Olives and super chili peppers, oh my!

Whoops...... I'm back!

Bought these puppies at Trader Joe's this morning. Can't be anything bad about them, right!?

I love that they have an Ode to Olives [pdf] on their site. 




As an aside, Flickr's new photo page really blows.

So also, I've been growing some plants on my balcony. Some have been more successful than others. A few months ago, my poor super chili (yes that's the name of the variety) fell off the balcony onto the ground below, but I was able to save it. I've been harvesting a few peppers off of it (they're REALLY spicy), but just in the last week, the thing decided to explode with flowers. If you look at the original version, you can see that there are literally a hundred soon-to-be peppers. I've been chopping them and freezing them so I have chili peppers ready whenever I want.

Happy Heirloom Tomato Season!

Only $2/pound!

Wacky Farmers Market Finds

Happy 4th of July!

Went to the Studio City Farmers Market early this morning and saw some pretty interesting stuff!

Lemon cucumber, which I have been fascinated with ever since we planted a plant of it in our work garden. It's interesting-looking and has kind of almost a spiny thin skin. Excited to try it.

Watermelon pluots, which I had always known as "dinosaur heart" since they are kind of green striped on the outside and pink on the inside.

Donut nectarines, which are pretty self-explanatory.

Yum!

Olive Tapenade

I can't believe this is my first post about olive tapenade. It's one of my favorites that I almost always have in the fridge because it lasts for ages. Maybe mine is not a "real" tapenade because I don't use capers or anchovies, but it is delicious to me. Culinary hero Alton Brown said in his olive tv show that it is important for your tapenade to have different olives with different textures. No problem for me, as I usually have between 5-10 varieties in my fridge at any one time.

The basics, besides olives of course, are fresh lemon juice, dried red chili flakes, fresh parsley, and lots and lots of extra virgin olive oil. Sometimes, if I've tried a variety of olive as an experiment, and I don't like it, I'll use them in tapenade. That works quite well.

No olives out of cans here. In today's batch, I used what I had in the fridge, which consists of 7 olives from 4 countries, including: manzanillla from Spain, kalamata from Greece (which I don't think any tapenade should be made without), four from Italy (Gaeta from Lazio, Barenese from Puglia, Taggiasche from Liguria, Castelvetrano from Sicily), and Old Mission from California.

Oh yeah baby:

I love the way it comes out from the food processor. Before I got one, I used to do it in my little magic bullet, and while it worked and still tasted good, it kind of really pureed it into a paste. The food processor just chops it all, so you're left with little chunks of different kinds of olives. Perfect.

And, the best way to eat it. On a really good piece of toasted bread (this is an organic whole wheat miche from Trader Joe's, which comes as a huge half-loaf that I slice up and freeze to retain freshness. It rocks.). Not toooooooo many things in the world are better.

Frozen Hot Chocolate

On this warm but lovely Memorial Day, I felt like making something new. Not hard, but new. Looked through some recipes I had scanned recently and found this one for Frozen Hot Chocolate in Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts So I gave it a whirl. Since I've got the recipe already scanned, I'll upload it, with all rights reserved to the author, of course (click for the larger version):

I halved the recipe and used the espresso powder. This is what it looked like after warming slightly (and I do mean slightly, it was still cool to the touch when all the sugar had defrosted). It took all of 5 minutes. Maybe even less. Oh and I used raw turbinado sugar, because that's what I had. I wonder if it would work out with agave... probably not too well:

Next day, I followed the rest of the recipe. I have no idea if this is what it's really supposed to look like, but it was damn good, so I can't say that I care much!

More Farmer's Market Goodies and a Breakfast of Champions

To the farmers market again today. Good news is that there were BELL PEPPERS!!!!!!!!!!!! Bad news is that I splurged on a really unhealthy croissant (see below). Today's loot: lettuce, tomatoes, grapefruit, cucumber, cherries (regular and rainier), peppers, sugar snaps, and white nectarines.

So here's the croissant (with an iced cappuccino). Just for your reference for how humongous it was, that's about a 6-7 inch plate. And I finished the whole thing. Oh dear.

An Apulian Feast (and more from the Farmer's Market)

First things first, I went (of course) to the Farmers Market today. Saw Julie Bowen buying stuff with her family, that was cool, she seemed really nice and I wouldn't have known she was a celebrity if I hadn't recognized her. I really wanted to tell her how much I worship Modern Family, but I digress... For $24 I got a ton of cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, grapefruit, snap peas, a red cabbage, and a couple of white nectarines. You know, if they made perfume that smelled like white nectarine, I'd totally buy it. I also tried some sirloin tip steak from the grass fed beef guy. It looks pretty good!

