What do you do with your Leftovers?

Saturday night's polenta made a great Sunday morning brunch.  Something I learned from the culinary talents of my aunts and cousins is that if you made a great pasta or rice dish the night before, chances are it will make a great torta then next day.  It is amazing what adding a egg or two will do.  If you have cheese (parmesan, fontina or mozzarella) even better.  Our Saturday dinner was a simple polenta with mushroom and tomato sauce.  The next day we mixed it together with 2 beaten eggs and added it to a hot skillet.  Once the bottom set it went in the oven at 350 degrees until it was done all the way through.  Then we topped it with poached eggs because, let's face it, everything is better with a poached egg on top.

What do you do with your leftovers?  

Fundraiser Brunch: Recipes and Thanks

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to make positive contributions to the world we live in.  That being said I have been wondering in what way I can use my own skills to do that.  What does it mean to live a life that is conscientious in addition to one that balances our joys and our survival?

So my dear friend, Janice and I made a recent call out to the internet universe (and a few neighborhood establishments) that we were holding a fundraiser brunch to raise money for the Food Bank of NYC.  Food for food, so to speak.  As promised in our menu, below are the recipes of the food we served as well as some photos of the event.  Hope it inspires, both cooking and kindness.

I want to thank all of you who came out to donate to the cause and show your support for Food Bank of NYC (and for Janice and I).  Thanks also to Veronica People's Club that allowed us to use their space.

Clementine Blackberry Compote

• 10  peeled and sectioned clementines
• 1 quart blackberries
• simple syrup (1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water
• orange juice (1/2 cup orange juice)

This is a simple fruit salad with and orange dressing.  Simple syrup is 2 parts sugar to 1 part water.  Bring your water to a boil.  Once boiling add your sugar stirring constantly until dissolved. Remove from heat and add orange juice.  Allow to cool before adding to your fruit for a lighter fresher fruit salad.  Or add your fruit to the dressing and cook until their juices are released and serve warm.  Great over yogurt.

White Bean Chowder

• slab bacon
• 1 large onion
• 2 teaspoons dry or 1 sprig fresh rosemary
• 16 ounces dry white beans, soaked and cooked until soft
• diced white or yukon gold potatoes
• salt
• pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil 
• 5 inckh square of cheese cloth
• 1 quart chicken broth

In a large soup pot or dutch oven, sautee bacon in olive oil until crispy. Add onions and cook on medium in rendered bacon fat until transluscent. Put your rosemary in a the center of cheese clothe square and tie securely.  Add your broth, cooked white beans, potatoes and rosemary pouch.  Add water to adjust the thickness of your soup.  Cook until the potatoes are tender.

Salad with Red Grapes and Walnuts

• 1 head of red or green leaf lettuce (or a mixture of both)
• 3/4 cup red seedless grapes halved
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
• olive oil
• white wine vinegar
• salt pepper

Wash and dry lettuce completely.  Cut along the vein of the lettuce so that you have two halves.  Then cut in horizontal bite-sized peices.  Toss with grapes and walnuts. Dress lightly with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper.

Fritatta with Goat Cheese and Dill 

or

Parsley, Sundried Tomato and Salami 

• 6 eggs beaten
• chopped parsley or dill
• 2 small potatoes sliced on the thinnest setting of a mandolin
• minced sundried tomato, crumbled goat cheese or genoa salami sliced in small strips
• salt
• pepper

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  Heat your oil in a 9 inch cast iron skillet.  Once your olive oil is hot but not smoking layer your potato slices in the hot oil, salting lightly in between the layers.  Cover and cook on medium low heat until the potatoes are tender. Add your eggs.  Once they have set on the bottom, scatter your herbs, cheese, tomato or salami (essentially whatever you are using to flavor your fritatta)  across the top. Add salt and pepper to taste.  Cook a little longer until the sides of your fritatta begin to set.  Then transfer into the oven.  Bake until the center sets.

