Weeknight Cooking:
Ricotta, Ham and Scallion Tart

So easy, so fast, and potentially so diverse in ingredients, the simple tart is a nice find for the expanding recipe box.  In essence, a tart recipe includes a crust and a filling of egg, cheese and cream.

For any one ingredient that this particular recipe calls for, I could easily see swapping it for something that suits the cook's taste (scallions, for example, could become asparagus without an ounce of trouble). This one calls for a fluted 9-inch tart pan, greased, to be lined with a refrigerated tube of pizza crust.  The pizza crust is massaged into the creases of the pan and rolled up over the ends as high as wanted, but remembering that the exposed crust above the pan will darken the quickest (I eventually placed aluminum foil over the edges so not to blacken).  Whisk 1/4 cup ricotta cheese, 1/4 cup heavy cream and an egg together; mince at least two scallions (optional, other stalk greens); add ricotta mix along

with parsley and a pinch of dill.  Meanwhile prepare diced ham however convenient.  I like to leave ham thickly diced and brown it well, sometimes with a touch of brown sugar, or even a splash of orange for zest.  Add the ham to the ricotta cheese mixture, lay into the prepared pizza crust pan and

set into 425 oven for 20 minutes, depending, again, on the color of the crust.  What really steals the show in this recipe are two things: the pizza crust in a pan becomes very fluffy and reminds you of the same sort of texture as deep dish pizza.  The other is the good ham suspended in all that ricotta cheese.  If thought of as something like pizza, then, this tart recipe could easily seen as a sausage tart, or pepperoni tart...or maybe no meat at all, but instead seasoned eggplant, zucchini, whatever. As long as there is the crust, the cheese, the egg, the cream, all should be well after 20 minutes.

Weeknight Cooking:
Hoppin' John with Andouille

"Eat poor that day, eat rich the rest of the year.
Rice for riches and peas for peace."
– Southern saying on eating a dish of Hoppin' John
on New Year's Day






How Hoppin' John, a Carolina low country dish with Carribbean / African roots, found its way on the pages of the "Weeknight Cooking" section of Food Network's magazine might not be as unusual as it first looks.  Beans, rice, and super food greens are trending upward on the American culinary scene at

a fast rate.  Beans, legumes, rice and greens add complex nutrients to our diets while also providing in some cases fairly substantial proteins.  What used to be eaten as a festive southern dish thought to be bring good luck for the coming year, now offers the eater a dish of great variety, health and substance.  At the base of the dish is a combination of black eyed peas, a 10-oz bag of frozen okra, white rice and celery; at the top of the plate is the sausage (I chose Polish as a family-friendly option, but recipe calls for the more spicy Andouille), cut into 1/4

inch thick pieces (I cut the slices into quarters, which spread the sausage out nicely), and two plum tomatoes, seeded and chopped.  To begin, the sausage and okra is cooked together in a pan, just long enough so that browned but remembering that when okra is cooked too long it becomes gooey as it

contains soluble fiber.  Set aside, then cook a diced yellow pepper, scallions and three stalks of celery in skillet.  Add three minced garlic cloves, a pinch of thyme, salt then 1 cup white rice to coat.  Stir in black-eyed peas and two cups of water, allowing to boil then reduce for around 18 minutes.  Once you re-top this panful with the sausage and okra, even though it resembles something like a true hodgepodge of ingredients, the result is a sort of comfort food stew which is dynamically textured and 'hops' with each forkful of sausage.

Coq Au Vin

"Woe to the child who tried to pass off a substitute hen from the one Maman wanted! Inevitably, after a morning of scrambling up haystacks or crawling through the woodpile to find the hiding place, the old hen was caught and brought to her just reward."
– Monique Hooker, from Cooking with the Seasons







Monique Hooker tells us in the introduction to her wonderfully personal Cooking with Seasons that "I learned early and well that the hand of the seasonal cook is the link between the good earth and family.  The important lesson was taught to me while I was growing up on our family's farm in Brittany.  There, my mother's daily call of 'table!' was a welcome summons to meals celebrating the bounty of each season."  Each spring Monique and her siblings would be asked to track down a chosen hen, which they did, and their just reward "came the next day, as a pot of coq au vin proudly took center

stage on the dinner table."  As I tried her particular recipe (have tried at least two others), it struck me that the most obvious thing in the world is true about this symbolically French recipe named "chicken in wine" – be sure to pick a proper red cooking wine!  Although the recipe does simply call for 4 cups of red wine, the type I chose to execute the dish with, Cupcake Red Velvet,  did not work as intended.

