the condiments, accompanied by the farmers’ market’s first ears of corn on the cob, plus these stovetop baked beans. The fact that they’re not actually “baked” was a huge boon, because my apartment’s beautiful 1950s Thermador oven has been broken for the past week and a half (we’re trying to have it repaired, because it’s a real collector’s item), leaving me at a loss in the kitchen. In this time of trial, the beans were a delicious comfort, tender and saucy with a nice sweet/sour/spicy balance and bacony undertones. I cut up leftover hot dogs and mixed them into the leftover beans for a Boy-Scouty treat. I’d definitely make these again as the summer progresses. (Recipe notes: I used canned cannellini beans with their liquid, omitted the cloves because I didn’t have them, substituted brown sugar for molasses, and skipped the onion/bacon garnish. I also wonder if mincing the onion and garlic and them leaving them in after the intial boiling might amp up the flavor even more.)

A Case of the Maybes


FLUFFY RICOTTA PANCAKES: Like the creators of this recipe from The Kitchen, I had some lemon curd (homemade last summer with a coworker’s glut of Meyer lemons and stored in my freezer ever since) to use up, as well as some ricotta, so breakfast-for-dinner ricotta pancakes seemed like a great idea. Beating egg whites until stiff (which is what gives these pancakes their lightness) is always a breeze with my KitchenAid, but it does mean that mixing up the batter is an irksome two-bowl affair. As promised, the pancakes were tender and fluffy, but they didn’t rock my world or anything (the lemon curd, on the other hand…nom nom nom). I’d make them again if I needed to use up some ricotta, but there are plenty of other delicious ways to do that. In short, a nice experiment, but not an addition to my permanent repertoire.

NO-BAKE NUTELLA OATMEAL COOKIES: Of course my oven had to go and conk out just when I needed to replenish my freezer’s cookie supply, but luckily I had this no-bake recipe from Bake or Break in hand. I love Nutella and uncooked rolled oats, and these treats were certainly easy to make (mix on stovetop, dollop onto waxed paper), though not as intensely Nutella-flavored as I’d expected (partially my fault; I didn’t feel like obtaining Frangelico and used vanilla instead). Given the array of cookie recipes available in the world, I’m not sure I’d make these again unless I find myself ovenless in the future--and really, they're more like candy than cookies; still, they’re certainly chocolatey and pleasing, with a tantalizing melt-in-the-mouth texture, like oaty clumps of firm frosting.

SWEET AND SALTY PEANUT CHOCOLATE CHUNK COOKIES: I like peanuts, I like chocolate, and I like some salty with my sweet, so of course I had to try this recipe after seeing it in Cooking Light. The cookies tasted good, about as you would expect, but the texture wasn’t ideal—a bit thin, as though the cookies only qualified as “light” because there wasn’t actually much cookie there. Again, given the wealth of cookie recipes in the world, I probably wouldn’t repeat this one unless requested, but it was perfectly worth trying once.

Not For Me, Maybe For You

CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP: The lesson here is simply that I don’t like cream of mushroom soup as much as I thought I did. I had a sudden craving for it a few months ago, and this glowing entry from the Smitten Kitchen provided a recipe I felt I had to try. It’s a perfectly good recipe and I think I executed it properly—I even bought expensive shitakes at the farmers’ market—but while I was making it I started to get overwhelmed by the mushroominess, even though I usually think of myself as quite the mushroom aficionado. Turns out dried wild mushrooms totally wig me out, and the smell of shitakes isn’t my favorite either. Who knew? The soup wasn’t inedible or anything; it was just too mushroomy for me and A. It’s always a strange feeling when you think you want something, and then when you get it you realize you were actually longing for something else, maybe something that doesn’t exist. In my case, I was apparently attracted to the idea of mushroom soup, not its reality. Learning experience!

PARMESAN-STUFFED CHICKEN BREASTS: You know how I enjoy foods stuffed with more food, especially when lemon and cheese are involved. This is a simple recipe from Everyday Food that, on the plus side, is a cinch to make. On the minus side, the flavor was just too simple. I found it hard to lift up the chicken skin sufficiently to get the stuffing evenly distributed across the breast; instead, it was more like a stuffing lump atop each piece. So when you cut into the top of the chicken to eat it, your first few mouthfuls were full of nice lemony cheesy flavor, and then after you’d eaten the top away, you were basically left with…a plain roasted chicken breast. Not my favorite thing. I’d rather have rubbed the seasoning all over the outside of the chicken, or stuffed it under the skin of a thigh instead. But still, there was just nothing special here. It’s fine for an emergency meal if all you have is chicken, parsley, Parmesan, breadcrumbs, and a lemon, but frankly I was underwhelmed.

