Easy Shrimp Pasta

I've spent most of this summer working from home, which means that I get to dictate my own hours. At first, it starts out by me getting up at 10 and going to bed at 2 or 3, but then it evolves into the get-up-at-4PM-go-to-bed-at-8AM. This leads to three things:

1) I am out of sync with the rest of Central Time
a) incidentally, that means I'm in perfect sync with Chris, who's in Hawaii.
2) Colby doesn't get nearly as much sleep as he's used to
3) I watch a lot of late night television, with laptop enlapped.

Late night tele usually involves police procedurals (oh Bobby Goren, you are, by far, my *favorite*) and whatever's on Food Network that doesn't involve Paula Deen, Mark Summers, or Bobby Flay. This leads to an enhancement in Alton Brown in my TV diet and lately he's talked a lot about crustaceans and how they're very closely related to roaches in the animal kingdom. This hasn't really helped my appreciation for lobster as I found one of their animal kingdom cousins wandering around my bathroom (which involved quite a bit of screaming and frantic searches for things to throw); however, I am able to ignore the roach-shrimp dichotomy in my head because phobias are nothing, if not irrational, which had left me craving shrimp.

Rewind to a week ago, and I found myself at the downtown farmers market with basil, brussels sprouts, pan sausage, and okra. Basil presented a myriad of possibilities, so I decided to make a cheesy tomato sauce with shrimp and linguine for dinner (in part, because I always wondered what canned tomato sauce actually was.). Nom. Nom. Nom.

1/2 c ricotta cheese
1/3 c grated parmasean cheese
1/4 c basil, chiffonade
8 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 tbs extra virgin olive oil
1 14.5 oz can tomato sauce (note: this is what I used... in the future, I'm using crushed tomatoes)
1 lb frozen shrimp, thawed in water and boiled for 3ish minutes, then shelled
1 lb linguine, boiled in heavily salted water
s+p to taste

combine ricotta, parm, basil and about 1/3 of the garlic and add salt+pepper to taste. The parm is salty enough, so it probably won't need a lot of salt and the pepper depends on your tolerance for heat. set aside. In a sauce pan, add olive oil and garlic and stir around until fragrant. Add in tomato sauce (or crushed tomatoes) and cook for a few minutes. Add cheese mix and cook some more until it's completely integrated into the tomato sauce and heated. Toss with linguine and shrimp.

pizza party

I've been craving Detroit style pizza for quite some time. I never really knew that square pizza was an especially Detroit thing, but moving to Texas has proven to be quite dismal in the pizza department. It seemed time to take matters into my own hands and clean out my pantry so we had a pizza party a couple days ago with a couple friends. The results were quite tasty, though not close to my cravings, so I will yearn some more until we make the trip back home in the summer.

pizza dough (makes 4ish pizzas)
1.5 c warm water
2 packets dry active yeast (or 4.5 tsp)
2 c + 1 tbs AP flour
2 tsp honey
2 tsp salt
6 tbs olive oil + more for coating

dissolve the dry active yeast in the water and let sit for ~5 minutes. while this happens, coat a large bowl with olive oil. whisk together flour and salt and add in yeast+water, honey, and olive oil in the bowl of your stand mixer that has been fitted with the dough hook. turn on medium-ish speed until the dough comes together. Be sure to pause and scrape down the sides a few times to make sure that all the flour is incorporated. Add extra flour as needed to make the dough less sticky and come together. Transfer the dough to the oiled bowl and roll to coat. Cover and allow to rise for *at least* an hour and punch down after it's risen.

Pizza sauce

1 14 oz can diced tomatoes
1 little can tomato paste
1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 tsp oregano
1 tbs grated parmesan
s+p to taste

combine everything over low heat until warm. Add salt+pepper to taste. You're probably going to need more salt than you expect because tomato paste is fricken sweet, tho be sure to taste it first because the parm is salty too.

