John

(After watching a Jamie Oliver show on the Cooking Channel)

Jamie made it look dead simple, and it was, plus I got to use my new food processor! I\’ll reduce everything next time – I had a bit too much oniony stuff relative to the beef stock. Or maybe I\’ll just make sure I have more beef stock around!

But the olive oil was put into a large pot (it\’s 8 quarts or better), and the sage and garlic was tossed in as well. Jamie used sage leaves, but I just had ground. I don\’t have an English garden and a gardener, either…

The leeks, shallots, and onions were tossed in shortly after, seasoned with salt and pepper, stirred around a bit, and then just left to cook, slowly over medium heat, for about an hour, stirring every fifteen minutes or so. They lost about 75% of their volume over time.

Then I poured in the beef stock, and brought it back up to simmer for another fifteen or twenty minutes.

Slice the bread into half-inch thick croutons. If you have the presence of mind to do this ahead of time, the croutons can dry out a bit to their benefit.

Ladle soup into oven-proof bowls, arrange a crouton or two to cover the soup, then cover the croutons with the cheddar. Pop under a broiler for five or ten minutes until the cheese is melted and browned.

Yum!

I wanted to attempt (yes, just attempt – I was fully prepared to just walk away) making ravioli, so I started off by finding the pasta machine (well, I had Peg do it – she claimed to know where it was), and buying semolina. I\’d made pasta before so it was reasonably straightforward to just make sheets of pasta – like lasagna noodles:

• 2 eggs, beaten
• 2 C semolina (about 2 C. What me, measure?)
• pinch of salt
• 2 T olive oil

Dump the flour on a board, make a well in the middle, and put in the oil, salt, and eggs. Pull the flour into the eggs gradually until it all comes together. You might want a little water or a little more flour to make the mixture a stiff, yet pliable dough.

Read the instructions on the pasta maker, or roll the pasta out by hand until it\’s ridiculously thin. Then keep rolling until it\’s half as thick as that. Seriously, decent pasta is very thin.

I made cheese filling because I wanted to concentrate on the ravioli making part of it, not get all caught up in the filling. So

• 1/2 C grated Parmesan
• 1/2 C grated mozzarella
• 1 C \”4 cheese pizza mixture\” (it was leftovers from making pizza earlier in the week)
• 1/2 C ricotta just to hold it all together
• salt & pepper to taste

Mix all of that up until it\’s workable. Add more ricotta if it\’s not binding together.

Then I laid out a sheet of pasta, and placed teaspoons of cheese mixture on the pasta, staggered so there was some room between the filling. I wet a finger with water and traced around each ball of filling to help seal the pasta sheets.

I laid another sheet of pasta out over the filling, and pressed gently down around the filling to squeeze out the air and form a good seal. Then I used a large shot glass (seriously, this is about a 3 oz glass!) as a cookie-cutter, and cut out the individual ravioli, reserving them on a plate. I made about 12 or 15 ravs with the materials I had made.

Into the boiling water for about 8 or 10 minutes they went. Only one ravioli broke open, so that was considered successful.

The sauce recipe came from a cookbook \”365 ways to cook Pasta\” that we\’ve had forever:

• 12 oz jar of roasted red peppers, drained
• 3 T butter
• 3 T flour
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2 C milk

In a food processor, puree the red peppers and hold.

Melt the butter in a quart saucepan. Add the flour and stir. Cook this roux for a minute, then slowly whisk in the milk, ensuring that the mixture stays nice and smooth. Gently bring this basic white sauce to a boil for a few minutes until the sauce starts to thicken nicely. Slowly whisk in the beaten egg, remove this bechamel sauce from the heat, and mix with the pepper puree in the food processor. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Grate a little parmesan cheese over the sauced ravioli, and graciously accept the compliments.

I think it was pretty good…

I\’ve eaten orzo a few times in salads, but I don\’t think I\’ve ever had it as a pasta dish. I was slogging through the grocery store a couple of weekends ago, and tossed a box of orzo into the cart. Nothing fancy – just the Market Basket store brand orzo.

The recipe is simplicity itself.

• 1 C orzo
• 3 T butter
• 2 C grated parmesan (I\’d capitalize it to Parmesan, but it was from Wisconsin, not Parma)
• Salt & Pepper to taste

• Grate the parmesan
• Boil some water
• Stir the orzo into the boiling water, and bring it back to a boil
• Turn down to a gentle boil

When the orzo is \”done\” per your definition of what constitutes pasta done-ness, drain it, and put it back in the pan with the butter until the butter is all melted, then stir in the cheese until it\’s all melted. Grind in some pepper (salt is very likely not needed), and serve.

Some chopped fresh parsley would have been nice, but I didn\’t have any.  Maybe next time.

Auntie Glenna always used to make pecan pie for Thanksgiving, and always got rave reviews. But in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, my Mom always made SO many pies – apple, pumpkin, blueberry, mince (her rule of thumb was \”one pie per person\”) – that I never got around to appreciating Glenna\’s contribution. Until she and Mom were both gone.