D.I.Y. TACO SEASONING

I can’t believe I never thought of this before. Because, you know, every now and then I want to make tacos. Like, the old-skool Ortega “taco night” tacos of my youth. Not often, but once every few months. So I’ve been buying the stupid seasoning packets and feeling guilty about all the powdery chemicals therein, especially when I dump them onto my beautiful ethical-gourmet grass-fed ground beef, but I want my tacos to taste like I want my tacos to taste, dammit, and that taste comes from a packet, right?

Duh.

On a whim, I started Googling last week and happened upon this Allrecipes entry, which had been rated an average of five out of five stars by a whopping 654 users, and over and over again the reviews said, “I will never buy packaged seasoning mix again!” I had every single one of the ingredients in my spice rack (even the onion powder, which I possess for the sole purpose of making Chex Mix), and it was the work of just a few minutes to mix the spices together in a bowl, brown some hamburger and add the seasoning, grate some cheddar cheese, shred some lettuce, chop some cherry tomatoes, warm up the taco shells, and open a container of my favorite salsa.

People, pay attention: The taco meat I made with this seasoning tasted exactly like the stuff made with the storebought packets, except maybe better. It was spicier (not overwhelmingly spicy, despite some of the “too spicy!” reviews, which were probably left by Minnesotans of Scandinavian descent, because this is only spicy if you think Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food), and yet at the same time the beef tasted beefier—the seasonings were enhancing its flavor, not masking it. I wouldn’t change a thing about the spice mixture, although of course the beauty of making your own seasoning is that you can adjust the quantities if you want to, and if you take the time to wade through the hundreds of comments on Allrecipes, you can find many suggested variations (for instance, using real onion and garlic instead of powders).

So with that, I’m joining the chorus of people who will no longer be buying taco seasoning mix (take that, corporate America!), and now that I’ve found this recipe I’ll probably be having tacos more often. (I’d also be interested to try the seasoning on chicken or veggies.) Now I just need to try making my own taco shells….

1 tablespoon chili powder
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
¼ teaspoon onion powder
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
¼ teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon paprika
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon coarse sea salt (if you don’t have coarse salt, use less than a teaspoon; I suspect some of the commenters found the seasoning too salty because they were using table salt)
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Mix ingredients together in a small bowl. If you aren’t going to use the seasoning right away, store it in an airtight container.

The original recipe doesn’t officially tell you how to use this to make beef tacos, but following the guidance in the comments, it was pretty simple to work out a successful method. The recipe makes enough seasoning to season about a pound of ground beef (I actually had about a pound and a quarter, which worked just fine). Brown the beef and drain off the fat. Dump the bowl of seasoning into the pan with the beef. Whisk about a teaspoon of cornstarch into about half a cup of water, then pour the water into the pan of beef. Stir well, and simmer over medium heat until the liquid reduces and the mixture thickens (it seemed like a lot of people didn’t even bother with cornstarch but just mixed together beef, seasoning, and water; however, I wanted a sauce-like effect like the storebought packets have, and the cornstarch helped).

Serves: 4–8
Time: For the seasoning mix, 5 minutes; for the tacos in their entirety, maybe 30 minutes

ROSEMARY POTATO AND CHICKEN PIZZA

I wasn’t sure whether to make this post a tribute to California Pizza Kitchen or a kiss-off. I don’t eat at chain restaurants that often, but I’ll admit a soft spot in my heart for CPK, which I had never eaten at before moving to California and which has since worked its way into my California-culture repertoire as a frequent site of workplace lunches and casual evening dinners (particularly for us in Pasadena, where good pizza restaurants have thus far been hard for me to discover). A friend recommended this pizza to me upon my first visit to CPK, and although I did try a few other varieties before settling down, it quickly became my go-to favorite, with its tender potatoes and subtle winey-buttery-herby-garlicky-oniony (shalloty, as it turns out) sauce. So when CPK summarily retired it last year, I felt more than a little betrayed. A’s CPK favorite, Peking duck pizza, disappeared at the same time, and we briefly contemplated a boycott of the restaurant before realizing that we don’t really eat there that much anyway (plus, there’s still a garlic chicken pizza at CPK that bears an uncanny resemblance to my departed favorite, but for the sad absence of potatoes). But it was one of those moments of modern life when you feel helplessly smashed in the cogs of the corporate machine, and it did piss me off enough for me to search out the recipe for rosemary-potato-chicken pizza online so that I could try to replicate it at home. Luckily, CPK did publish a cookbook in the 1990s, and although my library didn’t carry it, Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature can be manipulated to gain access to desired content without buying the book. I felt so vengeful toward CPK that I copied out the entire recipe from the Internet by hand on a sheet of graph paper—but in doing so, I noticed how complicated it was—it consisted of four separate mini-recipes for pizza dough, garlic-shallot butter, grilled chicken, and rosemary potatoes, and the ingredients list was about a mile long. I stashed it away in a folder, in case someday I got really ambitious.

