fast

Tomato Confit

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by Lisa

For two years now, I’ve served my Christmas filet with tomato confit. It’s totally delicious, sweet, herbaceous, jammy concoction that is pretty and complex enough for your holiday table.

But every year I have way too much left over. This year, I halved the recipe and still had too much, and so when we were fatigued from eating meat (the very next day) I used the leftover confit to dress pan fried gnocchi, and on the next day it dressed the leftover (but not-yet cooked) shell pasta from the Christmas Eve Fish Soup.

The results were so good and so appreciated by the family, that I’ve resolved to periodicaly make big batches of this confit and use it for all sorts of things like:

  • quick pasta sauce
  • quick gnocchi sauce
  • to dress inexpensive cuts of beef (think skirt steak or strip steak or london broil, etc.)
  • to top hamburgers on or off the bun
  • to top meat loaf before cooking
  • I’m sure you can find other things to do with this….any firm-fleshed white fish like halibut could handle this as well…

The confit will freeze, so you can freeze smaller family-sized portions for another quick, fast, and a little-bit elegant weeknight meal. It might even remind you of something special, like Christmas.

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Tomato madeira confit

from Gourmet

  • 8 large garlic cloves
  • 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 4 (14-ounce) cans diced tomatoes, drained
  • 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped rosemary
  • 1/2 California or 1 Turkish bay leaf
  • 1/4 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 cup Madeira (preferably Verdelho), divided (you can also substitute a red or white wine; taste will vary, but it will still be good)
  • 1/4 cup water

Cook garlic in oil in a large heavy skillet over medium-low heat, turning occasionally, until golden, 10 to 15 minutes. Add tomatoes, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, sugar, 1/4 teaspoon table salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and 1/2 cup Madeira and briskly simmer, stirring frequently and crushing tomatoes with a heatproof rubber spatula, until tomatoes start to break down and oil separates slightly, about 1 hour.

Mash garlic into tomatoes with spatula, then stir in 1/4 cup Madeira. Discard bay leaf.

If you’re roasting anything, be sure to deglaze the pan and add the drippings to the confit before serving.

Nutella Almond Macaroons

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by Caroline

macaroons

I own over a hundred cookbooks, and yet still subscribe to several magazines containing recipes and visit food websites frequently. My usual route through a magazine is read and tear, read and tear, saving those torn-out recipes to (eventually) file in one of my recipe binders and (someday) try. When I find good-looking recipes on line, I email the link to myself (and often, too, my sister and mom) and save it in a “recipes” folder on my computer. It is rare that a recipe arrives in my inbox and I just make it, right then.

But Friday night, it was less than an hour from “oh, that looks good” to cookies coming out of the oven — a new land speed record for me. Chalk it up to having a well-stocked pantry, two kids as busily occupied by LEGO as Lisa’s, a recent stroll past Paulette, San Francisco’s new source for Parisian macaroons, and one really easy recipe. Don’t be put off by the need to separate eggs; it’s only two, and you can keep the yolks to throw into an omelette the next day.

I found the original recipe over at Svelte Gourmand, following a link from my new favorite source for everything food-related, The Food News Journal. It’s a delicious cookie: crisp on the outside, chewy inside, the sweetness of the coconut and nutella wonderfully offset by the salt. It would be good spread with dark chocolate ganache instead of the nutella, of course, but I don’t keep a jar of dark chocolate ganache in my pantry. No matter what, it’s much more delicate and delicious than those giant softball macaroons you find most places. I tinkered with the recipe slightly (I can’t help myself), so here’s how I did it:

Pichet’s Coconut Nutella Almond Macaroons

2 egg whites
½ c granulated sugar
pinch of salt
1/2 t vanilla extract
2 T all-purpose flour
1-1/2 c shredded coconut, unsweetened
1/3 c nutella
1/4 c almonds, toasted
1/8 teaspoon sea salt

Preheat the oven to 325.

Beat the egg whites until frothy, then gradually add the sugar and salt, continuing to beat until just stiff.

Whisk in vanilla and flour until well combined, then fold in coconut.

