Apart from the chocolate matzo we’ve been eating nightly, it’s been a pretty healthy week for us, and not too trying! My happiest discovery was that quinoa is kosher for Passover, so we had a quick quinoa salad for dinner that night:

It was light and nutritious and I made enough to bring the leftovers to work the next day, which relieved some of my lunchtime stress. Out of Kitchen has a nice array of vegetable side dishes, but you can run out of options if you eat there every day.

Thursday night, Gil and I met up with my cousins who were visiting from Louisiana. They’d had a LONG day and were dead on their feet, so they didn’t want to stray too far from the 7 train. That meant Sapore in the Village was out, so I suggested Spanky’s BBQ in Times Square. Good thing, too — the guys came in wearing their LSU caps. They would’ve looked pretty out of place in the Village but blended well enough with the very vocal group behind us sporting Yankees jerseys. Gil and I split ribs, pulled pork, and brisket and had some tasty taters and collards on the side. Others in our party were bolder:

My cousin Herman, who isn’t actually a Hobbit.

Friday night was a little more challenging for us. I’d heard of substituting matzo for noodles and decided to give a matzosagna a whirl. I made the standard marinara I learned from Lydia’s Family Table and layered it with roasted eggplant, whole wheat matzo and lots of cheese. I was pretty happy with the outcome, even if it was a little soupy.

But we had to pick up a new baking dish Saturday, as ours became a Passover casualty:

Gil warned me that matzo was heavy, but I really didn’t expect that.

recipes after the jump

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Day One: I am unbowed and unbroken, the queen of my kosher-ish castle! That’s not to say I didn’t have a heightened awareness of sandwiches (and donuts! and popcorn!) all the day long, but I resisted the siren call. As expected, evenings aren’t so bad. We had poached eggs over sauteed spinach with garlic and olive oil last night, and roasted salmon (dusted with Emeril’s seasoning blend, which Gil assured me was ok) with steamed cauliflower and salsa verde this evening. This is pretty much the way we already eat for dinner, so it doesn’t take much thought or deprivation.

Breakfast and lunch are another story. It’ll be a rough week knocking down fruit salad and cottage cheese every morning instead of my beloved Kashi cereal. And without my go-to sushi (no rice), sashimi (no soy), or sandwich (no bread or mustard) for lunch, I may be dropping a lot of weight keeping things vegetarian during the week.

Maybe I’ll just think of this as the original Atkins diet and hope for the best. At least I can finally commiserate with the dieting shiksas at the office.

The corollary to “Don’t shop when you’re hungry” should be “Don’t read cooking magazines before breakfast.” I broke out the latest issue of Gourmet on the bus one morning last week and found, buried in a story about the author’s trip to somewhere, a passing line about a tasty chocolate-banana bread pudding with caramel sauce. You know me, dear reader — my mind latched onto that sentence like Sanjaya to a curling iron and wouldn’t let go, despite the ungodly hour.

So when I found myself with the better part of a LARGE brioche loaf going to waste, I improvised something for Saturday’s breakfast using my basic bread pudding recipe. The bananas we had weren’t quite ripe enough, so I roughed them up a little with the bananas foster treatment to coax some extra flavor from them.

No caramel sauce because this WAS breakfast, after all, but it was pretty tasty even without. The dish was utterly unphotogenic, so you get no picture, but you’ll survive. You’re strong like that, baby.

I’m really glad we got this bread pudding in the rotation when we did because, as I learned this weekend, The Official MI Husband has decided to give up the proscribed stuff for Passover. Which means I’m giving up the proscribed stuff for Passover. (Being neither Catholic nor Jewish, the only thing I ever had to avoid was dancing, so I’m rather naively looking forward it.)

I hope you’ll join me here for the next eight days of The Pesach Challenge, where you will no doubt witness a shameless combination of moaning and lusting over foodstuffs. Probably not much different than a normal day, now that I think about it.

recipe after the jump

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I walked into the house this evening to find my husband at the top of the stairs with a look of panic on his face. “I tried to call you. I swear, I tried to call you.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t need to peel the onions or the garlic.”

Some couples finish each other’s sentences; we just process how badly the other has screwed up. It works for us.