Finally, last week, that day arrived. I’m continuing to become a more confident cook, and I’m currently on a homemade-pizza bender, so when I stumbled across the hand-scrawled recipe in the back of the folder and happened to glance it over, it didn’t seem so intimidating. With the advent of Trader Joe’s pizza dough as a shortcut, I could ignore the CPK pizza dough recipe (someday I’ll probably get into making my own, but not while I live two blocks from a TJ’s), and it seemed like the rest of the recipe could be streamlined. It was basically just: season some potato slices and bake them in the oven (the original recipe as I copied it down said it would take 45 minutes to bake quarter-inch-thick slices, but that just didn’t seem possible), marinate some chicken and grill it (I’d be doing this on the George Foreman for expediency), and make a simple sauce of butter, garlic, shallots, white wine, lemon juice, and herbs. The original recipe had seemed too decadent, calling for so much butter, it also made two CPK-sized pizzas; I figured I could halve the recipe for my baking-sheet-sized crust—I might get slightly sparser topping coverage, but I’d survive. All in all, it didn’t seem too arduous an undertaking, especially if it meant I could taste that delicious pizza once again.

The verdict: more complicated than most of my other pizza recipes, but not at all hard to make. I simplified the ingredient list to reflect total quantities (so that I could just mince 2 tablespoons of garlic at the beginning, for instance, instead of cutting up a teaspoon for the chicken marinade and then later realizing I needed another 2 teaspoons for the potatoes and more for the sauce), and I rearranged the steps more efficiently, so that I could work on the potatoes while the chicken marinated and the sauce while the potatoes cooked. And the result? As tasty as the original, and somehow more wholesome-feeling because I’d made it myself. The garlic-shallot butter is amazing in its own right. Admittedly, this pizza was delectable enough that I might have eaten half of it in one sitting if no one was looking, but two slices with a large green salad still made a perfectly satisfying weeknight dinner, and that way I got to have leftovers the next day. A wasn't home for dinner that night and didn't eat his portion until after I went to bed, but he enjoyed it so much that he left me a note on the bathroom mirror that said, "Awesome pizza!"

I’ll definitely be making this again. Probably more often than I eat at CPK, for that matter.

Recipe notes: I didn’t have any chicken broth in the freezer, so I skipped that. It’s such a small amount, I didn’t notice the missing flavor; however, if I had it on hand, I would add it. I also totally forgot to add the parsley at the end and didn’t notice its absence until I started typing up the recipe just now. Poor parsley, always an afterthought.

2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic, divided
½ teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon coarse (kosher or sea) salt, divided
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast (5 to 8 ounces)
½ pound small red potatoes, sliced into ⅛-inch-thick rounds
2 teaspoons chopped fresh oregano, divided
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary, divided
Ground pepper to taste
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
2 tablespoons minced shallot
½ teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
3 tablespoons chardonnay
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon chicken stock
Dough for one pizza (1 lb)
¾ cup shredded mozzarella cheese
2 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

2. Combine 1 teaspoon minced garlic, ½ teaspoon soy sauce, ½ teaspoon coarse salt, and 1 tablespoon olive oil in a small, shallow bowl. Add chicken, turning it over to coat it thoroughly, and marinate for about 15 minutes.

3. While chicken is marinating, mix together 2 teaspoons minced garlic, ½ teaspoon chopped fresh oregano, 1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary, ground pepper to taste, ½ teaspoon coarse salt, and 1 tablespoon oil in a medium bowl. Add the sliced potatoes and toss to coat thoroughly. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and place the potato slices on it in a single layer, without overlapping. Discard leftover potato marinade (do not pour over potatoes). Place potatoes in oven and cook for about 20 minutes, flipping over once, until tender and beginning to brown. Remove potatoes from oven and increase oven temperature to 450 degrees.

4. While potatoes are cooking, prepare a grill, and when hot, grill chicken until cooked through. Chill chicken in refrigerator until ready to top pizza.

5. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a medium nonstick saucepan over medium heat. Add minced shallot, 1 tablespoon garlic, and minced thyme. Cook, stirring, until tender and light brown, 5 to 7 minutes. Add ¼ teaspoon coarse salt, ground pepper to taste, wine, lemon, and chicken stock. Cook until reduced, turning heat to low if necessary to prevent scorching. Remove pan from heat and quickly whisk in 2 tablespoons butter.

6. Roll out pizza dough and place on baking pan or pizza stone. Spread garlic-shallot butter over dough, then cover with the shredded mozzarella. Add the chicken, 1 teaspoon rosemary, 1½ teaspoon oregano, and the potatoes. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until crust is browned. Sprinkle parsley over pizza and serve.

