Seafood Feast!

One of the few culinary tradition we have in our family is a seafood feast the night of Christmas Eve. I'm not Italian, I'm Polish but I tend to refer to this meal as "Seven Fishes" because it's a more familiar term than our Polish "Wigilia". It's basically a meatless meal that consists of 12 dishes. My mom and grandparents had a smorgasbord that included some less desirable things like eel and herring. Growing up we always had stuffed shrimp, stuffed flounder, fried scallops, twice baked potatoes and a couple of vegetables (we didn't really follow that 12 dish thing!).

I wanted to have an early "Wigilia" with my Philly friends this year and for an added challenge decided to make seven different fishes. It was a bit of a cultural combo - we had everything from vegetarian gulumpkis to calamari in red sauce over linguini! Here's the menu:

Not bad right? I've admitted this before - when I'm entertaining I STINK at taking pictures. Luckily Ron was around to snap a few of the appetizers.

Deviled Eggs with Crab:

Stuffed Clams:

Flatbread with Anchovies, Olives, Tomatoes & Caramelized Onions:

And this delicious Salmon Rillette:

We changed this recipe a touch by using Ron's home smoked salmon in the spread and lined the bowl that we were using as a mold with store bought smoked salmon.

Then I stopped taking pictures - you'll just have to believe me that the rest was delicious! I'll be posted a recipe for veggie gulumpki soon - it was a crowd favorite.

Best Bay Scallops Ever & A Dinner Party

I've mentioned before that I'm from the North Fork of Long Island and that means that I'm occasionally blessed with awesome seafood. Remember this clammy feast? A few weekends ago my parents were in town and they brought me some peconic bay scallops that were so fresh and sweet that I couldn't stop popping raw ones in my mouth. I normally only get to eat them once a year - Christmas Eve when we deep fry them (yeah - yum) so this was a really special treat!

We had a few friends over for a dinner party - 8 people altogether including me and Ron and my parents. I wanted to make something that didn't require any last minute cooking - the star (besides the scallops - I'll tell you about those in a second) was a giant pork roast that I slow cooked in lots of white wine and herbs until it was fall apart tender.

While that cooked away in the oven I prepared the rest of the meal. Side dishes included white beans and greens:

I made these with dried beans, someone please tell me how to make them taste as good as the ones out of the can. They're always half undercooked, half overcooked. In spite of that these still game out pretty tasty. Amazing what salt, pepper, lots of tomato paste and a couple ladles of that pork cooking liquid will do!

I also made my absolute favorite salad - mixed greens with roasted butternut squash, paper thin red onions, goat cheese, pepitas and a maple vinaigrette. So good.

Oh, what's that in the bottom left you ask? That's the scallop dish I made - did you think I was gonna leave you hanging? Talk about how awesome it was and then not give you the recipe? Don't you worry. First thing you should know is that it's a Ina Garten recipe so you know it's gonna be awesome and second, just listen to the name "bay scallop gratin". GRATIN - I'm in. You puree delicious thing like butter and garlic and parsley and lemon juice all together and smear them on top of scallops that have been splashed with white wine (I didn't have the pernod that the recipe called for) and top them with panko bread crumbs (the recipe called for mixing them into the butter mixture, I thought that was weird so I threw them on top) and bake. What comes out of the oven is a dish that people will RAVE about. Take a look:

Oops! I almost forgot the last ingredient that puts this over the top - prosciutto! See it under the bread crumbs mixed in with the butter? Yup, PROSCIUTTO mixed with BUTTER.

And of course there was dessert - but that's for next time. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!

Brined Chicken

I used a recipe similar to this Mark Rhulman brined chicken recipe from this fantastic charcuterie book to make the most delicious and good-looking chicken I've ever made. Although there is one thing that really, really stinks about it - I'll never be able to make a un-brined chicken again. It's not that it's difficult to brine a chicken, throw the ingredients in a pot and simmer until everything is dissolved and let cool before dunking in your whole chicken or start with a small amount of water and simmer the ingredients and add a ton ice like they do in the recipe linked above.

