Tenderloin: Always a good decision

If I want someone to propose to me, I will make him this. If I want someone to forgive me, I will make him this. If I want peace in the Middle East, I will make them this. Though maybe I should just leave that to negotiators who actually know what they are doing. Still, you see where I am going with this.

I am back in Atlanta for my Dad's birthday and I wanted to make something especially special for the occasion. About a year ago, my best friend linked me to this and I have been desperate to make it ever since. So, I called my mom and told her to get sirloin cut Chateaubriand at the butcher. For a number of reasons, we ended up with tenderloin - it is never a problem to have tenderloin. Also, since I have an almost pathological aversion to cilantro, I had to tweak the sauce a bit.

I really cannot adequately express to you how delicious this is. Nor can I describe my glee when I managed to cook it perfectly (medium rare, cooked evenly). And I really cannot convey the look of unadulterated bliss on my Dad's face. The tangy topper compliments the buttery meat so well that it's just sinful.

You really need to make this. Right. Now.

Bomboloni- Italian for Fried Dough

This has been a big week for me. Huffington Post made me a legitimate blogger and my first articles went live, the ACC (lawyers, not sports) picked up my antitrust primer, and even AboveTheLaw, comment trolls and all, noticed me. While I'm at it, there's a book here.

Crazy stuff.

Anyway, I decided to celebrate by making something extremely delicious and extremely unhealthy. Not to mention that anyone who says that they don't like fried dough is either lying or selling something. But... well... why stop at frying things? Why not also stuff them with dark chocolate? Oh yes, I went there.

I did, in a sudden burst of generosity/realization that I would eat them if they stayed in my house, take the batch in to the contract job I've been working this week. My coworkers were kind enough to demolish the pile in short order.

Behold.

On rainy days and split pea soup

When I was a little girl, my mother found this weird powdered vegetable soup at Sam's Club and brought it home for my sister and I to be able to make as a snack. I was completely obsessed with this soup. It was thick and smooth (It was powdered after all, chunks would have been creepy) and was exactly what I wanted on rainy days. My sister did not share this passion, but that was fine, more for me! One day it stopped appearing at the house and I've never seen it since. My tiny heart broke.

Years later, I still revel in the idea of a thick green soup on overcast days.

This morning was one of those where, though you get out of bed at a perfectly reasonable hour, it's debatable whether you ever actually wake up. The apartment was dark thanks to a few drizzling cumulus beasts and I absolutely had to have soup. Of course, I didn't have what I needed in the apartment. Again. Blast! Off to the store I trudged to pick up some split peas and diced ham... and while I was there a few other tasty treats, but that's neither here nor there.

And now I have a delicious, non-powdered, split pea soup to get me through my sleepwalking day.

Oh? You want to know how to make it? Ok then.

Chicken Tetrazzini?

This is my baby (One day I will have the full set and, on that day, I will become invincible... in the kitchen... or something):
And I get to make things like this in it:
Tasty looking, no?

Southern Living has a section called "Mama's Way or Your Way," and last month that featured chicken tetrazzini. Usually I side with the "Mama's Way" side of things, butter and all (yes, I exercise a lot to make up for these decisions). This time, however, some of the changes in the "Your Way" portion appealed to me. Still, the thought of bottled alfredo sauce is quite upsetting to me. So, my brilliant answer to this problem is to combine the two. I've used the mornay sauce from the original, but tossed in the peas, mushrooms and some pancetta (instead of prosciutto)from the modern choice. The reason for the "?" in the title is simply that I'm not sure it still counts as tetrazzini after all of these changes, but we're going to pretend that it does.

I frequently combine bits of separate recipes to make one delicious dish, though it's rarely quite so convenient as two opposite pages dealing with the exact same food. If you're wary when it comes to trying to piece together a (yummy) Frankenstein (well, technically the monster) recipe, this is probably a good way to start. After you've worked on a few this way, you'll start feeling a lot more comfortable taking a hatchet to all sorts of recipes.

On to super secret option C.

