le blog de tranny

Temescal Farmer’s Market – what a treat! Heirloom tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, little gem lettuce… these are a few of my favorite things. I combined these with a few more of my favorite things, namely, bacon and mozzarella. I’d been planning on adding hard-boiled eggs but forgot . It was still enough without the egg, but I’m a protein and fat fiend and so is Paul so I’d say that for our purposes omitting the eggs was a mistake. It would’ve been such a breeze to add them too, what with Caro’s nifty Krups egg cooker thingy.

To make the salad, I chopped up the heirloom tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, little gem lettuce, mozzarella and (cooked) bacon. For the dressing I mashed up a garlic clove with some salt using the mortar and pestle until smooth and creamy, then combined it with the juice of half a lemon, about twice as much red wine vinegar (1 tbsp maybe?), a few dashes of Worcestershire, a smidgen of dijon, some freshly cracked pepper, and whisked it up with a drizzle of olive oil (2 tsp to a tbsp?). Loosely based on this recipe, but with way less oil, no sugar and delicious mashed garlic clove like in Deborah Madison’s/Caro’s lemon vinaigrette recipe.

P and I were all bachelored out that day – we also made jacket potatoes with bacon, sour cream and chives to “go with” the salad. I did not partake, but Paul had just enough time to scarf one down before we left to see Inception. I love those 1-full-package-of-bacon dinners.

Quite the heavy meal for a hot summer evening, huh? I did have my reasons though…

The first is that I got off work early that day, so I was feeling a bit more ambitious than usual. A gift from Paul had also just arrived in the mail that day — my very own copy of How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. As I was flipping through the pages of my new toy, his recipe for Coq au Vin popped out at me as an opportunity to do two things I don’t do very often — cook with wine and make chicken taste good. Let me just say that I think Mark Bittman is great. I really appreciate a cookbook author who tries to keep things simple. I must admit though, that for fear that MB would cut corners, I ended up referring to this recipe, from Simply Recipes, quite a bit. The two recipes differ only slightly — what appear as unique, ordered steps in the Simply Recipes recipe are in some cases consolidated into one step in Bittman’s version.

I was feeling pretty inspired to make this a French meal at this point, and for good reason: I had recently discovered La Tartine Gourmande, which immediately became my absolute favorite food blog upon visiting it for the first time. (Thanks for the recommendation, Google Reader!) Her photos are so gorgeous and full of light and her narrative style of writing is so utterly charming! I love the French dialogue and the photos of her baby. Why is it that the best food bloggers (i.e. Smitten Kitchen and La Tartine Gourmande) have the cutest babies? Because they’re well-fed? Anyway I knew we had some potatoes on-hand from the CSA so I decided to try out Mark Bittman’s braised potatoes recipe, which seemed simple enough, with some dijon and herbs to make it a bit French.

In an attempt to mimic La Tartine Gourmand’s style I turned my camera to “nostalgic” mode and played around with photo composition. The effort I put into these photos waned pretty quickly once I got deep into the braise-fest I had set myself up for. Oh Tartine Gourmand, comme vous m’inspirez! I can’t believe I only just discovered this blog three weeks ago!

It felt really weird to blanch bacon, which I did per Simply Recipes’ suggestion. In retrospect, I would not have done this, as the main purpose was to avoid making the dish too salty and I ended up adding a lot of salt back in. This might be partially attributable to the fact that I was using low sodium chicken broth, but I added a bunch of salt to the pot, mmkay.

Oh alright, I’ll stop being a lazy fuck and actually write out the recipe for this meal, because I was referring to two different recipes and because it was damn good. This recipe stuffed five of us to the gills but could’ve easily fed a sixth if I’d made a salad or something.

Coq au Vin
- Soak one package of dried porcini mushrooms in hot water to cover.
- Blanch half a pound (or more) of back bacon for 5 minutes (or don’t).
- Dice the bacon and brown it in a heavy-bottomed pot. Remove the cooked bacon, leaving the bacon fat in the pan.
- Working in batches, add pearl onions and chicken thighs or legs (1-2 per person), excess fat trimmed and skin in-tact, to the pan skin-side down. Brown on both sides. Halfway through this process season with s&p and add 6 whole garlic cloves, peeled.