See, I’d asked him to put a pot of water to boil with a couple of onions, a head of garlic, and a bag of Zatarain’s Crab Boil in preparation for our shrimp boil this evening. Specifically, I asked:

And around 7pm, can you fill the big silver pot (kept under the sink) about 3/4 with water and put a Zatarain’s bag in there to boil? Once the water starts boiling, add some salt, the onions and garlic to the pot. It needs to infuse the water before we begin our seafood boil!

Pretty clear, right? I know him well enough at this point to spell out everything when it comes to cooking, so I thought the lack of cutting/chopping direction would be enough. Sigh. Anyway, he could’ve always called my dad, but chose instead to peruse his iPhoto library to see how it looked last time.

Despite his worries, things turned out fine. I threw in some small red potatoes, some smoked sausage cut into pieces, and boiled until the potatoes were tender. The shrimp went in next and boiled for a couple of minutes until they floated to the top. At this point, I used a trick my dad taught me — I turned off the flame and threw in a package of frozen corn on the cob. It stops the cooking process and heats the corn through at the same time. After it rests for about 10 minutes, everything is ready to eat.

In Louisiana, we pour the boiled seafood over a table covered with newspaper (see below), but only made enough tonight for the two of us, so it went onto a platter. Not as colorful, maybe, but not as messy, either.

Delicious! I served it with dipping sauce from Leah Chase’s The Dooky Chase Cookbook.

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I love to cook. Really, I do. But sometimes when I get home from work I just can’t stand the thought of it. Unfortunately, that leaves me with only two choices: Call Luigi’s for a pie (which we did Monday night) or suck it up and cook something anyway (which I did last night). Sucking it up can be as easy as eggs and toast or I can actually produce something from the pantry, albeit something simple.

Enter the lentil. It’s hard to go wrong with lentils. They’re great for you, cook quickly, and pair well with lots of flavors, as they live somewere between tofu and wild rice on the “blank slate” continuum. The Young Ones connotations aside, they make for a perfectly fine meal.

I opted for a really easy preparation last night. While the lentils (green ones, this time) were simmering in about two inches of water, I cooked a few strips of bacon using the easiest method ever: Place bacon slices on a rimmed baking sheet and put into a cold oven. Heat the oven to 425 degrees, and the bacon is ready! (Seriously. No mess, no fuss, no hot grease splatters on your skin.) With the lentils and bacon cooking away, I made another basic vinaigrette — dijon mustard, lemon juice, olive oil, minced shallot, chopped thyme, and salt & pepper — and tossed it with the drained, hot lentils, then mounded them over a little spinach sauteed with olive oil and garlic. Topped with crumbled bacon and blue cheese, it paired nicely with our “honeymoon rosé,” the Roshambo Imoan.

Update: I just had the leftovers for lunch and highly recommend making this a day ahead. The lentils were fine last night, but much tastier after mingling with the vinaigrette, bacon, and cheese overnight.

When I landed in New York and started going through the grueling process of finding not just an apartment, but roommates, I really started to re-evaluate my decision to move halfway across the country for what boiled down to finding some kind of social life in my 30s. Now, of course, I don’t regret it at all, but things were looking bleak there for a few months.

Then I met my favorite Brits. Kate & Carl sort of knew each other through a friend back in London, but we all found each other on Craig’s List, met for a drink, and hit it off immediately. They’d moved across the pond for reasons similar to my own (I suppose that’s true that “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” but Mr. Johnson hadn’t been to modern-day New York). Kate and I discovered we had a great degree of overlap in our cd collection, an aversion to too-tidy apartments, and a longstanding dislike of girly girls. Carl had a terrific, dry sense of humor and was a fellow ginger, so how could I go wrong?

Short answer: I couldn’t. We shared a converted apartment for about a year, until Carl’s company transferred him back to London, at which point Kate and I lived with a succession of roommates whose horrible non-Carlness served only to highlight the catch we’d found in him. So we ditched the third person at lease renewal time and moved into a two-bedroom that restored some measure of peace and tranquility to our lives.

