Vstrecha-blog

In which my Valentines Day dinner is almost ruined, but then surprisingly I end up with a perfectly done steak

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I decided to cook myself a really tasty dinner. So I go to the grocery store and get all the ingredients: mushrooms, asparagus, yukon gold potatoes (for mashed potatoes), and a really nice looking filet.

I come home, and I start the water for the potatoes first. When it gets boiling, I drop the chunks of potato in. Meanwhile, I slice up the mushrooms and cook them in some of the red wine i’m having with my steak. When the wine reduces down all the way, I add a couple splashes of worcestershire sauce (I made this up on the spot, and it ended up pretty tasty. I liked the balance of sweet from the wine and tangy from the worcestershire). Also meanwhile, i’ve turned the oven on broil and am heating up my cast-iron skillet. I’d just read how to oven-cook a perfect steak, and I thought I’d try it (never cooked a steak in the oven before).

Up until this point, dinner preparations have been going very well. But here’s where the interesting part of the evening begins. After the mushrooms were done, I set those aside & halved the asparagus and dumped them in the same cooking pan. Then I got the skillet out of the oven to sear the steak on the stovetop before it actually went in the oven to cook. I’d rubbed my steak with a bit of oil, salt & pepper, so when I plopped it into the skillet, it almost immediately started smoking. A lot. I’d nearly finished searing one side before the smoke alarm went off.

I flipped the steak over to sear the other side before going to deal with the smoke alarm. Now, the important thing to know about my apartment is that it has really high ceilings. I mean, I’m not the tallest person ever, but neither am I super short, either, and I have to get a chair and stand on my tip-top-tippy-toes and I can *just* reach the button to hush the alarm. Which, in a genius move by the apartment builders, is right next to the kitchen. It won’t shut off. I’m mashing the buttons as hard as I can, until I can’t stay up on my toes any longer, and it still won’t shut off. This may have had to do with the fact that my kitchen was now filled with smoke.

I’m now worried that i’ll have one burnt side of a steak if I let it sear any more, so I transfer it to the oven. And also take the asparagus completely off, so as to not ruin those either. Now the way i’m describing it, you may think that I’ve been completely calm, which is not the case AT ALL. I am now entering panic mode. I’m frustrated that this stupid alarm will not SHUT UP, and i’m pretty upset that my dinner might be ruined. I open the door to my porch in the hopes that the smoke will dissipate, and drag my kitchen table over underneath the alarm and continue to mash buttons/beat the smoke alarm. It refuses to yield. Time is meaningless now; I have no idea how long my steak has been in the oven. I’m in tears, despairing that i’ll have no dinner, and absolutely sure that the fire department will show up any minute now (and wouldn’t that be embarassing). Nothing’s working — I’ve completely unplugged the alarm from the ceiling, taken out the battery, but this does nothing to shut up the second black box alarm in my bedroom that has no buttons at all. 

Finally, I suppose on no account of my own & just because enough of the smoke has gone out the open door, the alarm shuts off and i’m able to take the steak out of the oven. I’m fully expecting it to look like a charred brick, but it doesn’t, so I optimistically pull it off onto my plate to let it rest for a bit. I assemble the rest of my dinner and then cut into the steak and it’s a perfect medium. I’m just glad that I was able to get a satisfactory dinner out of the most stressful cooking experience ever. (Why is it that I have so many ‘most stressful cooking experience ever’s? :)

Adventures in Cooking: Stuffed Cabbage (Golubtsy)

I think people have a visceral connection with food. I am of course, making sweeping generalizations based on my own personal experience, but I really think i’m not the only one here. I’m talking about the good kind of connection, where you can’t wait until Thanksgiving for your mom’s sweet potato casserole. The next time you eat it, no matter where you are, you still get that same comfort of home & feeling of being loved.

My theory is, what a person considers to be the “best food” is the stuff with which he’s associated strong memories or emotions.

I have a visceral connection with an entire cuisine.

