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Author: Livia N

Pepping for a longish trip – clearing out perishables

Food list
tonight for dinner:

  • retrieve laundry
  • make bacon
  • 3 ounces of pasta
  • cook together: olive oil, onion, garlic, fried leeks, jalapeno pepper, kale, red pepper flakes, diced tomato
  • cook on the side: small yellow squash with Penzey’s Pasta Sprinkle (in pan with the bacon grease poured out)
  • stir into kale at the end: 2 sliced scallions, 1 roasted red pepper, crumbled bacon, 1/3c shredded parmesan cheese
  • freeze at least half of the kale/pasta as lunches
  • pop turkey meatballs in the freezer
  • put remains of beet/coconut milk soup in compost
  • pack
  • empty trunk of car

tomorrow for breakfast:

  • slice the last scallion and mix it with 1.5 ounces of cream cheese
  • microwave/toast bagel
  • while making up all the rest of the collard greens (kenyan style)
  • freeze half the greens on top of the leftover rice as a lunch
  • do dishes
  • vacuum, scoop litter, fill up extra food bowl for Tika, take everything that won’t melt to the car on the way to work

food list

food I have
Protein
chicken breast of dubious vintage
roast beef from weekend before last
chicken stock (needs to be boiled and put in a new container)
1/2 slice bacon (yes, there’s more in the freezer, but that’s what is thawed)

Produce
roasted garlic (1 1/2 heads)
roasted tomatoes (2/3 cup)
container with the seeds and juice from the tomatoes I roasted
roasted red peppers in their own juice (1-2 peppers’ worth)
fried leeks
fresh cilantro
1 whole coconut
muhammara
hot peppers (mostly green jalepenos)
1 small leek
bulb of fennel
3-4 leaves of kale
5 little yellow squashes and 1 medium
carrots
6 potatoes
1 delicata squash

Bread
Nope, I ate all the bread. Well, there ate tortillas and the bagels in the freezer, but those don’t spoil, so they don’t ever count.

Meals
Well, I was going to ask you all for recipes that would combine the winter squash and the fennel, but then I came across this recipe for delicata with spiced pecans and dried cranberries (I’ll need to acquire some cranberries for that plan.)… but don’t let that stop you from offering suggestions anyway. Especially for the fennel.

Thursday, October 2
pasta with the rest of the kale and the medium yellow pepper. Also turkey meatballs from the freezer. And some lemon juice. Huh – I didn’t notice lemons when I made this list, but there are usually some hiding out in my fridge… if not, I’ll find out how important they are to the recipe. Also nab some more of those jalepenos from my neighbors that had been on the bush long enough to turn red; those are awesome. Ooo… maybe I shall put roasted tomatoes in this.

Friday, October 3
Make hash from roast beef and potatoes. Also add fried leeks, roasted garlic, and two jalepeno peppers.

BUY LETTUCE – it’s on sale at my grocery until Friday. Can I just mention how much it bothers my that it is a physical impossibility to stock up on lettuce when it is on sale? I cry my bitter tears of woe.

Saturday, October 4
Harry Potter’s naked bum! Er, I mean, I’ll be eating out. At Red Lobster.

Sunday, October 5
breakfast: make more awesome cream cheese with roasted red peppers and roasted garlic. I am so glad this will be my last batch of the peppers because ever since I perfected the technique it has been very difficult not to just eat it ALL RIGHT NOW! Nom!

Food List

Food I have
Protein
chicken breast of dubious vintage
roast beef from weekend before last
chicken stock (needs to be boiled and put in a new container)
1/2 slice bacon (yes, there’s more in the freezer, but that’s what is thawed)

Produce
roasted garlic (1 1/2 heads)
roasted tomatoes (2/3 cup)
container with the seeds and juice from the tomatoes I roasted
roasted red peppers in their own juice (1-2 peppers’ worth)
fried leeks
fresh cilantro
1 whole coconut
muhammara
hot peppers (mostly green jalepenos)
1 small leek
bulb of fennel
3-4 leaves of kale
5 little yellow squashes and 1 medium
carrots
6 potatoes
1 delicata (I think) squash

Bread
Nope, I ate all the bread. Well, there ate tortillas and the bagels in the freezer, but those don’t spoil, so they don’t ever count.

