Salami, arugula and tomato strata

Stratas are wonderful ways to free up space in your refrigerator and freezer. I've always got a stash of bread cubes accumulated from ends of loaves I'm trying to save before they reach the compost-fodder stage. At some point they start to take up valuable real estate in the refrigerator freezer and it's time to play another game of what's in the house.

So I grab whatever cheese is teetering on needing using (usually something I bought for some recipe that I can no longer what it was), whatever protein is at hand and random of acts of vegetables. Pour over your standard egg-dairy mixture and you've got a great make-ahead dish.

And once you've eaten your way through the leftovers for lunches, you've got all that reclaimed refrigerator to fill up and start the process all over again.

This version of random acts turned out particularly nicely, so I thought it was worth sharing. 

Salami, arugula and tomato strata

Adapted from variatons on a Gale Gand recipe in House Beautiful

Ingredients

5 cups cubed bread (crusts are fine)

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

½ cup salami slices (uncured pink peppercorn worked well here)

1 cup arugula leaves

2 cups grated Fontina (or whatever you’ve got handy)

10 large eggs

1 quart whole milk(or some combo pack of dairy that adds up to that; I used a mix of 2 percent milk and some odds and ends of half and half and cream that needed using)

1 teaspoon dry mustard

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon garlic powder

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

Method

Grease a 9-by-13 pan. Scatter bread cubes on the bottom of the pan. Scatter tomato halves and salami pieces over the top. Strew the top with arugula, pushing ends down in. Sprinkle cheese over the top.

Mix eggs, milk, mustard, salt, garlic powder and pepper together. Pour over ingredients in the pan. Cover and refrigerate for 4 to 24 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Set out pan to warm up in the meantime. Uncover and bake for 60 minutes, until puffed and golden brown. If it starts to get to brown, top with foil. Let cool slightly before serving.

Rating: Just fine. Perfect for days when blizzard-level winds howl and random sheets of snow go sideways past your house, so you'd rather cook what's in your house than leave it. 

Fusilli with olives, capers and roasted cauliflower

 

When a recent snowstorm hit the Pacific Northwest, media outlets had their fun reporting that Portland residents' idea of stocking up ahead of the storm apparently involved denuding the produce aisles of kale. Really, I'm surprised it wasn't cauliflower, given its current love as a staple in cauliflower bowls, etc. 

Does a Minnesotan rush to the store for kale? No, of course not. We can't get there because of all the blasted snow. Besides, I've got two kinds of it growing in the basement. You know, for those kale emergencies.

Aside from the cauliflower, the rest of the ingredients list for this dish are pretty shelf stable, so if a trip to the grocery store looks to be annoying, it's a decent option using the seemingly omnipresent cauliflower.

Fusilli alla Siciliana

Adapted from "Lorenza’s Pasta," by Lorenza de'Medici. Serves 4 generously.

Ingredients

1 1-pound head of cauliflower, broken into florets

½ cup olive oil, plus 2 tablespoons, divided

4 garlic cloves, chopped

½ cup pitted black olives (I used kalamatas); the recipe suggests Gaetas or another Greek type

4 tablespoons capers in brine

4 anchovy fillets in olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, plus more for garnish

1 pound of fusilli, cooked until al dente and drained, with some cooking liquid reserved

Method

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. On a rimmed baking sheet, toss cauliflower with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Sprinkle with coarse salt and ground black pepper. Roast for 35 to 40 minutes until almost tender, tossing occasionally. Remove from oven and set aside. (Alternatively, you can follow the original recipe and cook with the fusilli until the pasta is al dente and the cauliflower is nearly tender, which would dirty one less pan.)

Heat ¼ cup olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Add garlic and cook a few minutes until fragrant. Add anchovy fillets and break down with the back of a cooking spoon. Stir in olives, capers, remaining ¼ cup olive oil and parsley, cooking a few minutes more until anchovies sort of dissolve into the sauce. 

Add cooked, drained fusilli to sauce along with cauliflower. Toss to coat, adding more pasta cooking liquid as needed for desired sauce consistency and cook briefly to blend flavors. Season to taste, keeping in mind that anchovies and capers are already pretty salty.

Rating: Dave really liked this. I thought it was quite fine, although perhaps not as good as a very similar recipe I've made. But it was less fuss than that one and a faster fix, so it has merit. Hard to go too far wrong with that basic ingredient list. And I could stay inside and glower at the snow.

