Meatballs
2 lb 85% ground beef
1 lb ground pork
1.5 tsp. gelatin, dissolved in 3 tbsp water
Panade (mix and let sit 10 minutes)
-->2 1/4 c. panko soaked with 1.5 c. buttermilk
3 lg. eggs (beaten)
6 oz. prosciutto
3 oz. grated parmesan cheese
6 tbsp. chopped parsley
3 cloves garlic
1.5 tsp salt
.5 tsp pepper

make 1/4 c. meatballs.
onto grate in baking sheet, lined with foil
roast 450 deg for 30 min.

//

Sauce
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1-2 grated onions (1.5 c.) - cook until "golden" 6-8 min
6 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp pepper flakes
1 tsp dried oregano
3 cans of 28 oz crushed tomatoes
6 tbsp dry white wine
6 c. tomato juice
1.5 tsp salt
touch of pepper

bring up to heat and simmer for 15 min.

Drop the hot meatballs into the sauce, and return everything (covered) to 300 oven for 1 hour.

Finish with 1/2 c. chopped basil and 3 tbsp. chopped parsley. Serve with those long noodley thingys.


((1/3 recipe made 24 meatballs, so 6-8 portions))

Starter

½ c. AP flour
½ c. warm water
1½ tsp. instant yeast

Dough

3 c. AP flour
½ c. warm water
2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

Toppings

2 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp. rosemary leaves
1 tsp. kosher salt

Peel & quarter 1 potato. Boil in ~1 qt. water for 25 minutes. Mix starter ingredients together in a bowl, cover and set aside for 20 minutes.

Grate potato, or run through vegetable ricer.

Add 1½ c. flour to the starter and mix well for ~5 minutes. Add grated potato, olive oil, water and 1¼ c. flour and continue mixing until dough comes together. Turn dough out onto floured surface and knead in remaining ¼ c. flour until the dough is elastic and sticky. Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl, cover and set aside until dough doubles in size (usually 1 hour).

With wet hands, turn dough out onto a generously oiled 15½x10½ rimmed baking sheet, and press dough flat. Cover again and proof until doubled in volume (usually 45-60 minutes).

Preheat oven to 425ºF.

Dimple the dough with wet fingers, and sprinkle on toppings, starting with the oil.

Bake until bottom crust is golden brown & crisp, 23-25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack before serving.

Prepare "paprika cream":
12 oz. roasted red peppers
1/3 c. sweet paprika
2 tbsp. tomato paste
2 tsp. white vinegar.
Blend.


3.5 to 4 lb. chuck eye roast
... cubed and salted, left to rest 15 minutes.

In 2 tbsp vegetable oil, saute 4 large onions, chooped over medium heat for around 10 minutes, until transluscent and soft but not brown.

Add meat but do not brown. Add 4 chopped carrots and 1 bay leaf.

Bake at 325F for 2.5 hours. Warm up and add 1 c. beef broth. Return to oven for 30 min.

Finish with 1/4 c sour cream and 1 tsp vinegar.

Garbure

in 2 tbsp. duck fat, saute

1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced

Add 1 generously-sized ham bone (or ham hock)
turnips
carrots
leek
bouquet garni

parsley
thyme
bay leaf
leek greens

Cover with water, simmer for 1 hr.

Add potatoes, bacon and cabbage (1 small green cabbage, chopped big (1") and blanched). Simmer 1.5 hours.

To finish, remove ham bone & bouquet garni. Add duck confit, 1 tbsp duck fat and canned beans. Simmer 10-15 minutes, then remove from heat.

Celery Root Remoulade
Serves 8

1 lb. celery root, 1" juliennes
½ tbsp. salt
½ tbsp. lemon juice
¼ c. dijon mustard
3 tbsp. boiling water
⅓ c. olive oil
3 tbsp. white wine vinegar
⅓ c. sour cream
2 tbsp. parsley, chopped


Toss the julienned celery root with the salt and lemon juice and let steep for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a warm bowl, make the dressing: take the dijon mustard and whisk in the hot water, olive oil and vinegar.

Rinse, drain and dry the celeriac. Fold in the dressing and add sour cream and parsley. Chill if not serving immediately.

So after all these crusty, rustic and free-form breads, I thought I'd take a stab at the one bread I've been purposely avoiding. In a way, sandwich bread (particularly stuff like Wonder Bread and other enriched white breads) are the reason I even started baking at all. Simpler and, frankly, more "European" just struck me as better. In the end, though, I have come to learn that using good judgement in choosing ingredients is more important than what that bread might happen to symbolize for you. And really, it makes sense: Sandwich bread is really good for, surprise surprise, sandwiches.

