Sunday Night Dinner

Monday, May 12, 2008

It's Over. It's Finally Over.

So… I am done. That’s it. I am now Dr. Anna, for whatever that is worth. Not a lot, really, but it’s still something. Now I have to re-write my blog profile blurb and I have no idea what to say. Before, I was a long-suffering grad student, trying to take the edge off a painful schooling experience by eating wonderful things. Now, I am just a person who eats a lot. I am in need of a new niche. If y’all come up with something, let me know. I am feeling dramatically unspecial right now. Boohoo me, right? Not really. I am also immensely relieved and excited to move on, and to get back all the sleep I lost and re-grow all the hair I pulled out in the last two months of dissertation writing and defending. That might take a while though.

One thing that I knew for sure all along is that I would not have made it this far or anywhere at all without the help (and tolerance) of my friends. They came out in force to keep me sane and keep me fed throughout the entire process. One evening, my friend Melissa brought her kitchen to mine. She came over with her favorite Dutch oven, pre-measured ingredients, and a recipe for chicken goulash with sour cream biscuits (from Bon Appetit? Gourmet? Don’t recall. I don’t remember a lot of things from the last month). I tried to help her with making dinner, but have a serious suspicion that I was in her way more than anything else. Turns out I am useless with a pasty cutter and even worse at handling raw chicken. Luckily, I am an excellent eater. No complaints from anyone on that end.

The goulash was a thing of beauty.

Chicken Goulash with Sour Cream Biscuits
2 lbs skinless boneless chicken thighs, cut into 2 inch pieces
1 ½ cups flour
5 tbsp cold unsalted butter
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp baking powder
2 ½ cups chicken stock
1 cup sour cream
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 red bell pepper
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp hot Hungarian paprika
2/4 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp thyme

- Preheat oven 425F
- Dust chicken with flour
- Melt 1 tbsp butter and olive oil in Dutch oven. Brown chicken on all sides and remove to plate. (may want to add a little bit more flour at this point if you like a thicker stew)

Meanwhile, make biscuits:
- Pulse flour, baking powder, ¼ tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper in a food processor. Add 4 tbsp cold butter and pulse.
- Whisk ½ cup chicken stock with ½ cup sour cream and add to flour mixture. Pulse until dough forms. Form into 10-12 round biscuits.

- Saute vegetables in Dutch oven until softened, scraping up chicken bits.
- Return chicken to the pot add spices and toast for a couple of minutes.
- Add remaining of chicken broth and sour cream.
- Place biscuits on top of stew.

Into the oven

- Bake for 20 minutes covered. Remove cover and broil for 2 more minutes to brown the biscuit tops.

Melissa’s recipe substitutions and notes – Melissa used white breast meat instead of thigh meat to cut down on the fattiness of the dish (much appreciated) and half regular paprika and half hot paprika to moderate the heat. It was still seriously hot, mind you, and I am not a spice wuss. One final recipe note – make double the number of biscuits. Seriously. They were so good I wanted to hug them. A little tangy from the sour cream and so smooth and creamy. They were perfect with the hot and spicy stew beneath. Oh, and the next day, the flavors in the stew meld together and the liquid soaks up into the biscuits to make bready flavor bombs. Ridiculously good.

If you don’t have a friend like Melissa, I suggest you go find one immediately. It will be worth your while. It was mine.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Appetite of Champions

You know what’s so completely unfair and annoying? My appetite. Many people, when they are upset or terribly stressed, can’t eat. They lose weight in all sorts of graceful, stressful and sorrowful ways. At least they have something to show for the shitty time they are having, right? Me? Nope. I am just the opposite. I eat. I don’t know what it would take for me to lose my appetite. Not illness, not stress (hello, dissertation), not heartache (not to sound dramatic). Those things just make me eat more, and eat with abandon. So now, after all the dissertation-writing nonsense, not only do I have a dent in my couch and a corresponding flat spot on my butt, I also have some gym time ahead of me.

Lest you think that I was dying a slow death by Cheetos the whole time I was writing… well, I sort of was. But this death was punctuated by episodes of food bliss. Among those, my new favorite breakfast – a breakfast sandwich. My favorite is not just any breakfast sandwich. This is THE breakfast sandwich, prepared by the supervisor himself. It makes waking up worthwhile, even if it’s already 11AM when you are out of bed.

So here is what you do. Take some good sliced bread and toast it. Fry eggs (a one-egger sandwich for me, a two-egger for those with bigger appetites and/or hands big enough to hold the ginormo sandwich) to over-medium in olive oil. You want the yolks still runny, but starting to thicken just a little. Layer eggs on the bread with slices of cheese (I can’t force you to use smoked cheddar, but I can tell you it won’t be THE breakfast sandwich without it), basil leaves, some form of breakfast pig product, like sausage or bacon (although I think prosciutto is the way to go), and top it with the key to the sandwich, almost as important as the smoked cheddar (or more so, if you listen to the supervisor himself) - tomato slices. Longest sentence ever? Check.

