Last night I decided to try out Mark Bittman's polenta pizza recipe from How to Cook Everything. I was reminded of my desire to try this recipe earlier in the week, when I spotted a variation to the HtCE recipe in the Wednesday dining section of the Times. Given that the variation included pancetta, which clearly breaks The Pork Rule, I chose to follow the original, although somewhat loosely, as I wanted to top it with spicy sauteed broccoli rabe and aged provolone—a match made in heaven, if you ask me.
So I was ambitious: I made red sauce from scratch, I prepared the broccoli rabe (sauteed with garlic and red pepper flakes, then braised with water until the stems were tender), and I made a batch of polenta. All of these were first-timers for me, and I'm proud of myself for doing each one. But the end product, the pizza itself, wasn't what I'd hoped. The crust wasn't firm enough to hold up to a spatula sliding underneath it as I tried to plate each piece. I suspect that one of these facts may have contributed to this disappointing result:
I might have flattened the polenta too thin in certain spots
I should have let the polenta rest and firm up a while longer before topping and baking it (this step was included in the published version of the recipe, but not in the HtCE version, though it should be noted that MB used different ingredients, such as milk, in the polenta in the published version, too)
I may have topped the polenta with too many wet ingredients
I'm not sure what is to blame, but I do know that I have more experimenting to do before posting my adaptation of the recipe here. Because while everything was exceptionally delicious, it looked a lot less like pizza and a lot more like a mess on a plate.
Tonight my dad and I are making: salmon baked with lemon and dill, potatoes Poupon (recipe to come tomorrow) and wilted arugula. I am also enjoying, as I type this in fact (!), a homemade margarita: lime juice, tequila, Cointreau, a splash of lemon juice. I'm still figuring out how the proportions, and until I do, you don't get the recipe. I think the best version was one I made over the summer and included some lemonade.
If you've been living under a rock at the bottom of the ocean, beyond the reaches of Internet access and general knowledge of the happenings of the world, you might not be aware of the pandemic of notes infecting Facebook users everywhere. It seems that every day when I log in, the news feed on my main page reports to me that yet another of my friends has posted yet another note with some sort of list—a list of random personal traits, a list of books read and not read, a list of facts relating to one's being a mother, etc. I succumbed to the 25 Random Things one myself, as I have always loved things like that and have never not passed along an email like that where you fill in answers to questions about yourself like "Vanilla or chocolate?" and "Glass half-full or half-empty?" Nevertheless, all the Facebook note-posting is getting out of hand, so I've sworn to myself that I would fill out no more of these things. (I also like to avoid posting too much personal information about myself in my profile, not because I'm fearful for my privacy/safety but because I have this weird interest in maintaining some sort of secrecy about myself. I think, partly, I try to reserve some personal details for the actual in-the-flesh parts of my life. But I bet my therapist might suggest that this has something to do with trust issues. And I would agree with her.) That is, until I saw that my friend Anna had posted one about her personal food quirks/preferences/dislikes. Not wanting to break my posting rule, I decided to post my personal version here, where I can be as self-divulgent as I want because no one reads this! (Although I think I will share the URL with Anna after I post this. I think she might actually be interested in these nonsensical food-related ramblings.)
1. Firstly, I hate bacon.
2. Related to the above: I eat a wide range of foods, and there are few things I absolutely do not like, but many of the foods I dislike come from pigs: pork sausage, pancetta, pepperoni, cappicola, speck, pork chops, spare ribs and baby-back ribs, salami, regular ol' ham, prosciutto. When I was a child, some of these foods were my favorites, such as bacon and pepperoni, but proscuitto is one I've always hated. These dislikes are collectively referred to (only by me) as the Pork Rule.
3. Whereas the pork aversion is not a holdover from my brief fling during college with vegetarianism, this one most certainly is: I don't want bones on my plate. I find it incredibly off-putting to have to navigate the anatomical structures of the creature I am consuming.
4. I strive to always know what it is I am hungry for and to feed myself that thing when possible. This is sometimes challenging, because I also try to feed myself whole, nutritious foods—and sometimes what I truly desire is neither whole nor nutritious.