This is another recipe taken from Hintz's book (the same one as the whole wheat loaf). As such, it is again super unfriendly for mixing by hand. The basic dough is quite stiff, as it counts on the addition of a stick of softened butter, but then there is the challenge of integrating that butter into the dough. Otherwise, it is a starter-less bread that seems to demand a lot of waiting, a warmer-than-usual area to rest and no steam.

One of the interesting techniques described in these recipes is an alternate way of degassing the dough. Instead of punching it down, it suggests pulling up one side of the dough (the "stretch") until it forms a large flap, then folding it over the rest of the dough. By doing this in all four directions, it should be enough manipulation to degas the dough, but does so gently, and in a way that smooths out the surface.

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Pain de Mie ("bread of crumb", or white sandwich bread)
Makes 2 loaves

666g or 4¾ c. bread flour
1¼ tsp. salt
1¾ tsp. sugar
2 tsp. instant yeast
1¾ c. milk (400g)
120g or 11 tbsp. butter, softened

Combine the bread flour, salt, sugar, yeast and milk and mix on "low speed for about 4 minutes." I took this as "hand mix for about 10". Add the softened butter, half at a time, and incorporate into the dough. I had difficulty doing this by hand, and eventually hand-kneaded the dough in the bowl for about 10 minutes until the butter seemed properly worked in.

Let the dough rise for about 45 minutes. Stretch and fold (see above) and allow to rise for another 45 minutes.

Divide the dough into halves, preshape into logs and proof for 45 minutes in greased bread pans. (Here I found the dough didn't rise properly unless it was warmer than usual. After an hour with no perceptible change in size, I proofed it for another 45 minutes or so in a warm oven.) The dough should rise to just about 1 cm below the rim.

Bake at 375° for 30-40 minutes, then remove from the pans and return to the oven for another 3-5 minutes, to get even browning on all sides. Let cool on a wire rack before cutting.

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Whether it was because it's just an obscene amount of butter, or because I wasn't able to incorporate it into the dough properly by hand, the result was very, very buttery and frankly a little bizarre:



The crust was a vaguely croissant-like finish, flakey, crumbly and buttery, while the crumb was tight and rich, almost like brioche. In fact, I would think that the crumb may have ended up more like what I imagined brioche to be than the actual brioche recipe I tried a year ago. Obviously with no eggs it's not quite the same but it still struck me as bizarre, as all the pictures in the cookbook show a nice, clean white loaf with an almost leathery crust, the way store-bought sandwich bread has.

I'm frankly not sure what to do to improve on the loaf. While it was a wonderful breakfast bread, I wasn't quite what I was hoping for in terms of making simple things like BLTs and grilled cheese. Perhaps I'll look up some other sandwich bread recipes and compare. Regardless, I think 11 oz of butter is too much, and I'll likely go with a lot less next time.

A kitchen supply store near my house is closing down and on a recent visit there, we noticed a pasta machine on liquidation for about $20. Not knowing much about pasta machine quality but wanting to try it out, we picked it up but it was only recently that I got to try it out.

I happened to have some extra spinach kicking around last week, thanks largely to the beet greens occupying the usual "leafy side dish" role in my meals. To be honest, I was a little hesitant, though; Frozen spinach seems so much more convenient, being that it practically disintegrates into mush when exposed to air. That quality alone would probably make it a lot easier to mix into pasta dough.

Despite my misgivings, I was inspired by a blog post I found that seemed confident that fresh spinach, "rinsed dry then chopped finely" would mix into the pasta dough just fine. With that in mind, I set out to make spinach tagliatelle, the traditional accompaniment to ragu bolognese.

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Buoyed largely by its success last time, I used the "middle-class pasta" I made for the bolognese as a baseline: 2 cups of AP flour, 7 oz. of liquid. In this case, I went with 2 whole eggs and trusted the generous handful of fresh spinach I was chopping would retain about 2 fluid ounces of water no matter what I did. The result was this:



While my freckled pasta looks great, the problem is that there are hard flecks of spinach in that pasta. After it was allowed to rest and I ran it through the pasta machine, the harder bits of spinach actually tore the pasta sheets when they got too thin. In the end, I had to settle for a thicker noodle, about the same thickness as when I rolled it out by hand, in fact.



