Sunny Days, Sunny Thoughts

Once in a while I'll be at a grocery check-out line and a girl with scars on her forearms will give me this knowing look of solidarity and I realize my food scars are being mistaken for self-mutilation. It's an awkward situation. I feel like saying no no that's actually from the convection oven at this one place I worked at, where everyone was taller, and this is from that time I left the tongs on the gas range and forgot they were hot, and that one... the list goes on. Anyway, I don't say any of these things. I just smile and hope she won't hurt herself anymore. I'm baking biscotti in my ridiculously sunny kitchen today with a breeze so nice I have to stop and acknowledge it every few minutes, and I'm wishing I could pack up a little cookie package for all the people I've met who ever needed to be comforted and weren't. Here is a biscotti recipe that will never fail. You must dunk these in coffee or wine, though, as they are of the tougher persuasion.


Spiced Chocolate & Espresso Biscotti
250 g flour
250 g sugar (I use half caster, half brown)
2 beaten eggs
75g chopped dark chocolate
75g chopped nuts
50g crushed espresso beans
pinch each of
salt
cinamon
chili pepper

Preheat the oven to 375

Mix everything together, except the eggs, which you will beat in a separate bowl with a bit of orange zest or vanilla extract, whichever you have or prefer.

Use your hands to bring it all together and form a dough. Try to distribute the nuts and chocolate evenly (but no fuss). If you have a hard time with the dough, put a few tablespoons of olive oil on your hands or in the mix.

Divide your dough, shaping two logs on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Your logs should be about an inch thick. Brush them with a little bit of milk and sprinkle an little extra sugar on top.

Bake the logs for 15 minutes letting them spread, but they should still be soft in the middle. Take them out and lower the oven to 325. Let them cool a little so you can handle them and cut them to your desired size. Arrange them all on the baking sheet again and bake for 10-15minutes more on each side. Watch them though, some ovens will burn your biscotti really fast.

I'm taking a plate down for the ladies working at the hair salon I live above. There's always a pot of coffee on down there...

Post Script: I went over to Sarah's to hang out with the little ones and look what I came home to! I feed the stylists, they hook me up with hair products. This is a functional relationship...

Why Not?

Why not get off the bus and go see a show you know you'd regret missing? Why not tell that old friend exactly what it was that hurt you? Learn the words to a song in a language you don't speak? Eat pasta at 10pm because you were working till 7 and it takes a while to get dinner going? I did all of those things in the last 72 hours and i still managed to make it through most of my to-do list as well. What's more, I'm gonna make a blog post even though I don't have very good pictures. I highly recommend you go for it as well, whatever it is you feel like doing. What's the worse thing that could happen? At least you'll learn something, right? That's a pretty good deal if you ask me! Here's a delicious work-week pasta dish that goes really well with an episode of your favorite food-network show. So check dinner off your list and put your feet up. Life is good.


Monday Night Rigatoni

450g dry rigatoni

400g ground beef
1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
10 crackers
1 egg
olive oil
1 can chopped tomatoes
2 tsp each of:
salt
pepper
ground ginger
ground mustard
paprika
chili powder

Food process the crackers, onion and garlic together. In a medium bowl, using your hands, knead together the beef, cracker mix, beaten egg and all dry spices for a few minutes until mixture looks homogeneous. Then wet your fingers and shape as many meatballs as the mix will allow. Freeze however much you don't want to cook.

Fry meatballs in olive or canola oil until browned all around and add a can of chopped tomatoes (or half depending on how much of your meat you froze) and cook on medium high until the tomato juice reduces a bit to sauce consistency. If you've got an open can of tomato paste you can use a bit of that to thicken the sauce, too.

Boil pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Throw it all together, add a hand-full of your favorite fresh green (mine is arugula), some shaved parmigiano, and press play.

Newness

This is Pipp. He is the newest addition to my family. he started out really small and has just moved into his bigger tin can. I have a feeling he's gonna need even more space soon. I've been trying to incorporate a lot of herbs into what I cook these days just to keep up with the ones I have in my kitchen. Soon I'm gonna have to resort to pesto-making, but it's still under control. Sweet basil in a savory crepe with cracked pepper and pecorino romano, which the cheese lady didn't let me pay for? So I went home for lunch today, you can probably tell. It was indulgent and brilliant.

All Purpose Crepes

2 eggs (get real farm eggs they're delicious)
1 1/4c good milk
1c sifted flour (a.p. or pastry will do)
pincha salt
1tsp sugar
2 tbsp melted butter or other oil you like

Mix the above ingredients really really well. If you feel like cleaning a blender, you could use that but I just used my big big whisk and burned some calories. The consistency should ideally be like heavy cream. If it's like custard, you need more milk. You want a runny batter with no clumps.

