St. Pat's

Spinach, Garden Lettuce, and Apples with Lemon-Honey Dressing
This dressing was amazing. Unfortunately, I don't remember how I made it, except that it had lemon juice and honey in it.

Colcannon (vegan and not)
Burnt. My fault.

Soda Bread (non vegan, with raisins)
I think that my favorite soda bread would be a hybrid. Yes on both whole wheat and butter. Yes also to raisins. Light on the sugar. This was the white flour, high sugar, butter, and raisins version from the Bread Bible. If I had to go to one extreme, I'd pick this one. But a little more bran and a little less sweet would be perfect.

Vegan Irish Baby with Turnip and Beets in an Asian Glaze
The baby was chewy and delicious. The Asian glaze was also delicious, but a little out of place.

Beef and Guinness Stew
Tragic waste of cow. This is one of my favorite recipes, but in the rush of the cooking shift, the stew got cooked at too high a temperature, and the meat was horrible and chewy. Next time, don't plan a beef stew unless it can start early! (Note: Margit did exactly this a couple of weeks later, and the result was an amazing falling apart almost rendang-like beef and beer and carrot dish. With roasted cauliflower.)

Lentils with Mustard Dressing
Standard. Good. I'd be happy if we always had this in the fridge.

Guinness Cake (vegan and not)
Margit, ahead of time. The recipe did not scale well to the large pans, and the vegan version didn't hold together too well. But it all tasted great. Especially the crumbly vegan disaster.

More than I could chew

10 march 2009 (Purim)

After three weeks of assisting and excited about the holiday, I was a little over ambitious this week. In particular, this menu suggested three night-before tasks. Any one of them would have been manageable, but all together they added about four extra hours onto the shift, and ate up all of Monday evening.

Challah
Dairy Free from the Bread Bible, times four, with an extra egg or two (oops). I made the dough the evening before. It was very wet, and I was a little concerned that it would be difficult to form the next day, but the night spent in the fridge did wonders for it. Margit made four gorgeous braids, and they all got demolished.

Salad with Preserved Lemon Dressing
Either the preserved lemons weren't ready, or I should have been more careful about just using the peel, but the dressing was awful. I spent way too much time trying to save it. In the end, it was alright but not great, so I threw together a batch of the Krug family's dressing and served both on the side.

Sasouf (Bulgur and Chickpeas with Herbs and Lemon)
This was really nice. Easy to make, and the leftovers went quickly.

Butternut Squash Soup
Roasting the squash the night before made this soup really easy day-of. But processing all the squash myself the night before was an enormous pain. The soup was very simple and came out well. Onions softened in earth balance, pre-baked squash, and vegan broth simmered together for most of the shift. I pureed it with the immersion blender, and then added just a tiny bit of coconut milk and salt and pepper before serving it. This was a first attempt at copying Lauren's recipe. I think that hers had bay and rosemary.

Roast Lamb with Gravy
Alistair took care of this. I can't remember what my plan was for the lamb, but he didn't like it. I wasn't attached to it, so I let him take over.

Chicken, Olives, Onions, and Raisins in White Wine

Roast Eggplant Slices

Yogurt Sauce
My favorite. House yogurt, pomegranate molasses, tahini, and garlic. It was perfect, but no one seems to love this as much as I do. There was a ton left over. I used myself as an extra condiment with almost every meal for the next week.

Roasted Red Peppers and Onions

Hamantaschen
I made the dough for this the night before as well, and let Margit actually form the cookies. We had poppy seed and jam fillings; no chocolate, as we ran out of time. I would definitely make these again.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2008/03/the_hamantaschen_project.html

Tuesday February 17th

Margit in charge, Kevin and I assisting

Fresh Garden Lettuce with Soy Milk Mustard Dressing
Roast Lamb with Apple/Prune Sauce, from epicurious, very good
Scandinavian Split Pea Soup
Vegan Soda Bread
Brussels Sprouts, shredded with butter and pecans
Pears Poached in White Wine

Best Meal Ever

Thanks to last weekend's wonderful Yosemite trip, I've been a little overwhelmed this week and haven't gotten around to posting Tuesday's dinner until now. And once again, I don't have time to flesh it out; V-day dinner starts in half an hour. However, it was really, really good, so I want to at least get the list down before I forget the dishes.

Roasted Salmon
With Asianish Glaze: Two parts mustard, One part soy sauce, a big glug of olive oil, and as much garlic as we had time to chop. Roasted at 500 for maybe 25 minutes? (Thank you Christie! That fish was maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in our kitchen!)