As long as the noodle was holding together before cooking, it seemed to survive two minutes of boiling and the finished dish turned out just fine. Instead of tossing the pasta with the bolognese sauce, I actually found I preferred this "nest-style" presentation, as the sauce is thick enough to hold its shape, but mixes really easily once you run your fork through the pasta: (and yes, I realize that's a ton of sauce)

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As for the pasta machine, a little research on the company name revealed that it's a Changzho Shule Pasta Machine (their web site is elusive). Visually, it's actually a dead ringer for any one of dozens of different varieties of pasta machine and 95% of the hand-cranked pasta machines have the same general look. Amusingly, the one problem I've had with it so far (the crank is loose and likes to fall out if I so much as look at it funny) seems to also happen with its higher priced twins (like the Atlas 150). We'll see how it does in the long run.

Recently, I was swayed by a reading of Michael Pollan's latest book, In Defense Of Food (Amazon, though we just borrowed it from the library). The more time goes by, the more I've been trying to eat more simply, with less junk, less processed foods, etc etc etc. One of the ideas in the book was to avoid foods with "more than 5 ingredients" at the supermarket, as well as ingredients you can't pronounce. This is all good and well in principle, as the idea is to cut out a lot of preservatives, extra nutrients that are otherwise just stapled onto whatever you're eating, and try to get back to a simpler, more direct way of eating. The minus side is that even some of the simplest things we eat have gone through fairly complicated processes. Enter the great mental debate about flour.

White flour (even unbleached), is stacked with ingredients and, for some reason, this piqued my curiousity. Apparently, some of these ingredients will help the flour to age (a necessary process, if it isn't bleached)... some enrich the flour with extra nutrients to make up for all that was lost in milling (since the bran & germ are discarded for white flour). The only saving grace is that white flour rarely needs any preservatives, since it's the oils in the discarded germ that usually makes flour go rancid.

Whole wheat flour, by comparison, rarely has more than one ingredient, even if it won't keep for a year on your shelf. Despite the fact that I adore delicious white bread, this was my little effort to try a mostly-whole-wheat-flour recipe because while white flour isn't bad for you, it's kind of a poor cousin to whole wheat, nutritionally speaking. This particular recipe is largely lifted from Baking Artisan Bread: 10 Expert Formulas for Baking Better Bread at Home by Ciril Hitz (Amazon but, again, from the library).

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Whole Wheat Dough
yields 2 loaves

Biga

180g bread flour
107g or ½ c. water
1 tsp. instant yeast

Dough

650g whole wheat flour
462g or 2 c. water
2½ tbsp. honey (see note)
1 tsp. instant yeast
1 tbsp. salt

Mix the biga, cover and let rise for 1-2 hours (until doubled).

Add the biga to all the dough ingredients and mix. Since the only instructions included were to "mix on low for 4 minutes, then medium for 2 minutes", I simply kneaded for a while. I am horribly unfamiliar with the "feel" of whole wheat dough and am nearly positive that I underkneaded it.

(The honey, which worked out to around 50g, I poured directly into the dough while it was on the scale, rather than fight with any sort of measuring cup/spoon. I think I'll always try to do it this way in the future.)

Cover and rest for about 45 minutes. Degas and re-rest for 45 minutes.

Cut the dough in half, shape into ovals and place into oiled bread pans. Proof for 1 to 1½ hours, until the dough recovers from a poke but leaves a partial indent.

Bake (ideally with steam) for 20 minutes at 450°F, then 20-30 minutes at 375°F.

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The most challenging part of this recipe is that, clearly, the dough was made to be done in a mixer. The biga (25 bread flour - 15 water, to the dough's 100 whole wheat flour - 70 water) was fine, but the dough was incredibly stiff to mix by hand, then incredibly wet for kneading by hand. The result was that I lost patience with both... which amusingly meant I had a finished brown dough that was partially marbled with the white biga.

After baking, the loaf turned out just fine, in that it wasn't a dense brick, but it was still a little heavy. I think that has largely to do with its high proportion of whole wheat flour, though perhaps I'll try to find a recipe (or maybe lighter whole wheat flour) that will allow me to knead it without wanting to throw a hissyfit.

Earlier this week, I took a trip to the market on Granville Island. I had one particular goal in mind, and that was to get some sablefish (also known as butterfish or blackcod). I went to what's quickly becoming my fish shop of choice, Seafood City... though maybe I just like them because they're Japanese. :)

When I arrived, though, they hadn't prepped it for sale yet so I had about an hour to kill walking around the market, so I picked up a few goodies:


All from Oyama Sausage, cave-aged raw milk gruyère cheese (that little block cost $11), a hunk of pancetta (that's about a half-pound), and some of their spicy italian sausage.


... and some local veg: no-spray beets and a yellow zucchini. The beets were particularly interesting, as the greens are edible, even if they're not often used.


... plus of course, the sablefish I came for.