5. When I was a child, my favorite food was hot dogs. Now, I have many, many favorite foods: salmon, eggplant, granny smith apples, peanut butter, short-grain brown rice.
6. I cannot eat fried foods (or hot dogs) without getting really bad heartburn. This is unfortunate, because sometimes I crave eggplant parmigiana.
7. Most of the time I drink my coffee black. In high school I put sugar and 1% milk in it; in college, I switched to Sweet 'N Low and ditched the milk, but about two years ago I weaned myself off the artificial sweetener, too. A few times in the last month I have experimented with 1% milk and evaporated cane juice crystals, and sometimes after a hard run I refuel with a soy-milk latte, which I find heavenly.
8. I started cooking in my second year of college, when I took a semester off and lived at home. I like that it is a physical activity that balances out the mental/intellectual activities that dominate my life.
9. Fond food memory: When I was little, my mother would give me a small bowl of chickpeas or thawed frozen cavatelli to nibble while she made dinner.
10. Compared to what I know about food, I am dumb about wine and beer. What I do know is that I like: pinot noir, merlot, any variety of Sam Adams, Blue Moon or Hoegaarden with a squeeze of orange or lemon (or mixed one-to-one with lemonade). If we're talking liquor, I will always take a not-too-sweet margarita (rocks, salt) or vodka with lemonade.
11. I probably will never voluntarily try foie gras, sweetbreads, tongue or pig's feet.
12. Foods I don't want on my plate (because I dislike them or find them stupid): cake, sour cream, macadamia nuts, coconut, creme anglaise, foams of any kind, shrimp, mayonnaise, flan, Swiss cheese. My friend Erica recently pointed out to me that I don't like a lot of foods that are white. I've also realized that I hate white wine.
13. My favorite pasta is orechiette.
14. I eat red meat only once or twice a month, and when I do, it is in the form of a medium-rare burger or filet mignon.
Reading the NYT's Dining section this morning got my all excited to do some cooking. Mark Bittman's column about savory, whole-grainy breakfast dishes motivated me to crack open the can of butternut squash I've had for a few days. I mixed some into my oatmeal, along with maple syrup, ground cinnamon and a sprinkling of that crunchy, Biblically inspired cereal I've mentioned before. The results, I can assure you, were scrumptious.
One of the recipes he mentioned is polenta pizza, which also appears in How to Cook Everything. I read the recipe there a few weeks ago around the same time that I toyed with the idea of making meatballs, which won out. Seeing it again in this morning's paper reminded me of my urge to give it a go, and with not much else planned for the day, I thought I might make it for tonight's dinner. I also spotted a few other recipes that, in their published form, seem like I'd like them with a few tweaks, like Melissa Clark's cauliflower with cheese AND chutney (yum to either one, but together? yikes) and Pichet Ong's chocolate-oatmeal cupcakes with maple-bacon buttercream, which clearly breaks The Pork Rule (I hate all pork products) and also the cake rule (I think cake is gross) but which appeals to my dual loves of oats and chocolate. I wonder if this could be adapted to a brownie form. I now recall that I have a brownie recipe, I think by Liz Applegate, that includes oats, but they're mixed into the batter a la The Sneaky Chef, whereas I'd like something that showcases the oats more boldly, something perhaps along the lines of a crumble. There was also a mention of chocolate mocha cookies in the Food Stuff section. Mmm.
All of this led me to the conclusion that I would be cooking tonight, and possibly baking tomorrow. Were it not for my gelato date with a friend tonight, I'd be all over some baking, but I wouldn't want any batter/dough sampling in the afternoon to kill my appetite for a cold confection post-dinner. But before I made it to the grocery store, Gelato Friend invited me over for dinner, too. So polenta pizza will have to wait another day ... but probably not more, because I'm really excited to take a crack at it.
This weekend, my cooking and eating and grocery shopping centered around a self-diagnosis that I am not eating enough iron-rich foods. I arrived at this conclusion while reading a thread on the RunnersWorld.com discussion boards about low iron levels, and although I don't have most of the symptoms that were described, I thought that at the very least I could stand to focus on incorporating a variety of iron-rich foods into my diet. I'm often quite fatigued after a long run, and lately also after some runs of less than an hour, so I figure it's worth tweaking my foods and seeing if that has any effect.
