Cacciatore

A couple of weeks ago, we made some chicken cacciatore based on The Silver Spoon’s rabbit cacciatore recipe. It was wonderful.

Ingredients
2 tbsp butter
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1/3 cup prosciutto, chopped
1 chicken, quartered, skin removed
3/4 cup dry white wine
A few sprigs of thyme and oregano
1.5 cans small dice tomatoes
Salt and Pepper

Procedure
Saute the prosciutto, onion, carrot and celery until soft, then brown the chicken. Add herbs, spices and wine, cover and cook for 20 minutes. Add tomatoes, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour (or until the chicken is cooked through and tender). Then, either uncover and reduce the sauce, or add flour to thicken. We served it over some mascarpone herbed polenta. The tomato sauce was really lovely, and the polenta added a nice contrast.

Lidia’s

For my graduation, my family came up and we all went to Lidia’s in Kansas City. Chris and I had been wanting to go there for a while, so this seemed like a great chance to try it. The food was wonderful. Most of my family (myself included) got the pasta sampler, which included wild mushroom ravioli, a tagliarini with a roasted tomato sauce, and a farfalle with shrimp and scallion sauce. I thought the mushroom ravioli was the strongest offering, but the roasted tomato sauce was surprisingly rich in flavor. The delicate balance of the shrimp and scallion sauce would have been good alone, but when paired with the other two pastas, the flavors became rather lost. They had caesar salad that was wonderful, and Chris got an asparagus, egg and prosciutto salad that was also very good. Chris got the gnocchi with a pulled duck sauce that was also sublime. My grandfather got their lasagna, which looked lovely, and huge, and my uncle got their manicotti, and it also looked very good. The $25 wine menu also has some nice selections on it, although we can’t remember what exactly we had. For dessert, I had tiramisu, while Chris got the olive oil cake with meyer lemon ice cream and basil sauce. Both were very good. I really enjoyed the candied basil leaves that came with Chris’ dessert, but he’s still not a fan of candied plant parts, so they were not as popular. All in all, a really delightful meal.

Sausage Making Fiasco

For Christmas, we got Chris’ dad a food grinder and sausage stuffer. Since he hadn’t really played with it much, we decided to try it out and make a couple of different kinds of sausage. We really aren’t as bright as we think we are. We searched around online and found a couple of different recipes (which we didn’t save, and the hard copies got too sausagey to save). We decided upon a Nurenburg brat and a Hungarian sausage, so off to the store we went. Ten pounds of pork later (one pork butt, another was some shoulder cut), we returned home triumphant. Now it was time to get started. Chris trimmed and cubed the pork parts while I put together the two spice blends, and set the mixer up. We ended up pretty evenly dividing the should and butt between the two sausage recipes for an appropriate fat content. We first did a course grind on both batches of meat. No problem so far, the grinder was working as advertised. We put the ground meat in the fridge to chill again as we tackled the next grind. After not nearly long enough, we took the meat out again, added the seasonings, and ground it (or tried to) with the smaller grinder plate. This is where we learned quite a bit, including some new words. This meat really does need to be almost frozen for it to feed through the grinder without sticking. Our meat was not frozen, so we had some pretty seriously slow grinding. Ten pounds of slow grinding. A couple of hours later we had the second grind done. We put the meat back in the fridge and set about getting the sausage stuffer ready to go. We had gotten some collagen casings from Gander Mountain (an outdoor outfitter type place), so we were ready to go. This was another opportunity for more learning. We got the meat out of the fridge and started to stuff casings. Again, our meat was not frozen, and not even that cold, so there were some issues even getting the stuff into the stuffer. Also, collagen is rather fragile, and it tears easily when moist, which is bad when trying to twist links on slightly overstuffed sausage. Furthermore, collagen doesn’t seal at the ends of the links, so when cooked, you end up with a rather bizarre dumbbell shaped sausage, and the casing is chewy.