Pour the batter onto a baking pan lined with parchment and spread it with an off-set spatula so it is about 1/4” thick.

Bake until the top is toasted and dry to touch, about 30 minutes.

While macaroon is still warm, cut into rectangular pieces.

Let cool until room temperature and then spread nutella on the cookies. Sprinkle toasted almonds on top of the nutella, then finish with a sprinkle of sea salt.

Picadillo, Let me count the ways…

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by Lisa

Over labor day weekend, I flew to Los Angeles to visit my friend, Melissa Clark,  the novelist (not the food writer). You can read her book about a girl impregnated by a lazy sperm or catch up with her on her blog.  Melissa is one of those friends you thank the world for every day.  She has kept me sane over many years, and as her blog attests, she is apparently connected to everything in the best way.  Every time I see her, no matter in what city or state, she’s always finding fun things to do, great places to eat, and amazing people to hang out with.  She’s also the one who connected me to my husband.   And on this, long-awaited, much-needed  trip, she not only re-connected me to myself, but connected me to picadillo, a classic Cuban dish of highly spiced, savory-sweet ground beef, with which I fell immediately, irrevocably in love.

Now, this is a little strange, because Melissa is a vegetarian. But she lives on the beach, in Marina del Rey (please don’t stalk her) and we walked to Venice for breakfast at a Cuban inspired restaurant, where I had Huevos con Picadillo.  Aside from the fact that we had a lingering, adult breakfast (imagine…), in the sun, on the Saturday of a long weekend, the picadillo was like nothing I had ever tasted before. It doesn’t look like much on the plate, but the flavors are rich and complex.

When I came home, I scoured the internet for recipes, emailed my friend Richard Fleming who wrote an amazing book about walking across Cuba. If anyone had an authentic picadillo recipe, it would be him. But alas, he did not (which is not, I promise you, a reason not to read his book, you should.)

Rich did write to me that regarding Cuban black beans, in the “Oriente, in the Santiago region, they are made “more flavorful” by the addition of a tablespoon or so of sugar near the end of cooking…”  I used this bit of information to adapt one of the many recipes I  found to come up with one that approximated what I had eaten in Los Angeles.  Almost all recipes call for raisins, but my husband hates raisins, so to add some sweetness, I used ketchup.  This also seemed in line with Rich’s advice to add sugar, and answered the complaint aimed at several recipes that called for the apparently inauthentic tomato paste.

The first night I served the picadillo, the kids stared at it with a ho-hum sort of chagrin.  Then they tasted it. Now, picadillo is one of those dinners that commands universal adoration.  I love it because it has introduced new flavors to our table.  I love it because it is fast, fast, fast to make.  I’ve had trouble getting through the week without making it…

If you prechop the ingredients, you can get from stove to table in under 15 minutes. (Especially if you have your kids set that table for you. )  Also, because we treat the meat more like a delicious side dish/accompaniment and less like the center of the meal (even though it really is the reason to sit down at the table) we can get at least a meal and a half out of a pound of meat.  We eat it with tortillas, rice, black beans, or under fried eggs…

I don’t know how authentic my version is, nor what part of Cuba it might represent, but I can vouch that it will not disappoint.

Picadillo

Ingredients:

  • Olive oil
  • 1 lb ground beef
  • 1 medium onion
  • 6-8 garlic cloves
  • 1 small tomato
  • 1/2 cup pimento stuffed olives
  • 1 tablespoon capers, drained
  • 1/4 cup ketchup
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1/4 cup white wine
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • freshly ground pepper, to taste

In a mini-food processor, finely chop the onions and garlic. Set aside.  Then finely chop the olives, capers, and tomato.

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You can do this ahead of time and refrigerate until you’re ready to cook. While many recipes will leave the olives whole, the dish I first had was of uniform texture...

In a saucepan cook onion, garlic, and bay leaves over medium heat until the onion is soft and translucent.  Add the ground beef and stir, breaking up clumps with a fork.

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Okay, there are 3 bay leaves here….experiment

When the meat is cooked through, add the white wine and let simmer down, then add the olives, capers, ketchup, cumin and pepper and simmer until the picadillo thickens.