Serves: 4
Time: 90 minutes

PAN-FRIED LEMON-RICOTTA GNOCCHI

I’ve been wanting to try making my own pasta for a while now, but am basically too lazy/scared, so I use my lack of hardware as an excuse (I’m still waiting for Santa to bring me that KitchenAid pasta roller attachment). Gnocchi seems slightly more manageable, but it’s still a lot of work to boil and mash all those potatoes, and my few early attempts, back when I was just beginning to cook for myself on a regular basis, were less than inspiring (granted, I think I could do a lot better now, armed with slightly improved kitchen skillz and a perfect recipe). But when I saw this recipe for ricotta gnocchi at Steamy Kitchen and realized I’m out of excuses. The fact that the gnocchi were pan-fried all crispy and brown, instead of the pale soggy lumpen things gnocchi can sometimes be, was the final nail in the coffin. I had some extra ricotta in the fridge anyway, so I chalked it up to destiny.

I suppose that coffin metaphor might become all too apt if I start eating too much ricotta gnocchi. It occurred to me as I was cooking that it’s just basically lemon-flavored cheese fried in butter. Then I took my first bite and I didn’t care. This is fantastic stuff, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. Eat a small bowl every now and then, with a gigantic salad (or in our case, a big pile of roasted aspararagus) on the side and you will live a happy life. What’s more, the recipe takes hardly any time and requires zero special skills. (Can you mix things in a bowl? Mush them around with your fingers? Cut dough into pieces? Bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan? Oops, sorry, I started singing for a minute there.) Rolling the dough into ropes was about as hard as it got, and certainly that didn’t even require much precision; it was mostly cosmetic anyway. I’m sure you could cook this in ugly dollops and it would taste just as good. You’ll notice my gnocchi got somewhat big and square, and I still loved them. I don’t judge a book by its cover, or a lemony cheese ball by its shape or lack thereof.

I’d be interested in trying to actually serve the gnocchi mixed up with some vegetables, as seen on the Smitten Kitchen with pan-fried potato gnocchi (drool...it’s that photo of the gnocchi with the tomatoes and green beans and white beans in a warm pasta-saladlike treatment that made me want to make my own gnocchi in the first place). Not only would it taste great, but it would diminish the classy-version-of-State-Fair-cheese-curds guilty undertone I kept feeling while I ate this. But seriously, it's truly a magical recipe, the kind you (yes, you!) should try right away. Because mostly, I was too busy thinking (even though I can’t take credit for the recipe) “This is awesome! I’m a genius!” as I ate to really worry about anything except getting the next forkful to my mouth. And that is always a nice feeling.

Also, did you notice that my lemon obsession is continuing unabated?

P.S. June 2008: I cemented my genius reputation by making this again, this time tossing the gnocchi and its buttery sauce with blanched asparagus between steps 3 and 4 of the recipe. Bingo! The asparagus adds a new dimension of flavor (greenness!), while acting as a natural complement to the cheese and lemon. If possible, it was even more delicious than last time, and erased the I'm-eating-a-big-bowl-of-fried-cheese feeling. And it was really pretty. See, look!


1 cup whole-milk ricotta (if you use skim-milk ricotta, you may have to use more flour because the ricotta will be more watery)
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (plus extra for garnishing)
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon lemon zest (plus extra for garnishing)
1 teaspoon coarse kosher salt (or ½ teaspoon regular salt)
1 tablespoon minced parsley (plus extra for garnishing)
¾ cup all-purpose flour (spooned in and leveled)
¼ to ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
Black pepper to taste

1. Combine ricotta, ½ cup Parmesan, egg yolk, 1 teaspoon lemon zest, salt, and 1 tablespoon parsley in a large bowl. Mix well. Sprinkle half of the flour over the mixture and gently turn a few times with a spatula to incorporate it. Dump the mixture on a clean, lightly floured work surface. Sprinkle the remaining flour on top of the mixture and gently knead with your fingertips, just bringing the dough together until the flour is incorporated. (This should only take a minute or two; any longer and you will be overkneading.)

2. Divide the dough into four equal parts. Take each part and roll it into a long log, 1 inch in diameter. Cut each log into 1-inch-long pieces.

3. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the butter and olive oil. When butter is just lightly browned, add gnocchi in a single layer. Fry for 2 minutes, then flip them over. Sprinkle with red pepper flakes and fry for another 2 minutes. Taste one to see if it’s done—if you taste the flour, it needs to cook longer.

4. Serve with a sprinkling of lemon zest, Parmesan, parsley, and black pepper.

Serves: 2ish
Time: 30 minutes

PIZZA BIANCA WITH ARUGULA, BACON, AND MUSHROOMS

I’m on a roll in more ways than one—not only do I have a really great string of new recipes to share with you this week, but I’m well on my way to my goal of being able to eat a different kind of pizza every day of the week. Let’s see, in addition to my normal traditional tomato-sauce pizza, which I’ve honed to near-perfection after much practice, we’ve got the asparagus pizza, the butternut squash pizza, and a great improvisational pizza I occasionally throw together with pesto, tomatoes, mozzarella, and maybe some sausage. And now we can add…the bacon pizza.