All in all, it was a learning experience that produced edible, even tasty sausage, but they weren’t quite what we were looking for. The small plate on the grinder was still too large for the texture we were looking for (which was really disappointing). Also, the casing was simply a disaster. Next time, it’ll be an experiment in natural casings. Finally, I think in the future, we may try a practice run before getting 10 pounds of pork to make sausage with.

Chicken Tikka Masala

A few days ago, we made some chicken tikka masala that was pretty darn tasty, but not for the faint of taste-bud.

Ingredients
Chicken
1 package of Shan Chicken Tikka Spice blend We followed the marinade on the back of the box, except-
8 chicken breasts (we just got a family-size pack of boneless skinless, rather than whole chickens)

Sauce
2 cans of Heinz Tomato soup (Yep, Heinz. Look in a British foods section-it should be there…right next to some scary canned haggis, clotted cream and mushy peas. Yummm).
Cilantro, to taste

Procedure
Marinate the chicken as instructed, then grill until cooked through. Heat the soup, and add the cooked, cubed chicken. Simmer about 10 minutes, and serve over some basmati rice, with chopped cilantro on top.

We also made some naan which we cooked on the grill and it turned out really well. Just a little warning, the chicken is rather warm, so if you’re a spice-neophyte, use a partial packet of the spices.

Book Plug

On the fourth of July, we put together a German meal from the Professional Chef for my family. We decided to forgo the typical hockey-puck hamburger and questionable sausage product that seems to be so strongly associated with this holiday, and instead served the Pork chop with braised red cabbage and potato pancakes that can be found in this book. The huge chops we simply grilled with salt and pepper and a little olive oil. We also had green beans and stewed apples as sides. For dessert, I put together a cheesecake (from www.cookingforengineers.com ), and a strawberry rhubarb pie. Everything turned out well, and the family seemed quite pleased with the food.

Mushroom Ravioli

After a rather lengthy silence, it’s past time we got back into the recipe posting game. To start things off, here’s a mushroom ravioli that we made a couple of weeks ago, after picking up a pasta machine.

Ingredients
Pasta Dough Recipe (any egg-based pasta recipe you like will work, we used the Professional Chef’s recipe) -as a side note, a stand mixer is a great asset in creating a nice smooth dough, as we found out the hard way.
1 tbsp each butter and olive oil
10 oz cremini (baby bella) mushrooms
1 package mixed dried mushrooms (about 2 oz)
1 shallot
1 -15 oz container of ricotta (if you are so inclined, mascarpone could work as well)
1 egg
Salt and Pepper
Thyme and oregano, or any herb you like

Procedure
Make the pasta dough, and let it rest while you prepare the filling.
Cut the dried mushrooms with kitchen shears and soak in boiling water for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mince the shallot and the cremini, and saute in butter and oil. After the dried mushrooms are reconstituted, drain (do not reserve liquid), and add to the shallot and mushroom mixture. Cook until little liquid remains, almost to a dry pan stage. Put this mixture in a food processor and process until smooth. Add the ricotta and egg, and process again until all incorporated. Add herbs now, if you want.

Roll out the pasta dough as per your machine’s instructions. For ours, we divided the dough into about four pieces (although in retrospect, we should have done about 8), and starting on the widest setting, start feeding the dough through the machine. We gradually decreased the thickness with each roll until we were at setting 3 on our machine. Cut the rolled dough into roughly 1.5″ square (or up to 2″), and deposit about a teaspoon of filling on half of the squares. Using water, brush the edges of the square, and place a filling-free pasta square over it, sealing the edges well. Once all the ravioli are made, you may either freeze them, or cook them in boiling salted water until they float, a couple of minutes.

To serve, we like to saute some shallot in butter with more thyme and some sage. Add the cooked ravioli and brown lightly on both sides (basically a brown butter sauce).

These were amazingly flavorful ravioli. The dried mushrooms gave the filling a richness and earthiness that was just fantastic.