See, easy right? It's just that it requires a bit of planning - you have to know the night before that you're having chicken for dinner the next day, no grabbing one on your way home from work. But luckily I have a feeling that planning ahead to have chicken for dinner won't be an issue when the results look like this:

And even better than the look of the chicken was the taste. Soaking in the salty/sweet/herby water leaves the meat seasoned all the way through. It's a taste I could never achieve just by seasoning the outside. Oh and if you have time after you pull the chicken out of the brine leave it uncovered in your fridge to really let the chicken skin dry out - then you'll have crispy chicken skin, what's better than that?

Whoopie!

Pumpkin whoopie pies with cream cheese frosting - need I say more?

I followed this recipe from Bon Appetit for the cake part, using the pumpkin flesh I talked about in my last blog instead of canned pumkin. The only other change was that I didn't grease my parchment and the bottoms got a little golden and didn't stick - I'd definitely go parchment-less.

The filling is a standard cream cheese frosting recipe from Martha Stewart.

Bake the cookies, make the filling, stuff, taste test, feed to friends.

Pumpkin Season!

Oh hey there - remember me? I went and got a job that left me too busy to post on my blog. Sorry about that. Good news though - the gig is over. Bad news? I'm once again be on the job search.

Anyway...since my last post the weather has gotten chillier, the leaves have turned color, and it's officially become the holiday season. Which means pumpkins! We got giant pumpkins from our CSA. The kind that I'm afraid to cut into for fear that I'll slip and lose a finger. I mean look at these things:

That green one - it's still sitting in the window. I'll get to him soon enough. The crooked neck pumpkin seemed a bit easier to tackle! I (carefully) cut off the crooked neck, sliced all the pieces in half and scooped out the all the guts and the seeds.

I roasted the pieces flesh side down in a 350 degree oven for about an hour until you could easily pierce the flesh with a knife and looks like this:

Then since I didn't really have something to do with all this pumpkin I decided to freeze it by the cup in plastic bags. Then...when my next recipe (hint it included cream cheese frosting) calls for pumpkin I can just grab a bag from the freezer.

And in the mean time there are roasted squash seeds to munch on! I roast them with salt, pepper and olive oil along side the squash until they're golden brown.

Caramelized Leek Scramble - Our New Favorite Breakfast!

We have a new favorite breakfast. It take about 20 minutes to make and 30 seconds to eat and it's a little fancy and a lot delicious.

I LOVE caramelized onions and if those onions are in leek form? Oh man, I would happily eat an entire bowl of them with a spoon.

For this dish I chopped up the whites of two small leeks and put them in a bowl of water to rinse off the grit. I sauteed the leeks in a bit of butter with a salt and pepper until they turned soft and sweet. Whisk 3 eggs with about a tablespoon of sour cream, salt, pepper and the sauteed leeks.

Put a couple pieces of your favorite bread in the toaster - we used rye. Slowly scramble the eggs until they are just cooked. Butter your toast, top with the scrambled eggs and a little bit of shredded parmesan cheese.

After I took this picture and we were several bites into breakfast Ron said "No cheese this time?". I practically sprinted to the fridge to grab the block of parmesan - it puts this simple breakfast over the top.

Surprise Party Birthday Cakes!

Store bought cake generally doesn't interest me - the frosting is always too sweet and the cake is always too dense. At a party it's the thing I skip so I can eat more potato chips. But homemade cake? That, I'll take a slice of. Even when the mix is out of a box and the frosting is out of a can it's somehow so much better.

But if you're going homemade you might as well make it from scratch and you might as well make it interesting. As you can tell by previous posts, I prefer things like pink lady cake, carrot cake, and root beer cake. Why go plain old vanilla and chocolate when you can add things like root beer and cream cheese frosting?

Our friend Mark just turned 30 and his girlfriend, Jackie, was throwing him a surprise birthday bash. I was asked make cake! I ended up making two - first was the root beer cake then in a last minute holy-crap-this-isn't-enough-cake panic I made a peach cake with brown sugar cream cheese frosting (I know, yum!). I doubled the root beer cake recipe to make a two layer 9x13 cake and turned the peach cupcake recipe into a 9 inch 2 layer cake. I had white peaches, regular peaches and nectarines on hand from the CSA so I used a combo of all of them in the batter.

Here's the before:


Here's the after:

Mark was VERY surprised, everyone liked the cakes and I only had one mini-meltdown so I consider this a successful baking venture!