Of course, bacon isn’t the focus of this dish (the recipe is from Cooking Light, after all), but that’s how I sold it to A: bacon pizza! With arugula and mushrooms and ricotta. And boy, those flavors go together just perfectly: creamy cheese, sweet onions and mushrooms (I really let those suckers get melty and caramelized on the stove, semi-accidentally but it was a stroke of genius I tell you), bitter greens, salty bacony bacon. I threw in some garlic, too, and it was a wise choice.

I just used Trader Joe’s pizza dough, so I haven’t replicated the crust recipe, but you can find the original instructions here. I was also a bit less fussy than Cooking Light about healthiness: I may have used three strips of bacon instead of two (they were sort of oddly stuck together, so I can’t be sure), and didn’t pause to make sure I was cooking the mushrooms and onion in just two teaspoons of bacon drippings, and I may have used just a tiny bit more cheese, and I did not slice my pizza into twelfths, and I damn well ate more than just one piece. Still, there were a fair amount of vegetables involved, enough to make a balanced meal out of a couple slices with maybe a small salad on the side. And it was easy and it was delicious.

Dough for one pizza crust (1 lb)
2 slices thick-cut bacon, diced
2 large garlic cloves, minced
½ cup thinly sliced white onion
½ pound whole white button mushrooms, quartered
½ teaspoon salt, divided
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, divided
1 tablespoon olive oil
½ cup ricotta cheese
2 cups baby arugula
⅓ cup shredded mozzarella cheese
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2. To prepare topping, cook bacon in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat until crisp. Remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate to drain.

3. Add garlic, onion, and mushrooms to bacon drippings in pan; cook until tender and browned and moisture evaporates, stirring occasionally, about 10–15 minutes. Season with ¼ teaspoon salt and ⅛ teaspoon pepper, and remove from heat.

4. Roll out dough and place on an oiled pizza pan or baking sheet. Drizzle with 1 tablespoon oil and sprinkle with remaining ¼ teaspoon salt and ⅛ teaspoon pepper. Place pan on lowest oven rack and bake for 10 minutes.

5. Remove pan from oven; spread ricotta as evenly as possible over crust, leaving a ½-inch rim around the edges. Arrange onion-mushroom mixture and arugula evenly over ricotta. Sprinkle with bacon, mozzarella, and Parmesan. Bake for 10 more minutes, or until crust is lightly browned. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Serves: 4
Time: 45 minutes

ROASTED ROOT VEGETABLES WITH SAUSAGE

This is one of the easiest and best improvisational dishes I’ve tried in a while. I just wish I’d thought of it first, but the credit goes to Not Eating Out in New York. So simple, yet so genius! I’ve often roasted a similar assortment of vegetables alongside a chicken, but it had never occurred to me that another, quicker-cooking meat like sausage would be an even easier way to round out the meal. (Plus, sausage and potatoes are a classic combination.) This versatile recipe is a great way to use whatever vegetables are in season at the market, especially in this early springtime when the asparagus and peas are slow in coming and the same root vegetables we’ve been eating all winter are still staring us in the face week after week. This meal bridges the gap: kind of wintery (hearty and roasty) but kind of springy (simple and colorful). And it’s incredibly versatile. I used a rainbow of different small potatoes, yams, carrots, and parsnips; I also had a pound of tricolor pearl onions getting old in my pantry, so I threw those in. The original recipe recommends adding grape tomatoes, which weren’t in season yet, so I skipped them, but I bet they would be great. I could also envision adding asparagus, green beans, zucchini, or squash to the mix, depending on the time of year.

I used chicken sausage—a kind from Trader Joe’s I hadn’t tried before, “spicy Italian with red wine and quattro formaggio.” The spiciness level was perfect—not overwhelming, but enough to balance out the sweetness of the vegetables—and the flavor was good, but the cheesy smell of the sausage was a little off-putting to me. I think I’d try a different kind next time, since there are so many out there to choose from, and each would impart a different quality to the dish.

The original recipe offers more precise timing directions, but I played fast and loose, just dumping everything in the pan and roasting until it looked like the right level of doneness to me. I’m rarely so devil-may-care with my cooking, but that’s the magic of this recipe, I guess. This is a keeper with a capital K. I think the best part was that it’s fun to eat, because each bite presented a different combination of flavors. I highly recommend eating a piece of sausage with a piece of sweet potato, and for the next forkful, a piece of potato with a big clove of garlic. Heaven!

