pasta in a mushroom cream sauce

The 'fuzz brought back 1 oz of dried porcini mushrooms from her last trip to Italy (that jet-setter). Today we turned them into a mushroom cream sauce that was easy, fast, and exceeded all our expectations. Our only regret is that we did not have some crusty Italian bread to soak up the remaining sauce; I was drinking it from my bowl at the end. This recipe only serves two hungry people.

• 1 oz dried porcini mushrooms
• garlic, olive oil, wine
• 1/2 cup cream or half-and-half
• few tbsp grated parmesan or equivalent
• pasta for two (not much!)
• fresh flat parsley, chopped a bit

Soak 1 oz dried porcinis in 1 cup boiling-hot water for 20 min. Sauté a clove or two of garlic, minced or pressed, in a few tbsp of olive oil. Add the porcinis (reserving the water they were in) and 1/2 cup of white wine. Keep at a low boil until the wine is fully evaporated. Add in the mushroom liquor—after straining it through a coffee filter to remove grit—and boil it down a bit too. Add cream and cheese and bring back to the boil. Salt (generously) to taste.

If you are clever, your pasta will be on the stove boiling, and just become done at this point; drain it and mix it in. Serve in shallow bowls with a mound of parsley on top, and crusty bread on the side.

country vichyssoise

I call this vichyssoise country because when you make it in the blender (even multiple passes), you still get a few tiny lumps. Also I use black pepper, not white, so it is not perfect in appearance. This recipe is based on an old edition of my bible, The Joy of Cooking.

Sauté a few sliced leeks (white part) and a sliced onion in a few tbsp of butter. When soft, add four peeled, sliced potatoes and four cups of dilute chicken broth. Simmer until tender. Blend until smooth; I usually pass the whole thing through the blender multiple times; the traditional thing is to force it through a sieve. You want it to be as smooth as possible. Salt and pepper the blended soup until it tastes good.

Chill. Add a cup of cream and wisk till perfectly blended. Serve cold (even ice cold) with chopped chives or green onions.

Vichyssoise is easy to make, but I can't quite figure out how to make it well. Maybe PMC can weigh in on this. The best I have ever had is in Le Café de Paris by the Casino in Monte Carlo. It was rich in taste but also very light in consistency. Perhaps the traditional method of forcing the soup through a fine sieve is better than blending it. That sounds dangerously like rocket science.

cold celery soup

This is a variation of PMC's soup algorithm, chilled for summer.

Sauté a thinly sliced medium onion in a few tbsp butter until the onion is soft and translucent. Add one whole bunch of celery, chopped and soaked (to remove sand and dirt), and enough diluted chicken broth (home-made or canned) to cover. Simmer for about 30 min. Blend until smooth in a blender, in a food processor, or in the pot with an immersion blender. Taste and adjust salt if necessary. Chill.

When cold, if you wish, mix in a small amount of cream or half-and-half for color and "body"; it's not necessary.

coq au vin

For all our southern-hemisphere readers, or the northern-hemisphere readers for whom it is a cold summer:

Sauté two sliced carrots, one chopped large onion, and one chopped clove of garlic in a few tbsp of butter and a few strips of bacon, chopped into pieces, in an oven-proof pot. Add chicken (in my case, tonight, four large thighs with skins; they are super-cheap and super-tasty). Sauté the chicken a bit too. Add a tbsp or two of flour (I am not sure this is necessary), a bay leaf, and maybe some marjoram and thyme, about 1 tsp salt, pepper, and (nearly) cover with cheap red wine (about 1.5 or 2 cups).

Let it cook in the oven at 250 F (120 C) for 1 hour, covered. Add 1/2 lb sliced mushrooms and cook for 15 more minutes, maybe on the stove-top. Skim some of the fat if you wish (I usually don't); add salt if necessary (it usually is). Serve in shallow bowls with bread, and maybe also roast or boiled potatoes, and maybe a salad to follow (if you have guests).

Coq au vin: who knew? It's not rocket science.

summer borscht

This recipe was reconstructed from the 'fuzz's memory, and various unreliable WWW recipes. We wanted a borscht that involved no meat, and that was light and refreshing for summer. Apparently it's not rocket science.

Cut tops from 6 or so beets, scrub clean, and simmer in 1.5 qts water until beets are starting to become fork-tender (maybe 1.25 hr). Remove beets from liquid and let them cool a bit.

Add to the beet water 1 bay leaf, 1 med onion cut up a bit, a quarter of the (washed, coarsely chopped) beet tops, 1 tbsp vinegar, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp peppercorns, (and maybe 1 tsp sugar or honey) and simmer till you have soup (maybe 1 hr). Strain the soup through a cloth to remove all solids. Add peeled, finely chopped beets back in. (Note how easily cooked beets peel themselves.) You won't necessarily want to add back in all the beets you cooked originally. Simmer a bit more. Near the end, adjust seasoning, and maybe add a bit of honey or sugar if necessary. Remove from heat and chill.