Lentilles au vin (encore, this time with champignons)
I carefully followed a recipe from Local Flavors by Deborah Madison, but the basic idea is this: get a lot of dried porcini mushrooms, maybe a cup and a half. Let them soak in boiling water for at least a half hour. While that is happening, saute some carrots and onions and celery and garlic in olive oil, then add some (four bottles of) wine. Simmer for a long time. Add the mushroom soaking liquid and some (maybe two cups) of soy sauce. Simmer some more, then strain, and mix with some (a gallon of) French lentils, and some chopped brown button mushrooms you've been roasting for the last half hour. This will be way to much food, so maybe next time cut by a quarter.

Carrot Salad (encore, this time with raisins and sesame seeds)
I don't always like raisins in my carrot salad, but I guess the house does. The leftovers didn't last half as long as last time.

Beet and Tomato Ragout with Goat Cheese Souffles
A favorite dinner party recipe from back when I was a grown up. It scaled remarkably well.

Chard and Beet Greens
Apparently emblematic of my cooking. Fortunately, pretty tasty.

Reheated Day Old Acme Bread
We had a lot of rolls this week, so I threw them in a metal bowl with a bit of water in the bottom and put them in a 500 degree oven for ten minutes. This worked ever better than I expected. We should do this every week that we have rolls, because I don't think we ever get through all the bread.

Vegan Chocolate Raspberry Cake
From the Veganomicon; very delicious. Someone asked "What kind of black magic makes this cake vegan?" The answer: Smucker's Strawberry Jam.

Indian Setsubun

Tuesday, February 3rd

Rescued Chickpeas
The chickpeas leftovers from Thursday were not getting eaten. I rescued them by substituting them, spinach and all, into a channa masala recipe. This would have worked well if I had been more careful with the spices; I accidentally poured in some cardamom at one point when I thought I was adding cumin. It was a bit much. The channa masala and spinach combo was great, though. Tasty (if you imagined away the extra cardamom) and really beautiful.

Rice With Onions
And cashews on the side. Should have had cranberries, but I forgot to put them out. This was also slightly overspiced, but would have been a great dish if I had been just a little more conservative. Next time: puree lots of garlic, ginger, and chilies in the food processor, fry briefly in a lot of olive oil, add the rice and water with just two or three cinnamon sticks and a tiny bit of turmeric and cumin, and mix in caramelized onions at the end. One gallon of short grain brown rice needs somewhere strictly between twenty two and thirty two cups of water.

Chicken Kebabs
From Julie Sahni's Savoring India, with dried cilantro instead of fresh, and three whole lemons in the marinade. Margit grilled these outside, and they were awesome. One whole box of frozen boneless skinless breasts was just about a perfect quantity.

Brussels Sprouts with Spicy Cornmeal
From the Veganomicon. Not as interesting as I expected it to be, but still very good. Rebecca did this one start to finish. This included trimming an enormous box of itty bitty sprouts.

Carrot Soup
Epicurious recipe. Okay, but not worth making again. Again, the spices were off. This time, they had been carefully measured, and then some fraction got charred and had to be replaced, but it wasn't clear how large a fraction had been lost... Also, important lesson: do not throw huge chunks of ginger into a giant pot soup that is going to be pureed with the immersion blender. This may well work in a tiny pot, but it will not work for the house. No matter how homogeneous you try to make the soup, you will fail, and you will miss some ginger chunks, and you will burn yourself. Chunks of veggies are okay.

Raita
Grated cucumber, dried peppermint, and Zeph's yogurt.

Sweet Coconut Green Tea Black Bean Soup
Small nod to Setsubun. Green tea, coconut milk, agave syrup, black beans, dried fruit. Too sweet for me, but most of it was eaten.

Too much, too much...

Wednesday. 29 January

So, apparently, 20 lbs of pork loin is a lot. Like, twice as much as we needed.

Also, if a 3 lb roast takes 1 hour, 2 and a half hours at the same temperature is NOT a good estimate for 20 lbs. However, 2 hours at the normal temperature plus half an hour at "as hot as the oven will go" seems to work pretty well. If you're into charring.

Menu:

Orange and Honey Pork Loin Roast
Orange juice, Honey, Garlic, salt, pepper, pork, and heat. Lots of heat. 350 for two hours in a braising dish, and then 500 on a baking tray for a half hour. A better plan might have been to start with the high temperature and then turn it down. Or maybe 400ish covered for the whole time. The meat was actually cooked perfectly tonight, but the outside was black.