1 pound small potatoes (red, Yukon Gold, fingerling, or a mix)
2 pounds assorted root vegetables (such as yams, carrots, parsnips, turnips, or beets)
1 onion, peeled and cut into wedges, or a handful of peeled pearl onions
4–5 whole fresh garlic cloves, peeled
1 teaspoon rosemary leaves
2–3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
4–5 fresh sausages (any kind)
A handful of grape tomatoes (optional)
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut vegetables down to 1-to-2-inch pieces of equal size. Mix potatoes, root vegetables, onion, garlic, rosemary, and salt and pepper to taste in a large baking dish. Coat with a drizzle of olive oil, cover with tin foil or a lid, and bake until tender, about 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, brown sausages on all sides in a pan or on a grill. Blot excess grease with paper towels and slice into 1-inch pieces. Remove baking dish from oven and arrange sausages and grape tomatoes (if using) atop the vegetables. Return to the oven for another 10–15 minutes, or until vegetables are browned. Toss with parsley and serve.

Serves: 4
Time: 1 hour

SALMON WITH LEMON-PEPPER SAUCE AND WATERCRESS-HERB SALAD

I don’t know what’s up with me lately—I’m craving lemons like crazy. I’ve always been a lemon fan (reverent pause here to contemplate lemon drops, lemonade, lemon meringue pie, lemon bars, and lemon curd), but lately it’s kicked into overdrive. Even coming into possession of an entire grocery bag full of Meyer lemons last month (because yes, I’m one of those obnoxious Californians with coworkers who have trees dripping with unwanted Meyer lemons in their backyards) only further fanned the flames of lemon-lust. This means that either (a) I’m turning into my mother, who is renowned for eating whole lemon wedges without blinking; or (b) it’s spring and there’s nothing springier than lemons, in flavor or color. (Also, they go great with asparagus, which is just coming into season.)

So when I paged through the March issue of Bon Appetit and saw this recipe for lemon-marinated salmon topped with a lemon-dressed salad and a lemon-pepper crème fraiche sauce, my eyes may have briefly bugged out of my head. I already had crème fraiche in my refrigerator, having made lemon chicken just a few nights before (see, I told you I’m lemon-obsessed), so it seemed like destiny. And indeed, this was a perfect recipe for spring—light, easy, prettily pink and green. It wasn’t quite the earth-shattering burst of awesome I’d hoped for (I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as the lemon chicken, for instance), but I’d definitely make it again, especially since I didn’t follow the (somewhat awkwardly written) recipe 100% perfectly the first time: I remembered to buy shallots, but then completely forgot to include them in the marinade, which made me sad. And I couldn’t find watercress or fresh tarragon, so I just used spring-mix salad greens with the dill. That part tasted just dandy to me, but I still would be curious to try it with the watercress. (Tarragon I can take or leave.)

I do have to admit that while I was eating, I kept thinking, “This isn’t nearly lemony enough.” Meanwhile, A kept making a pucker face. I took a bite of his food and realized I’d given him all the salad from the bottom of the bowl, where the oil and lemon juice had pooled. Next time, I’ll take that part!

2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons olive oil, plus extra for brushing
2 tablespoons chopped shallot
3 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons lemon juice, divided
1 teaspoon lemon zest, divided
1 cup crème fraiche
6 (6-ounce) salmon fillets
1½ cups (lightly packed) watercress leaves and small sprigs
¼ cup small fresh dill sprigs
¼ cup fresh tarragon leaves
Fleur de sal or sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
6 lemon wedges

1. Whisk honey, 1 tablespoon olive oil, shallot, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, and ½ teaspoon lemon zest in a glass baking dish large enough to hold all the salmon fillets in a single layer. Add salmon fillets and turn to coat them with the marinade. Cover and chill 15 minutes to 1 hour, turning salmon occasionally.

2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with foil and brush it with olive oil. Transfer the salmon fillets, with some marinade still clinging to them, to the baking sheet. Roast until salmon is just opaque in the center, about 14 minutes.

3. While salmon bakes, whisk crème fraiche, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and ½ teaspoon lemon zest in a small bowl. Season with salt and a generous amount of pepper.

4. Meanwhile, toss watercress leaves and sprigs, dill sprigs, tarragon leaves, remaining 2 teaspoons lemon juice, and remaining 2 teaspoons olive oil in a medium bowl. Season with fleur de sal (or sea salt) and pepper.

5. Place 1 salmon fillet on each of six plates. Top with watercress salad. Drizzle with lemon-pepper sauce and garnish with lemon wedges. Serve with additional sauce on the side.

Serves: 6
Time: 45 minutes to 1½ hours, depending on how long you marinate

HOT CROSS BUNS

I know I’m too late for Easter, but didn’t Easter take everyone by surprise this year? According to my uncle the pastor, this year was the earliest that Easter will occur in our lifetimes—the next March 23 Easter will be in 2180—so if you were feeling harried about it, you had good reason. Just do yourself a favor and put these on your list to make next year. Or, heck, just make them now, because these spiced, raisiny, gently sweet buns really should be eaten more than once a year.