Serve the soup cold with sour cream, and chopped dill, cilantro, and parsley. For added fun, let your guests add their own shredded raw carrots, sliced, hard-boiled eggs, chopped radishes and cucumbers.

agua fresca

Blend 4 or 5 cups of watermelon chunks (no rind, but seeds are fine) along with a a cup (or less) of water until pulverized. Strain. Add 1/2 tsp (or less) of salt, maybe a tbsp or two of lime juice. Chill. Drink!

roast chicken with potatoes and gravy

I am starting to sound like a broken record here, with lots of chicken and lots of roast vegetables, but I can't help it. They're good, they're cheap, they're certainly not rocket science, and I'm hungry!

Ingredients:

• chicken
• potatoes
• lemon & onion (good but not necessary)
• salt, pepper, butter, & oil

Pre-heat the oven to 450 F. Rinse, pat dry, butter, salt, and pepper a chicken. Put the chicken in some kind of pan in the oven and, a few minutes later, turn the oven down to 350 F. No need to dress or truss! Cook for about 20—25 min per pound, or until a meat thermometer in the thigh reads 180 F (okay, maybe that's rocket science).

Put large, olive-oiled (or buttered or bacon-greased or chicken-fatted) chunks of potatoes into a separate pan in the oven for the last hour of roasting.

While the chicken is in the oven, boil the neck and a bit of onion in a cup or two of water to make weak broth in anticipation of gravy.

When the chicken is done, remove it to a platter and let it stand. Pour the pan juices into a glass and let them separate (clear fat rises to the top). Put a few tbsp of the fat back into the roasting pan and, in the pan on the stove, cook a few tbsp of flour into a brown "roux", stirring constantly. Slowly add in the broth, and maybe the liquid from the platter the chicken's in, and maybe the liquid below the fat in the glass, boiling it on the stove, stirring, and using it to "cook off" the burnt stuff from the bottom of the pan. This, with a tiny bit of lemon juice, vinegar, or wine, and salt to taste, makes beautiful gravy (and cleans the pan).

Carve the chicken and serve with the potatoes, gravy, and a green vegetable or salad. Also try mixing the potatoes with beets, parsnips, turnips, or carrots. Don't forget to save the bones and scraps and table scraps (yes, even the table scraps) for chicken broth, and put the extra skimmed fat in the fridge for roasting vegetables the next time.

chicken broth

Okay, this is a no-brainer, but since I made it last night and both the 'fuzz and I went ga-ga over it, I have to post it.

Whenever you cook chicken, keep the bones or necks or scraps or whatever in a bag in the freezer. Then, when bored, put it all into a pot, along with a hacked up onion and some celery (including leaves), and "sweat" it for a bit (PMC's terminology). Cover everything with water, add peppercorns and a bay leaf. Simmer for 45 mins or more. Strain and add salt bit-by-bit until it's delicious.

In principle, you can use this, diluted, in the many soup recipes on F,NRS. In practice, it tastes so damn good, you will just eat it all right away.

boule of country bread II

Bread flour and terra cotta tiles make all the difference. I used about 6 cups of Robin Hood "Best for Bread Homestyle White" bread flour and half a cup of stone ground organic rye from La Milanaise mill in Quebec to 2.3 cups of tap water. (This gives a percentage of water of about 70, normalized to the weight of the flour.) Of this, two cups of bread flour and one cup of water were used, with half a teaspoon of active dry yeast (Fleischman's), to make a "sponge" the night before. This, with the rest of the flour and water and 1 tbsp of sea salt, was used to make the final dough, which was almost pourable, but that apparently is what you're after with this kind of bread.

The first rise took about three hours. I did not punch down the down but rather gingerly scraped it out onto a floured board and gently formed a boule, a disconcertingly flaccid boule. The second rise of about 45 minutes was in a muslin lined colander. Meanwhile, I covered a large jelly roll pan with a double layer of unglazed terra cotta tiles and set it in the oven to preheat at 450 degrees F.

When I put the bread in to bake, I thought, "There's no way this big floppy pancake is going to bake into anything resembling a loaf of bread." But wow! Those big air bubbles I was so careful to preserve hit the heat of the tiles and the surrounding air and up, up, up. The bread tastes great too. Hooray!

cod puttanesca

Last night's supper was fish baked in sauce, but what a sauce!

• Sauté 4–5 cloves of garlic, minced, in about 5 tbsp of good olive oil until just turning golden.
• Add a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes packed in juice and bring to a simmer.
• While simmering, drain and rinse a small can of anchovies and fire those into the sauce. Then add about 20 pitted black olives (Kalamata, baby) and a heaping tbsp of capers. Add a pinch of crushed chiles or some harissa, sambal olek, etc.. Do not add any salt to this sauce.
• If your sauté pan isn't oven proof, pour the sauce into a baking dish. Lay fresh cod filets on sauce (we also had some ocean perch or "sebaste" in French, which is damn cheap and very good) and bake in a medium oven (around 350) for 10 minutes. Sprinke with fresh parsley and tuck in.

We ate this with basil mashed potatoes (russets + olive oil and butter + milk + fresh chopped basil + salt and pepper) and garlicky, lemony sautéed red Swiss chard. The sauce is potent, so I opened a fairly big wine, a 2002 Vacqueyras, to go with it.

The kids powered back the fish, so I'm afraid there were no left overs for bloggers seeking adoption in our household. On a related note, if "Kurt" could be persuaded to come east for a visit this summer, I would gladly make the trip as well to ply him with sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage in exchange for his insight on classroom management