Chill covered for about an hour. I made mine in the morning before I went to work and used it at lunch. That worked just fine.

In a non-stick crepe pan/frying pan that has been lightly oiled on medium heat, cook 1/4c batter at a time. Swirl the pan to get a thin and even(ish) crepe but don't fuss. You'll wreck a few and get the hang of it. cook for a minutes or so per side, and use your own judgment for doneness, pans and batters vary, of course. If you're like me and you cooked way too many crepes, cook the ones you're not eating a little less and wrap and refrigerate them. Then when you want to eat one, you can heat it on the same pan and it won't brown too much.
So so good. I promise.

I couldn't resist. I had a sweet one with brown sugar and lemon, too.

Short Shorts and White Wine

I'm still digesting this meal. It was good. It was really really good. Is that bragging? I don't mean it that way. Considering how long it's been since my last post, I'm surprised at my ambition for thinking I can manage to bang this out before heading out to watch the Canucks game (but between us, I really only care about the final quarter so we still have time to hang out here). It's been so lovely and beautiful here these days. Sun, wind, just enough of everything. My life (other than work) has been filled with music. In fact I noticed as I squeezed a lemon on this fish that I have guitar blisters. Stinging but sweet. What can I say about this dish, other than the honest truth, which is that I came up with the idea while drinking an after-work glass of pinot grigio, some of which I spilled on my shorts... It was an experiment and it worked out. What more could I ask for?


Tilapia Turbans with Chorizo and Sweet Pepper Filling

2 fillets of tilapia
3" piece of chorizo sausage
1/2 red bell pepper
2 fresh lemon (juice and zest of)
4 tbsp white wine
salt pepper dill
olive and garlic oil

Clean and pat dry the fillets of tilapia and with a super sharp knife, cut each fillet first in half and then slice lengthwise to make thin sheets of tilapia. These will roll more easily than whole chubby pieces. Drizzle with olive oil and lemon juice. Season with salt, pepper, dill, and lemon zest. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350degrees.

Food-process chorizo and red bell pepper with juice and zest of half of your lemon, until you have a course meal. Quickly saute this in a frying pan with a tablespoon of olive oil for a few minutes, just to marry the flavors.

Drizzle a bit of garlic oil (or olive oil) in a small cast iron pan. Roll each piece of fish into a turban and fill the middle with the chorizo mixture. Tie each roll with a piece of twine or a long toothpick and arrange in the oiled pan. Pour white wine around the rolls and cover with a piece of foil.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until the fish is opaque and looks cooked. Finish uncovered for a few minutes, just to get a little bit of colour.

Serve with wild rice or a green salad and whatever white wine you were drinking while you were cooking! I'm off to watch the game!

Look ma, no fork.

Nothing says Spring like eating with your hands. After the eight month freeze, people in Canada start acting a little funny: Oh, it's four degrees above freezing, you say? Hold on, let me get my shorts and sandals. Ten degrees with and overcast on a Tuesday? Let's hit the patio and get a bucket of Coronas at lunch. I'll admit it, I'm guilty of a little of the crazy. We woke up yesterday morning and Mina looked outside at the gray skies, birds chirping on the barren branches draped with torn plastic bags, preening their feathers of the spitting rain, the damp gray sidewalk littered with a crust of dirt and cigarette butts in the wake of melted snow banks, and commuters heading to work in their rain coats, umbrellas in hand, and she said, "It's beautiful outside." And I thought, "Yeah, it is, isn't it."

So, in that spirit. Why not kick off Spring (there are, literally, snow flakes outside the window, today, on April 5th) with fajitas?



Chipotle Ground Beef Fajitas with Guacamole

1lb lean ground beef (chuck works, but you could use ground sirloin if you're feelin classy)
1 red pepper, sliced
1 green pepper, sliced
2 onions, halved and sliced
1 to 5 dried chipotle peppers, ground (pick your poison: the more pepper the higher the flame)
3 tbsp cooking oil
1/2 C sour cream, for topping
1/2 C cheddar, grated for topping
3 diced jalapenos, for topping
1 diced tomato, for topping
6 to 10 corn fajitas, lightly toasted (use an open gas burner and tongs if you have them)

For the guacamole

2 ripe avocados, halved, pitted and crosshatched in their skins
1/2 a bunch of fresh cilantro, roughly chopped, stems and all
3 green onions, finely sliced horizontally
2 limes, juiced
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp chili powder (or mexicali spice mix)

Start by making your guac. Gently turn the cut avocado out of its skin with a tablespoon directly into a bowl and fold in (just as if you were taking care to preserve whipped egg whites, because you don't want your diced avocado to turn into mush) cilantro, lime juice, green onions, and salt to taste. Then top with the chili powder. My favourite is to use a micro grater to dust the top of the guac with a dried nacho chili - and yes, those are a real variety of pepper.