Pasta with rosemary garlic chick pea sauce

This dish is a perfect pantry meal, one of those what's-in-the-house concoctions. Well, providing your house has fresh rosemary handy, so I guess there's an asterisk there. My potted rosemary plants are managing to survive this punishing winter in the basement under grow lights, waiting, like me, for longer, sunnier, warmer days when it's safe to be outside.

In the meantime, this is a good hearty winter pasta. I suppose if you're cooking for a crowd that insists on meat in every meal, some cooked pancetta would go well tossed in with it. But it's a substantial dish without it.

If you make the recipe with dried beans, it does take a bit of planning ahead. But canned beans would certainly work. I have the equivalent of canned beans in my freezer, where I store beans I've cooked in the slow cooker. Recipes like this are the payoff for the minimal amount of work it takes to have them on hand.

 

Farfelle con passato di ceci

Adapted from “Lorenza’s Pasta” by Lorenza de’Medici, a cookbook that falls under the category of oldie but goodie, outlining 200 essential pasta recipes. She says this dish serves 4, and I'd agree, although you could stretch it to 6 if it's just a pasta course rather than the main dish.

Ingredients

4 ounces dried chick peas (or 2 cans with their liquid)

6 tablespoons olive oil

4 garlic cloves, chopped

3 rosemary sprigs, leaves chopped, plus an optional sprig for garnish

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 pound farfalle or other short pasta, cooked to al dente and drained with some cooking water reserved

Method

Soak the dried chick peas overnight in enough water to cover. Drain and place in a large pot with enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer and cook until tender, about 2 hours. Drain beans, reserving liquid. (Or if you’re using canned, skip this step but reserve the liquid in the can.) 

Puree drained beans in a food processor, adding some salt and pepper and up to a cup of bean cooking liquid (or liquid from the can). (If you're using canned beans, go easy on the salt at first and add more later if needed, since canned beans tend to be heavier on salt than the ones you cooked yourself.) Add about ⅔ of a cup of the liquid to begin with and then add more as needed to make a fairly liquid mixture. (The sauce will tighten up a bit as a cooks.)

In a large deep saute pot, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add garlic and rosemary and cook until garlic is slightly tender and oil is fragrant. Add chick pea puree and tomato paste and heat through. Add a touch more bean cooking liquid (or pasta cooking liquid) as needed if the sauce is too thick. Stir in cooked pasta and season to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish with rosemary if desired.

Rating: Nice, and pretty fast to prepare if you're using beans already cooked by you or someone else. Next time I might add a touch of crushed red pepper flakes, or perhaps some Parmesan cheese for garnish. It also might be interesting to try with fresh sage leaves. Certainly a handy bail-out meal using mostly shelf-stable ingredients.

Orange-glazed scones

 

They're talking about a roughly 70-point temperature swing by this weekend. Bring on those low 40s. In the meantime, something best served warm:

Orange scones with maple-orange glaze

Adapted from “Magnolia Table” by Joanna Gaines

Ingredients

2 cups flour

1½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup sugar

Zest of 1 orange, divided

¾ cup sour cream

1 egg

1 ½ cup butter, cut into cubes and frozen

3 tablespoons melted butter

1¾ cup powdered sugar, sifted

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ teaspoon maple syrup

3 tablespoons orange juice

Method

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Sprinkle a large board lightly with some flour.

Mix flour, baking powder, soda and salt and set aside. Muddle half the orange zest into the sugar; a pestle is great for this if you have it, otherwise use a wooden spoon. Mix into flour mixture.

Combine sour cream and egg. Set aside.

Using a pastry blender, cut butter into flour until it reaches the coarse crumb stage. Mix in sour cream and egg and stir to form a dough. Divide in half (a pastry scraper works well here).

Transfer 1 half to prepared floured board. With lightly floured hands, form into a ball and then flatten to a round about ¾ inch thick. Cut into six wedges and place on parchment-lined sheet, placing a couple of inches apart because these babies really spread in the oven.

Repeat with remaining half and transfer to sheet, or to a wax-paper lined freezer storage box and freeze until ready to bake.

Bake for 13 to 15 minutes until golden. Cool on sheet on wire rack. (If you're freezing half the scones to bake later, just bake from frozen for about 17 minutes.)

