Potato Leek Poundage

"Poundage" because this soup is packed with some extras to help put some weight back on my dad. Most people are usually trying take off a few pounds here and there, but if you have someone you love who has been ill and has lost weight, this is a very comforting soup that can help bulk them back up.

I brought this to the hospital the other day (really, any outside food is appreciated if you're stuck in the hospital) and it was a hit.

I started out with a typical potato-leek soup recipe: 2 medium leeks and one small onion, chopped and sweating in olive oil and about 3 TBSP of butter. (Remember, I'm trying to make this rich!)

Season with salt once they have started to sweat and soften.

Then I added about 1/2 cup of white wine and let that simmer for a few minutes.

To that I added about 6 medium sized Yukon Gold potatoes. (Next time I think I will use a mixture of Idaho potatoes and Yukon Golds, just for a different flavor and texture.) Top with about 4 cups of chicken stock, or however much it takes to cover the potatoes.

An odd addition to this was a can of white beans, because while I was trying to make this a calorie-heavy soup, I also wanted some nutrition to it. The beans add both protein and fiber.

Lastly I threw in a bay leaf for good measure and set the pot to simmer, lid on, for 30 minutes, or until the potatoes were soft enough to purée.

(Remove the bay leaf first!)

Once puréed (I find an immersion blender is easiest), I added about 1/4 cup of grated cheddar cheese (because that's how much I had left) about 1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese, and about 3/4 of a cup of mascarpone cheese instead of cream (made in Vermont, so pasteurized and therefore transplant-safe.) Season with salt (or garlic salt if you prefer) to taste.

Garnish with chopped chives (and yes, that has a dollop of mascarpone in it as well) and you're all set.

Another tasty garnish option is a drizzle of good olive oil.

Those options of course was not enough for me tho, so I crisped up some prosciutto and used that as the extra garnish for the portion I brought to my dad.

Cute note: While he was happily chowing down on his soup, he stopped and looked at me and said,

 "Wait, you said this is potato leek soup, right?" 

To which I replied in the affirmative.

"But, there's meat in it."

"I thought you'd like that little extra touch, Dad."

"Oh... it's good!" and he kept eating.

He has no idea just how many "extras" I put in his soup for him.

Whatever works!

My Bacon Valentine

Men really get the short end of the stick when it comes to Valentine's Day. They're expected to do the heavier share of the gift-giving as decreed by Hallmark and the Florist contingent. And since I do wake up every year to some form of chocolate sitting on my computer table when I wake up, I try to show my appreciation for my hubby with what I'm good at: cooking.

Awwww...

I chose his 2 favorite foods: Steak and Bacon.

(Arguably his 2 favorite foods could be bacon and bacon, but that's just redundant.)

I also decided to incorporate bacon into every part of the meal except the beverage, just to really show I care.

And no, I'm not trying to kill the hubs or myself. My genetically high cholesterol has dropped 170 points in the past year thanks to medication, but I am slightly anemic, so I am now not only allowed to eat bacon on occasion, I need to eat more steak!

Yay!

Now bacon-wrapped filet mignon is a classic, but it's an expensive classic, so I opted to go another way.

Bacon compound butter, on a cheaper cut of steak.

(Saving money shows I care about our future...)

Above you see room temperature butter (about 2 TBSP) and 2 slices of cooked bacon, finely chopped.

After mixing it together, spoon it onto some plastic wrap and mould it however you like.

I went with an attempt at a heart...

Awwwwww...

Potatoes!

As potatoes are probably #3 on the hubs's favorite food list, I had to have them for a side dish. These I roasted in the oven in a combination of rendered duck fat, a little bacon fat, some salt, onion, and fresh thyme. Roughly 40 minutes at 400-425º, turning once halfway through, and they come out crispy and brown and fabulous. 

Don't forget to season them again while they are hot so the salt sticks.

Mmmm... more bacon

Not to be left out, I chopped up and crisped one more slice of bacon and cooked the frozen peas in the rendered fat.