Thanksgiving in its current form provides a much smaller audience, but a few years back someone lamented that nobody made pecan pie any more. I stepped forward, and true to form, I asked my wife for help. She told me to use the recipe on the Karo syrup bottle. \”That\’s what Glenna used.\”

It\’s simplicity itself. I even use the pre-made crusts, so it\’s even easier (though this past Thanksgiving I made a crust of my own just to show that I could, and it turned out pretty well.)

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Prepare the crust according to package directions. Try to make it pretty. Neatness does count.

Melt 3T of butter (15 seconds in the microwave – not 30. Don\’t ask)

Combine:

• 3 eggs – beaten lightly
• 1 C sugar
• 1 C Karo syrup (I\’ve used light and dark with equal success)
• 1 t vanilla extract
• the butter

Just mix it nice and thoroughly.

Add 1 1/2 C ( 6 Oz) of pecans. I usually go kind of overboard here (I\’m not trying to make a profit). I\’m just saying that if you \”accidentally\” put in 12 Oz of  nuts, the universe won\’t collapse…

Pour it all into the pie shell.

Bake for 60 to 70 minutes. If you press lightly in the center of the pie and it springs back, the pie is done.

Peg has a recipe for corn chowder that contained, in my humble opinion, far too many ingredients, required the making of a roux, opening a bunch of cans… Feh! So I went online, searched for corn chowder recipes, and kind of ORed them together to get to my recipe for corn chowder. Now, most of you that know me would think that I\’d opt for clam chowder, or fish chowder, or the entirely generic-sounding seafood chowder. Then again, those of you that know Peg know that seafood, in any way, shape, or manner, is completely out of the question. (I don\’t think she\’d even eat Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers…).

So tonight I made a batch:

• 12 oz of salt pork, diced. I\’d been using bacon, but Mom used salt pork.
• 2 small onions, diced
• 1 green bell pepper, diced
• 16 oz bag of frozen corn. It\’s January, and real corn is quite rare in New England. (even if it weren\’t rare, it would be dear, and I\’m just too cheap. A pound of frozen corn for 99 cents is right up my alley…)
• 8 medium potatoes, peeled and diced to about 3/8\” or so.

I rendered off the salt pork in a touch of olive oil. I always use olive oil when I cook. It\’s good for you.

Then I tossed in the onion and pepper and let that cook for a while, followed by the corn. I do fear that I put the corn in too early. It doesn\’t really need to cook as much as the onions and pepper.

The potatoes were covered in water, salted rather heavily, and put on the heat. After they boiled for a while I tested (e.g. tasted) for done. They were still a bit rare, but I drained off most of the cooking water, coarsely mashed some of the potatoes as a thickener, and returned everything to the pot, including the pork and vegetables.

Tomorrow (and this will be really good after clearing all of that snow that\’s coming), I\’ll take the pot out of the fridge, add about two cups of milk, a cup of light cream, and a dollop or three of butter, and bring it almost to a boil. It still needs some salt, I think.

Hope I have some oyster crackers.

Followup:

Turned out that this was quite salty. The 12 Oz of salt pork might be too much for this recipe. And I didn\’t really care for the salt pork so much – even diced up pretty small, there were chunks of it that were just fat. And Peg opined that the corn/potato ratio was too low. Otherwise it was pretty good, I thought. I saved the leftovers – though I might dilute the salty flavor with a bit of milk.

So the next batch will have a half-pound of bacon instead of 12 Oz of salt pork, and more corn.

I was watching one of Emeril\’s shows Sunday AM as I finished my coffee (after a French Toast breakfast). He tossed together (I bet his production staff had something to do with it…) a very quick meal, and it inspired me as I got to the grocery store later that morning.
– some Italian sausage – I used sweet, Emeril mixed hot and sweet
– onion – I used a small sweet onion, Emeril used a large Spanish onion
– red bell pepper
– escarole – I used green chard because I couldn\’t find escarole
– rigatoni – I used fettucini

The pasta water went on first, of course.

The sausage was broken up and cooked off in a bit of olive oil. When it was nice and brown, the onions and peppers went in with a bit of salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes. The fettucini went into the water as well.

After the onions and peppers were tender, I tossed in the chard, which I\’d rinsed nicely and coarsely chopped. I should have used the larger skillet, but I muddled through.

When the pasta was done, it was drained and returned to the pot, and the sausage mixture was tossed with it.

I served it with some fresh Parmesan cheese grated over it, and it was pretty excellent. I wanted to go back for the rest of it, but I am actually trying to loseWeight Exercise some Lose Weight Exercise. Peg tasted it (she was going out for a dinner date) and claimed that she liked it. We\’ll see next time I make it.

I think the escarole would be better, and rigatoni would have made it a bit easier to mix together. But I really like fettucini…