beets & goat cheese

 

It seems like this has become such a hackneyed combination of late - in the past year it seemed like every restaurant we’ve visited has had a beet/goat cheese salad on their menu. But you know what? That’s because the flavors are PERFECT together.

Oddly enough, though, I don’t think I had ever combined them at home. We eat beets fairly frequently, since I discovered the glory of roasting them in olive oil until they get soft and caramelized, but we usually just eat them straight and blazingly hot, or mix them with other roasted vegetables. I also once made a beet salad from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook where they were marinated in black currant vinegar and mixed gently with walnuts and watercress, but somehow beet salad never made it into the regular home repertoire.

A few days ago, though, I was shopping for something to go with a steak from our freezer, and I noticed bunches of baby beets from one of the local farms. As I was picking out a bunch, I suddenly remembered the half-round of Bucherondin chevre lurking in our fridge - we had eaten some of it along with good bread and the shrimp gratin earlier in the week, but then run out of bread - and it’s much too good of a cheese to allow to spoil. So I picked up a head of redleaf lettuce as well, hauled my goodies up the hill and plopped the beets into a pan of water to simmer. Once they were fork-tender, I ran cold water over them and slipped the skins off, cut up the beets into thick slices and drizzled a little walnut oil over them. The chevre I cut into small chunks, which went into the bowl with the beets. Then I tossed the lettuce with a dressing of olive oil, Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar, and took it all to the table so we could compose our own salads.

It was a thing of beauty alongside the steak, with an Oregon Bordeaux-style wine (Cana’s Feast Bricco Two Rivers - delicious) and a good pan sauce. Why don’t I do this more often?

spiced sweet potato wedges

We had already decided to have hamburgers for dinner, one night last week. The plan was to get some sort of interesting cheese and a big salad, and some form of roasted sweet potatoes, which we love. At the last minute I remembered a post I’d seen on Smitten Kitchen a little while back, for sweet potato wedges tossed with an interesting sweet and hot spice mix. The premise was almost identical to my usual approach, which is to toss sweet potato chunks with olive oil, coarse salt, pepper and sometimes paprika or cumin. However, I adore coriander and fennel, so when I saw this recipe I was sold. I pulled up the post from work and read the recipe to J over the phone, and he got the spices ground up and the oven hot (to 425°) before I got home.

an old recipe new again

A million years ago (give or take a bit) I spent a few months in Italy as part of a geology course I was taking. We stayed in a tiny village in the Marche region, with occasional field trips elsewhere. We did most of our own cooking, under the supervision of our professors (one Italian and one American), and our diet was pretty repetitive: fresh rolls from the bakery down the road for breakfast, spread with chestnut jam; also cornflakes stirred into blueberry yogurt. Sandwiches for lunch, made from very hard rolls and very ripe pecorino (we referred to it as the Stinky Feet Cheese). Dinner was always, always pasta, but fortunately there was some variation in the toppings, many of which were really delicious. Some of my classmates put together a small recipe book, and I continued to make many of my pasta sauces from this collection for many years afterwards.

One of these sauces that was in my regular rotation was made up of sauteed eggplant mixed with sun dried tomatoes, chopped nuts and mascarpone cheese. It had a great nutty, savory taste and was a nice change from the endless red sauce/pesto rotation. As J and I started to phase out high glycemic foods from our diet I stopped making pasta for dinner as a regular thing, and the eggplant sauce disappeared from the repertoire.

Last week, though, as we were staring vacantly at grocery store produce with very little inspiration, we saw some eggplants that looked halfway decent, and J said, “What about that eggplant walnut sauce you used to make? What if we did it with meatballs?” And so we did.

maple-rosemary-horseradish glaze for short ribs (and post #100!)

I’ve already talked about Molly Stevens’ recipe for braised short ribs with porter, but I did leave one thing out when I made it before: the glaze. I really think I like short ribs best as a kind of stew, with everything mushed up in the pot together and served over noodles, but we thought it was worth a try to do the recipe in its entirety at least once.

The idea is, after you’ve done your braise, you arrange your short ribs in a single layer in a heavy pan, tuck the vegetables around the sides, then paint them with a glaze made of rosemary-infused maple syrup mixed with prepared horseradish (the recipe uses 3 Tbsp syrup to 1 Tbsp horseradish). The pan goes under the broiler until the glaze is glossy and caramelized. Then, finally, you can eat them.

Ethiopian beef tartare

I may have mentioned my deep and abiding love for the book Flatbreads & Flavors by Toronto-based husband-and-wife team Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It introduced us to cooking all sorts of ethnic cuisines that we might not have attempted, by making the recipes simple yet authentic. Each chapter has a limited number of recipes, but they fit together perfectly - there might be two different breads, a beef dish, a chicken dish, a vegetable and a condiment. So just from this one cookbook, you could make a feast from Georgia, the Middle East, India or Italy!