There was one healthy-ish aspect to this meal, I swear.

Guess which is my piece

In a very hot skillet, I seared some seasoned (room temperature!) steaks that I had pat dry and brushed lightly with olive oil, cooking until medium-rare. About 2-3 minutes per side for a 3/4" thick steak.

Place the bacon compound butter atop the hot steak and watch it melt.

Just like the hubs's heart when he saw what was for dinner.

(Wah-wah...)

Money shot of the fabulous potatoes

I added the crisped bacon pieces to the potatoes after I had plated them so they would not get soggy.

I cannot stand soggy bacon.

It's such a let-down.

Ta da!

My Valentine's Day dinner to show how much I care was not a let-down.

It was quite tasty.

Unfortunately dessert was not as big a hit as I'd hoped, as I had ordered a custom-made chocolate bar for the hubs, which was dark chocolate with bacon and peanut butter chips in it.

For shame Chocomize.

Your options are intriguing, but your chocolate quality kind of sucks.

Luckily there was plenty of Godiva to go around, and dessert was salvaged.

Hubs to the rescue again.

I do love him so.

Cauliflower Concoctions

I have so many ideas for blog posts, and so few days when I'm feeling articulate enough to really write more than just a bald step-by-step. At some point I am going to delve into palates and how they can change and expand as you grow up and have more varied experiences. Along those lines, there are foods I would not touch with a ten foot pole when I was a child, and now I eat them with relish.
And no, I don't mean that pickled crap people put on sausages and hot dogs.
I still won't touch that stuff.

My most recent experiment in palate expansion involved cauliflower.
Blech!
Even tho I just ate it, my knee-jerk reaction is still, ''blech!"
I can't help it.
It probably didn't help that in college I did a play in which there had to be a brain in formaldehyde on a doctor's desk, and to create the "brain" the prop master (hi Krainin!) used a head of cauliflower in a large jar of water colored with a yellow highlighter, and MAN did that thing start to stink after a couple days. The Green Room had that funk for weeks.

A lot of people equate broccoli with cauliflower, and I just have to say, they are wrong. That is like saying carrots and parsnips taste the same. They don't! (But they are both delicious.)
As a child I always ate broccoli, whether raw in a crudité platter, steamed or grilled, roasted, whatever. My mother still won't touch the stuff, but I love it. However, you could not get me to eat cauliflower. It was bland, it was icky, it was white!! Everyone knows that nothing healthy is ever white! So why make me eat it? 
(No one actually did force me to eat it, since no one in my family ate the stuff. I'm just making a point.)

So WHY I got it in my head to try eating cauliflower again is beyond me, but I decided to give it a go. And you know what? With the right preparation, it's not bad. It's not my favorite, but I can make it perfectly edible.
I prepared it two really really basic ways, and sneakily fed it to the hubs to see if he'd eat it, without telling him what I was doing. (So trusting!) He seemed to find it perfectly tasty.

Image borrowed from ChowMama.com cuz I didn't take a pic of mine...

Method One - standard roasting in the oven.

I cut up some of the florets (damn does that stuff grow tightly packed!) and drizzled them with olive oil and salt, threw them in a 400º oven for 20 minutes. They came out browned and crispy, and perfectly tasty. I popped a piece in Mike's mouth, sort of without him seeing what I was giving him, and his response? "Tastes like broccoli."

Not exactly what I thought, but good enough, considering that that style of preparation is the only way I get the hubs to eat broccoli. And he actually likes it that way. Not just "will eat" it.

My own thoughts? Nice light char taste, the salt helps, and the only thing that gets me is the texture. Cauliflower just has such a weird texture. That right there may have been 50% of why I never liked it before.

Method Two - mash that sucker up with a bunch of potatoes and cheese. Oh yes.