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Discard the bay leaves and serve warm.

I cannot seem to do justice to the food styling on this one…a pile of ground beef looks like, well…so you will just have to take my word. Just try it.  If you eat meat, you will count the ways, too.

Apple Cake, Thanks to Mickey

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by Caroline
cake
It was late Sunday afternoon, and Tony was cooking dinner while the boys and I sat on the couch, reading. Ben was buried in his new book, The Mad Scientists’ Club and Eli and I were reading In the Night Kitchen. When I turn to the last page, I always stop reading and even Ben pulled his nose out of his book to sing out with Eli, “And that’s why, thanks to Mickey, we have cake every morning!”

Then came the inevitable epilogue: “Mama, why don’t we have cake every morning?” “Well, we have pancakes a lot,” I answered. But it sounded lame to me, so we made cake.

It needed to be quick, it needed to be something I could make easily with Eli, and it needed (after the recent Halloween orgy) to not be chocolate. I dug through my recipe binder with a dim recollection of a good recipe emailed to me by my sister and, miraculously, found it in less time than it takes to peel 5 apples for cake.

5-6 apples or pears
juice of 1/2 lemon (about a tablespoon)
2 t cinnamon
1 1/2 sticks of butter, melted
3/4 c sugar (brown, granulated, or a combination)
1 c flour
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350.

egg

Peel, core, and slice the fruit (I cut the apples into sixteenths) and toss into a pie dish. Sprinkle with the lemon juice and cinnamon. Next stir the sugar, flour and eggs into the melted butter and mix well.

baking
Pour the batter over the fruit and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Bake for about 50 minutes, until the cake is browned and the fruit is tender.

Fast-Slow Roasted Garlic & Tomato Sauce

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by Lisa

My quest for fast, delicious, from-scratch weeknight meals continues.  There’s the night I teach and I have to prep dinner at lunch, and there’s the afternoon soccer practices when we spend a lovely hour at the park, and a ballet night that doesn’t get us in until after 6 pm. So prep time is greatly reduced, and some nights, dinner needs to be on the table in 10 minutes or less, otherwise, bedtime is hopeless. I need food that gets to the table fast; I need food that keeps at room temperature, or that won’t be compromised by the refrigerator.

Here’s what I’ve learned: planning is vital.

Fish tacos work, all kinds of eggs work, so does a roast chicken (if you’re home to cook it early), and quiche. Then there are all the things that you can prep on the weekend and transform over the week. When you can get 2 different meals out of one thing, it’s also economical.

This weekend I brought home a few pounds of Roma tomatoes from the farmer’s market, spread them on a baking sheet, sprinkled with olive oil and salt and threw in a few sprigs of basil just because I had it AND two whole bulbs of garlic. I roasted the heck out of them in a 200 degree oven. After several hours they were totally deflated-looking.  By then, it was 8 or 9 o’clock at night, and I didn’t want to deal with them anymore, so  I stuck them in a covered dish and stuck it in the refrigerator.

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A few days later, I remembered the tomatoes when I needed dinner.  I dumped them in a pot, squeezing the roasted garlic out of its husks, added a little salt, about a 1/4 cup of white wine and after simmering for a few minutes to blend the flavors, I used an emulsion blender to smooth it out. You could easily blend everything in a blender and then heat it slowly after. Also, you can use any kind of fresh, flavorful tomato. Early girls are good if you can still get them.

The result was a creamy, garlicky, deeply flavorful sauce we ate over pasta. The kids loved it.

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Two nights later, the same (leftover) penne, mixed with extra sauce and baked with a topping of fresh mozzarella and grana, made a faux, super-fast, what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-cook-tonight lasagna, which I think they liked even better.

We’re still at the very end of tomato season here, any maybe you are, too.  If you can find good fresh tomatoes anymore, you can still roast the garlic and blend it into a can of good San Marzanos.  But if you can still find some tomatoes, load up, slow roast, and freeze the tomatoes whole, right off the tray once they’ve cooled.   Or make this sauce and keep it in ziplocks next to your frozen pesto.   You’ll thank yourself on one of those cold dark nights that are just around the corner.

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