Meals
Well, I was going to ask you all for recipes that would combine the winter squash and the fennel, but then I came across this recipe for delicata with spiced pecans and dried cranberries… but don’t let that stop you from offering suggestions anyway. Especially for the fennel.

Thursday, October 2
pasta with the rest of the kale and the medium yellow pepper. Also turkey meatballs from the freezer. And some lemon juice. Huh – I didn’t notice lemons when I made this list, but there are usually some hiding out in my fridge… if not, I’ll find out how important they are to the recipe. Also nab some more of those jalapenos from my neighbors that had been on the bush long enough to turn red; those are awesome. Ooo… maybe I shall put roasted tomatoes in this.

Friday, October 3
Make hash from roast been and potatoes. Also add fried leeks, roasted garlic, and two jalapeno peppers.

BUY LETTUCE – it’s on sale at my grocery until Friday. Can I just mention how much it bothers my that it is a physical impossibility to stock up on lettuce when it is on sale? I cry my bitter tears of woe.

Saturday, October 4
Harry Potter’s naked bum! Er, I mean, I’ll be eating out. At Red Lobster.

Sunday, October 5
breakfast: make more awesome cream cheese with roasted red peppers and roasted garlic. I am so glad this will be my last batch of the peppers because ever since I perfected the technique it has been very difficult not to just eat it ALL RIGHT NOW! Nom!

Delicata and spiced pecans and dried cranberries
I’ll need to acquire some cranberries for that plan.

Roman Cooking – Meatballs, Kale with Poached Eggs

*note: this entry was never finished, but it has some fun recipes nonetheless, so here’s the partial thing*

So last weekend I had people over for a workshop on Roman Cooking. Here are the recipes we got through (translations from the Flower & Rosenbaum translation of Apicius:

Meatballs?

Isicia Omentata
liber II (Sarcoptes), i (isicia), 7

pulpam concisam teres cum medulla siligine * in vino infusi. piper, liquamen, si velis, et bacam myrtae extenteratum simul conteres. pusilla isicia formabis, intus nucleis et pipere positis. involuta omento subassabis com caroeno.

Forcemeat Sausages
II (The Meat-Mincer), i (forcemeat), 7

Chop up meat and pound with white bread without crust which has been steeped in wine. At the same time pound pepper, liquamen, and, if you like, seeded myrtle-berry. Make little forcemeat balls, inserting pine kernels and pepper-corns. Wrap in sausage-skin and cook gently in caroenum.

Right – so that sounds nothing like meatballs at all, does it? Well originally this was just a step to create the isicia that a whole other recipe called for – only we got distracted by the yumminess and ate all the meatballs plain – so I figured there had to be a meatball recipe somewhere in the book, and this was the closest I found.

When researching this recipe on the internet (hee!), I even found one guy who uses this recipe to make hamburgers. So those sausage casings the recipe is named after? Let’s forget about those. And I didn’t stick peppercorns into the center because if they were in another dish, I thought it might be too much of a texture surprise than if they were standing alone.

Right, so, what did we do?

I put on some wine to reduce by 1/3 = caroenum. And I dunked 3 or 4 slices of bread (crust cut off) into the wine and then squoze them out. The squishy bread was mushed in with roughly 2 pounds of 80%lean ground beef. We pounded (with a mortar and pestle because why not go all out?) some pepper and some dried elderberries (because I didn’t have myrtle and it seemed no fun to just do pepper), and then we added some fish sauce to turn it into a paste. Added that to the meat/bread mixture. And then we made teensy tiny meatballs (1/2″ diameter) and tucked a pine nut into each one.

I preheated the oven to 350F, put the tray of meatballs in the oven, and then poured in just barely enough of the reduced wine to mostly cover the bottom of the tray. Roughly 15 minutes (untimed) later, we had some of the tastiest meatballs ever.