I sliced up two yukon gold potatoes, put them in cold water and brought it up to a boil until fork-tender. For the cauliflower, I did not like the idea of boiling. The only vegetable I will actually boil IS a potato that is being prepped for mashing. So, I steamed the cauliflower for 15 minutes on the stovetop, until tender.

Giant bowl of steaming-hot white vegetables.

To this I added about 1/4 cup of fresh ricotta cheese, some salt, and later a decent handful of grated pecorino romano cheese. (Instead I might have used some garlic salt, but I only thought of that after I'd added the cheese, and that would have been too much salt. Maybe next time. But it needed something with flavor to it. Like a small head of mashed roasted garlic!)

Mashed all together it looked like this. 

Had I been worried about presentation, I would have snipped some fresh chives on top for both color and flavor.

Clearly, I was lazy.

Looks aside, it tasted pretty good. Creamy and cheesy and potato-y, tho I could still sense the texture of the cauliflower. I was just too lazy to haul out (and then clean) the food processor, which would have eliminated the texture of the cauliflower.

Note: good way to hide your vegetables from finicky kids - mashed potato purées like this one. Of course, it only works with other white foods like cauliflower, turnips, parsnips, and celery root. 

But the best ways to fool a finicky kid into eating veggies is to add them to mashed potatoes, cover them in cheese (neither of which is terribly healthy...) or purée them into tomato sauce over pasta.

If I wasn't trying to serve this to the hubs as well, I might have used sour cream to create a similarly tasty and creamy side dish with a slightly different flair, but sour cream is on the list of Things Mike Won't Eat, so I'll have to store up that idea for some time I have chosen to make this for just myself.

Which I so don't see happening... too much food for little ol' me.

But maybe one of you will want to try it that way.

Ah, the ubiquitous photo of sautéing shallot.

To go along with our cauliflower experiments, I made a super simple chicken cutlet. 

(Totally didn't realize I was defrosting cutlets instead of breasts when I took them out of the freezer yesterday... whoops.) 

(I don't even know why I bought cutlets in the first place... must have been on sale.)

Super fast pan gravy using the browned shallots and garlic, a little flour whisked in, salt, and a splash of white wine & lemon. If you care enough, crush some dried thyme in there as well. Crank on high until it comes together.

(Sounds remarkably close to Picatta, doesn't it? I didn't realize I'd essentially been making a version of Chicken Picatta as my go-to pan sauce all these years...)

Dinner done.

And I totally ate all the (not pictured) roasted cauliflower as a snack while cooking the rest of dinner.

The reason for the slap-dash chicken is that I cooked this the same day that I made another successful batch of the Julia Child version of French Onion Soup. So I was exhausted from cooking that for 2+ hrs, and then experimenting with cauliflower. The chicken was a total cop-out protein.

But it was still tasty :)

Potato Wedges: Even Better Day Two

I'm back from San Francisco!!! And it only took ten hours between getting on the Powell BART stop and walking in my UWS front door.  

Just 10 short hours!!! Ugh.

While I sift through all the photos I took and check my food notes from the trip and eventually get around to posting about it all, possibly in multiple posts, I shall give you a quickie post that should in fact come in handy on occasion. 

I have told you before a simple way to rejuvenate soggy french fries. Today I am taking it a step further.

Last night A while back the hubs ordered a burger that came with the kind of enormous french fries that I never see in New York anymore. They are actual potato wedges, rather than skinny little sticks. As such, there were just too many to eat last night, and I decided to create some crispy potatoes as a side dish to a dinner of lamb chops. 

(A moment to drool over the tastiness that is the lamb chop... mmmmmmm... ok.)

Once the lamb chops were flipped and finishing off in the oven, I took the giant potato wedges and sliced them into bite-size pieces.

When the lamb was done I moved it from the hot pan to their respective plates to rest, and added the potatoes to the combination of olive oil and rendered lamb fat, and cooked them over medium high heat.

I carefully flipped them so they would all have 2 crispy sides.

To finish them, I sprinkled them with Lavender Rosemary Sea Salt, so they would reflect the rosemary that I cooked the lamb chops with.