I must be in a nostalgic mood, because pre-Easter I suddenly became obsessed with the need to make hot cross buns, one of the few homemade foods I associate with the holiday besides ham and hard-boiled eggs (I’m mainly a fan of the Easter candies—oh, Cadbury eggs and mini-eggs, and Whoppers Robin Eggs, you complete me!), but one lodged mainly in my childhood—I’m not sure when I last ate one, but it seems at least 5 years ago. I’d thought I had my mom’s recipe tucked away somewhere, but when the day before Easter rolled around, I realized I was mistaken and scrambled online to see if any bloggers had a tried-and-true recipe to offer. It turns out hot cross buns aren’t quite as popular as I had imagined; they seem to be mainly a British (and Australian) phenomenon. Thanks to the awesome Food Blog Search, however, I managed to find a few options and at last settled on this one, from Emeril Lagasse via A Mingling of Tastes. This is where food blogs come in handy, because the original recipe is slightly insane. As most of the Food Network site commenters note, it calls for way too little flour in the dough (resulting in sticky goo that’s impossible to roll and manipulate as described) and way too much milk in the icing, and yields far more than the 12 rolls it claims to. Thanks to A Mingling of Tastes, I was amply forewarned about these problems (though I panicked and overcompensated with too much flour, probably 4½ cups, and my dough was a bit too stiff, and instead of getting 1 or even 1½ dozen, I got something like 30 rolls out of it, which I hastily had to pawn off on A’s and my coworkers before they got too stale). A Mingling of Tastes also suggested a heaping ½ teaspoon cardamom, which I happily embraced, because I adore cardamom and find it wildly underused; and adding ginger, allspice, and cinnamon to the mix, which I’m so glad I did. I also recalled reading that traditional hot cross bun recipes often involve candied citrus peel (yuck), and another recipe I’d seen on some other site had added orange zest instead, which sounded tasty, so I went for it and I’m so glad I did. Basically, despite the many weirdnesses of the recipe and my possible screw-ups (besides the extra flour thing, I got lazy and didn’t follow Emeril’s detailed instructions for rolling the dough into buns, and my frosting was a little runny, making my crosses more like squiggles), these hot cross buns were (sorry, mom) the best I’ve had—with the citrus and the spice, the flavor was just so delicious and they weren’t too sweet. The better to eat more Easter candy!

P.S. Also, I got to use my new silicon pastry brush, an early birthday gift, to brush on the beaten egg wash. It was so simple and easy to clean—I joyfully threw away my clumpy, oily, real-bristle one.

1 envelope (¼ ounce, or 2¼ teaspoons) dry yeast
¾ cup sugar
1½ cups warm milk (about 110 degrees F)
1 stick (½ cup) of butter, melted
1 egg
½ cup raisins
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon orange zest
3½ to 4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 large egg, beaten
1 cup powdered sugar
1–3 tablespoons milk

1. Combine the yeast, sugar, and milk in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook. Beat on low speed for 1 minute. Add the butter, egg, and raisins. Mix for 1 minute. Add the salt, spices, orange zest, and 3½ cups flour. Beat on low speed until all the flour is incorporated, about 1 minute. Then, beat at medium speed until the mixture forms a ball, leaves the sides of the bowl, and climbs up the dough hook. If the dough seems too wet and sticky, add up to another ½ cup of flour (or as needed).

2. Using your hands, form the dough into a smooth ball. Lightly oil a large bowl with the vegetable oil, place the dough in the bowl, and turn it to oil all sides. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside in a warm, draft-free place until it doubles in size, about 1 hour.

3. Remove the dough from the bowl and invert it onto a lightly floured surface. Pat the dough into a rectangle about ¾ inch thick. Roll up the dough, beginning with the long side and stopping after each full turn to press the edge of the roll firmly into the flat sheet of dough to seal. Tuck and roll so that any seams disappear into the dough. Cut the dough into 1-inch pieces and roll each piece into a smooth, round ball. (If you’re really lazy like me, you can just remove the dough from the bowl, pinch off 1-inch pieces, and roll them into balls.)

4. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the rolls on the baking sheet, ½ inch apart. With a pastry brush, spread the beaten egg evenly over the rolls. Cover rolls with plastic wrap and set aside in a warm, draft-free place until they double in size, about 1 hour.

5. While rolls are rising for the second time, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. When oven is hot, bake rolls until lightly brown, about 25 to 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool slightly on a rack.

6. In a mixing bowl, combine the powdered sugar and 1 tablespoon milk. Mix until smooth. Add additional milk as needed until icing reaches desired consistency (but remember, if you want to pipe it in a cross shape, it will need to be fairly thick—otherwise it’ll turn into more of a glaze). Ice rolls with frosting in the shape of a cross. Serve warm (leftover rolls can be reheated for 20 seconds in the microwave).