Sometimes you have to atone

On occasion I try to cook something new, usually because I am out of food and hungry. Generally speaking, this goes very well, or at least is sufficiently tasty to get me through the night. There are days, however, that are a bit less successful. Monday was one of those days. I took a series of perfectly good ingredients and ended up, somehow, with a salt lick. Because I am as stubborn as the day is long, I still ate a good bit, once I removed the salty cheese portion. After this mini-debacle, I needed to make something new and tasty - both at the same time - thus reestablishing my kitchen prowess.

Bolognese sauce to the rescue! In what I believe to be one of the more embarrassing omissions in my self-training, I've never actually made a bolognese. Today, I remedied this, and learned a few things along the way. For example, did you know that there is a product in the grocery store called "Meatloaf Mix"? Well there is. It's a combination of beef, veal, and pork meat that is perfect for something like a bolognese, despite the inherent creepiness of a single ground meat product produced from three separate animals. However, in a concession to health..ish... I decided to use about 2/3 strange meat mix, and 1/3 ground turkey. Also, once again, the store has decided to sell things in annoying quantities. Namely: each ground meat product comes in a 1.3lb portion, and I really don't need to use more than 2 lbs of meat in a single dish. I mean... come on. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.

This is extremely tasty. Extremely. So, next time you're at the store, grab the nearest blended ground meat product and go nuts!

Bit of a risotto kick

First of all, allow me to freely admit that this is a fall recipe and it is wholly inappropriate that I made it in the middle of 85+ degree heat. Fortunately for me, a happy stomach knows no season. I made the (delightful) mistake of buying a lot more arborio rice than I could possibly use in one recipe. This has resulted in me making risotto at least four times in the last month.

I am reasonably sure this is not normal.

Since I do not want to deluge you with bits of my current obsession, I will discuss one today and leave the rest until I make one of them again far enough in the future that I do not run the risk of being a one trick pony. This is a butternut squash rosemary risotto. It. is. delicious. It's creamy, rich, flavorful and will be perfect when the fall comes around and people other than me start making these sorts of dishes. Even more importantly, however, I was able to hide the onions in it from my roommate (who thinks she doesn't like them) and even she inhaled it. And one more thing! I put the leftovers in the refrigerator and ate them the next day, even microwaved them, and they held up! Risotto is known for its inability to abide waiting or storage.

In short, I was thrilled and you will be too

Macaroons

Ooof. I have been slow on the update. Many apologies. Whilst away, I can assure you that I have still been cooking, though decidedly less frequently since I've been on a short contract project. Yesterday, however, I woke up with the all consuming urge to bake, so I perused the internet, various cookbooks, and my head until something struck my fancy. What was it, you ask?

Chocolate dipped coconut macaroons.

I can actually hear my dad make yummy noises upon reading that. I have never before made macaroons, however, as it turns out, not having the foggiest clue what I'm doing no longer stops me. So, off to the store I went to pick up some shredded coconut and melt-worthy chocolate. Of course, upon arriving at the store, I completely forgot whether I was supposed to be using sweetened or unsweetened coconut... and ended up with both, just to be safe. Also, since I was supposed to have 8oz of coconut and the bags are in multiples of 7oz (Why? Why would you use 7? It makes no sense, you never need anything in multiples of 7!), I ended up throwing in a handful of the unsweetened anyway. Mine turned out well, but in the future I would actually scale back the coconut to egg white ratio, so the recipe I'm giving you is tweaked to reflect that. Also, it allows you to purchase just one bag of blasted coconut and not have to worry about measuring. Tada.

On to the tastiness!

Refreshing

As a quick credit, I may have pilfered this idea from Joy The Baker. Also, if I ever use the word "may," I actually mean "will," "have," "did" or some variation on that theme. That said, today I have a salad for you. Well, it is technically a salad in that some green bits most assuredly exist within it and we're making a dressing, however, it's not a pansy little side salad. It is carb central. We have rice and potatoes and chickpeas and all sorts of good stuff. There is an argument to be made that it is healthy, though I wouldn't necessarily say that it's slimming.

