Weekend Evaluation: I know I-tey food when I hear it - it's all them 'eenie' foods (aka 'His name's not Fellini, it's Jake')

I feel like I'm only cooking Italian food right now; kind of boring myself, but you don't want to get in the way of these ingredients.  In the summer I usually cook a lot of mexican too, but this year I'm in a Mediterranean rut - we need to have some sopes or something soon.    I guess I shouldn't complain, the next thing you know we'll only be potatoes, cabbage, and winter squash everyday.

Speaking of which - we did finally make it to the Red Hook carts this weekend, the papusa was pretty good and I got my hands on some chicharron and beef tendon tacos.  I do think I prefer Tortilleria Nixmatel.

Zucchini, Potato, Fennel Pizza

I always thought that potatoes on pizza was weird (starch on starch?), but Sullivan St. Bakery makes this potato/pizza bianca thing, usually with rosemary.  I wasn't planning on cooking at home, but then it wasn't that nice out, so we went home for dinner; this meant I didn't feed a starter in the morning; so I used a combination of active dry yeast and dried commercial weiss yeast.

Sliced the potato and zucchini on the mandolin - soaked potatoes in water to release starch, salted squash to release moisture.  Finished the pizza with grana padana, olive oil, and lemon basil

Positive - The crust was Ok, the outside was really good.  The potatoes tasted very strongly of potatoes, and overall was pretty good. 

I did get to use some new pizza flour I bought at Chelsea Market on Friday - I think it worked pretty well; the actual crumb of the dough was really good.

Negative - The crust was really boring tasting; there was no yeast character in there. 

I feel like adding zucchini to the potato pizza is a good idea interms of moisture; but doesn't bring much flavor to the table.  I've made this with only potatoes and I think it's a little dry, sometimes the potatoes kind of fall off if you're not careful.

Looked like a lot of fennel on there, but there wasn't, and I had plenty - was kind of a waste.

Crust was too thin in the middle, got a little cracker-y.

Warm Corn and Fennel Salad

I thought that the pizza was going to be a little small for dinner, so I sauteed the rest of the fennel, added corn and some corn-cob stock that I reduced all the way down to a glaze.  Added some lemon, lemon basil and fennel fronds at the ened.

Positive - This corn tastes great right now; we're eating a lot of it right now A LOT.

Negative - We're eating a lot of corn right now - A LOT.

Eggplant Puree

I keep saying I'm going to make baba ganoush, but I keep forgetting to buy tahini.  So I just made a puree of roasted eggplant, some call this eggplant 'caviar' - why that's any better than puree I don't know.  I guess the seeds look like caviar.  Roasted eggplant, pureeed with lemon basil, some thyme, garlic, olive oil, rice wine vinegar, all the usual stuff I put in every single puree....I'm boring myself.

This tasted pretty good when I made it, but I haven't even eaten it since; I thought maybe Gretchen might want this for her lunch.

Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes w/ Raspberry Syrup

Used a different recipe than normal for the pancakes, based on this post, and they came out pretty good.

Positive - These were fluffier than normal and had a really nice buttermilk flavor.   

Negative - I had too much oil on the skillet so they got brown too fast, and didn't have the uniform browness I associate with pancakes.

Raspberries were cooked down in some grade B maple syrup, but I probably could have either cooked them less - or cooked them more (to get out more moisture).

Skordalia

Since we have a ton of potatoes from the CSA (again - too soon), I decided to make skordalia for Gretchen's lunch instead of beans. 

Positive - Not much good here.

Negative - I used two kinds of potatoes here, a starchier kind and wax-y kind....coked them at the same time, but the waxy ones obviously needed to be cooked more.  So when I whipped them with olive oil and garlic the starchy potatoes got all glue-y before the yellow poatoes were pureed. Failure.

Ox Tail 'Carbonnade' Ravoli

Braised Chard and Corn

The idea here was to make a braised meat dish that was still seasonal - if this worked OK.  I'd never formed filled pasta before so that was a new experience.

