Try a new recipe each week

Work had a nice cabbage soup with smoked ham – good enough that I decided I’d have to try doing the same to my frequently-made cabbage stew. I ended up using cubed ham from the butcher, but it didn’t have anywhere near as smoky a taste as the original. Time to move to a better smoked ham/pork.

I tried this at work and liked it enough to find a recipe n the internet. I made it tonight when I felt too lazy to wash lettuce for a salad.

Take a couple stalks of celery, and slice into thin (1/2”) slices on the diagonal. Add some chopped pitted dates and some candied walnuts (none in the house – I used slivered almonds.) Dress with a vinagrette, and top with a couple thin shavings of parmesan cheese.

Here’s a real recipe for those who don’t want to wing it: http://kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot.com/2008/11/celery-date-walnut-salad.html

The sweet and nutty go nicely with the celery, and it was an easy way to have some green veggies. I’ll definitely make this again!

We’ve been hanging out with friends too much lately, and I hadn’t done a grocery shop. When we actually ate at home tonight, the frozen shrimp in the fridge seemed like an obvious starting point.

Chosen recipe: “Shrimp and vegetable pasta” straight from a worn copy of New Basics. Like the ham and olive pasta from “Bistro Cooking”, this is a pasta in a lemon and oil dressing. It’s a bit of work; cook shrimp, put in bowl. Add lemon juice, olive oil, tomatoes, bell peppers, dill, tarragon, chili oil, chili flakes, minced onions, and pepper. Let marinade. Blanch broccoli, throw in. Cook pasta, mix together, serve. Dear wife liked it, and it had enough spice for me to like it too.

My mother-in-law was over for dinner tonight. Dessert sounded like a good idea (and something warm, considering it’s getting chilly at night!) I’d seen a recipe for baked pears in the SF Chronicle last week; we had almost all the ingredients, and it was easy to throw together in 30 minutes.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/29/FDRK13NQA8.DTL#recipe1

Short answer: it’s just baked pears with a pancake batter poured over the pears, and sugar and almonds over the top. I finely minced almonds rather than crushing them (how do I do that), I left out the lavender flowers, and I used the pears we had in the fridge – some Bartlett, some Anjou. No french butter pears at Safeway this week.

At the Farmer’s Market last week, we found a vendor selling all sorts of cool sausages, vacuum packed duck drumsticks, and other french-style meats. We ended up taking home a package of venison sausage, one of the drumsticks, and the toulouse-style pork sausages. The toulouse-style sausages went right into the fridge to defrost, but by today I was thinking I ought to use them.

Second recipe I found online: lentils and sausage stew. Dear wife, who’s not very fond of beans, made a face and said she’d try to eat them. Once she’d tasted the final product, she was sold… and even went back for seconds!

(Subtitled Smashed Potatoes, from Patricia Wells “Bistro Cooking”)

Cut up baking potatoes into chunks, and boil/ microwave them til cooked.

Saute sliced onions in butter til brown. Throw in potatoes, a bit more butter, nutmeg, salt, pepper. Throw the whole mix into something suitable for the oven, dot with butter, and put under the broiler til the top gets a little bit crisp.

Quick, easy, tasted good with tri-tip beef. Probably not the appropriate thing with the heat wave, but seemed like it would go well with grilled meat.

Turned out great, even though the mint was a bit dried out. The mint’s been growing fast and filled a huge pot, but now it’s not getting enough water.

My sister’s backyard fig tree is producing like crazy, so we came back from her place with a couple pounds of figs. She also told us about her favorite recipe – fig pizza with caramelized onions, ricotta cheese, and arugula, and it sounded good enough that we had to try it at home.

We didn’t make the same recipe, but stole bits from internet recipes and from what was available at the grocery store. The arugula was sold out, so I sliced up some radicchio, and I used an opened package of goat cheese rather than open the container of ricotta we’d saved to try making raviolis from scratch. I also remembered the local Italian supermarket had fresh pizza dough, so I grabbed a ball of dough and stretched my own crust. There’s no tomato sauce on the pizza, just a ton of very slow cooked onions soaked in balsamic vinegar.

It came out pretty well; I’d never had good luck rolling my own pizza dough, but several minutes of worrying the dough in the right directions gave me a thin crust and a mostly round shape. One edge got messed up when it slipped off the pizza stone in the oven, but other than that it turned out very, very well.

Okay, I don’t have fresh meat. I’ve got frozen shrimp. I’ve got leeks I’ve been meaning to use. What can I make?

I actually dived through the cookbooks this time. It seems so twentieth-century.

The Old Sicilian Gentleman’s Cookbook had a recipe for Shrimp Marinara – shrimp in a tomato-based sauce. New Basics had the same thing, but with leeks instead of onions, and rosemary and parsely instead of garlic and onions. Went out and grabbed some branches from the overgrown rosemary hedge out front, used canned tomatoes and those leeks I’d gotten for another recipe. Didn’t turn out too bad…

Last week: we picked a ton of lemons off the tree in our front yard. It needed pruning so next year’s crop wouldn’t grow right over the driveway. We ended up with at least fifty or sixty, and so I’ve been going through lemon recipes trying to use them up.

Last week: lemon rice soup with kale, tumeric, and soy sauce. I thought it was ok, Christine thought it was subtle and good.

Personally, I liked the lemon and black pepper cookies from a few weeks back more.