Now that you have assembled the king of all breakfast sandwiches, you have to eat it. This process involves a ritual of its own. Here’s the thing, the yolk is still liquidy (do it, it’s awesome) and when you squeeze the sandwich or bite into it, the (hot) yolk breaks and runs all over your hands and the plate. That’s the best part. Here comes the ritual. The rules are: 1) you can’t put the sandwich down once you start (because it will be an even bigger mess than the one you have in your hands) and 2) you dip the entire sandwich into the pooled yolk on the plate. Don’t be a sissy like me and tear off a piece of the bread to dip into the yolk or the supervisor will scold you, like he did me. I was ashamed. And then I went to the gym.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Like Butter on Crack

My dissertation has been turned in! I can hardly believe it. It has been hanging over my head inconspicuously for seven years and aggressively for two months, and now it is done. The word relief doesn’t seem to do my present state justice.

I now have some time to describe my diet of the last two months. In a word: eww. Picture everything and anything that is not nailed down in one’s pantry or refrigerator. Picture those food stuffs consumed in no particular order or ritual, just for the sake of being consumed with the hope of keeping my meager attention span tuned to my work for just another little while longer. Yes, I have eaten everything in my house. I can’t say I enjoyed it because frankly, I can’t remember it. It was like sleep eating. One thing does stand out from this past month of bleary-eyed dissertation hell. It takes a bit of a story to explain fully, so here goes.

I ran away to the Tavern with the supervisor one evening to get a break from the soul-numbing dissertation writing and to get out of the house. Here is what I learned that evening – three drinks in one night are ok, but not if they are red wine, vodka on the rocks, and beer, in that order. That was not smart. It might also explain how we (ok, I) wound up picking up a stray French cook at the bar and bringing him home with the promise of good foie gras. I don’t know how it happened, so don’t ask, although it's fair to assume that it had something to do with my ill-advised booze trifecta.

That's whole duck liver, for the non-Francophiles. The ingredient list is brilliant - Foie, booze, salt and pepper. I don't know what else one needs for complete contentment.

If I ever get a tattoo, it will be of that little duck, somewhere private and personal. Because that's how I feel about foie gras.

And the foie gras? It has been teasing me from the back of my fridge with its yellow duck fat and crack cocaine-like addictive contents. I have had it stashed for over a year - my parents brought it back from Paris for me. So to make a long and boring story short, we brought the stray Frenchman home and had drunken foie gras at three in the morning. We huddled around my kitchen counter because the rest of my house was covered in an even layer of dirty mugs and papers papers papers, eating big chunks of foie on toasted bread with olives and salty roasted fingerling potatoes and cold beer. It was perfect, drunken, and decadent. The foie was unctuous and melty, supported by the crunch of the bread. Like a pale beige butter with a slightly animal quality to it. I could have easily finished the entire jar by myself. Luckily, I was too drunk to stay up long enough to accomplish that not-at-all-challenging feat.

Yes, I have been living in grad student dissertation squalor for the last month. It wasn't pretty. Didn't smell that great either.

And when all the foie is gone, the yellow duck fat will remain, to make for amazing meals of eggs and potatoes fried in duck fat. Browned mushrooms sauteed with duck fat and thyme. Toasted bread smeared with duck fat. Oh yes. Duck fat = crack.

Mmmmm... duck fat. Drool.

Chips and salsa after a long night out? I don’t think so.

I really hope I manage to con the Frenchman into cooking for me someday soon. He is suspiciously (perhaps, wisely) not replying to my emails...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

I Can't Wait to Be Done

The list of things I want to do once I am done with this defense business is growing longer. I can't wait.

An update

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Non-Mexican Breakfast Tacos

Ok, ok, so I am totally cheating. I think the vote for the last Choose Your Own Adventure post was evenly split between my grandmother’s spectacular blini and my own, somewhat less striking, breakfast tacos. Here’s the thing. I am painfully short on time these days. I will write about the tacos first because they are, well, tacos, and therefore easy. I will leave my grandmother’s blini to another day, which will hopefully be soon!

So. The breakfast tacos. The inspiration for these was part my newfound love of home made tortillas and part a brunch that Awesome Archna and I had at a wonderful Mexican place, Tu Y Yo. Archna ordered scrambled eggs with chorizo and they were wonderful. The sausage was ground up and mixed in with the eggs, coloring the whole business a burnt orange color (sigh, I am such a girl) and infusing the eggs with the oily chorizo loveliness.