Anyway... a while back I was reading A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveler, by Frances Mayes (of Under the Tuscan Sun fame). I am not sure how she brought it up but she mentioned a cookbook all of recipes from the Apulia (Puglia) region of Italy. It so happens that I am hopefully planning to try to hit that region on my next trip. Mayes mentions a dish of fried artichokes layered with tomato sauce and cheese, so I said UH WHAT! Luckily, the LA Public Library system had the book and I requested it: Flavors of Puglia. It has some amazing recipes in it, but this "Carciofi Parmigiana" recipe stuck out to me, as did a few with olives (no surprise there).

So for the artichokes, first you clean and soak them in lemon water, then make a batter of flour, water, and olive oil. Kind of like tempura I guess. Then you fry them.

Til "golden and crisp" - looks like it to me!! (and honestly, they were good just like this.)

but no, not done: one layer of artichokes, mozzarella, sauce, and parmigiano:

then another layer and it's ready for the oven:

And while it's baking, I started the sauteed olives. I used fresh tomatoes instead of canned, but otherwise it's just garlic, olives, tomatoes, a pinch of oregano, and some parsley. The olives i used were a combination of Apulian Peranzana olives and Ligurian taggiasche olives:

Then the big moment when the parmesan comes out of the oven. OH YEAH BABY!

And the finished meal. Apulia, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Farmers Market Experiment: Week 3

Back to the Farmer's Market again of course. Spent around $26 this week on 2 different lettuces (romaine heart and butter), garlic, cherries, strawberries, grapefruit (5 for $2!), cucumber, parsley, snap peas, and tomatoes. The good news is that I saw some green bell peppers at one place. Hopefully that means the colored (riper) ones will be coming soon! The early stone fruit varieties are also showing up. Can't wait til nectarine season!!!!!

Speaking of tomatoes, look at these adorable little teeny weeny babies! I couldn't resist them.

Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies

It's been so long since I downloaded the PDF of this flourless peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie recipe for that I don't even remember where I found it (almost 2 years to be exact). Finally decided to try it as part of a birthday present for a friend.

I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, except I left out the peanut chunks. I made a double batch so that I'd have some for myself too. They are more crumbly than a normal cookie. I generally prefer chewy cookies but I guess with no flour and no butter, that's not really going to happen. I also overcooked a few of them, as you can see in the last picture, but oh well. Still very tasty!

Farmers Market Experiment: Week 2

Full disclosure: I bought grapefruit yesterday at Jon's. Otherwise, you can see my loot below: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, tangerines, baby artichokes, snap peas, green garlic, and cherriesssssss!!!! All for $24. A bit more than last week but I also bought a bit more. I love the green garlic, it's expensive ($1) but worth it.

I also love talking to the growers, about their food, when their season starts, etc. The cherry guy was saying that they have 12 different varieties. Cool! This is the first week so they're not AMAZING, but they're still pretty good. Looking forward to cherries for the next six weeks or so :) It will be really hard to not buy them from Jon's when they (inevitably) have them for 99c a pound... I might give in once or twice, we'll see.

In the meanwhile, I'm still calling the experiment a success financially, it's still very close, maybe slightly more, than I spend on average at Jon's. But the quality is incomparable, it all tastes so much better, and i don't have to worry about eating chemicals or supporting large nasty companies.

Gramigna "all'amatriciana"

I had some tomatoes from the farmers market and I wanted pasta... I had brought a bag of Gramigna home from Bologna last fall that I still hadn't touched, so I decided to make an "all'amatriciana" like preparation. I boiled the tomatoes for a minute to peel them easily (one plum tomato and one yellow tomato), diced them, and put them in a saute pan where I had been cooking pancetta cubes, diced red chile peppers (that I had frozen - convenient!) and diced garlic in olive oil. Sauteed it all for maybe 10-15 min til it made a sauce. the pasta cooks in 6 minutes. Nice. I took a bit of the pasta water to put in the sauce and then dumped in the pasta. It got super super creamy for some reason, and it was pretty great. Add some parmigiano-reggiano and delicious fast easy pretty authentically italian dinner!

Note the steam still rising up from the bowl......mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!

Farmers Market Experiment: Week 1

Got to the Studio City Farmers Market bright and early this morning and scoped things out. Several stands had signs that said "CHERRIES NEXT WEEK" - yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy! Anyway, to the results of the experiment. I should say that for the past several weeks I've been buying both strawberries and sugar snap peas at the market already. So, for about $22.50, I got the berries and peas, I got everything in the picture below: lettuce, red cabbage, snap peas, strawberries, tons of tomatoes, grapefruit, and a cucumber. Not everything is Organic, but I don't care that much about that. It's all pesticide-free, which is what I care about.