I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting Russia on two occasions. I know some of my travelling companions missed their hamburgers, but I have many fond memories of food, and the people I shared meals with. Picture this…

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We’d taken a bus out to Rachmaninoff’s country home, and were picnic-ing in the nearby field. The sun is shining and we have set up underneath the birch trees. Simple salad of absolutely fresh from the market cucumbers and tomatoes, chunked, then sprinkled with sprigs of fresh dill. There is ALWAYS dill. Dense, black bread, with or without butter, but ALWAYS with fresh dill.

//

The university students threw us Americans a 4th of July party at the beach. So of course there was face painting, beer, rowboats on the lake, teaching Russians beloved American patriotic songs… and shashlik. I have no idea what kind of meat it was, or what spices were used, but it was heavenly. Pulled right off the skewer onto a piece of cardboard, you pull pieces off with your fingers and eat the chunks with fresh onion and tomato.

//

…I swear these anecdotes are relevant. Because I associate these memories with Russian food in general (and also because Russian recipes are hard to come by), I immediately pounce on it whenever one comes along.  These gloubsty once again come from the lovely Deb of Smitten Kitchen, who has shared with us her mother-in-law’s stuffed cabbage recipe. I am absolutely ecstatic that her husband is Russian, if for the only reason that these family recipes keep coming.

I am immediately nervous about recipes that ask me to stuff something inside of something else. Invariably the outside-something comes apart, allowing the inside-something to escape and roam free in whatever boiling water or sauce mixture the whole mess is cooking. Fear not! Once you let the Savoy cabbage marinate in boiling water, the leaves are quite pliable & stick together quite nicely.

Note 1: Do, however, make sure you’ve considered the size of the cabbage head when you’re buying at the store… and make sure you’ve got a big enough bowl to fit it in. I couldn’t immerse the entire thing in boiling water, so I improvised & covered the entire kit with tin foil (to… keep the steam in? That was my thought process. Yay engineering?) It seemed to work, but I bet I would have gotten better results if I was able to cover ALL of the cabbage with boiling water.

Note 2: A WARNING— In its normal state, cabbage really has no smell, and therefore I was not prepared for the intense smell that’s created when cabbage is cooked. So i’m warning you. (You’re welcome.) Cooked cabbage smells pretty strongly of feet. Not the best of unexpected smells. Now, don’t let this prevent you from cooking cabbage at all, and thus never prepare this recipe. Because it’s totally, tastily, worth it. Just, y’know, be prepared for your kitchen to smell like feet for a while.

The best part about this recipe? I have leftovers enough for two additional meals, waiting for me in my freezer!

Adventures in Cooking: Raspberry Buttermilk Cake

Well, I am not terrible at *making* these tasty tasty food experiments, but I sure am terrible about blogging them. It doesn’t help that I’ve already written this particular entry once, and was letting it “marinate” a bit before I went back to read through & revise one last time…. when my computer crashed, and NONE of it got saved. ._. Kids, ALWAYS SAVE YOUR WORK. You think I would have learned my lesson through 6 years of college. ALAS NO.

Moving on.

I made this particular gem what seems like EONS ago now, and I really want to make it again, with raspberries this time(!), before all the summer fruit goes away from the store. Yes, despite the fact that it is called a *Raspberry* Buttermilk Cake, I didn’t make it with raspberries, due to some Extremely Frustrating Circumstances (which, I might add, may seem funny now, but were severely disheartening to me at the time) that I will describe to you now.

I was planning on making this to bring with me to a dinner at a friend’s house, putting me under a Time Crunch — I really only had about an hour to run to the store after work & grab the fruit, then come home & make the dessert before I had to leave. So after work, I stop at the grocery store that’s directly on the way home. I make a quick loop of the produce section — no raspberries. There’s one more grocery store I can try that’s a bit further out of the way, so I go there…. and same deal. Quick loop of the produce section & NO RASPBERRIES. WOE. I have seriously been salivating over thinking about this cake with raspberries all day, and I am crushed to have my cake hopes dashed*. I have to take a moment right there in produce to pull myself together.

Deep breath. HOKAY. Plan B… B is for blackberries!