But, infrequent meat-eater as I am, the simple solution to eat more beef is not the route I'm taking. Quick Internet researching yielded apricots and several seeds and nuts as good sources of the stuff. This, combined with my ever-mounting guilt about buying packaged foods, pointed me in the direction of homemade granola. (Above photograph is before baking; below, the end result.) It's ridiculously simple to make, with less fat and sugar than most store-bought varieties, and it allows me to continue this trend of eating oats for breakfast without getting sick of oatmeal ... which, I can sense, is about to happen, as I made it almost every day last week.
As usual, I looked to Mark Bittman as my guide. His recipe from the New York Times (January 10, 2007) seems simpler than the slightly different version in How to Cook Everything. His recipe includes 2 cups total nuts/seeds and 1 cup total fruit; I doubled the fruit, and while I eyeballed my nuts and seeds (and wheat germ!), what I had in the house amounted to less than 2 cups total. So the amounts below are suggestions only.
Granola Adapted from Mark Bittman Time: 40 minutes Yield: About 9 cups, or at least 18 servings
6 c. rolled oats (not quick-cooking or instant) 1/2 c. raw almonds, chopped 1/2 c. raw pumpkin seeds 1/2 c. raw sunflower seeds 1/4 c. sesame seeds 1/4 c. wheat germ 1 tsp. ground cinnamon Dash salt 1 c. maple syrup 1 c. chopped dried apricots 1 c. chopped dates
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a very large bowl (I used a shallow, wide soup pot), combine oats, nuts and seeds, cinnamon, salt and maple syrup. Place on a sheet pan and put in oven. Bake for 30 minutes or a little longer, stirring every 4-6 minutes to brown evenly and prevent burning. Says Mark: "The browner it gets without burning, the crunchier the granola will be."
2. Remove pan from oven and add dried fruit. Cool on a rack, stirring occasionally until granola reaches room temperature. Transfer to a sealed container and store in the refrigerator; per Mark, it will keep indefinitely.
A caveat: This makes a LOT of granola. I've filled a large tupperware and almost a whole freezer storage bag, too. You might want to halve the recipe the first time ... which I tried to do, but then had a little mishap with the salt. I read the measurement of the cinnamon, though it was the quantity for the salt, and halved it. After dumping in the half-teaspoon into my bowl with everything else, I realized the mistake, and rather than throw everything out, I proceeded with making the full recipe to balance out the salt. It turned out saltier than I wanted, but it is hardly overpowering or unpleasant.
Mark also suggests other exciting flavorings, which I can't wait to try--notably, vanilla and peanut butter (though probably not together). Endless experimentation seems possible, and I'm already thinking about this as a contender for 2009 Christmas gifts.
The mood that's dominated this week so far has been: wanting to snuggle on the couch, drink coffee, avoid the snow and leaving the house. And you'd think that because I'm unemployed, this would be an option. Alas, it is not. Partly, this is due to how I'm hardwired to do, move, think, act constantly and how I'm unable to laze about without feeling guilty. The other part is that I have obligations and to-dos outside the house (doctor's appointments, my scheduled workouts, dates with friends, or yesterday, needing to be out of the way of the cleaning lady), which means I don't get to heed the voice in my head asking for coziness.
Today will be another busy one (so busy, in fact, that by 7:30 I had literally planned my hour-by-hour schedule for the rest of the day), with lots of time spent away from home. But to make the most of what little time I do have indoors, and to give myself the fuel I need to complete the treadmill speedwork I've got planned, I made the big bowl of breakfast cozy pictured above. It's not rocket science, just my favorite (and most often consumed) sandwich turned into a bowl of hot cereal. Not as good as curling up on the couch and staying there all day, but it comes pretty close.