Now to be fair, I didn't buy much fruit because I have some oranges from last week's shopping still in the fridge. But they are California oranges so I don't feel badly about still eating them in this experiment. I definitely got less for the money, but I also didn't buy stuff I don't need that's out of season and probably full of pesticides and god knows what else, like Chilean grapes and Mexican pineapples. I was surprised that I couldn't find ANY bell peppers at the market; that's the one thing I would have really wanted that I couldn't find. But I don't normally put tomato in my lunch salad, so I figured I would replace the bell pepper with some tomato. I was paying 2.99/lb for the Mexican bell peppers anyway, so the tomatoes barely even cost more.

So, considering the $22.50 included the peas and strawberries (which together total a good 1/3 of that $22.50), I actually spent LESS on produce this week than I have been spending a lot of recent weeks. Some things, like the grapefruits at 2 for a dollar, and snap peas at $4/lb were the same or almost the same price as Jon's. Because of all that, I will declare Week 1 a rousing success. 

I also bought about a pound and a half of grass-fed skirt steak. It was their last 2 packages and I was there at 8:15am!! It's beautiful-looking meat. For $14.00 I got 6 dinners worth. For that quality, not bad at all. One of the packages was so fresh that it wasn't even frozen.

We'll see what happens next week!

My Food, Inc. Farmers Market Experiment

The other day I finally watched Food, Inc.

And I was horrified.

Not because of the animal treatment stuff, b/c really, I knew all that already. I guess I actually knew all of it, but seeing it presented in a movie was pretty shocking. How the government subsidizes corn and that's why our beef feeds on corn and that's why our beef has so much e.coli in it. And how Monsanto literally owns the soybean and how they go after anyone who dares try stay GMO-free. And how half of Monsanto's former executive team is infested in our government (including a former counsel on our SUPREME COURT). And the pork packing employees who are RECRUITED in Mexico, helped here illegally, treated like utter garbage, then Smithfield and cohorts make deals with the government to arrest 15 people periodically, so that the company isn't investigated for their recruitment efforts. Anytime you eat Smithfield pork, you're encouraging illegal immigration. UGH.  The problem is that most of the time we are eating it and don't even know it, because they pack stuff for so many other companies. I buy Fresh & Easy bacon often, but I know Tyson packs it (I saw the boxes). I wish I knew who packed Trader Joe's bacon.

Last week after trying local, no hormone, no antibiotic, grass-fed beef at the Studio City Farmers Market, I already decided I would be buying this beef from now on, merely because the taste was incomparable to any supermarket meat.

But what concerns me is that I eat a lot of fruits and veggies. Which is great. But I don't buy much organic, and I'm concerned about all the pesticides I eat. If I eat 4-5 servings EACH of fruits and veggies a day, every single day, that's a lot of pesticides. 

So now, my experiment is to see how much it will cost me every week to buy most of my stuff at the farmers market instead. I'm not that concerned about something like say, grapefruit with a very thick skin. Plus, those are coming from California anyway so I don't feel so badly. the killer will be tomatoes, which I can get cheap at Jon's and not at the farmer's market. But lettuce, things like that, I don't think will cost me very much more. I usually spend about $15 a week at Jon's on fruits and vegetables.  So I will avoid Jon's for the next couple weeks except for a few very select items and see what the difference is. I've always said it would be too expensive to go all farmers market, but I've never really tried.

So we will see.  If it's not that much more expensive, I don't really have an excuse.

Whole Wheat Cinnamon Walnut Swirl Bread

I've made this bread, from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads, a couple times now. Felt like making it again. Makes great french toast. This time I added some flaxseed meal into the starter.

Not much more to say than that.....

I made the starter doughs on Saturday per the recipe. Then you mix them together with the final ingredients to make the final dough, then let it rise. In this picture, it has already risen, then you flatten it into a square, put some cinnamon sugar on it, and roll it up to make the swirl inside...

This is what it looked like rolled up, in the loaf pan, before the 2nd rise....

and after the 2nd rise....

and out of the oven....the loaf weighs TWO POUNDS!!! It doesn't look like it should, but it's heavy for its size.

and sliced open....

and delicious! I think this is the third or so time I've made this bread and this is the best one by far. Really tender. I think maybe because I used white whole wheat flour instead of regular hard wheat flour. Anyway, Awesome.

So this is the end of the crazy cooking weekend of April 2010. I'm impressed with myself that I actually managed to get these posts up in a timely manner. Not sure what I will embark on next, but I do know that the library is holding four more Alice Medrich (aka, CHOCOLATE) books for me, with a fifth and a King Arthur Flour Whole Grain book on the way!

By the way, as I made this post, Anthony Bourdain's Food Porn 2 episode is airing. He was at a steakhouse in NYC with a 24-pound perfectly-cooked prime (truly prime) rib. In HD. I want it.

Pizza (can never have enough.)

Yesterday, I made the starter doughs per the recipe in Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. Today, I put them together and completed the dough. Froze 5 of the balls and let one sit in the fridge for tonight's dinner. This time, instead of making 2-3 ounce balls of dough, which makes like one pizza, I made 5.5-6 ounce balls of dough so I can have leftovers each time. Yay!