Let me assuage your fears, as I know y’all are in much suspense: the blackberry buttermilk cake was equally as tasty as I imagine a raspberry buttermilk cake would be. The recipe is, of course, courtesy of the fabulous Deb from Smitten Kitchen.

To prove my point, I submit to you this quote of mine from the Day of Baking:

Ok, y’all, the pictures don’t do the smell justice. Heaven is wafting through my apartment right now. If it tastes as half as good as it smells, this will be the best thing i’ve ever eaten.

And truly, this is the best summer cake ever. If you are like me and

1. are not a big fan of super-sugary icing getting in between you and your cake OR
2. like to have your heavier cakes as a sweetener to some sort of hot beverage like tea, most lovely in the winter-time

then you will completely agree with me. It is dangerously light and fluffy — and I say dangerously, because you can very easily eat 2 or 3 pieces without a second thought. Also, it has fruit in it! We are talking multiple chunks of the food pyramid here, people, what more can you ask out of a dessert!

The only snaffu I ran into — and it may not be a snaffu so much as an unexpected occurance — was that the cake rose so much it completely covered the blackberries. I overturned the pan onto a plate to achieve the tasty-looking photo featured up top, but I am sure this cake will be equally delicious in either attitude.

*You may think i’m dangerously close to hyperbole here, but let me explain to you my love affair with raspberries. I have a memory of summers in Wisconsin when I was younger, where my sister and I would go over to my great-grandparents’ and jump on their trampoline. In the backyard behind the trampoline, they had bushes and bushes of raspberries that we would pluck and pop straight into our mouths, gorging ourselves until we’d spoiled our dinners. Raspberries taste like those idyllic summer days.

Coming soon!

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m behind on the dessert posts. I have a couple drafts that I’m going to post Real Soon, I Promise. 

But coming up next: I just got a whole bunch of SC peaches (The best kind! No arguing!) when my family came up to visit me this past weekend, so i’m thinking about trying my hand at peach pie. My go-to gal Deb over at smitten kitchen has a couple of possibilities (that are perhaps more complicated and less traditional than i’d like):

Peach & Creme Fraiche Pie

Bourbon Peach Hand Pies

Plus i’ve googled around for some more traditional options:

GA peach pie (from Food & Wine)

Blueberry & Peach pie (without the blueberries, from Country Living)

Peach pie (from Joy of Baking)

Nita’s secret peach pie (from Paula Deen)

So. It’s up to y’all. Especially those of you in the area that might actually get to partake of the tastiness. Which pie form should my peaches take? (Feel free to submit your own recipe, too.)

Peaches and squash and okra, oh my!

So… I brought back some SC peaches from my trip home this past weekend, with the full intention of making something with them. But I had one for lunch today, and it is delicious, and I am now eating them all. Myself. Sorry.

Not to worry! I also brought back lots of other goodies, fresh from the garden, thanks to my family. So I have a zucchini, a cucumber, some yellow squash, okra, and various hot peppers to cook with!

My mom also sent me away with her zucchini bread, some homemade salsa, cucumber dip and stuffed peppers. NOM NOM. No you can’t have any! (Well, maybe if you ask nicely.)

Adventures in Cooking: Strawberry-rhubarb crumble

I’m going to kick off a new series of blog posts I’ve been calling tentatively in my head: dessert-a-week. In which I make a new dessert every week (or so, depending on how long it takes me [+ helpers?] to finish it), and then I share it. Not a terribly complicated concept. And yes, that was a request for dessert tasters. I’m simultaneously kicking off my new training schedule for the 10 mile race i’m running in October. Coincidence? I think not.

Desserts have always been my confidence-saver. I cannot recall a time where I have ever really screwed up a dessert to the point where it didn’t taste good. I’m not including flat-out burnt stuff, because everyone can do that. That’s a normal type of disaster. I hope I was able to convince you last post of how gifted I am at creating absolute food disasters.