Being who I am, I took Joy's recipe and made the dressing far more acidic and stripped down some of the embellishments since I didn't have a bushel of parsley sitting in my refrigerator. It's delicious and a really great summer evening meal when you just don't have it in you to eat something hot and straight out of the oven. The salad works equally well cold as it does with the potatoes and rice still warm, and if you make a sizable batch, you can snack on it for days... or feed it to your family, if you want to be nice.

Don't worry, making dressing is actually easier than shaking the bottle of the store bought kind enough to have the perfect distribution of floating bits.

Crepes! Part deux.

Now that we've covered how to make a crepe, I think it's time to make a main dish with them. Admittedly, you could just go out, buy some tortillas, and stuff them to the bursting point with this filling... or you could just leave the crepes off completely like I did in the top photograph because I happened to have some extra filling and wanted to eat it immediately. Yes, I could have made another crepe, but I didn't. I'm not sorry.

So! If you want to fill crepes with tasty quasi-Mexican goodness, I have a delightful option for you. As a warning, however, for those of you out there who love garlic even close to as much as I do, do not use more garlic in this, it will eat you alive.

That said, here we go...

Bookends: Desserts

So, the other evening I saw "Despicable Me." It was cute and charming and has the best theme song if you happen to be a smidge cranky. The chorus is brilliant. Here, take a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lJRTeCMvGc

Now, when one is in such a mood, what is the proper response? Dessert! Yes, I'm cliche today, just acknowledge it and we'll move on. At my little dinner party with the ricotta pillows, I stole yet another Southern Living recipe for the desserts, with a few small modifications.

Original Recipe: http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1990016

My changes were simple. First, I didn't have time to make the little pie crust cups, so I used store bought frozen pastry cups. Secondly, I did not use baking bars, but rather a couple of bars of dark chocolate because that's what I had in the house and I'm a firm believer that dark chocolate makes everything better. To make up for these forays into laziness, I did at least make the whipped cream myself with the whipping cream left over. I just threw in a completely blind guess worth of splenda and vanilla and whipped it by hand until it looked pretty and tasted amazing. I find that the vanilla addition to the whipped cream compliments the dark chocolate especially well.

And now you have an extremely simple crowd pleaser for your next dinner party. Added bonus: no tell-tale fork marks if you ate one before the guests arrived...

Bookends: Appetizers

I find that the most difficult part of having people over to the house for dinner is pulling together a coherent meal that includes something for them to snack on when they walk in the door, and is topped off with a sweet treat at the end of the evening. It's easy to pick one or the other, or the main meal, but having a series of items that make some form of logical combination drives me up the wall. Perhaps I just need more Thai appetizers to match my love of curries and coconut based desserts.

Yum. Coconut.

Ok, back to the matter at hand. Today we will discuss a fairly versatile appetizer that tastes amazing and appears substantially more complicated than it actually is. Basically, it's a ricotta-based filling for crepes that people can eat as finger food. It took my 5 guests approximately 3 minutes to eat 15 or so of these little gems. More importantly, you can serve it with Italian, some American, or French without worrying in the slightest. Yes, it requires you to make crepes, but they are so much easier than you think they are. In fact, they are not just "easier" (especially if you think they are "oh god what am I doing" difficult), they are downright simple.

But you need to buy a crepe pan. They aren't expensive and they are your personal vehicle to looking very fancy in front of your friends and having an excuse to eat Nutella whenever you want.

That said...

Pizza again? Yes, but this time it has tomatoes.

Ok, I know that last time you were a little disappointed that I didn't have any actual tomatoes on a pizza, nor did I replace them with a pesto or make a white pizza. But did I make an abomination?! No. It was tasty. This time, however, I will bend to more conventional pizza stylings and give you tomatoes. Not just any tomatoes, though, tomatoes that you don't have to farm yourself yet have flavor. How is that possible (you ask)? Well, you roast them and they become magically delicious.

The key here is patience, as the process itself is extremely simple. Go out and buy a bunch of roma tomatoes, cut them in half, remove some of the inner juices (otherwise they will explode upon biting), toss them in some olive oil and salt (I throw in a hint of balsamic vinegar as well), then put them in the oven at 250 for at least two hours. AT LEAST. You can decide when they are done, but you want to dry them out a bit to intensify the flavor. I tend to cook an extra tomato or two just to eat straight out of the oven, and might I suggest you do the same.