To construct the pizza, grab a handful of dough, roll in flour and stretch it to form a disky shape. If it's not perfect, it doesn't really matter because it's pizza. Our first pizza looked like this:



Add on sauce, cheese, toppings and brush the edges with olive oil.



You could also sprinkle the crust with tasty things if you remember before you put it in a 425 degree oven for ~15 minutes, or until the edges are golden and the cheese is melty and delicious!

We served the pizza with "Italian nachos"... here's a picture after they had been partially devoured:



The "italian" bit is that the nachos are actually deep fried pasta, instead of corn tortillas and served with pizza sauce instead of salsa-like things. They turned out really well, though now I have a ton of fried pasta chips left over. The pasta chips are super easy to make, especially if you cheat and use wonton wrappers. I got the small square kind and simply cut them in half to form triangles. Be sure to separate them!

In a dutch oven (or some other frying vessel) bring ~2 in of oil to 350-360 degrees. Working in batches, submerge 5-6 wonton skin halves at a time for ~20-30 seconds until they are no longer floppy, but not incredibly golden as well. A little color is okay, but they'll still crisp up a bit even after you fish them out of the dutch oven. You'll probably figure out the best amount of time/number of wontons after a few batches. Cover in salt when they're hot. We did this the Alton Brown way and took a sheet pan, lined it with newspaper, and then put a wire cooling rack upside down to help wick away oil.

After they cool, store in a ziplock bag for awhile. I made these on Thursday, and they're still good in the wee hours of Sunday morning. With any luck,they'll become part of dinner tonight. :)

To make them "italian" take the pastchos (that doesn't work, does it?) and cover in mozzarella with other typical pizza toppings. We had banana peppers, pepperoni, and italian sausage and place in an oven until the cheese is melty.

Thanksgiving Recapped

I celebrated my first Thanksgiving away from home and it made me realize two things: a) my friends are wonderful and b) I really want a *real* dining room table instead of the card table that we inherited from Kyle. I sent an open invitation to the department and had about 12 people show up. It was the perfect size for the party and now I'm looking forward to planning a miniature white-elephant exchange Christmas party.

I took a lot of recipes from all over and modified them to fit my tastes/pantry. I made the homemade rolls from the pioneer woman cooks, which were tasty if not a bit heavy. Turkey, of course, with stuffing a la Chris complete with breakfast sausage and sour dough bread from the farmers market. We also had the Alton Brown version turkey and green bean casserole (although, I didn't have the patience or time to make my own french fried onions). Both came out wonderfully, and the turkey was made even better with cranberry apple chutney. There were also mashed potatoes with roasted garlic (along with plenty of cream and butter) and we mashed sweet potatoes from the farmer's market with cream, butter, smoked sweet paprika, and just a hint of cayenne. We also had apple and pumpkin pies which were made courtesy of my new pink KitchenAid stand mixer. Way tasty and easy too! :) In all, it was very successful and I'm looking forward to winding down the rest of the semester and going home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The preparations for Thanksgiving are very much under way. In the past couple of weeks, I've done some test run on side dishes, and I've definitely come across some really awesome recipes. :) Currently, the test pumpkin pie is half eaten, and sitting in the refrigerator and the apple pie is in the oven. I think that later today will be a well orchestrated dance between oven and stove top, made more complicated by a relatively small kitchen and four people who want to be in it.

Here's the menu at current:

Turkey a la Alton Brown
Sour Dough + Challah bread dressing
green bean casserole a la Alton Brown
roasted garlic mashed potatoes
roasted sweet potatoes with smoked sweet paprika
home made dinner rolls
apple cranberry chutney
apple pie
pumpkin pie

Sooooooooo excited! :)

NaBloPoMo Day Eight: A Recipe that Popeye Would Love

I love watching cooking shows, finding a recipe I love, and then realizing that I have almost all of the ingredients sitting in my pantry/refrigerator. This was most definitely the case a few nights ago when the spinach salad episode was on Good Eats. I made it last night it an attempt to a) not feel hungry and b) make peace with pork. It didn't work so well, but at least I tried (Part b, that is. The salad was really tasty if I ignored the porkiness.)