Can you say deliciousness???

I think so.

Repurpose your leftovers into awesomeness.

Go for it.

Dinner, Continued...

I am continuing yesterday's Braised Chicken dinner into tonight's dinner for two reasons: one - just about all braised meals taste even better the second day, and two - I made a HUGE amount of food.

I'm serious. I did 2 bone-in chicken breasts (one which apparently belonged to a pterodactyl-chicken, for size, not age...) and 4 thighs. That's a lot of food for two people. So tonight, leftovers!

One thing I wasn't prepared for in my leftovers, tho, was that the sauce was now basically gelatin. I had reserved all the cooking liquids in a bowl and put them in the fridge for easy fat-skimming and reheating purposes, but once I skimmed the (considerable) layer of fat away, the clear sauce was jiggling at me in a frighteningly aspic-like manner. In fact, it IS aspic. And I am really NOT a fan of aspic. On any level. Or so I thought.

<-- Extra revolting, I know.

I don't like aspic in its traditional serving form, which is to say, cold and jiggling. I find the whole concept revolting. But I guess I didn't really understand that consommé is just warmed aspic. So I guess as long as it's warm and I don't have to think of it possibly turning back into a solid inside my very warm interior, I can deal with it. Because dang is the sauce tasty! My sauce still tastes of concentrated cider and chicken, etc. (and melts the instant it hits a warm pan, as it aught) but the visual unnerved me. I guess I shouldn't be that surprised that by slow-cooking that much bone-in meat, I ended up with aspic. I just hadn't planned to make it, and that would be one thing that All About Braising failed to mention. Unless I glossed over that paragraph, which is entirely possible. I just feel like The Accidental Gourmet, inadvertently creating something delicious (and presumed fancy) that I previously thought was revolting. Whoops!

Anyhoo... continuing on the theme of questionable yet delicious substances:
My refrigerator is not a safe place to blindly search around in at the moment, as there are many little glass bowls filled with various solids. One of these is the leftover duck fat from this fabulous meal I made a few nights ago. So tonight, as promised, I shall reheat the chicken in its cider reduction, and make duck-fat-sautéed potatoes. And they shall be delicious!!
And do you know WHY they shall be so delicious? Because not only am I using the leftover duck-fat in the potatoes, but I also have about a tablespoon and a half of saved BACON drippings from the start of yesterday's braise. (Save. Everything.)
Duck-fat AND Bacon-fat. (Both freeze beautifully by the way.)
Good thing I only cook like this once or twice a year or no one would pity my insane and uncontrollable cholesterol levels.

For the meat, I will ladle some of my Accidental Aspic into a pan and simmer the meat in it, lid on, just to bring it back to a warm temp, keep it juicy, etc..

For the veg, I will do my usual roasted carrot method in the oven as explained here in my previous duck recipe. Although I may throw some more hard cider, or Accidental Aspic, so it follows the flavors of the whole dish more closely.

For the potatoes: Preheat your oven to 375º (I am following a Gordon Ramsay recipe)

I'm using baby red bliss potatoes, so I'm just going to halve them, and throw them in some (cold) water and bring them up to a boil. After five minutes of the water actively boiling, drain the potatoes.
Meanwhile heat some of the duck fat in a stainless pan until "murky" or starting to smoke. CAREFULLY toss the potatoes in and stir to coat them all. Add your seasonings (salt and thyme or rosemary work the best) and place them in the oven for about 30 minutes. Check on them once to stir and make sure all sides are becoming browned.

Can you say, "YUM!"? Say it with me now... Yum.

Everything came out super tasty, as expected. The carrots were actually surprisingly sweet and tender, so the extra cider/aspic worked out great. I'm not sure the potatoes were worth the extra calories from the fat this time, only because I did not think they were any better than my usual crispy potatoes (mix of butter and evoo), but they were still damned tasty.

But that's how to make use of leftovers, people.

Go forth and cook!