Summertime just calls out to me to make things with fruit in them. There’s nothing that says summer to me more than sitting out on the porch and biting into a slice of watermelon or a peach, and having the juice run down your chin.  I also remember this dessert that my mom used to make, called Rhubarb Crunch. So when I saw this recipe for strawberry-rhubarb crumble come up on my all-time new favorite cooking blog, I knew I just had to make it.

Now, rhubarb is one of those things where no one knows what it is. Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable. The cashier at the grocery store just didn’t know what it was, I had to tell him. To be fair, rhubarb is also one of those things, like kohlrabi, that didn’t really make it out of the midwest (my mom is from Wisconsin).  And frankly, i’m not even sure why they started eating it to begin with. It only really tastes good when cooked with a ton of sugar.

This dessert comes together really easily, it’s just a matter of chopping up the rhubarb and the strawberry, tossing it with sugar, and crumbling the butter cut into the dry ingredients on top. Awhile in the oven later, and you’ve got a bubbling bowl of awesome with the perfect fruit-to-crust ratio. I think my tasters would agree :)

Adventures in Cooking: Blue cheese and red potato tart

I enjoy cooking, I really do. It’s the cleaning up part that I absolutely detest. And I even have a dishwasher in my apartment.

In the spirit of Full Disclosure, I do have to admit that I haven’t had the best track record at cooking (or even reheating). There was the time where I messed up canned breadsticks. (For awhile, my family would not let me live this down. Frankly, who can blame them?) You know how, after you pop the can open, you rip the dough on the perforated edges, unroll it so the dough is flat, then twist the dough around to form a curlicue and press the ends onto a baking sheet? Easy, yeah? I somehow neglected the step where you unroll the dough. Instead, I ripped the dough into pieces and formed the pieces into these sort of knobby logs. Strangely enough, I couldn’t get these to form the nice curlicues I remembered, and thus just plopped the dough logs onto the baking sheet. They came out of the oven much like they went in, and were still completely doughy in the middle. Also completely disgusting.

Another time I was reheating a tostada in the toaster oven and it completely caught on fire. I saw the smoke seeping out the door of the toaster oven. So in my infinite wisdom, I opened the door to investigate, and flames start coming out. I quickly shut the door again, unplugged the toaster oven, and waited for the fire to go out before I pulled out the charred remains of my lunch and dumped them in the trash. Sadly, not the first time I’d caught something on fire in the kitchen. Those are just a couple of my mishaps.

Right. So. Hopefully with these posts, there will be more “cooking” than “adventures,” which I think I achieved this time around, with this blue cheese and red potato tart. The recipe comes by way of a cooking blog, which recently I have become completely enamored with, Smitten Kitchen. Deb (the blogger) is completely unpretentious and totally accessible, and her husband takes the most gorgeous pictures of the food. I have so many of those recipes bookmarked now, it’s not even possible for me to ever make them all.

This recipe seemed not-terribly complicated: crust, dump stuff in aforementioned crust, bake. I could handle that. The directions for the crust say to mix the ingredients together until they begin to stick together. Okay, I say, and pick up my fork to begin cutting the butter into the flour. 10 minutes later, I’m crazed, wondering why the heck none of this is sticking together?? I finally abandon the fork and work the dough with my hands, finally getting it to form in ball. 

Rolling the dough out into a crust was another battle. My little apartment kitchen does not exactly have an overabundance of counterspace, and I have not yet found the secret to keeping dough from sticking to the counter. Eventually, after I have covered myself and everything else in a 2 foot radius in flour, I have achieved a piece of dough large enough to cover the pie tin. Sadly, I don’t own a pretty tart pan, but I doubt even that would help prettify this Frankenstein piece of crust dough. It covered the whole tin, so I consider that a success. 

I had a lot more potato than would fit in one level of the pie tin (which is also much deeper than a tart pan, I think), so I ended up having 2 layers of potato slices. In hindsight, I realize that if you have multiple layers, you should split up the cream mixture and the cheese, as that doesn’t seep down to the bottom layer very well.

The finished product might not be as pretty, but I think it would be equally as tasty: for dinner with a light salad, or even reheated for breakfast. :)