New York can be a terrifically lonely, hard place to live, so finding the sort of camaraderie with two strangers that I thought I’d left behind in St. Louis really eased my transition. It was great making new friends who understood the value of taking the piss out of each other without storming off or collapsing into a big puddle of weep. Though our time as roommates taught me quite a few things, food wasn’t high on that list, but the two most important food-related discoveries were learning to appreciate a good shepherd’s pie and discovering that a healthy dose of HP Sauce on just about anything makes it better — eggs, meat dishes, potatoes, veggies, takeout, pretty much anything short of a milkshake.

Now that I’m married, I have another (former) Brit in my life — my fab mother-in-law — and so, inspired by this wealth of propriety in my life and the leftover leg of lamb in my fridge, we dined on shepherd’s pie this evening.

Shepherd’s pie (or cottage pie if you use beef instead of lamb) is almost embarrassingly easy to make, although I’m sure what I produced isn’t exactly traditional. I chopped up some leftover lamb, made a gravy with the pan drippings, topped it with sauteed spinach, then crowned the whole thing with a fluffy helping of mashed potatoes. As Nigella Lawson recommends, I ran a fork across the top to make ridges that would crisp up in the oven, and dotted the whole thing with butter.

And it was marvelous with the HP Sauce.

recipes after the jump

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And I bake bread, bread, BREAD. … Ahem, sorry. As you can see, I’m in bread pudding mode this weekend.

Growing up, there was always a battle of the grandmothers for the bread pudding title in my family, but Nola’s dense, plain dessert topped with meringue always beat Edna’s pineapple-and-coconut fancy blend, in my opinion. Nola hasn’t been able to cook for a few years, but I can still remember everything about what’s become my ur-pudding — the ancient pan it baked in that no longer knew how to lay flat on the counter, how the bits of meringue I couldn’t scrape off sweetened it just a touch, the crust stratification in each perfectly square piece, and how it was always best fresh from the oven and served in a puddle of Pet Milk (never, ever, bourbon sauce).

About 10 years ago, I started collecting recipes from my older relatives when I was home for the holidays to keep these dishes alive, to make sure they weren’t lost to time. And, to be honest, I like knowing I’ll always have a little piece of my family with me whenever I make my grandfather’s oyster dressing or sauce piquant, my uncle’s cornbread dressing, my aunt’s banana cake, or my grandmother’s bread pudding.

But the funny thing about family recipes is no one but the person famous for making them can make them. Sure, what I turn out is passable, but it isn’t the same. Following my grandmother’s directions to the letter turns out a different bread pudding every time, so I just don’t know how she achieved such consistency. I blame the lack of Louisiana humidity in my kitchen, but, of course that isn’t it. (I’m not one of those people who buys that “cooking with love” business, either. Apart from sounding really gross, I’m pretty sure your state of mind isn’t making the food any more palatable.)

Instead of moaning about how I can never get it right, I decided to start my own bread pudding tradition when Gil and I got married. I bake the pudding on a layer of slightly sweetened blueberries and add a little bourbon and cane syrup to the custard for flavor. It isn’t bread pudding as anyone in my family would recognize it, but it’s all mine and feels like home.

Apart from making a nice dessert from scraps, bread pudding can also be a complete meal. Savory versions abound, and are a great way to use leftovers — add whatever meat, vegetable, or cheese is hanging around in your fridge, combine it with bread, milk, and eggs, and you’re on your way. I found a delicious recipe for Swiss Chard Bread Pudding at Last Night’s Dinner and munched on that for a few days last week. It really is a versatile dish.

recipes after the jump

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The Official MI Husband is catching a Knicks game in the city tonight with one of his friends, so I’m on my own for a few hours. Because we rarely spend evenings apart, I always take full advantage when the situation presents itself by cooking foods from his No Fly list. Thankfully, said list is small, but topping it is the dreaded Brussels sprout. Never again shall a Brussels sprout pass his lips, nor shall it befoul the air around him! — so he has decreed. It must’ve been a particularly bad childhood experience. My own family was sprout-agnostic, so I never even tried them until Thanksgiving two years ago. Paula had roasted them in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and I nearly ate my weight in those little gems that day.