Meanwhile, mix 3 tablespoons melted butter, remaining orange zest, powdered sugar, vanilla and maple syrup. Whisk in orange juice 1 tablespoon at a time until smooth and of desired spreading consistency. Drizzle over warm scones and serve. (If you’re not eating them all at once, store the scones unfrosted and then frost after baking.)

Rating: The best thing about these scones is the frosting. I'm not a huge fan of frosted scones, but the frosting is nice. It helps along the scones themselves, which don't have my idea of a scone-like texture. With that much butter in them, they spread quite a bit and don't have a super lot of lift. The batch I made straight from the freezer spread slightly less, but again, they still don't have that scone crumb. But as I say, nice frosting, so they go down just fine. It was nice to have something to pull out of the freezer on a cold Sunday morning. Before it got really cold, like now.

Follow-up: Turns out I'm not alone in my complaint about the butter content in one of the recipes in this book. (Although really, I can't believe I'm even saying that.)

Braised chicken with marinated artichoke hearts and olives

 

I come from the land of potlucks, so when I saw a new release entitled "Potluck," naturally I wanted to check it out. Turns out there are different definitions of potluck out there.

Braised chicken thighs with marinated artichoke hearts

Adapted from “Potluck,” from the Food & Wine test kitchen

Ingredients

8 chicken thighs, skin-on, bone-in

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 (7.5-ounce) jars marinated artichoke hearts, including ¼ cup brine from the jars

1 cup Castelvetrano olives

1 head of garlic, separated but not peeled

1 lemon, thinly sliced

6 thyme sprigs

1 cup chicken broth

½ cup dry sherry

1 tablespoon fish sauce

1 teaspoon salt

Method

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large skillet and sear thighs, skin-side down. You’ll probably want to do this in batches to get each piece browned and crisp. Transfer skin side up to a large baking dish. 

Scatter olives, garlic cloves, thyme springs and lemon slices among the chicken pieces.

Drain fat from the skillet. Heat broth, sherry, artichoke heart brine and fish sauce to boiling. Add 1 teaspoon salt and pour mixture over chicken. 

Cover baking dish with foil and bake for 1 hour. Uncover, raise heat to 400 and roast for another 15 minutes to recrisp the skin. (Note: if I was to make this again, I would pour off most of the liquid into a skillet after the hour of baking and reduce it on the stovetop over high heat while the chicken browns in the oven. That would make an actual sauce and give the chicken a better shot at browning.)

Rating: I think this dish is one extra step (outlined above) away from being quite good. As it is, it's fine enough, but the chicken would have a much better shot at being truly crispy if it wasn't swimming in excess liquid, and that tasty liquid would be much more useful as a concentrated sauce. So I'm willing to give it another shot.

But. (A pause, for Rant Mode On.) The idea that this is a potluck dish is quite an odd one. Unless you modify it, there's way too much liquid to transport well, and it's a non-starter unless you're talking about an evening supper club type scenario where your friends don't live too far away and don't spend too much time gabbing/appetizer noshing/cocktail swilling before dinner. I've got an insulated carrier with a sleeve for a hot pack insert, but I can't imagine crispy skin is going to stay crispy under tin foil in the carrier for too long. And that much liquid will have inevitably sloshed inside the carrier making a hot mess that doesn't meet presentation standards and will be annoying to clean.

That doesn't mean it isn't a reasonable low-effort dinner party dish, since you can get it started well before guests arrive. The subtitle of the book is "Food and Drinks to Share with Friends and Family," and so long as the family comes to your house, it would work just fine. 

Aside from two short generalized paragraphs in the back of the book that don't really offer much wisdom, you're on your own for transport guidance.(In fairness to the book's editors, they probably aren't thinking of how to transport a dish when it's say, 9 below F. You know, just to pick a random number like today.)

Some of the recipes look like they'd work just fine as potluck fodder, like the appetizers and salads. And many of the main dishes are reasonable candidates for the church basement potluck scenario that applies to a dwindling number of people. Just don't expect many main dish options that address the standard potluck we are confronted with in the Midwest, the dreaded workplace potluck, where the criteria involve a dish that can be transported awkwardly via public transit, crammed it into an overcrowded office frig and then presented artistically over the noon hour with no oven available for reheating. So as long as you adjust your expectations of what this book offers, it has some reasonably tasty looking recipes that would work well at home. And maybe we just need to get invited to a different kind of potluck where these dishes could work. (Rant Mode Off.)