For that night, I wanted to try the sablefish two ways: fried in touch of butter, and in a clear broth soup (sumashi-jiru). For the fried fish, I figured I'd try frying up the beet greens as a bedding, and cram the zucchini in there as well. For the soup, I had some spinach waiting at home, which I figured would be a fine complement. Finally, I wanted to try the beets themselves plus the kohlrabi I had already in my stock potato salad. Here's what it all looked like:



As it happens, the beet greens are mild-flavoured but are surprisingly robust, holding up well to sautéeing much better than spinach does. The stems, however, are tough and fibrous. I simply fried them for a little longer, but I heard steaming them for a while before was a better solution. I may also cut further up into the leaf to remove more of the stem, as it is a very different consistency than the green around it.

The sablefish, while very flakey, actually held together in the soup. That said, I found its buttery goodness didn't really add anything to the soup and I'll probably just broil the whole darn thing next time with sweet miso (I've already started marinating them in a sake, mirin, miso and sugar mixture).

Finally, since it would be a shame to not have at least one recipe:

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Mixed-root salad
made about 6 servings

½ lb. of nugget potatoes, cubed
½ lb. kohlrabi, peeled and cubed
½ lb. beets, trimmed, cleaned and cubed
2 hard-boiled eggs
¼ c. red onion, minced
3 celery stalks, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp. whole grain mustard
4 tbsp. mayonnaise
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 tbsp. red wine vinegar
salt & pepper

Start the hard-boiled eggs first.

Set the beets to steam for 20 minutes. Boil the potatoes for about 10-12 minutes. The kohlrabi can remain raw.

While your tubers cook, mix the dressing: the mustard, mayo, red onion, garlic and vinegar. Season with salt & pepper to taste.

In a big bowl, toss the potatoes, kohlrabi, beets and celery. Add the dressing. Shred the hard-boiled eggs on a grater and mix. Serve immediately. It should keep in the fridge for a few days as well.

I've been on a bit of a mushroom kick lately. After learning how good regular ol' white mushrooms were when sautéed in butter, I pushed a little further to try it as a pasta sauce (with a lil garlic and onions). Not long after, inspired by this success we picked up a basket of assorted mushrooms from a local farmer's market and at the bottom was a giant portobello mushroom. When subjected to the same butter + sauté, the result was (as anyone who's eaten these regularly knows) absolutely delicious: an incredibly meaty and earthy taste.

Stuffed mushrooms are apparently a fairly stock Italian dish, but usually they involve cremini mushrooms, which are substantially smaller. I was hoping more for one big stuffed mushroom, which could be served as the main dish and sliced almost like a hamburger steak. As with most bizarre desires, I found myself in good company on the internet but wanted to use a classic stuffed mushroom recipe as a starting point.

This was my trial-sized first attempt.

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Stuffed Portobello à la Jon
Serves 1

1 large Portobello mushroom, whole
1 tbsp. shallot, minced
1 tbsp. yellow bell pepper, chopped
2 tbsp. bread crumbs
1 tbsp. Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated
½ tbsp. italian parsley, chopped
1 tbsp. butter
olive oil
salt & pepper
½ c. chicken stock
1 tbsp. vermouth

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Remove the stem from the mushroom and finely chop, setting aside the cap.

Heat about 1 tbsp. of olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Just before it gets to smoking, add the shallot and toss until barely translucent. Add bell pepper and chopped mushroom stem, and cook for about 3 minutes. Allow to cool.

In a bowl, mix the sauteed vegetables with the bread, cheese and parsley. (I found it didn't bind well, see below) Season with salt & pepper. Stuff this mixture into the mushroom caps.

Place the stuffed mushroom into a shallow baking pan, then dot the top with butter. Add the stock and wine to the baking pan and bake for about 20 minutes, until the mushroom is cooked through and the bread crumbs are lightly browned.

Spoon the juices from the pan over the mushroom and serve immediately.

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On the surface, it seems simple enough: bread crumbs, cheese, aromatic veggies and herbs, stuffed into a mushroom cap, then braised in the oven.

The problem I ran into was that the portobello I had simply wasn't all that concave, so the fact that the stuffing was very crumbly meant it had to be packed in rather tightly if I expected it to stay. I initially added olive oil, then a little water to try and bind the stuffing together, which ended up holding it together long enough to go into the oven, but when it was done, the stuffing crumbled all over the place. I am tempted to see what sort of binding ideas I can steal from other stuffings in order to make it hold together. In the end, the goal is to have a giant stuffed mushroom that can be sliced, almost like a pizza.

Before:


After: