Category Archives: Cookbooks

Polenta ala Ina Garten

Ina Garten's rosemary polenta

Ina Garten’s rosemary polenta

I made a great polenta dish today from Barefoot Contessa Family Style by Ina Garten.  I love all of Ina Garten’s cookbooks because the recipes really work.  This is an older book – from 2002 – but I go back to it again and again.  The rosemary polenta on page 130 is killer, even if you substitute whole milk for the half and half and use commercially-prepared chicken stock.  I have some leftovers which I plan on serving under chicken in pan gravy tomorrow.  Of all the cooked-formed-chilled-cut-fried polenta dishes in my world, this is by far the best; that little bit of rosemary she calls for really makes the dish.  Oh, did I mention that I served the polenta tonight with NY strip steaks?  I nabbed a whole USDA Choice striploin the other day for $5.99/lb.  This is by far the best way to go if you need to feed a group or if you don’t mind freezing what you don’t use right away.  A good striploin does not need much trimming and, indeed, you’ll want to leave that layer of fat on there to lubricate the meat as it cooks.  Simply cut steaks evenly with a sharp knife.  Once you’ve done this a time or two you’ll be a pro – just don’t fear those larger cuts of meat since they often represent a terrific bargain.  When my mother goes into my fridge to see what’s going on in there and she catches a glimpse of a massive vacuum packed slab of beef, she knows she’ll be firing up the Weber for steaks that weekend.

Happy Easter 2008!

Easter Sunday!  We once again made roast duck.  My mom stuffed them with green apples, adding great flavor and a bit of acidity, which is nice with fatty foods.  The stars of the meal were the Junior’s cheesecake, which I made from a recipe in Molly O’Neill’s New York Cookbook (1992), and my old standard, the 7-up cake.  The cheesecake was exactly as it should be – dense, a bit crumbly and not too sweet.

Jon was over for the weekend and we all had a fun holiday together.  I once again was able to harvest enough duck fat to see the family through the next six months of roast potatoes, and Berry made out pretty well, too.  Happy Easter to all!

jon and berry the akita ready to have easter dinner in 2008

I cooked an Asian meal today

lion’s head meatballs 3-16-08

Chinese dinner tonight for friends.  I guess I’m just crazy enough to make Chinese food for Chinese guests, but I figure they’d appreciate the gesture as I do when someone serves me up some Eisbein that is less than echt.  I made a couple of my favorite Shanghai-style dishes:  lion’s head meatballs, which are first fried and then braised in cabbage leaves, and pork belly braised in wine, soy sauce, ginger and rock sugar.  For some reason I also served up kare-kare, a Filipino dish of tripe and oxtails laced with annatto oil and peanut butter, just for some contrast.  It’s generally a bad idea to cook something you never made before when company calls, but I saw this in Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet on our Immigrant Ancestors (1990), and wanted to give it a go.  I love kare-kare, but you can’t eat too much in one sitting or you’ll feel like killing yourself.

kare kare 3-16-08

Yes, I know this meal was too heavy in sum total, and I should have had a veggie or fish dish to round it all out, but we wanted to go for broke.  I didn’t even mention the potato Kugel with blood pudding dip – which sent this nothing-really-goes-together meal into depraved territory.  Yes, yes, I know Jeff Smith has been accused of terrible things and I should never use his cookbooks because that would go against the wishes of the powers that be – essentially to wipe his memory off the face of the earth, but I have no intention of stopping.  His cookbooks are pretty good.  Rip off my arms and legs if you want to.

braised pork belly

One recipe of Nigella’s bites

I like Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks.

I got a used copy of Nigella Bites (2002) the other day and prepared two recipes thus far:  chocolate fudge cake (page 47) and liptauer (page 161).  I am always on the lookout for a good chocolate cake recipe, but I can honestly say that this isn’t one.  The cake itself came out dry and bland and is not worth the ingredients or multiple bowls you’ll need.  I have numerous “toss everything in one bowl and let her rip”- type recipes that turn out a much better product.  The frosting was also just so-so.  That said, my mother loved the cake because it was not overly sweet and she liked the heavy, buttery frosting.

The liptauer, however, was great.  (Liptauer is what Californians would incorrectly call a schmear for bagels, even though schmear means “a little,” as in, “a bagel with a schmear,” which, when ordered in New York City, would get you a bagel with a little plain cream cheese.) . I had an Austrian chef-instructor in cooking school who talked fondly about liptauer.  It’s a cheese spread that you make by processing everything together in one fell swoop and then pressing the resulting mass into a mold.  You eat this stuff on bagels or good, hearty bread – the kind that can stand up to the caraway seeds, which provide a pronounced flavor to the mix.  The only thing I suggest is to drain the cottage cheese she calls for – since I assume you’ll be using the runny cottage cheese that is prevalent in the US.  My guess is that people in Europe use quark, which is something like cottage cheese but not easy to get here and considerably more expensive.  If you can find dry curd cottage cheese, that’ll solve your problem altogether.  Please do not use fat free cheese or you won’t get a good mouth feel – and that goes for the cream and cottage cheeses.  Use real block cream cheese, sil vous plait.  I have no photos of the items, so I substituted Berry, just to add a little color to the entry.

Berry the akitachow looking mellow in 2008

The $3 cupcake

Cupake with milk chocolate icing

I baked my version of the $3.00 cupcake today using the sour cream cake recipe from The Ebony Cookbook (1978), by Freda DeKnight, and a basic milk chocolate buttercream recipe from school.  Just to be interesting I used pans with odd shapes, like a ghost mini cake pan that springs into action every Halloween.  The cake was a bit rubbery so next time I’ll try a pound cake batter; most cupcake batters are just too soft for my taste.  Incidentally, this is one great cookbook.  No pictures, but a treasure of recipes, especially if you want to make things like coffee cakes and biscuits.  Plenty of good ideas for chicken, too.