I’d been following the Epicurious recipe more-or-less since then (deglazing with balsamic vinegar instead of water), but then I ran across a recipe from the incomparable Orangette that wouldn’t let me go. The thought of cream-simmered sprouts worked its way into my imagination until I became consumed with trying it in my very own kitchen. Did I say consumed? I meant obsessed. But Gil was annoyingly AROUND all the TIME and I just couldn’t manage it.

Until tonight. Moo-hoo-hoo…

Not wanting to waste my chance to get this right, I added the cream component to my original recipe and ended up with something so rich and delicious that I can only thank the gods Gil is home nearly every night — I’d weigh a ton if he wasn’t. The cream cooked down to a thick, silky sauce that caressed each sprout and the bacon was content to let the other ingredients shine, just coming to the forefront with a smoky, chewy bite every now and then. I mean, honestly — I had to stop myself from licking the still-hot roasting pan, thus preserving my dignity and the integrity of my tongue.

[Ordinarily I'd air out the house right about now, but Gil's car still smells of his White Manna run from two days ago, so I think he'll survive this brush with Brussels.]

recipe after the jump

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Some of you might believe from my untethered food posts that there aren’t many rules I abide by in the kitchen.* Obviously, you can’t go screwing around with oven temperature or food safety, but I think I’ve given the impression that I take recipes as mere suggestions when that’s really not the case at all. One rule I always follow is to prepare a recipe as written the first time around. It’s good to know what the author had in mind and always smart to give yourself a starting point for your flights of fancy. The other rule is always to clean as I go, but you’re not here for a review of my cleaning techniques, no matter how fierce they may be.

A few weekends ago, the Official MI Husband (he of the strong back and questionable judgment) and I invited a friend over for lunch and I scrambled to find something that wasn’t typically brunchy or pan-Asian, at her request. I settled upon two recipes from Cooking Light — cumin and coriander crusted salmon and roasted cauliflower — but I’m sad to say they were both a little uninspired. OK, they were BLAH, despite our friend’s kind words that she enjoyed the meal. (The girl was raised right.) But my deep and abiding faith in Cooking Light led me to believe the bones of the recipes held promise, so I tried them again tonight with a different spin.

The problem with the salmon was that the flavor of the marinade didn’t really penetrate the fish. I’m a cumin junkie (just shy of needing an intervention), so I was disappointed that the cumin didn’t assert itself in the dish. Figuring the wet marinade was to blame, tonight I coated the salmon in cumin, coriander, salt, and pepper before roasting, then made a salsa verde from the cilantro, shallot, and olive oil along with two blackened cubanelle peppers and a healthy dose of lime juice.

The cauliflower’s blandness wasn’t really a surprise if you read the recipe, so it was an easy fix as well. I lightly dusted it with harissa before roasting, but otherwise kept to the directions. To get a contrasting color on the plate (it’s the graphic designer in me), I sautéed some spinach with shallots in olive oil and doused it with lemon juice, salt & pepper.

*While my devil-may-care attitude usually doesn’t come back to bite me, it has resulted in some spectacularly bad dishes (oven-fried potatoes, I’m talking to you).

recipes after the jump

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We lucked out in a sense, and only got about 10 inches of snow Friday — not a piddling amount, but so much better than the 18 inches we feared. Instead of holing up Saturday morning, I did my wifely duty and helped Gil shovel the driveway to the best of my ability. We didn’t make much headway, but did get it cleared enough for his Element to take us out for the day.

When we returned, I started dinner and heard a strange, lawnmower-like sound in our driveway. It was our amazing neighbor bailing us out once again with his snowblower. Seriously, this guy saves our lives every time we have a heavy snowfall. I feel guilty, while Gil just doesn’t know what to do, so I decided to send him a token of our appreciation.

As luck would have it, we had several overly ripe bananas in our fruit bowl, so why not bake two loaves of banana bread, one “thank you” loaf for Rich, and one for us? My favorite recipe comes from Cooking Light, but I noodle around with it from time to time. Adding walnuts and chocolate chips seemed like the neighborly thing to do, elevating the basic recipe to something a little more fitting. We’ll send over a bottle of muscat, too, in case the banana bread doesn’t ring his bell, but I think he’ll enjoy it.

And even if he doesn’t, at least we’ve enjoyed our bread enough for all of us.

recipe after the jump

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