- Once all the chicken is browned, add any chicken that’s been set aside back to the pan and add 2 cups chicken stock, 2/3 – 3/4 a bottle of Pinot Noir, a package (or at BB, a bag’s worth) of sliced button mushrooms, the bacon, 2 bay leaves, and a shit ton of fresh parsley and thyme. Bring to a simmer. Cover and cook for 30 minutes or more, adding salt and wine to taste. The chicken is done cooking when it’s tender and tastes good.

I don’t care if the following photos are repetitive, because they are effing gorgeous.

- Remove the chicken pieces and keep them warm. Remove and discard the herbs. Drain the porcini, add them to the pot, and crank up the heat. Boil the cooking liquid until it is reduced by three fourths and is pretty thick and sauce-like.
- Turn the heat to low and add back the chicken and 2 tablespoons of butter. Coat the chicken with the sauce as you reheat it.
- Garnish with fresh chopped parsley (which I forgot to do!) and serve with Dijon potatoes.

Braised Potatoes and Carrots with Dijon and Thyme
I’d never thought to braise potatoes until Mark Bittman suggested it to me. What a clever and fool-proof method!

- Peel potatoes and cut them into large chunks. Heat olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot. Add the potatoes and season them with s&p. Throw some chunks of peeled carrot in there if you have any on hand (which I did). Saute the potatoes until they are golden brown, adding more olive oil if necessary to keep them from sticking. Add one small onion, minced, and stir until it softens.
- Add chicken stock and some water to barely cover the potatoes. Add a heaping spoonful of dijon and sprigs of fresh thyme and/or rosemary. Bring to a boil, stirring to keep the potatoes from sticking, then lower to a simmer.
- Cook for 20-25 minutes or until the potatoes are tender, such that you can stab them with no resistance. The broth should be reduced to a nice, thick sauce by this point. Garnish with fresh parsley, if you please.

Bon appetit!

On sunny Sundays the default activity of choice among our friends is an impromptu backyard bbq. Sometimes at Jane & Matt’s; sometimes at my+Caro’s place. Fish-wise we usually go for tilapia — it’s cheap, and makes great fish tacos. Regardless of what Mark Bittman says (i.e. that he hates tilapia) I always find it to be quite successful in satisfying my cravings for fish. One sunny Sunday au fin Juin we decided to spice things up a bit and grill halibut for a change. The menu du jour at Chez Hummer-Tranny that afternoon made good use of the barbecue: grilled halibut with chimichurri, salad of spinach and grilled strawberries, green beans and corn, and grilled potatoes with parsley and rosemary. Yummykins McDerish.

For the chimichurri, I combined ~1/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil, the juice of 4 lemons, 1 tbsp of water, 4 sizeable cloves-worth of minced garlic, 1 medium shallot, minced, 1 tbsp (maybe more) of red pepper flakes, and a bunch of chopped fresh parsley. I tried to follow this recipe but ended up adding more lemon juice and garlic/shallot than it calls for. (I was also dealing with more halibut than the 4 servings-worth specified in the recipe.) It just tasted better to me with a slightly higher lemon juice to olive oil ratio. If I had to do it over I would probably have added more parsley than I did — I sort of just eye-balled it this time around but I think next time I’ll measure it out to make sure I’m actually using (at least) 3/4 cup chopped parsley.

Hummer gams:

To prep the halibut I just patted it dry with paper towels, brushed each piece on both sides with canola oil (Epi suggests veg oil… I think any oil would work really, but preferably one with a lower smoking point) and seasoned it with s&p.

Perhaps we should have sliced the potatoes length-wise — Caro and I both accidentally let (more than) a few slip through the bars of the grill. Or maybe we should get a grill basket. Kitchenaccessoriesgalore.

I sometimes wonder what fish I should (or rather, should not) be eating. As a rule, I don’t order tuna at sushi restaurants anymore, but apparently it’s more complicated than that. This site, recommended to me by my coworker, is quite helpful.

The salad was, in a word, gorgeous. Caro made a dressing of shallot-infused olive oil, honey and rice vinegar. The grilled strawberries were divine.

I decided to try my hand at grilling the halibut this time (usually Caro does all the grilling in our marriage-like dichotomy of domestic tasks). These halibut steaks were thick — I think they took 6-7 minutes per side (with the grill covered) to cook all the way through. Once they were off the grill I spread a generous amount of chimichurri over each filet.

Lovely!

P.S. Hup Oranje!