Yields: 1 to 2 dozen
Time: 3½ hours

ASIAN DUMPLING SOUP

Dudes! I love, love, love dumplings. A and I have been known to visit our local Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant and consume a meal consisting entirely of momos—steamed veggie momo appetizer, pan-fried chicken or lamb momo entrees. I get a little pouty at our favorite sushi restaurant if there are no gyoza out on the little boats that carry food around the bar. I’d like to try making my own dumplings sometime, but I don’t know why it never occurred to me to check out Trader Joe’s frozen dumpling offerings in the meantime. I guess because…what would I do with them? Dumplings for dinner is fine for the occasional eating-out treat, but it would make me feel like a college student to sit down to a big bowl of convenience-food dumplings at home. But dumplings floating in homemade chicken broth chock-full of wholesome, colorful veggies? Sign me up!

I am a fan of many Asian soups, from udon to pho to won-ton to tom kha gai, and while it’s not authentic to any one cuisine, this one sort of reminded me of all of my favorite restaurant versions at once. But unlike eating in a restaurant, I could adapt it however I liked. Usually it drives me crazy to read Epicurious comments from people who modify the recipe so much it bears no resemblance to the original: “I substituted lime for the lemon, pork for the chicken, and spinach for the arugula, then added some peanut butter and Fontina cheese. It was great!” But after I scrolled through the comments on this recipe as it was originally published in Gourmet, it did seem that this was a flexible, forgiving soup that might benefit from a bit of dressing up. Taking the advice of many cooks who thought the original was on the bland side, I added some garlic and fresh ginger, and a few red-pepper flakes for spiciness. A hates regular frozen peas, so I used fresh sugar-snap peas instead—I love them, and I figured they were big enough for him to avoid if he wanted, though he ate them happily. I though the soup was sufficiently salty already, but A drizzled some soy sauce on his bowl before eating, and also commented that chili sauce, like Sriracha, might be good with it, too (he likes the salt and spice, that boy). Thinking wistfully of pho (there’s only one Vietnamese restaurant in Pasadena; its sign says, “The only Vietnamese restaurant in Pasadena!”), I sprinkled some cilantro on my serving and thought it was a great addition.

We used Trader Joe’s frozen pork gyoza, which were fabulous (I’ve got the chicken variety sitting in the freezer right now, so you can bet I’ll be making this recipe again soon, so I can compare them). The original recipe called for 3 cups of cabbage, which I gamely went along with even though I don’t like cabbage. It was fine, but there was a bit too much for me, so in the future I’ll only use 2 cups. I’d also love to try totsoi or baby bok choi leaves instead. I used a mixture of shiitake and cremini mushrooms—I got the shiitake at the farmers’ market and they were gorgeous, but at $4 for about a cup, I needed to supplement them with a cheaper mushroom. Both kinds worked fine.

In short: I highly recommend this recipe. It’s quick and easy (except for all the vegetable-chopping; I’m so bad at julienning carrots, but can’t bring myself to buy the bagged shredded kind; someone buy me a mandoline already!), it tastes great, and you can do just about anything you want to it without messing it up. But mainly, you get to eat dumplings for dinner.

Update, October 2015: You know what's an excellent replacement for peas here? Shelled edamame! 

1 (16-ounce) package frozen Asian dumplings. such as potstickers or gyoza (about 20 to 24)
5 cups low-sodium (or homemade) chicken broth
2 cups thinly sliced Napa cabbage or other greens
2 cups thinly sliced shiitake mushroom caps (or another brown mushroom, such as cremini)
1 cup shredded or matchstick (1/8-inch thick) carrots
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger, or to taste
½ cup frozen peas or fresh snow peas or sugar-snap peas
½ cup chopped scallions
1 teaspoon Asian sesame oil
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
red pepper flakes, soy sauce, chili sauce, and/or cilantro to taste

1. Cook dumplings in a 6- to-8-quart pot of boiling unsalted water, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until cooked through, 5 to 8 minutes. Remote pot from heat and keep dumplings warm in hot water. (Or you can follow the package directions to pan-fry and steam the dumplings, if you like.)

2. While dumplings cook, bring chicken broth to a boil in a 4- to 6-quart heavy pot. Add cabbage, mushrooms, carrots, ginger, and garlic and boil, uncovered, stirring occasionally, 3 minutes. Add peas and cook 2 minutes. Stir in scallions, sesame oil, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes if desired, and boil until all vegetables are tender, about 1 minute.

3. Divide dumplings evenly among 4 soup bowls with a slotted spoon. Ladle soup over dumplings. Season with soy sauce, chili sauce, or cilantro if desired.

Serves: 4
Time: 30 minutes