The rest of the ingredients were quite beautiful and the chicken itself turned out tender and complex to taste.  It calls for 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed, 1 leek trimmed and coarsely chopped, 1/2 pound mushrooms quartered, diced onion, and one half an onion studded with 4 cloves. Place a 3-lb chicken (in 8 pieces) in a pan with these ingredients, leaf and thyme, the bottle of wine and let sit in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or overnight.  Some of the next steps will be to pull out the chicken from marinade, pat dry, brown the chicken on both sides, and eventually add some flour back into the pot with all the ingredients for thickening and stir in the wine marinade plus enough chicken stock to cover the chicken and simmer for at least an hour.  This process, as chef Hooker so wonderfully conveys, reveals an earthy kitchen aroma virtually unrivaled.  However, and this is a big however....choose the correct red wine!  Elizabeth David, the virtuoso French culinary writer, recommends in her own recipe for Coq Au Vin French Provincial Cooking, a Burgundy or Beaujolais red.  I used what I thought might be appropriate but the Cupcake, it turned out, was far too purple, of all things.  A combination of Zinfandel, Merlot, and Petite Sirah, the Red Velvet, although a considerably adorable red to sip, was not a well chosen cooking wine, which I should have known.  The chicken, yanked out of the pot of more than pleasant French

vegetable, was visibly purple to the skin – it had similarly bizarre features as we see pictures of a human heart!  We peeled the skin away and, not necessarily to our surprise, the interior of the chicken was the kind of tender that cooks dream of, juicy, not in the least over done, moist and yes, tasting of leek, clove, a pinch of bay, etc.  Would I love to make this recipe again with a different red?  Yes.  And I will, yet I will remember that it is the heat and the marinade that makes a chicken, not its color.

Weeknight Cooking:
Glazed Chicken with Dried
Fruit and Parsnips

The end product of this fairly easy recipe is the most wonderfully textured chicken dish I have yet made.  For a couple of years now, I have tried to figure out the fine art of roasting chicken.  For the most part, simple chicken roasting comes down to buying a good batch of chicken thighs and considering using whatever fresh vegetables you might have on hand.  Almost anything will do: carrots, celery, potatoes, onions, toss in some peas, other roots vegetables, whatever.  For classic roasting I chop up the veg and let them roast on their own in some olive oil at something like 425 in the oven to soften while I brown the thighs in the skillet.  Place the thighs in with the vegetables, place in the oven, and wait for it all to cook and you have one of the great stand-byes possible.

The glazed chicken had some real similarities, but in this case it was the fruit that made all the difference and turned what tends to be a more crisp meal into one that is nearly creamy.  The recipe starts with a sauté of shallots and four diced parsnips, softened and browned but not yet fully cooked.  For cooks new to parsnips, think zingy potatoes, to the point that the root vegetables take on entirely new meaning (may be my own favorite vegetable).

On the side, meanwhile, whisk together good apricot preserves, some whole grain mustard, a pinch of ginger and cumin in a bowl, then essentially dredge your salted chicken pieces (thighs and half breasts) in the apricot glaze.  Eventually, it is the potent zing of the mustard up against the softness of

the fruits that makes this a special roast.  At this point, scatter cut dried apricots and cut dried prunes into the skillet with the parsnips and shallots; place the chicken on top along with a bit of water until it boils and cooks for six minutes.  Place this full skillet in a 425 oven for around 25 minutes.  This is one of those kitchen recipes that fill the house with an aroma that is both hard to pin down yet succulent.  Is it the sweet of the apricot, the root of the parsnip, the grain of the mustard, or the skin of the chicken that you smell at minute twenty of roasting in the oven?  The bottom layer in the pan is a sort of cooked jam, the chicken pieces blistered brown from the oven.  Spoon up parsnips over the chicken. Serve with rice, a good bread, on a crepe?

Italian Wedding Soup

"Contrary to popular belief, the way to a man's heart is not necessarily through his stomach.  His nose can be equally susceptible..." – Peter Mayle, from French Lessons






One brief step into the house of where a good soup is being made reveals much much more than the house with no soup.  The house of the soup has been transformed for at least one evening, until gradually, perhaps overnight, the memory, along with dynamic smells, disappear, and the eaters (smellers) must wait for the next hopeful batch.  This last week I went on a good soup cooking frenzy: Hunter's Minestrone (from Tyler Florence's very useful home cook book Tyler's Ultimate) sunday, and later in the week a pot of Italian Wedding Soup.  Of the two, the Minestrone was a heartier,  more

Wedding Soup

stew-like concoction, stocked full of sausage and very robust rigatoni pasta.  The Italian Wedding, on the other hand, was surprisingly pungent and filled the house, for at least a night, with a dreamy European pizazz.  I picked this recipe because the chief trio of components – the cheesy turkey meatballs, the wonderful ditalini