AB's Spinach Salad, explained:

8 strips of bacon
3 tbs bacon drippings
3 tbs red wine vinegar
1 tsp mustard
1 tsp sugar
2 eggs, hard boiled and quartered or eighthed
1 bag spinach (8-10 oz)
handful of mushrooms, sliced
s+p to taste

Set the oven to 400. Take a baking sheet and place a cooling rack over top. Make sure that the cooling rack fits into the baking sheet. Arrange the bacon atop the cooling rack and bake until crispy. This can take anywhere from 15-20 minutes depending on your oven and your patience with making sure that every last bit of porky bacteria is obliterated. After it's done crumble the bacon and take three tbs of the bacon drippings from the pan and put in a metal working bowl that you've suspended over a pot of boiling water in a pseudo double boiler fashion. Whisk in the red wine vinegar, mustard, and sugar and add s+p to taste. Fold in the spinach, allowing it to wilt, slightly and then add in the eggs, mushrooms and ta da! you have the world's least healthy salad.

I think next time I'm going to substitute the red wine vinegar with apple cider vinegar and drastically reduce the bacon content. In fact, next time I can see this being done with turkey bacon so I don't feel weird and icky after.

Guacamole by feel... for the family!

I've decided that when I have kids that are old enough to be trusted to not drool in the mixing bowl, I'm making guacamole a family activity. It's totally gross to smash avocados, and that seems like something a little kid would *love* to do.

I've been straying from recipes for some time, which is ironic because I am a scientist and recipes can be very scientific things. This is due, in part, to sheer laziness and also due to the fact that I want to develop my palette. It's sort of like writing computer programs. Even though it's faster to just do the task by hand, and even though programming makes you a wee bit homicidal, it's all because you want to automate a task and learn something new... yeah. ANYWHO

I had this intense desire to make guacamole because I haven't baked/cooked/prepared anything that wasn't leftovers in the microwave for a few days and tonight we had yummy dinner at North by Northwest. I found out midway through the process that Colby has used an entire huge onion for the meatballs he made last night (which explains why there were so many damn onions) and so I had to improvise. Based largely on the Alton Brown version, I mashed avocados, added lime juice, threw in one small tomato, diced, 1/2 a jalepeno diced super small, two small garlic cloves, minced, about half a tbs of onion powder, some large amount of salt, about half a tsp of black pepper, tsp ground cumin, tbs dried parsley so you can fake out guac snobs by having them think there might be cilantro in it (because cilantro==gross). Stir stir. It actually came out pretty well.

I have tons of other posts in the works, but I've been too busy (read: lazy) to post. I threw a Lego themed dinner party a couple weekends ago and recipe to follow from it. Also, thoughts on milk from a lactose intolerant.

Also, yay for my friends getting food blogs too! (And she's going to grad school for food science!)

Refrigerator Pie: Part Doo

I'm pretty sure that quiche is a very amazing breakfast food, even if it is 2:40 PM. I set out last night to do laundry and make a spinach-artichoke quiche, but it turns out that artichokes are a) hard to deal with and b) fucking spiny, screw that. It became a spinach+mushroom+garlic quiche. It should be noted that Julie + wilted spinach == bff returns true.