Positive - Overall this dish was OK, didn't have any blowouts; the meat was really rich (gelatanous).  I thought it was on the verge of being over-reduced, but nothing great here.

Despite the construction of the ravoli, and the braising of the meat, I did a good job of actually cooking and plating the pasta with the corn/butter sauce.

Negative - I was at a loss for what to use as a braising liquid; there's no wine in the house except a bottle of bordeaux we bought in France during our honeymoon, probably not the best use of a eight year old bottle of wine.  So I braised the oxtail in Ommegang Abbey since they had it at the supermaket. I've it used before for carbonnade, but this time I used the pressure cooker, and there just seemed to be something missing when it was done. 

I know people say you lose something with spice/herbs if you use a pressure cooker, maybe that was it..just wasn't as good as it could have been.  I should have just taken the time to braise it on the stove top (oven was occupied).

The pasta was too thick, the pasta was harder to roll out this week and I didn't take the time to let the gluten relax when it was springing back on me.  Seems like you need it really thin so those edges aren't super thick, and these were.

Didn't do a great job of taking the larger stems out of the chard, and some of them were under cooked; so there was an unpleasent tannic quality every once and a while.

Bourbon Banana Pudding Ice Cream

Positive - Heard banana pudding ice cream as flavor somewhere and it sounded good.  The bananas I had weren't very ripe, so I cooked them in butter and brown sugar- then flambeed them foster's style with bourbon (instead of rum).  Pureed the bananas with milk and some more bourbon and brown sugar then added the cream.

The custard base tasted really good, it probably needed some spices maybe - but I think it probably would have tasted too much like banana bread. 

Negative  - I added crushed up nilla wafers after I ran it through the ice cream maker and probably didn't add enough.  When we had a scoop we added some more to top it.

Chicken Stock/Beef Stock

Positive - It was finally going to rain on a weekend, and I've been putting off making stock, so I finally cleared out all the old bones, necks and feet in the freezer.

The beef stock smelled and tasted really beef-y.  I bought some neck bones (w/ meat) from the farmers market to supplement the bones that I had.  Last time I made beef stock I used very little meat, and it did taste a little bit too much like bones; which is a weird thing to say but you know it when you taste it.

Negative - I hadn't made stock since March, and the temperature control on our oven is still a little new to me.  I probably should have had this up higher; or done a better job of bringing the stocks up to temp. on the stove top.  They took forever; and I didn't really pay attention to how long they were taking. 

While stock is supposed to take a long time, I think that chicken stock especially tastes a little off if it's cooking for too long; there's an optimal time when it's 100% chicken-y tasting and once you pass it, your not getting back there.  You just hope you've extracted all of the gelatin from the bones at that point.

I didn't do a good job of this, the temperature wasn't high enough to really break down the cartilage most of the time it was in the oven so I put it on the stove top and turned it up (not to boiling). 

I also didn't taste it enough; and at one point I strained everything, tasted, and then put everything back in the pot.  This process usually doesn't take very much 'active time' - but between my impatience and the new kitchen setup it got to be a pain, and ran into the time I was planning on making dinner.

The bones definitely we're broken down enough, and you can tell that the stock isn't as gelatinous as it could be just from the way it 'wobbles'.

Tomato Confit

Since the oven was going to be on at 200 degrees for 10 hours and we got 5 pounds of tomatoes in the CSA, I figured I'd put those in there too

Positive -  These tomatoes look good and I'm glad they're preserved so I don't have to eat them all this week.

Negative - I think they're underseasoned; and could have been cooked at a higher temperature.  They were in the top rack in a 200 degree oven, so they were probably at 180-190 - I have a thermometer in there; but it was all bent back and I could read it without moving the stocks a lot.

CSA

Cherry Tomatoes

Green Bell Peppers

Red Bell Pepper

Fennel

Nicola Potatoes

Tomatoes

Red Batavian Lettuce

Raspberries

Peaches

Navy Beans

Wheat Berries

Coffee