Baked Pecan French Toast with Honeyed Yogurt

We used a recipe from Ezra Poundcake.  If you haven't been to this blog yet you should definitely check it out!

Chocolate Mousse

This is strictly a Mark Bittman's recipe.   

Dinner for One: Baked Eggs and Brussels Sprouts

I have been cooking for two for so long I forgot what it was like to fend for myself.  But I do have many single friends and most cook for themselves.  There is a popular opinion that when you are one person it is easier and just as cheap to get take out and I am still trying my hardest to prove that wrong.  Picture this: it is a Wednesday.  I come home from a long day at the office.  I have two hours before having to run out again.  I am even trying to get in a shower.  Yet, I am the food snob that I am and I want my dinner to be delicious spectacular.  If you find yourself in the same predicament one night, try the recipe below. 

Baked Eggs and Brussels Sprouts

• 2 eggs
• 4 brussels sprouts shredded
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
• Parmesan cheese to taste
• drizzle of balsamic cream
• sea salt
• pepper

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Toss brussels sprouts, olive oil, salt, pepper, and balsamic cream in a single serving, oven proof ramekin.  Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.  Crack the two eggs over the top.  Sprinkle with more Parmesan, salt and pepper.  Bake for 20 minutes.  

Go have a shower.  Do your thing.  It will be done by the time you get out.  

Artful Brunch: Scones

Before I decided that I liked eating scones, I liked the word scone.  I like how the sound pours out of your mouth long and low like a church bell.  I also liked the idea of a scone, evoking cloth napkins and china tea cups.  Although what was a beautiful, auditory sound for me was paired with a dry, sandy mouthful of lumpy bread.  This was made worse one unfortunate weekday morning when, in a groggy, decaffeinated state, I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to get a scone at Starbucks.  Still dry, lumpy bread but with too much sugar.

But still, I was not ready to give up on the romanticized vision of china teacups.  And the word scone falling off the tongue easier than, let's say, pancake.  Not that I have anything against pancakes. Particularly if they are made with buttermilk and plump with blueberries (Janice!).  And I will say it, I didn't like pancakes until I had them made that way.  Proving yet again that it isn't the food alone but the approach.  Brunch, like all of life's simple pleasures, should be artful.

The first batch of scones I made were my best scones.  Back in the fall, after a very ambitious day of apple picking that became the inspiration to many an apple laden recipe (see here), I made apple cheddar scones.  These were adapted from a recipe in "Once Upon a Tart" by Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audureau.  I came upon this lovely little cookbook quite by accident.  Or rather I should say that my mother came across this book in the library she was working in.  I came to learn that this little cafe is located on Sullivan St. in Manhattan and if you are in the neighborhood it is most certainly worth a visit.

Back to the scone recipe.  My scone adventure began with a simple recipe for Cheddar-Parmesan Scones with Fresh Dill.  I was first intrigued by how simple the recipe was.  I didn't even have to take out my Kitchenaid mixer.  How could it hurt? I swapped out the Parmesan, cayenne and dill for apples, being that I had about a bushel on hand anyway.  The result was not dry, but a delicately balanced, sweet and savory,  steamy cloud of bread that drank butter when you spread it on.  I thought that perhaps it was the apples that balanced out the texture but I have since made a few versions without that were almost as soft.  (The apples do help a little.)  My most recent version of this scone was closest to the original.  But the recipe is so adaptable that you can find any combination of sweet or savory additions to make this work. Something to remember is that if the flavor you are adding is moist by nature it adds to that fluffy, soft, texture in your scone.  The book does have a variety of scone recipes, all were the ratios are different depending on the types of ingredients being used, and is worth checking out (for other things too).  My sincere thanks Frank and Jerome!