two large handfuls of flat leaf spinach destemmed and washed
2 tsp? of olive oil
2 tbs butter
1/2 thing of roughly chopped mushrooms
mozzarella
colby jack
3 big CLOVES of garlic
s/p/garlic salt

put a little bit of olive oil (like 1 tsp?) into a pan and make sure that you coat the entire bottom. put in spinach... turn turn wilt wilt. season with salt. Try not to eat all of that spinach whilst you're cooking because seriously... you <3 spinach. Add in the 2 tbs butter (this may be excessive and it was kind of like I was boiling the mushrooms in butter) and when it melts, add in the mushrooms and season with garlic salt + a bit of kosher s/p at the end. More on that later. Anywho, take out the mushrooms when they're done. Add in a bit more olive oil, put in the minced garlic and fry until they start to look light brown. add the spin+mush+garlic to a pie crust making sure it's well-mixed and there is space for cheese+royale mixture. Add in handfuls of cheese at your own discretion. Pour in the royale (2 eggs + 1 c heavy cream beaten together) making sure the mixture sinks to the bottom. Sprinkle some kosher salt over top of the pie. Into the oven at 350 for ~45 minutes.

So the quiche came out pretty okay. The garlic didn't come out exactly as I had hoped because apparently Chris' stove runs at 5778 K. Still... if you heat up the garlic slower, it should be better, not bitter. Also, this is the thing about garlic salt. I like using it with mushrooms because I feel like mushrooms pick up the flavor better with garlic salt because it's super concentrated granular garlic. Also salty. Anywho, tonight looks like a good night to try to make the poor man's alfredo sauce, since i have lots of leftover cream and Colby's back in town. Yay heart disease!

Also, the next time, I'm going to look for either a better pie crust or a crust recipe because the crust, I feel, is too sweet. Puff pastry would make this kind of excellent, but again with the heart disease.

Refrigerator Pie

So I went to DC over New Years to visit Kate, and during one of my hangover recovery periods, I watched a whole bunch of Good Eats on my computer. One of the episodes was Egg Files II - Man with a Flan and Alton made quiche, which he dubbed refrigerator pie. It was super easy. I took a store-bought pie crust (yes, I know, I'm lazy) and then put a royale mixture in it and then stuff.

1 pie crust

royale mixture:

2 eggs
1 c heavy cream
2 pinches salt

fillings

Preheat oven to 350. Beat eggs and cream and then beat in the salt. Put your fillings in, but leave open spaces for the royale mixture to go. I used mushrooms sauteed in butter and garlic salt (I ran out of garlic. :( ), broccoli that I had pre-cooked a bit, and some white cheddar cheese with herbs. It has a name. I don't really remember it, though.

Don't fill everything up to the top. Bake for ~45 minutes, or until the filling is set to the consistency of jello.

It turned out really well. I was surprised by that. I had enough stuff left over to make flan, which actually seemed rather easy to make, but I don't own ramekins and upon further reflection hate flan, so I decided against it.

Graduate applications are a pain

So in the past month, I've made risotto, chicken, some sort of dip, cheese straws, holiday cookies, milk chocolate (by accident), more bread, cream biscuits with cheese, roast lemon chicken, green beans, and mashed potatoes. Also a couple drop biscuits here and there. I've also been working on my application to grad school and that's kind of awful... so more updates once those are done.

Also

http://loltonbrown.blogspot.com

Homemade apple sauce!

Yum-O! Actually, I should use some Alton Brown saying, since this was the best we could come up with from one of his recipes. It's actually pretty simple.

Combine:

1 c unfiltered apple juice (or apple cider)
6 medium-sized apples (3 tart, 3 sweet)
2 tbs butter
3 tbs honey
2 tbs cognac
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Peel, core, quarter the apples, add everything in a sealable container... shake really hard. Microwave for 10 minutes. Go at it with a stick blender.

Serve with a piece of cheddar cheese or ice cream. Ice cream == way better.

So the problem that I had with the recipe is that the intermotron wasn't working so we had to make up the recipe from memory-ish. It worked out okay, albeit a little watery. We used 1.5 c, not 1 c of cider, 2/3 shot of cognac (although, could that be 2 tbs?), and 1 tsp cinnamon. If I could do it all over again, I'd use less cider, 1 tsp. cinnamon, and I'd seriously reconsider the cognac because it smelled like death. Or maybe this is my disposition against liquor speaking.