Chickpeas with Garlic and Spinach
Boring! I thought that I added a ton of garlic, but this seemed tasteless to me. Maybe it just needed salt. Or lemon juice. Next time, I would do this with fresh spinach, and pay a little more attention to the dish overall. It could have been good.

Veggie Paella
Onions, Red Peppers, Sweet Potatoes, Fennel, Green Beans, Artichoke Hearts, Rice, and Saffron. Good, not great. next time: cut the artichokes, add some mushrooms and more spices. I almost lost half of this. Must remember that one of the big woks has some thin spots and can get burny!

Bulgur with Vegetables and Paella Spices
A little overkill, perhaps. I was worried that the paella would not be enough. This was false.

Roast Cauliflower
Four trays full, five hundred degrees for just over an hour. Perfect. Thanks, Harold!

Sauteed Cauliflower Greens
Should have been chopped much smaller, and maybe mixed in with the chickpeas.

Tapioca Pudding
Excellent, even with the spinach spicing. Sarah B followed a recipe that she found on the internet, but cut the sugar by half. The only change I'd make next time would be to make more of it. Sarah started with 3 quarts of milk, and there wasn't quite enough.

Go, Sarah, Go!

Wednesday, January 28th

I came home today to find Sarah P and Benoit in the kitchen waiting for a head cook. At about 4:10, Benoit checked the sign up sheet and discovered that no one had taken the shift. So the two assistant cooks instantly rose to the task in front of them, rummaging around the kitchen, looking for protein sources and unclaimed veggies, but seemed like everything they picked out was reserved for my meal tomorrow.

It's hard enough cooking for the house when you're down a set of hands, but they were hit by surprise and without a plan (no defrosted meat! no soaking beans!), and additionally had my greedy kitchen whining to deal with (hands off those peppers!), so I stuck around for a little while to help them plan. Specifically, I started some Massaman curry, in the hopes that a rich coconut milk based Thai curry would stretch out the small bag of chicken that Benoit found, and make the whole meal seem more substantial. Sarah took on the head chef role and made some awesome lentils for the vegetarians, and quinoa, and stir fried some bok choy. The total quantity of food was a little low (you can only chop so much with 2/3 of a team), but overall I was quite impressed with her meal. Very well done, for such a last minute affair, and quite substantial as well.

The Massaman curry was a liberally modified recipe from somewhere on the internet. Equal parts coconut milk and veggie broth (two big cans each), lots of cumin and coriander, quite a bit of cinnamon and cardamom, a little nutmeg and cloves, and a tiny bit of tumeric for color. Soy sauce. Brown sugar. Most of the work went into making an impromptu curry paste: roughly chopped red onions, peeled and coarsely chopped ginger, peeled whole garlic, a few chopped chilies, and 3 quartered limes sauteed until the onions looked brownish, then thrown in the food processor and turned to mush. Perhaps not the most nuanced approach, but the whole limes were a solid co-opy replacement for both lemongrass and lime leaves.

I left Sarah with a big pot of curry and nothing in it. She and Benoit split the curry into two pots, chopped up a million sweet potatoes and a bunch of onions and threw them into both, then processed and fried a bag of chicken thighs and added them to one of the pots. They had roasted peanuts and dried coconut on the side, as well as a bottle of fish sauce. (The fish sauce really should have gone into the curry, at least the chicken one, but fish sauce is very controversial, so to the side it went). Green onions and cilantro would have been nice, but again: there's only so much you can do with two cooks. I don't even know if we had cilantro.

The lentils were tamarind lentils from the Veganomicon. I suggested them because I thought that the tamarind would go well with the curry. It's not clear if the pairing really worked, but the lentils themselves were super delicious. For all the complaints I hear about too many lentils, these didn't even last through dinner. Maybe it's just my lentils people don't like. Sarah's were a huge success.

Along with the lentils and curry, they made quinoa and bok choy. Either this quinoa was somehow different than our usual quinoa, or Sarah is a better quinoa washer than I am, but it seemed extra nutty and totally lacking in the usual quinoa hint o' bitterness. That did go extremely well with the curry. If I ever make Thai curry again for the house, I plan to forgo the usual brown rice. and make some quinoa. It was perfect.

And hopefully, I'll have three cooks, so that there will be time to chop more bok choy, because one wok full is definitely not enough!