Cheddar-Asiago Scones with Chives

(adapted from Once upon a Tart by Frank Mentesana and Jerome Audureau with Carolynn Carreno)

2 2/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick of butter, cut in 8 pieces

3 large eggs,

1/2 cup cold milk

2 tablespoons chopped chives

2 cups cheddar cheese

1/3 cup grated asiago

Position one of your oven racks in the center of your oven and preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.   Dump the dry ingredients into the bowl of a food processor and pulse so that they are mixed evenly.  Add the butter run your food processor for 15 seconds.  Continue to pulse if there are still chunks of butter.  It should look a little like bread crumbs. Then dump the mixture into a large bowl.  In a smaller bowl, whisk the eggs o break the yolks.  Whisk in milk followed but chives and cheeses.   Then pour the wet ingredients in with the dry and stir with a wooden spoon.  Note that it will seem very dry at first but it will come together.  Once you have a dough- like consistency scoop  up about a 1/2 cup of it in your hands and plop in on the parchment paper.  They should be about 2 inches apart.  Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Sustainable Spring: Sunchoke Slivers with Green Onions and Hollandaise Sauce

I am ready for change.  Life has been moving a little too slowly for my impatient taste.  Despite my efforts to push it along.  Just once can that really great thing that I have been waiting for happen right now! I always feel this way at this time of the year.  Late March and early April give me these anxious feelings of what I need to be accomplishing or what I should have already accomplished.  At the same, I have great expectations for the rest of the year (more so than in January it seems) and for all the great ways I will take advantage of the beautiful weather.  I am already buying spring dresses meant to be worn without tights, boots or scarves.  Is it really going to snow again this week?

Last week I was reading one of my favorite blogs "Not Eating Out in NY" and learned that Cathy Erway is co-sponsoring a contest entitled "Sustainable Spring." The challenge is to come up with a recipe that is true to the name, that is incorperating sustainable, seasonal ingredients.  The winner gets cooking classes at the Ger-Nis Culinary and Herb Center taught by chef Jacques of Palo Santo.  And the deadline is, oh yeah, today!  What a great way to celebrate and embrace the change in season that is so welcomed after our long cold winter!  I left work yesterday and headed to the Union Square Greenmarket with visions of ramps, peashoots, dandelion greens, artichokes and asparagus before my eyes.  Despite my leaving work as early as I could, I got to the market at twenty to six and the stalls were getting ready to close up for the day.  I found one vegetable stall still in business.  One stall with an overflowing basket of sunchokes.  Deja' vous?  This was all too familiar.  As it seems, last year and the year before, I had hit the farmers market in March with the same aspirations minus the blogger contest and found lots and lots of sunchokes.  Until my moving to Brooklyn and thus making local greenmarkets part of my food shopping routine, I had never heard of or eaten a sunchoke.  I still marvel at the strange little vegetables that they are. They look like ginger knobs, have a texture like a potato but a little crisper, and taste like an artichoke.  This recipe is a variation on the classic steamed/boiled artichoke with hollandaise dipping sauce.

Hollandaise Sauce

1 stick of butter

3 egg yolks

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon lemon

pinch of cayenne

Melt the butter on low heat in a saucepan.  Do not brown.  In a blender add egg yolks, salt, lemon and cayenne and blend.  While the blender is still on drizzle the butter in slowly.  Taste and adjust your seasonings.  Serve immediately or keep warm up to thirty minutes in a bowl over simmering water.

Sunchoke Slivers

sunchokes (as many as you  like)

drizzle of olive oil

drizzle of lemon

sea salt

Scrub your sunchokes clean and drop in a pot of boiling water in descending order from largest to smallest.  Boil for ten minutes and transfer your sunchokes into a boil of ice water to cool and stop the cooking. Remove the cool sunckokes and slice into 1/4 inch slivers.  Toss in a bowl with all other ingredients.

Place a sheet of parchment on a cookie pan.  Place a layer of you sunchokes on it spread out.  Place in the oven at 475 degrees for 5-8 minutes.  This will dry them a little and make them perfect for dipping.