Put half the oil in a small cast iron (or non-stick) pan and turn the heat to high. In a second medium-sized pan, add the remaining oil and half of your onion and cook for three to four minutes, until onions are soft, then add ground beef and stir through.

By now, your small cast iron pan should be smoking hot. Toss in the red and green pepper and remaining onion. Shake the pan hard once or twice, then listen to the sizzle. Toss every half-minute for five minutes, while keeping an eye on the beef mixture. When your peppers have blackened at the edge, remove from heat (if they stick at all, flick or spray some water into the pan and shake loose). Continue to stir your beef until the moisture has cooked off, then salt, pepper and add the chipotle. Cook for another minute, then remove from heat. The rest is simple: spread all your separate ingredients on a platter and start the free-for-all. Also, if you've got some, serve this dish with hot sauce and cold beer.

Cheers!

Variations on a Theme

Once again though not much time has passed, it seems the whole order of the universe has shifted since my last post. It's officially spring now, which the Persian new year has kindly reminded me, though for the most part the whether refuses to acknowledge that. On the table these days are a bunch of hard, honest, and essential questions, pending decisions, possible travel, and of course as it always is with these things, so many possible variations. You can get yourself pretty tangled in thinking sometimes as your comfortable grip on things fades farther and farther away and out of reach. This is where food comes to the rescue. It fills your stomach, your mind, and your kitchen. Something about the smell of cooking in the house, a cutting board covered in scraps and a sink full of dishes forces you to stop asking questions even just for a few hours. So here are recipes for chorizo (two ways) to keep you busy. Take a break, you don't have to do everything at once.

Glazed Chorizo Tappas Style

150 g chorizo sausage
1/2 small clove garlic, crushed
1 tbsp honey
1tbsp balsamic vinegar/red wine
olive oil

Slice the chorizo and fry in olive oil until crisp and slightly darkened in colour (photo above). Drain all but about a tablespoon of the oil, add the garlic and cook for a minute. Turn the heat down and add the honey and vinegar/wine and cook on medium until reduced and glaze-like.

Chorizo Pizza

1/3 recipe pizza dough
sliced chorizo
sliced red pepper
hot peppers
sliced red onions
spinach
buffalo mozzarella

Prehead oven to the highest possible temperature.Oil a baking sheet, sprinkle with cornmeal (very important step), and place your thinly rolled out dough over it, pricking the surface with a fork several times. Brush olive oil over the dough and a bit of tomato paste if you like. Arrange the sliced toppings and slip in the oven. Pour yourself a glass of wine as your pie bakes, but careful, it takes minutes, so don't walk away.

Happy Thoughts

What helps you get through February? I guess this doesn't apply to you if you live in Australia, or somewhere where it's always sunny and beautiful. If you're like us and live elsewhere, though, you're gonnna need all your tricks in February. It's that time. You've already endured the rain and the snow and the wind, but it's not over yet. It's that month when every technical difficulty feels like a personal insult, and you're never more than two bad days away from an existential crisis. Last Friday was a particularly difficult one for me. A few things hadn't worked out and I felt totally defeated and unable to convince myself that things were alright. I happened to be with a friend who used to be a roommate, and instead of convincing me everything was ok, she just shoved me in her little kitchen and made me do what ultimately lifts me out of my blues... I guess what I'm saying is, hang in there. Spring, the end of the school year, outdoor markets, and picnic season are so close you can almost smell them. And for the time being, these cookies will make your place smell warm and happy and home-like. I promise.


Soft Almond Cookies (from Rachel Eats)

150g ground almonds
100g powdered sugar
zest of a small lemon (or 1/4tsp cardamom for a Persian variation)
1/4tsp almond extract
1 large egg (beaten)
handful of whole almonds
Extra powdered sugar for rolling

Preheat the oven to 350/180 degrees.

Mix dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the egg with the almonds extract and lemon zest. Add to the dry mixture and form a sticky (oh it will be sticky) dough. Dip your hands in extra sugar and shape walnut-sized balls and place an inch or so apart on a parchment lined baking sheet. Don't be shy on the powder for your hands, it's the only way to deal with this dough. When all your cookies are formed, make a deep indentation in the centre of each cookie with your little finger pressing almost all the way down. This is to help the cookies bake in the middle.

Bake on the middle rack for about 20 minutes or until the cookies are just slightly coloured. They will be soft out of the oven but harden as they cool so don't try to take them off the tin when they're hot. While they're soft, put an almond in the center, pressing gently to secure the nut in its place.

Enjoy with coffee, tea, or a glass of wine, and store in an air-tight tin.