I wanted desperately to make these eggs for one of my Battling Brunches with Maiya, which I have fallen so behind on (stupid thesis). I have long since stopped trying to wow her because that’s not really possible. This is after all, the woman who deep fried poached eggs in front of me. I wanted to make something that would taste simple and simply good. This turned out to be more challenging than I thought.

It appears that there are a few types of chorizo out and about – Mexican and Spanish/Portuguese. Mexican chorizo, like the stuff I had at Tu Y Yo, is sold raw, out of the casing, as basically a big pile of ground, spiced meat. The Spanish chorizo, on the other hand, is fully cooked and sold in links. I couldn’t find the Mexican stuff anywhere. I tried so hard. I even went to a butcher shop, but even they would only sell me the prepackaged, fully-cooked stuff.

With a heavy heart, I dragged my non-Mexican chorizo home to make faux Mexican breakfast tacos. The cooked chorizo tasted like a spicy kielbasa, which was really not the flavor I was shooting for, but beggars can’t be choosers. I fried chunks of the sausage in a little bit of olive oil till they became brown and crispy (oy yum. I could really just eat an entire plate of fried chorizo chunks). I then tossed in beaten eggs into the same pan, to scramble them in the chorizo oil. And uh, that was it. The end of the super un-complicated breakfast taco procedure.

The eggs were creamy and suffused with the chorizo oil, and when topped with fresh avocado and pico de gallo, and all wrapped up in a fluffy and slightly chewy flour tortilla, they were pure, non-Mexican taco breakfast beauty. I was happy with them, if not awed by their complexity. Sometimes that’s ok too.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Deflation

Forgive this break from our regularly scheduled programming, but I just had to bring you this:

From my horoscope today, courtesy (or dis-courtesy, as you will shortly see) of Google -

"Everything isn't as rosy as it appears, so don't be fooled just because others seem to support you. It's not a good idea to relax and let down your guard, for it's likely that you don't have the whole picture. Building a relationship on promises won't work now, so get to the bottom of what's going on before a little problem grows into a much larger one."

What. The. Crap.

I want to go back to bed now. What is the purpose of deflating people so throughly?? I read my horoscope about once every 6 months. When I do read it, I like be told that I am wonderful, smart, irreplaceable, and am about to have the bestest day ever. Honesty, if honesty it be, has no place in horoscopes! Gah.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Choose Your Own Adventure: A Photoessay

'Tis time for another photoessay. I am totally short on time and cannot write a proper post at the moment. I also have a massive backlog of photos of the things I eat (I take pictures of close to everything that passes my lips, much to my very patient friends' chagrin) that never sees the light of day. That's just not right. And while my cooking has slowed down as of late, it has not stopped entirely.

So here is the theme for the current photoessay: Homemade Adventure. You tell me which picture speaks to you the most. Not necessarily the prettiest picture or the best composed plating, but what you would want to eat most. Tell me what makes your stomach grumble and that shall be the subject of my next post, provided I don't blow an aneurysm in the next week from dissertation stress. Stranger things have happened.

Help me out. Make the decision for me - tell me what to post about! Please vote by leaving a comment with the name of the dish/picture. Vote with your stomach, less with your eyes (I really do suck at taking good pictures).

Mark Bittman's short ribs, braised with red wine and coffee; lemon risotto, and the supervisor's honey and vinegar glazed carrots.

Breakfast tacos: scrambled eggs with chorizo and avocado, in home made tortillas (a Battling Brunches entry).

Baked cod, breaded with homemade buttered bread crumbs and smoked paprika, with balsamic drizzled avocado (an American Test Kitchens test recipe! They send you a recipe, you test it and tell them what you think. It's neat to be a part of the "test" in Test Kitchens, even if in a small part).

Yellow tomatoes with fresh basil, balsamic, and good olive oil. Simple and summery. (Guess now you know how long that picture has been the depths of my hard drive).

Blini - this one is a bit of a cheat. My grandmother actually made these Russian-style crepes, stuffed with ground beef, onions, and other secret grandmother ingredients that make this wonderful, delicious, and near impossible to replicate. If the blini are selected for the next post, I will beg her for the recipe and try to write it up, although please don't expect the product to taste nearly as good as these did. It's not possible, because you are not my grandmother. (Hi Lina!)

No-knead bread - no work, all the pay-off. It really does taste like it's straight from a bakery. Spread with pepper-blueberry preserves.

Breakfast the morning after - samosa insides fried as potato cakes and fried eggs. Part of the post New Years recovery program. I highly recommend it.