Ditalini

pasta, and the escarole – would literally "marry" well together and would be eaten by adult and child alike.  The recipe asks for meatballs that are made of ground turkey hand mixed with a 1/4 cup ricotta cheese, some pesto, and another 1/4 cup of grated parmesan.  These ended up an excellent choice.  The heaviness of the cheeses were nicely supported by the lighter type of meat.  There is no doubt that any fully marbleized beef could have sufficed, but the soup kept some lightness about it because of the meat choice, and then further, the short pasta, and then the head of escarole that dominates in a very

Escarole

good way each spoon full.  The base of the soup is a standard mixture of onion and garlic, but with a solid dash of Italian seasoning and salt to taste.  It was at the point where the "upper" and the "lower" portions of the soup merged that created the very marriage that the Wedding Soup is named after.  The title doesn't really have anything at all to do with the ceremony that one might assume, but instead it refers to the very thing that the cook finds out: the meatball, greens, pasta and broth serve as a wonderful meal in one.  This fine marriage is the nose of the soup, at once cheesy, green, meaty and enticing.

Weeknight Cooking
Red Lentil Burgers

More and more I lean toward red lentils as a hearty red meat alternative.  It might be impossible to ever replace the reality of the well executed beef burger (our own grocery store has recently picked

up a very good grass fed beef brand which, with very little manipulation, were truly notches above any other beef source we've had in years), but it doesn't seem a bad idea to try.  In fact, this red lentil recipe ends up carrying what I would describe as a more dynamic all around texture than its beef counterpart: carrot, onion, panko, and cilantro (optional for us anyway), are all added.  The recipe calls to pick through, rinse and boil the red lentils, setting them aside and mix later into a sautéed pan full of onion, one finely diced carrot, garlic and cumin.  Add to this, for the sake of adhesion and texture, 1/2 cup of whole-wheat panko bread crumbs, an egg and the cilantro.  Create patties and refrigerate in order to cool the recently cooked lentils and allow a shape to seal.  Cook the patties around 4 minutes per side – a fairly quick deep brown forms to something quite like the look of a good hash brown.

Add onto a favorite style of bun a combination of greek yogurt mixture – a dash of lemon, more cilantro if desired, salt and pepper – then land on a bed of spring greens.  As I tasted my own prepared yogurt sauce I felt it was a bit plain, so also added a pre-prepared dollop of edamame and red bell pepper hummus, which matched very nicely the earthy qualities of red lentil burger.  The overall burger is quite flavorful and healthy.  The brief introduction to this particular recipe sums up the use of the red lentil in such a way that makes these burgers a worthwhile investment, "Red lentils are coveted for their relatively quick cooking time, high levels of cholesterol-lowering fiber, energy-providing iron and fueling protein."

Rutabaga & Carrot Soup

What to do with a rutabaga?  The brief description to the Williams-Sonoma Soup of the Day recipe for Rutabaga & Carrot Soup mentions that these otherwise known "yellow turnips" often get ignored because people just don't know what to

do with them.  Yet they are sweet and very flavorful when roasted.  "Paired with carrots and allspice, they simmer into a delicious soup."  Rutabagas have that sort of taste that might remind you not just of your grandmother's kitchen, but your great grandmother's kitchen, and in that right it's one of those throwback foods that remind you of old time kitchen gardens, pickling, root cellars or a summer breeze flying through a screened-in front porch.  I'd go a step further and say that anytime roasted vegetables are called for in a recipe – roasting chicken and vegetables is a fairly common recipe – one cut-up rutabaga might turn a standard vegetable dish into something much more surprising and authentic.  This recipe calls for two rutabagas and four carrots chopped and roasted on a sheet until tender.  When done, they get dumped into a prepared soup base of a sautéed yellow onion, garlic and, importantly, a

good 1/2 tsp. of allspice. Add at least five cups of vegetable broth, a chopped up tomato and let it simmer for 25 minutes.  At this point this soup is brothy at the top and chunky at the bottom so I

assume that if a cook wanted to leave it like this it could be fine.  But the recipe calls to puree the soup in batches in a blender, then pour this back into the warm pot to adjust its brothiness if chosen.  I blended the soup not quite to a full puree, leaving some noticeable chunks of carrots and rutabagas, then added some water to loosen a bit more.  This is ultimate comfort food. A pinch of pepper over the top or maybe even a squeeze of honey...the rutabagas add a very robust but not bitter or too bold taste to the more neutral flavor of the carrots.