Once you have these lovely tomatoes, you get to make a pizza...

On dads and cheese

Today, we shall discuss two things: 1) How awesome my dad is and 2) a food he wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Yes, this is how I show him my love on Father's Day, I post a recipe he'd hate.

First, the good part: during the official Father's Day call this morning, Dad informed me that he made some changes to his traditional grilled chicken marinade inspired by one of my posts. I practically glowed I was so pleased. It's the little things.

Now, it is unfair to say that Dad doesn't appreciate a good pizza, he loves them... as long as there isn't a shred of cheese present. In fact, my house was impressively cheese-free (except for one Atkins burst inspired by my mother) for the first eighteen years of my life. As a result, I've come a little late to the cheese game and have been trying to sort out the sweet from the salty and the creamy from the hard and the goat from the cow from the sheep. Incidentally, I still can't handle bleu cheese and Snofrisk goat/cow cheese is happiness in a plastic container. In this attempt to catch up, I've started making a lot of cheese-related foods. I started with a fancy mac & cheese, moved on to bechamel sauces with whatever I had in reach melted in them, and now have started making my own pizzas. They. Are. Delicious. I even made one without cheese for Dad when I was home, because I'm nice sometimes.

This particular pizza is a nice balance between a spicy sausage and the sweetness of caramelized onions and peas, topped with fontina for the creamy, mild flavor. It's a little bit different from your average delivery, but not so far out that it would spark an outcry. Of course you can, and should, put anything you want on your pizza. In fact, the dough recipe I'm about to give you makes enough for not one, but two 10-14 inch pizzas. I popped the second dough ball in the freezer for round two (oh my, was that a pun?) later this week.

Enough talk, time to eat.

Improv!

"This sauce is amazing. Can you give me the recipe?"
"Thanks, but I pretty much just threw things in a pot and hoped for the best, I can give you a rough list of ingredients though."
"Um... yeah... I dunno."

Tragic. Why is it so scary to just try something? I wouldn't do it for years, and some people never do. While in Boston, I sacrificed my precious, precious sleep on Sunday mornings for a couple of months to take a class at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. My teacher drove me nuts. It always seemed like he was right behind me, commenting freely on my style or whatnot. I was completely uncomfortable cooking with an audience and this made me really jumpy. He was also always telling us that the recipe was merely a guide and that we should keep messing with it until we liked the way it tasted. "Don't like eggplant? Then why is it in your dish!" I did not like this.

Loathe though I am to admit it, he was good. Over the course of the class, I grew accustomed to cooking with an audience and even ended up just sassy enough to put something together from whatever happens to be in my kitchen. Admittedly, it's not always fancy, but it's usually good. And you know what? If it's not, no one is going to die (it's not like I serve raw chicken). This is why I now understand why all of the celebrity chefs are so arrogant: they essentially have to be or they would never try anything new and interesting.

So, today, I will list out ingredients in two different dishes (based on similar principles), but not tell you how much of each or in what order I did things, in part because I do not know. Very traditional and simple combinations, very tasty.


Trust me. You can do this.

Feeling kind of lazy? No problem.

There are days where I am just tired. I don't want to cook; I just want to lay on the couch and be laaaaaaaazy. I am ok with this. Much to my dismay, these days seem to often coincide with me completely running out of real food. Tragic. On these days, I resort to slacker cooking. There are many permutations of this, but last night I just roasted some chicken and steamed broccoli.

Quick warning: I love broccoli and you're going to see it with some frequency. That is all.

Fortunately, roasting chicken breasts is extremely easy and hands off, yet tastes amazing. I used boneless/skinless breasts because that's what I had around, though of course using bone-in adds a richer flavor. I always have lemons in the house these days, a tip I picked up in cooking class once upon a time, and a handful of really standard ingredients which, as it turns out, make for a very flavorful roasted chicken.

So, for those days when you really don't want to stand over the stove...