~*~

And then I alternated with a vegetable – Kale with poached eggs

Patinam ex rusticis, sive tamnis sive sinapi viridi sive cucumbere sive cauliculis
Liber IV (pandecter), ii (patinae piscium holerum pomorum), 7

item facies: si volueris, substernes pulpas piscium vel pullorum.

** #6 – Aliter patina de asparagis: adicies in mortario asparagorum praecisuras, quae proiciuntur, teres, suffundes vinum, colas. teres piper, ligusticum, coriandrum viride, satureiam, cepam vinum, liquamen et oleum. sucum transferes in patellam perunctam, et, si volueris, ova dissolves ad ignem, ut obliget. piper minutum asperges .

Patina of wild herbs, black byrony, mustard plant, cucumber, or cabbage
book IV (many ingredients), ii (patinae of fish, green vegetables, and fruit), 7

Prepare in the same way, and if you wish add fish fillets or chicken meat. (So this book and another agree that this recipe should come after the Patella with horse-parsley, but I saw no reason why the recipe directly above it wouldn’t work as well. So here’s the recipe above, too)

#6 – Asparagus patina, another method: Put in the mortar asparagus tips, pound, add wine, pass through the sieve. Pound pepper, lovage, fresh coriander, savory, onion, wine, liquamen, and oil. Put puree and spices into a greased shallow pan, and if you wish break eggs over it when it is on the fire, so that the mixture sets. Sprinkle finely ground pepper over it and serve.

So here’s what we did –

Since it seemed a drying shame to use dried onions, I diced the onion first and put it in the skillet with 2 teaspoons of olive oil.

When they were just starting to caramelize, I added 3-4 big leaves worth of kale, cut thinly in a chiffionade (cause I wasn’t turning it into a paste, that’s for sure).

After a few seconds, I splashed a decent quantity (1/4 cup?) of fish sauce into the pan and let it cook down.

When the kale was bright green and a little relaxed but still perky, I added the pounded spice paste (pepper, dried lovage, cilantro, and powdered savory, mixed into a paste with wine), gave it a quick stir to distribute everything, and cracked three eggs over the top. I turned the heat down a bit and covered the pan to let the eggs poach.

When the egg whites were solid and the yolks were pinking up, but still a little runny, I finagled it all onto a plate mostly together and still looking pretty. I topped with a grind of pepper and a sprinkle of salt. Om nom nom!

(Here is someone else’s reconstruction of the asparagus one)
~*~

back to meat – I set up for a beef roast

Tinto

I swanned into my old college library, flamboyantly (and possibly unnecessarily) saved the day, and then I absconded with [redacted]. We went back to my place and talked about sundries and nothings.

But the reason we were getting together was for Center City Restaurant Week and our reservations at Tinto – OMG! We ended up not talking too much at the restaurant because we were having way too much fun eating. And since we shared everything, including the cocktail but not the desserts, I’ll just list everything we had (it’s a Basque tapas restaurant).

Cocktail

Mairritze: Leblon Cachaca, muddled mint, lime, blood orange

First Course

Le Moulis: served with thinly sliced tart green apple, a square of quince jelly, a dab of artisanal honey, and a small spot of powdered hot red pepper.

Jamon Serrano: Just prosciutto. Well, okay, not just – we had thin flatbreads and baguette slices, and it came with a delicious egg salad. But it was really an excuse to indulge in prosciutto. Also, it was good with the apples that came with the cheese.

Montaditos de Panceta: pork belly, honey laquer, shaved apples. It was pork. It was fat. It was salty and sweet and greasy and I was so glad it was on a thin slice of baguette because otherwise its sexy juices would have been lost, and I’d have had to lick the plate. We thought this was going to be the best thing all night.