I also made fresh tomato sauce last night since I was almost out. Today, I also wrestled with my food processor to shred the mozzarella. I refuse to buy pre-shredded cheese because it's got other ingredients in it to keep it dry and separate, plus it's never made with whole milk cheese. And that is the difference between ok pizza and awesome pizza, I have decided. Put it all together and it's ready to go into the oven. Here it is on the pizza stone...

Out of the oven....I made the crust *slightly* thicker than usual, which made it so much easier to handle.

Ready for eating......mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......in Italy, they serve it with raw prosciutto, so, what kind of wannabe Italian would I be if I didn't serve it the same way ;)

Chocolate Nibby Espresso Cookies

Recently took Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate, which is all about cooking with really good dark chocolate, out of the library after having made brownies from the book as posted by one of my favorite blogs Smitten Kitchen. Not too many of the recipes really struck me, but I scanned a few to save, this being one of them. I had bought some cocoa nibs not long ago and had no idea what to do with them, so this recipe seemed perfect. The "espresso" comes from ground coffee beans. I didn't have unsweetened chocolate, but luckily she provides substitution instructions for using 70%, etc., chocolate instead.

When I made the dough on Saturday, I was worried because it was more like a batter than a cookie dough. But the recipe called for it to sit in the fridge anywhere from an hour to four days. So I figured we'd see how it turned out overnight.

Of course, it had a lot of melted butter and chocolate in it so I knew it would harden, and of course, it hardened too much so I left it out to warm up a bit. Then I got impatient so I made a mess digging and scooping and whatnot. Anyway, this is what they looked like beforehand:

Cooked them about 9 min.....as you can see they spread a bit and blistered a little on the top, but I could tell they were still quite soft inside. Fine by me, I'd rather undercook than overcook.

Tried putting some chocolate covered coffee beans I had lying around in some of them while they were still hot...

Needless to say, they're amazing. There's not quite enough coffee flavor, but it's there. And the nibs add a cocoa-y crunch. Delicious.

Falafel (the start of a banner cooking weekend)

No idea what got into me yesterday, but I started cooking, and cooking and cooking. I prepared starter doughs for two breads (pizza dough and cinnamon walnut swirl bread - both whole wheat), made cookie dough, made tomato sauce, and put some dried chick peas in water to soak.

Every time I go to the library, which seems to be quite often lately, I check out the cookbooks for something new and different or something I hadn't seen before. A few days ago I tried The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone in Between. Not too many recipes interesting to me, but a few caught my eye.

Now that I have a real Cuisinart 7-Cup Food Processor, I could make proper falafel. I liked the flexitarian recipe because it used dried chickpeas and had a lot of good seasonings. I followed the recipe in the book pretty closely except that I used less onion and more garlic. I was a little concerned when i started taking the dough out of the food processor b/c there was no flour or egg or anything, so I wasn't sure how it was going to stick together.... but it did!!! I shallow fried it in grapeseed oil, and it got this nice really crispy crust on it. I was worried I overcooked it....

But then I bit into it, and as you can see, it was just right! Nice and moist and soft inside, REALLY crispy/crunchy outside (I thank the grapeseed oil for that, love frying with it). And all around really good! I froze the rest for 2 future easy quick dinners, hopefully it cooks up after being frozen just as nicely.

Yum! I will be posting photos from the other things I made this weekend soon.

I eat weird lunches

I eat weird lunches
Originally uploaded by debstah1

I think the subject says it all.....3 gourmet cheeses, whole wheat tuscan toast with homemade olive tapenade, farmers market sugar snaps, carrots, a tomato, a handful of raw mixed nuts, and farmers market strawberries, with a can of San Pellegrino limonata (not pictured)... just another weekend lunch for me!

(btw, posted this via Flickr's "blog this" function, worked pretty well!)

Resurrection?

I need to resurrect this blog; I can't believe it has been almost a year and a half since I posted. completely unacceptable, especially since I've been cooking a lot. Baking, making bread, pasta, pizza, chicken, chocolate, lots of chocolate, you name it. I guess I'm just lazy. I had one of the best food experiences of my life in Italy last fall, going to Parma and seeing them make Parmigiano-Reggiano. Now, I refuse to buy anything else. I found a couple of Italian markets in Santa Monica where I have gone a couple times for goodies like amazing olives, pancetta, and even limonata. No, not LEMON SODA :( but San Pellegrino Limonata is pretty close.

Heck, I've even moved since I last posted. This kitchen is small but I have been able to make do.

I even bought a new camera that blows away the one I had before. But I've already had that baby almost a year. No excuses.

I've been going to the Studio City Farmer's Market more and more, almost every Sunday now. It's April, which means strawberry season in California. Picked these babies (delicious babies) up today.





I'm going to try to do better. I must.