Oatmeal with peanut butter, banana and honey 1 c. water 1/8 tsp. kosher salt, or to taste (I use about half) 1/2 c. rolled oats 1/4 c. Ezekiel 4:9 organic sprouted whole grain cereal, original or cinnamon raisin (or Grape-Nuts, or skip this) Half or whole banana Peanut butter to taste (One caveat: I am a huge lover and eater of peanut butter, but I can't take more than a few teaspoons in my oats; it's just too rich.) Honey to taste
Add water and salt to small saucepan, and bring to a rolling boil. Add oats, lower heat to medium and simmer 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add Ezekiel cereal, stir, and cook 2 minutes more. Cover saucepan, remove from heat, and let oatmeal stand 2-3 minutes. While it rests, slice banana into small circles or half moons. (I peel it, run my knife through it lengthwise, then slice on the horizontal to make small half moons. I like this size in my cereal because it's not too big for a spoonful.) Add banana to your bowl, with some peanut butter and honey. When oatmeal has rested, pour over remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Taste, and add more peanut butter or honey if desired.
I've been in the kitchen quite a bit in the past few weeks, but I haven't posted any recipes because I haven't really modified or put my own twist on any I've tried. But to stay true to my original goal of documenting all the recipes I prepare for the entire year, I'm going to mention them briefly:
1. Spaghetti with homemade meatballs (Jan 24): Lately, I have felt an inexplicable yen for meatballs. I can't understand why, exactly, because I didn't enjoy them much in my pre-vegetarian days, and with a few exceptions, I am typically not interested in meaty dishes like this. But the most important food rule I follow is "If you want it, you should eat it," and while I'm not always good at following it, in the case of the meatballs I did just that. I followed Mark Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything and used equal parts (1/4 lbs.) beef, veal and pork. Very simple and requiring no fancy kitchen skills. What blew me away was how profoundly filling they were; halfway through a small portion of pasta and a single, medium-sized meatball, I questioned whether I'd even be able to finish. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, but one which I'm not used to feeling--probably because of my usual preference for leaner meats and, more often, meatless meals.
2. Tilapia with capers and tomatoes (Jan 25): The judge gave me the assignment of finding a preparation of tilapia with capers and tomatoes, and the recipe we chose together was this one from Cooking Light. I hate that a magazine by this name exists, and I have many times sworn to myself that I'd never cook anything from it. But this looked too delicious, and it didn't contain any weird/fake/chemical-y "lite" sort of ingredients, so I though it was worth breaking the rule. Because I couldn't find anchovy paste in the supermarket that met my food-purity standards (the one kind I found contained, among other things, sugar, butter and added salt--who needs it, when you're dealing with anchovies?!), we bought a tin of flat anchovies and mashed a couple with a fork, using a little of the oil they came in to achieve a paste-like consistency. It was exceptionally delicious, very fresh tasting, but also filling and satisfying.
3. Pumpkin oatmeal (several times in Jan): After a little trial and error, I've arrived at what I consider the ideal way to make pumpkin oatmeal. So I guess I do have a recipe here, although the procedure is based mostly on the instructions on the canister of oats.
In a small saucepan, bring 1 c. water and 1/8 tsp. (or less) salt to a rolling boil. Add 1/2 c. rolled oats, lower heat to medium, and simmer 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.* Cover saucepan, remove from heat, and let stand 2-3 minutes. Meanwhile, place 1/4 c. pumpkin puree in the bowl you're going to eat from. When oats are ready, pour over pumpkin, add 1-2 tsp. maple syrup and a few shakes cinnamon (optional), and stir to combine. I like to drizzle an additional teaspoon maple syrup on top at the end.
*Optional: When I have some in the house, I like to add 1/4 c. of this crazy sprouted whole grain cereal (crazy, because it's named for a Bible verse...) when there are 1-2 minutes left in the cooking time. This adds texture variety to the final product, as the sprouted cereal is crunchier to start and cooks for less time. Mmm!
4. Finally, I discovered a veggie burger that meets my current criteria: does not contain funny ingredients; does not contain an excessive number of ingredients; is delicious. I like to top it with 1/4 of an avocado that I've smashed with a fork and mixed with a sprinkling of salt and a few drops of lemon juice. This doesn't count as a recipe, but maybe a little bit of pleasing kitchen ingenuity.
For the sake of making this blog less ugly and stupid, here's a photo.
It doesn't count as cooking, but I was proud of how I gussied up my Indian leftovers from Monsoon. By adding frozen corn to the saag paneer and fresh string beans to the dal makhani, I got more mileage out of small portions and also amped up the nutritional content of my meal. For my grain, I made my own brown rice. Booyah!