Montaditos de Pato: duck confit, black cherry, bleu de basque spread – Guh! We were wrong – the food just keeps getting better. Crispy skin, sexy duck meat – and the cherry! Okay, so I went first, and since the cherry was out to the side, I ate that off first – and it was shockingly juicy and tart. My dining companion, however, smooshed her duck a bit and then split the cherry so that she could spread it over the duck… the flavors were delightfully complimentary. But really – the duck! I love duck! I have eaten more than my fair share of the duck of the world (and shall continue to do so), and this was right up there.

Brochetas de Pollo: chicken, garbanzo puree, truffle jus, thyme marinade. They don’t mention the grapes, and they really should. Each little skewer alternated chicken, grape, chicken grape – and they were all seasoned and grilled together. Grilled grapes (when seasoned and all juicy from the chicken) are amazing. The garbanzo puree (thinner than your average hummus, so I’ll forgive them their fancipants) gave it a smoother, more filling, mouth feel and the truffle jus… well, this was the first time I have been impressed by anything truffle. It was like the essence of outdoor grilling, but there in a pool on the plate.

Second Course

Moules Basquaise: mussels & chorizo in sauce basquaise. This little bit of mussel stew had us sending for two more mini dishes of bread so that we could properly appreciate the tomato-based sauce. Lovely, tender (naked) mussels, but I would expect nothing less. It nurtured all of my fond childhood memories of mussels and it made my mouth all tingly with just a nice warmth of spicy hot.

Pulpo: spanish octopus, confit potato, piquillo pepper paint, lemon powder. I totally nabbed the slightly burny tentacle on top. I have gotten so used to fancy restaurants doing elaborate presentations to undo the chewiness of octopus that I was surprised to find this one still a bit chewy… and yet also surprisingly, that didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment at all. The pepper paint really was just a schmear across the plate as if it had been spread with a paintbrush, but MMmmm tasty. And the lemon powder straight was a bit like a pixie stick, and you wouldn’t think it would work, but it really perked up the dish and complimented the squishy seafood nicely. Also, mollusk pride!

Brochetas de Gambas: shrimp, chorizo, grape tomato, espelette chile. Whole shrimps – seasoned, on a skewer so that they wrapped around and has a tomato and tiny pieve of chorizo nestled between the head and tail on the skewer. I couldn’t figure out how to eat it together at all, though, so I had a tomato/chorizo skewer and then a gnawed into the shrimp separately. And I got my dining companion’s shrimp head as well. It had very tasty brains. I did my best to eat the exoskeleton in yummy, crunchy bites right along with the rest of the shrimp – it make me happy, so I figure it was the right thing to do. This was the dish that finally ended up with me having a greasy spot on my shirt… but I had been doing really well up until then.

Merluza en Salsa Verde: sea bass, cockles, salsa verde. So this was the only sad note of the evening. Since we had a 10:30pm reservation (since I didn’t know I’d be sneaking out sick, and because I only made the reservation one or two days ahead on restaurant week), they brought out all of our second course at once (whereas the first course had trickled in as prepared)… or it was because it was all seafood and took about the same amount of time to prepare. Either way, by the time we got to this plate, it was no longer piping hot. Only the cockles really suffered, but while I had popped one in at the beginning and it was a buttery little morsel I had to dig out with my tongue will all appropriate sexual metaphors, but the time we really devoted our attention to it, they were just little chilled seafood bits. The sea bass, however, did not suffer. It was tasty and flaky and had a lovely brown seasoned crust on top. We used up the last of our flatbreads on this.

Dessert

Gateaux Basque: traditional basque cake, pastry cream, black cherries. This was my dining companion’s dessert. She seemed to like it. And even though the cherries looked like exactly the same ones as were on the duck, she said they tasted completely different (not tart, but very sweet), so I guess they had two separate marinades.

Bananas y Azafran: chocolate cake, caramelized bananas, saffron crema. It was more like chocolate fudge. Smooth, silky, and devastatingly dense. And they didn’t spare the saffron in making the crema, you could clearly tasty the iodine, and that helped clear the palate a bit. And the bananas… my only complaint was that there were only three slices, but it all blended together and added the sweetness, which the cake alone hadn’t needed.