I had fallen in love with Ethiopian food from the first time I had it, at a restaurant in Minneapolis, of all places. It never occurred to me that you could make it at home - then I got this cookbook. When I made the chicken stew from it, with its simple combination of chicken, butter, cardamom, berbere paste and red wine, it was like an Ethiopian restaurant had opened in our kitchen. We’ve also made injera at home (with mixed success, frankly) and tibs wett. But our favorite go-to dish is definitely the partially-cooked beef tartare, kitfo lebleb. It’s fast, rich, and very very spicy.           

For this dish J defrosted a sirloin steak and chopped it very finely. You could certainly use ground meat but we’ve always preferred the texture of chopped. The original recipe calls for onions, but we usually leave them out. Adding mint is great if you have it, but I don’t think dried mint is a good substitute - leave it out if you don’t have fresh.

braising a brisket

On Sunday we did something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time - stayed home all day! We ventured out only to bring in the paper and fetch a bay leaf from the tree in the back yard. The morning was snowy and the rest of the day gray and uninteresting, so it was a perfect way to spend the day. We had gotten a brisket out of the freezer a couple days before. J got it prepped and simmering before breakfast, so its aroma filled the house all day long. We had it for dinner with mashed potatoes and some spinach sauteed with garlic.

We’d never done a brisket before, so we just picked a recipe that looked interesting from the book Kitchen Sense by Mitchell Davis. It uses ketchup, which sounded odd but somehow intriguing. The final product is very tender, and the flavor sort of reminiscent of barbecue, but also sort of like meatloaf. I might make this one again sometime, but I don’t think it’ll be my go-to brisket.

Braised Brisket

adapted from Kitchen Sense by Mitchell Davis

• 1 small brisket (ours was only 3 lbs or so)
• 7 oz ketchup
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp worcestershire
• 1/2 Tbsp dry mustard
• 1/2 Tbsp white vinegar
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp New Mexico chile powder
• 1/4 tsp paprika
• 1 good grinding of black pepper
• 1 bay leaf
• 3/4 cup water

steak night, with herbs and anchovies

Friday nights are often steak nights around our house - we have steak in the freezer, so we don’t have to go to the store, plus it’s both easy to cook and festive to eat. Last Friday we were racking our brains trying to think of something to go with the steak we’d pulled out to thaw, and eventually J came up with an idea for pasta mixed with fresh herbs and breadcrumbs. Sounded good to me!

J did most of the cooking for this dinner - he trimmed and seared the steaks, picked and chopped the herbs, sauteed the breadcrumbs and chose the wine. I helped season the meat, boiled the pasta and stirfried some spinach to go on the side. The pasta was very simple - rotini cooked al dente, then tossed with olive oil and chopped fresh rosemary, thyme and sage, and served with breadcrumbs cooked with oil and garlic until golden and crispy. Yum.

Hungarian mushroom soup

This soup is a relic from the days when I was cooking my way through the old Moosewood Cookbook. I lived in a vegan interest house in college, so I was pretty limited in what I could make - almost everything from Moosewood has cheese AND butter in it. So when I’d fly out to visit J, my then-fiancé, we’d spend much of our time furiously cooking up all the stuff we didn’t normally get (in my case, dairy - in his case, almost anything that wasn’t spaghetti). Some of those recipes we never made again (looking at you, Almond Soup) and others are still in our repertoire thirteen years later, if somewhat modified.

Like many Moosewood recipes, I find the basic concept of this soup to be the important part, so I usually open the cookbook to the correct page, glance at the ingredient list, and then make it how I want. Here’s my personal version of Hungarian Mushroom Soup, adjusted for a carnivorous household.

Half a cow

We got our cow!

Every so often we buy a side of beef from a friend who regularly raises cattle to keep the grass in his pastures down. The first time we did this, the cow in question was a rather energetic and troublesome character, one of a duo named Mary-Kate and Ashley (I’m not sure which one we got). The last two have not had names, as far as I know. The meat gets processed at a local butcher shop, packaged, labeled and hard frozen, so we can pick it up, toss it in the trunk and take it home to our chest freezer. It’s a great feeling to have a freezer-full of local, pasture-raised beef - we just have to think ahead a bit to make sure it’s defrosted in time for dinner.

 Hamburger, anyone?

Meatballs with arrabbiata sauce

One of our tried-and-true, easy to make, yummy weeknight dinners. Both the meatballs and the sauce are inspired by recipes out of Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, and are basically just vehicles for garlic. And an excuse to drink red wine.

J almost always makes the meatballs in this house - here’s how he did these. He started with two pounds of ground beef, almost the last of our local half-a-cow that we bought last year. The beef was mixed with 1/2 cup each of bread crumbs and milk, two eggs, salt and pepper, and a head (yes, a head!) of chopped garlic. The original Bittman recipe called for onion, but the first time J made it we were out. He substituted garlic (which we grow ourselves), and we liked it so much it stuck. The meatballs get baked for about 20 minutes in a 375° oven. We generally use parchment paper, it helps tremendously for cleanup.